by Anna Bikont
Jan Cytrynowicz said: “In church it was constantly emphasized that Jews had killed Christ, there could be no sermon without that theme. Father Rogalski of Wizna was forever calling on people not to buy from Jews, not to visit Jews. He held it against my father, who had converted, that he did business with Jews, and as a punishment he kicked me out of religion class. That’s why my education stopped after elementary school. With an F for religion you couldn’t pass to the next grade.”
Judging by the amount of space the Interior Ministry reports devoted to the priests of Wąsosz and Radziłów, the towns where Catholics murdered almost all Jews in 1941, they were particularly active supporters of anti-Jewish campaigns.
Father Piotr Krysiak of Wąsosz was an important figure in the National Party not only on the local level; he often visited Drozdowo, where the founder of the National Party, Roman Dmowski, moved toward the end of his life. It was under the intellectual leadership of Father Krysiak, the Interior Ministry reports stress, that a circle of National Party supporters came into existence, and it was the priest himself who organized National Party member meetings and called for picketing Jewish shops. Even on his way out, in September 1937, at a ceremonial farewell to the priest, who was retiring, he urged his parishioners to organize a picket in neighboring Szczuczyn as well.
Mosze Rozenbaum had Polish acquaintances who remembered Father Aleksander Dołęgowski, the Radziłów parish priest, proclaiming at the funeral of the National Party attack squad members in 1933: “If the blood of Jews does not flow to all four corners of the world, Christianity will perish.” Perhaps the words were not quite that brutal. In any case, we know from the Interior Ministry reports that Father Dołęgowski dedicated a Mass to the memory of the squad members on the first anniversary of the pogrom, and gave an address to five thousand people crowded into the marketplace.
By the Polish residents of the town, Father Dołęgowski was remembered above all as an exceptionally miserly priest. He kept gardens where he had the faithful work for meager wages, which as a rule he neglected to pay them. His curates were outspoken anti-Jewish activists—and it was they who led the boycotts.
First, the curate Władysław Kamiński. I was told that “he hated Jews so much that when he was drunk he shot at the windows of the tailor Monkowski, who lived across the street.” Stanisław Ramotowski recalled, “I saw with my own eyes how he went with boys from the National Party to break the windows of Jewish shops.” We know from the Interior Ministry reports that he gathered together kids from the senior classes and urged them to combat Jewish trade. As an official at the Interior Ministry department elegantly phrased it, “He put forward the argument that Jewish bakers mixed dough with their dirty feet and spat in it. He stressed that a student who dared to buy a product from a Jew would fail religion class.” On another occasion, Father Kamiński said in class that during the war between Poland and Soviet Russia in 1920, Jews had scalded General Rydz-Śmigły’s head with boiling water, leaving him bald. For that reason the general harbors hatred toward Jews and plans to drive them out of Poland. It’s unknown to what extent the curate was conveying Rydz-Śmigły’s sentiments, but this was doubtless a way to express his own. At a National Party county convention in Grajewo in 1936, which brought together twenty-five hundred participants, the curate, appealing for a battle against Jews and Communism, thundered that it was for their own purposes that Jews permitted their women to marry Poles, and there were ministers who had Jewish wives.
The name of another curate of the Radziłów parish appears even more frequently in the Interior Ministry reports: Father Józef Choromański. In March 1937, the curate personally organized pickets of Jewish shops. In his religion classes he sneered at children whose parents shopped with Jews, and “the schoolchildren, remaining under the influence of the curate, were guilty of anti-Jewish speech and behavior.” On July 18 in Wąsosz, at the Catholic ceremony blessing the National Party flags, the curate spoke to a group of seven hundred people and organized picketing campaigns. On July 29, he intervened at a police station in Radziłów on behalf of arrested picketers. In Radziłów on August 12, he sent people out picketing (and after being transferred to nearby Kolno in 1938, he organized campaigns at the beginning of the school year in which Polish children blocked their Jewish fellow students from entering the schoolhouse).
