Polish Jews In 1945-46 By Robert Cohn

Eastern Europe, a region buffeted, battered and beaten by wartime chaos, was host in the post-war period to large groups of displaced Jews and holocaust survivors in need of assistance with many aiming to repatriate or migrate. Multiple historians seek to analyze the predicaments of these individuals, attempting to discern whether conditions improved for Jews in the latter half of the 1940s - examining resettlement and migration patterns enabling a stronger understanding of the diurnal complications of Jewish life in the postwar period. Robert Cohn examines the brief window in time between 1945-46 where some Polish Jews had not yet been defeated by despair and aimed to return to their previous homeland - through this narrative he illuminates
Utilizing the primary accounts of three educated Polish-American outsiders unimpeded by needs to reconstruct their homes like a majority of Poles - Cohn depicts the grim reality for Jews attempting repatriation. In the post-war period, underground terrorist groups such as the Polish Nationalist Armed Forces(NSZ), an organization originally constructed to oppose Soviet influence, brutally murdered Jews believing them to be the “agents of the detested communists” (pg. 319). Although Cohn’s utilization of the NSZ is without a source, Polish-American sociologist Tadeusz Piotrowski further corroborated this assertion, stating that attacks against Soviets by the NSZ, quickly became more “focused on individual Jews who were placed in highly visible positions of authority” suggesting an additive and vehement hatred for Jews specifically, not merely Soviets, in positions of power in Poland (pg. 97). Cohn explains how these physical attacks committed by radical Polish nationalists were the fringe in violent action, but their unwavering anti-semitism was indicative of the wider Polish “rejection” of Jewish repatriation to Poland, visible in their vocalization of diurnal threats towards Jews returning to their pre-war property (pg. 318-19). The Polish population at large widely engaged in daily “hissing” that there are too many Jews in government (pg. 327). This meant that repatriating Polish Jews not only sensed broader antisemitism sonically, but the anti-Jewish sentiment increasingly materialized in violent attacks and massacres in Poland, and those who successfully returned to their homes, were met with aggression by their non-Jewish neighbors. Jacob Pat, the executive secretary of the Jewish Labor