This moving and disturbing book describes the unsuccessful attempt of the small group of Jewish Holocaust survivors from the town of Radom to establish a viable Jewish community in the town that had been their home before 1939. By providing a detailed account of the fate of Jewish survivors in a provincial Polish town, which can be seen as a microcosm of the situation in the country as a whole, it makes a major contribution to our understanding of the long-term impact of the Holocaust in the Polish lands. The large number of contemporary photographs adds considerably to the volume's vividness.

The Nazi occupation left Polish Jewry devastated. Barely ten per cent of the prewar Jewish population survived the war. According to the records of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland (Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce: CKŻP) the principal Jewish body in post-war Poland, by July 1, 1946, only 244,000 Jews had registered with it. Few remained in Poland and by January 1952 no more than 70,000 to 80,000 were still in the country. This exodus was caused by a number of factors—unwillingness to remain in a country that many of the survivors saw as a Jewish cemetery, persistence of anti-Jewish violence, and fear of the consequences of the establishment of a communist regime among those who had very negative memories of their wartime sojourn in the Soviet Union.

On the eve of the Second World War, Radom, situated in central Poland, had a population of 90,000, of whom around a third were Jews. Most were unassimilated and Yiddish-speaking but there was also a small group who were acculturated and Polish-speaking. Very few survived the Holocaust and even fewer returned to the town. In August 1945, on the basis of the figures of the CKŻP, 959 Jews were living here. Some had previously been in German concentration camps, while others had found hiding places in the town and its surroundings or had spent the war in the Soviet Union. It would have been helpful if the book had provided a more detailed breakdown of how they had succeeded in surviving the Nazi occupation.

Krzyżanowski gives a clear account of the prewar history of the town, marked by the serious deterioration of relations between Poles and Jews after 1935. He describes the way the Germans implemented the Holocaust here and the difficult post-war years, characterized by scarcity and near-civil war conditions as the unpopular and unrepresentative communist government attempted to consolidate its position. He analyzes the history of the post-war Jewish community under three headings, “Violence,” “Community” and “Property.” In the period between the end of the Nazi occupation of Poland and the consolidation of communist rule in early 1947, a fair number of the small remnant of Polish Jews that survived the Holocaust fell victim to sporadic anti-Jewish violence. The number of those killed in this way is disputed and estimates range from 400 to 2,000. Krzyzanowski describes the climate of heightened antisemitism in post-war Radom and analyzes seven murders of Jews in the town, five of which had an antisemitic character (one of these was of a Jewish policeman). This violence led to the flight of many of the survivors: at the end of October 1946, only 111 were recorded as living in the city.

Krzyżanowski's analysis of the post-war Jewish community and its relations with the Radom municipality draws on the fortunate survival of most of the archives of the District Jewish Committee (Okręgowy Komitet Żydowski), which was active in the town from 1945 to 1950. He also consulted many other archives and conducted interviews with Jewish survivors and non-Jewish Poles living in Radom, where he grew up. As he shows in his careful analysis of the documents, the Committee was made up of individuals who had not played a major role in Jewish life before the war, and this inexperience limited their ability to deal with the municipal authorities whose members were often antisemitic. Two Jewish doctors, who had been among the community leadership before the war, did attempt to return to the town but were not accepted because they had served on the Judenrat, where their behavior had aroused resentment. Nevertheless, the survivors did succeed briefly in establishing communal institutions which provided a modicum of mutual support.

The final section describes their largely unsuccessful attempts to regain their property confiscated by the Germans or appropriated by the local population, with which they sought both to support themselves and to provide a link to their prewar lives. Krzyżanowski gives a clear account of the changes in the laws on property restitution and also describes the lawless atmosphere in which a number of Jewish criminals (described as “lipiarze”—falsifiers) attempted to profit from property restitution.

In the last analysis, the returning survivors were an embarrassment, “ghost citizens” who were not wanted by their Polish neighbors. Krzyżanowski uses two events to frame this sad story. The first is the destruction in 1945 by the local authorities of the town's main synagogue, which, although in poor condition, had survived the war, and the second, the dedication on August 17, 1950 of a Holocaust memorial on the site where it had stood. This proved to be the last collective act of the local Jewish community, which at the beginning of 1950 numbered barely thirty and shortly thereafter ceased to exist.