Only Ashes? Jewish Visitors to the New Poland in 1946 and the Future of Polish Jewry

Analysing the experience of Jewish travellers to Poland in 1946 and their feelings about the possibility of a future for Jews in Poland, I seek to go beyond the views that have so far been presented in the academic literature on the topic. ¹ The focus here will therefore be on Polish and international politics in the first half of 1946, questioning the teleology of the Holocaust aftermath which has anachronistically infused events occurring immediately after the war with the meaning and logic of later events. I then analyse the impact of interwar experiences on Jewish attitudes towards the post-war reality, and, lastly, focus on the differences between Jewish experiences in Central Poland and in new Polish territories acquired from Germany after 1945. This article starts with a brief analysis of the impressions of Jewish travellers from Central Poland and then shows the radical difference between these impressions and those from the new Polish territories.

The first half of 1946 was characterised by events crucial to Polish and East European Jewry. The repatriation of the Polish Jews who had survived the war in the Soviet Union started in February and continued until July. The Polish-Jewish community, consisting almost solely of Holocaust survivors and middle-aged people (since children and older people had had a far lower chance of surviving), consisted of 93,000 officially registered members in January 1946, and was now joined by Polish-Jewish families and children born either in the Soviet Union during the war or in Poland just before. In the early summer of 1946, the Jewish presence in post-Holocaust Poland reached its maximum numbers, between 200,000 and 240,000 people. ² Most of the repatriates were sent to new Polish territories, especially to Lower Silesia in the south-west of the country. About half of the Jews in Poland at the time were living in this region. ³ For the portion of Jewish elites engaged in rebuilding Jewish life in Poland, this considerably large number of people, together with the hope for demographical growth represented by children and young people arriving from the east, offered the prospect of a bright future. On the other hand, widespread anti-Semitism and the physical and psychological impossibility of living in a place where so many relatives and friends had been murdered, combined with the emigration work of the Zionist movement, caused tens of thousands of Jews to leave Poland across the southern and western borders. Zionism in Poland at that time was given a boost by the visit to Poland of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry in February 1946, which was looking at the problems of European Jewry and Palestine, and by the publishing of its final report a couple of months later. On the basis of its assessment of the situation of European Jewry, including in Poland, the Committee recommended easing British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine and letting in 100,000 European Jews. This strengthened Zionist efforts to concentrate the maximum number of Holocaust survivors in Displaced Person (DP) camps in Germany, Austria and Italy, and then to bring them from there to Palestine. ⁴ The flight of Jews from East-Central Europe – the Bricha in Hebrew – was important in the great-power competition amongst Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union over the political future of Palestine and the question of the emigration of Holocaust survivors, including Polish Jews. ⁵

The first half of 1946 in Poland concluded with two crucial events. On 4 July, the pogrom in Kielce, in which at least 42 Jews were killed, marked the culmination of the 1944–46 wave of anti-Jewish violence in the country. ⁶ Five days earlier, the Polish authorities, instead of holding democratic elections, had organised the ‘People’s Referendum’ (also known as the Three Times Yes referendum or Trzy razy tak), which marked an important stage in finalizing the Communist domination of Poland. ⁷ Nevertheless, neither the Kielce pogrom nor the enormous flight of Jews from Poland in the spring and summer of 1946, nor the stabilisation of Communist power ended the discussion about the possibility of a future for the Jews in Poland.

All of these events provided various conflicting interpretations and arguments in the general discussion about the future of Polish Jewry. These unfolded in the early part of the Cold War, when no one knew the extent of cooperation, coexistence and rivalry between the Western and the Eastern Bloc or what the nature of the political regimes of the east-central European states would be. ⁸ All of this provided the larger context in which Jewish travellers from the US, Western Europe and Palestine reflected on the possible future of Polish Jewry. Their reflections were informed not only by the present but also by the past, not only the Holocaust, but also the interwar experience of these visitors, all of whom had been born in territories which between 1918 and 1939 had become part of the Polish state. In what follows, I argue that the combination of the memories of life in interwar Poland and the experience of the first couple of years immediately after World War II, together with the social space of the new Polish western territories, constituted the three crucial factors fostering a belief in the possibility of a Jewish future in Poland.

Using the travelogues of visitors to Poland in 1946, I hope to uncover this deeper context, analysing these documents from a non-teleological perspective. This perspective is enabled by the cautiously postmodernist character of this article. The postmodernist (and, earlier, micro-historical) revolution, re-evaluating historiographical perspectives and narratives, has also brought a widespread reluctance to accept the great narratives, which are usually based on authoritative explanations and chains of events and processes stemming one from another and unfolding into the ‘essence’ of the historical process. ⁹ In such narratives, history moves in a clearly discernible direction, thus either implicitly or explicitly having a teleological character. ¹⁰ The presentation of the aftermath of the Holocaust and the subsequent demise of the Polish-Jewish community as being inevitable and inscribed in the logic of events since 1945 is a perfect example of such teleological thinking.

