WW2

Question 1

polish life under Nazi occupation

Answer 1

• Wanted Poland to cease to exist for living space- Western occupation – universities and other aspects of normal life existed and cooperation with government was forced. In Poland no Polish officials higher than village mayor and all high schools and above were shut.

Question 2

death toll in Poland

Answer 2

• 6 mill poles killed and roughly half were Jewish – 1/5 of prewar population. In the UK there were 450k civilian and soldier deaths

Question 3

comparative Poland military resistance

Answer 3

• Poland had largest military resistance
• Could it be like suffragettes? Why are we fighting for Jews when our lives are at stake

Question 4

Jewish murder in public

Answer 4

• the Polish– Jewish historian Szymon Datner observed that “practically every hamlet, village, town, and city in the General government was witness to the murders of Jews who fled the ghettos, or escaped death trains. These victims, who— unlike the hundreds of thousands and millions of those who perished in gas chambers and were killed in mass executions— quite often can be individually identified, deserve our special attention. They were people who tried, in their own way, to fight for their survival.” Here, Datner was making reference to the Jews who remained from the very beginning outside the ghettos, or those who fled the ghettos during their final liquidation.

Question 5

Death toll outside the ghetto

Answer 5

• Datner estimated the number of Jews who survived the war on the territory of occupied Poland at close to 100,000. According to him, another 100,000 Jews fell prey to the Germans or their local helpers, or were murdered in various unexplained circumstance
• According to more recent estimates, however, the number of survivors has been reduced to no more than 50,000 people, while the number of Jewish victims who perished on the “Aryan” side has been revised significantly upward.

Question 6

Jewish population comparative

Answer 6

• Pre-war- Poland had the largest proportion of the population as Jewish – 10% on eve of war compared to Germany which had a percentage of less than 1% + in term of absolute numbers, Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe and the lowest survival rate

Question 7

Hunt for the Jews

Answer 7

• Grabowski - The expression Judenjagd (“hunt for the Jews”) was used by German policemen and gendarmes to describe the search for Jewish refugees who ran away from the liquidated ghettos and sought shelter among non-Jews in occupied Poland.
  o this kind of hunt became one of the most important tasks of the German police forces in occupied Poland
• the punishment of those who dared to help the Jews was described as a priority like the hunt for the Jews themselves

Question 8

absence of hostilities of Jews was arguably more important than saviours

Answer 8

• Tanay - My survival was dependent upon the absence of hostile behaviour of Poles who hated Jews….. I resent the many that harmed countless Jews, and the millions who were eager to do so. The denunciations of the Jews who were hiding or were on false papers were not a sporadic activity, but an endemic problem. Virtually all Poles resisted, passively or actively, the German occupation. However, the majority of the Polish population assisted the Germans in their efforts to annihilate the Jews’ .

Question 9

Polish as a unique location of the holocaust

Answer 9

• no other European society witnessed the Holocaust longer and more intensely than Poles considering that first massacres of Polish Jews took place as early as September 1939, that only ghettos in bigger Polish cities were sealed whereas those in smaller towns were left open, and that the Nazis established all extermination camps on the Polish territory

Question 10

Jewish survival rates

Answer 10

• The estimates for Jewish survivors in Poland range from 50,000 to 100,000, compared to the prewar population of 3.5 million.

Question 11

Hilberg on bystanders

Answer 11

• R. Hilberg – divided the human scenery of Holocaust into 3 categories: victims, perpetrators, bystanders. - For Hilberg, who was much more familiar with W. European context of the genocide, the bystanders constituted a heterogenous mass of largely uninvolved people

Question 12

visual aspect of bystanders

Answer 12

• Sendyka, emphasizes the visual nature of bystander behaviour: as “visual subjects” they saw what was happening, whether they chose to turn their backs or strained to watch. - goes against assumption that “a bystander is a person who just accidentally happens to be nearby” + Barnett has noted the “individual act of silently watching the public humiliation of local Jews” or the “observant passivity” of bystanders

o The very act of viewing places the bystander closer to the position of perpetrator and the same way turning your eyes away makes you guilty of hostility through indifference

