Foreground

4. National Bolshevism

A few years ago, a Jewish worker from Chicago travelled to Russia to visit and also to familiarize himself with local Jewish life. On the way home he stopped in Berlin and told me the following anecdote. He once sat with relatives and acquaintances from his hometown and they discussed the situation of the Jews in Russia. Suddenly a young man jumped up and ran over to the American, grabbed him by the lapels, and started shouting in a strained voice: “Oy, oy, take me with you to America, take me to New York! At least for one day take me to New York! Just for one day!”

On the question from all sides of what he would do for one day in New York, the young man shouted: “I will climb to the top of the highest tower in New York and scream out to all New York Jews, ‘For God’s sake, why are you allowing three million Jews to go under? Why are you letting three million of your brothers suffer? Why are you so calm and cold when we are starving, without a shirt on our back?’”

I recalled this incident when I recently departed from Poland. Everyone looked at me with eyes that spoke as if to say that I should climb to the tenth floor and utter a cry about the needs of Polish Jews that would shock everyone to the point that the most coldblooded would be terrified.

Will I succeed in uttering such a cry? Will I actually succeed in providing an accurate picture of the economic life of Polish Jews so that our American brothers will finally realize that we have sinned against Polish Jewry and abandoned them?

I do not want my cry concerning the situation of the Jews in Poland to stir only the hearts of American Jewry. I also want their heads to pay attention, for once to seriously consider not just how to feed the hungry, but how they can be extricated from the conditions in which the number of hungry and naked grow.

One must admit that until now American Jews have seriously occupied themselves with the destiny of Russian Jewry and well understood that it is not enough to send packages of flour and grain or of clothes and shoes, but one must also reconstruct the entire economic life of Russian Jewry and adapt it to the new conditions that have been created there.

The great merit of the emissaries and delegates of the “Joint” and of “ORT”1 is that they helped so many thousands of Jewish families to settle on the land or become employed in industry. Much greater is their service in being the originators, the initiators, the first to show how to fundamentally reconstruct Jewish economic life. Emissaries have pushed members of the Yevsektsiya (the Jewish section of the Soviet Communist Party) and awakened the Soviet government, reminding them that the Jewish question is a state problem, that the Jewish plague is a state plague that must be healed by state ways and means. Accordingly, if in the first years of [agricultural] colonization and industrialization the resources of Jewish societies comprised a large percentage of the expenses toward these ends, they now comprise only a small percentage.

You know very well that in Poland completely different conditions exist, and completely different classes are in power. From this one must absolutely not infer that one must leave the three million Polish Jews to their own devices and refrain from any action. To the contrary, one must infer that it is necessary to formulate a different program of work and find different ways to implement it, one must find different methods of forcing the Polish government to understand that one cannot uproot a mass of millions of people and go unpunished.

Certainly, solving the economic problem of the Jews is much, much more difficult in Poland than in Russia. The Bolsheviks have nationalized all factories, placing them in the hands of government. The Polish government has monopolized the alcohol and tobacco factories and salt mines, and it intends to put its hands on other industries. The Bolsheviks did not compensate the factory owners. I won’t start complaining about it here. The Polish government paid the factory owners well—and the Jewish factory owners too. But it chased out all Jewish workers and salaried employees from the monopolized enterprises. Five or six Jewish owners of tobacco factories received fat sums and now run other business with their money, but the several thousand Jewish workers and office workers who worked for decades in these factories, giving up their young years and their lungs in them were rudely and cruelly thrown out on the street. Ostensibly, they were also compensated, but that sufficed only for funeral shrouds, not for making a living.

Jewish workers were employed in the Polish tobacco industry for more than 50 years. For decades they formed the majority in the industry. One may say that the Polish tobacco industry stands on Jewish bones because many hundreds of Jewish workers caught tuberculosis in its factories and died an early death.

Already in 1885 around 1,000 Jewish workers and very few Christians were employed in the tobacco industry in Warsaw. Now in the state tobacco factories there are 1,600 workers but not one Jew. Certainly no fewer than 10,000 workers and office workers are employed in this industry in all of Poland.

