Poland's Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present Review

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(More customer reviews)With the partitions and the Nazi and Soviet occupations, no other European nation has suffered as Poland has, which makes it extremely difficult for Polish Catholics to admit to any malevolence of their own.
Polish monarchs welcomed Western Europe's Jews to Poland in the Middle Ages but this was not for altruistic reasons. The nobility desperately needed the Jews' acumen in finance and trade. Over the centuries, anti-Jewish sentiment grew in Poland, fueled by economic rivalry and the Polish Catholic Church.
At the end of the nineteenth century, a growing number of Poles envisioned an independent Poland whose citizens would be exclusively ethnic Polish and Catholic. This "Poland for Poles" ethno-nationalism, spearheaded by Roman Dmowski and his National Democratic Party, tapped into centuries-old, popular anti-Jewish sentiment. By the 1930's, anti-Semitism was not only prevalent among the masses, it was becoming increasingly institutionalized throughout independent Poland.
There were boycotts of Jewish businesses, restrictions on Jews attending university, segregation of Jews in classrooms, increasing Catholic-on-Jew violence, restrictions on Jewish religious practices passed into law, discussions of deportations, hiring and promotion restrictions in the public sector, etc.
Michlic ably examines the rise of institutionalized anti-Semitism in Poland in the 19th and 20th centuries. There can be no arguing with the extremely well-researched contents of her presentation. This book would be quite an education for Polish and Polish American conservatives, who deny anti-Semitism most zealously, and hold to it most dearly.
The editor of a Polish American weekly recently proclaimed that "Poles are not anti-Semitic" (Am-Pol Eagle, 4/8/2010), pointing to the thousands of Polish Catholics who participated in rescuing Jews during the Holocaust. The ignorance of this argument is beyond comprehension although it is widely disseminated throughout Polonia, even by academics who should know better. It's quite obvious that anyone who holds to this opinion has an extremely parochial understanding of Polish history, 1918-1945.
Polish chauvinists constantly point to the fact that Poland leads other former Nazi-occupied countries in the number of Righteous Among Nations awarded by Yad Vashem (6195 as of 6/12/10) without acknowledging that half of Europe's Jews lived in the country at the beginning of the Second World War. In reply to Poles who purposely misinterpret the number of Righteous by country for their own purposes, Yad Vashem states on its website, "The number of rescuers in the different countries depends on a multitude of factors and therefore does not necessarily indicate the attitude of the local population to the Jews and their murder. Moreover, in view of the great difference in circumstances between different countries and regions, one should proceed with great caution when making such comparisons."


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In this provocative and insightful book, Joanna Beata Michlic interrogates the myth of the Jew as Poland's foremost internal “threatening other,” harmful to Poland, its people, and to all aspects of its national life. This is the first attempt to chart new theoretical directions in the study of Polish-Jewish relations in the wake of the controversy over Jan Gross’s book Neighbors. Michlic analyzes the nature and impact of anti-Jewish prejudices on modern Polish society and culture, tracing the history of the concept of the Jew as the threatening other and its role in the formation and development of modern Polish national identity based on the matrix of exclusivist ethnic nationalism. In the late nineteenth century and throughout the greater part of the twentieth, exclusivist ethnic nationalism predominated over inclusive civic nationalism in Polish political culture and society. Only in the aftermath of the political transformation of 1989 has Polish civic nationalism gradually gained predominance. As civic nationalism has become more assertive, Polish scholars have begun to unearth and critically examine the legacies of Polish anti-Semitism and other anti-minority prejudices. Michlic conducted extensive research in Polish, British, and Israeli archives for this book. Poland’s Threatening Other contributes to modern Jewish and Polish history, the study of nationalism, and to a new school of critical inquiry into the nature of anti-Jewish prejudices. Download a list of textual corrections (PDF) here.

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Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940: Truth, Justice and Memory (BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies) Review

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(More customer reviews)Sanford presents a wealth of information on the events leading up to and including the Katyn massacre and the decades-long coverup (in both Communist and western nations) of Soviet responsibility. Ironically, many past Soviet dissidents had acknowledged Soviet guilt for this crime (p. 213). Interestingly, evidence from Luftwaffe photos has recently become public that adds to the proof that the burials, and hence the massacre, must have predated the German invasion of the USSR (pp. 145-146).
Some 98.1% of the victims were ethnic Poles (p. 54). However, the "Poles" may include around 900 heavily-Polonized or secularized individuals of Jewish origin. Physical evidence recovered in the 1990s exhumations confirms the fact that a significant fraction of Polish victims fought back against their murderers (p. 108). Katyn was no emotional spur-of-the-moment murder. Instead, it resembled the acts of the Nazis: "The Soviet 1940 massacre, though, shares one fundamental feature with the trainloads of Jewish and Roma victims brought to be exterminated in Auschwitz and other death camps on industrial lines in batches according to a carefully thought out and scientifically organized method. The element of planned, impersonal and unemotional control predominated even though the chosen Soviet method of execution was about as direct and personal a relationship between executioner and victim as one could get." (p. 95). Sanford doesn't mention the fact that nearly 2 million of the 5-6 million murdered Jews also died through the "personal" means of being shot (by Einsatzgruppen, other German units, and their Ukrainian and Baltic collaborators).

Sanford quotes Neil Ascherson, who called Katyn "an act of selective genocide against a part of Poland's national elite, closely parallel to Hitler's order to exterminate the Polish intellectual class". (p. 83). Sanford himself concludes that: "It also suggests that the massacre was not aimed primarily to eliminate Poland's officer corps, so much as to weaken its general leadership elite." (p. 52). Finally, Louis FitzGibbon called Katyn: "The worst single unpunished crime in history." (p. vii).
Consider the progressive betrayal of Poland by the British and Americans, culminating at Teheran and Yalta. Unlike those who rationalize this event, Sanford acknowledges the fact that there was no danger of a Soviet-Nazi separate peace (p. 163), and that the Soviet puppet state was not a foregone conclusion given Red Army successes: "On the other hand, Western failure to tie Stalin down over the political future of Eastern Europe during his period of military weakness meant that Roosevelt had no cards left to play at the end-of-war conferences apart from a simple-minded banking on Stalin's goodwill." (p. 168)


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The Soviet massacre of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn and in other camps in 1940 was one of the most notorious incidents of the Second World War. The truth about the massacres was long suppressed, both by the Soviet Union, and also by the United States and Britain who wished to hold together their wartime alliance with the Soviet Union. This informativebook examines the details of this often overlooked event, shedding light on what took place especially in relation to the massacres at locations other than Katyn itself. It discusses how the truth about the killings was hidden, how it gradually came to light and why the memory of the massacres has long affected Polish-Russian relations.

