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said to Mother, ‘what a fine little boy you have there,’ and they gave me a candy. It was enough for Mother to say: ‘Hey, that other Jew has that fabric for 2.10, and you’re asking 2.20?’ and the man bowed right away, saying: ‘I’ll give you a bit extra, Mrs. Mocarski, and you can have it for 2.05.’”
    Jews can’t only have been polite to the nice Mrs. Mocarski. They replaced the shop windows that had been broken and went on doing business on credit with the National Party activists who’d broken them. They made an effort to behave properly, even ingratiatingly, toward Poles, trying to win their favor.
    According to the stories I heard from Polish and Jewish interlocutors, good neighborly relations were usually based on Jews performing some service to Poles; it could be writing a letter or keeping peelings for the pigs. Probably apart from ordinary neighborliness a role was played by the centuries-old tradition that taught them they had to pay their way into the societies they lived in, and the Jews saw nothing odd in it. But what did their Polish neighbors feel, raised on anti-Semitic propaganda, when they experienced such courtesies? Many of them must have experienced them as a humiliation.
    The majority of Polish residents felt distrust for and distance from Jews, and also a sense of superiority because of the fact that they belonged to “the true faith.” In turn, Jews felt scorn for “goys” (even when they tried not to show it) because they were illiterate, or because they drank and beat their wives, or didn’t make sure their children got an education.
    â€œMy father was a tailor, he sewed cassocks for the priest, he had a lot of Polish acquaintances, but we children weren’t allowed to play with Polish children,” I was told by Izaak Lewin. “We saw them in school, which was mixed, or in the courtyard, but at home it was drummed into us: ‘The only good things are Jewish.’”
    8.
    In 1936 the parliament passed a law restricting shehita , or ritual slaughter, violating the Treatise on Minorities, which forbade the state from interfering with the religious customs of minorities. Edicts followed on both the state and local level that reduced Jews to the status of second-class citizens. State schools that taught Yiddish lost their funding, and Polish schools were forbidden to skip the Sabbath. The Interior Ministry reports in those years show—probably without meaning to—how the state’s attitude toward the Jewish question changed after Piłsudski’s followers adopted a moderate form of the National Party’s anti-Jewish ideology to shore up their own power. From 1936 onward, one notices a certain change of tone in the officials’ reports. The National Party was gaining strength and assertiveness, and at the same time the nationalists are described in more positive terms, with some blame being placed on their victims. “The National Party’s unruly supporters have permitted themselves minor anti-Jewish excesses. The Jews were partly responsible for bringing this on themselves by their arrogant and provocative behavior” (report of May 1936).
    In March 1936, The Catholic Cause was still furious—in an article titled “A Jewish Master of Ceremonies’ Brazenness at a Rifle Meeting in Ostrołęka”—that reformist circles had allowed a Jew to be master of ceremonies. Before long the Riflemen would not only refuse to entrust a Jew with that position but would also refuse to let him participate in its meetings.
    Local ties binding the community, which developed at least in part from the citizens meeting at town council sessions, were already under pressure, and now they were often severed for good. A report from January 1938 discloses that in Białystok, after funding for Jewish schooling had been cut, the Jewish council members had left the meeting and withdrawn from