{"product_id":"fear-isbn-9780812967463","title":"Fear","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn astonishing and heartbreaking study of the Polish Holocaust survivors who returned home only to face continued violence and anti-Semitism at the hands of their neighbors\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e“[\u003ci\u003eFear\u003c\/i\u003e] culminates in so keen a shock that even a student of the Jewish tragedy during World War II cannot fail to feel it.”—Elie Wiesel\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eFINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY \u003ci\u003eTHE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Poland suffered an exceedingly brutal Nazi occupation during the Second World War, in which 90 percent of the country’s three and a half million Jews perished. Yet despite this unprecedented calamity, Jewish Holocaust survivors returning to their hometowns in Poland after the war were further subjected to terror and bloodshed. The deadliest peacetime pogrom in twentieth-century Europe took place in the Polish town of Kielce on July 4, 1946.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In \u003ci\u003eFear,\u003c\/i\u003e Jan T. Gross addresses a vexing question: How was this possible? At the center of his investigation is a detailed reconstruction of the Kielce pogrom and how ordinary Poles responded to the spectacle of Jews being murdered by their fellow citizens. Anti-Semitism, Gross argues, became a common currency between the Communist regime and a society in which many were complicit in the Nazi campaign of plunder and murder—and for whom the Jewish survivors were a standing reproach.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e For more than half a century, the fate of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Poland was cloaked in guilt and shame. Writing with passion, brilliance, and fierce clarity, Jan T. Gross brings to light a truth that must never be ignored.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eFear\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “That a civilized nation could have descended so low . . . such behavior must be documented, remembered, discussed. This Gross does, intelligently and exhaustively.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Gripping . . . an especially powerful and, yes, painful reading experience . . . illuminating and searing.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Gross tells a devastating story. . . . One can only hope that this important book will make a difference.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eBoston Sunday Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A masterful work that sheds necessary light on a tragic and often-ignored aspect of postwar history.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eBooklist \u003c\/i\u003e(starred review)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Astonishing . . . Gross supplies impeccable documentation.”\u003cb\u003e—Baltimore \u003ci\u003eSun\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Compelling . . . Gross builds a meticulous case.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eJan T. Gross\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of the widely acclaimed \u003ci\u003eNeighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, \u003c\/i\u003ewhich was a finalist for the National Book Award. He teaches history at Princeton University, where he is the Norman B. Tomlinson ’16 and ’48 Professor of War and Society.1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Poland   Abandoned\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      Wars in Europe have simultaneously been periods of social revolutions, and  the Second World War is a good case in point.1 Indeed, one could argue  that in Eastern Europe the entire decade from 1939 to 1948—despite the  clear divide of 1945, which saw the defeat of the Third Reich—was one  continuous epoch of radical transformation toward a totalitarian model of  society, imposed first by the Nazis and then by the Soviets.2\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    While the war, it is true, had an enormous impact on every European  society, producing both a new map of Europe and a new paradigm of European  politics, Poland’s case was unique among the belligerent countries because  of the scale of devastation and upheaval under the impact of Nazi  occupation from 1939 until 1945 (supplemented by the Soviet annexation of  eastern Poland from September 1939 until June 1941).* As a\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    *On August 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union concluded a treaty  of nonaggression, known in historiography as the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact  after the names of the foreign ministers who signed the document in  Moscow. A week later, on September 1, 1939, World War II began. As agreed  between the signatories, the Red Army marched into Poland soon after the  German attack. In the secret protocols attached to the August treaty, the  Soviet Union reserved for itself a “sphere of interests” including  Bessarabia, Estonia, Latvia, and the better part of Poland. The original  demarcation line between the Nazi and Soviet zones of occupation—splitting  the capital city, Warsaw, in half along the Vistula River—appeared in the  September 25, 1939, issue of the main Soviet newspaper, Pravda.