Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland by Jan Grabowski (review)

"The trouble was not lack of friends, but the multitude of enemies," wrote a Holocaust survivor in 2013. Although he personally had been rescued by Poles, he added bitterly that "the majority of the Polish population assisted the Germans in their efforts to annihilate the Jews" (p. 4). A school-teacher's 1942 diary recorded a hunt for Jews who had escaped deportation to the death-camps: in the "orgy of murders," alongside Germans and their "Ukrainian and Latvian helpers," "our dear policemen"—Nazi-subservient blue-uniformed Poles—and "normal Poles, accidental volunteers, took part," in hastily formed "citizens' militias." The villagers bought scythes at the hardware store for what they called the "Jew hunt." Asked "how much do they pay you for each captured Jew," embarrassed silence ensued. The answer was: "vodka, sugar, potatoes, oil, but also personal items taken off the victims." The teacher concluded, "People volunteered for this hunt willingly, without any coercion" (p. 53).

Jan Grabowski salutes the "selfless and noble people" (p. 130) who enabled the survival of the roughly 50,000 Jews, including Grabowski's father, who found refuge on German-occupied Poland's "Aryan side." But these were only one fifth of the estimated quarter-million who escaped the General Government's death camps (where two million perished). The other 200,000 died of neglect or violence, mostly murdered furtively, or through capture in "Jew hunts," or through betrayal to blue-uniformed Poles or to Germans. Judiciously weighing non-Jewish aid and antagonism, Grabowski concludes: "If not for the fact that all attempts to save Jews were so deadly dangerous and that helping Jews was considered by many [Gentiles] a sin, or even worse a crime, many of the Jewish refugees could have survived" (p. 172).

Widespread cooperation in capturing Jews is not reducible to German coercion, or to the moral depravity of specific individuals acting for material gain or from ideological, theological, or pathological hatred. If it were, Polish nationalist objections to historians' exposure of Polish Christian Holocaust complicity would be less vehement than those evidenced in rebuttals, both scholarly and journalistic, to Jan Gross's explosive arguments in Neighbors (2001; Polish 2000) and subsequent writings, as well as to Grabowski's own analysis as set forth in the 2011 Polish-language version of Hunt for the Jews.

Right-wing journalism in today's Poland has harshly attacked Grabowski, charging that he aids Nazi-apologists in Germany by allegedly suggesting that the Holocaust was a joint German-Polish enterprise. In response, Grabowski in 2016 won a libel suit against the nationalist-Catholic-antisemitic website Fronda. His voice remains influential in current debates on the controversial amendment to the law governing the state-administered Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), which in February 2018 criminalized on pain of three years' imprisonment allegations that "the Polish Nation or Polish State" participated in the Holocaust. Those in support of the law argue that the "Polish Nation as a whole" (in governing party-chief Jarosław Kaczyński's words) possessed no collective agency, and that under Nazi occupation no Polish state existed. These formulations are proof—as Grabowski and colleagues have persuasively argued—of the debate- and scholarship-suppressing thrust of the law. It is but self-delusion to suppose it will secure justifiable self-protection against "antipolonisms" hurled against the country from polonophobes at home and abroad, as its defenders weakly claim.

As in pre-Holocaust explanations for the incontrovertible existence of aggressive, violent, and criminal antisemites in Poland, so still today historians convinced of a fundamental national innocence identify murderers and collaborators as "scum" such as, regrettably, any society inevitably harbors. But that Poles—in Grabowski's study, Polish villagers in Dąbrowa Tarnowska county in former Galicia—should view protection of their Jewish neighbors from Nazi murder as sin and crime challenges national self-understanding in ways highly threatening for many Poles.

Confining his...