WARSAW (AFP-EJP)---Forty years ago an anti-Semitic purge by Poland's communist regime exiled thousands of Polish Jews: intellectuals, students, communists or average citizens, some were Holocaust survivors.
The racist campaign was rooted in a settling of accounts inside the communist party, but a high pitched protest by students at Warsaw University on March 8,1968 in which they were brutally quelled by the police for having dared to demand democratic rights was used as an excuse.
"For Wladyslaw Gomulka, the head of the communist party at the time, the spontaneous revolt was a very good pretext to eliminate his rivals in the seat of power," according to Polish historian Dariusz Stola.
"Criticised for his authoritarian tack by militant communists of Jewish origin or by intellectuals, Gomulka seized the opportunity to discredit them, because a fair number of students leading the revolt were sons or daughters of communist Jewish intellectuals," like Adam Michnik, today head of Poland's liberal Gazeta Wyborcza daily, Stola told AFP.
Aided by the SB political police and Communist Party radicals, Gomulka orchestrated anti-Semitic purges. Official propaganda relaunched the stereotype of the "communist Jew", very wide-spread in Poland.
According to Stola, "Gomulka was very frightened that Poland would be 'contaminated' by the reforms introduced in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring," eventually crushed by the August 1968 military invasion by the Warsaw Pact under the direction of Moscow.
The anti-Semitic campaign saw some 20,000 Polish Jews forced into exile. Of this number 13,500 were stripped of their citizenship between 1968-1970, according to archival documents.
"I have no feeling of nostalgia for my country of birth," says Nelly Plotzker, 62, who fled Poland in 1968 to live in Israel.
"We understood we must leave and we took with us what the authorities allowed us to take," she told AFP.
She recently found a list of goods that had to be presented to Polish customs agents, including the exact number of clothes, pieces of cutlery and a list of books.
"But above all we lost our citizenship," she recalls.
She returned to Warsaw for the first time in 2006 to accompany her daughter, a historian who was conducting research on the period of purges.
"I didn't even go see my childhood home," she admits, adding she turned the page a long time ago.
However, every three years in Israel she attends a special meeting of Jews exiled from Poland in 1968.
Malgorzata Melchior, 57, chose to stay in Poland in 1968.
"My brother decided to emigrate to Sweden. Our father also wanted to leave, but I, a high school girl of 17, I didn't want to hear about it", she recalls.
"I remember bizarre people who came to see our flat in Warsaw, saying they heard from the building administration it would be free soon."
"One day, in the street, a young man called me a 'dirty Jew'. A Polish friend who was with me began to shake her fist at him and he ran away. I understood that with friends like this in Poland I had no reason to leave."
On Tuesday, Poland's Interior Minister Grzegorz Schetyna announced he ordered civil servants to immediately provide 'proof of citizenship' to anyone who had been stripped of it during the 1968 purges.
His announcement came in response to a letter sent by the Union of Jewish Religious Communities at the end of February in which Piotr Kadlcik, president of the Union, and Paula Sawicka, chairman of the “Open Republic” Association against anti-Semitism and xenophobia, asked for a quick decision to settle the issue.
Jewish organisations and Polish intellectuals also petitioned President Kaczynski to automatically return citizenship.
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