Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Communist indulgence of antisemitism

http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/comment/90035/cruelty-and-injustice-postwar-europe
 
 
Cruelty and injustice in postwar Europe
 
 
By Anne Applebaum, November 12, 2012
 
 
 
For the British, who came home to a country at peace, it has always
been hard to understand what happened after the Second World War in
Eastern Europe. In Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, there was no
joyous liberation or triumphant parades: Soldiers, prisoners and
refugees returned home to towns still consumed by ethnic, political
and criminal violence. In parts of Poland, a civil war raged through
1947, as the remnants of the Polish Resistance fought the Red Army. In
parts of Czechoslovakia, angry mobs dragged ethnic Germans out of
their homes and hounded them across the border. The NKVD, the Soviet
secret police, launched a programme of mass arrest and mass
deportation in every country the Red Army occupied.
 
Across the region, it could, at times, be dangerous to be a communist
official, dangerous to be an anti-communist activist, dangerous to be
German in a Polish village, to be Polish in a Ukrainian village, to be
Hungarian in a Slovak village.
 
Many Jewish communists were ambivalent about Jews and about the
Holocaust, even as it was unfolding
 
It could also be dangerous to be Jewish. Although there is both
anecdotal and archival evidence of Jews being welcomed home after the
war, there is also anecdotal and archival evidence of anti-Jewish
violence, though not much agreement on the scale. Numbers for “Jewish
deaths” in Poland in this period range widely, from 400 to 2,500, for
example.
 
This statistical disagreement reflects a deeper set of uncertainties.
Were Jews who returned to claim back their houses murdered for their
property — or for being Jewish? Were Jews who joined the security
services murdered for being communists — or for being Jewish? The same
can be said for robberies and assaults, which affected everybody
during this lawless period. One historian points out that many
archival records are ambiguous:
 
“On the night of August 10 1945, according to a communist dispatch, ‘a
Jewish tailor and shoemaker co-operative in Radom was attacked and 4
Jews and one Red Army officer were murdered.’ Was this a political
assassination of a Soviet officer? Was it a common robbery? Or was it
an antisemitic attack? We have no answers.”
 
But if Jews were among many victims of the generalised violence, they
were also in a few concrete instances also victims of genuinely
antisemitic riots that require some special explanation. In the two
years following the war, outbursts of anti-Jewish violence exploded in
several towns in southern Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia. By far the
two most notorious took place in Kielce, Poland, on July 4, 1946, and
in the Hungarian city of Miskolc a few weeks later, between July 30
and August 1. Why?
 
In Kielce, the ostensible cause of the riot — hard though it is to
believe such a thing was still possible in the 20th century — was a
rumour of blood libel. To avoid punishment for not coming home on
time, a Polish child told his parents he had been kidnapped by the
Jews, who planned to kill him as a ritual sacrifice. He told them he’d
been kept in the basement of the Jewish Committee building in Kielce,
a kind of dormitory and community centre, where several dozen Jewish
survivors in Kielce were then living. His drunken father reported this
to the local police; the police solemnly set out to investigate. But
even as the occupants of the building were explaining to the police
that they had no basement and thus could not have kept the child
there, rumours began to spread throughout the town.
 
A crowd began to gather outside the committee building. An army unit
arrived — 40 soldiers from the Internal Security Corps. To the shock
of Jewish leaders inside, the soldiers began to fire on the Jews. And
instead of dispersing the crowd, they joined it, along with policemen
and members of the citizens’ militia. By the end of the day, at least
42 people were dead and dozens wounded.
 
In Miskolc, events unfolded differently. Although there were blood
libel rumours in the city in the days leading up the riots — and
although stories about Jews and Christian children had sparked
violence in Kunmadras and Teplicany — violence was sparked by the
arrest of three black marketeers, of whom two were Jewish. The story
of their arrest was quickly passed around the town. A crowd was
waiting for the men on the morning of July 31, when they were to be
escorted from local custody to an internment camp. The crowd was
worked up, prepared and carrying signs: “Death to the Jews and Death
to the Black Marketeers.” When the prisoners appeared, the mob flung
itself at them, murdered one of the men and beat the other so badly he
wound up in hospital. The third — who was not Jewish — managed to
escape. That afternoon, the police, though notably absent during the
earlier riot, arrested 16 people for the public lynching. On August 1,
another angry crowd, outraged by these arrests, attacked and occupied
the police station. This time, a Jewish police officer was murdered.
 
Genuine shock and outrage followed both of these events. Polish and
Hungarian intellectuals and politicians of all stripes wrote anguished
condemnations deploring these remnants of antisemitism, so repellent
in countries where memories of the Holocaust were fresh. The Polish
state conducted a judicial investigation and put some of the
perpetrators on trial, eventually doling out nine death sentences. In
Hungary, the central committee of the communist party — a body
dominated by Jewish communists — openly discussed antisemitism for the
first and last time after the Miskolc riot. But the results of the
subsequent police investigations satisfied no one.
 
In both cases, elements of the regime were partly responsible. In
Kielce, the police and security services had actually joined the mob,
along with the army. In Miskolc, local police tipped off the crowds
that the arrested speculators would be in the town centre, and melted
away when the violence started. Matyas Rákosi, the Hungarian communist
party leader, himself a Jew, had been in Miskolc only a week earlier,
where he denounced “speculators” — “Those who speculate with the
forint, who would undermine the economic foundations of our democracy,
should be hung on the gallows.”
 
