Fear Anti-semitism in Poland After Auschwitz

1 Poland Abandoned Wars in Europe have simultaneously been periods of social revolutions, and the Second World War is a good case in point.1 Indeed, one could argue that in Eastern Europe the entire decade from 1939 to 1948despite the clear divide of 1945, which saw the defeat of the Third Reichwas one continuous epoch of radical transformation toward a totalitarian model of society, imposed first by the Nazis and then by the Soviets.2 While the war, it is true, had an enormous impact on every European society, producing both a new map of Europe and a new paradigm of European politics, Poland's case was unique among the belligerent countries because of the scale of devastation and upheaval under the impact of Nazi occupation from 1939 until 1945 (supplemented by the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland from September 1939 until June 1941).* As a *On August 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union concluded a treaty of nonaggression, known in historiography as the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact after the names of the foreign ministers who signed the document in Moscow. A week later, on September 1, 1939, World War II began. As agreed between the signatories, the Red Army marched into Poland soon after the German attack. In the secret protocols attached to the August treaty, the Soviet Union reserved for itself a "sphere of interests" including Bessarabia, Estonia, Latvia, and the better part of Poland. The original demarcation line between the Nazi and Soviet zones of occupationsplitting the capital city, Warsaw, in half along the Vistula Riverappeared in the September 25, 1939, issue of the main Soviet newspaper, Pravda. On September 28 in Moscow, the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty was signed and a somewhat modified territorial division of recent conquests was agreed upon. Stalin settled for only half of Poland's territory and drew the frontier eastward, result of the war, the country suffered an unprecedented demographic catastrophe. It lost its minoritiesJews in the Holocaust, and Ukrainians and Germans following border shifts and population movements after the war. A third of its urban residents were missing at war's end. Poland's elites in all walks of life were wiped out. More than half of its lawyers were no more, along with two fifths of its medical doctors and one third of its university professors and Roman Catholic clergy. It lost its choice civil servants, army officers, and sportsmen. Several million people were displaced, either because they were deported, or because their domiciles were destroyed, or because the frontiers were changed. Somewhere between 41?2 million and 5 million Polish citizens lost their lives during the war (including 3 million Polish Jews), and several million more experienced imprisonment, slave labor, or forced resettlement.* The scale of material devastation matched the volume of population loss and trauma. Virtually every family in Poland was victimized in one way or another, and many catastrophically. Particular devastation was suffered by Poland's Jews, an ancient community that was physically destroyed as a result of the war. No more than 10 percent survived the Nazi onslaughtsome in German camps, some hiding among Gentile neighbors, most in the Soviet interior, where they fled or had been deported earlier by the Soviet secret police. While half of Poland's prewar territory was under Soviet control from mid-September 1939 through June 1941, a direct result of collaboration between Hitler and Stalin at the time, more than one million Polish Jews (out of the total of approximately 3.5 million) lived in the Soviet zone. following what used to be known as the Curzon Line (a demarcation line suggested by the British foreign secretary,Gross, Jan T. is the author of 'Fear Anti-semitism in Poland After Auschwitz', published 2007 under ISBN 9780812967463 and ISBN 0812967461.