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Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture (Jews of Poland) Review

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(More customer reviews)Among other things, the Talmud records edited discussions between rabbinic scholars on legal and literary-interpretive topics. Two particular rabbi-scholars frequently appear in tandem, commenting and responding to each other's opinion. These two are named Rava, and Abbaye. One day in Talmud class my Talmud teacher, a devout Polish Jew, commented that "Rava and Abbaye go together like ham and eggs". I saw the jaw of one of my classmates literally drop, nearly hit the floor. "But Rabbi", he stuttered, "what do you know of ham and eggs?". My teacher replied "I never tasted them, but I've heard they go together well". So too Poles and Jews. They seem to go together. Poles and Jews. Jews and Poles. But this taste is bitter, complicated, with a lingering confused finish on the palate.
At least they used to go together. These days, Jews and Palestinians are edging their way into the spot traditionally reserved for Poles and Jews. Israel and the Zionist lobby are making sure of that. Where were Poles will be Palestinians. And some day, sadly, tragically, someone will have to write a book about Jewish-Palestinian relations, stereotypes, etc., and that writer will be called names, variously and such as "anti-Semite", "self hater", "Jew lover", "Zionist spy", "traitor", etc., names such as Danusha Goska will be called for writing "Bieganski".
In "Bieganski" Goska writes a serious book, treading on sacred, crushed bone-, ash- and gold teeth- filled ground, and our journey with her, not surprisingly, is frequently unpleasant. The sites she guides us to in the courageous "Bieganski" are illuminating, and shocking: amazing quotes from current newspaper articles, from the New York Times and Washington Post etc., quoting esteemed, mostly WASP American scholars and commentators saying the most outrageous, nasty things about Poles, Bohemians, Hungarians, 'Bohunks', describing them as brutish protohumans who can only be assumed of eating their own while smacking greasy bulging lips with stupid, sated Slavic simian smiles. Goska points us, with sniper-scope accuracy, to the systematic, disgusting, and pervasive anti-Polish bias in contemporary Hollywood film, literature, and popular major media outlets, television, and newspapers.
But the stuff we read in "Bieganski" is not esoteric; this racism is as mainstream as ham and eggs, as ordinary as Rava and Abbaye doing their intellectual joustings across the centuries of Talmudic discourse. Yet we can barely keep our breakfast down; we want to vomit up that ham, those eggs in disgust. Revulsion. How could we accept such trayf, such unkosher hatred?

And Jews, how do Jews feel about Poles? "Bieganski" incorporates unusual interviews Goska personally conducted with American Jews, speaking off-the-cuff about their stereotypes of Poles. Jews? Poles? We feel what we were taught, and what has been reinforced and encouraged by our WASP overlords and by our Jewish, anti-Polish dayschool teachers; Poles are subhuman, they are fed antisemitism in their mother's milk, we are superior to them. We go to visit modern Poland to see how poor and stupid and undeveloped the Poles are, and to see the Nazi death camps on Polish soil, and we know that the Poles are undeveloped and poor and stupid in cosmic punishment for the so-called "Polish Holocaust", which was a Nazi Holocaust conducted on occupied Polish soil, and which targeted Catholic Poles as much as it targeted Jews. But of course the Poles are to blame. And the mass murder of Poles, Polish Catholics, by Nazis from the west, and by Soviets from the East, is completely ignored, relegated to the ash heap of history, irrelevant, unworthy of mention.
So why will author Dr. Goska likely need to hire a bodyguard now? Why, for writing "Bieganski" will she be reviled, by Jews, by Poles, by African Americans? Why is it that no mainstream publisher would touch her book "Bieganski" for fear that they might lose support from generous financial backers? Why will Goska now be labelled, variously, as an "anti-Semite", a "Polish apologist", a "right-wing whacko", a "racist", a "self-hating Pole", a "Jew lover" and a "Zionist spy", all at the same time?
You'll just have to read the book and figure it out for yourself. It will be an exhilarating ride, eye-opening, jaw-dropping, intellectually rich and deep yet smooth as a Cuban cigar with a glass of dark, dark rum. "Bieganski". Mark my words. This one's a keeper. You'll be talking about it with your friends for years. "Bieganski". An exploration of the brute within.


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In this controversial study, Goska exposes one stereotype of Poles and other Eastern Europeans. In the ''Bieganski'' stereotype, Poles exhibit the qualities of animals. They are strong, stupid, violent, fertile, anarchic, dirty, and especially hateful in a way that more evolved humans are not. Their special hatefulness is epitomized by their Polish anti-Semitism. Bieganski discovers this stereotype in the mainstream press, scholarship, film, in Jews' self-definition, and in responses to the Holocaust. Bieganski's twin is Shylock, the stereotype of the crafty, physically inadequate, moneyed Jew. The final chapters of the book are devoted to interviews with American Jews, which reveal that Bieganski and Shylock are both alive and well among those who have little knowledge of Poles or Poland.

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When God Looked the Other Way: An Odyssey of War, Exile, and Redemption Review

