Antisemitic violence in Bielsk County, Poland (1941)

When the Nazi German-led invasion of the Soviet Union happened in summer 1941, anti-Jewish pogroms[a] happened in the Bielsk County[b] of Poland, causing huge Jewish casualties.[3][4]

Background

In September 1939, Nazi Germany briefly occupied the Bielsk County before handing it over to the Soviets.[c] Polish-Jewish relations reportedly worsened over a small number of Jews welcoming the Red Army.[4] Mosze Kleinbaum, chairman of the Zionist Federation in Poland, wrote:[4][5]

Ukrainian peasants [...] and young Jewish Communists [...] applauded and hailed the Army with friendly greetings. The number of Jewish enthusiasts was not very large, but they made more noise than all the others that day. This created the false impression that the Jews were the chief hosts at this festival.

Żydokomuna

Further information: Antisemitic stereotypes and Antisemitism in Europe

Such isolated incidents were exaggerated by Catholic Poles to paint Jews as communists, namely Żydokomuna,[f][9] though Polish Jews constituted about 30% of the Poles deported to the Soviet interior.[4][10] The Żydokomuna trope paved the way for Polish-led anti-Jewish pogroms,[4][9] including the Jedwabne pogrom[11] and Szczuczyn pogrom.[12][13]

Causes

For the causes of the pogroms, mainstream historians pointed to Catholic antisemitism, the Żydokomuna trope – made worse by grievances towards the Soviet occupation – and the sense of immunity from a messy change of power to the Germans who were happy to see Poles killing Jews. Many Poles took the chance to kill Jews they mistook for having caused Polish suffering.[3][4]

Events

When the Red Army retreated, some Jews followed them to flee the Germans. The Bielsk County was occupied by the Germans within six days. The Nazi death squad Einsatzgruppe B began hunting down Jews.[4][g] The German massacre of Jews was backed by local Catholic Poles. Many anti-Jewish pogroms happened in western Bielsk. Survivors recalled:[3]

Jews were ordered to break the [Lenin] monuments apart into small pieces [...] ordered to march with great ‘pomp’ around the whole town, singing and shouting out, for example: ‘Down with Lenin!’ ‘Down with the Soviets!’ and so on. Then they reached the river, into which all of the pieces of the shattered monument were thrown.

Survivors also recalled what happened in Siemiatycze:[h][3]

“ Poles, on their own initiative, gathered all Jews [...] when the Jews were crossing the bridge, they were pushed off of it into water [...] one Jew died when his head struck a pillar of the bridge. ”

The Germans turned the Bielsk County into the Białystok District, divided into eight Kreisskommissariat[i] and the Bielsk Podlaski County.[4][15] Polish local police, known as the Blue Police, were recruited from ethnic Poles of all faiths, the majority Catholic.[4][15] Of the hundreds of Bielsk Polish policemen who served the Germans, merely 46 were sentenced after the war.[4][15] They mostly claimed to have been forced to serve,[16][17] though recent research has shown otherwise.[18]

Moreover, 39.6% of Bielsk Podlaski County's Jews died of betrayal by neighbors, who helped German troops and Polish policemen hunt Jews down, while 0.8% were killed by the Polish underground.[4] Israeli historians Yisrael Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski estimated that there were about 120 cases of Jews getting killed by the Polish underground, some happened in the Biłgoraj County.[4][19] Polish peasants who hid Jews sometimes stole their belongings[j] before handing them over.[4][20]

Legacy

Further information: Historical revisionism

Despite abundant evidence, many in Polish society refuse to acknowledge these pogroms.[21][22] Some scholars said that such denial was going mainstream[23] amid the rise of nationalism across Europe,[24][25] where Jews were sometimes equated with the disliked Soviet communists against whom the Holocaust was considered "a reaction".[25][26]

