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

Hearing the words from R’ Shmuel Yaakov, Satan burst into laughter, and his laughter was heard in all worlds:—Ay, R’ Shmuel Yaakov, I thought that you were really a clever Jew, because everyone in the shtetl holds you to be so. What do you thing, R’ Shmuel Yaakov, that today is like former, when I had to work so hard before I was able to bring a Jew to commit a sin?

You certainly recall that Friday, before dawn, when they caught R’ Shmuel Asher, the Shokhet, in the baths with the shikse, Zuzgeh, the bath-heater. Do you recall how easy it was for me to seduce that Jew, who observed each and every mitzvah as if it were the eye in his head, and who fled from every sin as if from fire, to bring him together with the shikse Zuzgeh? Ay, ay, how much effort I put into this particular matter! Night after night, I would come to him with Zuzgeh, and Zugzeh would take off all her clothes until she was stark naked, and I would say to him:—R’ Shmuel Asher, just take a peek at Zuzgeh’s feet, how beautiful they are, and how red they are! Blood literally spurts out of them. However, R’ Shmuel Asher had shut his eyes, and thereafter shouted out: What does Satan, may his his name be erased, want from me! However, on the third night, he half opened his eyes, and took a look at Zuzgeh’s red feet. A little at a time, he could not tear his eyes away from her feet.

When I saw that I had him along a path, I went further:—R’ Shmuel Asher, take a look at Zuzgeh’s breasts. Ach, how beautiful and graciously they stick out from her breast cage. And the same process occurred. … An so, the entire matter went, up till last Thursday evening, at which time, R’ Shmuel Asher the Shokhet not only didn’t close his eyes, to keep him from looking at Zuzgeh’s naked body, but rather clamored into her body with both of his hands, to the extent that I permitted myself to make a joke with him …

When it was about two hours before dawn on Friday, I said to him:—R’ Shmuel Asher, let Zuzgeh go; she has to heat up the bath, in order to warm up the mikva for the Jewish women, in honor of the Sabbath. However, R’ Shmuel Asher was no longer the master of his own will. A terrifying passion had taken control of him, and he would not release Zuzgeh from his hands. … My advice is as follows: let Zuzgeh go now to attend to her work. In an hour or so, she will be done, so get yourself dressed, and go to her in the baths, and put a coin in her hand. I assure you, that she will completely surrender herself to you, and you will be able to still your passion. And R’ Shmuel did just that …

However, don’t think that this sin came so easily to R’ Shmuel Asher. That is why I am Satan, in order to do evil as much as it is possible for me to do. …

On the floor, on which the kapote of R’ Shmuel Asher was spread out, close to the oven, which was full of burning wood, lay R’ Shmuel Asher, sunken into Zuzgeh’s half-naked body. The long feathery fringes of his tallit-katan were wound around Zuzgeh’s body. …

As R’ Shmuel Asher, on that Friday before dawn, after this occurrence, ran in the streets of the little shtetl, pale and frightened, I, Satan, stood in his way, and said to him:—Hey, you fine Jew, was it all worth it for that disgusting shikse? Tfui on you, for having lost both worlds!²⁰⁹
Confirmation of these sentiments, usually in a much more tempered form, can be found in many Jewish memoirs. Traditionally, Jews avoided contacts with Christian Poles, except those that were absolutely necessary for their survival such as trade and commerce. Stanisław Likiernik, who came from a highly assimilated family, points out that “Jews tended to live apart, not so much because of the attitude of Poles but mainly because of their own wish not to mix with gentiles, to be among their own kind.”²¹⁰ Anna Lanota, a psychologist who hails from Łódź, made the following observations: “The [Jewish] community [in which I lived] had a somewhat unfavourable attitude toward other nations—maybe even contemptuous. There prevailed the feeling that we were the chosen people. In school there was that same atmosphere that Jews were the chosen people. We did not pay attention to what others might be saying about us.”²¹¹

David Krelenbaum, from Parczew, believed that the Jewish community leaders deliberately attempted to isolate Jews from Poles in order to prevent Jews from assimilating.²¹² Poles were often regarded as a nuisance, someone to be avoided except for doing business. In the words of a resident of Wierbnik, “We had a beautiful life … except for having Poles around, which was very unpleasant.”²¹³ Many Jews, especially those from Orthodox backgrounds, shunned the company of Poles all together and projected their antipathy toward Christians onto the Poles. A Jewish woman from a Bundist family in Łódź recalled:

While most of the families living in our building were Jewish, there was also one Polish family who lived on our floor. We never talked to them or to their children. I think we were afraid of them. We knew that Poles did not like Jews, and so we stayed away from them.²¹⁴
Dov Freiberg, a young Jewish teenager from Łódź, recalled the admonition he received from his older brother when the family vacationed at a cottage in the countryside:
I made friends with the farmer’s family, especially with one of the sons, who was my age. … My brother Motel would get angry and would tell me not to play with non-Jews and warn me never to eat any of their food, not even a piece of dry bread, because it was not kosher. In the farmer’s house, I was often invited to eat with the family or to taste something that the farmer’s wife had baked. But I always refused, and one day the farmer explained to everyone that “Jews were not allowed to eat with Poles.”²¹⁵
Kopel Kolpanitzky, from the town of Łachwa in Polesia recalls:
My friends and I met every day at school, at the club or movement, and sometimes at each other’s home, but we stayed away from the non-Jewish kids, and did not become friends with the Byelorussian children. The [few] Jewish children who studied at the Polish school, however, became friends with non-Jewish students as well.²¹⁶
Poles were often ridiculed and dehumanized in Jewish society. Halina Birenbaum states: “The Poles were ‘goys’… who were regarded as pagans, we criticized or ridiculed their tastes, customs, beliefs … We were not taught mutual sympathy for them. They were different, foreign to us, and we to them, often our open or hidden enemies.” When Birenbaum, who lived in Warsaw, visited her grandparents in a small town she was warned not to venture near a church, because that was forbidden by the Jewish religion. “I was eight years old then,” she recalled, “and I was taught to fear ‘goys’ and their distinct character. How then was I to look for or anticipate salvation on the ‘Aryan’ side when we were sentenced to annihilation?”²¹⁷ Eta Cjat Wrobel recalled that when she took her closest friend, a Catholic Pole, to a Jewish dance, “word got out that there was a shikseleh (a gentile girl) in the crowd. The boys decided to play a trick on whoever she was, and decided it was me. … When the dance was over, I let them have it in Yiddish. I said, ‘That’s not a nice way to treat a young lady, Jewish or not.’”²¹⁸ Polish children could also become the butt of nasty rhyming ditties, like the one Jewish children sang in front a Polish girl in the Warsaw suburb of Praga: “Raz dwa trzy, katolicy psy, Żydzi monarchy, katolicy parchy.” (“One, two, three, Catholics are dogs, Jews are monarchs, Catholics are scabs.”)²¹⁹

Traditional values permeated the Jewish community, which was generally hostile towards non-Jews. Christian Poles were regarded as “generally an ignorant lot, especially the peasants,” states Michel Mielnicki, who hails from Wasilków. Mielnicki displays obvious difficulty, even in retrospect many decades later, in rising above the hostility toward Christians that permeated the community. “But I didn’t spit on the ground at the sight of a Roman Catholic nun, as some Jews did,” he makes a point of stating. “And I didn’t think to condemn all Christians for worshipping a false messiah and his mother.”²²⁰

William Samelson, from Piotrków Trybunalski, let it be known that he considered most Poles to be uncouth and unclean, when he remarked: “some Polish (Christian) males from more enlightened homes had also been circumcised.”²²¹ Julia Wald recalls turning down an invitation to a Polish wedding, feigning illness: “what could I do there, the only Jewess among a bunch of Catholics and such oafs as well?”²²² Abraham Rotfarb describes how his views of Poles developed in the Jewish district of Warsaw where he had spent his childhood:
There are more Jews than goyim. Because the janitor, the housemaid, the workman, and other people performing ‘menial tasks’ were goyim, I ranked them very low. What do they know, these goyim? A goy knows nothing, a goy does not think, the only thing he knows how to do is beat up Jews. And despite the fact that I considered Christian peasants to be soulless savages, I was still mortally afraid of them. My world was divided into Jews and goyim.²²³

Haskell Nordon, from a provincial town in central Poland, recalled:

I came to believe that non-Jews were all pagans, worshippers of idols, statues and paintings in their churches—was it any wonder, then, that they behaved barbarically? They weren’t really responsible before God for their impulsive lives of drunkenness and violence that could sometimes end in murder. I concluded that Christians must be inherently inferior—how else could they believe in a God who has a Father and Mother, when surely there was only one God, the God who revealed Himself to Abraham one star-studded night in the desert, many thousands of years ago?²²⁴
Samuel Honig, who attended a Jewish high school in Kraków, recalled a question that a fellow student wrote on the blackboard for discussion period which was typical of the mindset of even educated Jews: “Why do we claim that the Jewish religion is the true religion and why is Judaism superior to Christianity?”²²⁵ Traditional teachings like these translated into full-fledged bigotry when these youngsters grew up.

Purim has been traditionally associated with anti-Christian practices.²²⁶ Chaim Zhitlovsky, and other cultural critics like him, rejected Purim as a chauvinistic celebration of Jewish vengeance.²²⁷ In the popular plays staged during the festival of Purim, the arch-villain Haman (who, in the Biblical story of Mordecai and Esther, was hanged on the gallows that he had planned for Mordecai) would often assume the persona of a Catholic priest. This centuries-old tradition was described by historian Elliott Horowitz:

For centuries it had been customary among the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe to vent their hostility toward the symbols of their powerful adversaries primarily through the dramatic depiction of Haman on the stage. The classic depiction of the Jews’ archenemy in the often raucous Purimspiels of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries featured an ecclesiastical cross worn prominently on his garments. It was also referred to explicitly in the dramatic text itself as an explanation for Mordecai’s refusal to bow before the king’s new prime minister. …

In the Jewish communities of Poland and Ukraine it was common, in the early eighteenth century, to hire a Christian to play the role of Haman in the annual Purimspiel. … Yet even at the end of the nineteenth century, according to Jewish memoirists, it was still common for Haman to be played by a young or poor Christian, preferably Yiddish-speaking.

As we have seen Haman was associated with Christianity and its adherents for a number of reasons. Not only was his form of death remarkably similar to that of Jesus, but he is repeatedly referred to in the book of Esther as an “Agagite,” linking him genealogically with the Amalekites and ultimately with Esau, the grandfather of Amalek through his first-born son, Eliphaz. And “Esau” together with “Edom” became, in the early middle ages, the standard Hebrew term for Christendom.

… These poems, still recited today, served for centuries as “backstage discourse,” allowing the Jews who recited them to conflate in their minds the dramatic downfall of Haman, Amalek, and Christianity—without arousing the ire of their oppressors.²²⁸

In Poland, these customs lingered into the 20^th century. Shtetls were known to stage mock representations of the passion of Christ.²²⁹ Priests were burned in effigy. A Christian was customarily hired for the role of Haman, and was spat on and beaten by Jewish revellers.²³⁰ At a costume ball in Zamość, three young men came dressed respectively as a jester, the devil and a Cardinal. To the amusement of the guests, the “jester” and “devil” took turns spitting at a crucifix held by the Cardinal.²³¹

As Elliott Horowtiz demonstrates, there is a long history of violence among Jews against the cross, which for centuries was commonly referred to as an “abomination.”²³² Even in contemporary Israel, there are frequent attacks upon Christian religious processions and clergymen, especially in Jerusalem.²³³ (It is a little known fact that the effigy of a pope is still burned in England, where as many as 50,000 Protestants gather on Bonfire Night in Lewes to observe the festivities.²³⁴) Yet Jewish manufacturers did a booming business in Poland producing Christian religious objects and Jewish merchants, often pretending to be Poles, were very active in their sale, especially in Częstochowa, the home of the famous Black Madonna and Jasna Góra monastery.²³⁵ Polish objections to this practice, which falls under the rubric of what is now known as cultural misappropriation, must be understood in light of the fact that Jewish policies allowed only Jews to prepare Jewish religious articles (prayer shawls, mezuzahs, tefellin).²³⁶

