Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (review)

Book Reviews 133 family tragedy provides important insight into Soviet history and makes the book especially fascinating and worthwhile reading for all audiences. Edward R. Drachman Department of Political Science State University ofNew York at Geneseo Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust, by Michael C. Steinlauf. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997. 189 pp. $16.95 (p). Poland holds a unique place in Jewish history. In the sixteenth century Rabbi Isserles ofKrakow interpreted the Hebrew Polin to mean resting place or refuge: "here" (poh) there is "rest" (lin). In the twentieth century Nazi Germany transformed Poland into a final resting place, the largest Jewish cemetery in the world. The son ofHolocaust survivors, Michael Steinlaufrnakes clear at the outset that the Holocaust "did not directly involve Poles." The murderous encounter was one between Germans and Jews. But as witnesses to murder on such a vast scale and at such close range, the Poles were subjected to a mass psychic and moral trauma unprecedented in history, and Steinlauf set out to examine and analyze how Poles have dealt with that trauma. The task was no easy one. Nearly every issue explored here is controversial-not only postwar responses to the Holocaust but Polish Jewish relations before and during the war. Steinlaufpresents not only the facts but their differing interpretations. Fluent in both Yiddish and Polish, he has a clear command of the literature and obviously spent long hours conversing with scholars in the field, Polish as well as Jewish. In attempting to report perceptions from all sides, he allows the complexity of the issues to speak for themselves. Steinlauf views Poland's situation as far more difficult and complex than Germany's. In Germany, once a small portion ofthe guilty were punished, society could attempt to move on. The crime was symbolically expiated. As witnesses, the Poles had committed no crime. There was nothing to expiate. But [they had witnessed the unprecedented, virtually total annihilation of neighbors most Of them did not like. And then they inherited the property ofthose neighbors. "The resulting self-accusation is all the more powerful for being unrelated to any actual transgression." The result, to use the phrase and analysis ofhistorian-psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, is a "bondage" to the dead. The introductory chapters on Poles and Jews before and during the war, though least original, are alone worth the price of the book. With a brevity born of erudition, they summarize an immense amount of literature with an eye to virtually every 134 SHOFAR Summer 1998 Vol. 16, No.4 important detail. Steinlauf leaves no doubt but that the death camps were built in Poland, not only because there were more Jews there, but also because the Poles would be the next to go. The Nazis intended the Poles to provide slave labor for the Reich, but it did not need twenty million slaves. While Steinlaufemphasizes the difference between the fate ofPoland's Jews (three million murdered) and that of the Poles (two million), he points out that nowhere else did the murder ofJews unfold amid such slaughter ofthe coterritorial people. Collective punishment and the death penalty for minor transgressions were regular occurrences. A single act of real or imagined resistance could occasion the death of scores or even hundreds of innocent people-certainly, as the Poles knew well, an act like hiding Jews. Poles point out that only in Poland did helping Jews mean an automatic death penalty, that the Dutch family who hid Al1l}.e Frank and her family were not executed for it. They point out that in Jerusalem more than any those of any other nationality, Polish names are honored among the Righteous who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. But Polish rescuers were often afraid ofunsympathetic neighbors who might well tum them in for hiding Jews. Steinlaufgives attention to the overt Nazi policy of demoralizing the Poles, orchestrating pogroms by Polish "hoodlums" in the early occupation and fostering extortion and blackmail. There was money to be made by blackmailing and informing on Jews hiding out on the "Aryan side," but these, Steinlaufwrites, were "activities that involved relatively few Poles." Considerably more numerous were the...