Travellers at Dworzec Gdański, a train station in the north of Warsaw, may notice a plaque that says: ‘Here they left behind more than they possessed.’ Put up in 1998, it commemorates the departure of thousands of Polish Jews who, 30 years earlier, were forced to leave the country for no other reason than their being Jewish. Organised by the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), the anti-Zionist campaign of 1968-1971 destroyed a Jewish community which had only just re-established itself after the Holocaust. It was a gruesome example of left-wing antisemitism inflected as ‘anti-Zionism’.
The assault on the Jews teemed with declarations against antisemitism. On countless rallies, people carried signs that read ‘Antisemitism – No! Anti-Zionism – Yes!’ Yet of the 8,300 members expelled from the Communist party, nearly all were Jewish (Blatman 2000, p. 308). Almost 9,000 Jews lost their jobs and hundreds were thrown out of their apartments (Wolak 2004, p. 73). The regime allowed Jewish citizens to leave the country under two conditions: they must revoke their citizenship; and they must declare Israel as the country of their destination. Thereby the regime legitimised the purge in the most cynical fashion: Why would these people go to Israel if they hadn’t been Zionists all along? READ MORE
