A Pogrom in Poland

Waikato Times, Volume 121, Issue 20260, 31 July 1937, Page 15 (Supplement)

A Pogrom in Poland

THOUSANDS OF JEWS RUINED

(Brest-Litovsk Correspondent of Manchester Guardian.)

BREST-LITOVSK (in Polish Brzesc), the capital of the Polish Province of Polesie, was last May the scene of the most serious pogrom experienced by the Jews of Poland in recent history. Hundreds of Jewish shops and houses were damaged, broken into, looted, and demolished. Thousands of Jews were ruined. With short intervals the pogrom lasted for fifteen hours, and all that time the Jewish population of Brzesc, numbering 22,000, and their homes, shops, synagogues, schools, and institutions, were at the mercy of the mob. The pogrom began in the early hours of May 13. At about seven in the morning a police agent received a mortal wound from a 10-year-old Jewish butcher from whose father the agent tried to take away some meat, which the Jew, according to a new Law in Poland, was not entitled to deal in. During a quarrel between the po.ice agent and the Jew the young boy, named Szczerkovsky, wounded the agent with a knife-sharpener. The pol’ce agent, after shooting and wounding the butcher in the leg, died on the way to hospital. At any other time this would have been a case for the authorities to deal with, but these are no«t normal times as far as the Jews in Poland are concerned. The mob took the law into its own hands and kept it till about one o’clock the following morning. During that time those streets of Brzesc inhabited by Jews were Turned Into a Battlefield, with the difference that in war both sides fight and in Brzesc the Jews alone were attacked and beaten. In some streets not a single Jewish shop or house was left undamaged. Every window pane was smashed. With axes and iron implements in their hands the mob broke into Jewish shops, robbing and demolishing all they found. What could not be taken away was destroyed. Several days have passed since the pogrom. The authorities have ordered the heaps of destroyed Jewish goods and furniture which lay broken and smashed in the streets outside Jewish homes to be cleared away, but the traces of wanton destruction are there to-day. In the Jewish shops in Donbrowska Street one can see bicycles broken into bits, tyres cut with knives into tiny pieces. In one shop there is silk and linen cut into pieces with razors. In other streets Jewish homes have been completely wrecked. Not a single piece of furniture was left undamaged. Pictures were cut in their frames; clothing and bed covers torn up. A weeping Jewess showed me her home of four rooms in which not a single thing was left. For ten years her husband bad worked in America. He had just come home and they were shortly to celebrate the wedding of their daughter. All the frocks and the wedding gown for the girl were ready. To-day she has nothing to put on. In another Jewish home I found fourteen people herded in a single room still fearing to appear in the streets five days after the pogrom. They were a father and mother, their three sons and their wives and children. All Their Possessions Had Been Destroyed. Their shops, worth several thousand pounds, were completely empty. Pointing to a four-month-old child on the bed, the grandfather said: “This is all we have left.” Even the child’s bedding was taken away and the child lay crying on the bed wrapped in his father’s jacket. “And the worst of it all,” said the Jew, a respectable, once wealthy merchant, “is that even now we fear to go out into the streets.” The same Jew stated that he knows some of the men who looted his home but is afraid to tell the police for fear of further injury. This was In Grajevka, a suburb of Brzesc, where destruction was worst. The amount of material damage caused by the pogrom is not yet known. A committee to register all the damage has been appointed, and during the first day of its activity it registered 300 complaints of cases of looting and destruction. But the number of sufferers reaches into thousands. According to provisional estimates of Jewish leaders in Brzesc, more than one-half of the Jewish population of the city suffered in one way or another. The sufferers were not only shopkeepers, but poor Jewish tailors, bootmakers, and artisans. The method employed in the pogrom was somewhat different from that employed during similar events in other Polish town. Although about thirty Jews suffered injuries, three of whom are in a grave condition in hospital, the pogrom in Brzesc was more of a “pogrom of Jewish things.” The crowd aimed primarily at destroying the Jewish sources of livelihood. They wrecked shops, broke up sewing machines, smashed looking-glasses belonging to Jewish barbers, and took away the tools from Jewish bootmakers, cabinet-makers, and so on. They aim at getting rid of Jewish competition. —>a method which the anti->Semites call the new way of

