Conservatives of Communist Party Using Anti-semitism As Weapon Against Liberal Wing

Commenting on the charges that Jews instigated the rioting, Victor Zorza said today in a dispatch from Warsaw in the Washington Post that “there is certainly real Jewish background to the affair. It is true that the offspring of prominent former officials have played an outstanding role in the student and intellectual ferment in Poland, and that many of these officials were Jews. A considerable proportion of these Jewish party leaders, who were among the most ferocious Stalinists in the early days of the regime, have mellowed greatly since then, and some of them have tried to instill in their children some of the idealism that first brought them into the Communist Party. The Jews have consequently found themselves largely on the liberal side of the party, and the party conservatives have therefore been able to use anti-Semitic arguments with which to beat the liberals.”

The dispatch said that “at Warsaw University, a battle with leaflets developed, and anti-Semitic and anti-conservative broad sheets alternated on university notice boards. It is noteworthy that both the official youth organizations at the university, the Communist Party’s Socialist Youth Union and the Union of Rural Youth, passed formal resolutions of protest against the anti-Semitic campaign and associated themselves unmistakably with the liberal opposition.”