At the same time, the Hungarian communist party put up posters and
distributed brochures featuring caricatures of “speculators” looking
like Jews. Clearly, they hoped to focus popular anger about
hyperinflation and poverty on “Jewish speculators” and thus to deflect
it from themselves. And yet both sets of riots undeniably had some
popular support. As if from the depths of the Middle Ages, rumours
that the Jews were killing Christian children, or that Jewish
speculators were robbing Christian peasants, suddenly took hold in a
few provincial East European towns, even as their countrymen looked on
in horror.
 
S ome think the explanation for this moment of madness is economic.
The Polish historian Jan Gross had argued that the mass killings of
Jews during the war created “a social vacuum which was promptly filled
by the native Polish petit bourgeoisie.” Uncertain of their status,
fearful of losing what they had so recently gained and above all
threatened by the new communist regimes, Gross speculates that this
social strata focused its ire on the returning Jews.
 
Others believe that something more profound than economic competition
must have underlain the animosity. As Polish historian Dariusz Stola
points out, Poles — like Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians, Lithuanians —
had seen, heard and even smelled the Holocaust to a degree
unimaginable in Western Europe, including Germany: “The psychological
reaction to that kind of experience is complicated and completely
irrational; the memory is a kind of convulsion, the feelings
associated are intense and uncontrolled, and, most importantly, these
aren’t necessarily feelings of pity or sympathy…”
 
Stola’s explanation, although voiced in 2005, isn’t so far from the
views of many Polish intellectuals at the time. In 1947, Stanisław
Ossowski, an esteemed philosopher and sociologist, came to the same
conclusion. “Compassion,” he wrote, “is not the only imaginable
response to misfortune suffered by other people… those whom fate has
destined for annihilation easily can appear disgusting to others and
be removed beyond the pale of human relations.” He also observed, as
others have done since, that those who had benefitted in some material
way from the destruction of the Jews were often uneasy or even guilt-
ridden, and thus they sought to make their actions seem legitimate:
“If one person’s disaster benefits somebody else, an urge appears to
persuade oneself, and others, that the disaster was morally
justified.”
 
The presence of Jews in leading positions in the East European
communist parties did not ease the tension. Nor did it produce
anywhere a set of policies which could reasonably be described as “pro-
Jewish.” On the contrary, many Jewish communists were extraordinarily
ambivalent about Jews and about the Holocaust, even as it was
unfolding. While in Moscow in 1942, the Polish communist Jakub Berman
began to hear horrible stories about what was happening to the Jews of
Warsaw. But he steeled himself against pity. In a letter, he advised a
friend not to be sidetracked or distracted by the unfolding tragedy.
“The situation of Jews in Poland is terrible,” he wrote: “However, it
seems to me that you can’t put too much effort into this… for although
the question of mobilisation of Jewish masses in Poland into an active
struggle against the occupier is important and valid… other things
should be at the centre of our attention.”
 
After the war, this ambivalence increased. In 1945 and ’46, Rákosi
worried that too many of the anti-fascist trials were focused on
“people who did something to the Jews”. Notoriously, Rákosi threw
antisemitic comments into his conversation, on one occasion offending
the speaker of the parliament, Béla Varga, so much that Varga snapped
at him, “your mother was a Jew and do not deny your mother.” Even East
Germany, with its almost non-existent Jewish community, made
distinctions early on in the honours bestowed upon former “Fighters
Against Fascism” meaning mostly communists, and former “Victims of
Fascism,” meaning mostly Gypsies and Jews.
 
Part of this queasy relationship between East European communists and
East European Jews might be attributable to the antisemitism of
individuals, even Jewish individuals. But at the deepest level, it
reflected the communists’ insecurities. Knowing they were perceived as
illegitimate by so many of their countrymen — perceived as Soviet
agents, to be more precise — they deployed traditional national,
religious and ethnic symbols in an effort to win support. In 1945, the
Hungarian Communist Party brought back the annual celebration of the
1848 “bourgeois revolution” and insisted, to the consternation of some
old Party members, that their followers carry Hungarian flags as well
as red Party flags. As Rákosi explained, “We still have a problem with
our patriotic character… It has to be underlined demonstratively that
we chose the red banner and the national flag… the flag of Hungarian
democracy.”
 
The German communists did the same, resurrecting the German Imperial
flag even as the war was still being fought. In August 1944, Polish
communists publicly celebrated a mass in honour of the “miracle on the
Vistula,” the Polish defeat of the Bolsheviks outside Warsaw in 1920,
a national holiday with distinctly anti-Russian overtones. That
strange event was made even stranger by the presence of General
Nikolai Bulganin, at the time the representative of the Soviet Council
of People’s Commissars, and later the Soviet prime minister.
 
Communist indulgence of antisemitism was part of this way of thinking.
Many hoped that, by ignoring or even flirting with antisemitism, their
party would seem more “national,” more “patriotic,” less Soviet, less
alien; perhaps more legitimate. Like anti-German feeling in the
Sudetenland, anti-Ukrainian emotions in Poland, and anti-Hungarian
sentiment in Slovakia, antisemitism became just another weapon in the
party’s arsenal. In their quest for popularity, communist parties were
willing to pump up ethnic hatred of Germans, hatred of Hungarians,
hatred of Ukrainians, and, even in the region most devastated by the
Holocaust, hatred of Jews.

 wrote:
 
Tana per Silvio!