Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (18 page)

In altering the character of politics, the Soviets created a
psychological resource
. Jews were given the appearance but not the reality of power. After the arrival of the Red Army in September 1939, local Jews appeared in visible positions of responsibility in greater numbers than had ever been the case between the wars. The Polish central government had acted to make sure that even towns with a Jewish majority did not have a majority of Jews on the city council. Although there were a few Jews in the Polish police and the Polish administration generally, the tendency was to keep those numbers low. The change in autumn 1939 was, therefore, experienced as dramatic. The Soviets had no particular desire to promote Jews as such, although a few commanders and officials opined that Jews were more reliable than Poles. Still, Jews were among those who were available and exhibited the willingness and skills to take up new positions. Jews were never the majority of local collaborators with the Soviet regime; Belarusians and Ukrainians were overall far more numerous. Local Jews never held real power, with the exception of a few weeks in autumn 1939, and that on a very local scale, and alongside other, non-Jewish, collaborators. Nevertheless, the change of regime made Jews collectively vulnerable. When the Germans invaded, the actual administrators of the new Soviet territory, the Soviet officials from the east, could marshal the resources they needed to flee. But the local Jews, those who had collaborated with the Soviets and those who had not, generally remained behind.

In other ways Soviet policy created the conditions for acts of revenge. In 1939, the Soviets had defeated, destroyed, and discredited traditional authorities, both secular and religious. They had presided over a moment of score settling and chaos in which many new scores were created that might be settled in the next moment of violent transition. They had deported or shot half a million people in lands where the total population was just over thirteen million, meaning that most families had been touched by the NKVD in some way. The rapid destruction of the Polish state was not simply a fact but a source of shame, a catastrophe that would beg for a scapegoat.

Even as Soviet power generated feelings of shame and resentment, it forced society to break the taboo of collaboration with a foreign power. Certain people had chosen, at the beginning, to collaborate; far more had collaborated simply by dint of continuing to hold their positions, fearful of deportation or worse if they did not demonstrate loyalty. With time, almost everyone had to engage with the Soviet regime in some way or another. The nature of the system demanded it. In seeking to transform eastern Poland into part of their own state, Soviet leaders included the local population in the process quite intensively: through coerced voting, through the encouragement of denunciations, through interrogation and torture and betrayal. Because the Soviet system was inclusive, there was often no clear line between victims and collaborators. Often the very experience that led to collaboration, such as torture and imprisonment, also meant victimhood. This refined the psychological resource in a special way. In Soviet conditions, victimhood and collaboration were widespread and hard to define, and so the next power holder would be the one to define them.

Finally, in destroying states, the Soviet Union created a
political resource
. As fragile and flawed as the Polish, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian states might seem, they were the homelands of tens of millions of Europeans. The wholesale destruction of modern states with fully fledged political nations was an extraordinarily radical step. Of course, not all of the (former) citizens of these (former) states cared deeply about national independence, but many did. Insofar as the Soviets removed states that people wanted, and insofar as the Germans could pose as the ally of those who wished to restore them, the Germans could manipulate a powerful desire. The nature of this opportunity depended, of course, upon what leaders of national groups believed that they could gain or lose from occupiers. The joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland did not, for example, create much of a Polish political resource for the Germans. Having already invaded Poland once in 1939, they could hardly pose as a liberator of Poland when invading the Soviet Union from their Polish colony in 1941. Germans could take credit on a local scale for ending Soviet oppressions, but they could hardly promise political autonomy to Poland.

The perspective of some of the political leaders of Poland’s ethnic minorities was quite different. Poland had been the largest homeland of Ukrainians beyond the Soviet Union and the largest homeland of Jews in the world. Almost all of Poland’s Ukrainians and more than a third of Poland’s Jews fell under Soviet rule in 1939. Neither Ukrainians nor Jews fared well in the enlarged Soviet Union; in general their experience was far worse than expected.

