May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

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278 Salsitz, A Jewish Boyhood in Poland, 190.

279 Roman Halter, Roman’s Journey (London: Portobello, 2007), 265.

280 Eliach, There Once Was a World, 399.

281 Leon Kahn (as told to Marjorie Morris), No Time To Mourn: A True Story of a Jewish Partisan Fighter (Vancouver: Laurelton Press, 1978), 81.

282 Livingston, Tradition and Modernism in the Shtetl, 68.

283 Account of Maria Chilicka, dated February 6, 2005 (in the author’s possession).

284 Samuel Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press; Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2001), 243.

285 Henry Gitelman, I Am Drenched in the Dew of My Childhood: A Memoir (No publisher, 1997), 21, as quoted in Zvi Gitelman, “Collective Memory and Contemporary Polish-Jewish Relations,” in Zimmerman, ed., Contested Memories, 275.

286 Adam Kazimierz Musiał, Lata w ukryciu (Gliwice: n.p.; 2002), vol. 2, 329.

287 Lehmann, Symbiosis and Ambivalence, 116–18. When this woman was seized by the Germans during the occupation together with other Jews and taken to the ghetto in Rzeszów, Jews in the ghetto tried to persuade a tipsy Ukrainian soldier to shoot her: “The Jews told him: ‘She is a convert! She has to be killed and shot!’ They said so in my presence. They didn’t care at all! But the Ukrainian soldier told the Jews that he had not received an order to shoot her. He beat her instead in order to ‘silence’ the Jewish mob.” Ibid., 119.

288 Lehmann, Symbiosis and Ambivalence, 126–27.

289 Diane Armstrong, Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations (Milsons Point, New South Wales: Random House, 1998), 129.

290 Freiberg, To Survive Sobibor, Chapter 1.

291 Helene C. Kaplan, I Never Left Janowska… (New York: Holocaust Library, 1989), 3.

292 Roman Grunspan, The Uprising of the Death Box of Warsaw (New York: Vantage Press, 1978), 12.

293 Marian Pretzel, Portrait of a Young Forger: Marian Pretzel’s Memoirs of His Adventures and Survival in Wartime Europe (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989), 89–90.

294 Israel Gutman, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust: Supplementary Volumes (2000–2005), volume II (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2010), 569–70.

295 Fay Walker and Leo Rosen (with Caren S. Neile), Hidden: A Sister and Brother in Nazi Poland (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 193, 194.

296 Haroon Siddiqui, “Anti-Arab Hate Grows in Israel with Rise of the Right,” Toronto Star, August 21, 2014.

297 Assimilationists and converts were generally loathed in the ghettos. In his chronicle of the Warsaw ghetto Emanuel Ringelblum notes that Jewish nationalists were delighted that the Jews were finally separated from the Poles, albeit in ghettos, seeing in this the beginnings of a separate Jewish state on Polish territory. Hatred towards Polish Christians grew in the ghetto because it was believed that they were responsible for the economic restrictions that befell the Jews. Moreover, many Jews embarked on a battle against the use of the Polish language in the ghetto, especially in Jewish agencies and education, and were opposed to Jewish converts occupying positions of authority. See Emanuel Ringelblum, Kronika getta warszawskiego: Wrzesień 1939–styczeń 1943 (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1983), 118, 214–15, 531ff. Some Jewish nationalists simply did not permit the use of the Polish language in their homes. See Antoni Marianowicz, Życie surowo wzbronione (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1995), 46; Antoni Marianowicz, Life Strictly Forbidden (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004). That author also attests to the fact that converts were generally detested (p. 47), and to the pro-German attitudes of some Jews in the ghetto (pp. 66–67, 190). A Jewish memoir describes how children who did not speak Yiddish, which was a German-based language, were ostracized by Yiddish-speaking children in the Warsaw ghetto: they were disparaged as “Poles” and “converts” and were even pelted with rocks. See Małgorzata-Maria Acher, Niewłaściwa twarz: Wspomnienia ocalałej z warszawskiego getta (Częstochowa: Święty Paweł, 2001), 48. A Jewish woman who turned to a bearded Jew in Polish, since she did not speak Yiddish, recalled his hostile reaction: “I think he understood me, but he got very angry that I did not speak Yiddish, so he spat at me, “Du solst starben zwischem goyim!” I did not understand exactly what he said, so I went back to my apartment and repeated it to my mother. “What does ‘Du solst starben zwischem goyim’ mean?” She said, “Who cursed you like this?” She explained to me that he had said, “May you die amongst the goyim!” He said this because if you do not speak Yiddish, you were an outcast.” See Goldberg, Running Through Fire, 39.