Question 13

Sendyka- autonomy of bystanders

Answer 13

o A bystander, viewed through the theory of spectatorship, is therefore always motivated by externally inherited cultures, ideologies, and complexes of desire and anxiety, power, and interest. Never autonomous

Question 14

4 types of bystanders

Answer 14

Sendyka - 4 types of viewers eg Gawker who watch with defecit of empathy, maybe driven by curiosity, the onlooker looks on but to look is an act of choice, the spectator who is already organised around an object and has protocols on how to refer to it - no independent account, the observer takes notice and is tethered by external rules- no independent account-

Question 15

Bystander as unstable category

Answer 15

o gaze exchange is a dynamic process; its participants can switch agency within very short periods of time (an observer can be absorbed by a mob to become momentarily a gawker, but in an instant, they can regain control over the movements of their body and turn their eyes away from the scene of torment). Can move between different viewings dependent on the events and forms of violence

Eg Charyton’s sketches eg of ghetto liquidation are unstable - scientific and emotionless modes of recounting by a professional observer, followed by emotion-driven portrayals of a spectacle (seen here no doubt as a tragedy), and finally an individual mode full of authentic sympathy.

Question 16

not seeing as still a bystander

Answer 16

• as Gross notes “a bystander could just as well be someone who turns his back on the event, occupied by his own concerns, or a person who is standing on her tiptoes in the crowd of gawkers”,

Question 17

Fulbrook - concept of bystander as unhelpful

Answer 17

the concept of the bystander is helpful neither for understanding the ways in which people’s behaviour shifts over time, nor for ascertaining degrees of conformity, complicity and collaboration.

Question 18

Grabowski on bystander as obsolete

Answer 18

• Idea of bystanders becoming obsolete (Grabowski)- had little to say in matters of life & death of the Jews. The only exception was the period of the Judenjagd, when the only way to salvation led through the hearts of Poles. This was the only time, only situation, when Poles [or Ukrainians, Belorussians, Balts] decided which Jews would live or die.The phenomenon of “Bystanding” implies a degree of impartiality and detachment that is impossible to contemplate under the extreme conditions prevailing at the time.
• It comes, therefore, as no surprise that the appeal of “Jewish fortune” attracted intense interest, and very few “bystanders” did actually stand by this massive assault on Jewish legal and property rights

Question 19

active Jewish persecution by Poles - makes bystander term obsolete

Answer 19

Grabowski - look at Dabrowa Tarnowska county in former Galicia: German police murdered 105 (37%); local civilians denounced all but 7 of them; the Polish blue police killed 13 on their own initiative & another 102 (36%) denounced to them by locals, who themselves murdered another 7 persons. 72% died as a result of civilians hunting down and turning in hidden Jews.

Question 20

Grabowski on what motivated Jewish persecution

Answer 20

• Grabowski accepts that it was in large measure, a coerced aggression- Polish communal heads & village mayors ordered by German superiors to render their precincts “free of Jews”, on pain of extreme punishment, whether of themselves or Christian hostages
• Polish-language announcements on village walls promised death for “favouring Jews- led to Poles throwing jews out of their apartments
• Gross corroborates – German promises that those who captured Jews would receive 1/3 of any confiscated moveable property
• Grabowski pushes beyond historiographical frontiers by pursuing the social-cultural dynamics causing ordinary villagers to view the protection of Jews as a “sin” or “crime”. + Gross has emphasised moral failings

Question 21

Ringelblum - bystander as more than just indifferent

Answer 21

• Ringleblum – the compassionate bystander broadens the category beyond just indifference. Appreciate the intelligentsia and conscious workers whose compassion was silent. Also shows failure to act is not just indifference or complicit support

Question 22

example of unstable bystander in offering Jewish aID

Answer 22

• Unstable - Sohovovich, who recounts that the Christian woman he was hiding with, Varka, for 6 months, at the burning down of her house and village, “became apathetic” and kicked them out. However this brief 3 week spell as a bystander ceased when she invited him back into hiding.

