The organisation called "escape"

Bricha, Hebrew for "escape", was founded at the turn of 1944 and 1945 in Lublin, even before the war had ended. It was set up by activists of Zionist organisations and people who had come out of the ghetto resistance movement, among them Icchak Cukierman, one of the commanders of the Jewish Combat Organisation from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In Poland its activities were coordinated by the illegal Zionist Coordination, in which representatives of all legalised Zionist parties sat alongside unlegalised Revisionist Zionists and emissaries arriving directly from Palestine. Its headquarters were initially in Łódź, later in Warsaw. There was one goal: to direct as many Holocaust survivors as possible to Palestine, then still a British mandate that strictly limited the number of people entering.

The legal route, through consulates, visas and emigration quotas, was in practice closed to most of those wishing to leave. Bricha therefore organised an illegal route: crossing the green border, temporary identity documents issued by the Zionist parties, transport, overnight stays and food along the way. In the Wrocław voivodeship the organisation operated continuously until 1949.

Why Lower Silesia in particular

Bricha divided the Polish state into four crossing sectors: the Carpathian one with Krosno and Nowy Sącz, the northern one with Szczecin, the western one with Żary and Zgorzelec, and the southern one with Wałbrzych and Kudowa-Zdrój. In 1945 the most important crossing points lay in the south-east of the country. When the Polish and Czechoslovak authorities began guarding those sections more tightly, the main role passed to Upper and Lower Silesia and Western Pomerania.

Lower Silesia had several practical advantages for this. It bordered directly on Czechoslovakia, from where the onward route led through Austria and Italy to the ports from which ships sailed to Palestine. Tens of thousands of Jews also lived here, repatriates from the USSR and people resettled from central Poland, so the movement of people did not immediately stand out. At the end of 1945 additional assembly points were opened in Katowice and Wałbrzych. From Wałbrzych the route led through Kłodzko and Kudowa to the Czech border, and from there to Prague. Key roles were played by bases in Kudowa and Mieroszów, where overnight stays, canteens and medical help were organised for those waiting to cross.

What crossing the border actually looked like

In practice this was organised logistics, not a random escape by individuals. Lorries carried people from Wałbrzych to Mieroszów, and from Kłodzko to Kudowa. At the destination, in organised lodging houses, they spent the night, and the next day crossed the Czechoslovak border. Those leaving identified themselves with documents from the Zionist parties, not official Polish passports. Kibbutzim, agricultural communities run as cooperatives, played a particular role; for many survivors they served as a substitute home and prepared places for people arriving from all over Poland. In the Wałbrzych county alone there were then over a dozen such centres, through which several hundred people passed.

Bricha's activities were not entirely secret from the authorities. Officers of the Security Office checked those leaving for their nationality, views and any attempts to take out foreign currency; the authorities thus knew about the crossings and tolerated some of them, as long as they stayed within the limits the authorities had set themselves.

A scale that is hard to imagine

The numbers show this was no fringe phenomenon. By the middle of 1946, illegal emigration from Lower Silesia had involved more than fifty thousand people, most of them Jews staying in kibbutzim. In the spring of 1946 Bricha's commander in Poland even considered an operation to take between ten and fifteen thousand people across the Lower Silesian border at once, calculating that any use of force by the Polish authorities would become an argument in the international debate on the fate of the Jews. In June 1946 a one-off operation took place in which about ten thousand people crossed the Czech border.

The real jump came after the Kielce pogrom of 4 July 1946, which triggered panic among Jews across Poland, including in Lower Silesia, although the region itself was free of similar incidents at the time. The authorities then agreed with the security, foreign affairs and national defence ministries that semi-legal emigration would be conducted in the Lower Silesian territories for a certain period. The first transport set off on 30 July 1946. Within three months about seventy thousand Jews used the Lower Silesian crossings, of whom half were residents of Lower Silesia. Wałbrzych county alone was left by about four thousand Jews in under five months.

Communists against Zionists

The Polish authorities' attitude to this phenomenon was ambiguous. The Jewish communist faction within the Polish Workers' Party openly fought against emigration sentiment, arguing that a democratic Poland would provide Jews with safety, while abroad only refugee camps and a life on UNRRA aid awaited them. At the same time, the same state, through its ministries, agreed to periodically open the border, presumably calculating that this would make it easier to limit the influence of the Zionist movement than fighting it head-on.

Within the Jewish community a sharp dispute was underway: activists of the PPR Faction and the Bund were opposed to mass emigration, the Zionists pushed for it, and ordinary people, especially after the Kielce pogrom, mostly chose to leave. One party activist in Wałbrzych county asked outright whether, given that a large part of Polish society was steeped in the venom of antisemitism, it might be them who should stand at the head of the Zionist movement. Such voices were not isolated.

How and when it ended

On 22 February 1947 the Polish authorities withdrew the border-crossing facilitations and soon after effectively closed the border to illegal emigration. A new period was beginning: Jews who had stayed in Poland had to come to terms with the fact that leaving was no longer as simple as it had been just a year earlier. Bricha itself did not disappear at once; in Lower Silesia it kept operating on a smaller scale until 1949. Security Service documents from this period contain mentions of uncontrolled youth collectives near the border crossing points and of Jews still crossing the green border with Zionist help.

The final turning point came at the turn of 1948 and 1949, when the authorities decided that the best way to limit Zionist influence would be to allow them to leave. On 5 September 1949 the newspaper "Rzeczpospolita" published a terse announcement about the possibility of legal emigration to Israel, and two days earlier the Jewish newspaper "Dos Naje Lebn" had run the same news on its front page. The announcement did not specify exactly who could leave, so almost all the Jews of Lower Silesia who still wanted to leave Poland put their names on the lists. The episode of illegal crossings, in which the region played the leading role nationally, closed with a legal route out.