Hunt for the Jews Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland [Hardcover]

Judenjagd, hunt for the Jews, was the German term for the organized searches for Jews who, having survived ghetto liquidations and deportations to death camps in Poland in 1942, attempted to hide on the Aryan side. Jan Grabowski's penetrating microhistory tells the story of the Judenjagd in Dabrowa Tarnowska, a rural county in southeastern Poland, where the majority of the Jews in hiding perished as a consequence of betrayal by their Polish neighbors. Drawing on materials from Polish, Jewish, and German sources created during and after the war, Grabowski documents the involvement of the local Polish population in the process of detecting and killing the Jews who sought their aid. Through detailed reconstruction of events, this close-up account of the fates of individual Jews casts a bright light on a little-known aspect of the Holocaust in Poland.

This book is a significant contribution to the scholarly and public debate on Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust. . . . All in all, Hunt for the Jews should become required reading for scholarsand students of Polish-Jewish relations....[A] grim, compelling work of research...The author followed the fates of 337 Jews who tried to survive in the county, of which 51 managed to hide until liberation, while 286 died between 1942 and 1945. Grabowski breaks down each group with meticulous research.Eschewing facile generalizations about latent or active anti-Semitism, Grabowski considers the motivations of both those who aided Jews and those who attacked them...Grabowski's highly detailed reconstruction challenges the conventional wisdom of dividing the population into victims, perpetrators, and bystanders...Recommended for all serious Holocaust collections.In 1942 and 1943, thousands of Jews escaped transports to death camps and sought shelter in the Polish countryside. Few survivied until 1945. Using previously unexplored archival ducments, Canadian-Polish historian Jan Grabowski argues that the explanation liló¤