Question 23

Role of concentration camps in sight/ seeing:

Answer 23

• any activity that might have rendered visual testimony was prohibited (i.e., viewing, photo-graphing). The camps were built in woods; crematoria were curtained with bushes. The roundups took place in the early morning hours—windows were shut, blinds drawn, and cars sealed, and locals were ordered to stay indoors

Question 24

Ghetto prohibiting sight/ seeing

Answer 24

• Jews were hidden behind ghetto walls became quite simply invisible in the eyes of the average Polish burgher. Adam Chętnik, a distinguished Polish ethnographer, noted in his diary in 1941: “In Warsaw one does not see Jews anymore, and some say that it would be hard to get used to them once again. In any case, we do not feel their absence.”

Question 25

Ghetto liquidation prohibiting sight/ seeing

Answer 25

• In 1942, when the liquidation of the ghettos began, for many “Aryans” the Jews existed largely beyond the “horizon of perception.” From time to time disturbing news arrived from behind the walls of the “Jewish quarter,” but such information was definitely not a major preoccupation for the gentile population living in the “Aryan” section of the city
• Perceived to be safer for the Jews?

Question 26

deterrents to escape from ghetto

Answer 26

• Zofia Kossak-Szczucka wrote in 1942- “fear of denunciation by hostile Poles was one of the great deterrents to escape. Indeed, among those who escaped, many experienced not only denunciation but robbery and even murder.”

Question 27

artist’s observation of the ghetto

Answer 27

• self-taught artist from eastern Poland, Józef Charyton. His works are a rare example of taking immediate visual notes of the Shoah, in this case a small-town ghetto and its annihilation….. Both his public service and the location of his apartment that overlooked the ghetto gave him an opportunity to witness events behind the wall closely: I watched the Jews build the Ghetto with their own hands. I knew then that some horrific trap was being prepared. I kept a diary, I checked all the facts, and I felt compelled to be everywhere and see everything, even though this took me to some very dangerous places. Some irresistible desire was pushing me to witness the History

Question 28

the destruction of the ghettos could easily be seen

Answer 28

In the occupied East, in the areas where the vast majority of European Jews dwelled, the process of destruction, starting with the liquidation of the ghettos, was always a public display of horror.
o Evidence - A German official from Tarnów noted that during the day of the liquidation, the city resonated with gunfire, and “dead bodies littered the streets.”
o Tsam’s notebook [child testimonies] - Rozhishche, age 16 – “At the gates of Lutsk, a Polish woman told me that thousands of people would be forced to go to the Krasno Bridge that day, to see what sort of an end the Jewish rebels would have.”
o the extraction of Jews from their hometowns, from the liquidated ghettos, was a brutal, horrifying affair, and countless Polish bystanders were witnessing and well aware of what happened.

Question 29

prevalence of payment in hiding Jews

Answer 29

• Evidence - among 160 county-level cases of hiding, 70% entailed payment, while 30% were altruistic, with another 177 cases of unknown motivation.

Question 30

how payment for protection effected chance of survival

Answer 30

• Among those who paid for concealment, only 9% survived war, while among those protected altruistically, 56% did so.
• Yet among all 337 cases, only 15% survived

Question 31

mention of saviour Jews post war

Answer 31

• Depending on the nature and extent of help, special kinds of recognition are bestowed upon Christians who saved Jews. One award is a certificate of honour with a special text in Hebrew and French. Another distinction offers to the recipient a chance to plant a carob tree at the Yad Vashem memorial. Each tree has a plaque with the name of the rescuer

Added to this distinction is a special medallion with the name of the recipient and the inscription: “He who saves one life, it is as if he saves the whole world.” These awards are often accompanied by financial aid. Thus, for example, in a poor country like Poland, practically all righteous Christians receive a modest pension The American Jewish Congress is in charge of all financial arrangements. To qualify for any one of these distinctions Christian actions had to involve “extending help in saving a life; endangering one’s own life; absence of reward, monetary and otherwise; and similar considerations

Question 32

help of antisemites

Answer 32

• Antisemites also helped – shocked by inhumanity of Hitler. Many devout Catholics- many had long history of charity or were introspective and responsive to extreme need- overshadowed their prejudice. Maybe this dismantles the argument that antisemitism lead to more persecution – can be antisemitic and not want Jews to die