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(More customer reviews)The teaching of history is often distorted by selective presentation of past events. Virtually everyone has heard of the 5-6 million Jews killed by the Germans. Few outside Polish circles have a clue about the fact that 2-3 million gentile Poles were also murdered by the Germans, and a few hundred thousand by the Soviets--first as Poland's sworn enemy and then as an "ally". While Churchill and Roosevelt were dilly-dallying with "Uncle Joe" Stalin, he was still murdering Poles and executing his plans to deprive "liberated" Poland from her rightful independence, freedom, and sovereignity. The western powers shamelessly disregarded the Atlantic Charter and betrayed the Poles--who all along had been fighting on their side on just about every front, and who had played a significant, if not decisive, role in preventing the Luftwaffe from achieving air supremacy over the English skies as a prelude to the planned German invasion (Operation Sea Lion).
This work provides an absorbing personal account of the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles by the Soviet Union following the German-Soviet conquest of Poland in 1939. Wes Adamczyk, then a boy of 7, was to lose his father in the infamous Katyn Massacre, and his entire family was uprooted and sent to a living death in Kazakhstan. He was one of the lucky few to be released and to eventually find his way to a new life in the United States. Decades later, he fulfilled his wish to visit the site of his father's murder near Smolensk, Russia.
The reader is exposed to the brutality of the Soviet police as they ransack the Adamczyk home, destroy objects related to Polish patriotism, and herd the family ("enemies of the people") into overcrowded trains for the fateful trip east. Every day becomes a battle for survival. They are near starvation. However, individual Kazakhs and Russians show friendship towards the Poles. The young Adamczyk befriends Mr. Petrovitch on a fishing boat. The moving account tells how the elderly Russian teaches the boy the truth about Communism. It is lies on top of lies on top of lies. In fact, the continued spying by the Soviet police on the captive Poles does not stem from the fact that they suspect that the Poles may escape or revolt. The spying comes from the fear that the locals may learn the truth about the outside world from the Poles--that the non-
Communist world is not rotten, and that the Soviet Union is no workers' paradise.
Nazi Germany turns against its erstwhile Soviet ally, creating a chance for the Poles, consigned to eventual death from starvation, overwork, and disease, to escape the Gulag. Negotiations "succeed" in securing the release of captive Poles. But the Soviets drag their feet, and only a fraction of still-living captive Poles end up being released. The Adamczyk family has to stage a near-escape adventure to reach Iran. The squalor of the just-freed Poles is indescribable. Thousands die right there, including Wes Adamczyk's mother--ironically just a short time after having finally left the clutches of the Soviet hell.
Tens of thousands of previously-captured Polish officers are found to be conspicuously and unexpectedly missing, and the Soviets say, "They all escaped to Manchuria". As time drags on, the Adamczyks realize the fate of their father and the remainder of the POWs. The Soviets don't admit responsibility for the Katyn Massacre until 1990. The long cover-up by western governments is little better than the decades-long Soviet one. The west needed a second coverup to cover its first coverup of the conspiracy of silence about this heinous Soviet crime.
The Adamczyks, like all surviving Poles, get a cruel blow when they learn that Roosevelt and Churchill have betrayed their faithful ally Poland by giving away eastern Poland to the Russians, and allowed a Communist puppet state to be forced on the rest of "liberated" Poland. In a sense, all of the Polish sufferings and sacrifices turn out to have been in vain. The Adamczyks, and millions of other Poles, have no home to return to. The only "happy ending" is a new life in America.


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"Final Solution": Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jew Review

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(More customer reviews)A most excellent insight. The author deals mainly with the period September 1939 to the Wannsee meeting in January 1942, making use of new material which has come to light. He illustrates with meticulous attention to detail how those entrusted with the grisly task - Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann, Frank etc - moved inexorably to their final position of Jewish extermination. The problems they had to deal with en route, including opposition from those who wanted to keep the Jews alive for indefinite slave labor and the economic expectancy of those Germans recently moved from "liberated" territories back to the Reich, are recounted in all their complex detail. The final chapter gives a selection of pertinent remarks from the murderers themselves. I have never read a more incisive and readable account of the incremental steps leading up to the Final Solution.

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How did it come about that a modern European state in the middle of the twentieth century planned and carried out the industrially organized mass murder of six million Jews, male and female, adults and children?Making extensive use of Russian, German, and Polish archives, Aly has provided the most exact and detailed reconstruction of the "Final Solution" yet achieved. As well as looking at the ideological imperative in the Nazi state to "solve the Jewish question" and at Hitler's own role, Aly investigates the actions of those running the Reich Security Headquarters in Berlin and of those numerous lesser figures on the ground who were in the eye of the storm, grappling with the planning failures inherent in Nazi resettlement plans and experiencing mounting difficulties in trying to be rid of "their" Jews. Aly illustrates, through the evidence he builds into an overall mosaic, the lunacy of Nazi race policy, and the variety of agencies that went into the gradual shaping of a policy of all-out genocide.

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Destroy Warsaw: Hitler's Punishment, Stalin's Revenge Review

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(More customer reviews)One especially valuable aspect of this book is its detailed introduction to the beginnings of the Polish Underground. Concrete strategy was planned even before the German guns of 1939 had fallen silent.
During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, even Polish firemen tried to help the doomed Jews: "The flames leaped high above the twelve-foot wall covered with broken glass, and firemen in gleaming helmets were called to the scene. But when they aimed their hoses at the burning buildings across the wall, an SS officer waving a pistol shouted at them to stop wasting water. They were there not to extinguish the burning Jewish part of the city but to prevent the flames from spreading to the `Aryan' side of Warsaw. Nearby factories produced uniforms and spare parts for German army vehicles. The firemen stood there, useless and helpless, together with a crowd of silent Polish onlookers, numb with horror and fear. Several women wept. Then Lithuanian police in black uniforms arrived and told the crowd to move on." (p. 55). Borowiec's testimony, an eyewitness one (p. 66), adds refutation to the oft-repeated Polonophobic innuendo of Poles cheering the burning of the Jews.
Borowiec was 14 years old at the time of the Warsaw Uprising. He writes much about the first days of the Uprising and the premature shootouts that occurred prior to 5 PM, August 1. This made it virtually impossible to coordinate the first planned actions of the Uprising, and it ruined whatever chances the Poles had of taking the Germans by surprise at their strongly-defended positions (bridges, etc.). The Poles' arms had been depleted by the actions of "Operation Tempest" further east. German armored units played a major role in stifling the Uprising in certain parts of Warsaw in its first days (p. 94)
As if writing a rebuke to those who labeled the Uprising a folly, Borowiec quotes from an Underground newspaper: "There are no regrets and no fear. And we are determined to die in the Polish Thermopylae, in the ruins of our city, rather than abandon the independent life and the values gained in the general enthusiasm." (p. 181)
Some 40,000 Varsovians were taken to concentration camps (p. 177), in violation of the capitulation agreement. The Germans removed 33,000 railway wagons of loot before burning Warsaw's remaining buildings (p. 178). The AK continued to fight the Germans after the Uprising before being disbanded on January 19, 1945 (p. 181).


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Written by a survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, this book examines the background of the ill-fated 63-day uprising that pitted poorly armed Polish civilians and volunteers against Hitler's well-armed and veteran forces.

