“The Soviet strategists who were in control of Poland saw significant advantage in fostering an animosity between Jewish and gentile Poles. This animosity was used as a tool to aid in the subjugation of Poland early in its capture into the Soviet empire in 1944. After World War II, Soviet machinations in this regard succeeded in converting the image of Jewish victims of German-Nazi genocide into the image of Jewish oppressors (Kersten, p. 130). This was purposely done to put the Polish gentile population between “a rock and a hard place.” Polish gentiles were left with two options: either don’t respond to the Soviet oppression, or respond to the Soviet oppression and thus appear to be anti-Semitic.
Although the image of Jews as oppressors was spread beyond Poland, this phenomenon was very noticeable in Poland, where there was a steady flow of news and often well-substantiated (if sometimes exaggerated) rumors of executions of anti-communist Poles by Jewish executioners serving in the Soviet-controlled terror apparatus. Kersten describes this unfortunate development when Soviet policies created the impression that Jews played the main role in the subjugation of Poland and other satellite countries to the communist system. At the same time, the communist propaganda machine equated opposition to the “socialist” regimes with anti-Semitism. So, if a Polish person opposed the socialist Sovietization of Poland, that person was branded as an anti-Semite. This smoke screen was used successfully to obscure the reality of the Soviet subjugation of Poland by the Soviet Union.
The Soviet terror apparatus in Poland included the so-called Polish military counterintelligence. It was initially integrated with the Soviet Smersh [Death to Spies] organization directed against German spying and subversion. However, when the front crossed the prewar Polish territory, Smersh was used increasingly against the significant Polish resistance to Soviet domination. In November 1944, the Polish section of Smersh became renamed Informacja, in which Col. Checinski later served for 10 years. Informacja remained under the close supervision of Smersh and was at first headed by Soviet Col. Nicolai Kozhushko. Soviet officers assigned to the Polish army were considered vulnerable to Polish influence and were under close surveillance by a special Informacja [Information] department. Informacja was clearly a Soviet-led force, not at all an independent force loyal to Poland.
At the time of the most intensive terror, between 1944 and 1955, Smersh used its Informacja branch to have agents pose as members of the military prosecutor’s office. They used this apparatus to conduct political trials in military courts in Poland. Tortured witnesses were “prepared” for these trials and later were secretly executed “to remove any trace of the provocation” (Checinski, p. 57). In that period, of the 120 officers serving in Informacja, only about 18 were Polish-born. Most of these 18 were Polish Jews and the rest were Soviet citizens, some of them Jews.
The Soviets were creative in inventing their own opportunities to manufacture conflict between Polish Jews and gentiles. For example, it was Soviet policy in Poland to change Yiddish names of Jews into Slavic-Polish names. This practice was resented by both Jewish and gentile Poles. An American journalist, Samuel Loeb Shneiderman, who visited Warsaw in 1946, wrote in his book “Between Fear and Hope” (New York, 1946) that under the cover of Polish names Jews were continuing their ethnic identity and must have felt like their ancestors forced into conversion to Christianity during their persecution in Spain (Kersten, pp.76, 108). The name-changing became widespread. It served to deprive the Jews of their cultural heritage in order to form a “progressive Jewish nation,” to use Stalin’s expression.
Checinski describes how Stalin ordered the NKVD to prepare a civilian network of police terror and repression, called the UB [Urzad Bezpieczenstwa), to work in parallel with the Informacja in Poland. The “Polish intelligentsia boycotted the security service, which was treated with universal contempt as an instrument of foreign domination” (Checinski, p. 61). Thus, the NKVD, despite its deep-rooted anti-Semitism, “could not do without Jews. Jewish officials were often placed in the most conspicuous posts; hence they could easily be blamed for all of the regime’s crimes” (Checinski, p. 62). The Soviet strategy of using people with striking Semitic features as the most visible executioners of Soviet policy in Poland was also aimed at presenting understandable anti-communist feelings within Poland as anti-Semitism. In 1945, the upper echelons of the terror apparatus were staffed with Jews. This created the appearance that many Jews in Poland were members of the Soviet-controlled terror apparatus. A public proclamation, made at a convention of Jewish members of the ruling communist party [PPR, Polska Pania Robotnicza] on October 7-9, 1945, stated that in postwar Poland, conditions were created for the Jews to find an outlet for their political, social, and national ambitions. Needless to say, neither Poles nor Jews trusted this official statement. The Zionists openly advocated a massive emigration to Palestine (Kersten, p.80), which for different reasons was also desired by the Soviet leadership.”
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” Is hatred for a person simply because of his ethnicity more acceptable today, as long as the object of the hatred is a Pole rather than a Jew? And once it is decided that it is important to instill hatred against members of a given ethnic group, can there be any limit to the perpetration of lies, myths, and mischaracterizations to drive the hatred home? And once ethnic hatred is started and nurtured in a people, where will it end? The Holocaust itself unfortunately provides one answer, one such ending point.”