Jews in Post-War Wrocław and L'viv: Official Policies and Local Responses in Comparative Perspective, 1945-1970s E-Book

Izabela Kazejak

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 296

Beschreibung

This book examines the process of re-establishment of Jewish communities in two post-war European cities – in Wrocław which passed after 1945 from Germany to Poland, and in L’viv which passed from Poland to the Soviet Union. These processes were thus overseen by two different Communist regimes. The book compares similarities and differences in the policies of the two countries. The attempt to re-establish full-blown Jewish life failed, in both cases. This study explains why the efforts to create communities that were self-identified as Jewish and loyal to the Communist state did not succeed. After reviewing the prewar history and wartime destruction of Jews in German Breslau and Polish Lwów, the book explores the efforts of the postwar regimes, supported by Jews who had survived the Holocaust, to reconstitute Jewish life. It examines the history of the nascent communities up to 1968 in Wrocław and up to the 1970s in L’viv. The comparison is made in relation to five inter-related contexts. These contexts are the official policies towards Jews of the governments of the Polish People’s Republic and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, how these central policies were implemented at the local level, the particular national frameworks of Jewish life in communist Poland and Soviet Ukraine, the effects of popular and official antisemitism on postwar Jewish communities in Wrocław and L’viv, and the repercussions of the economic and social modernization of the Communist regimes for local Jewish communities.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. The historical background

1. Jews in Breslau

2. The rise to power of Hitler and its effect on Jews in Breslau

3. Jews in Lwów in 1918

4. Polish Jews and the Second Polish Republic

5. Attitudes towards Jews in the Polish Second Republic

6. Emigration of Jews

7. Jews, Ukrainians and Russians

8. Jews in the Soviet Union in the interwar years

9. The Second World War: Poles, Ukrainians and responses to the Holocaust

Conclusion

2. Jews in Wrocław and L’viv, 1945-48

1. Shifting of the borders and the exchange of populations

2. Jews and Politics in Poland

3. The transformation of Lwów into L’viv

4. Jewish settlement in Wrocław

5. Finding a job in Wrocław

6. German Jews

7. Jewish educational and cultural organizations in Wrocław

8. Antisemitism in Wrocław

9. The reconstruction of the Jewish community in L’viv

10. Antisemitism in L’viv

Conclusion

3. Jewish life from 1948 through the 1950s

1. The Soviet Union and the Creation of the State of Israel

2. Polish Jews and the Creation of Israel

3. Jewish Life in Wrocław in the 1950s

4. 1956 as a turning point

5. Jewish Life in L’viv in the 1950s

4. The decline of the Jewish communities in the 1960s and 1970s

1. The Closure of the Synagogue in L’viv

2. Jews in Wrocław in the 1960s

3. Schooling for Jews in Wrocław

4. Pressures to Assimilate

5. The Six-Day War of 1967 and the Crisis of 1968

6. Jewish Emigration from Poland

7. Emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union in the 1970s

Conclusion

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to all the people who have supported me during the work on this topic. I would not have been able to have reached this point without the help and advice of my supervisor in the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute (EUI), Professor Steve Smith, who has always commented on my work with great interest and insight. I am also grateful to my former advisor, Professor Philipp Ther, who accepted my project proposal at the EUI and encouraged me to start working on the topic of comparative and transnational history. I would like to express my thanks to Professor Michael Meng, Professor Tarik C. Amar as well as to Professor Kiran Patel for the contribution they have made in helping me. I greatly benefited from the advice given to me by Professor Bożena Szaynok, Professor Krzysztof Ruchniewicz and Professor Arfon E. Rees at an early stage of my doctoral research. I would also like to thank Professor Gangolf Hübinger for kindly preparing a letter of recommendation for me.

I am also grateful to Professor Fritz Stern for the first scholarship that I was awarded. It was as a result of this scholarship, and the practical work that I did with historical records in the archives, that I became interested in doing comparative work on the history of Jews in Wrocław and in L’viv after the end of the Second World War. I was helped greatly by archivists in all the archives in which I worked in Poland and in Ukraine; many thanks to these people also.

