The Jews of Poland
Jews had been living in Poland since at least the Middle Ages. When Crusaders moved through Europe in the thirteenth century, Jewish refugees sought safety in Poland. The 1264 Statute of Kalisz created legal protections for Jews that were extended by King Kazimierz Wielki, or Casimir the Great, in the early fourteenth century. With these protections, Jewish communities in Poland began to thrive. Scholars suggest that by the sixteenth century, 80 percent of all Jews worldwide lived in Poland, where they enjoyed relative autonomy and tolerance and developed a rich social and cultural life, including several significant Jewish religious movements, such as the Hasidim (a sect of Judaism with an emphasis on mysticism and prayer) and a Jewish reformation movement called the Haskalah.
The relatively peaceful existence of Polish Jewry was threatened toward the end of the eighteenth century when, in a series of diplomatic moves, Poland was partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. With Russia in control of vast areas of Poland, most Polish Jews found themselves living under Russian rule. Russia imposed geographic and professional restrictions on Jewish life, confining Jews to the Pale of Settlement (which was abolished legally in 1917, though this region continued to house the majority of European Jewry). In response, Jews fought alongside Polish fighters seeking independence during a series of uprisings throughout the nineteenth century.
Except for a small minority of well-off Jewish merchants, bankers, and factory owners, the majority of the Jews were poor and became even more so under Russia’s control. They made a living as traders, as semi-skilled craftsmen in old and emerging industries (textiles, for example), and as shopkeepers. Few were farmers; many were destitute. For the most part, Jews lived in small towns known as shtetls. In tandem with cultural and intellectual changes, once the processes of industrialization and urbanization were under way, most Jews left the shtetl to live in larger urban centers such as Warsaw, Vilna, Krakow, and Lodz. By the 1920s, they made up between a quarter and half of the population in Poland’s larger cities (in some smaller towns, they made as much as 90 percent).
Those cities became the cultural, religious, and intellectual centers of world Jewry. There, Jews developed an extensive network of cultural and literary institutions and charities. Alongside competing religious trends, new political theories and ideologies gripped Polish Jews, including Zionism and socialism. These ideas and many others were discussed in thousands of newspapers, books, journals, and plays, written mostly in Yiddish.
In the 1880s and 1890s, after the assassination of Russian Tsar Alexander II, Russian-Polish Jews were exposed to a series of organized massacres targeting Jewish communities called pogroms. In response, some two million Jews emigrated out of this region, with the vast majority going the United States. Others responded with different solutions. Some Orthodox Jews, who looked to protect Judaism, tried their best to isolate themselves from hostility and outside forces. Zionists promoted the idea of mass migration to Palestine, while socialist Bundists sought to unite all the Jews in Eastern Europe in a class-based fight for economic reform. Others believed that assimilation (or acculturation) into mainstream culture was the proper response.
After World War I, Poland became a democratic independent state with significant minority populations, including Ukrainians, Jews, Belorussians, Lithuanians, and ethnic Germans. However, increasing Polish nationalism made Poland a hostile place for many Jews. A series of pogroms and discriminatory laws were signs of growing antisemitism, while fewer and fewer opportunities to emigrate were available. One the eve of World War II, three and a half million Jews, or about ten percent of the population, lived in Poland, giving it the highest percentage of Jews in any European country
THE LODZ GHETTO PHOTOS:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/02/21/metro/once-buried-cache-images-polands-lodz-ghetto-emerges-mfa/?s_campaign=8315
https://www.mfa.org/media/slideshow/9089
https://time.com/4673934/nazi-ghetto/
Polish Jewish Genealogy
The silence lifts on Poland's Jews
By Joseph Polak | July 28, 2007
Boston Globe Article
A Dutch child survivor of the Holocaust, I recently visited Poland, where 30 members of my family had been murdered, including 10 cousins younger than 14. None of these relatives has a grave; their ashes dot the countryside or blow in the winds. I found Poland lifting a long silence about its Jews -- those who lived there and those, like my family, who were brought there to be murdered.
Poles are finally beginning to deal with these ghosts in their midst. The more thoughtfully they continue to do so, the more truthful -- and perhaps the more consoling -- the memories of the Jewish experience of Poland are likely to be.
Everyone knew that Poland had turned a corner when in 2001 then-President Aleksander Kwasniewski spoke at the village of Jedwabne. There, on behalf of his country, Kwasniewski apologized for the 1941 massacre of Jedwabne's Jews, who were burned alive by their neighbors with little help from the Germans. In the past, when Poland had spoken of the Holocaust, it saw itself as a victim among victims, and when it spoke about its almost 2 million citizens murdered by the Nazis, it was not referring to its Jews, 3.5 million of whom were also murdered by the Germans.
For 60 years Poland was silent when it came to its slaughtered Jews, echoing, if that is the word, the silence of their absence. The Kwasniewski speech finally brought the silence to an official end.
Last month, the door that had been pried open by Kwasniewski swung wide with the groundbreaking for a Museum of the History of Polish Jews, to be erected on the grounds of the former Warsaw Ghetto. When the museum opens in 2011, Poles will find themselves with much to talk about: the Jews' considerable contribution to the Polish economy and military, the profound Jewish impact on Polish culture, and the very mixed bag of Poland's treatment of the Jews, from offering them a safe, welcoming, and dignified haven from the Crusades to their subsequent efforts, centuries long, of preserving the Jews' otherness.
The museum, in trying to tell the story of Poland's Jews through multimedia technologies and three-dimensional scale models, will of historical necessity have to put a positive spin on its presentations. Yet I imagine that the better the museum makes the Jews look, the more massive the collision with reality will be at the end. A people who lived and thrived here for 1,000 years, younger Poles will wonder, are gone?
It is not their murder in the Holocaust that will be overwhelming, but the encounter with their absence. The harder the museum tries to be faithful to its story, the harder will it collide with this absence.
Omnipresent in Poland is a loss so massive that its proportions are not manageable -- almost not imaginable. Not just the numbers, but the humanity gone -- the mothers, the children, the schools, the clubs, the communities; hundreds, perhaps thousands of villages, emptied. Poland, for the most part, was not the murderer, yet death oozes everywhere from its pores. A mass grave of children here, a death camp there; the wind, blowing through decapitated, wearied frames of synagogues; bathhouses for family purity and bath houses that were gas chambers; the wind howling, through abandoned cemeteries and leveled ghettos, of an all-embracing sadness that will not subside and for which there is no consolation.
Visitors will come to the museum, appreciate its energy and intentions and displays, and then ask -- so where are these Jews? Does anybody here miss them?
This silence, this great absence into which the visitor leaving the museum will surely be slammed, will undo the museum's messages, will sabotage its best intentions, will ask: Who here weeps for the Jews besides the Jews? Indeed, unless it can make Poland itself cry for its murdered Jews, the museum will represent a dry nostalgia, an exercise in historical anthropology, with the Jews as Poland's Mayas.
While Poland boasts the largest number of righteous Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, it has still not fully embraced the moral challenge of why it did so little to save so many others. The museum must not let visitors leave with the impression that the murder of Poland's Jews will always speak louder than their millennium of accomplishment there. The Forum for Dialogue among Nations, a group created by a former member of the Polish parliament, Andrzej Folwarczny, in conjunction with the American Jewish Committee, has gone a long way in exploring such issues, especially with young people. The museum would do well to ally itself with these efforts.
What is particularly encouraging in all this is the extent to which the museum is a communal effort. At the groundbreaking, Poland's new president, Lech Kaczynski, spoke with great pleasure in describing his own energetic efforts toward creating this museum while he was still the mayor of Warsaw, and of Poland's need to embrace its present through its past. The museum is thus supported by the city of Warsaw, by Poland, by Germany, as well as by substantial private contributions from all over the world.
The story of Poland's Jews has long waited to be told properly. Perhaps the time has finally come when this can happen.
Rabbi Joseph Polak is director of the Florence and Chafetz Hillel House at Boston University.
By Joseph Polak | July 28, 2007
Boston Globe Article
A Dutch child survivor of the Holocaust, I recently visited Poland, where 30 members of my family had been murdered, including 10 cousins younger than 14. None of these relatives has a grave; their ashes dot the countryside or blow in the winds. I found Poland lifting a long silence about its Jews -- those who lived there and those, like my family, who were brought there to be murdered.
Poles are finally beginning to deal with these ghosts in their midst. The more thoughtfully they continue to do so, the more truthful -- and perhaps the more consoling -- the memories of the Jewish experience of Poland are likely to be.
Everyone knew that Poland had turned a corner when in 2001 then-President Aleksander Kwasniewski spoke at the village of Jedwabne. There, on behalf of his country, Kwasniewski apologized for the 1941 massacre of Jedwabne's Jews, who were burned alive by their neighbors with little help from the Germans. In the past, when Poland had spoken of the Holocaust, it saw itself as a victim among victims, and when it spoke about its almost 2 million citizens murdered by the Nazis, it was not referring to its Jews, 3.5 million of whom were also murdered by the Germans.
