Is this just my own personal impression? Perhaps my soul is ill and I see pitch blackness, despair, and helplessness where there is only everyday poverty, as exists among all nations? Alas, it is not so. Alas, my soul is not ill and I would much rather have seen rays of light and hopeful faces—but I did not encounter any. I searched but could not find them.

Let us take a look at some facts in order to understand the situation of Polish Jewry and get a sense of its tragic grief.

“In the gateway of the house at 3 Twarda Street, the porter Borekh Shtikgold suddenly collapsed. The doctor from the first aid service called to the scene established that the cause of Shtikgold’s loss of consciousness was exhaustion due to hunger” (Haynt [Today], 6 October 1932).

“Thirty-seven-year-old unemployed mechanic Yankev Bornshteyn passed out from hunger on Sunday afternoon. He was revived and escorted to the third precinct” (Folks-tsaytung [People’s Newspaper], 4 July 1932).

“Herman Zelmanovitsh, unemployed, is a frequent visitor to the first aid service. He is regularly found unconscious from hunger on the street. On Sunday afternoon, Zelmanovitsh was found lying passed out from hunger on Kopernika Street” (Folks-tsaytung [People’s Newspaper], 4 July 1932).

These kinds of things happen in Warsaw, Lodz, Vilna, Lemberg, and tens of other Polish cities every day. Of course, for every person who collapses on the street, there are dozens who are no less hungry but bear the hunger more easily, hundreds who are three-quarters as hungry, and tens of thousands who do not have enough to eat, who are growing thin and withering away, and who will establish a generation barely capable of work. Someone who collapses on the street gets noticed and registered. Those fasting in silence or wasting away at home do not. However, one only has to wander around the Jewish quarter of Warsaw for a little while to recognize in the pale faces and extinguished eyes hundreds of candidates for collapsing from hunger, thousands of candidates who are truly desperate for a piece of bread.

Over the two years since I had last visited Warsaw, the face of the Jewish quarter had changed dramatically. The people had grown paler, gloomier, shabbier, thinner, more feeble. This state of enfeeblement is undoubtedly the defining characteristic of Polish Jewry. It is feeble not only in the physical sense of the word, but also in the spiritual sense: abandoned, without a father or a mother, without movements to captivate the masses and give them courage and faith in a better future, without great central leaders to comfort them, without central institutions to which they might direct their cry in a time of trouble. Disorganized, torn apart, despondent, and feeble. We will return to this tragedy of fatherless and motherless Polish Jewry later. First, we will consider some additional facts that demonstrate the state of Polish Jewry.

We have seen how people are collapsing in the streets, a phenomenon that we have not read about in the newspapers of any other nation, despite the fact that there are 30 million unemployed people in the world. The suicides among Polish Jews are also highly unusual. Here are several examples:

“Lemberg. A horrible incident took place in the Jewish quarter on the evening of Yom Kippur. Fifty-year-old Berta Grinboym (3 Reja Street) got dressed, took a prayer book, said goodbye to the members of her household, wished them a good year, and then, instead of going to the synagogue, went out onto the balcony and threw herself off. She is in the hospital with no hope of survival. The cause of her suicide was the severe material hardship she was experiencing” (Haynt [Today], 12 October 1932).

A devout Jewish woman, with a prayer book in her hands, on the evening of Yom Kippur—how poisoned must the atmosphere be, how sick the soul of Polish Jewry, how desperate and enfeebled the whole environment, when a person like this throws herself off a balcony at a moment like this.

Here are some additional facts:

“Vilna. The Jewish court intern Shmuel Katsev has committed suicide. The cause was Katsev’s removal from court under the suspicion of anti-government activity. He was arrested. The suspicion turned out to be false, but the court would no longer employ him” (Frimorgn [Morning], 1932, No. 258).

Thus, a young man who has graduated from the juridical faculty and is preparing to become a lawyer is suspected of communism and arrested. This does not seem sufficient to plunge someone into despair. It turns out that the suspicion was unfounded, but this is Poland; a single percentage point of suspicion is enough to block your path to a career. Even without a shred of suspicion, they are still prepared to pile mountains of stones on the path of a Jewish intellectual, and all the more so when you are marred by the taint of political opposition. The young man is removed from court—so he ends his life! Where are the youthful strength, ambitions, obstinacy, and hopes? Where is the feeling of spite that plays such a major role among youth? Where is the hatred and loathing and fury towards the enemy piling stones on your path? All of these things usually give life a sense of purpose, generate wings and energy and spur someone forward to live, to work, to influence, and to fight, but the soul of the Jewish young man in Poland is a desert. His mind is desolate and vacant and his whole being is poisoned. In a feeble mental state, he drags himself and his burden around, and at the first difficult trial, he hands his ticket to the Lord and flees the world.

To understand the psychology of this young Jewish suicide, one must consider the situation of the Jewish intellectual in Poland, as well as that of the Jewish youth in general. Here, a Jewish young man tells of the seven circles of hell he went through as he took his first strides in life. He is studying at a technical school in Warsaw. He is, of course, put through a great deal of misery by his Polish colleagues. He is not only boycotted but also verbally abused, and sometimes worse. From the professors, too, he often hears that Jews should stick to trade and not study technical professions. He bites his tongue, ignores all the insults, and studies. Before graduating, students are required to work for two months in a factory; otherwise, they are not permitted to take the diploma exam. The director has forgotten about the Jewish student and he is left without a work placement. The young Jewish man runs back and forth between the director and the manager and finally gets the director to call the state automobile factory, where they agree to accept a trainee.

