Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation, 1939-1944 (Paperback)

The book deals with the tragedy that befell the Polish nation during the war - an umbrella term which covers, as it should, not only ethnic Poles, but the Jews, Gypsies, and other ethnic minorities which made up the fabric of the country at the time. By not focusing on any one group in particular, as previous works have done, Dr Lukas offers a far broader picture of the state of the country at the time. He gves a rare insight into the interaction of the persecuted ethnic groups and gives credit where credit is due to the bravery of various people at the time, regardless of race.

The way Dr Lukas deals with the political issues is thorough, yet succinct enough for someone like myself, who is not that politically minded to be able to follow and understand without getting bogged down. He remains impartial and objective throughout, which is important as it lends a far greater sense of credibility to the work. This is reflected in the extensive bibliography which shows the amount of research that went into this book.

For someone with prior knowledge of the subject, this book will serve to clarify and enlighten even further. For the reader who thinks that the Holocaust was a purely Jewish phenomenon, or that the Poles during wartime were an anti- Semitic race, this book will be an eye opener. A must read for anyone with any interest in the subject.

On the one hand, we have authors like Norman Davies and Richard Lukas, whose position is that the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were treated as well as they could be by their Christian Polish neighbours, given the circumstances. On the other hand, there are a number of historians who advance the proposition that the Poles were simply only too happy to see ‘the enemy within’ exterminated: these historians tend to be American and/ or Jewish. Into this mess are stirred implicit accusations of anti-semitism (against the former group) and Zionism (against the latter). A third group of historians leaves well alone, simply ignoring the issue (eg. Adelson, ‘The Lodz Ghetto’), which severely degrades their work.

Each side proffers its arguments: the ‘Polish Jews’ school points to comparable participation in atrocities by Jews in association with the communists at the end of the war - indeed, the great Norman Davies was refused a chair at Stanford for pointing this out; the ‘Jewish Poles’ point to the Jedwabne massacre (1941), when Christian villagers, with a nod from their Nazi overlords, killed some 1,600 Jewish neighbours.

Personally, I find the ‘Polish Jews’ argument more convincing. By and large, Christians had a tolerant attitude towards Jews, and one can fairly easily run off a list of examples: that King Kasimir, who invited the Jews into Poland in the middle ages, is the only Polish king known as ‘the Great’; that the Jews usually ran village taverns, and it seems unlikely that such an occupation would give rise to unpopularity; that Poles, who pride themselves on their courtesy and good manners, would descend to the vulgar abuse of Jew-baiting; the refusal of Polish politics in the ‘20s and ‘30s to descend into anti-semitism. Mickiewicz, the Polish national poet, had a Jewish mother and Marshal Pilsudski a Jewish wife. On the other hand there were undoubtedly areas of friction; largely based on the issues of Jewish clannishness, which could be particularly provocative in those areas where they controlled the entire local economy. The ‘Jewish Poles’ argument seems to me to rely too much on selective quotations from Jews who were under the most dreadful strain; generalisations and over-simplification. At its worst, this leads to - frankly - unhistorical rubbish like Leon Uris’s books in which Jews are characterised as noble helpless victims, and everyone else as anti-semitic neanderthals.

And so to the war, and the Holocaust. Dr. Lukas begins his book by pointing out the immediate descent into Nazi brutality: mass arrests - intellectuals, priests - and shootings - including Boy Scouts and passers-by in the street. The first victims were not necessarily Jews at all - they were herded into ghettos - but any individual around whom a resistance could form. Much of this initial stage of repression appears to have been based on brutality to cow the remainder of the population. Statements by Hitler and Hans Frank (the Gauliter of the Cracow region) make it quite clear that the objective was to exterminate any opposition; to destroy the Jews and leave a helot race of uneducated Polish ‘untermensch’, who would in their turn be exterminated. As Frank put it, in time the Vistula river valley would become as much a part of Germany as the Rhine. Almost any form of opposition, down to not making way for a German on the pavement, was punishable by death. In fact, collective punishments and round-ups - sealing both ends of a street and shooting everyone in-between - were widespread and terrifying in their randomness.

The punishment in respect of helping Jews, however, was even worse: the annihilation of one’s entire family - the appendix gives heart-rending accounts of grandmothers to babies in the same family - if one lived in a block of flats, the manager and caretaker were killed too; in the country the farmhouse and any barns were burnt down. Lukas estimates that each individual helping a Jew extended the potential retribution to 9 others.

Unfortunately, the situation was not helped by the attitude of the Jews themselves: the Lvov Jews appear to have had a strong streak of both pacifism and fatalism, often refusing offers of help. (It is worth pointing out, at this point, that Simon Wiesental had moved to Lvov: in 1943 his wife was smuggled out of a Lvov labour camp with the help of a German supervisor, Adolf Kohlrautz, and Polish partisans, who provided her with forged documents: Wiesental escaped a year later, was hidden by the underground, but recaptured.) There were tragic instances of captured Jews being promised their lives if they denounced their helpers - promises never kept, of course. The ‘fighting Jews’ of ZOB, who took the main part in the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising, were also socialists/ communists: in other words, the very people who had supported the Soviet Union when it attacked Poland from the East in 1939: it is no wonder that there was certainly an initial element of reserve when ZOB approached the AK (Home Army) for arms. Another huge cause of friction was the propensity of Jews under Polish arms abroad to desert: the worst example, perhaps, being Corporal Menachim Begin, who promptly began a guerilla war against the British in Palestine.

What was the attitude of the Christian Poles? The AK did what it could to help ZOB, but it simply did not have the heavy weapons necessary against tanks; it risked informers, blackmailers, and agents provocateurs - Nazis pretending to be escaping Jews. The Gestapo dogged the AK, arresting senior officers and uncovering arms caches. Nonetheless, Polish Christians must have been only too aware that they and Polish Jews had a common enemy, and that the fate of the Jews was merely a foretaste of what was to planned for them. Militarily, in 1943, just as in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, the underground was too ‘light’ to engage the Germans in anything other than targeted assassinations and other guerilla activities; its forte was in activities such as espionage, organising escape routes, and propaganda. It is extraordinary, really, that anyone thinks that the Polish underground could have done more, given that it was far and away the most effective resistance in occupied Europe, its limited resources offset by huge popular support: one only has to compare it with the minimal activities of the Czechs, or the French who were operating under considerably more favourable conditions.

The tragedy of the Holocaust in Poland is that its historiography has degenerated into a profoundly distasteful name-calling. These were horrific times, during which individuals were forced to weigh up their consciences; some behaved horribly, some chose to protect their families at the expense of the stranger: but ultimately a heart-warmingly majority chose to resist.

Finally, back to Dr. Lukas’ book; the good points: well-written, well chosen, if horrific, photographs, and properly referenced. Bad points: the references are often to secondary sources rather than the original, and, ideally, the references would give some indication as to when the events noted took place; the book covers five years and it can be difficult to put some of the references into a chronological context. However, this is a major work, interesting to both the specialist and general reader: I would particularly recommend reading it alongside Norman Davies’ ‘Rising ‘44’ (about the Warsaw Uprising).