Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940-1945 (review)

Among heretofore neglected dimensions of the social history of the Holocaust, rescue and Jewish survival in specific localities figures prominently. Gunnar S. Paulsson's Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940–1945 is welcome as a pioneering and long overdue work. However, in spite of his skillful quantitative analysis and valuable observations about the phenomenon of survival itself, Paulsson's work fails to address consistently certain major interpretive problems.

The strength of Secret City lies in part in the elaboration of earlier work by a small number of scholars such as Nechama Tec, herself a survivor from Poland. Tec argued that hidden Jews, both adults and children, were not mere passive recipients of help, but took an active role in saving themselves. Secret City consists of observations, sometimes brief, on a series of topics related to Jewish escapees from the Warsaw ghetto, which imprisoned approximately 445,000 people at its peak in 1941. The book presents the stories of the escapees in chronological order from the formation of the Warsaw ghetto in autumn 1940 through the Great Deportation of July–September 1942, the Aktion of January of 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943, the liquidation of the ghetto in summer 1943, and the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944. Paulsson estimates about 28,000 escapees in hiding or under false identity beyond the ghetto walls, a "secret city" within Warsaw. Of the latter figure, Paulsson calculates that just over 60 percent were still alive on the eve of the 1944 uprising, 11,500 (or roughly 40 percent) after the end of the war. Paulsson convincingly argues that roughly 12.5 percent escaped the ghetto in the last three months prior to the ghetto uprising of 18 April 1943.

Paulsson's analysis reveals his passion for understanding events quantitatively, a talent manifested in his discussion of economic aspects of life in wartime Warsaw. However, when it comes to large interpretive problems such as the nature of evasion and the reasons for the relatively small number of the Jewish escapees, the problem of antisemitism in wartime Polish society and its impact on Jewish escapees, and rescue activities and the relationship of the Polish rescuer to his or her own community, many of Paulsson's suppositions are questionable. For example, Paulsson's claim that "the lateness of escape [delay in deciding to escape?], rather than a shortage of hiding-places, explains why 95 percent of the ghetto population did not flee" (p. 232) is problematic, suggesting a failure to grapple with some of the complexities of crossing to and living on the Aryan side. Paulsson overlooks early postwar testimonies of Polish Jews, including those who had grown up in acculturated middle-class households, who were forced to return to the ghetto in summer 1942—during the Great Deportation, the increase in attempted flights, and the return of some escapees to the ghetto caused by the hostile atmosphere on the Aryan side. In its most extreme form, this hostility led some Poles to denounce Jews to the Germans. More typically, it took the form of social pressure on those who sheltered Jews to stop doing so. Postwar rescuer testimonies at the Jewish Historical Institute inform us that such pressure came from neighbors, acquaintances, close friends—even members of the rescuers' families. Many indicate that rescuers had to "isolate themselves from the rest of the world," or even "to disappear, to relocate outside Warsaw."

Paulsson's categories of "untypical" and "typical" also collapse under scrutiny. His claim about the possibilities of escape from the ghetto for more traditional Jews thanks to their connections with the acculturated Jews and Jewish converts to Christianity and therefore to many Poles on the Aryan side (pp. 34–35), is naïve, if not confusing. Perusal of the Ringelblum Archive reveals that acculturated and converted Jews generally were isolated from the rest of the ghetto community.

Paulsson leaves out of the discussion one of the major...