Such a Beautiful Sunny Day…: Jews Seeking Refuge in the Polish Countryside, 1942–1945 by Barbara Engelking (review)

In this book, originally published in Polish in 2011, Barbara Engelking, founding director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw, analyzes the experiences of Polish Jews during the third phase of the Holocaust, when the process of mass murder was mostly complete, and the Germans were "hunting" for survivors. (The ghettos were the first—indirect—phase; the death camps of "Operation Reinhard" were the second—direct—phase). Only in the third phase were the actions of Poles crucial in Jews' chances for survival. Engelking's work is based on testimonies from the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and from Yad Vashem, published memoirs and diaries, and records of postwar trials for collaboration in Nazi crimes.

Methodologically, Engelking was the first Polish researcher since the early 1990s to work from the Jewish victims' perspective. Exclusively focused on the "Jewish side of the coin" (p. 15), she salvages, from the oblivion to which Polish historiography has consigned them, the words of escaping Jews. Common in accounts of the wartime experiences of ethnic Poles, this methodological focus on the use of memoirs and testimony has been rare in Polish Holocaust scholarship. Although Jan Gross's groundbreaking Neighbors (2001; Polish, 2000), on events in Jedwabne during summer 1941, precipitated a national debate, Engelking was the actual pioneer. In her earlier books she used victim testimony—at the time often dismissed by scholars as unreliable—anticipating the contemporary trend towards what Saul Friedländer termed "integrated history."¹ In the present volume, Engelking focuses on the effects of trauma as it was occurring—on Jews under immediate threat of death (more typically scholars focus on postwar psychological effects). Thanks to her approach, we learn about hiding (for example) through the experiences of victims defying death: the fear, desperation, exhaustion, apathy, and even suicidal ideation that plagued them.

Engelking studies psychological confrontations with the suffering of others, and raises methodological questions about how—and why—an idealized image of universal Polish willingness to rescue Jews came to predominate in so much Polish scholarship. Most Polish scholars have consistently ignored the informers who turned Jews, rescuers, and members of the Polish underground over to the Germans. Publications on the rescuers themselves proliferate, furthering a therapeutic national pedagogy but impeding an accurate understanding of Polish-Jewish relations during the war. Alongside other recent works, Engelking's book addresses this gap, introducing first-hand accounts of experiences so traumatic that readers will be obliged rethink many preconceptions.

The book tells an intimate story about neighbors. As in Omer Bartov's recent work on Ukraine, no Germans appear in this drama, even if their actions provide the framework. In Jewish eyes, Engelking points out, the Germans killed systematically but without anger or rage; but as they recall, many Polish peasants hunted down Jewish prey and killed them with frantic passion. The countryside, here understood monolithically as an anthropological category with its mechanisms of group cohesion, afforded secrecy to the murderers after the war, when many perpetrators evaded prosecution. The footnotes often reveal what happened (or did not happen) to the murderers and informers: charges dismissed for lack of evidence, sentences reduced on appeal. The anonymity of the victims made this all the easier.

The author organizes the book into two parts. Part one, "In Hiding," discusses the Jewish experience of evading the Nazis during the last stage of the Holocaust. Chapters depict incidents in which Jews were uprooted, were left searching for shelter, were offered or refused help, were robbed or evicted; she also details their means of earning a living while in hiding, the persistent issue of the perpetrators' greed, and Jewish perceptions of the Polish peasants.

Part two, "Doomed," describes the experiences of those who, failing to find safety, were killed or turned over to the Germans during the "Jew hunts." Historians calculate that about ten percent of Polish Jews attempted to escape the Nazi deportations. Estimating...