Underground, The Story of A People

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Text originally published in 1953 under the same title.

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UNDERGROUND: THE STORY OF A POEPLE

BY

JOSEPH TENENBAUM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

PREFACE 5

PART ONE—Jewish History; Poland Restored; Nazi Timetable 7

CHAPTER I—A Thousand Years Of Jewish History 7

CHAPTER II—Poland Restored 26

CHAPTER III—The Nazi Timetable 39

PART TWO—Warsaw Ghetto; Ghetto Uprising; Rubble Fighters; Last Chapter; The Echo 43

CHAPTER IV—The Warsaw Ghetto 43

CHAPTER V—The Ghetto Uprising 58

CHAPTER VI—The Rubble Fighters 78

CHAPTER VII—The Last Chapter 88

CHAPTER VIII—Echo Of The Ghetto Uprising 96

PART THREE—Lodz; Czestochowa; Lublin; Bialystok 103

CHAPTER IX—The City of Lodz 103

CHAPTER X—Czestochowa (Chenstochova) 111

CHAPTER XI—Lublin 124

CHAPTER XII—Bialystok 135

PART FOUR—Extermination Camps; Ovens of Birkenau 145

CHAPTER XIII—The Extermination Camps 145

CHAPTER XIV—The Ovens of Birkenau 152

PART FIVE—Slaughter in the East; Lemberg; Wilno; Revolt of the Towns 160

CHAPTER XV—Slaughter in the East 160

CHAPTER XVI—My City Lemberg 168

CHAPTER XVII—Wilno (Vilna) 183

CHAPTER XVIII—Revolt of the Towns 212

PART SIX—PARTISANS: Eastern Sector; Galicia; Central Poland; Justine’s Diary 226

CHAPTER XIX—The Partisans 226

CHAPTER XX—Partisans In Galicia (Malopolska) 240

CHAPTER XXI—The Partisans In Central Poland 246

CHAPTER XXII—The Diary of Justine 259

PART SEVEN—Cracow; Oswiecim; Silesia 266

CHAPTER XXIII—Cracow, The Ancient Capital 266

CHAPTER XXIV—Visiting Oswiecim 272

CHAPTER XXV—The Jews In Silesia 279

PART EIGHT—Hitler’s Heritage; Death of a Civilization 283

CHAPTER XXVI—Hitler’s Heritage 283

CHAPTER XXVII—Death of A Civilization 287

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 294

POLISH SOURCE MATERIAL 295

MAPS 297

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 300

PREFACE

This is the story of a people, its origin, its history, its struggle for survival and its tragic end—the life-and-death story of Polish and other Eastern European Jewries. It is all this and more; more than a mere historical sketch or an episodic narrative of human greatness, more than a record of fighting gallantry and Nazi gore. It is the epic of a people, its prose and its poetry, its piety and devotional consecration, its visions of a heavenly glory in an environment of collective disapproval, its never-fading hopes amidst strains of despair—a people that lived by the book and died by the sword.

The vitality of these Jewries in so strange an environment—an underprivileged, underground minority, at best as citizens in exile—has been a puzzle to historians. Somehow their rise did not fit in with orthodox sociological theories or historical precedents. Neither did their tragic end, and while their life was a miracle, their execution is a nightmare which shall not cease plaguing the human mind, if not man’s conscience.

Different readers will find in this book different things. Some will be satisfied to learn the bare facts, others will be thrilled by the heroic struggle of a crushed minority. Yet the problem goes deeper. It is not merely that the evil that men do lives after them, indeed, it is not evil alone, but the source of evil that baffles and confounds. Experience has nothing to go by, and history offers no parallel on the subject of scientific mass murder.

How could the minds and hearts of civilized men have been perverted to the slaughter of old men, women and children by the mere theory of race inferiority? And if this were nothing but a convenient trick of rationalization, then it is no less an enigma how atavistic prejudice could succeed so easily in uprooting age-old taboos and shedding the veneer of an indoctrinated civilization. The epidemiology of collective moral insanity has never been satisfactorily investigated. It is a challenge to all of us and especially so to the social scientist, to the ethical culturist as well as to the theologian to probe and ponder the gravity of the offense.

Meanwhile many of us will wonder if all this was merely an apocalyptic flashback to primitive barbarity or a portent of the times. Fortunately, humanity has a way of returning to sanity every so often despite all the follies of the ages, and if this book, by giving a frank presentation of facts, can offer a modest educational contribution towards a better world, the author will feel amply rewarded for his labors.

