The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (10 page)

There is little doubt that many local and refugee Jews in eastern Poland, threatened by the Germans and long-suffering victims of the Poles, welcomed the Soviet troops. So did many Ukrainians. Moshe Kleinbaum (later known as Moshe Sneh, a commander of the Jewish underground army in Palestine [the Haganah] and ultimately, although he had started as right-of-center liberal, the leader of the Israeli Communist Party) reported on March 12, 1940, that the Jewish population of Luck, where he was at the time, watched the rolling in of the Red Army with curiosity, like everybody else. The young Jewish communists, not particularly numerous, represented the unpleasant exception: “Their behavior on that day was conspicuous for its vociferousness, which was greater than that of other groups. In this fashion it was possible to obtain the erroneous impression that the Jews were the most festive guests at this celebration.”
¹⁵³

The sense of relief among Jews was certainly more widespread than Kleinbaum admitted, and their initial attitude to Soviet presence more enthusiastic than he reported. We shall see further on how the Poles perceived the issue. In the late 1970s historian Isaiah Trunk went further than Kleinbaum in his severe assessment of Jewish communists. According to Trunk, these Jewish communists were both tactless and treacherous: Their enthusiasm had a triumphant tinge; they penetrated the local Soviet apparatus and did not hesitate to denounce Poles and Jews (“bourgeois” or “socialist”) to the NKVD [the Soviet secret police, precursor of the KGB].
¹⁵⁴
Trunk’s harsh judgment was probably influenced by his own Bundist hatred for communism and thus may also be in need of some revision.

The difficulty in assessing Jewish reactions to Soviet occupation, at least during the first weeks and months, derives in part from the temporary convergence of gut feelings of relief probably felt by all Jews who came under Soviet rule and the quite differently motivated enthusiasm of Jewish communists. When, for example, the news spread among the Warsaw Jews that they would possibly be in the Soviet zone, their enthusiasm knew no bounds, according to a somewhat later entry in Kaplan’s diary. Kaplan was politically conservative and an Orthodox Jew who detested the Soviet regime. Nonetheless, his description of Jewish reactions, on October 13, 1939, is telling: “There are no signs of Jewishness at all in Russia. Yet nevertheless, when the news reached us that the Bolsheviks were coming closer to Warsaw, our joy was limitless. We dreamed about it; we thought ourselves lucky. Thousands of young people went to Bolshevik Russia on foot; that is to say, to the areas conquered by Russia. They looked upon the Bolsheviks as redeeming Messiahs. Even the wealthy, who would become poor under Bolshevism, preferred the Russians to the Germans. There is plunder on the one hand and plunder on the other, but the Russians plunder one as a citizen and a man, while the Nazis plunder one as a Jew. The former Polish government never spoiled us, but at the same time never overtly singled us for torture. The Nazi is a sadist, however. His hatred of the Jews is a psychosis. He flogs and derives pleasure from it. The torment of the victim is a balm to his soul, especially if the victim is a Jew.”
¹⁵⁵

Kaplan touched on the most fundamental motivations of the Jewish populace. The role of Jewish communists is more complex; the degree of their participation in the Soviet repression system has been variously assessed. According to historian Jan T. Gross, questionnaires filled by Polish refugees from the formerly Soviet-occupied zone, who fled after the German attack of June 1941, do not seem to confirm this common accusation. “Among other things,” Gross writes, “we know scores of names of members of village committees and personnel of rural militias that served all over the area—
and Jews are only infrequently mentioned among them
[emphasis in the original]. We know also that higher echelons of the local Soviet administration—on county, or city level—were staffed by functionaries brought in from the east and while there were Jews among them, of course, they were not any more numerous than in the administration apparatus in the Soviet interior.”
¹⁵⁶
On the other hand Alexander B. Rossino, quoting research by Yitzhak Arad and Dov Levin, as well as an earlier study by Jan T. Gross and mainly Evgeny Rozenblat’s research about the Pinsk district, near Bialystok, offers a different picture: “In his examination of various sectors of local society, Rozenblat found that, despite the fact that Jews made up only 10 percent of the regional population, they held 49.5 percent of the leading administrative positions in the Pinsk
oblast
[district], including 41.2 percent of those in the judicial and police administration.”
¹⁵⁷

