Black Earth(58)

The Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in 1939 meant the destruction of the mainstream Ukrainian political parties that had functioned legally in Poland: the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance (UNDO), for example, which had tried to work within legal institutions and had opposed official antisemitism. Soviet rule created relatively favorable conditions for groupings that had been illegal: the nationalists and the communists—the first because they were accustomed to being underground, the second because they could emerge from underground and collaborate with the regime. Yet, as Jews and Poles tended to notice, often it was Ukrainian nationalists rather than communists (insofar as this distinction had meaning) who took up local positions of Soviet authority. Both Ukrainian nationalists and Ukrainian communists took the opportunity to denounce local Poles to Soviet authorities, no doubt from both political and self-interested motives. In most villages in southeastern Poland there was a Ukrainian activist who knew what categories of person the NKVD was looking for and was happy to supply an appropriate Pole. This created an empty homestead and farm; denunciation and deportation were a version of land reform.

During the first few months of Soviet rule, the social revolution from abroad attracted many Ukrainians. Polish authorities were often replaced by Ukrainians, although in meaningful positions these were Ukrainians from Soviet Ukraine. The handful of Jewish mayors were also replaced by Ukrainians from the east. The initial Soviet deportations chiefly concerned Poles and indeed Polish landowners, and so could be experienced as social advance for Ukrainian peasants. Soviet-style revolutions usually had two stages: first a gesture to the peasants, then the seizure of their land. In 1940, the Soviets began to collectivize agriculture in the territory they had annexed from Poland, just as they had done a decade earlier in the Soviet Union as a whole. Some Ukrainians recalled then the mass famine that had followed in the USSR. Virtually none wanted to concede land to the Soviet state. Collectivization discredited Ukrainian communists among the population and led some Ukrainian communists to shift toward nationalism.

Ukrainian nationalists, for their part, were hoping in 1940 for a German invasion of the Soviet Union that would create the possibility for a Ukrainian state. These were people who had been Polish citizens, and saw themselves as representatives of the millions of Ukrainians in Poland and the tens of millions of Ukrainians in the Soviet Union. From their perspective, only Germany could create the conditions for a Ukrainian state by destroying both Poland and the USSR. Poland was no more as of 1939; in 1940, some Ukrainian nationalists joined in the German preparations to annihilate the Soviet Union. The Germans used Ukrainian informers to prepare the way for the invasion known as Operation Barbarossa, and they recruited and trained hundreds of Ukrainians for advance groups to be used in Soviet Ukraine. In early 1941, the NKVD sensed the threat and began to arrest Ukrainians in high numbers. The fourth wave of Soviet deportations, in May and June 1941, was heavily Ukrainian. Many thousands of Ukrainians were also imprisoned. When the Germans did arrive in June 1941, they found the corpses of these people left behind in Soviet prisons.

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All in all, Soviet occupation closed Jewish possibilities. Could it also have created a Jewish political resource for the Germans? As with the Ukrainians, there was a Jewish nationalist Right in interwar Poland, Betar, that was committed to building an independent national state by revolutionary and violent means. Unlike Ukrainian nationalists, however, Jewish nationalists were the clients and not the enemies of the Polish state. They wanted to leave Polish territory rather than claim it for their own. After the German invasion of September 1, 1939, leaders of Betar fled eastward from the Germans. They were then caught in the Soviet net. Jewish radicals, unlike Ukrainian radicals, had no experience of working underground. The Soviets quickly identified and arrested them. The NKVD was aware that Betar was a front for Irgun, and broke underground Irgun circles as well. Menachem Begin, the leader of Betar in Poland, fled from Warsaw to Vilnius and managed to hide for a time. He was eventually arrested by the NKVD—in the middle of a game of chess—and sentenced to eight years of hard labor at the camps of Vorkuta.

Betar was quickly powerless in occupied Poland. Its sister organization Irgun, based two thousand kilometers away in Palestine, was not. The conspirators of Irgun, most of them Polish Jews, found themselves in an unexpected predicament: considering the opportunities provided by war but deprived of the backer which had sought to prepare them for such a moment. They had received a certain amount of training from the Poles, as well as money and weapons. Yet the grand scheme for which all of that was mere preparation—a landing of thousands of Betar members in Palestine with Polish support—was now unthinkable. No further Polish help was coming. The Polish officers who had trained Irgun were dead or in camps or in hiding or in exile. The latest shipment of Polish weapons for Irgun in Palestine, on the docks in Gdynia in August 1939, was destroyed by German fire even as Poles scrambled to unpack the weapons to use them to defend themselves. Irgun had been preparing for a conflict with the British Empire, but not for one in which its Polish patron would be totally absent. As one Betar comrade wrote to another in distress in late 1939, “we feel that there is no one behind us.”