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the council’s work. After 1936, many Jewish organizations were established, a majority of which were efforts by a threatened community to protect itself. And so it was that in Białystok in September 1936, an aid committee was set up to collect funds on behalf of the owners of boycotted shops. We know from Interior Ministry reports that it helped Jews in Radziłów and Jedwabne.
    On March 23, 1937, a delegation from Ciechanowiec in the Białystok region set out for the capital with a petition to Jewish parliamentarians: “On market days two to three hundred people come into town from the countryside and groups of five or six of them picket a shop, not letting a single customer in, hurling insults like ‘swine,’ ‘Jewish lackeys,’ dragging customers out by force, and it sometimes happens that a customer who resists is picked up, thrown out, and even beaten. Within two or three months new Christian merchants have built themselves shops along the whole length of the marketplace and they egg the hooligans on. We turn to you, representatives. Save our town from annihilation.”
    An August 15, 1937, proclamation of the Białystok district conference of Jewish small-business owners, in which optimism masked despair, stated, “In the conviction that the present manifestation of racial terror is transitory, we call on all Jews not to yield to despair or apathy, but to hold fast their threatened positions in trade with good humor.” At the same time it appealed to the Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish relief organization in the United States, to enlarge its credit to small-business owners.
    Things only got worse.
    In August 1937, sixty-five violent anti-Jewish incidents were noted in the Białystok region. And so, “on August 19 during a market in the hamlet of Śniadowo a crowd shouting ‘Jews to Palestine!’ and ‘There’s no room for you in Poland!’ drove away tradesmen. The fleeing Jews were thrashed with whips and one of them was hit on the head with a post. At the same time a basket of apples belonging to Jews was tipped over, 8 sacks of grain were slashed, and a horse’s harness was cut up.” A report of September 1937: “Although the number of violent incidents has dropped (62 compared to 65 in August), one feels a significant deepening of hatred toward Jews in the village as a whole.”
    Mosze Rozenbaum noted that Jewish boys had stopped going to swim in the river near Radziłów because they were immediately attacked by Polish boys of their age. He himself was gravely beaten when he was thirteen, and his eleven-year-old cousin, Dawid Sawicki, was trapped in a stable by a gang of boys and roughed up so badly that he died two days later.
    In February 1937, The Catholic Cause wrote enthusiastically: “The mood of excitement has turned into a systematic campaign in which the whole county population takes part. Farmers refuse to sell food to Jews, and entering villages, one sees signs that read ‘No Jews.’ Jewish shops are empty, water mills and windmills stand still, for no one gives them grain to grind.” In August 1938, the diocesan paper praised the situation in Zaręby Kościelne: “Jewish stalls are watched so carefully that no peasant can go near them and 250 Jewish families are doomed to go hungry.”
    That hunger increasingly stared Jews in the face. But one should also remember that these were the times immediately following the Great Depression and the boycott only added to dramatically worsening economic conditions.
    Toward the end of the 1930s, National Party activists changed their tactics. The state would intervene when they launched anti-Jewish campaigns, so nationalists started to fight against Communists, which was in keeping with government policy. When the National Party leaders euphemistically called for an “anti-Communist” vigil, it was code for an anti-Jewish vigil, but