Daniel Goldhagen famously argued in Hitler's Willing Executioners that to be German on the eve of the War was to be anti-Semitic; to be a Nazi, however, required a willingness to act on this intrinsic xenophobia. Goldhagen's thesis was on my mind as I read (and recently re-read) Jan Gross's Neighbors - a book which, to my mind at least, falls under that category of 'indispensable.' Most striking among Gross's discoveries: first, that organized massacres of Jews continued in Poland as late as 1947 (two years after Potsdam and Yalta); and second, that Polish historiography is almost entirely void of studies dedicated to the role of ethnic Poles in the destruction of European Jewry. This is a dark book, but as I say, a vital one as well.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Jan Gross
Daniel Goldhagen famously argued in Hitler's Willing Executioners that to be German on the eve of the War was to be anti-Semitic; to be a Nazi, however, required a willingness to act on this intrinsic xenophobia. Goldhagen's thesis was on my mind as I read (and recently re-read) Jan Gross's Neighbors - a book which, to my mind at least, falls under that category of 'indispensable.' Most striking among Gross's discoveries: first, that organized massacres of Jews continued in Poland as late as 1947 (two years after Potsdam and Yalta); and second, that Polish historiography is almost entirely void of studies dedicated to the role of ethnic Poles in the destruction of European Jewry. This is a dark book, but as I say, a vital one as well.
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