Year Zero (12 page)

Poles, too, suffered horribly under German occupation.
Untermenschen
, like the Russians, they were enslaved, their capital city was razed, and more than a million non-Jewish Poles were murdered. Poles could not
be blamed for the German decision to build the death camps on their soil. And yet it is as though the Poles took out their own suffering on the one people who had suffered even more.

A common account is that Polish vengeance was based on the perception that Jews were responsible for communist oppression. When Soviet troops had occupied different parts of Poland, some Jews hoped that they would protect them from Polish anti-Semites, or from the even more lethal Germans. Communism as an antidote to ethnic nationalism had long had a natural appeal to members of a vulnerable minority. But while many communists were Jews, most Jews were not communists. So vengeance against Jews for what was called “Judeo-Communism” was at best misplaced, and politics may in fact not have been the main source of revenge at all. For most Jews were not attacked after the war for being communists, but for being Jews. And Jews were associated not only with bolshevism in popular anti-Semitic lore, but with capitalism too. They were assumed to have money, to be better off than other people, even privileged. Communists were not above exploiting anti-Semitism themselves, which is why most Jewish survivors in Poland ended up leaving the country of their birth.

Although the majority of Polish Jews were in fact poor, the perception of superior wealth lingered. This had something to do with a guilty conscience, sometimes eased in a bizarre way by communist propaganda against Jewish capitalists. Poles certainly bore no responsibility for the German plan to exterminate the Jews. But many of them did stand by at the edge of the ghetto, with horse carts, waiting for their chance to plunder once the Jews had been conveniently disposed of. Others—like so many European citizens—were also happy to move into houses and apartments, whose rightful owners were taken away to be murdered.

In some places, especially in northeastern villages around Bialystok, Poles did some of the killing themselves. In July 1941, the Jews in Radzilow were locked up in a barn and burned alive while their fellow citizens ran around filling their bags with loot. An eyewitness remembers: “When the Poles started rounding up and chasing Jews, the plundering of Jewish
houses began instantly . . . They went mad, they were breaking into houses, tearing up quilts; the air was full of feathers, and they'd just load up their sacks, run home and come back with an empty sack again.” One family, the Finkielstejns, managed to run away. After they returned, they asked the priest to convert them so they might have a better chance to survive. The daughter, Chaja, recalls the village conversations: “They would always talk about one thing: who had plundered how much and how rich the Jews had been.”
¹⁸

It should never be forgotten that other Polish Gentiles behaved very differently. Hiding or helping Jews to survive carried huge risks, not just for the helper alone, but for his or her family. If caught in a western European country, a person might be sent to a concentration camp for helping Jews. In Poland it could mean death by hanging. Yet some Jews did survive thanks to the bravery of Polish Gentiles. Children were adopted, families hidden. In one famous case, several Jewish families were hidden for more than a year in the sewers of Lvov by a petty thief named Leopold Socha. More than twenty people survived underground, eating Socha's crusts of bread while fending off rats in the dark, and at least once almost drowning after a heavy rainstorm flooded the sewer. When they emerged from the manhole, pale, emaciated, covered in excrement and lice, the people aboveground were astonished to see a Jew still alive. Several months later Socha died in an accident, run over by a drunken Soviet army truck driver. The neighbors whispered that this was God's punishment for helping the Jews.
¹⁹

This is perhaps the most shocking thing about the postwar Polish story. People who had protected Jews from being murdered were well advised not to talk about it. Not only because of God's wrath for helping “the killers of Christ,” but because of the suspected loot. Since Jews were assumed to have money, and their saviors were expected to have been richly compensated, anyone who admitted to have hidden Jews was vulnerable to plunder.

Even after they were long dead, Jews were still thought to have something worth taking. In the autumn of 1945, the former death camp of
Treblinka, where more than eight hundred thousand Jews had been murdered, was a muddy mass grave. Local peasants started digging in search of skulls from which they might still be able to extract some gold teeth overlooked by the Nazis. Thousands worked the site with shovels, or sifted through the mounds of ashes, transforming the mass grave into a huge field of deep pits and broken bones.

The Poles, it must be emphasized again, were not unique. Greed was the common result of barbarous occupation, which affected countless Europeans. The historian Tony Judt observed: “The Nazis' attitude to life and limb is justifiably notorious; but their treatment of
property
may actually have been their most important practical legacy to the shape of the post-war world.”
²⁰
Property up for grabs is a great incitement for brutality. What is unusual about Poland is the
scale
of plunder. A whole new class had come up from the war which essentially took over the assets of those who had been killed or driven out. A lingering sense of guilt can have perverse consequences.

A contemporary Polish weekly paper,
Odrodzenie
, put it succinctly in September 1945: “We knew in the country an entire social stratum—the newborn Polish bourgeoisie—which took the place of murdered Jews, often literally, and perhaps because it smelled blood on its hands, it hated Jews more strongly than ever.”
²¹

This explains the sometimes bloody vengeance against the main victims of Hitler's Reich better than anything. Plundering the Jews, in a way, was part of a larger social revolution. And this type of revenge, too, would not have happened without the sometimes tacit, but often active, connivance of powerful opportunists in the Polish bureaucracy and police. It was not the official policy of the communist-dominated Polish government in 1945 to go after the Jews, but encouragement from the middle ranks was often quite enough.