Jedwabne appears only episodically in the reports, although there, too, like everywhere, anti-Jewish excesses are noted: “On August 25, 1937, in Jedwabne picketers would not let Jews put up their stalls. One of the Jews put up his stall with hats despite being told not to, and the picketers overturned it.” In the same year, Father Marian Szumowski wrote in the Jedwabne parish book, “All the tradesmen in the marketplace are now Polish. No one has dared to enter a Jewish shop, and the one woman who defied the warning to go to a Jewish baker was thrashed (with a stick).”
As the nationalists were increasingly subjected to trials and other restrictions, like the suspension of some groups’ activity, the Church shielded them more and more closely. From August 1938, Father Antoni Kochański was the executive director of the Łomża district branch of the National Party, which—as Professor Szymon Rudnicki, an expert on the nationalist parties of the interbellum, told me—is a testament to the extremely close ties between the local church hierarchy and the party.
The Polish-Jewish conflict, or rather the conflict between nationalists and Jews, did not determine the entire network of neighborly ties. Conflicts among Poles also inflamed great passions. The Church in the Łomża district forbade the dedication of Masses on the occasion of the name day or memorial celebrations of Marshal Piłsudski, the head of state in independent Poland, a politician favorably disposed to national minorities and therefore hated by nationalists.8 Piłsudski’s followers, among them a large part of the local intelligentsia, teachers, and officials, were politically closer to the educated Jewish elite than to fellow Poles who joined the National Party.
6.
Reading the reports of the Interior Ministry, one could easily think that the life of the Jedwabne or Radziłów Jews was one long succession of humiliations and persecution. But it is worth remembering that the reports of security services usually create a distorted image of reality.
Although it was not easy for Jews to live in a hostile environment, and though they often suffered from poverty, they nevertheless lived a life that was often sorely missed by those who managed to escape across the ocean. Relations with their Polish neighbors were only the backdrop to the life of a Jewish community bound by strong ties and equally strong antagonisms, absorbed in its own dreams and quarrels. The Jews in the region constituted a strong, separate modern society. Even in the smallest towns there were Jewish institutions, parties, mutual-aid groups, banks, and associations.9
The reports of the Interior Ministry, which monitored the Yiddish press, give a good sense of just how much Jews led a life of their own, how remote the issues at the heart of the Jewish community were from the things that occupied their Polish neighbors.
Let us take the time of the pogrom in Radziłów. In March 1933, on the premises of the Union of Jewish Butchers on Zamenhof Street in Białystok, at the conference of delegates of Jewish butchers’ guilds of the Białystok region, Icchak Wałach and Lejb Szlapak gave speeches protesting a law intended to restrict ritual slaughter. In May in Białystok, there was a strike by Jewish textile workers, and the Zionist Orthodox organization Mizrachi created a consortium of artisans and businessmen committed to establishing a textile factory in Tel Aviv. Thanks to the daily press these kinds of events were on everybody’s tongue in no time.
In Warsaw, Lvov, or Białystok, assimilated Jews often treated both Jewish tradition and the activity of Jewish organizations as a kind of alien folklore. But in Radziłów or Jedwabne, every Jew—even ones who preferred speaking Polish rather than Yiddish and were proud of service in the 1920 Polish war of independence—went to the synagogue and belonged to some Jewish organization.
&n
bsp; The growing influence of the National Party was met among the Jewish population with the reactive growth of Zionism, which involved Zionist groups competing with one another. None of them had any liking for Jewish Communists, or vice versa for that matter. Agudat Israel, the organization of Orthodox Jews, fought with equal passion against both Zionists and Communists.10
7.
“The nationalists broke down their stalls until the police had to intervene,” remembered Kazimierz Mocarski, “and the Jews at those stalls were so polite: ‘Good day,’ they said to Mother, ‘what a fine little boy you have there,’ and they gave me a candy. It was enough for Mother to say: ‘Hey, that other Jew has that fabric for 2.10, and you’re asking 2.20?’ and the man bowed right away, saying: ‘I’ll give you a bit extra, Mrs. Mocarski, and you can have it for 2.05.’”
Jews can’t only have been polite to the nice Mrs. Mocarski. They replaced the shop windows that had been broken and went on doing business on credit with the National Party activists who’d broken them. They made an effort to behave properly, even ingratiatingly, toward Poles, trying to win their favor.
