Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.
Updated on Oct. 9
In 1967, about 25,000 Jews lived in Poland, a sad remnant of the 3.5 million who resided there before the Second World War.
Over the next two years, from late 1967 through 1969, more than 11,000 of those Polish Jews were forced out of their jobs, their homes and eventually their country in a government-sanctioned anti-Zionist campaign. Poland’s leaders accused the Jews of acting as a “fifth column,” more loyal to Israel than the land of their birth.
Menlo Park resident Sabina Baral was one of those Polish Jews. She was 20 years old and a second-year university student in December 1968 when she and her parents, like other Jews who were emigrating, were given three weeks to liquidate their assets and wrap up their lives.
Like all Polish Jews of their generation, Baral’s parents were Holocaust survivors, whose lives were being upended for the second time. These forced emigrants were only allowed to take the equivalent of $5 per person out of the country. Their Polish citizenship was stripped from them, and they were not allowed back into the country until the fall of the communist regime two decades later.
It was, Baral said, the only post-war exile of a Jewish community from Europe.
And it is a story virtually unknown in the West. The New York Times published an article in August 1968, a full five months after massive student protests devolved into a nationwide anti-Jewish campaign. The article ran only on page 12.
“I am puzzled by this complete tabula rasa, this lack of knowledge about this story,” Baral told J. “I’ve tried to find a reason why the American Jews didn’t know, and maybe even more, maybe weren’t interested in knowing. The part that interests me is, to what extent are the American Jews interested even today?”
Baral chronicles this story and her family’s history, in “Notes From Exile,” published in English in March. (I will speak with Baral about her book at a Jewish Community Library event in San Francisco on Sunday, Oct. 19.) First published in Polish in 2015, the book became a surprise bestseller in Poland before it was adapted for the stage and then, in 2024, for Polish television. The theater adaptation won 13 awards.
No one was more surprised by that success than Baral. After all, her book, like the events of 1968-69, revealed the extent of the latent antisemitism that persisted in Poland for decades after the war. “Notes From Exile” is, she acknowledges, a harsh indictment of the Polish people who stood by while their Jewish neighbors, once again, were persecuted.
“I thought the Poles would get offended, and only three people would read the book and that would be the end of it,” Baral said. “Quite a different thing happened. The book became a sensation.”
Maybe, she conjectures, it’s because she wrote it as a memoir and it slipped under the radar.
“Scholars have been rebuked for their work [on Polish antisemitism] — Jewish scholars, stellar Jewish scholars,” she said. “And my book, it’s as if it was a literary work rather than reflecting something that actually happened.” There were some negative reactions to the book, she said, “but they were individual, not systemic.”
Clocking in at just under 300 pages, “Notes From Exile” is rich in detail. Much of it describes her family’s journey, from a modest existence in Wrocław, a Polish city along the Czech border, through a hurried departure for Vienna, then months in temporary housing in Rome, before arriving at their final destination of Detroit.
Baral describes her upbringing in Poland as filled with Jewish content. She attended Jewish schools, went to Jewish summer camp and enjoyed many Jewish and Israeli-themed activities, all funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which was allowed to operate within Poland after World War II.
That ended with the Six-Day War in June 1967 between Israel and the Arab coalition of Egypt, Syria and Jordan.
Poland — a member of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact but not of the USSR itself — responded to the war in lockstep with the Soviet Union by supporting the Arab countries. Poland then forbade the Joint from funding any more Jewish activities and began the persecutions. Jews were purged from communist party leadership and the military. Doctors, engineers and professors lost their jobs. Jewish students were no longer admitted to university. They were, the government said, welcome to leave for their true home: Israel.
It was almost an inverse of the situation of the Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union. The Soviet refuseniks wanted to leave but were prevented from doing so by the state. Poland’s Jews, by contrast, didn’t want to leave until the officially sanctioned persecution made it “impossible for us to stay,” Baral said. In both instances, these Jews were hounded out of their jobs, forced to abandon their apartments and pensions and allowed to take almost nothing with them.
Baral relates her parents’ mad dash in late 1968 to stock up on goods they could take with them, even though that was limited to items made in the Soviet bloc since 1948.
Her father bought new electric appliances, unaware that they couldn’t be plugged into American 110-v outlets. Her mother bought elegant damask bedding, which stayed packed away in their Detroit closet as the family switched to no-iron American sheets.
“It wasn’t just my family. It was all the families who lived on the street,” Baral said, noting that her street was known as a “Jewish” street. “Everybody was going through the same thing. Every evening, my dad would come home after having met with Mr. Pearlstein and Mr. Zukerman and they were all saying: What to buy, what can we take? How to prepare for life in a place we didn’t know?”
Regardless of the past, Baral does not consider herself a victim. She built a good life for herself here, founding an import company for Italian marble and granite, traveling the world and, with her second husband, raising five children.
Her parents were a different story. They’d spent their adult lives recovering from the Holocaust only to see their carefully hoarded savings depleted when they were once again kicked out of their homes.
“I don’t speak about us — we conquered America,” she said, referring to the Polish Jewish friends of her generation, with whom she has stayed in touch.
Her parents deserved better, she said.
They never learned English and spoke only Yiddish. (Like the other Polish Jewish exiles Baral knew, she and her family stopped speaking Polish, the language of the country that betrayed them.) And they never quite got used to life in America; it was just too confusing. The image of her parents that sticks in her mind is a bittersweet one.
“To this day, I see my parents holding hands, walking in the dark to the bus stop in Detroit,” she said.
Eventually Baral became an American citizen. It became possible for the exiles to reclaim their Polish passports after 1989. Baral declined to do so even though she has repeatedly returned to visit.
“Every time I’m asked in Poland, am I Polish, or partly Polish, I say very clearly, I’m American,” she said. “I am American out of gratitude. I have American children. I have an American home. I’m an American.”