Jews behind mayhem in Poland under Soviet occupation

Jews behind mayhem in Poland under Soviet occupation

Collection of articles taken from the Resistance site Polish Truth.

Żydokomuna in Poland?
Jews in the Red Army after the war
Jewish Soviet Collaboration in the east (quotes collection)
Julia Brystiger ("Bloody Luna")
Jewish Collaboration with the Soviets in post-war Poland
Eastern Poland – Jewish collaboration in the Borderlands
Jewish-Soviet Collaboration in the context of Polish History – Understanding the past through victim accounts
Abram Tauber - sample Jewish traitor

Żydokomuna in Poland?

Wikipedia and other sites, as well as individuals, say this term is derogatory and racist.

But what if the correlation between Communism and Jews is true?

Did Poles have the right to assume that many Jews were Communists?

Could Żydokomuna be a term used as a defense to avoid dialogue and accountability?

In the Communist Party of Poland, those that were "active" in certain areas mostly consisted of people of Jewish descent, who, for example, were in so-called technology (printing, courier communication, etc.), they constituted approximately 75 percent of the members. This incorporated into other various areas and lay at the root of the fairly widespread functioning Jewish “myth” of being "threats to Poland."

Can "myths" be true?

Given that Jews were at most 1 percent of citizens in Poland at the time, the situation seems quite clear he wrote: "In the light of the presented statistical data, the thesis about the high participation of Jews and people of Jewish origin in the leadership of the UB was formulated on the basis of true premises and as such reflects the historical fact."

Probably the most accurate data on an interesting topic was given by Dr. Krzysztof Szwagrzyk in the "IPN Bulletin in 2005.

But actually, much of this was factual.

Stereotypes were significantly strengthened during the Soviet occupation in 1939–1941. Among Jews, Poles saw those who supported the Soviets and benefited from Soviet orders, agitators, and militiamen; traitors and collaborators.

Many Poles were murdered by Jews that collaborated with the Communists. So sometimes "stereotypes" ring true and it may be worth trying to accept instead of blaming on a form of discrimination.

Here is an article that provides this information:

https://polishtruth.com/article/view/88/eastern-poland-collaboration-in-the-borderlands.html

When in 1944 the communists began to build a new system, the Ministry of Public Security (MBP), it had to be under the full control of trusted communists. The vast majority came from the CPP, so many Jews were in the leadership of the security service. Professor Paweł Śpiewak writes that they played the role of Janissaries. They were isolated from the rest of society, hated, ethnically strangers, professionally, and sentenced to life to the apparatus in which they worked.

One of the most brutal murderers who pacified the Białystok peasants in the 1950s was Colonel Józef Czaplicki (Izydor Kurc), who due to the persecution of the Home Army soldiers was baptized in the security service by the significant nickname Akower. The Communist Movement was dealt with by Department X MBP led by Anatol Fejgin. His deputy was the later famous fugitive to the West, Colonel Józeflight (before the war shoemaker and communist activist Isaac Fleischfarb).

In the Central Committee of the PPR / PZPR, Jakub Berman was the key figure responsible for the apparatus of coercion. Years later, Berman himself told Teresa Torańska: "I was aware [...] that I should not take the highest positions as a Jew or I could not [...]. Actual possession of power does not necessarily go hand in hand with displaying oneself [...]. I wanted to make a contribution, make a mark on this complicated power that was shaped, but without displaying myself. Of course, this required dexterity. " Berman has indeed left his mark on the new system. He personally directed the trials in which the murders of innocent people took place.

Reports of the Polish independence underground and articles of the underground press were less funny. They described the catastrophic picture of Poland being destroyed by communism and the Soviets. One of the most important tools for implementing this criminal policy were to be "nasty" "insidious" "traitors", "Murderers", "eternal enemies of Christianity" and "foreign agents" - Jews.

Along with this came much truth as it the crimes committed against the underground were perpetrated by Jews.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the issue of Jews in UB leadership was obviously a public taboo. The situation changed after 1956 when Władysław Gomułka became the party secretary again. He ruled for the first time in 1944–1948 and was then sensitive to the fact that there were not too many Jews in the party's leadership structures. He did not do so for anti-Semitic reasons. He simply wanted the PPR to obtain the widest possible, authentic social He believed that this would not be facilitated by the "too many" positions filled by persons considered by Poles to be foreign.

When in 1948 Gomułka's position in Moscow began to weaken clearly, he was convinced that the takeover of the rudder in the party by Berman and his associates would not bring anything good to the system. In a letter to Stalin, he wrote: "On the basis of [...] observations I can say with full responsibility that some Jewish companions do not feel connected with the Polish nation, and therefore with the Polish working class by no threads, or take a position that could be determined called national nihilism. " Comrade "Wiesław" was removed from power and then imprisoned.

Regardless of why many were put in power, they did.

He blamed the heroes of the letter for his fate. When he returned to power in 1956, he dealt with Berman, Hilary Minc, and his former opponents. Several more were sent to prison senior officers of the Ministry of Public Security of Jewish origin: Romkowski, Fejgin and Różański. Together with Gomułka, leading activists of the communist armed underground during the war, such as Mieczysław Moczar or Stefan Kilanowicz vel Grzegorz Korczyński, returned to high positions.

Many of them had personal accounts with the previous team. After the Arab-Israeli war, the Gomułka team's suppression of revenge for real and imaginary wrongs simply exploded. The names of Jewish communists, who in the years 1944–1954 held high positions in the party and the security apparatus, were ritually publicly mentioned.

A fair discussion of the facts became possible only in the Third Polish Republic.

The first more substantive voice in the case was the paper of professor Andrzej Paczkowski, delivered in 1995 on the basis of an internal security service. The professor stated that there were 131 out of 447 people in the security service at the security headquarters, i.e. not 13%, as claimed by prof. Krystyna Kersten, only about 30 percent Certain confirmation of the data provided by professor Paczkowski were published several years later Soviet documents.

He found that out of 450 people who held high positions in the Ministry of Public Security in the years 1944–1954 (from head over and above) there were 167 people of Jewish origin, i.e. 37 percent. In the Public Security Committee (1954–1956) formed from the MBP, the number dropped slightly and amounted to 34.5 percent.

You can read more about personal accounts from Poles who faced the criminal actions of the Jews:

https://polishtruth.com/article/view/77/jewish-soviet-collaboration- in-the-context-of-polish-history-understanding-the-past-through-victim-accounts.html

So as you can see 1 percent of Jews making up a considerable portion of the Communist party may be considered Żydokomuna, it is up for you to decide?

Jews in the Red Army after the war

After the Red Army entered Poland – Communist Jews, devoting themselves completely as experts on relations joined the NKVD services and were the main factor that contributed most to mass arrests, executions, and deportations of members of the Polish independence movement.

1949, USSR ambassador Viktor Lebedev, in his report to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs:
“There is not a single Pole in the Ministry of Public Security, from department heads to deputy ministers. They are all Jews.”

Why do I tell you this? Because I believe in justice and fairness and that people should know the true story of Poland from both sides. Not just the Jewish side, so people can understand that there may have been dislike against Jews but it didn’t come from classic antisemitism but from treason and loyalty.

To whitewash history and blame one people outright without clearly looking at the full story is deceptive, you are fooling yourself. Polish-Jewish relationships are complicated and not so black and white.

Jewish Soviet Collaboration in the east

We must also remember for the sake historical posterity that Poland was also attacked and betrayed from within and faced treason from amongst many of the Jewish citizens who collaborated with Poland’s enemies the Soviets.

This ignored part of history should be recalled so people understand the dynamics of Polish-Jewish relations. One cannot simply call the Poles anti-Semitic when they were fighting for their families and country.

Pograms against Poles were committed throughout the east with the utmost brutality, not unlike Ukrainian crimes. If we count victims, it may be likely that more Poles were murdered at the hand of Jews, than Jews killed by the Poles.

Julia Brystiger ("Bloody Luna")

Julia Brystiger (Bloody Luna)

Julia Brystiger ("Bloody Luna") was the daughter of a Jewish pharmacist from Stryj (now Ukraine). In 1920 she graduated from high school in Lwów (new Second Polish Republic) and married a Zionist activist Natan (Nathan) Brystiger. She studied history at the Lwów University while pregnant and a year later gave birth to a son, Michał Bristiger.

After graduating from University, Brystiger went to Paris where she continued her education, receiving a PhD in philosophy. Upon their return, in 1928–1929, she got a job at a high school in Vilnius and in a Jewish Teacher’s College Tarbuch. Since 1927, she was an active participant in the communist movement, and in 1929 was fired because of her communist agitation. Working for the Communist Party of Poland, she was arrested several times, and in 1937 was sentenced to 2 years in prison.

After the German and Soviet attack on Poland, Brystiger escaped to Samarkand, accepted Soviet citizenship and became an active member of the Soviet political administration. She created the so-called Committee of Political Prisoners, which helped the NKVD to imprison several members of the prewar Polish opposition movements. She was “denouncing people on such scale, that she antagonized even Communist party members”. Ironically, at one point Brystiger oversaw the interrogation and persecution of Bela and Józef Goldberg – her future colleague, the UB interrogator known as Józef Różański. Różańskis had committed “a crime” of accepting Western food-aid in the form of two kilograms of rice and a bag of flour from the Polish Government in Exile’s embassy, in order to save their daughter from starvation.

A few years later, Józef Różański joined the NKVD and eventually, became a high ranking functionary in the Polish secret police. He ended up working alongside Brystiger – his former interrogator – in the Ministry of Public Security of Poland under Stalinism.

Following German Operation Barbarossa Brystiger fled to Kharkov, then to Samarkand deep in the USSR. In 1943-44, she worked for the Union of Polish Patriots, and in October 1944, joined the new Polish Workers’ Party. In December 1944, after returning behind the Soviet front, Brystygier began working for the infamous Ministry of Public Security of Poland, where she soon got promoted to the rank of Director of the Fifth Department created in July 1946 specifically for the purpose of persecution and torture of Polish religious personalities.

Her career is believed to have been so rapid also because she was intimate with such high functionaries as Jakub Berman and Hilary Minc. In the Polish official archives, there is an instruction written by Brystygier to her subordinates, about the purpose of torture:
In fact, the Polish intelligentsia as such is against the Communist system and basically, it is impossible to re-educate it. All that remains is to liquidate it. However, since we must not repeat the mistake of the Russians after the 1917 revolution, when all intelligentsia members were exterminated, and the country did not develop correctly afterwards, we have to create such a system of terror and pressure that the members of the intelligentsia would not dare to be politically active.

Brystiger personally oversaw the first stages of each UB investigation at her place of employment. She would torture the captured persons using her own methods such as whipping male victims’ genitals. One of her victims was a man named Szafarzynski – from the Olsztyn office of the Polish People’s Party – who died as a result of interrogation carried out by Brystygier. One of the victims of her interrogation methods testified later: “She is a murderous monster, worse than German female guards of the concentration camps”. Anna Roszkiewicz–Litwiniwiczowa, a former soldier of the Home Army, said about Brystygier: “She was famous for her sadistic tortures; she seemed to have been obsessed with sadistic treatment of genitalia and was fulfilling her libido in that way.”.

Brystiger became the head of the 5th Department of MBP sometime in the late 1940s. It specialized in the persecution of Polish religious leaders. Brystygier – a dogmatic Marxist – yearned to destroy all religion as an “opiate of the masses”. She directed the operation to arrest and detain the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski. The decision to arrest him had been made earlier in Moscow. Brystygier took an active part in the “war against religion” in the 1950s, in which only in 1950 (in one year), 123 Roman Catholic priests were imprisoned.

She also persecuted other congregations, such as the 2,000 jailed Jehovah’s Witnesses. Julia Brystygier left the Ministry of Public Security in 1956 and tried to become a writer, authoring a novel “Crooked Letters”. She worked in a publishing house under Jewish communist Jerzy Borejsza (Różański’s brother), and was a frequent visitor to a blind school.

Jewish Collaboration with the Soviets in post-war Poland

In the Communist Party of Poland, those that were “active” in certain areas mostly consisted of people of Jewish descent, who, for example, were in so-called technology (printing, courier communication, etc.), they constituted approximately 75 percent of the members. This incorporated into other various areas lay at the root of the fairly widespread functioning Jewish “myth” of being “threats to Poland.”

When in 1944 the communists began to build a new system, the Ministry of Public Security (MBP), it had to be under the full control of trusted communists. The vast majority came from the CPP, so many Jews were in the leadership of the security service. Professor Paweł Śpiewak writes that they played the role of Janissaries. They were isolated from the rest of society, hated, ethnically strangers, professionally and sentenced to life to the apparatus in which they worked.

