Abstract
Reviewed by: Lukasz Krzyzanowski, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
The medium-sized cities of Poland have been largely overlooked by historians of the Holocaust, who have primarily focused on Warsaw and a few other big cities or smaller locales for which extraordinary sources have been preserved. Sara Bender’s recent study of the Kielce Jewish community constitutes a significant attempt to fill this gap. This is worth noting not only because Kielce was a local centre at the periphery of the country, but also because there were many similar locations in Poland at the time. Jewish life and the course of the Holocaust in these regions differed from that of the few Polish metropolises and the numerous shtetlach. Furthermore, In Enemy Land is the first comprehensive history of the Holocaust in Kielce.
The work under review is an English translation of Bender’s book, which first appeared in Hebrew in 2012, published by Yad Vashem. The study is the result of extensive archival research and utilizes sources collected in Israel (Yad Vashem, Ghetto Fighters’ House), Poland (Institute for National Remembrance, Jewish Historical Institute, Kielce State Archive), Germany (Bundesarchiv) and the US (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). The author uses also published memoirs and seven interviews she conducted in 1990 and 2001–2004.
The book consists of six chronologically organized chapters. Chapter 1 contains detailed information regarding economic life and community institutions. Although the author discusses in great detail different Jewish political parties and factions present in the pre-war community, surprisingly little effort is dedicated to integrating this information into the broader context of the city. Despite a rich description of thriving Jewish political and cultural life, the book remains virtually completely silent in regard to the Jewish community’s and Jewish political parties’ contacts and possible cooperation with the local authorities of the city and Kielce province, as well as non-Jewish political parties. Although there is a section within the first chapter entitled ‘Jewish-Polish Relations in Interwar Kielce’, its exclusive focus remains on Polish anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish violence present in the area before World War II. While it is impossible to tell the story of the community in the Second Polish Republic without anti-Semitism, focusing solely on this factor significantly flattens the picture of Kielce, in which Jews comprised more than one third of the population. Certainly, Jews were discriminated against, but they also sat on the city council. Thus, a more nuanced and complex story of interactions between the two groups could have been told. Its absence results in a contrast between a studious reconstruction of Jewish pre-war institutions filled with names and the far less detailed and more general description of intergroup relations, largely reduced to one over-arching dimension.
The following four chapters focus on the history of persecution during the Holocaust: from the beginnings of the German occupation of the city to the shrunken Restghetto and labour camps for Jews, operating almost until the arrival of the Red Army. The author puts great effort into a meticulous reconstruction of the history of the Kielce ghetto and the trajectories of its survivors in the late phase of the war. While the author’s own voice and clear argument is less visible in this part of the book, bringing the detailed information into the light is undoubtedly of historical value.
The last chapter focusing on Jewish-Polish interactions in the Kielce region during the war and the Epilogue, which contains a rough sketch of the aftermath of the war, seem somewhat detached from the rest of the book. In these two parts, the author discusses not only the history but the historiography. The discussion of wartime interactions and the infamous Kielce pogrom of 1946, which claimed the lives of more than 40 Jewish victims, presents anti-Semitism as almost the sole and self-evident explanation. However, what is more surprising is the author’s reading and use of the existing scholarship. Bender’s reading, especially of works by Polish scholars, is more than critical. She states: ‘This historiography is characterized by a blatant attempt to overstate immeasurably the aid that Poles extended to Jews during the war and a tendency to reject and contest testimonies, diaries, and memoirs of Jews who lived in Poland during the German occupation’. While this could be a correct assessment of the re-writing of history fostered by the current Polish government, it is certainly not entirely true of the scholarship more broadly. For example, the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, under the leadership of Barbara Engelking, in the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw has for years now been producing cutting-edge research and unearthing facts testifying to the scale and extent of Polish involvement in the Holocaust. The multiple publications originating from the Center and the scholars affiliated with it are virtually absent in Bender’s book. Totally absent are the works of Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, who has published extensively about Polish anti-Semitism in the Kielce region, the blood libel, and the Kielce pogrom (both in Polish and English) and who, as it happens, was recently awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize precisely for her work on the Kielce pogrom. Had the author included this scholarship published in the last two decades, she would likely have come to different conclusions. Equally surprising is the way the author criticizes Jan Tomasz Gross, a retired Princeton University Professor, whom she claims ‘seeks to restore his reputation in Poland by pinning the blame for the Poles’ behaviour on the Germans and the Jews themselves’ (298). The extent to which Gross has been criticized by the right-wing side of the Polish political scene and the prosecutorial investigations launched against him seems to contradict this statement.
In Enemy Land is also not free of factual errors. For example, neither of the two entities – NSZ (Narodowe Siły Zbrojne) and WiN (Wolność i Niezawisłość) – could have operated prior to the war (274), as they were not established until 1942 (in the case of the first) and 1945 (in the case of the second). Ahistorical terminology can also be found in the author’s choice of the phrase ‘pre-independence Israel’ to denote British-controlled Mandatory Palestine (33). A careful reading of Bender’s text reveals more of similar mistakes, as well as occasional missing references or incomplete archival signatures. Bender’s book would certainly have benefited from more careful editing to help eliminate such mistakes, but also unnecessary repetitions (e.g.: 90/108, 104/111, 173), multiple typographical errors in surnames and names of locations, and mistranslations of administrative units. For example, the General Government (GG) never contained an entity known as ‘Kielce District’ (174). Rather, in the German nomenclature, the city and surrounding areas were located within Distrikt Radom of the GG. The ‘subdistricts’ that appear in the book seem to refer to German Kreise, commonly rendered in English-language literature on the subject as ‘counties’. Although such errors are impossible to avoid in any publication, their frequency in the book under review may hinder its understanding and reception.
Sara Bender’s In Enemy Land is a book with a clear agenda, manifested at the outset from the very title onwards. It presents the Kielce Jewish community as strangers in an utterly hostile land. While there is no exaggeration in descriptions of the resentment and violence that Jews encountered in Kielce and the surrounding areas from the local Polish Christian population, what made the Jewish fate even more tragic is the fact that for many Polish Jews, Poland was the only homeland they knew. Presenting Kielce Jews as strangers not only deprives them of agency but, paradoxically, presents them from the same reductive perspective that finds agreement with Polish anti-Semites and right-wingers.