I am also grateful to my parents, who supported me when I was writing my dissertation and who visited me in various European cities where I was working towards my PhD. I would also like to thank my sister and her family, who have been very supportive.

Finally, I would like to thank Kathy Wolf-Fabiani, Rita Peero and Anna Coda Nunziate for their administrative help. Especially, I would like to express my warmest thanks to Rita Peero who helped me so much from the administrative and financial point of view in the last stages of my doctoral program.

I would also like to thank all the members of the L’viv Center for Urban History who always welcomed me when I was travelling to L’viv to carry out my research. I am also grateful to the Willy-Brandt Center for European and German Studies in Wrocław for helping me to organise my initial research on the history of Jews in Wrocław in 2006.

Generally, I would not have gone far without the History and Civilization Department at the European University Institute where I was allowed to work on my doctoral thesis with a grant. I would also not have even started without the help of the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) and the support from the Faculty for Cultural Studies, where I first became interested in conducting research on this topic.

Introduction

This study examines the attempt to re-establish Jewish communities in two cities that once boasted a substantial Jewish presence, a presence that was utterly destroyed by the Holocaust. The postwar reestablishment of the communities took place in Wrocław, a city that passed after 1945 from Germany to Poland, and in L’viv, a city that passed from Poland to Soviet Ukraine. The process of reestablishment of Jewish life in these two cities was thus overseen by two different communist regimes, and a large part of this investigation is concerned to compare the similarities and differences in the policies of the two regimes. In the end, the attempt to reestablish Jewish life in the two cities largely failed and my study seeks to explain why the effort to create communities that were self-identified as Jewish yet loyal to the communist state did not succeed.

The first chapter looks at the prewar history and wartime destruction of the Jewish communities in Breslau in Germany (or Wrocław, as it became after 1945) and in Lwów in Poland (which was incorporated as L’vov/L’viv into Soviet Ukraine after 1945). The study then goes on to trace the efforts of the postwar regimes, supported by those Jews who had survived the Holocaust and who chose not to leave Eastern Europe, to reconstitute Jewish life. It examines the history of these communities up to 1968 in the case of Wrocław and up to the 1970s in the case of L’viv. Chapter 2 compares how after 1945 Jewish communities were reestablished in two cities that had as a result of the war been moved into new polities, both of which were or soon became in the hands of Communists. There were similar processes of emigration, resettlement and an increase in Zionism in both cities. Chapters 3 and 4 go on to compare the policies of the two regimes that notionally repudiated antisemitism at the municipal level. Analysis of the impact of policy in two cities allows us better to understand how policies on such matters as work, housing, education influenced the attempt to restore Jewish life. The work compares how Jews sought to rebuild their communities but also why they were unable to develop vibrant Jewish communities in both cities, the causes of which lay not only in the policy of the state, but also in the memory and experience of the Holocaust, which manifested itself in political Zionism and emigration, as well as in popular antisemitism. The study concludes by attempting to assess the relative importance of factors such as the small size of the Jewish population, of official policies that were never supportive of Jews and sometimes outright discriminatory, of popular antisemitism, and of the processes of assimilation in determining the relative success of the communities in the two cities. The main research questions thus relate to how similar or different the policy was towards Jews in the Soviet Union and in Poland after 1944 and how it was articulated in the respective cases of the Jewish communities in Wrocław and in L’viv. Secondly, the study asks, how did policy change over time (if at all)? What were the factors that led to the failure to re-establish a vibrant Jewish community in the two cities? What were the factors that led to Jews, by and large, conforming to the values, norms and languages of the surrounding majority. Thirdly, it examines the stereotype of Poles and Ukrainians as antisemites.

