“By a representative committee of Christians and Jews.”
“How many Christians?”
“Sixty.”
“And how many Jews?”
“One.”
I said I should like to see that one.
“Well,” said the Burgomaster, “you see he wasn’t on good terms with the Zionists, and so he had to go.”
I sent for a committee of Jewish residents.
They told us of their fearful predicament. The governmental control of their city had changed six times in four years. Each time it changed, the new power, be it Austrian, Polish, or Ukrainian, would punish them for having been loyal to their predecessor. If they remained neutral, all would make them suffer. “What are we to do?”
I guessed now what the local authorities had been up to. They were anti-Jewish and, if the federal government had not sent somebody in answer to their request, they would have interpreted that as the sanctioning of further excesses. I therefore had the Burgomaster and his friends in again, and declared that the republic’s authorities realized that Poland’s standing with the outside world depended on her justice to the Jews.