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The Poles Who "Hunted" Jews and Turned Them Over to the Nazis

(Ha'aretz) Ofer Aderet - Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland, by Polish-born historian Jan Grabowski, describes the Polish population's involvement in turning in and murdering Jews who asked for their help during the Holocaust, drawing on Polish, Jewish and German records from the war and postwar periods. Grabowski also documented the heroism of Poles who tried to rescue their Jewish neighbors and sometimes paid for it with their lives. A whole mechanism was set up to hunt Jews, he says. It operated under German supervision but all those on the ground were Poles: villagers who conducted "night watches," local informers, policemen and firefighters. Together they created a dense web that made it almost impossible for those hiding to escape discovery. Emmanuel Ringelblum, the historian of the Warsaw Ghetto, said that the Polish "Blue" police alone were responsible for "hundreds of thousands of Jewish deaths." Grabowski came across the diary of Stanislaw Zeminski, a teacher from Lukow in eastern Poland who documented the war's atrocities until he himself died in the Majdanek death camp. He provides testimony by Polish peasants who surrounded a nearby village and launched a hunt for Jews. They did it to obtain prizes offered by the German occupiers: vodka, sugar, potatoes, oil - along with personal items taken from the victims. "They pulled out the Jews from the houses; they caught them in the fields, in the meadows. The shots are still ringing, but our hyenas already set their sights on the Jewish riches. The [Jewish] bodies are still warm, but people already start to write letters, asking for Jewish houses, Jewish stores, workshops or parcels of land." People "volunteered for this hunt willingly, without any coercion."
2017-02-10 00:00:00
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