Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (8 page)

The Soviet, Polish, and German systems can be defined by their relationship to land. Communists, like capitalists, had to confront the basic dilemma of maintaining stability in the countryside while satisfying urban populations. In the Soviet Union in the 1920s, those urban populations were a largely theoretical working class inhabiting largely unbuilt cities, to be fed by real peasants who in some places, such as Ukraine, were very attached to their real plots of land. The Nazis exported the land question, treating it as a matter of foreign conquest. Polish governments tried and failed to resolve it in a more or less legal way. Stalin faced the issue squarely and drew a logical conclusion: The existing Soviet peasant and countryside could and would give way to a future of workers and cities. The Poles had no glorious vision of a peasant utopia; the Nazi agrarian vision of
Lebensraum
depended upon a foreign triumph. The Soviets believed that their revolution could be made at home, the costs borne precisely by the large peasant class—people who had no place in socialism in any case.

In Moscow, Warsaw, and Berlin, the land question was always international as well as domestic. If Germany was recolonial, planning to seize lands from another empire, and Poland was decolonial, hoping to liberate other empires for the emigration of its citizens, the Soviet Union was
self-colonial
. Stalin wished to apply to his own subjects the policies that he believed imperialists applied to native peoples. Since the Soviet Union was isolated from the capitalist world and yet needed to match capitalist development, the only hope was to exploit the resources, including the people, to be found within Soviet borders. Since the Soviet Union was the largest country in the world, covering a sixth of its landmass, such thinking was plausible in Moscow as it was not in Berlin or Warsaw. The centerpiece of Stalin’s self-colonization was the collectivization of agriculture that began in earnest in 1930: the seizure of private farmland and the transformation of some peasants into controlled agricultural laborers and others into workers in the city or in the camps.

This policy brought massive resistance and then massive starvation: first in Soviet Kazakhstan, where more than a million people died in a mad dash to pin nomads to plots of land, which the state then took from them almost immediately, and then in southern Soviet Russia and the entirety of Soviet Ukraine, productive territories where peasants lost their land to the collective. In the second half of 1932, Stalin treated the starvation in Ukraine as a political problem, blamed the Ukrainians themselves, and claimed that the whole crisis was a result of Polish intelligence work. The Soviet leadership that autumn and winter applied a series of specific policies to Soviet Ukraine that ensured that starvation deaths were concentrated there rather than elsewhere. About 3.3 million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine died horrible and unnecessary deaths of starvation and disease in 1932 and 1933.

From the beginning of collectivization, thousands of peasants fled Soviet Ukraine across the Polish border, entire villages at a time, begging for a war of liberation. One peasant promised that if “a war were to begin the mood of the people is such that if the Polish army came everyone would kiss the feet of the Polish soldiers and attack the Bolsheviks.” Another expressed the hope that “Poland or some other state would come as quickly as possible to free them from their misery and oppression.” The summary report of the Polish border guards assigned to interview the Soviet refugees read as follows: “The population longs for armed intervention from Europe.”

A deliberate mass starvation in one of the earth’s most fertile regions could hardly escape notice. But the reactions in Warsaw and Berlin were quite different. Even as they chronicled starvation, Polish border guards and intelligence officers reported that Soviet forces assembled along the borders after the first wave of flights and enforced the starvation campaign. Contemplating the lethal and unmistakably modern policy of collectivization, Polish Prometheans began to ask themselves whether they had, in fact, understood the Soviet Union. Given this new uncertainty, some began to wonder whether their prior attempts to use the national question were politically and morally sound. Polish foreign policy changed course. Poland had agreed in 1931 to a Soviet proposal to discuss a treaty of nonaggression, and one was signed in July 1932. This separated Poland from its previous Ukrainian clients and from the Ukrainian question. This too had its moral hazards.

