JTA — In March 1968, Rachelle Halpern walked into her university in Szczecin, Poland, and found a group of her classmates gathered around a newspaper. She asked what they were reading about. The answer came: “Zionists.”

Halpern didn’t understand. Who were the Zionists? One classmate said, “The Jews.”

“But I’m a Jew,” said Halpern. Her classmates looked at her in disbelief. She couldn’t be, one said. She had no horns.

Halpern was about to be swept up in a spiral of social and political crises in communist Poland, culminating in a government-sponsored antisemitic campaign that stripped Jews of their jobs, schools, and citizenship, forcing some 13,000 to leave the country. Within months, Halpern would find herself renouncing her Polish nationality and leaving everything she knew for a new life in the United States.

At that moment, when her classmates read the word “Zionists” and looked up at her with horror, she felt a shift.

“It sort of evoked a lot of distrust and fear, that somehow there were all these people around that were going to do some harm to the Polish people,” Halpern told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Now 79 years old, Halpern joined a group of Polish emigrants and their children who traveled to Poland in April to unwind the trauma of 1968. Their meeting was organized by the Engaged Memory Consortium, a collection of organizations dedicated to Polish Jewish heritage, and funded by Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

It was the first time that the government paid for a trip to reckon with the events of 1968 and invited the Jews whose lives were upended, according to the program’s coordinator, Patrycja Dołowy.

The nine participants came from Sweden, Denmark, and the United States. Over eight days, they visited Jewish sites and community groups in Warsaw, Wroclaw, and Lodz. These three areas hosted the largest groups of Jews who remained in Poland after the Holocaust, where they decided to rebuild — and where their communities were decimated again in 1968. Though the members of the trip had never met, their memories overlapped, patching together a dark, open wound in the history of Polish Jews.

It’s a chapter that remains obscure among many Poles and Jewish communities around the world, partly because of a myth that Jewish life was wholly extinguished by the Holocaust, according to Karen Auerbach, a historian of Polish Jews at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“There’s such limited understanding of the fact that there was a Jewish population in Poland after the Second World War, that this doesn’t rise to the surface,” said Auerbach.

The Jewish flight of 1968 started with two words from Wladyslaw Gomulka, then the leader of communist Poland. Days after Israel’s victory over Soviet-supported Arab countries in the Six-Day War of 1967, Gomulka said that Poland would not tolerate a “fifth column” of Polish Jews. The phrase signaled that Jews could be loyal to Israel and treasonous to Poland. Soon after, the communist secret police purged Jews from state and party apparatuses, especially the army.

This campaign exploded after Poland, like other countries across the globe, was rocked by youth uprisings in March 1968. Polish students demonstrated against state censorship and the growing restriction of their civil liberties under Gomulka. Thousands were detained, expelled from universities, and dismissed from their jobs in the ensuing government crackdown. Some of the students were Jewish. That became the pretext for Polish authorities to accuse them of “Zionism,” pinning the demonstrations on a global Jewish conspiracy.

The government organized “anti-Zionist” rallies and stoked fear of “Zionists” in official propaganda, avoiding the word “Jew.” Newspapers outed “Zionists” to their neighbors. A new wave of purges expelled thousands of Jews from their jobs and exposed them to antisemitic attacks in their cities and towns. Jews were pressured to leave the country, and when they applied for exit documents, they were forced to renounce their Polish citizenship.

The purges were not only executed by government order, but also by ordinary Polish citizens who took advantage of the campaign and antisemitic sentiment to further their careers, said Dariusz Stola, director of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

“It was opening opportunities for many people for advancement,” said Stola. “Say you compete for a position in your institution, and you have a Jewish colleague, why........

© The Times of Israel