Footnotes

  1. ↑ A pogrom is a form of riot that targets an ethnic or a religious group. It is derived from the Russian word погром ("pogrom"); from "громить" IPA: [grʌˈmitʲ] ‒ to wreak havoc, to demolish violently.[1][2]
  2. ↑ Polish: powiat bielski
  3. ↑ Under the Nazi-Soviet agreement on Poland's partition.[3][4]
  4. ↑ Polish: Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny (ONR)
  5. ↑ Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov refers to Marek Jan Chodakiewicz's book After the Holocaust, written about the postwar violence in Poland after the Soviet takeover. Amid a raging Polish anti-Communist insurgency, the Polish Jewish Communists returning from the Soviet Union fought to establish a revolutionary Marxist–Leninist regime, thus adding to the stereotype of Żydokomuna among some Poles. According to him, some younger academics in Poland have questioned the loyalty of Jews during the Soviet occupation, reflecting a "right-wing turn" in Polish politics. Bartov refers in particular to Marek Jan Chodakiewicz and Marek Wierzbicki.[6]
  6. ↑ Żydokomuna ("Jewish Communism") is an antisemitic trope suggesting that most Jews are communists.[7][8]
  7. ↑ The Einsatzgruppen were directly responsible to the Reichsführer SS and Chief of German Police Heinrich Himmler. Each unit was one thousand men strong and comprised small units, Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos; their members were recruited from among officers of Waffen-SS and German police forces.[14]
  8. ↑ Siemiatycze [ɕɛmʲaˈtɨt͡ʂɛ] (Belarusian: Сямятычы Siamiatyčy) is a town in eastern Poland, with 14,391 inhabitants (2019). It is the capital of Siemiatycze County in the Podlaskie Voivodeship.
  9. ↑ Counties, powiat
  10. ↑ Including gold and clothes.[4][20]

