The quote you sent me is a bunch of crap. Its support of the anti-Semitism charge rests on a flimsy translation of the misspelled Polish word "gazrurka." When translated literally, it indeed means "gas pipe" but its common usage has nothing to do with "gas." It refers to using a piece of steel pipe as a weapon in acts of hooliganism or street fights. This simply denotes the idea of resolving intellectual debates with the use of brute force, which was a common trope in the Stalinist discourse of that time, akin to the Nazi slogan "Wenn Ich Kultur hoere, entischere Ich meinen Browning" (when I hear about culture, I cock my pistol).
A larger point is why people resort to such crap to make a point? While anti-Semitism was widely spread in Poland before WW2, the post war communist government was the first that eradicated all institutional barriers (e.g. to government employment) that Jews and other minorities faced. As far as I can tell, the surviving Jews were generally quite supportive of the communist government, perhaps even more so than the population at large - to the point that the reaction coined the derogatory term "zydo-komuna" (difficult to adequately translate, perhaps "kiko-commies" will do) to describe the new political regime.
In that light, questionable charges of "anti-Semitism" against the post WW2 authorities smack of anti-communist diatribes. This is not to say that there was no anti-Semitic prejudice among some party members, or that anti-Semitism was not used in internal party struggles (c.f. Mieczyslaw Moczar) - but the fact remains that socialism was the best thing that happened to Jews and, for that matter, non-Jews, in the entire history of that part of the world.
Wojtek
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Pugliese [mailto:michael098762001 at earthlink.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2005 1:18 AM
> To: ssokolo1 at jhem.jhu.edu
> Subject: Kazimierz Witaszewski
>
> ------- Forwarded message -------
> From: "Robert W. Cherny" <cherny at sfsu.edu>
> To: H-HOAC at h-net.msu.edu
> Subject: meaning of "Stalinism"
> Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2005 20:59:13 -0800
>
> From: Leo Gluchowski <lwgluch at cogeco.ca>
>
> Can anyone provide me with an example of a leading CPUSA member, for
> instance, who publicly articulted views interpreted to be antisemitic or
> xenophobic? I am trying to discover if this was something peculiar to
> Stalinists from the former Soviet bloc.
>
> (One of the most notorious example is that of Brigadier-General
> Kazimierz Witaszewski, the chief political officer and ideologue of the
> Polish People's Army in 1956. He worshiped Stalin and was Marshal K.K.
> Rokossowski's personal friend and greatest supporter. Witaszewski told
> party activists and workers at a factory in Lodz in April 1956 that the
> party had the right to defend itself against anti-party elements, such
> as the intellectuals critical of Stalin in light of Khrushchev's
> 'sercret speech', by using a 'gazrurek'--gas pipe [obvious reference to
> a method used by the Nazis to murder Jews]--if it had to. The party
> leadership warned Witaszewski a month later that he had 'inappropriately
> accented and unjustly formulated' his thoughts, and that the comrade
> general should 'stress the significant and constant work for even
> stronger ties between the intelligentsia and the leading force in
> society, the working class.' Witaszewski was also promoted in two months
> later to the rank of Major-General.)
>
> Leo Gluchowski
>
>
>
> --
> Michael Pugliese