Many of them grew into symbols of the Stalinist system of repression and crime. These include Mieczysław Mietkowski (Mojżesz Bobrowicki), Salomon Morel, Roman Romkowski (Natan Grynszpan-Kikiel) and Józef Różański (Goldberg) – a psychopathic torturer, an NKVD officer during the Soviet occupation. The brain of many security operations and an extremely influential person was the director of Department V MBP was Julia Brystiger. One of the most brutal murderers who pacified the Białystok peasants in the 1950s was Colonel Józef Czaplicki (Izydor Kurc), who due to the persecution of the Home Army soldiers was baptized in the security service by the significant nickname Akower. The Communist Movement was dealt with by Department X MBP led by Anatol Fejgin. His deputy was the later famous fugitive to the West, Colonel Józef Swiatlo (before the war shoemaker and communist activist Isaac Fleischfarb).

In the Central Committee of the PPR / PZPR, Jakub Berman was the key figure responsible for the apparatus of coercion. Years later, Berman himself told Teresa Torańska: “I was aware […] that I should not take the highest positions as a Jew or I could not […]. Actual possession of power does not necessarily go hand in hand with displaying oneself […]. I wanted to make a contribution, make a mark on this complicated power that was shaped, but without displaying myself. Of course, this required dexterity.” Berman has indeed left his mark on the new system. He personally directed the trials in which the murders of innocent people took place.

Jews also appeared in high state positions, in the economic apparatus, in the army. The paradox was that this took place after the murder of the Jewish community in Poland. For the average citizen, the Jews disappeared from the area, but they appeared massively in the structures of the new government, and of course in the security service. This again strengthened the stereotype of Jewish communists sometimes taking the form of “Jewish security”. Jews became ubiquitous and all-powerful, ruled Poland. In the 1940s on the Warsaw street, the question: “What is the most important party in Poland?” the answer was: “Bermanówna.” Reports of the Polish independence underground and articles of the underground press were less funny. They described the catastrophic picture of Poland destroyed by communism and the Soviets. One of the most important tools for implementing this criminal policy were to be “nasty” “insidious” “traitors”, “Murderers”, “eternal enemies of Christianity” and “foreign agents” – Jews.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the issue of Jews in UB leadership was obviously a public taboo. The situation changed after 1956, when Władysław Gomułka became the party secretary again. He ruled for the first time in 1944–1948 and was then sensitive to the fact that there were not too many Jews in the party’s leadership structures. He did not do so for anti-Semitic reasons. He simply wanted the PPR to obtain the widest possible, authentic social He believed that this would not be facilitated by the “too many” positions filled by persons considered by Poles to be foreign.

When in 1948 Gomułka’s position in Moscow began to weaken clearly, he was convinced that the takeover of the rudder in the party by Berman and his associates would not bring anything good to the system. In a letter to Stalin he wrote: “On the basis of […] observations I can say with full responsibility that some Jewish companions do not feel connected with the Polish nation, and therefore with the Polish working class by no threads, or take a position that could be determined called national nihilism.” Comrade “Wiesław” was removed from power and then imprisoned.

He blamed the heroes of the letter for his fate. When he returned to power in 1956, he dealt with Berman, Hilary Minc and other his former opponents. Several more were sent to prison senior officers of the Ministry of Public Security of Jewish origin: Romkowski, Fejgin and Różański. Together with Gomułka, leading activists of the communist armed underground during the war, such as Mieczysław Moczar or Stefan Kilanowicz aka Grzegorz Korczyński, returned to high positions. Many of them had personal accounts with the previous team. After the Arab-Israeli war, the Gomułka team’s suppression of revenge for real and imaginary wrongs, as well as the usual hatred of Jews, simply exploded. The names of Jewish communists, who in the years 1944–1954 held high positions in the party and the security apparatus, were ritually publicly mentioned.

A fair discussion of the facts became possible only in the Third Polish Republic.

The first more substantive voice in the case was the paper of professor Andrzej Paczkowski, delivered in 1995 on the basis of an internal security service. The professor stated that there were 131 out of 447 people in the security service at the security headquarters, i.e. not 13%, as claimed by professor Krystyna Kersten, only about 30 percent of confirmation of the data provided by professor Paczkowski were published several years later Soviet documents.

In one of them, responsible for the pacification of Poland and the destruction of the underground, NKVD adviser to the Ministry of Public Security, General Mikołaj Seliwanowski, wrote at the end of 1945: “18.7% of Jews work in the Ministry of Public Security, Jews hold 50% of managerial positions. 27% of Jews work in the First Department of this Ministry […]. They hold all managerial positions. In the Personnel Department – 23% of Jews, in managerial positions – 7 people. In the Department of Officers (special inspection) – 33.3% of Jews, all hold responsible positions. 49.1% of Jews in the Sanitary Department of the Ministry of Public Safety, 29.9% of Jews in the Finance Department. ” Probably the most accurate data on an interesting topic was given by Dr. Krzysztof Szwagrzyk in the “IPN Bulletin” in 2005. He found that out of 450 people who held high positions in the Ministry of Public Security in the years 1944–1954 (from head over and above) there were 167 people of Jewish origin, i.e. 37 In the Public Security Committee (1954–1956) formed from the MBP, the number dropped slightly and amounted to 34.5 percent. Given that Jews were at most 1 percent of citizens in Poland at the time, the situation seems quite clear he wrote: “In the light of the presented statistical data, the thesis about the high participation of Jews and people of Jewish origin in the leadership of the UB was formulated on the basis of true premises and as such reflects historical fact.”

Translated from Polish.

[still from Andrzej Wajda's 2007 movie "Katyń"]

Eastern Poland – Jewish collaboration in the Borderlands

Almost everyone knows about the so-called pogroms of Jews in Poland; although they are only so-called, practically no one knows of the pogroms committed against the Poles by Jews. These horrific crimes began the moment the Soviets entered Poland. Why don’t we know? Because the Polish were unable to write their own history. They were behind the Iron Curtain, and others were writing their story.

What was it really like during the Soviet invasion?

Only recently, on the pages of Rzeczpospolita, was a lengthy article by Professor Tomasz Strzembosz, a distinguished researcher of recent Polish history, especially the period 1939-54. Strzembosz’s article demonstrates the Jewish population's actual role in eastern Poland during the first Soviet occupation.

The discussion to date, declares Strzembosz, “overlooks the most important fact: what happened in Jedwabne after the German army entered the area, i.e. who, when, and in what circumstances carried out the mass murder of the Jewish population of Jedwabne.” Strzembosz analyzes in-depth the behavior of the Polish and Jewish populations in the years 1939-41, especially the initial and final periods of the first Soviet occupation.

Jews Joined the NKVD

“The Jewish population,” writes Strzembosz, “especially the young and the urban poor, participated en masse in greeting the entering [Soviet] army and in introducing the new order, even with guns in their hands. There are also thousands of testimonies to this: Polish, Jewish and Soviet; there are the reports of the Armed Combat Union commander-in-chief, Gen. Stefan Grot-Rowiecki, and there is the report of courier Jan Karski; there are accounts recorded during the war and in the postwar years.

Jews Executing Poles

What is more, the “guards” and “militias” springing up like mushrooms right after the Soviet attack were primarily made up of Jews. Nor is this all.

Jews committed acts of revolt against the Polish state, taking over towns and setting up revolutionary committees there, arresting and shooting representatives of the Polish state authorities, and attacking smaller or even reasonably large units of the Polish Army (as in Grodno). It was armed collaboration, the side of the enemy, betrayal in the days of defeat.”

Organizers of the red terror

The Fifth Column

So it was in the first period when the Polish state was still defending itself when our army units were fighting, and it seemed that not all was lost. The Jews then played the role of a “fifth column.” Later, things became much worse. Strzembosz cites the conclusions of Dr. Marek Wierzbicki as to who implemented the Bolshevik terror – of course, the NKVD and, before that, the Red Army. Still, the miscellaneous guard formations and militias played a decisive role every day. And their ranks were primarily filled with Jews. “Polish Jews in civilian clothes, with red bands on their arms and armed with guns also play a large part in arrests and deportations.

That was the most drastic thing, but for the Polish community, another glaring fact was the large number of Jews in all the Soviet agencies and institutions. In September-December 1939, numerous arrests took place of those representatives of the Polish population who, before the war, filled high functions in the administrative and political structures of the Polish state or were very involved in community work. The local Jews, members of the temporary administration or militia, provided extensive assistance to the Soviet authorities in tracking down and arresting them.”

Jews Picked Out Poles For Execution

Why did this happen? What were the roots of this terrible hatred toward Poland and the cruel revenge on Poles? “It is true,” writes Strzembosz, “things were not going very well for the Jews in Poland. But still, Jews were not being deported to Siberia, shot, sent to concentration camps, or killed by hunger and slave labor. If they did not consider Poland their homeland, they still did not have to treat it as an invader and join its mortal enemy in killing Polish soldiers and murdering Polish civilians fleeing to the east. Nor did they have to take part in designating their neighbors for deportation.”

Torture in Jedwabne

Strzembosz proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that events took precisely the same course in Jedwabne itself. Here is one account from a resident of Jedwabne, Józef Rybicki, summing up what happened in the town after it fell to the Soviets:

Revenge On Their Polish Neighbors

“Jews who had put up an archway greeted the Red Army. They changed the old town government and proposed a new one drawn from the local population (Jews and communists). They arrested the police, the teachers . . . They led the NKVD to apartments and houses and denounced Polish patriots.” The description of the tortures inflicted upon Polish conspirators by the NKVD in Jedwabne is shocking. The following is an account by Corporal Antoni B., a member of the anti-Soviet underground who was turned in to the NKVD by Jews:
“they took me for interrogation, the investigating judge and the NKVD commander and one torturer came, and they sat me on a stool next to a brick wall, then I look over, and one in civilian clothes took a stick from behind the stove like the kind in the walls of our tents, that long and thick, and suddenly they threw me on the floor and stuffed my cap in my mouth and started to beat me, I couldn’t cry out because the judge sat on my legs and the second one held me by the head and held the cap in my mouth, and I fought back until I tore the cap to bits, and the third torturer beat me the whole time, I got that stick more or less 30 times, and they stopped beating me and sat me on the stool by the wall. I had long hair, and the senior lieutenant grabbed me by the hair and started to beat my head against the wall, I thought that nothing would be left of my head. He tore the whole clump of hair from my head. They threw me on the ground and started to beat me with a hazel stick, they turned me from side to side and beat me, and in addition, two of them were still sitting on me and suffocating me and said that they would finish me off. They kept beating me until they probably knew that I couldn’t take anymore, so they finally let me go. They beat me like a cat in a sack, and at the end, they sat me on the stool and beat me with the stick on the arms.” (from W czterdziestym nas matko na Sybir zesłali [In 1940, Mother, They Sent Us to Siberia], published by the Solidarity Interfactory Structure, p. 82).

NKVD Ship Poles To Siberia

I took this text from a collection of accounts prepared years ago for print by Professor Jan T. Gross. When writing his book about Jedwabne, Gross skips over the description of Antoni B.’s arrest and torture, although he quotes other fragments of this account. Why?

The facts leave no room for doubt: the Jedwabne Jews, as in the entire territory occupied by the Soviets, constituted the nuts and bolts of the machinery of repression. Up to the last moment, they were delivering Polish patriots into the hands of the NKVD and preparing the next deportation transports to Siberia.

Polish Jews Were Ecstatic When Russians Occupied Poland

[The text below is mainly taken from Neighbours on the Eve of the Holocaust - Polish-Jewish Relations in Soviet-Occupied Eastern Poland, 1939–1941, Chapter 5, by Mark Paul. Consult it for references/sources to the quotes.
Note: Headlines in bold in the segments below, also those in quotes, have been added by this site]

The Targeting of Polish Officials and Civilians

Numerous testimonies attest to the prominent role played by Jews in the militias and “revolutionary committees” that sprung up both spontaneously and at Soviet urging. These entities often played a decisive part in getting the new regime and its machinery of repression off the ground. Their activities were buttressed by large numbers of individual collaborators acting on their own initiative to further the Soviet cause.

The Bandits Took Charge

Throughout Eastern Poland; local Jewish, Belorussian, and Ukrainian communists formed militias and “revolutionary committees.” With the blessing of the Soviet invaders, they apprehended, robbed, and even murdered Polish officials, policemen, teachers, politicians, community leaders, landowners, and “colonists” (i.e. interwar settlers) – the so-called enemies of the people. They also plundered, set fire to Polish property, and destroyed Polish national and religious monuments. Scores of murders of individuals and groups have been recorded. Robbery of Polish property took on massive proportions, with the spoils enriching the collaborators’ families and communities.

One of the earliest and most hideous crimes was the murder of almost as many as fifty Poles in the village of Brzostowica Mała, near Grodno around September 20, before the Soviets were installed in the area.

Vicious Jews Killed A Polish Countess

A pro-communist band with red armbands and armed with blades and axes, led by a Jewish trader by the name of Ajzik, entered the village, dragged people out of their houses screaming, and cruelly massacred the entire Polish population. The victims included Count Antoni Wołkowicki and his wife Ludwika, his brother-in-law Zygmunt Woynicz-Sianożęcki, the county reeve and his secretary, the accountant, the mailman, and the local teacher. The victims of this orgy of violence were tortured, tied with barbed wire, pummelled with sticks, forced to swallow quicklime, thrown into a ditch, and buried alive.

