“Pogroms?” Pilsudski had thundered when I first called on him. It was in the Czar’s summer palace near Warsaw that he was living, and he received me in the “library” where there was not a book to be seen. “There have been no pogroms in Poland!—nothing but unavoidable accidents.”
I asked the difference.
“A pogrom,” he explained reluctantly, “is a massacre ordered by the government, or not prevented by it when prevention is possible. Among us no wholesale killings of Jews have been permitted. Our trouble isn’t religious; it is economic. Our petty dealers are Jews. Many of them have been war-profiteers, some have had dealings with the Germans or the Bolsheviki, or both, and this has created a prejudice against Jews in general.”
At that meeting he stormed against the new school regulations; they would not only ghettoize the Jews, but, and here his real objection revealed itself, they were repugnant because forced upon the country from the outside.
“Russia,” he declared, “will return to autocracy: the Russians can survive even the privations of Bolshevism. But our problem is vastly different. We have become a free republic, and we propose to remain one, in spite of interference. The Poles and the Jews can’t live together on friendly terms for years to come, but they will manage it at last. In the meantime, the Jew will have all his legal rights. It is our own affair; our own honour is involved, and we are entirely able to guard it.”
Now our Commission was at Vilna, and Pilsudski came there; it was his birthplace, and here were we invading it with an American Commission. Etiquette required that Jadwin and I should call on him.
The president was quartered in the Bishop’s Palace. We were received with great formality and ushered through several vast rooms before we reached the audience-chamber. A storm was brewing, the light was dim. We found ourselves in a great big uninviting room, with long windows opening on a large court. War had stripped it of all its ancient hangings; the old furniture that belonged there must have vanished, in its stead were a few pieces of cheap and stiff modern manufacture. There was a desk at the far end, and at it was seated Pilsudski.
He was a huge, forbidding man. His uniform, buttoned tight to the base of his big neck, was unadorned by any orders—the uniform of a fighter. His square jaw was thrust out below thick lips firmly set; his face was abnormally broad, with cheekbones high and prominent; his cropped hair bristled and his snapping eyes glinted from under a thicket caused by his heavy eyebrows that met across his forehead.
He had evidently been reading the Anti-Semitic newspapers to advantage and was determined to give me a piece of his mind. The storm from heaven broke just as the verbal torrent began, and the patter of the rain on the stones of the old courtyard wove in and out like an orchestral obligato to the Wagnerian recitative of the Polish Chief-of-State. He spoke in German—a language excellently suited to his purpose—and soon the ancient rafters were ringing with his invective.
He declared that he was the chosen head of 20,000,000 people and would defend their dignity. He represented the Polish Government, the ruling power of a people that had been a nation when America was unknown, and here was a committee of Americans stepping between the elected Government of Poland and the Polish electors—positively belittling the former to the latter. He dismissed as unfounded the stories about bad treatment of prisoners. He asserted that, considering Vilna’s population of 150,000, civilian casualties in the three days’ fighting for its occupation had been comparatively few. Excesses? The exaggerations of the foreign press concerning what had happened to a relatively small number of Jews had been monstrous—one would think the country drenched with blood, whereas the occurrences had been mere trifles inevitably incident to any conquest.