Jewish Commandos from the Second Polish Republic

Polish special services trained right-wing Jewish fighters who carried out remarkable attacks on the British in Palestine. “I talked to many of them a quarter of a century ago. They all said that training in Poland gave them a significant advantage. Although they had no professional military education, they became conspirators and soldiers who would face the British,†said Israeli historian Laurence Weinbaum.

In the spring of 1939, in Andrychów, near Wadowice, intensive training was underway at a secret training ground of the Polish Army. The rapid staccato of machine guns and occasional explosions were heard as Polish officers trained dozens of young recruits in irregular uniforms. They crawled in the mud, cut barbed wire with scissors, shot at targets, tossed grenades, and learned the basics of asymmetrical combat. There were lectures and courses on constructing explosives, covert communications, diversion, sabotage, urban guerilla tactics, and conspiracy.

Irgun fighters training during exercises in 1947

These young men who started training as civilians later became dangerous commandos and killing machines. The whole project was strictly confidential and only a few senior officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Marshal Edward Śmigły-Rydz knew about it. If the operation became known, there would have been an international scandal. The trained men were members of the Jewish right-wing armed organization Irgun Zwai Leumi, whose byname was Etzel.

After the training in Poland, they were to be secretly transferred to British-controlled Palestine. There they would use their skills against the British by blowing up bridges and gendarmerie posts, planting bombs in places visited by British soldiers and public administration buildings, stopping truck convoys, and blowing up trains. Lastly, they would physically eliminate British officials, policemen, and soldiers.

Many of these actions were extreme and the British fought hard against Irgun, which they called a terrorist organization. The fighters trained by the Poles, however, were generally able to escape the slow-moving British investigators who followed them. Further attacks were carried out, the most famous of which was blowing up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where nearly 100 people died. A separate chapter was the war these Jewish rightists fought with the Arabs.

King David Hotel after the 1946 bombing

Irgun members were the most radical and intransigent of the Jewish nationalists. They were called Zionist-revisionists and were led by the charismatic leader Włodzimierz Żabotyński, a Russian Jew born in Odessa. Unlike the left-wing Haganah, the “Żabotyński boys†advocated an open armed struggle against the British in order to create a Jewish state.

Irgun also sought allies against the British, which included contacts with fascist Italy and even Nazi Germany. The latter effort, however, was quickly broken off when Hitler began his persecution of Jews. Without doubt, Zionist-revisionist relations with Poland were the most durable.

In the Footsteps of Marshal Pilsudski

The Second Polish Government’s help to Zionist-revisionists was not limited to military training. In dealing with the League of Nations, Foreign Minister Józef Beck repeatedly petitioned to enlarge Jewish territory by including the Negev desert so that access to the Red Sea was ensured. Poland also provided Żabotyński with financial loans and enabled thousands of Polish Jews to illegally enter the Middle East. This, of course, was against the will of the British, who continually protested to Warsaw.

Where did this seemingly unusual alliance come from? “The answer is simple: it was a community of interestsâ€, as emphasized by Weinbaum. In the late 1930s, Polish officials and Zionist leaders both agreed that there were too many Jews in Poland. Jewish towns were overpopulated and the percentage of Jews in the cities was considered too high. Polish support of the Zionists who wanted to deport Jews to the Middle East was therefore a pragmatic solution.

The Polish diplomat who organized this action, Wiktor Tomir Drymmer, wrote years later: “In 1938, I called a large conference to which I invited all Jewish organizations. It was unanimously agreed that different ways should be sought for Jewish emigration, which is necessary.†The conference resulted in the establishment of the Jewish Emigration and Colonial Committee, which was financed by Warsaw and given the considerable amount of five million złoty.

Encouraged by the positive reaction of the Poles, Å»abotyÅ„ski presented a logical plan to evacuate Jews from Poland to Palestine. It consisted of the emigration of 1.5 million of Poland’s 3.5 million Jews. The operation was to last 10 years and would transfer approximately 150,000 Polish Jews to the Middle East annually. “Our position,†wrote Drymmer, “completely coincided with that of the Zionist-revisionists and the organizations close to them. It contained the sentence: Jewish, independent Palestine, as large as possible, with access to the Red Sea.â€

This community of common interests, however, was not the only link connecting Poland and Jewish fighters battling for independence. Both groups felt there was another important connection between them. As Lila Strasman, one of Irgun’s members, pointed out, because the legend of PiÅ‚sudski’s Legions was an integral part of their upbringing, some Polish Jews gave up assimilation and chose to fight for an independent Jewish state. Ms. Strasman, whose husband was a Polish officer murdered at KatyÅ„, asked “Could there be any closer groups at all? They who went with the scythe to the sun, and we who sometimes seemed like a group of madmen.â€

According to Jewish historian Colin Schindler, Piłsudski was the inspiration and idol of the Zionist revisionists. They remembered how he traveled to Tokyo during the Russo-Japanese war and before the First World War, he organized legions to fight against Russia alongside Austria-Hungary. Pilsudski’s campaign was an important part of the history of the Polish national liberation movement. The idea of challenging the Russian colossus may have seemed crazy and the world was surprised when Poland defeated Russia in the Polish-Bolshevik War.

The Zionists planned to do the same and believed that, if they were as determined and brave as the Poles, they would be successful in securing a Jewish state. It was no accident that Poland was the center of the Zionist revisionist movement. It was in Poland that they were the most popular and their movement was clearly suffused with Polishness.

The secret Polish Military Organization (POW) founded by PiÅ‚sudski was a model that Å»abotyÅ„ski and his closest associate, Avraham Stern, used to create their own combat organizations. “All the time they remembered that PiÅ‚sudski, in order to achieve his goal, not only used violence, but also terrorist methods,†stressed Schindler. “He even robbed trains to raise funds for his movement and this is exactly what Zionist revisionists did in Palestine.â€

Poet and Soldier

Avraham Stern played a key role in the fight for a Jewish state. As one of the most militant Jewish activists, and a Betar acolyte, he broke ranks with Irgun and formed his own underground organization, Lehi. In 1939, he traveled to Poland to supervise the training of his fellow Zionists at the training grounds in Adrychów, Rembertów, and Warsaw.

Avraham Stern with wife Roni

“Stern preferred to use the Hebrew name Ben Mosze,†Drymmer recalled. Ben Mosze was born in Poland and raised on our romantic poets, he particularly loved SÅ‚owacki, and our national heroes. He viewed PiÅ‚sudski as his exemplar, whose statements he knew by heart and often quoted. He was an excellent leader and a fanatical supporter of achieving independence with his own blood-stained efforts. Quoting Adam SkwarczyÅ„ski, he frequently said: “The state is won by blood, it is built by workâ€.

The training course in Andrychów lasted four months and, according to the Polish-Jewish agreement, further training was to begin soon. The next group of Jewish fighters were already prepared to travel from Palestine to Poland; however, Hitler’s attack on Poland in September 1939 cancelled these plans. Few people know that Yitzhak Shamir, the future Prime Minister of Israel, was in the next group that was to train in Poland. Shamir, whose original name was Yitzhak Jazernicki, became well-known for his bigoted public statement that “Poles suckle anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk.â€

Hitler’s war also prevented the transfer of another shipment of arms and ammunition to Palestine, which Poland had given to the Zionist-revisionists and remained in a secret warehouse in Warsaw. Ms. Strasman, quoted above, had the keys to the warehouse and when the Germans tightened their cordon around the Polish capital, she went to General Walerian Czuma, who was responsible for the city’s defense, and told the astonished officer about the existence of the weapons. It isn’t known if the weapons were used.

Revenge

Interestingly, the contacts between Poland and rightwing Zionists did not break off with the outbreak of war. They were revived in 1942, when the army of Władysław Anders arrived in Palestine. It was then, and with the permission of Anders, that about 3,000 Polish Jews “deserted†the Polish army. Many then joined the anti-British armed resistance, one of whom was Corporal Menachem Begin, a principal activist in the Zionist-revisionist movement. Earlier in 1938, Begin became the leader of the Polish branch of the Betar youth movement, which was dedicated to establishing the Jewish state. Begin later became prime minister of Israel and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Stern contacted members of Anders Army in Palestine and decided to return the covert help that the Polish government had provided a few years earlier. It was thanks to the support of the Zionists that the Poles published and distributed the illegal newspaper “Independent Bulletin†in the Middle East. The newspaper was targeted at the Soviet Union and supported Poland’s anti-Soviet government-in-exile in London, which was led by General Władysław Sikorski. This cooperation was made easier because Drymmer, who had arranged Poland’s secret training of Irgun, had come to Jerusalem.

“As an example of the positive attitude of Irgun and Hagana to our branches in Palestine,†he recalled, “was their request to the commander of the Polish army that Polish military cars carry Polish pennants painted on the door. The red-and-white pennant could be seen from afar by a Jewish observer and prevented the firing of a mine on the road where British cars were traveling.â€

Although Stern was murdered in 1942 by the British, the path he took along with his comrades in arms was the practical one. Just as the Poles regained independence in 1918, the Zionists achieved independence and established the state of Israel in 1948. The help they received from Poland in the 1930s was an important step to make their dream come true.

Sources: Historia do Rzeczy (History to the Point) website; Author: Piotr Zychowicz, translated from Polish with minor edits for readability; Encyclopedia Britannica; Wikipedia.