The exchange of letters caused a good deal of ill will on both sides. The Poles felt that the Israelis were hiding a typical communist criminal. The Israelis felt that the Poles were attacking a typical Jewish victim. And yet Morel’s story was not typical at all. Far from being a “symbol” of unfairness to either Poles or Jews, his life story should have been treated as an exception.
To start with, Morel’s story is unusual because, unlike most Eastern European Jews, he survived the Holocaust. It’s not easy to say exactly how rare this was because precise numbers of survivors are not available. Not everybody who was Jewish registered as such in postwar Eastern Europe, and not everybody wanted to be in touch with Jewish organizations. Many had changed their names in order to pass as “Aryan,” and then simply kept those names after the war. But according to the best estimates, it seems that less than 10 percent of the 3.5 million Jews who had lived within the prewar Polish borders were still alive after the war. Perhaps 80,000 survived in Nazi-occupied Poland. The rest had spent the war in the Soviet Union, and when the war ended most came home. By June 1946, there were about 220,000 Jews within the postwar Polish borders. This was, at the time, less than 1 percent of the total population of Poland, which numbered about 24 million.58
Estimates are even more difficult to make in Hungary, where there was a long tradition of Jewish assimilation, intermarriage, and conversion. As a result, the numbers given for Jews in Hungary in 1945 vary widely, from 143,000 up to 260,000. This was, again, a small percentage of the total Hungarian population of 9 million. But because the Nazi deportations in the latter part of the war, including the famous mass transport to Auschwitz, had affected mainly Jews in the provinces, almost all of the remaining Hungarian Jews lived in Budapest.59 Within the city, which then had about 900,000 inhabitants, Jews were a very visible and vocal minority. With their families and professional networks intact, the Hungarian Jews quickly began to play an important role in public life. This was not the case in Poland, and certainly not the case in Germany. Only about 4,500 Jewish survivors remained in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany after the war, a tiny fraction of the population of 18 million. They were, and remained, nearly invisible.60
Salomon Morel was also atypical in that he remained in Eastern Europe after the war. The vast majority of Jews who returned to their homes after the war stayed just long enough to find out if their relatives were alive and to see what property remained. Most were devastated by how little they found. In a 1946 memo, Polish Jewish authorities explained that many Jews were leaving the country mainly because it was impossible, simply, to live in towns or villages that had become “the cemeteries of their families, relatives, and friends.”61 Some left because they had relatives abroad—sometimes their only living relatives. Others, especially those with wartime experiences in the USSR, left because they hated communism and feared, correctly, that Jewish businessmen and traders would have no future in a communist state.
But others left because they were afraid. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and eastern Germany, like all of Eastern Europe, were violent places after the war. It was dangerous to be a communist official, dangerous to be an anticommunist, dangerous to be German, dangerous to be Polish in a Ukrainian village, dangerous to be Ukrainian in a Polish village. It could also be dangerous to be Jewish. Some Jews were welcomed home after the war, and treated with fairness and friendship. One Polish Jew who had joined the Red Army returned home to be welcomed by neighbors who fed him and protected him from local Home Army units who were hunting down communists. Other Polish Jews with communist party connections helped rescue Gentile Home Army partisans from the NKVD. Emil Sommerstein—a Zionist activist who was released from the Soviet Gulag in 1944 on the condition that he join the Polish provisional government as minister for Jewish affairs—conspired secretly to send Home Army couriers to London disguised as Orthodox Jews.62
At the same time, there is both anecdotal and archival evidence of brutal and fatal attacks on Jews in the months and years immediately after the war in Hungary and Poland—as well as in Czechoslovakia and Romania—though not much agreement on their scale. Numbers for “Jewish deaths” in Poland in this period range from 400 to 2,500.63 This statistical disagreement is perhaps not surprising, given that there is no consensus on how many Jews had survived in the first place, but it also reflects a deeper set of uncertainties. With a few important exceptions, these attacks were isolated, and—unlike attacks on Germans in Poland or Hungarians in Slovakia—they were not part of an official government policy. Some were provoked by the return of Jews to homes occupied by others, some by political disputes, and it was not always clear which was which. Were Jews who returned to reclaim 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? Were robberies of Jews acts of anti-Semitism, or were they ordinary crimes?
Less ambiguous, at least in this narrow sense, were the anti-Semitic riots, sometimes called pogroms, which also took place in this period. From 1945 onward, outbursts of anti-Jewish violence unfolded in the Polish towns of Rzeszów, Kraków, Tarnów, Kalisz, Lublin, Kolbuszowa, and Mielec; in the Slovak towns of Kolbasov, Svinna, Komarno, and Teplicany; and in Ózd and Kunmadaras in Hungary.64 By far the two most notorious riots 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.
