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Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz | 
 enlarge | Author: Jan Gross
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Category: Book
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Rating:  30 reviews
Sales Rank: 185382
Media: Paperback
Pages: 336
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Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0812967461
Dewey Decimal Number: 947
EAN: 9780812967463
ASIN: 0812967461
Publication Date: August 14, 2007
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Product Description
Poland suffered an exceedingly brutal Nazi occupation during the Second World War. Close to five million Polish citizens lost their lives as a result. More than half the casualties were Polish Jews. Thus, the second largest Jewish community in the world–only American Jewry numbered more than the three and a half million Polish Jews at the time–was wiped out. Over 90 percent of its members were killed in the Holocaust. And yet, despite this unprecedented calamity that affected both Jews and non-Jews, Jewish Holocaust survivors returning to their hometowns in Poland after the war experienced widespread hostility, including murder, at the hands of their neighbors. The bloodiest peacetime pogrom in twentieth-century Europe took place in the Polish town of Kielce one year after the war ended, on July 4, 1946.
Jan Gross’s Fear attempts to answer a perplexing question: How was anti-Semitism possible in Poland after the war? At the center of his investigation is a detailed reconstruction of the Kielce pogrom and the reactions it evoked in various milieus of Polish society. How did the Polish Catholic Church, Communist party workers, and intellectuals respond to the spectacle of Jews being murdered by their fellow citizens in a country that had just been liberated from a five-year Nazi occupation?
Gross argues that the anti-Semitism displayed in Poland in the war’s aftermath cannot be understood simply as a continuation of prewar attitudes. Rather, it developed in the context of the Holocaust and the Communist takeover: Anti-Semitism eventually became a common currency between the Communist regime and a society in which many had joined in the Nazi campaign of plunder and murder–and for whom the Jewish survivors were a standing reproach.
Jews did not bring communism to Poland as some believe; in fact, they were finally driven out of Poland under the Communist regime as a matter of political expediency. In the words of the Nobel Prize—winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, Poland’s Communist rulers fulfilled the dream of Polish nationalists by bringing into existence an ethnically pure state.
For more than half a century, what happened to the Jewish Holocaust survivors in Poland has been cloaked in guilt and shame. Writing with passion, brilliance, and fierce clarity, Jan T. Gross at last brings the truth to light.
Praise for Fear
“You read [Fear] breathlessly, all human reason telling you it can’t be so–and the book 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, The Washington Post Book World
“Bone-chilling . . . [Fear] is illuminating and searing, a moral indictment delivered with cool, lawyerly efficiency that pounds away at the conscience with the sledgehammer of a verdict. . . . Fear takes on an entire nation, forever depriving Poland of any false claims to the smug, easy virtue of an innocent bystander to Nazi atrocities. . . . Gross’ Fear should inspire a national reflection on why there are scarcely any Jews left in Poland. It’s never too late to mourn. The soul of the country depends on it.”–Thane Rosenbaum, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Provocative . . . powerful and necessary . . . One can only hope that this important book will make a difference.”–Susan Rubin Suleiman, Boston Globe
“Imaginative, urgent, and unorthodox . . . The ‘fear’ of Mr. Gross’s title . . . is not just the fear suffered by Jews in a Poland that wished they had never come back alive. It is also the fear of the Poles themselves, who saw in those survivors a reminder of their own wartime crimes. Even beyond Mr. Gross’s exemplary historical research and analysis, it is this lesson that makes Fear such an important book.”–The New York Sun
“After all the millions dead, after the Nazi terror, a good many Poles still found it acceptable to hate the Jews among them. . . . The sorrows of history multiply: a necessary book.”
–Kirkus (starred review)
“Gross illustrates with eloquence and shocking detail that the bloodletting did not cease when the war ended. . . . This is a masterful work that sheds necessary light on a tragic and often-ignored aspect of postwar history.”–Booklist (starred review)
“[Fear] tells a wartime horror story that should forces Poles to confront an untold–and profoundly terrifying–aspect of their history.”–Publishers Weekly (starred review)
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 25 more reviews...
 At Best, a Gross Exaggeration July 18, 2006
Jan Peczkis (Chicago IL, USA)
111 out of 161 found this review helpful
For all of the media fascination with this book, little of its content is new. There are too many fallacies, non sequiturs, and ridiculous assertions in this book to even begin addressing here. Those readers familiar with some of the sources that Jan Thomas Gross cites will notice immediately that he does so in a selective manner according to his Pole-demonizing agenda. Gross cites Browning on rural Poles betraying Jews to the Germans--while conveniently omitting the fact that those Jews had been stealing food from the Poles (Browning, p. 126)(magnified by the near-starvation conditions under the brutal German occupation). As for Gross' expansive accounts of Polish-German collaboration in the killing of Jews (as at Jedwabne--itself a Gross exaggeration--pardon the pun), Gross tiptoes around Browning's paragraph (p. 52) on the Germans' dissatisfaction with the overall rarity of Polish collaborators and the need to replace them with Ukrainians and Baltics. (The latter subsequently became a mainstay in the roundup and killings of Jews throughout German-occupied Poland). Elsewhere, Gross' citation of Yitzhak Zuckerman, on Jewish grief after Kielce, avoids mention of Zuckerman's statement (p. 661) on the disarming of Kielce's Jews the day BEFORE the pogrom (excellent evidence for well-preplanned Communist staging). Elsewhere, Gross' preoccupation with Poles rejoicing at Jewish sufferings conspicuously omits Zuckerman's (p. 374, 493) detailed description of Polish conduct during and after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. A few Poles, mostly underworld figures, did make cruel jokes. But masses of Poles watched "without a trace of spiteful malice", while other Poles cried. There was also widespread Polish admiration for Jewish bravery. (Of course, Jews had sometimes rejoiced at Polish tragedies in the past).
Gross' tendentious use of readily-available sources destroys the credibility of his many obscure citations. In addition, almost all of Gross' accounts of in-war and postwar "Polish killings of Jews" occur in a contextual vacuum. They all automatically assume that: The killers were all ethnic Poles, anti-Semitism was always the sole or main motive, and extenuating circumstances were always absent.
Gross abandons all reality in his contentions that Poles should've overlooked the almost-completely Zydokomuna (Jewish Communist) leadership of the Soviet puppet state forced upon them. To say that they had nothing to do with Jews (since most Jews weren't Communists) is akin to saying that Einstein had nothing to do with Jews (since most Jews weren't and aren't exceptionally intelligent). Gross elaborates on the Communist persecution of Jews as "evidence" against the Zydokomuna. It is no such thing. Jews had persecuted Jews before, while Communists, ever the masters of duplicity, first played both ends and then eventually dumped the Jews altogether. Perhaps silliest of all of Gross' self-refuting statements is the one about Communism being imposed upon Poland even in the absence of Jewish Communists. Well, what about the fact that 5-6 million Jews would've been murdered by the Germans had not a single Polish anti-Semite ever existed and not a single post-Jewish property gone to the Poles?
In a rare display of genuine scholarship, Gross (pp. 228-230) cites various estimates (13%, 24.7%, 30%, even 50%--probably top leadership) of the Jewish share of the leading positions in the Bezpieka (UB: Communist security police). But Gross fails to "connect the dots". A conservative 20% share means that Jews were twenty times more common as leaders in the hated police than in the general population, and were responsible for at least 16,000--60,000 of the 80,000--300,000 Polish victims of the Communist terror. The clear, inescapable fact is that Jews killed more Poles than Poles killed Jews. Of course, the reader can guess which side is called upon to "come to terms with the past", engage in endless apologizing, etc.
Gross dusts off anti-Catholic Stalinist propaganda when he accuses the Church of a "tardy" response to the Kielce tragedy. Who is holding the stopwatch? And how many influential Jewish religious (and secular) leaders had promptly, loudly, and specifically condemned Jewish Communists for their torture and murder of Poles?
