Antisemitic violence in Bielsk County, Poland (1941)

When the Nazi German-led invasion of the Soviet Union happened in summer 1941, anti-Jewish pogroms happened in the Bielsk County of Poland, causing huge Jewish casualties. AŻIH, 301/1829, Testimony of Symcha Burstein.
 AŻIH, 301/1463, Testimony of Jehoszua Kajles.
 The extensive literature attends to the pogroms that took place in the eastern territories of the Polish Commonwealth in the summer of 1941 and analyzes their causes. See Paweł Machcewicz and Krzysztof Persak, eds., Wokół Jedwabnego, vol. 1–2 (Warsaw: IPN, 2002); Andrzej Żbikowski, U genezy Jedwabnego. Żydzi na Kresach Północno-Wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej, wrzesień 1931–lipiec 1941 (Warsaw: ŻIH, 2006); Witold Mędykowski, W cieniu gigantów. Pogromy 1941 roku w byłej sowieckiej strefie okupacyjnej. Kontekst historyczny, społeczny i kulturowy. Zarys teorii pogromów (Warsaw: ISP PAN, 2012).

Background


In September 1939, Nazi Germany briefly occupied the Bielsk County before handing it over to the Soviets. Polish-Jewish relations reportedly worsened over a small number of Jews welcoming the Red Army. Mosze Kleinbaum, chairman of the Zionist Federation in Poland, wrote:Moshe Kleinbaum, report in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR 1939–1946, ed. Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), http://catalog.nypl.org/search/o25915273, cited in Alexandra Garbarini, Jewish Responses to Persecution: 1938–1940 (AltaMira Press: Walnut Creek, 2011), 180.

Żydokomuna


Such isolated incidents were exaggerated by Catholic Poles to paint Jews as communists, namely Żydokomuna, though Polish Jews constituted about 30% of the Poles deported to the Soviet interior. Jan Tomasz Gross, Revolution from Abroad (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 196–98. The three major Soviet deportations (1940–1941) encompassed varying numbers of Jews, along with some Ukrainians and Byelorussians. The ethnic distribution for all deportations has been estimated at 52 percent Poles, 30 percent Jews (while the Jews made up 10 percent of the total population), and 18 percent others.
 The estimated number of Polish citizens deported from Poland’s eastern borderlands is between 300,000 and 330,000, including some 80,000 Jews; Alina Skibińska, “Żydzi polscy ocaleni na wschodzie (1939– 1946),” in Narody i polityka. Studia ofiarowane profesorowi Jerzemu Tomaszewskiemu, ed. August Grabski and Artur Markowski (Warsaw: ŻIH and Instytut Historyczny UW, 2010). The Index of the Repressed (https://indeksrepresjonowanych.pl) contains incomplete information on Jews deported from the individual county’s localities. The Central Card File of the Jews Who Survived the Holocaust mentions as many as 113 persons who survived in the USSR territory out of 220 from Bielsk County registered by the Central Committee of the Jews in Poland.
 Dora Galperin, “Tragedia i zniszczenie Kamieńca,” in Księga pamięci: Kamieniec Litewski, Zastawie i okolice, http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/Kamenets/Kamenets.html. The Żydokomuna trope paved the way for Polish-led anti-Jewish pogroms, including the Jedwabne pogrom 



  and Szczuczyn pogrom.

Causes

For the causes of the pogroms, mainstream historians pointed to Catholic antisemitism, the Żydokomuna trope – made worse by grievances towards the Soviet occupation – and the sense of immunity from a messy change of power to the Germans who were happy to see Poles killing Jews. Many Poles took the chance to kill Jews they mistook for having caused Polish suffering.

