Jacek Kuroń - Why anti-Semitism flourished in Poland (18/150)

To listen to more of Jacek Kuroń’s stories, go to the playlist:    • Jacek Kuroń (Social activist)   Polish activist Jacek Kuroń (1934-2004) helped to transform the political landscape of Poland. He was expelled from the communist party, arrested and incarcerated. He was also instrumental in setting up Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) and became a Minister of Labour and Social Policy. [Listener: Jacek Petrycki, Marcel Łoziński; date recorded: 1987] TRANSCRIPT: Marek Edelman was telling me that when they were getting rid of the small ghetto, they were getting rid of the ghetto altogether but section by section, and the 'small' ghetto was the part that was beyond Leszno, later it was all of it, but before they reached that point it was still section by section. And it was on the sections that people were already turning up, people who had instructions from the Germans to move into those apartments. They would come and watch as the Jews took their possessions with them. If there was a bag on a wagon, they'd throw themselves in it and take it, fighting to get it, the Jews would fight back and then battles would flare up. But you didn't even need that much - it was enough to look at the Jewish children in the streets. And here, anti-Semitism wasn't... we know there were anti-Semites, people guided by ideological anti-Semitism, who participated in activites to help Jews. Żegota was set up by Kossak-Szucka who was quite obviously an anti-Semite. She began Żegota. So you didn't have to, you could be an anti-Semite and not be, whereas a peson who looked on and walked past this - a child was killed, he had a child as well. Whether he wanted to or not, he had to feel a connection with the child that was being killed. And he had to save himself from this somehow. So it was on this fertile ground, on this need, that the whole anti-Semitic propaganda landed. It was done very well, very well indeed because like I've already said, that poster with the Jew's face looking like a louse really made an impression on me. It was subconscious. There was a need here, to stay sane you had to tell yourself there was someone worse than you, I said that was why I had this double burden. One was this overwhelming sense that I'd been assigned to the 'master race', I'd been made into someone better. The other was helplessness. The first of these two was enough to drive a person crazy, so to stay sane, to live normally, people had to tell themselves that Jews were inferior. I think this mechanism, this social self-preservation is an in-built mechanism. I saw it in all kinds of occasions, for example, when the residents of Warsaw were forced to leave. Are they catching people? No, it's the residents of Warsaw. I saw that. The displaced, in Lwów when they brought the newcomers - no, it was only those that had been rounded up, as they were called, when the Russians were deporting them. Because of course this was overlaid by earlier anti-Semitism and undoubtedly, undoubtedly even for Lwów the attitude of the Jews, some of the Jews, but that's irrelevant because from the outside you see a Jew - towards the Soviet authorities. My father would come and tell us about a Jewish woman who came and was saying something, giving a fiery speech in praise of the Soviet authorities, my father said: she was proclaiming. Of course, of course this was true only of some of the Jews, but they were visible. And I think this was a very far-reaching mechanism, this psychological self-preservation. In this sense, anti-Semitism fell on fertile ground and that's why it resurfaced so strongly as soon as the war was over.