Gross engages in imaginative "psychoanalysis" of Polish thinking (pp. 246-249), accusing postwar Poles of murdering Jews out of a guilt complex over the earlier purchase of post-Jewish properties in Nazi-sponsored auctions. His egregious thesis begins with Polish "opportunistic complicity" in the Holocaust based solely on these acquisitions. Gross' bizarre reasoning implies that anyone who acquires the property of a murder victim thereby becomes complicit in the murder (and, what's more, also a "plunderer" and "exploiter" of the victim), regardless of the circumstances surrounding the acquisition and the fact that the recipient had nothing to do with the murder itself! Considering the massive loss of Polish life and property, and the destitution and desperate housing shortage during and after the war, what were Poles supposed to do? Let the Jewish properties stand vacant in reverence for Jewish deaths, and on the outside chance that the owners may return? Let's also have a little perspective on the 600 Jewish postwar deaths (p. 35; somewhat higher quoted figures are unproven) in the light of the 300,000 returning Jews and assumed 5 Jews per property. Merely 1% of Jewish property reacquisitions had met with murderous Polish resistance, claiming the lives of a miniscule 0.2% of Poland's surviving Jews. Some mini-Holocaust! Some Polish guilt complex!
The perceptive reader can see through Gross' preposterous equation (pp. 248-249) of the Kristallnacht-related looting of Jewish properties with Polish post-Jewish property acquisitions. Decades after the former, a woman expressed guilt over an ill-gotten pillow, and asked the Jewish owners' descendants what to do. The moral of the story is obvious: The Poles, "suffering from a long-repressed guilt complex", can finally resolve it by paying massive tribute ("restitution") to Jewish organizations (part of the Holocaust Industry). The plot gets even thicker: Gross discards WWII completely and actually equates the Polish acquisitions of post-German properties with the post-Jewish ones (p. 248)! Is this a veiled reference to a Jewish/German-revanchist alliance for the coming shakedown of Poland?
 Gross's "Historical Interpretation" July 3, 2006
Charles Chotkowski (Fairfield, Conn.)
63 out of 98 found this review helpful
In his new book, "Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz" (Random House), Jan T. Gross advances a novel thesis: "it was widespread collusion in the Nazi-driven plunder, spoliation, and eventual murder of the Jews that generated Polish anti-Semitism after the war." His case in point is the Kielce pogrom of July 4, 1946.
The Kielce pogrom was a horrific massacre; an uncontrolled mob of soldiers, policemen and civilians murdered 42 Jews. Gross devotes two chapters of his book to Kielce, but his narrative of the pogrom does not prove his thesis.
Nowhere does Gross show that the victims were former residents who had returned to Kielce to reclaim their property, or that the perpetrators held formerly Jewish possessions. It's doubtful he could: the victims had arrived from the Soviet Union, and presumably came from the eastern Polish borderlands, not Kielce.
Nor is the allegation of "widespread collusion" in plunder and spoliation substantiated. The over 20 million ethnic Poles in postwar Poland could not, as a whole or in major part, have plundered the limited amount of property the 3.3 million Jews in prewar Poland owned.
The "eventual murder" of Jews was a German crime without Polish participation, except in a few instances like Jedwabne. The Germans did not use Poles as death camp guards or SS-auxiliaries. It is illogical to claim that a postwar pogrom is proof of Polish behavior during the war.
Gross prefaces his theory with "Until someone offers an alternative explanation, we must consider that..." He makes bald assertions, with scant statistical data behind them.
Deborah Lipstadt mistakenly wrote in Publishers Weekly that a government investigation confirmed Gross's book "Neighbors" about the Jedwabne massacre. The investigation found about 400 victims, not 1,600, about 40 perpetrators, not half the town, and two other cities, not "many," with similar size massacres.
Compare "Fear" With An Earlier Book By Gross August 22, 2007
pareto (Texas USA)
58 out of 86 found this review helpful
The invasion of Poland by Germany and Russia in September of 1939 was an unprovoked partition of the country. It is understood that the Poles were not pleased by the Russian occupation, but it may be thought that the Russian occupation was a minor annoyance compared to the occupation by the Germans. In an earlier book Revolution from Abroad written in his pre-postmodern days, when Gross was an associate professor at Emory, Gross carefully and with excellent documentation shows how wrong this notion was. He wrote (Revolution from Abroad, Princeton Univ. Press, 1st ed., p. 229):
"These very conservative estimates show that the Soviets killed or drove to their deaths three or four times as many people as the Nazis from a population half the size of that under German jurisdiction. This comparison holds for the first two years of the Second World War, the period before the Nazis began systematic mass annihilation of the Jewish population."
