Financial Policy For Christian Youth In Action: Fill & Download for Free

Below is an excerpt from an essay I wrote two years ago. It is based on Richard Dowden’s book Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles. When I say “African,” I am referring to Sub-Saharan Africa. (Though, after studying abroad in Morocco for a semester, I notice several similarities between what I have broadly labeled as Sub-Saharan “culture” and Moroccan “culture.”) As with any other essay about Africa, the piece below speaks in generalizations that cross not only thousands of ethnic groups, but dozens of countries as well. Keep in mind that there are exceptions to every rule.Several aspects of African culture can be cited as sources for the continent’s decline. The first of these is the importance placed on family. In African culture, the amount of closeness one feels toward relatives does not lessen by the degree to which those relatives are related to you. It is common for mother-in-law’s, father-in-law’s, uncles, and aunts to be treated with the same respect and care as one’s own parents. The line between cousins and siblings is blurred in almost all of Africa and virtually nonexistent in close-knit villages. Elders are, essentially, the grandparents of the whole community. Along with the huge importance placed on extended family and community comes one of the most corrosive aspects of African culture – the responsibility placed on the young and prosperous to financially provide for members of their “family” that are in need. On a small scale, professionals making meager wages must pay for the school fees of younger family members, maintain the houses of older adults and elders, and contribute to funeral expenses. The income of these individuals returns to the community but not in a way that helps the community as a whole. Meanwhile, the savings of these professionals are depleted, compromising economic security on the individual level. On a much larger scale, successful politicians are responsible for seeing that village and state development projects are instituted successfully, sharing these riches with the members of their personal community, and securing jobs for family members and friends. In such cases, income returns to the communities of the rich and elite but is not circulated throughout the country.A second component of African culture is extreme honor and reverence for the dead. Funerals are lavish affairs in Africa and can easily cost half a year of a family’s earnings. Economic growth created by funeral culture is, again, stagnated at a village and family level. Further, the effects of this deep veneration do not stop at expensive funerals. The cultural practices of many African cultures dictate that the reputation of the dead must not be tarnished upon their death. Death from drug addiction, suicide, AIDs, and other insidious things is never brought to light, and awareness about these issues, for this very reason, remains low.The African mindset that old age endows people with infallible wisdom is yet another part of African culture that has cost the continent. Young leaders with revolutionary ideas are ignored because of their youth. Meanwhile, leaders uninterested in change are elected because the public equates their old age with wisdom. (Remember, youth lasts until around fifty years of age.) Regardless, it is the youth who are most impacted by the effects of globalization, even if merely through their consumption of foreign pop culture. It is also the youth who entertain the idea that they (and Africa) have a global role that extends beyond families, villages, and ethnic groups. Thus far, the involvement of youth in African politics has been relegated to violent rebel movements. By shutting youth out of politics, Africa loses not only its global edge, but also suppresses the dissatisfaction of its young people in such a way that the only outlet for discontent becomes violence (be it robbing, gang formation, or lethal rebel groups).The African propensity for concealing bad news until the last possible minute is another aspect of African culture that has destabilized the continent. In Western cultures, bad news is broadcast almost, it sometimes seems, preemptively. People are able to prepare for disaster, express their grief/anger with others, and take the necessary precautions to avoid danger or further tragedy. The constant optimism of Africans and the shame associated with failure and misfortune do not allow bad news to be shared as quickly as it is elsewhere. Politicians do not admit to impending disaster until after disaster has happened, attacks on civilians are kept under wraps, violent changes of power are revealed when they are already in full swing, and figures of death and disease are manipulated to avoid culpability and resentment. It seems that Africans never have time to prepare for the disasters that happen to them, and the group brainstorming that could prevent such atrocities is nonexistent. The tendency of governments to not admit to wrongdoing until their actions are forcefully revealed leads to billions of dollars lost to corruption and delayed international aid in a variety of situations. People outside Africa are often shocked by the numbers of people killed by civil wars, famine, and disease in the continent. They do not realize that, often, Africans too are just as blind-sighted.The treatment of those in power with an idol-like respect is yet another characteristic of African culture that has kept it from realizing its full potential. African culture is one that fawns over power at every level it is exerted. House servants kneel, bow, and kiss the hands of their masters, corporate bosses are treated like royalty by their employees, and everyone stops what they are doing to properly greet and compliment elders. At the political level, politicians and policy makers are almost worshipped. Disagreement is only openly expressed by public rivals, while, by normal people, it is expressed only in privacy. The deity-like praise that African leaders receive from those in their inner circle goes far to promote the feelings of entitlement and greed that have threaded themselves so deeply into African politics. No person that a politician associates with on a regular basis will tell them they have made a mistake, are heading in the wrong direction, or that a decision will incite public outrage or resentment. In corrupt systems, the rule of law does not apply to those who hold power, and, in environments where using constitutional/moral means to achieve a goal could delay or impede the goal’s implementation, exerting one’s power to exploit loopholes and override due process is the preferred method. This method is made wickedly easy when everyone a politician associates with, regardless of whether or not they agree with their behavior, acquiesces submissively to their will.Two behaviors that have led to entrepreneurial success in Western society, individuality and solitude, are not valued by African culture. The concept of personal space, in both its physical and social manifestations, does not exist in Africa. Similarly, any attempt to distinguish oneself from a group, especially if that group is one’s family or home community, is frowned upon. Thus, the rugged individualism and idea of “forging one’s way” that has produced some of the greatest social and technological inventions of the Western world are alien to African people, and, if a project does not benefit the home community of its creator in a tangible way, it is discouraged. Having to always think of oneself in terms of ethnic and community terms derails projects that need to incorporate other communities and ethnic groups. As a result, thinking on national and global levels is an underdeveloped enterprise in Africa. And, coupled with the responsibility of the young and prosperous to provide for their communities and families to the point of personal impoverishment, the creative, driven, and industrious whose ideas could truly benefit Africa, are suppressed.Finally, the African belief that every event is spiritually rooted has caused copious problems. Disease, famine, political strife, wealth, prosperity, death, and birth are only a few of the occurrences that Africans claim are caused by spiritual forces. Failure, then, is rarely the fault of the individual who failed and much more likely the fault of witchcraft being done against that person. Few decisions are made without consulting a witchdoctor (or, since the arrival of Christianity, a “prophet”) to warn the decision-makers of the people plotting against them and advise them on which actions they should take to ensure their success. There are several consequences of these superstitious beliefs, and all of them are bad. The first is that political breakdown, epidemics, violent conflicts, and economic disintegration never get the full analysis they deserve because it is assumed, even by the most educated, that the events have an underlying spiritual cause. Second, the punishments given to leaders for their bad actions are lessened by their supporters who, if they admit fault at all, will claim their leader was supernaturally influenced to make the ill-fated decisions. The anger of those who oppose these leaders is never the pointed, directed anger that Westerners have towards their leaders when wrongdoing occurs. Instead, it is a spread-out anger that, because it is partially directed at an intangible spirit force, easily finds targets unrelated to the incident. Finally, unnecessary hesitation is present when making big, truly revolutionary decisions due to a fear of the spiritual backlash that may be received. Other times, rash decisions are made on the confidence that success has been supernaturally assured.

Yes, my political views have changed dramatically as a result of life experience, education, having lived abroad, traveled to most continents, and after reflecting on what really matters. I was an ultra-conservative, campaigned for the racist Presidential 3rd party candidate, George Wallace, as a teenager.I spent summers in Arkansas during the 1960s, used the white only water fountains, rode in front seats of buses while blacks rode in the back, saw how they barely lived in lean-to shacks with no electricity.It became abundantly clear over my lifetime that most evangelicals and other devout Christians support candidates who do not accept people of color, non-heterosexual orientation and do not represent my values. It is contrary to what I was taught in Methodist Sunday School and church as a child and took me a long time to recognize the dichotomy and square it in my mind.Donald Trump is the Anti-Christ and has overwhelming support of evangelicals and Christians. It makes no sense, since his actions and policies are diametrically opposed to what Christians espouse in their houses of worship.I worked in a conservative, secure, environment throughout my career, and developed a thorough understanding of the need and value of our system of government.While I don’t suffer from “white guilt,” I recognize that I had privileges that were not granted to minorities and women during my youth.In the early 1970s, as a teenager, women at my company in Washington DC were paid at a rate of 50% of men and received annual raises of exactly 50% of men.When I started at a large government agency in the mid 70s, I noticed that women were in predominantly clerical and subservient roles. There were no women in upper management and certainly no people of color. That began to change, but only by Congressional mandate in the 1980s.I came to realize