Skrzynski opened the talk that followed the luncheon by praising our work and our evident inclination to spare Poland’s pride. I followed by saying that, though we would have to rap Poland’s knuckles and blame some of the Poles severely for certain excesses and economic persecutions, which I strongly condemned, we would present our conclusions with fairness to both sides. It was important not to forget that this was a matter in which all the world was interested and that only strict honesty would satisfy. The Polish authorities had adopted a contradictory defense, entering a general denial and yet pleading justification. They ought to have confessed that excesses had occurred, denied any official participation in them, frowned upon them, promised to prevent them in the future, and punished the culprits.
Billinski replied for the Cabinet. A man of more than seventy, he had held the portfolio of Finance under the Emperor Franz-Josef of Austria and was typical of the old Continental bureaucracy. He, too, felicitated us on the pleasant ending of our work, concerning which, he said, he and his colleagues had entertained such grave doubts. Poland, he said, wanted no more “polemics”; the desire of the government was to quiet things. Any admission of mistakes they thought had better be decided by Paderewski. He hoped that our report would call attention to Poland’s thousand years of culture, which had made her the advance post of civilization in eastern Europe; would mention that she had ever been tolerant toward the Jew and welcomed his arrival and that she did not forget how, in the Revolution of 1863, the Jews had loyally fought against Russia. They would not have done that, he argued, had the Poles been persecuting them. He said it was unfortunate that, in the recent war, some Jews had informed against the Poles in Galicia and thereby created the prejudice against them.
“The Pole,” he concluded, “must live side-by-side with the Jew and wants to do it in peace.”
What, in this question of Anti-Semitism, were the feelings of that member of the government who is best known to all the world? Ignace Paderewski is not only not an Anti-Semite: he is infinitely the greatest of the modern Poles.
After my experience at the synagogue in Warsaw, to which I have already referred, I asked Paderewski if he would not accompany me to service some Friday. I said that he was charged with being Anti-Semitic.
“How ridiculous!” he answered.
“M. Paderewski,” I explained. “I know you are not Anti-Semitic, and you know that you are not—but how are the people to be convinced of it?”
Paderewski at once saw the point. He was anxious to refute the charge against him, yet his caution prompted him to consult his political associates, who advised against his adoption of my suggestion.
“Never mind,” he reassured me: “I’ll find another way.”
That way he found when Hoover came to Warsaw. I was then about to visit Pinsk, and he requested me to postpone it for a day or two.