Katarzyna Person’s study of Jewish Displaced Persons from Poland in the American and British Occupations Zones, 1945–1948 offers an important addition to an already extensive historiography on Jewish DP experience in postwar Germany. This German language translation (by Anna Labentz) of Person’s postdoctoral Habilitation thesis for the Polish Academy of Sciences (2023) briskly and clearly summarizes multiple aspects that have been previously investigated at length and in depth. The book addresses seemingly familiar topics, including the early days of liberation; the establishment of separate camps for Jewish survivors and the concomitant spread of Zionism as a vehicle for asserting that separate identity; the astonishingly rapid self-organization of this “surviving remnant”; the growing influx of survivors from eastern Europe, many of whom had first been repatriated to Poland from their precarious shelter in the unoccupied Soviet Union; the reconstruction of family and collective life; as well as the complicated relationship between Jewish DPs and their representatives with occupation officials in the US and British zones, aid organizations, local Germans, and other non-Jewish DPs.

Person, however, does significantly more than review the existing narrative; she reads it from a different angle, using previously neglected Polish language sources to open up new perspectives and questions about the political, social, and linguistic diversity of the Jewish DP population and the policies affecting their fate. As a historian who directs the Ringelblum Archive project at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw with an impressive record of scholarship on the Ghetto Police, Jewish Honor Courts, and general themes of justice, revenge, and memorialization, Person reminds us of the problematic “Polishness” of the majority of Jewish DPs. This attentiveness to conflicted identities leads Person to a greater emphasis on divisions and conflicts among DPs than has been evident in other even recent publications that have highlighted the myriad ways in which the “surviving remnant” of East European Jewry reconstituted itself: the “baby boom,” the dynamism of sports, theater, literature, and political engagement, mostly within a fractious Zionist movement, and the search for new homes outside of Europe (see for example the source collection, Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany 1945–1950, 2024). This latter approach, relying on sources in English, German, and, increasingly Yiddish, mostly produced by scholars based in the US, Germany, and Israel, has tended to obscure other key aspects of Jewish DP history, such as the role of the newly installed Soviet-dominated regime in Poland and the competing Polish government in exile; the (mostly hostile) relations with non-Jewish Polish DPs; the understudied formation of a separate Verbandes Polnischer Juden; or just the fact that for some, Polish continued to be their everyday language.

Building on innovative analysis of Polish archives in Warsaw, Wrocɫaw, New York, and London, Person probes a wide range of conflicts within the DP community: between the orthodox and secular; Zionist and non-Zionist; the Central Committees of Liberated Jews in the American and British zones; painful rifts over charges of Jewish collaboration and how they were adjudicated in autonomous survivor “Honor Courts”; and disputes over the fate of child survivors between (distant and close) family and aid organizations that generally prioritized family reunification versus Zionist groups determined to encourage Aliyah to Palestine. She outlines arguments over language policy, noting that even within the general practice of  “speak Yiddish, learn Hebrew,” Yiddish itself was a contested terrain. With Polish Jews resenting the more elite status of Lithuanian Yiddish, debates in turn reflected the disproportionate political influence of Lithuanian Jews who, as direct survivors liberated by US troops in Bavaria, formed the early and enduring leadership in the American Zone (192–200).

Reports about the mutual hostility between non-Jewish and Jewish Polish DPs connect to discussion of sometimes violent postwar antisemitism expressed by Germans, Poles, and allied occupiers. The ubiquitous black market emerges as a major field of conflict, with Polish Jews outraged at being blamed and punished for infractions that were, in their view, much more commonly committed by non-Jewish Poles. Unfortunately, Person does not follow up her observation (124) that non-Jewish Polish DPs were subjected to the same harsh treatment, raising the question of the status of antisemitism in the broader context of occupier control. Moreover, given Person’s expertise in, and access to, Polish sources, she would have been perfectly positioned to address perhaps the most glaring lacuna in Jewish DP history: the differences between those who had survived under Nazi occupation and the majority that had endured the war in the unoccupied USSR. Polish Jewish DPs feared and denounced Polish antisemitism but did not share their virulent anticommunism. How much, we might ask, did this have to do with memories of the Soviet experience? How did those differences play out in relation to the other conflicts that Person outlines, including the role of Zionism as a dominant dream but not necessarily desirable destination for emigration? These frustrating gaps illustrate a point that Person herself stresses in the conclusion: the many remaining opportunities for comparative research and a more comprehensive understanding of the ways in which Jewish Poles remained an “integral part” of postwar Polish history even if they had made the “conscious decision” that they “no longer wished to be part of Poland” (259).