The Tito-Stalin split shaped international communism. Tito’s independent stand, and the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform that followed, made him a negative model of “national communism.” Between April and September
1948, Moscow’s satellite regimes were encouraged to concern themselves with the supposed nationalist danger (the “right-wing deviation” from the party line) rather than the (Jewish) cosmopolitan one (the “left-wing deviation”). When Polish general secretary Władysław Gomułka objected to the new line, he opened himself to charges that he too exemplified a national “deviation.” In June 1948, Andrei Zhdanov instructed rival Polish communists to bring down Gomułka. The Polish politburo member Jakub Berman agreed that the Polish party suffered from a national deviation. That August, Gomułka was removed from his position as general secretary. At the end of the month he had to issue a self-criticism to the assembled central committee of the Polish party.
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Gomułka was in fact a national communist, and Polish comrades of Jewish origins were perhaps right to fear him. He was not Jewish (though he did have a Jewish wife), and was seen as more attentive to the interests of non-Jewish Poles than his comrades. Unlike Jakub Berman and several other leading communists, he had remained in Poland during the war, and so was less well known to the Soviet leadership in Moscow than were comrades who had fled to the Soviet Union. He had certainly profited from national questions: he had presided over the dual ethnic cleansings of Germans and Ukrainians, and had taken personal responsibility for the settlement of Poles in the western “recovered territories.” He had gone so far as to make a speech to the central committee in which he criticized certain traditions of the Polish Left for their disproportionate attention to Jews.
After his fall, Gomułka was replaced by a triumvirate of Bolesław Bierut, Jakub Berman, and Hilary Minc (the latter two of whom were of Jewish origin). The new Polish troika came to power just in time to avoid an anti-Semitic action in Poland. Disconcertingly for them, the line from Moscow altered during the very weeks when they were trying to consolidate their position. While the right-wing national deviation was still possible, Stalin’s most explicit signals in autumn 1948 concerned the role of Jews in east European communist parties. He made clear that Zionists and cosmopolitans were no longer welcome. Perhaps sensing the new mood, Gomułka appealed to Stalin that December: there were too many “Jewish comrades” in the Polish party leadership who “do not feel connected to the Polish nation.” This, according to Gomułka, led to the alienation of the party from Polish society and risked “national nihilism.”
20
The year 1949 thus brought a particular sort of Stalinism to Poland. Jewish Stalinists exercised a great deal of power, but were caught between Stalinist
anti-Semitism in Moscow and popular anti-Semitism in their own country. Neither of these was important enough to make their rule impossible, but they had to make sure that the two did not meet. Jewish communists had to stress that their political identification with the Polish nation was so strong that it erased their Jewish origins and removed any possibility of distinct Jewish policies.
One striking example of this tendency was the reimagining of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, the major instance of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust, as a Polish national revolt led by communists. Hersh Smolar, the Polish-Jewish communist who had been the hero of the Minsk ghetto, now drained the Jewishness from Jewish resistance to Nazis. He described the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the obligatory ideological terms of Zhdanov: there had been “two camps” within the ghetto, one progressive and one reactionary. Those who spoke of Israel were in the reactionary camp now, as they had been then. The progressives were the communists, and the communists had fought. This was an extraordinary distortion: while the communists had indeed urged armed resistance in the ghetto, the left-wing Zionists and the Bund had more popular support, and the right-wing Zionists more guns. Smolar promised purges to Jewish political activists who failed to accept Polish national communism: “And if there turn out to be people among us who are going to buzz on like flies about some sort of supposedly higher and more essential Jewish national goals, then we will eliminate those people from our society, just like the fighters of the ghetto pushed aside the cowards and those of weak will.”
