Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Poland Between The Wars, 1918-1939, by Peter D. Stachura (Editor). 1998

Organized Jewish Hostility to Poland, Then and Now

This book addresses many topics. I focus on a few of them.

LEFTISTS AND JUDEOCENTRISTS DON’T LIKE HIM, SO THEY–SURPRISE–CALL THE AUTHOR A NATIONALIST

This book has been mischaracterized as a nationalistic tome, one which attempts to blame prewar Polish minorities for all their problems. This is manifestly incorrect. Stachura never says that minorities’ conflicts with Poles are all of their own making. He merely says that their steadfast enmity towards Poland, and constant rebuffing of positive Polish overtures, influenced their fate.

JEWISH CONDUCT IN PRE-WWII POLAND: MINORITIES BLOC WAS ANTI-POLISH ACTIVISM, NOT “FREE SPEECH”

I first address some criticisms of this book.

There is no contradiction whatsoever between the self-chosen nonassimilated status of most Polish Jews and the fact of their overall economic dominance. Also, Jewish involvement vis a vis the Bloc of National minorities and relative to Narutowicz was hardly a free-speech matter. It was, as described by Stachura, nothing less than “a declaration of political warfare against the state” (p. 75), and one with intrusive German involvement to boot.

Finally, complaints about Stachura not mentioning Sikorski’s 1942 comments and the Kielce pogrom of 1946 are doubly ridiculous in that they both occurred after the stated time scope of this book (1918-1939), an elementary fact obvious from even its title. (Parenthetically, Sikorski was not the only one who contended that Poland had far too many Jews. This opinion was shared by the Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, among others. As for the Kielce pogrom, there is ample evidence, from Russian and Jewish sources alone, that it was a Soviet Communist staged event).

TOO NARROW AN ANALYSIS OF POLONOPHOBIA

A major shortcoming of Stachura’s book is his inadequate treatment of the agendas behind the demonization of Poland vis a vis her minorities. He does mention the Soviet-imposed Communist puppet government’s need to appear legitimate by trying to make prewar Poland as bleak as possible. However, Britain and the US also needed to belittle prewar Poland in order to rationalize their dirty, stinking doublecross of Poland at Yalta. The advent of Holocaust supremacism has required the marginalization of the genocides of non-Jews, notably that of Poles. Finally, the emergence of the Holocaust Industry has created a need to blur the distinction between prewar Poland and Nazi Germany as much as possible in the public eye, and even to create an artificial continuity between the experiences of Polish Jews in prewar Poland and their subsequent genocide in Nazi-German ruled Poland.

Stachura depicts the Zionist leader Yitzhak Gruenbaum in a very negative light. In this respect, his opinion is somewhat shared by the Jewish author Joseph Marcus, who in his SOCIAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE JEWS IN POLAND, 1919-1939, sees Gruenbaum as an unnecessarily polarizing figure in Polish-Jewish relations. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/average-jew-better-off-than-average-pole-marcus/

JEWISH AGGRESSION AGAINST POLAND

Go figure: Stachura calls Dmowski a (what else?) anti-Semite, while at the same time identifying all the Jewish mendacity about Poland that had pushed Dmowski in that direction. For example:

As related by Stachura, the Jewish hostility to the Polish state took on nothing less than staggering dimensions. A “Jewish lobby” at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 had opposed the creation of the Polish state. Jewish collaboration with the Communists was extensive, and was much more significant than any Byelorussian-Communist cooperation owing to the economic and political power of the Jews. Indeed, numerous world Jewish organizations and personages spared no efforts to continually defame Poles and Poland. Reading this, it sounds so familiar to what occurs today under the auspices of Holocaust programming and Holocaust education. All we ever hear about is Polish anti-Semitism. Yet Stachura documents many specific examples of Jewish Polonophobia. For instance, bogus accounts of pogroms in Poland were created and circulated, only to be almost entirely discredited later through the investigative efforts of a delegation headed by Henry Morgenthau, a Jew himself. The so-called Minorities Treaty presented a platform for Poland’s allies and enemies to meddle in her internal affairs. An ironic situation developed wherein, for instance, Britain, with her global empire, dubious treatment of the Irish, and having almost no local Jewish population to deal with, used the Minorities Treaty to moralize Poland on her treatment of minorities!

Polish anti-Semitism had been the reason given by many Jewish organizations and individuals for refusing to support the emergence of an independent Polish state. However, Stachura misses the opportunity to call the bluff on this excuse. The fact is that, if anything, tsarist Russia had been far more anti-Semitic than the Poles. On the basis of this alone, Jews should have preferred Polish self-rule over continued Russian rule. As for Communism, its totalitarian and barbaric nature had, if nothing else, been well demonstrated by the Russian Revolution. The reluctance or refusal of Jewish organizations to support the independence of Poland, even after its inception, owes, in actuality, to long-term Jewish financial and economic interests in Russia (and also the other partitioning powers, Austria and Prussia).

DOES NOT AWFULIZE THE SITUATION OF MINORITIES IN POLAND

Peter D. Stachura makes it clear that, in general, Poland was very tolerant of minorities. The Jews enjoyed a flourishing economic, cultural, and economic life unparalleled in any other nation. The average Jew was better off than the average Pole. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/average-jew-better-off-than-average-pole-marcus/

Although there were necessary repressive acts done by Poland against her seditious minorities, they were never systematic nor continuous. Stachura could have mentioned the commutation of the death penalty against Ukrainian nationalist leaders Bandera, Lebed, and Shukevych, who had been involved in assassinations of Polish and pro-Polish Ukrainian leaders. How did they return the favor? By organizing and implementing (during the later German occupation) an unspeakably sadistic genocide of 100,000 Poles (and thousands of Ukrainians who desired good Polish-Ukrainian relations or otherwise refused to submit to the fascist dictates of the OUN-UPA leadership). Stachura’s work needs to be expanded, and it is hoped that a future edition will do this.