Polish diplomats in Soviet Ukraine, in evident moral distress, observed the consequences of collectivization. The consul in Kharkiv, then the capital of Soviet Ukraine, estimated that five million people had died of hunger, which was a low estimate for the Soviet Union as a whole and a slightly high one for Ukraine itself. In February 1933, he reported that men came to his office to weep about their starving wives and children. “On the streets” of Kharkiv, another diplomat wrote, “one sees people in the last throes and corpses.” Hundreds of dead bodies were removed each night; residents of Kharkiv complained that the militia was not clearing them quickly enough. Polish intelligence reported, correctly, that the starvation was even worse in the villages. Peasants were fleeing the countryside for Kharkiv to beg on the streets. The militia tried to move them out of sight; the quota for the number of children to be seized each day was two thousand. Even as the death toll moved from the hundreds of thousands to the millions, the head of Polish military intelligence wrote in March 1933 that “we want to be loyal” to the arrangement with the Soviets, “even though they continually provoke and blackmail us.”

The withdrawal of the Poles from the Ukrainian question could be experienced by Ukrainians themselves as a betrayal, as indeed it was. The leading Polish expert on the nationalities question recorded one consequence of the Soviet-Polish agreement: “The signing of the pact annulled the hope of rescue from abroad, and so Soviet power in the conviction of the mass population became the absolute master of life and death. This was confirmed by the fact of the massive extinction of the rural population in spring 1933.” The last hope of Ukrainian peasants, as they themselves said, was a German invasion of the Soviet Union and the destruction of the Soviet order.

The Polish diplomats, accustomed to seeing nationality and loyalty as political matters, began to ask themselves how the Germans would manage Soviet Ukraine if they did invade at some later point. As one wrote, the Germans “will have to think long and hard about their material and moral approach to the local population, what the slogans will be and how they will be realized.” These nuances would have escaped Hitler. He was planning to invade the Soviet Union and seize Ukraine, but with the goal of racial colonization rather than of national liberation. He did not see Ukrainians or Soviet citizens as subjects of politics, or even as full human beings.

The political famine in Soviet Ukraine realigned the foreign relations of the major regional powers, setting the stage for the Second World War. In 1930, as mass collectivization began, Stalin and the Soviet leadership were alarmed by the consequences of their own policies and sought peace talks with Piłsudski to avoid Polish intervention during the collectivization chaos. The Polish leadership, cutting defense budgets during the Great Depression and troubled by the moral implications of intervention, was agreeable. Moscow and Warsaw signed their treaty of nonaggression in July 1932. Berlin was very sensitive to the possibility that this pact might be directed against its interests. Piłsudski assigned his new foreign minister, Józef Beck, appointed in November 1932, to balance this agreement with a similar accord with Germany. This initiative was timely. Piłsudski had tried (and failed) to arouse interest in Europe for a preemptive action against Hitler. Hitler was interested in rapprochement with Warsaw. In January 1934, Berlin and Warsaw signed a declaration of nonaggression, agreeing that their common border would not be changed by force.

For Polish leaders in 1933 and 1934, facing the rise of both Hitler and Stalin, preserving the status quo was an end in itself. For Berlin the declaration was a first step towards the grand plan of eastern war and colonization of Soviet territory. Hitler knew that peace with Poland was unpopular in Germany, but he did not care: He saw the German-Polish territorial questions as a springboard to future eastern empire. He expected that a deal could be reached whereby Poland would voluntarily concede some territories in exchange for lands gained from the Soviet Union. In that scenario, traditional German revanchists would get what they wanted—and be drawn into the war that Hitler wanted. After the joint declaration, anti-Polish disinformation disappeared from German newspapers. Joseph Goebbels, Berlin’s master of propaganda, lectured in Warsaw on the challenging subject of “National Socialist Germany as an Element of European Peace”; Beck promised to prevent an international congress of Jewish organizations from meeting in Poland. Piłsudski, now an old man in faltering health, began to figure in German military publications as the genius who had shown, back in 1920, how the Red Army could be beaten in rapid encirclement battles. His memoirs were published in German with a munificent foreword by the minister of defense. Hitler wondered aloud about what it would take to draw the Poles into a full military alliance and told his generals that this was what he wanted and expected.

Moscow had its own interpretation of the diplomatic realignment brought about by the Ukrainian catastrophe. Whereas Warsaw saw the nonaggression agreements with both Moscow and Berlin as proof of a policy of supporting the status quo, and Berlin saw its engagement with Warsaw as pointing towards a common campaign against the Soviet Union, Moscow saw the German-Polish rapprochement as a sign that Poland and the Soviet Union would never be allies. In the European war that Stalin expected, Poland would be either hostile or neutral toward the USSR. This meant that Polish statehood was of no possible value to the Soviet Union, and should be eliminated when the occasion arose. It then transpired that the large Polish minority in the western reaches of the USSR had been hostages to the possibility of some future Soviet-Polish accord. Once Stalin ceased to believe that Poland could ever be a Soviet ally, Soviet citizens of Polish nationality became disposable. Poles in the Soviet Union could be blamed for Soviet policy failures (such as the famine in Ukraine) and punished accordingly.