Even a few years ago it was a Jewish industry. The office workers were almost all Jews, as was a majority of the manual workers. Now only in Grodno, in the once famous Shereshevski tobacco factory, there remain around 300 Jewish workers. The managers of the factory, among whom there is not one Jew, are driving out the last few Jewish workers. They fire Jews at the least excuse and immediately hire Christian replacements. It is easy to imagine how Jewish workers must feel in such a factory, where they know their days are numbered; where they sense that their bosses are seeking reasons to fire them; where bosses often cause them to feel that they are superfluous. Only inhuman need, only hunger in the most literal sense of the word, forces these few Jewish workers to endure.

This, then, is national Bolshevism—expropriating from private owners, like the Bolsheviks, but so that Jewish manual and office workers pay the price for it. The few rich factory owners who received large sums of money from the government quickly find an alternative way to make a living, but what of the several thousand Jewish workers and several hundred Jewish office workers?

However, national Bolshevism does not affect only the Jewish proletarian. It is consistent and goes further. The tobacco industry is government owned and one can no longer deal with it freely. One must have a concession from the government, and in granting concessions the government squeezes the Jews again. For example, in a city like Pinsk, where all 26 tobacco concessions were owned by Jews, 10 were handed over to Christians. And that is in Pinsk, situated close to the Russian border, where there are almost no Poles apart from the officials sent there, and the Byelorussians are almost all country folk who do not yet compete with the Jews in trade or in artisanal work. In that city, Christian shopkeepers were inserted in more than one-third of the tobacco stores that used to be completely in Jewish hands. And in the real Poland, a few concessions are thrown to the Jews but most are given to one’s own. Thus Jewish shopkeepers are also ruined.

Salt is also a monopoly in Poland. And in the quintessentially Jewish city of Pinsk, where 98% of storekeepers are Jews, all six concessions are effectively in Christian hands. Jews run five of them, but Christians share in the profits and this will probably last only until the Christians learn the trade, at which point they will show the Jews the door.

And while we are considering Pinsk, let us add a few more facts that will immediately clarify how the Jews are being encircled—especially poor Jews, but also middle-class Jews—and how in a free political republic a Jewish economic ghetto is being created. In Pinsk, as noted earlier, 98% of storekeepers are Jews. And industry too is almost completely in Jewish hands. Not only are the factory owners Jews; a large number of workers are too. Pinsk is a real Jewish city, as will be later elaborated.

In Pinsk a branch of the state bank opened {in the 1920s}. To whom should it offer credit if not to Jewish factory owners, merchants, and storekeepers? It turns out that the bank gives credit only to landowners, even when their estates are burdened with debt, and to Christian cooperatives. If, with great effort, a Jewish cooperative credit association manages to get credit, it is small in comparison with the credit received by the area’s Christian-owned cooperatives.

One may assume that the director of the state bank is completely against giving credit to merchants and storekeepers. But there opens in Pinsk a Christian-owned paper business and the owner immediately receives a substantial sum of credit. Yet in Pinsk there is a Jewish-owned paper business that is 65 years old, and the Jew is denied credit so he must get credit from private sources at 25–30% interest, while the Pole borrows money from the state bank at 10–12%. If one adds that the office holder who collects taxes is also a Pole who feels it his obligation and a good national deed to charge the Jew higher and higher taxes and to demand payment with the greatest strictness, one gets a clear picture of how the Jew in the free Polish Republic is surrounded by iron rings that cut into his body, wounding him more seriously than do political constraints.

In the Galician oil fields there were several hundred Jewish workers and many Jewish office workers. Since the founding of the Oil Trust, in which the government is a major shareholder, the number of Jewish workers keeps on falling. It is very close to the time when oil drilling, in which Jews worked hard for decades, will be Judenrein. The Oil Trust is also engaged in a war with Jewish oil merchants, who will suffer from it.