Consequently, I am interested here in the particular historical moment, the year 1946, and its characteristics, which do not fit into a greater narrative. As I will show, the uncontested conviction of Poland as a place of the Jewish past but not of the future became fully established only after 1947 – with the destruction of Jewish political pluralism in Poland between 1948 and 1951, and the severing of Jewish transnational ties by the Communist regime and the introduction of the ‘Stalinist’ system in the country. ¹¹ This article thus brings new insights to our understanding of the consequences of the Holocaust not only for Jews living in Poland but also for the international Jewish community, and its reflections on the future of the Jews and their transnationalism. ¹²

1. Ruins and ashes

Jacob (Yankev) Pat (1890–1966), a native of Białystok, was a leading figure in the socialist Bund in interwar Poland. In 1938, he emigrated to the United States, and in 1940 became the executive secretary of the Jewish Labour Committee (JLC), a left-wing non-Communist Jewish labour organisation resourcefully engaged in helping East-European Jewry during the Holocaust and its aftermath. He had arrived in Warsaw in February 1946. At the time, the Polish capital was almost completely in ruins. Pat could not recognize most of the Warsaw streets he had known so intimately before the war, since they were now just piles of rubble. The hardest thing for him psychologically was to confront the old Jewish quarter (called the ‘Northern District’) that during the Holocaust had been turned into the Warsaw Ghetto and demolished. The ‘endless sea of desolation,’ ‘the desert’ that he had seen, seemed to convey an indisputable message – namely, Jewish life in Poland was no longer possible after the Holocaust. ¹³ The very same impressions and feelings were noted by Mordechai Tsanin (1906–2009), a pre-war Polish-Jewish journalist, who left Poland in the beginning of the war, and via Lithuania, the Soviet Union and Japan made it to Palestine where he was living in 1946. ¹⁴ An account provided by an enthusiast of post-war Poland, Peysakh (Paul) Novick (1891–1989), was no different. Novick, who had emigrated to the United States in 1913, was the editor-in-chief of the Morgen Frayhayt (Morning Freedom), a Yiddish-language Communist newspaper based in New York. ¹⁵ For all three men, the destruction they had witnessed had a personal dimension as well. It had robbed them of family and friends. They could not recognise or even find buildings or places connected to important events in their personal lives. The Holocaust took away parts of what had been most intimate to them. ¹⁶ Another traveller, Shimon Samet (1904–1998), who emigrated to Palestine in 1926 and became an established Tel Aviv journalist and Haaretz correspondent, visiting Poland in January-March 1946, wrote: ‘building a spiritual life amidst the ashes of millions was impossible.’ ¹⁷

This sense of impossibility not only originated in the Holocaust; it was deeply rooted in the violent, at times murderous, anti-Semitism observed by the Jewish visitors. The estimates are that between 1,500 and 2,000 Jews were murdered from the second half of 1944 to the end of 1946. ¹⁸ Most of the travellers we are looking at here came to Poland between February and July 1946, during the peak of Polish anti-Jewish violence. Some of them were in the country during the Kielce pogrom. Jacob Pat, who toured Poland in February and March, met with Holocaust survivors in Warsaw, his hometown of Białystok, as well as Kraków, Łódź and dozens of smaller towns. He remarked: ‘For sixty days I drifted on the violent sea that rages across this unhappy ruined land. Waves of antisemitism broke against my face.’ ¹⁹ Henry (Chaim) Shoshkes (1891–1958), who had emigrated to the United States in late 1939 (escaping and leaving his short-term position in the Warsaw Judenrat in the first months of the German occupation), returned to Warsaw as a correspondent on the New York Yiddish-daily Morgen Zhurnal. He wrote about new Polish merchants selling the belongings of their murdered Jewish neighbours, dozens of Polish towns emptied of their Jewish inhabitants, Jews attacked and killed all over Poland, and Polish peasants ‘coming like jackals in the night’ and digging for gold fillings or any valuables left by people murdered in the Treblinka death camp. ²⁰ The same feeling is present in the writing of Samuel (Shmuel) Leyb Schneiderman (1906–1996). Schneiderman had been a prominent journalist for the Polish-Yiddish press before leaving Poland in 1938, first to France and later to the United States. Visiting his native land as the Morgen Zhurnal correspondent, he wrote that the level of anti-Semitism in post-Holocaust Poland was enormous, documenting the murders of Jews in Polish towns and in the countryside, the participation of Poles from different social origins and political views in the Kielce pogrom. ²¹ All of this was meticulously chronicled by Mordechai Tsanin as well. In his travelogue, Tsanin vividly expresses the resentment felt by all the other Jewish visitors. ²² They had all grown up in Poland, with Polish culture, and among Poles. The harm done to the Jews by their Polish neighbours, people whom they too had grown up with and whose culture and symbols they had been thought to love, was even more painful, bitter and more deeply etched in their memories than those left by the Germans.

