As for this topic, please see my previous posting(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20141029). (Lily)
(http://www.sztetl.org.pl/en/term/449,march-1968/)
March 1968
March 1968 – a conventional name of either the students’ protests in the Warsaw University or the anti-Semitic campaign (called then “anti-Zionist”) waged by the authorities, which wanted to dispose of the people of Jewish origin from important positions. Fractional disputes in the party were one of the reasons for the anti-Semitic campaign. The so-called “moczarowcy”, the supporters of Mieczysław Moczar, wanted to deprive Władysław Gomułka, the First Secretary of the Polish Workers’ Party, of power. The language they were using was pointing out to Jews as those to blame for the perversions of system. When in 1967 the Six-Day War broke out in the Middle East the Soviet Union and its satellites, including Poland, condemned Israel and broke off diplomatic relations with it. In Poland began purges in the army. On the 19th June 1967, during the trade unions’ congress, Gomułka accused Jews of disloyalty to the state and showing their enthusiasm for the Israel’s victory in the war in public. Polish Jews were being persuaded to issue statements condemning the Israeli policy. In March 1968 the Polish press launched a smear campaign against Jews which was well-received in the generally anti-Semitic society. Rallies condemning the so-called Zionists and rabble-rousers were organised in work places. Applying racist criteria, the authorities were dismissing all people considered to be Jews from the state’s work places. The authorities were openly encouraging Jews to emigrate, thus losing the Polish citizenship and the right to return (the emigrants received the travel papers). It is estimated that due to the March events about 20, 000 Jews left Poland, most of them represented the well educated part of society and included professionals, officials, artists and intellectuals.
The term was created within the framework of the project Zapisywanie świata żydowskiego w Polsce [recording the Jewish environment in Poland], whose author is Anka Grupińska, a well-known Polish journalist and writer, specializing in the modern history of the Polish Jews. The project, initiated in 2006 by the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, consists in recording interviews with Polish Jews from all generations.
(http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/about/09/poland.asp)
The Fate of the Jews Across Europe
Murder of the Jews of Poland
Jews lived in Poland for 800 years before the Nazi occupation. On the eve of the occupation 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland – more than any other country in Europe. Their percentage among the general population – about 10% – was also the highest in Europe.
After the conquest of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939, most of the Jews remaining within the area occupied by Germany – approximately 1.8 million – were imprisoned in ghettos. In June 1941, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Germans began to imprison the rest of Polish Jewry in ghettos and to deport them to concentration and slave labor camps.
In December 1941 the murder of the Jews from the Lodz ghetto began in Chelmno with gas vans. Murder of Polish Jews in Auschwitz began in March 1942. After the basic guidelines for action were formulated at the Wannsee Conference, between March and July 1942 the Germans established three death camps in Poland (Operation Reinhard) close to main rail lines: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. With the arrival of the deportation trains, the victims – men, women, and children – were sent straight to their deaths in the gas chambers.
On July 22, 1942, on the eve of the Ninth of Av in the Jewish calendar, the Germans began the mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto. By the time they ended on September 21, Yom Kippur, some 260,000 inhabitants of the ghetto had been deported to the Treblinka extermination camp.
Approximately 1,700,000 Jews, primarily from Poland, were murdered in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka by the end of 1943. Between September 1942 and the summer of 1944 tens of thousands of Jews, most from Poland, were murdered in Majdanek, outside of Lublin.
In the summer of 1944 the remaining 80,000 Jews from the Lodz ghetto were deported to be murdered. Most were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, while some were sent to the Chelmno murder site, which was reopened for this purpose. Approximately 300,000 Jews were murdered in Chelmno, mostly from Poland. The murders in Auschwitz and Chelmno continued until the Red Army liberated the camps in January 1945.
At the end of the war, approximately 380,000 Polish Jews were still alive in Poland, the Soviet Union, or in the concentration camps in Germany, Austria and the Czech territories.
(http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/about/03/warsaw.asp)
The Ghettos
Warsaw Ghetto
In Warsaw, the capital of Poland, the Nazis established the largest ghetto in all of Europe. 375,000 Jews lived in Warsaw before the war – about 30% of the city’s total population. Immediately after Poland’s surrender in September 1939, the Jews of Warsaw were brutally preyed upon and taken for forced labor. In 1939 the first anti-Jewish decrees were issued. The Jews were forced to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David and economic measures against them were taken that led to the unemployment of most of the city’s Jews. A Judenrat (Jewish council) was established under the leadership of Adam Czerniakow, and in October 1940 the establishment of a ghetto was announced. On November 16 the Jews were forced inside the area of the ghetto. Although a third of the city’s population was Jewish, the ghetto stood on just 2.4% of the city’s surface area. Masses of refugees who had been transported to Warsaw brought the ghetto population up to 450,000.
Surrounded by walls that they built with their own hands and under strict and violent guard, the Jews of Warsaw were cut off from the outside world. Within the ghetto their lives oscillated in the desperate struggle between survival and death from disease or starvation. The living conditions were unbearable, and the ghetto was extremely overcrowded. On average, between six to seven people lived in one room and the daily food rations were the equivalent of one-tenth of the required minimum daily calorie intake. Economic activity in the ghetto was minimal and generally illegal, smuggling of food being the most prevalent of such activity. Those individuals who were active in these illegal acts or had other savings were generally able to survive longer in the ghetto.
The walls of the ghetto could not silence the cultural activity of its inhabitants, however, and despite the appalling living conditions in the ghetto, artists and intellectuals continued their creative endeavors. Moreover, the Nazi occupation and deportation to the ghetto served as an impetus for artists to find some form of expression for the destruction visited upon their world. In the ghetto there were underground libraries, an underground archive (the “Oneg Shabbat” Archive), youth movements and even a symphony orchestra. Books, study, music and theater served as an escape from the harsh reality surrounding them and as a reminder of their previous lives.
The crowded ghetto became a focal point of epidemics and mass mortality, which the Jewish community institutions, foremost the Judenrat and the welfare organizations, were helpless to combat. More than 80,000 Jews died in the ghetto. In July 1942 the deportations to the Treblinka death camp began. When the first deportation orders were received, Adam Czerniakow, the chairman of the Judenrat, refused to prepare the lists of persons slated for deportation, and, instead, committed suicide on July 23, 1942.
(End)
