Black Earth(38)

On March 15, 1938, the day of the Anschluss, Polish diplomats were preparing a pro-Zionist request to the Americans. They asked the U.S. Department of State to pressure the British Foreign Office to open Palestine to Jewish migrants from Europe. In general the Poles urged American diplomats to support an independent Israel with the most expansive possible boundaries. The timing was no coincidence. The major consequence of Anschluss was exactly the opposite of what the Polish leadership desired. German policy and Polish policy both aimed to extrude Jews; now an enlarged Germany was dispatching Jews to Poland. Some twenty thousand of the Jews in Austria were Polish citizens, many of whom claimed and received the right to return to their country of origin. Since America and Palestine remained blocked (except to daredevils like Stern), Poland could expect ever more Jewish immigration as German power spread.

Polish diplomats worked unceasingly to open Palestine to Jewish settlement, but were in no position to force that issue. German repressions of Jews had led Britain not to soften but to harden its line on Jewish immigration to Palestine. The Polish foreign ministry asked the Polish parliament after the Anschluss for the right to review the documentation of all citizens who had resided abroad for longer than five years. This was granted on March 31, 1938. Although the law and most of the internal bureaucratic correspondence avoided the word “Jew,” the purpose of the new policy was clear: to block the next wave of returning Polish Jews. As Drymmer himself put it, the goal was “excluding the unworthy and above all disposing of the destructive element,” by which he certainly meant Jews. This was a qualitative change in Polish citizenship policy, occasioned by the pressure of Anschluss and immigration limits in Palestine and the United States, and inspired by German examples. Until 1938, Polish diplomats, whatever their personal feelings, had intervened on behalf of all Polish citizens, including Jews.

The Nazis understood the implications of the Polish initiative for the sixty thousand or so Jews of Polish citizenship residing in Germany in 1938. If these people lost their Polish citizenship while living in Germany, it would become very difficult to expel them later to Poland. Berlin asked Warsaw for a delay in the application of the Polish law, and the German coercive apparatus was mobilized for its greatest stroke thus far. With Himmler’s approval, Heydrich arranged for the forcible expulsion of some seventeen thousand Jews of Polish citizenship across the German-Polish border on the night of October 28. This was a shockingly massive exercise of coercion by the standards of the day. It was also the first major action of such a kind by the SS, whose capacity for violence expanded rapidly at the German border. The surprise deportation of Jews from Germany to Poland was a strange contrast to the words of Hitler, who was speaking just at this time to the Polish government about a common Jewish policy.

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In European capitals in 1938, state destruction could appear to be something that happened to other people, perhaps even as a beneficial correction of the postwar order. Neither the western powers nor the Poles concerned themselves with the passing of Austria. The Jewish perspective was different: Jews could see the beginning of a general process of separation from European states, and began to sense that they had nowhere to go. In July 1938, representatives of thirty-two countries, led by the United States, discussed Jewish emigration at évian-les-Bains in France. Only the Dominican Republic agreed to take any Jews. The various ways that Jews were separated from the state in Europe, meanwhile, began to interact and mutually reinforce. The German destruction of Austria brought Jews to Poland. Warsaw reacted by seeking to deny citizenship to Polish Jews living abroad. Berlin responded by expelling such people across the Polish border. By the standards of the time and place, this seemed to Jews like a catastrophe, above all to the individuals and families concerned. Very often these were people whose whole lives were in Germany and whose connections to Poland were quite limited.

The Grynszpan family, for example, had moved to Germany from the Russian Empire in 1911, seven years before Poland had regained independence. The children had been born in Germany, spoke German, and regarded themselves as Germans. They held Polish passports after 1918 because their parents hailed from a part of the Russian Empire that had become Poland. In 1935, the Grynszpans sent their son Herschel, then fifteen, to stay with an aunt and uncle in Paris. By 1938, his Polish passport and his German visa had both expired, and he had been denied legal residency in France. His aunt and uncle had to hide him in a garret so that he would not be expelled. On November 3, they showed him a postcard from his sister, mailed right after the family had been deported from Germany to Poland: “everything is finished for us.” The next day Herschel Grynszpan bought a gun, took the metro to the German embassy, asked to meet a German diplomat, and shot the one who agreed to see him. It was, as he confessed to the French police, an act of revenge for the suffering of his family and his people.