All of this contributed to the conviction that life in Poland was impossible for the Jews. This conviction was only strengthened by the observations of Holocaust survivors, many of whom had been forced to hide their Jewish identity, ²³ and by what these visitors saw in the existing Jewish communities of Central Poland. The biggest Jewish community was in Łódź, the second largest Polish city. ²⁴ For Pat, Schneiderman and Samuel Leo Wohl (1891–1951) - the latter emigrated to the US as a young man in 1912, visited his family in Warsaw during the interwar period and went to Poland again in June 1946 ²⁵ - the decisive majority of Łódź Jews, whether secular or orthodox, were afraid to live in Poland, suffered from anti-Semitism and dreamt of leaving the country. ²⁶ Chaim Shoshkes visited Łódź in February 1946 while the Anglo-American Committee was in Poland to take account of the situation of Polish Jewry. ²⁷ In a demonstration of thousands of Łódź Jews that took place in front of the hotel in which members of the Committee were staying, Shoshkes saw the ‘Zionism of despair.’ Jews of all social backgrounds and political views were bound together by their will to escape. ²⁸

2. Contrast: The New Poland and its politics

At the very same time, most of these Jewish visitors had not only observed the destruction and tragic situation of the Holocaust survivors in Poland but also things they considered positive. But could these positive aspects really mean anything in the face of all the calamities and atrocities that had befallen the Polish Jews and were continuing to do so in 1946? Could they really lead some of them to remain in Poland?

Historians of the Jews of Poland after the Holocaust seldom look at the Polish Jews’ pre-war experiences as an important part of what happened after the war. But, in fact, for Jewish visitors to Poland in 1946 who had lived in Poland before 1939, their interwar experiences were crucial in forming their views of the post-war political reality. For example, for Schneiderman, the wartime reluctance of the main forces of the Polish anti-Nazi resistance to grant help, the indifference that a large number of Poles felt toward the fate of their Jewish neighbours and even the participation of some of them in the evils of the Holocaust, all largely stemmed from pre-war anti-Semitism. ²⁹ For him, as for many other Jews, both Polish and Western, the Poland of 1946 represented a zero-sum game. One either stood on the side of the Communists, fighting for progress, or with the anti-Communist opposition, which included anti-Semitism, clerical nationalism and even fascism. This peculiar understanding of the political logic led Schneiderman to dismiss obvious evidence that the Communists had falsified the results of the 30 June 1946 referendum and the arrests of many members of the legal Polish political opposition. As for many other Polish Jews, the non-Communist Schneiderman's support for post-war Communist authoritarianism stemmed from his assessment of interwar Poland, its anti-Semitism, class and ethnic discrimination. ³⁰

Experience of the years between the world wars is reflected similarly in the travelogue of Paul (Peysakh) Novick, especially when he describes his visit to a meeting of the Polish government. In the 1930s, it was dangerous for a Jew to walk in that part of the city (Krakowskie Przedmieście street). Now, it was not only safe, but here he was, a Jewish journalist, invited to the seat of the Polish government. ³¹ As he writes, ‘benevolence shown by the current Polish regime to a representative of the Jewish press and of Jewish [foreign] organisations, was a revolution in itself.’ ³² The same impression, post-1945 ‘new Poland’ seen in contrast to its decisively worse pre-1939 predecessor, was left on another, this time non-Communist Jewish visitor from the West, Joseph Leib Tenenbaum (1887–1961), the president of the American and World Federation of Polish Jews. Tenenbaum left Poland and moved to New York in 1920; nevertheless, throughout interwar period, he was deeply engaged in Polish-Jewish affairs. According to him, it was only after the Holocaust that the Jews in Poland achieved real equality. The New Poland did away with economic discrimination and gave Jews an opportunity to work in government at all levels, including the military and the police force – i.e. in all the places from which they had formally or informally been barred before the war. ³³ Just like Novick, Tenenbaum was impressed by the members of the Polish government whom he met. ³⁴ His praise for what he saw after 1945 also stemmed from his judgement of everything that he had seen before 1939. Tenenbaum had represented Eastern Galicia and its Zionist movement at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, where Poland, like several other countries, was forced by the Entente Powers to sign a minority rights treaty and to commit to protecting the individual and collective rights of its national (ethnic) minorities. ³⁵ The whole history of Poland between the world wars was, as Tenenbaum saw it, a consequent breaking of this commitment. ³⁶ The Poland of 1945 was, according to Tenenbaum, the opposite of all of that. For the first time in its modern history, Poland was now becoming ‘free from prejudice and bigotry.’ For him, too, the political situation in 1946-Poland was a zero-sum game. ³⁷