“polonising” the towns. Much time and money will be needed before the ruined Jews will be able to re-establish themselves and earn a living again. Will the authorities repair part of the heavy Jewish losses ? They might at least repay the Jews their financial loss, and some of them hope that the municipal authorities will do something to relieve the terrible fate of the poor Jews in the terrorised city. Most of these poor victims are now suffering from hunger, unable to earn or to buy bread. Who staged the pogrom? Who participated in the destruction and pilage of Jewish property ? These questions are important. Reporting the events, the Polish Telegraphic Agency stated that they were a sort of “reaction” on the part of Polish society to the death of the police agent. This would mean that the “reaction” came from Polish society as a whole, and, according to some reports, all classes, from the workers and peasants to the intelligentsia, participated in the pogrom. But investigation on the spot does not confirm that view. According to the Jews, certain municipal and even a few minor State officials were seen in the riots, but the pillage generally was the Work of Criminal Elements, with whom the peasants joined. As a matter of fact, the looting did not start till about seven o’clock in the evening, when several thousand peasants arrived from the suburbs and villages. But the criminal element led by “ Endek” agitators prevailed. (“ Endek” is the name of a powerful Fascist and anti-Semitic party.) Much of the Jewish property which the police are now recovering is found in possession of people from the local “underworld.” But others gave a helping hand. A Jew told me of a case in which a peasant came back next day after the pogrom to look for his axe which he had used in demolishing the Jew’s home and shop. He found the axe in the heap of ruined goods. He was not arrested. The version spread by the anti-Semitic press that Jewish property was only “destroyed” but not robbed is untrue. About 150 persons are stated to be in gaol because the police found Jewish goods in their possession. Two women have already been convicted for pillage. Large numbers of women and even small school children participated in the pogrom. Jews in Brzesc know of cases in which women broke into their homes leading the mob to attacks on Jews. It is illustrative of the prevailing atmosphere that crowds who did not directly participate in the looting and destruction stood on the pavement applauding loudly each time a new Jewish shop was broken into or a new Jewish home destroyed. Shouts of “Bravo!” accompanied each new wild act of the mob. An aged guardian of one of the twenty synagogues of Brzesc to suffer during the pogrom told me that this “frantic applauding of the crowd” was “the most terrible and humiliating” thing of all. But there were also acts of charity and sympathy by the non-Jewish population. Jews of Brzesc speak with pride of a number of cases when Christians Stood Up In Their Defence. Some even saved Jewish homes from destruction by their intervention. The mob never touched houses and shops owned by Christians, and it was enough to put the sign of a cross over one’s shop to make it immune. In one case of a Christian putting a cross over his own house put one also on the house of his neighbour, a Jew, and saved it from ruin. But were also cases of extreme brutality. A Jewish house-owner told me that his own Christian tenants with whom he has lived in peace for years refused to give him shelter when the pogrom broke out. The attitude of the Polish press to the pogrom was disquieting. With the exception of the Socialist “ Robotnik” none of the papers openly condemned it. The official and Conservative press was silent, publishing only brief reports. The “ Kurjer Poranny,” the daily now believed to represent the Right Nationalist wing of the regime, even went so far as to justify the event by putting the blame on the Jews. The Endek press, of course, reported the pogrom with unconcealed satisfaction. Even the Catholic “ Maly Dziennik” joined in justifying the pogrom. These voices contain much that is ominous for the Jews. One thing, amongst others, is still unexplained and is being subjected to most careful investigation by an official commission sent to Brzesc by the Polish Ministry of the Interior. How was it possible that in a city which Is the seat of the governor and has a big police force and a garrison at its disposal a pogrom should be able to last for so long a period of time ?