References

  1. ↑
    • "Pogrom | Meaning, History, & Facts". Britannica. September 23, 2024. Retrieved November 9, 2024.
    • "Pogroms | Holocaust Encyclopedia". Holocaust Encyclopedia. Retrieved November 9, 2024.
    • "Pogroms". Encyclopédie d’histoire numérique de l’Europe. Retrieved November 9, 2024.
    • "What Were Pogroms?". My Jewish Learning. Retrieved November 9, 2024.
    • "Global leaders react to Amsterdam pogrom". The Jerusalem Post. November 8, 2024. Retrieved November 9, 2024.
  2. ↑
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4
    • AŻIH, 301/1829, Testimony of Symcha Burstein.
    • AŻIH, 301/1463, Testimony of Jehoszua Kajles.
    • The extensive literature attends to the pogroms that took place in the eastern territories of the Polish Commonwealth in the summer of 1941 and analyzes their causes. See Paweł Machcewicz and Krzysztof Persak, eds., Wokół Jedwabnego, vol. 1–2 (Warsaw: IPN, 2002); Andrzej Żbikowski, U genezy Jedwabnego. Żydzi na Kresach Północno-Wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej, wrzesień 1931–lipiec 1941 (Warsaw: ŻIH, 2006); Witold Mędykowski, W cieniu gigantów. Pogromy 1941 roku w byłej sowieckiej strefie okupacyjnej. Kontekst historyczny, społeczny i kulturowy. Zarys teorii pogromów (Warsaw: ISP PAN, 2012).
  4. ↑ 4.00 4.01 4.02 4.03 4.04 4.05 4.06 4.07 4.08 4.09 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 4.14 Grabowski, Jan; Engelking, Barbara; Skibińska, Alina; Szurek, Jean-Charles; Zapalec, Anna; Panz, Karolina; Frydel, Tomasz; Swałtek-Niewińska, Dagmara (2022). "Night without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland". Combined Academic Publishers. Indiana University Press. pp. 46–55, 66–68, 131, 148. ISBN 9780253062864. Retrieved January 5, 2025. Series: Studies in Antisemitism. 546 pages, 152.00 x 229.00 mm, 73 b&w photos, 8 maps, 1 chart, 35 b&w tables.
  5. ↑ Moshe Kleinbaum, report in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR 1939–1946, ed. Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), http://catalog.nypl.org/search/o25915273, cited in Alexandra Garbarini, Jewish Responses to Persecution: 1938–1940 (AltaMira Press: Walnut Creek, 2011), 180.
  6. ↑ Bartov, Omer (2007). Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-day Ukraine. Princeton University Press. p. 206. ISBN 9780691131214. Some younger Polish scholars claim again that the nation's Jewish citizens were disloyal to it during the Soviet occupation and therefore had to be suppressed by the forces of the state.
  7. ↑ Stone, Dan (2014). Goodbye to All That?: The Story of Europe Since 1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 265. ISBN 978-0-19-969771-7.
  8. ↑ Michnik, Adam; Marczyk, Agnieszka (2018). "Introduction: Poland and Antisemitism". In Michnik, Adam; Marczyk, Agnieszka (eds.). Against Anti-Semitism: An Anthology of Twentieth-century Polish Writings. New York: Oxford University Press. p. xvii (xi–2). ISBN 978-0-1-90624514.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Grabowski, Jan; Klein, Shira (February 9, 2023). "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust". The Journal of Holocaust Research. 37 (2): 133–190. doi:10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939. Retrieved January 20, 2025. The charge of Żydokomuna, that Jews were in the majority communist or conspired with the communists to hurt Poles, occurs frequently on Wikipedia. One vivid example of this form of antisemitism was [...] an image showing a poster written in Yiddish, placed just beneath a hammer and sickle sign in Soviet-occupied Białystok [... captioned as] 'Jewish welcoming banner for the Soviet forces invading Poland.' In fact, this image showed nothing of the sort. The poster actually read, 'Election of delegates for Western Belorussia People's Assembly,' meaning this was a Soviet sign advertising Soviet-imposed elections.
  10. ↑
    • Jan Tomasz Gross, Revolution from Abroad (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 196–98. The three major Soviet deportations (1940–1941) encompassed varying numbers of Jews, along with some Ukrainians and Byelorussians. The ethnic distribution for all deportations has been estimated at 52 percent Poles, 30 percent Jews (while the Jews made up 10 percent of the total population), and 18 percent others.
    • The estimated number of Polish citizens deported from Poland’s eastern borderlands is between 300,000 and 330,000, including some 80,000 Jews; Alina Skibińska, “Żydzi polscy ocaleni na wschodzie (1939– 1946),” in Narody i polityka. Studia ofiarowane profesorowi Jerzemu Tomaszewskiemu, ed. August Grabski and Artur Markowski (Warsaw: ŻIH and Instytut Historyczny UW, 2010). The Index of the Repressed (https://indeksrepresjonowanych.pl) contains incomplete information on Jews deported from the individual county’s localities. The Central Card File of the Jews Who Survived the Holocaust mentions as many as 113 persons who survived in the USSR territory out of 220 from Bielsk County registered by the Central Committee of the Jews in Poland.
    • Dora Galperin, “Tragedia i zniszczenie Kamieńca,” in Księga pamięci: Kamieniec Litewski, Zastawie i okolice, http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/Kamenets/Kamenets.html.
  11. ↑
  12. ↑ "Yad Vashem Ghetto Encyclopedia: Szczuczyn". Yad Vashem. Retrieved May 30, 2025.
  13. ↑ Spector, Shmuel; Wigoder, Geoffrey (2001). The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust: Seredina-Buda-Z. p. 1276. Retrieved May 30, 2025.
