Searching for Scapegoats

Anti-Semitism has had a long and troubled history in Poland. Though Poles can claim a better record of tolerance than their Russian and German neighbors, suspicion and fear of the Jew as an outsider have all too frequently erupted over the centuries in persecution and pogroms. On the eve of World War II, Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe. The Nazi Holocaust, postwar migration and a later purge reduced a once thriving community of 3.3 million to a tiny minority of some 5,000.

Last week the anti-Semitic specter appeared to rise again. On the surface the rally staged by about 1,000 Polish war veterans in front of the former secret police headquarters in Warsaw seemed respectable enough. The veterans had ostensibly come to pay homage to the victims of Stalinist terror in Poland in the early '50s. But a disturbing anti-Semitic strain began to sound through the nationalistic rhetoric. Orators singled out Jews in the Stalin-era Polish secret police and government as the torturers and murderers of "Polish patriots." Declared a former soldier in Poland's Home Army: "Those Jewish nationalists made a bloodbath. Let us block the way to power of the next generation of Zionists." Handbills with the slogan KEEP SOLIDARITY POLISH named the alleged Zionists: KOR Activist Adam Michnik and Solidarity Spokesman Karol Modzelewski, both identified as Jews.

Why would anyone reawaken the anti-Semitism issue in a country where there are now so few Jews to attack? In fact there was an overwhelming suspicion that the rally organizers had another target in mind. Coming only days after the temporary detention of Dissident Leader Jacek Kuron and other incidents of harassment against Solidarity, the rally seemed to many to be an attempt to discredit the independent trade union with an emotional "Zionist" label.

According to some Poland watchers, the anti-Semitic ploy may have originated in the middle ranks of the Communist Party and the government's security organization. Said one Eastern Europe expert: "Given the ease with which the group organized the rally and distributed leaflets, it is evident that the people behind the new movement are close to the police and power apparatus." One Bonn Foreign Ministry official, however, suspected a more elevated figure: "Mieczyslaw Moczar is back in the power structure. This could be his work."

Though Moczar, a former Interior Minister, only recently returned to the Politburo in a party shake-up last December, he is a past master of the art of anti-Semitic plotting. In March 1968 he crushed an uprising of Polish students and used the opportunity to advance his own nationalist faction through a purge of Jewish Communists. Could the revival of anti-Semitic rhetoric signal a new bid for power by the wily general? "It's a good bet," noted a West German diplomat. "This could have been a Moczar trial balloon."

Solidarity's Warsaw chapter quickly called on Poles "to stand against the attempt at anti-Semitic action." The Communist Party also rejected the incipient antiSemitism. Said Party Chief Stanislaw Kania: "We do not think that the possibility exists to use anti-Semitism for any purpose. It was always foreign to Communists and contradictory to the tragic experiences of the Polish nation." There were signs last week that most Poles agreed. After the rally, flags, flowers and an anti-Semitic plaque left by the protesting veterans were angrily removed.

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