Much has been written about liquor concessions and I will not repeat it all here. But here in Poland there is a brand new edict regarding commerce. In the Polish wood trade, the Jews are nearly alone. They are the large wood merchants who export all kinds of lumber. They are the big specialists in felling trees, measuring forests, selecting and sorting lumber, and manufacturing various wood products. The government arrived at the idea that it will no longer sell its forests to private individuals and will cultivate them itself. The government owns 50–60% of all forests in the country. Besides, the government was until now the largest customer of manufactured wooden goods. Thousands of Jewish workers in the forests have been fired and hundreds of small Jewish merchants were left without bread. I had the opportunity to speak with a Jewish lumber merchant. He has four to five thousand dollars, about 40,000 zloty, which in Poland is a large amount of capital. Yet in the eyes of this nearly rich man I saw such desperation, such a lost look, that he elicited great pity in me. He gave the best 30 years of his life to the forest, and now, in his early 50s, beginning anew, searching, risking his savings, starting out on a new path, fear grips him. The man lost his courage and belief in himself.

But a thousand times more desperate and terrifying is the situation of the Jewish forest workers, who have not saved even a month’s living expenses and who must now seek new occupations. They want to throw themselves into the ocean. They are so forlorn, lost, and beaten down that they can do almost nothing.

Forestry employed some 20–25,000 Jews. Jobs for a few thousand Jewish shopkeepers and a few thousand artisans were generated by their work. Life is interconnected; the livelihoods of the Jewish storekeeper and the Jewish artisan depend ultimately on the Jewish population. When thousands of Jewish manual and office workers in the tobacco industry, thousands of Jewish lumber traders, and hundreds of salt and liquor sellers lose their livelihood, it inevitably has strong repercussions for Jewish storekeepers and artisans.

You know already from telegraphic dispatches that the government is planning to incorporate grain sales in its state office, which will be directly tied to peasants and peasant cooperatives, eliminating all intermediaries from the grain market. This will affect many tens of thousands of Jewish families, so it is no wonder that it has elicited such panic and fear in Jewish society.

Already now the government is issuing permits for exporting grain, but not one Jew is among the 18 people in the government office that allocates the licenses—and it is understandable that Jewish exporters must wait much longer than non-Jews for permits while preference is given to big {non-Jewish} landowners. Jews feel that the grain trade, which directly and indirectly supports half a million Jews, is slipping out of Jewish hands; that flax will soon follow the fate of grain because the government is already talking about organizing the flax trade; that after flax can come another product and yet another, so the Jewish masses are deeply alarmed and find themselves gripped by hysteria. If one adds the general {economic} crisis—which has affected Jews more than others, and which we will consider later—to the aforementioned factors, it becomes evident why the Jews find themselves in such an hysterical, unnaturally nervous, agitated state.

All the mentioned government monopolies are essentially progressive phenomena. If they were just a struggle against the middleman, we could not and would not be permitted to object to them. If they were only such a struggle, they would not disturb the Jews so much. If, when the government took over the tobacco industry, it continued to employ Jewish manual workers and salaried employees, we would have nothing against it. And even in lumber and grain exports, if Jews remained state salaried employees, we would have to greet the state monopolies, even if a certain percentage of Jews would suffer from it. But in Poland, national Bolshevism prevails. As soon as a branch of the economy is monopolised it becomes Judenrein. It is not just the Jewish factory owner, large lumber merchant or large grain exporter who is ruined, as was the case in Russia, but also the Jewish worker, the Jewish salaried employee, the small Jewish merchant, and the Jewish artisan. The Jewish masses are rudely and cruelly thrown onto the street and it is not even considered necessary to be interested in the question of what will become of these déclassé impoverished masses. Here, against national Bolshevism, which wraps itself in a virtuous, socially progressive prayer shawl and causes a Jewish catastrophe, one must mount the greatest struggle.