According to one source, there were fewer than 1,600 Christian converts in the Warsaw ghetto; according to other sorces, there may have been as many as 2,000 or even 5,000. See, respectively, Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 59; Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City (New Haven, Connecticut, and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 652; Peter F. Dembowski, Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto: An Epitaph for the Unremembered (Notre Dame Indiana: Notre Dame University, 2005), 66–68. As many accounts confirm, the general sentiment toward Jewish converts to Christianity living inside the ghetto was one of hostility and derision. Malicious jokes about converts circulated within the ghetto. See Lusia Przybyszewicz, All That Was ([Broovdale, New South Wales]: n.p., 2001), Chapter 13. Rabbi Chaim Aron Kaplan expressed tremendous rancor toward Jewish converts, attributing to them the vilest of motives and rejoicing at their misfortune: “I shall, however, have revenge on our ‘converts.’ I will laugh aloud at the sight of their tragedy. … Conversion brought them but small deliverance. … This is the first time in my life that a feeling of vengeance has given me pleasure.” See Abraham I. Katsh, ed., Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan (New York: Macmillan; and London: Collier-Macmillan, 1965), 78–79, 250 (Kaplan suggests that Jewish informers may have been behind their betrayal to the Germans). Traditionally, Jews viewed converts as particularly virulent “enemies of Israel.” See Dembowski, Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto, 101. Even Jewish atheists openly declared their disdain toward converts. See Grace Caporino and Dianne Isaacs, “Testimonies from the ‘Aryan’ Side: ‘Jewish Catholics’ in the Warsaw Ghetto,” in John K. Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell, eds., Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2001), vol. 1, 194. As many accounts confirm, the general sentiment toward Jewish converts to Christianity living inside the ghetto was one of hostility and loathing. The Orthodox members of the Jewish council attempted to deny Christian Jews the rights and help given to Jews in the ghetto. See Dembowski, Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto, 70. They were detested for everything: their betrayal of Judaism, their use of the Polish language, their education and social and economic status, their alleged air of superiority and anti-Semitism, and even the assistance they received from Caritas, a Catholic relief organization. Soon malicious, but false, stories spread that they had taken over the senior positions in the ghetto administration and controlled the Jewish police force. See Havi Ben-Sasson,”Christians in the Ghetto: All Saints’ Church, Birth of the Holy Virgin Mary Church, and the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto,” in Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 31 (2003): 153–73. This was so even though, according to one prominent researcher, many if not most of the converts were opportunistic and continued to consider themselves Jews, few of them sustained any connection with their new religion, and “virtually all continued to donate to Jewish religious charities.” See Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919–1939, 78. See also Dembowski, Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto, 93; Marian Małowist, “Assimilationists and Neophytes at the Time of War-Operations and in the Closed Jewish Ghetto,” in Joseph Kermish, ed., To Live With Honor and Die With Honor!…: Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives “O.S.” [“Oneg Shabbath”] (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986), 619–34. (The memoir of Halina Gorcewicz, whose father ostensibly converted to Catholicism when he married her mother, illustrates that even Jews who had fully assimilated linguistically and culturally maintained a strong tribal-like attachment to fellow Jews—perhaps an embodiment of the lingering notion of the oneness of “the chosen people” they had inherited from Judaism. See Halina Gorcewicz’s memoir, Why, Oh God, Why?, posted online at