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Jan T. Gross is well known for his previous book, the widely acclaimed and controversial Neighbors (2001), which investigated the mass murder of Jewish inhabitants of the small town of Jedwabne by their Polish neighbours in the summer of 1941. The central topic of Fear is another act of anti-Jewish violence in Poland: the pogrom in Kielce in the summer of 1946, during which 42 Jews were killed and about a hundred wounded by an angry mob, following a rumour that Jews had kidnapped a Christian boy. ‘I want readers … to experience from time to time a sense of discomfort’, writes the author. The book creates such a sense repeatedly; it may leave the reader deeply disturbed, and rightly so, as it focuses on ghastly events, deeds and words that are hateful and difficult to comprehend. It asks the question ‘How was it possible after the Holocaust?’, and...
Dariusz Stola (Fri,) studied this question.