Sliwa on Person, 'Policjanci'

H-Poland Sliwa on Person, 'Policjanci'

Review published on Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Katarzyna Person. Policjanci. Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2018. 294 pp. $19.53 (paper), ISBN 978-83-65254-78-8.

Reviewed by Joanna Sliwa (Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany - Claims Conference) Published on H-Poland (June, 2019) Commissioned by Anna Muller (University of Michigan - Dearborn)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=54222

Katarzyna Person, a historian of modern East European Jewish history and the Holocaust affiliated with the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, embarked on a difficult mission to present a nuanced study of the Jewish Order Service, commonly known as the Jewish Police, in the Warsaw ghetto. Person has done a praiseworthy job in her meticulously researched book,Policjanci: Wizerunek Żydowskiej Służby Porządkowej w getcie warszawskim (Policemen: An Image of the Jewish Order Service in the Warsaw Ghetto). She challenges the single story of the Jewish Police in the Warsaw ghetto as sadistic oppressors, willing Nazi collaborators, or self-hating Jews. This view has dominated the imagination, memory, and often scholarship on the topic. Instead, Person pulls the reader in another direction. She writes, “The most important thing is to show the diverse attitudes of members of the ŻSP [Jewish Order Service] and their individual motivations; this applies to policemen in the Warsaw ghetto as well as in other ghettos.” She explains that these attitudes and motivations “resulted primarily from German policy to demoralize the Order Service, but also from wartime reality: the brutality of daily life in the ghetto and the shifting of boundaries of acceptable behaviors. Then too, [they derived] from a search for normality and striving for stabilization of life, which, to a minimal extent, membership in the ŻSP provided” (p. 246). Person seamlessly demonstrates this throughout the book. The Jewish Police, Person emphasizes, were both victims of Nazi anti-Jewish policy and tools the Nazis used to destroy Jewish life.

The seemingly unassuming one-word title of the book, Policjanci (Policemen), appears on the cover against a black-and-white photograph of rows of predominantly young men wearing caps and coats. The cover is significant, as it sets the stage for the book itself. To the knowing reader, the brief title and the photograph already encapsulate the highly contested memory and representation of Jewish policemen in the Warsaw ghetto. The particular subject of the book becomes explicit only after turning a page. Each of the ten chapters (as well as the introduction and conclusion) outlines both the image and the reality of the Jewish Police and illuminates, in both a chronological and thematic way, the process of adaptation of these Jewish victims to the conditions imposed on them. The book begins with the creation of the Jewish Order Service, its recruitment, and membership (chapter 1). It goes on to examine its organization and goals (chapter 2) and the violence and corruption of its members (chapter 3). The focus then slightly shifts to explore the perspectives of ghetto residents (chapter 4) but also gives voice to the policemen themselves (chapter 5) and reflects on the institutional modes of regulating and disciplining the Order Service (chapter 6). Another turn occurs with the analysis of the German authorities’ preparation for the deportation of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto in spring 1942 (chapter 7), the involvement of the Jewish Police in the deportations in summer 1942 (chapter

8), and the fates of the policemen who remained in the ghetto in the aftermath of the German actions (chapter 9). The last chapter (10) focuses on postwar efforts to bring Jewish policemen to justice—in Jewish communal courts, Jewish honor courts, and state courts—and mentions the fates of some of them.

As the book’s subtitle indicates, Policjanci is about the image of Jewish Police. A wealth of Jewish, Polish, and German archival documents (a few of which are included in the appendix), wartime and postwar accounts (both written and oral), poems, contemporary newspapers, and secondary sources inform Person’s research. Photographs, too, assume an important part of the book. In fact, references to scenes captured in a series of photographs serve as a point of departure for Person’s study. They present the variety of roles that Jewish Police members (including women) held in the ghetto. These visuals and the discussion of them offer a critical lens onto the study of Jewish Police. Perhaps reference to archival footage and the representation of the Jewish Police in film could have added to the author’s focus on imagery.

As Person contends, “Despite the passage of time, Jewish policemen continue to be seen, as in the immediate postwar years, as foreign, more perpetrators than victims. The image of a ghetto policeman carved into memory does not have a bright side” (p. 238). Person attributes this situation to a few factors. Observations that Emanuel Ringelblum and others in the Oneg Shabbat group had made as the events were happening have shaped the way in which the Jewish Police has been imagined and remembered. Person observes, “Despite expressions of understanding for individual members, the ŻSP as a formation was seen as one of the most drastic manifestations of wartime demoralization in the ghetto and the collapse of values in the new reality of the occupation” (p. 127). Sources produced after the war solidified this view. “Many accounts, especially [those submitted] after the war, were underpinned by the atmosphere surrounding the ŻSP, rumors, or the attitude of the author to the Order Service resulting from personal experiences,” Person claims. She explains the selective recollections that often characterized oral histories and written accounts, “In their immediate postwar testimonies, most survivors focused on the most shocking and drastic events, and not on daily life. Thus there are policemen conducting round ups, but no policemen directing traffic; there are bribes, but no trash control” (p. 239). The image that emerges from these sources is that of Jewish policemen as morally wrong, as foreign because of their assimilation (so not “real Jews”), and as an extension of external (Nazi) power (p. 128).

