[A.
Destruction of the Jewish existence in Poland
1929-1939]
[5.2. Discrimination and murderous pogroms in
anti-Semitic Poland 1935-1939]
[Discrimination of Jews
in Poland is harsher than in the Third Reich]
The economic problems, which will be discussed below, were
accompanied by a growing crescendo of physical attacks by
anti-Semitic elements on the Jewish population. At times
these attacks tended to overshadow the dismal poverty into
which the Jewish masses were sinking. The physical attacks
were accompanied by acts of deliberate discrimination that
equaled, and often exceeded, the steps taken by Germany's
Nazis at that time.
[March 1935: Lodz:
Subsidies for Jewish institutions abolished]
In early March 1935 the Endeks [National Democrats] ruling
in the municipality of Lodz (a town with a Jewish
population of 200,000) abolished all subsidies to Jewish
institutions.
(End note 3:
Jewish
Chronicle, 3/22/35 [22 March 1935], p.22)
[Years 1935-1937:
Discrimination of Jewish students from universities
enforced]
Late in 1935 the long-standing Endek demand to separate
Jewish university students from their non-Jewish
colleagues was put into operation in Lwów; the Warsaw
Polytechnic followed suit in October 1937, as did the
universities of Vilna, Cracow, and Poznan.
(End note 4: Ibid. [
Jewish
Chronicle], 12/20/35 [20 December 1935], 1/17/36
[17 January 1936]. R61-report on Poland, February 1939,
46-report 1938; special bulletin of AJC [American Jewish
Committee], 2/1/38 [1 Feb 1938])
[Since early 1935:
Boycotts and pogroms against Jews with stones, fire and
many murders]
Starting in early 1935, boycotts of Jews spread all
through the Polish countryside. These were followed by
pogroms: window-smashing, the overturning of Jewish market
stalls, beatings, arson, and finally murder. The details
of these brutalities are repetitive and terrible.
In 1935 pogroms took place at Radomsko in April, at Radosc
(near Warsaw) and Grochow in May, at Grodno in May. In
December [1935] these isolated occurrences began to harden
into a campaign: disturbances in Klwow, Lodz, Katowice,
Kielce, and Hrubieszow were followed in January 1936 by
attacks on Jews in Cracow and Warsaw, among other places.
On March 9, 1936, a terrible pogrom occurred at Przytyk,
where two Jews were killed and many houses burned: Bombs
were thrown in those same months in 13 more towns,
including Minsk Mazowiecki; there a second pogrom occurred
in early June and, after four Jews had been killed, most
of the Jewish population left for Warsaw.
During 1936 and early 1937 the pogroms became a daily
occurrence in Poland, and clearly indicated increasingly
better oganization. In Czestochowa riots started in June
1937 (p.183)
with a fight between two porters; a well-organized boycott
movement against the Jews prolonged the unrest there for
months.
Kahn discerned "carefully planned activities of
anti-Semitic elements, in which high government officials
participated." In the course of the Czestochowa pogrom,
the Endek paper
Ganiec
Czestochowski gave lists of streets on which Jews
had not as yet been robbed.
(End note 5: Large amounts of material on the pogroms are
available at the JDC archives, files R13, R52, R60, 8-21,
14-5, 46-reports 1936, 1937, 1938; See also: WAC, Boxes
345 and 366. The quotation is taken from Kahn's report,
6/7/37, in R52; See also: Jewish Chronicle 4/19, 5/3,
5/10, 6/14, 9/6, 11/2, 12/6, 12/13/35; 3/13, 3/27/36; et
seq.)
75 Jews were wounded in this particular outbreak.
In May 1937 another outbreak occurred at Brest Litovsk,
where a number of Jews were killed and some 200 wounded.
(End note 6: R13-Hyman's report to the Budget and Scope
Committee, 6/27/37; see also WAC, Box 366 (a)
Between May 1935 and January 1937, 118 Jews were killed
and 1,350 wounded; 137 Jewish stores were destroyed. A
total of 348 separate violent mass assaults on Jews were
counted during the period, and the compilation was termed
both "unofficial" and "incomplete". Another compilation
showed that between the end of 1935 and March 1939, 350
Jews had been killed and 500 wounded.
