Lukasz Krzyzanowski spent years poring over documents and interviewing Jewish survivors who returned to the Polish city of Radom after the war. His goal in writing this book was ambitious and contributive: to demonstrate that Holocaust survivors were not passive victims, but fought to reestablish their communities after an unprecedented catastrophe. Beyond this clear purpose, there looms a larger goal, one both etiological and ethical: to situate Jewish experiences as establishing a context for understanding the relative homogeneity of present-day Polish society. By means of this referential relationship, the book belongs to the thriving New School of Holocaust Studies in Poland, which, according to David Engel, approaches Jewish history in a way that addresses questions of Polish identity and current “historical policy” (“Scholarship on the Margins: A New Anthology about Jews in the Warsaw District under the Nazi Occupation,” Yad Vashem Studies 37, no. 1 (2009): 179–92).

Apart from the immediate postwar research on the Jewish minority by Irena Hurwic-Nowakowska, recent contributions in this subject area include books by Anna Cichopek-Gajraj and Monika Rice. In her comparative analysis of the return of Jewish survivors to Poland and Slovakia, Cichopek-Gajraj insisted on the necessity to look “beyond violence” in order to understand the postwar experience of Polish Jews, a methodological objective that Krzyzanowski wishes to further. Rice's book discussed how different geo-political contexts influenced the ways in which postwar encounters with Polish neighbors would be remembered.

Krzyzanowski's focus is on a medium-size city—a potential model for other localities that still await a study of postwar Jewish life. His reading of local sources—for example, fortuitously preserved documents from a District Jewish Committee—is deepened by an intimate familiarity with the topography and history of his hometown.

To discover how the survivors coped in their postwar situations, Krzyzanowski originally hoped to consult early postwar diaries and letters of Radom Jews. An apparent lack of ego sources has critically influenced the kind of book he eventually wrote: he could not document and relate the story of the emotional experiences that accompanied the return of the Jews to their hometown just as they experienced them. He could, however, interview the survivors or, at least, listen to their recorded testimonies, and he has used this possibility to the utmost. Such evidence, recorded decades after the events under discussion, requires particular methodological tools to decipher, and it can be problematic, to the extent that it might be used as a projection to assess earlier experiences—a consideration which the author does not address.

What Krzyzanowski could also do—and managed to do in an impressive way—is to recreate the circumstances of Jewish returns based on rare, often untapped archival material referring to the location, found in Polish regional, national, and private collections, as well as later testimonies (from USHMM, Yad Vashem, YIVO, and the USC Shoah Foundation, among others).

The first chapter introduces us to prewar Radom, so as to provide necessary context for the postwar situation. Radom was one of the larger urban centers in the Kielce province. In 1938, about one third of its 90,000 inhabitants were Jews, and most of these were Yiddish-speaking and unassimilated. Apart from housing an important armament factory, interwar Radom was known for its trade and its handicrafts, which were held predominantly in Jewish hands. Politically, the Jewish socialists of the Bund collaborated with Polish socialists to shape local politics. While Jews were represented in municipal government, on the street, parity gave way to more traditional forms of discrimination. Economic boycotts and violence, especially during the second part of the 1930s, reflected the general dynamics of Polish–Jewish interactions. When the war started, existing divisions only sharpened. Incorporated to the General Government (the Nazi-established administrative unit including most of Central Poland), the Jews of Radom were subjected to successive exclusion and eventual annihilation. It was only in April 1941 that a separate “ghetto compound” (consisting of one large and one small ghetto) was created, and by August 1942, two deportations to Treblinka marked the destruction of the Radom Jews (26).

Krzyzanowski depicts growing anti-Jewish persecution and mass murder as examples of “intimate violence”—an essential feature of the Holocaust in East Europe. He emphasizes the proximity of Polish neighbors witnessing and participating in genocide. The presence of Nazi violence radicalized Polish antisemitism by demonstrating “what was possible” against an unprotected group singled out for persecution. Discussing the postwar period, the author pays proper attention to the desperate situation of the Polish population, characterized by Red Army violence, hunger, destitution, and a general lack of provisions. For Jewish survivors, coming out from their hiding places or returning from the camps, this period was even more traumatic, as it brought with it the realization that almost all of the prewar Jewish community had been destroyed and that reestablishing its roots among a hostile Polish population was no longer feasible.

Chapter 2 describes the violence visited on Jewish survivors returning to Radom.

Krzyzanowski is aware of the pitfalls of discussing this complex topic: on the one hand, ascribing all anti-Jewish violence to antisemitism; on the other hand, placing it within the general context of postwar brutality. Focusing on several case studies, he confirms what David Engel demonstrated in his ground-breaking research several decades ago: that the robberies, attacks, and murders against the Jews, while occurring in a generally brutalized context of postwar poverty and arguable “civil war,” more often than not resembled executions. Krzyzanowski demonstrates local expressions of anti-Jewish hostility among the members of the anticommunist underground as well as the communist administration, similar to those previously analyzed in the overall Polish context by Jan T. Gross, Irena Grudzinska Gross, and Joanna Tokarska-Bakir. When reporting about Polish opposition to resolutions condemning the Kielce Pogrom, the author could have analyzed it through a sociological lens, within the well-known context of the opposition to the communist takeover, as manifested by the forged results of the People's Referendum of June 30, 1946. As is, his presentation of events suffers somewhat from a one-sided focus, and it might contribute to the generation of faulty interpretations.

Chapter 4 discusses the postwar Jewish community—now increasingly bereft of its prominent prewar leaders and led by persons who stepped accidentally into their positions out of necessity. This chapter describes a slow but sure progress into the relative nonexistence of a community, unnoticed by either the non-Jewish society or the postwar authorities.

The last chapter delivers a closer look at Jewish attempts to recover prewar property. Analyzed within a well-researched legal context that also addresses the situation of non-Jewish property, this chapter points to the hopelessness that Jewish survivors and their relatives encountered while attempting to “settle back” in their hometown or, when that became impossible, to salvage whatever was recoverable in order to avoid destitution. Krzyzanowski convincingly demonstrates that, while real estate was sometimes recoverable, other forms of property were extremely hard to fight for. This chapter manifests best the author's thesis about the agency of the postwar Jewish community, as the survivors, while most often opting to leave Poland in order to avoid violence, did what they could to recover their property and, thus, improve their situation.

Krzyzanowski's book is generally impressive on two counts: first, it is based on thorough—even if not exhaustive—archival research on the postwar Radom Jews in collections spread out globally and enhanced by interviews with survivors and witnesses. Secondly, Krzyzanowski's perspective remains close to the ground, reporting and interpreting only phenomena that he can carefully document. While the need to “speak to the Poles” about their Jewish neighbors remains a subtext of this research, the author abstains from making large theoretical claims and delivers a solid communal case study. I am pleased to add that he does so in a refreshingly humble way.