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Your Life Is Worth Mine: How Polish Nuns Saved Hundreds of Jewish Children in German-Occupied Poland, 1939-1945 Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a great book. The author did a very comphrehensive research, every argument is supported by numerous sources. I enjoyed it a lot! But for a person who is not a scholar or not familiar with the aspects of war in Poland the best it to start reading the book from appendix - with real memories of nuns about children and children about being hidden in the monastery. After that read the chapters. In this way you would have a better understanding of the author's arguments.
I was crying while reading some fragments. The book is wonderful, very touchy. It is a comprehensive historical outlook into many aspects of war in Poland.


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The story -- never told before -- of how Polish nuns in World War II saved hundreds of Jewish lives in German-occupied Poland. Forty-nine convents and orphanages were involved in protecting the children and the most authoritative estimates indicate 1200 Jewish young people survived the war in these shelters.

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Sparks Amidst the Ashes: The Spiritual Legacy of Polish Jewry Review

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(More customer reviews)Whether or not one agrees with everything he says, one can feel enlightened and uplifted by Sherwin's refreshingly-different and generally-balanced analysis of Polish Jewry and Polish-Jewish relations. He writes: "Indeed, the contemporary view of Poland as a land endemically inhospitable to Jews runs sharply counter to much of historical experience." (p. 55). And, it turns out, contrary to the claims of Jan Thomas Gross, far from all Poles attempted to erase all memories of Jews: "The Jews of Makow are gone...The cemetery was destroyed by the Nazis. The tombstones were used for construction. Remnants of these tombstones still pave parts of the road near the bus depot. After the war, the Poles of Makow salvaged what they could of the shattered tombstones and built a monument to the Jews of Makow." (p. 76).
Sherwin soundly repudiates the common notion that Poland is little more than a giant cemetery of Jews (p. 6). His travels throughout Poland uncover a surprisingly-large remnant of Jewish artifacts. Much of his book consists of detailed descriptions of the achievements in philosophy and religion of past Polish Jews, especially by the Hasidim. His entire work has a flavor of mysticism.
Rabbi Sherwin believes that most of American Jewry has turned to a lachrymose view of history (p. 87), forgetting this rich tradition and replacing it with poor substitutes: "The `myth' of death/rebirth, Holocaust/Israel tends to replace belief in God as the foundation of Jewish faith...Concerning American Jews, a number of Jewish scholars have observed that faith in Israel and in the Jewish people has replaced or superseded belief in God...The ideology of survivalism, coupled with the dual dogmatic pillars of Jewish civil religion of Holocaust-destruction and Israel-rebirth, folded nicely into an increasingly secularized Jewish self-identity." (pp. 85-86). Sherwin goes as far as suggesting that American Jewry is in danger of eventually self-destructing through the neglect of its heritage (p. 87, 90, 100).
Sherwin repeatedly stresses the reciprocity of Polish-Jewish prejudices, mentioning, for example, the Jewish belief that Christians are idol worshippers (p. 18). He also comments: "Perhaps the Jewish stereotype that Poles are anti-Semites was as problematic as the Polish stereotype that Jews are atheists and communists." (p. 32). But why do Polish anti-Semitism and Jewish Polonophobia persist? Sherwin believes that both Poles and Jews retain unexamined views of each other that have been handed down two or more generations from their ancestors, and usually without personally knowing anyone of the other group (pp. 129-130).
Sherwin freely acknowledges what many Poles had long suspected: "In the popular American and Israeli understanding of the Holocaust, the Poles all but replace the Germans as the perpetrators of the Holocaust, as the archenemies of the Jews throughout the thousand-year Jewish presence in Poland." (p. 84). He cites a visit to Auschwitz (p. 82) during which Israeli students were all but told that Poles were co-responsible with the Nazi Germans for the Holocaust, and suggests that this was being done not with the direct intention of denigrating Poles but for the forging of a post-Holocaust Jewish identity. (Even so, the outcome is identical.)
Sherwin criticizes what he considers the exaggerations of Polish aid to Jews during the Holocaust, but unfortunately makes no attempt to analyze the extent of this help. He also elaborates on the seemingly-paradoxical fact that prewar Polish anti-Semites often played a major role in the wartime rescue and hiding of Jews (p. 129).
Sherwin addresses the reality and limits of the Zydokomuna (Jewish Communism): "In this regard, it must be admitted that both for idealistic and self-serving reasons, proportionately more Jews than non-Jews were involved with the communist powers. But the popular Polish perception that Jews outnumbered non-Jews in the party or the state apparatus is patently false."(p. 136).
Sherwin recognizes the fact that contemporary Jewish attitudes may actually give rise to what may be called "secondary anti-Semitism": "However, to be sure, the pervasive Jewish stereotype of all Poles as anti-Semites may well encourage young Poles initially devoid of anti-Jewish sentiments to become anti-Semites." (p. 135). He also writes: "While the `competitive martyrology' of Jews and Poles results in nothing except the amplification of tensions, few Jews have acknowledged the devastating impact that the Nazi occupation had upon the non-Jewish population of Poland. (p. 133).
Sherwin includes various tidbits of little-known information, including the strongly philo-Semitic orientation of Kosciuszko (p. 143), and the fact that Hasidic dress is actually modified Polish clothing (p. 101). Rabbi Moses Isserles of Krakow once taught that philosophy originated with the Jews, and was only later copied by the Greeks (p. 37).
While not written for this purpose, some old rabbinical teachings discussed by Byron L. Sherwin find correspondence to Christian thinking. For example, the teachings of the Rabbi of Kotzk (Kock?) on the good works produced by genuine faith (p. 122) recount the Reformation teachings of good works as a fruit of genuine faith. Musar's warnings against an excessively mechanical obedience to the Law (p. 120), and that to the detriment of moral and ethical virtue, are reminiscent of the teachings of Jesus Christ against the Pharisees. And, contrary to the common view that the Jewish conception of God is one where He is less personal than in the Christian conception of God, Sherwin cites some Hasidic teachings (p. 114-115) that point to a very intimate human-God communion, even using such terms for God as "our little Father", "my darling", and God being not in heaven as much as "In our guts." A superb book!

