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  • They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust
  • Fatme Myuhtar-May
They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust. By Bill Tammeus and Jacques Cukierkorn. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. 204 pp. Softbound, $24.95; Hardbound, $44.95.

In Memory, Identity, Community (Hinchmann and Hinchmann, eds., Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), a group of authors make the important point that oral narratives not only matter in human science but also, in fact, enjoy a significant academic comeback. Modern social sciences, these scholars charge, are so preoccupied with the quantitative interpretation of subject matter that they have entirely lost sight, indeed have quite intentionally overlooked the human stories in the process. “Leaving stories out of account,” however, “mean[s] renouncing the best clues about why people act as they do” (xiv).

In light of such arguments emphasizing the importance of oral history and human storytelling, one could fully appreciate Bill Tammeus’ and Jacques Cukierkorn’s They Were Just People. The book is a poignant and illuminating collection of what David Carr aptly calls “first-order narratives” (Memory, Identity, Community, 7–25), in this case, the stories Jewish Holocaust survivors from Poland tell about their experiences.

Prior to 2009, when the book was published, Tammeus and Cukierkorn—a Presbyterian Christian elder and a Reform Jewish rabbi (2–3)—traveled across the U.S. and Poland to collect the amazing stories of survival both from Jews and their rescuers (or the rescuers’ descendants). Along with recording, verifying, and narrating these stories, the authors focus on finding out what prompted ordinary Polish Catholics to save Polish Jews during the Nazi occupation of 1942–44.

When Adolf Hitler was elected to power in Germany in 1933, what was to befall Europe’s Jewry less than a decade later was almost inconceivable, although he launched his anti-Jewish policies quickly. Even as Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and instantly embarked on a campaign of violence against the Polish Jews, including segregating them in designated ghettos, few dared to imagine the massive annihilation of life to follow. Yet, between 1942 and 1944, ninety percent of the 3.5 million Jewish of Poland were murdered in death camps, in the ghettos, on the streets; everywhere (2, 205). The tiny number of survivors, however, lived to tell stories not only of unimaginable horror but also of human courage, resourcefulness, and kindness. Whereas some of these survivors became Tammeus’ and Cukierkorn’s central source of information for They Were Just People, their rescuers—or their living descendants—provided the vital foundation for verification and comparison in the authors’ final analysis.

In the book’s introduction, Tammeus and Cukierkorn explain why their research focuses on Poland. First, the country had the largest Jewish population anywhere [End Page 416] prior to the German invasion of 1939 (1–2). Second, in Poland, the Nazis opened concentration camps that would become history’s most notorious factories of mass murder, most notably Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka but also Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek, and Chelmno. Third, the overwhelming majority of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust perished in Poland (2). Yet, the greatest number of individuals who Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial authority on the Holocaust, would honor as “righteous” for saving Jewish lives, also came from Poland. Accordingly, Poles account for more than 6000 persons out of 22,211 in total declared to be “righteous” by Yad Vashem (2, 201).

These “righteous” Poles were deserving individuals like Anna Puchalska, who saved the lives of young Felix Zandman, and three others, by hiding them in a dank and narrow hole under a bedroom floor of her house for seventeen months. In doing so, she, along with her husband and five young children, ran the risk of being executed had the Nazis discovered them hiding Jews. “I should have been dead since 1943, many times dead,” Felix Zandman told the authors, when they interviewed him (173). But with the help of Anna Puchalska not only did he survive but also he went on to receive a PhD in physics from the French Sorbonne, to build Vishay Intertechnology Inc., a large international electronics...

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