Much research has gone into this volume. The field is vast and the literature on the subject has grown to sizable proportions. The publication of the Trial of the Major War Criminals alone consumes over forty volumes. The writer has endeavored to present the most essential facts and facets and to round out a composite picture in, it is hoped, as concise and readable form as possible. In this volume are included the most important phases of the anti-Nazi struggle, the various Jewish underground organizations and the little-publicized Jewish partisan movement. Their record is based to a large extent on the study of hitherto unpublished manuscripts and individual affidavits of Jewish survivors. Parts, incorporated in a previous publication, have been revised and expanded in conformity with the material more recently discovered and, in the case of the Ringelblum Archives, literally, unearthed. All the larger ghettos and many cities and towns have been reviewed, their history, their martyrdom as well as their heroic defense organizations.

The names of persons and places have been kept in their native spelling as far as possible. Extensive footnotes and citations have been omitted with a view of making the book more accessible to the general reader. A selected bibliography is appended instead.

The writer wishes to express his appreciation to his wife Sheila for her devoted cooperation and to his many friends who have read the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions.

PART ONE—Jewish History; Poland Restored; Nazi Timetable

CHAPTER I—A Thousand Years Of Jewish History

THE FOLLOWING historical sketch aims at being no more than an introductory review of the position of the Jew in the history of Poland. Its inclusion in this book was deemed necessary for the evaluations of his past achievements and of the circumstances leading up to the great tragedy that all but cut off the trail of Jewish history in Poland.

The dawn of history in Poland is enveloped in a mist of fact and fancy. Early history speaks in the winged language of legends. Paradoxical as it may sound, it can be assumed that Jews lived in Poland before there was a Poland. There are traces of Jews that lead to the ninth century, and legend has it that before the Piast dynasty was founded, a Jew called Abraham Prochownik was crowned, if only for a day, to reign over the country. Jews came to Poland from the South and the East, from the lands of Chazar and Bus, and later from the West, principally from Bohemia and Germany. In the eleventh century, Jews from Bohemia found shelter in Poland. The crusades with their bloody pogroms uprooted the Jews in the West and contributed to the shift of the Jewish population to the East.

To the Jews everywhere, under any circumstance, country or clime, there has always been applied the iron law of public utility. In the West, their pioneering efforts had spent themselves. In the East, there was an economic low pressure area and the population drift followed the trade winds. In the twelfth century, under Duke Mieszko the Third, and his successors, Jews were placed in charge of the mint and produced coins with Hebrew inscriptions. The development of cities and centers of commerce and handicraft did not materialize in Poland before the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and by that time, Jewish immigrants had fulfilled an important economic mission by transferring to Poland their skills in financial matters, credit and commerce. Since the Jews were dispersed over the entire globe, they were in a position to serve as the best medium for opening commercial routes and linking primitive countries with the centers of civilization. Then too, the Jews were free from the injunction imposed on the Christians against charging interest (usury), and this fact made them an asset to Christian believers, who were enabled to practice usury through Jewish intermediaries with a clear conscience. In the fifteenth century, their money lending function had declined in favor of commerce.

The most important asset of the Jews was fiscal. They were the Crown’s subjects. They and all their possessions belonged to the King. As a chattel of the Crown, servi Camerae, the Jews received from the Crown not a bill of rights but a statute of privileges, which granted them a modicum of personal safety and guaranteed economic life within certain limits. No other estate or subordinate power on the Crown’s territory could tax the Jews, because in the King’s language, we have preserved them for ourselves. The Special Privileges issued by Emperor Frederick II in favor of the Jews of Vienna in 1238, and those of Frederick II of Austria in 1244, served as a model for similar acts. They were based on the principle which was so well expressed by another ruler: These Jews as our subjects ought to be prepared with their money to serve our needs. The first Statute of Privileges was granted to the Jews of Great Poland by Boleslaw the Pious in 1264 (the Statute of Kalisz), and this was confirmed and extended to all of the Crownlands by Kazimierz the Great in the fourteenth century.

The great wave of Jewish immigration to Poland was intensified in the fifteenth century. Mass expulsions of Jews from whole provinces and districts of German territory caused an intensification of mass migration to Poland. As a result, the Jewish settlement in Poland grew rapidly in size. It formed the second largest Jewish settlement, by the sixteenth, and became the largest in the world, in the seventeenth century.