For 60 years Poland was silent when it came to its slaughtered Jews, echoing, if that is the word, the silence of their absence. The Kwasniewski speech finally brought the silence to an official end.
Last month, the door that had been pried open by Kwasniewski swung wide with the groundbreaking for a Museum of the History of Polish Jews, to be erected on the grounds of the former Warsaw Ghetto. When the museum opens in 2011, Poles will find themselves with much to talk about: the Jews' considerable contribution to the Polish economy and military, the profound Jewish impact on Polish culture, and the very mixed bag of Poland's treatment of the Jews, from offering them a safe, welcoming, and dignified haven from the Crusades to their subsequent efforts, centuries long, of preserving the Jews' otherness.
The museum, in trying to tell the story of Poland's Jews through multimedia technologies and three-dimensional scale models, will of historical necessity have to put a positive spin on its presentations. Yet I imagine that the better the museum makes the Jews look, the more massive the collision with reality will be at the end. A people who lived and thrived here for 1,000 years, younger Poles will wonder, are gone?
It is not their murder in the Holocaust that will be overwhelming, but the encounter with their absence. The harder the museum tries to be faithful to its story, the harder will it collide with this absence.
Omnipresent in Poland is a loss so massive that its proportions are not manageable -- almost not imaginable. Not just the numbers, but the humanity gone -- the mothers, the children, the schools, the clubs, the communities; hundreds, perhaps thousands of villages, emptied. Poland, for the most part, was not the murderer, yet death oozes everywhere from its pores. A mass grave of children here, a death camp there; the wind, blowing through decapitated, wearied frames of synagogues; bathhouses for family purity and bath houses that were gas chambers; the wind howling, through abandoned cemeteries and leveled ghettos, of an all-embracing sadness that will not subside and for which there is no consolation.
Visitors will come to the museum, appreciate its energy and intentions and displays, and then ask -- so where are these Jews? Does anybody here miss them?
This silence, this great absence into which the visitor leaving the museum will surely be slammed, will undo the museum's messages, will sabotage its best intentions, will ask: Who here weeps for the Jews besides the Jews? Indeed, unless it can make Poland itself cry for its murdered Jews, the museum will represent a dry nostalgia, an exercise in historical anthropology, with the Jews as Poland's Mayas.
While Poland boasts the largest number of righteous Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, it has still not fully embraced the moral challenge of why it did so little to save so many others. The museum must not let visitors leave with the impression that the murder of Poland's Jews will always speak louder than their millennium of accomplishment there. The Forum for Dialogue among Nations, a group created by a former member of the Polish parliament, Andrzej Folwarczny, in conjunction with the American Jewish Committee, has gone a long way in exploring such issues, especially with young people. The museum would do well to ally itself with these efforts.
What is particularly encouraging in all this is the extent to which the museum is a communal effort. At the groundbreaking, Poland's new president, Lech Kaczynski, spoke with great pleasure in describing his own energetic efforts toward creating this museum while he was still the mayor of Warsaw, and of Poland's need to embrace its present through its past. The museum is thus supported by the city of Warsaw, by Poland, by Germany, as well as by substantial private contributions from all over the world.
The story of Poland's Jews has long waited to be told properly. Perhaps the time has finally come when this can happen.
Rabbi Joseph Polak is director of the Florence and Chafetz Hillel House at Boston University.
Poland during the second world war
On September 1, 1939 Germany attacked Poland, launching World War II. Poland's allies, Great Britain and France, immediately declared war on Germany. Despite this, Poland fell to the Germans in just weeks, its capital, Warsaw, capitulating on September 28.
A Polish government-in-exile was quickly established in France (when France fell to the German army in mid-1940, the Government-in-Exile moved to London). This government, represented in Poland by the underground Delegatura and the Polish National Council, continued to wage war against Germany for the duration of World War II.
According to the terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, signed in August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union eagerly divided up the newly-conquered Poland: Germany annexed the western third to the Reich, a region that included 600,000 Jews; the Soviet Union annexed the eastern third to its Soviet republics of Belorussia and the Ukraine, adding 1.2 million Jews to its population; and the middle third was put under the control of a German civil administration, called the Generalgouvernement. Approximately 1.5 million Jews found themselves under the Generalgouvernement's jurisdiction.
