p. 272, Translated by Zulema Seligsohn

Chapter Sixteen

THE STEIGER TRIAL

In the twenty years of Polish independence, the Jews in Poland were fated to have their own Beilisiad. True, the accusation was not that Jews use blood to bake matzos for Passover, but that they had planned and carried out an attempt on the life of President Stanislaw Wojciechowski (1869-1941).

On the 15th of September, 1924, on Mariatski Square in Lemberg, when the president came with a large entourage to open the "Eastern Market," someone threw a petard at him. Immediately there appeared a witness, one Maria Pasternak, a hysterical old maid, a woman of a rather dark past, who swore that she herself "had seen" how Stanislaw (Shloime) Steiger, a student at Lemberg University, had thrown the "bomb," as the innocuous petard was called in the official police language. Steiger denied it but he was made to appear before a military tribunal. Since the punishment was death by firing squad, the judges could not agree on whether Steiger was the real culprit and the trial was transferred to a jury. The accusation against the Jewish student and the trial stirred up Jews in Poland and around the world. The issue was followed in the political circles of Poland and abroad with as much interest.

The attack on the president was not intended to harm him physically. The petard was not meant for that end. But as a political demonstration it accomplished its aim. The world was put on notice that Eastern Galitzia does not wish to recognize Polish rule. The military uprising of November 1918 had been suppressed (see Ch. 4), but the Ukranian campaign against Polish rule did not end. The Polish government was considered an enemy occupier, Ukrainians boycotted the elections to the constituent Sejm (See Ch. 7), and young people were urged not to serve in the Polish army. In 1921, the clandestine "Ukranian Military Organization" was formed, and began to carry out terrorist acts against

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the Polish government, Polish aristocrats, and especially against the farmer-colonists who had been brought down from other provinces. In today’s terminology it would be called a guerrilla war.

The local rulers, with a hint from Warsaw, persecuted the Ukranians in every way. Their press was confiscated; their schools were paralyzed; imported Polish managers replaced Ukranians, who were pushed out of the administration, the courts, the police, the railroads. In the same way that it was applied to Jews throughout the country, the principle of " Polish only rule" with all it implied was brought to bear upon Ukranians in Eastern Galitzia. Jews were fought against by means of terror, boycotts, and any and all methods of uprooting; against the Ukranians they used administrative and brutally repressive means as well as bloody methods of pacification.

The terrorist act against President Wojciechowski was not the first armed attack against a head of the Polish government in Lemberg. Three years earlier, on the 25th of September in 1921, when Marshall Jozef Pilsudski came to Lemberg on an official visit, a young Ukranian nationalist, Stefan Fedak, shot at him three times. Pilsudski himself was not hurt but the Lemberg military commander Witold Grabowski, who was standing by his side, was wounded. The Ukranians let it be known that the attack was a protest against the visit of the head of the Polish government to Lemberg, a visit that was meant to demonstrate that Eastern Galitzia was a part of Poland; that they do not recognize the rule of Poland and will in the future again react in the same manner if the Polish president should come to Lemberg. And thus it happened. When President Wojciechowski came officially to open the "Eastern Market" in Lemberg, he was attacked with a thrown petard in broad daylight, in front of thousands of people.

But the central government in Warsaw and the local rulers in Eastern Galitzia did not want to lose face by confessing to the whole world the real situation in Eastern Galitzia. They feared that the prestige of the Polish government would suffer outside its borders. It suited them better to have the Jew, Steiger, be the scapegoat. When the Pasternak woman showed up as an eye-witness it was particularly handy. The truth was suppressed, and the polce did not even make the effort to find the actual thrower of the petard, who left for Germany without any problem. He was Teofil Olshanski, a member of the "Ukranian Military Organization," The German government granted him asylum as a

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political emigreé.

A wave of anti-semitic propaganda was started: that Sztaiger was not alone, that he was merely a tool, that behind him stood the whole Jewish community, the "country without a name." Half a century has passed since that time, and for those who have not experienced a smear campaign it is impossible to imagine at the present time the difficult, disquieting period that Jews in Poland had to endure. Jewish society came to the consensus that defending Steiger would not be easy, as they had the whole government machine against them. Besides it became apparent that Steiger had no qualifications to be a "hero" in a political process of worldwide significance. A young man from the provinces without great ambition, one of many such young people of average capabilities growing up in lower middle class homes, he was dumbfounded by his sudden "publicity." At the trial he did not show his best, did not sound sure in his statements. His defenders had little help from him. The old adage that the life of an individual is often more interesting than the individual himself would be confirmed in his case as well. Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) and Mendel Beilis were also not heroic either in their lives or on the bench of the accused.