3. Contrast: The New Poland and its geography

Poland was not only politically new, but also geographically. As early as at the Teheran Conference, toward the end of 1943, and then the Yalta Conference in February 1945, and finally, where it was confirmed, at the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, the Big Three (the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Kingdom) decided that the territories Poland had lost to the Soviet Union in the east would be compensated for by transferring German territories to Poland in the west. ³⁸ The geographically largest, most populous and most industrialized part of the new Poland, the ‘Recovered Territories’ (Ziemie Odzyskane), was Lower Silesia, in the southwest of the New Poland. During the war, this region had been characterised by the immense presence of Nazi concentration and labour camps, holding tens of thousands of forced labourers, including thousands of Polish Jews. Immediately after the war, in May and June 1945, some of these liberated Jewish inmates decided to stay in Lower Silesia. Thus, from its very beginning as part of the New Poland, this region had its own Polish-Jewish community consisting of camp survivors. In the summer and autumn of 1945, they were joined by a growing number of Holocaust survivors from Central Poland and the eastern territories newly annexed by the Soviet Union. In September 1945, about 10,000 Jews were living in Lower Silesia. In January 1946, their number rose to 18,000. ³⁹ In February 1946, the Polish authorities started to repatriate hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens who had survived the war in the Soviet Union. Together with the Central Jewish Committee in Warsaw (Centralny Komitet Żydów Polskich – CKŻP), the authorities decided that most of the 135,000 Polish Jews recently brought home from the east would be sent to Lower Silesia. The development of the Jewish community during the second half of 1945, the abundance of houses and jobs left by the ‘transferred’ (that is, deported) German population, the absence of disputes over property that Poles had taken from their Jewish neighbours during the Holocaust and the high incidence of anti-Jewish violence in Central Poland were the factors that made Lower Silesia the best place for Jewish settlement in Poland. ⁴⁰ At the beginning of July 1946, just before the Kielce pogrom, Lower Silesia had, in effect, 90,000 registered Jewish inhabitants. ⁴¹ Thousands of them, however, soon joined the mass exodus from Poland that was organised by the Bricha. At the same time, thousands of people, often the same ones, who had contemplated emigration, were carefully considering their chances of starting a new life in this new part of Poland. With the end of the massive wave of emigration, in autumn 1946, the number of registered Lower-Silesian Jews had stabilised at around 60,000. ⁴² It was precisely at this tumultuous time, between February and August 1946, that our Jewish travellers visited Lower Silesia and its Jewish community.

The shock and surprise of this visit is revealed even by the structure of the post-Holocaust Jewish travelogues. Their narration starts in Warsaw, develops in Central Poland and the eastern territories, and culminates with the story of anti-Semitism, the destruction of the Jewish communities and the misery and humiliation of the Holocaust survivors. In each of the travelogues considered here, the chapters about Lower Silesia come at the end. When they were first published, this writing must have been shocking, similar to what the authors felt when they first came to this region. For what they saw here was the opposite of what they had seen elsewhere in Poland. In the travelogues, the chapters on Lower Silesia function as the counterpart to, a total reversal of, the plot and trajectory of the early post-Holocaust story of the Polish Jews.

The overall tone of Jacob Pat's travelogue totally changes when he reports on the first hours of his visit to Lower Silesia. Entering what pre-1945 had been the German town of Reichenbach, but was now Rychbach (and from the second half of 1946 – Dzierżoniów), Pat noticed a sharp difference between this place and everything that he had so far seen in post-Holocaust Eastern Europe:

the difference between Richenbach [sic] and any other East European city – was staggering […] Everywhere you turn you see Jews going about their business, or standing in small clusters on street corners […] I can see lighted store windows, open doors. Everything is peaceful and snug. Is this [a] dream or reality? […] for the first time since I set foot in postwar Poland I see a large sign saying in Yiddish letters: Community Center. It is simply impossible to imagine such a sign in any other Polish city – Warsaw, Lodz, Białystok or Cracow – or great Jewish centers once […] It is impossible to believe. Only yesterday, it seems, reality was Oświęcim [Auschwitz] – it is now Richenbach [sic]. ⁴³