Question 33

socio politcal background of Polish saviours

Answer 33

• Intellectuals were most prone to Jewish rescue and peasants the least so. Majority were politically inactive – no real correlation to political vs non political of helpers. Lack of uniformity of religion of helped – a lot of Catholics but also a lot of pre war Catholicism was antisemitic. Most saviours in fact were not devout or not religious at all.
  o During war religion was often an excuse to persecute- parishioners sometimes urged Nazi support

Question 34

help from those previously known

Answer 34

• Only minority spoke of friendship as a reason to help Jews (9% limited help to just friends). In 65% of cases, help was given to both friends and strangers

Question 35

notion of peasants helping Jews

Answer 35

• ## The alleged closeness between Jews and gentiles living in the rural areas did not translate, according to contemporary witnesses, into stronger empathy, better treatment, or more energetic attempts at rescue.- On the contrary, many peasants, seduced by modest prizes and inducements offered by the Germans, became actively involved in hunting down the Jews. Others joined the search out of fear.

Question 36

history of helping the needy

Answer 36

• many had helped the needy in the past . Tec argued that many saw their help for Jews as a natural and moral duty- most denied being called heroes. Most denied their fears or said they pushed them into background- aid of jews came first/ dominated. The more likely people act in accordance with moral imperatives, the more likely they are to become traditional patterns, the easier they are to follow. Tradition of standing up for needy is most significant factor determining saviours

Question 37

for those that were paid to help where did motivation come from

Answer 37

• Tec says that those who were paid to help would not have done it without financial incentive

Question 38

independence of saviours

Answer 38

• Relative independence of saviours – free from external pressures and goes hand in hand with strength and freedom. More able to stand up for their moral convictions- second most important factor

Question 39

Tec’s theory of rescue

Answer 39

• Tec on those who saved jews - Poles who rescued Jews did so because of an atypical societal identity as outsiders, combined with a track record of helping the downtrodden and a personal sense of independence

Question 40

sight and seeing vs active participation in Polish society

Answer 40

• the theater critic Grzegorz Niziołek formed the strong thesis that postwar Polish culture was generally a culture of “‘witnesses,’ ‘observers’ or even ‘gawkers’”(passive roles). ). This characterization implies a certain detachment or distance from active participation or engagement with events

Question 41

was there such think as objective witnessing

Answer 41

Sendyka- influence of external factors such as culture, ideologies, desires, anxieties, power dynamics, and interests on the act of observation. This challenges the notion of pure, objective observation and suggests that our perceptions and interpretations are shaped by a complex interplay of various forces.

Question 42

visualising as an unstable phenomenon

Answer 42

Karski’s thirty-nine-minute monologue, one observes many attempts to recreate the eyewitness’s visual experience of the Holocaust. Someone visiting the ghetto- Karski, the narrator, is then urged by his Jewish guide, “Look at it, look at it!” In this moment, his position as a visual subject is confirmed and reinforced. The visual subject has not fulfilled his mission: “You didn’t see everything. You didn’t see too much. I want you to see everything,” says his guide. The second visit is clearly different. “I was more conditioned, I felt other things,” says Karski. The initial sense impressions on entering the ghetto are indeed different the second time around, especially for the olfactory sense: “stench everywhere, suffocating.” The walk is interrupted many times by the guide’s urging, “look at it,” concluded by an order, “remember!”….. The visit ends with Karski feeling physical ill.
o It is clear from this recapitulation that the experience of eye witnessing the Shoah is a dynamic and not a stable visual “process.”

Question 43

sketches showing lack of emotion in observation is not possible

Answer 43

• If we concentrate on the three sketches from the JHI collection , we may at first define the viewer as an observer: he is cold, calm, and composed, giving precise dates and informing us in writing on the nature of the ongoing event. He gives us a full frame and a clear view.
  o However with more focus the “rationalized” mode of giving an impartial account is broken by the very technique (or—techniques, since they vary) used. The paper is of a random choice; the hand seems shaky and rushed. The perspective is not linear; the image is flat, with no depth, resembling the poetics of a snapshot. The sketch is hasty… the sketches become too personal, revealing too much of the viewer’s inner emotional state.

