“ a Jew from Poland is not and never was simply Polish. … it was clear to Jews and Poles alike

Another account states: “How many tears of sorrow and anguish he had brought upon his parents by her visits to his house. … His parents were furious and enraged when they saw them together. They never tired of reminding him that it was high time he be at heder and not mooning about with a non-Jewish girl. Misha was not insensitive to their pain and tried to avoid Lucia as best he could.”²⁹⁵ Yet another states: “Morris, then sixteen, had committed an unpardonable sin. He was observed by several Jews holding hands with a shiksa in a little park behind the church in Łęczna, where his family lived. On Saturday the rabbi reported the shameful event to the congregation, and Jankel, Morris’s father, was so humiliated that he slapped the youthful offender in front of everyone. That night Morris took whatever money he could find in the house and ran away from home.”²⁹⁶ This attitude was pervasive is small towns populated by Jews. Leon Lepold recalled the “nationalistic, chauvinistic” upbringing he received in his native town of Tłumacz, in eastern Galicia. “You could not go out on the street with a gentile girl… The whole city would know about it… You would be thrown out from the shul… It would be the biggest shmanda [shame], the biggest embarrassment for the family.” While “Gentile people went to the Jewish doctor and the Jewish people went to the Jewish doctor, … the Jewish people didn’t go to the gentile doctor.”²⁹⁷

But such attitudes were also common in large centres, even among the educated classes. When a Jewish teenager from Warsaw went out with a Polish Catholic student, a friend of her brother’s, a Jewish couple who passed them on the street exclaimed that it was shameful for a Jew to go out with a goy.²⁹⁸ A Jew from a well-to-do Orthodox family from Warsaw faced universal ostracism on the part of his family, friends and community for courting a Polish Christian girl from his own neighbourhood. Some of his acquaintances were very frank about the consequences: “‘How can you walk down the street with her?’ he asked. ‘You’ll be ostracized, beaten, ridiculed. Your own people are going to hate you … What’s going to happen when your father finds out? You may give him a heart attack.’” To escape the harassment, they frequented one of the better Polish restaurants: “I didn’t have to worry about being heckled for dating a Polish girl. No one paid any attention to us.” Eventually, he “started calling for her at her apartment, and her parents didn’t seem to mind.”²⁹⁹

