Part IV

“The Jew is no longer front-page news,” lamented Milton K. Susman, editor of Pittsburg’s The Jewish Criterion on September 15, 1939. “Attention has been diverted from him and his ’international connivance’ to the pressing business of escaping the enemy’s bullets and bombs. He has relinquished the center of the stage to the masses of armed men who have been ordered to kill or maim whether they like it or not.”

A far more ominous concern appeared in The New York Times on September 13, 1939 disclosing the “first intimations that ‘a solution of the Jewish problem in Poland’ was on the German-Polish agenda.” This “special report” from the German News Bureau, dispatched from the occupied areas of Poland, revealed that “Removal of the Polish Jewish population from the European domain would…in the long view, definitely bring a solution of the Jewish question in Europe nearer. For this is just the Jewry which, through its high birth rate and in spite of all existing differences between the two groups, has continually established the large numbers of western Jewry, whose birthrate is small.” The Times did not explain “how the removal of Jews from Poland without their extermination can halt the alleged ‘strengthening of western Jewry.’”

Annexation of Poland by Russia and Germany

On September 17, 1939, the Russian Army invaded eastern Poland, leading to the partition of German- and Soviet-occupied Poland. In October 1939, Germany annexed former Polish territories along German’s eastern border: West Prussia, Poznan, Upper Silesia and Danzig. The balance of the German zone included Warsaw, Krakow, Radom and Lublin, known as the Generalgouvernement (General Government) under Hans Frank, a Nazi party lawyer.

Most of the American Jewish press categorically rejected the Soviet government’s justifications for the seizure and annexation of Poland, asserting that Russia had betrayed a de facto government. On September 18, 1939, Der Tog, The Congress Bulletin on September 27, 1939, and the Forward in October 1939 rejected the Communist claim that the invasion was made to protect the White Russians, Ukrainians and Jews from the rampaging Nazi army.

The Effect of Partition

Much discussion centered on the effect partition would have on Jewish life in Poland. In general, American Jews believed that those living under Hitler’s rule faced physical destruction. Jews under Soviet rule would face “cultural annihilation.” B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee were quick to note that Jews would encounter discrimination in Russia, though not necessarily because they were Jews, but rather because of their previous economic status.

Some Orthodox journalists found no rationale for distinguishing between the treatment of Polish Jewry under the Nazis and the Soviets. To them, the future of Judaism was paramount. There could be little solace with just the body of Soviet Jewry without its soul. This view was expressed by The Jewish Outlook in October 1939: “Now this is the bulwark of Judaism has been divided among two sects of beasts—those who are bent on devouring the bodies of Jews and those who destroy the spirit of Israel. There is nothing to choose between the brown shirts and the Society of the Godless. An agent of the Gestapo is not to be preferred to an invading commissar, not a red Asiatic to an Aryan sadist. To the survivors of red and Nazi criminality no hope shines before them; to Orthodox Jewry there comes a near irreparable loss.”

When Warsaw surrendered on September 27, 1939, American Jewry realized that the Nazis had succeeded “in what centuries of persecution did not accomplish—the destruction of the heart of world Jewry.” Daily reports in the JTA, Forward and other Jewish papers like the politically conservative The Jewish Morning Journal and sporadically in The New York Times, told of the wholesale executions; the complete obliteration of hundreds of Polish towns; the confiscation of all property of Jews who had fled; the “savage butchery” of Jews by Ukrainian terrorists; the condemning to death of 22 Jewish nurses serving with the Polish Red Cross by the Nazi military authorities after the fall of the fortress of Modlin, about 30 miles north of Warsaw; the tens of thousands of homeless and starving refugees seeking refuge; the large number of Jewish suicides in Warsaw; and the forced labor.

New Role for American Jewry

Whether Polish Jewry would once again resume their historic role was open to conjecture. Given the frightful situation in Europe, American Jews had to fill the vacuum. The American Jewish Congress believed American Jewry was “obligated by history to assume the functions of the greatest Jewish center of the Diaspora and to live up to the traditions of such a center.”

The American Jewish press recognized and accepted the new leadership role for American Jewry. Whether the crisis in Europe would compel American Jews to respond in a united manner would be open to question.

By Alex Grobman, PhD

Alex Grobman, a Hebrew University-trained historian, has written three new books on Israel: “BDS: The Movement to Destroy Israel,” “Erosion: Undermining Israel Through Lies and Deception,” and “Cultivating Canaan: Who Owns the Holy Land?” He also wrote “Nations United: How the UN Undermines Israel and the West.” He is a consultant to the America-Israel Friendship League, a member of the Council of Scholars for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) and a member of the Academic Council of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.