satellite states, as there had been in the Soviet Union. Under Khrushchev, the Soviet Union would invade its communist satellite Hungary in 1956. Although the civil war that followed killed thousands of people and the intervention forced a change of leadership, no mass blood purges followed. Relatively few people were purposefully killed in communist eastern Europe after 1953. The numbers were orders of magnitude less than during the eras of mass killing (1933–1945) and ethnic cleansing (1945–1947).
Stalinist anti-Semitism haunted eastern Europe long after the death of Stalin. It was rarely a major tool of governance, but it was always available in moments of political stress. Anti-Semitism allowed leaders to revise the history of wartime suffering (recalled as the suffering only of Slavs) and also the history of Stalinism itself (which was portrayed as the deformed, Jewish version of communism).
In Poland in 1968, fifteen years after Stalin’s death, the Holocaust was revisited for the purposes of communist nationalism. By this time Wladyslaw Gomulka had returned to power. In February 1956, when Khrushchev criticized some aspects of Stalin’s rule; he undermined the position of east European communist leaders associated with Stalinism, and strengthened the hand of those who could call themselves reformers. This was the end for the triumvirate of Berman, Bierut, and Minc. Gomulka was released from prison, rehabilitated, and allowed to take power that October. He represented the hope of some Poles for a reform communism, of others for a more national communism. Poland had already gained what it could from postwar reconstruction and rapid industrialization; attempts to improve the economic system proved either counterproductive or politically risky. After all attempts to improve the economic system failed, nationalism remained.58
In Poland in 1968, Gomulka’s regime enacted an anti-Zionist purge that recalled the rhetoric of Stalin’s last years. Twenty years after his own fall from grace in 1948, Gomulka took revenge on Polish-Jewish communists, or rather upon some of their children. As in the Soviet Union in 1952 and 1953, so in Poland in 1967 and 1968 the question of succession loomed. Gomulka had been in power for a long time. Like Stalin, he was willing to discredit rivals by way of their association with the Jewish question, and in particular by their softness on the supposed Zionist threat.
“Zionism” returned to the communist Polish press with the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War of June 1967. In the Soviet Union, the war confirmed the status of Israel as an American satellite, a line that was to be followed in the east European communist states. Yet Poles sometimes supported Israel (“our little Jews,” as people said) against the Arabs, who were backed by the Soviet Union. Some Poles saw Israel at that point much as they saw themselves: as the persecuted underdog, opposed by the Soviet Union, representing Western civilization. For such people, Israel’s victory over Arab states was a fantasy of Poland defeating the Soviet Union.59
The official Polish communist position was rather different. The Polish communist leadership identified Israel with Nazi Germany, and Zionism with National Socialism. These claims were often made by people who had lived through, and indeed sometimes fought in, the Second World War. Yet these grotesque comparisons followed from a certain political logic, now common to communist leaders in Poland and the Soviet Union. In the communist worldview, it was not the Jews but the Slavs (Russians in the USSR, Poles in Poland) who were the central figures (as victors and victims) of the Second World War. The Jews, always an immense problem for this story of suffering, had been assimilated to it in the postwar years, counted when necessary as “Soviet citizens” in the USSR and as “Poles” in Poland. In Poland, Jewish communists had done the most to eliminate Jews from the history of the German occupation in Poland. Having performed this task by 1956, the Jewish communists lost power. It was the non-Jewish communist Gomulka who exploited the legend of ethnic Polish innocence.
This recitation of the Second World War was also a propaganda stance in the Cold War. Poles and Russians, Slavic victims of the last German war, were accordingly still threatened by Germany, which now meant West Germany and its patron the United States. In the world of the Cold War, this was not entirely unconvincing. The chancellor of West Germany at the time was a former Nazi. Maps of Germany in German schoolbooks included the lands lost to Poland in 1945 (marked as “under Polish administration”). West Germany had never extended diplomatic recognition to postwar Poland. In the western democracies, as in West Germany, there was then little public discussion of German war crimes. In admitting West Germany to NATO in 1955, the United States in effect overlooked the atrocities of its recent German enemy.
