Between the Nazis and Soviets: Occupation Politics in Poland, 1939-1947 (review)

The history of Poland during the Second World War has been the subject of acrimonious debate. One side holds that the Polish people put up noble resistance to the Nazis, while the other condemns the Poles as unsympathetic spectators, even collaborators, in the Holocaust. Some Poles have accused Jews of aiding the Soviet Union in the establishment of Communist control over Poland, both in 1939 and again at the war's end, thus instituting a regime with which ethnic Poles wanted nothing to do. Over the past fifteen years researchers have produced a great deal of new scholarship that allows us to see the wartime experience in Poland with more nuance, moving beyond the rigid dichotomies that have long held sway. Marek Chodakiewicz's study contributes to this endeavor.

Making extensive use of Polish archival records, published document collections, periodicals, and memoirs, Chodakiewicz provides a detailed study of one region in central Poland, the county of Janów Lubelski, as a way to deal with these controversies. This area was part of the Generalgouvernement from 1939 until the Red Army drove out the Germans in 1944. Breaking from standard wartime histories, Chodakiewicz considers the period from 1939 to 1947, including postwar Soviet domination and the establishment of a native Communist regime, in one long narrative of occupation—a sensible approach from the perspective of local inhabitants. He focuses on the reactions of the population, including the majority Polish peasants as well as the Jewish, Ukrainian, and German minorities, to the harsh events that overtook their lives.

In so doing, Chodakiewicz moves away from the dichotomy of resistance or collaboration to the grayer and more prevalent category of accommodation. He argues that under both the Nazi and the Soviet occupations, "accommodation was the natural reflex for most, and resistance for a few" (p. 319). This holds true, with different timing and varying degrees of intensity, for the Polish majority as well as the minorities. Chodakiewicz further argues that the occupiers' use of terror—more brutal under the Nazis but nearly as bad under the Soviet forces—drove most of those who initially accommodated into some form of resistance. For Jews this meant (early in the war) turning to the black market; for peasants of all nationalities it meant not fulfilling the food delivery quotas or avoiding the corvée; and for elites in the new administration it meant either performing their duties badly or shielding the population from the most harmful effects of Nazi policies. Of course some individuals also joined the underground with the aim of undermining the system.

Chodakiewicz discusses the question of accommodation and resistance with subtlety and sympathy for the choices people had to make. His argument that individuals could both accommodate and resist, and that sometimes the former was necessary to mask one's activities in the underground, complicates the usual picture. At the same time, he tends to downplay Polish collaboration, assuming, for example, that most elites who cooperated with the Nazis strove to help the subject population. Likewise, he calls any level of non-compliance with Nazi policies "resistance," including cheating on food quotas, something many peasants had to do in order to provide adequate sustenance for their families. Despite the detailed discussion of accommodation, Chodakiewicz's loose definition of resistance renders nearly the entire population resisters. To my mind, the intentions behind an act are critical to whether one can truly label it resistance. Actions motivated purely by survival, or, in some cases, greed, cannot be lumped together with those stemming from selfless moral or political motivation. Just as Chodakiewicz defines collaboration as a narrow category of political acts of treason, he would do well to maintain a distinction between ideologically minded acts of resistance and self-interested refusals to comply, not to mention simple self-defense.

Chodakiewicz sometimes makes questionable conclusions about the motives behind his subjects' actions. This points to a larger problem with some of his assertions: They are his...