THE RISE OF THE COMMON PEOPLE^151To right and left stood a row of shallow shops, each of them like cupboards boarded
over with paper, coming to a sudden end a couple of paces from the pavement. The
wooden shelves carried a few cheap cigarettes, pickled eggs, smoked herrings, chocolate
in tablets, sweets, slices of cheese, carrots, garlic, onion, cakes, turnips, dried peas, and
redcurrant juice.
In each of these shops, a heap of black mud lay smouldering on the' floor, and even in
the heat preserved something of its natural humidity. Children, covered in dirty rags,
were crawling all over it. Each such hole was the resort of several persons who passed
their life there in gossip and idleness. At the rear, sat the father of the family, a greenish-
faced melancholic, who never left his place from dawn to dusk, gazing, out into the street
in the hope of making his fortune.
One step further, one could look through an open window into a tailor's workshop, a
dim cave with low ceilings, exuding a powerful odour, where men and women, bent and
bowed, worked out their shortened lives. Right opposite, stood a hairdresser's salon,
making wigs for devout Jewesses. It was one of several in a long row. Pale, sickly, lan-
guid girls, dishevelled and unwashed, were setting the curls in position... From the
courtyards, from the doorways, even from the rooftops, sick, lean, long-nosed, blotchy
faces peered out with indifference through patient, sorrowful, bloodshot eyes onto this
world of misery, dreaming of death.. ,^16
Time brought no relief. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, when
the rate of increase of the non-Jewish proletariat slowed down, the Jews of
Warsaw stood fair to attain the position of an absolute majority. By 1918,
numbering some 319,000, they had reached 42.2 per cent of the whole. It was a
nice paradox; but at the moment of national independence the capital of Poland
contained virtually as many 'non-Poles' as Poles. Warsaw not only sheltered
more Jews than any other city in Europe; it was only just losing to New York
the claim of being the principal Jewish sanctuary in the world. Thereafter,
Warsaw's Jews entered a period of relative decline. In the 1920s, the renewed
influx of peasants into the city served to strengthen the Polish element; whilst
the Jewish community itself was reduced by the emigration of many young
people to the West. By 1939, the total Jewish population had risen only modestly
to 375,000. Their proportion to the population at large, at Z9.1 per cent, had
fallen to levels current fifty years before.
In the Second Republic from 1918 to 1939, social reforms in Poland achieved
only limited success. But the social effects of the Second World War overshad-
owed everything which had happened in the century since Emancipation. All
classes without exception were assaulted by the Nazi and Soviet Terror. The
educated and propertied classes suffered inordinately. The national minorities
were eliminated. The intelligentsia, the landowners, the bourgeoisie, and the
civil servants were decimated. Almost all who survived lost either their property
or their previous source of income. By a sudden and terrible process of elimina-
tion, only the peasantry and the proletariat remained relatively intact.
In People's Poland, therefore, no social revolution was necessary. The levelling
of society had been largely accomplished by the War. Under the rule of a 'People's
Democracy', the common people were supposed to enter their inheritance.