Steiger was defended by the most respectable attorneys in Galitzia:

The doyen of Polish lawyers in Lemberg, Dr. Mikhal Grek (1863-1929), testified first. He saved Steiger from the death penalty at the military tribunal and held it his duty to defend him also in the civil court.

The well-known attorney and cultural leader, Dr. Leib Landau (1866-1942), from Pszemisl, gathered the necessary materials for the trial and worked out the general defense strategy. He investigated pyrotechnics in particular in order to show that the military expert had made a false declaration against Steiger. During cross-examination at the trial he annihilated his "expertise," and that fact surely moved the sworn judges, in large part, to render the judgment that he be freed.

Senator Dr. Mikhal Ringel, one of the Zionist leaders in Galitzia and president of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, lent prestige to the defense with his presence. His aide, Dr. Leon Rosenkranz (1882-1942), assisted in the defense.

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The fifth defense attorney was Dr. Natan Levenshtain (1859-1929), leader of the assimilation in Galitzia. As a member of the Austrian Parliament, he often kept company with the Polish members from Galitzia and had little to do with the Jews; but when it came to Steiger’s trial he, the son of the Lemberger Rabbi Dr. Maximilian Levenshtain and son-in-law of the head of the community, Shmelke Horowitz (1836-1925), no longer wished to deny his ties to the Jewish community. He reported to Steiger’s defense, but a great part of that Jewish community in Galitzia was against allowing the stubborn assimilator ro take part in the trial, which they saw as an open attack against the Jewish collective in Poland. Others, however, held that it was necessary to show Jewish unity before the world in a time of trouble, and this view won out.

Steiger’s trial began on the 13th of October and ended on the 19th of December 1925, when the sworn court rendered a verdict of not guilty. The whole corruption, foolishness, and incompetence of the administration; it’s anti-semitism, and the brutality of the police were made evident as they had never been before.

HAYNT (actually NAYER HAYNT as the paper was called then) dedicated whole pages to the trial. Every day the newspaper was full of reports, articles, and drawings depicting the courtroom. I. M. Nayman and H. L. Zhitnitsky wrote up scenes from the court sessions, drew pen portraits of the judges, the prosecutor, the defense attorneys, and the witnesses. B. Yeushson and M. Kipnis came to Lemberg to acquaint themselves with the courtroom atmosphere and wrote about their impressions of the mood among the Jews in the city who had been living and breathing the events of the trial throughout this time and long afterwards. The long-time HAYNT correspondent B. Tzegrovski (Ben-Tzion Ginsberg) helped with this work and wrote long detailed articles. Chaim Finkelstein was the special representative and dictated daily reports over the telephone describing at great length his impressions of the courtroom, which were printed on the front page of the newspaper and often took up a great many pages inside it. He also wrote weekly reviews of the progress of the trial. Throughout the long trial, HAYNT worked hand in hand with the defense. This was demonstrated in particular when, at the defense’s request, the paper did not print prematurely that the actual thrower of the petard had been Olshanski. When this secret became known in Jewish political circles, the attorneys defending Steiger

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asked the press not to reveal this until the defense was ready to themselves bring out this fact before the sworn judges at the right time in the trial. DER MOMENT did disclose the secret, however. In this connection, HAYNT, in its issue No. 252 of November 2nd, 1925 (p. 3) printed the following "little question for MOMENT":

"In yesterday’s issue of MOMENT there appeared the confidential report from the Polish Telegraph Agency ("PAT")’s correspondent in Berlin to the Warsaw Press-Bureau in regard to the echoes of the Steiger trial abroad. HAYNT, like all other Yiddish newspapers, did not find it necessary to pass on that report. DER MOMENT, however, did print that report word for word, but left out the last few lines, which literally read as follows: Their actions in this particular matter (i.e., the actions of the MOMENT correspondents in the Olshanski matter) appear to me to favor the point of view of Polish propaganda. Why did DER MOMENT hide those particular lines from its readership? Aren’t those lines the key to the whole report?"