Year Zero by Ian Buruma

perception that Jews were responsible for communist oppression. When Soviet troops had occupied different parts of Poland, some Jews hoped that they would protect them from Polish anti-Semites, or from the even more lethal Germans. Communism as an antidote to ethnic nationalism had long had a natural appeal to members of a vulnerable minority. But while many communists were Jews, most Jews were not communists. So vengeance against Jews for what was called “Judeo-Communism” was at best misplaced, and politics may in fact not have been the main source of revenge at all. For most Jews were not attacked after the war for being communists, but for being Jews. And Jews were associated not only with bolshevism in popular anti-Semitic lore, but with capitalism too. They were assumed to have money, to be better off than other people, even privileged. Communists were not above exploiting anti-Semitism themselves, which is why most Jewish survivors in Poland ended up leaving the country of their birth.
    Although the majority of Polish Jews were in fact poor, the perception of superior wealth lingered. This had something to do with a guilty conscience, sometimes eased in a bizarre way by communist propaganda against Jewish capitalists. Poles certainly bore no responsibility for the German plan to exterminate the Jews. But many of them did stand by at the edge of the ghetto, with horse carts, waiting for their chance to plunder once the Jews had been conveniently disposed of. Others—like so many European citizens—were also happy to move into houses and apartments, whose rightful owners were taken away to be murdered.
    In some places, especially in northeastern villages around Bialystok, Poles did some of the killing themselves. In July 1941, the Jews in Radzilow were locked up in a barn and burned alive while their fellow citizens ran around filling their bags with loot. An eyewitness remembers: “When the Poles started rounding up and chasing Jews, the plundering of Jewishhouses began instantly . . . They went mad, they were breaking into houses, tearing up quilts; the air was full of feathers, and they’d just load up their sacks, run home and come back with an empty sack again.” One family, the Finkielstejns, managed to run away. After they returned, they asked the priest to convert them so they might have a better chance to survive. The daughter, Chaja, recalls the village conversations: “They would always talk about one thing: who had plundered how much and how rich the Jews had been.” 18
    It should never be forgotten that other Polish Gentiles behaved very differently. Hiding or helping Jews to survive carried huge risks, not just for the helper alone, but for his or her family. If caught in a western European country, a person might be sent to a concentration camp for helping Jews. In Poland it could mean death by hanging. Yet some Jews did survive thanks to the bravery of Polish Gentiles. Children were adopted, families hidden. In one famous case, several Jewish families were hidden for more than a year in the sewers of Lvov by a petty thief named Leopold Socha. More than twenty people survived underground, eating Socha’s crusts of bread while fending off rats in the dark, and at least once almost drowning after a heavy rainstorm flooded the sewer. When they emerged from the manhole, pale, emaciated, covered in excrement and lice, the people aboveground were astonished to see a Jew still alive. Several months later Socha died in an accident, run over by a drunken Soviet army truck driver. The neighbors whispered that this was God’s punishment for helping the Jews. 19
    This is perhaps the most shocking thing about the postwar Polish story. People who had protected Jews from being murdered were well advised not to talk about it. Not only because of God’s wrath for helping “the killers of Christ,” but because of the suspected loot. Since Jews were assumed to