The Crime and the Silence by Anna Bikont Read Free Book Online Page A

side of the Polish farmer.” “It seems the time has come for Jews to understand that Poles are the boss in Poland.”
    Even priests were exposed to the danger: “Two Jewish agents who have material for priests’ cassocks have appeared in the area of the Łomża diocese. They show the visiting cards of various priests in our diocese, which makes it easier for them to persuade people to buy from them. Honorable Priests are therefore warned not to give their visiting cards to these Jews, for in so doing they support Jewish trade without any good reason, contrary to the slogan ‘Our people buy from their own, and only their own.’” 3
    Parenthetically, people were told not to believe too readily in popular sayings about Jews: “Until recently many have spoken disparagingly about Jews, one often heard things like: ‘A Jew’s a dope, he’ll buy old rope,’ ‘You work like a Jewish farmer,’ ‘You look like a Jew on a horse.’ None of this made any sense and it detracted from our caution and vigilance against Jews … Folks laughed at Jews, and all the while those incompetent, simple, ordinary Yids took over all of our trade, took control of crafts, became landowners, factory owners, doctors, lawyers.”
    Life and Work and later The Catholic Cause played an active role in the boycott of Jewish shops. “Whoever buys from Jews or uses the services of Jewish doctors, lawyers, craftsmen, will answer to God and the people for the growth of poverty and crime in Poland, for the rise of Communism, godlessness, and socialism.” People were encouraged to fight Jewish competition by devious means: “In Stawiski, the Polish bakery wasn’t doing very well, but someone put the word out that typhus fever was going around among the Jews and they were using loaves of bread to beat each other, and business at the Polish bakery picked up.”
    Examples of successful boycotts were cited without any mention of the beatings and destruction of market stalls that accompanied them. Violence was not yet openly encouraged, but it was made clear that various tactics were permissible. The grandiose defense speeches at the trials of nationalist attack squad members were reported by the newspapers, even when the charges involved beatings and lootings.
    After the pogrom in Radziłów in 1933, the censors confiscated a whole edition of Life and Work. The next issue of the paper already carried an ironic appreciation of the pogrom in the note, “A Fine Example of Helping One’s Neighbor,” about the arrests, in connection with the Radziłów pogrom, of two brothers who had left their farm unattended and their mother alone at home. “However, the old woman and the farm have been looked after by friends of the men under arrest, former members of the Camp for a Greater Poland, who worked together to plough and sow the farmland.”
    According to the National Party’s ideology, Poles were supposed to not only weed Jews out of retail trade and crafts, but also refuse to sell them land or allow them into schools or state offices.
    The diocesan press repeated: “No Christian family will give its child into Jewish hands.” “Protesting against letting Jews into Polish schools, we Catholics are only doing what our faith commands … Our Catholic conscience and national pride command us to get rid of Jewish teachers.” When a state office employed a Polish citizen of Jewish origin, there was outrage under the headline “A Jew Instead of a Pole”: “The rumor we once gave voice to has proved true, for a Jew has become head physician at the Łomża Health Fund. The fact that the most prominent positions in Poland are occupied by persons of an alien race pains the Polish population.” Or “Just such an impossibility that has nevertheless become a reality, is a Jew, a certain Turek, being the representative