When the Nazis forced most of Warsaw's Jews into the city's
infamous ghetto during the Second World War, some 28,000 Jews
either hid and never entered the Warsaw Ghetto, or escaped from it
later in what Gunnar S. Paulsson calls 'the greatest prison-break
in history'. This book - the first detailed treatment of Jewish
escape and hiding during the Holocaust - tells the story of these
hidden Jews of Warsaw. Using memoirs, diaries, testimonies and the
records of Jewish and Polish organizations that helped the
fugitives, Paulsson shows that after the 1942 deportations nearly a
quarter of the ghetto's remaining Jews managed to escape and,
despite appalling difficulties and dangers, more than 11,000 of
them lived to see the end of the war. Connected by elaborate
networks of which Poles, Germans and the Jews themselves were
largely unaware, they formed what can aptly be called a secret
city. Paulsson challenges many established assumptions.He shows
that, despite the social gulf that separated Jews and Poles, enough
private contacts existed to make escape on a large scale possible,
without much help from the Polish or Jewish underground; that the
much-reviled German, Polish and Jewish policemen, as well as Jewish
converts and their families, were key in helping Jews escape; and
that many more Poles helped than harmed the Jews, though most
stayed neutral and often expressed antisemitic sentiments. He
argues that the Jewish leadership was wrong to dismiss the
possibility of escape, staking everything on a hopeless uprising.
Paulsson's engrossing book offers a new perspective on Holocaust
history. 'For many of us in this field it is difficult to imagine
something new: the main lines of our understanding were sketched by
some often formidable authors, many of whom lived through these
terrible events. Paulsson manages to break new ground, however,
with an intelligent, fresh, and independent-minded
analysis.'Michael Marrus, Professor of Holocaust Studies, Toronto
University 'the best, most complete examination we have to date of
the texture of hiding and rescue in Nazi-occupied Warsaw - or
anywhere in Nazi-occupied Europe' Lawrence Powell, Professor of
History, Tulane University 'an important, formidable - and
bound-to-be controversial - book' Berel Lang, Trinity College,
Hartford Co-winner of the 1998 Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary
History Gunnar S. Paulsson has been the senior historian of the
Holocaust Exhibition Project Office at the Imperial War Museum,
London; Koerner visiting fellow and lecturer at the Oxford Centre
for Hebrew & Jewish Studies; and Pearl Resnick fellow at the
Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the US Holocaust Memorial
Museum. He is the son of a Holocaust survivor.
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