The intensified Jewish immigration was paralleled by Germans from urban centers who drifted towards Poland to exploit the new opportunities of trade and handicraft. The advantage was on their side, because they were not considered aliens in a country which was under the sway of the Cross. The Universal Church guaranteed them universal citizenship in all Christian lands. Thus the same factors which condemned the Jews to alien status made the Germans and Poles brothers in faith. Favored by these advantages and trained in a superior economic state, the German settlers brought with them to Poland not only their skills and their German laws (the Magdeburg Codex), but also a keen sense of competition, and the peculiar Germanic hatred of the Jews, which economic rivalry had sharpened to razor edge. German territories became not only exporters of settlers (the unceasing Drang nach Osten) but also the dispensers of their peculiar brands of anti-Semitic persecution. In the wake of German immigration followed the tales of ritual murder, desecration of the host and similar fabrications.

The German migrants settled in towns and cities and exploited their opportunities by laying the groundwork for the development of urban centers on the German pattern. They organized the cities and fought for the rights and privileges of the municipalities, the townspeople, the petty bourgeoisie. But they brought no freedom. They built walls not only around the cities but also raised protective barriers against competition in the form of brotherhoods, guilds and by means of prohibitive excise taxes. They guarded zealously against any infringement of their rights and fought for an extension of their privileges. Anti-Semitism was in itself a kind of tariff wall for the protection of their racial trade privileges, and they never flagged in their efforts to incite the populace to hatred, pogroms and expulsion of the Jews, their chief competitors.

At the end of the sixteenth century, conditions became so rigorous that most of the largest cities of Poland were closed to the Jews. Of those principal cities only Lwow and Poznan granted domicile rights to the Jews. In other cities of that size and importance, they were subject to expulsion by virtue of the non-tolerance privileges, which the burghers bought, begged or extracted from various rulers. In the Crown cities where Jews had been permitted residence, they were segregated into isolated streets and sections.

However, the Jews did not evacuate these cities completely. They moved to suburbs like Kazimierz, a suburb of Cracow, or Podzamcze (Under the Castle) in Lublin. They lived on the country grounds and possessions of the squires, starostas and, curiously enough, on Church and Jesuit grants. New communities of Jews erected on the outskirts of existing communities expanded rapidly in size and importance. In addition something of a building boom of towns and villages developed, and there was keen competition for urban settlers by enterprising magnates, the nobles and Church Princes.

The Jews enjoyed greater rights in these new settlements than in the old municipalities, not only economically but in some parts, as in Red Russia and Volhynia, a greater measure of political freedom. However, taking Poland as a whole, the economic situation and the political status of the Jews at that time was far from satisfactory.

Anti-Semitic agitation, expulsion and waves of pogroms fostered by a growing urban middle class, increased in direct proportion to the weakening of the Crown’s prerogatives. Gradually the Jews ceased to be the King’s wards. As early as 1539, King Zygmunt I had decreed that nobles having Jews in their towns and villages may enjoy all the advantages to be derived from them, but they would be required to try their cases. For, we (the king), not deriving any advantages from said Jews, are not obliged to secure justice for them.

The Jews, exposed to the whims of their new masters, restricted in commerce and trade by legislative barriers and persecution by the city magistrates, were driven into new avenues of economic life. These included the administration and leaseholding of estates, farming of excise revenues, bridge and road toll levies, exploiting salt mines and dispensing of the liquor trade, including the renting of distilleries, breweries and taveras (propination). They also managed dairies, lumber yards and mills. This brought a complete change in the position of the Jewish people. While as middleman, the Jew was an indispensable link in the economy of the szlachta, he was also more deeply dependent on the nobleman not only for protection but also for his daily bread. In time the Jew became more and more the special factotum of the nobility. With his economic status, the social standing of the Jew deteriorated. He became enslaved bodily and spiritually, and was forced to cater to the will of his noble owner. To the general anti-Jewish prejudice, the nobility added their own brand of insults, an attitude of condescension and disdain. These attitudes, the relation of sire to his factotum, brought to Polish anti-Semitism a note of contempt that shattered human dignity. The Jew became not merely the property of the lord, but his court jester. From the blending of German viciousness, alien to Polish tradition, and the courtly contempt of nobility developed that rank growth of a special kind of anti-Semitism which culminated finally in tragedy for Jew and Pole alike.

