Bondage to the Dead

by Michael Steinlauf

Overview

A summary of Polish-Jewish relations up to and during the Holocaust outlines how the Polish people were involved in the Holocaust as witnesses, the subsequent denial of involvement after the war, and the communist manipulation of Holocaust memory in the struggle between the Solidarity movement and the Polish government.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815604037
Publisher:	Syracuse University Press
Publication date:	12/28/1996
Series:	Modern Jewish History Series
Pages:	189
Product dimensions:	6.07(w) x 9.05(h) x 0.86(d)

About the Author

Michael C. Steinlauf teaches history at Gratz College in Philadelphia. A Fulbright Fellow in 1983-84, he was one of the first students allowed to study Jewish history in Poland. He has taught at the University of Michigan, Brandeis University, and Franklin and Marshall College and has been a senior research fellow at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York.

Editorial Reviews

Bondage to the Dead should be mandatory reading. . . . It is an exhaustive, lucid and compassionate account of an experience that is complex, tragic, and highly charged with emotion, one that is marked by stereotype, myth and stubbornly iconized memory. . . . The Polish trauma was exacerbated by several factors. One. was the memory of hundreds of years of Polish-Jewish co-existence before the Holocaust. Another was the complex Polish political scene in which antisemitism played a role before, during and after the war. Another was the fact that, as Steinlauf points out, Poles were more than just witnesses to the Holocaust: they themselves were also victims of the Nazis. On top of this was the added trauma of repressive post-war communist rule that manipulated Holocaust history for its own political aims and stifled any means of coming to terms with the past. . . . Only in the past decade has an open discussion of the role of Poland--and Poles--in the Holocaust been possible. Yet this new openness, too, entails anguish. Steinlauf does a masterful job in picking our way through the labyrinth.-- "Ruth Ellen Gruber, East European Jewish Affairs"

A very well researched and nuanced study of postwar Poland's efforts, first to deny then to begin to deal with the complex reality of the Holocaust and particularly the fact that Auschwitz and all other major death camps were located on Polish soil. . . . This very fine study of intellectual, cultural, and ethnic history deserves broad exposure.-- "Kirkus Reviews"

From the Publisher

A very well researched and nuanced study of postwar Poland's efforts, first to deny, then to begin to deal with the complex reality of the Holocaust and particularly the fact that Auschwitz and all the other major death camps were located on Polish soil.

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

Steinlauf's work is crisply written and refreshingly succinct. This very fine study of intellectual, cultural, and ethnic history deserves broad exposure.

Kirkus Reviews