that you can mandate change but you cannot mandate cultural change. The same racist, sexist people who felt somehow silenced and castrated by “political correctness” are now back out in the open. White supremacist groups equate “Make America Great, “ with racial superiority back in vogue. They feel vindicated, emboldened and it’s not pretty.Besides my reckoning with race and gender issues, I also became aware of how fragile our environment, the Earth and our local ecosystem, along with the impacts on other living species. I studied climate change in college classes later in life and participated on a committee formed during the George W Bush era that had access to scientific data from the world’s leading climate scientists. It was heartening to see that our country was finally shifting away from fossil fuels and investing in renewables.That all came to a screeching halt in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump, nomination of Scott Pruitt to lead EPA and Ryan Zinke at Dept of Interior.Pruitt and his replacement were dedicated to polluting the environment and destroying all progress that has been made. Zinke has opened up the last pristine and protected lands in this country to mining, destruction and corporate greed. Yesterday, the president signed a bill eliminating protections for several endangered species, including allowing the killing of Grisly Bear cubs in Alaska.Equally disheartening, based on a career that included thwarting Russian Intelligence and Russian organized crime, I am certain that our president is compromised by Vladimir Putin, fell into his financial and sexual traps. Many Republicans in Congress who are protecting the president have taken illegal dark money foreign contributions. Our government representatives are failing to protect our citizens from attacks on our democracy,Every day, I am just disgusted and saddened that Americans allowed this to happen. The level of greed, racism, corruption, dishonesty, dysfunction, crime, graft, treachery and outright treason is beyond anything I would even imagine could happen in this country.If you watched Donald J. Trump push a conspiracy theory about Barack Obama’s birthplace, knowing that was a test run, racist dog whistle, but still voted for him, then I see you as a racist.I consider myself a moderate and centrist because that is how our political system functions most effectively. However, I plan to vote mostly democrat, regardless of the candidate, for at least the foreseeable future. The Republican Party has shifted far right, it’s been hijacked by the Tea Party that morphed into the Freedom Caucus. The same extremists, rebranded.

(Disclaimer: This answer is bound to be controversial, which is why I see it important to back up my claims with extensive literary evidence, mostly from Jewish sources themselves. It is easy for such an answer to be misunderstood, but my true purpose in writing this is to show the other side of Polish Jewish relations that differs drastically from the commonly accepted narrative that portrays Poland as a traditional hotbed of antisemitism. Indeed, Polish Jewish relations were complex, and no side, including the Jews, was solely innocent. Yet I attempt to show that unfair stereotypes, discrimination, and provocative actions were also carried out by Jews against Poles, and that Polish antisemitism, while real, was not of the same intensity or fervor that existed in other European nations of the era.)Traditional Jewish attitudes towards Poles and the Complexity of Polish Jewish RelationsWhile many historians and laymen alike choose to focus exclusively on Polish attitudes towards the Jews, they fail to construct an even handed and fair narrative by neglecting the complexity of Jewish attitudes towards the Poles. Recently there seems to be a tendency to view antisemitism as a scourge that is endemic and characteristic to the Polish people and culture, with any criticism voiced by Poles against Israeli policies and proclamations being promptly derided as a symptom of so called “Polish antisemitism”. The problem that lies in this approach, is that it is woefully one sided, and does not seem to consider the great complexities of Polish Jewish relations.While the most common trend lately appears to warrant putting the blame for Polish Jewish tensions solely on the Polish side, the truth is that both communities harbored mutual and reciprocal prejudices and stereotypes about the other. There is no doubt that out of all the nations in Europe, it was in Poland that Jews enjoyed not only the most protection and security, but also a home in which they could socially, culturally and politically thrive relatively unmolested. Yet there is no denying that on the eve of the war and the decades before, there existed tensions and discontent between the two groups.Historically, Poland has for a great part of its history been a land of relatively peacefully ethnic, religious and cultural mixture and exchange, in contrast to many other areas of Europe. Muslim Tatars, Eastern Christian Armenians, and Protestant Scott’s are only a handful of the many groups that enjoyed protection under the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, with many of them assimilating into the Polish culture. Indeed, Jews were one of the largest of these groups, and played a major role in cultural and social world of Eastern and Central Europe, enjoying freedoms and favors that Western European Jews could only dream of. What separated the Polish Jews from other ethno-religious groups within Poland, including their Jewish kin living in Western Europe, was that they were a willfully secluded and enclosed society that resisted assimilation and even normal interaction with the world of the Gentile Christian Pole.While Jewish seclusion is often credited to alleged Polish persecution, there is indeed ample evidence that suggests that segregation between Poles and Jews was applauded and encouraged by the Jews themselves. This purposeful Jewish self-segregation stemmed from a desire to maintain Jewish tradition, a rising Jewish ethno-nationalism, and in part also a condescending attitude towards the cultures of the indigenous Slavic peoples of Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe. Orthodox Rabbi Avigdor Miller attributed the unwillingness of Poland’s Jews to assimilate to economic self-interest,along with a somewhat condescending attitude towards Poles. The rabbi comments:“When the Jews in Spain began to use that wealthy land as a means of mingling with the Arabs and Spaniards, G-d’s plan caused them to be expelled to lands of lesser culture, such as Turkey and Poland, with whom our people had no incentive to assimilate. Among these nations, G-d permitted the Jews to live in relative peace for centuries; for there was no danger that they would imitate the ways of the poor and backward populace. But those of our people who dwelt among the Germans,French, and English were tempted to mingle with them; for their higher living standards created allure. You see how our nation adopted the German language, but not Polish or Turkish.” (1)Harry M. Rabinowicz,in his work, “The Legacy of Polish Jewry: A History of Polish Jews in the Inter-War Years 1919–1939”, highlights the distinctiveness of Jewish society from that of the Poles:“Despite a continuous history of nearly ten centuries, the Jews were isolated from their fellow-citizens by religion, by culture, by language, even by dress. The Polish Jew had his own educational system, his own communal organization, his own youth movements, his press, theater,his party politics.”(2)Dr. Berthold Zarwyn, himself a Jewish holocaust survivor, wrote this passage in his contribution to Jakob Weiss’s, The Lemberg Mosaic: The Memoirs of Two Who Survived the Destruction of Jewish Galicia:“It appears to me that two main factors led to anti-Semitism in Poland. The monopolization of commerce by Jews forced into this area by exclusive regulations, and the lack of cultural interaction based mostly on religious ignorance. The attitudes of Catholic clergy on the one-side and of Orthodox Jewry on the other did not stimulate a normal understanding and intermingling.” (3)While Jewish distinctiveness was originally a product of their religion, the emergence of a anti-assimilationist Jewish ethno-nationalism in the late 19th and early part of the 20th century served to only entrench Jewish “otherness” among non Jews and Jews alike. The Yiddishist secular movement in the 19th century further enforced this cultural divide, and defined themselves in direct opposition to the Poles.During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when both Poles and Jews were aspiring for future statehood and rights, the differences in culture and conflicting national interests were bound to clash. While Poles wanted to establish Poland as a nation for the Poles after years of foreign occupation, many Jewish groups saw Poland as a multi-ethnic state in which various ethnic groups could vie for their own interests. Some Jewish movements, in particular the Yiddishist-oriented Jews, were against the undoing of the partitions of Poland, as such an event would spell the end of a united Russian Jewry and the advent of “backward peasant nations”. As Joshua Karlip writes in his The Tragedy of a Generation,As this last shred of hope gave way to sober reality, Yisroel Efroikin also mourned the breakup of Russia into independent successor states as spelling the death of a unified Russian Jewry. From the late eighteenth century until World War I, Lithuanian, Polish, and Ukrainian Jews had comprised a united Russian Jewry that experienced modernization together through such movements and processes as Haskalah, Zionism, and the rise of Yiddish culture. Now, however, Russian Jews would face the future as minorities in emerging nation-states. ... Although the successor states might guarantee personal emancipation and national autonomy, he argued, the small size of these fragmented Jewish communities would preclude autonomy’s implementation. The peasant nationalities that would lead most of these successor states, moreover, would force the Jews from their traditional economic role in commerce and industry. Echoing the Yiddishist call for a synthesis between Jewish and European cultures, Efroikin feared that the low cultural level of these peasant nationalities would negatively affect the development of secular Yiddish culture.(4)The desire of the Jews to remain distinct from the non Jewish population also resulted in widespread ignorance of the Polish language, history and culture among many Jews, and schools for Jewish children focused on providing a Jewish education. In an article entitled, “Jews and Poles Lived Together for 800 Years But Were Not Integrated,” published in the New York newspaper Forverts (September 17, 1944), Yiddish author and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote under the pen-name Icchok Warszawski:“Rarely did a Jew think it was necessary to learn Polish; rarely was a Jew interested in Polish history or Polish politics. ... Even in the last few years it was still a rare occurrence that a Jew would speak Polish well. Out of three million Jews living in Poland, two-and-a-half million were not able to write a simple letter in Polish and they spoke [Polish] very poorly. There are hundreds of thousands of Jews in Poland to whom Polish was as unfamiliar as Turkish. The undersigned was connected with Poland for generations, but his father did not know more than two words in Polish. And it never even occurred to him that there was something amiss in that.”