Bondage to the dead : Poland and the memory of the Holocaust /

Steinlauf's book encompasses Jewish/Polish relations before, during, and after the Holocaust. Considering the ideological and emotional pitfalls, the author accomplishes the task without excessive moralizing and without anger. The work is intellectually engaging and an important step in continuing dialogue between Poles and Jews. A brief first chapter surveys Jewish/Polish relationships up to 1939. Chapter 2 covers the Holocaust years; chapters 3 to 6 examine the various stages of the relationship during the Soviet domination. In the final chapter the discussion returns to free post-1989 Poland. One cannot argue with the author's treatment of Jewish/Polish relationship during the periods when Poland was free, but Steinlauf occasionally exaggerates the autonomy of Polish opinion during the occupation. The Soviets, no less than the Nazis, were master manipulators of opinion and of people. Crimes committed when foreign armies dominate a country cannot be of the same quality as those committed when the nation is sovereign. Well footnoted; good index. All levels. A. Ezergailis Ithaca College

A very well researched and nuanced study of postwar Poland's efforts, first to deny, then to begin to deal with the complex reality of the Holocaust and particularly the fact that Auschwitz and all the other major death camps were located on Polish soil. In an angry outburst, former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir once claimed that Poles ``imbibe anti-Semitism with their mother's milk.'' Largely by probing Polish sources, Steinlauf, a senior research fellow at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, uncovers a far more complex, variegated relationship between Polish Jews and Gentiles before, during, and after the Holocaust. He doesn't scant the longstanding, deep Polish stereotype of the Jew as ``the spoiler, the avenger, the foe of everything Polish.'' Yet he also notes how some Poles, even while manifesting anti-Semitic attitudes, were so appalled by the Nazi juggernaut of death that they saved or otherwise assisted Jews. Unfortunately, even more betrayed Jews; most, however, remained distraught bystanders, paralyzed by the Germans' murder of over two million of their non-Jewish fellow citizens. The immediate post- Holocaust period witnessed pogroms in Kielce and elsewhere during which some 2,000 returning Jewish survivors were murdered. In the nearly half-century of Communist rule that followed, there were several violent anti-Semitic outbreaks, and purges in the Polish Communist Party. Steinlauf traces the slow, uneven, and still very incomplete emergence of a new, more open and sympathetic attitude toward the Holocaust and the rich, if often troubled, legacy of Polish Jewish history, as well as toward contemporary Jewish sensibilities. Steinlauf clearly links this change to the emergence of the Solidarity movement and the fall of Communism, though it is still being bitterly fought by Polish nationalists both within and outside of the Catholic Church. Steinlauf's work is crisply written and refreshingly succinct. This very fine study of intellectual, cultural, and ethnic history deserves broad exposure.