Władysław Gomułka's communist regime responded to 1968's calls by students and the intelligentsia for a Polish counterpart to the Prague Spring by stigmatizing protestors as “Zionists” and, finally, forcing some 15,000 “Poles of Jewish descent” into permanent emigration. Was this, as Anat Plocker concludes in her valuable book, “the last official, government-induced anti-Jewish campaign in Europe” (196)? Late Soviet policies complicate this judgment, but Communist Poland must bear the dishonor of the last mass expulsion of Jews.
Plocker, having dug deep into communist regime archives, constructs a now-authoritative event history of this lamentable turning point in People's Poland, while offering an interpretation meant to challenge prevailing judgments. The historical literature, authored both in Poland and in the west, agrees that the anti-Jewish campaign emerged from the shadows of pre-existing communist chauvinism to brightly lit center stage when Gomułka spoke publicly against a putative “Zionist fifth column” of party members and intelligentsia allegedly cheering Israel's battlefield victory in June 1967's Six Day War. Led by Interior Minister and communist war veterans’ association chief Mieczysław Moczar, CP “Partisans” released a flood of antisemitic propaganda, paranoically denouncing a Zionist-West German alliance, sealed by German funding of Israel, to discredit Poland, notably by charges of Polish collaboration in the Nazi Holocaust. This roiled the party, inducing Gomułka to authorize high-level purges in it and associated organizations, among which was the (hitherto CP-approved) Social-Cultural Society of Jews in Poland (TSKŻ).
This campaign gained momentum from the regime's repression of student/intelligentsia/working class protest in March 1968, triggered by demonstrations supporting a theatrical performance judged anti-Soviet by the authorities, but mushrooming into calls for “socialist democracy.” Gomułka publicly condemned the rebels as privileged Warsaw youth offspring (młodzież bananowa—able to purchase imported bananas) of discredited former Stalinist officials, branded as Jewish. Harsh crackdowns by police and working-class-recruited auxiliaries silenced what the regime labeled “revisionist,” Jewish-inspired calls for liberalizing reforms.
Thousands of prominent and loyal Jewish-descended Communist Party members, stripped of their jobs, followed Gomułka's call for “Jewish Jews” to emigrate. This outcome, disgraceful in intelligentsia eyes at home and abroad—in 1969 I myself incredulously witnessed “anti-Zionist” banners over Auschwitz streets—gravely weakened Polish communism. Neither Gomułka nor Moczar long survived in office, and the 1980s witnessed burgeoning opposition intent on toppling, not reforming, the communist system.
Plocker argues that existing literature, both Polish and English, interprets the anti-Zionist campaigns as undertakings serving ulterior purposes: to ingratiate the government with Moscow, to stave off revisionism, to open paths of advancement within the party to lower-echelon members. Plocker holds, however, that the authorities acted authentically from fear. Invoking recent theorizations of emotion in history, she argues that Gomułka and company convinced themselves that the Zionist-West German threat did indeed menace the existence of communism in Poland, not only as evidenced by the disinclination of many highly placed party and intelligentsia members to enthusiastically support the Soviet anti-Israeli line, but especially by widespread revisionist inclinations, which derived in reality from the defects of Gomułka's regime. One could go farther: the specters of pre-communist antisemitism awakened in them.
Plocker offers trenchant formulations of her position. By initiating discussion of Jews in the CP, “the genie was out of the bottle and Poles began speaking of a Jewish-dominated Communist Party, a belief that was already well spread among the population” (188). In the party leadership, “fear of the Żydokomuna [antisemitic shibboleth of ‘Jewish Communism’] trumped the fear of the Żyd [Jewish ‘fifth column’]” (188). With his characteristic wit, the Jewish-born communist poet Antoni Słonimski spoke of the reversal of fear of Jewish communism into “Żydo antykomuna,” a new myth that Jews in the CP were working secretly to undermine it (116).
Self-preservation led the party to end the anti-Zionist campaign, but by then it had dealt itself a deep wound in civilized eyes. Moreover, as Plocker demonstrates in an engrossing chapter on how the standard Polish encyclopedia's treatment of the Holocaust was revised in a Polish nationalist direction, the 1967–68 campaign gave enduring public voice to the post-communist right-wing defensiveness about Polish victimhood, antisemitism, and wartime collaboration that stamps official historiography and Holocaust politics to the present day.
The solid and sophisticated existing literature, as penned especially by Dariusz Stola, Joanna Wawrzyniak, Marcin Zaremba and other colleagues, acknowledges the irrational and emotionally-driven dimensions of the anti-Zionist campaign to a greater degree than Plocker allows. Her book, while not exactly the first English-language synthesis (see Joseph Banaś, Tadeusz Szafar, Lionel Kochan, eds., The Scapegoats: The Exodus of the Remnants of Polish Jewry [London, 1979]), nonetheless succeeds in establishing itself as an empirically pathbreaking and interpretively original and persuasive study of the final tragedy of Polish Jewry, and of those who sought equality and acceptance as “Poles of Jewish descent” in the society of their birth.
