administrative functions. Many people were bothered by the fact that Jews could be appointed to positions in the new power structures that had beenunavailable to them before the war.
Moreover, the Jews were not privileged by the Soviet occupying forces. In proportion to their numbers in the population, far more Jews were deported east than Poles and other ethnic groups living in the eastern territories.
When imposing repressions, Soviet occupiers used different criteria from the Germans. Deportations an d other acts of political violence and terror affected all employees of the Polish administration from before 17 September – for government officials, police, and foresters alike. Jews – as mentioned – were excluded from holding such positions in pre-war Poland, so they could not have been victims of such repressions. They were affected by persecution and mass deportation for other reasons: as refugees (that category of thepopulation was, by definition, treated as suspicious), as activists of Jewish political parties, and finally, as people belonging to the wealthier segments of the population. Activists of political parties operating in Poland before 17 September 1939 were repressed in equal measure, for Poles and Jews alike. This was true of all parties, even the pre-war communists, because the Polish Communist Party and its affiliated organisations, such as the Communist Party of Western Belarus and the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, as well as their youth affiliates, had been dissolved – on Stalin’s orders – by the Komintern (the Communist International) formally in 1938 (and actuallyearlier, in 1937), and their leaders had been summoned to Moscow and shot. Absurdly, the Soviet political police accused the Polish Communist Party of supposedly having been founded as an agency of the secret services of the Polish government.
The Komintern, and more specifically the Soviet authorities, permitted Polish communists to resume their operations, and even supported their efforts. When the Soviet–German war reached a critical phase, in late 1941 and 1942, it was hoped that the Polish communists would develop guerrilla warfare behind the German lines. The Polish Communist Party was then reborn under a different name: the Polish Workers’ Party. Polish communist groups previously operating under the German occupation did not have the support of Moscow.
In almost every city and town of the Second Republic occupied in 1939 by the Red Army, there were groups of Jews, former members of the disbanded
PREFA C E TO THE PO L ISH E DITION XIX
