Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (36 page)

Although communism had been illegal in Poland before the war, and the interwar Polish communist party had been tiny, communism did provide some Polish citizens a compelling alternative to national identity. Very often, people who were communists by conviction (as opposed to apparatchiks of a communist regime) did help Jews after the German invasion. People who were accustomed to persecution for their beliefs tended to be more generous to others who suffered during the war.

In villages where communism (or its front organizations) had been popular before the war, pogroms against Jews in 1941 were less likely. Communist party membership before the war always involved meaningful social contacts between Jews and non-Jews, and always required experience in life underground. Communism also meant, for non-Jews, a worldview that competed with the everyday antisemitic discourse of the National Democrats and the Polish Right generally in the 1930s. One Polish citizen, a nurse who worked in a hospital in Białystok before the war, befriended Jewish doctors. Like a considerable number of her fellow Belarusians who lived in Poland in the 1930s, she was sympathetic to communism and disgusted by what she remembered as “ubiquitous antisemitism.”

Though communist ideology was friendlier to Jews than most varieties of patriotism, the wartime circumstances of actual recruitment to the Soviet partisans were difficult for Jews. In the places where the Soviets had ruled in 1939 and 1940, in the doubly occupied territories and in the prewar Soviet Union, the Germans carried out the Holocaust by shooting in 1941 and 1942, delegating the task when they could to Soviet citizens. This meant that in the occupied Soviet Union, the number of local young men who took direct part in the murder of Jews was high, far higher than in occupied Poland to the west. To the Soviet partisans, however, the members of the auxiliary police forces were a precious resource, to be brought over if at all possible to their own side. The result was that the Soviet partisans, behind the German lines, were fighting amidst the killing fields and recruiting the killers, sometimes by promising them amnesty. Anton Bryns’kyi, a Soviet partisan commander so friendly to Jews that he was rumored to be Jewish, recruited from the German police apparatus. Indeed, in late 1942, Ukrainian nationalists were quite concerned that young Ukrainian auxiliary policemen, whom they regarded as their future cadres, were instead leaving to fight for the Soviets. One Ukrainian policeman, in a dramatic example of this trend, saved his Jewish girlfriend from the death pits by switching sides just before she was to be shot and taking her with him to join the Soviet partisans.

Jews who knew the local terrain deliberately recruited the murderers of their fellow Jews to the Soviet partisans. Izrael Pińczuk was a young Jewish man from a tiny village called Gliny, near Rokitno, in Volhynia. When the killing began, Pińczuk did not want to be separated from his mother. Like many Jewish fathers, brothers, and sons, his first thoughts during the mass murder were of his family. His mother told him to save himself so that he could say kaddish for her. At first he disobeyed and followed the rest of the community towards death. But then the men were separated from the women at a transit camp in Sarny, and he never saw his mother again. Having listened to rabbis prophesy the return of the messiah and proclaim the need to accept death with dignity, Pińczuk ran and made his way to local peasants whom he knew and trusted. Then he joined the Soviet partisans, and turned his deep local knowledge to their purposes. “I have a whole staff of local people recruited by me,” he said, “among the local people, Ukrainians, who went over to the service of the Germans, and now come over to our side. Although this is an element that served the Germans and even robbed and killed Jews, it is much better to have them as our collaborators rather than as enemies favoring and serving the Germans.”

Not every local Jew working for the returning Soviet regime was so explicit about this question, but the experience was a general one. Such side switching was necessary for the existence of the Soviet partisans, who were often double or even triple collaborators. The result was a curious mixture, in the ranks of the Soviet partisans, between Jews who were seeking to save themselves from the Germans and murderers of Jews who were seeking to save themselves from Soviet revenge for their collaboration with the Germans. Some of the Soviet commanders from prewar Soviet territory were themselves antisemites, who found in the partisans an opportunity to express and act according to views that were illegal in the Soviet Union itself. Jews seeking to join the Soviet partisans had to deal with, in various measures, the kinds of people they had been seeking to escape. Many Jews who tried to join the Soviet partisans without weapons were murdered instead. Some who tried to join were first robbed of their weapons and then killed.

Nevertheless, the Soviet partisans were, for most Jews, the closest thing to a friendly army and the best opportunity for self-rescue by taking sides. The commanders of the Soviet partisans who were friendly to Jews and saved their lives were people from both sides of the Polish-Soviet border and of various nationalities. Perhaps the most warmly remembered of them was “Max,” who served under Anton Bryns’kyi in northwestern Ukraine, in Volhynia. Max was rumored to be many things but was, in fact, a Pole named Józef Sobiesiak. He was one of the few, and perhaps the only, partisan commander who sought out contacts within ghettos in the hopes of rescuing Jews. On one occasion he ordered a punitive expedition against a pair of Ukrainians who had raped and turned in two Jewish girls who had been in hiding. The two Ukrainians were shot, their houses were burned down, and warnings were left for their neighbors. The partisan who led this punitive exhibition was himself a Ukrainian.

A substantial number of the Jewish men who joined the Soviet partisans and fought with vigor were from Volhynia. Like Belarus to the north, Volhynia was a terrain well suited to partisan warfare. As the Germans undertook to complete the liquidation of ghettos in Volhynia in autumn 1942, Soviet partisans were already known to be in the vicinity. In comparison to Belarus, its people were highly politicized, in all possible directions: Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish, communist, and nationalist. The much-loved Polish Soviet partisan commander Max was active in this region. A certain level of Jewish initiative resounded in the Jewish voices of wartime Volhynia. Many of the Jews who joined the Soviet partisans in Volhynia had already fled to the marshes before the Soviets arrived. Some of them had formed family camps, where women and children were sheltered and fed. Jewish men from Volhynia were articulate about their motives: “the magnificent feeling of the deed, of the struggle for victory.” Or: “I am glad that I took some revenge. With every German I killed I felt better.”