All the misconceptions that claim the government is undertaking these reforms only because of antisemitic blindness and they must inevitably fail economically are self-delusional and will yield no good results. For the first few years, the Polish government will perhaps run the lumber and grain trades worse than the Jews do, but its public servants will eventually learn the necessary skills and perform better than the small-town Jewish agents and buyers. Thus in the Pinsk region, which has much forested land, the Polish government is founding a higher forestry institute and a high school to prepare forestry specialists. And those employees who graduate from the schools will probably understand how to handle lumber so it will not rot no less well than do the Jews who learned it from practice.

We live in a time of regulation and organization, when governments have a great influence on economic life, in a time of trusts and syndicates, of planned economies with defined goals. We are no longer in a position—nor is it in our interest—to turn back the wheel of history. One must also remember that all those states neighbouring Russia must follow it, not because of their love of Bolshevik ideals but because they are forced to do so economically. Here is an example of how Bolshevik Russia forces a neighbouring country to nationalize a branch of industry. In the last year, Poland exported fully 100 million zloty of lumber less than in 1928. Why? Because Russia, which needed foreign currency and had no grain to export, sold lumber so cheaply that nobody could compete with her. Specialists told me that Soviet Russia charged only for rail transportation and labour costs, but nothing for the lumber itself. It is likely that this competition from Soviet Russia led the Polish government to the idea of taking over the Polish lumber industry in its entirety. The Polish government must have foreign currency to survive and will probably follow Russia’s Soviet government and sell its lumber for a low price.

We cannot resent the Polish government for wanting to organize its purchase of grain from the peasantry so it does not pass through five pairs of hands—all Jewish hands—and goes directly from the peasant to state warehouses and from there to export markets. In this way the peasant will receive higher prices, and one can have nothing against this. But we all have the right to demand that salaried employees in the state warehouses and public servants working in this branch can be Jews. In practice, however, Jews are not allowed in, and the government does not consider it necessary to even do anything for the déclassé, impoverished masses whose number keeps on growing.

In the contemporary state—not just among the Bolsheviks but also in all European states—and especially in the newly independent states such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and so on, civil servants occupy a tremendously large place. This class grew quickly everywhere and now makes up a much larger percentage {of the labour force} than it did before the war. Together with the mass of salaried employees and workers in state and municipal enterprises, they form a large part of the population. In Russia, the percentage of Jews among civil servants is large, but Poland tries hard to ensure that Jews will have no place in this class. Not only are Jews excluded from office jobs, but even from unskilled manual labour on the railroads, in state railroad workshops, as railroad porters, street sweepers, road repair workers—everywhere the same system prevails. The Jews must be segregated in their economic ghetto and not permitted any work for the state or the municipality.

Here are just a few statistics from Warsaw. In 1928, the municipal streetcar corporation employed 4,342 manual workers and salaried employees. Of these, two were Jews. The Bundist faction in the city council fought two years for these two positions. In 1929, an additional 1,500 workers and salaried employees were hired, among them only four Jews. And that was at a time when thousands of Jewish workers remained unemployed for years and were prepared to undertake the hardest work just to earn enough for bread.

The shamelessness of the antisemitic Warsaw city hall goes still further. In 1928, 1,857 manual workers and salaried employees were employed in the water and sewage department, among them a few tens of Jews. This year, employment grew by more than a thousand, and all Jews have been fired. Excluding the Jewish hospital, the Jewish home for the elderly, and the Jewish foundling house, the municipal council employed more than 20,000 people, among them about 50 Jews—one-quarter of one percent. Meanwhile, Jews compose one-third of Warsaw’s population and contribute more than one-half of all taxes.

And concerning taxes, Jews, neither the living nor the dead, have been at all pitied. This week the following occurred in Warsaw: The tax collector came to a religious Jewish widow demanding six zloty. Because she could not pay, he took her featherbed. The widow went out to the courtyard and burst into tears. The neighbours, all poor, collected among themselves six zloty and bought back the featherbed from the tax collector. That is how taxes are collected from Jews.

