Hunts for Jews and Golden Harvest. New research on the Holocaust in Poland

Audrey Kichelewski

 

Jan Tomasz Gross and Irena Grudzińska-Gross, Golden Harvests. Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust, Oxford Univesity Press, April 2012, 160p.,$16.95 [English translation of Złote żniwa. Rzecz o tym, co się udało na obrzeżach zagłady Żydów, Krakow, Editions Znak, 2011]

Jan Grabowski, Judenjagd. Polowanie na Żydów 1942-1945. Studium dziejów pewnego powiatu [Judenjagd. Jew Hunt 1942-1945. Studies on the history of a county], Warsaw, Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2011, 257 p., 34 zlotys.

Barbara Engelking, Jest jak piękny słoneczny dzień...Losy Żydów szukających ratunku na wsi polskiej 1942-1945 [The weather is so nice today. The fate of Jews looking for help in the Polish countryside, 1942-1945], Warsaw, Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2011, 288 p., 34 zlotys.


After Neighbors, in 2000, in which he described the participation of the inhabitants of the Polish village of Jedwabne in the mass murder of their Jewish neighbors, who were burned alive in a barn in the summer of 1941, and Fear, in which he attempted to make sense of the pogroms perpetrated by the Poles against Jewish Holocaust survivors after the war, the Polish-American historian and sociologist Jan Gross rocks the boat again with Golden Harvest,  his latest book on Polish-Jewish relations.  The author examines further the participation of Poles in crimes committed against their Jewish neighbors, highlighting their main motive: the lure of gain and potential enrichment through the famous “Jewish gold” – more fantasized than real – a thesis he already proposed in his previous book.
 

 

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