Sometime in 1920, my Zaide (grandfather) made a fateful decision. Having been drafted into the Polish army, he absconded from his unit and made his way to Germany, never to return to Poland. This post attempts to reconstruct the historical circumstances of that decision, one to which I owe my very existence.

He was born Yosef Weirzbowicz in 1899 or 1900 in Zambrow. Zambrow is located in eastern Poland, though Poland did not, at that time, exist as a political entity. Russia controlled that area which was part of the Congress Poland, just west of the Pale of Settlement, lands where the Russian government allowed Jews to live.

My grandfather’s birth was apparently never registered with the Russian authorities. I have found the birth records of some of his other siblings, but not his. It is likely that his father intentionally declined to register his birth because, had he notified the local officials of the birth of a male child, that would have increased his son’s chances of being drafted into the Czar’s army. That prospect was one most Jewish families dreaded, as Russian army service could last for long periods of time and under conditions that often led to conversion to Christianity. (http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Military_Service_in_Russia)

My grandfather was never was drafted into the Russian Army because, by the time he became draft eligible, Zambrow was no longer controlled by Russia. It was now located in a newly founded country, Poland. Poland declared its independence on November 11, 1918, at the end of World War I and, on June 18, 1919, was officially recognized as a sovereign state under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles that concluded the war. In addition, a year earlier, as a result of the Russian Revolution, Russia ceased to exist as an independent political entity and became part of the Soviet Union.

Instead, sometime in 1919, my grandfather was drafted into the Polish army. To understand how he must have felt about serving in the Polish army, it is helpful to review the years leading up to his military service.

The five previous years were ones of profound and unsettling changes in the region, especially for the Jewish population. For much of the First World War, Zambrow came under German occupation. In 1915, as the fighting on the eastern front between Russia and Germany intensified, Jewish refugees began pouring into Zambrow. The Zambrow Yizkor book recounts that refugees came the surrounding towns of “Jedwabne, Grajewo, Szczuczyn Nowogród, Ostrolenka, and so forth. They were quartered in the Batei Medrashim, in the synagogue, in private houses, to the extent that we could.” (Sefer Zambrow, p. 52). While at first the eastern front was west of Zambrow, as the war progressed, “the battlefields crept near, and the front already stood near Zambrow.” (Ibid.)

The end of the First World War did not bring about stability in Eastern Europe. Rather, as the old empires–Russian, Austrian and Ottoman–collapsed, replaced by new independent countries such as Poland, a series of brutal wars ensued between these new nations, aimed at achieving each’s territorial claims. As Winston Churchill observed, “The war of giants has ended, the wars of the pygmies begin.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Soviet_War#cite_note-AHP-26)

Nowhere was this more true than on the new borderlands between Poland and Russia. Where exactly Poland’s eastern border ended and the Soviet Union’s western border began was uncertain. Poland declared its borders according to its historic claims, one which the Soviets were having no part of. As the German army withdrew, a “vacuum” was created “into which Polish and Soviet troops moved spontaneously.” (Davies, White Eagle, Red Star, p. 27). What followed was a brutal war between the two nascent countries, a war usually referred to as the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1920.

The Jews of Zambrow were caught in the middle between their former allegiance to the Russian authorities and their new status as citizens of the Polish state. The Poles distrusted the Jews’ loyalty to their state. According to the Yizkor book,  Poles blacklisted Zambrow Jews who had cooperated with the Russians. Some Jews left Zambrow and moved to the Soviet Union to escape Polish rule. The wife of a suspected Russian collaborator, after being tortured by Poles, killed herself by jumping off her balcony. A pharmacist and communist sympathizer named Zalman Szklovin hid from the Poles to avoid persecution. His wife sought the aid of a Polish pharmacist, Skarzynski, who promised to protect Szklovin. But when young Poles demanded that Szklovin be handed over to them, he complied. Szklovin was beaten, forced to pull a wagon full of manure all over the city, then tortured and killed. (Sefer Zambrow, p. 54).

The fighting between Poland the Soviet Union began in February, 1919. The Poles took the offensive, extending their authority further east. As they did so, anti-Semitic riots broke out all over Poland and in neighboring Ukraine, with estimates of up to 50,000 Jewish dead. (http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Pogroms) The worst violence came in Ukraine where Ukrainian nationalists, seeing Jews as allies of the Bolsheviks, massacred tens of thousands of Jews. But Polish forces also committed atrocities, albeit on a smaller scale, against Jews. A notorious episode took place in Pińsk in April 1919, when Polish troops that had just recaptured the town massacred 35 Jews accused of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” (https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/fr/node/2968; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinsk_massacre

And so, by age 19 or 20, my Zaide had already lived under Russian and German occupation, and then found himself a “citizen” of a new Polish state. While Poland had, as a condition of the Versailles Treaty, signed a “minorities treaty” that was supposed to guarantee the civil and religious rights of non Catholics living in Poland, many Poles resented the treaty as an infringement of their country’s sovereignty. (Polonsky,The Jews in Poland and Russia, volume 3, pp. 30-32). All of this must have made my Zaide question the viability of living a safe and secure life in Poland. Yet in was in this atmosphere that he was compelled–it seems inconceivable that he volunteered–to risk his life for that state as a soldier in the Polish army.

