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Jewish Survival Strategies in Occupied Poland 1939-1945. Studies of Selected Counties

   The goal of this project is to conduct an inquiry into the survival strategies of Jews in several pre-selected, rural counties of the Warsaw, Radom, Cracow, Galizien  Lublin Districts and Białystok area of occupied Poland (reorganized by the Germans into a rump state known as the Generalgouvernement and Bezirk Białystok).  While our knowledge of the fate of the Jews hiding in the urban centers of the Generalgouvernement is significant, much less is known about the survival strategies pursued by the Jews in the countryside.  The project is innovative on many levels, but its focus on the victims and on their survival strategies as well as the focus on rural areas need to be pointed out.

   The project is conducted on two chronological levels, each of which involves the study of substantial available historical evidence. First, the researchers involved in the project looks at the selected counties during the 1939-1942 period. The Polish , German and Jewish sources enables us to present an in-depth portrait of Jewish responses to the early German measures, such as financial burdens, ghettoization and resettlements. We look at the nature (and the quality) of contacts between the Polish and the Jewish communities as well as the relationship between the Jews and the representatives of lower rungs of the German administration (local German police forces and civil administration). The sources selected for this part of our research include the Jewish testimonies (Yad Vashem, Jewish Historical Institute - ZIH, Warsaw), broad array of evidence from the Ringelblum Archive (ZIH) as well as the reports of German civil authorities and police from the German archives in Berlin and in Ludwigsburg. In addition to the sources above, the second part of the study (focusing on the survival strategies of Jews during the post-liquidation period) will take advantage of the so-called “August” files, or the post-war investigations conducted by the Polish authorities against people accused of various forms of collaboration. This new historical evidence, made recently available to scholars, significantly expands our knowledge regarding the fate of the Jews who went into hiding in Poland, following the mass deportation of Jewish masses to the extermination camps, in the spring and  summer of 1942 Historians agree that at least 250,000 Polish Jews sought refuge “on the Aryan side”, among the gentile population.  From among them about 40.000 survived the war while the fate of the rest remains, for the most part, unknown.  The “human horizon” of unknown and unreported victims is, therefore, larger than 200.000  people – in the Generalgouvernement alone (Datner, 1970; Prekerowa, 1974, Friedlaender, 2006, Stankowski, Weiser, 2011) .  The goal of this project is to shed as much light as possible on the fate of these people – both survivors and those who died while in hiding.  The project will study in detail the interaction between the Jews, the German civil and police authorities  and the surrounding “gentile” society (Bartov, 2002; Browning, 1997, 2010). The available historical evidence makes it possible to place the Jewish struggle for survival within the proper social context of help/lack of help, threats and indifference.  On the one hand the study allows to identify the social and economic profile of these Jews who made an active attempt to resist the deportations, and who sought shelter. It enables us also to tie their strategies of survival (living in the open, using false identities, hiding in bunkers in remote areas, living in shelters provided by the “Aryans” etc.) to the question of the chances of their survival.  On the other hand, it helps to identify non-Jews who took active part either in sheltering, or in harming the Jewish refugees.  This way, the project brings us closer to answering fundamental questions about human motivations (help/indifference/harm) at the time of great social tension and under grave strain associated with the political regime based on terror (Engelking, 2011).

    In the study of the Holocaust much attention has been devoted to the fate of Jewish victims and survivors.   There remains, however, a little known area, which can be called “the margins of the Holocaust”, and which concerns the fate of Jews who fled  the liquidated ghettos, and tried to survive in hiding.  Most of them perished, but we know very little about their fight for survival. In the case of occupied Poland alone this “margin of the Holocaust” is very broad - historians speak of hundreds of thousands of victims. The goal of this research project is to produce a detailed study of the fate of the Jews on the territory of five selected counties of occupied Poland.

    The project is highly innovative – in fact, there are no studies of this kind being done in Poland. The project helps to fill ‘blank spots’ in the knowledge and understanding of the course of the Shoah. The majority of sources which we plan to put to use have been rarely or never (lower, city, court records, for instance). The projects have an important impact on the ongoing debate concerning the memory and restitution in post-war Europe.  

    The fact that our Centre regroups specialists from several disciplines reinforces the overall value of our project.  The project adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the accumulated historical evidence and draws on methodological strengths of its participants, who work in history, sociology, psychology and literary studies.
 

Publication sumarizing research project

Late Spring of 2018 collective volume sumarizing this research project has been published. Book "Night Without End. The fate of Jews in selected counties of occupied Poland" eddited by prof. Barbara Engelking and prof. Jan Grabowski.

Collaborative volume is a product of several years of work of researchers working in the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

This volume contains nine chapters, each concerning a different county; Bielsk Podlaski, Biłgoraj, Bochnia, Dębica, Łuków, Miechów, Nowy Targ, Węgrów, and Złoczów. In 1942, on the eve of the liquidation actions, Jews made up 5-10% of the total population of each of the studied areas. Our aim was to study - in as much detail as possible – the fate of the Jews in each of the counties in 1939-1945, with the main emphasis placed on the time of the liquidation actions (1942-1943) as well as on the time of hiding until the liberation.
 

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One of the most important conclusions that sums up several years of our joint research effort is the wealth of observations regarding the degree of Jews’ own agency when faced with the impending and ongoing Holocaust. One is struck by the determination, resourcefulness and the mobility with which the victims started to fight for their own lives and that of their close ones. Our observations – collated and outlined for the entire occupied country – give the lie to claims about the alleged passivity of the victims, about “Jews led to death like sheep to slaughter”.

Our studies show that there was an enormous variety of survival strategies adopted by Jews hiding on the Aryan side. Some found rescue under their neighbours’ roofs, others tried to survive in the network of German labor camps. Others – when the topography permitted – decided to live in the woods, in certain cases fighting for their lives in the bunkers, and in other cases they tried to survive by joining the partisans. Where possible, networks to smuggle people across the border were set up, especially to Slovakia and Hungary.

Nevertheless, for each three Jews looking for shelter, two perished, most often with the involvement of their Christian neighbors.  Our studies provide evidence which indicates a considerable – and larger than previously expected – scale of Polish involvement in the destruction of their Jewish compatriots. However difficult for many to accept, historical evidence collected in this volume leaves no doubt: considerable and identifiable groups of the Polish population took part in liquidation operations (and later - during 1942-1945) directly or indirectly contributed to the deaths of thousands of Jews who were seeking rescue on the “Aryan” side.
 

This project was made possible thanks to the financial support of :

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