“Don’t—don’t tell my uncle what I have said,” she begged, “he would never forgive me!”
Askenazy is another personage of those days whom I shall long remember. One of the great scholars of Lemberg University, he was known as the foremost historian of Central Europe; since then he has become a familiar international figure as Poland’s representative at the Geneva meetings of the League of Nations. An occasional attendant at the Synagogue, he was nevertheless a pronounced Assimilator and enormously proud of the fact that his family have lived in Poland since 1650.
Askenazy saw small benefit to anybody in the alleged privileges of educational separation granted the Polish Jews by the Treaty.
“If the Jews have their own schools,” he said, “that will only widen the difference between them and the Poles.”
I reminded him that the separation extended merely to the primary schools.
“It will be gradually applied to the high schools,” he insisted, “and then to the universities. In their primary schools, the Jewish children will of course be taught Hebrew or Yiddish; that will make it next to impossible for them to mix with the pupils of the higher grades when they get there.”
Very impressive was our visit to the chief synagogue of Warsaw. There must have been 25,000 people present. Outside the building, those clamouring for entrance literally jammed the square, and the streets for several blocks surrounding it, from house wall to house wall; inside, the crowd was so dense that every man’s shoulder overlapped his neighbour’s. The cries from the street made it imperative for us to show ourselves there, after the services, when we were almost mobbed. Some of the crowd wanted to pull our automobile to our home; others clamoured to carry us there on their shoulders, and something close to good-natured force had to be used to enable us to reach our car. Rubenstein came from Vilna for the meeting; there was a delegation from Posen; and Dr. Thon represented the Jews of the Parliament. An eminent nerve specialist from Posen, in his speech, stated that the nervous condition of the Jews should be attributed to “Halleritis”—a fear of what the Polish Army under General Haller might next do to them; while Poznansky, the Rabbi, in his address, laid stress on the Jews’ desire to be first class, and not second class, Polish citizens.
This is not the place to recapitulate all the details of our journey through Poland. In Vilna, where our calendar was overcrowded, we got through a really incredible amount of work, by running three tribunals, each with an investigator, interpreter, and stenographer. The accounts of the evidence—of the testimony concerning the outrages to which the Jews had undoubtedly been subjected—all the world has long since read. I shall touch only on three incidents: those at Stanislawa, Pinsk, and Vilna.
From Stanislawa, the Christian authorities had asked for a visit from our Commission to prevent a provocation of a pogrom by the Jews. When I arrived, the Burgomaster explained that the Jews’ sympathy with the Ukrainians might provoke an attack of the Polish citizens. I asked:
“How is your city governed?”