Gross shows that, for Polish Catholics, the Soviets were even worse, indeed much worse than the brutal Nazis. Essentially all the Polish professional and semiprofessional classes (doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, managers, foremen, farmers with holding beyond a few acres, etc.) were rounded up by the Soviets and then either killed immediately or retained in prisons for shipments to slave labor camps in Siberia and Central Asia. Prison conditions were hellish, worse than those in the Nazi concentration camps. Gross writes (Revolution from Abroad, p. 161): "In Lwow, twenty-eight people living in a 11.5 sq. m cell relied on the geometrical skills of a gifted high school student who fitted them most ingeniously by size into an intricate pattern." Sanitary conditions were appalling, with inmates frequently forced to urinate and defecate on the floors of the cells.
What was the situation with the Jews in the lands occupied by the Soviets and what was their attitude to the occupiers? Gross writes (Revolution from Abroad, p. 32):
"What Poles and Ukrainians report, often with biting irony, the Jews do not deny: 'Jews greeted the Soviet army with joy. The youth was spending days and evenings with the soldiers. . . Jews received incoming Russians enthusiastically, they [the Russians] also trusted them [the Jews].'"
Again, Gross writes (Revolution from Abroad, p. 34, quoting Celina Koninska):
"It is hard to find words to describe the feeling -- this waiting and this happiness. We wondered how to express ourselves -- to throw flowers? To sing? To organize a demonstration? How to show our great joy? I think the Jews awaiting the Messiah will feel, when he finally comes, the way we felt. "
These warm receptions by Jews for the Soviets in eastern Poland were in September of 1939, when there were no Germans in sight. The Jews were rejoicing over the occupation of eastern Poland by the Russians. To Polish Catholics, this was simply treason, analogous to the occasional warm receptions in western Poland of the Germans by some Volksdeutsche.
Now, it is undeniable that in the German-occupied portion of Poland where the situation of the Jews was worse than that of the Catholics, many Polish families hid Jews from the Nazi occupiers. It is a matter of record that Poles are listed at Yad Vashem numerically first amongst the righteous Gentiles for risking their lives and those of their families for sheltering Jews from the Nazis. So, it is fair to ask the question, "When did Jews use their favored position in Soviet occupied eastern Poland to shelter Polish Catholics from the NKVD?" This reviewer regrets to say that he cannot find any instances of such assistance.
Up to the day (June 22, 1941) when Hitler broke his deal with Stalin and invaded Soviet-occupied Poland, Gross (Revolution from Abroad p. 194) estimates that 1.25 million people were transported into the Soviet Union from eastern Poland. The ghastly NKVD prisons in Poland were generally used as holding cells for Poles awaiting execution or prison train space for transportation to the gulags. When the Germans attacked the Soviets on June 22, 1941, the NKVD killed or moved to the east 150,000 prisoners from these holding cells. In the Brygidki prison in Lwow, on June 22, 1941, the NKVD killed almost all of the 13,000 inmates. (Revolution from Abroad, p. 179). This was recorded by Gross as a "massacre" rather than a pogrom.
After the Nazis occupied western Poland in 1939, they encouraged anti-Semitic acts by the Poles, including pogroms. The Germans had only the most minimal success. Polish Catholics were not inclined to participate in Nazi murders. Moreover, the Polish underground punished betrayal of Jews to the Nazis by death. In Fear, Gross eschews the careful data based arguments he gave in his earlier book Revolution from Abroad. What is substituted is the kind of postmodern sermonizing that appeals to Gross's anti-Polish, anti-Catholic choir.
Fine achivement? July 6, 2006
Simon Says
47 out of 88 found this review helpful
It can be find distasteful what professor Gross is doing, trying to built his position and career on the tragedy of so many of people. The tragedy which he is willing to (ab)use and manipulate. He is also trying to support and keep up a myth of Polish widespread and strong anti-Semitism. I think it is proper to know some facts which can dispel and impair that untrue myth, and first of all other facts which show how prof. Gross is tinkering at the true to rack up, at any price, arguments which back up his thesis.
