of the communist party and its security apparatus remained multinational even as the country was ethnically cleansed: party and secret police leaders were disproportionately of Jewish origin. Jews who chose to stay in Poland after the war were often communists with a sense of mission, who believed in the transformation of the country for the good of all.16
Poland had been the center of Jewish life in Europe for five hundred years; now that history seemed to be over. Some ninety percent of Poland’s prewar Jewish population had been killed during the war. Most of the Polish-Jewish survivors of the war left their homeland in the years following the war. Many of them could not return to their homes in any event, since these now lay in the Soviet Union, which had annexed eastern Poland. In Soviet ethnic cleansing policies, Ukrainians and Belarusians and Lithuanians were to remain in the Soviet republics that bore their names, whereas Jews, like Poles, were to go to Poland. Jews who tried to return home were often greeted with distrust and violence. Some Poles were perhaps also afraid that Jews would claim property that they had lost during the war, because Poles had, in one way or another, stolen it from them (often after their own homes had been destroyed). Yet Jews were often resettled in formerly German Silesia, a “recovered territory” taken from Germany, where this issue could not have arisen. Even so, here as elsewhere in postwar Poland, Jews were beaten and killed and threatened to such an extent that most survivors decided to leave. It mattered, of course, that they had places to go: the United States or Israel. To get to these places, Polish Jews first went to Germany to displaced persons camps.
The voluntary movement of Holocaust survivors to Germany was not only a melancholy irony. It was also the latest stage in a journey that revealed many of the dreadful policies to which Jews and others had been subjected. Jews in displaced persons camps in Germany were very often Jews from western and central Poland who had fled from the Germans in 1939, or been deported by the Soviets to the Gulag in 1940, only to return to a postwar Poland where people wanted to keep their property and blamed them personally for Soviet rule. It was very dangerous to be a Jew in postwar Poland—though no more so than to be a Ukrainian or a German or a Pole in the anti-communist underground. These other groups generally wished to stay in their homeland. Jews, however, had a special reason to be unsure of themselves in their own country: three million of their fellows had just been killed in occupied Poland.
The departure of Polish Jews to Israel and the United States made the role of Jewish communists in Polish politics even more visible than it would otherwise have been. The Polish communist regime faced a double political handicap: it was not national in a geopolitical sense, since it was dependent upon the support of Moscow; and it was not national in an ethnic sense, since some of its prominent representatives were Jewish (and these people had spent the war in the Soviet Union).17
Polish communists of Jewish origin could be in power in 1949 because of the international politics of the early Cold War in 1948. For reasons that had nothing to do with Poland, and everything to do with a larger rupture within the communist bloc, Stalin paid more attention to the risk of majority nationalism than to the risk of Jewish “cosmopolitanism” or “Zionism” in summer 1948.
Since Stalin was trying to coordinate and control his new group of communist allies, Moscow’s ideological line reacted to perceived disloyalty in eastern Europe. As Stalin must have observed, it was much harder for the leaders of communist regimes to follow the Soviet line than it had been for leaders of communist parties before the war: these comrades actually had to govern. Stalin also had to adjust his ideological line to the realities of American power. These anxieties came to the fore in summer 1948; the concern with Jews dropped momentarily into the background. This was crucial for Poland, since it allowed communists of Jewish origin to secure power, and then to make sure that no anti-Semitic show trial took place.