•   •   •

THAT POLES WOULD WISH
to direct their revenge against Germans is more comprehensible. But that, too, was partly driven by class warfare.
For centuries Germans had lived in areas such as Silesia and East Prussia that are now part of Poland. Major cities, like Breslau (Wrocław) or Danzig (
), were largely German. German was the language of the urban elites, the doctors, bankers, professors, and businessmen. In 1945 more than four million Germans were still living in former German lands invaded by Soviet troops. Roughly the same number, terrified of what they had been told about Russian behavior, had fled to the west. Plans to expel the rest of the German population were already clear well before May 1945. In 1941, General Sikorski, the Polish prime minister exiled in London, declared that “the German horde, which for centuries had penetrated to the east, should be destroyed and forced to draw back far [to the west].”
²²

This policy had been endorsed by the Allied leaders. Even worse, Stalin advised the Polish communists to “create such conditions for the Germans that they would want to escape themselves.” And Churchill had told the House of Commons in December 1944, “Expulsion is the method, which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting.”
²³

As long as the Red Army was in control, the Poles more or less held themselves back. Libussa Fritz-Krockow, scion of a noble Pomeranian landowning family, remembered how they had actually felt protected by the Russians at times, even though those same Russians “were responsible for the vast majority of the rapes and the lootings.” Yet, she observed, “their violence was somehow comprehensible to us, whether we explained it as the principle of an eye for an eye, sheer exuberance, or conquerors' rights. The Poles, on the other hand, were merely camp followers. Their seizure of power had a different character. There was something cold and furtive about it, almost sneaky, which made it seem far more sinister than naked force.”
²⁴

The Krockows were not Nazis. Christian von Krockow, who wrote up his sister Libussa's memoirs, was a liberal who understood very well that their suffering was “the result of our own German madness.”
²⁵
But there may be a hint of anti-Polish bias or bitterness in Libussa's statement, even
perhaps a sense of betrayal. This was not an unusual sentiment. A German Protestant minister, Helmut Richter, expressed the same thing. He had always expected the Poles to be good people. After all, hadn't Germans treated them well in the past? But now he realized “the awful nature of these eastern peoples.” For a long time, they had behaved themselves as long as they felt “a fist hovering over their heads,” but they turned “barbaric when they have the chance to wield power over others.”
²⁶
This is the way colonizers always talk about the natives. The difference with most European colonies in Africa or Asia, however, is that in this case many of the former colonizers had been natives themselves, albeit natives of a privileged class.

In any case, the Poles did not want Soviet troops to spend a moment longer than necessary in the conquered lands that were now officially part of Poland. And the cruelties that went with massive expulsions and population transfers decided by the Big Powers at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 were not just the result of Polish vengeance. More than two million “Congress Poles” from the east of the Polish Soviet border, now part of Ukraine, were moved to Silesia and other areas that had been more or less swept clean of the Germans. So they took German homes, German jobs, and German assets, a process that was rarely gentle.

Of course, ethnic cleansing did not begin in 1945. Hitler had expelled Poles and murdered Jews to make room for German immigrants in Silesia and other border areas. But bitterness over disputed homelands went back further than that. As so often with bloody ethnic revenge, a history of civil war preceded it. With the defeat of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, the fate of their holdings in Silesia had to be decided. Bits went to Austria, bits to Czechoslovakia, and bits to Poland and Germany. Upper Silesia, however, remained in dispute. There was a strong Upper Silesian independence movement, supported by local Poles and Germans. But the Allies decided in 1919 that a plebiscite should decide whether the territory should go to Poland or Germany. This decision led to serious violence. Armed Polish nationalists assaulted Germans, especially in the industrial area around Kattowitz (Katowice), not far from
Auschwitz (
). These attacks provoked even bloodier reprisals by thuggish German adventurers in the ultranationalist, paramilitary Freikorps, a breeding ground for the future Nazi movement that was formed in late 1918 after Germany's defeat. “Black-Red-Gold! Smash the Poles!” was one of their charming slogans. The majority voted for Germany to govern Upper Silesia, a decision that caused more violence. In the end, part of Upper Silesia went to Poland after all. But memories were still raw in 1945, all the more so because of the treatment of Poles under Nazi occupation.

The family of Josef Hoenisch had lived in Upper Silesia for many generations. Because he had never joined the Nazi Party, he decided that it would be safe to stay home in 1945. A bad decision. He was arrested by the Polish Militia, which had replaced Soviet troops. Asked by Militia interrogators whether he had been a Nazi, Hoenisch replied that he had not, and was booted in the face. This went on for some time, until he was dragged, covered in blood, into a six-by-nine-foot cell filled with nine other German prisoners who had barely enough room to stand, let alone sit. Polish militiamen, he recalls, had their fun by making prisoners, men as well as women, strip and beat one another. After eight days of this, Hoenisch was confronted by a former schoolmate, a Polish wheelwright named Georg Pissarczik, who had fought against the Germans over the fate of Upper Silesia in 1919. This was Pissarczik's chance for revenge. Now, at last, the German would get his just deserts. The story has a further Silesian twist, however. The two men met again, and Pissarczik was reminded by his former schoolmate that Hoenisch's father had helped Pissarczik's father get a job in the early 1920s, when no German would employ him. Could Pissarczik not help him in return? Four weeks later, Hoenisch was released.