The subtext and intentions of Joseph Tenenbaum in his travelogue chapters about Lower Silesia are the same as Pat's. Tenenbaum had arrived in Lower Silesia two months after Pat, in April 1946, but like Pat, he could scarcely believe what he saw:

The largest Jewish community was in Rychbach […] I was struck by the sound of Yiddish everywhere, Yiddish posters, large streamers in Yiddish calling for May Day celebrations, Yiddish theater bills […] I have even heard some of the non-Jewish Poles massacre the tongue with an atrocious Polish accent as if in the recognition that Yiddish was the official language of the ‘Jewish town.’ […] Here for the first time I felt at home, free from the haunting fear of pogroms […] there was a feeling of security, a feeling of ‘belonging.’ Here, the Jews could rebuild a permanent home for Polish Jews. ⁴⁶

4. Towards a new life – but with a bit of the old mixed in

What was it about these images and signs of Jewish life in Lower Silesia after 1945 that was so perplexing to the Jewish visitors from the West, and what gave them the power to change the visitors’ opinions about the possibility of a Jewish future in Poland? The answer is that, paradoxically, it was in this new part of Poland, fundamentally German, that they saw so much of their own Polish-Jewish past. It was the past, or at least a considerable part of it, that they, while observing the aftermath of the Holocaust in Central Poland, had believed was irrevocably lost. ⁴⁹

When they first arrived, these Jewish visitors were convinced that the almost one-thousand-year-old Jewish civilization of Poland had been wiped out. For some of them, like Henry Shoshkes, Moshe Samet and especially Mordechai Tsanin, the mass murder had such a total and ultimate meaning, that anything else they saw in Poland paled almost completely in comparison. This is the reason why Tsanin's travelogue lacks any description of the Jewish community in Lower Silesia. For him, the presence of that community was meaningless in the face of the finality of the Holocaust. This differs from the reports of all the other Jewish visitors. To their extreme astonishment, they discovered that Polish Jewish civilization in Lower Silesia was not entirely lost, that its elements were being reborn in this foreign land that had now become part of Poland.

These elements of apparently miraculous, unexpected continuity are picturesquely described in Moshe Shulshtein's travelogue:

It is obvious that the Lower Silesian yishuv is a direct descendant of the previous generation that was destroyed by the Catastrophe. It consists of small remnants of Jewish masses, which had been brought together from many places, Jews from all corners of Poland. They have brought here their various customs and ways. Here, dialects and sayings are mixing […] Amongst them, one hears a bit of Vilnius, a bit of Częstochowa, a bit of Kolomiya and a bit of Lublin. Countrymen meet their compatriots, telling themselves stories of how things used to be in the old days, people feel joy and connection […] In the progressive character of the Lower Silesian Jewish settlement one sees the older Jewish ways and folk customs of the destroyed homes. ⁵⁰

Paul Novick saw a change in the Jewish economic structure (the move from merchant occupations to various kinds of manual ones – universally labelled as ‘productivization’ in Polish, English, Yiddish and Hebrew documents at the time) and employment in state factories in Lower Silesia as a conscious ‘break with the traditions of the old Poland,’ where ‘big industry had remained ‘Judenrein’.’ ⁵² Yet in this ‘absolute revolution’ he also saw, paradoxically, a continuation. In several of the towns in Lower Silesia, these new productive Jews, gathering in large groups and speaking Yiddish on the streets, covering walls with Yiddish posters and Yiddish shop signs, attending literary evenings, living next to one another, created elements of the continuation of pre-Holocaust shtetls. ⁵³

Out of all of the symbols of the new life and the Jewish transformation in post-Holocaust Poland, none is stronger than that represented by the Jewish coal miners in the town of Wałbrzych (Waldenburg). ⁵⁴ For Novick they were the ‘cream of the Jewish proletariat,’ representing the break with the past, the revolutionary transformation of the Jewish socio-economic structure. In Wałbrzych, Novick saw the proud avant-garde of the Jewish proletariat, which was aware of its historical role. ⁵⁵ This topic had played an especially strong part in Schneiderman's travelogue. In Lower Silesia, the ‘Light in the Darkness’ (as he titled one of the chapters of his travelogue) was personified by Yechiel Nussbaum, a 42-year-old Jew, originally from Warsaw, whom he had met in a Wałbrzych coal mine. Nussbaum had lost his wife and three children in the Holocaust. Before the war, he had been a member of the neo-Hasidic ⁵⁶ group of Hillel Zeitlin (1871–1942). ⁵⁷ Schneiderman tried hard to convince his readers that Nussbaum's enthusiasm for his work in the mine did not come from his denial of his own pre-war past and his religious beliefs. It was, instead, based on a philosophical, dialectical, and somehow Marxist reworking of Jewish spirituality. Nussbaum argued that although the Holocaust and his personal loss had immersed him for a time in religious doubt, he had found God again after the war, in Wałbrzych, in proletarian, physical labour. ⁵⁸