(5)Arthur L. Goodhart, who came to Poland in the summer of 1920 as counsel to a mission sent by the president of the United States to investigate conditions in Poland, described typical Jewish schools in Warsaw connected with synagogues. These schools were steeped in Jewish history and tradition but paid virtually no attention to the non-Jewish community around them:“We then went to the senior class, where the children were thirteen or fourteen years old. These children had just been studying Jewish history, and one of them enthusiastically repeated to me the names of the different kings of Judah. As this was the oldest class, I thought I would ask them some questions. Of the thirty-five children ... Nearly all of them knew that New York was in America.None of them knew who Kosciuszko [Kościuszko] was, and one particularly bright boy was the only one in the class who had ever heard of [King John] Sobieski. He thought that Sobieski was a Polish nobleman who had fought against the Russians. I then asked them some questions about languages. Only one boy could talk Polish, although four or five could understand it. ... All the classes in this school were conducted in Yiddish, although the main emphasis was put on teaching the children Hebrew. ... We visited three or four other Talmud schools during the day. One of the best had some maps on the wall. When I examined them I found that they were detailed charts of Palestine. The children in this class were able to draw excellent plans of the country on the blackboard, filling in the names of all the cities and most of the villages. I asked one of the boys whether he could draw a similar map of Poland, and he said “No.” ...”(Arthur L. Goodhart)(6)Jews who attempted to forge bridges between the Polish and Jewish peoples and provide Jewish children with broader education were often scoffed and excluded from Jewish society. William John Rose, an authority on Poland as well as a professor, visited Poland many times before and after the First World War. Here he writes about the issue facing assimilated Jews:“Then my guide took me to see what everyone regarded as a model piece of work for abandoned children, the Jewish orphanage on Leszno Street [in Warsaw], managed by a Mr. Hosenpud. This remarkable man had been a teacher for years, and was president of the Jewish Teacher’s Association.A believer, he took the view that Jewry is a religion and not a nation, and had many enemies among his own people, who were opposed to having orphan lads taught Polish, or brought up to play games,or introduced to the school curriculum that is regarded the world over as the road to intelligent citizenship.”(7)Raymond Leslie Buell, an American writer, educator and President of the Foreign Policy Association,made the following observations, in which she asserts that assimilated Jews were freely accepted in Polish society, and that lack of assimilation was primarily caused by the Jews. She also distinguished German antisemitism from Polish antisemitism, asserting that Polish tensions with Jews were not racially motivated:“The ordinary Jew speaks Yiddish ... and is influenced by a particularly formidable type of orthodoxy, or rabbinism, of the Tsadika or Wunderrabi variety. While some Jews contend that the government obstructs assimilation, there is little doubt that the most powerful factor which keeps the Jew separate from the Pole is the type of orthodoxy which dominates a large part of the Jewish population. The American visitor unaccustomed to the Polish tradition wonders why more interracial disputes have not occurred when, on visiting a typical village, he sees the Orthodox Jew,wearing his skullcap, black boots, long double-breasted coat, curls and beard, mingling with the Poles proper. The government may think it is in its interest to support the Orthodox Jews against their more assimilated brethren, but the foreign observer is nevertheless struck by the readiness of the ordinary Poles to accept the assimilated or baptized Jew as an equal. In government departments, in the army, in the banks, and in newspapers, one finds the baptized Jews occupying important positions. This class, which in Nazi Germany is subject to bitter persecution, has been freely accepted in Poland. With the growth of nationalist spirit among both Jews and Poles, the trend toward assimilation seems to have been arrested. It remains true, however, that the Polish attitude towards the Jew is governed by racial considerations to a lesser degree than the attitude of other peoples.” (8)Another major source of contention between Poles and Jews was the historical position of economic middlemen that Jews enjoyed in Poland Lithuania throughout the Commonwealth and period of partitions. Jews were often employed by the Polish nobility, or Szlachta, to manage economic affairs and transactions. Often times, this involved extorting and abusing the uneducated peasantry who were easily manipulated. Booker T. Washington, the famous African American activist, scientist and a former slave himself, went on a trip to Europe in 1910, including Poland. Washington later put his travels into a book, and wrote that the social and economic position of the Polish peasant reminded him of the harrowing condition of Black Americans in the south. He witnessed peasants living in weather beaten huts filled with animals and dirt. His local Jewish guide, in Washington’s words, “looked down upon and despised” the Polish peasants, and referred to them as “ignorant and dirty creatures”.“wherever in Poland money changes hands a Jew is always there to take charge of it. In fact, it seemed to me that the Jew in Poland was almost like the money he handled, a sort of medium of exchange.”Washington concluded that:“there was much the same life that I had known and lived among the Negro farmers in Alabama. ... I am convinced that any one who studies the movements and progress of the Negroes in America will find much that is interesting by way of comparison in the present situation of the Polish people and that of the American Negroes.”(9)Indeed, this was a system set up by the Polish nobility. While the nobility enjoyed great freedoms, peasantry were for the most part serfs. The usage of Jews as economic middlemen fostered the generalized perception among Polish peasantry that the Jews were swindlers and the source of their financial misery. And the Jews, themselves a isolated community with their own interests, would often act against the interests of the peasant. The Polish peasant, had literally no way to succeed or rise out of his position. In the 1870’s, Polish peasants began to organize themselves in order to establish economic independence. This movement, which lasted from the partitions to the interwar era, led Polish peasantry into serious economic and political competition with Jewish merchants who had previously enjoyed a monopoly on trade. Historian Keely Stauter-Halstead, who traces these developments,points out that after peasant emancipation in the mid-19th century, the traditional Jewish middleman position, between landlord and peasant, began to decline, and Polish-Jewish relations began to sour, culminating in the notion, nowadays, that Poles are born anti-Semites. Stauter-Halstead points out that, “Beginning in the 1870’s, Christian peasants sought to organize their own credit institutions and village stores in order to undercut the interest rates and prices Jewish merchants demanded.” Halstead continues:“Village innkeepers were also almost always without exception Jewish, since gentry landowners had sold their concessions for alcohol trade only to non serfs before emancipation. In the absence off normal credit facilities, peasants were frequently forced to turn to village Jews for emergency loans,especially to meet their new tax burdens. Because of their position within the money economy, Galician villagers viewed rural Jews, whether in the capacity as bartenders, moneylenders, or managers of general stores, as responsible for much of their economic misery. To complete the picture of economic control, Jewish families in the 1870’s began competing with small farmers to buy up estate land from impoverished gentry. By 1889, some 10 percent of agricultural land was owned by Jews.”Polish-Jewish antagonism was not as one-sided as nowadays portrayed. Stauter-Halstead comments,“Peasant resentment of rural Jews heightened still further after the latter began to retaliate against the loss of business. Jewish merchants attacked parish priests for their role in founding Christian stores. The Jewish shop owner in the town of Kalwarya reportedly offered to donate 60 zlotys[złoty] year to a cloister of the priest’s choosing if the clergyman would convince circle members to close their store, and offered the circle itself 100 zlotys to cease its operations. In most cases,peasant entrepreneurs persevered. Occasionally, however, as in the parish of Dąbrowa in 1884, the Jews triumphed and circle activities ceased altogether in response to the “great agitation” Jewish businessmen organized.”(10)Other examples can be mentioned. Stanislaw Thugutt, a minister in the interwar Polish government, was threatened by local Jewish merchants after he opened a food cooperative in the town of Cmielow. After threats proved futile, he was falsely charged with attacking a Jew, and was thrown out by the court. When a cooperative produce store was opened in Brańsk in 1913 on the initiative of the local Christian intelligentsia, local Jews physically attacked one of its founders. In addition, the Jewish merchants who wanted to force the store to close, so as to maintain their monopoly on local commerce, jointly lowered their prices. When a Polish company attempted to open a provision shop in Tarnobrzeg, they ran into a formidable obstacle. All the buildings in the centre of the town were owned by Jews who were adamantly opposed to the idea and would not rent or sell to Poles.When one Jew finally sold to the Poles, the Jews:“made things very bad for the Jew who sold it, and offered to double the amount paid down in order to recover the place. It all came to naught. That evening the deed was signed after the seller left town. His family was the object of persecution, their windows were broken and for weeks they were not admitted to the synagogue.”(11)Unlike Polish perceptions of Jews, Jewish perceptions of Poles have been neglected in the popular narrative and is often times simply written off as a reaction to Polish antisemitism. The shortcoming of this view is that it fails to take into account the complexities and hostilities that can emerge between groups that are unable to have any normal interaction but are are forced to compete over political and economic interest. It is important to remember that Poland invited Jews when they were most in need, and remained the center of Jewish culture and life for centuries mainly because Jews could enjoy an unhindered social and religious life in the country. Positing that antisemitism is uniquely Polish or spawned by a flaw in the Polish character, is one sided and dehumanizing. The truth is, no side was free of generalizations and false beliefs. Indeed, many scholars, even Jews, assert that Polish antisemitism was not racial or even mainly religious in origin.Polish Jewish historian and Holocaust survivor Eva Hoffman writes:“What of Jewish attitudes toward the Poles? We tend to forget that minority groups are not powerless in the perceptions; that they, too, exercise judgment and gauge the character of others; and that,much as they may be the targets of prejudice, they are not themselves immune to it. That the Jews had their views of the people among whom they lived we cannot doubt, but their ordinary opinions,ideas, and preconceptions are largely inaccessible to us, since almost no secular Jewish literature is extant from the early period. We do know, however, that Jews had their exclusionary and monopolistic prescriptions, prohibiting rights of residence to outsiders in their quarters, and strictly guarding certain business practices and “secrets” from non-Jews. ... We can take it for granted,moreover, that fierce religious disapproval traveled both ways. Just as Jews were infidel in Christian eyes, so Jews were convinced that Christians were wrong, deluded, and blasphemous.And from both sides of the divide, the conviction of the other’s wrongness created essential, and increasingly rigid, spiritual barriers. As the Jewish communities in Poland became more settled and began to establish stronger religious institutions, Polish Jews became more rigorously observant.They began to shun intimate contact with Christians, if only on account of the dietary laws. The Poles, then, were the Jews’ radical Other, just as much as the other way round.”