Black Earth(110)

Once they had done what they could, Sugihara and his two Polish employees left Kaunas for Stockholm and traveled from there to Germany. Sugihara’s mission was to predict when the Germans would attack the Soviet Union—which he estimated correctly within a few days. Shortly after Operation Barbarossa began on June 22, 1941, one of his two Polish confederates, Jakubianec, was discovered by the Gestapo in Berlin, and shot as a spy. Although Jakubianec was working with the Japanese, he was reporting to his superior Rybikowski, who was serving the Polish government-in-exile and thus Britain and the United States. His execution was the end of a man who had invented a scheme that had saved thousands of Jews. But he was not executed for that, or remembered for that, or indeed for anything. His refugee scheme had nothing to do with sympathy for Jews; it was a clever manipulation of the artifacts of collapsing statecraft.

Daszkiewicz continued working for Sugihara, now in Prague, within the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and thus in the Reich. He tried to make contact with the Czech underground. The discovery and death of his friend Jakubianec forced him to leave Europe. He chose to work in Palestine, a traditional terrain for Polish intelligence operatives.

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During the Second World War, Palestine was still under a British Mandate, and Poland was a British ally. Before the war, Poland had been pursuing an anti-British policy in Palestine, preparing Jewish revolutionaries for their moment of opportunity: a war or a moment of British weakness. The prewar Polish consul, Witold Hulanicki, remained in Jerusalem during the war, working for the British, while maintaining his relationship with his main Jewish contact and friend, Avraham Stern. It was Stern, ever the seeker of risk and glory, who saw the Second World War as the chance to defeat the British, even going so far as to solicit the help of Nazi Germany (without success). In a tiny group known as Lehi, Stern exploited Polish training and probably Polish weapons in a campaign of violence against the British. He was fulfilling his political program, but also pursuing a spectacularly enunciated death wish. He met the ideal fate of the Polish Romantic rebels whose martyrological ideas he deepened in his own poetry. After Stern was shot and killed by a British policeman in 1942, the work of Lehi was continued by Yitzhak Shamir. The next year Shamir’s partner in anti-British violence would be Menachem Begin, who in 1942 was on his way to Palestine by a very circuitous route.

In the late 1930s, Begin and the young men of Betar had planned to create a State of Israel by descending upon Palestine to support an uprising initiated by Irgun. This was an operation that was to be carried out by Jews who were Polish citizens with the support of the Polish authorities. The destruction of the Polish state in 1939 made such schemes impossible, as Polish aid to Irgun collapsed and the leaders of Betar did their best to flee to Vilnius. Some were placed in ghettos by the Germans; others were arrested and deported by the Soviets. Begin himself was among the Betar activists deported to the Gulag in 1940.

When Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin altered his attitude towards the male Polish citizens in his custody. They were to be allowed to leave the Gulag and form a Polish army to fight against the Germans. Stalin had no interest in Polish citizens fighting on the eastern front, where they might later pose a problem for Soviet power. The Red Army had, after all, invaded Poland once already during the war, and these were precisely the people who had experienced oppression by the NKVD. Best then to force them to fight on the western front, far from the USSR and Poland, where ideally they could kill Germans and die themselves. In order for Polish citizens to travel from the Gulag to the western front, they had to journey from one end of the Eurasian landmass to the other, from the Soviet north, far east, or Kazakhstan through India and Iran and Palestine to western Europe.

This new Polish armed force, created at the sufferance of Stalin and subordinate to the Polish government in London, was commanded by W?adys?aw Anders and so known as the Anders Army. Many of the commanders of the Anders Army had little interest in Jews or held antisemitic stereotypes about their value in combat. But Jews were, nevertheless, among the Polish citizens who joined its ranks. For whatever reason—because they were more likely to be targeted by Stalin, because they were more eager to fight, or because they had better relations with Polish officers—Betar members and Revisionist Zionists were present in the Polish army in considerable numbers. In this way many right-wing Zionists did make their march from Poland to Palestine, if by a very long and indirect route. The British stopped Jews who tried to come to Palestine by sea during the war, but they could hardly stop Jews who came by land in Allied uniforms.