Along with the constant street attacks on Jews, the Hitlerized Polish antisemites began an active boycott of Jewish businesses.
The call for an economic boycott of Jews was nothing new in Poland. With the slogan, “Swój do Swego” (“Our Own to Our Own”), that is, “Poles Should Buy Only from Poles,” as revenge against Jews for voting for the Socialist candidate Jagiełło and unseating the nationalist, antisemitic candidate, Kucharzewski, the call for an anti-Jewish economic boycott never left the pages of the right-wing Polish press. But now the Polish Hitlerites began to conduct an organized boycott in an entirely different way. They terrorized Polish customers and prevented them physically from entering and shopping in Jewish businesses. They especially pursued this tactic against the Jewish businesses in the strictly Polish neighborhoods of the city.
As is well known, the great Warsaw commercial center of Nalewki-Gęsia-Franciszkańska Streets (also the largest commercial center in all of Poland) was entirely Jewish. In addition, however, there were many Jewish businesses in the Polish neighborhoods, especially in the prominent, central, Polish commercial street, Marszałkowska. Also, practically the entire book trade business in Warsaw (especially the selling of new and used textbooks, as well as rare books) lay in Jewish hands and was concentrated on one street, Świętokrzyska, a narrow street that cut through Marszałkowska. Almost all the bookstores on this street belonged to Jews. Some of them had been there for over 100 years and had contributed much historically to the development of the Polish book trade. At the beginning of the school year, the street would be packed with students buying or exchanging new and used textbooks.
The Oenerowcy posted pickets in front of the stores on Świętokrzyska Street and in front of the Jewish stores on Marszałkowska, forcibly preventing customers from entering the shop, sometimes even falling upon the customers and beating them. The calls would come in from all sides to the Bund Secretariat asking them to come and help drive away the picketing hooligans, who were preventing Polish customers from entering Jewish shops. Storeowners would call, as well as ordinary people, appealing to the Bund to “do something.” We took the position that this was not about securing the profits of the Jewish shopkeepers, but of protecting the civil rights of Jews. We decided to put up a fight against the hooligans and their antisemitic picketing of Jewish businesses.
We encountered many difficulties in carrying this out. The stores were open and were picketed during the day, at a time when our militiamen, who were, of course, all workers, were at work. Nevertheless when the pickets in a certain place became particularly numerous and aggressive and we received urgent phone calls asking for help, saying that something was about to happen, we relieved some of our militiamen from their jobs and sent them to fight off the hooligans. Such calls, however, were coming more and more often, and we couldn’t take the militiamen away from their jobs so frequently: they were practically all family men and had to support a wife and children. Absenting themselves too often from their work could result in their losing their jobs.
True, the Jewish shopkeepers being picketed would gladly have paid the workers whatever they lost in pay, and even more. But we didn’t want that—that would have had, we thought, a demoralizing effect. The resistance to the antisemitic attacks had to have a purely political and ideological character. The slightest breakdown in this particular could have brought a great deal of harm, and so we therefore categorically rejected any thought of taking financial help from the shopkeepers suffering from the boycott.
But we found a way out of this difficulty. We organized unemployed workers for this purpose. We kept them on alert all day in our Arbeter Vinkl on Przejazd 9, and we sent them out to mount a resistance against the pickets whenever we got an urgent call requesting help. But since we were keeping these unemployed workers in our meeting hall all day, we had to feed them, and even simple fare for several dozen people every day was a severe financial burden for our party treasury. We could have easily gotten help from the shopkeepers for this, but we didn’t want to do that either. We met these expenses ourselves.
In this way we gave no peace to the picketers in front of the Jewish businesses. We did not permit them to carry out, undisturbed, their antisemitic terror and boycott action against Jews, and we often succeeded in driving them away.