The young Jewish man is delighted and the following morning runs happily to the factory. He is received very pleasantly and given a questionnaire to fill out. He completes it honestly with his Jewish name and Jewish faith. The secretary takes the sheet, reads it through—and his whole attitude shifts immediately. He is suddenly as cold as ice; he needs to speak to the factory director, so the young man will have to come back tomorrow. The next day, the gatekeeper will not even let him in. He runs back to the technical school and requests, demands, argues. The director responds that the factory does not want any Jews and there is nothing he can do about it. He cannot get into an argument with the factory’s director for the sake of a Jewish student. But the student is unable to complete the exam without the work experience. Using his contacts, he eventually manages to get a placement in the municipal bus workshop and writes the exam.

Dozens of Polish students who wrote the exam at the same time as the Jewish man get jobs right away. Meanwhile, he takes his diploma and knocks on door after door, getting rejected each time. After many months of running around, and through a great number of connections and requests, he manages to get hired in the streetcar workshops as an unskilled labourer. He is prepared to do anything just to have a job, to end his idleness, to start earning something. He needs a certificate from a municipal doctor showing that he is healthy. On the certificate, the doctor lists illnesses that the young man has never even heard of. The engineering graduate is back on the street, without work and without any hope of finding a place for himself. He is later hired in those same streetcar workshops for temporary work. He has the necessary physical strength, but where can he find the courage not to lose faith in himself and throw himself off the fifth-floor balcony?

We have recounted this story in great detail because it is a typical everyday occurrence. This is the fate of the entire Jewish intelligentsia in Poland—and not just the intelligentsia.

Here is a set of truly shocking facts:

The Rovne city hall reduced its number of officials. Of 20 Jewish officials, 14 were fired, more than two-thirds. Of 192 non-Jews, 40 were fired, just a fifth. Jews make up 75% of Rovne’s population. Previously, they made up 9% of city hall officials, after the dismissals, fewer than 4%.

The Otvotsk city hall fired almost all Jewish officials, even though they hired several new non-Jewish ones.

In the Grodno municipal tobacco factory—formerly the Shereshevski factory, where hundreds of Jews had sacrificed their health over dozens of years—they promptly smoked out all the Jews. They recently dismissed 12 Jewish mechanics, several of whom had worked in the factory for more than 30 years. After a great deal of hustling on the part of a representative from the bureau for the right to work and many requests and complaints to the management, they got them to rehire one Jewish mechanic, a 54-year-old man, but only for unskilled labour, not as a tradesman.

On the topic of tobacco, it is worth adding the following. Before the tobacco monopoly was introduced in Poland, the tobacco trade was almost entirely in Jewish hands, with 800 Jewish wholesale businesses. Once the monopoly was introduced, it became necessary to obtain permits to deal in tobacco. Jews were given virtually no permits; of 800 Jewish wholesalers, hardly 30 remained. Recently, they took away the permits of these 30 as well, and thus tore from the Jews a branch of economic life that had formerly been exclusively Jewish; the tobacco manufacturers, tobacco workers, tobacco employees, and tobacco dealers had all been Jews. Now barely a trace remains—the state has taken over the entire branch, and Jews are not allowed to benefit from the state.

Jews must pay taxes, license fees, and various other contributions to the state, but they are forbidden from benefitting from it. Not only are they barred from jobs in the administration, the official apparatus running the state, but they are also prevented from working in the state factories, sweeping the municipal streets, and serving as railroad porters. This hunger principle with respect to three million Jews is being carried out more consistently, mercilessly, and thoroughly than any other state principle. Compromise is acceptable when it comes to many issues, but not when it comes to giving Jews a livelihood, not when it comes to loosening the rope around the Jews’ throats, not when it comes to allowing the tiniest hope to arise in the Jews’ hearts that they may one day have equal rights.

Equal rights. The Polish government promptly pulls out the constitution and unfurls it before the world, pointing to where it states clearly and simply that all citizens are equal. Jews are indeed citizens like all others—just not when it comes to carrying baggage on trains, working in a state tobacco factory, measuring and chopping wood in a state forest, selling state sugar, tobacco, salt, or crude oil, and certainly not when it comes to collecting taxes from the population, when it comes to teaching children, even Jewish children in state schools. In sum, one trifling little thing has been taken away from the Jews—a living—and now they are crying out, and collapsing in the streets, and throwing themselves off their top floors in order to break every bone in their bodies, and falling into a depression that screams from tens of thousands of faces on every street in every city of reconstituted Poland.

The Polish government can boast that it has put an end to antisemitism on the streets; they are no longer pulling out beards and peyes or throwing Jews out of railroad cars. The current government has one other great merit. A Jew can make a complaint in the dozens of administrative offices and they will hear him out, receiving him politely with a kindly “hello” and a warm “goodbye.” Here, however, lies the current regime’s cynicism. They lead the Jew to the gallows with a smile on their face and tighten the rope around his neck while acting as though they have invited him to a dance.

After all, what could be more cynical than firing Jewish teachers from schools attended exclusively by Jewish children? What could be more cynical and more merciless than complaining that Jews are too involved in trade while at the same time creating a network of laws meant to suffocate the Jewish artisan and doing everything possible to prevent the emergence of a new generation of Jewish craft workers?

Let us consider one example. The Polish budget allocated more than 20 million zloty to professional education. Of that, less than 100,000 zloty went to Jewish professional schools, less than 0.5%. This despite the fact that Jews comprise more than one-half of all artisans in Poland and that at least one-half of the license taxes, which are specifically allocated to professional education, are paid out of Jewish pockets.