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On September 28 in Moscow, the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship  Treaty was signed and a somewhat modified territorial division of recent  conquests was agreed upon. Stalin settled for only half of Poland’s  territory and drew the frontier eastward,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    result of the war, the country suffered an unprecedented demographic  catastrophe. It lost its minorities—Jews in the Holocaust, and Ukrainians  and Germans following border shifts and population movements after the  war. A third of its urban residents were missing at war’s end. Poland’s  elites in all walks of life were wiped out. More than half of its lawyers  were no more, along with two fifths of its medical doctors and one third  of its university professors and Roman Catholic clergy. It lost its choice  civil servants, army officers, and sportsmen. Several million people were  displaced, either because they were deported, or because their domiciles  were destroyed, or because the frontiers were changed. Somewhere between  41?2 million and 5 million Polish citizens lost their lives during the war  (including 3 million Polish Jews), and several million more experienced  imprisonment, slave labor, or forced resettlement.* The scale of material  devastation matched the volume of population loss and trauma. Virtually  every family in Poland was victimized in one way or another, and many  catastrophically.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Particular devastation was suffered by Poland’s Jews, an ancient community  that was physically destroyed as a result of the war. No more than 10  percent survived the Nazi onslaught—some in German camps, some hiding  among Gentile neighbors, most in the Soviet interior, where they fled or  had been deported earlier by the Soviet secret police. While half of  Poland’s prewar territory was under Soviet control from mid-September 1939  through June 1941, a direct result of collaboration between Hitler and  Stalin at the time, more than one million Polish Jews (out of the total of  approximately 3.5 million) lived in the Soviet zone. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    following what used to be known as the Curzon Line (a demarcation line  suggested by the British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, in a message to  the Soviet foreign minister, Chicherin, during the Polish-Bolshevik War of  1920). In exchange for giving up a good chunk of Poland, including half of  the capital city, he consolidated his grip on the Baltic states by  bringing Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia into the fold. Two secret  protocols were included with the treaty. The first one amended the  boundaries agreed upon in August; the second, barely two sentences long,  eliminated for the next two years the anti-Nazi Communist underground in  Poland: “Both parties will tolerate in their territories no Polish  agitation which affects the territories of the other party. They will  suppress in their territories all beginnings of such agitation and inform  each other concerning suitable measures for this purpose.” We need to know  these preliminaries to begin our story, which is embedded in the war  experience of Poland’s inhabitants.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    *The often quoted estimate of total demographic losses—6 million—advanced  immediately after the war was certainly an exaggeration. Dzieje Najnowsze  devoted an entire issue to the study of Polish casualties during the  Second World War. An eminent economic historian, Czeslaw Luczak, surveying  the present state of research in the introduction to the issue, proposed a  more likely total of 5 million—2 million Polish non-Jews and 2.9 to 3  million Polish Jews (pp. 12, 14). I am grateful to Professor Antony  Polonsky for this reference.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Some 100,000 to 120,000 Jews were deported in 1940–1941 and forcibly  settled in the Soviet interior, as part of broader repressive measures  aiming at Sovietization of this area. It was the irony of Jewish fate that  being subjected to Soviet repression had saved many Jews from death at the  hands of the Nazis. In Polish historiography, the Jewish fate was usually  presented as a separate story from that of the rest of Polish society.  There was a kernel of truth in this approach, since the Nazis did indeed  single out Jews for “special treatment,” but it conveniently enabled  historians to pass in silence over the complex phenomenon of interaction  between Polish Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors throughout the period  of German occupation. Polish neighbors had witnessed up close the  extermination of the Jews, and they often availed themselves of the  opportunities afforded by their attendant spoliation. The story of this  opportunistic complicity with the Nazis is only now being told in Poland,  and I plot it into the narrative as we go along since it provides a  crucial background for understanding postwar anti-Semitism.3\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Underground State\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Despite the violence of foreign invaders, it will be noted in the  historical annals that Polish society confronted the horrors of the Soviet  and Nazi occupations with heroism and resilience. According to Nazi racial  doctrine, Poles were considered “subhuman” (Untermenschen). Unlike the  Jews, however, the Poles were not scheduled for extermination but were  relegated in the Nazi vision of the “New Order” in Europe to the status of  slaves fit only for utilization as physical labor. In response to policies  of occupation that denied them rights and material resources necessary for  survival, Polish society mounted the most formidable and complex  resistance movement that the Nazis had to face anywhere in occupied Europe.