Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (33 page)

One such man was Ho Feng-Shan, the consul of the Republic of China in Vienna when Austria was incorporated by Germany in March 1938. Ho identified with the Austrian state and nation, and he sympathized with Chancellor Schuschnigg in his resistance to the Nazis, whom he regarded as “the devil.” Ho took a rather unusual view of the essence of national greatness, believing that it was “only possible through inclusion and tolerance.” His response to the “scrubbing parties” and pogroms that followed the collapse of Austria was to give Chinese visas to Jews. He issued at least a thousand, some of them to people whom he personally extracted from concentration camps. Ho could not have known in 1938 what fate awaited Jews who remained in central Europe, but he was responding to what was, at the time, an unprecedented outbreak of violence against them.

After the German occupation of the Netherlands in spring 1940, the Swiss consul, Ernst Prodolliet, issued Swiss transit visas to Jews. He was ignoring instructions to the contrary. When the Swiss consulate was closed in 1942, he left its funds with people who were trying to help Jews escape from Europe. As German forces reached France that same spring, French Jews fled southward, where some found assistance from diplomats who allowed them to continue their flight. In Bordeaux, the Spanish consul Eduardo Propper de Callejón issued thousands of transit documents to Jews and others. He was one of several Spanish diplomats throughout occupied Europe who worked in this direction. Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in the same city, also issued thousands of documents that allowed Jews and others to leave France. These men were assisting total strangers. They were using the authority inherent in their positions against prevailing policy.

A diplomatic rescuer whose actions were closer to official policy was Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kaunas, Lithuania. He was assigned to Lithuania in 1939 in order to observe German and Soviet troop movements and predict the outbreak of the German-Soviet war. After September 1939, citizens of Poland, Jews and non-Jews alike, fled both the Germans and the Soviets to Lithuania. Particularly after the Soviets incorporated eastern Poland and began deportations to the Gulag, Jews sought refuge in Lithuania. The Soviet deportations of April 1940, which targeted Jews in large numbers, caused a mass flight of Jews to Vilnius and Lithuania generally. In Vilnius that month, some 11,030 Jewish refugees were registered. At the very moment when the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania, in June 1940, it was also carrying out another wave of deportations of Polish citizens, chiefly Jews. This brought a double panic among Jews: they had fled Soviet power in Poland only to find themselves pursued by Soviet power to Lithuania. They found in the Japanese consul a sympathetic listener.

In the 1930s, Sugihara had learned Russian, married a Russian woman, and converted to Russian Orthodoxy; he wanted people to call him Sergei. He spoke Russian with his colleagues in Polish military intelligence in the 1930s, as they all cooperated in the Promethean project and in other anti-Soviet plans. During the war, even after Poland was destroyed in September 1939, he continued to work with Polish officers in the Baltic states. His main contact was Michał Rybikowski, who was running an Allied spy network from neutral Sweden and reporting to the Polish government-in-exile in London. Rybikowski was posing as a Russian and using a passport from the Japanese protectorate Manchukuo, which he presumably obtained from Sugihara. (Because there were many Russian emigrants in Manchukuo, a European with such a passport, especially a Russian speaker such as Rybikowski, would not attract attention.) The cooperation between Sugihara and Rybikowski prepared the way for Sugihara’s eventual action to help Jews.

One of Rybikowski’s assignments was to manage the consequences of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the German-Soviet invasion and occupation of Poland by aiding Polish refugees. His particular task in Lithuania was to prepare an escape route for Polish citizens who had gotten that far and wished to continue their flight from Europe. To this end he recruited two further officers of Polish military intelligence, Leszek Daszkiewicz and Alfons Jakubianec, who got passports from Sugihara and were employed by the Japanese consulate.

The scheme that the Polish intelligence officers invented for Polish refugees was to get a Japanese transit visa for a destination that did not demand an entrance visa. Jan Zwartendijk, the honorary Dutch consul, was willing to sign a declaration to the effect that entering Curaçao, an island in the south of the Caribbean Sea that was a Dutch colony, did not require a visa. The two Poles created a template for a special Japanese transit visa for travel to Curaçao as well as two special visa stamps, one for themselves and one for Sugihara. The original idea, as seen from the perspective of the Polish government-in-exile, was to save Polish citizens who were particularly valuable. Since transit was to be by train across the Soviet Union to Japan, the intelligence officers no doubt hoped to gather useful information from their handpicked refugees.

In the chaos of the summer of 1940, as the Soviets deported masses of people from eastern Poland and established their new regime in Lithuania, the three men gave visas to everyone who asked. Of the 3,500 or so visas they issued to Polish citizens, about two-thirds were given to Polish Jews. Since one visa sufficed for a family, some eight thousand Jews left Europe thanks to these documents. Like Ho in Vienna two years earlier, Sugihara could not have known what would happen to Jews if they remained in Lithuania. He was reacting to the refugee crisis brought on by the German occupation of western and central Poland and the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland and Lithuania. Nevertheless, he clearly felt sympathy for refugees and wished for them to survive; in this sense he consciously rescued Jews. He described the source of his actions at least once, in a brief memoir written in Russian, “as my sense of humanity, from love for my fellow human being.” Daszkiewicz, not at all a sentimental man, wrote later that Sugihara was “a man who had a good heart.”

