The Historiography of the Holocaust

War, Occupation and the Holocaust in Poland 101
nearly all activities that saved Jewish lives and maintained Jewish collective
identity as forms of civil defence or resistance. Earlier research focused only on
armed resistance, 124 which started in eastern Poland in 1942 and culminated in
the Warsaw Uprising of April–May 1943. The Uprising itself has acquired an
almost mythical status, which can detract from the events themselves. 125 Today
activities such as social assistance, smuggling and underground publications
and culture are taken more into consideration. 126
The majority of Polish Jews had been killed by the end of 1942. By September
1943 all ghettos except Lódz had been liquidated; Jews could survive for only
a limited time in camps or in hiding, either with the help of non-Jewish Poles
or by passing as ‘Aryan’. The question of how Polish society reacted to the
murder of the Jews was being discussed immediately after the war. But from
1947 the issue was restricted to one topic, the rescue of Jews by Poles. Especially
during the ‘Anti-Zionist’ campaign of 1967–68, several publications were issued
to defend the Polish image. Jewish witnesses and historians outside Poland
took a rather different stand: they accused Poles of having collaborated in the
Holocaust. 127 Starting in the late 1980s, intellectuals began to reconsider
Polish–Jewish relations. Then, in 2000, Jan T. Gross, in his book on the Jedwabne
pogrom of 1941, caused a moral outcry in Poland. Despite some very critical 128
and even antisemitic responses, the case led to a re-evaluation of Poles’ reactions.
There is no study of wartime antisemitism among Poles, including the role
of the Catholic Church in this context. 129 Apparently the acknowledgement of
the ‘Judeo-Bolshevik’ stereotype spread among the Polish population, especially
in 1940–41. 130
But despite enormous efforts to clarify the events in and around Jedwabne, 131
there is almost no modern research on Polish–Jewish relations. Several efforts
to reconstruct this interrelation on a local basis resulted in contention. 132 The
only advanced field remains Polish rescue efforts on behalf of Jews, which have
been analysed by western historians. 133 Much information has been amassed
on the attitude of the different resistance movements to the Jews, which, not
surprisingly, varied widely; 134 even the Government-in-Exile, which installed
the Council for Aid to Jews, 135 seemed reluctant to make the genocide public. 136
Much less is known about the participation of Poles in the persecution or other
pogroms, the role of the Polish police, denunciations or of local Poles who profited
from the expropriation of Jewish property. 137 Despite these blank spots it is
necessary to emphasize the difficult situation of the Poles themselves, who
until early 1943 had no hope of being liberated.
Polish society and the underground
Until the 1970s, Polish society under the occupation remained a subject of
fiction. With few exceptions, historiography started to investigate the moods
and behaviour of ordinary citizens under foreign rule only at the end of that