Jews who married Gentiles, even if they did not convert, were regarded as renegades by the Jewish community and were usually disowned by their families.³⁰⁰ The Talmud contains a strict ban on intermarriage and Jews who embraced Christianity were treated with particular aversion. Those who intermarried were completely ostracized by the community, and their family members suffered too. Apostates were considered by all to be dead.³⁰¹ In the town of Wilczyn, near Inowrocław,
A Jewish neighbor—one of seven brothers—joined the Polish army, and while in the service, met and married a Christian girl. It was a sin for a Jew to marry a Gentile and a really grave sin for this family. His father was a pious Jew and stood out in town with his long beard, wearing a fur hat known as a shtreimel. Married Haredi men grew beards and wore such hats on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays. This man became very bitter over his son’s marriage and was shamed by other Jews. It put a huge blot on his family for the rest of his life.³⁰²
The apostate Tzipora, was universally regarded as “the blot on our Sochaczew—she who embarrassed and mocked not only her pious father but also the entire Jewish city.”³⁰³ The mother of a girl who ran off with her Polish tutor and married him in a church service, “burdened by shame, overwhelmed by grief threw herself into one of the town wells and fell to he death. Soon afterward the family disappeared from Kolbuszowa.”³⁰⁴ When a Jewish girl fell in love with a Polish officer,
she had to choose between never seeing her parents again or breaking off with her beloved. The entire Jewish community of Chodecz was in an uproar about it. In the end, the young woman drowned herself in a well and was buried outside the cemetery.³⁰⁵
In the town of Ejszyszki near Wilno, “the Jewish community lost no opportunity to express its revulsion toward [Goldke],” who had converted to Catholicism to marry a Catholic man. When Meir Hilke converted to Catholicism in 1921 to marry a Catholic woman, “Not a single Jew was to be found on the streets … and all the doors and windows were shut against the terrible sight.”³⁰⁶ Another Jew from Ejszyszki described the nature of some of the doubtless milder harassment endured by Goldke, who had married a Polish farmer. Whenever she ventured into town, local Jews taunted her in the streets with calls of “Goldke, the convert! Goldke, the convert!”³⁰⁷ According to another account,
Little children pointed their fingers at her and yelled, “There goes Goldke the Mishumaidisteh!” when she attended church on Sundays. No one had any tolerance, much less sympathy, for her actions.³⁰⁸
A Jewish woman who married a Pole in Naliboki, and secretly converted to Catholicism so as not to incur the wrath of the local Jewish population, received an ominous gift from her own mother (who lived in Lwów): a cake containing broken pieces of glass.³⁰⁹ Another Jewish woman from the Wilno area who converted when she married a Pole “had done the most abominable deed that a Jewish child could do to her God-fearing parents.” It was her father’s duty according to Jewish law to “repudiate” her:
Now it was his duty to mourn her as if she were dead. He sat shivah for seven days and cried. Later he attempted to put her out of his mind, as if she had never existed.³¹⁰
One memoir describes the reaction when the daughter of a rabbi fell in love with a Polish policeman in a small town near Lublin and insisted on marrying him after converting to Catholicism:
Her poor parents followed the carriage, crying and screaming and beating their heads to a bloody pulp on the sides of the wagon with their daughter not to go through with this woeful deed. … After this shameful tragedy, the girl’s family secluded themselves and never went out of the house. Her three sisters never married, neither did their cousins in the nearby town. No one would marry them.³¹¹
When Dobka Sztrum of Uniszowa near Ryglice married a Pole and converted to Catholicism before the war, the couple was forced to leave the village because of the harassment they experienced from local Jews. When she returned to the village during the war, she was denounced by a Jew; pregnant, she was executed by the Germans in front of her home.³¹²

When a young Jewish woman converted to Catholicism in the village of Jaśliska near Krosno, the Jews nearly rioted. The situation became so precarious that she was escorted by a policeman on her way to the church. According to this woman, “Jews threw stones. … After this celebration, my father came and pleaded with me to go home. … But I was already baptised … Later Jews asked my father why he had not brought an axe or a knife with him and cut my head off … Because it is a horrible thing for Jews when one of them gets baptised.” Jews did not leave her in peace. “They tried to stop her from entering the church and they wanted to ‘kill her and stone her to death’. … After her baptism, [she] sold her second-hand sewing machine and escaped [from the village], because ‘I knew that the Jews would never leave me in peace.’” The initiative to convert had been entirely this woman’s who had shown a fascination with Catholicism since childhood: “It often happened that the priest would show her the door, because Jewish children were not allowed to participate in religious lessons. It also happened that her father would beat her and lift her up by the hair, because he did not like his daughter to attend Catholic services.”³¹³

A similar situation is recorded in the small nearby town of Stoczek when a young Jewish woman, the daughter of a businessman, married a Polish peasant from a nearby village.
When one changed his faith in Stoczek, it signified to all that he had abandoned the Jewish community and went over to the hostile Poles. … Despite the period of mourning, the community insisted that they did not recognise the act of conversion because a Jew could never be anything but a Jew. It was inconceivable in Stoczek that a Jew could come to believe in another faith. The Jew who went through conversion was, therefore, considered a shmadnik, an apostate and traitor, a low and spiteful character, but he never became a Gentile in the eyes of the community.
When this Jewish woman arrived to be married in church, “almost all Jews, young and old, gathered around the town hall where she was staying and shouted insults at her.”³¹⁴

An account by a Jew from a professional, largely Polish-speaking milieu in Kraków acknowledges: “Intermarriage had become more common in Poland during the 1930s, but it was still regarded as a tragedy by most orthodox parents. Some disowned their children, while others sat shivah for them as though they had died, observing seven days of mourning with slippers on their feet and ashes on their head.”³¹⁵ A Jew from Łódź recalled:

I had been aware of a close relative of my father’s who had become a Christian, had married a Pole and was working as a senior clerk in the council offices of Lodz [Łódź]. The sorrow and shame felt by the family was so great that no one in the family dared to mention the convert’s name. So-much-so, that everyone tried to forget that she ever existed—her parents actually went through the traditional seven-day mourning period for her, broke all contact with her and felt so ashamed and disgraced that they isolated themselves from society.³¹⁶
The daughter of a prominent industrialist in Borysław recalled that when her great-grandmother’s daughter married a Christian, she was “considered an outsider in the family. It was not until the war started, when the family wanted to find her to ask her if she could hide my sick grandfather, that I discovered this family secret. No one knew her married name, so the attempt to locate her did not succeed.”³¹⁷

The Second World War did not alter the situation for many. When a Jewish prisoner-of-war whose life had been rescued by a Polish nurse returned to his home in Warsaw in October 1939 to introduce his new Polish girlfriend to his father, Rabbi Moses Korngold, the reaction was one of shock:

“My son has brought a Christian girl home,” he thought, reflecting deeply. “A Polish girl, Is he going to marry her? That must never happen. Never! Never!” …

“You have brought a Christian into my house. What a disgrace!” his father scolded him. “You are killing me, Never shall I give my consent while I live.”

He would not allow Leon to say a word, but covered his face with his hands, and walking back and forth in his despair, he continued, “Doesn’t your conscience bother you? Have you no sympathy for your old father?” …

Moses Korngold interrupted him brusquely, shouting at him, ‘You are a lost soul! Get out of my house!’”³¹⁸

In German-occupied Lwów, a Jew who had been given shelter by his Polish girlfriend kept the relationship a secret from his parents for fear of being disowned: “Irka was David’s Gentile girlfriend. Giza had told me she thought David and Irka were secretly married, and I quite understood why David would keep the news from his family. He was even more under his Mother’s thumb than Karol, and I am sure she would rather have seen him dead than married to a non-Jewish girl.”³¹⁹ Yet, although Janina Papliński had converted to Judaism when she married her Jewish husband before the war, her parents sheltered her and her Jewish sons during the war. After Janina was caught by the Germans when she was outside the family home, her parents and sister continued to hide the boys with different people in the surrounding villages. After the war, the boys were reunited with their father, who had been mobilized by the Red Army during the war. They moved to Israel severing contact with the Catholic family who had saved them.³²⁰

Two Jewish siblings who spent the German occupation moving from home to home in the countryside near Kańczuga were apprehensive about the relationships they struck up with their Polish peers. Faiga Rosenbluth wrote: “Much as it hurt me to tear myself away from Stasiek and this comfortable place, it was time to move on. Besides, I knew I could never marry a goy. My parents would die a second death, if such a thing were possible.” Her brother Luzer recalled his own dilemma: “All that night, I lay awake thinking about Andzia. I was trying to figure out whether it was all right to marry a shiksa if there were no other Jews left in the world. It seemed fair to me, but I wasn’t so sure what our rabbi would say.”³²¹

The media reported a rather dramatic example of this phenomenon in present-day Israel when an anti-Arab protest occurred over a wedding between an Israeli Arab and a Jew. The bride’s father said of his son-in-law: “My problem with him is that he is an Arab.” Demonstrators shouted “Death to the Arabs” and sang a song with a line, “May your village burn down.” The two anti-Arab groups involved in the protests, Lehava and Yad L’Achim, oppose assimilation of Arabs and Jews.³²²

Nor is it surprising that assimilationists were generally frowned on by mainstream Jewish society for whom nationalism was a potent force. The creation of ghettos under the German occupation intensified markedly the precarious conditions for converts, assimilated Jews, and even Polish-speaking Jewish children living in traditional Jewish society.³²³ For some Jewish leaders, like Mordechai Chaim Rukowski, chairman of the Łódź ghetto council, the walled and fenced ghettos created by the Germans were not without their blessings.³²⁴ Jacob Gens, the German-appointed leader of the Wilno ghetto, boasted in a speech delivered on January 15, 1943: “For the first time in the history of Vilna [Wilno] we have achieved a purely Jewish school system.”³²⁵ (The Germans allowed schools to be reopened—at least for a time—in many ghettos, including Warsaw, Łódź and Lublin, where the language of instruction was Yiddish.³²⁶) Moreover, Jewish children who spoke Polish in the ghettos were harassed, ostracized and even beaten by Jewish children.³²⁷ Curiously, even in the ranks of the Communist Party of Poland Jewish nationalism came to the forefront among the remnants of that disbanded party who found themselves in France in the late 1930s. The Jewish members, who were better connected and had more financial resources than their Polish colleagues, scorned the latter and even harassed Jews who spoke only the Polish language.³²⁸