Despite its exclusion, the Jewish Police, as Person aptly shows throughout the book, was very much part of the ghetto society. The complexity of the Jewish Police as a formation and of its individual members evades straightforward labeling and demands scrupulous investigation, something that Person has successfully managed to accomplish in the book. Person wants the reader to see the choices, attitudes, behavior, activities, and rationalization of Jewish Police members in the context of the gradual destruction of Jewish life, and not isolated from it. She emphasizes the diversity of the Jewish Police pool: “Among those who found themselves in the Order Service were both the poor and the rich, those threatened by round ups to labor camps and those for whom this was a way to do business. There were those for whom career was important and those who fulfilled their assignments in the most limited scope and treated the service as a way to assure their families’ survival” (p. 245).

While primarily a study of the Holocaust-era Jewish Police,Policjanci also offers a noteworthy perspective on the Polish Blue Police. Person explains that the statute of the Jewish Police and the

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Sliwa on Person, 'Policjanci'. H-Poland. 06-20-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/9669/reviews/4214524/sliwa-person-policjanci Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Poland theoretical training of its members were based on those of the prewar Polish Blue Police. In fact, some ninety Polish policemen stationed in the ghetto conducted practical training for the Jewish policemen subordinate to them (pp. 70-71). But the role of Polish policemen extended beyond its connection to the Jewish Police. The prospect of bribes, extortions, and enrichment determined Polish policemen’s attitude toward Jews and defined their activities in the ghetto. The lack of rotation of Polish policemen, explained by the Germans’ fear of typhus, further strengthened corruption among Polish policemen who had established themselves on their posts and forged connections. The thread of the Polish Blue Police in the Warsaw ghetto elucidates aspects of Polish-Jewish wartime relations and highlights the participation of Poles in the oppression of Jews. But Person refrains from vilifying the Polish force. Rather, her examples paint a complex picture of individuals and groups, their responses, and webs of connections.

Policjanci is the first such thorough scholarly study of the Jewish Police in the Warsaw ghetto. It is an essential book that contributes to the considerable and still growing scholarship on the Warsaw ghetto. Understandably, Person did not and could not explore a few crucial topics, which she nevertheless touches on. For example, Person observes that those Jewish policemen who survived the Holocaust were often marked by their role in the ghetto until the end of their lives. How did that stigma affect their lives? How did they respond to it? Person references interviews with anonymous family members about the roles their relatives in the Jewish Police fulfilled. Access to such fascinating sources prompts questions: If and how have these family members constructed the image of their loved ones? Did they, too, have to cope with the familial stamp of the Jewish Police?

In her earlier book, Assimilated Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1940-1943 (2014), Person explores assimilated, acculturated, and baptized Jews and the ways their prewar identity shaped these Jews’ experiences in the Warsaw ghetto. Among the topics that Person covers in this earlier study is the involvement of Polonized Jews in the ranks of the Jewish Order Service. She has taken that discussion further and examines the topic in-depth in Policjanci. Person paves a new path toward understanding the Jewish force that the Germans created to turn against their own people by implicating these Jews in the Holocaust. Key to that endeavor is Person’s recognition and employment of the mode of research on Jewish Police introduced by Jewish honor courts in the first years after the Holocaust. Only zooming in on individuals allows the researcher to gain a refined view of the complexities of the Jewish Police during the Holocaust. Person has once again skillfully and elegantly tackled a charged topic about a group that has been subject to distortions, myths, and misunderstanding. In the current political climate in Poland, research on perceived Jewish complicity during the Holocaust can become a convenient tool of public vilification of Jewish victims of the Holocaust (and Jews in general), as well as of minimization (and even denial) of the Holocaust. Person’s discussion of the timing and context of the appearance of the topic of the Jewish Police in Polish public discourse throughout the years is indicative of such trends. Scholarship on such an emotion-inducing subject is faced with many challenges. The strength of Person’s book lies in its grounding in diverse source material, a sharp focus, and stellar analysis. It does not seek sensationalism; quite the contrary—it aims to challenge assumptions, dissect an image of a group, and illuminate the historical reality in a comprehensive and intelligible way. Therefore, Policjanci is addressed to both scholars and an educated general audience. No wonder that Person was nominated for a prestigious Historical Award from the Polityka magazine for Policjanci.

Citation: Joanna Sliwa. Review of Person, Katarzyna,Policjanci . H-Poland, H-Net Reviews. June,

2019. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54222

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.