Word: grosse
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Book launches for works of history are typically sedate, often even boring affairs, but the shouts of "Lie!" and "Slander!" from the agitated crowd suggest that the latest offering from Jan Tomasz Gross is garnering attention in circles way beyond those of academic historians. Gross has come to Warsaw's Entrepreneurship and Management Academy to promote his new book, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, and the visible police presence and the plethora of TV cameras in the jam-packed hall make clear that the topic has aroused strong emotions...
...Gross, a U.S. historian born and educated in Poland became internationally famous for his 2001 book Neighbors, chronicling the massacre of Jews in the village of Jedwabne during the Nazi occupation. That book stoked controversy in Poland because it demonstrated that the Jews of Jedwabne had been brutally murdered not by the Germans, but by local Poles. Fear, published in English in 2006 but first released in Polish just two weeks ago, takes a wider look at post-war anti-Semitism in Poland, investigating why Jews returning to their homes having survived Nazi atrocities were terrorized and sometimes murdered...
...Poland, which lost about 6 million of its citizens in the war - half of them Jewish - prides itself on being the only country in Nazi-occupied Europe that did not have a collaborator government. But Gross suggests that being a direct witness to Nazi atrocities - Jews from all over Europe were herded to concentration camps in Poland - unleashed a brutal anti-semitism in the country that had for almost nine centuries been home to one of Europe's largest Jewish communities. Gross provides extensive evidence of how many Poles chased away or killed Jewish Holocaust survivors, often out of fear...
...Entrepreneurship and Management Academy event, Gross recounted his amazement at reading the memoir of a Jewish activist traveling across post-war Poland seeking Jewish children hidden from the Nazis by Poles. "Those people who had heroically saved an innocent Jewish child begged not to have their names revealed out of fear that their social circle would find out," said Gross. "I did not understand that, and in this book I have attempted to answer that question...
...Many leading Polish public figures have criticized the book, saying that Gross neglected to take into account the context of of a shattered and demoralized post-war Poland suffering the the brutal imposition of the Soviet system. The victims of the turbulent postwar years were not only Jews, but also anti-communist Poles as well as Ukrainians and Germans expelled after the post-war shifting of borders. "Let?s remind ourselves of what was going on in New Orleans after a few days of a hurricane," historian Marcin Zaremba wrote in the Polityka weekly. "In Poland, the 'hurricane' took place...