Early in 1944, a third of the Jewish soldiers in the Polish-Army-in-Exile in Scotland, complaining of widespread antisemitism, left their units and demanded transfer to the British forces. Eager to hush up the controversy, the Polish and British authorities acceded to the demands of two large groups but then drew the line. The court martial of a third small group caused an international scandal and a diplomatic crisis. The revelation of widespread antisemitism in the armed forces of an ally fighting Nazism was a public relations disaster, jeopardizing the standing of the Polish government in the eyes of the British public just as the Soviets were setting up a rival government and making territorial demands on Poland. It split the Polish National Council, as leftist and Jewish representatives called for a purge of reactionary elements in the Army. The question of the nature of the Polish commonwealth, unresolved at its founding, thus carried over into debates over what sort of state postwar Poland should be: monoethnic or multiethnic, democratic or authoritarian—and whether it could offer a future for the surviving Jews. The saga of the “deserters” is nothing less than a microcosm of the problem of Polish national identity and the at times troubled history of what is laconically called “Jewish-Polish relations.”
