All About Chelm, Poland And why Germans Lived There Before WWII

 Nadene Goldfoot                                           

                 From the story: The Wise Men of Chelm

 In Jewish folklore Chelm is an imaginary city inhabited by fools who imagine they are actually wise men. In a typical Chelm story, the people are presented with some difficulty and wind up settling on the dumbest solution imaginable.  Tales of the wise men of Chelm have entertained Jewish readers for generations and are among the best-known folk tales of Eastern European Jewry.  

Germans were living in Chelm, Poland.  When did this take place? The German army entered Poland in 1939. On September 1, 1939, German forces under the control of Adolf Hitler bombard Poland on land and from the air. World War II had begun. Shortly after the German invasion, the Russians invaded.  The Soviet invasion of Poland was a military operation by the Soviet Union without a formal declaration of war. On 17 September 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, sixteen days after Germany invaded Poland from the west.  Poland was holding the Germans back while on horseback, while the Germans were prepared with up to date transportation.                       

And just before the invasion, we had Peace in Our Time with On September 30, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain received a rowdy homecoming after signing a peace pact with Nazi Germany.  It lasted a few days.  Hitler, who had annexed Austria earlier in the year, had vowed to invade Czechoslovakia on October 1, 1938, to occupy the German-speaking Sudetenland region, a move toward the creation of a “greater Germany” that could potentially ignite another conflagration among the great European powers.  Chamberlain was the most naive person of all. To have trusted Hitler's word after WWI, a war where more people were killed than any other war, was a crime.

 All he had to do was to look at Germany's record against Jews starting in the early 30s.  That's why Albert Einstein came to the USA in 1934.    

To my surprise, "The history of Germans in Poland dates back almost a millennium.

 Poland was at one point Europe's most multiethnic state during the medieval period. Its territory covered an immense plain with no natural boundaries, with a thinly scattered population of many ethnic groups, including the Poles themselves, Germans in the cities of West Prussia, and Ruthenians in Lithuania. 5 to 10% of immigrants were German settlers. (In the Middle Ages, there was no homogeneous German state; the label "German" generally refers to German-speaking people, including Germanized Polabian Slavs and Lusatian Sorbs.  By the end of the Middle Ages significant populations in a number of western Polish cities were German-speaking, and some municipal documents were written partly in German (until the transition to Latin, and later to Polish).

Chelm was a town in Poland that had been a Jewish settlement from the 15th century.  It was known in Jewish literature as being naive inhabitant who figured in many anecdotes of Jewish folk-humor. 

 It had been destroyed during the Cossack massacres of 1648 but was refounded after that.  The community numbered 7,615 before World War II.  Some escaped to Russia in 1939, with the remainder being killed by the Nazis.  

Military invasions and war brought a halt to the city’s development. In a series of pogroms targeting the Jewish residents of the city during the 17th century, among them the Khmelnitsky Pogrom, the Jewish community in the city was severely harmed. However, the community recovered rapidly. They returned to full financial activity and representatives from Chełm were active in the Council of Four Lands – the organization of Polish Jews at this time.

When Poland was partitioned, at the end of the 18th century, Chełm became part of Austria for a number of years. Yet for most of the 19th century the city was under the control of the Czarist Russia. The city continued to develop, but due to Polish rebellions, the Russian authorities employed repressive measures to control the Polish residents of the city, thereby destabilizing the economy. There was a rise in antisemitism during this period.

After the First World War, with the creation of an independent Polish state, Chełm was again included within the boundaries of Poland. During the early interwar years the city enjoyed rapid development – notably in building and industry. Yet this upward trend was cut short by the international financial crisis of the 1930s.                   

Russian-Polish Shtetl of Chelm 

The Jews of Chełm earned their living from industry and trade. Many of them bought and sold farm animals, others traded in pelts and hides, many other Jews worked as tanners. In addition, the city was home to a number of Jewish owned printing presses.

Three Jewish banks operated in Chełm, although one of them operated only very briefly before going out of business. A trade bank catered mostly to the affluent Jews, while the Jewish Volksbank (People’s Bank) operated as a cooperative bank until the Second World War. The Volksbank provided loans at low interest rates for small merchants and manufacturers, thereby helping many of them survive the great financial crisis of the 1930s.

On the eve of the Second World War, the civil authorities in Chełm were planning a renovation of the city’s streets, particularly the main street. This street contained many shops owned by Jews, and was use as meeting place both by the Jewish youth in Chełm and by the antisemites of the city. The municipality began implementing its renovation plan, thereby deflecting trade from the Jewish businesses. Jewish institutions whose offices were located on the street were also severely disadvantaged – among them the offices of the Jewish community, the offices of several Jewish newspapers, the Jewish Culture House, the office of the Jewish Trade Union, and a number of chapterhouses belonging to various Jewish parties. The renovation works were cut short by the outbreak of the Second World War.

In 1939 Chełm had 15,000 Jewish residents, nearly half of the total population of the city.  Chełm, city, Lubelskie województwo (province), eastern Poland. The city is located on the Uherka River, a tributary of the Bug River, 15 miles (24 km) west of the Ukrainian border.

Lubin, Russia was very close to Chelm. They are 15 miles apart.   Germans live in Lubin as well as Chelm.   

Lubin is situated on the Zimnica river in the Lower Silesian historical region, about 71 kilometres (44 miles) northwest of Wrocław and 20 km (12 miles) north of Legnica.  The native Polish population of Lubin was subjected to planned Germanisation, which lasted until the 1930s. 

Chełm is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Rudna, within Lubin County, Lower Silesian Voivodeship, in south-western Poland.

It lies approximately 24 kilometres (15 mi) north-east of Lubin, and 68 kilometres (42 mi) north-west of the regional capital Wrocław.

Resource:

https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/valley/chelm/before_holocaust.asp

https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/valley/chelm/german_occupation.asp

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che%C5%82m

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che%C5%82m

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Germans_in_Poland

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-sages-of-chelm/