Black Earth(111)

The arrival of these Jews in Palestine revitalized Irgun. Begin reached Palestine with the Polish army in May 1942. There he encountered Wiktor Drymmer, who as director of Poland’s Jewish policy in the late 1930s had been Begin’s patron. Drymmer had worked to create the conditions for a large migration of Polish Jews to Palestine by way of supporting Betar and Irgun. Now he helped to arrange Begin’s honorable discharge from the Polish army, so that he need not face the shame of desertion as he left a conventional armed force to serve an unconventional one. When Begin was chosen to lead Irgun in October 1943, the only clothing he owned was his Polish army uniform.

Now that the war had turned decisively against Nazi Germany, Begin’s Irgun joined Shamir’s Lehi in anti-British terrorism. This meant that two Polish Jews were leading the anti-colonial resistance against Poland’s ally. In February 1944, Begin declared the revolt of Irgun against the British mandatory government. Begin was in every conceivable way a product of Poland. His deputy in Irgun was Eliahu Meridor, who had lived in Poland until 1936 and had returned for training by Polish military intelligence in 1939. Moshe Nechmad, responsible for Irgun operations in the Haifa district, had also taken part in the exercises in Poland in 1939. Eliahu Lankin, the Jerusalem commander of Irgun who led the attack on British intelligence in July 1944, was another Polish product. Lehi under Shamir organized the assassination of Lord Moyne that November, on the rationale that the British minister of state had opposed a Jewish state and stopped the immigration of Jews to Palestine. The techniques learned from Polish military intelligence were used by Irgun in the bombing of the King David Hotel in July 1946.

—

During the Second World War the Polish state existed only in the echoes of its former policies and in its flight from its own territories. The efforts made by Polish diplomats and intelligence officers in the late 1930s to create the conditions for a State of Israel did bear fruit, but only after the war. Though some of these pro-Zionist Poles, such as Hulanicki, remained active in Europe or Palestine, the Polish government itself had to flee the European continent. It evacuated Warsaw with what was seen as scandalous haste in September 1939, and made its way to Paris through Romania. After the German invasion of France, it moved again to London. There Polish ministers found themselves in a curious position. The British had entered the war on their behalf, to protect the sovereignty and borders of Poland. That objective had not been met. Poland was Britain’s only ally between the fall of France in June 1940 and the entrance of the Soviet Union into the war a year later. But after the Soviet Union and then the United States entered the war in 1941, the Polish connection counted for much less.

Poland remained a formally sovereign state thanks to the legal continuity of its government-in-exile. The Germans did not recognize this government, since it claimed to represent a state that the Germans maintained had not existed. Neither did the Soviets, except for a period in the middle of the war, between the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and the visible turn of the tide of war in 1943.

The London exile government exercised formal command over the underground state in Poland and its armed forces. The Polish armed resistance, best known as the Home Army, was a vast umbrella organization that included dozens of fighting groups from the center right to the center left of the political spectrum. In principle, its chain of command was subordinate to civilian control in London. In fact, the connections with the people who ran the military and civilian organizations in Poland were slow and irregular, dependent upon couriers making long and dangerous journeys across occupied Europe. For the most part, Polish sovereignty in London meant the ability of Polish authorities to communicate with their British allies. But even such a highly constrained form of sovereignty did have some significance for Polish Jews.

The Polish government in London, unlike the Polish prewar government, comprised all of the major political parties, including the antisemitic National Democrats. It was facing a German occupation of Poland that was bloody beyond the imaginations of British politicians and public opinion. It was also confronted with a domestic Polish population who had been taught to expect, under the previous Polish regime, that one day most Jews might leave Poland. The arrival of the Germans in half of Poland in 1939 had led to the disappearance of Jews in most of the places they had lived for hundreds of years: as they were concentrated in ghettos in 1940 and 1941, and then as they were murdered in gas chambers in 1942. Poles from the eastern half of Poland, invaded by the Soviets in 1939 and reinvaded by the Germans in 1941, had seen the Jews there murdered in the open air in and after 1941; some of them propagated the version of events that the Nazis also preferred: that the Jews had earned their fate as Soviet collaborators. This was a convenient fiction, but it was often believed by Poles in western and central Poland. As the commander of the Polish underground wrote to the Polish prime minister in London, the “crushing majority” of the Polish population under German occupation was antisemitic. The Polish government in London, which did have direct sources of information on the mass shooting and then the mass gassing of Jews, sometimes blurred this information into general reports of German terror against Polish citizens.