1968 - Mark Kurlansky [41]
The Israeli embassy had been getting flowers and notes of congratulations from all over Poland, though not from officials of his government. The congratulations were not all coming from Jews, either. Poles asked, were not the Israeli fighters Poles—the very people who had left Poland through Vienna? Suddenly a Jew from Poland was a Pole. Was not the Israeli Defense Force, the Haganah, founded by Poles? Actually, it was founded by a Jew from Odessa, Vladimir Jabotinsky, but it was true that many Israeli soldiers were of Polish origin. Had not the jojne, an anti-Semitic stereotype of the cowardly Jew, gone to war? Jojne poszedl na wojne—the jojne went to war—it even rhymed in Polish. And the jojne even won, beating Soviet-trained troops in six days. It was a wonderful joke, and everyone—not the Jews, but the Poles—was laughing a little too loudly.
Gomułka was not a great lover of Russians, but he knew this was not a good time to be laughing at them. Since the fall of the Soviet Union it has been learned that at the time of the Six Day War, Brezhnev sent nuclear submarines into the Mediterranean. He then called Johnson on the hot line, and the two labored to keep Israel from marching to Damascus. While this was going on, Gomułka and other Eastern European leaders were meeting with Brezhnev. Notes by Gomułka’s secretary indicate that news of the Arab defeat, step by step, was reaching Brezhnev while he was meeting with Gomułka and other leaders. The Russians had a sense of not only defeat but humiliation. Gomułka returned to Warsaw, deeply troubled, saying that the world was inching toward war, and then he received reports from Moczar, the minister of the interior, and the head of the secret police that Polish Jews were sympathizing with Israel. The report said nothing about the fact that non-Jewish Poles were doing the same thing.
On June 18, 1967, in a speech to the trade union congress, Gomułka spoke of “Fifth Columnist” activities, and that speech was interpreted as a signal that the purge of Jews or, as it was known, “the anti-Zionist campaign” could now begin. The terms Fifth Columnist, to indicate an underground traitor, and Zionist were now to be found in proximity. Zionists were to be rooted out and removed from high places. The worker’s militias, always available in the service of the government, dutifully began demonstrating against the Zionists. But the word syjoninci, meaning “Zionist,” was not well known, and some workers, told to demonstrate against the syjoninci, carried placards saying, “Syjoninci do Syjamu”—“Zionists Back to Siam.”
While Gomułka had Moczar on one flank and Moscow on the other, a Polish dissident movement was growing among students. University students were an unlikely source of discontent, since they were the privileged children of good communist families. From the rubble of a society that became a nightmare, their parents had built through communism a society of greater social justice and, for those of Jewish origin, a society that did not tolerate racism.
Toward the end of World War II, with the Red Army rapidly driving the Germans west, the Polish Home Army rose up against the Germans in Warsaw, expecting the Soviet arrival. But the Soviets didn’t come, and both the Home Army and the capital city were destroyed. The Soviets said they were held up by German resistance, the Poles say the Germans wanted a crushed and supplicant Poland. According to the Soviets, Warsaw was 80 percent destroyed. According to Polish historians, it was 95 percent rubble.
When the Red Army entered the capital, only a tenth of the population, 130,000 people, still lived in Warsaw, huddled