by Ian Buruma
Female collaboration with the enemy was mostly about sex. Unlike treason, this was not a crime that existed in any legal code before. One could call it tactless, selfish, indecent, an affront, but not a crime. So a new law was devised in France, in 1944, to deal with such cases. People who had undermined the national morale by unpatriotic behavior, such as sleeping with the occupiers, were guilty of “national unworthiness” (indignité nationale) and stripped of their civil rights.
All kinds of people, men and women, were purged, often with extreme violence, after May 1945 in France. About four thousand people lost their lives. Many had been guilty of treason; others were purged for reasons of personal vengeance, or for political reasons, if they stood in the way of the Communist Party, for example. But popular wrath fell disproportionately, and most publicly, on women accused of “horizontal collaboration.” This, too, can be explained at least partly through a common sense of humiliation. The submission of France by superior German force was often described in sexual terms. The rampant German army, representing a powerful, virile nation, had forced weak, decadent, effeminate France to submit to its will. Horizontal collaboration, the giggling young française perched on the knees of the Boche, swilling fine French champagne, was the most painful symbol of this submission. And so it was the women who had to be punished with maximum disgrace.
Already before national liberation, and the wild purge, Frenchwomen had been given the right to vote for the first time, in April 1944 to be exact. The following sentences, from Le Patriote de l’Eure, a resistance newspaper, published in February 1945, reveal a great deal about contemporary attitudes to the women who had strayed into the wrong arms:
Soon we shall see these women voting side by side with our valiant ordinary French women, good mothers, wives of prisoners of war. But surely we should not allow those who sniggered at us, who threatened us, who swooned in the arms of the Boches, to have any say in the destiny of France reborn.15
Contrast the sniggering, swooning floozies with those virtuous mothers and POW wives, and one senses the shame, as well as the strong puritanical streak. The horizontal collaborators were not only unpatriotic, but also threats to bourgeois family morals. Add to this the always toxic element of economic envy, and righteous indignation becomes truly explosive. From the indictments of the wicked women it is not always clear which was considered worse, the sexual immorality or the material benefits that came with it. Sleeping with the enemy was bad enough, but living better than everyone else made it a far graver crime. The case of one Madame Polge, wife of a well-known football player in Nimes, serves as a grim illustration.
During the occupation, Mme Polge became the mistress of the local German commander, whose French family name was Saint Paul. In exchange for her services, she received all manner of material benefits. In the words of a contemporary newspaper, Le Populaire, Mme Polge “admitted to having two or three liters of milk delivered every day, as well as fresh game, twice or three times a week, from the Boche commandant. She was also able to keep her house nice and warm, as well as having her hair done, and all that without paying a centime . . . And meanwhile working-class people and their children were dying of hunger . . .”16 Mme Polge was sentenced to death. Shaven and stripped, she was driven through the streets to the execution ground. After she was shot, her corpse was displayed to the good people of Nimes, who covered it in spit, and prodded it with a broomstick, the final indignity befitting a modern witch.
The most enthusiastic persecutors of filles de Boches were usually not people who had distinguished themselves in acts of courage during the war. Once Liberation came to formerly occupied countries, all kinds of men managed to present themselves as members of resistance groups, strutting around with newly acquired armbands and Sten guns, disporting themselves as heroes as they hunted for traitors and bad women. Vengeance is one way of covering up a guilty conscience for not standing up when it was dangerous. This too appears to be a universal phenomenon, of all times. As the truly heroic Polish dissident Adam Michnik once put it, when he protested against purging former communists after 1989, he had nothing to be ashamed of before, so he had no need to prove that he was a hero by pointing fingers at others now. This humane attitude, always rare, was not exactly common in 1945.
Greed, prejudice, and a guilty conscience might help us understand the most perverse form of revenge in 1945, the persecution of Jews in Poland. The ancient Jewish community in Poland was almost annihilated. Three million Polish Jews were murdered during the Nazi occupation, either shot or gassed, mostly on Polish territory. Ten percent managed to survive, hidden by Polish Gentiles, or living in exile in far-flung parts of the Soviet Union. The physically and mentally wounded survivors who came staggering back to their hometowns and villages, after having lost all or most of their friends and relatives, usually found that they were no longer welcome. Worse than that: they were often threatened and driven out of town. Other people had moved in to their houses. The synagogues were destroyed. What possessions they might have left behind had long ago been stolen by others, frequently former neighbors. And it was a rare person who was willing to give anything back.
This happened in other parts of Europe as well. Quite a number of Jews returning home to Amsterdam, Brussels, or Paris found that they had no home left there, either. But in Poland, especially outside the main cities, Jews were in physical danger. There were cases of families being pulled off trains, robbed of all their possessions, and killed on the spot. More than a thousand Jews were murdered in Poland between the summers of 1945 and 1946. Even in the cities, they were not always safe.
