192 ZYDZI
Germany or the Fascists in Italy: they were old-fashioned reactionaries. They were active
in organising economic boycotts, but they would not encourage physical pogroms. They
were for a Humerus clausus at the universities, but were not for closing them completely
to non-Catholic, Polish citizens ... They were in favour of establishing two classes of citi-
zens with different political rights, but were not for taking these rights away completely
from any group. They were ready ... to inflict severe wounds ... on any semblance of
liberal parliamentary democracy, but they also accepted... the existence of political par-
ties representing all shades of opinion (with the exception of the communist party). Their
cultural chauvinism was mitigated by the traditional respect and admiration for...
Europe's Latin culture... The Nationalist party could never really become monolithic
and totalitarian in its philosophy. Loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church was a basic
feature of the party image...^20
The National Democrats' opponents on the Left — the socialists, communists,
and the liberal intelligentsia as a whole, were overtly pro-Jewish. The one active
Fascist formation, the Falanga of Bolestaw Piasecki (1914-79), attracted little
popular support, and was dispersed by the police on the two occasions, in 1934
and 1937, when it dared to take openly to the streets. The militant Jew-baiters,
such as the Revd Stanislaw Trzeciak, one-time Professor in the Catholjc
Academy at St. Petersburg, who participated in the Nazi 'Panaryan Weltdienst',
or Edward Chowariski, an editor from Katowice, who served a nine-month jail
sentence,for announcing the destruction of the world by the Jews, did not go
unchallenged. Press reports in the West of 'Pogroms in Poland', though accepted
by Jewish commentators, were repeatedly discredited by the investigations of
independent British and American observers. The so-called pogrom in Lwow,
in November 1918, turned out to be a military massacre where three times more
Christians died than Jews. The so-called pogrom in Pinsk in March 1919 turned
out to be work of a panicky lieutenant, whose order to execute thirty-five sus-
pected Bolshevik infiltrators was described by a US investigator as 'fully justified
by the circumstances'; the pogroms in Wilno in April 1919 and again in October
1920 were occasioned by the Red Army's hasty retreats, and by military reprisals
against suspected collaborators. Polish Jews in the 1930s were indeed subjected
to a number of ugly threats and denigrations, and to a mounting wave of eco-
nomic hardship and emotional insecurity. After Pitsudski's death, the OZON
leadership saw little place for the Jews in their vision of Polish national unity.
The law of April 1936 limiting shebitah (ritual slaughter) to Jewish localities
caused needless inconvenience. Yet the crude campaign to discredit the
'Judaic-Masonic Circle' of the Republic's President, Ignacy Moscicki,
rebounded on its instigators. In terms of real violence, the Polish Jews suffered
nothing compared to the Sanacja regime's brutal pacifications of rebellious
peasants or of separatist Ukrainians; and they never experienced the sort of
assaults meted out to their compatriots in neighbouring Hungary, Romania,
Germany, or the Ukraine. By 1939, no satisfactory solution to the deteriorating
problem had been found; and the future was indeed bleak. But historians who
glibly state that 'the writing was on the wall', or that the Polish Jews were stand-