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For hundreds of years, Poland served as the epicenter of Jewish life. As a result of the Holocaust, though, Poland has become a "Jewish Atlantis." Yet, the majority of Jews in the world today have their genealogical roots in the historical lands of Poland. In this book, Sherwin demonstrates how the unprecedented works of intellect and spirit produced during the Jewish "Golden Age" in Poland can provide contemporary Jews with the spiritual and intellectual resources required to ensure Jewish continuity in the present and future. Sherwin introduces us to the vast range of mystical speculation, evocative stories, talmudic dialectics, theological ideas, and social realities that were muted by the destruction of Polish Jewry during the Holocaust. Sherwin critiques the tendency among contemporary Jews to disregard the precious legacy bequeathed by Polish Jewry, and presents a plan for re-creating Jewish life after the Holocaust that draws from the wisdom of the spiritual magnates and from the communal experience that characterized Jewish life in Poland. Sherwin concludes with a controversial proposal for the future of Polish-Jewish relations.

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Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is a first-hand account of the failure of the Christian morality at a time when what it preaches was so desperately needed. In a wider sense, it's an insight into the human condition, exposing the fact that civilization is but a thin veneer that disappears so readily when disaster, natural or man-made, strikes. This is the story of the hordes of Polish racists, thugs and profiteers who used the opportunity of the Nazi persecution of the Jews to shamelessly prey on the victims, often in ways that were no less horrific than what the Nazis themselves concocted. This is the story of the tens of millions of Poles who turned the blind eye to these atrocities. More so, this is the story of the coward Polish government who fled to London, and while claiming to still be the legitimate power, occupied itself with discussing how to 'cleanse' the Polish land of the handful of its remaining Jewish citizens when the war ends instead of offering them even a token of assistance, just moments before they perish in the gas chambers of Treblinka. The only exception to the doom and gloom in the Polish political circles were the Communists, who readily took the Jews into their underground cells and provided a few badly needed weapons for the ghetto resistance fighters. Food for thought...
Obviously the author, in spite of his desire for scientific accuracy, was not an 'unbiased observer'. He tends to focus on the evil, even though he does pay homage to the few righteous Poles who put their life on the line to save fellow human beings. But who could demand balance from someone struggling for survival in the doomed ghetto?
This manuscript was intended serve as notes for a book to be written after the war. Unfortunately, the author, after somehow surviving the liquidation of the ghetto, did not escape the hand of the very evil souls that he describes, and was ultimately betrayed and murdered. The editors did not see fit to edit the text, and instead only provided extensive footnotes. This is a mixed blessing, because the text is raw, full of repetitions and occasionally hard to read.
The English translation is awkward and at times misleading. Scores of misspelled Polish names escaped the proofreaders. Many Hebrew words are so badly transliterated that even a Hebrew speaker is having trouble recognizing them. The legacy of Ringelblum deserves better. Nevertheless, for those who want to learn about the period from authentic documents rather than sugar-coated Hollywood movies, this is a very engaging book.


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Did the Children Cry: Hitler's War Against Jewish and Polish Children, 1939-1945 Review

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This book is known less for its content than for the controversy that has surrounded it. Nominated for the Janusz Korczak Literary Award, it was subsequently beset with a flurry of Jewish protests. After a spate of bad publicity, and the threat of legal action, the award was belatedly presented--but without any ceremony.
One reason give for challenging the Janusz Korczak Literary Award is the transparently bogus charge that this book "sanitizes" Polish behavior. Even a cursory reading of it reveals just the opposite. Lukas criticizes Polish conduct many times. For example, he discusses Polish-German collaboration (e. g., pp. 141-142), even citing an Israeli study that estimates that there were 7,000 Polish collaborators in all (p. 152; which, incidentally, means that about 1 in every 4,000 Poles had been a collaborator). Another reason given for challenging the Janusz Korczak Literary Award is the claim that this book is "borderline anti-Semitic". Indeed it is--if one understands anti-Semitism to be any criticism of Jewish conduct under any circumstances. Lukas, for example, points out that Jews were commonly prejudiced against Poles just as Poles were commonly prejudiced against Jews (p. 152). He also gives examples of Jewish selfishness against fellow needy Jews at the same time that he gives examples of Polish selfishness against fellow needy Poles (p. 28). Lukas also cites a Jewish historian who faults the method that Jewish organizations used to recover Jewish children after the war (p. 220). Is all this anti-Semitism? Let the reader decide.
And, far from overstating the extent of Polish assistance to Jews, Lukas quotes a wide range of estimates (both Polish and Jewish) of how many Poles were involved in such aid (pp. 155-157). Lukas also provides figures for the deaths in some of the extermination camps. The collective death toll at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka ranges from 1.65 million to 2.54 million (p. 230).

The genocide against Jews is well known, but Lukas makes it clear that Poles were also victims of genocide. The genocide of Poles does not spark the imagination as much as the industrial-scale gassing and cremation of Jews by the millions, but it was no less real. Heinrich Himmler stated (p. 17) that all Poles will disappear from the world and that all Poles will be destroyed. Martin Bormann (p. 21) asserted that Slavs should be kept alive only as long as they are needed as forced laborers. 2-3 million Polish gentiles, including roughly half of the Polish intelligentsia, were already murdered. Of course, since the Polish population was much larger than the Jewish one, the genocide of Poles had to be a long-term German project, with greater emphasis placed on passive genocide, at least until Germany won the war. Hitler spoke of reducing the Slavs' fertility and, by 1942, the Polish birth rate had fallen by 80% relative to its prewar level (p. 87). SS General Odilo Globocnik noted that the mass killings of Poles and their replacement with German colonists meant that Poles would be gradually crushed "economically and biologically"(p. 107). Heinrich Himmler wanted the General Government (German-occupied central Poland) to be completely Germanized within twenty years (p. 107).
Throughout this book, Lukas consistently relates the experiences of Polish and Jewish children to each other. Both, for instance, experienced the horror of the German conquest of Poland. Both experienced a breakdown of morality caused by the privations of the German occupation. Both learned how to lie and steal to survive. Both quickly learned not to trust anybody. Both were in German concentration camps. Both were used in sadistic experiments conducted by Dr. Mengele. Both experienced sexual assaults (including homosexual assaults) by German guards and officials (pp. 95-96, 202). Both were sent to secret schools in their respective communities. Both took part in clandestine cultural activities. Both enjoyed the childrens' books written by Polish Jew Janusz Korczak. Both held odd jobs to help their parents. Both were forced to work in Germany as forced laborers under appalling conditions. Both were involved in the rescue of their compatriots. Both served in their respective guerilla movements. Both had to watch their parents die, and both experienced death at the hands of the Germans in large numbers. Both were commonly left orphaned. Both experienced difficulties in locating still-surviving relatives (with postwar Germans commonly resisting attempts to identify kidnapped Polish children: pp. 211-214). Finally, both experienced adjustment problems after the war. For example, both Polish and Jewish children commonly internalized the German hatred directed against their respective nationalities, scorning their respective heritages, and sometimes actually believing that their nationalities had deserved their sufferings.
Let us return to the contrived fuss surrounding the Janusz Korczak Literary Award. The reader can clearly see that this book does not fit with the template of modern thinking--where the genocide of Jews is given disproportionate attention, is accorded a special term (Holocaust), and any attempt to compare it with any other genocidal event is called "relativizing the Holocaust." In contrast to all of this, Lukas consistently juxtaposes the experiences of Polish and Jewish children. Perhaps that is what motivated the outburst of hostility to this book. So long as Jewish sufferings are thought to be higher than those of others, or at least more worthy of public attention than those of others, specifically the Poles, any such juxtaposition will be unbearable, especially for a book that is to receive any special recognition.



