During the last few decades, the study of the Holocaust has become one of the fastest growing areas of historical research. Initially preoccupied with the Taetergeschichte (history of the perpetrators), it quickly evolved to include the study of the Jewish victims and, more recently—the “bystanders,” or the European populations that witnessed and reacted to the ongoing extermination of their Jewish neighbors and compatriots. “Relations between Jews and Poles During the Holocaust” straddles the two latter historiographical currents. More specifically, it deals with Polish Jews and the perceptions that they held of their Polish co-citizens during the war. There are very few areas of historical research more fraught with tensions, emotions, and open to explosive debates than the topic chosen by the author. And there are very few people who have the necessary skills and tools to successfully tackle these volatile matters. Havi Dreifuss, one of the most eminent Israeli scholars of the Holocaust and an accomplished historian of the destruction of the Polish Jewry, is one of these rare people.

The book is structured chronologically. The first chapter offers a brief overview of the situation of the Jewish minority in pre-war Poland and the initial Jewish reactions during and after the collapse of Poland in September 1939. The second chapter tracks the further development of the Jewish perceptions of Poles and of Polish society during the early occupation, roughly from the end of 1939 to 1941. The third part is devoted to the period of ghettoization, which lasted from late 1940 until early 1943, when last ghettos were liquidated and their inmates sent to the extermination camps. The final chapter, “Confronting Annihilation: Shattering the Image,” discusses the last period of war and focuses on perceptions of Jews who managed to flee the liquidated ghettos and went into hiding among the gentiles. It needs to be stressed once again that the reviewed study focuses on Jewish perceptions of the realities of the Holocaust rather than on everyday reality as such. The two phenomena are related, of course, but their relationship is very complex and that is where the author's interpretative skills are essential.

To put it short—the book offers us a quickly progressing tour through the hopes and disillusionments of members of a doomed community. It starts with a strong message of hope: after the outbreak of war, Jews seemed to think that the German onslaught brought about the previously impossible social unity and harmony. Willing to forget and forgo the misery and tensions of the last pre-war years, Jews considered themselves more and more a part of the mainstream and Jewish authors and witnesses noted an unprecedented social cohesion and closeness that rose above the preexistent racial divide. In order to explain the not-infrequent cases of anti-Jewish hostility on the part of the Poles, Jewish authors employed conceptual tools that Dreifuss calls “persuasive definition” (169) and “comforting interpretation” (83). First, the acts of violence perpetrated against the Jews were initially explained by factors external to Polish society (such as German propaganda, or the Volksdeutsche) and, second, by blaming the attacks on the criminal fringes of Polish society, on people that in no way could be representative of the broader society. These conceptual devices allowed the Jewish authors to maintain some degree of hope (“at least we are not alone!”) and to believe that despite the horrors of occupation, human decency and social solidarity could prevail. The hopes and illusions of Polish Jews about their Polish neighbors, argues Dreifuss, carried well into the subsequent period of ghettoization. It was during this time, when the majority of Jews had been forced into ghettos and when links with the “Aryan” community outside weakened significantly that the previous, largely “positive” stereotype of the Poles persisted in Jewish testimonies, diaries, and letters. It was the final period, one during and after the bloody liquidations of the ghettos, that the previously harbored hopes and illusions came crashing down. Once the ghettos were liquidated, the Jewish refugees, instead of receiving support and help, found themselves in a very hostile world. For the Jews fleeing the ghettos and camps, it was the Poles rather than the distant Germans who decided who lived and who died. It was the Poles who could detect “Jewish features” and report the victims to the authorities. The disillusionment of Jewish survivors (and non-survivors, of course, too) with the Poles and with the attitudes of Polish society was profound. In fact, the bitterness and disappointment ran so deep that some authors (such as Emanuel Ringelblum, for instance) decided to re-evaluate and rewrite their previous “comforting interpretations”; their optimistic assumptions about the Poles in light of the damning evidence of the 1943–44 period. In direct opposition to the “comforting interpretations” of the past, for Jewish authors fighting to survive on the “Aryan side,” the actual help extended to Jews was “not ascribed to Polish society in general but rather to particular benevolent groups, whereas Polish involvement in the persecution of the Jews was considered a reflection of the true aspirations of the Polish nation to destroy the Jews” (169).

Havi Dreifuss's book makes an important contribution to our knowledge of the destruction of Polish Jewry, to the state of mind of the dying Jewish community, and to the relations between Jews and the gentile “bystanders”—an expression that seems to be quickly losing its interpretative value. The book, based on hundreds of unknown and little-known primary sources, should be required reading for anyone interested in the fate of Polish Jews.