In August 11, 1945, a rumor started in Krakow that Jews had killed a Christian child in the synagogue. This was an updated version of an age-old anti-Semitic canard. People spoke darkly of Jewish survivors using Christian blood to revive their ravaged health. Soon, a mob gathered, led by policemen and militiamen. The synagogue was attacked, Jewish homes were plundered, and men, women, and children were beaten up in the streets. Several people (the exact number is not known) were murdered. It was a bloody pogrom against people who had only just survived a genocide. Badly wounded Jews were taken to the hospital, where some of them were assaulted again while awaiting surgery. One female survivor recalls “the comments of the escorting soldier and the nurse, who spoke about us as Jewish scum whom they had to save, and that they shouldn’t be doing this because we murdered children, that all of us should be shot.” Another nurse promised to rip the Jews apart as soon as surgery was over. A railway man at the hospital remarked: “It’s a scandal that a Pole does not have the civil courage to hit a defenseless person.”17 This man, true to his word, proceeded to beat a wounded Jew.
Poles, too, suffered horribly under German occupation. Untermenschen, like the Russians, they were enslaved, their capital city was razed, and more than a million non-Jewish Poles were murdered. Poles could not be blamed for the German decision to build the death camps on their soil. And yet it is as though the Poles took out their own suffering on the one people who had suffered even more.
A common account is that Polish vengeance was based on the perception that Jews were responsible for communist oppression. When Soviet troops had occupied different parts of Poland, some Jews hoped that they would protect them from Polish anti-Semites, or from the even more lethal Germans. Communism as an antidote to ethnic nationalism had long had a natural appeal to members of a vulnerable minority. But while many communists were Jews, most Jews were not communists. So vengeance against Jews for what was called “Judeo-Communism” was at best misplaced, and politics may in fact not have been the main source of revenge at all. For most Jews were not attacked after the war for being communists, but for being Jews. And Jews were associated not only with bolshevism in popular anti-Semitic lore, but with capitalism too. They were assumed to have money, to be better off than other people, even privileged. Communists were not above exploiting anti-Semitism themselves, which is why most Jewish
survivors in Poland ended up leaving the country of their birth.
Although the majority of Polish Jews were in fact poor, the perception of superior wealth lingered. This had something to do with a guilty conscience, sometimes eased in a bizarre way by communist propaganda against Jewish capitalists. Poles certainly bore no responsibility for the German plan to exterminate the Jews. But many of them did stand by at the edge of the ghetto, with horse carts, waiting for their chance to plunder once the Jews had been conveniently disposed of. Others—like so many European citizens—were also happy to move into houses and apartments, whose rightful owners were taken away to be murdered.
In some places, especially in northeastern villages around Bialystok, Poles did some of the killing themselves. In July 1941, the Jews in Radzilow were locked up in a barn and burned alive while their fellow citizens ran around filling their bags with loot. An eyewitness remembers: “When the Poles started rounding up and chasing Jews, the plundering of Jewish houses began instantly . . . They went mad, they were breaking into houses, tearing up quilts; the air was full of feathers, and they’d just load up their sacks, run home and come back with an empty sack again.” One family, the Finkielstejns, managed to run away. After they returned, they asked the priest to convert them so they might have a better chance to survive. The daughter, Chaja, recalls the village conversations: “They would always talk about one thing: who had plundered how much and how rich the Jews had been.”18
It should never be forgotten that other Polish Gentiles behaved very differently. Hiding or helping Jews to survive carried huge risks, not just for the helper alone, but for his or her family. If caught in a western European country, a person might be sent to a concentration camp for helping Jews. In Poland it could mean death by hanging. Yet some Jews did survive thanks to the bravery of Polish Gentiles. Children were adopted, families hidden. In one famous case, several Jewish families were hidden for more than a year in the sewers of Lvov by a petty thief named Leopold Socha. More than twenty people survived underground, eating Socha’s crusts of bread while fending off rats in the dark, and at least once almost drowning after a heavy rainstorm flooded the sewer. When they emerged from the manhole, pale, emaciated, covered in excrement and lice, the people aboveground were astonished to see a Jew still alive. Several months later Socha died in an accident, run over by a drunken Soviet army truck driver. The neighbors whispered that this was God’s punishment for helping the Jews.19
This is perhaps the most shocking thing about the postwar Polish story. People who had protected Jews from being murdered were well advised not to talk about it. Not only because of God’s wrath for helping “the killers of Christ,” but because of the suspected loot. Since Jews were assumed to have money, and their saviors were expected to have been richly compensated, anyone who admitted to have hidden Jews was vulnerable to plunder.
Even after they were long dead, Jews were still thought to have something worth taking. In the autumn of 1945, the former death camp of Treblinka, where more than eight hundred thousand Jews had been murdered, was a muddy mass grave. Local peasants started digging in search of skulls from which they might still be able to extract some gold teeth overlooked by the Nazis. Thousands worked the site with shovels, or sifted through the mounds of ashes, transforming the mass grave into a huge field of deep pits and broken bones.
The Poles, it must be emphasized again, were not unique. Greed was the common result of barbarous occupation, which affected countless Europeans. The historian Tony Judt observed: “The Nazis’ attitude to life and limb is justifiably notorious; but their treatment of property may actually have been their most important practical legacy to the shape of the post-war world.”20 Property up for grabs is a great incitement for brutality. What is unusual about Poland is the scale of plunder. A whole new class had come up from the war which essentially took over the assets of those who had been killed or driven out. A lingering sense of guilt can have perverse consequences.
