The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland: Memory Wars and Homeland Anxieties by Anat Plocker (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland: Memory Wars and Homeland Anxieties by Anat Plocker Audrey Kichelewski Anat Plocker. The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland: Memory Wars and Homeland Anxieties. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. 240 pp. In 2018, Polish authorities commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the events of March 1968, when student protests demanding democratic reforms were violently crushed, while Polish Jews were blamed for political disorder and driven out of the country. While Polish president Andrzej Duda officially apologized to the families of those who were repressed and harmed by this hate campaign, his prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki pointed out that Poland was then not a sovereign country but depended on Moscow, thus implying that Poles need not be ashamed today for past antisemitism imposed from above, but rather only to be proud of those who fought for freedom.1 Against this backdrop, Anat Plocker’s thorough examination of the “anti-Zionist campaign” that led to the expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland offers a most welcome and convincing reply to political distortions of the past. Her study gives a new framework for understanding the events, showing how they were basically a product of Polish nationalist and antisemitic thinking within the Communist Party. No documentation suggests that the Soviets initiated the antisemitic campaign: the international context—the Six-Day War of June 1967 and the politicized memory of the war and the Holocaust in the Cold War frame— merely added to deeply rooted beliefs used to create an atmosphere of panic and search for scapegoats (Polish Jews as “Zionists”). Analyzing a broad range of sources, mainly archives from the Communist Party and Security Service, supplemented by contemporaneous propaganda material and testimonies from the protagonists of the time, the author provides new insight on events hitherto solely analyzed through the dissidents’ prism, overshadowing the anti-Jewish dimension, or seeing it as merely instrumental.2 Other recent publications have collected testimonies of victims of this hate campaign, showing its long-lasting traumatizing [End Page 481] effects rather than unraveling its mechanisms.3 Plocker argues that reading the use of antisemitism as a political tool for repressing democratic voices and distracting the masses from the real problems of the regime leads to seeing Polish society as easy to manipulate and “naturally antisemitic” (14), an essentialist and highly problematic assumption. Instead, she advocates for an in-depth study of the way the crisis was created, controlled, and dealt with. After an introductory chapter that helpfully retraces the situation of Polish Jews following the Holocaust in a country that had turned to Communism, the analysis shifts to the June 1967 war in the Middle East, which dramatically changed the lives of the tiny community of Polish Jews. This war and the subsequent “fifth-column speech” of First Secretary Władysław Gomułka accusing Polish Jews of supporting Israel—deemed as the aggressor by the Warsaw Pact countries—and thus traitors to the Polish nation, has often been seen as the first act of the anti-Zionist campaign. Plocker goes further by carefully analyzing how this event speeded up a longer trend within the Ministry of Internal Affairs of excluding Jews from the nation and transforming them into a subversive minority. The move from condemnation of Israel to struggle against “Zionist infiltrators” thus came from a genuine fear that had been created and promoted internally. The third chapter is probably the most novel. It focuses on a little-studied event closely linked with the anti-Jewish purge: the dispute over the entry devoted to Nazi concentration camps in the Polish encyclopedia, published in 1966. In the aftermath of the denunciation of “Zionist traitors” following the Six-Day War, a reevaluation of the Second World War narrative was promoted by national-chauvinists within the Party, rejecting the statement that death camps murdered primarily Jews, not Poles. In the context of growing awareness of the genocidal nature of the persecution of Jews during World War II, fear of potentially minimizing Polish suffering and heroism led to censorship, the firing of the editors, and a vast public campaign against the “falsification of history by world Zionism.” This episode paved the way for the...