In this investigation the micro- and macro-level approaches has very important. This is because I concentrated on state policies and did not confine myself to the policies of the cities. It was important to explain the overall policies of the state and how these policies were implemented in the small scale of two cities. Additionally, because Ukraine was a Soviet republic, the context of the Soviet Union was highly significant in the Ukrainian case. This is due to the fact that the Ukrainian state was not able to introduce its own independent policies towards Jews. The contexts were thus different in the two cases. In the Polish case the context is that of Polish socialism, while in the L’viv context what matters is the Soviet policies towards Jews and their local implementation in Ukrainian cities.

The comparison of the two Jewish communities is explored in relation to five inter- related contexts. The primary context is that of the official policies towards Jews of the government of the Polish People’s Republic (this was its official name only from 1952) and of the government of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 examine the aims and effects of these official policies in some detail, highlighting the many similarities in the policies between the two regimes—similarities that arose not least because Poland, especially in the late-Stalinist era, was required to submit to economic, political and social policies handed down from Moscow. At the most general level the analysis of official policy is concerned to understand the tensions between the desire of the two regimes to integrate Jews as equal members of socialist society and their recognition of some elements of Jewish difference, whether that difference was understood in terms of religion or ethnicity. Soviet Jews, while never having the extensive territorial autonomy awarded to some other national groups, were, for better or worse, recognized as an official nationality. One’s Jewishness was a dimension of one’s Soviet citizenship in a way that was never true in Poland, where Jews were simply citizens of Poland. Nationality was a key element in individual status in the Soviet Union, recorded in one’s internal passport (which was introduced in 1932) and recorded in all official transactions. One’s nationality derived from one’s parents’ nationality, not from one’s place of residence, language or subjective identification. There was no possibility of changing one’s nationality, except for children of mixed-nationality marriages, who at the age of 16 had to choose one of their parents’ nationalities. In some contexts, notably admission to higher education and application for certain types of employment, legal nationality significantly shaped one’s life chances, both negatively (especially for Jews) and positively for titular nationalities in non-Russian republics who benefitted from tacit affirmative action. Incidentally, since mixed marriages were common among Jews, this reclassification strategy contributed substantially to the apparently dramatic shrinkage of the Jewish population of the USSR from 2,2m in 1959 to 1,4m in 1989. In Ukraine, according to the 1979 census, only 10.3 percent of children born to a Jewish father and a Russian mother and 9.1 percent of children born to a Jewish father and a Ukrainian mother opted to become Jewish (although even this was higher than in the Russian Federation).1 As we shall see, then, there were important differences as well as many similarities in the official policies towards Jews of the two regimes. The focus on official policy requires that we explore how the two regimes viewed the decimated Jewish populations in the two cities after 1945, and how these perceptions shaped policy on the vital matter of emigration, since following the destruction of the war hundreds of thousands of Jews desired only to leave the territory on which the Holocaust had been taken place. The majority of the 270,000 Holocaust survivors registered in Poland, for example, decided to emigrate, so that by 1955 only 75,000 to 80,000 Jews remained in the country. The second context of our enquiry is directly related to the first and concerns how central policies were implemented at the local level of the two cities. Chapter 2 examines official efforts at repatriation and resettlement of Jews in Wrocław and L’viv, while chapters 3 and 4 compare how the local administrations responded to Jewish claims for recognition of cultural and religious rights in areas such as education, language use and the practice of religion. I try throughout to highlight the fact that the Jewish community was not homogeneous, and that there were important divisions between religious and non-religious Jews, between communist, socialist and Zionist Jews, between Jews who were Polonized or Ukrainized and those who were formed in the shtetl.

