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Polish Responsibility for the Holocaust Was Not Minor

(Tablet) Andrew Apostolou - A recent book, Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland, edited by historian Jan Grabowski and by Barbara Engelking, director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw, is a significant addition to our understanding about how the Germans pursued the "Final Solution" in Eastern Europe with the help of local non-Jewish populations. The German effort to find and murder every Jew on three continents was a vast undertaking. The Germans killed Jews throughout the war, shooting Jews and their Christian companions barely 300 yards from the U.S. Army in Pisa in August 1944. Poland was the center of the slaughter. Of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, some 3 million were Polish Jews. The Germans called the final stage of the Holocaust - the elimination of the survivors of the initial waves of mass killings - the Judenjagd (hunt for Jews). It was a shared enterprise, involving Germans, the Polish authorities, and Poles who lived near the Jews. While the Germans destroyed the Polish nation, many Poles exploited the assault on the Jews to settle scores, enrich themselves, promote nationalist and antisemitic politics, or to survive at the expense of Jewish friends and neighbors. The Germans and Polish police sometimes killed Poles who hid Jews, which in turn led other Poles to preemptively murder Jews they were concealing - either with their own hands or by surrendering them. Few Poles were willing to help Jews, and those who were endured threats and sometimes retaliation, including murder, from fellow Poles. The book demonstrates how the Germans' genocidal goals were impossible without the collaboration of Poles. Polish neighbors could identify Jews in a way Germans could not. In Nowy Targ county, Polish village guards, not the Germans, scoured the woods for Jews. Polish volunteer firefighters hunted Jews. The authors write, "Sizable parts of Polish populations participated in liquidation actions and later, during the period between 1942 and 1945, contributed directly or indirectly to the death of thousands of Jews who were seeking refuge among them."
2023-05-11 00:00:00
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