Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

by Anne Applebaum

  With Israel’s attainment of statehood, all travel ceased to be clandestine. In 1948, the Polish state travel agency, Orbis, organized the first regular train transport, again via Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Italy. After one or two successful trips (once Jews became convinced they were “really going to Israel, and not to Siberia”) the applications to emigrate began to increase again.83 The numbers went down again in the early 1950s, almost certainly thanks to Soviet pressure: Stalin’s initial support for Israel had by then hardened into suspicion and paranoia. Nevertheless, by 1955 no more than 80,000 Jews remained in Poland: more than two-thirds of the survivors had left. The numbers were similar elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Between the years 1945 and 1957, 50 percent of Romanian Jews left their country, along with 58 percent of Czechoslovak Jews and 90 percent of Bulgarian Jews. Between a quarter and a third of Hungarian Jews left Hungary too.84

  Out of those remaining, a disproportionate number chose to stay because they were communists, because they had high expectations of a communist regime, or because they had jobs in the communist state apparatus. This is only logical: at a time when anticommunists of all kinds were being arrested and killed, anticommunist Jews left Eastern Europe. And this is the final unusual thing about Salomon Morel: he was exceptional because he was a Jew who not only stayed but also joined the security police. Popular Eastern European mythology to the contrary, the majority of Polish Jews did not join the secret police. How could they have? Most of them had left or were planning to leave the country.

  It is true that a small number of Jews did occupy very senior, very prominent positions in both the communist party and the communist security apparatus in Poland. Among them were Jakub Berman and Hilary Minc, Bolesław Bierut’s top advisers on ideology and economics, respectively; Julia Brystiger, who ran the secret police department dedicated to the penetration of the Catholic Church; Józef Różański, the vicious chief secret police interrogator, and his deputy, Adam Humer; Różański’s brother, Jerzy Borejsza, a writer who eventually came to control much of the postwar publishing industry; and Józef Światło, a senior secret policeman who later defected. This notorious group was never a majority. The best estimate, by the historian Andzrej Paczkowski, puts them at about 30 percent of the secret police leadership in the immediate postwar period. After 1948 their numbers fell further. Without question, they attracted a disproportionate percentage of anticommunist resentment anyway.85

  In Hungary, the situation was different because all of the leading Hungarian communists—Rákosi, Gerő, Révai—were of Jewish origin, as were many of the founders of the political police and the Interior Ministry, including Gábor Péter. Yet even in Hungary it is not at all clear that the Jews in turn favored the communists. Only a quarter of the Jewish population voted for the communist party in the 1945 elections. And although the number of visible Jewish party leaders remained high in the immediate postwar years, the percentage of Jews in the state apparatus began to fall after 1948, as the Hungarian communist party—like the East German communist party and the Romanian communist party—actively set out to recruit low-ranking members of the previous regime, especially policemen, in an open bid to become more popular in that milieu and to combat a stereotype of communists as “elite” or “alien” or indeed “Jewish.” (“They aren’t bad fellows, really,” Rákosi told an American journalist, speaking of former members of the fascist party. “They were never active in it. All they have to do is sign a pledge and we let them in.”)86

  More importantly, the presence of Jews in leading positions in the Eastern European communist parties did not produce anywhere a set of policies that could reasonably be described as “pro-Jewish.” On the contrary, communists, including Jewish communists, were extraordinarily ambivalent about Jewish history and Jewish identity, even as the Holocaust was unfolding. While in Moscow in 1942, Jakub Berman began to hear horrible stories about what was happening to the Jews of Warsaw. In due course, one of his brothers would be gassed in Treblinka. But he steeled himself against pity: true communists could not let the Nazis define their politics. In one of the letters he wrote to Leon Kasman—who was also Jewish—he advised his 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 mobilization of Jewish masses in Poland into an active struggle against the occupier is important and valid … other things should be at the center of our attention.”87

  After the war, this ambivalence increased. In 1945 and 1946, Rákosi worried that too many of the antifascist trials were focused on “people who did something to the Jews,” which might not be popular.88 Notoriously, Rákosi threw anti-Semitic comments into conversations, 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.” He would also issue blanket denials. When the Smallholder prime minister, Ferenc Nagy, commented at a cabinet meeting on the large number of Jews among the Hungarian postwar politicians, Rákosi calmly observed that the communist party didn’t have this problem: “Luckily all our leaders are Catholic.”89 Even East Germany, with its almost nonexistent Jewish community, made distinctions early on in the honors bestowed upon former “Fighters Against Fascism,” meaning mostly communists, and former “Victims of Fascism,” meaning mostly Gypsies and Jews. As Jeffrey Herf puts it, “The old anti-Semitic stereotypes of the Jew as capitalist and passive weakling would continue to lurk within the muscular Communist discourse of East German antifascism.”90

