Polish Jewish Relations During The Second World War

A man of towering intellectual accomplishment and extraordinary tenacity, Emmanuel Ringelblum devoted his life to recording the fate of his people at the hands of the Germans. Convinced that he must remain in the Warsaw Ghetto to complete his work, and rejecting an invitation to flee to refuge on the Aryan side, Ringelbaum, his wife, and their son were eventually betrayed to the Germans and killed. This book represents Ringelbaum's attempt to answer the questions he knew history would ask about the Polish people: what did the Poles do while millions of Jews were being led to the stake? What did the Polish underground do? What did the Government-in-Exile do? Was it inevitable that the Jews, looking their last on this world, should have to see indifference or even gladness on the faces of their neighbors? These questions have haunted Polish-Jewish relations for the last fifty years. Behind them are forces that have haunted Polish-Jewish relations for a thousand years.

Imaginary Neighbors offers a unique and significant contribution to the contemporary debate concerning Holocaust memory by exploring the most important current political topic in Poland: Jewish-Polish relations during and after World War II.

The following book was translated and published in English: Ewa Kurek, YOUR LIFE IS WORTH MINE - How Polish Nuns Saved Hundreds of Jewish Children in German-Occupied Poland, foreword by Prof. Jan Karski, New York 1998. She has also contributed articles in English that were published in Polin (Oxford: Institute for Polish Jewish Studies), Embracing the Other (New York University Press) and From Shtetl to Socialism (LondonWashington). Her research on the subject of Polish-Jewish relations in World War II in Poland has been presented at several international academic congresses, including Yad Vashem, Jerusalem (1988), Princeton University (1993), and Columbia University (2007). In the book POLISH-JEWISH RELATIONS 1939-1945; BEYOND THE LIMITS OF SOLIDARITY, Ewa Kurek reconstructs the wartime history based almost exclusively on Jewish sources. Like in her other books, Ewa Kurek has the courage to raise important questions and the courage to search for equally important answers.

Zimmerman examines the attitude and behavior of the Polish Underground towards the Jews during the Holocaust.

Winner of the 2022 PIASA Anna M. Cienciala Award for the Best Edited Book in Polish StudiesThe majority of Poland’s prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. This collection of original essays tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees, forced laborers, or political prisoners. This diverse set of experiences is covered by historians, literary and memory scholars, and sociologists who specialize in the field of East European Jewish history and culture.

Rethinking Poles and Jews focuses on the role of Holocaust-related material in perpetuating anti-Polish images and describes organizational efforts to combat them. Without minimizing contemporary Polish anti-Semitism, it also presents more positive material on contemporary Polish-American organizations and Jewish life in Poland.

Intending to dispel misconceptions about Polish collaboration with the Nazi regime during World War II, a former leader of the Polish underground discusses the helpless position of the Poles with the advent of the German occupation, cooperation between Jewish and Polish underground movements, sabotage of German factories and transports, execution of collaborators, and notification to the Allies of the persecution of Jews in Poland. Notes that despite the fact that aiding Jews was automatically punished by death, over 100,000 Jews were saved. As a former leader of the anti-communist Polish Peasant Party who fled Poland in 1947, discusses Polish-Jewish relations after the war and "Jewish rule in Poland" under the aegis of the Communist Party. Notes the effects of the film "Shoah" on Polish-Jewish relations, contending that it is a biased account of the Holocaust.