The paralyzed Countess Ludwika Wołkowicka was dragged to the execution site by her hair. Żak Motyl ordered the murder, a Jew who headed the “revolutionary committee” – composed of Jews and Belorussians – in Brzostowica Wielka. Typically, the culprits were never punished. On the contrary, the NKVD officers praised them for their “class-conscious” actions, and Ajzik was made the president of the local cooperative. The racist aspect of the crime, however, is undeniable – only members of the Polish minority perished at the hands of their non-Polish neighbors.

Janusz Brochwicz-Lewiński, an officer cadet who attained the rank of corporal in 1939, was captured by the Soviets near Stołpce. He was one of fifteen Poles, a judge, a pastor, a chaplain, a teacher, and several civil servants, taken before an NKVD tribunal in groups of five and sentenced to death. Fortunately, his group escaped while being transported to their unknown execution site. The other ten condemned Poles were executed by firing squad.

Judges, Policemen, Teachers Were All Killed

While Brochwicz-Lewiński was imprisoned in Stołpce, an NKVD officer made the rounds in the company of his aide, a local Jew who identified the members of the Polish educated class, now the so-called enemies of the people, among whom he had lived for years, by their occupation: judge, teacher, policeman, civil servant, forest-ranger, landowner.

Killed Catholic Priests

Equally despicable were the murders of Catholic clergymen carried out by roving gangs of Jews and Belorussians such as that of Rev. Bronisław Fedorowicz, the pastor of Skrundzie near Słonim, and those of Rev. Antoni Twardowski, pastor of Juraciszki, near Wołożyn, and the latter’s cleric, the Jesuit Stanisław Zuziak.

A rabble of pro-Soviet Jews and Belorussians came to apprehend Rev. Józef Bajko, the pastor of Naliboki near Stołpce, intending to hand him over to the Soviet authorities or to possibly lynch him (as had been done in other localities). A large gathering of parishioners foiled these plans, allowing Rev. Bajko to escape before the arrival of the NKVD.

Henryk Poszwiński, the prewar mayor of Zdzięcioł, a town near Nowogródek, described the new order in his town:

In Zdzięcioł, a Jewish woman named Josielewicz stood at the head of the revolutionary committee, which was organized even before the arrival of the Soviet army.

Jews Executed Polish Police

The local police left town just after the Red Army had crossed the border. On the evening of September 17, I was informed that a band of criminals released from jail was getting ready to rob some stores. I called a fire brigade and civilian guard meeting, and these two organizations began to provide security in our town. The stores were spared, but the [criminal] bands attacked the defenseless civilians escaping eastward from the Germans. The culprits stripped them of their clothes, shoes, and anything else they had on them. Those, who resisted, were cruelly killed on the spot. Outside the town, roadside ditches were strewn with dead people. ... The revolutionary committee, which soon disarmed the fire brigade and civilian guard, stood by idly while all this took place.

In the morning hours of September 18th, a small detachment of the Polish army still traversed Zdzięcioł. A field hospital team was transported in a dozen horse-drawn carriages. The convoy consisted of thirty soldiers led by a sergeant. The revolutionary committee attempted to stop and disarm them. The soldiers discharged a volley of gunfire into the air. The revolutionary committee ran out of town in a stampede and hid in the thickets of the municipal cemetery. ...

In the afternoon hours of September 18th, the Soviet army entered Nowogródek. That evening the first three Soviet tanks arrived in Zdzięcioł. The entire revolutionary committee, headed by Josielewicz, came out to greet the invaders shouting: ‘Long live the great Stalin!’ After a short stop, the tanks moved toward Słonim. The revolutionary committee ordered owners to display red flags in their houses. The Poles cried like children, tearing the white portion off the [white and red] Polish flags. ...

In the morning hours of September 19th, a Jew from the revolutionary committee came to the town hall and advised me that the committee was summoning me to attend a meeting concerning an epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease which had broken out among some cattle that had been brought to Zdzięcioł. Believing what I had been told to be accurate, I immediately got up from my desk and accompanied that man to the headquarters of the committee located at the other end of town. I had to wait about an hour before I was taken to the chairwoman’s office. During that time, I observed the accurate picture of the “revolution.” Hundreds of people surrounded the committee premises; most of them were women who had broken out in tears and were wailing. ‘Return our stolen property!’ they cried. ‘Release our husbands and fathers of our children!’ ...

People who had been badly beaten occupied the corners of the room; most of them were refugees fleeing the Germans. The committee members, who were dressed in civilian clothes with red armbands and had Soviet stars on their hats, carried rifles or revolvers in their hands and competed with each other in brutally mistreating these people. It was a sight that I had difficulty countenancing.

After about an hour’s wait, the door was thrown open, and I was summoned into the chairwoman’s office. When I entered, I noticed three rifle barrels pointed at me. One of the bandits yelled, ‘Hands up!’ I raised my hands and turned to the chairwoman. ‘What have I done wrong? Why are you treating me like this?’ Although she knew Polish well, Josielewicz replied in Russian, ‘You will find out in due course.’ ...

After being searched [and stripped of all my personal effects. I was instructed to move toward the table occupied by Josielewicz, the chairwoman, and by a Soviet NKVD officer. The officer removed a form from his bag and started to complete it. ... The last portion of the form asked for the reason for my arrest and imprisonment. Before filling it out, the NKVD officer turned to the chairwoman and asked what to enter. The chairwoman replied, ‘He’s a Polish officer, a Polish patriot, the town's former mayor. That’s probably reason enough. The NKVD officer wrote in this portion: ‘Dangerous element.’

After filling out this form, three committee members escorted me to police detention. Twenty-three people had been arrested in a small detention room built to hold no more than four people for a short period. Unable to sit in that crowded place, we had to stand next to one another the whole time. People fainted from lack of air and had to relieve themselves on the spot. Among those arrested were school principals, county reeves, village administrators, officials, and various others who had escaped eastward from the Germans, as well as a priest who often repeated under his breath, ‘Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.’

We spent almost an entire day in this place of detention. Finally, on September 20, we were put in a truck and taken to the jail in Nowogródek. During the journey, which lasted more than an hour, we were lying on the floor of the truck used to transport coal while four Jews from the revolutionary committee watched us with rifles in their hands. Every now and then, one of them would warn us, ‘Don’t lift your heads, or you’ll get a bullet in your skull.’

Along the road over which the truck moved slowly, we encountered Soviet artillery going in the opposite direction in many places. Soviet soldiers would approach our vehicle during the stops and ask, ‘Who are you carrying, and where are you going?’
‘We’re taking Poles to the jail,’ the guards would answer.
‘What have they done wrong?’
‘They haven’t done anything. It’s enough that they’re Poles!’

From Clerk To Head Of The Militia

In Baranowicze, Jews filled the “red militia” ranks and denounced Polish officers, policemen, teachers, and government officials to the NKVD. At night black box-like carriages arrived at the homes of these people. They were loaded on, taken to the railway station, and deported to the Gulag – never to be heard from again. Among those arrested with the assistance of local Jews was the sister of Bogusław J. Jędrzejec and eight members of her family. The NKVD murdered her husband and father in Baranowicze; the rest of the family was deported to the Soviet interior in the winter of 1939–1940. According to historian Yehuda Bauer, ‘Jewish agents of the Soviet secret police penetrated every corner; everyone was terrified of being denounced and deported.’

According to Nachum Alpert, in Słonim,

A provisional city administration was organized in Slonim, headed by Matvei Kolotov, a Jew from Minsk. ...

Kolotov immediately began organizing a “Workers Guard” (a temporary militia), whose function was to maintain order in the city. Heading this Guard was Chaim Chomsky, a veteran communist. ....

... And no sooner did the NKVD arrive than it made itself felt everywhere. First, they deported merchants, manufacturers, Polish officers, and police; then Bundists, Zionists, Trotskyites, and Polish “colonists” and “kulaks” from the villages. Many innocent people were caught in this dragnet.

According to Polish sources, Chaim Chomsky (Chomski), who took charge of the “revolutionary committee,” issued a direction to have the Polish mayor Bieńskiewicz arrested when he reported to work on September 18; afterward, all traces of the mayor disappeared.

A Jew, soldier in the Polish army, who found himself in Slonim for a brief period in September 1939, claims that the only Jews who collaborated with the Soviet invaders were long-time communists: ‘I don’t deny that there were Jews – old-time communists – who disarmed Polish detachments,’ but adds, quite correctly, ‘but can one blame this on all the Jews?’

In Dunilowicze, a small town near Postawy, a Jewish woman named Chana led Soviet soldiers to the home of her neighbor, Józef Obuchowski, a sergeant of the Frontier Defence Corps. Pointing to his wife, she said, ‘This is a Polish ‘Pani’ [‘lady’ – the feminine of ‘Pan’], her husband is in the military.’ The soldiers tore apart the house looking in vain for her husband, the sergeant. The Polish woman was taken away instead. During her interrogation, which lasted twenty-four hours, she was forced to keep her hands raised and was drenched with water until she passed out.

Another Polish “Pani,” Mrs. Kwiatkowska, was arrested by the Jewish Committee on her estate near the towns of Wołożyn and Wiszniew, soon after the Soviet army passed through. The de facto local authority rested with such groups which had sprung up like mushrooms. It was they who led the Soviet officials to their prey. Mrs. Kwiatkowska endured Soviet prisons until the end of 1949.

Witold Rozwadowski and his father were arrested on their estate near Kucewicze. The former was held interned in Oszmiana, where he was murdered by a Jewish colleague who had joined the Soviet militia.

In Oszmiana, They Became Kings

The temporary authorities consisted of Jews and communists who proclaimed themselves the commissars of the town. Power was exercised with the help of the militia consisting most of Jews and communists. The Jews and communists served the Bolsheviks through denunciations out of spite and by betraying soldiers and police out of uniform. The militia was the population's terror because individual militiamen competed with each other in their servility.

In Nowa Wilejka,

The positions of authority were filled solely by Jews and Soviet citizens, who were very well provided for in every respect by the Soviet authorities. The latter also oversaw the agitators, who had at their disposal Jews and local riff-raff. The Soviet authorities issued the following directives: agitation centres were established, the so-called agitpunkts, and a large number of agitators, mostly Jews, were brought in from Soviet Russia.

They were ordered to hold meetings of the local riff-raff with communist leanings, former prisoners and Jews in order to prepare them to help out. They were ordered to hold meetings at which all things Polish, the Polish system, and the Polish government were criticized and condemned and Polish patriots were mocked. The public was called on to denounce such people because they were dangerous for the Soviets, to arrest them, and to deport them. The [Polish] public was not receptive and even replied with a furor: ‘what for?’ All of these insults and demands came from the mouths of Soviet agitators and Jews.

These meetings were generally compulsory and those who did not attend faced repercussions. ...

Mass searches were carried out at the homes of former military men, policemen and civil servants, and those people who were thought to be harmful to the Soviet Union were arrested.

The searches and arrests all took place only at night; they were carried out by the police which was always overseen by the NKVD. Hardly anyone came out of such a search whole; someone from the entire family inevitably fell victim to it. Very often during the searches they seized documents, money, valuables, photographs of former military men and policemen, and important papers, all of which simply disappeared. The searches were entirely pro forma because these people were already judged (found guilty) in advance, for the most part by the Jewish communists. After these people were arrested examinations and investigations followed, and the most incredible confessions were extracted from them as a result of all sorts of repressions and torture. That was their sole and favourite goal – the destruction and wreaking rage upon the Poles. In order to extract additional information about those Poles who still enjoyed their freedom, apart from formal investigations, Jewish communists were planted in prison cells to investigate and to extract such information from their victims.

For example, one night a group of Poles was arrested by local Jews overseen by the NKVD. The victims were then examined and investigated using “light torture” methods such as hitting on the head, while it was covered with cardboard, with the spine of a book or a heavy book or a rubber club. After such investigations people walked around half-dazed, lost consciousness briefly, or even lost their minds. Many of my friends fell into this category, for example, Krawczyk, the headman of the Polish state in Nowa Wilejka, Second Lieutenant Zygmunt Piórko, in the active service of the Third Combat Battalion Wilno, also from Nowa Wilejka, and many others. The former could not endure it and died; Piórko latter suffered a nervous disorder of the brain and went insane. …

At this time they ordered the compulsory registration of the population and the issuance of temporary identity documents or attestations for which the population was afraid to go and show themselves to the Soviet authorities, at whose side local Jews sat as clerks and provided an opinion about every Pole, who came to register.

Many Poles resided there or hid without registering, which also increased the number of those arrested and the new victims of torture.

Vicious Little Demigods

After fulfilling the orders of the Soviet authorities and packing part of the Polish population into jail as a hostile element for the Soviets, they quickly embarked on their next task, pre-election agitation, which took place on a wide scale. A large number of agitators were sent from Soviet Russia, and these gathered the local riff-raff to help out, such as Jews and former prisoners, not only political ones but also others. They started to convoke all sorts of meetings, which were compulsory under threat. ...