Question 44

Zegota

Answer 44

• the founding, in Sept 1942, of a clandestine Polish organization devoted to helping Jews survive on the “Aryan side” – this was ZEGOTA . incorporated into the Polish underground and funded until the end of the war by the Polish gov-in-exile and western Jews
• primarily active in Warsaw- located housing, forged documents, financial support.

Question 45

initiative behind Zegota

Answer 45

• The initiative for Zegota creation was a leaflet written and distributed in Warsaw in Aug 1942- a Catholic nationalist, reminded Poles of what was taking place behind the ghetto walls, then condemned the world’s silence, which she equated with complicity with the murders, and insisted that the duty of Catholics and Poles was to protest

o Did go on to say: We have not ceased to regard them as political, economic and ideological enemies of Poland. Furthermore, we recognize that they hate us more than the Germans, that they hold us responsible for their misfortunes…. Our awareness of these feelings, however, does not free us from the responsibility of denouncing the crime’

Question 46

the ghettos of Poland

Answer 46

• The first ghetto was formed in Piotrkow in October 1939, only to be abandoned by the Nazis without any explanation. This was followed by the establishment of the Lódé ghetto in 1940, which included 160,000 inmates. The year 1940 saw the creation of the Warsaw ghetto with a population of about half a million. Lódz, Warsaw, and Bialystok, the three largest ghettoes, contained 1 million Jews, about one-third of the Polish Jewry.

Question 47

hunt for Jews mirrored Nazi death machinery

Answer 47

• The year 1942 signaled the readiness of the Nazi death machinery, the beginning of the end for most Polish Jews. In the summer of 1942 the head of the Judenrat in Warsaw, Adam Czerniakow, was asked to deliver 10,000 Jews per day. When he realized what was happening he committed suicide

Question 48

role of the neughbour in death

Answer 48

• Death ‘often came in the familiar form of a neighbour”
• Unofficial- Neighbour’s tools- “even though the tools of the executioners often lacked sophistication they were equally deadly”.

Question 49

peasants as more deadly than concentration camps

Answer 49

According to survivors’ accounts, the local “Aryans,” Polish peasants, were in large part responsible for their misery and for the deaths of their close ones. Concentration camp deaths, which occurred away from witnesses’ eyes, were far removed from survivors’ own experience. They had heard about the German machine of murder, but they lacked firsthand knowledge of the factories of death. They were painfully aware, however, of the brutality

Question 50

Polish complicity in genocide

Answer 50

Bartov raised an important point: “Genocide would have been much harder to accomplish, and its success much less complete, had the Germans not found so many collaborators willing, even eager, to do the killing, the hunting down, the brutalizing, and the plundering.”

Question 51

Post war trials of Jews

Answer 51

• 1944 august trials concerning the punishment of Nazi war criminals- “traitors of the Polish Nation” included- among them that we find individuals who denounced, mistreated, or simply murdered their Jewish fellow citizens. According to the contemporary interpretation of the law, all actions undertaken by Poles that helped the Germans to exterminate Jews constituted a form of collaboration with the enemy.

Question 52

lack of accusations in post war trial

Answer 52

• when the vast majority of survivors from the Holocaust had already fled Poland. Those who stayed behind made a conscious decision to adapt to the new reality and, quite naturally, were highly unlikely to accuse their non-Jewish neighbors of wartime crimes against the Jews. The few Jewish survivors still present in the area, paralyzed with fear, hastened to provide their Polish neighbors, murderers of the Jews, with an alibi.

Question 53

home army’s hunt for Jews

Answer 53

• Zimmerman talks of home army:
• In his 1947 testimony, Baum recalled that the local Home Army division “often began to look for Jews. The situation for the Jews worsened from day to day. We fought the Poles no less than the Germans.”

Question 54

free Poland force and murder

Answer 54

there were young men who made up a free Poland force. The commander of the unit of some forty men was a thirty-year-old soldier who greeted Halina and Maria warmly. Among the partisans in the group was Zdzisław, Maria’s and Olga’s younger brother. That evening, during a conversation over dinner, Halina learned that the unit had recently come across a Jew hiding in the forest. She was shocked when the unit commander revealed he had ordered his men to shoot him.