It is at this point that the contexts relating to official policy and its local implementation intersect with a third context, specifically one that which relates less to communist ideology and policy and more to the particular national contexts of Poland and Soviet Ukraine. As a result of the war, Poland became essentially a mono-ethnic and mono-religious state, whereas the Soviet Union (of which Soviet Ukraine formed a part) remained a multi-ethic and multi-religious state. In Poland, the communist regime was forced to come to terms with a strong Polish nationalism and with a hegemonic Catholic Church, and this had indirect effects on the Jewish population that were not a direct consequence of official policy. Meanwhile in Ukraine, the incorporation of Galicia, which had historically been a bastion of Ukrainian nationalism since the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, strengthened the Ukrainian nationalism that had been gathering pace in Soviet Ukraine since the 1920s. Ukrainian nationalism, combined with the vigorous efforts of the Orthodox Church to assert its dominance in the newly incorporated territories, were factors that had an indirect effect on the policies of the Soviet Ukrainian government towards Jews. As this suggests, despite the massive rupture of the Holocaust and the political revolution that transpired in Poland, both regimes had to contend with the legacies of history (thus the importance of chapter 1). This was nowhere more evident than in respect of the traditions of antisemitism that intersected more or less powerfully with Polish and Ukrainian nationalism.

The fourth context of our enquiry, therefore, explores both popular and official antisemitism and how this shaped the fate of the postwar Jewish communities in Wrocław and L’viv. Both Poland and Ukraine had grim histories of ingrained discrimination and periodic violence against Jews, although the extent and nature of antisemitism is a question that needs to be investigated rather than simply assumed. There is much in this traditional antisemitism that may be characterized as ‘anti-modern’, with Jews being seen as the cause of the social, political, religious and cultural problems caused by modernity.2 At the same time, as the Nazis showed only too clearly, antisemitism could be articulated in highly modern terms, and in the case of the two communist regimes it was at various times coupled with ‘anti-cosmopolitism’, hostility to ‘bourgeois’ intellectuals, ‘anti-speculation’ campaigns, anti-religious campaigns and, above all, following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, anti-Zionism. Particularly shocking, in view of their purported rejection of any form of racial and ethnic discrimination, was the way in which the two communist regimes in the postwar era succumbed to antisemitism—often under the banner of anti-Zionism. Presiding over Slav populations that had suffered massively during the Second World War, neither the Soviet Ukrainian nor the Polish communist regimes was willing to recognise the specific suffering of their Jewish citizens in the Holocaust. But much worse was the way in which in the late 1940s the Soviet government for the first time engaged in anti-Jewish repression and rhetoric, since in the years prior to the Stalinist terror the Soviet Union had stood out among the interwar regimes of Eastern Europe for its progressive policy towards Jewish self-expression. Ironically, this was an important reason why Jews in Poland joined the Communist Party in significant numbers both before and after the war. Jews who were active Communists were always a small minority among Jews in both Poland and Soviet Ukraine, yet in both countries Jews in general—i.e. that small handful that had miraculously survived the Holocaust—tended to attribute their survival, at least in part, to the Soviet Red Army. We do not have precise figures on the number of Jews in the United Polish Workers’ Party, but relative to their number in the population as a whole they were numerous. Jews in the Polish Workers’ Party were especially prominent in the Ministry of Foreign Trade, in the Ministry of Public Security and in Military Counterintelligence. These Jews were largely spared the antisemitism unleashed in the Soviet Union (and in Czechoslovakia) in Stalin’s final years (although Jewish officers in the Polish army, purged by Soviet officers in 1950 to 1953, were not so lucky). Moreover, in contrast to the anti-cosmopolitan campaign in the Soviet Union, antisemitism in the Polish Workers’ Party remained covert until 1956, when the general crisis of the communist regime led to a new wave of Jewish emigration; even then, however, antisemitism did not come to dominate official policy towards Jews until 1968.