On the scheduled meeting days, agitators were dispatched to workplaces. They called a break in the work or an earlier quitting time and led everyone to where the meeting was to take place, advising them in advance that no one was to be missing. … Meetings held on days off work … or those announced by written notices were doomed. … only Jews and some poorly educated children came. ...

From Store Clerk To Local Commissar

Every meeting was graced by a large cordon of uniformed and undercover police and the local Jewish population. … the agitators kept repeating that they would take care of the resisters. …

The agitators and Jews frequently raised all sorts of nonsense about General Sikorski [the leader of Poland’s government-in-exile] and the former Polish government. They said that one should get out of one’s head the notion that liberation would come from General Sikorski or from England or from anyone else. At this the Jews, agitators and militia replied with applause. The [Polish] population sat there silently without giving any signs of life.

A committee was set up to draw up electoral lists. For the most part Jews were assigned to the committee; they went from house to house and registered everyone eighteen and over. For example, to my wife’s parents came two Jewish women, accompanied by an agitator, a young Jew from Wilno, to register them. ...

Jews Killed And Then took Estates

In order to win more people over to their side, they ordered the redistribution of land seized from [Polish] settlers and wealthy landholders to laborers, poor farmers, and Jews … Only the Jews willingly took the land given to them …

Premises were designated, the city was divided up into regions, and an electoral committee was struck. The electoral committee consisted mainly of Jews, some members of the local riff-raff, and Soviet agitators, many of whom were Jews too. ...

From Students To Election Supervisors

The polling stations were manned by Jews, the families of Soviet agitators, and others. The elections got underway. The mood of the [Polish] population was gloomy.

The polling stations were full of Soviet agitators, politruks [political commissars], uniformed and undercover police, Jews, and NKVD. A large number of Soviet soldiers and automobiles were assigned to help out. ...

[Because many Poles were evading] … late in the evening, the agitators, Soviet soldiers, NKVD, and Jews set out in automobiles to collect eligible voters from their homes and drive them to cast their votes. ...

Up until the last moment, they did not inform us officially of the fact that there was a plebiscite and the actual purpose of the voting [namely, to sanction the incorporation of seized Polish territory into the Soviet Union – M.P.], thus everyone [i.e. the Poles] considered this to be a big joke, because voting for unknown people and unknown purposes was absurd. Even though it was forbidden to cross things off or to make changes on the ballots, there was a lot of crossing out. Any voter who made some inappropriate gesture with his ballot was observed and noted by the agitators. … A few weeks after the elections, searches, arrests, repressions, and torture were recommenced again on a large scale, as well as the deportation of the Polish population to the so-called polar bear country.

A Polish woman recalls how the shopkeeper Rumkowa’s son, her Jewish neighbors who knew the townspeople well, helped the Soviets round up and arrest targeted Poles in Nowa Wilejka. When the Germans arrived in 1941, and the Lithuanian police started to harass the Jews, this same Jewish shopkeeper bemoaned what was happening to the Jews. The Polish woman then reminded the shopkeeper of how her own son had behaved when the Bolsheviks arrived. Embarrassed, the Jewish woman hung her head in silence.

In Białystok, the NKVD utilized the members of the largely Jewish “citizens’ committee,” which was formed before the entry of the Red Army, to create a “workers’ militia” armed with weapons confiscated from Polish soldiers. The militia carried out huge numbers of searches in Polish homes. As one witness reports: "They looked for weapons in every nook and cranny. If they found anything made of gold, such as rings and bracelets, they took it for their own use, and if one offered resistance, they were threatened with death."

A pro-communist committee made of Jews, which Awraam Laznik led, seized control of the town of Sokółka, north of Białystok. The “red militia,” composed of local Jews (many of them Bund members and an aggressive cobbler by the name of Gołdacki) and headed by Szymon Aszkiewicz, a reserve officer of the Polish army, arrested many Polish officials and prominent local Poles and executed three Polish policemen. They conducted numerous raids, looking for arms and seizing radio receivers and photo cameras. A Jewish blacksmith named Abel Łabędych shot a Polish policeman in the nearby village of Bogusze, on September 24th.

A head forester named Łabecki was summoned to a Soviet post established in the town of Sokółka. He was kicked and beaten by armed Jews wearing red armbands. Devastated by this brutal treatment, he took his life by throwing himself under a train. His wife and six-year-old son were deported to Irkutsk in the winter of 1940.

Stefan Kurowski had better luck when he was stopped on his bicycle on a highway on the outskirts of Łapy, west of Białystok, by a Jewish militiaman. Fanatically consumed by his new role, this young Jew burst into a long tirade against the “Pan’s” Poland, whose “oppression” of the Jews he was now avenging as an enforcer of Soviet authority. Having nearly fallen into a trance as a result of his political agitation, this militiaman, less aggressive and brutal than most, seemed to have forgotten why he had stopped Kurowski in the first place and allowed him to continue on his way.

Yesterday He Worked As A Clerk At A Butcher Shop

Today; he is a party official filling out deportation orders on his Polish neighbors.

While others also commented on their military incompetence, the local Jewish militia later proved to be an extremely useful tool for the Soviet occupiers in carrying out tasks such as stealing the church bell and preparing lists of Poles for deportation. Rev. Józef Dowgwiłło was arrested in Mońki in the fall of 1939 at the instigation of local Jewish activists and imprisoned in Knyszyn. Uncharacteristically, he was released after a crowd of Poles gathered at the NKVD headquarters and petitioned for his freedom.

The NKVD, accompanied by Jewish militiamen, came to Sieburczyn to arrest the landowner Jan Nepomucen Bisping and his family on October 4, 1939. The men were tied up and beaten in the wagon that transported the Polish family to Wizna, where the town’s Jewish inhabitants ridiculed them. The following day they were taken to Łomża. His family was released but Bisping was never seen again.

Aleksander Gawrychowski, the former township administrator (wójt), was seized from his home in the small town of Wizna, near Łomża, by Jewish militiamen at the beginning of October 1939 on charges of being an armed supporter of the Polish authorities. More arrests and interrogations of alleged Polish conspirators took place the next day: Jerzy Blum, Stanisław Drozdowski, Jan Kadłubowsk, Piotr Nitkiewicz and Stanisław Gawrychowski. Among the interrogators were the brothers Chaim and Avigdor Czapnicki, prewar Zionists. Other Jewish militiamen from this small locality included: Abraham Birger, Lejzor Kiwajko, Kałmaniewicz, and Chaim Węgierko.

In Supraśl, according to a Jewish source,

Some of the Jews, including Toleh Kagan, Baruch Gamzu, and even Arke Rabinowitz, the Rabbi’s son, received permission to carry arms. … One day, Issar, the decorator’s son Itzik, burst into the priest’s house with a gun and stole a radio.

In Polesia, Count Henryk Skirmunt and his sister left their manor house in Mołodów near Drohiczyn Poleski on September 17th, hoping to escape the Soviets. When passing through the nearby Jewish hamlet of Motol, their automobile was stopped, and a group of Jewish communist sympathizers detained them. Not only did their Jewish neighbors fail to come to their assistance, but they prevented their escape. Shortly thereafter, both of them were executed.

Jews Formed Militias

A Polish high school student from Brześć nad Bugiem (Brest Litovsk) recalled:

The Germans first occupied Brześć on September 15, 1939, but already by the end of the month, the Red Army had entered, greeted enthusiastically by the Jewish community with bread and salt and flowers… From that time we Poles often heard slurs and threats directed against us… I will never forget the sight of a Polish policeman, led in handcuffs by policemen along Jagiellońska Street, who was surrounded by Jews howling and spitting at him, throwing rubbish and stones at him, and disparaging him cruelly.

The Jewish militia seized the brother of Feliks Starosielec from his high school in Brześć. He was arrested, charged, and promptly executed. A Polish woman and her young daughter were shot and robbed by a mixed Jewish-Ukrainian patrol in the village of Wołynka, near the railway line to Włodawa. In Janów Poleski, Stanisław Doliwa-Falkowski, a landowner, was sheltered by friendly Jews only to be apprehended and executed by the local “red militia,” mainly composed of Jews.

According to a Jewish source, in Pińsk, Basey Giler, a Jewish member of the Communist Party, recognized the Polish Minister of Justice, Czesław Michałowski, and pointed him out to the “workers’ guard,” who promptly arrested him.

Julius Margolin describes the reaction of the Jewish population to the fate of Polish officials:

First, the officials of the original Polish government disappeared before our eyes. Nobody was concerned, however, and I doubt if a second thought was given to their fate. Yet the method at work, typically Bolshevik, required not merely their dismissal but their liquidation in toto. Thus they disappeared without leaving a trace.

Jews Killed Town Officials

In Sarny (Volhynia), local Jews armed with handguns and a few Soviet soldiers marched Polish town officials in groups of five to their place of execution in a nearby forest. The Jews spat at the policemen during the ordeal and called them derogatory names.

A Jew by the name of Herszko from Jagodzin, near Luboml, warned a Pole he knew: ‘You, Poles, are already all in a sack; all that remains to be done is to tie it up’. At the beginning of October 1939, a telegram was dispatched to Stalin, signed by 70 Jews from Luboml, thanking the Soviet dictator for “liberating” Volhynia and beseeching him to hold them close to his heart.

In Jaroslawicze near Łuck,

It started with individual cases — arrests and disappearances, especially of Poles. Great help and great zeal in making all sorts of denunciations of the NKVD were shown by the Jews.

The predominantly Jewish communist militia seized control of the town of Łuck on September 18th and killed a Polish policeman. A Polish officer who had taken refuge in that city was fortunate enough to escape from the clutches of the Jewish militiaman who had attempted to arrest him on the street.

Other Polish soldiers were not so lucky. As Herman Kruk recalls:

The day after the entry of the Bolsheviks, groups of the new militia disarmed Polish soldiers. A Jewish fellow stopped a high-profile Polish officer and challenged him to give him his weapon. The officer gave his revolver, which he carried on his belt. Finally, the young militiaman began removing the medals from the officer. The officer complained that he couldn’t take them from him. The fellow threatened him with the rifle. The officer then took another revolver out of a holster and shot the militiaman on the spot. The officer was arrested.

College Students Become Judge And Jury

The officer in question was doubtless executed summarily by the Soviets, as was their practice. There is no question, however, except perhaps for a die-hard communist or an ardent Jewish nationalist, who was the hero and the traitor in this black-and-white scenario. Once the Soviets were installed, Polish officials were brought before a field court-martial at which a Jewish law student by the name of Ettinger, the commander of the Workers’ Guard, acted as the local adviser. Proffering opinions about those marked for execution, Ettinger, in effect, sealed their fate.

In Berezno,

The many Ukrainians and members of the Jewish poorer classes who spontaneously greeted the Red Army soldiers started to show their enmity toward the Poles, who were in the minority. They searched for Polish officials, civil servants, and escapees from the western and central regions who had sought refuge from the Germans and pointed them out to the NKVD. Massive arrests of those fingered and deportations followed.

In Dubno, on September 17th, local Jews spontaneously formed a militia that apprehended the reeve, Bartłomiej Poliszczuk, a Ukrainian who loyally fulfilled his duties to the Polish State. He was eventually handed over to the Soviets – never to be heard from again (his name has appeared on a list of executed Polish officials released by the Russian authorities).

The Hidden Fifth Column

Not realizing how efficient their Jewish fifth column was, a few days later, the NKVD came looking for Poliszczuk at his home; his name had been put on a list, prepared by local communists, of Polish officials earmarked for arrest.

In Krzemieniec, a self-styled Jewish militia disarmed the citizens’ guard formed by students from the lyceum. A Pole from Krzemieniec recalled:

When I went out on the streets that day, numerous patrol units, militiamen composed of Jews, were circling the streets. They walked about with red armbands and guns, searching whoever they encountered. There were few Soviet troops. Only in the days that followed did the Soviet divisions march through the city.

The events and mood in Krzemieniec were vividly captured in the memoirs of Janina Sułkowska, the daughter of the county secretary, Jan Sułkowski, whose ultimate fate is described later on.

Militias Use Students

The Poles watched the Soviet invaders with a mixture of revulsion and fear. Not a few of us cried. But as disconcerting was the emergence of a local Jewish militia which was friendly to the Red Army and had made its appearance even before the enemy had marched in. Armed and organized its first task was to arrest the students and Boy Scouts who had been posted as guards and who carried old carbines in some cases taller than them. The Jews roughed up the shocked youngsters who had considered their captors as friends and classmates before turning them over to the Soviets from whom they had prior directions. What was the fate of those young Poles? In many cases torture and death. This Jewish militia would help carry out the Soviet’s dirty work during their occupation. My family would fall victim to them.

Children Turned In Their Teachers

In town, Jews and Ukrainians were cheering and ingratiating themselves with the Soviets. I recognized many neighbors and acquaintances among those who were now jostling Poles and eyeing their property for future theft. Jewish men offered gifts to the Russians while their wives and daughters kissed their tanks.