As in the 1950s, Stalinist anti-Semitism assigned Israel a perfidious place in the Cold War. Picking up a theme from the Soviet press of January 1953, the Polish press in 1967 explained that West Germany had conveyed Nazi ideology to Israel. Political cartoons portrayed the Israeli army as the Wehrmacht. Thus Israel’s claim that its existence was morally sanctioned by the Second World War and the Holocaust was supposed to be reversed: on the Polish communist account, capitalism had led to imperialism, of which National Socialism was an example. At the moment, the leader of the imperialist camp was the United States, of which Israel and West Germany alike were the cat’s paws. Israel was just one more instance of imperialism, sustaining a world order that generated crimes against humanity, rather than a small state with a special historical claim to victimhood. The communists wished to monopolize claims of victimhood for themselves.60
These Nazi-Zionist comparisons began in communist Poland with the Six-Day War in June 1967, but came home when the Polish regime repressed opponents the following spring. Polish university students, protesting the ban on the performance of a play, called a peaceful rally against the regime for 8 March 1968. The regime then castigated their leaders as “Zionists.” The previous year Jews in Poland had been called a “fifth column,” supporting Poland’s enemies abroad. Now the problems of Poland as a whole were blamed upon the Jews, categorized once again, as in the USSR fifteen years before, as both “Zionists” and “cosmopolitans.” As in the Soviet Union, this was only an apparent contradiction: the “Zionists” supposedly favored Israel, and the “cosmopolitans” were supposedly drawn to the United States, but both were allies of imperialism and thus enemies of the Polish state. They were outsiders and traitors, indifferent to Poland and Polishness.61
In an agile maneuver, Polish communists were now claiming an old European anti-Semitic argument for their own. The Nazi stereotype of “Judeobolshevism,” Hitler’s own idea that communism was a Jewish plot, had been quite widespread in prewar Poland. The prominence of Polish Jews in the early communist regime, though a product of very special historical circumstances, had done little to dispel the popular association between Jews and communists. Now, in spring 1968, Polish communists played to this stereotype by claiming that the problem with Stalinism was its Jewishness. If anything had gone wrong in communist Poland in the 1940s and 1950s, it was the fault of the Jews who exerted too much control over the party and thereby deformed the whole system. Some communists might have done harm to Poles, was the implication, but these communists had been Jews. But Polish communism, it followed, could be cleansed of such people, or at least of their sons and daughters. Gomulka’s regime, in this way, tried to make communism ethnically Polish.
The solution could only be a purge of Jews from public life and positions of political influence. But who was a Jew? In 1968, students with Jewish names or Stalinist parents received disproportionate attention in the press. Polish authorities used anti-Semitism to separate the rest of the population from the students, organizing huge rallies of workers and soldiers. The Polish working class became, in the pronouncements of the country’s leaders, the ethnically Polish working class. But matters were not so simple. The Gomulka regime was happy to use the Jewish label to rid itself of criticism in general. A Jew, by the party definition, was not always someone whose parents were Jewish. Characteristic of the campaign was a certain vagueness about Jews: often a “Zionist” was simply an intellectual or someone unfavorable to the regime.62
The campaign was calculatedly unjust, deliberately provocative, and absurd in its historical vacuity. It was not, however, lethal. The anti-Semitic tropes of Polish communism recalled late Stalinism, and thus stereotypes familiar in Nazi Germany. There was never any plan, however, to murder Jews. Although at least one suicide can be connected to the “anti-Zionist campaign,” and many people were beaten by the police, no one was actually killed. The regime made about 2,591 arrests, drafted a few hundred more students to garrisons distant from Warsaw, and sentenced some of the student leaders to prison. About seventeen thousand Polish citizens (most but not all of Jewish origin) accepted the regime’s offer of one-way travel documents and left the country.63
Residents of Warsaw could not help but notice that they left from a railway station not far from the Umschlagplatz, whence the Jews of Warsaw had been deported by train to Treblinka only twenty-six years earlier. Three million Jews at least had lived in Poland before the Second World War. After this episode of communist anti-Semitism, perhaps thirty thousand remained. For Polish communists and those who believed them, the Jews were not victims in 1968 or at any earlier point: they were people who conspired to deprive Poles of their
