Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (9 page)

Both Menachem Begin and another promising Betar activist, Yitzhak Shamir, treasured the Polish Romantic poets of the nineteenth century and quoted them at Jewish gatherings. The great poet of the new Jewish Right, Uri Zvi Greenberg, spent the 1930s in Poland. The secular messianism of Begin and Shamir and the Betar movement bore a strong resemblance to the Polish version, developed during Poland’s long period of statelessness in the nineteenth century: sacrifice on this earth for change on this earth.

After Piłsudski’s death in May 1935, Polish spies were not the only ones sent on long missions to find the symbolically appropriate soil for his commemoration. Members of Betar brought clumps of earth from their own sacred site, Tel Hai in Palestine, where their own hero, Joseph Trumpeldor, had been killed by Arabs. (“Betar” was the site of the last stand in the Third Roman-Jewish War; the name was later reimagined as a Hebrew acronym for “Covenant of Joseph Trumpeldor.”) In life, both Trumpeldor and Piłsudski had been subjects of the Russian Empire; both struggled to reconcile national and social justice; and both commanded legions that were meant to cultivate cadres for national armies and national states. Piłsudski had been victorious in his war of liberation against the Soviet Union in 1920; Trumpeldor was killed that same year. So their unity after death was perhaps not so strange. Betar members attended Piłsudski’s open-air memorial service in large numbers, arriving in precision formation on motorcycles bearing Polish and Zionist flags. Jabotinsky spoke of “eternal, indestructible sacrifices on the altar of the fatherland.” Piłsudski became a central cult figure of both traditions, that of Polish leaders and Jewish revolutionaries.

Yet disagreement about the meaning of Piłsudski’s legacy was inevitable. Piłsudski had led a colorful life and had deployed violence in various settings. Which Piłsudski was the model for the Jewish future? Was it the Piłsudski of the Legions, nominally loyal to an empire, and preparing for a war in which that empire would have to make concessions? This was how Jabotinsky saw matters, and at first his vision defined that of Betar. As time passed, however, the Piłsudski of the Polish Military Organization, exploiting terror and propaganda, was ever more appealing to Jewish rebels. Each of these approaches has a political logic; each depends upon a judgment of the historical conjuncture. The logic of legions is that supporting an empire in times of war creates debts to be repaid in times of peace. The logic of terrorism is that fear can destroy a weak system and make way for a new one. In the late 1930s, Menachem Begin mounted a challenge to Jabotinsky, supporting political terrorism rather than legions. At a Betar congress in Warsaw in September 1938, Begin openly criticized Jabotinsky’s judgment.

By 1938, the Polish ruling elite was supporting the most radical available option among the Revisionist Zionists, a conspiratorial National Military Organization operating in Palestine that favored terrorism to provoke the conjuncture rather than waiting for it. After the Arab riots and general strike of 1936, and the British concessions to the Arabs in 1937, members of the Haganah disagreed about the future. Younger, more right-wing, and more radical individuals left the Haganah to form the Irgun Tzvai Leumi, or National Military Organization, named and modeled after the Polish Military Organization, and usually known as Irgun. The core of the new Irgun were Jews from Poland who had been members of Betar. Under Begin, the leader of Betar in Poland from March 1939, the organization was increasingly a front for Irgun.

Irgun liaised with the Polish government through the Polish consul in Jerusalem, Witold Hulanicki. His general instructions were to present himself as “the representative of a state that has interests that are similar to Zionist aspirations and that can contribute to the realization of those aspirations.” Hulanicki tended to know about Irgun’s actions before they took place. From his perspective, Irgun was a “very comfortable and very much needed (by me) political instrument” and Avraham Stern, one of its leaders, was a Polish agent.

Avraham Stern was a child of revolution. He was born in Suwałki in 1907, in a Jewish-Polish town near the Augustów Forest in the western reaches of the Russian Empire. Deported as a boy along with his family and hundreds of thousands of other Jews, he became one of the young Jewish men radicalized by the Russian imperial collapse. He lived with his family in Bashkiria for about six years, then saw the great cities of postrevolutionary Russia and became a communist before returning to Suwałki in what had meanwhile become independent Poland. Stern came to revere Piłsudski and his new Polish state much as he had admired Lenin and his new Soviet state. He immigrated to Palestine in the 1920s, and began studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was regarded by his professors as one of the great hopes of Jewish humanist studies. But he was without any means of subsistence, and in 1929 he was going hungry.

