Iron Curtain (27 page)

In the wake of that murder, the Polish regime finally mobilized itself to deport the Ukrainians, not to the Soviet Union—they might cause trouble there too—but to the formerly German lands in northern and western Poland. Trumpeting their intention to bring “security” to the eastern part of the country—a goal the majority of Poles surely approved of—at the end of April they launched Akcja Wisła, Operation Vistula, a major military operation involving five infantry divisions, 17,000 soldiers, 500 militia, sappers, pilots, and Interior Ministry troops. Militarized Soviet NKVD divisions and the Czechoslovak army provided support along the borders.
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By the end of July, this enormous force had finally succeeded in evicting some 140,000 Ukrainians from their homes, placing them in filthy boxcars, and resettling them in the north and the west of Poland. It was a bloody, angry process, every bit as bloody and angry as the killings in
Volhynia three years earlier. One Ukrainian, a child at the time, remembers Polish soldiers breaking up his cousin’s wedding:

Without their support network among the Ukrainian peasantry, the Ukrainian partisans could no longer maintain their resistance. Those who weren’t killed were captured, interrogated, and often tortured at
Jaworzno, another former Nazi camp that had until then been used to hold Germans (like many Nazi camps, it had a long life, and served many functions). The Ukrainians were dispersed all over Poland. In the 1990s, I once encountered a group of their descendants living near
Ełk, in the Mazurian lake district. They no longer spoke much Ukrainian. Because the Polish authorities ruled that no town in the country could consist of more than 10 percent Ukrainians, they had slowly lost their language, their culture, and their distinctiveness.

A few weeks after the end of Operation Vistula, the Soviet Union launched a similarly brutal action on the adjoining territories in Soviet Ukraine. Within the span of a few days in October 1947, the Soviet secret police arrested 76,192 Ukrainians in western Ukraine and deported them to the Gulag.
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Several historians have speculated that the two operations were related. Both were intended to destroy forever the fiercely proud and tightly knit west Ukrainian community that had generated so much resistance to Poles and Russians alike. Operation Vistula ensured that any Soviet Ukrainians who escaped arrest could no longer use Poland as a safe haven.
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Both operations were popular. Polish peasants who had been tormented by Ukrainian partisans were delighted to see them gone—and grateful to the Soviet and Polish troops who had dispersed them.

Operation Vistula was a particularly brutal example of a population exchange within a single country but it wasn’t the only one. When the Czechoslovak government failed to get approval from the Allies, either at Potsdam or at the subsequent Paris Peace Conference, to deport Hungarians from Slovakia, they hit upon a similar solution. On paper, there would be no deportation of Hungarians from Slovakia, just a “voluntary” population exchange. To encourage these “voluntary” departures, Hungarians in Slovakia
were deprived of citizenship, of the right to use their language in official places, and of the right to attend church services in Hungarian. Between 1945 and 1948, some 89,000 Hungarians were thus “persuaded” to leave Slovakia for the
Sudetenland, where they replaced the missing Germans, or else to cross the border into Hungary itself. Some 70,000 Slovaks arrived from Hungary in their place.
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Not a word of protest was heard from outside the region. One Hungarian historian has declared that this was because “the fate of the Hungarian minority did not interest anyone.”
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But, in truth, the fate of none of the minorities interested anyone. The world hardly noticed the ethnic war between Poland and Ukraine, let alone Operation Vistula. Nor did it notice the 100,000 Hungarians who fled or were expelled from Romania, the 50,000 Ukrainians who left Czechoslovakia for Ukraine, or the 42,000 Czechs and Slovaks who returned from Ukraine to Czechoslovakia after the war.
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By 1950, not much remained of multiethnic Eastern Europe. Only nostalgia—Ukrainian nostalgia, Polish nostalgia, Hungarian nostalgia, German nostalgia—endured. In 1991, I went to visit a tiny hamlet near the town of Zablocko, in western Ukraine. It was occupied by a Ukrainian couple who in 1945 had been frightened by nightly visits from all kinds of partisans, frightened by the fighting and tired of war. Anxious for peace, they agreed to leave behind their beloved village on the river San, in eastern Poland. They piled all of their possessions onto a cart and trudged east. They eventually moved into a wooden house on top of a hill, until recently the property of a Polish family, and there they stayed. Half a century later, their granddaughter, who had never seen Poland, still pined to go there. Was it, she wanted to know, “as rich and beautiful as they say?”

