1968 - Mark Kurlansky [40]
Władysław Gomułka was the kind of enigma that CIA agents and KGB agents could earn their salaries trying to analyze. He was an antinationalist with a streak of Polish nationalism, a man with a history of rebellion against Moscow and yet a leader eager for good Soviet relations, an alleged anti-Semite married to a Jew. Being married to that woman would make anyone an anti-Semite, Polish Jews used to joke. Marian Turski, who covered the Gomułka years for the Polish weekly Polityka, said, “In a way there was something in common between him and de Gaulle . . . a very selfish man with a very large, unlimited ego.”
Gomułka was juggling at least three problems at once, all of which tugged in different directions: internal discontent partly but not entirely related to the failure of the economy, Moscow’s paranoia, and an internal power struggle with an ambitious general who plotted for years to replace Gomułka. According to Jan Nowak, head of the Polish-language service of Radio Free Europe at the time, Interior Minister Mieczyslaw Moczar began plotting Gomułka’s overthrow as early as 1959.
Moczar had not read Marx or Lenin or, for that matter, many other books. Uneducated and unrefined, he understood power and wanted to turn the “happy barracks” into a police state run by him. He was one of a group of extreme Polish nationalists known as the Partisans who had fought the Nazis together from inside Poland. The Partisans were bitter rivals of the so-called Muscovite faction that backed Gomułka, those who had fought the Germans by fleeing to Russia and joining up with the Soviets. The Jews, forced to flee Poland, became Muscovites and not Partisans. To help bring himself and the Partisans to power, Moczar did something that had often been done in Polish history: He played the Jewish card.
By the eighteenth century, Poland had the largest concentration of European Jewry since the 1492 expulsion from Spain. But the Poles became increasingly anti-Semitic, and during World War II many Poles, while they resisted German occupation, cooperated in the murder of all but 275,000 of the 3.3 million Jews living in Poland. After the war, Jewish survivors faced further massacres and pogroms by Poles. Socialism had not ended anti-Semitism, as it had promised, and wave after wave of Jews left Poland in response to periodic outbreaks of it. The Polish government encouraged Jews to immigrate to Israel, offering them passports and transportation to Vienna. How does a smart Jew talk to a dumb Jew? went a popular Jewish joke in Poland. The answer: On the telephone from Vienna.
By the mid-1960s only about thirty thousand Jews remained in Poland, and most of these identified more with the Communist Party than with Judaism. Despite recurring Polish bigotry, they were oddly comfortable, convinced that communism was the only hope for constructing a just society and ending anti-Semitism. In fact, communism would make both Judaism and anti-Semitism obsolete. Anti-Semitism, like Judaism, was a thing of the past in Poland.
In 1967, Moczar discovered that the Gomułka government had been infiltrated by Jews. Many of the Muscovites who supported Gomułka were Jewish, and many of them held high-ranking positions in his government.
The Polish anti-Semite accepted and needed no proof that Jews were foreigners, that they were not loyal to Poland, and that they were agents of foreign governments. In Poland, a Polish Jew is always called a Jew. A Pole by definition is Christian. Jews were often accused of siding with the Soviets against Poland or with the Israelis against the Soviets. Now Moczar was suggesting that they were guilty of both.
All of this