Among this rabble were criminals released from jail by the Soviets to create mayhem. They were all emboldened by posters that had suddenly appeared urging various groups to attack Poles with axes and scythes. And the Soviet officers indicated they would not stand in the way of slaughter which was already turning the countryside red with the blood of the Polish minority outnumbered by Ukrainians and Jews.

On that day I had my first encounter with a swaggering group of traitors attired in leather jackets, red armbands or sashes, stolen pistols, and hatred in their eyes. I beheld a number of classmates among them, including girlfriends. These primarily young Jews, often well-educated and from rich or religious families, now addressed everyone as “comrade.” One of them gestured a slash across the throat at me. Their love for communism and Joseph Stalin would know no bounds—especially human sacrifice. ‘ They were much worse than the blackmailers and denouncers, who emerged in great numbers among the Jews and who were interested in the goods and jobs of their Polish victims.

From Jews To Kings

Starting as communist sympathizers who flocked to the militia or acted as informers, these political types would soon graduate into “agitators”, administrators, and even sadistic interrogators for the Soviets as they filled positions in the new order. Knowledge of the language and the local scene, combined with their fanaticism, would be essential to the NKVD’s reign of terror; they eagerly compiled lists and arrested Poles—and Jews, whom they considered to be enemies of the state. On horseback, they would chase my father down the main street like an animal to act as interpreters for their torture victims.

A sizable minority of Polish Jews from all levels collaborated, usually passively but often actively, with the Soviet occupiers in their liquidation of Poles in eastern Poland from 1939–1941. For many, including my kin, the last sight they had of Poland or their loved ones was a cattle train bound for Siberia – and a Jew or a Ukrainian, or both, with a rifle on every wagon.

The Jewish militia from the Jewish village of Osowa and the Ukrainian militia from Mydzk, the harbingers of the new Soviet order, wasted no time descending on the Polish settlement of Ożgowo and others near Huta Stepańska to carry out arrests of targeted Poles.

The attitude of the Jewish population changed overnight in Kąty near Krzemieniec. The better goods were hidden away in their shops, and they became “vulgar and insulting” toward Poles. They openly ridiculed the Polish government and social institutions and made life difficult for the Poles.

Young Jews entered the militia and, in that capacity, came to our village and beat up some officer trainees (Romek Kucharski and others) for their alleged crimes (as former members of the Officers’ Training Corps “Strzelec”).

In Równe,

In the newly formed militia, which engaged members of the local population, there were very many Jews. Undoubtedly the auxiliary apparatus of the NKVD, and thus agents of all kinds also took in many of them.

The local population – Jews and Ukrainians – helped the Soviets a great deal … They chased down Polish patriots and handed them over to the NKVD.

According to a Jewish witness,

The day after the entry of the Soviet army into Rowne, enraged mobs recruited from those elements, who were always ready to loot, began to demand that the “exploiters”, bourgeoisie and local “Pans” be punished. Armed with weapons and sticks, they started to drag the guilty out of offices, stores and private houses. The first victims were employees of the courts, the public prosecutor’s office and the police. They were led down the middle of the street under the barrel of rifles, surrounded from all sides and accompanied by a shower of profanities. Apparently, this was supposed to be the revolutionary element of the oppressed national minorities of Ukraine. On the sidewalks, one could see functionaries discretely maintaining order.

The following day, the revolutionary element of armed civilians vanished imperceptibly from the streets of the city, and in their place appeared the organs of order ... Thus began the systematic and precisely planned process of plucking out from society those people who were recognized as enemies of the Soviet regime.

Among the many Polish officials arrested in Równe were: Dezydery Smoczkiewicz, a deputy to the Seym (Poland’s Parliament), murdered in the Spring of 1940 by the Soviets in Kharkov; Tadeusz Dworakowski, a former senator; five judges of the District Court; and the deputy prosecutor. All of them were later murdered. Two assistant prosecutors were also arrested. One of the principal denouncers was an articling student, the son of a well-to-do local Jewish family. These harsh measures did not dampen the enthusiasm of young Jews for the Soviet regime: whenever a picture of Stalin appeared on the screen in the local cinema, they stood and howled ecstatically.

In Aleksandria, near Równe, Jews and Ukrainians formed a militia and disarmed the Polish police in anticipation of the arrival of the Soviets. The militia also invaded the estate of Prince Lubomirski, who was executed.

In Wlodzimierz Wołyński, local communists and Jews were quick to denounce local officials, who soon disappeared without a trace.

A young Pole, who was apprehended in Różyszcze on September 24, when he tried to obtain a pass to Kowel described his encounter with his interrogator as follows:

The whole thing became complicated when we were taken before the commissar himself. He was a young Jew with a red star on his lapel. He started a regular interrogation … that I was surely a student, I surely belonged to the ONR [National-Radical Camp], had beaten Jews, etc.

In Huta Pieniacka near Brody, a self-styled militia consisting of four Ukrainians and two Jews took over the police station and post office. They donned red armbands and carried out arrests in anticipation of the arrival of the Soviets.

Hangings In The Town Square

A militia, consisting mostly of Jews, soon appeared on the streets of Tarnopol. Dressed in Polish military coats and armed with Polish rifles, they entered homes searching for those who were now wanted by the new “authorities”. The jails were filled and executions abounded:

While descending to the first floor level, we saw five Polish officers being led by Soviet soldiers out of an unrented, unfurnished apartment, where the officers had slept the night before. We followed them to the street. … A few moments later, we saw the five officers lined up against the wall of a small white house under the bridge and shot dead by an impromptu firing squad. …

Two Polish uniformed railroad men escorted by the Soviets passed us, followed by two escorted mail carriers. Seconds later, we heard a volley of shots. All were executed on the same spot where the five officers had been executed.

A Polish official (a former mayor of Łódź), a socialist, who had found temporary refuge in the home of a local Jewish doctor, recalled:

At that time the communists fulfilled the most shameful role. They not only formed a “fifth column”, but also were the veritable right hand of the NKVD in their war against the socialists and Polish political activists. They especially denounced members of the Polish Socialist Party and Bund. Alarmed by the arrests that had begun in town, after about a week our hosts advised us to go to some smaller county town, where it would be easier to hide out for a time.

When pro-Soviet Jews spread rumors that Polish officers shot at Soviet soldiers from the bell tower of the Dominican church in Tarnopol, the Soviets opened fire and set the church ablaze causing serious damage to the building and its contents. Clergy from the monastery were arrested and almost shot as a result of this false denunciation. Upon examination, however, the tower was found to be locked shut and there was no trace of any activity there. The Soviets, nevertheless, encouraged townspeople to plunder the monastery.

A number of prominent Poles were arrested in Germakówka near Borszczów: the police commander Styczyński, the principal of the public school Gayrów, the mill owners Muller (husband and wife), and a few other families, all of whom were taken away without a trace. The list of Polish victims was prepared in the home of a Jew named Raabe.

They Emerged Like Dormant Locust

On the eve of the Soviet invasion, armed Jews attacked the railway workers in Stanisławów in order to seize control of the train station. When the Soviets arrived in the city, Jewish houses were decorated with red flags and banners bearing slogans like “Long Live Wise Stalin”. A militia, made up mostly of Jews and Ukrainians, patrolled the town. Leon Rosenthal, the chief of the “red militia”, was particularly active in carrying out arrests of Poles. Local Jews staged a mobile show with effigies mocking prewar Polish leaders. The spectacle attracted a large Jewish rabble that chanted anti-Polish slogans.

In nearby Dolina, the NKVD, accompanied by two local Jews known to the Poles, descended on a home to arrest young Polish, men who belonged to Polish patriotic organizations. One of the young Poles was killed in the local jail; the others were deported to Siberia.

Tadeusz Hajda, a teacher of Polish at the King Kazimierz Jagiellończyk High School in Kołomyja, was arrested by Jewish collaborators and handed over to the NKVD shortly after the entry of the Soviets. Luck was with him – he was freed from prison because of a petition signed by Poles, Ukrainians and German colonists, though banished to a remote village school.

In Przemysl, Poles – employees – came to the assistance of their Jewish employer. His daughter recalled:

They [the Soviets] considered us to be “bourgeoisie” and therefore bad. … They had taken everything we had. Everything the Germans left the Russians took. … They arrested my father and then they released him. They emptied our house. We had three Polish employees at the store. They wrote the Russians that my father was a good employer and wanted to continue to work for him. My father wrote that he would give the store to the government, if he could stay on as manager. … And the Russians did not want a bourgeois running the store.

Not infrequent acts of solidarity such as this belie the much repeated and exaggerated claim of open hostility among these various groups in interwar Poland.

In Kalusz, the invading Soviet army was greeted boisterously

by entire throngs of the Jewish community, who called out [in Russian], ‘Our people are coming’. They bore red armbands on their sleeves and bountiful bouquets of flowers which they threw on the vehicles; they embraced the tanks with their bodies. And these were Jews, who we knew had property and shops …

Polish children began to be discriminated against by Jewish children, who yelled: ‘Oy vey, where’s your Poland?’ The sons of our Jewish neighbours, Itzek and Munio Haber, called to us: ‘Look, look. Sigit, sigit. A Polish officer is riding on his white horse’.

And thus immediately began the cleansing of the Polish population. Jews with red armbands, as representatives of the authorities, started to liquidate the Polish police, post offices, and above all took care of the military officers and soldiers. The officers were deported; those who defended themselves were shot. Polish soldiers, who tried to escape to Romania over the Carpathians were killed.

In Gwoździec, Jews and Ukrainians decorated the bridge to the town to greet the Red Army. They flocked to meetings organized by the Soviets to slander the Poles and flooded the Soviet authorities with denunciations of all sorts. Communist fighting squads composed of Jews and Ukrainians roamed the streets terrorizing the Polish population and entered the Catholic church to search for arms.

A Jewish mob set upon and beat a Polish woman as she left church and screamed at her: “… Your time is over; ours is just beginning. Stop praying here.” A few days later, at night, a group of masked Poles met up with the Jewish hoodlums in some dark alleys and gave them a good thrashing. Jewish harassment subsided somewhat after that.

When three Soviet tanks from Kołomyja descended on a company of Polish State Police and border guards in Delatyn, local Jews and some Ukrainians helped to disarm the Poles. Among those apprehended and disarmed outside of Delatyn, with the help of the Red militia consisting of Jews and Ukrainians, was Józef Dutka, a senior police officer from Myszyn. Dutka was imprisoned in Kołomyja together with other Polish policemen and executed in Stanisławów on October 20, 1939.

In Sambor, the Jews who entered the Red militia roamed the town searching for Polish officials. Many of them were arrested and executed. Those who managed to hide out for a time, like police commissioner Wojciech Bryl (murdered by the Soviets in the Spring of 1940 in Tver/Kalinin) from Horodenka, were denounced by local Jews and Ukrainian nationalists.

Jewish and Ukrainian communists hunted down Polish policemen and civil servants in Bóbrka and handed them over to the NKVD. Szklanny, department commander of the Polish State Police, was murdered near the brickyard by the NKVD and two Jewish communists, Kahane from Podhorodyszcze and Rod Majorek from Bóbrka.

In Drohobycz, the local militia, made up mostly of Jews, carried out inspections and drew up lists of those to be arrested and deported. Together with the NKVD they arrested Bronisław Naja (murdered by the Soviets in the Spring of 1940 in Tver/Kalinin), the commander of the Polish State Police in the nearby village of Schodnica.

Abraham Sterzer, a Jewish doctor from Lwów, recalled:

When the Red Army marched into [Eastern Galicia], the Jews behaved as if Messiah had arrived. They flocked to sign up for various communist-front organizations, and joined the NKVD secret police.

On September 26th, Leon Kozłowski, a former minister in the Polish government, was taken by Soviet officers from the museum on Plac Mariacki, where he was installed temporarily, to the NKVD premises on Sapieha Street.

The officers, who arrested me, engaged me in a conversation, a sort of interrogation, and stated that people like me, enemies of the people, the Soviet system destroys and puts out of action. One of them pointed out that he was a Jew and that I should remember well that it was a Jew, who had arrested me and that he, a Jew, would be the cause of my eventual destruction which would inevitably occur. …

My cell became overcrowded by the next day. Twelve people were placed in it on a bare wooden floor. …

The vast majority of prisoners were, of course, Poles. There was an army officer, a police inspector, a uniformed lieutenant from the reserves who was a lawyer by profession from Łódź, a judge of the district court, a railway worker, a student from the Polytechnic University, and a student from the Higher School of Foreign Trade. A similar make-up of people, as I later learned, was found in the other cells: judges, policemen, captured army officers, social activists, workers, and students. All of them, like I, had been arrested based on denunciations by communists, for the most part, Jews.