First of all professor Gross is a sociologist and not a historian. His investigations cannot be at any rate called suitable and reliable. As an example can stand his postulate that testimonies of Jewish witnesses should not be subjected to source critique, which is a common scientific procedure. In his book `The neighbours:......' about the massacre of Jews in Jedwabne he wrote about 1,600 victims, while all others reliable sources say about 400 victims. His is not even mentioning that, this indeed horrible atrocity was probably inspired by Germans (SS squad operating around), which of course do not diminish the blame of Poles. But can you called `objective' the book which makes the number of victims four times higher than it factually was, and which completely omits circumstance of intimidation of perpetrators by the occupant. Prof. Gross builds the vast, comprehensive picture on single, incidental events which are not confronted and compared with a great amout of heroic acts by Poles rescuing Jews (which was punished by imidiate execution by shot). He is not also trying to sketch the complicated situation in Eastern Poland which during the II W.W. was occupied initially by Soviets. He left unsaid the fact that some Jews were then betraying their Polish neighbours, which were taken into hands of Soviet butchers and sent to work camps on Siberia or (the intellectuals) executed. It does not justify any hositle acts commited by Poles but if (in all such occasions) such facts are left out it makes impossible to describe properly (and only this makes possible reasonable judgement and real understanding) the whole complex structure of reasons. To outline as the only reason common hatred of Poles against Jews, not taking into account all other circumstances is certainly a wrongdoing. Thus, nothing can justify and endorse prof. Gross' thesis, which we can find in his latest book `Fear: .....', that Poles should be ashamed becase of their attitude towards Jews during II W.W. and that it was that shame which forced them to post-war anti-Semitism. It is (?) commonly known that anti-Semitism in communist Poland was mostly studiously planned by communist regime and its secret services and it was arising when there was a political need resulting from struggle between various, respective factions. Of course I do not claim that anti-Semitism did not and does not exist in Poland. There is always and everywhere a considerable group of narrow-minded and primitive people who need someone to hate, who need scapegoats, and anti-Semitism as a phenomenon helps them to justify the need for viciousnes and cruelty, but to acusse Poles of common anti-Semitism is a serious mistake. To the contrary, from XIV century Poland was called BY JEWS `The Jewish Paradise'. It was the tradition of tolerance which lured Jews from the whole Europe (where they were often persecuted) to that country, and THIS IS WHY half of European Jews lived in Poland when the II W.W. began and THIS IS PROBABLY WHY German Nazis built in Poland their biggest death camps. It was just convenient to them (it is quite a different story with thoughtless using the phrase `Polish death camps' -they were as much `Polish' as `British' were bombs which were dropping on Birmingham, Coventry and London in 1940). Thus, it is very sad that prof. Gross is among those who still set at variance these severely experinced nations which generally kindly lived together. The book by prof. Gross is written with lively, vivid language. It evokes emotions equally to best novels. But is it a novel? Prof. Gross can achive this effect only by simplifying the reality and sacrificing the true. I doubt if it is such a fine achivement. Maybe in this case there exist no absolutely `true' point of view but to approach the most true one we cannot confine ourselves to only one opinion, even if it appears to be so attractive. Why so attarctive? Maybe because it helps to put down the unconvenient question: `What my nation did to help Jews during the war?'. May be.
 A disturbing narrative, but tightly argued and supported July 23, 2006
M. Wilson (USA)
46 out of 110 found this review helpful
I agree with Mr. Rockman's review here, although I'll up him a star. This book is uncomfortable to read, especially (as is apparent from the other reviews) for Poles and Polish-Americans, but it is necessary to understand as much as we can of the complex mix that is anti-semitism. Yes of course there were righteous Poles during the occupations by both Germans and Russians, and many Jews owe their lives to them. There were also, though, vicious anti-semites among the wartime Poles, and the Germans and later Communists gave them opportunities to employ their thuggishness. Dr. Gross asks us to ponder from where such thoughts and emotions are derived in Polish culture.
One clue which is found in the text of "Fear" and in some of these Amazon reviews: the distinction between "Poles" and "Jews" in the same country. Indeed, Dr. Gross even cites the use in many post-pogrom accounts by Poles of a difference stated between "human beings" and "Jews". That Polish Jews were Poles as well appears to be a difficult concept for some.
This book is well referenced and well argued. Jan Gross is an eminent historian, and it shows.
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