Once they had done what they could, Sugihara and his two Polish employees left Kaunas for Stockholm and traveled from there to Germany. Sugihara’s mission was to predict when the Germans would attack the Soviet Union—which he estimated correctly within a few days. Shortly after Operation Barbarossa began on June 22, 1941, one of his two Polish confederates, Jakubianec, was discovered by the Gestapo in Berlin, and shot as a spy. Although Jakubianec was working with the Japanese, he was reporting to his superior Rybikowski, who was serving the Polish government-in-exile and thus Britain and the United States. His execution was the end of a man who had invented a scheme that had saved thousands of Jews. But he was not executed for that, or remembered for that, or indeed for anything. His refugee scheme had nothing to do with sympathy for Jews; it was a clever manipulation of the artifacts of collapsing statecraft.

Daszkiewicz continued working for Sugihara, now in Prague, within the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and thus in the Reich. He tried to make contact with the Czech underground. The discovery and death of his friend Jakubianec forced him to leave Europe. He chose to work in Palestine, a traditional terrain for Polish intelligence operatives.

During the Second World War, Palestine was still under a British Mandate, and Poland was a British ally. Before the war, Poland had been pursuing an anti-British policy in Palestine, preparing Jewish revolutionaries for their moment of opportunity: a war or a moment of British weakness. The prewar Polish consul, Witold Hulanicki, remained in Jerusalem during the war, working for the British, while maintaining his relationship with his main Jewish contact and friend, Avraham Stern. It was Stern, ever the seeker of risk and glory, who saw the Second World War as the chance to defeat the British, even going so far as to solicit the help of Nazi Germany (without success). In a tiny group known as Lehi, Stern exploited Polish training and probably Polish weapons in a campaign of violence against the British. He was fulfilling his political program, but also pursuing a spectacularly enunciated death wish. He met the ideal fate of the Polish Romantic rebels whose martyrological ideas he deepened in his own poetry. After Stern was shot and killed by a British policeman in 1942, the work of Lehi was continued by Yitzhak Shamir. The next year Shamir’s partner in anti-British violence would be Menachem Begin, who in 1942 was on his way to Palestine by a very circuitous route.

In the late 1930s, Begin and the young men of Betar had planned to create a State of Israel by descending upon Palestine to support an uprising initiated by Irgun. This was an operation that was to be carried out by Jews who were Polish citizens with the support of the Polish authorities. The destruction of the Polish state in 1939 made such schemes impossible, as Polish aid to Irgun collapsed and the leaders of Betar did their best to flee to Vilnius. Some were placed in ghettos by the Germans; others were arrested and deported by the Soviets. Begin himself was among the Betar activists deported to the Gulag in 1940.

When Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin altered his attitude towards the male Polish citizens in his custody. They were to be allowed to leave the Gulag and form a Polish army to fight against the Germans. Stalin had no interest in Polish citizens fighting on the eastern front, where they might later pose a problem for Soviet power. The Red Army had, after all, invaded Poland once already during the war, and these were precisely the people who had experienced oppression by the NKVD. Best then to force them to fight on the western front, far from the USSR and Poland, where ideally they could kill Germans and die themselves. In order for Polish citizens to travel from the Gulag to the western front, they had to journey from one end of the Eurasian landmass to the other, from the Soviet north, far east, or Kazakhstan through India and Iran and Palestine to western Europe.

This new Polish armed force, created at the sufferance of Stalin and subordinate to the Polish government in London, was commanded by Władysław Anders and so known as the Anders Army. Many of the commanders of the Anders Army had little interest in Jews or held antisemitic stereotypes about their value in combat. But Jews were, nevertheless, among the Polish citizens who joined its ranks. For whatever reason—because they were more likely to be targeted by Stalin, because they were more eager to fight, or because they had better relations with Polish officers—Betar members and Revisionist Zionists were present in the Polish army in considerable numbers. In this way many right-wing Zionists did make their march from Poland to Palestine, if by a very long and indirect route. The British stopped Jews who tried to come to Palestine by sea during the war, but they could hardly stop Jews who came by land in Allied uniforms.

The arrival of these Jews in Palestine revitalized Irgun. Begin reached Palestine with the Polish army in May 1942. There he encountered Wiktor Drymmer, who as director of Poland’s Jewish policy in the late 1930s had been Begin’s patron. Drymmer had worked to create the conditions for a large migration of Polish Jews to Palestine by way of supporting Betar and Irgun. Now he helped to arrange Begin’s honorable discharge from the Polish army, so that he need not face the shame of desertion as he left a conventional armed force to serve an unconventional one. When Begin was chosen to lead Irgun in October 1943, the only clothing he owned was his Polish army uniform.

Now that the war had turned decisively against Nazi Germany, Begin’s Irgun joined Shamir’s Lehi in anti-British terrorism. This meant that two Polish Jews were leading the anti-colonial resistance against Poland’s ally. In February 1944, Begin declared the revolt of Irgun against the British mandatory government. Begin was in every conceivable way a product of Poland. His deputy in Irgun was Eliahu Meridor, who had lived in Poland until 1936 and had returned for training by Polish military intelligence in 1939. Moshe Nechmad, responsible for Irgun operations in the Haifa district, had also taken part in the exercises in Poland in 1939. Eliahu Lankin, the Jerusalem commander of Irgun who led the attack on British intelligence in July 1944, was another Polish product. Lehi under Shamir organized the assassination of Lord Moyne that November, on the rationale that the British minister of state had opposed a Jewish state and stopped the immigration of Jews to Palestine. The techniques learned from Polish military intelligence were used by Irgun in the bombing of the King David Hotel in July 1946.