Very soon, however, many Jews became disenchanted with the new rulers: Economic hardship spread; Jewish religious, educational, and political institutions were disbanded; NKVD surveillance became allintrusive; and in the spring of 1940, mass deportations, which had already targeted other so-called hostile groups, began to include segments of the Jewish population, such as the wealthier Jews, those who hesitated to accept Soviet citizenship, and those who declared that after the war they wanted to return home.
¹⁵⁸
In view of these worsening conditions in the Soviet zone, thousands of Jews even attempted—and managed—to return to the German-occupied areas. “It is strange,” Hans Frank commented on May 10, 1940, “that also many Jews prefer to come into the Reich [the Reich-controlled territories] than to stay in Russia.”
¹⁵⁹
Moshe Grossman’s memoirs tell of a train filled with Jews going east, which, at a border station, met a train moving west. When the Jews coming from Brisk [the Soviet zone] saw Jews going there, they shouted: “You are mad, where are you going?” Those coming from Warsaw answered with equal astonishment: “You are mad, where are you going?”
¹⁶⁰
The story is obviously apocryphal, but it vividly illustrates the plight and the confusion of the Jews in both zones of Poland and, beyond it, the disarray spreading among the Jews of Europe. In the meantime the NKVD, in the new climate of cooperation with the Gestapo, was handing over members of the former German Communist Party (KPD) who had been held in Soviet prisons, including Jews.
¹⁶¹

In its great majority, the Polish population under German occupation remained hostile toward the Jews in the German-controlled areas and expressed fury at “Jewish behavior” in the Soviet-occupied part of the country, according to a comprehensive report written for the government-in-exile in February 1940 by a young courier from Poland, Jan Karski.
¹⁶²
The report pointed out that the Germans were striving to gain submission and collaboration from the Polish masses by exploiting anti-Semitism. “And,” Karski added, “it must be admitted that they are succeeding in this. The Jews pay and pay and pay…, and the Polish peasant, laborer, and half-educated, unintelligent, demoralized wretch loudly proclaim, ‘Now, then, they are finally teaching them a lesson.’—‘We should learn from them.’—‘The end has come for the Jews.’—‘Whatever happens, we should thank God that the Germans came and took hold of the Jews,’—etc.”
¹⁶³

Karski’s comments were unusually forthright: “Although the nation loathes them [the Germans] mortally, this question [the Jewish question] is creating something akin to a narrow bridge upon which the Germans and a large portion of Polish society are finding agreement…. The present situation is creating a twofold schism among the Poles, with one group despising and resenting the Germans’ barbaric methods…and the other regarding them (and thus the Germans, too!) with curiosity and often fascination, and condemning the first group for its ‘indifference toward such an important question.’”
¹⁶⁴

Even more disturbing was the part of Karski’s report that described Polish perceptions of how the Jews reacted to the Soviet occupation of the eastern part of the country: “It is generally believed that the Jews betrayed Poland and the Poles, that they are basically communists, that they crossed over to the Bolsheviks with flags unfurled…. Certainly it is so that Jewish communists adopted an enthusiastic stance towards the Bolsheviks, regardless of the social class from which they came.” Karski did, however, venture the explanation that the widespread satisfaction notable among working-class Jews resulted from the persecution they had suffered at the hands of the Poles. What he found shocking was the lack of loyalty of many Jews, their readiness to denounce Poles to the Soviet police and the like. Karski did not include the Jewish intelligentsia among the disloyal majority: The intellectuals and the wealthier Jews, he stated, would much prefer an independent Poland again.