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In addition to an underground military organization, the Home Army (Armia  Krajowa, AK), which at its peak boasted over 300,000 sworn-in members, an  elaborate network of institutions was set up in occupied Poland, which  together came to be known as the Underground State (Panstwo Podziemne).  This “state” included clandestine versions of prewar political parties and  a shadow government administration (Delegatura) headed by a representative  of the legal Polish government-in-exile, which resided first in Angers and  then, after the defeat of France in 1940, in London. A skeleton parliament  functioned in the underground, bringing together representatives of the  four main political parties—the National Democratic Party, the Peasant  Party, the Polish Socialist Party, and the Labor Party, liberal in  outlook—who regularly consulted with each other and the government  delegate. Political leaders, the government, and the army command in  London maintained contact with the home country through a clandestine  network of couriers and radio operators.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Underground State was funded by the government-in-exile, from London.  Apart from supplying secret military and political organizations, this  money was also used to sustain civil society including, for example, an  illegal school system, a welfare network, and an organization, Zegota,  that was set up in 1942 in order to aid Jews who were hiding from the  Nazis. More than 2,000 underground newspapers and magazines were put out  in Poland at one time or another during the occupation. Several made only  an ephemeral appearance, with limited circulation, but others were  published continuously for a number of years. The most   important weekly of the Home Army, the Information Bulletin (Biuletyn  Informacyjny), reached a hefty circulation of 43,000 copies. During the  period of its most intense activity, the Warsaw office of the Bureau of  Information and Propaganda of the Home Army used five tons of paper  monthly.4\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Henri Michel, the doyen of French historians of the resistance, could  hardly be suspected of playing to a domestic audience when he concluded  that the Polish underground had enjoyed a strength and a scope  unparalleled in Europe.5 The story first became known in the  English-speaking world when one of the most courageous couriers of the  underground, Jan Karski (who brought direct evidence to Prime Minister  Winston S. Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt that the Nazis  were exterminating European Jewry), wrote his slightly fictionalized Story  of a Secret State.* It became a best-seller soon after its publication, by  Houghton Mifflin, during the winter of 1944–45.6\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Underground State was the product of a broad mobilization of societal  energies. It came about as a result of myriad individual initiatives,  which were then institutionalized and put in a broader organiza-tional  framework. One could have expected that such a remarkable\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    *Film and television audiences all over the world remember a lengthy  interview with Jan Karski from Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, in which he  describes the circumstances of his mission and meetings with leading  politicians in England and the United States, whom he informed about the  tragic fate of the Jews.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    collective achievement would provide a good foundation for postwar  reconstruction. But it was not to be. As a by-product of Great Power  politics and the division of postwar Europe into spheres of influence, all  the efforts and sacrifice that had gone into the creation of this  contested realm, this civil society that had defied a ruthless regime of  occupation, were soon dismissed as a misguided and wrongheaded enterprise.  Once Poland had been liberated by the Red Army in 1944–45, any earlier  association with the so-called London underground was labeled a stigma and  a liability by the emergent Communist organizers of the public order. Soon  after liberation the Home Army was portrayed in propaganda posters as “a  spittle-bespattered dwarf of reactionary forces” (“AK—zapluty karzel  reakcji”) and its veterans had to either hide their past or else risk  arrest, internment, censure, or humiliation.* How did this   situation—which led to a pervasive sense of historical injustice among a  significant majority of the Polish population—come about?