Anti-jewish Drive Recalls Saddest Aspects of Pre-communist Poland, Paper Says

The Washington Post said in an editorial today that the Polish anti-Semitic campaign ‘deeply offends the many Americans who otherwise sympathize with Poland’s legitimate strivings.” It described what was going on in Poland as the elimination of the Jews who had returned to Poland after the war and had been “seated in power by the Red Army” by “a Communist faction based among Poles who passed the war underground at home.”

The editorial declared that “the fair objection to the purge is not that one group or generation of Jewish Communists is losing out. The objection is that, in a country in which Jews have seen such tragedy, the purge is being conducted in a publicly, provocatively anti-Semitic way.” The newspaper asserted that Communist Party Chief Wladyslaw Gomulka is defending a political line “which denies the courage that led many Poles to help Jews during the war. The campaign recalls the saddest aspects of pre-Communist Poland.”