Betrayal, Memory, and the Wounds of Two Occupations

This article matters for our group. We’ve had moments of friction, and part of the reason is that the Polish point of view is almost never acknowledged. It’s time to step back and examine this history through their eyes.

Many people don’t know what the Poles saw and the throwing of the word antisemitism around is ludicrous. That is hatred of Jews for being Jewish, yet as I point to in my essay many Poles had resentments towards Jews that reasonable and rational yet still would be called antisemitic to escape accidentally – many of you have witnessed this maneuver

So let’s have a fair objective factual piece on the Polish view of Jews 1939 -1956.

Betrayal, Memory, and the Wounds of Two Occupations:

The relationship between Polish and Jewish communities during the Second World War and in the years that followed was shaped by suffering, fear, courage, and—at moments—deep mutual resentment. These tensions did not spring from ideology or ancient hostility. They came from lived experience. They came from two peoples trapped between two totalitarian empires, each of which sought to destroy the Polish state and uproot Jewish life. To understand the bitterness that emerged, one must confront uncomfortable truths without slipping into collective accusations. Trauma, proximity, and memory often distort reality, and isolated but highly visible acts can cast long shadows that far exceed their statistical weight.

My aim is to tell this history plainly, without hatred and without euphemism.

I. 1939–1941: The Soviet Occupation and the First Fracture

When the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, 1939, the Polish state collapsed under the pressure of two invading armies. In many eastern cities—Lwów, Białystok, Baranowicze, Grodno, many Jews openly welcomed the Red Army and there were actually pogroms committed against the Poles. They believed, sincerely or naively, that Soviet power offered protection from German extermination or from prewar Polish nationalism (they were wrong). This was real, but not universal. It grew out of:
• Fear of the Germans.

• Sympathy for socialism among segments of Jewish youth.
• Grievances about prewar social exclusion.
• The belief—misplaced—that the USSR offered equality.

All of this happened despite the fact that Poland had given Jews centuries of protection and freedom unmatched in Europe, especially given that many lived separately, resisted assimilation, and often did not fight for the state that sheltered them.

Poles saw something entirely different. As the NKVD dismantled Polish institutions, deported more than 300,000—later 1.5 million—Polish citizens, arrested officers, and executed thousands, including the murdered of Katyn, they also saw Jews joining Soviet militia, auxiliary police, and administrative roles. The sight of Jewish youth wearing Soviet armbands while Polish families were being herded onto trains bound for the taiga felt like betrayal in its purest form.

They would march, young Jews spitting on officers telling them Poland is dead.

It did not matter that most Jews were also victims of the Soviets or that many Jews hated Soviet rule. Emotionally, the visibility of a large minority overshadowed the silence or helplessness of the majority. This wound, formed not from ideology but from countless personal encounters, would burn through the rest of the war. How could it not?

II. Under German Rule: Coercion, Collaboration, and the Tragic Mirror

German occupation created a separate category of Jewish intermediaries: the Judenräte and the Jewish Ghetto Police. These institutions were designed by the Germans and operated under coercion, yet they often behaved harshly, sometimes brutally. There were individuals who acted with courage, but many succumbed to corruption, self-preservation, or abuse of power and there were tens of thousands of them.

Poles had nothing like this, no government, governing employees, they had the “Blue Police” ranking of 9,000 in the entire nation used for traffic, it was estimated 50 percent were in the Underground and at one point several were murdered for not shooting Jews.

Remarkably some Jews blame Poles for their plight when they were low in food and there were cases of Jews throwing stones at Poles. Even though the Warsaw Ghetto was kept alive through the goodwill of the Poles, at the same time they were being murdered.

Also it’s important to note that no other nation did more for the Jews than Poles. The Polish government in exile begged for assistance many times but were ignored. Ironically Jan Karski who shared the Holocaust was blown off by Roosevelt and called a liar by the Jewish Supreme Court Justice. By the way, Karski was also one of the first to see the Jewish Soviet takeover and still helped Jews.

From the outside, Poles saw Jewish police enforcing German orders, carrying out roundups, and participating in the machinery that crushed both Jews and, at times, Poles. The nuance, coercion, hopelessness, moral collapse under terror, rarely survived in public memory.

Meanwhile, Poles were enduring their own catastrophe: mass executions, deportations, starvation, and forced labor on a scale without parallel in Western Europe. They were the first target of German racial and political annihilation.

Thus the two shattered communities saw the worst reflections of each other: Poles seeing Jewish collaborators; Jews seeing Polish indifference or hostility. Neither side saw the whole picture, and both judged by the hardest moments they had endured.

III. Postwar Poland: The Final and Most Painful Wound

The deepest rupture came after the German defeat.

When the Soviets re-entered Poland in 1944–1945, they installed a communist puppet state supported by the Ministry of Public Security (MBP/UB). In the chaos of liberation and occupation, the Soviets deliberately elevated minorities—including Jews—into positions of authority. This was not because Jews sought to persecute Poles. It was because:
• Many Polish communists had died.
• Moscow favored minorities who were presumed to lack loyalty to the old Polish state.
• Many believed communism offered safety after the Holocaust.


