Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder, by Alan Rosen. 2010

No “Greed” and “Anti-Semitism”: Poles Requiring Payment for Hiding and Housing Fugitive Jews Were Acting Entirely Properly. Payment was Logically Expected. Demystifying the Star of David

David Boder (Aron Mendel) was a Latvian-born American Jewish psychologist who had spent the early decades of his life in Russia. He decided to study the surviving Jews after WWII.

HOLOCAUST RESTITUTION? NOT ONLY JEWS: MILLIONS OF NON-JEWS HAD LOST THEIR PROPERTY

There were 8-10 million DPs (displaced persons) in Europe after WWII. (p. 8). Immediately after WWII, Boder interviewed about 109 (the number vary: pp. 239-on) Holocaust-surviving Jews in Europe, and taped their testimonies. This book focuses more on his methodology than on the results of the interviews.

THE FALLACY OF CONNECTING THE MANDATORY JEWISH WEARING OF THE STAR OF DAVID, UNDER CHRISTIANITY, WITH THAT UNDER NAZISM

This work touches on other matters of historical interest. Consider the wearing of the Star by Jews in Muslim and Christian nations, and as decreed by the Church in 1215. It may not have been a mark of humiliation. Boder suggested that Jews themselves wanted to wear identification that would unambiguously identify them as members of a privileged class relative to the peasant masses. (p. 126, 270).

NO BLACK AND WHITE: RECIPROCITY OF POLISH AND JEWISH PREJUDICES

The Shoah-surviving Jews interviewed by Boder immediately after WWII were probably not a random cross section of survivors. Many of them had fled Poland after the [probably Soviet-staged] Kielce Pogrom. (p. 58). Of course, prejudices between Poles and Jews went both ways. For instance, there was an ethnic Pole, a Gulag survivor, named Tadeusz Grygier, who also interviewed DP’s. Most Jews automatically refused to trust him because he was a Pole. (p. 194).

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The few quoted survivor testimonies include interesting information. One survivor testimony stands out, and I elaborate it below:

PAYMENT FOR AID TO JEWS LOGICALLY EXPECTED

In recent years, neo-Stalinist authors such as Jan T. Gross and Jan Grabowski have demonized Poles who had required payment from fugitive Jews. The neo-Stalinists have characterized such Poles as ignoble and callous at best, and greedy, exploitative, and–what else–anti-Semitic at worst. The media took it all in and repeated it.

The attitude of interviewer David Boder was DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSITE. Boder interviewed seventeen-year-old Jurek Kestenberg, a Jew who managed to jump off a Treblinka-bound train. Boder expressed surprise that the Polish peasants who took him in did not require payment, and even refused payment. Author Rosen analyzed the situation, (quote) Even after having been told that the Polish peasants who cared for Kastenberg so diligently wouldn’t take the zlotys he offered, Boder, at a loss, asks, rather indelicately, “Did you pay him anything?” Such a refusal of money in a time of scarcity does not add up; paying something would at least allow for the usual way of understanding devotion of this kind to kick in. (unquote). (p. 6).