Before me lies a copy of a request from a Jewish woman storekeeper, Brokhe Pshekupnik from Byala, to the tax office in Lublin. This document would be worth showing to the Polish ambassador in Washington, who not long ago boasted before a delegation from the Polish-Jewish Federation that Jews in Poland are living in an actual paradise. Brokhe Pshekupnik writes that various taxes totalling 200 zloty are being demanded of her. The tax collector removed from her store 4 kg of rice, 4 kg of kidney beans, 5 kg of cereal, 2 kg of sugar, and 50 lime pellets.2 The store’s entire stock is worth a little more than 13 zloty, a dollar and a half, and they are demanding 200 zloty from her.

One of the most burdensome statutes, really a pharaonic edict that has the greatest peril for the entire class of Jewish artisans, more than one-third of the Jewish population, is the well-known guild regulation. Special master exams are being instituted, and in practice conditions have been created that will cause Jewish artisans to fail so that young Jewish apprentices will never be able to achieve the title of master. Just the fact that the exams are conducted in Polish by Polish examiners will mean that thousands of older Jewish artisans who know their trade much better than the examiners will fail.

Still worse is the situation with youth. According to the law, every apprentice must, while employed in a workplace, take evening courses in general and special technical subjects. This is a fine law, like those among people in civilized countries. However, for Jews {in Poland} this nice law is really a deadly poison. In all of Poland, 92,000 male and female apprentices are now enrolled. Only 3,000 of them are Jews, around 3%, when Jews make up more one-half of all artisans in Poland. In Warsaw alone, 11,000 young people are enrolled in such courses, only 327 of them Jews—3%.

One might think that Jews do not want to send their children to these courses, but that is not so. Rather, it is made difficult for Jews to send their children to these courses. The courses are purposely conducted only in Christian parts of the city. If a Jewish apprentice manages to take such a course, they hide his hat and his coat, they pour ink on his notebook, they beat him, and they ridicule him when he does not answer questions in fluent Polish. In general, they poison his life so he must flee. For the sake of justice they would need to open separate courses in Yiddish, but in Poland justice is not practicable, so Jews must take care of themselves. {To take such courses} one needs the consent of officials and a lot of money to buy it.

Of course, we have not developed all the points mentioned here. One could write an entire dissertation about each point. About taxes alone once could write a new “Eykhe”3 because one cannot meet in Poland one Jew who does not complain about how taxes are choking him.

One must remember that until today the richest people in Poland are the big landowners who own large estates. All landowners directly provided 64 million zloty for the government in 1928, while trade and industry directly provided 350 million zloty in taxes. Although agriculture provides the state treasury with only one-sixth of the amount provided by trade and industry, it received loans and support from the state totalling 470 million zloty in the same year and at the same time as the government treated urban occupations like step-children. Therefore, a double injustice is visited on the Jews. The government sucks the marrow from the urban population and gives it to the countryside. It takes much more in taxes from the city than the countryside, and when it comes to loans the countryside is the prime beneficiary. The Jews are, however, very little occupied in agriculture and can therefore benefit little from the favours that are bestowed on the countryside.

Yes, in Poland national Bolshevism rages in its worst form. It is much crueller than the Bolshevism of the Soviet Union because it singles out Jews economically, constructs a medieval economic wall between them and the non-Jewish population, and erects a social and class ghetto on top of the political one. The Jewish population is singled out economically and is pushed to the backward corners of economic life. It is encircled by iron economic walls that are more fearful than the ghetto walls of medieval times. This explains the panic that is immediately apparent to Polish Jews, the nervous state that is so well known to us from Bolshevik Russia, the uncertainty of the next day. From this derives the fear of sudden, unforeseen actions on the part of office holders for whom the Jew is really like clay in the potter’s hands. From this derives the psychology of “better spend the little money one has because they will in any case take it from you” and the psychology that in Poland one can achieve nothing, there looms only sorrow upon sorrow, so whoever can must run away, save himself as soon as possible because later it will be worse.