According to new research done in Poland, two-thirds of the local Jews who hid in the country from the Nazis lost their lives due to the actions of their non-Jewish neighbours.
The figure comes from a two-volume work of 1,600 pages that historians from the Warsaw-based Centre for Research on Holocaust of Jews have compiled over the past five years. It covers nine out of Poland’s 13 regions.
Arriving amid a polarising debate in Poland over a law that limits rhetoric on Polish complicity in the Holocaust, the study suggests Poles bore partial responsibility for hundreds of thousands of deaths of Jews in the Holocaust — a figure that is significantly higher than previous estimates.
The findings of the research were published earlier this year in a Polish-language book titled “The Fate of the Jews in Selected Regions of Occupied Poland.”They pertain to the fate of more than one mi
llion Jews who went underground to avoid being killed in Operation Reinhard — Nazi Germany’s campaign of annihilation of 3.3 million Jews in occupied Poland.
The study claims that perhaps a tally of well over half a million Jewish Holocaust victims who died as a result of the actions of non-Jewish Poles.Especially dangerous for Jews in hiding were small Polish towns, according to historians Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski, two of the nine researchers who conducted the study. They called them “death traps.”
Grabowski is professor of history at the University of Ottawa in Canada and a dean among Holocaust historians, especially on the actions of bystanders. His 2014 book, “Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland,” was the Yad Vashem International Book Prize winner for the same year. He also served as a fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The latest research entailed identifying, interviewing or reviewing interviews with as many survivors as possible to ascertain the fate of other Jews in hiding who did not survive.
It also features newly discovered archives from remote areas of Poland from the Nazi occupation days and thereafter.In one region, Miechów, more than 10 percent of the Jews in hiding were murdered directly by partisans who were members of the Polish underground, according to the study.
