Free Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder Page A

that Poland is where the Jews of Europe chiefly lived. About ten times as many Jews were citizens of Poland as were citizens of Germany. There were about as many Jews in individual Polish cities such as Warsaw and Łódź as there were Jewish citizens of Germany. And of course Poland was the country that lay between Germany and the Soviet Union, where Hitler’s true revolution was to be made.
    A war was always the object of Hitler’s policy. The fact that one took place was above all a result of his designs and achievements within Germany. Yet Hitler made a mistake about Poland, imagining it only as an instrument in a larger German enterprise. Instead, Poland behaved as a political agent, a sovereign state.
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    The German calamity of 1918 was a Polish miracle. Virtually everything about the outcome of the First World War that was threatening for Germans was exhilarating for Poles. The Treaty of Versailles of 1919, a symbol of injustice in Germany, was a pillar of the legal order in which an independent Poland could exist. When German troops withdrew from the East, a new Polish army could fill the power vacuum. Poles fought the Red Army for the lands that had been German client states. Poland won the Polish-Bolshevik War, and the Treaty of Riga of 1921 established Poland’s eastern border with the Soviet Union.
    Poland was a new state drawing together territories from three former empires: Russian, Habsburg, and German. Jews were present in large numbers in almost the entire country, so interaction with them was a part of daily life for the other citizens of Poland. Jews were most of the doctors, lawyers, and traders, and so mediated in contacts with the broader worlds of knowledge, power, and money. Jews paid more than a third of the taxes in Poland, and firms owned by Jews were responsible for about half of the foreign trade. There were about as many assimilated Jews in Poland as there were in Germany; the difference was that for every assimilated Polish Jew there were ten more who spoke Yiddish and were religiously observant in one traditional form or another. Jews in Poland had parallel systems of schooling, a parallel press, and a parallel party system.

    The question of loyalty to the Polish state was not resolved simply by answers to census questions about language or religion. It is to yield to ethnic nationalism to imagine that all people who spoke only Polish identified with the Polish state and that people of other backgrounds necessarily did not. Not everyone who spoke Polish was loyal to the new state or even identified with it. Most Poles were peasants, and most peasants awaited some gesture from the state that would arouse their loyalty. The Polish countryside was massively overpopulated, and rural unemployment was staggeringly high. Land reform was halting and insufficient. Rather than redistributing land from the large estates, the Polish state acted as a broker in negotiations for purchases and a source of credit for purchases. Peasants were dissatisfied by slow transactions, and hurt when credits were withdrawn during the Depression. Most peasants wanted both their own plot of land and their traditional rights to shared use of common land, desires that were contradictory in ideology but understandable in practice. When all land was treated as private property with defined owners, ancient rights to the use of pastures and forests could not be enforced. Polish peasants had been immigrating to America in large numbers for half a century, but in the 1920s and 1930s new American laws held them back. Independent Poland assimilated and integrated large numbers of peasants, but had to deal with considerable dissatisfaction in the countryside.
    Polish patriotism spread outward from the intelligentsia, a large social group mostly composed of the children of noble landholders and of the rising middle classes, including the children of prosperous Jews. Polish political society was divided into two major orientations