FEAR. Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz -An essay in historical interpretation. By Jan T. Gross. 336pp. Princeton University Press. Pounds
16.95. (US $25.95).
0 375 50924 0
For hundreds of years, Poland, as an early modern commonwealth, as lands partitioned among empires, and as an independent republic, was the main homeland of the Jews. Then, under German occupation during the Second World War, Polish lands were the site of their rapid extermination. The Germans killed some 90 per cent of Poland's 3 million Jews in the death camps or the killing fields. Yet most Jewish survivors wished to stay in Poland after the war; they left after 1945 not chiefly because of the Holocaust itself, but because of anti-Jewish violence in Poland. According to Jan T. Gross, Poles murdered about 1,500 Jewish Holocaust survivors, leaving the rest no longer welcome in their homeland. In his latest study of ethnic relations in twentieth-century Poland, Gross asks how Poles could have been anti-Semitic after Auschwitz.
Gross's previous book, Neighbors (2001), demonstrated that Poles killed Jews in the village of Jedwabne in the summer of 1941. This initiated a national debate on the behaviour of Poles towards Jews during the Second World War, the most important discussion of the Holocaust outside Germany itself. The centrepiece of Gross's latest book, Fear, is the pogrom at Kielce of July 4, 1946, in which Poles killed about forty Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, in a long day of bloodletting. Unlike the mass murder at Jedwabne, which might have been forgotten without Gross, the pogrom at Kielce is well known, and has been the subject of recent monographs in Polish, for example by Bo.ena Szajnok, and of a lengthy document collection published by the official Institute of National Remembrance this year. Yet the events at Kielce pose perhaps a greater challenge to Poles' self-understanding even than those at Jedwabne. The Jedwabne controversy demonstrated that in several villages in one isolated region, Poles murdered Jews at the beginning of the Holocaust. Kielce shows that Poles were capable of killing Jews, with the full knowledge of what Jews had already survived.
In 1946 Poland was a violent, lawless place. A young Communist regime fought the remnants of an underground army. It was dangerous to be a Jew, but also dangerous to be a Communist performing a public function or a soldier of the democratic opposition. It was perhaps most dangerous to be a Ukrainian or a German, groups regarded as war enemies and slated for forced transfer. Murder rates were extremely high. Gross is interested in the Jews not because their predicament was statistically the most dangerous, but because their treatment was a moral test of their neighbours and their polity. They were not supposed to be targeted by the State, and Polish civil society knew everything there was to know about the Holocaust. Gross implicitly places himself within a group that he admires and criticizes: the Polish intelligentsia. He cites Wincenty Bednarczuk in 1945: "Today it is not a question of saving the Jews from misery and death. Today it is a problem of saving the Poles from moral misery and spiritual death". This is not so far from the approach Gross takes in his book.
He combines the intellectual's moral concern with sociological realism. The first is the posture of the intellectual asking for nobility from his nation, the second the scepticism of the scholar who seeks an explanation for collective murder. For the most part this mixed method works beautifully. Gross dispenses with much that has passed for an explanation of Kielce. The pogrom was provoked by rumours (in 1946!) that Jews had kidnapped a boy to use his blood for matzo. The boy had gone to pick berries. A stubborn version of the events, repeated by a number of Polish historians without convincing evidence, asserts that the Communist regime wanted to draw attention away from falsified elections by provoking violence that could be blamed on its opponents. The regime certainly exploited the pogrom to discredit the opposition (which had nothing to do with it), but that seems to have been nimble reaction rather than planned action. Interestingly, the provocation thesis is repeated in the preface to the valuable new study on Kielce by the official Polish Institute of National Remembrance: although the volume's historical and legal sections deny this version. Gross finds no evidence for this thesis, and shows that the central Communist authorities were troubled by Kielce.
A less varnished and more vernacular explanation of Kielce is that Poles hated Jews because Jews collaborated with Communism. Gross inverts this view: Poles hated Jews in 1946, he maintains, not because Jews collaborated with Communists, but because Poles had colluded "in the Nazi-driven plunder, spoliation, and eventual murder" of the Jews. This harmonizes with emerging literature on German acceptance of the Holocaust, and fits a social fact about Poland. Throughout Poland, Jews, on average, were better off than Poles. When the Germans murdered the Jews, Poles occupied vacated properties and social roles. When surviving Jews returned, Poles feared for their own social advance.
As a motivation for murder, this is persuasive, and can be demonstrated in individual cases. Gross goes on to claim that Polish public opinion took a step further, regarding as legitimate the murder of surviving Jews to take whatever property they might still have. This claim is hard to prove generally, but Gross does give some chilling examples.