In the five years between the signing of the German-Polish declaration in January 1934 and the clear break in German-Polish relations that would come in January 1939, Poles in the Soviet Union were subjected to a campaign of ethnic cleansing. The first wave of deportations of Soviet Poles from border regions of Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belarus began a few weeks after the German-Polish declaration was signed and continued until 1936. Then Polish communists in the Soviet Union were depicted as participants in a vast Polish conspiracy to undo the Soviet order. Their interrogation led to the “discovery” of this “plot,” which then became the justification for the Polish Operation of 1937 and 1938—the largest and bloodiest of the Soviet ethnic actions during the Great Terror of those years. More than a hundred thousand Soviet citizens were shot as ostensible Polish spies. This was the largest peacetime ethnic shooting campaign in history.

As the Polish Operation began, Stalin said that he wanted the “Polish-espionage slime” to be destroyed “in the interests of the USSR.” When the chance came to destroy the Polish state itself, he would seize it. Poland was the home of Europe’s largest Jewish population, more than three million people. The annihilation of their polity would be crucial to their fate.

N
aturally, there were Polish spies in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, some of them on a rather unusual assignment. On June 8, 1935, Polish military intelligence ordered its officers in Soviet Ukraine to make tours of all the battlefields of the Polish-Bolshevik War of 1919–1920. Their task was not to prepare some new campaign, but to commemorate a past one. Józef Piłsudski had died the month before, and a small bag of earth from each of the battle sites was to be discreetly gathered for his burial mound.

The end of a political life reopened the issue of the character of the Polish state. Piłsudski’s authority had been personal, and the old comrades (“the colonels”) who wished to succeed him had to contend with popular politics at a time of economic depression. Piłsudski’s old enemies, the National Democrats, chose to exploit popular antisemitism to mount a challenge to the regime that his associates established after his death. Their encouragement of pogroms, at the same time an act of racism and a violation of the law, was understood by both sides as an attack on the state. The new regime enjoyed greater formal powers than had Piłsudski himself, since it exploited an authoritarian constitution that had been conceived while he was still alive. Although most of his successors were not antisemitic by conviction themselves, they tried to ride out the challenge from the National Democrats by adopting antisemitic public policy. In so doing, Piłsudski’s successors compromised the basic moral premise of his politics: that Poland was a state and not a race.

In 1935, responsibility for Jewish affairs was transferred from the ministry of internal affairs to the ministry of foreign affairs. Jews were no longer normal citizens to be integrated and protected by the state, but somehow aliens: a matter for the world at large, objects whose future might be negotiated with foreign officials. Piłsudski’s electoral organization, which had been popular with Jews, was replaced by a party of power which excluded them. This new Camp of National Unity (Obóz Zjednoczenia Narodowego, OZON), created in 1937, announced its preference for the emigration of about ninety percent of Poland’s Jews. Such policies, regarded as a loathsome betrayal of tradition and principle by much of the Polish Center and Left, were meant to prevent the pogroms organized by nationalists. The leader of OZON had a Jewish wife, something unthinkable for a Nazi. Nevertheless, by the standards of previous Polish practice, the change after 1935 was fundamental and unmistakable.

The man responsible for Jewish policy was Wiktor Tomir Drymmer, a close collaborator of Polish foreign minister Józef Beck. With a background in military intelligence, Drymmer was formally in charge of both personnel and consular affairs in the foreign ministry. He was also the head of its emigration office, charged with arranging the exit of citizens. Poland’s official position was that European maritime empires should either permit Poland access to resources in their overseas colonies or allow Polish citizens to migrate to such places. This analysis had a force that went beyond Jewish policy. At a time when rural unemployment exceeded fifty percent, Warsaw was pushing for the right of all of its citizens to emigrate. In the case of Jews, Polish diplomats pointed to the dramatic consequences of frozen migration routes. Before the First World War, roughly 150,000 Jews left Europe each year; in the 1930s the figure was a small fraction of this. In “trying to find an outlet for its surplus population” the Polish government had “in mind the Jews first of all.”

