Also significant was the participation of Jews in the NKVD and the state medical supervision. Their importance within the officer corps also increased visibly, but they were mainly entrusted with positions of deputy chiefs for political affairs. Available sources do not specify how many of them were Lithuanian Jews, and how many newcomers from the USSR. The situation was similar in the field of economy and administration, where Jews usually served as deputies or lower-level directors. Particularly popular was the Komsomol. Jewish youth accounted for approximately 50 per cent of the members of this organisation and they were used extensively in all propaganda campaigns. Komsomol even had a Yiddish-language periodical – Shtraln. Jewish youth also had a number of separate clubs.
The attitude of a large part of the Jewish community was criticised by the Polish underground movement supporting the government in exile in London. Lt. Col. Nikodem Sulik reported on 22 February 1941:
The Jews utterly and unreservedly cooperate with the Bolsheviks in the fields of economy and politics. Given their familiarity with the area, they are simply invaluable for the NKVD and they are used as a whip against the Polish population. This is particularly true of the Jewish youth of both intellectual and working-class backgrounds.356
Such views are repudiated by other reports from Vilna. The legacy of General Kazimierz Sosnkowski includes two studies from the Polish democratic leftcircles. To quote from the “Memorandum of Vilna”, of 7 May 1940:
in the spheres representing the socialist Jewish refugees, there is a clear – so to speak – “Polonophilism”, both political and cultural: these spheres are very clearly opposed to the currents inspired by the Lithuanian Jewish circles tending to dissuade Jews from using the Polish language, and so on.
“Notes on the Situation in Vilna and the Vilna Region” admitted that:
the Soviet regime liberated the Jewish population from national oppression in relation to the situation of the Jews in Poland, let alone in the German Partition. The attitude of the Jewish community to the Soviets was primarily determined by ethnic factors. The persecution of the Jews in Poland and the profound
