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This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources. Find sources: "Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (May 2008)

Fear - Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz is a book by Jan T. Gross. It was published by Random House in 2006.

Fear was written to explore the themes Gross introduced in Neighbors, in it, he explores the question of how such a thing as the Jedwabne pogrom could have happened.

Context

In his first chapter, Gross is at pains to lay out the horrors that Poland suffered during WWII: The initial division of the country between Stalin and Hitler, the subsequent Nazi conquest, the Katyn massacre of Polish army officers by the Soviets, the Warsaw uprising of 1944 and the Soviet decision to postpone entering Warsaw until the German army had defeated the Polish Armia Krajowa, the destruction of Warsaw (reduced, Gross tells us, "to a pile of rubble,") and the abandonment of Poland to half a century of Soviet Communist domination by Britain and America at the Yalta Conference.

The Unwelcoming of Jewish Survivors

Gross estimates that 250,000 Polish Jews attempted to return home at the end of the war. Approximately half returned from internment inside Russia, many has passed for members of another national group during the war, others survived the camps or emerged from hiding. One of the more startling revelations in Fear is that Poles who had hidden Jews - regarded by the rest of the world as heroes - begged the people whose lives they had saved not to reveal their actions for fear of reprisals by neighbors.

Gross describes a situation in which the homes, property, occupations and businesses of Polish Jews had been taken over by their neighbors during the Nazi occupation, with the result that Jews returning to their former homes in the hope of finding their relatives and rebuilding their lives were warned that they would be wise to leave and, in many cases, murdered. Property belonging to the Jewish community, including not only synagogues, but office buildings and schools, became the property of local governments which could continue in possession only if no Jewish community was reestablished.

Kielce Pogrom

In addition to more isolated murders of individuals and family grops, there were pogroms in Krakow (the Kraków pogrom), Rzeszów (the Rzeszów pogrom), and in several smaller towns, but the largest mass murder was the Kielce pogrom. Gross makes several particular claims about this pogrom. The pogrom was initiated not by a mob of citizens, but by the police, and involved people from every walk of life except the highest level of government officials in the city. It went on for many hours, murders were committed by small groups of individuals who sought out and murdered individual Jews in all parts of the city, and by others, including - as Gross claims - even Polish Boy Scouts who stopped trains passing through the city, pulled Jews out and murdered them. In a memorable phrase, Gross describes these as "passionless killings."

Gross's understanding of the Anti-Jewish violence in Poland, 1944-1946

Gross argues that there is "no other plausible explanation of the virulent post-war anti-Semitism in Poland but that it was embedded in the society's opportunistic wartime behavior." Gross argues that because Poland had the largest Jewish population of any country conquered by the Third Reich, a proportionately large part of the Polish population had enriched themselves with the property of murdered Jews and was reluctant to have Jews reclaim their property. Therefore, a relatively small number of Jews, Gross estimates 1,500, were murdered and this served to frighten most of the 250,000 Polish Jews who had survived the Nazis and returned home, to flee in fear of their lives. But Gross also gives and explanation beyond simple greed. Citing Tacitus, who wrote that "It is indeed human nature to hate the man whom you have injured," Gross tells us that "Jews were so frightening and dangerous... not because of what they had done or could do to the Poles, but because of what Poles had done to the Jews." Poles living under Nazi occupation had not merely witnessed the mass murders of Jews, they had actively murdered Jews. The Jews were hateful because they were a reminder of how badly many Poles had behaved.

Criticism

Fear has caused much controversy in Poland (where it was published in 2008). It got mixed media reception and began a debate about antisemitism in post war Poland. It has been welcomed by some historians and media, e.g. "Gazeta Wyborcza" but at the same time was sharply criticized in other papers, and by historians accusing Gross of coming up with conclusions before completing full research, ignoring sources which did not confirm his own views, neglecting the wider context of the event, misinterpreting data (for example counting a traffic accident death as an antisemitic attack) to reach his conclusion, using inflammatory language and labeling all of postwar Polish society as antisemitic.

See also

• Holocaust in Poland

References

1. Fear, p. 81-2
2. Fear, pp. 73-80
3. Fear, pp. 83-166
4. Fear, p. 62
5. Fear, p. 247
6. Fear, p. 256
7. Craig Whitlock, A Scholar's Legal Peril in Poland, Washington Post Foreign Service, Friday, January 18, 2008; Page A14
8. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz: People’s past has to be reviewed critically on individual basis, Rzeczpospolita, January 11, 2008 Template:En icon
9. Piotr Gontarczyk, Far From Truth, Rzeczpospolita, January 12, 2008 Template:En icon

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