  Part of this queasy relationship between Eastern European communists and Eastern European Jews might be attributable to the anti-Semitism of individuals, even the anti-Semitism of Jewish individuals. Some of it reflected Stalin’s own anti-Semitism, which grew deeper with time, culminating in a purge of Soviet Jews in high positions just before his death. But at the deepest level, their uneasiness about Jews and Jewishness reflected the communist parties’ insecurities about their own popularity. Knowing they were perceived as illegitimate by so many of their countrymen—knowing they were perceived as Soviet agents, to be more precise—they deployed traditional national, religious, and ethnic symbols in an effort to win support. This was particularly true in 1945 and 1946, when they still thought they had a chance to take power through elections. While Rákosi spouted anti-black-market and anti-Semitic rhetoric, the Hungarian communist party also championed the annual celebration of the 1848 “bourgeois revolution” and insisted, to the consternation of some old party members, that their followers carry national Hungarian flags as well as red party flags. As Rákosi explained, “We still have a problem with our patriotic character. A lot of comrades are afraid that we are deviating from the Marxist track. It has to be underlined demonstratively that we chose the red banner and the national flag … the national flag is the flag of Hungarian democracy.”91

  The German communists did the same, resurrecting the flag of imperial Germany even as the war was still being fought, the better to attract ex-soldiers to their cause. They also bent over backward to honor traditional German heroes—for example, by celebrating a Goethe Year in Weimar in 1949 and holding a quadrennial Bach competition in Leipzig. The Poles also organized a Chopin Year in 1949. In August 1944, Edward Osóbka-Morawski, the leader of the Lublin provisional government, even publicly celebrated mass in honor 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.92

  The communist indulgence of anti-Semitism was part of this same way of thinking. Many hoped that by ignoring or even flirting with anti-Semitism, their party would seem more “national,” more “patriotic,” less Soviet, less alien, and more legiti
mate. In Poland, the thesis that the party’s unpopularity was due to the presence of “too many Jews” came originally from the party itself. In 1948, when he had fallen out of favor, Władysław Gomułka, the leader of the wartime Polish communists and Bierut’s great rival, wrote a long memo to Stalin, declaring that the Jews in the communist party were making it difficult for the party to widen its base: “Some of the Jewish comrades don’t feel any link to the Polish nation or to the Polish working class … or they maintain a stance that might be described as ‘national nihilism.’ ” As a result, he declared, “I consider it absolutely necessary not only to stop any further growth in the percentage of Jews in the state as well as the party apparatus but also to slowly lower that percentage, especially at the highest levels of that apparatus.”93

  Like anti-German feeling in the Sudetenland, anti-Ukrainian emotions in Poland, and anti-Hungarian sentiment in Slovakia, anti-Semitism finally became just another tool, another weapon in the party’s arsenal. In this sense, the postwar history of the Jews belongs in the same chapter as the more vigorous forms of ethnic cleansing. In their quest for popularity, communist parties were willing to pump up hatred of Germans, hatred of Hungarians, hatred of Ukrainians, and, even in the region most devastated by the Holocaust, hatred of Jews. The Polish communist party would later return to this theme, expelling most of its own Jewish members in 1968.

  And Salomon Morel? In the end, he was a “typical” figure of this period in only one sense: like many people who lived through the horrors of the war and the confusion of the postwar years, he played different roles in different national narratives at different times. He was a Holocaust victim, a communist criminal, a man who lost his entire family to the Nazis, and a man consumed by a sadistic fury against Germans and Poles—a fury that may or may not have originated from his victimhood, and may or may not have been connected to his communism. He was deeply vengeful, and profoundly violent. He was awarded medals by the communist Polish state, was prosecuted by the postcommunist Polish state, and was defended by the Israeli state, though he had expressed no interest in moving to Israel until half a century after the war, and even then only after he started to fear prosecution. In the end his life story proves nothing about Jews or Poles at all. It only proves how difficult it is to pass judgment on the people who lived in the most shattered part of Europe in the worst decades of the twentieth century.

  Chapter 7

  YOUTH

  Your anti-Fascist action group must be broken up at once … ! You’re supposed to wait for instructions from the Central Committee!

  —Walter Ulbricht, 19451

  Those who own the youth, own the future.

  —Slogan of the German Young Pioneers

  IN 1947, STEFAN JĘDRYCHOWSKI, a communist veteran, member of the Polish Politburo, and minister in the government, wrote a memo to his colleagues on a subject close to his heart. Somewhat pompously entitled “Notes on Anglo-Saxon Propaganda,” the memo complained, among other things, that British and American news services were more influential in Poland than their Soviet and Polish equivalents; that American films were too warmly reviewed; and that American fashions were too readily available. He firmly suggested that Soviet fashions be more prominently displayed and advertised, that strict limits be placed on the British Council and other organizations which taught English in Poland, and that the activities of Western embassies be more closely monitored.

