The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer Page B

German-occupied areas. “It is strange,” Hans Frank commented on May 10, 1940, “that also many Jews prefer to come into the Reich [the Reich-controlled territories] than to stay in Russia.” 159 Moshe Grossman’s memoirs tell of a train filled with Jews going east, which, at a border station, met a train moving west. When the Jews coming from Brisk [the Soviet zone] saw Jews going there, they shouted: “You are mad, where are you going?” Those coming from Warsaw answered with equal astonishment: “You are mad, where are you going?” 160 The story is obviously apocryphal, but it vividly illustrates the plight and the confusion of the Jews in both zones of Poland and, beyond it, the disarray spreading among the Jews of Europe. In the meantime the NKVD, in the new climate of cooperation with the Gestapo, was handing over members of the former German Communist Party (KPD) who had been held in Soviet prisons, including Jews. 161

    In its great majority, the Polish population under German occupation remained hostile toward the Jews in the German-controlled areas and expressed fury at “Jewish behavior” in the Soviet-occupied part of the country, according to a comprehensive report written for the government-in-exile in February 1940 by a young courier from Poland, Jan Karski. 162 The report pointed out that the Germans were striving to gain submission and collaboration from the Polish masses by exploiting anti-Semitism. “And,” Karski added, “it must be admitted that they are succeeding in this. The Jews pay and pay and pay…, and the Polish peasant, laborer, and half-educated, unintelligent, demoralized wretch loudly proclaim, ‘Now, then, they are finally teaching them a lesson.’—‘We should learn from them.’—‘The end has come for the Jews.’—‘Whatever happens, we should thank God that the Germans came and took hold of the Jews,’—etc.” 163
    Karski’s comments were unusually forthright: “Although the nation loathes them [the Germans] mortally, this question [the Jewish question] is creating something akin to a narrow bridge upon which the Germans and a large portion of Polish society are finding agreement…. The present situation is creating a twofold schism among the Poles, with one group despising and resenting the Germans’ barbaric methods…and the other regarding them (and thus the Germans, too!) with curiosity and often fascination, and condemning the first group for its ‘indifference toward such an important question.’” 164
    Even more disturbing was the part of Karski’s report that described Polish perceptions of how the Jews reacted to the Soviet occupation of the eastern part of the country: “It is generally believed that the Jews betrayed Poland and the Poles, that they are basically communists, that they crossed over to the Bolsheviks with flags unfurled…. Certainly it is so that Jewish communists adopted an enthusiastic stance towards the Bolsheviks, regardless of the social class from which they came.” Karski did, however, venture the explanation that the widespread satisfaction notable among working-class Jews resulted from the persecution they had suffered at the hands of the Poles. What he found shocking was the lack of loyalty of many Jews, their readiness to denounce Poles to the Soviet police and the like. Karski did not include the Jewish intelligentsia among the disloyal majority: The intellectuals and the wealthier Jews, he stated, would much prefer an independent Poland again.
    The concluding lines of his report were ominous: “In principle, however, and in their mass, the Jews have created here a situation in which the Poles regard them as devoted to the Bolsheviks and—one can safely say—wait for the moment when they will be able simply to take revenge upon the Jews. Virtually all Poles are bitter and disappointed in relation to the Jews; the overwhelming majority (first among them of course the youth) literally look forward to an