The concluding lines of his report were ominous: “In principle, however, and in their mass, the Jews have created here a situation in which the Poles regard them as devoted to the Bolsheviks and—one can safely say—wait for the moment when they will be able simply to take revenge upon the Jews. Virtually all Poles are bitter and disappointed in relation to the Jews; the overwhelming majority (first among them of course the youth) literally look forward to an opportunity for ‘repayment in blood.’”
¹⁶⁵

The Polish government-in-exile was certainly aware of the anti-Jewish attitude of the population even before receiving Karski’s report; it was thus facing a quandary that was to grow with time. On the one hand, Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski’s group knew that it could not denounce anti-Semitism in the home country without losing its influence on the population; on the other hand, abetting Polish hatred of the Jews meant incurring criticism in Paris, London, and particularly in the United States where, the Polish government believed, the Jews were all-powerful. As for the future of Polish-Jewish relations, it seems that in 1940 Sikorski’s men were giving up the hope that the Jews would help them reclaim the territories occupied by the Soviets. Some of them, moreover, hardly rejected the attitudes reported in the Karski memorandum.

In a report sent on December 8, 1939, to the government-in-exile about the situation in eastern Poland, a local member of the underground wrote: “Jews are so horribly persecuting Poles and everything that is connected to Polishness under the Soviet partition…that at the first opportunity all the Poles here, from the elderly to the women and children, will take such a horrible revenge on the Jews as no anti-Semite has ever imagined possible.”
¹⁶⁶
Sikorski’s government soon appointed the former Polish ambassador in Berlin, Roman Knoll, to a senior position in its political delegation to the underground. Knoll did not hide his own views about the desirable fate of the Jews in Poland: “No longer do we face a choice between Zionism and the former state of affairs; the choice is rather—
Zionism or extermination
.”
¹⁶⁷

X

The approximately 250,000 Jews still living in Germany and annexed Austria at the outbreak of the war were an impoverished, predominantly middle-aged or elderly community.
¹⁶⁸
Part of the male population had been drafted into compulsory labor, and a growing number of families depended on welfare (mainly handed out by the Reichsvereinigung). Throughout the country the number of “Jews’ houses” [houses inhabited only by Jews, on order of the authorities] was growing, as were the areas off-limits for Jews. The Jews of the Greater Reich were entirely segregated pariahs among some 80 million Germans and Austrians. Emigrating was their ever-present but rapidly dwindling hope.

On the first day of the war the Jews of Germany were forbidden to leave their homes after eight o’clock in the evening.
¹⁶⁹
“All police authorities in the Reich have taken this measure,” a confidential instruction to the press explained, “because it has frequently happened that the Jews used the blackout to harass Aryan women.”
¹⁷⁰

Yom Kippur, duly remembered by the
Einsatzgruppen
in Poland, had not been forgotten in the Reich, either. On that day (September 23), the Jews had to hand in their radios.
¹⁷¹
On September 12, throughout the Reich, the Jews were ordered to shop only in special stores belonging to “reliable Aryans.”
¹⁷²
Some of the store owners refused to cater to Jews, the SD reported from Cologne on September 29, until they were informed that they would not suffer any disadvantages from doing so.
¹⁷³
In that same city Jews could shop only from 8 to 9:30 a.m.
¹⁷⁴
“The mere presence of Jews in queues was felt as a provocation,” the Bielefeld Gestapo explained on September 13: “One could not demand of any German to stand in front of a shop together with a Jew.”
¹⁷⁵
Five days later the Jews were ordered to build their own air raid shelters.
¹⁷⁶

In October, anyone volunteering to serve as a firefighter had to be instructed “about the notion of the Jew,” and declare that he was not one.
¹⁷⁷
In November, after it occurred to the RSHA that Jews whose radios were confiscated could simply buy new ones, the names and addresses of all purchasers of new radios had to be registered.
¹⁷⁸
The radio issue was in and of itself the source of intense bureaucratic turmoil: How did the ruling apply to the non-Jewish spouses in a mixed marriage? What should be done about radios in a house still inhabited by both Jews and non-Jews? And what about the rights of Jewish wives whose Aryan husbands were fighting for the fatherland: Should they keep their radios or not? Finally, in a detailed list of instructions issued on July 1, 1940, Heydrich tried to give definitive answers to the intractable problems created by Jews listening to radios; it is not recorded whether this put everybody’s mind at rest.
¹⁷⁹
As for the distribution of the confiscated radios, elaborate hierarchies and priorities were established that had to take into account the rights of army units, party authorities, local grandees, and so on. (On October 4, 1939, for example, 1,000 radios were allocated to Army Group C, stationed in Wiesbaden.)
¹⁸⁰