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(More customer reviews)Although there are things in it which are slanted, I find this work a cut above the usual works on this subject (review based on 1987 edition). Engel begins with pre-WWII Polish-Jewish relations. He points out that whatever local Jewish support there existed for the resurrection of the Polish state in 1918, it was largely motivated by a desire to weaken the authority of the tsar (p.23), not out of love for Poland.
Now consider WWII. Engel realizes the fact that, after the Jews, the Poles suffered the most at the hands of the Germans. (pp. 158-159). As for the Polish government in exile, it, according to Engel, sought Jewish support because of a growing disinclination of the British to support the eventual restoration of Poland's eastern frontier, even in 1940. (p. 70). [However, it is doubtful if Polish attitudes towards Jews played any significant role in British policies. All along, Britain saw Russia as a fellow imperial power, and opposed any large Polish state, especially one constructed at Russia's expense.]
There was much fuss in the British press over the exile publication JESTEM POLAKIEM (I Am a Pole). Engel understands the clear distinction that exists between the occasional hostility towards Jews that sometimes arose out of traditional Polishness and Catholicism, and the kind that developed out of Nazism. (p. 76, 243).
The documents Engel cites alone make his book worth reading. One learns, for instance, of reports of local Jewish misconduct against Poles (e. g., p. 168, 291-292). Also, the Polish Blue Police was removed from service by the Germans when it came time to ship Warsaw's Jews to their deaths at Treblinka. (p. 300). In England, Polish Jews commonly avoided military service in the Polish Army (p. 242), making-up charges of anti-Semitism as an excuse.
Engel asserts that, while the Polish government in exile was the first to publicize the mass extermination of Jews in German-occupied Poland (p. 200), it did so because the information was soon to become known from other sources. (p. 201). Apart from impugning Poles and their motives, what makes Engel tacitly suppose that the Poles were supposed to have some sort of monopoly on this information?
All along, Engel seems to be projecting long-postwar developments retroactively upon WWII-related thinking. He accuses the Poles in London of downplaying what they knew about Jewish deaths at the hands of the Germans out of fear that they would overshadow Polish deaths. But, at that time, and unlike the Holocaust dominance in modern western culture, Jewish deaths were not generally seen as special or above those of others. So any such concern would've been weak at best.
In the end, Engel believes that both Poles and Jews were unreasonable in their approaches to each other. (p. 206). This hindered Polish-Jewish rapprochement.
For a sequel to this work, see Facing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-In-Exile and the Jews, 1943-1945. For a published debate between David Engel and Dariusz Stola, see Jews in Independent Poland 1918-1939: Polin (Studies in Polish Jewry , Vol 8).
Click Here to see more reviews about: In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939-1942
The announcement in December 1942 by the Polish government-in-exile that the Germans were attempting to exterminate all Jews in Poland came after much information had reached the West through other sources. The Polish government's action and inaction in releasing the information was the result of the complex weighing by the government's concept of its obligations to the Jewish citizens of Poland.
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