The fifth and final context in which we place our comparison of the development of the Jewish communities in Wrocław and L’viv is that of the economic and social modernization that the communist regimes carried out. One of the questions posed is how far the failure of Jewish communities to reestablish themselves as strong vibrant communities in the postwar era had less to do with official policies or with official and popular antisemitism, and more to do with the indirect effects of economic and social processes that led to the assimilation of Jews into the wider society, whether these were Jews ‘of the street’, i.e. who hailed from traditional, religious, Yiddish-speaking areas, or those who were already more urbanized and Polonized or Russified on the eve of the Second World War. What is clear is that the majority of Jews in the postwar era lost contact with the religious, cultural and linguistic traditions that were the taproot of Jewish identity, as urbanization, industrialization, education and intermarriage with the dominant populations got underway. In Poland, for instance, from the late 1940s, many Jews took on Christian names and surnames that sounded more Polish.3

The aim, so far as sources allow (and they are inevitably uneven for the two cities) is to explore the experience of Jews in Wrocław and L’viv in relation to these five different contexts shaped. By choosing to compare two cities, I hoped to go beyond macro-level generalizations and to explore how Jewish communities re-established themselves at local level after 1945—from scratch in the case of Wrocław—and also why these communities failed to grow. The two cities had substantial and vibrant Jewish communities prior to 1945, but these were completely decimated in the course of the Nazi occupation. Both briefly experienced an influx of Jews as a result of the forced migrations that took place following the end of the war. From the mid-1950sthe Jewish community in Wrocław became the largest of any in Poland—it overtook Łódź at this time—yet it was a community in steady decline, its size falling from 17,747 in 1946 to 3,800 in 1960 (these figures are on the conservative side) or from 9.8 percent of the population to 0.9 percent of the city’s population.4 The Jewish community in L’viv was altogether larger, numbering 25,800 in 1959 and falling slightly to 24,362 in 1970, or from 6.3 percent of the city population (which stood at 410,678 in 1959) to 4.4 percent of the population (which stood at 553,452 in 1979). In 1931 Jews had comprised 24.1 percent of the population of Lwów; in 1989 they comprised just 1.6 percent.5

1 Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/demography-soviet-union-russian-federation-and-other-successor-states (accessed 5 February 2012).

2 Werner Bergman, Geschichte des Antisemitismus (München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2004), 6.

3 Ewa Koźmińska-Frejlak, “Polen als Heimat von Juden: Strategien des Heimischwerdens von Juden im Nachkriegspolen 1944-1949,” Jahrbuch zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust 2 (1997): 92.

4http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/WrocpercentC5percent82aw (last accessed 4 February 2012)

5http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/percentD0percent9BpercentD1percent8CpercentD0percentB2percentD0percentBEpercentD0percentB2 (last accessed 4 February 2012).

1.The historical background

The chapter offers an overview of the history of Jews in Poland and Ukraine in the interwar years, with particular reference to Breslau and Lwów (L’viv), with a view to providing a benchmark against which the experience of Jews in communist Wrocław and L’viv can be judged. It examines the demography, social profile and political status of these Jews and seeks to trace their changing fortunes over time, particularly by focusing on the extent and nature of antisemitism in the two regions. The first part of the chapter traces the history of Jews in the German territories through to the 1930s, concentrating on Breslau. The second part looks at the life of Jews under the Second Polish Republic, again with a view to providing a point of contrast for the discussion of Jewish life in Lwów after it was incorporated into socialist Ukraine.

1. Jews in Breslau

Between 1800 and 1933, the Jews in Breslau constituted the third largest Jewish community in Germany, after Berlin and Hamburg, at a time when the city was the seventh largest in the Reich.1 Jews overall made up only 0.95 percent of the Reich population and were concentrated mainly in large cities, although there were those who lived in rural areas and small towns.2 In 1910 Breslau had a population of 512,000 and a Jewish population of 20,2003; Protestants made up 60 percent of the citizens of the city, a further 35 percent were Roman Catholics, and 5 percent were Jewish.4 Up to 1914 Jews and non-Jews had close contact and interaction in Breslau and it could be said that the Jews were closely integrated into the life of the city. In general Jews in Breslau belonged to the middle-class. A large number were lawyers, businessmen, and teachers. They also held positions in academia, making a major contribution to building the excellent reputation of the universities in Breslau, and were active in the cultural life of the city, for example in the opera and theater. They owned department stores and were active in commerce. Their children mostly attended the best schools in the city.5 German Jews were thus better integrated into German society than Jews in any other country, some even being German nationalists.6 German Jews in Breslau were indistinguishable from the rest of the German inhabitants of the city. They spoke German, dressed like the Germans and identified themselves fully with the Germans. They also showed patriotism during the First World War. Nevertheless there was still a kind of barrier between Jews and non-Jews. Jews faced obstacles in achieving positions in the civil service, the army or higher education, and their social relations with Gentiles might be called close but not intimate. The Jews of Breslau were not full ‘insiders’, but nor were they ‘outsiders’.7