Toward the end of September 1939, Zygmunt Winter, a Jewish colleague from high school days, brought the NKVD to apprehend Zdzisław Zakrzewski, an activist in the All-Poland Youth (Mlodziez Wszechpolska) organization at the Lwów Polytechnic University. Not finding him at home, the NKVD arrested Zakrzewski’s father, Wilhelm, an officer of the Polish State Police, who was soon executed. Zakrzewski’s mother and sister were later deported to Kazakhstan, where his mother perished. Zdzislaw Zakrzewski, together with a group of colleagues who made their way to the Polish army in France, had several run-ins with armed “revolutionary committees”, composed of Jews and Ukrainians in Jagielnica and a village near Śniatyn, from which they managed to extricate themselves.

Edward Trznadel, a Polish official, who had taken refuge in Lwów, was apprehended by some Jewish communists from Olkusz. They took him to the commissariat and denounced him as their persecutor. Fortunately for Trznadel, after being interrogated, he was released. Ironically, Trznadel had been on good terms with the Jewish community in Olkusz, where he served as deputy county supervisor (starosta) and was even called on to mediate disputes within that community.

There are numerous similar examples from Lwów, where Poles continued to be arrested throughout the Soviet occupation. A Polish woman saw her husband, a doctor of gentry origin, killed in their home by Jews. In the fall of 1940, Stanislaw Schultz, a 40-year-old Pole, who had been excused from active military service for health reasons, was denounced as a Polish officer by a Jewish neighbour. He was exiled to hard labor in eastern Siberia and was not heard of again. Michał Byczyszyn was arrested on the street in 1941 by Jewish communists. Jewish students of Prof. Zdzisław Żygulski advised him that he had been spared in their denunciation of their fellow Polish students, alleged “anti-Semites”. Żygulski thereby escaped arrest by the NKVD.

Many accounts also identify local Jews acting as jailers and interrogators throughout Eastern Poland already during these early days of the occupation, in towns like Równe, Włodzimierz Wołyński, Hrubieszów, Grodno, Lwów, Augustów, and others. Witold Sągajłło, an officer in the Polish Navy, who was caught by the Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland, recalled that “nearly every commissar” he had the misfortune to meet, was a Jew.

Kazimierz Bączyński, a Polish soldier who was arrested and held in a camp near Stanisławów in southeastern Poland, recalled: “Our guard was a Jew, which was not unusual as the Jews co-operated with the Russians.” A Pole imprisoned in Kołomyja recalls:

In a cell for six people, they packed thirty-six people. By a strange coincidence, Władek [Władysław Traczuk] found himself in the company of policemen from his town of Gwoździec. Among them were Zalewski, Wolno, Gosztyła and Klincza. Seeing the emaciated Wladek, one of them gave him a little bread and another a spoonful of soup. They were thus able to nourish him somewhat. These policemen were interrogated every night. After their ordeal, they returned to their cell staggering on their feet, all mangled and bloody. Jews and Ukrainians whom we recognized often passed down the corridors. They would stop in front of the cell, point at someone with their finger, and tell the NKVD officer who accompanied them: ‘That’s the one’. After such a visit the fingered victim was treated especially badly. Zalewski and Klincza were beaten the most. ... Few of them managed to leave that prison alive.

References:

Professor Tomasz Strzembosz

John Morrison

John Sack

Jewish-Soviet Collaboration in the context of Polish History – Understanding the past through victim accounts

Denying the importance of the role of Jews in the service of the NKVD is contrary to the basic facts established by historians. Prof. Andrzej Paczkowski formulated this thesis as “an over-representation of Jews in the UB.” Unambiguously writes about the “over-representation of Jews in the UB” by another leading IPN historian, dr hab. Jan Żaryn in his study “Wokół pogromu Kieleckiego” (Warsaw 2006, p. 86).

The very unfortunate disproportions resulting from the excessive number of Jews in the UB were also mentioned by many more reliable Jewish authors than Gross, for example Michael Chęciński, a former military information officer of the Polish People’s Army, in his 1982 book in New York, Poland. Communism, Nationalism, Anti-semitism ”(pp. 63-64).

The Jewish author of the book “Les Juifs en Pologne et Solidarność” (“Jews in Poland and Solidarity”) published in Paris in 1984, Michel Wiewiórka, wrote on p. 122: “The Ministry of the Interior, especially with the exception of the minister himself, was departments by the Jews, while Soviet advisers ensured control of its activities. “

In a number of pages of “Fear” Gross tries to completely deny from American readers any importance of the role of Jews in the UB. At the same time, however, the same Gross completely ignores the significant influences, even the domination of Jewish communists in other spheres of power, such as the judiciary, propaganda or the economy. In the more than 50-page part of the book devoted to “Żydokomuna”, even one sentence does not mention this to American readers, cynically keeping them totally ignorant of it.

The role of Jews in the security service, its uniqueness, consisted not only in excessive numbers, but also in the fact that many Jewish functionaries of the UB defiled themselves with examples of extreme cruelty, lack of any scruples and brutal violations of the law against Polish political prisoners. It is significant – the ominous role of the Jewish functionaries is visible in every more significant crime of the Security Service, from the genocidal murders in the Świętochłowice camp, through the court murders of General Fieldorf “Nile” and Captain Pilecki, to the trial of General Tatar and co-accused of senior military men.

The main culprits behind the murder of this Polish hero are, for the most part, Jewish communists. Among them was the red prosecutor Helena Wolińska (Fajga Mindla-Danielak), who decided about the unlawful arrest of General Fieldorf, and later unlawfully prolonged his arrest. The death sentence for the general in a fabricated trial was issued by a Jewish communist judge, Maria Gurowska, née Sand, daughter of Moryc and Frajda née Einseman.

Let us add to this the Jewish origin of three of the four members of the board of the Supreme Court who approved the death sentence on the Polish hero (judge Dr. Emil Merz, judge Gustaw Auscaler and prosecutor Paulina Kern). All three later lived the last years of their lives in Israel. Let us also recall that earlier in the trial of the first instance, Benjamin Wajsblech, one of the most ruthless prosecutors of Jewish origin, accused General “Nil”. Let us add that probably Józef Różański himself (Goldberg) handed the interrogator of General Fieldorf, Lieutenant Kazimierz Górski, the so-called question marks, ie properly written sets of questions to be asked by the prisoner (according to P. Lipiński, The topic of life: wine, “Gazeta Wyborcza” magazine, November 18, 1994).

In this context, it is worth recalling a fragment of Sławomir Bilak’s conversation with Maria Fieldorf-Czarska, the daughter of the murdered general.

She said, among other things: “I am asking why nobody says that only Jews were involved in my father’s case? I do not know why the Jews in Poland accused and tried the Polish citizen ”(quoted after: Temida’s eyes are closed. Nobody will answer for the death of my father,“ Our Poland ”, February 24, 1999).

Let us now recall the shameful matter of passing the death sentence to one of the greatest Polish heroes, Captain Witold Pilecki, and his execution in 1948. A man who voluntarily allowed himself to be arrested in order to go to Auschwitz and investigate the truth about the situation in the camp, and later became the founder of the first camp underground. An officer whom the eminent English historian Michael Foot called “the conscience of Europe fighting against the Nazis” and one of the most outstanding and brave figures of the European Resistance Movement. Well – as Tadeusz M. Płużański wrote about the case of Captain Pilecki and his co-accused in the trial:

“The sentences were passed earlier,” Józef Goldberg Różański, the director of the investigative department of the Ministry of Public Security, issued them. During one of the interrogations, he told Płużański: “Nothing can save you. I have two death sentences. They will come, lead them fucking in the head, and it will be such an ordinary human death“ (cf. TM Płużański, Prosecutor for special tasks, ”It’s Time“, October 5, 2002).

It is also worth noting that one of the members of the college of the Supreme Military Court, who on May 3, 1948, approved the death sentence on Pilecki, executed on May 25, 1948, was Judge Leo Hochberg, son of Saul Szoel (according to TM Płużański, Lawyers of the Second Polish Republic, communist criminals, “High Time”, October 27, 2001).

I will omit here a broader account of one of the most frequently recalled crimes – the genocidal murder of about 1,650 innocent prisoners in less than a year by Salomon Morel and his Jewish torturers from the UB (see the book by the author of the very reliable Jewish self-reckoning, John Sack, entitled “Oko za oko “, Gliwice 1995).

Let me just remind you here of one of S. Morel’s favorite “games” of the genocidal “executioner from Świętochłowice”, consisting in setting up pyramids of people who were told to lie on top of each other in fours. When the pile of bodies was large enough, he would jump on them to add even more weight. After such “games”, the people at the top of the pile came out with broken ribs at best, while the bottom four ended up in the morgue.

The later crimes committed by Morel against young Polish political prisoners “re-educated” in the camp in Jaworzno are much less known. There, Morel replaced Ivan Mordasov as the commander of the NKVD captain. In Marek J. Chodakiewicz’s book, “Jews and Poles 1918-1945” (Warsaw 2000, p. 410), we read:

“Between 1945 and 1949, about 10,000 prisoners died in the camp in Jaworzno.” These terrifying figures sound unbelievable and require thorough verification, although Chodakiewicz quotes them after the source work of M. Wyrwich (“Łagier Jaworzno”, Warsaw 1995).

Various accounts confirm, in any case, the exceptional cruelty displayed by Commandant Morel towards young Polish prisoners. Starting with his greeting subsequent transports of juvenile prisoners with a typical greeting:

“Look at the sun, some people see it for the last time!” Or with the words: “You are bandits, we will show you here what it means to fight against the people’s power.”

(Both quotations after the text of the “Open letter to the Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland” written by Mieczysław Wieła (“Jaworzniacy” No. 2/29 of February 1999).

In addition to his physical torments, Morel liked to inflict various mental torments on his victim. For example, he had him write a thousand times: “I hate Piłsudski” (according to M. Wyrwich, “Łagier Jaworzno”, Warsaw 1995, p. 90).

The genocidal criminal S. Morel received a Polish pension – approximately 5,000. PLN.

The leading historian of the Institute of National Remembrance, dr hab. Jan Żaryn wrote recently:

“The experiences of 1944-1945 only strengthened the stereotype of Żydokomuna. “The NKVD, with the help of the remaining Jews, organizes bloody orgies,” reported Władysław Liniarski “Mścisław”, commander of the AK District in Białystok in January 1945 to “Polish London” (…).

After the war, Poles, using the slogan “Żydokomuna”, used the stereotype created by the Jews themselves. Therefore, Jews became jointly responsible for the suffering of Poles, including the loss – once again – of state independence.

The families heard the details of the tortures that their relatives – often soldiers of the independence underground – were subjected to in the security dungeons. “When I left the prison, I was immediately taken upstairs and the NKVD officer Faber [Samuel Faber – footnote by J. Żaryn] (who he was, I don’t know if he was a Pole or a Russian, certainly a Jew) (…) ordered me to be tied. They tied my mouth with a rag and between my arms and legs they put a stick on which they hung me, and then they started pouring pus into my nose. After a while, they stopped. I did not lose consciousness, so I felt everything to the end. I got a hemorrhage from that (…) ‘, recalled Jakub Górski,’ Jurand ‘, a Home Army soldier (…).

Another activist of the independence underground, Mieczysław Grygorcewicz, remembered the first days of his stay in the NKVD and UB arrest in Warsaw:

“(…) At first I did not answer the questions asked by Józef Światło – the head of the Provincial Security Office, I was indifferent to all threats and screams, I was overcome by apathy, I faced a vision of death. After all, I am in the hands of the enemy, and in the hands of Jews, who were present in the UB. I felt a great disgust with them, after all I had to deal with social scum, mostly brought up in the nalewkowskie gutter ”.

“Józef Światło – a Jew by origin, having a gun in his hand, told me that if I did not give my place of residence, he would shoot me in the head (…)”.

The light was brought by Halicki, the head of the investigative section, who was also a Jew, and he started a preliminary investigation (…). The UB officers changed frequently (…). One of them, in particular, spoke to me brutally and rude, he threatened with the death penalty without trial. As I learned later from the investigator, Lieutenant Łojka, it was Józef Różański himself (Józef Goldberg), deputy Radkiewicz, Minister of Security.

In such a situation and among this group of security services, I was prepared for the worst, even to be shot (…) ”. (quoted from J. Żaryn, Hierarchy of the Catholic Church towards Polish-Jewish relations in 1945-1947, in: “Wokół pogromu Kieleckiego”, Warsaw 2006, pp. 86-88)“.

Let us recall that Józef Różański (Goldberg) mentioned here, director of the Investigative Department at the Ministry of Public Security, has earned a well-deserved fame as the cruelest security officer. From the former Home Army officer Kazimierz Moczarski, who was one of the victims of the “infernal investigation” under Różański’s supervision, we know what the methods of torturing prisoners interrogated in the Ministry of Public Security were. Among 49 types of ill-treatment and torture to which he was subjected, Moczarski mentioned, among others:

“1. hitting specially sensitive areas of the body with a rubber truncheon (e.g. the bridge of the nose, chin and mucous glands, protruding parts of the shoulder blades, etc.);

beating with a whip, covered in the so-called sticky gum, the tops of bare feet – a particularly painful torture operation;
hitting the heels with a rubber truncheon (a series of 10 strokes per heel – several times a day);
plucking hair from the temples and the neck (so-called goose plucking), from the chin, from the breast, and from the perineum and genitals;
crushing fingers between three pencils (…);
burning a hot cigarette around the mouth and eyes; (…)
forcing them to sleep for 7-9 days (…) ”(quoted after K. Moczarski, Hell’s Investigation,“ Rebirth ”, January 21, 1989).

