with fellow citizens, then ethnic, religious, and cultural links prevailed. The presented sources reveal the mechanism which governs societies in critical moments of history. They allow us to reconstruct the stages of disintegration of neighbourly ties, alienation of whole groups, transformations in occupational structure, and changes in the hierarchy of values, when the very foundations of life are in danger. The Borderlands Jewish community was forced to adapt to new conditions, and a certain part of the group in question did so using all their talents and abilities, without any particular regard for how the environment might respond to such attitudes. However, the whole community paid a great price, as they were all completely alone when the German occupiers entered those areas. Polish neighbours forgot that during the Soviet occupation the Jews also suffered, that they accounted for more than 20 per cent of the deportees, that they lost most of their property, and suffered manyhumiliations.
The Borderlands Jews had realised what one could expect from the Germans by 1939, when German troops reached the outskirts of Lvov. The Jews were sent to forced labour, military commanders collected forced contributions, and the Abwehr agents encouraged the local Ukrainian and Lithuanian population to take armed actions against Poles and Jews. After the demarcation line was established, the latter were evicted en masse from many border towns, including Przemyśl, Jarosław, and Tarnobrzeg, and in December – also from Chełm and Hrubieszów. For the subsequent 18 months, the German intelligence closely monitored ethnic relations in the former Polish Borderlands. Exaggerated reports flocked to the Berlin headquarters,sent, for example, from the consulate in Lvov and the embassy in Bucharest, describing the allegedly significant Jewish presence in the police, the NKVD, and local government bodies. In a conversation with a Bulgarian MP on 3 December 1940, Hitler himself said that in Galicia, “under the rule of the Jews” the Ukrainian intelligentsia was being eliminated. Three months later,he issued a special directive for the police and SS Einsatzgruppen, in which the main objective of their future activities was “to remove Judeo-Bolshevikintelligentsia”.
GENERA L INTRO D U C TION XXXIII