Defeat in the First World War and the political crisis that ensued caused a deterioration in relations between Jews and non-Jews. Between 1916 and 1923 there were antisemitic campaigns in the city that saw Jews excluded from teaching positions, medical associations, and the boy scouts. By 1919 antisemitic agitation on posters started to appear. In 1920, at the time of the Kapp Putsch, when right-wingers tried to seize power, some Jewish students who removed antisemitic texts from walls were locked in a cellar and roughed up. Half a year later antisemites staged a pogrom: they demolished a Jewish department store and stormed a hotel in which Jews from East Central Europe were accommodated. Although the police arrived in time and an outbreak of violence was prevented, one Jewish student was murdered by a group of Nazis. Another pogrom took place in Breslau on 23 July 1923 during a protest march against unemployment and hyperinflation. About 500 people plundered more than 100 shops, almost all of which were owned by Jews. During the outbreak of violence several Jews were killed and many wounded.8 Already during the Weimar era Jews were becoming a declining minority in both demographic and economic terms.9

The economic situation of the Weimar government was always fragile and the inflation of 1923 followed, after a period of stabilization, by the world economic crisis of 1929/1932 fueled popular hostility against Jews. Jews were suspected of being speculators and swindlers and assumed to be intent on taking over the possessions of the German Volk. Proof of this was, supposedly, the presence of Jewish ministers in the government. Whereas individual savers lost money in 1923 and during the crash, Jewish departments, it seemed, continued to prosper.10 Economically-based fears of Jews were amplified by fear of being swamped by foreign forces, of being dominated or surrounded byforeigninfluences [Überfremdung]. Jews coming from East Central Europe—the ‘Ostjuden’—were the especial focus of these fears. By the 1920s twenty percent of German Jews were of East Central European descent, of whom approximately one-third had moved to German territories after the First World War. East Central European Jews dressed differently from Germans and their customs appeared strange and even sinister. Germans perceived them as socially and culturally inferior, coarse and loud. There was even a league which called among other things for the expulsion of the East Central European Jews from Germany. Of these East Central European Jews more than a half had Polish passports and some were ‘stateless’.11 There were indeed big differences between East Central European Jews and German Jews, East Central European Jews being religiously more observant and less educated than their German counterparts. What is more, some of them did not adapt to the ‘western’ style of clothing and they continued to speak Yiddish. Thirty percent of the East Central European Jews who settled in Breslau came from Austria-Hungary, the rest coming from Upper Silesia and the province of Posen.12 By the time Hitler came to power there was already a widespread perception that saw Jews as ‘international conspirators’, able to manipulate inflation, crisis and wars with the aim of achieving control over the stock market, or else as an alien force that threatened the German way of life.

