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I had an interesting conversation with a Polish survivor of WWII. He had been an officer in the Polish underground, commissioned at age 16 or 17, I forget. He was an accomplished linguist, and said it was an important skill for him to survive the war.

I asked about people hiding Jews, and he recounted a story of a family of Poles that hid a family of Jews all through the NAZI occupation. When the Russians occupied the town, the Jews went out, and immediately denounced the family that had saved them, as anti-communists (the Jews saved were Communists). The family of Poles was immediately arrested (they were probably sent to the gulag or shot).

Of course it cannot be confirmed. But I heard several of his stories, and they all hung together rather well.

When the story of Jedwabne and the other towns where Poles attacked Jews surfaced, the first thing I noticed was that all of them had been in the Soviet zone of occupation.

I don't recall ever hearing any stories of Poles attacking Jews in 1939.

I read that, according one elderly Pole, the Jews had welcomed the Soviets as saviors from the Germans.

That would not, of course, have gone over well with their Polish neighbors, who would have called such actions treason.

The terrible problem for both Jews and Poles was becoming the grain to be ground between the millstones of competing political and national struggles across central Europe.

Russian writer Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, got into trouble over his last book, "200 years together", for getting into topics like the role of Jewish communists.

In a review by The UK Guardian:

In his latest book Solzhenitsyn, 84, deals with one of the last taboos of the communist revolution: that Jews were as much perpetrators of the repression as its victims. Two Hundred Years Together - a reference to the 1772 partial annexation of Poland and Russia which greatly increased the Russian Jewish population - contains three chapters discussing the Jewish role in the revolutionary genocide and secret police purges of Soviet Russia.
...
Yet he added: "But it is impossible to find the answer to the eternal question: who is to be blamed, who led us to our death? To explain the actions of the Kiev cheka [secret police] only by the fact that two thirds were Jews, is certainly incorrect."

How much of the animosity towards Jews in Eastern Europe in the 1940s, was actually animosity against the Communists that so many Jews apparently aligned with?

That’s entirely possible. Some Jews were filled with hatred for Poles who saved them. I think they resented the fact that the Polish state, the Polish society and peopel survived while everything Jewish was wiped out in Poland.

This comes through rather well in the following documentary:

https://www.amazon.com/Hiding-Seeking-Faith-Tolerance-Holocaust/dp/B00067BBQY/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

Description excerpt: “This award-winning documentary tells the dramatic and emotional story of a Jewish father who journeys with his two ultra-orthodox adult sons back to Poland to try to find the Christian farmers who hid their family from the Nazis. To his sons, like many offspring of Polish Holocaust survivors, this is a country whose people are incurably anti-Semitic and beyond redemption. His hope is to instill in his insulated and narrow-minded sons the power of interfaith tolerance and trust.”

The grandfather was the one hidden - at incredible personal risk - by the Christian family. The family told him essentially, “If you get to America, remember us one day (i.e. send us some money if you succeed in life).” The grandfather did succeed but absolutely refused to help the Polish family. His son took it upon himself to hunt down the family with his two adult sons (who are clearly anti-Christian, anti-Polish bigots) to support the effort but give in. They are changed by what they discovered.

It’s available on Netflix I believe.

Another documentary I saw centered around a Jewish American survivor of the holocaust who had became a success on the textile business. His whole family and just about every Jew in a particular Polish town had been wiped out. He ended up meeting and working with a Polish historian who was trying to research what happened and how. The most interesting scene was when he returned to the town and encountered an old man who knew his father. He asked him why didn’t the Poles do anything to help the town’s Jews when the Nazis came for them? The old man told a story. In the story, he admitted that he had been a poacher and had killed two deer. He took the deer to the father of the Jewish-American man who ran a successful and prosperous business in town and they made an agreement on a price for the deer. Then the father refused to pay the price he had agreed to. He ripped the man off. When the Jewish American man heard the old Pole tell this story he went nuts denying his father would ever do such a thing. It was telling. The old Pole seemed very sincere in his story. There was no logical reason for him to make up such an elaborate story for such a question. The Jewish American man, robbed of his family, naturally only remembered (or only knew) about their good points and couldn’t imagine they would have traits that made enemies. None of that excused anything, of course, but it was a fascinating insight into how people thought at the time.