Day-to-day relations between Christians and Poles in the interwar period are often portrayed in grim colours and violence directed against Jews has been written about extensively. Contrary to the dire picture presented by authors such as Celia Heller, the evidence does not support that extreme view, since on a personal level day-to-day relations were usually proper. Heller undermines her doom-and-gloom portrayal of Polish Jewry when she discusses Jews organizing defences against violent attacks by Polish hoodlums and extreme nationalists in the 1930s.³²⁹ Small groups of Jewish men, usually armed with such meager things as clubs and perhaps a few firearms, were often successful in preventing or beating off such attacks. Were the attacks anything other than unorganized, uncommon, and small-scale, how could such defences possibly enjoy success?

As historian Szyja Bronsztejn points out, not all of the conflicts and quarrels between Jews and non-Jews were as a result of national differences or anti-Semitic motives.³³⁰ In particular, it would be unfair to characterize all, or even most, altercations between Polish and Jewish school boys as anti-Semitic assaults.

‘We played together … in school and sometimes near the house too. And as it is between youths, fights resulted. That’s how we played near here.’ Later the same man related how the Catholic boys would elbow a Jewish boy between them in school. When asked if the Jewish youth fought back, he replied: ‘Of course! He was no coward! It was normal. Normal youths. Normal like everyone else.’ … There were fights between the proste and balebatish, and sometimes between Jews and goyim: ‘It would all start with insulting songs and would be returned with insulting songs. Then the fighting began until their parents stopped it.’³³¹
I looked up and saw Tadek Kadril, one of the few Christian friends I had made. In our early years we had thrown rocks at each other, a custom often indulged in by the Jewish and Christian boys of Radom. But later, when we grew older and entered school, we became good friends.³³²
The following accounts make it clear that ordinary Poles were not the feared, anti-Semitic ruffians that they are often portrayed to be and that many of the incidents were merely the kind of bullying that is commonplace among children everywhere. Jews youngsters could also initiate such incidents and could hold their own, and suffered no consequences on that account.
Two or three meters separated Grandmother’s yard from that of Mr. Zychlinski. Close to the fence grew a big nut tree whose large branches overhung Grandmother’s yard. My brother Leon and his friends threw stones into the branches trying to knock down the nuts, then the children picked up the nuts from both sides of the fence. One day a stone fell on Mr. Zychlinski’s son’s head, injuring him. When Mr. Zychlinski complained to my father, Father shook it off saying, “Why does your son walk where stones are being thrown?” Citizen Lajbus Fryde announced, “Your son is fighting with shkootzim!” Father’s answer was, “Do you want the shkootzim to beat up my son?”³³³
I was also fiercely protective of my sister. She knew that in spite of my size, I could be tough and dauntless. Once when I overheard a bully at school taunt Gita with cries of “Christ killer,” I went after the boy and knocked him down. After I threw the first punch, the boy on the ground cried, “Stop! I take it back!” Reluctantly, I backed off, warning him that I would meet any further comments of that nature with a far stronger response.³³⁴
Sometimes when my friends and I swam in the river we were attacked by gentile boys who threw stones and called us “dirty Jews.” We always fought back and after we had beaten them, they would run off to the surrounding fields.³³⁵
The first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, recalled his childhood among non-Jewish children in Płonśk, a small town northwest of Warsaw, as follows: “Somebody would perhaps throw a stone, or start an argument, and very often it was the Jews who started first. We used to get the upper hand.”³³⁶ In his memoir, he elaborates on Polish-Jewish relations in his hometown and on interaction between rival gangs.
I personally never suffered anti-Semitic persecution. Plonsk [Płońsk] was remarkably free of it, or at least the Jews felt well protected in the cocoon of their community life. Nevertheless, and I think this very significant, it was Plonsk that sent the highest proportion of Jews to Eretz Israel from any town in Poland of comparable size. We emigrated not for negative reasons of escape but for the positive purpose of rebuilding a homeland, a place where we wouldn’t be perpetual strangers and that through our toil would become irrevocably our own. …

