The Polish Army Ghetto: The Internship of Jewish Soldiers in Jabłonna in 1920

Abstract

At the height of the Polish-Soviet War in August 1920, the Polish army interned thousands of its Jewish soldiers at Jabłonna near Warsaw. Although the internees were released after several weeks, the events gave rise to numerous domestic and foreign policy debates and shaped Polish-Jewish relations in the years to come. ‘Jabłonna’ stands pars pro toto for the problems of the Polish state and Polish society in dealing with a heterogeneous population at the beginning of the interwar period. In recent decades, the events surrounding the internment have been taken up and contextualised sporadically by historians and publicists, but usually without them having made recourse to the available archival sources.