In Ejszyszki, “Jews never set foot in the Yourzdiki [Juryzdyka] church, even out of curiosity, because ‘they said if you went in a church you were forty days in herem [ban or excommunication].’”²³⁷ Yet Jews recalled that Christians came into the main shul [synagogue] on Kol Nidre evening at the start of Yom Kippur to marvel at the musical skill of the chazzan [cantor] and his choir. “They were giving respect for this night,” one resident said.²³⁸ Decades later, a Jewish woman insisted that her family’s Polish maid poisoned and killed her baby sister, “although common sense simply does not corroborate the details of her story.” When asked for a possible motive for such an act, the woman replied, “Nu? A shikse!”²³⁹

Abraham Lipkunsky, who grew up in the village of Dowgieliszki, a small settlement near Raduń inhabited for the most part by Jewish farmers, recalled a “deep-rooted custom” from his childhood:

At every crossroad and before every village there were crosses protected by little sloping roofs, with icons of Jesus or the Madonna hanging beneath them. For some reason, we children were under the impression that Jews were forbidden even to glance at a cross, but our childish curiosity got the better of us and I would quickly and guiltily snatch a glance at the cross while repeating the short prayer ‘thou shalt utterly detest it, and thou shalt utterly abhor it, for it is a cursed thing’ (Deuteronomy 7: 26), spitting in the direction of the alleged cursed thing, but seeing to it that no one should see me doing so. Heaven forbid! Like the spitting after the saying of the prayer: ‘It is our duty to praise the Lord, since he hath not made us like the nations of different countries, nor placed us like the families of the earth.’²⁴⁰
The following account is that of Haya Kreslansky from Dereczyn, in Polesia:
Saturday afternoons, we would take a walk in the fields, passing by the Catholic Church, its crucifix and image of the Christ, from which we would avert our eyes, and asking one another: “Have we passed by yet?!” And while a Jewish child was forbidden to gaze at the image of Jesus, one was tempted to steal a glance in passing …²⁴¹
When Krystyna Budnicka (then Hena Kuczer), who was born in Warsaw in 1932, was sent to the Christian caretaker of the tenement house where she lived to pick up a key, she was warned by her mother not to look around because a cross might be hanging on the walls and it was forbidden to look at it. “I remember the feeling of guilt, of sin: I wanted to see what it was that I wasn’t allowed to look at.”²⁴² Haim Grzybower recalled his mother’s concern about the route he took to school in Warsaw because she did not want him to pass by a Catholic church and see the cross in its front courtyard: “it was taboo for Jews to look at the cross. It was taboo for Jews to even mention Jesus.”²⁴³

Rivka Barlev from the small town of Kosów Lacki, said to have been eighty-five percent Jewish, regarded the very existence of a Catholic church in her town as an intolerable abomination:

A Gothic church stood at the end of the street. It looked like a stranger there and was for us children a scary place to run around. … The church, the statue, the bell-ringing every Sunday morning, was a reminder that no matter how many Jews lived in this town, and no matter how many centuries they had lived here, Kosow was Polish and Catholic and the Jews were outsiders. For the young people the church was the turning point when taking a walk on the main street.”²⁴⁴
The Jewish merchants in that town were united in their contempt for Polish peasants, whom they ridiculed among themselves as unclean animals:
Aria Dovid, Velvel Holder’s son, used to cry the news of the great event that was soon to occur: Jozef’s [Józef’s] Fair. He would do this on a Friday market-day, standing on the bed of a peasant’s wagon, calling out in a healthy bass voice: “Chodźcie panowie jarmark w Kosowie!”—”Come, ladies and gentlemen, to the fair in Kosow!” And the grain merchants, who could tell just by touching the thick homespun burlap sack what sort of kernels it contained, would mumble under their breath: “koniami, kurami, jajami, świniami”—“horses, chickens, eggs, pigs”—by that last word meaning the P… [Polacks] themselves.²⁴⁵
Dr. Itzchak Schwartzbart, a resident of Chrzanów, recalled: “Christians—tsabanes [i.e., fools] as they were called—lived on that street. For us children, that fact alone was a source of terror.”²⁴⁶ Miles (Shmoil) Lerman stated that, when he was growing up in Tomaszów Lubelski, “We always felt that we are Jewish. … first of all, we kind of felt that we are intellectually superior.”²⁴⁷ Samuel Oliner, a Jewish scholar, recalled his childhood days in a village in southern Poland:
Since I was illiterate at seven, my education was not off to a very good start. ‘Shmulek will grow up to be a stupid goy!’ lamented my grandmother. …