In Kielce, the ostensible cause of the riot—hard though it is to believe such a thing was still possible in the twentieth century—was a rumor of blood libel. A Polish child, probably to avoid punishment for not coming home on time, told his parents he had been kidnapped by the Jews, who intended to make him a ritual sacrifice. He had, he said, been kept in the basement of the Jewish Committee building in Kielce, a kind of dormitory and community center where several dozen Jewish survivors 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, rumors began to spread throughout the town.
A crowd began to gather outside the committee building. An army unit arrived—forty soldiers from the Internal Security Corps. To the shock of the Jewish leaders inside, the soldiers began to fire not on the menacing crowd but at the Jews. And instead of dispersing the crowd, they joined it, along with policemen and members of the citizens’ militia. When their shift ended, workers from a local factory joined in as well. During the course of the day, Jews were murdered in different parts of town, on the outskirts of the city, and on trains whose Jewish passengers had the tragic bad luck to arrive in Kielce. By nightfall, at least forty-two people were dead and dozens wounded. To this day, this ranks as the worst outbreak of anti-Semitic violence in postwar Eastern Europe.65
Although there were blood libel rumors in Miskolc in the days leading up to the riots—and although stories about Jews and Christian children had sparked violence in Kunmadaras and Teplicany—the Miskolc breakdown was actually caused by the arrest of three black marketeers, of whom two were Jewish. The story of their arrest was quickly passed around the town, possibly by the police, and 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 already 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 the hospital. The third—who was not Jewish—managed to escape.
That afternoon, the police, though notably absent during the earlier riot, arrested sixteen people for the public lynching. Outraged by these arrests, another angry crowd attacked and occupied the police station on the following day. This time, a Jewish police officer was murdered.
Genuine shock and outrage followed both of these events, which received a good deal of national—and in
the case of Kielce, international—attention. The pogroms prompted fresh waves of emigration. As a Jew who lived in Łódź at the time explained, “although we sensed that our existence was anchored in quicksand, we didn’t allow this sensation to affect our consciousness. We wanted to resume living again as human beings. The Kielce pogrom woke us up from our illusion. One shouldn’t stay here even for a moment.”66
Non-Jews were upset too. Polish and Hungarian intellectuals and politicians of all stripes wrote anguished condemnations deploring these remnants of anti-Semitism, 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 communist party Central Committee openly discussed anti-Semitism, probably for the first and last time, on the day following the Miskolc riot.67 But the results of the subsequent police investigations and internal inquiries satisfied no one.
In both cases, elements of the regime were partly responsible. In Kielce, the police and security services not only failed to prevent the riot but actually joined the mob, along with the army: police participation had unleashed the crowd violence. In Miskolc, local police probably tipped off the crowds in advance that the speculators would be in the town center, and certainly melted away when the violence started. More importantly, Rákosi, though himself Jewish, had been in Miskolc only a week earlier, on July 23, when he gave a speech at a mass rally denouncing 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 caricatures of Jews.68 Apparently, the party hoped to focus popular anger about hyperinflation and poor economic conditions on “Jewish speculators”—and to deflect it from the communist party.69
In neither case is there any archival evidence of more careful advance planning, let alone international coordination, as some have alleged. Though Soviet agents and advisers were present in both cities—a Soviet NKVD officer in Kielce was even present at the riots—and despite the fact that these pogroms all took place in the same time period, it isn’t possible, so far, to trace any direct Soviet involvement in their organization.70 Nor is it clear that either the Russians or the local communists felt that the riots had benefited them. Although both Hungarian and Polish authorities pinned the blame on the anticommunist movements and the church—a smear which, at the time, seemed to stick—in internal debates they recognized the riots as a sign of their own weakness. In Kielce, the different branches of the security services had argued with one another, failed to obey orders, and lost control of a mob on July 4, after all, which was hardly evidence of their competence. In the wake of the riots, several local party leaders lost their jobs.71 The Hungarian communists were also unnerved by Miskolc. Rákosi blamed the riots on “fascist infiltration into our party” and vowed to prevent it from spreading.72