JEWS IN WARSAW

Until 1526, Warsaw, while a tributary, was not a province of Poland. It was part of the Duchy of Masovia. The Jews came late to Warsaw, later than to the more developed and to the more civilized Polish Crownland. The first traces of Jews in that region appear in 1237 in Plock, which was within the confines of the Duchy. The first records of Jews in Warsaw appear at the end of the fourteenth century, and the first historical source relating to their settlement in Warsaw dates back to 1414. The earlier half of the fifteenth century, under the reign of Janusz I, was a period marked by prosperity of the Jewish community in Warsaw. There were probably no more than one hundred and twenty Jews in Warsaw at that time.

This period or soon thereafter also witnessed the strengthening and development of the non-Jewish urban population of Warsaw which grew in power and wealth, and sought to monopolize trade and commerce. The only source of Jewish protection resided in the Dukes, who, in need of money, favored the Jews and granted privileges on the model of the Crown.

However, the Statute of Privileges of the Crown did not extend to Warsaw proper. Nor was there any uniform policy. The rights granted by one prince were rescinded by another who yielded to the bribes and blandishments of the tradespeople in the city. In 1454 and 1455, things took a drastic turn. The Church was menaced by schism, and a new wave of religious persecution swept the country. Pope Nicholas V, eager to restore the authority of the Church, sent a host of inquisitors throughout Europe to defend the true faith. Poland was favored by the arrival of the Franciscan monk John Capistrano, a scourge of the Hebrews, as his admirers referred to him, who tried to compensate for his failure against the rebels of the Church in Bohemia, with a crusade against the Jewish heretics in Poland. His trail was marked by bloody pogroms in Germany, Austria, Silesia and Moravia. He brought havoc to Poland.

A great orator and fanatical Jew-baiter, Capistrano hypnotized the crowd with his frenetic harangues and horror stories. In Cracow, he was instrumental in causing the outbreak of a bloody pogrom in 1454. The same year witnessed excesses against the Jews in Warsaw. In 1469, Duke Konrad III took the Jews under his protection. They were expelled in 1483. Thereafter with recurrent modifications and exceptions, Jews were forbidden to enter Warsaw, save during the periods of fairs, or for short intervals by special permission. The Jews did not abandon Warsaw, however, although Warsaw forsook them for three long centuries. They took up residence in the outskirts of the city and in the outlying settlements.

In 1526 the Duchy of Masovia joined the Polish Crown. King Zygmunt I and his successor Zygmunt August confirmed the privilegium of non-tolerance (Privilegium de non-tolerandis Judaeis) to the municipality of Warsaw. Its provisions were extended to the new Warsaw. In 1595, Warsaw became the capital of the Crown. Jews were permitted to enter the city during the Sejm sessions as well as during fairs.

The further history of the Jews in Warsaw becomes identified with the history of the Jews in Poland. Zygmunt I, though endeavoring to live up to the principle that equal justice be meted out to the rich and mighty lords and to the meanest pauper, had to yield to the lords and to the clergy in extending limitations on the Jews in their sphere of activities. This chain of discriminations had an adverse effect on the Jewish economic position not only in but around Warsaw. In accordance with a regulation passed by the Sejm commission, a Pole was permitted to earn on a transaction seven per cent of the cost, a foreigner five per cent, and a Jew three per cent. The life of the Jew was made increasingly difficult. The summit of the Jews’ difficulties arose from other quarters.

WITH FIRE AND SWORD

The seventeenth century witnessed a number of de-feats of the Polish Crown, the Cossack insurrection under Hetman Bohdan Chmielnicki, war with the Muscovite state and the conflict with Charles X of Sweden. The decade from 1648 to 1658 constitutes one of the darkest periods in Jewish history. The Ukrainian people rose against the Polish landowners, their exploiters, and because of deep national and cultural differences, the insurrection took at once a violent nationalistic turn. The Jew was in the middle between the warring forces and suffered the brunt of the terror despite the fact that he himself was a victim of discrimination. Thousands and tens of thousands of Jews were massacred. The bloodiest massacres took place in fortified cities. Thousands of Jews who sought safety and shelter were surrendered to the enemy by Ukrainian in-habitants or, as in the Podolian town of Tulczyn, by the Polish garrison. The Ukraine as well as Volhynia and Podolia were turned into one big slaughter house. The terrible slaughter in Niemirow was made possible partly through a ruse of the enemy and partly through the treachery of the inhabitants. The Ukrainian roving bands of revolting peasants raided White Russian and Lithuanian towns, destroying everything in their path. In the city of Homel, the Jews, betrayed into the hands of their murderers, died amidst terrible scenes of torture. Husbands, wives and children fell in heaps. They were not even given burial. Dogs and swine fed on their bodies, writes one chronicler.

