For nearly 21 months, from the end of September, 1939 until June 22, 1941, the residents of Zambrow lived under the control of the Soviet Union. In retrospect, this period was but an interlude between the initial Nazi occupation in September, 1939, until their 1941 reoccupation, during which they would destroy Zambrow’s Jewish community. Yet, in real time, the Soviet occupation lasted long enough to become a “new normal.” Polish Jews within newly controlled Soviet territory had no reason to assume the Soviet takeover would be temporary. This post, the second of four planned accounts of the history of the Jewish community of Zambrow during World War II, attempts to describe Jewish life in Zambrow for those nearly 21 months of Soviet occupation.

Part 2: Soviet Occupation: October, 1939-June 22, 1941

As a result of the agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) that served as a prelude to World War II, Poland was divided into German and Soviet zones. Zambrow fell within the Soviet area of control. Yet when the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, they conquered the area around Zambrow and occupied the town for several weeks, beginning on September 10, 1939. The Soviet conquest of Poland began on September 17, 1939. Sometime toward the end of September (I have not been able to determine the exact date), the Germans withdrew from Zambrow and Soviet forces moved in. The partition formally began on September 29 or October 1 (depending on the source), at which time Poland ceased to exist as a de facto political entity.

In northern Poland, the Bug River, located only about 23 miles (37 kilometers) west of Zambrow, served as the line of demarkation between Germany and the Soviet Union. (In Southern Poland, the San River marked the new border.) Indeed, Zambrow was one of the larger towns situated close to the Nazi-Soviet border. The dividing line was about three kilometers west of Ostrow Mazowiecka, located southeast of Zambrow.

The reaction of the Jews of Zambrow to the withdrawal of German troops was one of jubilation. The Zambrow Yizkor Book (citations are from the translation into English from the original Yiddish and Hebrew) records that “[w]hen the Red Army entered our area, we were overjoyed: the dark terror that weighed heavily on the burned down and impoverished city, lifted, and there was dancing in the streets, the joy being so great – we had gotten rid of the Nazi murderers!” (pp. 72-73). Jews from the town of Sokoly, some 22 miles (35 kilometers) east of Zambrow, felt similarly. Word of the German retreat took place on September 23, 1939, while the residents were observing the holy day of Yom Kippur. In his memoir Deliverance, Michael Maik describes the joyous moment: “The knowledge that the Germans had retreated, revived the spirit of life. All those present [in the synagogue] raised their heads. Heaven and earth rejoiced. In one moment, the entire world changed from darkness to light” (p. 9).

The reason for this reaction was due not only to the end of the brutality German troops had visited on Zambrow’s residents–Jews and non Jews–during their brief occupation. (Click here to read about the initial Nazi occupation.) Polish Jews had never fully embraced the Polish state, which came into being in 1920 following the First World War. Memories of the forced drafting of young Jewish men into the Polish army and the mistreatment they experienced there were still fresh. (For my grandfather’s experience in the Polish army, click here.) Jews experienced growing anti-Semitism during the 1930s, inspired by Polish nationalist political parties. In 1934, local Christians promoted a boycott of Jewish businesses in Zambrow accompanied by occasional physical attacks. “Life became difficult, and unbearable,” reports the Zambrow Yizkor book. “Young Jewish men organized themselves in order to offer resistance. Once, on a market day, it was on a Tuesday, peasants, who had arrived from the surrounding villages, launched a pogrom. They tore out paving stones, and used them to knock out the panes of windows, while robbing stores. Many Jews were wounded. That day remained in the memory of Zambrow as ‘The Black Tuesday;'” (Zambrow Yizkor book, p. 73).  As historian Yehuda Bauer concludes, “interwar Poland was an oppressive regime and could hardly demand loyalty from its badly treated Jewish population” (Bauer, The Death of the Shtetl, p. 37).

In addition, Zambrow’s Jews had reason to hope for a brighter future under Soviet rule. Although the Soviet Union was a totalitarian state without guarantees of individual rights, anti-Semitism was not part of its official policy. Historian Eliyana Adler, in Survival on the Margins, her recent book about Jews who survived World War II in Soviet territory, writes that “all the national minorities had experienced official discrimination in Poland. Jews and others had reason to welcome Soviet promises of cultural autonomy and affirmative action in employment” (Adler, 53). That Jewish soldiers made up a not insignificant proportion of the Soviet Army may have further allayed the anxiety of Zambrow’s Jews about the prospect of Soviet occupation.

It did not take long for Zambrow’s Jews to grasp the vast difference between living under Soviet as opposed to German rule. No matter how repressive life was under the Soviet regime, it compared favorably to life under German occupation. Refugees from Ostrow Mazowiecka, located just over 20 miles from Zambrow, fled into Zambrow, carrying reports of Nazi atrocities. (The border between German and Soviet occupied Poland was porous for the first few months of the war.) Zambrow’s Jews surely would have heard about the events of November 5, 1939, when German soldiers murdered some 500 Ostrow Mazowiecka Jews, many of them women and their children, who were forced to dig a trench, blindfolded, and then shot at close range. (Ostrow Mazowiecka Yizkor Book, pp. 505-506.)