Another element of continuity consisted in the activities of the landsmanshaftn, Jewish émigré associations of Jews from various places of the ‘old Poland,’ which were now operating in Lower Silesia. In the interwar period, they became some of the most important institutions providing social and philanthropic aid, and they played a crucial role in the development of modern Jewish transnationalism in Poland. ⁵⁹ As they had been before the Holocaust, so now too, in post-1945 Lower Silesia, dozens of landsmanshaftn were working closely with their central branches in the West, especially in the United States. ⁶⁰ It was in Dzierżoniów (Lower Silesia), rather than in his native Warsaw, that Samuel Leo Wohl, the US representative of the Warsaw landsmanshaft not only met individual local Jews, but also the well-organised, integrated community of Warsaw Jews. 1,000 of his landslayt (fellow Warsaw Jews) attended the meeting with Wohl. It was here that he witnessed the wedding of two of them performed by the local rabbi. ⁶¹ Much of Jacob Pat's shock and amazement at what he saw in Lower Silesia stems from the same things Wohl writes about. It was here, not in Warsaw, that he met the Bund comrades he had known in Warsaw from his days before the Holocaust. In Dzierżoniów, Pat also met the nucleus of the reconstituted community of Vilnius. ⁶²

Most of these writers visited Lower Silesia in the first half of 1946. Nevertheless, their books about the visit were edited and published in the second half of the year, in 1947 or even in 1948, that is, after the Kielce pogrom, which, despite its drastic consequences, did not end belief in the collective, national Jewish future in Poland. The fact that this faith was placed mainly in Lower Silesia is strongly corroborated by publications in major American and British dailies, as well as in the American Yiddish press of 1947. As in 1946, so too in the following year, visions of a rosy Jewish future struggled with visions of serious doubt in it. In February, in an article published under two different titles in The New York Herald Tribune and in The Washington Post, the war correspondent Marguerite Higgins (1920–1966), reporting her impressions from Lower Silesia, wrote: ‘the controversy over how Jews fare in the new Poland seems to have a clear answer here. Most of the 50,000 Jews in Lower Silesia say the opportunities are so great they will remain permanently in Poland, giving up thoughts of emigrating to Palestine.’ The mood among the local Jews was radically different from what she had encountered among Jewish fugitives escaping Poland whom she interviewed in Berlin in January 1946. Like the authors of the travelogues, she too highlights the ‘sociological revolution’ taking place in western Poland, in which, unlike before the war, the Jews now had unrestricted access to employment in industry, government and all other occupations and professions. ⁶³ The conclusions of some other articles about the Jews of Poland, and Lower Silesia in particular, which were published at this time in The Christian Science Monitor, The Manchester Guardian, The New Statesman and Nation, The Jewish Advocate and The Boston Daily Globe were similar. ⁶⁴

Even Sidney Gruson (1916­–1998) of The New York Times, presenting a much more pessimistic vision of the Jewish future in Poland, singled out the western Polish territories as the place where Jews lived in much better conditions and felt much safer than in the other parts of the country. ⁶⁵ This was even admitted by correspondents of the American Yiddish Press who firmly condemned any attempts to reconstruct Jewish life in Poland. Writing for the New York-based Forverts under the pseudonym Shlomo Azrieli, Israel Chipkin (1891–1955) remarked on thousands of Jews in Wrocław, Wałbrzych, Świdnica and Dzierżoniów ‘living a normal life,’ earning a ‘decent living’ in Jewish cooperatives and other institutions, ‘not wanting to flee Poland’ and, if considering emigration, being ready to do so legally, after obtaining the visas and other necessary documents. Though not failing to point out the ubiquitous anti-Semitism and the threat that non-Communist Jews faced from the Communist domination of Poland, he also remarked on the high visibility of Jews and the existence of Jewish national culture in Lower Silesia. ⁶⁶ In April 1947, a journalist on Haaretz (Tel Aviv) and a Palestine correspondent of Der Morgen Zshurnal, Yeshayahu Klinov (1890–1963), interviewed Yitzhak Grűnbaum (1879–1970), a Polish Zionist leader between the wars, then a member of the Executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel and one of the most important Zionist politicians who had just returned to Palestine from his trip to Poland. According to Klinov, Grűnbaum was outraged by the Polish Jews he met who, feeling greater physical security and a greater chance to better their lives materially, still rejected the notion that their future lay in the Land of Israel. ⁶⁷