Question 55

presence of antisemites in the home army

Answer 55

• Gen. Tadeusz Komorowski, the man who replaced Rowecki as Home Army commander. A sympathizer of the right-wing, openly anti-Semitic National Party, Gen. Komorowski reversed the policies of his predecessor, refusing to provide aid to Jews inside ghettos wishing to mount self-defense, and favoured the exclusion of Jews from the ranks of the Home Army. He divulged this policy to the head of the Home Army’s Bureau of Information and Propaganda in August 1943 right after he became commander, using the argument that “Polish society” was opposed to arming Jews until that time when the general uprising against the German would take place.

Question 56

Jews as communists in home army

Answer 56

• Komorowski characterized Jewish partisans as communist, pro-Soviet elements, an attitude that gave local Home Army units (especially in the northeastern provinces where the Polish-Soviet conflict was most acute) a green light to treat Jews any way they wished.

Question 57

split role of home army

Answer 57

30% - tells stories of a Home Army that rescued and protected Jews- behaviour of the Home Army towards the Jews reveals both profoundly disturbing acts of violence as well as extraordinary acts of aid and compassion”
*

Question 58

eg of split role of home army

Answer 58

Eg Melezin escaped Vilna ghetto with wife and 1 yo son. Found refuge in home of senior member of the Vilna District Home Army- recruited him and found him false papers. Was assigned high position in Nowogrodek where he encountered hostile anti-Jewish climate while posing as a pole

Question 59

the opposite experience for Poles and Jews

Answer 59

• While for Jews, failure to locate such helping Poles effectively eliminated their chances of survival, the opposite was true for these protectors; refusal to shield Jews would have removed a serious threat to their lives.

Question 60

legal pre requisite to mass murder of Jews

Answer 60

• As a general rule, in each country mass murders were preceded by a carefully orchestrated sequence of violations of rights. In the first phase, laws were introduced defining who was and who was not a Jew and requiring the identification of all those who were now defined as Jewish. Next came the expropriation of Jewish property and the denial to Jews of gainful employment. The beginning of the end was signaled by the removal of Jews from their homes to specially designated areas, usually sealed-off ghettoes, out of sight of Christian populations. Isolation of the Jews in the ghettoes before moving them to the death camps was a rigidly enforced

Question 61

difference in timing of mass annihilation between countries

Answer 61

• For Polish Jews who survived this onslaught the last quarter of 1941 signaled the beginning of the Final Solution. In contrast, only in 1943 did the Nazis decide to move against the Danish Jews by ordering their deportations to concentration camps. Final solution was even later in Hungary

Question 62

“most formidable barrier to Jewish rescue”

Answer 62

• The most formidable barrier to Jewish rescue was the degree to which Nazi occupying forces gained control of the governmental machinery, Where the Nazis were in virtual control, they were prepared to do whatever was necessary to annihilate the Jewish populations.

o Influencing their decision about how much direct control to exert was their attitude toward the occupied country’s Christian population, for in the world of Nazi-occupied Europe, policies and controls depended on racial affinities. For example, the Nazis defined all Slavs and those who lived in the Baltic countries as subhuman, as only slightly above the racial value of Jews. In contrast, the highest racial rank was reserved for the Scandinavians

Question 63

pre existing antisemitism effecting Jewish annihilation

Answer 63

within an environment with a strong anti-Semitic tradition, denunciations of Jews and their Christian protectors were more common

, in a society hostile to Jews, Jewish rescue was likely to invite disapproval, if not outright censure, from local countrymen.\

Moreover, in areas of pervasive anti-Semitism, even the helpers themselves could be influenced by long taught anti-Jewish images and values. While they were engaged in the humane act of saving Jews, some must have had to cope with their own negative attitudes about the Jews.

Question 64

Poland as a special case in terms of Jewish annihilation

Answer 64

• In contrast to the examples thus far described and for many of the reasons mentioned, obstacles and barriers to Jewish rescue were the most formidable in Poland. Poland was both extreme and special.
• In 1939 when the Germans occupied Poland they had behind them six years of experience with anti-Jewish policies. This experience added to their efficiency.
• both Polish and Jewish, suggests that the Łomz ˙ a region in northeastern Poland where Jedwabne is located, an area that had long been a stronghold of the extreme right, was the only area in which collective massacres of Jews by civilian Poles took place in the summer of 1941

Question 64

size of Jewish population and mass annihilation

Answer 64

• Aside from these cultural patterns, the sheer number of Jews within a particular country and the degree to which they were assimilated must also have affected their chances of rescue. It is easier to hide and protect fewer people. Also, the easier it was for Jews to blend in, the less dangerous it was for others to shield them.