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All resistance to fascism was by definition led by communists; if it was not led by communists, then it was not resistance. The history of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 had to be rewritten such that communists could be seen as leading Polish Jews—just as they were supposedly leading the Polish anti-Nazi resistance generally. In the politically acceptable history of the Second World War, the resistance in the ghetto had little to do with the mass murder of Jews, and much to do with the courage of communists. This fundamental shift of emphasis obscured the Jewish experience of the war, as the Holocaust became nothing more than an instance of fascism. It was precisely Jewish communists who had to develop and communicate these misrepresentations, so that they could not be charged with attending to Jewish rather than Polish goals. In order to seem like plausible Polish communist leaders, Jewish communists had to delete from history the single most important example of Jews resisting Nazis from Jewish motivations. The bait in Stalin’s political trap was left by Hitler.
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This was Polish-Jewish Stalinist self-defense from Stalin’s own anti-Semitism. If Jewish resistance heroes were willing, in effect, to deny the significance of Hitler’s anti-Semitism to Jewish life and politics, and in some cases to their own desire to resist the German occupation, then surely they had proven their devotion. Stalinism involved denying the most obvious historical facts, and their most pressing personal significance: in the case of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, Polish-Jewish communists managed both. By comparison, the associated slander of the Home Army and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 was an easy labor. Since it had not been led by communists, it could not have been an uprising. Since the Home Army soldiers were not communists, they were reactionaries, acting against the interests of the toiling masses. The Polish patriots who died seeking to liberate their capital were fascists, little better than Hitler. The Home Army, which had fought the Germans with much greater determination than the Polish communists, was a “bespittled dwarf of reaction.”
23
Jakub Berman was the politburo member responsible for both ideology and security in 1949. He repeated a key Stalinist argument for terror: as the revolution nears completion, its enemies fight ever more desperately, and so committed revolutionaries must resort to ever more extreme measures. With feigned deafness to the Soviet line, he framed the struggle as one against the right-wing, or national, deviation. No one could fault Berman for lack of attention to nationalism after the Tito-Stalin split. Meanwhile, no one could have done more than Berman to discolor the Jewish memory of German mass killing in occupied Poland. Berman, who had lost much of his immediate family to Treblinka in 1942, presided over a Polish national communism in which, only a few years later, the gas chambers fell deep into the historical background.
24
The Holocaust had drawn many Jews toward communism, the ideology of the Soviet liberator; and yet now, in order to rule Poland and to appease Stalin, leading Jewish communists had to deny the Holocaust’s importance. Berman had already made a first important move in this direction in December 1946, when he directed that the official estimate of non-Jewish Polish dead be significantly increased and that of Jewish dead somewhat decreased so that the two numbers were equal: three million each. The Holocaust was already politics, and of a dangerous and difficult sort. It, like every other historical event, had to be understood “dialectically,” in terms that corresponded to Stalin’s ideological line and the political desiderata of the present moment. Perhaps more Jews than
non-Jewish Poles had died. But perhaps that was politically inconvenient. Perhaps it would be better if the number were even. To allow one’s personal sense of factuality or fairness to interfere with such dialectical adjustments was to fail as a communist. To recall one’s own family’s deaths in the gas chamber was pure bourgeois sentimentality. A successful communist had to look ahead, as Berman did, to see just what the moment demanded from the truth, and act accordingly and decisively. The Second World War, like the Cold War, was a struggle of progressive against reactionary forces, and that was that.
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Berman, a very intelligent man, understood all of this as well as anyone could, and he brought these premises to their logical conclusions. He presided over a security apparatus that arrested members of the Home Army who had accepted the special assignment of saving Jews. They and their actions had no historical resonance within a Stalinist worldview: the Jews had suffered no more than anyone else, and the soldiers of the Home Army were no better than fascists.
Berman’s most glaring fault, from the perspective of Stalin himself, was that he was himself of Jewish origin (though his documents showed Polish nationality). This was not exactly a secret: he had married under a khuppah. In July 1949, the Soviet ambassador complained in a note to Moscow that the Polish leadership was dominated by Jews such as Berman, and that the security apparatus was run by Jews—an exaggerated assessment, although not without some basis. In the period 1944-1954, 167 of 450 high-ranking Ministry of Public Security officers were Jewish by self-declaration or origin, so about thirty-seven percent in a country where Jews were fewer than one percent of the population. Most though far from all people of Jewish origin in the upper reaches of the security service defined themselves as Poles in their identity documents. This may or may not have reflected how they regarded themselves; these matters were rarely simple. But passport identity, even when it did (as it often did) reflect a sincere identification with the Polish state or nation, did not prevent people of Jewish background from being seen as Jews by much of the Polish population or by the Soviet leadership.