The Nazis had a plan for Poland: to turn it into Lebensraum ("living space") for Germans. To do so, they first had to destroy the Polish society and people. Thus, some two million Poles with German blood were given special privileges, while the rest of the Polish population was treated with great brutality and suppression. Many Poles were displaced to make room for ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche), while leaders of the Polish people and resisters were killed, often in Nazi camps. There was a broad resistance in Poland that took the form of an underground state. Contact from Poland was maintained with the Polish government-in-exile in London. The two largest armed resistance organizations in Poland were the Home Army and the Home Guard (see also Home Guard, Poland).
The single most defining feature of the history of Polish Jewry under the Nazis is the appearance of the "Final Solution." The history must be viewed in each community as two distinct periods - before and after the start of the murders. Immediately after the Germans occupied Poland, the country's Jews were subjected to a two-month wave of random murders. After the Germans and Soviets carved up Poland, some 300,000 Jews fled to the Soviet-occupied region from the German areas, leaving 1.8-2 million Jews in German-ruled Poland.
Among the first sets of official anti-Jewish measures in Poland was that issued by Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich on September 21, 1939: he demanded that the Jews living in areas annexed to the Reich be expelled to the Generalgouvernement;that they be concentrated in large cities near major railroad junctions; and that Judenraete be established. In late fall the governor of the Generalgouvernement, Hans Frank, decreed that in his jurisdiction all Jews over the age of 10 must wear a white armband with a blue Star of David (see also Badge, Jewish). In October he issued a decree whereby all Jewish males of a certain age could be sent to do forced labor. In addition, the Nazis began seizing and liquidating Jewish businesses with the exception of small shops. Jews were only allowed to keep small amounts of money, making it very hard to buy or sell anything. In January 1940 Jews were forbidden to use trains, except by special permit, and they were ordered to register their property with the authorities. Many Jews were attacked, rounded up randomly and made to do various jobs, and robbed.
The first Polish Ghetto was established in October 1939 in Piotrakow Trybunalski. The first large ghetto, in the city of Lodz, was decreed in February 1940 and was closed off from the outside world in May 1940. Ghettos were set up in Warsaw in November 1940, in Lublin and Cracow in March 1941, and in the Zaglembie region as late as 1942 and 1943, after mass extermination had begun.
In some ghettos, Jews had the ability to leave, which helped them smuggle in food and supplies. Other ghettos were hermetically sealed, letting no one in or out - subjecting the Jews to starvation and epidemics. Jews in all the ghettos, however, were determined to survive. The Judenraete and Jewish community organizations tried their hardest to procure and distribute food and medicine to the ghetto population, provide some semblance of schooling for the children, and cultural activities for all. Zegota (the Polish Council for Aid to Jews), the Jewish Self-Help Organization, the Youth Movement and political undergrounds all strove to help their fellow Jews survive, both physically and emotionally.
In June 1941 Germany turned on its ally, the Soviet Union, and began a massive invasion. The Germans created a new territorial district called Bialystok, and accorded it a status similar to that of the Polish areas that were incorporated into the Reich earlier on. Other areas taken from the Soviet Union by Germany became part of the Reichskommissariat Ukraineand theReichskommissariat Ostland administrations. German mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen immediately embarked upon the mass extermination of the Jews living in the newly conquered areas.
Just months after the slaughter began in the Soviet Union, the Germans launched a mass murder campaign in Poland, as well. The first of six Extermination Camps on Polish soil, Chelmno, was established on December 7, 1941. During the spring of 1942, three other extermination camps began to function - Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka - as part of Aktion Reinhard, the plan to liquidate all Jews in the Generalgouvernement. In addition, the Concentration Camps at Auschwitz and Majdanek were expanded to function as extermination centers, as well. Those Jews who had been interned in ghettos were now sent to their deaths in these camps. The liquidation of ghettos in the Generalgouvernement continued throughout 1943, and by summer 1944 only the Lodz Ghetto was left.
The Germans did not immediately kill all the Jews, however, because they wanted to exploit Jewish slave labor for the war economy. In early 1943 some 250,000 Jews were still being kept as slave laborers in the Generalgouvernement. But the killing continued, and by late 1944, when SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered a halt to the murders in Auschwitz, only tens of thousands of Jews were left.
Some ninety percent of Polish Jewry, about three million, were murdered by the Nazis; approximately three million non-Jewish Poles, soldiers and civilians, also met their deaths during the war.