“If This Diary Is Supposed to Be True, I Must Write About It”: Jewish Policemen's Accounts of the Warsaw and Otwock Ghettos in Their Own Voices

Abstract Despite studies and testimonies on the Jewish police and the availability of memoirs written by policemen, the policemen's own voices have rarely been examined as a means of understanding their personal experiences or self-representation. Their accounts are often cited to illustrate situations or interactions, while scholarship has tended to portray them primarily in negative terms, or as symbols of individual and collective Jewish tragedy. Their perspectives as subjects, however, remain largely unexplored. This article explores how Jewish policemen narrated their experiences and represented themselves in their writings. It demonstrates how their awareness of documenting events for an anonymous future reader led them to blur or minimize their intimate, individual voice, even when it merely seemed to surface in the text. The policemen frequently erased the uniqueness of their role, subsuming it within a broader system of argumentation that aligned their behaviors with those of Jewish leadership or the wider Jewish population. A reading against the grain, through details, anecdotes, and arguments they unintentionally employed, reveals layers of their narration that they chose to ignore. In this way, it becomes possible to glimpse attitudes, topics, and situations they excluded from their accounts.