The number of Jews and Poles in the city were roughly equal, about five thousand each. The Jews, however, formed a compact, centralized group occupying the innermost districts while the Poles were more scattered, living in outlying areas and shading off into the peasantry. Consequently, when a gang of Jewish boys met a Polish gang the latter would almost inevitably represent a single suburb and thus be poorer in fighting potential than the Jews who even if their numbers were initially fewer could quickly call on reinforcements from the entire quarter. Far from being afraid of them, they were rather afraid of us. In general, however, relations were amicable, though distant.³³⁷

For Ben-Gurion, Zionism was thus not an escape from persecution or perceived perpetual gentile unfairness to Jews: It was an affirmative end in itself. In common with most Jews living on foreign-ruled Polish soil, his parents gave their loyalties according to expediency. Ben-Gurion recounts that, “I was born and brought up in a Zionist home and soaked up the Hebrew language and a love of Zion as an infant. … I remember that as a boy I wanted nothing of Polish nationalism. I thought it irrelevant to Jewish freedom; and at elementary school in Plonsk I decided to learn Russian and not Polish. One could choose either.”³³⁸ Ben-Gurion did not hail from a Litvak family. His roots were in ethnic Polish territories. Yet, ironically, he had no problem with Russian even though tsarist Russia was, in his words, “irrelevant to Jewish freedom.”

The foregoing and following examples correct the distortions of Celia Heller and her book, On the Edge of Destruction, where she misrepresented Poland’s Jews as living in constant fear of Polish street violence, and of being largely defenceless against it when it did occur. A Pole from Krasnystaw recalled that when he and his friends were playing ball and it happened to land in the courtyard of a Jew, the Jew punctured the ball and shouted at the Polish boys.³³⁹ Norman Salsitz’s depiction of his Jewish boyhood in Kolbuszowa, a small town in southern Poland, is equally instructive. As he notes, “We were no community of angels; no one group had a monopoly on mischief.”³⁴⁰ Less-than-innocent pranks and hooligan antics on the part of Jewish youth were frequent occurrences. Their behaviour does not demonstrate a fear of Poles, and had these acts been perpetrated by Polish youth they would doubtless be labeled as “anti-Semitic.” Jews engaged in similar conduct toward fellow Jews. A Jew from Naliboki recalls how he and a friend glued the rabbi’s beard to the desk in the cheder when he fell asleep.³⁴¹ Other examples include:

Some of the things we did I certainly can’t account for, but the fact remains that they were tolerated, sometimes even encouraged. A week before the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur came Selichot, an entire night given over to prayer before the arrival of these days of awe. What we children did on this night, however, was something quite different: we stole fruit off the trees and out of the orchards of the townspeople and peasants. Why we did it no one seemed to know. The Poles, of course, knew of this practice and tried their best to protect their property. Dogs were set upon us, and if Poles caught up with us we could expect a beating. But year after year it was the same all over again. Instead of actually taking fruit, too often we just managed to break off the tree limbs and ruin what was on them. …
Boys were boys and some manner of mischief was to be expected. Most of it was relatively harmless. An opportunity developed each time a wagon driver sped through town. There was one peasant in particular, the proud owner of a pair of uncastrated horses … who was our favourite target. On those occasions when he sped by us we’d go running after him, loudly shouting “Mister! Mister!” Finally catching his attention, we caused him to rein in his horses, assuming that we had something important to tell him. After great effort he finally came to a stop and turned to us for our vital information. “We wanted to let you know,” we said, “that your wheels are turning.” We laughed heartily, thinking how great a joke it was. Rarely was the peasant amused.