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Berman, the most important communist of Jewish origin in Poland, was the obvious target of any potential anti-Semitic show trial. He understood this perfectly well. To make matters worse, he could be connected with the leading actors of the main drama of the early Cold War, the Field brothers. The Americans Noel and Hermann Field were by then under arrest in Czechoslovakia and Poland as
American spies. Noel Field had been an American diplomat, but also an agent of Soviet intelligence; he was friendly with Allen Dulles, the American intelligence chief who had directed the OSS office in Bern, Switzerland; he also ran a relief organization that aided communists after the war. Field came to Prague in 1949, probably believing that the Soviets again wished for his services; he was arrested. His brother Hermann came to look for him, and was himself arrested in Warsaw. The two of them, under torture, confessed to having organized a vast espionage organization in eastern Europe.
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Though they were never tried themselves, the Field brothers’ alleged activities provided the plot line for a number of the show trials that were then being held throughout communist eastern Europe. In Hungary in September 1949, for example, Lászlo Rájk was show-tried and executed as an agent of Noel Field. The Hungarian investigation had supposedly discovered cells of the Fields’ organization in fraternal communist countries as well. As it happened, Hermann Field knew Berman’s secretary and had once given her a letter for him. The Fields were dangerous precisely because they did in fact know many communists, could in fact be associated with American intelligence, and now under torture could be expected to say anything. At a certain point, Stalin himself asked Berman about Field.
28
Jakub Berman could also be linked to Jewish politics of a kind that were no longer permitted. He knew the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, since he had met with Mikhoels and Fefer before their 1943 visit to the United States. He came from a family that represented some of the range of Jewish politics in Poland. A brother (killed at Treblinka) had been a member of Poalei-Zion Right, one branch of socialist Zionism. Another brother, Adolf, who had survived the Warsaw ghetto, was a member of Poalei-Zion Left, another branch of left-wing Zionism. Adolf Berman had organized social services for children in the Warsaw ghetto, and after the war directed the Central Committee of Polish Jews. As Poland became communist, he remained a left-wing Zionist, in the conviction that these political positions could somehow be reconciled.
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In 1949, it was becoming clear that people such as Adolf Berman had no place in postwar Poland. Indeed, it was to him personally that Smolar had directed the harsh words about the reactionary character of Zionism and the need to eliminate cowardly Jews from Polish society. In so doing Smolar was creating a kind of Stalinist defense against Stalin himself: if Jewish communists in Poland
were ostentatiously anti-Zionist and pro-Polish, they could elude accusations of Zionism and cosmopolitanism. But it was less than clear that even this categorical approach could defend Jakub Berman from the association with his brother. Stalinist anti-Semitism could not be so easily resisted by individual loyalty and commitment.
Jakub Berman survived because he was defended by his friend and ally Bolesław Bierut, the general secretary of the Polish party and the gentile face of its ruling triumvirate. Stalin once asked Bierut whom he needed more, Berman or Minc: Bierut was too wise to fall into that trap. Bierut placed himself between Stalin and Berman, which was to take a risk. In general, Polish communists never permitted themselves the brutality to one another that was evident in Czechoslovakia, Romania, or Hungary. Even the disgraced Gomułka was never forced to sign a humiliating confession or face trial. Polish communists who were in power in the late 1940s usually knew, from personal experience, just what had happened to their comrades in the 1930s. Back then, Stalin had sent a signal; Polish communists had duly denounced each other, which led to mass murder, and the end of the party itself. Although all foreign communists suffered in the Great Terror, this Polish experience was unique, and perhaps created a certain sense of concern for the lives of one’s own closest comrades.
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