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Based on eye-witness accounts, interviews, and prodigious research by the author, who is an expert in the field, this is a unique contribution to the literature of World War II, and a most compelling account of German inhumanity towards children in occupied Poland.

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The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale Review

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(More customer reviews)The title of this review consists of words I don't use too often. But this is a masterpiece that deserved its Pulitzer Prize and then some. What makes Spiegelman's work so moving is the juxtaposition of a supposedly lighthearted form, the comic strip, with the greatest evil and suffering in human history, the Holocaust. Spiegelman's parents miraculously survived the concentration camps, being among very few survivors, getting by on luck and (in the case of Spiegelman's father) a lot of resourcefulness. This is their story, from the point of view of the father, who lost nearly all of his relatives. With the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats, this work pulls no punches in describing the true horrors of the Holocaust, and Spiegelman's minimalist artwork makes the images all the more disturbing. You don't get this kind of emotion, terror, and brutal honesty in standard written accounts of the period. But underneath the direct suffering of the Holocaust, the true theme of this book is the lasting effects on the Spiegelman family, including the father's lasting agony and the mental illness shared by both Spiegelman's mother and himself, who hadn't even been born yet. The strained relationship between father and son are the true heart of this tremendous work. I haven't been this blown away by a work of literature in a very long time, if ever.

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A son struggles to come to terms with the horrific story of his parents and their experiences during the Holocaust and in postwar America, in an omnibus edition of Spiegelman's two-part, Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller. 25,000 first printing.

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When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland Review

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(More customer reviews)"When Nationalism Began to Hate" is an excellent book. The title is a bit sensationalistic and a bit misleading.
WNBtH is a history of eighteenth century Polish nationalism. It is an attempt to answer the question: Why is it that decent Poles, and certainly decent Polish Catholics, in the 1880s, could not and did not publicly support an anti-Semitic brand of nationalism, and yet by the 1930s, this had changed -- Polish Nationalism and Polish Catholicism were both often openly anti-Semitic?
What happened?
Porter takes the reader on a journey through the tragedies of Polish history, and the uprisings that Poles mounted to resist German and Russian colonizers' attempts to eliminate Polish identity, and the theorizing that went on behind these uprisings.
Philo-Semitism was a marked feature of Polish Romantic nationalism, and Jews did participate in the struggle for Polish freedom. Many Poles saw Jews as an integral part of Poland. Mickiewicz created Jankiel, a Polish Jewish hero of the national epic, "Pan Tadeusz." Patriotic Jewish Poles were not just a feature of fiction; Jews like Michal Landy gave their lives in the nationalist struggle.
A feature of Mickiewicz's Romantic Nationalism was the concept of Poland as the "Christ of Nations," that would struggle for the uplift of all humanity. This wasn't just rhetoric -- Poles fought internationally. Poles like Haym Solomon, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and Casimir Pulaski contributed to the American Revolution in this multi-national, Christian-inspired spirit.
Poland's many uprisings against Russian and German colonizers ended tragically, with the deaths and deportation of many, and even harsher attempts to stamp out Polish language and culture.
These tragedies changed Polish nationalists' views of time -- could time really result in progress? -- and what constituted a Pole. Could Lithuanians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, and Jews ever be part of a successful Polish nation state?
Peasants presented a particular problem. A popular argument stated that Polish uprisings failed because the peasants did not support them, and, in fact, had no reason to. Did it matter to them if they slaved for Poles, Austrians, or Russians? What did peasants care about Poland's literary heritage? They couldn't read. Some regarded peasants as inherently lesser creatures, perhaps inferior because of reincarnation.
Similar questions were asked about Jews and other ethnic minorities.
The answers that Poles, struggling with a highly multi-cultural, multi-faith population, came up with are fascinating, and speak to the mult-cultural, multi-faith world many of us live in today. One can hear echoes on nightly news discussions of how to address Spanish speaking, or Muslim, immigrants to the US.
Porter emphasizes that there is nothing inherently Polish, or Catholic, or Polish-Catholic, about anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was a development of one train of nationalist thought, a train of thought inspired by Social Darwinism and Scientific Racism.
Roman Dmowski, the proponent of this train of thought, wrote with brutality about forcing nationalism on peasants, whether they liked it or not, and forcing deportation on Poland's Jews. Dmowski stated, "Every Pole should be the enemy of every German he meets."
Dmowski had suffered under colonization, and he was a trained biologist. He was influenced by Social Darwinism, and saw life as a struggle for the survival of the fittest. He wanted Poles, as he understood Poles, to survive.
Dmowski rejected Poland's Romantic Nationalism, as embodied by Mickiewicz, and Mickiewicz's multicultural, philo-Semitic view of Poland. That approach -- the Romantic approach -- was worthlessly "spiritual" in Dmowski's view, and doomed to failure. Poles and Poland needed to enter the Darwinian struggle for life, and renounce any touchy-feely notions of solidarity with others who were not ethnic Poles.
Again, though this is a scholarly book, it is a fasciating read. Porter writes well. The questions the book engages are questions we are all contemplating in our increasingly globalized world.
I wish I could place "When Nationalism Began to Hate" on the required reading list of all of those who read a book that made a very big splash recently, Jan Tomasz Gross' "Neighbors."
Though I'm sure Gross did not intend this, "Neighbors," and the flood of media that accompanied its release, encouraged the stereotype of Poles as mindless, inherently anti-Semitic, brutes.
As WNBtH shows, multi-cultural societies present a series of challenges, and that is especially true when multi-cultural societies face the added stress of foreign occupation, colonization, and attempts at the elmination of the culture being colonized.
Polish thinkers developed varied ways of dealing with their oppression, and of responding to multi-culturalism. Their words, written a century ago, have resonance for us today.