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Discovery of the Katyn Mass Graves\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In the concluding stages of the Second World War, the Germans were being  pushed out of Poland by the rapid advance of the Red Army. For the leaders  of Poland’s underground state, this was far from a desirable outcome. The  Soviet Communists were regarded as the historic enemies of Polish  independence. Twice since the October revolution of 1917, they had  asserted their ambitions of westward expansion in military terms. In 1920,  the course of the Polish-Soviet war “miraculously” turned at the outskirts  of Warsaw, with fighting continuing until the eventual peace \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    *On September 15, 1944, the Political Bureau of the Polish Workers’ Party  (as the CP was known at the time) accepted the following text of a  declaration that Home Army soldiers were supposed to sign: “I, . . . ,  having been sent to an internment camp on suspicion   of negative attitude towards the only legal organizations of the Polish  state—the KRN and the PKWN [Communist Party–sponsored organizations, whose  genesis I later explain] and the supreme command of the Polish army,  declare from my own unforced and free will the following: 1. I appreciate  the activity of the KRN and PKWN as indispensable for our nation and in my  further work I will remain loyal and obedient to all their regulations, as  befits a Polish soldier; 2. I understand and condemn the abominable  activity of the leaders of the AK and other affiliated organizations, who  helped the Hitlerite occupier, and weakened the Polish army and the unity  of the Polish nation by their diversionary activity . . .” and so on, in  the same spirit, for two more paragraphs, promising in the end to aid “the  KRN and PKWN” in combating these “pernicious influences” (Krystyna  Kersten, Rok pierwszy, p. 49).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to Tim Snyder and Marci Shore for their  efforts to come up with an English translation of the bizarre phrase  zapluty karzel reakcji. We settled after a long discussion on  “spittle-bespattered dwarf.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    treaty of Riga.* And in 1939, the Red Army invaded Poland in collusion  with Hitler, resulting in Soviet occupation of approximately half of  Poland until June 1941. When Nazi Germany launched its assault on the  Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 and the USSR finally joined the Allied  cause, the Polish government-in-exile renewed diplomatic relations with  the USSR.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Soviet Union initially buckled before the onslaught of the Nazi war  machine and welcomed all the assistance and friends it could muster. A  period of intense Polish-Soviet engagement ensued. A treaty was signed  between the two governments, and several hundred thousand Polish citizens  were “amnestied” in the Soviet Union. A welfare network was established in  the USSR to provide for the needs of destitute Polish citizens just  released from labor camps and forced settlement in the Soviet interior. At  designated assembly points, able-bodied men could join units of a new  Polish army, which the Soviets agreed would be formed on their territory.†\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But as the fortunes of war gradually turned and as the Soviet Union proved  a formidable member of the anti-Nazi coalition, Churchill and Roosevelt  developed an ever greater sympathy with Soviet territorial claims and  security guarantees in postwar Europe. During their Big Three meeting with  Joseph Stalin in Teheran late in 1943, they agreed that after the war the  Soviet Union’s border could be moved far to the west, at Poland’s expense,  roughly to the Curzon Line. In this manner, without consulting or  informing the Polish government-in-exile in London, they sanctioned a  territorial expansion reminiscent of what the Soviet Union had acquired as  a result of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact in 1939.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    As an emboldened Stalin began to maneuver for a postwar settlement that  would eventually lead to the Communist subjugation of East-\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    *In Polish folklore and historiography, Jozef Pilsudski’s  counteroffensive, which pushed the Bolsheviks back from Warsaw, has been  referred to as “the miracle on the Vistula” (“cud nad Wisla,”). August 15,  the day he opened the counteroffensive, was celebrated during the interwar  years as a national holiday in Poland.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    †Prime Minister General Wladyslaw Sikorski signed the treaty with the  Soviet Union in the face of vigorous protests by leading Polish  politicians in London. The reason for their opposition was Stalin’s  refusal to guarantee Poland’s territorial integrity in its prewar borders  by renouncing the territorial acquisitions made by the Soviet Union in  1939. The pretext for Soviet reluctance was that the population of the  occupied territories had allegedly expressed a sovereign wish to join the  Soviet Union in a referendum held on October 22, 1939. (On the manner in  which this “referendum” was conducted, see my Revolution from Abroad,  chapter 2.) Nevertheless, Sikorski decided that he must sign the treaty  without delay, for while territorial disputes could be settled in the  future, hundreds of thousands of Poles lingering in Soviet captivity were  in danger of death each day from mistreatment and destitution. To save  their lives he thought he had to act immediately.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ern Europe, Polish-Soviet relations soured. Indeed, the deterioration had  begun even before the Teheran conference. In the spring of 1943, the USSR  severed diplomatic relations with the Polish government following the  discovery of mass graves in Katyn.An essay in historical interpretation; [quote]--Elie Wiesel, The Washington Post Book World; Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303631048933,"sku":"NP9780812967463","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812967463.jpg?v=1767726781","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/fear-isbn-9780812967463","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}