Question 65

initial soviet control

Answer 65

• For 21 months – Sept 1939 – June 1941 – the Soviet Union ruled the kresy, an area that made up ½ of the pre-war Polish state, but in which Poles constituted only a minority of the pop. Goal of occupation – incorporation of this region into the Soviet system

Question 66

persecution under Soviet rule

Answer 66

o institutionalized the system of terror that Stalin had perfected in the 1930s - the victims chosen according to no logic that anyone could fathom – provoked fear. More than ½ mill poles rounded up without warning.

Question 67

did Jews welcome the Soviets

Answer 67

o The fate of some 300,000 Jews from western and central Poland who fled to the Soviet sector during the first months of the war is also instructive. shows they had welcomed them

Question 68

Katyn forest

Answer 68

o April 1943 – in the Katyn forest, Germans discovered bodies of 4000 Polish officers who had been arrested & then murdered by the Soviets at the beginning of the war

Question 69

how did soviet rule aid Nazis

Answer 69

o Led to antisemitism (belief in Jewish compliance), support for Nazis and possibly also recognition of real Nazi threat of non-compliance

Question 70

eg of ability to live under false identity

Answer 70

• An account by Pesla born 1914 in Klimontów, located 63 miles southwest of Lublin. In her testimony given in 1946, she recounts that in 1942, at age twenty-eight, she escaped from the Sandomierz ghetto with her husband and child. Together, they lived on false papers as Catholics. The area of Wieliczka, Pesla maintained, had a large Home Army presence but this contingent of Polish Underground fighters “did not suspect that I was Jewish.”

Question 71

Warsaw Ghetto uprising

Answer 71

• took place in the Warsaw Ghetto in German-occupied Poland from April 19 to May 16, 1943. The uprising was the largest single revolt by Jews against the Nazis during World War II
• the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB) and the smaller Jewish Military Union (ŻZW) decided to resist the Nazis. - launched a coordinated attack against German forces during the Nazi operation to deport the remaining Jews from the ghetto

Jewish fighters put up a fierce resistance against the well-equipped German troops. They used smuggled and homemade weapons to defend themselves and launched surprise attacks against German positions. The Nazis responded with brutal force, using tanks, artillery, and flame-throwers to crush the uprising.

• The uprising lasted for nearly a month, with the Jewish fighters holding out longer than expected against the Nazi forces. However, by May 16, 1943, the Nazis had managed to suppress the uprising and destroy the Warsaw Ghetto

Question 72

expectations of Poles

Answer 72

• the only way to salvation led through the hearts of Poles. This was the only time, and the only situation, when Poles (or, for that matter, Ukrainians, Belorussians, or Balts) decided which Jews would live or die.
• the Jews who went into hiding had very different expectations as far as Germans and their Polish co-citizens were concerned. While the Germans were seen as the embodiment of evil and harbingers of death, the Poles were perceived as potential allies in the desperate struggle for survival.

Question 73

Limits to how much emphasis we can put on the good of the Poles

Answer 73

bartov also raised the other side of the point, Conversely, hardly any of the handful of Jews who lived to tell the tale would have survived had it not been for those Ukrainians and Poles who gave them food or shelter, even if at times they charged them for the service and not infrequently drove them out or denounced them once the Jews’ resources ran out.”

Question 74

trade off of Jewish life

Answer 74

o the prosecutors had learned form an earlier case that Mendel Kogel had been caught by the local peasants and later delivered (or, to use the local euphemism, “rendered”) to the Germans, for execution. h’d escaped. The head of the local administration told the authorities that “Dudek could not find this Jew, so he started looking for him. During the search, he located the Jew in a barn and brought him to the police station in Bolesław . . . the same day this Jew was shot by the gendarmes

Kogel showed up in the village and told the peasants that he was no longer willing to continue hiding and that he had lost his will to live.

