May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

. Karol Kewes, whose parents were Jews and atheists, enrolled him in a Catholic high school in Łódź run by priests where he was exempted from religious teaching. He states that he “was never personally beaten up as a ‘dirty Yid.’” See K.S. Karol, Between Two Worlds: The Life of a Young Pole in Russia, 1939–46 (New York: A New Republic Book/Henry Holt and Company, 1986), 10. A Jewish woman who grew up in Katowice recalled that her life was peacefully blissful. The Jewish and Gentile populations in Katowice were entirely integrated, as it was not until high school that she became friends with other Jewish youth. In her apartment complex, she grew up playing with children regardless of religious background. See Natalie Marsh, “Opening the Dusty Windows of History,” California Holocaust Memorial Week, April 28–May 4, 2008, April 2008, 135. Aharon Arlazoroff, who lived in a mixed neighbourhood of Wilno, stated that in their building Jews and non-Jews lived in relative harmony and did not recall any anti-Semitic incidents. See the testimony of Aharon Arlazoroff, Internet: . A young woman from a Jewish family who moved to Lwów from Ukraine after the Bolshevik Revolution recalled: “Our first residence was in an ethnically mixed neighborhood where Jews and Gentiles lived side by side without incident or any apparent enmity. … In the late 1920s, we moved out of the cramped flat on Piekarska Street to take up residence in an apartment building at 51 Zyblikiewicza Street. … Our new neighborhood, like the one we had moved out of, was ethnically diverse, with Jews and Gentiles, and Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians living together in harmony. … We got along well enough with the Gentiles, but we didn’t socialize with them. A few polite words of greeting usually marked the extent of our dealings with each other. My parents didn’t socialize with Polish Jews either. There was no friction between Polish and Russian Jews, but little effort was made by either group to get to know the other. My parents kept to their own kind, Russian immigrants who had fled Bolshevik oppression.” See Lala Fishman and Steven Weingartner, Lala’s Story: A Memoir of the Holocaust (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 42, 47–48. Uri Lichter, whose family owned a prosperous business in Lwów, recalled: “The Prachtels, the Swirskis, and others, all Polish and Ukrainian professionals, high civil servants, army officers and businessmen, were our steady customers. They liked to do business with Uri Lichter and Family. … We had all co-existed peacefully with Polish and Ukrainian families, many of them were good customers and gracious acquaintances.” See Uri Lichter, In the Eye of the Storm: A Memoir of Survival Through the Holocaust (New York: Holocaust Library, 1987), 24, 38. Leopold Weiss, a native of Lwów, reported: “My memories are of a mixed neighborhood where Polish Catholics lived together with Orthodox Jews side-by-side, peacefully, and without incident.” See Weiss, The Lemberg Mosaic, 15. Edward Spicer, who attended a school in Lwów where ther were only a very small number of Jewish students, remembers being treated fairly and did not have any specific problems with students or teachers. See the testimony of Edward Spicer, Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Interview code 12729. A Jew who attended the Romuald Traugutt senior high school in Częstochowa during the years 1934–1939 recalled, “There was no open anti-Semitism ar school. … we were not discriminated against in school. We were treated just like other students.” See Kazimierz Laski, “A Few memories, “ in Jerzy Mizgalski and Jerzy Sielski, eds., The Jews of Częstochowa: The Fate of Częstochowa Jews 1945–2009 (Toruń: Adam Marszałek, 2012), 230.

