Subtitle: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and Its Aftermath
Author: Joshua D. Zimmerman
Subject: Jewish Studies/History/European History
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-3158-6
Pages: 336 pp. 2 maps
Description: A courageous collection of essays that reassesses Polish-Jewish relations before, during, and after World War II.

Praise for Contested Memories

"This well researched and gripping collection of essays will become a standard work on the subject."-Antony Polonsky, Albert Abramson Professor of Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Brandeis University

Few issues have divided Poles and Jews more deeply than the Nazi occupation of Poland during the Second World War and the subsequent slaughter of almost ninety percent of Polish Jewry. Many Jewish historians have argued that, during the occupation, Poles at best displayed indifference to the fate of the Jews and at worst were willing accomplices of the Nazis. Many Polish scholars, however, deny any connection between the prewar culture of antisemitism and the wartime situation. They emphasized that Poles were also victims of the Nazis and, for the most part, tried their best to protect the Jews.

This collection of essays, representing three generations of Polish and Jewish scholars, is the first attempt since the fall of Communism to reassess the existing historiography of Polish-Jewish relations just before, during, and after the Second World War. In the spirit of detached scholarly inquiry, these essays fearlessly challenge commonly held views on both sides of the debates. The authors are committed to analyzing issues fairly and to reaching a mutual understanding. Contributors cover six topics:

• The prewar legacy
• The deterioration of Polish-Jewish relations during the first years of the war
• Institutional Polish responses to the Nazi Final Solution
• Poles and the Polish nation through Jewish eyes
• The destruction of European Jewry and Polish popular opinion
• Polish-Jewish relations since 1945.

Joshua D. Zimmerman is an assistant professor of East European Jewish History at Yeshiva University, where he holds the Eli and Diana Zborowski Chair in Holocaust Studies. He is the author of the forthcoming title Poles, Jews and the Politics of Nationality: The Jewish Labor Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Czarist Russia, 1892-1914.