  But above all, Jędrychowski was annoyed by the apparent clout of Polska YMCA, the Polish section of the Young Men’s Christian Association, an organization founded in Warsaw in 1923 and then banned by Hitler. In April 1945 Polska YMCA had restarted itself with some help from the international YMCA headquarters in Geneva and a good deal of local enthusiasm. The YMCA was avowedly apolitical. Its main tasks in Poland were the distribution of foreign aid—clothes, books, food—and the provision of activities and classes for young people. Jędrychowski suspected ulterior motives, however. The YMCA’s propaganda, he wrote, was conducted “carefully … avoiding direct political accents,” which of course made it more dangerous. He recommended that Comrade Stanisław Radkiewicz, the minister of state security, conduct a financial audit of the organization and monitor carefully which publications were being made available and which kinds of courses were being taught.2

  He was not the only one who was worried. At about the same time, the Education Ministry also received a report from leaders of the communist youth movement, then known as the Union of Fighting Youth (Związek Walki Młodych, or ZWM), which loathed the YMCA even more than Jędrychowski did. The young communists were irritated by the YMCA’s English classes, clubs, and billiards games. In Gdańsk, they complained, the organization sponsored dormitories and dining halls, and gave away used clothes. In Kraków it had rented a building with a seventy-five-year lease. Though they didn’t say so, all of this was far more than they themselves were capable of doing.3

  There may have been darker concerns: in the period just after the Bolshevik Revolution, a British agent named Paul Dukes had actually used the YMCA in Moscow as a cover for his espionage activities, though not with any particular success.4 But the Polish communists wouldn’t have needed to know that piece of history in order to find the Warsaw YMCA irritating. They hated the YMCA because it was fashionable, if there could be said to be such a thing as fashion in postwar Warsaw. The Warsaw YMCA was, for example, the abode of Leopold Tyrmand, a novelist, journalist, and flâneur, as well as Poland’s first and greatest jazz critic. Tyrmand rented a room in the half-destroyed building after the war as he later wrote, “two and a half metres by three and a half metres—in other words a hole. But cozy.” All around was nothing but mud, dust, and the ruins of Warsaw: this gave the building, a mere dormitory for single men, the air of “a luxurious hotel.” It wasn’t much, but it was clean and quiet.5

  In the evenings, Tyrmand dressed in brightly colored socks and narrow trousers, the latter specially made for him by a tailor who also lived at the YMCA, and went to the jazz concerts downstairs. There, “between the cafeteria, the reading room and the swimming pool the best girls ambled about in the then-fashionable style of swing.” Both the Warsaw and Łódź YMCA branches were renowned for these concerts. One fan remembered that getting a ticket to a YMCA concert was “a dream … it was cultured, elegant, hugely fun, even without alcohol.” Above all it was entertainment: “We didn’t know anything about Katyn or about how one lives in a free country, we didn’t have passports, we didn’t have new books or movies, but we had a natural need to find entertainment, fun … that was what jazz gave us.” Tyrmand himself wrote later that the YMCA represented “genuine civilization in the middle of devastated, troglodyte Warsaw, a city where one lived in ratholes. Above all we valued the collegial atmosphere, the sportiness, the good humour.”6

  But with enemies like Jędrychowski and the Union of Fighting Youth, the organization could not last. In 1949, the communist authorities declared the YMCA a “tool of bourgeois-fascism” and dissolved it. With bizarre, Orwellian fury, communist youth activists descended on the club with hammers and smashed all the jazz records. The building was given over to something called the League of Soldiers’ Friends. The inhabitants were harassed, first with early-morning noise, later with cuts in water and electricity, in order to get them to move out. Eventually, the young communists threw everyone’s possessions out of the windows of the buildings and removed their beds.

  Still, not everybody left, largely because they had no place to go. Tyrmand stayed. New people arrived, sometimes bringing wives and children. By 1954, the place was noisy and dirty, with washing hanging in the hall and the smell of cooking in the air. Whole families slept in the tiny rooms. The buildings had come to resemble a “Parisian slum,” wrote Tyrmand. “The cheerful comfort of the old YMCA is now but a distant memory from an idyllic prehistory.”7

  The reconstruction of Polska YMCA in the immediate postwar period was a classic example of what is nowadays called “civil society,
” a phenomenon that has gone by other names in the past.8 In the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke wrote admiringly of the “little platoons,” the small social organizations from which, he believed, public spirit arose (and which he thought were threatened by the French Revolution). In the nineteenth century, Alexander de Tocqueville wrote equally enthusiastically of the “associations” that “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form.” He concluded that they helped ward off dictatorship: “If men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve.” More recently, the political scientist Robert Putnam has redefined the same phenomenon as “social capital,” and concluded that voluntary organizations lie at the heart of what we call “community.”

  By 1945, the Bolsheviks had also developed a theory of civil society, albeit one that was entirely negative. In contrast to Burke, Tocqueville, and their own Russian intellectuals, they believed, in the words of the historian Stuart Finkel, that “the public sphere in a socialist society should be unitary and univocal.” They dismissed the “bourgeois” notion of open discussion, and hated independent associations, trade unions, and guilds of all kinds, which they referred to as “separatist” or “caste” divisions within society. As for bourgeois political parties, these were meaningless. (As Lenin had written, “the names of parties, both in Europe and in Russia, are often chosen purely for purposes of advertisement, the ‘programs’ of parties are more often than not written with the sole purpose of defrauding the public.”9) The only organizations allowed to have a legal existence were de facto extensions of the communist party. Even completely apolitical organizations had to be banned: until the revolution had triumphed, there could be no such thing as an apolitical organization. Everything was political. And if it was not openly political, then it was secretly political.