Of course, the firmest believers in a future for the Jews in Poland, where socialism would go hand in hand with national Jewish culture (the Yiddish language and other specifically Jewish cultural features), were the Jewish Communists in the Jewish Faction of the Polish Workers Party (PPR – Polska Partia Robotnicza). These ideas were codified in ‘Nusekh Poyln’ (the Polish way), the official ideology of the Jewish Communists in Poland from 1945 to 1949 (until it was abolished by the Stalinists). ⁶⁸ Among Jewish visitors from the Western Bloc, their views were represented by Paul Novick. The fact that in its main points this ideology was compatible with the observations of the non-Communist Jewish visitors proves that in 1946 and 1947 it was truly more than just propaganda. At the time, Nusekh Poyln encompassed views popular among both Polish and Western Jews. For the Marxist Novick, Nusekh Poyln was a dialectical creation, a mixture of some pre-1939 elements of Jewish civilization, experiences and lessons taken from the Holocaust, and also, lastly, social and economic advantages and changes created in the new, post-1945 Poland. ⁶⁹ Not only Novick but also many of his non-Communist contemporaries had failed to see the authoritarian and destructive potential of this project, which threatened the Jewish cultural and political pluralism of 1946–47 Poland. They seem to have been unable to imagine what could well happen in the future and what finally did happen – the increased great-power tensions of the Cold War, the Communist ‘war over commerce,’ which attacked the Jewish non-socialist sector of the economy, the 1948–50 attacks on Zionism, on Jewish transnationalism, on Jewish religious culture, and the final destruction of the pluralism of Jewish life in Poland. ⁷⁰

5. Problems and doubts

At the same time, the obvious fact that these visitors could neither imagine nor foretell the future, does not mean that while seeing that the prospects for Jews in Lower Silesia were better than in other parts of Poland, they were not critical of elements of the new reality. Their faith in a future for the Jews of Poland was not unconditional; indeed, they were ambivalent.

Expressing his doubts about the durability of the Jewish experiment in Lower Silesia, Shimon Samet (1904–1998) called his Lower Silesian chapter ‘Second Birobidzhan?’ ⁷¹ The question mark expresses doubt and ambivalence. For Samet, as for our other authors, the future was a mystery. Like so many Jews, he also had doubts (based largely on his knowledge of what the Soviet Jews had experienced) about whether the Polish and the Jewish Communists genuinely accepted Jewish political and cultural pluralism in Poland in 1946. ⁷²

Samuel Leo Wohl expressed similar reservations. Generally, certain that the Polish authorities were predisposed to support the Polish-Jewish community, he not only remarked on the overall strength of anti-Semitism in post-war Poland but also on the presence of people with anti-Semitic views, including among the Communists. Furthermore, in Lower Silesia, one aspect of the story was the success of Jewish settlement; another aspect, in addition to the anti-Jewish views manifested by many Polish settlers, consisted of material problems, overcrowding, and problems with housing that characterised many of the new Jewish communities. According to Wohl, many other Jews would have left if they could get a US visa. ⁷³ Similar views were also held by S. L. Schneiderman. ⁷⁴

Jacob Pat also expressed this uncertainty about the future of the Jews in Lower Silesia. In the final chapter of his travelogue, summing up his ambivalent feelings on the matter, he describes an argument he witnessed between local, Lower Silesian Jewish activists and a delegation of Swedish Jews who had come to pick up a few hundred Jewish orphans. The activists, members of the local Jewish Committee, strongly resisted the Swedish Jews’ attempts to take the orphans away, arguing that without children it would be impossible to build a future for the Jews in Poland. Pat himself could not decide who was right and whether the Jewish leaders of Lower Silesia had the right to risk the children's future since he was unsure whether there would be one in Poland. ⁷⁵

6. Conclusions

If The Jewish travellers’ overall impression from their visit to Poland in 1946 (and many of the press reports from 1947) could be described in one term, it would perhaps be ‘ambivalence.’ This impression encompasses the assessment of the Holocaust as the greatest disaster to befall the Jewish people, together with the uncertainties, fears, but also a cautious faith in the possibility of a Jewish collective future in post-Holocaust Poland. In 1946 and 1947, contrary to the post-Holocaust aftermath teleology popular today, no one was yet sure, nor could they be, whether the Holocaust meant the end of Poland as a place for Jewish life. At the time, there were two competing visions of a Jewish future in Poland . The negative vision proved to be correct only later, but with its triumph, the promising vision of the early post-war years has long been forgotten.