The question of the settlement of European Jews was a general European one, in which Poland occupied a position somewhere between the Nazi one (Jews must be eliminated, and emigration seemed the practical way to achieve this) and the Zionist one (Jews had a right to a state, which would have to be created from an existing colony).

The question of where European Jews might settle had been open since the nineteenth century, and very different sorts of politicians and ideologues proposed the same places. The island of Madagascar, a colonial French possession off the southeast African coast in the Indian Ocean, was introduced to the discussion by the antisemite Paul de Lagarde (actually a German named Bötticher) in 1885. This idea could be considered with greater or lesser hostility or sympathy. It had supporters in Great Britain and, of course, among Germans, including the Nazi leadership. Only in French could one say
“Madagassez les Juifs,”
but not all of those who considered the idea in France were enemies of the Jews. Zionists also considered Madagascar, although most rejected it.

Polish authorities also allowed themselves to be tempted by the prospect of colonizing Madagascar. The idea of settling Madagascar with Polish citizens was first raised in 1926; at that time the idea was the emigration of Polish peasants from the overpopulated countryside. A decade later, after Piłsudski’s death, the idea returned in a Jewish variant. Beck proposed the emigration of Polish Jews to Madagascar to French prime minister Léon Blum in October 1936, and Blum allowed the Poles to send a three-man exploratory delegation to the island. The representative of the Polish government thought that about fifty thousand Jews could be settled immediately—a significant number, but not one that would have affected the population balance in Poland. The delegate from the Jewish Emigration Association thought that four hundred families might settle. The agricultural expert from Palestine thought that even this was too much. The inhabitants of Madagascar rejected any settlement from Poland. French nationalists, for their part, were concerned that the Polish colonization project would succeed and that the island would become Polish. Meanwhile, the pro-Madagascar propaganda of the Polish regime backfired: When told that the island was suitable for colonization, Polish nationalists demanded “Madagascar only for the Poles!”

Beck and Drymmer expressed a special interest in the future of Palestine, a former Ottoman possession that was under British authority. The decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire had been a lesson for many European statesmen. Whereas Hitler tended to see the creation of Balkan nation-states from the Ottoman Empire as a positive example of militarism, Poles understood the same history as national liberation that would spread from Europe to Asia. Whereas European territories taken from empires after the First World War generally became nation-states, Asian territories tended to become part of the French or British empires, sometimes in the form of “mandates” from the League of Nations. These were places judged not ready for sovereignty, and thus allotted to the great powers for political tutoring. Palestine, taken from the defunct Ottoman district of South Syria, was such a mandate. Although the territory had a rather small Jewish minority when the British took control in 1920, British policy presented Palestine as a future Jewish National Home. This was in line with the hopes of Zionists, who hoped that one day a deal for full statehood could be struck.

Hitler’s Jewish policy forced all of the powers to clarify their position on the future of Palestine. About 130,000 German Jews emigrated in the years after Hitler came to power, some fifty thousand of them settling in Palestine. Their arrival reduced the demographic advantage of local Arabs, who tended to consider Palestine as part of some larger Arab homeland. Thinking that a continuation of Jewish immigration could lead to the success of Zionism, Arab leaders organized political action: first riots in April 1936, then the formation of strike committees and a general strike that lasted through October. This meant that 1937 was the moment of truth for the European states with a declared interest in the future of Palestine: Great Britain, Nazi Germany, and Poland.

London at first reacted to the Arab disturbances with a proposal for the partition of Palestine. When this led to further political chaos, the British restricted Jewish immigration to a quota. As the world was seen from London, Palestine was only a tiny part of the vast Arab and Muslim territories of the British Empire. Pleasing Jews over Palestine could mean alienating Muslims throughout the Near East and southern Asia. Berlin specified in 1937 its own attitude toward Zionism and a possible State of Israel. Palestine had appealed to the Nazi regime as a place where Jews could settle so long as this had no clear political implications for the Near East. But in spring 1937 the German consul in Jerusalem was concerned lest the creation of a State of Israel from Palestine weaken Germany’s position in the world. The German foreign minister circulated the official position to all embassies and consulates that June: Jewish statehood in Palestine was to be opposed, as a State of Israel would become a node in the world Jewish conspiracy.