(End note 7:
--
New York Times,
2/7/37 [7 Feb 1937];
-- R10-American Jewish Committee review of the European
situation, 3/30/39 [30 March 1939] (by Moses Moskowitz)
The wave of pogroms did not abate throughout 1937 and
1938. In August 1937 five severe outbreaks occurred in
central Poland, and anti-Jewish demonstrations occurred in
seven towns, including the capital.
(End note 8: WAC, Box 366 (f)
One result of these events was an increased movement of
the Jews from smaller places, where they felt themselves
exposed, to the larger towns, where they thought
they would be safer.
But in early 1938 the riots spread to Warsaw, and from
then on attacks on Jews in the larger cities became a
normal occurrence.
[Jews on strike and
self-defense units against riots - police supports the
pogroms]
Several times the Jews reacted by demonstrations and
general strikes (March 1936, May and June 1937). In Warsaw
and Lodz the Bund tried to create Jewish self-defense
units. These were supported by PPS as well, but police
intervention in favor of the pogromists
(End note 9: "Jews have been deserting many villages en
masse and going to the cities, their property burned down
and their very lives endangered" - JDC Executive Committee
(ECO), 9/23/37 [23 September 1937])
neutralized Jewish opposition.
(End note 10: 44-3, cable 3/20/38 [20 March 1938]; ibid.,
8-21
[1938-1939: Poland:
Boycott movements in anti-Semitic Poland ruin Jewish
communities]
In 1938 and 1939 the anti-Jewish boycott movement became
more and more effective. Again, it was mainly the small
Jewish communities that were hit, and in this a parallel
to the experience in Germany can clearly be discerned.
These boycott actions were usually organized by the
Endeks, but by early 1939 the government OZN group also
supported them.
In February 1939 an OZN- (p.184)
inspired boycott in the Lublin area caused Jewish economic
life to be "practically ruined".
(End note 11: R61, February 1939)
The number of Jewish stores in town after town decreased,
while the Polish stores grew in number, despite the
continued economic crisis.
(End note 12:
-- JDC, 45-publicity, Warszawski Dziennik Narodowy,
4/14/38;
-- R28-
Fortnightly
Digest, no. 14 (5/1/38 [1 May 1938], et seq.)
[Early 1939: Poland:
Deportations of Jews from the frontier towns]
In early 1939 Jews were forced to leave certain frontier
towns because they were considered to be unreliable
elements - as though Jews were less interested in
resistance to the Germans than were the Poles. In this
connection "almost one-quarter of the Jewish population of
Gdynia was deported". At Katowice it was "feared
that half the local Jewish population may be forced to
emigrate elsewhere."
(End note 13: See note 11 [R61, February 1939])
[1939: Anti-Semitism also
in Western and Northwestern Poland]
Riots, pogroms, and boycotts now spread to areas in
western and northwestern Poland, where the number of Jews
was very small; up till then these areas had been spared
from excesses.
(End note 14: 45-publicity, bulletin, 3/10/30 [10 March
1930]; thus a bloody pogrom in Dobrzyn caused "many Jews
to be wounded", etc.; at the same time the pogroms did not
cease elsewhere).
[April 1936: Poland: Law
against ritual slaughter]
Jews, especially observant Jews, who formed the majority
of Polish Jewry, were hard hit by Polish laws against
ritual slaughter (shehita) enacted in April 1936 and, in a
final and drastic form, in March 1939. Not only was
religious freedom sharply diminished, but a large number
of Jewish butchers and supervisors of ritual slaughter
were threatened with economic ruin.
[March 1939: Poland is
threatened after German occupation of CSR - laws against
Jews in anti-Semitic Poland]
The general and extreme anti-Jewish movement, both
political and economic, continued until the spring of
1939. Only with the increased Polish-German tension after
Hitler's conquest of Czechoslovakia in March did Polish
anti-Semitism show signs of weakening, as the attention of
the Polish nationialists became directed outward.
Yet the long campaign against the Jews was even then by no
means over; on the contrary, it was the clear intention of
the middle-class parties to enact openly anti-Jewish
legislation. Laws modeled on Nazi legislation were to
include "the revision of citizenship and the elimination
of the Jews from the economic and cultural life of
Poland."
(End note 15: 44-4, memo, 5/1/39 [1 May 1939])
