JACK
The invasion of Poland, which began on 1 September 1939, was over with quickly. The Polish army was overwhelmed from the start. There was no serious resistance. Within a month, the two conquerors were already setting up their respective regimes in the western and eastern sectors.
There is no question that things were far better for the Jews in the east. Amongst the Russian people there were, of course, a considerable number of anti-Semites, and Stalin himself – as history shows – held a deep and violent hatred of Jews. But the official Soviet policy was that discrimination on the basis of ethnic or religious groupings was illegal and intolerable as it cut against the formation of a unified socialist society. So there was no such thing as Pole or Jew or Belorussian – only members of the state.
Mir, where my parents lived, was so close to the Russian border that the Soviet troops arrived and took control literally a day or two after the invasion began. I remember that they came around noon, and that the first vehicles to arrive were not tanks but open trucks full of Russian soldiers. The people of Mir were very confused as to what they should do … go in the house and hide, or go outside and wave. The trucks were parked and the soldiers were basically waiting there. Finally, they came down from the trucks and began giving away candy, cigarettes. They seemed to be friendly so the people began opening their windows, coming out of their homes, even inviting the Russian soldiers inside for dinner.
As Jews, we learned that we were lucky that it was the Russians, not the Germans, who had arrived. We didn’t hear about the atrocities in the western section of Poland for three or more months, when a very few of the Jews from that section managed to sneak over to our side. Those Jews were calledbyegentses [refugees]. In some cases they managed it by bribing the border guards. Anyway, they started to let us in on what was going on. We had no idea of the extent of what was to come – we didn’t know, for example, about the concentration camps. But we understood what to expect – that many Jews would suffer and die. We heard that the Germans were seizing Jewish houses and possessions and putting all the Jews into ghettos, which were always in the most run-down sections of a town. The refugees told us that, when entering the ghettos, each Jew was allowed to carry one suitcase with only basic clothing items. If you were caught trying to smuggle in furs, gold, even a nice warm coat that a German or a Pole might want, you were immediately shot. Jews had to wear the yellow star patches, which symbolised that they were less than human, with no legal rights, no right to attend school or receive medical aid or even adequate food – there were strict rations for items such as stale bread and watery soup with fish bones. We heard that the younger Jews were being put to work while the older ones and the very young children and the babies were somehow disappearing.
None of that information was ever officially acknowledged by the Russian occupiers. Either they were uninformed, or, more likely, they had decided not to discuss it. Perhaps they did not wish to cast a bad light on their German allies, or perhaps they did not want to deal with the unrest that the news might have caused if it reached the Jewish population as a whole. But the net effect was that the Russians ignored the ‘Jewish problem’.
Please understand that we were not so foolish as to think that the Russians had brought Paradise with them. As time went on, we discovered