In the Ukrainian case, the opportunity this presented to the Germans was rather strong. The Ukrainian minority in Poland was substantial and territorially concentrated, adjacent to the Ukrainian republic of the Soviet Union. Although Ukrainian nationalism was never the dominant political orientation in Ukrainian political life in Poland, it did attract attention in neighboring capitals. All regional powers had tried to turn the Ukrainian question to their own ends in the 1920s and 1930s. The Soviets pursued a policy of affirmative action of Ukrainians in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s and established a Communist Party of Western Ukraine on Polish territory in the hope of drawing Ukrainians from Poland toward the Soviet Union. The Poles imitated this policy in their Volhynian district in order to draw Ukrainians in the Soviet Union towards Poland. The Germans had cultivated Ukrainian agents within Poland, usually nationalists, who believed correctly that Germany was the only power that could possibly destroy both enemies: Poland and the Soviet Union.

That said, the Ukrainian nationalists associated with Germany knew perfectly well that a major source of their local support was the social question—chiefly the redistribution of farmland. And the Soviets were quite aware that the Communist Party of Western Ukraine had to address the national question. With nationalists concerned with expropriating large estates and communists flying national flags, a certain amount of ideological syncretism was the rule in the 1930s. For example, a local Ukrainian communist leader could be a Jewish woman named Fryda Szprynger, and one of her more successful underground activists could, meanwhile, use the pseudonym “Hitler.”

The Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in 1939 meant the destruction of the mainstream Ukrainian political parties that had functioned legally in Poland: the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance (UNDO), for example, which had tried to work within legal institutions and had opposed official antisemitism. Soviet rule created relatively favorable conditions for groupings that had been illegal: the nationalists and the communists—the first because they were accustomed to being underground, the second because they could emerge from underground and collaborate with the regime. Yet, as Jews and Poles tended to notice, often it was Ukrainian nationalists rather than communists (insofar as this distinction had meaning) who took up local positions of Soviet authority. Both Ukrainian nationalists and Ukrainian communists took the opportunity to denounce local Poles to Soviet authorities, no doubt from both political and self-interested motives. In most villages in southeastern Poland there was a Ukrainian activist who knew what categories of person the NKVD was looking for and was happy to supply an appropriate Pole. This created an empty homestead and farm; denunciation and deportation were a version of land reform.

During the first few months of Soviet rule, the social revolution from abroad attracted many Ukrainians. Polish authorities were often replaced by Ukrainians, although in meaningful positions these were Ukrainians from Soviet Ukraine. The handful of Jewish mayors were also replaced by Ukrainians from the east. The initial Soviet deportations chiefly concerned Poles and indeed Polish landowners, and so could be experienced as social advance for Ukrainian peasants. Soviet-style revolutions usually had two stages: first a gesture to the peasants, then the seizure of their land. In 1940, the Soviets began to collectivize agriculture in the territory they had annexed from Poland, just as they had done a decade earlier in the Soviet Union as a whole. Some Ukrainians recalled then the mass famine that had followed in the USSR. Virtually none wanted to concede land to the Soviet state. Collectivization discredited Ukrainian communists among the population and led some Ukrainian communists to shift toward nationalism.

Ukrainian nationalists, for their part, were hoping in 1940 for a German invasion of the Soviet Union that would create the possibility for a Ukrainian state. These were people who had been Polish citizens, and saw themselves as representatives of the millions of Ukrainians in Poland and the tens of millions of Ukrainians in the Soviet Union. From their perspective, only Germany could create the conditions for a Ukrainian state by destroying both Poland and the USSR. Poland was no more as of 1939; in 1940, some Ukrainian nationalists joined in the German preparations to annihilate the Soviet Union. The Germans used Ukrainian informers to prepare the way for the invasion known as Operation Barbarossa, and they recruited and trained hundreds of Ukrainians for advance groups to be used in Soviet Ukraine. In early 1941, the NKVD sensed the threat and began to arrest Ukrainians in high numbers. The fourth wave of Soviet deportations, in May and June 1941, was heavily Ukrainian. Many thousands of Ukrainians were also imprisoned. When the Germans did arrive in June 1941, they found the corpses of these people left behind in Soviet prisons.