A contemporary Polish weekly paper, Odrodzenie, put it succinctly in September 1945: “We knew in the country an entire social stratum—the newborn Polish bourgeoisie—which took the place of murdered Jews, often literally, and perhaps because it smelled blood on its hands, it hated Jews more strongly than ever.”21
This explains the sometimes bloody vengeance against the main victims of Hitler’s Reich better than anything. Plundering the Jews, in a way, was part of a larger social revolution. And this type of revenge, too, would not have happened without the sometimes tacit, but often active, connivance of powerful opportunists in the Polish bureaucracy and police. It was not the official policy of the communist-dominated Polish government in 1945 to go after the Jews, but encouragement from the middle ranks was often quite enough.
• • •
THAT POLES WOULD WISH to direct their revenge against Germans is more comprehensible. But that, too, was partly driven by class warfare. For centuries Germans had lived in areas such as Silesia and East Prussia that are now part of Poland. Major cities, like Breslau (Wrocław) or Danzig (), were largely German. German was the language of the urban elites, the doctors, bankers, professors, and businessmen. In 1945 more than four million Germans were still living in former German lands invaded by Soviet troops. Roughly the same number, terrified of what they had been told about Russian behavior, had fled to the west. Plans to expel the rest of the German population were already clear well before May 1945. In 1941, General Sikorski, the Polish prime minister exiled in London, declared that “the German horde, which for centuries had penetrated to the east, should be destroyed and forced to draw back far [to the west].”22
This policy had been endorsed by the Allied leaders. Even worse, Stalin advised the Polish communists to “create such conditions for the Germans that they would want to escape themselves.” And Churchill had told the House of Commons in December 1944, “Expulsion is the method, which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting.”23
As long as the Red Army was in control, the Poles more or less held themselves back. Libussa Fritz-Krockow, scion of a noble Pomeranian landowning family, remembered how they had actually felt protected by the Russians at times, even though those same Russians “were responsible for the vast majority of the rapes and the lootings.” Yet, she observed, “their violence was somehow comprehensible to us, whether we explained it as the principle of an eye for an eye, sheer exuberance, or conquerors’ rights. The Poles, on the other hand, were merely camp followers. Their seizure of power had a different character. There was something cold and furtive about it, almost sneaky, which made it seem far more sinister than naked force.”24
The Krockows were not Nazis. Christian von Krockow, who wrote up his sister Libussa’s memoirs, was a liberal who understood very well that their suffering was “the result of our own German madness.”25 But there may be a hint of anti-Polish bias or bitterness in Libussa’s statement, even perhaps a sense of betrayal. This was not an unusual sentiment. A German Protestant minister, Helmut Richter, expressed the same thing. He had always expected the Poles to be good people. After all, hadn’t Germans treated them well in the past? But now he realized “the awful nature of these eastern peoples.” For a long time, they had behaved themselves as long as they felt “a fist hovering over their heads,” but they turned “barbaric when they have the chance to wield power over others.”26 This is the way colonizers always talk about the natives. The difference with most European colonies in Africa or Asia, however, is that in this case many of the former colonizers had been natives themselves, albeit natives of a privileged class.
In any case, the Poles did not want Soviet troops to spend a moment longer than necessary in the conquered lands that were now officially part of Poland. And the cruelties that went with massive expulsions and population transfers decided by the Big Powers at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 were not just the result of Polish vengeance. More than two million “Cong
ress Poles” from the east of the Polish Soviet border, now part of Ukraine, were moved to Silesia and other areas that had been more or less swept clean of the Germans. So they took German homes, German jobs, and German assets, a process that was rarely gentle.
Of course, ethnic cleansing did not begin in 1945. Hitler had expelled Poles and murdered Jews to make room for German immigrants in Silesia and other border areas. But bitterness over disputed homelands went back further than that. As so often with bloody ethnic revenge, a history of civil war preceded it. With the defeat of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, the fate of their holdings in Silesia had to be decided. Bits went to Austria, bits to Czechoslovakia, and bits to Poland and Germany. Upper Silesia, however, remained in dispute. There was a strong Upper Silesian independence movement, supported by local Poles and Germans. But the Allies decided in 1919 that a plebiscite should decide whether the territory should go to Poland or Germany. This decision led to serious violence. Armed Polish nationalists assaulted Germans, especially in the industrial area around Kattowitz (Katowice), not far from Auschwitz (). These attacks provoked even bloodier reprisals by thuggish German adventurers in the ultranationalist, paramilitary Freikorps, a breeding ground for the future Nazi movement that was formed in late 1918 after Germany’s defeat. “Black-Red-Gold! Smash the Poles!” was one of their charming slogans. The majority voted for Germany to govern Upper Silesia, a decision that caused more violence. In the end, part of Upper Silesia went to Poland after all. But memories were still raw in 1945, all the more so because of the treatment of Poles under Nazi occupation.
