Grabowski Hunt Critique

December 2017 (REVISED February 2020) Another Look at Polish-Jewish Relations in Dąbrowa Tarnowska County A Much Needed Corrective to Jan Grabowski’s Hunt for the Jews by Mark Paul CONTENTS Introduction … 2 The Catholic Church and Clergy – Some Observations on Grabowski’s Methodology … 5 Clergy Assistance Overlooked …16 Polish Attitudes, Risks Associated with Rescue, and the “Emerging” Holocaust Narrative …21 Problematic Approach to Testimonies …30 The Extent of Rescue …34 Rescue Overlooked, Rescue Covered Up …45 Poles Put to Death for Helping Jews …54 Paid Rescue …57 Polish Police, Jewish Police – Shifting the Blame …64 Robbery and Banditry – The Cover-Up …71 Conclusion …74 Tables …75 I. Poles from Dąbrowa Tarnowska County Recognized as Righteous Among the Nations …76 II. Other Polish Rescuers from Dąbrowa Tarnowska County …88 III. Jews Who Reported to the Żabno Office of the Central Committee of Polish Jews …115 IV. Jews Who Survived the War Hidden in Dąbrowa Tarnowska County …116 Appendix: Rescue by Poles Recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations …119 Statement of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance …148 Response to Jan Grabowski’s Toronto Globe and Mail Article …151 Response to National Post article by Vanessa Gera (AP) …152 #1 Introduction Given the very narrow focus of Jan Grabowski’s book Hunt for the Jews1 – Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War in D!browa Tarnowska, a rural county in Kraków voivodship in southern Poland with a population of some 70,000, one would have expected a thorough and scholarly treatment of this topic. Instead, what we get is a book that is less than reliable in many respects. It is characterized by selectivity, unsubstantiated generalizations, frequent digressions, unnecessary polemics, and tedious moralizing. At least one-quarter of the book is drawn from events and examples from outside the county (often from distant parts of Poland). The book is also marred by inadequate research and misuse of documentary sources. Grabowski is unable to identify most of the documented cases of rescue of Jews in D!browa Tarnowska county, and matters that are said to crucial for our understanding of the topic, such as the role of the Catholic Church, are dealt with in a cursory and even shoddy manner. Sadly, Grabowski’s information cannot be taken at face value. At every turn, one must examine closely the sources he relies on to see whether he has done so accurately. Yet, reviewers (with no expertise on local conditions) have showered accolades on Grabowski’s book for his “exemplary” scholarship and “meticulous” research.2 Grabowski was even awarded the 2014 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. Moreover, Grabowski’s findings are relied on as authoritative by prominent Holocaust historians, much to detriment of the scholarship on wartime Polish-Jewish relations. Jan Grabowski is associated with the Polish Center for Holocaust Research (Centrum Bada$ nad Zag%ad! "ydów), an institution that receives most of its funding from the Polish state. Grabowski’s research has benefited greatly from the input of historians associated with that institution. As such, his works can be regarded as fairly representative of the scholarship of that milieu. Before the publication of the English version of his book Hunt for the Jews in 2013, Grabowski had the benefit of perceptive and detailed scholarly critiques of the 2011 Polish edition, titled Judenjagd.3 1 Jan Grabowski, Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013). 2 The favourable reviews of Grabowski’s book are not noted here, but an excerpt from a typical one by Rosa Lehmann will suffice to capture their flavour: “Grabowski’s Hunt for the Jews presents an example of outstanding academic writing. Because it is firmly grounded in solid research …” See The American Historical Review, vol. 121, no. 4 (1 October 2016), 1382–83. The following letter of support for Professor Grabowski, couched in superlatives and forwarded to Chancellor of the University of Ottawa by a group of international Holocaust and modern history scholars on June 19, 2017, is reminiscent of those reviews: “We can attest to the fact that he is a scholar of impeccable personal and professional integrity. His scholarship holds to the highest standards of academic research and publication, and for such he has earned widespread acclaim in academia, as well as honors and awards. The contribution Professor Grabowski has made to understanding the Holocaust in Poland and especially the relations between Poles and their Jewish neighbors at the time, has assumed a central place in academic discourse about those subjects.” See “Solidarity with Jan Grabowski,” Internet: <http://michael-wildt.de/blog/solidarity-jan-grabowski>. In a nutshell, Grabowski is the epitome of the current state of Holocaust research. The Chair of the History Department at the University of Ottawa wrote: “I highly regard his research, conducted in the most rigorous manner, based on solid methodology, and peer-reviewed.” The reference to peer review brings into question the value of that tool when the reviewers form part of a rather small and like-minded clique. 