All in all, Soviet occupation closed Jewish possibilities. Could it also have created a Jewish political resource for the Germans? As with the Ukrainians, there was a Jewish nationalist Right in interwar Poland, Betar, that was committed to building an independent national state by revolutionary and violent means. Unlike Ukrainian nationalists, however, Jewish nationalists were the clients and not the enemies of the Polish state. They wanted to leave Polish territory rather than claim it for their own. After the German invasion of September 1, 1939, leaders of Betar fled eastward from the Germans. They were then caught in the Soviet net. Jewish radicals, unlike Ukrainian radicals, had no experience of working underground. The Soviets quickly identified and arrested them. The NKVD was aware that Betar was a front for Irgun, and broke underground Irgun circles as well. Menachem Begin, the leader of Betar in Poland, fled from Warsaw to Vilnius and managed to hide for a time. He was eventually arrested by the NKVD—in the middle of a game of chess—and sentenced to eight years of hard labor at the camps of Vorkuta.

Betar was quickly powerless in occupied Poland. Its sister organization Irgun, based two thousand kilometers away in Palestine, was not. The conspirators of Irgun, most of them Polish Jews, found themselves in an unexpected predicament: considering the opportunities provided by war but deprived of the backer which had sought to prepare them for such a moment. They had received a certain amount of training from the Poles, as well as money and weapons. Yet the grand scheme for which all of that was mere preparation—a landing of thousands of Betar members in Palestine with Polish support—was now unthinkable. No further Polish help was coming. The Polish officers who had trained Irgun were dead or in camps or in hiding or in exile. The latest shipment of Polish weapons for Irgun in Palestine, on the docks in Gdynia in August 1939, was destroyed by German fire even as Poles scrambled to unpack the weapons to use them to defend themselves. Irgun had been preparing for a conflict with the British Empire, but not for one in which its Polish patron would be totally absent. As one Betar comrade wrote to another in distress in late 1939, “we feel that there is no one behind us.”

Of the three European states with an active interest in Palestine in the 1930s, only two remained as the decade came to an end: Nazi Germany and Great Britain. They were at war with each other, which meant that Jewish fighters in Palestine might gain some leverage by siding with one or the other. Nazi Germany was the enemy of Jews in Europe (although to what extent was not fully clear, even in 1939). It was also the enemy of the British Empire, which controlled Palestine and prevented Jewish emigration. Irgun could not decide between the obligation to defend Jews and the obligation to fight for a Jewish state, so chose neutrality between Germany and Britain. Avraham Stern now led a split within Irgun, establishing a splinter group eventually known as Lehi. He was joined by Yitzhak Shamir, another Polish Jew who had hoped for further training in Poland but had run out of time. Lehi then did exactly what other Far Right groups did at the time: It made a proposal to Hitler.

The appeals sent by Jewish and Ukrainian nationalists to Hitler were very similar. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists used this language in June 1941: “The newly emerging Ukrainian State will cooperate closely with the Great Nazi German Reich, which under the guidance of its
Führer
Adolf Hitler is forming a new order in Europe and the world and which will help the Ukrainian Nation liberate itself from Muscovite oppression.” In Palestine, Lehi saw the British much the same way as the Ukrainian nationalists saw the Soviets, and it drew the same practical conclusions. In January 1941, Stern proposed “cooperation between the New Germany and a renewed racial-national Hebrewdom,” which would involve “the erection of a historical Jewish State on national and totalitarian foundations, which would stand in a treaty relationship with the German Reich, in the interest of the protection and strengthening of the future German power position in the Near East.”

Stern assumed that Hitler wished to rid Europe of Jews and that a logical way to do so would be to send them all to Palestine. Perhaps misled by his contacts with Polish elites, he confused the Polish with the German approach. The Polish regime really had supported a mass Jewish emigration to Palestine and a Jewish state. Lehi could be trusted to make a Jewish state that would be a good partner for Nazi Germany, continued Stern, because “in its worldview and structure it is closely related to the totalitarian movements of Europe.” Stern was asking Berlin to replace Warsaw as the patron of Lehi. The documents concerning Poland’s official Zionism, he helpfully (and correctly) noted, could be found in the Polish archives, now under German control.