In Hunt for the Jews, Jan Grabowski quotes a rural Polish schoolteacher who on 5 November 1942 wrote in his diary, “I drive through the village of Siedliska. I enter the local community store. The peasants are buying scythes. The sales lady tells us ‘the scythes will come [in] handy for today's hunt.’ ‘What hunt?’ I ask. ‘The Jew hunt,’ they tell me” (53).
After the liquidation of the Polish ghettos began a period when the German police, the Polish “blue police,” and many other actors in the local Polish population hunted for Jewish people in hiding. Jan Grabowski's monograph concentrates on this period, which lasted from the autumn of 1942 until the arrival of Soviet forces in January 1945. Grabowski limits his study to a single county, Dąbrowa-Tarnowska, located about 50 miles east of Kraków. The restriction of the chronological and geographical scope allows Grabowski to reconstruct a detailed and convincing picture of the harsh wartime realities. Among his main sources are the testimonies of survivors preserved in the Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Most of these testimonies were transcribed in 1945–8. In a long appendix to the monograph, Grabowski provides translations of a well-selected sample of these testimonies. All of them are riveting, but particularly striking are the recollections of a survivor who worked as a droshky driver during the occupation, chauffeuring German as well as Judenrat officials (189–208). During the liquidation he even drove Gestapo men around to conduct their deadly business. Other sources employed by Grabowski include Polish trials of Poles who betrayed Jews (held in 1947–50) and German trials of war criminals (held in the 1960s). Many other sources are also adduced, such as letters captured by the Polish underground written by German soldiers who participated in the liquidation actions. Twenty-two valuable photographs are also included in the volume.
An aspect of the monograph that is particularly innovative and enlightening is Grabowski's exploration of how the moral climate in rural Poland became fatally skewed during the Nazi occupation. He shows that the local administration continued from the prewar period. The Germans did not allow the village elders to resign, and they had to follow the Germans’ bidding regarding requisitions of food stuffs and forced labour for Germany as well as regarding Jewish policy. The blue police, whose responsibilities included hunting for Jews and shooting many of those who were found, usually had served in the prewar police as well, and many went on to serve in the postwar, communist police. The local administration also had to assign villagers to a night watch, whose duties included looking out for Jews. Limited-term “hostages” were appointed, and they too were held responsible, on pain of death, for informing about any Jews who might be roaming about or hiding. Volunteer fireman brigades were pressed into anti-Jewish service as well. The Germans also simply drafted peasants ad hoc into the hunts for Jews. In Dąbrowa-Tarnowska county, Polish males who turned 20 had to spend a year serving in the Baudienst. Aside from working on construction projects, the Baudienst yunaki were regularly employed in the hunts for Jews. In short, the Germans simply conscripted the entire local administration and many other Poles into their genocidal project, creating an atmosphere in which hunting down Jews and turning them over for execution seemed the right thing to do. When one village elder was reluctant to order the execution of a Jew whom some peasants had captured, one of the peasant hunters said, “If the elder does not know what to do with the Jew, perhaps the Germans will know what to do with the elder” (71).
Also, the very situation that was produced by the liquidation of the ghettos and the outlawing of Jews pitted Poles and Jews against each other. Jews hiding in or near a village were considered a threat, a source of danger, by rural Poles. The Germans could take vengeful retribution, and many Poles could suffer. Thus Jews who appeared were shooed away by peasants, told that they were not allowed to trespass on their property, and frequently reported to the authorities. Sometimes local people ganged up and captured them. Farmers considered the Jews who hid in nearby woods to be pests, since they stole from gardens and dug up potatoes in order to feed themselves – a phenomenon that was far less frequent when Jews were confined to ghettos. Those Poles who were holding valuable items for Jews until their persecution ended were now tempted to report those Jews to the blue police so that they could secure ownership of the valuables.
There were other factors that conspired to make the situation of the Jews more difficult. Many Poles had already engaged in the petty theft or extortion of Jewish property before the autumn of 1942 and now would not allow themselves to feel any pity for Jews. And the population lacked the moral compass that religion might have provided, since they had been hearing antisemitism from the pulpit for decades.
Although the Germans accomplished much of their antisemitic hegemony through force and the suborning of local authorities, many Poles took part in the anti-Jewish actions with relish. This is especially true of the 20-year-old men of the Baudienst. Although their service in the Baudienst was mandatory, as was their participation in Jew hunts, the yunaki often distinguished themselves with their brutality and enthusiasm, chopping off heads with axes and murdering Jews with blunt instruments. Grabowski records their deeds in chilling detail (121–9). The peasants who went after the Jews with scythes were sometimes frustrated at having to waste a day chasing Jews; but it was an inconvenience, not a moral dilemma (82).
Grabowski devotes a chapter to that small minority of Polish villagers who took the risk of rescuing Jews (149–70), but, generally in Grabowski's account, rescue is not the straightforward site of righteousness that often appears in the popular imagination, but is instead complex and often morally ambiguous. He notes that to rescue Jews out of compassion was to break a consensus that Jews should not be helped: “In the general accounting of gains and losses, the risks incurred by the community were incomparably higher than the uncertain, shifting, and often not fully accepted moral imperatives. This phenomenon, well known to psychologists, is linked to the general unwillingness to violate the norms of established group behavior. In other words, if certain activities become a norm, and favor the interests of one's own community … then taking an opposing stand becomes the privilege of the few – sometimes of a tiny minority that has to bear the hostility of their peers” (166, 169). Accordingly, those who had hidden Jews during the war were often regarded with suspicion and resentment by their neighbors after 1945 (163–4, 170).
Rescue was dangerous, and sometimes rescuers got cold feet and decided to get rid of the Jews they were hiding. In such cases they would usually turn them over to the Polish blue police to be shot. They were afraid, however, to turn them over to the Germans directly, since the Jews could inform on them, and reveal the identities of those who helped them. Thus it was safer to have the blue police take care of the killing; they were discreet and wanted to protect Polish lives. Sometimes, however, the rescuers would kill the Jews themselves (77, 104, 117–18, 148). Money was an issue; when the Jews ran out of it, they could be turned in or killed directly by their former rescuers (61, 145).
This is a well-written, well-researched, highly illuminating study that takes us deep into the mechanisms of the Holocaust in rural Poland. In short: a brilliant book, and a harrowing read.