Not in all places did the Jews succumb without a fight, and not in every place did treachery prevail. In September 1648, Chmielnicki at the head of his Cossack troops laid siege to the city of Lwow, the capital of Bed Russia (Gralicia). The Jews defended a sector of the city walls. The city magistrates refused the demand of the Hetman to surrender the Jews even while they had his promise to relieve the siege. The Cossacks finally withdrew after having received a rich ransom to which Jews and non-Jews contributed. In other cities, the Jews fought on until overwhelmed by the invaders.

Five years later, in the summer of 1654, the Muscovite-Cossack coalition spread destruction to the Jewish communities in White Russia and Lithuania. In Smolensk, Mohilew and partly in Wilno, the streets overflowed with the blood of Jewish victims. In Lublin the Jews tried vainly to ransom their lives.

The invasion of Swedish troops (1655-1658) brought a large part of Great and Little Poland under the sword. The Jews were accused of Swedish sympathies and, despite their participation in the defense of the Polish kingdom, paid with their lives. Polish troops under Stefan Czarniecki vied with the Cossacks in cruelty and fiendishness. The miracle of Jasna Gora (the Luminous Mountain) in Czestochowa where the first victory over the Protestant Swedes was won, became a symbol of religious frenzy and, as in every religious crusade, the Jews were the first and last to suffer. Forty Jewish settlements were completely wiped out. Little Poland followed Great Poland in the bloody carnage, with twenty Jewish settlements drenched in blood. This chain of events marked the culmination of the greatest disasters that had thus far befallen Polish Jewry. It reduced the Jewish population to one-half of its former numerical strength, and left a deep mark on the Jewish community, a wound that was slow to heal. Death, destruction, flight and poverty were the aftermath of this period of Polish history, which the great epic writer Henryk Sienkiewicz so aptly characterized as the Deluge.

A general depression followed the disastrous wars which struck the weakened Jewish population with the greatest force. About one-third of the Jews were concentrated in the innkeeping and liquor trades.

In the eighteenth century the Jews existed without the protection of the law unless they were shielded by a puritz, someone with sufficient power to exercise protective custody. For this kind of protection they paid heavily, frequently saddling themselves with debts to secure life and limb. The Jews were squeezed dry in this process. The lot of the Jewish middleman on the manor was one of injury and humiliation. Jewish innkeepers were flogged for the slightest failure to satisfy the whim or fancy of their lord and lessor. Jews paid for noble protection with their bodies and wealth—they supplied money and mayofoes (buffoonery to amuse the lord).

JEWISH AUTONOMY

The eighteenth century also brought to a close an era which witnessed the expansion of a unique system of Jewish autonomy. The Magna Carta of Jewish autonomy dates back to the charter of Zygmunt August, issued on August 13, 1551, and containing the principles of self-government of the Jewish communities in Great Poland. This charter gave the Jews the right to elect their own rabbis and lawful judges to take charge of their spiritual and social affairs. The elected rabbis and judges had authority to make decisions on questions of Jewish ritual, to perform marriages and grant divorces, and take charge of inner jurisdictional and private disputes, in accordance with the Mosaic law and supplementary Jewish legislation. Originally the organization of Community Councils, like almost everything else connected with the Crown’s interest in Jewish affairs, was prompted by fiscal considerations, the distribution and levying of the taxes for the exchequer of state.

As the sixteenth century neared its end, the former conferences of elders and rabbis which had been held regularly at Lublin fairs, became an assembly of representatives of Lesser Poland (Cracow, Lublin), Greater Poland (Poznan), Red Russia (Lwow), Yolhynia (Ostrog, Kremenetz), and Lithuania (Brzesc, Grodno). In 1623 Lithuania seceded and organized a Council of its own. The Lithuanian Council (Vaad Hamedinah) met every three years in Brzesc and other cities. The first chairman of the Council was Rabbi Meier of Brzesc, son of Saul Wahl. The remaining four Provinces formed the Vaad (Council) of the Four Lands.

The Vaad was often called a state within the state. Indeed it had appropriated many of the state functions besides the purely religious-ceremonial ones. It assumed authority over the entire complex of economic, political and moral relations within the communities, and was a sort of foreign office of Polish Jewry. It represented Jewry in the negotiations with the Crown, municipalities, Church and nobility, and acted as the spokesman of Polish Jewry in relation to Jewries in other countries. The power of taxation was vested in the Vaad, which also had the supervision over schools, books, publications and other cultural matters. Its moral authority extended to the prevention of the purchasing of stolen goods, prohibiting excesses in interest charges, unfair business practices or debasing metals.