2. The rise to power of Hitler and its effect on Jews in Breslau

Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and his racial policy on Jews brought an end to German-Jewish coexistence in the Weimar Republic in general and in Breslau in particular. Attempts were now made to exclude Jews from the economy and their property was confiscated. Hitler’s obsessive racial antisemitism was actually only partially based on economic motives; for him Jews were to be excluded because of ‘blood’. The twenty-five-point program of the NSDAP contained statements and definitions which drew a sharp line between Jews and true Germans: ‘Point number four of this program: only a Volksgenosse [member of the folk community] can be a citizen. Only a person who has German blood, apart from any consideration of religion, can be a member of the community. Thus, no Jew can be a Volksgenosse. In particular, the concept of Volksgemeinschaft—the community of the Volk—was of central importance to the integrational capacity of Nazi ideology. This exclusion of Jews from the ‘organic folk community’ was the basis on which Jews were also excluded from economic and political life.13 The aim of Nazi policy was at first to encourage Jews to emigrate and to undermine the material basis of their existence.14 Some authors, however, claim that the implications of Nazi policy were far more radical, Jews being seen as an anti-race with which the ‘Nazi humanity could not coexist […] on the same planet’.15

In Breslau after 1933 the SA and NSDAP organizations gave free rein to their antisemitic hatred. For middle-class Jews the increase of violence and hostility towards them was incomprehensible, Breslau having a reputation for being one of the most liberal German cities. Theater director Paul Barnay was kidnapped by SA men and beaten with rubber and dog whips.16 In another incident men from the SA came into court and shouted: ‘Jews out!’ and proceeded to chase and beat the judges and lawyers.17 The number of Jewish advocates was officially reduced to sixteen. Twenty-eight Jewish doctors at hospitals in Breslau were given notices of dismissal. These actions were a prelude for the Day of Boycott—1 April—when the word JUDE was written on Jewish stores. In 1935 German Jews had their German citizenship revoked and laws were directed towards their total exclusion from the Volk. During the ‘Reichskristallnacht’ of9-10November 1938 Nazis destroyedJewishpropertyandsynagogues throughout GermanyandAustria. In Breslau Jews were forced to watch the burning of one of their synagogues and others of the city’s nine synagogues were destroyed even earlier.18 By 1939 Jews were forbidden to enter public spaces such as schools, theaters, cinemas and libraries and were forced to pay a contribution—one milliard German Reichsmarks. The process of ‘Arisierung’ (‘Making it Aryan’) of Jewish property followed.19

As a consequence of all these actions taken against the Jews a massive emigration of Jews from Germany followed. The first and the largest wave of Jewish emigration took place in 1933, when almost forty thousand Jews emigrated out of a total Jewish population of 525,000.20 From 1933 to the end of 1937, between 126,000 and 129,000 German Jews emigrated, and in 1938 between a further 33,000 to 40,000 fled. Finally, in 1939 another 75,000 to 80,000 emigrated. German Jews who stayed behind were robbed, lost their jobs and were reduced to impoverishment. Eventually they were called up for forced labor.21 So far as Breslau was concerned the Jewish population had already decreased from 20,200 to 18,200 by the time the Nazis came to power.22 By 1937 there were 16,600 remaining in the city, although 720 left in that year.23 Over half of the Jews living in Breslau managed to leave the city before the outbreak of the war and therefore survived.24 Among them was the historian Fritz Stern. By 1938 more than half of Jews who still lived in Breslau were over fifty years old. Mostly it was young people who emigrated. Of those who emigrated in 1937, 18 percent went to Palestine.25 Almost all the Jewish inhabitants of Breslau who stayed behind perished in the Holocaust. Between November 1941 and April 1944 seven thousand Jews were deported from Breslau and killed in Kaunas, Majdanek, Sobibor, Theresienstadt and Auschwitz.26