Given the large number of such testimonies, it is surprising, to say the least, for historian Antony Polonsky to claim, as he did in his obituary of Irena Sendler, that “Unusually for a Catholic child, she was allowed to play with Jewish children as she grew up.” See Antony Polonsky, “Polish Social Worker Saved Around 2,500 Jewish Children from the Nazis,” The Guardian, May 14, 2008; reprinted under the heading “Polish Nurse Saved 2,500 Jewish Children from the Nazis,” The Globe and Mail, May 15, 2008. In fact, as Jewish testimonies confirm, the objections most often came from the Jewish side. Since this obituary is doubtless Polonsky’s most widely read piece on Polish-Jewish relations, he has done more than any other historian to entrench this particular falsehood—a veritable “black pearl.” For many Jews who lived amidst Poles in Warsaw (and not in Jewish enclaves) relations with non-Jews were no different than in Western European countries or North America at the time. A Jew from Warsaw recalled: “I was transferred to a public school at 68 Nowolipki Street where most of the teachers and students were Jewish because it was located in the Jewish section of the city. … It became my ambition to become a student of the Marshal Józef Piłsudski School of Graphics in Warsaw. … It was very difficult to be accepted to this school. … There were three other Jews in my class besides me … Sending me to such a school involved great financial sacrifice for my parents. … In addition, a Polish musician named Bronisław Bykowski, who was very devoted to my father, pawned his and his wife’s wedding rings to help us out. … the atmosphere at the Marshal Piłsudski School was liberal and tolerant based on ethical and democratic principles. I enjoyed a warm and kind relationship with the director of the school, Stanisław Dąbrowski, and many of the professors and instructors, which included both Poles and some Germans. … They made no distinction between Christians and Jews. … My relationships with my classmates were cordial, although we never mixed socially outside school.” See Morris Wyszogrod, A Brush with Death: An Artist in the Death Camps (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 18–20. Bernard Goldstein, a socialist who worked in a slaughterhouse in Warsaw, recalled: “Jews and Poles worked side by side and the relations between them were good, despite the fact that both were strongly nationalistic, unruly, and impulsive. They had frequent conflicts over working conditions, but they always managed to settle them in comradely fashion. They drank and played cards together, living in friendly harmony.” See Bernard Goldstein, The Stars Bear Witness (London: Victor Gollancz, 1950), 8. Another Jew from Warsaw recalled: “When Grandfather Yakov and I came to the village [of Siekierki, just outside the city], we would enter a peasant hut where we were welcomed with respect and genuine warmth. I felt comfortable with the peasants. Grandfather spoke spicy Polish, without any Jewish slang or idiom. … We lived in a working-class quarter where there weren’t many Jewish families. … There were few Jewish children my age in the neighborhood, so I played mostly with Gentile children who came to my house. We’d play soccer, go down to the Wisla [Wisła] River and enjoy the fresh air, swim, and row. Later, when I went to the Jewish school, the Gentile children used to tease the Jewish children on their way to and from school, so we would walk in a group and felt safer. We didn’t run away from Gentile hoodlums but fought back with blows and stones. … [My parents] made their living running a store that sold paint, kerosene, building materials, and haberdashery. Ninety-nine percent of their customers were Poles, who got along well with my parents … When Mother went into labor, I was sent to fetch the Polish midwife. … I started my formal schooling in the heder … But I soon quarrrelled with the teacher and ran away from the heder. The teacher, who felt responsible, sent some children to look for me and bring me back. When they followed me to my street, I sicked my Polish friends on them.” See Simha Rotem (“Kazik”), Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 2–5. Barbara Góra, born in Warsaw in 1932 as Irena Hochberg, was from an assimilated family who lived in the city centre on .Zurawia Street. She recalled that, in their apartment building, Poles and Jews lived in harmony, and during the tome of the war all the children played together in the courtyard.” See Wiktoria Śliwowska, ed., The Last Eyewitnesses: Children of the Holocaust Speak (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998],71.

At a scholarly conference on this topic held in Radom in December 1998, many examples of peaceful coexistence of Poles and Jews, especially in small towns, were brought to light. Feliks Tych, the director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, expressed the view that on the whole, despite the growing economic competition and social radicalization of the 1930s, Polish-Jewish relations remained proper. The main bone of contention was the economic field. In Rzeszów, for example, where there was good cooperation in the city council under its Polish mayor and Jewish vice-mayor, there was fairly fierce competition (mostly verbal) between the fledgling Polish merchant class and the entrenched Jewish merchant class, who did not wish to yield its domination over the local economy. See Zbigniew K. Wójcik, Rzeszów w latach drugiej wojny światowej: Okupacja i konspiracja 1939–1944–1945 (Rzeszów and Kraków: Instytut Europejskich Studiów Społecznych w Rzeszowie, and Towarzystwo Sympatyków Historii w Krakowie, 1998), 162. Charactistically, Jews who didn’t personally experience harassment often claim that it happened elsewhere. Felicia Fuksman, who hails from the large industrial city of Łódź, explains her lack of problems to the fact that she “lived in a much bigger town. In the smaller towns those things happened. But I did not experience this.” See the account of Felicia Fuksman, Louisiana Holocaust Survivors, The Southern Institute for Education and Research, posted online at