APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070023-3
Poland, where faltering steps to relieve their cultural suppression came only after 1956.
Anti-German feelings were so much a part of Polish nationalism after the war that until the late 1950's harsh restrictions were levied on those Germans who remained within the newly drawn Polish boundaries. Even token emigration of individual Germans was not permitted although mass expulsion was an official policy. After 1956 a relatively lenient policy permitted Germans who had previously declared Polish nationality to profess their Germanism and allowed emigration for the purpose of "reuniting families." Thereafter, applications for emigration were dealt with on an individual basis, with wide variation in the ease with which such applications were granted. Denial was most frequently experienced by those possessing skills needed by the Polish economy. This factory has greatly complicated the repatriation of ethnic Germans and has become something of a hindrance to the "normalization" of bilateral relations with West Germany.
Poland's policies towards its Jewish minority, the subject of periodic international concern, is rooted in the country's political and social history. The drastic reduction of the Jewish population from about 3 million in the immediate postwar years to about 25,000 in the mid-1960's was due to the wartime extermination policies of Nazi Germany and to extensive emigration in the postwar period. The postwar exodus of Jews was to a large extent attributable to the persistence of anti-Semitism, despite grudging Polish respect for Jewish heroism in the famous Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943 and the stirring of the national conscience over the question of possible Polish guilt in failing to help most Jews escape from wartime destruction.
In prewar Poland, Jews were typically small merchants or industrial workers who spoke Yiddish as a native tongue and lived in a state of isolation in the cities and towns. About 10% deviated from this pattern, becoming members of the intelligentsia. They contributed greatly to Polish culture but were strongly resented not only by the landed gentry but also by the growing numbers of Polish intellectuals with whom they competed in the professions. Because of the wartime destruction of the Jews, anti-Semitism might have disappeared in the postwar period had not a disproportionately large number of the surviving Jews become Communists and had not many of them acquired responsible positions in those agencies of state authority associated in the public mind with Communist oppression, especially during the Stalinist era of the early 1950's. Moreover, most of the Jewish Communists had spent the war years in the Soviet Union and were thus regarded as foreign "viceroys" not only by the non-Communist population but also by the large nationalistic element within the Communist Party. Anti-Semitism thus became a major issue in the party's factional strife after the assumption of power in October 1956 by the regime of Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had spent the war years as leader of the Communist underground in Poland. The political impact of anti-Semitism was further complicated by the fact that many formerly Stalinist Jews rallied to the support of Gomulka in 1956, thus becoming identified with his rule, and by the fact that this rule soon forsook those liberal and national policies which characterized the immediate post-1956 period.
Popular attitudes as well as factional rivalries brought about frequent, though limited, purges of Jews from various party and government positions during the years of Gomulka's rule, but it was not until the political crisis of 1968 that anti-Semitism became a major political tool openly used by Gomulka's opponents within the party. Spurred by the generally pro-Israeli attitudes of some leading Polish Jews during the Middle East conflict of June 1967 in contravention of Soviet and official Polish pro-Arab policies, the party's nationalistic wing combined lingering popular anti-Semitism with anti-intellectualism to form an essentially populist challenge to Gomulka's rule. Gomulka's survival of this challenge was due not only to his political sill and Soviet backing, especially after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, but also to concessions which resulted in wholesale purges of the Jewish element in the party and government apparatus and in cultural and economic lift. These purges were accompanied by a policy of actively encouraging the emigration of those Jews "whose primary loyalty was not to Poland."
Because of the formerly disproportionate importance of the Jewish element in Poland's political and cultural life, the impact of the 1968 events was significant. More than one-half of the estimated 25,000 Jews in Poland before 1967 are believed to have left the country since then, reducing the Jewish minority to a core of some 8,000 to 10,000 mostly elderly persons who do not intend to emigrate. To many Poles, the purges and emigration of Jews have had the desirable effect of transferring some power and influence from an old and frequently discredited group to a generally capable younger generation, even before the demise of the compromised Gomulka regime. For the same reason, the leadership of Edward Gierek must have been privately relieved that the issue
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070023-3