As the Zambrow Yizkor book reports, “[l]ike an outpouring that comes from a broken dam, Jews [from Ostrow Mazowiecka] began to come streaming, across the border, into our city. The Germans, on their side of the border, began their work of extermination. Thousands of people sat in the streets, without a roof over their heads, and Zambrow did everything within its power to help and lighten the suffering of the refugees” (Zambrow Yizkor Book, p. 74). These refugees ended up living, at least temporarily, in the Zambrow synagogue or being taken in by those with spare rooms in their homes. All totaled, it is estimated that, between the fall of 1939 until the spring of 1940, about 300,000 Jews fled areas of German occupation for areas newly conquered by the Soviet Union. (Bauer, p. 52; Adler, pp. 27-28).

The following expression aptly sums up the general attitude of Jews newly living under Soviet rule: “I know who the Bolsheviks are. I know they will take my property, but they will leave me with my life” (Bauer, p. 37).

One of the contributors to the Zambrow Yizkor book uses the phrase “Red paradise” (p. 70) to describe the period under Soviet control. This description, however, was penned only in retrospect, relative to the horrors that would be visited on the Jews of Zambrow following the Nazi invasion of June, 1941. The 21 months preceding the Nazi invasion was certainly no paradise. Prior to the Soviet invasion, Poles in general were not fully aware of what it meant to live under Soviet style totalitarianism. (Adler, p. 70). They would soon learn about the repressive, terror state that Stalin had created.

Many Jews in Poland, such as my great grandparents, were small business owners. They ran a small factory that produced oil from various types of seeds. (Click here to read about the business.) It is likely that they lost their business, as the Soviet’s banned private ownership of business. To the extent the business continued to operate, they were probably forced into a collective, answerable to Soviet authorities. In addition to these constraints on small business owners, the Soviets, on January 1, 1940, banned the use of the Polish currency, the Zloty. Anyone who’d saved their money in Zlotys saw their life savings vanish overnight.

Moreover, anyone who had accumulated wealth was a potential target as a “capitalist” or  “speculator.” Soviet authorities appropriated the property of those who lived in large homes, leaving their owners with at most a couple or rooms. This may have occurred to my great grandparents, who, while not being especially wealthy, did have extra room in their home as most of their children no longer lived at home.

Soviet authorities also confiscated all kinds of valuables. Owning valuables signified capitalist wealth; moreover, such property, being in short supply in the Soviet Union, was desired by Soviet officials. (Watches were especially prized.) Of course, residents were reluctant to part with their possessions. Orders to give up property were routinely evaded, with people devising various stratagems for hiding their property.

The inevitable effect of the nationalization of industry was a massive shortages of consumer goods, a consequence endemic to Soviet communism. Staples such as bread were rationed. Long lines for food and clothing formed at dawn and stretched until nightfall. (Maik, pp. 12-13). This led to a thriving black market that operated side by side the so-called legitimate economy. The valuables people hid came in handy for trading on the black market or bribing Soviet authorities to look the other way. As Isaac Shumowiz, who lived in a town near Zambrow narrates in his memoir The Red Forest, writes, “refugees who came from western Poland would come with goods to barter. The local native population was loaded with products which they had stolen as political situations changed, and anyone with money was able to buy. Many would travel to Lomza [about 12 miles from Zambrow], or ‘Little America’ it came to be called, for a variety of black market goods” (Teyer, The Red Forest, 63).

While black market trading was a practical necessity under Soviet communism, it also put one at risk for being reported to the Soviet Secret Police, then known as the NKVD (later the KGB). It was not uncommon for people to try to curry favor with the authorities by informing against their neighbors, accusing them of smuggling, hiding valuables or selling on the black market. Giving up the names of other suspected “law-breakers” was one way to avoid punishment. The other was the tried and true method of bribing Soviet officials. Vodka, apparently, was the bribe of choice. (Lior-Liechtenstein, Remember Never to Forget, 45).

Some Jews embraced the new Soviet reality, especially young people already committed to the vision of a communist society. But for those such as my Zambrow relatives, traditionally minded Jews, the radical reformulation of social and religious life transformed the world they had always known. In line with communist ideology, all civil or religious organizations not sanctioned by the State were banned, including public religious services. Religious schools and synagogues were shuttered, the latter sometimes turned into storehouses. Religious services and rituals such as marriages and circumcisions were held, if at all, privately in people’s homes. Children were forced to go to school on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays. (Bauer, pp. 41-43). Newspapers and schools were infused with anti-religious propaganda disparaging the old way of life. (Adler, pp. 78-79). The religious and cultural bonds that held together the Jewish community for centuries were severed. As Yehuda Bauer explains, while some individuals benefitted from Soviet communism, the communal aspect of Jewish life was dissolved “into the fold of a totalitarian, atomized society”(Bauer, 160). “The Soviets,” he concludes, “destroyed the shtetl as a historical-sociological-cultural phenomenon before the Germans annihilated it.” (Ibid.)