Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (37 page)

Between 1945 and 1949, in the four years after the war, as communists supported by Moscow made their way to total power in Poland, Soviet propaganda developed the postwar line that supporters of Polish statehood, supporters of Jewish statehood, Americans, Nazis, and fascists were all somehow essentially the same people. The United States had remained politically present in Europe by extending the aid known as the Marshall Plan; Israel was established as an independent state in 1948 but did not become, as Stalin had hoped, a Soviet client; and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded in 1949 as a military alliance to the west of Stalin’s empire. In the Soviet propaganda of the early Cold War, the same alignment of forces that the Red Army had defeated in 1945 were still at large in the world, ready at any moment to attack the homeland of socialism. The actual facts of the matter—who had fought against whom and who had collaborated with whom between 1939 and 1945—were largely irrelevant. History was not to be discovered and understood but to be worked into a shape that was suitable for the future of the Soviet political order. All governments do this in some measure; the Soviet aspiration was unusual because it was total.

Polish soldiers who had spent the whole war fighting the Germans were classified as fascists and sometimes even executed along with German prisoners. Meanwhile, Poles who had tortured and murdered Jews during the war joined the Polish communist party, which was reestablished under Soviet tutelage, and became supporters of the new Soviet-backed communist regime in Poland. Such double collaboration was politically explicable, since people who had carried out German policy needed protection in the new order. It was also politically necessary. Just as people who resist one form of tyranny will tend to resist another, people who have collaborated with one form of tyranny will tend to come to terms with the next. Multiple collaboration was inevitable in a country such as Poland that had first been divided between the Germans and Soviets, then completely occupied by the Germans, and then completely occupied by the Soviets.

Any Marxist could have explained why Soviet power in postwar Poland could not be pro-Jewish. Poles, like everyone else in Europe under German occupation, had taken Jewish property. Because Jews had been so numerous in Poland, and because the share of urban property owned by Jews had been high, this amounted to a dramatic transformation of the whole society. It was not that all Poles were poorer than all Jews before the war. Nor was it the case that Poles prospered during the occupation—the scale of destruction, even in the countryside, was something inconceivable in western Europe. What was telling for the future was the German politics of relative deprivation: taking something from everyone, but taking everything from the Jews, and then taking their lives. This created the gaps—the empty apartments and commercial and professional niches—that Poles filled with all the greater determination given their losses during the war and their uncertainty about what was coming next.

The Soviets entered a country devastated by war and faced a population that was generally hostile. Rather than questioning the Nazi social revolution in Poland, Soviet power sanctioned it. In effect, though not by design, the Germans had carried out the first stage of the standard two-part Soviet revolution: the transfer of property from a group deemed to have no future to another group that then becomes beholden to authority—preparatory to the completion of the revolution by collectivization. Soviet and thus Polish communist propaganda denied the special suffering of Jews and portrayed their murder as part of the general martyrdom of peaceful Soviet or Polish citizenries. If there was no Holocaust and therefore no ethnic specificity to German policy, then there could not have been an ethnic transfer of property. Property became a point of contact between the Soviet authorities and the local population, much as it had between the German authorities and the local population. The Germans allowed Poles to steal, and the Soviets allowed Poles to keep what they had stolen. The consequences of the Holocaust became part of the legitimation of Soviet rule.

Soviet-style rule in Poland as elsewhere required a monopoly on virtue as well as control over the past. Resistance to the Soviets was by definition pro-German and reactionary, since History had only two sides. Any true wartime opposition to the Germans must have been organized by the Soviets. Other forms had no right to exist, and so had to be crushed if they still existed, presented as somehow objectively pro-Nazi and “fascist.” The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 was revised as communist (and therefore not essentially Jewish) and thus acceptable; the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 was presented as fascist and consigned to oblivion. The Home Army was presented as a partner of the Nazis, even though the men and women of the Polish resistance were being tortured in Gestapo prisons while the Soviet Union was still Nazi Germany’s ally.

Poles who had rescued Jews were sometimes troublesome in the new communist order, since they drew attention to the social basis of Soviet rule (the far larger number of Poles who had stolen from Jews) as well as to the hollowness of the Soviet characterization of the war (fascists against the USSR and its peaceful citizens). Thus, individual Poles who resisted the Germans
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resisted the Soviets
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drew attention to the special Jewish plight were a hindrance to memory policy. Witold Pilecki, who volunteered for Auschwitz and fought in the Warsaw Uprising, was shot by the Polish communist regime as a spy. Władysław Bartoszewski, who had been sentenced to Auschwitz by the Germans and who had worked ably to rescue Jews in Żegota, was sentenced to prison by the communists for his service in the Home Army. Jan Karski, who had voluntarily entered the Warsaw ghetto and had tried to explain to western leaders the character of the Final Solution, was in emigration after the war, and so beyond the reach of Polish communist authorities. Soviet propaganda slandered him as an antisemite. In Palestine, Witold Hulanicki, the Polish diplomat who supported Jewish revolutionaries, was murdered, most likely on Soviet instructions. The most effective rescuer of Jews in eastern Europe, the amateur diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, was arrested by Soviet counterintelligence and held in the infamous Lubianka and Lefortovo prisons. He died in Soviet custody, although to this day no one knows the details.