At the same time, both sets of riots undeniably had some popular support. As if from the depths of the Middle Ages, rumors that the Jews were killing Christian children or that Jewish speculators were robbing Christian peasants suddenly took hold in a few provincial Eastern European towns, even as their countrymen looked on in horror. Some think the explanation for this moment of madness is economic: the Polish historian Jan Gross points out that the mass killings of Jews during the war created “a social vacuum which was promptly filled by the native Polish petite bourgeoisie.”73 Uncertain of their status, fearful of losing what they had so recently gained, threatened by the new communist regimes, this social strata, Gross speculates, focused its ire on the returning Jews. There was certainly something to that, and many witnessed the same phenomenon in other countries. Heda Kovály, a Jewish camp survivor, returned to her family’s Czech country house in 1945: “I rang the bell and, after a while, a fat unshaven man opened the door, stared at me for a moment and then yelled ‘So you’ve come back! Oh no! That’s all we needed!’ I turned around and walked into the woods. I spent the three hours until the next train back to Prague strolling on the mossy ground under the fir trees, listening to the birds.”74 Fearing a negative popular reaction, in Hungary the communist party actually refused to advocate the return of Jewish property. In March 1945, Szabad Nép counseled Jews to have “understanding” for the Gentiles who now occupied their apartments, even if those Gentiles had been collaborators with the fascist regime. Party officials in Budapest also suggested that returning Jews “reach an agreement” with the inhabitants of their homes, something which, under the circumstances, was surely impossible.75
Others believe that something more profound than economic competition must have underlain the animosity. As the 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 … I’m not a psychologist but I lean toward this theory because I don’t see any other explanation for certain horrific forms of behavior, for example when someone throws a grenade at an orphanage housing Jewish children.76
Here Stola is referring to an infamous incident: on the night of August 12, 1945, an unknown assailant did indeed throw a grenade into a Jewish orphanage in the village of Rabka, and then kept firing at it for another two hours. Astonishingly, no one was killed. But the orphanage was soon shut down and the children moved away.77
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 benefited in some material way from the destruction of the Jews were often uneasy or even guilt-ridden, and thus 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.”78
Whatever the reason for the persistent hostility, it indeed helped persuade Jews to leave Eastern Europe and to emigrate to America, Western Europe, and above all Palestine. Some 70,000 left Poland for Palestine in the three months following the Kielce riots. They were helped and encouraged by a handful of Zionist organizations, founded or supported by groups in Palestine or the United States, which had been set up for this purpose. Under the terms of this arrangement, Polish Jews exited through agreed-upon border crossings in Silesia, then traveled on foot and in transport trucks through Czechoslovakia and eventually on to one of the Mediterranean ports, where they embarked for Palestine (though some broke off and headed for other countries along the way).79
Eventually this mass movement began to embarrass the Polish regime—immigration to British-mandated Palestine was still illegal, and the British press had begun to write about it—and it was halted for a short period. But after the establishment of the State of Israel, Jews were once again allowed to leave, not least because the Polish state, then in the course of imposing economic centralization, was more than happy to rid itself of the Jewish community’s small businessmen. In order to encourage emigration, the new government of Israel also negotiated a trade deal advantageous to the Polish government, effectively guaranteeing Poland an inflow of hard currency. The Romanian government struck a similar deal with Israel, and it is likely that the Soviet Union actively approved both agreements.80 In Hungary, the American-Jewish Jo
int Distribution Committee—a major Zionist charity—paid the Hungarian government $1 million at about this time too. In exchange, 3,000 Hungarian Jews were allowed to leave for Israel immediately.81
Behind the scenes, several Eastern European states were even more supportive, far more so than their leaders would later admit. All of them, with the exception of Yugoslavia, had voted for the partition of Palestine in 1947: at the time, the Soviet Union supported the creation of the State of Israel, not least because Stalin believed Israel would quickly join the communist camp. Enthusiasm for Israel was high in Eastern Europe too—so much so that in late 1947 the Polish, Czechoslovak, and Hungarian governments all opened training camps for the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization that formed the core of what would later become the Israeli Defense Forces. The Hungarian army and secret police force trained some 1,500 Hungarian Jews—and some 7,000 Polish Jews meanwhile traveled to Bolków, a small town in Silesia, where they received training from both Red Army and Polish army soldiers, and eventually from Haganah fighters. At the time, this program enjoyed both national and local support. In June 1948 the Central Committee of the Polish communist party allocated the group “a certain amount of weapons and a military training ground for drilling.” In Bolków, drills took place in the open, the volunteers marched through the town singing, and when the recruits left for Palestine, via Prague and Marseilles, “there were flowers and banners—even Poles had a lot of sympathy for their freedom struggle,” in the words of one ex-trainee. The program lasted until early 1949 and was intended to have long-term benefits: the Polish secret police kept lists of who had been through the training courses. Those who were communist party members were asked to agree to cooperate as informers, “even after they went on to Israel.”82
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