After the war, it was obvious that the demographic, political and cultural centres of the Jewish world had moved outside of Europe. Nevertheless, in the Jewish visitors’ vision of 1946 Poland, its Jewish community still had an important role to play in the Jewish world. This role would be mainly to retain the Ashkenazic culture of Eastern Europe, of Yiddishkeit, of the elements of this tradition that were withering in the new Jewish centres in the Land of Israel and the United States. Thus, it was also emigrant nostalgia and the experience of emigration that drove them to assist personally in the post-Holocaust recovery of the Polish Jewish community. As the anthropologist Jack Kugelmass has aptly put it, they went ‘to revisit and sometimes reclaim the past’ but such reclaiming was impossible. ⁷⁶ As I have sought to show in this article, however, this is only partly true. Elements of Jewish civilization, so personally meaningful to Jews who had left Poland, which were now buried under the ruins and ashes of Central Poland, were still present in the new Polish territories in 1946, among the Jewish communities that had settled there.

The pace of political events in the early years after the war, combined with the material, cultural and moral destruction that the war had brought, has led scholars and people in general to look on the post-war situation of the Jews in Europe as a totally new reality through the prism of event-centred political history. Nevertheless, as this article has undertaken to show, it is worthwhile to look at post-Holocaust Polish Jewry also from the perspective of social and cultural history, from the perspective of interwar experiences, and to ask what role these experiences played after 1945. On the one hand, what made Jewish visitors believe that a Jewish future in Poland was still possible after the Holocaust was the difference between what they recalled or knew personally of pre-1939 experiences and what they saw after 1945. On the other hand, contrary to the youthful attitudes of many Jewish visitors who, in their escape to the wide modern world in their younger years, rebelled against Jewish traditions and the world of the shtetl, it was after the Holocaust that some of these traditions made them optimistic about that future. This was another curious sign of early post-war ambivalence.

The conditions of Lower Silesia enabled the creation of large Jewish communities whose members lived close to one another and were able to participate in the dense network of Jewish institutions. They were not afraid to speak Yiddish in their daily life and could participate in and create a Jewish national culture. No less important were the new economic and political opportunities, as it seemed in 1946, created by the new Poland, giving Polish Jews not only formal but also real equality among its other citizens. Finally, for activists of the Joint, the JLC and the landsmanshaftn, like Samuel Leo Wohl, Joseph Tenebaum and Jacob Pat, or for journalists and writers like Samuel Leyb Schneiderman and Moshe Shulshtein, a Jewish future in Poland was made possible by the fact of their own presence in a country on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Their presence and activity, combined with Jewish political pluralism, the work of the Zionist movement, religious life and the flow of letters, money and goods between Poland and Western centres of the Jewish world, together constituted modern Jewish transnationalism, an important element of Jewish life in early post-Holocaust Poland. All these elements were a litmus test by which Jewish visitors assessed the chances for a collective Jewish future in Poland. This suggests that for many Western and Palestine-Jews in 1946 the Iron Curtain was far from having descended. The Cold War had only just broken out; its full consequences became evident only later, at least not until 1949. The absence of clear-cut alternative futures in the Jewish world shortly after the Holocaust enabled Jews from the US, Western Europe and Palestine to be engaged in Polish-Jewish affairs. Later, the polarization caused by the Cold War largely dashed all hopes for such a future.

Could Pat, Schneiderman and the others have foreseen that outcome? Was it at all predictable? Could it have been deduced from the internal logic of the Communist system and the way it had operated in Bolshevik Russia and the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1946? First of all, this non-empirical question cannot be decisively answered at the level of historical argument. Was it the logic of the Bolshevik-Leninist system which finally allowed people like Stalin to rise to unprecedented total power, conditioned the Great Purge of 1937, the demise of Soviet-Yiddish culture and the overall growth of the totalitarian dimension of the Soviet regime between the two world wars? Or were these events and processes outcomes of later decisions that could not be derived from this logic? ⁷⁷ The same questions apply to the situation in which Polish Jewry found itself after the Holocaust. The ‘logic’ of the demise of its political, cultural and social pluralism from 1949 to 1951 could be observed only after the fact. Predicting it in 1946 may have been possible, but no more easily than it would have been to predict the Soviet crackdown on the Jewish Anti-Fascist committee and the further developments of Jewish life in the Soviet Union after 1948. ⁷⁸ In 1946 and 1947, things could have gone in many directions. The Cold War, Communist authoritarianism in East-Central Europe (which never took a fully Soviet-Stalinist form) and the subsequent marginalization of Jewish communities were only then emerging. For these reasons, the aftermath of the Holocaust can be properly understood not as a stable state of affairs sealed in the brief period at the end of World War II, but only as a dynamic historical process developing in the context of the Cold War. The ultimate unwavering belief in the Jews having no future in Poland was established well after 1946 or 1947, and only gradually. For many people at the time, it seemed that this future was not yet sealed.