27 July 2007
Prosecutors are investigating members of Poland's former Communist Party on suspicion of inciting racial hatred through anti-Semitic comments that sparked an exodus of Polish Jews in the late 1960s, a state institute has said. Based on extensive archive research, prosecutors from the Institute of National Remembrance, a state-run body that investigates crimes by Communist and fascist regimes, said they held ample documentation showing communist leaders' “public calls” for hatred against “Polish citizens of Jewish ethnicity in 1968-1969” in the central city of Lodz. “In the light of gathered documentation, there is no doubting the fact that at the beginning of 1967, central Communist Party authorities started calling for hatred ... directed against people of Jewish descent, and the operation then moved to the local level, setting in across the country,” the statement was quoted as saying by the AP news agency.
The institute notes that the then-leader of the Communist Party, Wladyslaw, Gomulka launched the anti-Semitic push in a speech on 19 June 1967, in which he pointed to the existence in Poland of an “imperial-Zionist fifth column”. Spurred on by Gomulka's speech, the Lodz Communist Party leadership published two “anti-Zionist” pamphlets, entitled “Zionism, its genesis, political character and anti-Polish faces” and “The Policies of the Party and its Opponents.”
Prosecutors say documents indicate that the Lodz Communist Party leaders were the “main instigators” of the anti-Semitic drive in the industrial city and environs, which saw businessmen, academics, and journalists out of jobs after tagging them with “Jewish roots or Zionist views”. According to the statement, more than 11,000 Jews applied for immigration papers during the anti-Semitic purge, a dramatic increase from the early 1960s. No charges have been pressed and prosecutors said they are still working to identify those who were involved. People convicted of public incitement of racial hatred face up to two years in prison.
