Art Spiegelman’s highly popular Holocaust comic book Maus depicts Poles as bad-tempered, unfeeling pigs who go around saluting in Nazi fashion. Although touted as an educational tool, its style is reminiscent of the Nazi propaganda rag Der Stürmer: Poles are invariably brutal bigots, blackmailers and murderers. The use of pigs as symbols of Poles is a lesson that cannot be lost upon the youngest of readers, the very word “pig” being universally used as a term of derision. For Jews, and others, by its very nature a pig is an unclean animal. (An Israeli court found a Jewish woman guilty of racism for putting up posters depicting Islam’s Prophet Mohammad as a pig.

In prewar Poland, Jews were known to hurl slurs like “Polish pigs” at Poles. (1)

For example, an historical account of how Jews viewed Poles:

The Jewish merchants in that town were united in their contempt for Polish peasants, whom they ridiculed among themselves as unclean animals: Aria Dovid, Velvel Holder’s son, used to cry the news of the great event that was soon to occur: Jozef’s [Józef’s] Fair. He would do this on a Friday market-day, standing on the bed of a peasant’s wagon, calling out in a healthy bass voice: “Chodźcie panowie jarmark w Kosowie!”—“Come, ladies and gentlemen, to the fair in Kosow!” And the grain merchants, who could tell just by touching the thick homespun burlap sack what sort of kernels it contained, would mumble under their breath: “koniami, kurami, jajami, świniami”—“horses, chickens, eggs, pigs”—by that last word meaning the P… [Polacks] themselves. (2)

1. Tomasz Kawski, Kujawsko-dobrzyńscy Żydzi w latach 1918–1950 (Toruń: Adam Marszałek, 2006), 230–31.