3. Jews in Lwów in 1918

Lwów, formerly known as Lemberg, was part of the Habsburg Empire from 1772 to 1918, when it was absorbed into the Second Polish Republic. Altogether there were about two million Jews in Austria-Hungary in 1914, roughly five per cent of the population. The majority lived in the small towns of Galicia and in the rural areas of Hungary and Bohemia, although Vienna, Budapest, Prague and other large cities had sizeable populations. Lemberg was the capital of Galicia, and the two main ethnic groups in the city were Poles and Jews. Its population in 1869 was 87,109, of whom 26,694 were Jews; in 1890 it was 127,943, including 36,130 Jews; in 1900 there were 44,801 Jews in a total population of 159,618. In general Jews in Galicia were socially integrated.27Antisemitic parties existed in Austria-Hungary, but the imperial government tended towards a policy of toleration towards Jews: the Austro-Hungarian army, for instance, was almost alone in Europe in promoting Jews to officer ranks.28In general, however, antisemitism was an important and integral part of the mentality of the inhabitants of East Central Europe from the middle of the nineteenth century, and this was reflected in the growing nationalist movements. The precariousness of the Jews’ position was underlined as Polish and Ukrainian nationalist movements grew within the empire from the late-nineteenth century. Neither movement was sympathetic to Jews. Poles tended to see Jews as exploiters owing to their positions as estate lessees, moneylenders and innkeepers. Jews, for their part, tended to see the peasant population of Galicia—Ukrainians for the most part—as crude and stupid, and Ukrainian nationalist movement resented them for this.29

The First World War greatly exacerbated antisemitism in Galicia. On 1 November 1918 the West Ukrainian Republic was proclaimed in Lwów, several days before Poland declared its own independence. A popular uprising took place in Lwów, where most of the population were Polish, and several weeks later the Polish army took control of the city, although it failed in its bid to seize eastern Galicia from the West Ukrainian Republic. The republic promised Jews civil equality and national autonomy, but the Jews in Lwów were not certain who would be the ultimate victor in the Polish-Ukrainian war. The local Jewish National Council thus decided to announce its neutrality while the conflict was ongoing, which some Poles regarded as a sign of their support for the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians also condemned Jewish neutrality, interpreting it as a continuation of the traditional pro-Polish attitude of the Jews in the city.30 Between 18 and 22 November, as Poles and Ukrainians were fighting for control of Lwów, Poles burned and pillaged the Jewish quarter of Lwów and murdered seventy-three Jews. In the eyes of the Poles, this was perceived as vengeance against the exploiting Jews who had never supported the historic claims of the Poles for the city—after all, a majority of the population was Polish.31In fact, of the 340 victims of the pogrom two-thirds were Ukrainians—which might suggest that the term ‘pogrom’ is misleading, and that it was more a military massacre fueled by Polish Anti-Ukrainianism, or even that it was a mindless outburst of brutality on the part of the Polish army against anyone not perceived to be on the ‘right’ side of the conflict.32 The violence towards Jews which erupted in 1918 in Lwów was not an isolated example of anti-Jewish violence. For example, in April 1919 during the Polish-Russian war thirty-five Jews were murdered in Pinsk because the Poles saw them as being supporters of communism.33 The events of these years showed in microcosm the problems that would beset Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish relations in the decades to come.34 Pogroms against Jews were carried out by both Ukrainian and Polish forces, and each side tried to accuse other groups of being provocateurs and perpetrators of these crimes.35

4. Polish Jews and the Second Polish Republic

The Polish Second Republic was a parliamentary democracy between 1921 and 1926 and then an authoritarian government under JózefPiłsudski from 1926 to 1935.36 Among the key problems it faced on coming into office was the issue of national minorities and, not least, the policy towards the Jews.

There were in 1921 2,849,000 Jews in the Polish Second Republic, and by 1931 this number had increased to 3,113,900.37 They thus made up the second biggest minority group after the Ukrainians, who numbered five million. There were also approximately one million Byelorussians on the eastern territories and one million Germans on the western territories.38 By 1939, Jews made up nearly 10 percent of the total population.39 Poland thus had one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe. In 1921 Jews made up one-third of the urban population, and in Polesie and Volhynia they constituted over a half of the urban population.40 By 1931, 75 percent of Polish Jews lived in cities and Jews now comprised 27 percent of the total urban population. In 1931 Lwów was the third largest city in the Second Polish Republic after Warsaw and Łódź, with a population of around 314,33041 inhabitants, and it had the third largest Jewish population.42