Zofia Trębacz. Nie tylko Palestyna: Polskie plany emigracyjne wobec Żydów 1935-1939. Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2018. 384 pp. $12.49 (paper), ISBN 978-83-65254-85-6.
Reviewed by Joanna Sliwa (Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany - Claims Conference)
Published on H-Poland (December, 2019)
Commissioned by Anna Muller (University of Michigan - Dearborn)
Published in 2018, the year that marked the centennial of Poland’s independence, Zofia Trębacz’s book, Nie tylko Palestyna: Polskie plany emigracyjne wobec Żydów 1935-1939 (Not only Palestine: Polish emigration plans toward Jews, 1935-1939) pushes readers to reevaluate their understanding of interwar Poland. As the subtitle of the book suggests, the study explores the plans of the Polish government to solve “the Jewish question” through the mass emigration of Jews. While Trębacz refers to earlier years, her focus is on 1935-39. The significance of 1935 onward, as Trębacz explains, lies in the death of Marshall Józef Piłsudski, a speech made by Prime Minister Felicjan Sławoj Składkowski giving his tacit approval to anti-Jewish measures, the upheaval caused by the economic crisis, and a turn in national politics. Trębacz’s exploration ends obviously with 1939, when Germany overran Poland and introduced its “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
A multilayered study, Nie tylko Palestyna deals with Poland’s history as it concerned the self-understanding of Poland in the interwar period and the country’s position on the world stage. Key to fulfilling that national and nationalist identity, Trębacz shows, involved blaming “the other” (Jews) for the ills plaguing Poland and purging the country of the perceived enemy through emigration. “The arguments against Jews were not original, but what was new was the certitude and unambiguity of the statements and the willingness to bestow upon the Jewish question the rank of a concrete political problem, in need of an immediate solution,” Trębacz explains (p. 25). Was emigration a tool to solve internal problems? Or, was emigration the goal itself? Trębacz asks these questions but refrains from providing one answer, preferring instead to steer the reader to see the complexities inherent in each scenario. While posing a question without providing an answer may work in one case, the repetitive use of such a device throughout the book is less effective.
Trębacz masterfully shows the various individuals and entities (government, lay, and religious) who had a stake in not only pushing Jews out of Poland but also conducting the search for a viable destination. Africa, South America, Central Asia, or Palestine—these options floated around. The amount of detail about the various actors involved in the process is both impressive and dizzying. What becomes clear is that the Jewish question rested with a range of Polish state ministries and organizations, among them the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Marine and Colonial League. It relied on the input of academics, thinkers, and travelers who conducted their expeditions. The church, too, had a role to play by engaging in and disseminating antisemitic propaganda that exculpated Christian Poles from their support for embracing antisemitism and the mass emigration project. Interestingly, the project aimed to involve the Polish Diaspora in South America in advertising the merits of Jews’ immigration to countries on that continent. International Jewish organizations, too, had a role to play in this endeavor, especially when the Polish side presented the emigration of Jews from Poland as a positive response to the Jews’ worsening situation—conditions created by the Polish government itself. Trębacz illustrates how the government-sanctioned and socially approved program to drive Jews out of Poland was a joint enterprise.
Nie tylko Palestyna is also a study about imagining Poland. Trębacz outlines the path to fulfilling the fantasy about Poland free of “the other” and the perceived source of all national, social, and economic problems—the Jews. With the departure of Jews, their jobs and property would benefit the only legitimate inhabitants of Poland: the ethnic, Catholic, Poles. Or so the promise and vision went. If inventing a new Poland was promoted in the domestic realm, that dream was also pursued on the international arena. For that, the Polish government strove to forge connections and solicit cooperation among various countries, in particular France. Therefore, Nie tylko Palestyna offers a transnational perspective that contextualizes the history and politics of various countries and regions through interests furthered by Poland. Poland, which itself had been partitioned thrice and disappeared from the map for 123 years to reemerge after the collapse of empires, voiced its own imperial aspirations. Trębacz explains that colonies, or rather mandates, that Poland demanded on the world stage would make up for lost time and opportunities as a result of the partitions, embody the national grandeur that the country strove for, offer a solution to an unwanted minority (Jews), and provide compensation that Poland believed it deserved.
Nie tylko Palestyna paints a grim picture of Poland on the brink of another world war. Poland was among the countries that espoused a closed-door policy on immigration. The infamous Polenaktion (Polish Action) in the course of which Nazi Germany expelled about seventeen thousand Polish Jews was a direct result of Poland’s antisemitic agenda and fear of a possible return of persecuted Jews from Greater Germany to their country of birth. As Trębacz shows, Poland continued to express interest in finding ways to get rid of its own Jews even as anti-Jewish persecution raged in Nazi Germany. The labeling of Jews as the enemy and source of all evil in Poland and the country’s determination to solve the problem through finding a place for Jewish Poles outside Poland shaped Polish responses to the Holocaust. Therefore, Trębacz’s book is an essential read for anyone who studies Polish-Jewish relations and the Holocaust.
The significance of the study is obvious, but some of the shortcomings of the book merit attention. While the book is grounded in an impressive wealth of primary and secondary source material, archival sources about the activities of American Jewish organizations in the context of Poland’s efforts to decrease the Jewish population through mass emigration are missing. Some of the glaring omissions include American Jewish Committee Archives and the JDC Archives. In the case of the latter, Trębacz devotes considerable attention to the JDC’s favorable response to the Polish government’s idea but cites only a secondary study. Trębacz briefly refers to Vladimir Jabotinsky and the Jewish emigration movement that he promoted but does not address how young people in particular responded to the Polish government’s plans. Here, the author could have drawn upon Daniel Kupfert Heller’s book, Jabotinsky’s Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism (2017). Trębacz also refers to the Fourth Aliyah. Magdalena Wrobel’s book, Social Networks and the Jewish Migration between Poland and Palestine, 1924-1928 (2013), could have contextualized that emigration wave as well as the phenomenon of a return to Poland from Palestine. Did reverse emigration influence the Polish government’s pursuits later on? From the outset, Trębacz indicates that repetitions are both inevitable and deliberate. Perhaps more careful editing could have eliminated such urging and thus made the narrative more compact.
Without a doubt, Nie tylko Palestyna is an important contribution to the field of Polish history, Jewish history, and migration studies. The book has received a nomination for the prestigious POLITYKA Historical Award for 2019 in the category of popular and scholarly debuts. The subject of the book is a timely one, too. It offers a key lens onto the current debates in Poland about nationalism, victimization, and attempts to deal with those deemed the “other.”
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-poland.
Citation:
Joanna Sliwa. Review of Trębacz, Zofia, Nie tylko Palestyna: Polskie plany emigracyjne wobec Żydów 1935-1939.
H-Poland, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2019.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54823
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |