effort. If they grew interested in some problem, they asked for an explanation, and shirked from any independent work. Reasons for this phenomenon are to be found elsewhere, as I explained earlier. Anti-Jewish incidents awakened a sense of national identity in the generally assimilated young people [6] and provoked a reaction of sorts. As young people are typically prone to radicalism, boys who had long been assimilated and separated from the Jewish masses turned in many cases to fascist nationalism. It seemed to them that the application of fascist methods in the Jewish environment would yield the same excellent results, which, they believed, had been achieved in Germany and Italy. This group of young people would like to see fascism in Palestine, and they were burning with hatred for the Arabs; in fact, they agreed with Hitler's methods, rejecting only his antisemitism. The interesting thing is that any moral evaluation of political activity was not even an option. The explanation alludes, once again, to the atmosphere in Poland before the war.
Young people attending Jewish schools were, in fact, less affected by antisemitism than their assimilated contemporaries were. The ghetto, which for the latter has only just begun to take shape, had existed for a long time for the former. This is perhaps why they were not as susceptible to fascism, but were rather taken with Stalinism. Political activity was, however, quite rare. Sometimes the mood found its expression in a certain concern for economic problems. In those latter pre-war years, Stalinism lost its popularity somewhat, in the wake of the events in Russia (court trials against the anti-Stalinist opposition, etc.). This was, in my opinion, the situation facing young Jews before the war. They were completely unprepared spiritually for the current ordeal. They lacked even a modicum of intellectual and moral sophistication. They were characterised by narrow pragmatism and obscurant existential realism, bordering on spiritual and external primitivism. They never experienced idealistic sentiments. I stress once again that the reasons for this lay beyond the young people themselves. They had absorbed all the negative qualities of social life in the pre-war era. Of course, a certain few groups and individuals were resistant to signs of intellectual and moral degradation, but unfortunately they were all too rare. They also proved their worth during the war.
