Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Stalin was an anti-Semite and always had been. But until the Second World War his dislike for Jews was so comfortably embedded in his destruction of other categories of person—Old Bolsheviks, Trotskyites, Left- and Right-deviationists, intellectuals, bourgeois and so on—that their Jewish origin seemed almost incidental to their fate. In any case, it was a matter of dogma that Communism had no truck with racial or religious prejudice; and once the Soviet cause was attached to the banner of ‘anti-Fascism’, as it was from 1935 until August 1939 and again from June 1941, the Jews of Europe had no greater friend than Josef Stalin himself. That last claim is only partly ironic. The European Communist parties, especially those of central and eastern Europe, counted significant numbers of Jews among their members. The Jews of inter-war Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania were an oppressed and disliked minority. Young, secular Jews had few political options: Zionism, Bundism10, Social Democracy (where it was legal) or Communism. As the most uncompromisingly anti-national and ambitious of these, Communism had a distinctive appeal. Whatever its passing defects, the Soviet Union offered a revolutionary alternative at a time when central and eastern Europe appeared to be facing a choice between an authoritarian past and a Fascist future. The appeal of the USSR was further accentuated by the experience of war. Jews who found themselves in Soviet-occupied Poland after the Germans...