(12)Polish antisemitism should also be realized as less intense and organized than the antisemitism of Western and other parts of Eastern Europe. Theodore Weekes notes that:“The Poles certainly had no monopoly on antisemitism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In fact, both “scholarly” and popular expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment were much more pronounced in Germany and France in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. ... It is also clear that much of the rhetoric of Polish antisemites ... was appropriated from German and French sources....no prominent Polish writer or scholar of the prewar [i.e. pre-World War One] period chose to publicly denounce the Jews as a threat to the Polish nation. Indeed before 1905 it was a rare Polish intellectual who made a carrier of denouncing the Jews. Instead, in that period prominent writers such as Bolesław Prus and Aleksander Świętochowski mercilessly mocked and reviled antisemites as hacks, careerists, and benighted fools.”(13)Some objectors to this account will say that it is possible that Jews developed anti Polish sympathies in response to persecution. However, while there was no doubt Poles who carried false stereotypes and fostered discontent towards Jews, Hasidic Jews themselves carried not only a stubborn desire to remain separate from the Gentiles, but also at times a sense of spiritual and racial superiority. Many accounts of Jewish holocaust survivors, including historians, display that intense Jewish prejudices against Poles and other Slavs were strongly present in Jewish society.Leon Weliczker Wells, adviser to the Holocaust Library in New York, who hails from Eastern Galicia,recorded:“Our small town, Stojanow [Stojanów], had about a thousand Jews and an equal number of Poles and Ukrainians. ... We looked down on the small (Polish) farmer, whom we called Cham, which was an old traditional way of saying Am Haaretz (people of the earth), which to us meant simpletons. ... We lived in a self-imposed ghetto without walls. The Jewish religion fostered our living together in groups which separated us from non-Jews. ... All of these [religious] restrictions caused the Jews to live in ghetto-like societies so that they could maintain their Jewish way of life. ... We had virtually no contact with the outside world, surely not social contact, as our interests and responsibilities were completely different from the goish’s….)Here he discloses that in his youth, there were racist feelings harbored by Jews against Poles:We Jews felt superior to all others, as we were the “chosen people,” chosen by God Himself. We even repeated it in our prayers at least three times a day, morning, afternoon, and evening ... The Polish farmers, who, even considering their low living standards, couldn’t support an entire family, sent their daughters to town to become servants in the Jewish households. I never knew a Jewish girl to be a servant in a Polish household, but the reverse was the norm. The gentile maid was referred to in negative terms as the “shiksa” (Hebrew for “a vermin like a cockroach”). [In Polish, the term had the added etymological connotation of “urine-dripping” girl.)Here, he discloses that many Jews, including his parents, praised Germany for being a civilized nation, and initially preferred German rule to that of the “backward Pole”:Our parents not only praised that time [i.e., Austrian rule] as being better for the Jews, but spoke with pride about the superiority of German culture and its people compared to the Polish culture. This attitude was very badly received by the Polish people. ... The belief that German culture was superior continued even to the time when Germany occupied Poland in 1939, and in its eastern part in 1941. I remember when the Jews spoke among themselves about the future under the Nazi regime: “Under the Germans it couldn’t be so bad as the press wants us to believe because they are the leading civilized nation.”(14)Jewish admiration for German culture at the expense of the Poles was often repeated in the accounts of other eyewitnesses. Jewish Professor Yacoov Talmon who hailed from the Russian Partition of Poland wrote:“... many important factors infused in the Jews a spirit of contempt and hatred towards the Poles. In contrast to the organizational activity and capacity of the Germans, the Jews saw the Poles as failures. The rivals most difficult to Jews, in the economic and professional fields were the Poles,and we must not underrate the closeness of Yiddish to the German language as well. I still remember that during my childhood the name “goy” sounded to me as referring to Catholic Poles and not to Germans; though I did realize that the latter were obviously not Jews, I felt that the Germans in the vicinity were not simply Gentiles.It would be shocking to think of it to-day, but the pre-Hitlerite relations between Jews and Germans in our vicinity were friendly. ... In the twenties, Jews and Germans stood together one election lists. Out of those Germans rose such who, during the German invasion, helped in the acts of repression and extermination as experts, who had the experience and knew the secrets.It is not surprising, then, that in the mixed loyalties of the time Jewish unity grew stronger and deeper, and consciousness in this direction burned like a flame. ... the actual motherland was not a temporal one, but a heavenly one, a vision and a dream—to the religious it was the coming of the Messiah, to the Zionists it was a Jewish country, to the Communists and their friends it was a world revolution. And the real constitution according to which they lived was the Shulhan Aruch, code of laws, and the established set of virtues, or the theories of Marx, and the rules of Zionism and the building up of a Jewish country.”(15)Inter-ethnic antagonism and conflict had firm roots in tradition and reality on both sides, and cannot simply be attributed to Polish chauvinism and xenophobia. Jewish Theodore S. Hamerow, who grew up in Warsaw, states that:Many Jews regarded the Poles with the same resentment which many Poles displayed toward the Jews. This resentment was partly rooted in religious exclusiveness or intolerance. Pious believers in each community regarded members of the other as infidels, as enemies of the true faith who deserved scorn and re probation. The refusal of those stubborn believers to recognize divine truth had led to their spiritual decline and moral corruption. Devout Poles often regarded the Jews as devious, cunning, and unprincipled, while devout Jews reciprocated by characterizing the Poles as ignorant, coarse, and dissolute. Hateful stereotypes on each side poisoned relations between them.Forced to live side by side, often dependent on each other economically, they managed as a rule to maintain at least minimal civility in dealing with one another. But inwardly they often shared a profound mutual hostility.Their antagonism was reflected in language even more clearly than in behavior. The Polish word“zyd” [żyd], meaning a Jew, did not simply define a religious identity or affiliation. It also carried connotations of cringing sycophancy and sly dishonesty. Ethnic prejudice could be found just as easily in Yiddish, the everyday language of the Jewish masses. The word “goy,” for example, meant more than a gentile. It carried overtones of ignorance, dissipation, and mindless pugnacity. To describe a Pole who did not conform to this stereotype, some modifying adjective would generally be added. That is, so-and-so was a “decent goy” or an “educated goy” or a “tolerant goy” or sometimes simply a “Christian,” a term which had no serious pejorative overtones.”(16)Ben-Zion Gold, a yeshiva student from Radom, writes:“Relations between Poles and religious Jews were burdened by prejudices on both sides. Just as our self-image was shaped by our religious tradition, so was our view of Poles. We were the descendants of Jacob, who, according to tradition, studied Torah and lived by its commandments.Poles, on the other hand, were the descendants of Esau, with all of the vile characteristics that our tradition ascribed to him: a depraved being, a murderer, a rapist, and an inveterate enemy of Jacob.This image of Esau, which developed two thousand years ago in reaction to the oppressive domination of the Romans, was transferred onto Christians ...Traditional Jews responded with contempt for both the people and their religion. We viewed Catholicism as idolatry. Poles were stereotyped as lechers and drunkards, given to brawling and wife-beating. I remember a popular Yiddish folk song about Jacob, the Jews, who rises in the morning and goes to the Beit HaMidrash to study and pray, and Esau, a Pole, who goes to the tavern. The refrain exclaims: “Oy! Shiker is a goy, a goy is drunk! And he must drink because he is a goy.” ...Religious Jews looked on assimilationists with a mixture of pity and contempt. We felt that they lost their self-respect as Jews and were still treated by Poles with contempt. We used to say, “Pol Zydem I pol Polakiem jest calym lajdakiem” [Pół Żydem i pół Polakiem jest całym łajdakiem](“Half a Jew and half a Pole is a whole scoundrel”).”(17)While there is great documentation of historical Christian religious stereotypes and slanders against the Jews, there are also examples of Jewish disdain for Christianity that receive less attention. Talmud-inspired perceptions of Christians could take on extreme forms. As Jewish historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern writes on the culture of the Jewish shtetl in the late 19th century,“[Jews] mistrusted the gentiles, goyim, and would spit on the ground when passing by a church.They also spat on the floor of synagogue while reciting the line in the everyday concluding prayer Aleynu about those “who pray to the emptiness and void and bow down to the god that does not save.” Although censors had long crossed this line out and had forbidden Jews to reprint it in prayer books, it nonetheless remained in the oral culture ...Rik, Hebrew for “void,” also was associated with Hebrew for “spit” (rok), while “god who does not save” could also mean “God is not Jesus.” Jews spat on the floor when they mentioned those who bow down to the void and emphasized that Jesus was not God. Jewish enlightened thinkers complained that Jews spat in the synagogue during prayers and that it was deplorable—but they cautiously avoided a detailed description.