Three quiet years before the next wave

After the border was closed in February 1947, Jewish emigration from Lower Silesia slowed markedly for several years. The years 1947-1948 brought the region relative stability - living conditions, employment prospects and safety improved, though this stability was only apparent. At the turn of 1948 and 1949, the influence of Zionist activists within the Jewish committees was administratively curtailed, and the authorities began looking for a way to end the dispute with the Zionist movement by means other than repression alone.

The announcement of 2 September 1949

On 2 September 1949, the Jewish newspaper "Dos Naje Lebn" published on its front page an announcement by the Ministry of Public Administration granting consent for emigration to Israel. The same announcement appeared a few days later, on 5 September, in "Rzeczpospolita". It was terse in character - it did not specify which groups of the population could apply for permission to leave. As a result, almost all Jews in Lower Silesia who wanted to leave Poland registered to go, regardless of whether they were Zionist activists, religious orthodox Jews, or simply wanted to start life over somewhere else.

The procedure and what had to be left behind

Departures took place on the basis of a so-called travel document, which permitted a single crossing of the Polish border - with no right of return. Every emigrant lost Polish citizenship upon leaving. On one hand, the authorities did not hold back the departure of people regarded as a "nationalist element" - Zionist activists, clergy, the elderly, the disabled or private entrepreneurs. On the other, they ran a determined campaign to keep workers, engineers, doctors, technicians and the working intelligentsia in the country. The leadership of the Provincial Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) in Wrocław wrote plainly at the end of December 1949 that it was necessary to "strictly observe and carry out the Central Committee's resolutions on halting the departure of workers and the working intelligentsia", treating the pace of registration for departure as proof that local activists were failing to stem this wave.

The scale of departures from the region

According to estimates by Zionist organisations, around 40,000 Polish Jews sought to leave. Agitation carried out by the Social and Cultural Association of Jews and the PZPR led about a third of those registered to give in to the pressure and abandon their efforts to leave. Even so, this wave of emigration saw more than 28,000 people leave Poland, of whom around 20,000 Jews left from Lower Silesia alone - the overwhelming majority of everyone who decided to leave the country during this period. The issuing of exit documents was wound down at the end of 1950, though individual cases were still being settled later. At the start of 1951, the number of Jews across the whole of Poland was estimated at only about 67,000, of whom just over 30,000 remained in Lower Silesia.

What happened to the cooperatives and schools

The scale of the departures hit institutions that had been built up over previous years with a permanent settlement in mind. Jewish work cooperatives in Lower Silesia, previously run by a separate central body, the "Solidarność" Union of Manufacturing Cooperatives, came under a single central administration at the end of 1949 - the Central Union of Labour Cooperatives, now shared with the whole country. A similar fate, though spread over the following years, awaited Jewish schooling. The number of pupils in the surviving institutions, such as the Perec Primary School in Wałbrzych, shrank with every school year despite periodic increases linked to the influx of repatriates from the USSR - in September 1956, 164 pupils began the school year there, and by the start of the following year only 121 remained, more than half of whom already had their exit documents prepared. The Wrocław education authority later described the atmosphere prevailing in such a school as the "atmosphere of a railway station" - a place people constantly pass through rather than settle in.