According to the stories I heard from Polish and Jewish interlocutors, good neighborly relations were usually based on Jews performing some service to Poles; it could be writing a letter or keeping peelings for the pigs. Probably apart from ordinary neighborliness a role was played by the centuries-old tradition that taught them they had to pay their way into the societies they lived in, and the Jews saw nothing odd in it. But what did their Polish neighbors feel, raised on anti-Semitic propaganda, when they experienced such courtesies? Many of them must have experienced them as a humiliation.
The majority of Polish residents felt distrust for and distance from Jews, and also a sense of superiority because of the fact that they belonged to “the true faith.” In turn, Jews felt scorn for “goys” (even when they tried not to show it) because they were illiterate, or because they drank and beat their wives, or didn’t make sure their children got an education.
“My father was a tailor, he sewed cassocks for the priest, he had a lot of Polish acquaintances, but we children weren’t allowed to play with Polish children,” I was told by Izaak Lewin. “We saw them in school, which was mixed, or in the courtyard, but at home it was drummed into us: ‘The only good things are Jewish.’”
8.
In 1936 the parliament passed a law restricting shehita, or ritual slaughter, violating the Treatise on Minorities, which forbade the state from interfering with the religious customs of minorities. Edicts followed on both the state and local level that reduced Jews to the status of second-class citizens. State schools that taught Yiddish lost their funding, and Polish schools were forbidden to skip the Sabbath. The Interior Ministry reports in those years show—probably without meaning to—how the state’s attitude toward the Jewish question changed after Piłsudski’s followers adopted a moderate form of the National Party’s anti-Jewish ideology to shore up their own power. From 1936 onward, one notices a certain change of tone in the officials’ reports. The National Party was gaining strength and assertiveness, and at the same time the nationalists are described in more positive terms, with some blame being placed on their victims. “The National Party’s unruly supporters have permitted themselves minor anti-Jewish excesses. The Jews were partly responsible for bringing this on themselves by their arrogant and provocative behavior” (report of May 1936).
In March 1936, The Catholic Cause was still furious—in an article titled “A Jewish Master of Ceremonies’ Brazenness at a Rifle Meeting in Ostrołęka”—that reformist circles had allowed a Jew to be master of ceremonies. Before long the Riflemen would not only refuse to entrust a Jew with that position but would also refuse to let him participate in its meetings.
Local ties binding the community, which developed at least in part from the citizens meeting at town council sessions, were already under pressure, and now they were often severed for good. A report from January 1938 discloses that in Białystok, after funding for Jewish schooling had been cut, the Jewish council members had left the meeting and withdrawn from the council’s work. After 1936, many Jewish organizations were established, a majority of which were efforts by a threatened community to protect itself. And so it was that in Białystok in September 1936, an aid committee was set up to collect funds on behalf of the owners of boycotted shops. We know from Interior Ministry reports that it helped Jews in Radziłów and Jedwabne.
On March 23, 1937, a delegation from Ciechanowiec in the Białystok region set out for the capital with a petition to Jewish parliamentarians: “On market days two to three hundred people come into town from the countryside and groups of five or six of them picket a shop, not letting a single customer in, hurling insults like ‘swine,’ ‘Jewish lackeys,’ dragging customers out by force, and it sometimes happens that a customer who resists is picked up, thrown out, and even beaten. Within two or three months new Christian merchants have built themselves shops along the whole length of the marketplace and they egg the hooligans on. We turn to you, representatives. Save our town from annihilation.”
An August 15, 1937, proclamation of the Białystok district conference of Jewish small-business owners, in which optimism masked despair, stated, “In the conviction that the present manifestation of racial terror is transitory, we call on all Jews not to yield to despair or apathy, but to hold fast their threatened positions in trade with good humor.” At the same time it appealed to the Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish relief organization in the United States, to enlarge its credit to small-business owners.
Things only got worse.
