Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (review)

Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, by Jan T. Gross. New York: Random House, 2006. 303 pp. $25.95. In Fear, historian Jan Gross explores a seemingly baffling phenomenon. How is it that there was aggressive antisemitism in Poland, after the Holocaust? How is that even thinkable? all, did not ethnic Poles and Polish Jews both suffer horrifically during the Nazi years? Did not Poles see much more intimately than other Europeans what the Nazi system of mass was like, since Poland was the site of so many death camps? In his investigations, Gross was intrigued to discover cases of Righteous Gentiles among the Poles who hid Jews during the Nazi slaughter, yet after World War II, they were reluctant to let their heroism be known to their fellow Polish citizens. Why be silent, when they exhibited an all too rare humanity on behalf of the Jews? They were afraid of the likely hostile reaction by their Polish neighbors. Here is Gross's summary view: I see no other plausible explanation of the virulent postwar anti-Semitism in Poland but that it was embedded in the society's opportunistic wartime behavior. Jews were perceived as a threat to the material status quo, security, and peaceful conscience of their Christian fellow citizens after the war because they had been plundered and because what remained of Jewish property, as well as Jews' social roles, had been assumed by Polish neighbors in tacit and often directly opportunistic complicity with Nazi-instigated institutional mass murder (p. 247). At the center of Gross's study is an analysis of the murderous outbreak of antisemitism in Kielce in 1946 and the reactions to it. Gross estimates that up to a quarter of the population participated in some degree with the violence against the town's Jews. Scores of Jews were murdered by both police and townspeople. Authorities themselves took pains to side with the locals involved in the melee, and not be seen as sympathetic to the Jews under attack. With one exception, the Catholic Church hierarchs basically blamed the Jews for what happened. There was no social stigma attached to those involved in the harassment, beatings, and murder. Gross quotes a witness to the stoning of a Jew at that time: After several hours of these events, people were tired but in spite of everything they were lifting stones and throwing them calmly, as if the death of a human being, killing of a person, were not at stake here (p. 103). One rare shining light Gross identifies in Fear is the outraged stands taken by Polish intellectuals vis-a-vis their fellow citizens' blithely brutal behavior. Gross comments that these interventions make all the difference for Poles today, and can be cherished as a measure of moral sensitivity which has not been dulled among the country's spiritual elite. …