In the end, most deported Germans went to Germany, Poles went to Poland, and Ukrainians could go to Soviet Ukraine. But the Jews of Eastern Europe, already displaced into hiding places, concentration camps, and exile, did not have an obvious homeland to which they could return in 1945. If they did return to their former homes, they found physical destruction, psychological devastation, and worse. Indeed, their postwar fate is impossible to comprehend without understanding that they returned to towns and villages that had been—and often still were—enveloped in ethnic, political, and criminal violence.

Accustomed to the idea that peace followed liberation, few Western Europeans find this easy to grasp. Nor is it easy to pick apart the myths and emotions that have wound themselves around the subject of the Jewish experience in postwar
Eastern Europe in the years since. All of the postwar ethnic disputes are inflamed, from time to time, it is true, by contemporary politicians who want to use the past to influence the present. The associations of former expellees played a large and often awkward role in West German politics in the 1970s and 1980s, at times—including the critical moment of 1989—agitating for a change in the Polish-German border and for the return of their homes. The Poles and the Ukrainians occasionally squabble over the memory of the
Ukrainian Revolutionary Army, whom the former remember as murderers and the latter now revere as freedom fighters. In 2008, Slovak-Hungarian tensions rose to the point that Hungarians, angered by the arrest of Hungarian activists in Slovakia, actually blocked several border crossings in protest.

Still, there is almost no greater emotional minefield than the history of the Jews in postwar Eastern Europe, and especially of the Jews in postwar Poland. The tangled relationship of the Eastern European Jews to Eastern European communism is a large part of it: some Jews played prominent roles in several of the postwar Eastern European communist parties and were thus perceived as beneficiaries of the new regimes, even though other Jews suffered at the hands of those same regimes. At times, Eastern Europeans and Jews have also engaged in a kind of competitive martyrology. The former resent the fact that the world knows about the
Holocaust but not about their own suffering at the hands of both the Nazis and the Soviet Union. At times, the latter have interpreted any discussion of anyone’s wartime suffering other than their own as a denigration of their uniquely tragic experience. There have been arguments about money, property, guilt, and responsibility.

An example of how these emotions play out arose in the 1990s, when a prosecutor at what became the Polish Institute for National Remembrance set out to investigate the unusual case of
Salomon Morel, who—all agree—was a Polish Jew and a communist partisan. From February until September of 1945, Morel was also the commandant of
Zgoda, a labor camp for Germans in the Upper
Silesian town of Świętochłowice, on the site of what had once been an auxiliary camp to
Auschwitz. After that, he remained an employee of the Polish secret police, eventually becoming a colonel and the commander of a prison in
Katowice. Morel emigrated to
Israel in the early 1990s.

Almost everything else about Morel remains in dispute. According to Polish investigators and prosecutors, Morel joined the Polish security police immediately after the war. He worked first in the prison of
Lublin castle, where he assisted in the interrogation of Polish Home Army leaders. He was then transferred to Zgoda. During his tenure there, he became known for his cruelty to the mostly German prisoners, including women and children. He deprived them of food, allowed hygiene to deteriorate, tortured them for pleasure, and sometimes beat them to death. As a result of the poor conditions, a typhus epidemic swept the camp in the summer and some 1,800 prisoners died. According to archival documents, Morel was held responsible for the epidemic by the Interior Ministry, put under house arrest for three days, and deprived of a part of his salary.

In 2005, a Polish prosecutor, having decided Morel was guilty of war crimes, sent an extradition request—one of several—to the State of Israel, where Morel then lived. The prosecutor received, in response, a furious letter from the Israeli Ministry of Justice. Morel, the Israeli letter declared, was not a war criminal but one of the war’s victims. He had witnessed the murder of his parents, brother, and sister-in-law at the hands of a Polish police officer during the war. His older brother was murdered by what the letter calls “a Polish fascist.” According to the Israeli ministry official, the camp at
Świętochłowice, when he ran it, contained no more than 600 prisoners, all of whom were former Nazis. Sanitary conditions were satisfactory. The Israeli official’s judgment was not motivated by facts but by emotions: Morel, he declared, had suffered from “crimes of genocide committed by the Nazis and their Polish collaborators,” the case against him was motivated by Polish anti-Semitism, and he would not be extradited.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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