[Jews] sometimes challeng[ed] their Christian neighbors with outright mockery of Christianity. ...Thus, for example, in Lithuania, several Jews spent Hanukah putting on an amateur performance with a Jew performing as Jesus on stage. ... in Belorussia, several Jews got exuberantly drunk on Purim, dug out a wooden effigy of Jesus from a road chapel, and carried it on their shoulders around the shtetl, singing and mocking a church procession. Elsewhere Jews went out on Christian holidays, particularly to the church processions, and engaged in clashes with Christians.In the early nineteenth century, we hardly find victimized Jews hiding themselves in their attics from the chastising sword and missionary word of the Christian Church. The contrary was closer to the truth: the shtetl at its height was afraid of nothing.”(18)Abraham Lipkunsky, who grew up in the village of Dowgieliszki, a small settlement near Raduń inhabited for the most part by Jewish farmers, recalled a “deep-rooted custom” from his childhood“At every crossroad and before every village there were crosses protected by little sloping roofs,with icons of Jesus or the Madonna hanging beneath them. For some reason, we children were under the impression that Jews were forbidden even to glance at a cross, but our childish curiosity got the better of us and I would quickly and guiltily snatch a glance at the cross while repeating the short prayer ‘thou shalt utterly detest it, and thou shalt utterly abhor it, for it is a cursed thing’(Deuteronomy 7: 26), spitting in the direction of the alleged cursed thing, but seeing to it that no one should see me doing so. Heaven forbid! Like the spitting after the saying of the prayer: ‘It is our duty to praise the Lord, since he hath not made us like the nations of different countries, nor placed us like the families of the earth.”(19)Intermarriage and especially conversion was often violently opposed by Hasidic Jews in the Shtetl. Many Jews who married Polish Christians or converted, faced exclusion, mockery and even violence at the hands of their Jewish neighbors. In Machla Lewin-Botler, “The Last Ones of a Family,” a story is told of the tragic fate of the mother of a Jewish girl who ran off with a Polish tutor and married in a Catholic church. The mother “burdened by shame, overwhelmed by grief threw herself into one of the town wells and fell to her death. Soon afterward the family disappeared from Kolbuszowa.”(20)A young Jewish girl who fell in love with a Polish military officer met a similar tragic end:“she had to choose between never seeing her parents again or breaking off with her beloved. The entire Jewish community of Chodecz was in an uproar about it. In the end, the young woman drowned herself in a well and was buried outside the cemetery.”(21)When a young Jewish woman converted to Catholicism in the village of Jaśliska near Krosno, the Jews nearly rioted. The situation became so precarious that she was escorted by a policeman on her way to the church. According to this woman, “Jews threw stones. ... After this celebration, my father came and pleaded with me to go home. ... But I was already baptised ... Later Jews asked my father why he had not brought an axe or a knife with him and cut my head off ... Because it is a horrible thing for Jews when one of them gets baptised.” Jews did not leave her in peace. “They tried to stop her from entering the church and they wanted to ‘kill her and stone her to death’. ... After her baptism, [she] sold her second-handsewing machine and escaped [from the village], because ‘I knew that the Jews would never leave me in peace.’”(22)In conclusion, cultural and social tensions between Jews and Poles before the war stemmed from attitudes on both sides. The insistence of the Religious Jewish community to exclude itself from Polish society and remain unassimilated most definetly helped prevent any level of cultural dialogue between Catholic Poles and Polish Jews. In addition, a lot of what is seen as antisemitism today, may actually stem from the economic competition that emerged between the poor peasantry and the Jewish Middle class businessmen. This undoubtedly also created tensions between Poles and Jews, but should not all be attributed to an inherent “Polish xenophobia”.Most importantly, Poland was not the center of antisemitism in Europe. Poland never planned to exterminate its Jewry, and pogroms were usually not widespread nor involved a high death rate. During the partitions, the overwhelming majority of deadly pogroms that occurred in Polish soil were perpetrated by Russian soldiers, and Jews were never slaughtered enmass in Poland as they were in Ukraine and Belarus. Indeed, Poland’s first independent government under Piłsudski, was pro Jewish. Tensions between Poland and it's Jews increased just as tensions were increasing with all of Poland's minorities, highlighting the instability and uncertainty that faced a multi ethnic Poland in the face of traditionally aggressive neighbors, like Germany and the Soviet Union. But this does not negate that in Poland, Jews could practice their religion and customs without fear of major disruptions. The high level of autonomy and social organization displayed by pre war Jews, demonstrates that they were by no means a persecuted and marginalized group on a grand political scale. This of course, does not discount that tensions and provocations existed mutually on both the individual and community level.Communist CollaborationTensions between Poles and Jews may also be attributed to the high amount of Communist party members within the Jewish community. While the majority of Jews were not communists, Jews filled a a high level of communist positions both before, after and during the war that was disporportionate to their numbers. This undoubtedly also created tensions between Poles and Jews, but should not be attributed to an inherent “Polish xenophobia”.In Warsaw about 65 per cent of the Communist membership was Jewish. In 1930 "Jews constituted 51 percent of the [Communist Union of Polish Youth], while ethnic Poles were only 19 percent. (The rest were Bylerussians and Ukrainians)." [Schatz, 96] In 1932 Jews were 90 percent of the International Organization for Help to Revolutionaries. [Schatz, 97] They were also 54 percent of the communist field leadership, 75 percent of its propagandists, and "occupied most of the seats" of the Central Committee of the Communist Workers' Party and Communist Party of Poland. In pre-World War II Poland, many communist activists were jailed. Polish researcher Andrzej Zwolinski found that "in Polish court proceedings against communists between 1927 and 1936, 10 percent of those accused were Polish Christians and 90 percent were Jews." [Piotrowski, 36] [Schatz, 97] Not surprisingly, the formal positions of the Polish Communist Party included a "firm stand against anti-Semitism." [Schatz, 100]In 1939, as Soviet troops were pouring into eastern Poland from the east, the Soviets employed the help of local Ukrainian, Belarusian and Jewish minorities in arresting, denouncing and executing Poles. While the majority of Jews were politically passive, Jews filled a prominent role in communist militias and manhunts, and many were remembered as spirited Soviet agents.No less a man than Jan Karski , who was made an Honorary Citizen of Israel for his role in warning the West about the Holocaust and cannot be accused of harbouring hostility toward the Jews.[1] Writing in early 1940, at a time when the mass deportations of Poles were not yet underway, Karski reported:“The Jews have taken over the majority of the political and administrative positions. But what is worse, they are denouncing Poles, especially students and politicians (to the secret police), are directing the work of the (communist) militia from behind the scenes, are unjustly denigrating conditions in Poland before the war. Unfortunately, one must say that these incidents are very frequent, and more common than incidents which demonstrate loyalty toward Poles or sentiment toward Poland.”(1)The fact that large portions of the Jewish community came out in droves to welcome their new Soviet “liberators”, is attested to in the accounts of both Jews and Poles from the Kresy. Jewish survivor and Israeli historian Dov Levin, describes his shock at the behavior of the Jewish community as Soviets entered the Polish (now Lithuanian) city of Wilno.“It is hard to describe the emotion that swept me as I saw in the street, across from our gate, a Russian tank bearing grinning young men with a blazing red star on their berets. As the machines came to a halt, the people crowded around. Somebody shouted, “Long live the Soviet government!” and everyone cheered. … You could hardly find a Gentile in that crowd. … Many people did not stop and consider what this regime would bring in its wake. … everyone greeted the Russians unanimously, as they would the Messiah.”(2)A Polish eyewitness observed the following on the 19th of September, 1939:“On Wielka Street we noticed a group of several hundred men. They waved red flags and were shouting something. Some of them were armed with rifles. As we approached we realized that they were Jews. Almost all of them wore red armbands. Red flags were hung from the windows of Jewish residences. We came across the first Soviet tanks in front of Ostra Brama. …Bolshevik offices were teaming with local Jews. The “people’s militia” was recruited from their numbers. They also provided the NKVD with information about “Polish elements hostile to the Soviet Union.” They considered the Soviet authority as theirs and openly enjoyed our [i.e., Poland’s] defeat. They often directed all sorts of threats at us and mocked our national and spiritual values. At every turn they declared that “our rule” had come to an end. Small Jewish children called me and my friends “hideous Polish mugs.”(3)Kazimierz Kalwiński, who was decorated by Yad Vashem for his family’s rescue of 24 Jews in a bunker on the outskirts of Lwów, recalled:“On the day they [i.e., the Soviets] entered Lwow [Lwów] I went to the center of the city to deliver milk to a physician, a longstanding customer. I witnessed a horrible sight. On the street were piled a mound of rifles and the Russians were leading Polish soldiers-prisoners into captivity. On the main street I saw a hearse pulled by black horses, on which lay an unusually large coffin draped with a Polish military flag. On both sides of the hearse young Jewish boys repeatedly yelled loudly in Polish: “We are going to bury rotten Poland.” These were the poorest who believed the lies spread by Communists promising them a better life. How could they know what would happen to them two more years? I stood with other people on the sidewalk and screamed something at them (I no longer remember what). Immediately, a young Jew brandishing a gun and a red band (he was no more than 15) came over to me and said, “You don’t like something?” Some old man pulled my hand saying, “Go! Go!”This is how they thanked Poland for accepting their ancestors centuries before. The richer, more intelligent middle class Jews condemned their behavior, but they could do little. Young Communists denounced them and reported them to the Soviets, as they did other Poles, and rich Jews.”