The dignitary of the Ministry of Public Security – Józef Światło supervised the secret prison in Miedzeszyn, where the methods of extracting testimonies included, among others, condemning to kneeling on a brick floor with hands raised for 5 hours, chasing naked through corridors with simultaneous flogging with steel bars, beating with a club woven of steel wires (according to T. Grotowicz, Józef Światło, “Our Poland”, July 22, 1998).

We will not find a single sentence of information about all these atrocities and crimes of Jewish executioners from the UB in the books of JT Gross, who wrote so readily and extensively about the crimes committed by Poles against Jews.

It is worth recalling that Różański (Goldberg) was responsible for the operation of a secret group of secret police murderers who, on his order, secretly murdered selected Home Army soldiers and people kidnapped from the street in the forest. This is how, among others, formally released from custody, Fr. Antoni Dąbrowski was murdered, former chaplain of the 27th Volhynian Infantry Division of the Home Army (27th Infantry Division of the Home Army) – a large infantry unit of the Home Army formed by the forces of the Volhynia District as part of the Operation “Storm”. In March 1944, the 27th Infantry Division of the Home Army numbered about 6,000 soldiers.

Among those murdered after being taken from prison to the forest were, among others Colonel of the Home Army, Aleksander Bielecki, from whom the secret police failed to force the expected testimony, and his wife.

It is worth recalling that the Jewish communist Leon Kasman, for many years the editor-in-chief of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers ‘Party, “Trybuna Ludu”, was the activist who most vehemently called for intensifying repression against political opponents during the session of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party in October 1944.

He “became famous” by saying: “The horror is overwhelmed that in this Poland, where the party is a hegemon, not even one head has fallen” (quoted after P. Lipiński, Bolesław Niejasny, Magazyn Gazeta Wyborcza, May 3, 2000).

And the heads of Polish patriots, mainly the Home Army soldiers, began to decline at an accelerated pace as a result of the first great wave of terror against the nation that was unleashed at that time.

And so, for example, in December 1944, five Home Army soldiers were shot in the basement of the house in front of the Lublin Castle. Their case was handled by a military prosecutor of Jewish nationality (according to Marek Kolasiński, a judge of the Court of Appeal in Lublin, “Report on court murders”, Warsaw 1994, p. 108).

Bright examples of the cruelty of Jewish investigators towards the interrogated Polish officers can be found in the so-called the Bydgoszcz case.

Jerzy Poksiński described, for example, how “Capt. Mateusz Frydman grabbed the interrogated officers by the throat and beat their head against the walls, he said to Major Krzysik:

“I will shoot you and I will tomb you, so that Anders cannot erect a monument” (see J. Poksiński, “TUN. Tatar – Utnik – Nowicki”, Warsaw 1992, p. 38).

In the Bydgoszcz case, Colonel Józef Meksz died martyred. In the course of another fabricated case of innocent officers, the so-called of the Zamość-Bydgoszcz affair, Colonel Julian Załęski, tortured in prison, died. He lost his life as a victim of cruel tortures ordered by one of the most ruthless Jewish torturers – the head of the Main Information Board of the Polish Army, Col. Stefan Kuhl, known as the “bloody Kuhl” (see AK Kunert – J. Poksiński, Col. Stefan Kuhl, “Życie Warszawy”, February 24, 1993).

Director of the Department of the 5th Ministry of Public Security, a Jewish communist, Luna Brystygierowa, specializing in the persecution of the Catholic Church and patriotic intelligentsia, was called “Blood Luna” because of the extreme ruthlessness with which she interrogated prisoners. A soldier of the Home Army and former political prisoner Anna Rószkiewicz-Litwinowiczowa wrote in her memoirs that:

Julia Brystygierowa was famous for the sadistic torture inflicted on young prisoners. During the interrogations in Lviv, she put the prisoners’ genitals into a drawer, slamming it sharply. She was sexually perverted, and here she had a chance to show off ”(see A. Rószkiewicz-Litwinowiczowa, Difficult decisions. Counter-intelligence of the Home Army Warsaw District 1943-1944. Prison 1949-1954, Warsaw 1991, p. 106).

One of the most disgraceful cases was the arrest in 1947, on the basis of fabricated accusations, of Major Mieczysław Słaby, a former Westerplatian physician, the most famous heroic formation of the Polish defense war of 1939.

After only a few months of interrogation, Major Słaby died at the age of only 42 as a result of injuries sustained during the investigation. His case was handled by the deputy prosecutor Major S.D. Mojsezon (Mojżeszowicz), a Jew by origin.

He wrote, in his own hand, the alleged “testimony” of Major Słaby. Weak Słaby, admitted that he “acted to the detriment of the Polish state”. He was persuaded with appropriate methods to sign the testimony formulated by prosecutor Mojsezon. The tortured major died before being convicted and sentenced.

Another example is the case of the behind-the-scenes death in the building of the Ministry of Public Security of one of the heroes of the book by Aleksander Kamiński from the “Zośka” battalion – Jan Rodowicz pseud. “Anoda”. The investigation of his death was canceled twice (in 1949 and 1994).

He was one of the characters famous for his incredible courage, dedication and the ability to take risks. For his military merits, he was awarded the Cross of Valor (twice) and the Virtuti Militari Cross.

A multi-talented student, he studied at the Faculty of Architecture of the Warsaw University of Technology when he fell victim to repression. He was arrested on Christmas Eve 1948 and taken to the secret police office. His interrogations were led by the head of the 5th Department of the Ministry of Public Security, Major of Jewish origin Wiktor Herer (later a professor of economics).

Only two weeks after the arrest, the legendary “Anoda” was killed in the building of the Ministry of Public Security. From the information submitted to the prosecutor’s office by another member of the “Zośka” battalion, imprisoned at the same time as “Anoda”, Rodowicz was shot by Bronisław K. from the Ministry of Public Security.

Former MBP chief Wiktor Herer denied the allegation of the murder of “Anoda.” He upheld the old official version that “Anoda” committed suicide by jumping on the sill of an open window and jumping from the fourth floor.

This version seems quite unlikely, if only because it was the middle of winter then – on January 7, 1949. So how to explain the claim that at that time there was an open window in the MBP building on the fourth floor?

Generally, the numerous crimes committed in various provinces under the command and command of local Jewish security service officers are still insufficiently known. A typical example in this respect is the case of crimes against 16 Poles – demobilized soldiers of the Home Army and NSZ, committed in Siedlce on April 12 and 13, 1945.

In the course of prosecution proceedings in the 1990s, it was unquestionably proven that the murder was committed by employees of the County Public Security Office in Siedlce. At the time of the crime, the head of the then UB in Siedlce was Lieutenant Edward Słowik, an officer of Jewish nationality who had Major Timoshenko as his “adviser” to the NKVD officer.

At the time of the crime, out of about 50 employees of the then Siedlce UB, about 20 were of Jewish nationality. According to historian Marek J. Chodakiewicz, most of the participants of the kidnappings and murders of 16 former soldiers of the independence underground in Siedlce, including Braun (Bronek) Blumsztajn and Hersz Blumsztajn, were transferred to other places on duty (cf. MJ Chodakiewicz, op. Cit., P. 466).

Among the criminal investigation officers of Jewish origin, it is worth mentioning separately Major (Izaak) Ignacy Maciechowski, deputy head of Department IV of the GZI in 1949-1951. According to the Mazur’s commission report, he was conducting an investigation against General Tatar, Col. Uziębło, Col. Sidorski, Col. Barbasiewicz, Col. Jurkowski and Maj. Wacek using very brutal interrogation methods. Several of the officers tortured by Maciechowski, after pleading guilty, were sentenced to death by Stalinist courts, Colonel Ścibor, Colonel Barbasiewicz and Colonel Sidorski (see T. Grotowicz, Ignacy Maciechowski, “Our Poland” of February 10, 1999).

A separate, extensive topic, which I present briefly here, is the case of numerous responsible judges of Jewish origin, such as the aforementioned prosecutor Helena Wolińska (Fajga Mindla-Danielak) or judge Maria Gurowska.

Let us list here, among others such people as the deputy prosecutor general of the People’s Republic of Poland, Henryk Podlaski, the deputy head of the Supreme Military Court and the head of the Military Board, Oskar Szyja Karliner (he led to such a management of positions in this board by officers of Jewish origin that this institution was maliciously called the “Chief Rabbinate of the Polish Army”) , the head of the Main Information Board of the Polish Army, Col. Stefan Kuhl, prosecutor Benjamin Wajsblech, judge Stefan Michnik, Lt. Filip Barski (Badner), Capt. Franciszek Kapczuk (Nataniela Trau), prosecutor Henryk Holder, judge of the Supreme Military Court Marcin Danzig, judge Col. Zygmunt Wizelberg, judge Aleksander Warecki (Weishaupt), prosecutor Col. Kazimierz Graff, Judge Emil Merz, Col. Józef Feldman, Col. Maksymilian Lityński, Col. Marian Frenkel, Col. Naum Lewandowski, prosecutors in the General Prosecutor’s Office: Benedykt Jodelis, Paulina Kern, Col. Feliks Aspis, Col. Eugeniusz Landsberg.

It is enough to recall that in 1968 alone, about 1,000 people left the former government apparatus, disgraced by their participation in the secret services of the UB, etc. (according to information provided on March 12, 1993 in a television broadcast by Colonel J. Poksiński, an outstanding researcher of recent history).

And let us remind you that some of the Jewish security service officers and murderers, the most discredited by the actions of the terror apparatus, left Poland earlier, in the first years after 1956. Let us compare these data with JT Gross, who tried to diminish the role of Jews in the repression apparatus, writing remarks about “a few dozens of Jews “,” acting as Stalin’s henchmen. “

I will only briefly mention a few less luminous figures from the judiciary. Among the most ruthless prosecutors of Jewish origin was Kazimierz Graff, son of the merchant Maurycy Graff and teacher Gustawa Simoberg, former chairman of the Warsaw Academic Antigett Committee in 1937-1938.

On February 26, 1946, as the vice-prosecutor of the Emergency Cases Department of the District Court in Siedlce, during an away session in Sokołów Podlaski, he sentenced 10 Home Army soldiers to death.

The very next day, Graff ordered the execution of convicted Home Army soldiers “so that they would not have time to submit a plea for pardon, which they were entitled to by law” (according to: TM Płużański, “The case of prosecutor Graff”, “High Time”, 6 July 2002).

Thanks to his ruthlessness, after a series of court murders, Graff was quickly promoted to the rank of Deputy Chief Military Prosecutor in the rank of colonel. He was the main prosecutor in the case of the Polish Underground Army commanded by Cpt. Stanisław Sojczyński “Warszyca”, leading to the death sentences against “Warszyca” and a number of other co-accused.

The Main Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against the Polish Nation established that “there was a judicial murder in this case” (cf. ibid.). Graff “became famous”, among others as a co-author of the indictment in the fabricated trial of General S. Tatar and other senior soldiers, which was to discover a “conspiracy in the army” (cf. ibid.).

However, the indictment prepared by him was considered to contain many accusations “too naive” and had to be processed by two more experienced than Graff specialists from Stalinist investigations – A. Fejgin and J. Różański.

The court murderer Stefan Michnik, brother of the current editor-in-chief of “Gazeta Wyborcza” Adam Michnik, was immediately promoted at the age of only 27 to the rank of captain, even though he did not have a high school diploma.

He “deserved” such his zeal in fabricated political trials. As a second lieutenant, he was a judge in the fabricated trials of Maj. Zefiryn Machalla, Col. Maksymilian Chojecki, Maj. Jerzy Lewandowski, Col. Stanisław Wecki, Maj. Zenon Tarasiewicz, Lt. Romuald Sidorski, Lt. Alexander Kowalski.

Stefan Michnik sentenced Maj. Z. Machalla to death at the age of 37, who was executed on January 10, 1952 (he was rehabilitated posthumously on May 4, 1956).

On December 8, 1954, Col. Stanisław Wecki, who was sentenced by Michnik to a 13-year prison sentence, died less than a month after his interruption in the execution of the prison sentence. Fortunately, the death sentences were not carried out on Col. M. Chojecki and Maj. J. Lewandowski. sentenced to death by S. Michnik.

In 1951 Major Karol Sęk was executed on the basis of the sentence of S. Michnik (in the trial of NSZ Podlasie – the crime was completely unknown.

This is how Stefan Michnik sentenced NSZ soldiers to death.