In the late 1930s, the Polish army had trained young Jewish men in the use of firearms in the Volhynia region, where Betar and Revisionist Zionism were popular. The Jews fighting in the swamps of Volhynia, like Jews of this part of Europe generally, lived not only in the midst of a German project to kill them all but among rival ideas of what their political future should hold: Israel, Poland, the Soviet Union. All of these Jews, so long as they lived, were touched not only by the campaign to kill them but also by all three of these visions of political life. Max remembered the names of the three family camps established by Jews: “Birobidzhan,” the name of the Soviet autonomous zone for Jews; “Nalewki,” the major Jewish neighborhood in Warsaw; and “Palestine,” the Mediterranean land that members of Betar had promised to themselves.

In 1943 and 1944, some Jews were fighting alongside the Soviets against the Germans in the marshes of what had been remote Polish borderlands; others, sometimes their neighbors, had been deported to the Gulag, then had made their way with a Polish army through India and Iran to Palestine, where they would fight the British in the deserts of what would become the State of Israel.

Both the Soviet Union and Poland claimed the territories where Jews lived and died, and the Soviets were intent on overwhelming not just the Germans but any forces that supported Polish independence. All organized attempts to rescue Jews had to become politicized, since from a Soviet perspective any organization, regardless of purpose, was either pro-Soviet or anti-Soviet. In the Stalinist understanding of reality, there was no society as such and no space for independent action. Anything that took place had to be seen not as an element of a complicated reality but as a reflection of the basic conflict between the proletariat and its global capitalist oppressors—which meant, in practice, the Soviet leadership and those it deemed hostile at a given moment. People who rescued Jews on a large scale, regardless of their own personal sentiments, were inevitably classified one way or the other. Those who lived under Soviet rule usually understood all of this.

One such person was Tuvia Bielski, a shopkeeper and miller’s son from prewar Poland’s major stretch of forests and swamps in the northeast, in what is today western Belarus. Bielski was a Polish citizen who had performed military service in the Polish army between 1927 and 1929. He first experienced Soviet rule during the German-Soviet invasion of 1939, when eastern Poland was annexed to the Soviet Union. Bielski moved then to the city of Lida and worked for the Soviet trade apparatus. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Bielski tried to defend Jews from mass murder. He and his brothers established a family camp in the Naliboki Forest in early 1942. Like other family camps, this was a Jewish initiative; but, as elsewhere, the leaders had to come to an arrangement with the Soviet partisans. Bielski convinced local Soviet partisans that he was one of theirs, and in late 1942 he and the men who protected the family camp were formally subordinated to Soviet command. The price of this was that Bielski and his men took part in Soviet operations against the Polish Home Army.

The Soviet Union had invaded eastern Poland in 1939 as an ally of Germany and arrived in eastern Poland again in 1944 as an enemy of Germany. Stalin explained to his British and American allies that the Soviet Union would treat the lands gained by alliance with the Germans as if they had always been Soviet. The Soviet forces that arrived in these lands, now for a second time, had amnesia among their ammunition. The previous Soviet invasion of Poland and the associated destruction of the Polish state in 1939 were to be completely forgotten. The arrival of Soviet forces in prewar Polish territory in 1944 was to be a liberation from fascism, nothing less and nothing more.

This powerful myth could admit no objection. Moscow’s actual responsibility for inviting the Nazis into eastern Europe was to be purged from Soviet history, distributed instead among the enemies of the moment, people deemed to be potential opponents of Soviet power. Since the populations that fell under Soviet rule in eastern Poland had been Polish citizens before 1939 and had therefore experienced a Soviet occupation between 1939 and 1941, everyone was in some sense suspect, because their lives contradicted the political line. Bielski himself was a Zionist who named his family camp “Jerusalem.” Zionism was a risky allegiance, and one that he would not have mentioned to his Soviet comrades. Fighting on the same side as the Soviets, against the Germans, was not enough to be on the right side of the story. The fact that Bielski was willing to use his men in actions against Polish forces, whatever he personally thought about it, was likely a necessary demonstration of his loyalty. Bielski had played chess with the local commander of the Home Army. His actions were no doubt dictated by his correct understanding of what the Soviets expected.

Although the Polish army, unlike the Red Army, had never engaged in combat as a German ally, the Soviets had no trouble seeing the Poles as fascists. In the Stalinist world of discourse, a “fascist” was not a Nazi or someone who had helped the Nazis; a “fascist” was someone who was deemed by the Stalinist regime not to be working in the interests of the Soviet Union. As a general rule, the Red Army would allow the Poles to engage in combat against the Germans, and then disarm them and give them a choice between subordination to Soviet command or the Gulag. In some cases, Polish soldiers, and especially Polish officers, were simply murdered. After the Red Army had reached Berlin and defeated the Germans in May 1945, it returned to the forests of northeastern Poland for a separate operation against the remnants of the Home Army. After the clearing of the Augustów Forest in June 1945, some 592 Polish men were executed. About forty thousand Polish men were sent to the Gulag at war’s end, seventeen thousand of them on accusations of having served in the Home Army—which was the largest underground organization in Europe to resist the Nazis from the beginning of the war to the end.