(4)Many accounts also reveal the different reaction Jews and Poles had to Soviet occupation. While Jews formed a majority of the pro Soviet marchers, the overwhelming majority of Poles were dejected and hostile to the Soviets:“The Jewish crowd cheered the Bolsheviks. A huge red flag was hoisted on the Town Hall and floodlit with a searchlight. The Jews put on red armbands and tried to form a kind of militia to take control of the town. …The delight of the Jews was indescribable. Some of them started making communist speeches and greeted others with uplifted fists. The Polish population, on the other hand, kept very quiet and stayed at home.”(5)Jewish actions of hostility against Poles was not only limited to mockery and welcoming invaders, but often escalated into bloodthirsty violence and the murders of Poles. Many Jews, as well as other ethnic minorities in the Kresy, organized militias and ambushed and attacked Polish soldiers fighting the Soviets. Often times, Polish fugitives were hunted down in the streets and the fields and turned over to the NKVD. Wiktoria Duda, a Polish witness, records the fates of hundreds of Poles in Grodno:“A cruel fate awaited Polish soldiers and hundreds of residents of Grodno who were taken prisoner after being fingered by Jewish and Belorussian fighting squads. The men were cruelly disfigured: their noses, limbs, and ears were cut off, their eyes were gouged out. Groups of fifteen were then tied together by barbed wire. They were fastened to tanks and dragged for several hundred metres over stony roads. The bodies were then thrown into roadside ditches and bomb craters. The moans and cries of the murdered could be heard over a distance of a few kilometres. The grimness of the situation was intensified by the fires. Polish homes were set ablaze after being ravaged by Jewish youths wearing red bandannas and bows.”Later she witnessed the cold blooded murder of Polish officers at the hands of a Jewish militia:“What most sticks in my mind were the terrifying scenes which took place at that time on the streets and outskirts of Grodno. For example, at the corner of Orzeszkowa and Dominikańska Streets, when a vehicle carrying two [Polish] officers and a driver came to a momentary stop, a group of armed Jews ran out of some nearby houses, pulled out the soldiers and assaulted them. They then hacked their bodies up with axes and piled them up on the road.”(6)K. T. Celny, a young Pole who accompanied his father, a major in the reserve of the medical corps of the Polish Army, encountered the following reception in the vicinity of Lwow:“As we approached every Ukrainian village, we were fired upon. In towns, we were also shot at by the Jewish militia, armed with stolen Polish army rifles and wearing red armbands. As we approached the outskirts of Lwów, we came upon a tragicomic spectacle: In a meadow beside the main road, about ten of the Jewish militiamen were guarding a sizable squadron of one of the elite Polish cavalry regiments. Soviet tank forces had disarmed the Polish regiment and had assigned their new “allies,” the Jews, to guard the Poles. I recall a feeling of pain and disgust that those who were Polish citizens should behave so treacherously.”(7)In Zaleszczyki, near the Romanian border, a Polish prisoner of war recalled his fate, typical of many Polish soldiers:“On September 19th, I was taken captive by the Bolsheviks. I was wounded and was taken to the hospital in Zaleszczyki. Our fate was horrible. The NKVD handed us over to Jews armed with rifles and guns. These were Polish Jews in civilian clothes with armbands. They treated the wounded soldiers with unusual brutality. They struck us and kicked us. They searched out officers and handed them over to the NKVD. They screamed at us that we were bourgeois lackeys who had sucked their blood, and that they would now suck our blood. They hurled many insults at us which I won’t repeat because they were so vulgar. They heaped profanities on us.”(8)“One of the earliest and most heinous crimes was the murder of 50 Poles, or possibly more, in the village of Brzostowica Mała near Grodno. A carnival of violence exploded on September 17–18, before the Soviets were installed in the area. A pro-Communist band with red armbands and armed with blades and axes, consisting of Jews and Belorussians and led by a Jewish trader by the name of Zusko Ajzik, entered the village, dragged people out of their houses screaming, and cruelly massacred the entire Polish population, possibly as many as fifty people. The victims included Count Antoni Wołkowicki and his wife Ludwika, his brother-in-law Zygmunt Woynicz-Sianożęcki, the county reeve and his secretary, the accountant, the mailman, and the local teacher. The victims of this orgy of violence were tortured, tied with barbed wire, pummelled with sticks, forced to swallow quicklime, thrown into a ditch and buried alive. The paralyzed Countess Ludwika Wołkowicka was dragged to the execution site by her hair. The murder was ordered by Żak Motyl, a Jew who headed the revolutionary committee in Brzostowica Wielka which was composed of Jews and Belorussians. Typically, the culprits were never punished. On the contrary, the NKVD officers praised them for their “class-conscious” actions. Ajzik became the president of the local cooperative and several others were accepted into the militia. The racist aspect of this bloodbath, however, is undeniable: only members of the Polish minority were targeted.”Massacre of Brzostowica MałaThroughout the course of the Soviet occupation of Kresy between 1939–1941, over 1,000,000 ethnic Poles were arrested and deported to the depths of Siberia and Central Asia, in what can only be described as ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Soviet authorities.So, in conclusion, what do we make of these testimonies? We should not conclude that all the Jews of the Kresy, or even the majority, were communist sympathizers or hounded and killed Poles. Indeed, many of the Jews who initially greeted the Soviets as liberators would also be arrested and deported, particularly Zionists and Bundists. However, we cannot discount the affect widespread Jewish collaboration with the Soviets had upon the Polish population. The prevailing opinion among Poles after 1939, was that the Jews as a collective were hostile to Polish independence and could not be trusted. Therefore, the division between the two communities widened even further, and the position of the Jews under German occupation was further compromised. It is unfortunate that many historians have neglected the impact Jewish collaboration with the Soviets had on the Poles in fermenting hostile feelings towards Jews. Indeed, Poles are usually not regarded at all in the traditional holocaust narrative, and are usually portrayed as irrationally antisemitic. Events such as the ones I described in Kresy, show that the situation was far more complicated and nuanced.This complicated situation is best summed up by famous Jan Karski, who wrote an even handed summary of the issue, taking into account both the Polish and Jewish perspectives:“Polish opinion considers that Jewish attitudes to the Bolsheviks are favourable. It is universally believed that the Jews betrayed Poland and the Poles, that they are all communists at heart, and that they went over to the Bolsheviks with flags waving. Indeed, in most towns, the Jews did welcome the Bolsheviks with bouquets, with speeches and with declarations of allegiance and so on.“One should make certain distinctions, however. Obviously the Jewish communists have reacted enthusiastically to the Bolsheviks. … The Jewish proletariat, petty traders and artisans, whose position has seen a structural improvement, and who formerly had to bear the indifference or the excesses of the Polish element, have reacted positively, too. That is hardly surprising.”(9)Polish Attitudes to the HolocaustA common oversimplification that tarnishes a balanced and true perspective on the Holocaust, is the assertion that Poles were generally complicit and supportive of the extermination of Jews, and that this can be attributed to traditional antisemitism. The truth is rather different, and much more complicated.Before we go further, it is essential that we review several basic facts. Poland was jointly invaded by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in September, 1939. After a month long valiant defence, Poland was defeated, but the Polish government never officially surrendered to the Germans. Regions in Western Poland were directly annexed into the Reich, and Central Poland was made into the Generalgovernment, which was a veritable reservation for Poles under German administration. Poles never formed a collaborative government with the Germans, and never devoted troops to the SS and German kill squads, in contrast to other occupied nations. Poles were never concentration camp guards. In fact, Poles were the first victims of German extermination campaigns, and between 1939 and 1940, 100,000 ethnic Poles were murdered in open air executions. Poles were the first prisoners in Auschwitz concentration camp, and made up 35% of its prisoners even after the arrival of the Jews. In total, 1,286,000 Catholic Poles were murdered in German camps, detention centers and prisons, with 3,000,000 Christian Poles being killed by the Germans in total (not including the additional 3,000,000 Polish Jews).Many German and Jewish accounts demonstrate that generally, Polish society was repulsed by the mass killings and mistreatment of the Jews at the hands of the German occupiers.In a report to Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, the Commander-in-Chief of the German Army, on February 6, 1940, General Johannes Blaskowitz, commander of the Eighth German Army during the September 1939 campaign wrote: “The acts of violence carried out in public against Jews are arousing in religious Poles [literally, “in the Polish population, which is fundamentally pious (or God-fearing)”] not only the deepest disgust but also a great sense of pity for the Jewish population.”(1)As a young girl, Goldie Szachter was sheltered by a Polish farm family inŚwiętomarz near Bodzentyn. The head of the family confided in the village priest, who assisted in the pretence that Goldiewas their niece, and a Catholic. That Jewish girl would later write, “I nevertheless recognized the beauty of the spirituality of the church services as well as its sanctifying influence on the Polish peasant household in general.”(2)Another Jewish survivor, Stefan Chaskielewicz, would write about his experience with Poles during his time hiding:“I must make one observation here. In hiding, I realized how deeply humanitarian the role of religion was, how much the teachings of the Catholic Church influenced the development of what was most beautiful and noble among believers. Just as in critical moments the majority of people turn to God for help–even if their faith is not particularly strong–so the very thought of God dictates to them the need to help their neighbor who is in danger.”(3)Abraham Lewin, another Jew, recorded in his wartime diary:“I have heard many stories of Jews who fled Warsaw on that momentous day, 6 September 1939, and were given shelter, hospitality and food by Polish peasants who did not ask for any payment for their help. It is also known that our children who go begging and appear in their tens and hundreds in the Christian streets are given generous amounts of bread and potatoes and from this they manage to feed themselves and their families in the ghetto.”(4)A Jewish underground journal, Undzere Weg,wrote on March 1, 1942:“The Poles, who avoided any negotiations and contacts with the Germans and who didn’t want to hear anything about establishing a Polish government which would obey the Germans and their rulers, announced their sympathy for the tortured Jews on every occasion. That was the reaction from members of the Polish intelligentsia, the Polish workers and peasants; they stressed that the Poles, as a people with beliefs, a politically mature people, would not be tempted to catch the racial hook. ... The occupier did everything in his power to isolate the Jews from the Poles.”