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

of the Union of Farm Workers. Is it not extraordinary that a person who by race, religion, and nationality is alien to the Polish spirit should decide the fate of a purely Polish union?”
    The diocesan press was the local population’s window on the world. The column “National News” reported on “Jewish usury,” “Łódź’s de-Jewification,” “Gold Stolen from Churches Bought by Two Lvov Jews,” “Jewish Teacher in Nowo-Święcane Spreads Communism,” and “the Jewification of the Boy Scouts.” Under the heading “World News”: “Rumors of Ritual Murder,” “Jews Whipped for Opening Shops on Sunday” (in Tripoli), and so forth. Most energy was devoted to spreading modern, economic anti-Semitism, although traditional, religious anti-Semitism also had its place in these publications. Recommending reading materials to their parishioners, they praised a brochure by Father J. Unszlicht, An Outline of the Life and Teachings of Jesus Christ , which dealt with the “perversity of Jews in relation to Jesus.”
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    One can argue about the immediate influence the press had in an area where one-third of the residents were illiterate and another third finished two grades of school at most. Reading documents from the postwar trials of participants in the massacre, one notices some of the witnesses and defendants sign with a cross. (Jan Cytrynowicz told me that peasants in Wizna buying three-quarters of a liter of oil would take three quarts paying for each separately, because they couldn’t do addition.) But the town elites, including the priests, read the local press. And it was they who set the tone.
    In its approach to the Jewish question the diocesan press was no different from the press in other parts of Poland, and sometimes things got much worse elsewhere. Toward the end of the 1930s, brutal anti-Semitism was an obsession in the press. 4 A firm majority of Catholic papers argued that the battle with the Jews was a virtue in the eyes of God, not a vice, and they called for people to work to rid the country of Jews.
    What was fundamentally different about the Łomża area, as the historian Dariusz Libionka has shown, was the high degree to which priests were involved in the activity of the National Party. The Łomża area was quite a phenomenon in that regard. 5
    The National Party already enjoyed the support of a majority of parish priests in the Łomża diocese, and the highest percentage fell in Łomża County (twenty-three of twenty-eight parish priests). Local bishop Stanisław Łukomski, a friend and collaborator of National Party leader Roman Dmowski, conducted a strong campaign against “introducing teachers and pupils of other faiths, particularly Jews, into Polish schools.” At the Congregation of Deans in 1929, he had already ordered parish priests to report on the number of Jewish teachers and pupils and offered as a model Father Rogiński of Wysokie Mazowieckie, who had “achieved the removal of a Jewish teacher.” Libionka also makes the point that Bishop Łukomski was exceptionally effective among higher church authorities in popularizing the notion of “ridding trade of Jews”—in a 1935 address to the clergy in his diocese he urged them to follow the example of a priest who had made his parishioners swear not to buy anything in a Jewish shop.
    From the reports of the Interior Ministry it clearly emerges that it was priests who propagated the National Party ideology from the pulpit and in addresses on national holidays. Activities on the party’s behalf were mainly organized by branches of the church-based groups of Catholic Action, which in the Łomża area were de facto appendages of the National Party, active in the greater part of the parish. Priests pressured their parishioners with threats and entreaties to participate in party activity. The