Events

When the Red Army retreated, some Jews followed them to flee the Germans. The Bielsk County was occupied by the Germans within six days. The Nazi death squad Einsatzgruppe B began hunting down Jews. The German massacre of Jews was backed by local Catholic Poles. Many anti-Jewish pogroms happened in western Bielsk. Survivors recalled:

Survivors also recalled what happened in Siemiatycze:

The Germans turned the Bielsk County into the Białystok District, divided into eight Kreisskommissariat and the Bielsk Podlaski County. YVA, O53/10, Ludwigsburg USSR Collection, Amtsblatt des Oberpräsidenten der Provinz Ostpreussen, Zivilverwaltung für den Bezirk Bialystok.
 The ressettlements of thirty-four villages took a bloody course: “After the evacuation was completed, most of villages were burnt to the ground” (AIPN Bi, 484/7. Displacement of the villages of Masiewo I and II, Hajnówka area, p. 224; fragments of the “Police Journal of the Police Battalion 322” in the case file).
 See Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschaftsund Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrussland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2000), 656. No Joint or ŻSS operated in Bezirk Bialystok. Polish local police, known as the Blue Police, were recruited from ethnic Poles of all faiths, the majority Catholic. Of the hundreds of Bielsk Polish policemen who served the Germans, merely 46 were sentenced after the war. They mostly claimed to have been forced to serve,Mikołaj Gonta, for example, testified, “I did not want to be in the police, but my father—the elder of the village of Miklasze—forced me to.” His mother testified, “[My] son was to be taken to Prussia, and my husband asked the Germans to give him a job locally, so they gave him this job with the police” (AIPN Bi, 408/250, Court records of the criminal case against Mikołaj Gonta, p. 73).Feliks Gałek, schutzman of the post in Hajnówka, testified, “I was forced to enlist to serve the gendarmerie as I was in very difficult circumstances . . . I had no warm clothing, went unshod” (AIPN Bi, 404/274, Court records of the criminal case against Feliks Gałek, p. 48). though recent research has shown otherwise.* 




Moreover, 39.6% of Bielsk Podlaski County's Jews died of betrayal by neighbors, who helped German troops and Polish policemen hunt Jews down, while 0.8% were killed by the Polish underground. Israeli historians Yisrael Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski estimated that there were about 120 cases of Jews getting killed by the Polish underground, some happened in the Biłgoraj County.Yisrael Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski, Unequal Victims: Poles and Jews During World War II (New York, 1986), 33, 211–215, 222, 233. Polish peasants who hid Jews sometimes stole their belongings before handing them over. 

Legacy 

Despite abundant evidence, many in Polish society refuse to acknowledge these pogroms. Robert Rozett, “Competitive Victimhood and Holocaust Distortion,” The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, XVI (2022); “Distorting the Holocaust and Whitewashing History: Toward a Typology,” XIII: 1 (2019); Yehuda Bauer, “Creating a “Usable” Past: On Holocaust Denial and Distortion,” XIV: 2 (2022); and Jan Grabowski, “The Holocaust and Poland's 'History Policy'” X: 3 (2016).
 Joanna Beata Michlic, “The Politics of the Memorialisation of the Holocaust in Poland: Reflections on the Current Misuses of the History of Rescue,” Jewish Historical Studies—Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, LIII: 1 (2022); Piotr Forecki, Po Jedwabnem: Anatomia pamięci funkcjonalnej (Kraków, 2018); Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (Princeton, 2001).
 Piotr Forecki, “Domestic ‘Assassins of Memory’: Various Faces of Holocaust Revisionism in Contemporary Poland,” presentation at a symposium in honor of Professor Antony Polonsky called “The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: sources, memory, politics,” March 16, 2021, UCL, London.
  Antony Polonsky and Joanna Beata Michlic (eds.), The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, 2009) and Laurence Weinbaum, “Amnesia and Antisemitism in the ‘Second Jagiellonian Age,’” Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel, Robert Wistrich (ed.) (Lincoln, 2016).
  Some scholars said that such denial was going mainstream 

  amid the rise of nationalism across Europe, where Jews were sometimes equated with the disliked Soviet communists against whom the Holocaust was considered "a reaction".

Related pages

 Kraków pogrom
 Jedwabne pogrom
 Szczuczyn pogrom
 Polish Memory Law

Footnotes

References

Category:Pogroms
Category:Massacres
Category:Controversies
Category:1940s in Poland
Category:Antisemitism in Europe