  14. ↑ Edmund Dmitrów, “Oddziały operacyjne niemieckiej Policji Bezpieczeństwa i Służby Bezpieczeństwa a początek zagłady Żydów w Łomżyńskiem i na Białostocczyźnie latem 1941 roku,” in Wokół Jedwabnego, vol. 1, Studia, ed. Paweł Machcewicz and Krzysztof Persak (Warsaw: IPN, 2002), 280.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2
    • YVA, O53/10, Ludwigsburg USSR Collection, Amtsblatt des Oberpräsidenten der Provinz Ostpreussen, Zivilverwaltung für den Bezirk Bialystok.
    • The ressettlements of thirty-four villages took a bloody course: “After the evacuation was completed, most of villages were burnt to the ground” (AIPN Bi, 484/7. Displacement of the villages of Masiewo I and II, Hajnówka area, p. 224; fragments of the “Police Journal of the Police Battalion 322” in the case file).
    • See Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschaftsund Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrussland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2000), 656. No Joint or ŻSS operated in Bezirk Bialystok.
  16. ↑ Mikołaj Gonta, for example, testified, “I did not want to be in the police, but my father—the elder of the village of Miklasze—forced me to.” His mother testified, “[My] son was to be taken to Prussia, and my husband asked the Germans to give him a job locally, so they gave him this job with the police” (AIPN Bi, 408/250, Court records of the criminal case against Mikołaj Gonta, p. 73).
  17. ↑ Feliks Gałek, schutzman of the post in Hajnówka, testified, “I was forced to enlist to serve the gendarmerie as I was in very difficult circumstances . . . I had no warm clothing, went unshod” (AIPN Bi, 404/274, Court records of the criminal case against Feliks Gałek, p. 48).
  18. ↑
  19. ↑ Yisrael Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski, Unequal Victims: Poles and Jews During World War II (New York, 1986), 33, 211–215, 222, 233.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 Barbara Engelking, “Czarna godzina. Rzeczy żydowskie oddane na przechowanie Polakom” [A rainy day: Jewish possessions given to Poles for safekeeping], in Klucze i kasa, op. cit., 387–437.
  21. ↑
    • Robert Rozett, “Competitive Victimhood and Holocaust Distortion,” The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, XVI (2022); “Distorting the Holocaust and Whitewashing History: Toward a Typology,” XIII: 1 (2019); Yehuda Bauer, “Creating a “Usable” Past: On Holocaust Denial and Distortion,” XIV: 2 (2022); and Jan Grabowski, “The Holocaust and Poland's 'History Policy'” X: 3 (2016).
    • Joanna Beata Michlic, “The Politics of the Memorialisation of the Holocaust in Poland: Reflections on the Current Misuses of the History of Rescue,” Jewish Historical Studies—Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, LIII: 1 (2022); Piotr Forecki, Po Jedwabnem: Anatomia pamięci funkcjonalnej (Kraków, 2018); Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (Princeton, 2001).
    • Piotr Forecki, “Domestic ‘Assassins of Memory’: Various Faces of Holocaust Revisionism in Contemporary Poland,” presentation at a symposium in honor of Professor Antony Polonsky called “The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: sources, memory, politics,” March 16, 2021, UCL, London.
    • "Polish appeals court dismisses claims against Holocaust book historians". Euractiv. August 17, 2021. Retrieved January 4, 2025. An appeals court ruled that two historians accused of tarnishing the memory of a Polish villager in a book about the Holocaust need not apologise, overturning a lower court ruling that raised fears about freedom of academic research.
  22. ↑
    • Antony Polonsky and Joanna Beata Michlic (eds.), The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, 2009) and Laurence Weinbaum, “Amnesia and Antisemitism in the ‘Second Jagiellonian Age,’” Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel, Robert Wistrich (ed.) (Lincoln, 2016).
    • Grabowski, Jan (2024). "Whitewash: Poland and the Jews". The Jewish Quarterly. London, United Kingdom. Retrieved May 25, 2025. In this ground-breaking essay, Jan Grabowski, a world-renowned Holocaust historian, examines how the government, museums, schools and state institutions became complicit in delivering a message of Polish national innocence during the Holocaust. He recounts his own experience as the victim of smears and a notorious lawsuit for questioning the complicity of Poles in the destruction of the country's Jews, and examines the far-reaching consequences of Poland's historical distortions, which have been repeated and replicated worldwide to challenge the truth of the Holocaust.
  23. ↑
  24. ↑ Petrović, Zorica (2018). "The Roman Catholic Church and Clergy in the Nazi-Fascist Era on Slovenian Soil" (PDF). Athens Journal of History. 4 (3): 227‒252. doi:10.30958/ajhis.4-3-4. Retrieved May 25, 2025.
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 Becker, Matthias J.; Troschke, Hagen; Bolton, Matthew; Chapelan, Alexis (October 16, 2024). "Holocaust Denial and Distortion". Decoding Antisemitism. pp. 237–260. Retrieved May 25, 2025.
  26. ↑ Klein, Shira (June 14, 2023). "The shocking truth about Wikipedia's Holocaust disinformation". The Forward. Retrieved October 24, 2024. Why Wikipedia cannot be trusted: It repeatedly allows rogue editors to rewrite Holocaust history and make Jews out to be the bad guys [... .]
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