Poland suffered an exceedingly brutal Nazi occupation during the
Second World War. Close to five million Poles were killed. Of
these, more than half were Jews killed in the Holocaust. Ninety
percent of the world's second largest Jewish community was
annihilated. But despite the calamity shared by Poland's Jews and
non-Jews, anti-Semitic violence did not stop in Poland with the end
of the war. Jewish Holocaust survivors returning to their Polish
hometowns 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 Kielce, Poland, a
year after the war ended. Jan Gross's "Fear" is a detailed
reconstruction of this pogrom and the Polish reactions to it that
attempts to answer a perplexing question: How was anti-Semitism
possible in Poland after the war?
Gross argues that postwar Polish anti-Semitism 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 filled with people who had
participated in the Nazi campaign of murder and plunder, people for
whom Jewish survivors were a standing reproach. The Polish poet
Czeslaw Milosz said that 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 Jewish Holocaust
survivors in Poland has been cloaked in guilt and shame. Writing
with passion, brilliance, and fierce clarity, Gross at last brings
the truth to light.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!