Although he was a talented linguist and writer, Stern opted in the 1930s for politics over literature. He traveled in Europe seeking support for an independent Jewish state, first from Mussolini’s Italy and then in Piłsudski’s Poland. Although he was an early emigrant from Poland and thus not a product of Betar, he was very comfortable in Polish culture. He wrote romantic poems about arousing hearts of stone and raising the dead—in Polish. As exercises for himself he composed poems simultaneously in his three revolutionary languages: Russian, Hebrew, and Polish. In a poem in Hebrew and Polish, he wrote of the tears shed for his happy childhood, his troubled youth, and his failed manhood. Stern grew to maturity in the middle of the great east European revolutionary forces: communist revolution, Polish state building, Zionism. He was a child of revolution who wanted to be a father of revolution. “Reality is not what it appears to be,” he wrote, “but what force of will and longing for a goal make it.”

Hulanicki, the Polish consul in Jerusalem, described Stern to his superiors in the foreign ministry as the “ideological leader” of the “extreme elements” of Irgun. In February 1938, Hulanicki wrote to Drymmer in Warsaw, asking him to meet Stern. The proposal that Stern brought to Drymmer, with Hulanicki’s support, was that Poland train instructors for Irgun. The Irgun elites trained by Poland would then become the officer corps of a future Jewish revolutionary army that would conquer Palestine. The soldiers would be thousands of trained Betar fighters brought from Poland. One of the Irgun men imagined “armed soldiers, entire battalions from many ships, landing simultaneously at various points along the coast of Eretz Israel.”

Drymmer endorsed the idea. Field training in the southeastern Polish region of Volhynia (where Betar had been trained by the Polish army for years) and staff training at Rembertów (a military base just outside of Warsaw) began within a few months. Volhynia became a staging area for the clandestine and illegal emigration of revolutionary Jews with military training to the British Mandate of Palestine. In Volhynia, where more than two-thirds of Jewish students attended Zionist schools, the regional governor, Henryk Józewski, was a sympathizer of Revisionist Zionism.

The first major encounter between German Jewish policy and Polish Jewish policy was not in Europe but in Asia. Nazi oppression led to the immigration of German Jews to Palestine, which led to the Arab riots that radicalized right-wing Zionism and created a new possibility for Polish foreign policy: the support of Irgun.

Although Polish leaders were responding to British, German, Arab, and Jewish actions over which they had little influence, their own policy did follow something like a consistent line. In a sense, the small group of Poles who made foreign policy after 1935 were shifting from one form of Prometheanism to another. The initial Prometheanism, under Piłsudski, presumed that Warsaw could aid neighboring peoples to the east, above all Ukrainians, to gain their freedom from the dominion of Moscow. The emerging variant involved support of the Jewish nation against British rule in Palestine. As Polish authorities abandoned the anti-Soviet line that Hitler admired, they shifted to a pro-Zionist conspiracy that the Nazis would have found incomprehensible—had they known anything about it.

There was some continuity in personnel from the first to the second Prometheanism. The Volhynian governor who supported Revisionist Zionism, Józewski, had been the most important Promethean activist. His heroes were Piłsudski and Jabotinsky, whom he called “an apostle of the Jewish world.” His province had been a departure point for Ukrainian spies in the early 1930s; it became a training ground for Jewish revolutionaries in the late 1930s. Drymmer, the high official of the foreign ministry charged with the Jewish question, had been a Polish Military Organization operative in Ukraine and a Promethean. Tadeusz Pełczyński, the director of Polish military intelligence who organized the training courses for Irgun, was also a veteran of the Polish Military Organization and a Promethean. Witold Hulanicki, the Polish consul in Jerusalem, was one more product of the Polish Military Organization.

