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4.0 out of 5 stars
Debunks Some Anti-Polish Stereotypes, But Parrots Others, April 1, 2004
This review is from: Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940-1945 (Hardcover)
Paulsson mixes highly original and very unoriginal thinking. He uses quantitative approaches, backed by simple statistics, in order to avoid the selective quoting of anecdotes to support predetermined conclusions. He also factors what he calls "the dog did not bark" situations (where only atypical events were recorded).
Further development needs to be made of the theme, based on quotes from Germans (p. 240) that German hatred of Poles was natural, whereas German hatred for Jews was "according to orders". If accurate, it undercuts the special victim status that many Jews claim relative to Poles, as it underlines the eventual genocidal intentions that Germans had for Poles. Parenthetically, the sentiments are probably mutual, which helps explain why Jewish hostility towards Poles appears, to this day, to be much more common and intense than Jewish hostility towards Germans.
The belittling of Polish aid to Jews, typical of Holocaust materials and discussions, evaporates in the face of Paulsson's analysis, which indicates an unexpectedly high 7%-9% Polish participation rate in the substantial aid to Jews. Pointedly, this figure would be even higher had 1) More Jews fled the ghetto (p. 35, 248), 2) There been no death penalty for aiding Jews, and 3) The privations of Aryan Warsaw had not been so severe (p. 248). Oft-repeated insinuations that Polish indifference and/or betrayals (see below) had been THE limiting factors of Jewish survival are clearly incorrect and inflammatory, and must be withdrawn.
We keep hearing of fugitive Jews as having almost zero chance of survival owing to numerous fanatically anti-Semitic Poles determined that not a single Jew escape the Holocaust. By contrast, Paulsson estimates that 6 in 7 fugitive Warsaw Jews were NOT betrayed. Furthermore, he proves that most Polish blackmailers (szmalcowniki) just wanted money and that very few of them actually turned Jews in to the Germans. Moreover, the szmalcowniki comprised only 0.4% of Warsaw's Polish population. Poles who would actually murder Jews or turn them in occurred at a rate of one individual per many thousands (probably little different from the Polish-on-Polish fatal betrayal rate).
The gravitation of szmalcowniki to fugitive Jews (p. 162), rather than simply a manifestation of anti-Semitism, is readily explicable by blackmailers' natural preference for vulnerable targets. Also, Paulsson's claim that nearly all szmalcowniki were ethnic Poles is contradicted by Yitzhak Zuckerman, who, in his memoir, reported being accosted by Jewish szmalcowniki about as often as Polish ones.
The oft-repeated charge of the AK (Polish underground army) killing Jews is examined by Paulsson and, at least for the Warsaw Uprising, shown to be a very marginal phenomenon. Some 100 Jews were killed out of over 15,000 fugitive Jews. Less than 100 and probably less than 50 AK soldiers perpetrated the killings, a drop in the bucket of 42,000 armed men. In fact, one potential "rotten apple" (Stykowski's unit) is alone allegedly responsible for 23 Jewish deaths. Moreover, the Jewish deaths all occurred under unclear circumstances, and at least some of the killings were for legitimate reasons. Contrary to Paulsson's comments, Jewish espionage on behalf of the Germans, and enemy forces masquerading as AK units, were definitely real. So was Jewish banditry directed against Poles. Finally, the armed conflict between the patriotic AK and the Communist AL (the latter largely Jewish), incompletely submerged by their "alliance" during the Uprising, is not even mentioned.
Unfortunately, Paulsson cheapens his seminal work by lapsing into the simplistic generalizations that typify books on this subject. The customary reference to prewar Polish discriminatory policies against Jews, job-creating properties of Jewish entrepreneurship notwithstanding, neglects the magnitude of Jewish economic dominance. At 10% of the prewar Polish population, Jews owned over 40% of Poland's wealth, and were comparably over-represented at universities. The prewar economic boycotts and numerus clausus at universities were, using modern parlance, a form of affirmative action designed to get more Polish gentiles, recently emergent from peasant backwardness aggravated by 123 years of foreign rule, into Jewish-dominated institutions.
As usual, Cardinal Hlond's 1936 statement about Jews being "freethinkers, vanguards of atheism and Bolshevism" is presented unanalyzed. Rejection of the religious aspects of one's heritage, often with concomitant involvement in radical political-social movements, has always been much more common among Jews than Poles, and this was keenly felt in the mostly religious Polish society. Also, don't Hlond's sentiments find parallels to the opinions of many Orthodox Jews towards secularized Jews, notably in modern-day Israel?
Paulsson's almost obsessive focus on church teachings (e. g. "Christ killers") overlooks the virtual universality of religious prejudice of pre-ecumenical times. How many Jews, based partly on Talmudic teachings, looked down at Christians as deluded worshippers of a mere Bastard, and of three gods? Ditto for anecdotes of individual Poles regarding "deserved" Jewish suffering. Invoking Divine displeasure has always been a common response to tragic events. Remember Job's "friends"? Didn't some rabbis (e. g. Eliezer Schach) also suggest that the Holocaust was God's punishment for Jewish sins (e. g., for having become "too Christianized", insufficiently Zionistic, etc.)? As for some individual Poles found rejoicing at Jewish deaths, the sword cut both ways. Certain Jews, Polish and not, had rejoiced at Poland's tragic fate in 1939.
All the while, Paulsson completely misses the mark about the true source of Polish animosities towards Jews. He cites several anecdotal reports of Poles who regarded Jews as Poland's enemies. Contrary to his claim, neither church teachings nor prewar attitudes had been the primary root of these animosities. It was, instead, the large fraction of Polish Jews who had collaborated, in 1939-1941, with the Soviet invaders of eastern Poland, helping send hundreds of thousands of Poles to Siberia. Consequently, as is evident from some Polish statements that Paulsson quotes, more surviving Jews translated into more servants of the Russian Communists, a polemic that, unfortunately, proved prophetic in the immediate postwar years (1944-1947). Overall, though, Paulsson's work is a major step forward, and I trust that he will eventually acquire a more balanced view of mutual Polish-Jewish antagonisms.
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