By the eighteenth century, the Council and the district communities were staggering under a crushing burden of debts. They were unable to meet the increasingly heavier taxes and levies which the Crown, Church, municipalities and nobility imposed on the impoverished Jewish settlements. Taking over the distribution and guarantees of commercial credits, land-rent and leases (Chasaca) added to the load. The Vaad, the local and the district Kahals, unable to meet the demands of the creditors and investors, paid their debts with notes and bonds with an additional ten per cent interest, on an average. This caused a great accumulation of debts which crushed the Vaad.

In 1764, after two hundred years of its existence, the Vaad ceased to function. In that year the Convocation Sejm abolished the Central Council and left to the local councils some of the autonomous prerogatives. The institution of Jewish Autonomy in Poland was one of the most important organizations, and its passing was mourned by all Jewry. For by that time Poland was not only a numerically preponderant settlement of Jews, but the spiritual center of World Jewry. Under such conditions, the passing of a central authority was an irreparable loss.

THE DECLINE OF THE POLISH STATE

After the deluge of wars and revolts, the Crown was shorn of much of its power and Poland became a de facto republic of nobles.

In 1772 the first Partition of Poland took place. Poland lost about one-third of her territory to her three powerful neighbors. Austria acquired Galicia (some 200,000 Jews), Prussia the Corridor of West Prussia, consisting of Pomerania and part of the province of Poznan, and Russia the province of White Russia.{1} This partition was the culmination of a long process of internal decay and political decline. It shocked the Poles into a realization of the necessity of reforms. The Four Year (Great) Sejm (1788 to 1792) was called into session to promulgate a new constitution, to bring the old feudal system of government into line with the new commercial revolution and the emergence of new social forces which had rent the world with novel slogans and revolutionary movements.

This revolutionary ferment had also involved the Jewish question in the West. Accordingly it had to be dealt with east of the border line.

In 1782, an anonymous pamphlet called Jews, or The Urgent Need to Reform Jews in the Lands of the Republic, caused a stir by its frank appraisal of the situation. It became the vade mecum of the progressive elements. Maciej Topor Butrymowicz and Tadeusz Czacki, both liberals, demanded equality of treatment for the Jews. It was Butrymowicz who proclaimed that the cause of anti-Semitism was not a matter of the sole responsibility of the Jews; the Jew is as we make him.

At the newly convoked Sejm, a Commission for Jewish Reforms was appointed in June, 1790, to formulate a plan for the solution of the Jewish problem. The Commission prepared a project which was submitted to the Diet, but consideration was postponed, and perhaps the only direct practical benefit was that, during the long session of the Sejm, Jews had the right of residence in the capital. This increased their number in Warsaw to the consternation of the Polish traders. The latter, grown in economic power and political strength, warned the authorities that unless the Jews were immediately expelled they would take matters into their own hands. Accordingly, the Jewish traders and artisans were ordered out of Warsaw. Only merchants with stores and warehouses were exempted from the expulsion edict.

In spite of such episodes, a new step had been taken in Polish-Jewish relations. Brochures, leaflets and dissertations flooded the public with arguments pro and con on the problems of Jewish emancipation. All agreed that the Jew would have to give up his national identity as an initial step. What they differed on was not the fundamental question of Jewish identity but on the price to be paid for giving up that identity. As Jacob Lestchinsky so well characterized the situation: The Poles wanted to denationalize but not to assimilate the Jews. For centuries the stolid burghers isolated the Jews, expelled them, and, at best, ignored them. Now suddenly the cry was raised everywhere: The Jews are aliens, they are isolating themselves, they constitute a foreign body.

According to the census of 1764, the number of Jews living in Poland was estimated at 620,000 (Czacki’s estimate was 900,000). Jews formed one-eighth of the total population. A group of this size could not be ignored. Nonetheless, there existed neither generosity nor enlightened self-interest in the hearts of the majority. The Constitution of the Third of May (1771), that paragon of Polish democratic reforms, passed over the Jewish question in silence. A characteristic decision of the Sejm relating to city ordinances was that the cities were prohibited from denying citizenship rights to alien or native freemen who were Christians. Another one relating to retail trade reserved that privilege for the citizens of the respective cities, and the Jews were not citizens.

