Polish Officials, Press Demand Jews in Poland Condemn ‘zionist’ Critics

Polish Communist officialdom, abetted by the state-controlled press, is demanding that Polish Jews condemn “ignominious accusations against the Polish nation” allegedly being made by “Zionists” abroad. This was the latest development in Poland’s official anti-Jewish campaign, which, according to information reaching here today, has switched from attacks on so-called “Zionist” elements within Poland to include denunciations of Zionism and Jewish leadership abroad with an implied threat to Polish Jewry to renounce them for their own good.

The change in emphasis, according to observers here, stemmed from the angry protests being lodged by Jews and non-Jews throughout the free world and even in some areas of the Communist bloc against Poland’s anti-Jewish campaign camouflaged as anti-Zionist. These protests and expressions of revulsion have apparently stung the Warsaw regime. Some Polish embassies abroad are refusing to accept letters and resolutions of protest for transmission to their capital, it was learned here today.

The campaign in the Polish press seems to have the two-fold purpose of convincing Poland’s surviving Jews that they were abandoned to their fate by Jewish and Zionist leaders during the German occupation in World War II and to further inflame anti-Jewish feelings among the general population. The Polish newspaper Kurier Polski alleged yesterday that Jews collaborated with the Gestapo during the war and vied among each other for Nazi favor. The Trybuna Mazowiecka claimed that no more than 1,000 Jews fought In the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943 and that they were supplied, trained and supported by Polish resistance fighters.

According to reports from Warsaw today, a leading Communist Party official. Piotr Jaroszewicz, speaking with apparent approval of the Politburo of which he is a deputy member, declared that “in a violent anti-Polish campaign, world Zionism is not even hesitating to mobilize for the struggle against the people’s authorities certain Polish citizens of Jewish origin. We are convinced that an overwhelming majority of them will declare themselves against and separate themselves from, these hostile machinations.” The official’s remarks were regarded as the strongest anti-Zionist stand taken by an important party official since the Communist Party chief, Wladislaw Gomulka, tried to tone down the anti-Zionist campaign. The Polish press, ignoring Gomulka’s statement that “it would be a misunderstanding for anybody to see Zionism as a danger to Socialism in Poland or to any existing social-political system,” called on Polish Jews to declare themselves against Zionism and loyal to Poland.