This book focuses on the fate of Polish Jews and Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust and its aftermath, in the ill-recognized era of Eastern-European pogroms after the WW2. It is based on the author's own ethnographic research in those areas of Poland where the Holocaust machinery operated. The results comprise the anthropological interviews with the members of the generation of Holocaust witnesses and the results of her own extensive archive research in the Polish Institute for National Remembrance (IPN). "[This book] is at times shocking; however, it grips the reader's attention from the first to the last page. It is a remarkable work, set to become a classic among the publications in this field." Jerzy Jedlicki, Professor Emeritus at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Focused on the struggle to survive by the Jewish Poles stranded in the Polish countryside during the Holocaust, case studies collected in this volume are based on research carried out at Poland's Institute of National Remembrance. Where possible, they are also complemented by Jewish survivors' testimonies dispersed throughout the world. There are at least two leitmotifs recurring throughout all texts: What are the social correlates of the anti-Jewish violence undertaken by Polish neighbours without German initiative and even knowledge? Are there certain types of social relationships more subject or prone to this kind of violence? What was the role of peasantry, social elites, and Catholic church in inciting and perpetrating it? Was this violence influenced by the Holocaust, or was it a separate form of genocidal violence?

In Cursed, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir investigates the Kielce Pogrom of 4th July, 1946, a milestone in the periodization of the Jewish diaspora. This massacre led Polish Jews who had survived the Holocaust to realize that there was nothing left for them in post-war Poland. Panic-stricken, they fled to the West in droves. The Kielce Pogrom remains a negative reference point in the Polish historical narrative, representing a lack of recognition of antisemitism as a deep-rooted, ubiquitous element of Polish identity. Tokarska-Bakir takes a fresh look at both predicaments, weighing the evidence and conflicting arguments to revise the perception of Poland as a country groaning under the Soviet boot that did not prevent the spread of antisemitism but instead attempted to turn a blind eye to it. The resulting analysis is filled with revelations from the archives, previously classified sources of the communist Ministry of Public Security, the Citizens' Militia, and the Polish Army, and oral testimonies by Jewish survivors. Drawing on archival research pertaining to every single Kielce militiaman and functionary of the Office of Public Security whose details were possible to find, Tokarska-Bakir examines the dominant hypotheses about the Kielce Pogrom, step by step. Cursed reveals a vivid portrait of society by detailing the wartime pasts of the militia and army as murderers of Jews and dispelling the comfortable generalization about Polish history being black and white. The result is an engaging narrative presented with scholarly exactitude revealing the fate of people whose descendants are today scattered across several continents.