War and Genocide by Bergen Doris L

Author:Bergen, Doris L. [Bergen, Doris L.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780742557161
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Role of Property

Some scholars suggest that Polish antisemitism was not primarily religious or racial but economic—that is, Polish Christians’ hatred of Jews was fueled by material resentments, often based on their own deprivation and fantasies of Jewish wealth. In this view it was not greed but pauperization that led to Polish gentiles taking advantage of German aggression to grab Jewish property.

Certainly the poverty of many Poles played into the hands of the Germans. In retrospect one is struck by the pathetically small stakes that induced some gentiles to betray Jews to the Germans or even kill them themselves. Life seems to have been worth very little. For example, in one Polish town during the war Germans promised a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of salt to anyone who brought in the head of a Jew. Local Ukrainians fanned out through the nearby forests and returned clasping severed heads. In other cases, bags of sugar served as a reward. Sometimes just the promise of whatever possessions the Jews carried with them sufficed.

Discussion of the role that greed played in the Holocaust draws our attention to the “banality of evil.” Hannah Arendt first used that phrase in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Most of the people involved in mass killing—as perpetrators, onlookers, and beneficiaries—were not crazed maniacs but ordinary people with familiar motivations. There were Polish peasants who deplored German brutality but willingly took the property of Jews forced into ghettos. There were ethnic German families who moved into homes from which the Polish owners had been evicted and eagerly accepted the booty for themselves. Such people did not necessarily initiate destruction, but they profited from it and developed a stake in its continuation.

Nevertheless one can also find many accounts that show Poles who risked their lives for others, including Jews. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and archive in Israel, honors non-Jews who rescued Jews from the Holocaust as “the righteous among nations.” One of the criteria for being recognized as one of the righteous is that the person received no monetary benefit for what she or he did. Of all the countries of Europe, Poland has the greatest number of gentiles recognized for heroism toward Jews—as well as the largest number of Jews killed in the Holocaust.

An important example of Polish rescue efforts is the organization known as Zegota. Its network of operatives provided aid, food, and medication to Jews all over Poland. Zegota also produced scores of forged documents. Its work is credited with saving the lives of forty to fifty thousand Jews.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.