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In When Nationalism Began to Hate, Brian Porter offers a challenging new explanation for the emergence of xenophobic, authoritarian nationalism in Europe. He begins by examining the common assumption that nationalist movements by nature draw lines of inclusion and exclusion around social groups, establishing authority and hierarchy among "one's own" and antagonism towards "others." Porter argues instead that the penetration of communal hatred and social discipline into the rhetoric of nationalism must be explained, not merely assumed.Porter focuses on nineteenth-century Poland, tracing the transformation of revolutionary patriotism into a violent anti-Semitic ideology. Instead of deterministically attributing this change to the "forces of modernization," Porter demonstrates that the language of hatred and discipline was central to the way "modernity" itself was perceived by fin-de-siecle intellectuals.The book is based on a wide variety of sources, including political speeches and posters, newspaper articles and editorials, underground brochures, published and unpublished memoirs, personal letters, and nineteenth-century books on history, sociology, and politics. It embeds nationalism within a much broader framework, showing how the concept of "the nation" played a role in liberal, conservative, socialist, and populist thought.When Nationalism Began to Hate is not only a detailed history of Polish nationalism but also an ambitious study of how the term "nation" functioned within the political imagination of "modernity." It will prove an important text for a wide range of students and researchers of European history and politics.

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Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940-1945 Review

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(More customer reviews)This well-researched, well-documented and well-written book is a masterpiece. It is also unique in the way it deals with the subject of escape in Nazi-occupied Poland. The author desribes in great detail the life and experiences of those who chose evasion - hiding under false identities - as a response to the Holocaust. He also presents accurately and with an amazing perceptivity the relationships between the Jews in hiding and the Poles who hid them. As one who survived on the Aryan side of Warsaw, Paulsson's writings resonate with my own experiences. A terrific book!

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My Brother's Keeper: Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust Review

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(More customer reviews)Jan Blonski has invented a new form of morality, in which indifference to a murder now makes one morally (though not legally) guilty of the murder. How creative! Not surprisingly, Blonski's "new morality" is entirely one-sided. Not a single one of the following questions is answered in this volume: Should those Jews who were indifferent to Polish deaths also share in moral guilt for them? In fact, how often did Jews include Poles in THEIR universe of moral obligations? Had Poles disappeared instead, wouldn't there have been some Jews delighted at this outcome? Should Jews also be enjoined to stop searching for attenuating circumstances behind their conduct, and admit fault for their complicity in Polish sufferings (as from the Zydokomuna)? Should the endless discussions on the Church's traditional negative view of Jews be expanded to include Judaism's historically negative view of Christianity? Or are there different moral standards now in existence for Poles and Jews?
Polonsky (p. 11), Blonski (p. 46), and Bryk (p. 176) portray Polish defensive reactions against Jewish accusations as tacit admissions of Polish guilt. Oh, really? Using the same reasoning, when Jews likewise react against falsifications of their history (e. g., by the Holocaust Deniers), should one conclude that the Deniers may be on to something?
What purpose does Blonski's "new morality" serve? Kazimierz Kakol (p. 146) sees it as yet another dilution of German guilt (however subtly, in this case). Otherwise, it is, not surprisingly, all about Holocaust uniqueness. Andrzej Bryk writes: "The Polish side has had difficulty in grasping that Jews have been struggling for the acceptance of the uniqueness of the Holocaust very often by indirect means, even through libelous accusations, bordering on the irrational. Yet it has to be added that faced with moral insensitivity toward's one's suffering, one fights with anything at hand, very often with shock." (p. 176). Taking Bryk to his logical conclusion, one could exonerate the Holocaust Deniers by treating their views as an irrational but somewhat understandable reaction against the chauvinistic exultation of Jewish sufferings over those of all others!
Blonski repeats the myth of the 10,000-strong Kielce mob (p. 39; actually 200-300 at its peak, with no more than 150 at 4 Planty Street) and the myth of equivalency in risk to life from participating in the Underground and from rescuing Jews (p. 38; Actually, one search by a dog-wielding German was usually sufficient to uncover a hidden Jew). Bryk (p. 170) complains that the AK was planning a desperate, suicidal uprising in the event of wholesale German extermination of Poles, but not for the 3 million Polish Jews (p. 170). What he conveniently forgets is that the AK also didn't launch an uprising for the 2-3 million murdered Poles.
Teresa Prekerowa (p. 74) presents an oft-quoted computation of only 1-2.5% percent of Poles ever helping Jews. Her computations are invalid because they do not factor the tiny number of Jews ever potentially AVAILABLE to be rescued. (The vast majority of the Jews remained trapped in ghettos until their journeys to the death camps). Owing to this fact, the vast majority of potential Polish rescuers never had access to a single Jew during the entire German occupation (Turowicz, p. 139)!
Poles are repeatedly berated (pp. 22-23, 77-80, 142) for discussing "Jewish passivity", when unmentioned is the fact that many Jewish authors (e. g., Bruno Bettelheim, Yitzhak Zuckerman, Leon Poliakov, Hannah Arendt) also shared this view. In attempting to create a Polish counterpart to "Jewish passivity", Prekerowa asks: "But was every Pole a conspirator? The enormous majority of the population even in Warsaw, in this heart of underground Poland, to say nothing of the inhabitants of the tens of smaller cities and towns and hundreds of villages, thought only about ways to survive the war, to stay alive...Their everyday lives were filled by commonplace activities which helped to make living under the occupation bearable." (p. 78). Ironically, by hinting that most Poles were afraid to participate in Underground activities, Prekerowa weakens the argument about Polish risk-taking in this activity but not in the hiding of Jews. And, ironically, by admitting the harrowing experiences of Poles, Prekerowa demolishes the usual portrayal of Poles as "spectators" of the Jewish catastrophe.
Salmonowicz (pp. 56-57) identifies Russian and Prussian Jews as 19th-century disseminators of anti-Polish writings. Rymanowski (p. 156) points out that few Jews were involved in the 19th-century Polish insurrections against foreign rule. Jan Karski (p. 86) confirms the shortage of arms faced by the AK at the time of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the disbelief of Judge Felix Frankfurter to his testimony (p. 88). Yisrael Gutman (p. 202) again repudiates the notion that the German [...] death camps were set up in occupied Poland because of Polish attitudes. He also recognizes the difference between traditional anti-Semitism of the Polish type, and the racist and exterminationist [...] anti-Semitism.
The informed reader understands that this book is part of the same old genre of Judeocentric selective moralizing against Poles--which continues to this day. After the recent publications of NEIGHBORS and FEAR by Jan Tomasz Gross, there was the predictable media fascination about the moral issues and responsibilities that Poles now must face, but not a trace of interest in any of the unsavory aspects of past Jewish conduct against Poles.