The Polish position differed from both the British and the German. London favored Jewish statehood (at some distant and undefined point) but opposed much further Jewish migration for the time being. Berlin opposed Jewish statehood, but wanted Jews to leave Germany as soon as possible for some distant and undefined place. Warsaw wanted both massive emigration of Jews from Europe and a Jewish state in Palestine. In public the Polish foreign minister and other diplomats called upon the British to ease immigration restrictions and create a Jewish National Home as soon as possible. The Poles had very specific ideas of what such an entity should be: “A Jewish, independent Palestine, as large as possible, with access to the Red Sea.” This meant both sides of the River Jordan; in private, Polish diplomats even raised with British colleagues the issue of the Sinai Peninsula, in Egypt. In 1937, the Polish armed forces began to offer arms and training to the Haganah, the main Zionist self-defense force in Palestine.

Zionism was the Jewish political movement, active for half a century, whose advocates identified the future of the Jewish people with the settlement of Palestine and the establishment of a state. As a general matter, Zionists believed that this would be achieved through cooperation with the British Empire and other great powers. Although its advocates held a variety of political positions and its factions were many, many Zionists in the 1930s were left-wing, envisaging agricultural communes that would transform both the ancient Jewish land and the modern Jewish people. In Poland, Zionism was the ideology of a whole range of political parties, from extreme Left through extreme Right. Much to the dismay of Zionist leaders in London and New York, the direction of the overall movement was much affected by the politics of Zionism within Poland.

The world Zionist movement split in September 1935, just as Polish policy on Jews was revised by Piłsudski’s successors. Vladimir Jabotinsky emerged then from the General Zionist movement with a program of Revisionist Zionism. He urged Jews in Europe to consider massive and rapid emigration while calling for the immediate creation of a State of Israel in the Mandates of both Palestine and Trans-Jordan. This version of Zionism spoke to Poland’s new leaders. In June 1936, Jabotinsky presented his “evacuation plan” to the Polish foreign ministry. He claimed that Palestine, over time, could absorb eight million Jews. When his initiative was announced in the Polish press a few weeks later, the specified goal was the settlement of Palestine on both sides of the River Jordan by 1.5 million Jews in the course of the following ten years.

Jabotinsky wanted Poland to inherit the Mandate of Palestine from Great Britain. He even proposed that Poland be given the Mandate of Syria, which it could then trade for the Mandate of Palestine or use as leverage against the Arabs generally. This sort of thinking about foreign policy was very much in the Polish diplomatic tradition: an imaginative attempt to turn nothing into leverage. Indeed, the easy agreement between Jabotinsky and Polish leaders was not simply a matter of common interests. Although Jabotinsky spoke French when he made his case in Warsaw, he like most Polish leaders was born a Russian imperial subject and had been educated in the Russian language. The idea of building a nation-state from empires that partitioned historic national lands was a common one.

Jabotinsky’s power base by 1936 was Polish. Revisionism was a movement of youth, based in paramilitary organizations. By far the largest of these was Betar, the right-wing Jewish youth paramilitary in Poland, whose members promised to devote their lives “to the revival of the Jewish state with a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan.” Betar’s model was the Polish Legions of the First World War, which in the favorable conditions of war among empires had prepared the way for Polish independence. Like the Poles of the Legions, the Jews of Betar trained with weapons and awaited the opportune moment of general conflict. The vast majority of Betar members were products of the Polish school system, and imbibed its core message of secular messianism (“Our dream: to die for our people!”). When Betar brawled with Jewish leftist organizations, its members sang Polish patriotic songs—in Polish. Uniformed Betar members bearing firearms marched and performed at Polish public ceremonies alongside Polish scouts and Polish soldiers. Their weapons training was organized by Polish state institutions and provided by Polish army officers. Menachem Begin, one of Betar’s leaders, called upon Betar members to defend the borders of Poland in the event of war. Betar members wrote in their newspapers of their two fatherlands, Palestine and Poland. They flew two flags, the Zionist and the Polish, until the end of their existence in Poland—in the ghetto uprising of 1943 they raised both banners from Warsaw’s tallest building.