Page 283 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

meant that they could never be included in the Polish nation. As early as 1934, a letter from the

Commission for Scientific Research into the Eastern Lands described the 900,000 Jews who

inhabited the kresy as “not analogous to other minorities” and characterized them as a group that was

“tight-knit and closed in on themselves,” more interested in their own cultural and economic goals

than “political consolidation with the interests of the Polish state.” 108 The TRZW’s work also

increasingly focused on Jews as threats to Poles, rather than as allies in the task of urban

development. The Równe branch of the TRZW, which began its activities in October 1936,

organized material help explicitly for the town’s Polish Catholic population, including soup kitchens

for the poor, courses for illiterates, summer camps for children, and the first professional Christian

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orchestra.
On the one hand, such language symbolized a break with the inclusive historical rhetoric of

Józewski and the local officials whom he appointed, men who had argued for a vision of Polish

tolerance that harked back to the traditions of the Commonwealth. And yet the assumption that

economic—and indeed civilizational—progress in the east could only be brought about by battling

“Jewish” backwardness was, in the end, not actually so different from Józewski’s projects. The

similarities in the approach can be seen by a close reading of the ways in which the TRZW framed its

work to improve housing conditions in the town of Równe. In particular, its local representatives

wanted to develop a “colony” that would feature housing and allotments for several hundred families

of unemployed Polish workers. While the scheme sought to develop the town in positive ways, the

TRZW’s aims were also inextricably intertwined with attempts to reduce what its members perceived

as the effects of overtly Jewish actions that reduced levels of material wealth among their Polish

Catholic neighbors. Local members of the TRZW explained, for instance, that Równe’s Poles were

108 Letter from the Commission for Eastern Borderland Affairs at the Presidium of the Council of Ministers to
Minister Tadeusz Schaetzel (March 6, 1934), AAN MSZ 5219/34-35.
109 Letter from the Równe circle of the TRZW to the County Head in Równe (September 22, 1938), DARO
182/1/2/11-11od.

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