To immediately link a helpless Jew to the communist takeover in Poland was, of course, absurd, but many supported this view with the common assumption that a disproportionately large percentage of the new governmental elite in Warsaw was of Jewish origin, as were many prewar Polish communists and socialists.21 In the words of Michael Steinlauf, the notion of the żydokomuna was “[t]he product of labyrinthine interaction between systems of myth and stereotype on one hand and historical experience on the other.”22
There were also more immediate and material causes for renewed discrimination against Jews. According to several scholars, the reclamation of former Jewish property was central to the problem.23 After the war thousands of Jews returned to their homes from refuge in the Soviet Union or from the camps. Much of their property and even many of their synagogues had been appropriated by Gentile Poles who assumed that they would never return. In his journalistic memoir, S. L. Shneiderman rather melodramatically described the dilemma faced when Jews began to return from the camps and abroad:
They were now returning to look for what was left of their homes or their relatives. But when a Polish peddler hands a Jew a loaf of bread or a bowl of soup, he wonders whence this Jew has come. He was persuaded that he would never again see a Jew. Many of these street peddlers have furnished their homes with the belongings of murdered Jews; some are living in Jewish apartments; others have inherited the workshops of Jewish tailors or shoemakers. Looking at the returning Jews, they wonder whether among their number there is not some relative of the Jews whose goods they had appropriated. In the smaller towns, where the inhabitants do not feel the hand of authority as directly as do those who live in the capital, such newly returned Jews have often been murdered.24
Postwar anti-Semitism was also rooted in a factor unique to the Polish situation: unlike the situation in other countries under German rule, where anti-Semitism was generally identified with fascist quisling governments, anti-Semitism in Poland was not wholly discredited by the experience of the occupation. Writing in the journal Odrodzenie, Kazimierz Wyka observed in 1945:
Why has the anti-Semitism of the educated classes, although at present it has no real basis, become tied with reaction in so many cases? Reaction alone cannot explain this. The core of the problem is elsewhere: it lies in the fact that Poland had no Quisling. Please do not imagine that I am trying to be paradoxical. Nevertheless, the tragic paradox of the present situation is that Poland is now the only country in Europe where anti-Semitism is still a factor and is inspiring murders. Ours is the country where the Jews were most thoroughly exterminated and where the resistance against the Germans during the occupation was the strongest, and yet it is here that Hitlerism has left its cuckoo egg. . . . If Polish anti-Semitism had comprised itself as collaborationist, it would later have been destroyed or at least unmasked. But since it never had a Quisling character, it retained its position and is still considered a mark of patriotism.25
Wyka’s argument is perhaps a bit simplistic, but it remains worthy of consideration as one of many reasons for the persistence of anti-Semitism in these years. There were certainly collaborators in occupied Poland, but there was no collaborationist government executing Nazi policy toward Jews. This factor is not decisive in explaining the presence of anti-Semitism in early postwar Poland, but it does invite one to speculate on the forms Polish anti-Semitism might have taken had it been identified with a discredited quisling regime.
Regardless, it is clear that in the first postwar years Poles were able to evade a thorough confrontation with the problem of anti-Semitism. Wartime devastation, reconstruction, demographic upheaval, and political conflict allowed for and even encouraged a retreat from the “Jewish question.” It also encouraged Poles to face the challenge of coming to terms with their “own” losses in the Second World War and turn to the cultivation of a Polish-national martyrological idiom—an idiom that came to center on the history and commemoration of Auschwitz. As Poles learned more about the camp, its place in the German occupation, and the crimes perpetrated there, Auschwitz quickly emerged as the most compelling symbol of Polish martyrdom.
Auschwitz in the Public View
Any consideration of Auschwitz and its place in Poland’s early postwar commemorative culture must come to terms with the presentation of the camp’s history to the Polish public, for the ways of conveying that history—the postwar vectors of Auschwitz memory—helped to define its meaning in the years to come. The nature of the crimes, the identity of both perpetrators and victims, and the significance of the crimes for postwar Poland were all issues open to public discussion as governmental institutions, the press, and former prisoners related the history of the camp to the public at large. Auschwitz was well known to the Polish population even during the occupation, as word of the brutal conditions in the camp spread via the channels of underground resistance26 and reports of prisoners who had been released.27 Even if Auschwitz had a certain symbolic status prior to the liberation, in the first months after the war its history and meaning were far from clear, as the Polish public was confronted with an array of inconsistent evidence and speculative reports on the crimes committed there.
The attempt to ascertain the number of victims at Auschwitz and other camps illustrates the confusion. On the day of Germany’s unconditional surrender a Red Army publication announced that 4 million had died at Auschwitz, a figure based on the findings of the Soviet investigative commission that had begun its work after liberating the camp.28 In late summer 1945 the Warsaw daily Życie Warszawy, citing a report by the French occupation authorities in Germany, claimed that a total of 26 million died in German camps during the war, with 12,000–14,000 murdered daily in Dachau alone29—a fanciful figure because Dachau did not function as an extermination center. A year later, the British prosecuting attorney at the Nürnberg Trials set the total number of dead in camps across Europe at 12 million.30 In May 1945 a report in Życie Warszawy stated that 5 million had been murdered in Auschwitz,31 and in January 1946 a Nürnberg witness claimed that 4 million Jews alone had perished in Auschwitz.32 A month later a report in Gazeta Ludowa, based on the estimates of the American Joint Distribution Committee for the Aid of Jews, stated that a total of 4.4 million Jews from across Europe had been murdered in all the camps.33 The lack of consensus undoubtedly confused many Poles, but reports such as these left no doubt that the German atrocities at Auschwitz were of an unimaginable magnitude.
Sensational as reports on the number of victims at Nazi camps may have been, they were only part of the wave of “publicity” after the liberation in January 1945. In the following weeks reports and survivor testimonies appeared in the press and in book form,34 while the Soviet forensic commission began its highly publicized investigations at the Auschwitz site on 4 February.35 The work of this group was augmented by the investigations of other organizations, each with its own research agenda. The Polish Institute of National Remembrance, committed to gathering information on German crimes “lest the heroics of the Red Army be lost,”36 was the initiative of the newly formed Ministry of Education. The Central Committee of Jews in Poland37 formed a subsidiary Jewish Historical Documentary Commission to study the fate of Jews in the camps and to determine their countries of origin.38 In addition, local courts across Poland collected evidence related to German crimes.
For most Poles, however, the main source for information about Auschwitz was the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland (Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce), an institution called into force by the provisional government in early 1945.39 The commission was the main agency for the collection and analysis of evidence related to Nazi crimes on Polish territory, both in camps and at large. The Central Commission also had several subsidiary groups, most notably the Kraków-based Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes at Auschwitz. This subsidiary commission issued the first report on crimes at Auschwitz, and its findings hit the press on the same day as news of the German surrender. The report not only included descriptions of the gassing and crematory processes, but based on research