In summer 1948, Stalin’s major worry in eastern Europe was communist Yugoslavia. In this important Balkan country, communism involved admiration for the Soviet Union but not dependence upon Soviet power. Tito (Josip Broz), the leader of the Yugoslav communists and Yugoslav partisans, had succeeded in taking power without Soviet help. After the war, Tito showed signs of independence from Stalin in foreign policy. He spoke of a Balkan federation after Stalin had abandoned the idea. He was supporting communist revolutionaries in neighboring Greece, a country that Stalin regarded as falling within the American and British sphere of influence. President Harry Truman had made clear, in his “doctrine” announced in March 1947, that the Americans would take action to prevent the spread of communism to Greece. Stalin cared more about stabilizing his gains in Europe than about further revolutionary adventures. He clearly believed that he could bring down Tito and have him replaced with more solicitous Yugoslav leadership.18
The Tito-Stalin split shaped international communism. Tito’s independent stand, and the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform that followed, made him a negative model of “national communism.” Between April and September 1948, Moscow’s satellite regimes were encouraged to concern themselves with the supposed nationalist danger (the “right-wing deviation” from the party line) rather than the (Jewish) cosmopolitan one (the “left-wing deviation”). When Polish general secretary Wladyslaw Gomulka objected to the new line, he opened himself to charges that he too exemplified a national “deviation.” In June 1948, Andrei Zhdanov instructed rival Polish communists to bring down Gomulka. The Polish politburo member Jakub Berman agreed that the Polish party suffered from a national deviation. That August, Gomulka was removed from his position as general secretary. At the end of the month he had to issue a self-criticism to the assembled central committee of the Polish party.19
Gomulka was in fact a national communist, and Polish comrades of Jewish origins were perhaps right to fear him. He was not Jewish (though he did have a Jewish wife), and was seen as more attentive to the interests of non-Jewish Poles than his comrades. Unlike Jakub Berman and several other leading communists, he had remained in Poland during the war, and so was less well known to the Soviet leadership in Moscow than were comrades who had fled to the Soviet Union. He had certainly profited from national questions: he had presided over the dual ethnic cleansings of Germans and Ukrainians, and had taken personal responsibility for the settlement of Poles in the western “recovered territories.” He had gone so far as to make a speech to the central committee in which he criticized certain traditions of the Polish Left for their disproportionate attention to Jews.
After his fall, Gomulka was replaced by a triumvirate of Boleslaw Bierut, Jakub Berman, and Hilary Minc (the latter two of whom were of Jewish origin). The new Polish troika came to power just in time to avoid an anti- Semitic action in Poland. Disconcertingly for them, the line from Moscow altered during the very weeks when they were trying to consolidate their position. While the right-wing national deviation was still possible, Stalin’s most explicit signals in autumn 1948 concerned the role of Jews in east European communist parties. He made clear that Zionists and cosmopolitans were no longer welcome. Perhaps sensing the new mood, Gomulka appealed to Stalin that December: there were too many “Jewish comrades” in the Polish party leadership who “do not feel connected to the Polish nation.” This, according to Gomulka, led to the alienation of the party from Polish society and risked “national nihilism.”20
The year 1949 thus brought a particular sort of Stalinism to Poland. Jewish Stalinists exercised a great deal of power, but were caught between Stalinist anti-Semitism in Moscow and popular anti-Semitism in their own country. Neither of these was important enough to make their rule impossible, but they had to make sure that the two did not meet. Jewish communists had to stress that their political identification with the Polish nation was so strong that it erased their Jewish origins and removed any possibility of distinct Jewish policies.
One striking example of this tendency was the reimagining of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, the major instance of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust, as a Polish national revolt led by communists. Hersh Smolar, the Polish-Jewish communist who had been the hero of the Minsk ghetto, now drained the Jewishness from Jewish resistance to Nazis. He described the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the obligatory ideological terms of Zhdanov: there had been “two camps” within the ghetto, one progressive and one reactionary. Those who spoke of Israel were in the reactionary camp now, as they had been then. The progressives were the communists, and the communists had fought. This was an extraordinary distortion: while the communists had indeed urged armed resistance in the ghetto, the left-wing Zionists and the Bund had more popular support, and the right-wing Zionists more guns. Smolar promised purges to Jewish political activists who failed to accept Polish national communism: “And if there turn out to be people among us who are going to buzz on like flies about some sort of supposedly higher and more essential Jewish national goals, then we will eliminate those people from our society, just like the fighters of the ghetto pushed aside the cowards and those of weak will.”21
All resistance to fascism was by definition led by communists; if it was not led by communists, then it was