In August 1937, sixty-five violent anti-Jewish incidents were noted in the Białystok region. And so, “on August 19 during a market in the hamlet of Śniadowo a crowd shouting ‘Jews to Palestine!’ and ‘There’s no room for you in Poland!’ drove away tradesmen. The fleeing Jews were thrashed with whips and one of them was hit on the head with a post. At the same time a basket of apples belonging to Jews was tipped over, 8 sacks of grain were slashed, and a horse’s harness was cut up.” A report of September 1937: “Although the number of violent incidents has dropped (62 compared to 65 in August), one feels a significant deepening of hatred toward Jews in the village as a whole.”
Mosze Rozenbaum noted that Jewish boys had stopped going to swim in the river near Radziłów because they were immediately attacked by Polish boys of their age. He himself was gravely beaten when he was thirteen, and his eleven-year-old cousin, Dawid Sawicki, was trapped in a stable by a gang of boys and roughed up so badly that he died two days later.
In February 1937, The Catholic Cause wrote enthusiastically: “The mood of excitement has turned into a systematic campaign in which the whole county population takes part. Farmers refuse to sell food to Jews, and entering villages, one sees signs that read ‘No Jews.’ Jewish shops are empty, water mills and windmills stand still, for no one gives them grain to grind.” In August 1938, the diocesan paper praised the situation in Zaręby Kościelne: “Jewish stalls are watched so carefully that no peasant can go near them and 250 Jewish families are doomed to go hungry.”
That hunger increasingly stared Jews in the face. But one should also remember that these were the times immediately following the Great Depression and the boycott only added to dramatically worsening economic conditions.
Toward the end of the 1930s, National Party activists changed their tactics. The state would intervene when they launched anti-Jewish campaigns, so nationalists started to fight against Communists, which was in keeping with government policy. When the National Party leaders euphemistically called for an “anti-Communist” vigil, it was code for an anti-Jewish vigil, but the authorities took them at face value and didn’t intervene.
Zionists, who were staunch opponents of Communist Jews, were abused in exactly the same way as Jews with Communist leanings. Every manifestation of Communist activity was scrupulously recorded in the reports of the Interior Ministry. Those notes reveal ho
w weak the activity of the Polish Communist Party was in the area.11
In Radziłów on October 3, 1937, an anti-Communist vigil, prefaced by a church prayer service and the laying of a wreath on the grave of a fallen Camp for a Greater Poland member (who must have been one of the men shot by the police during the 1933 pogrom), gathered a thousand people in the marketplace. At that time Radziłów was a town of fifteen hundred inhabitants, including about six hundred Jews, so the “anti-Communist” vigil attracted almost the entire non-Jewish population, plus people who had come from neighboring villages. The next time there was such a large flock of people in the Radziłów marketplace was July 7, 1941.
In an Interior Ministry report of February 3, 1939, we read, “Anti-Semitism is spreading uncontrollably.” In a climate where windows being smashed in Jewish homes, stalls being overturned, and Jews being beaten were daily occurrences, one case from Jedwabne that came to trial in 1939 concerned an accusation made against a Jewish woman. The district court in Łomża sentenced Etka Serwetarz to six months in prison for profaning the cross. The Catholic Cause revealed that “despite having it pointed out to her several times, she hung her underwear to dry near the cross and poured out slop and dirty water.” Petty gripes among neighbors; by then, Jews and Poles lived in bitter hostility but still had common courtyards.
A Polish government official who had started the thirties thinking of Jews as full citizens, by the end of the decade treated Jewish citizens as aliens. This is clearly demonstrated by the reports of the Białystok Interior Ministry for 1939: “Jewry in these parts will always seek its own advantage and interests. This is due to its exile’s psychology, links to world Jewry and extremely materialistic tendencies.” Or: “The Jewish question, particularly how to resolve it in a way that is good for us, is one of the more emotionally charged and urgent subjects among wide swathes of the population” (the phrase “for us” connects the aims of nationalist thugs with the state’s interests). And when Jews demonstrated civic virtue, they were given a condescending pat on the shoulder: “The subscription campaign on behalf of the Anti-Aircraft Defense Loan is being intensively and energetically conducted by the Jewish community, which has performed its duties as it ought, declaring a sum of six and a quarter million zlotys.”