(5)The Germans realized that they would not receive support from the general Polish population, and that the mass acts of violence carried out against both Catholic Poles and Jews would only foster Polish hostility towards the occupiers, so they devised a plan to sow divisions between Poles and Jews in order to stir up conflict. For example, the Germans were known to stage events where Poles would begin to loot Jewish property, in order to convince the Jews that the Germans were the only ones protecting them from the wrath of the peasantry.“On September 6, [1939] the Germans set fire to a few streets in the Jewish quarter and shot Jews trying to escape from their burning houses. ... Those still hiding in their homes soon noticed that the Germans were interested primarily in their property. Both individually and in groups, the latter had invaded the Jewish community and confiscated virtually everything they could—clothes, linen, furs, carpets, valuable books, etc. They often invited the Poles in the streets to take part in the looting, after which they would fire bullets into the air in order to give the impression that they were driving away the Polish “thieves”. These scenes were photographed by the Germans to demonstrate that they were protecting Jewish property from Polish criminals.”(6)Another Jew recalled that the Germans promised the Jews protection from the local gentiles, even as they were deporting them to the camps:“I remembered the order to assemble on the lawn in front of the Judenrat headquarters in Grabowiec, the announcement that all the Jews of Grabowiec would be ‘resettled’ in Hrubieszow [Hrubieszów], where the SS officer had told us, the Jews would live and work together in a miniature ‘Jewish state,’ protected by the kindly German authorities from the wrath of the local Gentile populace.”(7)Likewise, the Germans also wanted to stir hostilities both ways as part of their strategy of divide and conquer:“The Nazis contrived in every way possible to provoke resentment and animosity between the national groups. For example, in February 1941 the warders for a Jewish labour camp were recruited from among Poles and Ukrainians, while early the same year the occupation authorities in Będzin employed Jews in compiling the registers of Poles liable to deportation from the town. Again, in the spring of 1942, five Jews were assigned for wholly clerical duties to the Treblinka I labour camp for Poles. Expedients like these all made for a continuous embitterment and vitiation of relations between Poles and Jews.”(8)The Germans also launched a massive anti semitic media campaign“In support of their policy of persecution of the Jews in Poland the Nazi authorities mounted a vast propaganda campaign of ferocious virulence which preyed on the lowest instincts of the unenlightened sections of the population. The Nazi Polish-language gutter press ... strove unremittingly to whip up the Poles against the Jews. New posters continually appeared on the walls, in trams, in railway stations and other public places vilifying the Jews.”(9)The reports coming from the Kresy, which told of thousands of Jews collaborating with the Soviets against the Poles, also served to divide the two communities even further.However, it is important to note, that even the German meddling did not lead Poles to commit mass murders of Jews. Indeed, this is a tragic misunderstanding that is held by many Jews today. The majority of Poles were seldom in the position to rescue or murder anybody, and were merely struggling for their lives under a severely brutal occupation. Poles were massively executed and killed for the smallest offense (most of times, no offense at all), and were regarded as sub human by the German authorities. The average Pole was allowed to consume only 700 calories a day, and was on the brink of starvation. Most Poles in the countryside and cities also lived in flat out poverty. Adding to the difficulties facing Poles who decided to save Jews, was the German decree proclaiming that any Pole who helped a Jew would be immediately sentenced to death alongside his entire family. It is estimated that up to 50,000 Poles could have been murdered by the Germans for saving Jews.The acts of German brutality against Polish rescuers are myriad. Often times, entire villages that were found to be collectively saving Jews were razed to the ground and completely exterminated to the last villager. Polish Catholics were driven into their churches and burned to death alongside the very Jews they attempted to rescue.Those who criticize Poles for not doing enough to save their Jewish neighbors open themselves up to personal scrutiny. Would you be willing to risk the lives of not only yourself, but your family and neighbors, in order to save an absolute stranger from a completely alien culture? Would you be willing to house someone in your home when you yourself had to scrap for food and battle the elements in order to ensure the survival of your own family? Most people would not take such risks, and I don’t know how I would act under such a situation. People who rescued Jews in German occupied Poland were special human beings, often motivated by the merciful teachings of Jesus Christ, who were ready to lay down their life for their fellow man.Here are some accounts of Jewish survivors, who display a remarkable level of sympathy and understanding for the Polish population:“I do not accuse anyone that did not hide or help a Jew. We cannot demand from others to sacrifice their lives. One has no right to demand such risks.”(10)“Everyone who states the view that helping Jews was during those times a reality, a duty and nothing more should think long and hard how he himself would behave in that situation. I admit that I am not sure that I could summon up enough courage in the conditions of raging Nazi terror.”(11)“I say this without needless comments, because I’ve been asked before: If I had a family I would not shelter a Jew during the occupation.”(12)“I’m not surprised people didn’t want to hide Jews. Everyone was afraid, who would risk his family’s lives? ... But you absolutely can’t blame an average Pole, I don’t know if anyone would be more decent, if any Jew would be more decent.”(13)Because of the high risks associated with helping Jews, Poles who committed themselves to such efforts often had to work in large groups and rely on the decency and loyalty of their Catholic neighbors and friends. It is estimated that the average Jewish survivor hid in 7 different locations throughout the war in Poland, and was aided by dozens of Poles. Indeed, it would often taken many Poles to save one Jew, and one Pole to betray an entire network of Polish rescuers and Jewish fugitives.Antek Cukierman, a Jewish survivor who survived because of Polish aid, wrote that:Anyone who fosters hatred for the Polish people is committing a sin! We must do the opposite. Against the background of anti-Semitism and general apathy, these people are glorious. There was great danger in helping us, mortal danger, not only for them but also for their families, sometimes for the entire courtyard they lived in. ...I repeat it today: to cause the death of one hundred Jews, all you needed was one Polish denouncer; to save one Jew, it sometimes took the help of ten decent Poles, the help of an entire Polish family; even if they did it for money. Some gave their apartment, and others made identity cards. Even passive help deserves appreciation. The baker who didn’t denounce, for instance. It was a problem for a Polish family of four who suddenly had to start buying double quantities of rolls or meat. And what a bother it was to go far away to buy in order to support the family hiding with them. ... And I argue that it doesn’t matter if they took money; life wasn’t easy for Poles either; and there wasn’t any way to make a living. There were widows and officials who earned their few Złotys by helping. And there were all kinds of people who helped.”(14)Szymon Datner, a Holocaust survivor and former director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw,also offers a far more balanced assessmentof the harsh conditions that impacted rescue. Datner judiciously explains why most Poles remained passive under these circumstances and stresses the asymmetry between denouncers and denounced.“to speak concretely of the attitude of Poles toward Jews: the majority of Poles behaved passively, but that can be explained by the terror and also by the fact that Poles, too, were being systematically murdered on a mass scale by the Germans.On the other hand, aside from passivity, which I regard as entirely justified by a situation in which every action was heroic, there also existed an indifference that I regard as negative—although even here one could look for a psychological explanation. Next, as if on parallel lines,come the two active groups. Those who betrayed, attacked, or murdered either from a desire for gain or out of pure hatred, and those who sheltered Jews and aided them in various ways. The second group (the one that saved Jews) was more numerous and more representative both of Poles and of the leadership of the Polish underground. Yet the first group was more effective in its actions. We sometimes forget that saving one Jew often took several or even a dozen or more people, with actions that generally lasted for long years. On the other hand, one person and one moment were enough to betray a Jew. Second, many attempts at aid ended in failure. Both the Jew and the Pole sheltering him died, and this is not counted in the positive statistics.”(15)Datner’s account is very balanced. Of course, there were Polish collaborators and denouncers, but they did not represent the totality or even a large portion of Polish society. Indeed, rescuers were greater in number and more representative of the average Pole, but found it hard to operate under the brutality of the occupation.An account from Marek Edelman, one of the leader of the Jewish ghetto uprising, also demonstrates that while Polish collaborators existed, they were by no means representative of the population as a whole.“Near the ghetto one always found a crowd of Poles looking at the Jews who were going to work. After leaving the ghetto gate one of the Jews might leave the work column, remove his armband, and steal away. Among the crowd of several hundred Poles there would always be one, two, perhaps three betrayers who would apprehend the Jew... The entire crowd, however, did not act that way. I didn’t know who among the crowd was a betrayer... One has to remember that there were not a thousand or five hundred betrayers; there were maybe five of them. It was the same way with neighbors; one didn’t know if the neighbor was upright. We lived on Leszno Street and across from us there was a suspicious dwelling. Ours was also suspect. After the uprising [of August 1944] broke out, it turned out that that dwelling was an AK [Armia Krajowa–Home Army] station. The mistress of the house had been afraid of us and we of her.”