Karol Sęk is one of the most beautiful patriotic cards. At the age of 16, he broke the German emblem, and later participated in the Polish-Bolshevik war. During World War II, a prisoner of Majdanek, a soldier of NOW and NSZ. Life for Poland was interrupted on June 7, 1952 by the decision of Stefan Michnik, brother of Adam Michnik. Karol Sęk was murdered in prison.

In the same trial of the Podlasie NSZ, Stefan Michnik issued two more death sentences: one was carried out (on Stanisław Okuniński), another (on Tadeusz Moniuszko) was commuted to life imprisonment. In Życie from February 11, 1999, it was stated that, according to the editorial staff, S. Michnik had handed down about 20 death sentences in political trials.

Prof. Witold Kulesza, the then head of the investigative department of the Institute of National Remembrance, loudly announced that the Institute of National Remembrance would demand the extradition of Stefan Michnik.

I wonder what these reasons (was it the concern not to weaken Adam Michnik’s “authority”?) made them withdraw from this announcement? It is worth asking why the authorities of the Institute of National Remembrance lacked elementary honesty and courage to publicly inform about the reasons for withdrawing from the announced demands for the extradition of S. Michnik?

Among other court murderers it is worth mentioning, among others about the case of the head of the Military Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw, Col. Eugeniusz Landsberg. He was saved by Poles during the war thanks to the shelter given to him by the Catholic Church. He repaid for them with numerous death sentences on Polish patriots in fabricated political trials.

For the Stalinist Soviet dignitaries in charge of matters in Poland, Stalinist Soviet dignitaries who were in charge of matters in Poland, the best guarantee of determination in the fight against Polish patriots from the independence underground. And in this respect, they were not disappointed.

Among Jewish security officers, judges and prosecutors, there was a particularly large number of the most inexorable “conquerors” of the Polish Home Army underground, ready to construct the most absurd accusations against him.

Typical in this respect was Judge Dawid Rozenfeld, who justified the sentence which sentenced only to life imprisonment a Gestapo agent guilty of denunciation and death of many soldiers and officers of the Home Army, complicit in handing over to the Gestapo General Stefan Rowecki “Grot”. As a mitigating circumstance, Judge Rozenfeld considered in the case of this agent the following:

”According to the Provincial Court, the accused is a victim of the criminal activity of the Home Army leadership, which, as we know now, cooperated with the Gestapo, served the Gestapo, and together with the Gestapo fought against the greater part of the Polish nation in its struggle for national and social liberation” (quoted in: J. Piłek, Stalinists are among us, in: Gazeta Polska, August 4, 1994).

ADWO – HANGERS

Let us add to the above descriptions the role of some lawyers of Jewish origin. A special type of “defender” in political trials was represented, for example, by the lawyer of Jewish origin, Mieczysław (Mojżesz) Maślanko. He “defended” his charges in such a way that he compared Moczarski’s group to the Gestapo and the Abwehr, claiming that ” all these institutions were established by having classes who want to stay the wheel of history ” (according to: TM Płużański, Advocacy, in: “The Highest Time “, January 26, 2003).

In a similar way, Maślanko “defended” – accusing the head of the 2nd Main Directorate of WiN Col. Franciszek Niepokólczycki, the famous “Łupaszka”, that is Maj. Zygmunt Szendzielarz, commander of the 5th Vilnius Brigade of the Home Army, nationalist Adam Doboszyński, Captain Witold Pilecki and co-defendants, General August Emil Fieldorf “Nil” (Maślanko agreed with most of the alleged evidence of “guilt” of gen. “Nil”).

According to the last delegate of the Government in London to Poland, Stefan Korboński, in the case of Pilecki and his co-defendants, “Różański made the case clear: the duty of the council of defense lawyers (chaired by Maślanko – footnote by TM Płużański) is to gather evidence against the accused” (cf. ibid.).

The unworthy behavior of M. Maślanko, who did everything to drown the accused whom he was supposed to defend, was all the more outrageous as he himself was saved from death in Oświęcim by the famous nationalist Jan Mosdorf.

A “defender” similar to Maślanko, or rather an “attorney” in political matters, was another lawyer of Jewish origin, working in a joint law office with Maślanko – Edward Rettinger.

He ‘defended’ Moczarski and his colleagues with the words: ‘(…) it was a mess of crime whose miasms still poison our souls today.

It was a puddle of crime, in which the frozen blood still sticks to the hands ”( cf. ibid.). Another such pseudo-defender was Marian Rozenblitt, who was already active in the judiciary of the Polish army in the USSR.

Gestapo and SB confidants were active in Kraków, including Jewish lawyers Maurycy Wiener and Karol Buczyński. The provincial prosecutor in Kraków was Rek, and his deputies were Gołda, Józef Skwierawski, and Krystyna Pałkówna. They acted jointly and in agreement with attorneys Wiener and Buczyński, discontinuing the investigations of common bandits for heavy money. The rich thugs were “recommended” by Bruno Miecugow, father of Grzegorz Miecugow, TVN journalist. Bruno Miecugow, as a signatory of the shameful list of 53 writers on the death sentences in the trial of the “Krakow Curia”, sent with the help of a Jewish doctor M. Orwid (psychiatry) to the Krakow’s Kobierzyn (psychiatric hospital) of the great Polish architect and patriot Wiesław Zgrzebnicki (“Zgrzesia”) for publicly condemning the signature of Bruno Miecugow in the shame of 53 Krakow writers in the Krakow Journalists’ Club “Pod Gruszką”. The disgrace “53” was also signed by, among others Wisława Szymborska and Sławomir Mrożek, from the decision of Card. Stanisław Dziwisz, buried in the National Pantheon in the crypt under the Church of St. Peter and Paul in Krakow.

Wiesław Zgrzebnicki, tormented by the female psychiatrist from Kraków, died at the age of 40.

A Krakow doctor, Ewa Hołowiecka, the secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party at the Medical Academy of Krakow was appointed to help Bruno Miecugow.

War crimes should be recalled:

Crime in Naliboki – massacre of Polish inhabitants of the village of Naliboki committed by units of Soviet and Jewish partisans on May 8, 1943 under the command of Paweł Gulewicz from the Brigade of Stalin, including a group consisting of people of Jewish nationality (it is being determined whether it was part of the unit under the command of Tevye Bielski or Sholem Zorin). http://www.bibula.com/?p=2061

Tewje Bielski or Tuwia Bielski and Anatol Bielski (born May 8, 1906 in Stankiewiczy near Nowogródek, died 1987 in New York) – Polish Jews, creators (together with three brothers) and commanders of the Jewish partisan unit in the Nabolicka forests during World War II .

The church, school, post office, fire station and some residential houses were burned down, the rest of the settlement was plundered. Several attackers were also killed. According to Soviet sources, the number of Poles killed was estimated at 250; on August 6, 1943, the village was again pacified, this time by German troops as part of the so-called “Operation Hermann”, and its inhabitants were deported deep into the Reich for forced labor.

Crime in Koniuchy – the mass murder of at least 38 Polish inhabitants (men, women and children; the youngest was 2 years old) of the village of Koniuchy (today in the Lithuanian state, formerly in the Second Polish Republic in the Nowogródek voivodeship, Lidzki poviat) committed on January 29, 1944 by Soviet partisans (Russians and Lithuanians) and Jewish.

During the pogrom, most of the houses in the village were burnt, apart from the murdered, at least a dozen or so inhabitants were injured, and at least one of them later died of wounds. Before the attack, the village was inhabited by about 300 Polish inhabitants, there were about 60 buildings in it. Previously, Soviet partisans often commandeered food, clothes and cattle from the villagers, which is why the local inhabitants set up a small volunteer self-defense unit.

The Institute of National Remembrance is investigating the case of the Koniuchy massacre. So far it has been established that the attack was carried out by Soviet partisan units stationed in the Rudnicka Forest: “Death to the Fascists” and “Margirio”, which are part of the Vilnius Brigade of the Lithuanian Guerrilla Movement, and “Death to the Occupant”, part of the Kaunas Brigade.

These units included Russians and Lithuanians, most of the “Death to the Occupant” unit was made up of Jews and Red Army soldiers escaping from POW camps. The Jewish unit consisted of 50 people, and the Russian-Lithuanian units – about 70 people. The commanders were Jakub Penner and Samuel Kaplinsky.

According to one of the attackers, Chaim Lazar, the aim of the operation was to kill the entire population, including children, as an example to intimidate the rest of the villages. According to the findings of the Canadian Polish Congress, which were the basis for the initiation of the investigation, the number of dead was greater (approx. 130).

The attack on Koniuchy and the murder of the local civilian population was the largest of a series of similar actions carried out in 1943 and 1944 by Soviet and Jewish partisans in the Rudnicka and Nalibocka forests (e.g. the massacre of the population in the town of Naliboki).

In May 2004, a monument commemorating the victims was unveiled in Koniuchy, with 34 established names of the victims.

In post-war studies, based on, inter alia, Jewish accounts of participants in the attack on the countryside (eg Izaak Chaim and Chaim Lazar) often provided information about the murder of all 300 inhabitants, as well as about fights with a unit of German soldiers (in other sources of the Lithuanian police).

However, later studies did not confirm the presence of Germans or policemen in the village, and also questioned the thesis that all inhabitants of the village had died (some of the inhabitants escaped from the massacre and survived the war). Information stating that all Polish inhabitants of the village of Koniuchy were murdered also appeared in the reports of the structures of the Polish Underground State at that time.

Documents, sources, citations:

prof. Jerzy Robert Nowak, (“Nasz Dziennik”, August 18, 2006)

http://pantarhei.type.pl/1712/zydowscy-kaci-w-powojennej-polsce/

http://dakowski.pl//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10450&Itemid=53

http://www.wicipolskie.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9400&Itemid=56

Author Aleksander Szumański

http://aleksanderszumanski.pl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1103&Itemid=2

Abram Tauber

This is unknown history that is hidden away and will never be talked about openly and surely this is not the only account of betrayal, but it just doesn’t fit the current narrative, but it’s vital that in the face of lies especially in the face of anti-Polish hatred we respond with true stories of how some Jews treated Poles.

True Polish history: Polish heroes risk their lives to save a Jew. The Soviets invade and then the Jew collaborates with the Soviets murdering Poles.

Polish-Jewish relationships often had nothing to do with “antisemitism” and everything to do with treason and self-preservation.

niewygodne.info.pl

The story of Abram Tauber – a Jew rescued by the Home Army who after the war became the head of the Security Service in Chodel.

This story shows that in the case of Polish-Jewish relations – especially in the post-war period – there can be no simple, zero-one narrative. Just as there were bad Poles surrendering hiding Jews to Germany, so were the hiding Poles murdered by communist torturers, the majority of whom were Jews. Abram Tauber was hidden by Home Army soldiers during the war. When the Soviet army appeared in the vicinity of Lublin, he came to their side. Soon after, he became the head of the UB in Chodel and personally murdered 4 Home Army soldiers.

Abram Tauber, due to his Jewish origin, did not have an easy life under German occupation. He had to hide. He was assisted in this by the Home Army soldiers under the command of Major Hieronim Dekutowski (aka “Zapora”). Many times he could count on shelter in locations controlled by the “Zaporczyk”.

In the second half of 1944, when Soviet soldierscaptured the Lublin region, Tauber decided to go to their side. He decided that the threat to his life would be much smaller when he got to the areas from which Germany was driven out.

At the beginning of 1945, Tauber was appointed commander of the MO post and head of the UB in Chodel. As the head of this communist unit, he contacted four Home Army soldiers whom he knew from the period of hiding from the Germans (one of them was to save him directly). These soldiers went to the meeting completely voluntarily and without weapons. It is possible that they were convinced that Tauber, who had been saved by them earlier, would want to repay them somehow, put vodka or give some good advice on the new reality.

What turned out in reality? The meeting with Tauber was a classic UB ambush. Tauber ordered them to be tied up with barbed wire first and then shot them all personally.

Upon hearing the news, Hieronim Dekutowski (“The Firewall”) decided to return to the underground. He organized a group of several dozen Polish soldiers and – as a revenge for Tauber’s deed – on the night of February 5-6, 1945, he broke the MO / UB police station in Chodel. The Dekutowski group did not find Tauber, however. According to the account of one of the “zaporczyki” by Stanisław Wnuk (aka “Opal”). Tauber was soon transferred to the Szczecin UB. Finally, he was supposed to emigrate to Israel.

I put this “pebble in the garden” to show that – contrary to what the Yad Vashem Institute claims – the history of anti-Semitism and anti-Polonism can sometimes intertwine and intertwine. Abram Tauber was undoubtedly a victim of Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic policy. However, as soon as the opportunity arose, he became an officer of the criminal regime for which the enemy number 1 was Poles fighting for freedom.

Source: Hieronim Dekutowski “Zapora” (Historycy.org)
Source: Justice system of the anti-communist armed underground at the AK-WiN Lublin Inspectorate 1945-1947 (bibliotacyfrowa.pl)
Source: Hieronim Dekutowski (Wikipedia)

niewygodne.info.pl
an inconvenient blog for the establishment of the Third Polish Republic