The version of history in which Poland was solely a victim of the Nazis has been questioned again, writes DEREK SCALLY
AT FIRST glance, the blurred image shows a scene of peasants at harvest time. But there are no crops in the foreground, only skulls and bones. This is the death camp of Treblinka in 1943 and the Polish peasants in the photograph are taking a break from rifling through the ashes of 800,000 inmates murdered and cremated here. The aim of their efforts? To find jewels and gold overlooked by Nazi guards in the remains.
That is the explosive starting point of Golden Harvest, a new book by a controversial Polish-born academic who accuses ordinary Poles of systematically stealing belongings of Jewish concentration camp prisoners – alive and dead.
“There was no secret about it, it was an open activity in villages near the camps even if it wasn’t openly discussed,” said Prof Gross, a sociologist at Princeton University. “It’s normal behaviour in a way, to plunder assets of vanished Jews, until one reads about the actual circumstances, which are often incredibly brutal.”
He quotes from the diary of a Jewish doctor who described how masses of peasants gathered in makeshift camps on the outskirts of his provincial town. The peasants were waiting for the Nazi deportation of Jews, the doctor learns, so they can move in for the spoils.
The academic began his research after he spotted the Treblinka photograph in the Gazeta Wyborczanewspaper two years ago. What began as an essay grew and grew as he came across ever more shocking material.
“What is truly dramatic is that it’s not marginal individuals, thieves or misfits involved, but very solid citizens who participated,” he said. “Local village leaders, people who remain in very good standing after the war, all were involved. It’s contrary to what one reads about Polish resistance and the great tragedy.”
The book has caused huge controversy in Poland ahead of publication next month, and Prof Gross’s Polish publisher has been bombarded by e-mails protesting against its spreading of “defamatory claims”.
"We have received a lot of protests, bizarrely enough from those who have not read the book and are not familiar with its contents," said Jerzy Illg, editor of ZNAK publishers, to Gazeta Wyborcza.
The campaign, organised by conservative Catholic groups, doesn’t limit itself to attacks on the book. Campaigners have taken aim too at the character of Prof Gross, describing him as a “lying Jewish sociologist”.
Prof Gross was born in 1947 to a Jewish family in Warsaw but emigrated to the US with his family in 1969, after an anti-Semitic campaign organised by communist authorities. A decade ago, he shocked Poland with his book Neighbours, describing the 1941 massacre of the entire Jewish population of the northeastern town of Jedwabne in one day by some of their Catholic neighbours.
That book challenged official Polish wartime history: that, by losing one-fifth of its population, Poland was exclusively a victim of Nazi occupation.
Aside from the current campaign, Prof Gross is a controversial figure among Polish academics, many of whom have raised questions about the quality of his research, sources and data. One has dismissed Golden Harvest as an "irresponsible and frivolous" work. But the weekly Tygodnik Powszechnynewspaper said the book would hopefully be a "shocking but cleansing read" for Poland.
The academic’s controversial work has thrown open the doors on the period to younger researchers, and the fate of Polish Jews under Nazi occupation is now a lively field of study.
“The persecution of Jews began with the Germans but, in the perception of large numbers of Poles, Jews were removed beyond the pale of humanity,” said Prof Gross.
“This is a terrible story – a breakdown of moral barriers.”