3 Jan Grabowski, Judenjagd: Polowanie na Żydów, 1942-1945: Studium dziejów pewnego powiatu (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Bada$ nad Zag%ad! "ydów, 2011). #2 In particular, Bogdan Musia%,4 Krystyna Samsonowska5 (both of whom are familiar with local conditions) and Przemys%aw Ró&a$ski6 provided excellent commentary that exposed many of the shortcomings of Grabowski’s research. Unfortunately, Grabowski chose to ignore those valuable critiques and compounded the problems that were identified by adding more material of a dubious nature to the expanded English version of his book. This critique does not deal with Grabowski’s treatment of the Judenjagd per se, that is, the elaborate mechanism that the Germans put in place to carry out manhunts, including the designation of a local person as a hostage to ensure, under pain of death, the participation of villagers. These matters have been discussed by historians Bogdan Musia% and Tomasz Frydel. Why did the Germans think it necessary to go to these great lengths if the local population was, allegedly, so eager to take part in the manhunts? Grabowski provides no persuasive answers. Yet he repeatedly speaks of the villagers’ willing “cooperation” in these operations. Comparisons with 4 Bogdan Musia%, “Judenjagd – «umiej'tne dzia%anie» czy zbrodnicza perfidia?” Dzieje Najnowsze, vol. 43, no. 2 (2011): 159–70; Bogdan Musia%, “Odpowied( na replik' Jana Grabowskiego: ‘R&ni'cie no&em, czyli polemika historyczna à la Bogdan Musia%’,” Dzieje Najnowsze, vol. 43, no. 4 (2011): 171–77. See also Bogdan Musia%, “‘Judenjagd’, czyli naukowy regres,” Rzeczpospolita–Plus Minus, March 5–6, 2011; Bogdan Musia%, “Zbrodnicza perfidia czy umiej'tne dzia%anie,” Rzeczpospolita–Plus Minus, March 19–20, 2011. The only correction that Grabowski appears to have made in Hunt for the Jews (at p. 75), without acknowledging Bogdan Musia%’s detection of Grabowski’s misreading of Adam Kazimierz Musia%’s Krwawe upiory: Dzieje powiatu Dąbrowa Tarnowska w okresie okupacji hitlerowskiej (Tarnów: Karat, 1993) in Judenjagd (at p. 79), is the removal of the specific claim that Polish firefighters were used to surround the execution site of Gypsies in Szczurowa, while retaining a general claim along those same lines for which Grabowski provides no source. 5 Krystyna Samsonowska, “D!browa Tarnowska – nieco inaczej,” Więź, no. 7 (2011): 75–84. 6 Przemys%aw Ró&a$ski, Review of Jan Grabowski’s Judenjagd, Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, vol. 61, no. 2 (2012): 627–30. #3 other jurisdictions where manhunts were conducted would have enhanced our understanding of this phenomenon.7 Historian Tomasz Szarota commented on Grabowski’s skewed focus in his review of German historian Daniel Brewing’s important monograph, Im Schatten von Auschwitz,8 as follows: while these authors [i.e., Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking] blame anti-Semitism and the desire for wealth for causing Poles to join the hunt for Jews, Brewing attributes a causative role to the occupation authorities who sought to use Polish peasants to fight all forms of resistance. In his opinion, several factors stood behind this ‘cooperation’ with the occupier: submission to the repeated calls from the Nazi authorities, the use of coercion, rewards offered for denouncing hidden Jews and the fear of punishment for failing to follow the occupier’s orders (pp. 216–24).9 Thus, the story of wartime Polish-Jewish relations in the county of D!browa Tarnowska remains to be written. A much needed corrective of some—but certainly not all—of those shortcomings follows. We shall consider, in turn, Grabowski’s treatment of the Catholic Church and its clergy; Christian attitudes toward the Holocaust; the extent and nature of rescue efforts and the risks associated with them; and phenomena that Grabowski overlooked such as the role of the Jewish police. Throughout, we shall also refer to various problems of Holocaust historiography, methodology, and conceptualization. 7 For example, in Vichy France, the manhunt was carried out by volunteers. If, in the northern zone, due to the formal Franco-German collaboration agreements, the French administration carried on working directly with the Germans authorities and made most of the arrests until the end of the war, then the situation was totally different in the ex- free zone. There, the French government was still enforcing his own anti-Semitic policy, while the Germans were enforcing the manhunt. Without the French administration support (and control tools like the census) and the French police manpower, the German police had to find another way to find and to arrest the Jews. Thus, thousands of French were recruited. A large part of them were dedicated to the enforcement of the “final solution”, becoming members of the IVb4 services of the various Sipo-SD posts in France.

Load more