My Brother's Keeper? Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust (review)

148 SHOFAR society. After applying it to conditions in the United States, for example, he concludes that it has several of the predisposing conditions but not the total cultural pattern. While it can be argued that Staub fails to adequately address several critical factors-such as the attributes of victims which render them likely targets, or the role of social institutions other than government, such as the dominant religious group or the educational system-he nonetheless makes a significant contribution to the comprehensive understanding of the roots of group violence. Staub offers us a multi-textured psychological understanding of genocide and group violence generally, as well as some concrete proposals for promoting caring, connection, and nonaggression. The book is well written and well organized; largely devoid of psychological jargon, yet conceptually rich, it should be easily comprehended by all. While it is written from the analytical perspective of a scholar, it is illuminated by the humane spirit of a man who, as a Hungarian Jew, experienced the horrors of the Holocaust. It is a provocative book from which scholars, students and the general public can benefit greatly. Pearl Oliner Altruistic Personality and Prosocial Behavior Institute Humboldt State University My Brother's Keeper? Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust, edited by Antony Polonsky. London: Routledge, in association with the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies, Oxford, 1990. 242 pp. £30.00. The Holocaust left the Jews with bitter legacies and memories aplenty. But with no group, not even the Germans, has the sense of anger and betrayal been so strong as in Jewish feelings about the Poles. This may seem paradoxical and unfair, since although most of the mass murders Of Jews took place on Polish soil it was not the Poles who carried them out, nor was there Polish collaboration in Nazi crimes on anything like the scale of the Ukrainians and Lithuanians. But it is precisely the fact that the Poles-even the bitterest antisemites among them-saw themselves as victims of the German occupation that gives a special quality to the issue of Polish-Jewish relations during the Shoah. As Antony Polonsky puts it in his fine introduction to the present volume, "in the rest of Europe, those right-wing groups which had espoused anti-semitism had been discredited by their collaboration with the Nazis. In Poland, their anti-Nazi record was, for the most part, impeccable...." Polish wartime antisemitism thus retained its patriotic aura, Volume 9, No.3 Spring 1991 149 a link not only with the prewar past with its pogroms, anti-Jewish boycotts, ghetto-benches in the universities, and all the rest, but also with the persecution of Jews in postwar Communist Poland, from the Kielce murders of 1946 to the vicious "anti-Zionist" campaign of 1968. Even apart from the antisemites , the usual Polish line, among Communists and non-Communists alike, was that everything possible had been done to help and save the Jews (who had done little to save themselves) and that the conscience of Poland, itself a martyr of the wartime years, was clear. On the other hand, a widespread Jewish belief persisted that many, perhaps most, Poles were pleased that Hitler had done their dirty work for them, and that the Polish response had at best been one of indifference and at worst one of blackmail and denunciation. Under these circumstances, a balanced and dispassionate examination of the responsibility of the Poles for the murder of their Jewish fellow-citizens, who numbered some 10 percent of the population in 1939, could not be expected. The situation began to change in the 19705. Interest in the Polish-Jewish past revived as a function of the gradual liberalization of Polish society, and inevitably wartime issues arose as well. Particularly significant was the appearance in January 1978, in the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, of an article by Professor Jan Blonski, of the University of Cracow, entitled "The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto." (The reference is to Czeslaw Milosz's wellknown poem, "A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto," written in Warsaw in 1943.) In this article Blonski, recalling the long history of Polish antisemitism and particularly the indifference of many Poles to the fate...