My father put down his pencil and glanced at me. ‘… The Poles are not the chosen people of God.’ …

One day I rode with Mendel to get farm supplies in Dukla. On the way home he whipped up the horse as we passed the gypsy camp. The frown on his face showed exactly how he felt …

The presence of a gentile defiled the home of a Jew, and no good was certain to come of it. … some Jews regarded the Poles with contempt and caution, but we had still been on good terms.”²⁴⁸

As we can see from the above account, Gypsies too were not immune from negative stereotypical attitudes on the part of Jews. Jews folk tales taught that Gypsies kidnap Jewish children.²⁴⁹ A Jew from a Carpathian village acknowledges: “We even had a few Gypsies who moved in and out of our area but never actually settled down. As children we heard stories that the Gypsies kidnapped children, so were a little afraid of them.”²⁵⁰ Leon Weliczker Wells recalls the stories he heard growing up in a Hasidic environment in the Lwów area: “We were also told about the gypsies who steal children and raise them as their slaves. And the fact that gypsies used to set up their tents each summer on the outskirts of our town lent credibility to these tales.”²⁵¹ Roman Frister from Bielsko recalled:
Generally, Gypsies were treated with suspicion and disdain. My parents would never have permitted me to talk to them under ordinary circumstances. Bielsko’s mothers warned their children that a Gypsy woman could cast a spell on their souls; its fathers watched their wallets when Gypsies were nearby, it being common knowledge that they were born pickpockets. … Decent folk kept away from them.”²⁵²
Run-ins with Gypsies were not unheard of, as the following account from Skoczów near Cieszyn shows.
A band of gypsies invaded the inn and refused to leave for several days. Papa’s regular business dropped off because customers refused to mingle with such rough company. The gypsies ignored Papa’s reasonable efforts that they depart the premises. At last, his patience came to an end. Papa appeared on the stairway wielding his World War I military saber. He leapt upon a table, shouting in anger, “Get out! Get out! All of you! Get off my property at once!”

The gypsy rogues were thoroughly intimidated by the ferocity of Papa’s command, and obeyed.²⁵³

A Jewish inmate of the Ravensbrück concentration camp painted a uniformly black portrait of the Gypsy prisoners:
They stuck us in a Block with gypsies who ganged up against us. We had to take punishment for their misdemeanours, and they’d steal anything we put down, or took all.²⁵⁴
Dora Kacnelson, who lived in Białystok before the war, said: “There are tolerant Jews, like my father for instance, but there are also fanatical ones, holding on tight to old traditions. … The orthodox Jews considered Christians to be beneath them.”²⁵⁵ A Jewish girl who grew up in Nowogródek admits candidly that all Poles were considered to be anti-Semites: “since he was a Pole, he must be anti-semitic deep down.” Moreover, her friendship with a Pole was “resented” by her Jewish friends: “I was presented with an ultimatum: either I must drop Eddie or they would drop me.”²⁵⁶

A girl from a middle class assimilationist family from Piotrków Trybunalski, a city in central Poland, recalls:

And what did I know about the other, non-Jewish world? In my home we spoke about goys with a certain irony and aversion which found its strongest expression in my grandmother’s saying ‘Meine shlekhte khulims of ale goims kieps,’ which roughly means ‘May my worse dreams fall on their heads.’ But I do not recall any conflict except for one incident when someone threw a stone into the prayer house on the Feast of Tabernacles during prayers.

Generally, the tenants in our home opened their windows to hear these prayers. My grandfather had a beautiful voice and apparently I wasn’t the only one who enjoyed listening to him. I was warned about hooligans who attacked Jewish children on their way from school, but I do not recall ever having encountered something like that. …

I don’t think that I ever asked myself before the war whether I was Polish or Jewish. I was Jewish, and that was obvious. My Polishness was accidental since some of my ancestors had settled here, but could just as well have settled elsewhere. … My father spoke Polish poorly, but my mother spoke it impeccably. My parents spoke Yiddish between themselves but spoke to [the children] in Polish. Neither I nor Ala knew Yiddish. My means of expression was therefore the Polish language, but it didn’t mean anything special to me. …