As the example of Wallenberg illustrates, the total need to allocate good and evil extended beyond the Polish and Jewish questions. The Soviet return to Europe meant the establishment of friendly, which is to say communist, regimes in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania, as well as in Poland. In none of these places would the robbery of Jews be challenged, and in none of them would the murder of Jews enter history as a distinct subject. Nowhere would the people who risked their lives to rescue Jews be regarded as heroes. Those who helped Jews were portrayed as those who somehow got more money for saving them than they did by killing them. Rescuers in eastern Europe generally tried to conceal what they had done, so as not to arouse the interest of neighbors who might want to search for Jewish valuables. The powerful and enduring myth of Jewish gold and jewelry in the houses of rescuers reflects the mindset of those many Poles and east Europeans who robbed and killed Jews, not that of those who helped them. But since under Stalinism no contrary moral discourse could appear, materialism was all that remained.

Klimenty Sheptyts’kyi was another Polish citizen and rescuer of Jews who was punished by the Soviets after the war. He was a Greek Catholic churchman, an archimandrite of the Studite Order of monks, representing a faith that in its liturgy was eastern, like the Orthodox Churches of Ukraine and Russia, but in its institutional hierarchy was western, in that it was one of the many smaller Catholic churches subordinate to the Vatican. Following the instructions of his brother Andrei, who was the metropolitan of the Greek Catholic Church, Klimenty and other monks and priests hid more than a hundred Jews, many of them children, in their cathedral complex, Saint Jura, in Lwów—which they, as Ukrainians, called Lviv.

Andrei Sheptyts’kyi was the only Christian churchman of such high rank to act decisively against the mass murder of Jews. He had initially welcomed the German invasion as a liberation from Soviet rule, which had targeted not only his church but an increasing number of his flock. Without ever changing his opinion about the evil of the Soviet regime, he quickly came to believe that Nazi occupation was worse. Aside from his labor of rescue, which was of course secret, he protested to Himmler, protested to Hitler, and asked the pope to intervene to protect Jews. He told Pius XII that Jews were “the first victims” of German rule and that National Socialism meant “hatred of everything that is honorable and beautiful.” He issued pastoral letters reminding his flock of the divine commandment not to murder. He also classified murder as a reserved sin, which meant that Greek Catholics who killed human beings had to confess personally to him. Because Andrei Sheptyts’kyi was aged and crippled, these confessions were his way of being informed about what he understood as a deluge of sinfulness among his people. Hearing confession required him to face the truth, time after time, of what many Ukrainian Christians were doing to Jews. He died in November 1944, not long after the return of the Red Army. The Soviets forcibly subordinated the Greek Catholic Church to the Moscow Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church, which they had long before humiliated and tamed. When Klimenty refused to renounce his faith, he was sentenced to prison in Soviet Russia, where he died in 1951.

The Sheptyts’kyi brothers were no doubt unusual human beings, and Andrei was acting from a position of some authority. As an archbishop of the Catholic Church, he was far less vulnerable to German oppression than the vast majority of the population and the vast majority of churchmen. His church was also in a special position, in that its believers had been subject to Soviet occupation in 1939–1941, when the Soviet Union annexed eastern Poland. Many of the Ukrainian nationalists whom the Germans induced to collaborate after 1941 were Greek Catholics. Although many of these young men did not heed the instructions of their metropolitan, they would have reacted negatively had the Germans arrested or killed Sheptyts’kyi. In this sense his status was something like that of a diplomat, and his ability to exploit the buildings of the cathedral complex to save Jews resembled the ability of diplomats to extend state protection.

Yet the Greek Catholic Church itself had a history of vulnerability. It was a kind of mediator between Eastern and Western Christian traditions in Europe. Established in 1596 as part of an attempt to restore unity among Eastern and Western Christians, it was known for two centuries as the Uniate Church. Its years of greatest prosperity were under the early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which ceased to exist in 1795. Most of the ecumenical territory of the Uniate Church then passed into the Russian Empire, which did not recognize its existence and which oversaw its merger with the dominant Orthodox Church. The Uniate Church survived, however, in the Habsburg province of Galicia. The Roman Catholic Habsburgs renamed it the “Greek Catholic Church,” to emphasize its connection with Rome. Under Habsburg rule, the church became associated with a Ukrainian national revival, one of whose leaders was Andrei Sheptyts’kyi.

In 1918, the Habsburg monarchy disintegrated after its defeat in the First World War, and Galicia, with all of its Greek Catholics, was incorporated within the newly independent Polish state. Ukrainians were suddenly a national minority within a nation-state rather than within a pluralist empire. The nationally aware Ukrainians of the former Habsburg district of Galicia, accustomed to a good deal of freedom under Habsburg rule, were seen by Polish authorities as a particular threat. Roman Catholic Poles did not usually regard the Greek Catholic Church within Poland as an equally dignified part of the larger Catholic Church. Within interwar Poland, the Greek Catholic Church was the refuge of a Ukrainian national minority, many of whose members believed that they were oppressed by the Polish state. The Polish state was constitutionally secular; its policies were nevertheless influenced, especially in the second half of the 1930s, by a large National Democratic movement that associated itself with the Roman Catholic Church. For many Polish nationalists, Andrei Sheptyts’kyi was the servant of an alien cause. Within his own church, Sheptyts’kyi was known for his unusually positive attitude towards Jews and respect for Jewish tradition. He corresponded with rabbis in Hebrew.

In its experience of alienation from central authority, the Greek Catholic Church resembled other churches that rescued Jews. As a general matter, churches that enjoyed a close relationship with the state before the war were not active in rescue. With the collapse of the previous political order, their own capacity for action declined. Men of the cloth who were unaccustomed to being in opposition rarely ventured forth with interpretations of Christian teachings that might provide a basis for resisting the new Nazi status quo. In Nazi Germany itself, the major denominations tended to articulate a form of Christianity that was aligned with the new order. Although there were exceptions, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church he helped establish, German Protestants generally allowed their churches to be nazified.