The continuities were ideological as well as personal. For the men in power in Warsaw, supporting right-wing Jews meant supporting fellow anti-communists. Revisionist Zionists might one day lead millions of Polish Jews to Palestine; in the meantime they drew some young Jewish hotheads away from communism, beat up in brawls the young Jewish men who did opt for the Far Left, and supported the Polish government against the Soviet Union. All of these veterans of Polish conspiracy could see that Jews needed statehood as Poles once did. The younger Jewish men whom they supported and sometimes befriended were looking forward to statehood just as the older Poles were looking back nostalgically to its creation. Jewish Prometheanism was thus a chance for Poles to relive a youth whose accomplishments now seemed endangered. As one Polish diplomat explained the endorsement of the Revisionists to a bemused supporter of mainstream Zionism, “Emotionally, they appeal to us the most.” From the Ukrainian to the Jewish Prometheanism extended the basic optimism that the liberation of nations from empires was a good to be expected from history. Poles preserved the same fundamental tradition of using the weapons of the weak to oppose empires and create states. They still embodied a certain elite romanticism of politics, the belief that deft techniques of state creation were a matter for the sensitive and courageous few, who would bring along the masses later, in good time. And they maintained the same preference for secret measures.

Yet there were some telling differences between the first and the second Prometheanism, corresponding to the fundamental shift in Polish Jewish policy in 1935. After 1935, the regime was much more pessimistic about the possibility for change in the Soviet Union. Poles who had worked for the Promethean movement either became liberal critics of the new regime or tacked to the new right-wing version of the idea. The first Prometheanism saw national minorities in someone else’s country as a problem for that other country—the major example being Ukrainians in the Soviet Union. The first Prometheanism had also involved the Muslim nations of the USSR. Insofar as Prometheans had engaged Jerusalem before 1935, it was as a center of Islamic national movements. The second Prometheanism regarded a national minority in Poland as a burden for Poland. Jews were no longer seen as citizens of a republic, but a national problem that might be resolved here or there, or perhaps a national force that might be deployed abroad. Jerusalem was no longer a city of Muslims today but a city of (Polish) Jews tomorrow. There was no longer the solidarity expressed by the slogan “For your freedom and ours!” The slogan of the second Prometheanism might have been: “For our freedom from you!”

In the first Prometheanism, Poland was to endorse minority rights to set an example and destabilize neighboring regimes that did not. In the second Prometheanism, it was legitimate to create conditions under which Poland’s own citizens would wish to emigrate. The Polish authoritarian regime after 1935 countenanced the use of economic pressure to encourage Jews to leave the country. The police stopped attempts at pogroms but treated boycotts of Jewish businesses as a legitimate economic choice. The parliament passed a ban on kosher slaughter, though it was never implemented. Civil society was moving in the same direction. Professional organizations in which Jews were prominent had to reregister their members. Most universities did nothing as Jewish students were beaten and intimidated until they sat in the last rows of the lecture halls, called “ghetto benches.” Much of the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church, in Poland as elsewhere in Europe, continued to explain that Jews were responsible for the evils of modernity in general and communism in particular.

Unlike the Nazi regime, the Polish government did not present Jews as the hidden hand responsible for global crises and therefore for all of Poland’s woes. Jews were portrayed, rather, as human beings whose presence was economically and politically undesirable. The vision of a future Poland without most of its Jews was certainly antisemitic, but this was not an antisemitism that identified Jews with the fundamental ecological or metaphysical evils of the planet. Unlike in Germany, there was meaningful opposition. The Polish Socialist Party, the largest political party in Warsaw, opposed the government line, as did the mayor of Warsaw. The Jewish political party known as the Bund, committed to socialism in Europe and to Jews remaining in Poland, did extremely well in the 1938 local elections. For that matter, the Jewish share in the Polish economy was greater in 1938 than it had been when the Great Depression began. The undeniable liveliness of Jewish commerce and politics as the 1930s came to an end made Poland quite different from Germany.

Nazi leaders saw in Poland what they wanted to see. A certain amount of misperception in Berlin was perhaps inevitable. Local Jewish success in Poland was invisible from Berlin, whereas official Polish restrictions on Jewish life were reported favorably in the German press. The more ambitious elements of Polish pro-Zionism were clandestine, whereas the official antisemitism was open. The Nazi leadership could read the evidence from Poland as a sign that the friendly German foreign policy initiated in 1934 had worked and could be extended.