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Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a powerful work. The tale of a young man's painful relationship with his father is elegantly interwoven with the father's recollection of life as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Poland. Spiegelman's skill and honesty make this a raw, gut-wrenching read, though the tale is somehow ultimately uplifting.
I first read this book as a teenager, and would highly recommend it to people of any age. Over the years, I have re-read it frequently and shared it with friends of all ages. All have taken much from Spiegelman's tale.
A few notes must be made in response to the 10/26/97 comment posted below by a reviewer from Ontario, Canada. It is quite clear that this reviewer did not, in fact, read the book. (S)he mistakenly attacks Spiegelman for portraying the Poles as rats, and wonders if he would be offended if a book were written portraying Jews as rats. Anyone who took the time to read Maus (or merely to examine it's cover!) would know that it is, in fact, the Jewish people who are portrayed as mice/rats, whereas the Poles are portrayed not as vermin, but rather as pigs.
In fact, far from a "vicious" attack against Poles, there are many acts of kindness by Polish people portrayed in the book. Certainly there is unkindness as well, but how can the reviewer forget that this is a factual account of Vladek Spiegelman's life, told from his perspective. If unkind acts by Polish people are a part of that life, then they should be in the book.
Finally, the reviewer in question inelegantly raises a point of some merit, though it is one that is only tangentially related to Spiegelman's work. The Polish people did, in fact, suffer horribly at the hands of both Nazis and Soviets alike. Their death toll in the concentration camps numbered in the millions, and should never be forgotten or omitted when discussing the Holocaust. This book, however, is about Vladek Spiegelman, and so surely it cannot be assailed for its focus on events from his perspective.
Spiegelman's fidelity to his father's! story is to be admired, not attacked. And certainly not by a reviewer who could not be bothered to read the book.

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Galicia: A Multicultured land Review

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(More customer reviews)Having embarked on a quest for a better understanding of my Ukrainian/Polish heritage, I found this collection to be a valuable resource. I have always been interested in my lineage beyond my nuclear family. It is a fact that on my Ukrainian side my Grandparents were Greek catholic, and on the Polish side Roman Catholic. That in itself is amazing to me and I am delighted to refer to myself and others as a "naturalized Galician"
Mssrs Hann and Magocsi have compiled an excellant work for those interested in the history of Galicia and its varied peoples. I would highly recommend for the researcher and non-researcher alike.

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Habsburg Galicia was an area in central Europe covering territory presently occupied by Poland and Ukraine that was distinctive for its multi-ethnic character. With the unraveling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire following the First World War, a new political map of Europe emerged, one based on the principle of the nation-state. The very concept of the nation-state, however, was problematic in culturally pluralistic regions like Galicia.
The essays in this volume examine Galicia beyond the traditional paradigm of national history, in an effort to better understand the region as a place where different ethnic communities - Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Austro-Germans - lived in peaceful co-existence. As expansion of the European Union proceeds, as migration becomes increasingly prevalent, and as the very concept of the nation-state is called into question, a look back to see how cultural diversity was managed in a pre-nationalist age is of more than antiquarian interest. The contributors to this multidisciplinary volume pursue a wide range of approaches to shed fresh light on this unique region.

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Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland (Oxford Studies in Modern European History) Review

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(More customer reviews)This is an excellent study of Arthur Greiser who was the Nazi leader of the area of Poland around Gdansk- an area where he came to be really hated. 15000 people attended his hanging. Greiser spent his life trying to become a model Nazi. The author believes that this was partly because he was trying to make up for what the Nazis viewed as past errors- such as the fact that he had been a Free-Mason and was late to join the party. He became particularly zealous to overcome these 'deficiencies'. He proposed bizarre intiatives like killing people with Tuberculosis but Hitler refused to countenance this. Epstein stresses the prominent role he took in the Final Solution. This excellent and well-researched study is backed up by some interesting private correspondence which makes an already compelling story even more engaging as we see that in his letters home he could seem like a loving family man whilst at the same time acting as a total monster in the area of Poland he controlled. I would have no hesitation in recommending this book to anyone interested in the Second World War.
I really hope this book wins a prize- it deserves it.

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Model Nazi tells the story of Arthur Greiser, the man who initiated the Final Solution in Nazi-occupied Poland. Between 1939 and 1945, Greiser was the territorial leader of the Warthegau, an area of western Poland annexed to Nazi Germany. In an effort to make the Warthegau "German," Greiser introduced numerous cruel policies. He spearheaded an influx of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans. He segregated Germans from Poles, and introduced wide-ranging discriminatory measures against the Polish population. He refashioned the urban and natural landscape to make it "German." And even more chillingly, the first and longest standing ghetto, the largest forced labour program, and the first mass gassings of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were all initiated under Greiser's jurisdiction.Who was the man behind these dreadful policies? Catherine Epstein gives us a compelling biographical portrait of Greiser the man: his birth in the German-Polish borderlands, his rise to Nazi prominence in Danzig, his actions as party leader in the Warthegau, and his trial and execution in postwar Poland. Drawing on a remarkable array of German and Polish sources, she shows how nationalist obsessions, political jealousies, and personal insecurities shaped the policies of a man who held remarkable power in his Nazi fiefdom. Throughout, Epstein confronts a burning question of our age: why do individuals imagine genocide and ethnic cleansing to be solutions to political problems?

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