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the authorities took them at face value and didn’t intervene.
    Zionists, who were staunch opponents of Communist Jews, were abused in exactly the same way as Jews with Communist leanings. Every manifestation of Communist activity was scrupulously recorded in the reports of the Interior Ministry. Those notes reveal how weak the activity of the Polish Communist Party was in the area. 11
    In Radziłów on October 3, 1937, an anti-Communist vigil, prefaced by a church prayer service and the laying of a wreath on the grave of a fallen Camp for a Greater Poland member (who must have been one of the men shot by the police during the 1933 pogrom), gathered a thousand people in the marketplace. At that time Radziłów was a town of fifteen hundred inhabitants, including about six hundred Jews, so the “anti-Communist” vigil attracted almost the entire non-Jewish population, plus people who had come from neighboring villages. The next time there was such a large flock of people in the Radziłów marketplace was July 7, 1941.
    In an Interior Ministry report of February 3, 1939, we read, “Anti-Semitism is spreading uncontrollably.” In a climate where windows being smashed in Jewish homes, stalls being overturned, and Jews being beaten were daily occurrences, one case from Jedwabne that came to trial in 1939 concerned an accusation made against a Jewish woman. The district court in Łomża sentenced Etka Serwetarz to six months in prison for profaning the cross. The Catholic Cause revealed that “despite having it pointed out to her several times, she hung her underwear to dry near the cross and poured out slop and dirty water.” Petty gripes among neighbors; by then, Jews and Poles lived in bitter hostility but still had common courtyards.
    A Polish government official who had started the thirties thinking of Jews as full citizens, by the end of the decade treated Jewish citizens as aliens. This is clearly demonstrated by the reports of the Białystok Interior Ministry for 1939: “Jewry in these parts will always seek its own advantage and interests. This is due to its exile’s psychology, links to world Jewry and extremely materialistic tendencies.” Or: “The Jewish question, particularly how to resolve it in a way that is good for us, is one of the more emotionally charged and urgent subjects among wide swathes of the population” (the phrase “for us” connects the aims of nationalist thugs with the state’s interests). And when Jews demonstrated civic virtue, they were given a condescending pat on the shoulder: “The subscription campaign on behalf of the Anti-Aircraft Defense Loan is being intensively and energetically conducted by the Jewish community, which has performed its duties as it ought, declaring a sum of six and a quarter million zlotys.”
    Besides the increasing anti-Semitic disturbances, the Jewish community was also worried about the coming war. Whereas previously, Zionist activists had had to campaign vigorously among young people to get them to leave for Palestine, there were now many more eager to go than had been foreseen when the quota was imposed by the British Mandate. Almost every Jew in the region dreamed of emigrating or at least sending his or her children to Palestine—or even better, to America. Not many made it.

 
    Journal
    JANUARY 2, 2001
    I call to wish Stanisław Ramotowski a Happy New Year. He’s just been discharged from the hospital with a prescription for some kind of salve, but his leg is still so painful that he can’t sleep. I call the doctors I know; despite the vague description they all agree that if this patient doesn’t get real medical help soon he may develop gangrene, leading to amputation or a painful death. I have to find him a hospital in Warsaw.
    JANUARY 4, 2001
    Białystok, seat of the regional branch of the Institute of National Remembrance. I’ve come to read