On January 23, 1793, the Second Partition took place, which cost Poland about half of her remaining territory and population. Prussia annexed Danzig and the provinces of Greater Poland (Kalisz, Plock, etc.); Russia incorporated the Eastern district, including Volhynia and the Polish Ukraine. The Poles struck back with the insurrection of Kosciuszko. The Jews rose to the defense of their motherland. Berek Joselewicz became the center of Jewish resistance in behalf of Poland. By special permission from the Polish-American hero-soldier Kosciuszko a Jewish regiment of light cavalry was formed, which for the first time in history, fought under the Polish flag. The great heart of Kosciuszko expressed itself in truly moving words in the following Order of the Day issued on the 17th of September, 1794:

The Jewish people, dispersed all over the world from the time they left their fatherland, have never taken part in these bloody exploits which the cruel despots have enacted throughout the world. In this year 1794, on the days of the 17th and 18th of April, when Warsaw joined battle with the Russian intruder, the Jews living in this city flocked to arms and courageously fought the enemy, proving to the world that where the interests of humanity were concerned, they did not think of their own safety. During the storming of Praga, on November 4, 1794, the Jewish regiment was practically wiped out. Delegates sent by the municipality of Warsaw to negotiate the surrender of the city reported the appalling sight of heaps of corpses on the ramparts.

In 1795, the Third Partition took place, with Russia gobbling up Kurland, Lithuania and Polesie, while Austria annexed the provinces of Cracow and Lublin to Little Poland, and Prussia swallowed the remainder of Great Poland, Warsaw and Masovia as well as the district of Bialystok.

JEWS UNDER PRUSSIAN RIGORISM

On April 17, 1797, the General Jewish Reglement was issued, which ordered all Jews to register and obtain protection papers. Only those who had been domiciled before and could produce proof of steady employment could remain in the occupied territory. In true Prussian fashion the tax screw was applied with more force than skill. The head tax was raised from three zlotys to ten. Every protected Jew (Schutzjude), from fourteen to sixty years of age, had to pay enlistment or protection taxes. The Prussian heel dug deep into the flesh of the 150,000 Polish Jews under Prussian domination. The Constitution of Servitude, as the Prussian system of government was dubbed, proved impossible of enforcement in Poland. It soon became clear to the authorities that the rigid Prussian system was inoperative in the fluid economy of Polish Jewry. New means were sought to accomplish Prussian purposes: to reform Jewish economy according to the Prussian concept of productive utility and to squeeze the maximum revenues out of the subjects of the Israelite faith.

Nevertheless some gains were registered with regard to the Jewish position, and the reforms instituted in 1802 exerted a considerable influence on the future. This was particularly true of the decree of King Frederick Wilhelm III, abolishing (except in Eastern Prussia) the prohibition of residence in certain cities and removing the legal obstacles barring the admission of Jews to the craft guilds. In practice it meant that after nearly three centuries, the decree of non-tolerance was abolished in 1802. Jewish rights of residence in Warsaw had been granted by the decree of April 17, 1797.{2}

As a result of these important reforms migratory movements from the smaller towns to the cities developed. Besides internal migration there was considerable immigration of new settlers from abroad. Among them were German Jews as a privileged class of business men, industrial entrepreneurs and intellectuals, and the underprivileged poor who were expelled from Prussia proper into the backwoods of the Eastern colony. Many privileged German Jews took root in Warsaw, opening commercial houses, shops and banks. However, events of a turbulent period cut short Prussian domination of Poland, leaving in its wake many unsolved problems.

THE DUCHY OF WARSAW

Napoleon, after the victory of Jena, in 1806, restored Polish sovereignty to parts of Prussian Poland. By the Treaty of Tilsit, on June 26, 1807, the Duchy of Warsaw was established. The Jewish population of this new state was 204,834 out of a total population of 2,039,653. The Saxon King Friedrich August became the head of the state. The legislative function was reserved for the Sejm. The Code Napoleon spread with the colors of the Tricolor. The new Constitution of July 22, 1807, gave equal rights to all citizens of the Duchy without distinction of creed. However, the Polish rulers soon experienced a change of heart. The Decrêt infame, applied by Napoleon to the Jews of Alsace and some of the other departments of France (on March 17, 1808), became the cornerstone of anti-Jewish legislation in the Duchy of Warsaw. It resulted in the following decree being issued by the Duke: To all the inhabitants of the Duchy of Warsaw who confess to the Mosaic religion, we suspend for ten years the use of political rights which they were about to receive, in the hope that during this period they will eradicate the stigmata which differentiate them so much from the rest of the population.