Question 75

Jew privy to antisemitism

Answer 75

• Baum had as a Catholic- exposed to conversations as no one knew he was Jewish

the Jewish problem. From different mouths, [one could hear] words of sympathy for the Jewish people. Like, for example: why does the AK shoot dead Jews who hide in the forests and similarly desire to [defeat] the bestial Hitlerites? Everyone turned silent when, at last, someone spoke: [because] they desire a Poland without Jews

Question 76

presence of Jews in home army

Answer 76

• In rare instances, Jews fought openly in the Home Army without concealing their background. An example was Pinkus Kornhauser… Kornhauser noted, he was treated differently. The commander did not give Kornhauser any assignments, nor was he introduced to any other Home Army fighters. He did, however, convince his commander to provide him a small salary…. After a while, Kornhauser began to suspect that the commander was plotting something against him and realized his life could be in danger- he fled
• Even in cases in which Home Army units accepted Jews, the likelihood of nearby Home Army units being hostile was a real problem

Question 77

quid pro quo in home army

Answer 77

At the first meeting, taking place on November 30, 1942, Nowak relayed Capt. Mularski’s request of 10,000 złotys per person for membership in the underground.

When explained that this amount far exceeded any one person’s ability to pay, Nowak replied that Zweigman should collect as much money as possible and present it at the next meeting. Zweigman, was able to pay 21,000 zlotys. As a result of the payment, Capt. Mularski authorized Zweigman to join the partisans. Zweigman replied that eighteen persons, in three groups of six, would be leaving the ghetto for induction into the Home Army. According to Zweigman, the first group of six, in a plan organized by Mularski, left the ghetto on 23 December 1942. Shortly afterwards, Capt. Mularski demanded goods from Zweigman, who had not yet left the ghetto, including fabric for three men’s suits, two overcoats, and a certain quantity of leather. On 4 January 1943, Zweigman testified that Nowak demanded more cash and goods

Question 78

rewards for Polish complicity in search for Jews

Answer 78

• The rewards for delivering the Jews to the authorities or for providing information about their whereabouts would include, for example, four pounds of sugar or two bottles of vodka per person. Sometimes the informers would collect as much as one-third of the value of the personal goods and clothes seized on the victim

Question 79

threat to ensure handing over of Jews

Answer 79

• • In late 1941, the death penalty was introduced for aiding and abetting Jews on the run, and the Polish administration was instructed to convey this message forcefully to the locals - You are to make absolutely sure that not even one single Jew, Jewess, or Jewish child is left on the territory of your commune . Village elders are also responsible for Jews hidden on the territory of their commune, and—in case of negligence—can face the death penalty.

Question 80

how common the hunt for jews was

Answer 80

• the hunts for Jews in the rural areas became so common that close to the liquidated ghettos “even dogs got used to the sound of gunfire, and stopped howling.”

Question 81

women v men on aryan side

Answer 81

• Weitzman – another reason that more women than men passed, or even took the decision to try to pass, was the greater cultural assimilation of females in Poland before the war. Jewish boys & girls had been educated separately – the boys in special Jewish schools, the girls in the Polish schools. This meant that Jewish girls learned the Polish culture, language, and literature.

Question 82

traditional gender roles in ghetto

Answer 82

• women continued to fulfil their traditional nurturing roles in the ghetto.
  o Evidence – survivor Vladka Meed tells of her parents’ differing response to experiences in the Warsaw ghetto: “[Her father] was not only helpless but a broken, dejected man who could not take care of his family. He was undernourished, run down; he got pneumonia and died. In contrast, my mother was someone who did not give up… somehow she had the strength to keep out home spotless without soap.”

Question 83

the curse of agency

Answer 83

• Asher’s sister ‘started losing her mind’ and it ‘became so bad that we were given an ultimatum: “leave the hiding place with your sister! If you don’t then we’ll leave” and whilst putting off the decision his sister “became louder…”. Asher in response stated that “I simply had to hand her over to them. Two men away with her… and came back without my sister. Hell began to blaze in my heart I prayed silently that we would all be discovered and shot”.