(16)Those who often accuse Poland of widespread collaboration will at times point to the Polish Blue Police, which was established in German occupied Poland by the Germans. What these people forget is that the Blue Police numbered only 15,000 men out of a population of over 20,000,000 Poles, and that policemen were forced to join the force on pain of death. Indeed, it is estimated that up to 20% of Blue Police members were killed by the Germans for working with the Polish underground, and several Blue Police are recognized as saving Jews. Indeed, Jewish historians Szymon Datner and Raul Hillberg write:“the Holocaust ... cannot be charged against the Poles. It was German work and it was carried out by German hands. The Polish police were employed in a very marginal way, in what I would call keeping order. I must state with all decisiveness that more than 90% of that terrifying, murderous work was carried out by the Germans, with no Polish participation whatsoever.”(17)Jewish Historian Raul Hillberg writes:“Of all the native police forces in occupied Eastern Europe, those of Poland were least involved in anti-Jewish actions. ... The Germans could not view them as collaborators, for in German eyes they were not even worthy of that role. They in turn could not join the Germans in major operations against Jews or Polish resistors, lest they be considered traitors by virtually every Polish onlooker. Their task in the destruction of the Jews was therefore limited.”(18)Indeed, Jewish accounts testify to the important role of Jewish Police in rounding up Jews to the cattle cars.“Yitzhak Zuckerman is even more graphic and blunt:When there were hundreds of thousands of Jews in Warsaw, the Germans couldn’t have taken the transports to Treblinka without the help of the Jews themselves. It was the Jewish policemen who caught and took out the masses of Jews. They were armed with sticks; we could have used sticks and knives against them; we could have strangled and hanged them. ... Of course, the Germans also came–it was enough for one German to show up, ten Germans. But the majority were Jewish police and they did their work faithfully. By that time, we realized that the Jews were being taken to their death.”(19)It is estimated that between 300,000 to 3,000,000 Poles were directly or indirectly involved in the rescue of Jews. Many were killed for their heroism. Instead of collectively blaming the Polish people for crimes they themselves were victims of, we should attempt to formulate a more nuanced narrative concerning the holocaust.Indeed, Poland as a state and an underground, was devoted to fighting against the Holocaust. This is the real representative of Poland!In conclusion, it is impossible to objectively understand Polish Jewish relations without taking into account the mutual stereotypes that were harbored by each community. If we were to only look at Polish antisemitism, we will wind up with a dehumanized and incomplete image of the Poles. Searching for reasons behind certain Polish attitudes and uncovering the mutual tensions that existed between both Poles and Jews reveals more concerning the condition of Jews in pre war Poland than the traditional narrative, which portrays Poles as the sole perpetrators. The tensions were far more complicated.We must also take into account the widespread Jewish Soviet collaboration in the Kresy between 1939–1942, and the impacts it had on Polish attitudes towards the Jews. Such a monumental event should not be easily disregarded as irrelevant, and if Jews claim that Poles should reveal the skeletons in their closet, Jews should be fair and be prepared to do the same. At the same time, one should not generalize that all or even more Jews were active communist collaborants. Rather, we should attempt to understand the impact these events had on Poles. The common narrative is sorely insufficient.And I cannot emphasis more! “Polish antisemitism” did not result in the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a German crime that took both Jewish and Polish Catholic lives. Indeed, the Germans attempted to stoke disfavor and division on both sides, but the Polish population was not lured into widespread or systematic collaboration. Before deriding Poles as antisemites who allowed the Germans to kill off the Jews, we should recognize the dangers and deprivations facing Poles, and should show more understanding towards the Polish population. Looking at the Shoah solely through a Jewish perspective and disregarding the accounts of other ethnic groups, such as the Poles, is harmful to Holocaust discourse.And of course, non of what I wrote attempts to put down the Jews as a people or belittle or justify the Holocaust. That is my last intention.I can write further concerning the complex nature of Polish Jewish relations, but this answer is already way too long. I have already exceeded the purpose of this question. I will be writing more on this under other questions, particularly the post war era.Peace:)Bibliography1-Avigdor Miller, Rejoice o Youth! An Integrated Jewish Ideology (New York: n.p., 1962), 276–77.2-Harry M. Rabinowicz, The Legacy of Polish Jewry: A History of Polish Jews in the Inter-War Years 1919–1939(London: Yoseloff, 1965)3-Jakob Weiss, The Lemberg Mosaic: The Memoirs of Two Who Survived the Destruction of Jewish Galicia (New York:Alderbrook Press, 2010), 373.4-Karlik, The Tragedy of a Generation, 146.5-Cited in Chone Shmeruk, “Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bruno Schultz,” The Polish Review, vol. 36, no. 2 (1991):161–67.6-Arthur L. Goodhart, Poland and the Minority Races (New York: Brentano’s, 1920), 170–72.7-Daniel Stone, ed., The Polish Memoirs of William John Rose (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 100.8-Raymond Leslie Buell, Poland: Key to Europe, Second revised edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939), 308–9.9-Booker T. Washington, with the collaboration of Robert E. Park, The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1912; New Brunswick, New Jersey:Transaction Books, 1984), 252, 257, 267–69, 291–94.10-65 Keely Stauter-Halstead, The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland,1848–1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 41, 50, 116, 133.11-Jan Slomka, From Serfdom to Self-Government: Memoirs of a Polish Village Mayor, 1842–1927 (London: MinervaPublishing Co., 1941), 199.12-Eva Hoffman, Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (Boston and New York:Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 8–913-Weeks, From Assimilation to Antisemitism, 175–76.14-Leon Weliczker Wells, Shattered Faith: A Holocaust Legacy (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995),15-Shimon Kanc, ed., Sefer Ripin: A Memorial to the Jewish Community of Ripin [Rypin] (Tel Aviv: FormerResidents of Ripin in Israel and in the Diaspora, 1962), 9–10.16-Theodore S. Hamerow, Remembering a Vanished World: A Jewish Childhood in Interwar Poland (New York andOxford: Berghahn Books, 2001), 135–37.17-Ben-Zion Gold, The Life of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust (Lincoln and London: University of NebraskaPress, 2007), 76, 79, 80. Gold goes on to state: “However, it would be grossly unfair to give the impression that all Polish people wanted to harm Jews. I knew Poles who defended Jews, who did business and worked with them.18-Petrovsky-Shtern, The Golden Age Shtetl, 165, 166, 167–69.19-Aviel, A Village Named Dowgalishok, 1920-Salsitz, A Jewish Boyhood in Poland, 19021-Roman Halter, Roman’s Journey (London: Portobello, 2007), 265.22-Rosa Lehmann, Symbiosis and Ambivalence: Poles and Jews in a Small Galician Town (New York and Oxford:Berghahn Books, 2001), 116–18.Communist Collaboration1-Karski’s full report, in its two versions, can be found in Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky, eds., Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–46 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 260–71.2-Account of Gershon Adiv (Adelson), (diary, September 18, 1939), in Levin, The Lesser of Two Evils, 33.3-Henryk Sobolewski, Z ziemi wileńskiej przez świat GUŁagu, Second expanded edition (Gdańsk: n.p., 1999), 94-Edmund Kessler, The Wartime Diary of Edmund Kessler: Lwow, Poland, 1942–1944 (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010), 106–7;5-Alfred Jasiński, “Borysławska apokalipsa,” Karta (Warsaw), no. 4 (April 1991): 104.6-Account of Wiktoria Duda, quoted in Nowak, Przemilczane zbrodnie, 17.7-Richard C. Lukas, ed., Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1989), 39–40.8-Account no. 3904 in Żaroń, Agresja Związku Radzieckiego na Polskę 17 września 1939, 126.Polish Attitudes Concerning the Holocaust9-Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Reiss, ‘Those Were the Days’: The Holocaust through the Eyes of the Perpetrators and Bystanders(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991), 4; Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham eds., Nazism 1919–1945: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts,vol. II: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination(New York: Schocken Books, 1988), 939.10-Goldie Szachter Kalib, with Sylvan Kalib and Ken Wachsberger, The Last Selection: A Child’s Journey Through the Holocaust(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 161, 163–64.11-Władysław T. Bartoszewski, “Four Jewish Memoirs from Occupied Poland,”Polin: A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies(Oxford: Basil Blackwell for the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies, 1990), vol. 5, 391.12-Abraham Lewin, A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto(Oxford and New York: Basil Black in association with the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies, Oxford, 1988), 124–25.13-As cited in Havi Ben-Sasson, “Polish-Jewish Relations during the Holocaust: A Changing Jewish Viewpoint,” in Robert Cherry and Annamaria Orla-Bukowska, eds., Rethinking Poles and Jews: Troubled Past, Brighter Future(Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 90.14-Jacob Birnbaum, “Piotrkow Trybunalski: the Last Chapter,” in Roman Mogilanski, comp. and ed., The Ghetto Anthology: A Comprehensive Chronicle of the Extermination of Jewry in Nazi Death Camps and Ghettos in Poland((Los Angeles: American Congress of Jews from Poland and Survivors of Concentration camps and Nazi Victims of15-Tatiana Berenstein and Adam Rutkowski, Assistance to the Jews in Poland, 1939–1945 (Warsaw: Polonia Publishing House, 1963), 19.16-Berenstein and Rutkowski, Assistance to the Jews in Poland, 1939–1945, 19.17-Michael Temchin, The Witch Doctor: Memoirs of a Jewish Partisan (New York: Holocaust Library, 1983), 54–55.18-Pola Stein cited in Nechama Tec, When LightPierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 29.19-Hanna Wehr, Ze wspomnień(Montreal: Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada, 2001).20-Testimony of Marek Oren (Orenstein), in Piotr Głuchowski and Marcin Kowalski, “Żyd miły z bliska,” Gazeta Wyborcza–Duży Format, September 11, 2007.21-Henryk Prajs, January 2005, Internet: <henryk prajs | centropa.org>22-Yitzhak Zuckerman (“Antek”), A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising(Berkeley, London and Oxford: University of California Press, 1993), 461.23-Interview with Szymon Datner in Małgorzata Niezabitowska, Remnants: The Last Jews of Poland(New York: Friendly Press, 1986), 249–50.24-Witold Bereś, Krzysztof Brunetko, Anna Guzik and Tomasz Fiałkowski in conversation with Marek Edelman, “To się dzieje dzisiaj: O powstaniu w getcie, Polakach, Żydach i współczesnym świecie,”, Tygodnik Powszechny(Kraków), April 18, 1993.25-Interview with Szymon Datner in Niezabitowska, Remnants,247.26-Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe,1933–1945(New York: Aaron Asher Books/Harper Collins, 1992),92–9327-Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory,208