Michael Kutz - If, by Miracle

Except for the graves of my family and my few survivor friends, I no longer felt any attachment to Niewie.

In the summer of 1945, when Michael Kutz realized that his whole family had been wiped out, that there was no one left, he began a long journey in search of a new home. That summer marked the end of his youth in Niewie, a small town in present-day Belarus, ninety-five kilometres south of the capital, Minsk. The orphaned fourteen-year-old recognized that alongside his family, a whole world was gone the world now often compressed into the word shtetl: a town populated by a tightly knit Jewish community, its geography shaped by synagogues and religious schools, and its daily chatter inflected by competing visions of where and how Jews should live in the ancient homeland or within other societies around the world. The Nazi genocide had eradicated one of the possibilities; there were no more Jews in Niewie at the end of World War II .

Michael Kutz wrote his memoirs late in life and the sweeping breadth of his story takes us on a journey through twentieth-century Eastern European, Soviet, global, Canadian and Jewish history. Born in 1930 into a family of five, young Michael grew up in a decade that thoroughly transformed Jewish life in eastern Poland. Jews in the region struggled to maintain individual lives and communal cohesion amidst Europe-wide arguments about the status of national minorities, strong currents of antisemitism in Poland, increased overall secularization and urbanization, and, by the end of the decade, annexation and war.

Michael Kutzs description of life in his hometown of Niewie gives the reader a window onto these times. With a population of almost 7,000 inhabitants, among them some 4,000 Jews, Niewie exemplified the crystallized image of a shtetl and its transformation in the interwar period: a small Eastern European town with a strong Jewish presence, where Jewish tradesmen and artisans were the driving economic force. The Belorussians and Ukrainians living in the town spoke and understood Yiddish, and much of the daily and weekly life followed the rhythm of Jewish religious observance. Several synagogues and cheders (religious elementary schools) catered to the large Jewish community. The very existence of this community in eastern Poland was the result of restrictions imposed upon the Jewish subjects of the Russian Empire: after 1792, Jews were required to live within the confines of the Pale of Settlement, a region covering large parts of present-day Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, eastern Poland and the western parts of Russia. With the 1917 Russian Revolution, these restrictions were lifted and many Jews moved away from the former Pale, but many stayed and became citizens of Poland, the Soviet Union, or the other states that emerged from World War I and thus continued the strong presence of Jews in the area.

Niewie fell to Poland in 1918 and, as Michael Kutz describes, its Jewish community experienced the political trends in Polish society characteristic of the time in its very own way. Since the turn of the century, right-wing forces had been on the rise in Poland. This trend intensified during World War I and, again, during the economic crisis of the 1920s and 1930s. At that time, the right-wing nationalist party National Democracy (ND, Endecja) became an influential political force, and Polish nationalism with an insistence on creating a Poland of Poles i.e., of Catholics gained traction among major parts of society. The Endeks singled out Jews as un-Polish and blamed them for the rising unemployment, frequently calling for boycotts of Jewish businesses and condoning the regular violent attacks on individual Jews. By the mid-1930s, this type of nationalism found expression in state policies that imposed special taxes on Jews and Jewish businesses, prohibited the ritual slaughter required to maintain the Jewish dietary laws (largely to break the monopoly of Jewish butchers on the meat market), introduced entry limitations for Jews to Polish universities, and banished Jewish students to the so-called ghetto benches in the back of classrooms. More and more professional associations were closed to Jews, making it impossible for Jews to conduct business.