But the consequences for Polish memory were catastrophic.

Jews in the Security Services

Serious research—Polish and Jewish alike—makes it impossible to deny that:
• Jews were disproportionately represented in early UB leadership.
• Some Jewish officers participated directly in interrogations, torture, repression, and murder.
• Jewish prosecutors and judges played roles in Stalinist show trials and executions.

Names such as Jakub Berman, Józef Różański (Goldberg), and Roman Romkowski (Nussbaum) appear repeatedly in archival documents describing the terror apparatus.

In the eyes of Poles who had already endured two genocidal occupations, Jewish participation in the Stalinist system became the final nail in the coffin of wartime resentment.

Pilecki and “Nil”: Martyrs of Stalinist Poland

Two of Poland’s greatest wartime heroes—Witold Pilecki (ironically the man who tried to stop the Holocaust murdered by Jews) and General Emil “Nil” Fieldorf—were captured, tortured, and executed by the communist regime. In their cases:
• Jewish officers were involved in interrogations.
• Jewish prosecutors signed or supported indictments.
• Jewish UB officials helped carry out Moscow’s orders.

This does not justify the claim that “Jews killed Pilecki” or “Jews killed Nil.” The chain of command led to Stalin, the NKVD, and Polish communist authorities, still those responsible were of Jewish origin

But emotionally and memory is never purely logical Poles saw Jewish communists helping the Soviets murder the very people who had risked everything to resist Hitler. After the war, after the ghettos, after Auschwitz, this felt like betrayal elevated to tragedy.

To Poles rebuilding their lives in a ruined country, Jewish participation in the repression of the Home Army felt like a cruel inversion of reality: Jews saw themselves as victims; Poles saw them, unfairly collectively but understandably emotionally, as agents of a foreign tyranny.

This clash of memories remains among the most sensitive points of Polish–Jewish history.

IV. The Tragic Paradox of Mutual Victimhood

Both peoples were victims—yet each saw in the other the face of its own suffering.
• Jews remembered Poles who denounced or betrayed them.
• Poles remembered Jews who cooperated with the Soviets, served in ghetto police, or staffed the UB.
• Each side remembered the worst; each side forgot the best.

No Soviet agent ever faced justice

Israel the nation so keen on finding war criminals would not extradite Solomon Morel, a masochist who ran postwar concentration camp Others were also free because they used antisemitism an excuse why they would not receive a fair trial
And overshadowing everything was the German genocide, Soviet terror, and the destruction of a multi-ethnic civilization that had existed—uneasily, imperfectly—yet together, for centuries.

V. Toward Honest History Without Collective Guilt

The historical record requires honesty:
• Some Jews collaborated with the Soviets in 1939–1941.
• Some Jews served in German-created structures.
• Some Jews were complicit in Stalinist terror after the war.
• These actions, though limited in number, had enormous symbolic impact on Polish society.

But precision also matters:
• Most Jews were victims, not collaborators.
• Some Jews fought bravely in Polish and Soviet partisan units.
• Jews were murdered by both Soviets and Germans.
• Jewish participation in the UB did not represent “the Jewish nation.”
• Polish suffering under both totalitarian regimes was immense, real, and unmatched in Western Europe.

History is not served by silence or by collective blame. It is served only by truth—complex, uncomfortable, human. And sometimes, when we listen to reliable old stories told decades later, we must remember that memory is pliable. People embellish, reinterpret, or shift blame to ease their own conscience. A person who was not heroic in their past may later invent an alter ego, and in that psychological rearrangement, Poles become the perfect scapegoat.

This is the tragedy of two peoples wounded by history: each remembering what hurt them most, each convinced they alone spared nothing, and each carrying scars that still influence how they see the other today.

Still, here is the question no one wants to touch, yet it sits at the center of this entire debate like a live wire:

If the positions were reversed and it were Poles who were starving, hunted, and begging for shelter would Jewish families have risked their own children to hide them?

I have looked at the history, the patterns, the behavior, and the cultural boundaries that existed.
And if I am brutally honest, I believe the answer would be low to none.

And that matters, because if a community cannot, in good faith, say they would have done more, then how dare they condemn Poles for supposedly doing “not enough,” especially when Poles were the only nation in Europe where helping Jews meant immediate death for the entire household?

How dare anyone, from the safety of hindsight, accuse Poles of moral failure when no other occupied nation faced that level of terror, and when we have no evidence—none—that they themselves would have taken greater risks?

Judgment without self-reflection is hypocrisy.

If one cannot imagine sacrificing their own mother, father, children, and home for strangers under a genocidal regime, then one has absolutely no moral standing to sit in judgment over those who faced that exact nightmare.

This double standard must be confronted head-on. Because without honesty on both sides, the conversation is not history, it’s accusation without accountability.

I hope this overview helps give some insight into the Polish

by Edward Reid

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