Other restrictions followed. The old prohibition of residence in Warsaw was restored in parts of the city. The old taxes were reintroduced, including the vexatious ritual meat consumption tax, calculated to net three million zlotys a year. On October 30, 1812, a final blow was struck. A decree was issued to eliminate the Jews from the liquor trade, which hitherto had been the sole means of support of thousands of Jewish families. The Franco-Russian War and the defeat of Napoleon intervened to arrest the execution of this decree. Like all wars, this one too, brought havoc upon the Jewish population. Just as the Jews were previously suspected of being Prussian collaborators, so they now were accused of being supporters of the Russian cause. On February 6, 1813, the Russian army entered Warsaw. A new-old chain of tragic experiences began for the Jews.

THE POLISH KINGDOM

In 1813, the Duchy of Warsaw came under Russian control. Two years later, the Kingdom of Poland was created at the Congress of Vienna. Hence the name Congressional Poland. In territory and population, the new kingdom was smaller than the former Duchy. It covered an area of 2,300 square miles, with a population of two and three-quarter million people of whom over 200,000 were Jews. A new ruler, Czar Alexander I, and a new Constitution were introduced into Polish history. As for the Jews, only the ruler was new. The Constitution merely reflected the penalties of the Prussian era and of the Warsaw Duchy. Only Christians were full-fledged citizens. Special grants were reserved for special Jews. The ghetto districts in the cities were retained and, if anything, narrowed. In Warsaw, the restrictions of Jews’ residences in certain streets and thoroughfares were made more rigid. According to the census of 1825, the number of Jews was 261,749, of whom 73,941 were listed in commerce, 159,837 in handicraft, 6,157 in leaseholding and 8,803 in agriculture. Almost twenty-seven per cent were without any sources of income.

A host of German immigrants was brought to Poland. The Germans who, by 1823, had made Lodz a textile export market for Russia, voiced strong objections to the participation of Jews in this field and succeeded in keeping them out of many other industries under their influence. Hence, Jews could only benefit partially from the new wave of prosperity which followed the opening of vast Russian markets. True, the Germans did not succeed completely in eliminating Jewish capital. Slowly the Poznanskis, the Posners, the Bergsons, the Bernhards and others rose to the top, either through the backdoor of renting factories or by starting from scratch in small shops as jobbers and subcontractors, and from there rising to greater heights. But the Jewish masses experienced little benefit from that. Some of the Polish writers had to admit that the majority of the Jews were living in dreadful poverty. One of these writers charged the government with the responsibility for not admitting the Jews to the guilds while foreigners like the Germans were solicitously welcomed. But there were other voices like that of Mochnacki who, though considered a progressive, wrote that Poland must have Polish cities and a purely Polish middle class. Even a man like Adam Czartoryski, though in general not unfriendly to Jews, had written that the Israelites are not natural inhabitants of our soil. He called them trespassers, foreigners and strangers who cultivate the habit and customs of a separate nation, and concluded that the Jews had no claim on citizenship rights.

On November 29, 1830, the November insurrection broke out in Poland. The Jewish masses, disappointed and dispirited, were not enthusiastic, but nevertheless rendered valuable aid to the Polish cause. On December 21, 1830, Josef Berkowicz (the son of the hero Berek Joselewicz) issued a fervent call to the Jews to rally to the common cause. He himself, with his seventeen-year-old son, enlisted. There was opposition to the enlistment of Jews in the National Guard. Later distinguished non-bearded Jews were admitted to the Guard. The bearded, but otherwise rich or distinguished Jews, were enlisted in the Jewish City Guard, formed for this special purpose by the head of the National Guard, Count Antoni Ostrowski. The Jews also participated in a special Security Force and in military workshops, while Jewish financiers, like Alexander Wertheim, contributed generously of their wealth. The insurrection soon collapsed and the Jewish people paid a heavy price. Jews in the provinces were killed by the insurrectionists as spies of the Czarist armies, while Czarist columns slaughtered Jews as Polish fighters and sympathizers. As villages and districts changed hands several times, Jews were hanged each time for contradictory offenses.

In 1855, Czar Alexander II ascended the throne. This event marked a new era in the history of the Jews in Poland. Czarist Russia was never pro-Jewish. On the other hand, it was not in the interest of the Czarist rulers to disregard the advantages of raising the status of the Polish Jews