As the Yizkor book recounts, while Poles may have questioned the role that Jews would play in their new state, that did not exempt Jews for being drafted into the army to fight for Poland. In 1919 and 1920, Jewish men born from 1896-1900, “went off to serve in the Polish military, and sent to the front.” (Sefer Zambrow, p. 52).

        Zambrow Yizkor book photo depicting Jewish soldiers from Zambrow serving in the Polish army.

By September 1919, the Polish army had 540,000 men under arms, 230,000 at the Soviet border. (White Eagle, Red Star, p. 83). While I have no information about my grandfather’s experiences in the Polish army, they could not have been pleasant. The conditions among troops in the Polish army were awful. The Polish historian Norman Davies’  book White Eagle, Red Star, which contains the fullest account of the war in English, writes that “[t]he Polish army kept men at the front without basic winter clothing, sleeping in the open.” (White Eagle, Red Star, p. 77). Many soldiers lacked boots or overcoats. Even among non Jewish Polish soldiers, the desertion rate was high. (Ibid. p. 79). The Polish army was generally disorganized and poorly equipped. “Only a few elite units were capable of engaging in battle. The majority of formations were able to accomplish only basic tasks.” (Worrell, The Battle of Warsaw, 1920: Impact on Operational Thought, p. 18).

Moreover, the fighting between the two sides “was quite brutal, with prisoners of war on both sides dying in the thousands, and numerous appalling atrocities.” (https://jewishcurrents.org/jewdayo-grid/jews-in-the-soviet-polish-war/) Casialties from the war were estimated at about 250,000. (Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, p. 9).  Most importantly, my grandfather was coerced to fight for a cause in which he had no stake. Given the mistreatment of Jews by Polish forces, it is inconceivable he felt loyalty to the Polish army.

During the first year of the war, the Poles had the Soviets on the defensive and expanded their borders eastward.

But in May of 1920, the Soviets counterattacked, reversing Polish gains and pushing Polish troops back deep into Polish territory. Eventually even the Polish capital of Warsaw was in danger of falling to the Soviets. As the Polish state was threatened, even more soldiers were drafted into the Polish army. “Military discipline was tightened. Deserters could expect no mercy. Persistent offenders were shot.” (White Eagle, Red Star, p. 193).

I don’t know the exact date when my grandfather escaped, but it probably coincided with the most intensive stage of the war, when the risk to his life was at its greatest. Even though his unit was probably one of those “guarding the German frontier” (White Eagle, Red Star, p. 83), perhaps because the Poles did not trust Jewish soldiers for front line duty, as the battle for the very existence of the Polish state neared, the chances of his seeing active combat must have increased. And, as the threat to the state increased, so too did anti-Jewish sentiment. So distrustful were Polish officers of the loyalty of Jewish soldiers that some Jewish soldiers were concentrated in separate barracks under armed guard. (Polonsky, p. 53). An official army poster appeared in 1920, depicting Bolshevism as the Devil, with obviously Jewish characteristics, sitting on a pile of skulls:

And so, according to the family history, my Zaide, while riding on a troop transport somewhere near the German border, jumped off the train and made his way to Germany. Before he could be shipped east to defend his fellow Poles, my grandfather went AWOL, never to return to Zambrow.

The war’s denouement took place from August 12-15, 1920, when Polish leader Jozef Pulsudski led this troops in the so-called “Miracle of the Vistula,” in which his forces not only successfully defended Warsaw but succeeded in dealing the Soviet forces a fatal blow. (The Battle of Warsaw is considered one of the most significant military engagements of the 20th Century, as it stemmed the flow of communism at the Polish border, at least until after the Second World War. (Robert Szymczak, Military History   https://jewishcurrents.org/jewdayo-grid/jews-in-the-soviet-polish-war/) It is unlikely my grandfather was still in Poland at this time. It is even less likely that he shared the joy of his Polish countrymen in the outcome of war or its culmination in March 18, 1921 in the Treaty of Riga, which restored much of Poland’s pre-partition frontiers.

Instead, my Zaide, by going AWOL from the Polish army, had achieved a personal victory of sorts, one which may have saved his own life. But that victory came at a terrible personal price. The courage he demonstrated by stepping off the train was matched by the pain of loss. There was no going back home again, ever. Never to see Zambrow again. Nor any of his siblings who stayed in Poland. A fateful decision he would carry with him for the rest of his life.