Black Earth(117)

The Home Army was a continuation of the prewar Polish army and a legally constituted organ of the Polish government-in-exile abroad. As such it was open to all Polish citizens. But unlike the prewar Polish army, which was integrated in fact as well as in principle, the Home Army was seen to be an organization of ethnic Poles. The war and the deliberate German and Soviet extermination of the Polish political nation tended to push Poles towards an ethnic understanding of armed struggle. The Judeobolshevik myth provided the moral cover for robbery and murder of Jews by units of the Home Army, which certainly took place. In 1943, as the surviving Jews of Poland were in hiding, the Home Army was instructed to treat armed Jews as bandits. Sometimes this meant that the Home Army executed them, but sometimes it did not. At the very same time, the Home Army issued death sentences upon Poles who were blackmailing Jews and carried out a few. The National Armed Forces (which Jewish survivors, understandably, often confuse with the Home Army) simply took it for granted that Jews were among the foes of the nation. Although the National Armed Forces were much smaller than the Home Army, they probably killed more Jews.

The myth of Judeobolshevism could also be murderous for the Poles who were trying to help Jews. In June 1944, Ludwik Widerszal and Jerzy Makowiecki, two members of the Home Army high command who had been most responsible for aiding Jews, were murdered by their own colleagues, apparently after a denunciation that they were working for the Soviet Union. The deed was arranged by Witold Bieńkowski, himself an antisemitic rescuer of Jews. Such incidents were possible in the political environment of occupied Poland towards the end of the war, where patriotic resistance against German occupation gave way to fear of a return of communism. The same Red Army that was now advancing as a liberator from German rule had occupied Polish territory not long before as an ally of Germany. Polish Home Army soldiers were certainly correct that people in Poland would collaborate with Soviet power and right to fear that the Soviet Union could dominate Poland after the war. It was the identification of communists as Jews and Jews (and their supporters) as communists that was the lethal error.





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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 Bia?ystok 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.