There are few Holocaust researchers in Poland. Researchers who conduct “field” research and deal with the micro-history of the Holocaust, are even fewer. It just so happens that the authors of this review have been engaged for a number of years in the microhistory of Jewish life and death in northeastern Mazovia, more specifically, in the neighboring counties of Sokolow (Katarzyna Markusz) and Wegrow (Jan Grabowski). Therefore, both of us were curious to read the volume recently published by the Center for Holocaust Research (eds. B. Engelking, J. Leociak, D. Libionka, A. Skibińska) entitled “Oto widać i oto słychać, Witnesses of the Holocaust in Occupied Poland.” Considering our interests, we started our reading with a chapter that came from the pen of authored by Michal Kowalski entitled “It’s better if you stay at home’. Polish residents of towns around Treblinka as witnesses to the Holocaust. A local study.”
We must begin, unfortunately, with a definition. Piotr Forecki, a respected researcher on Holocaust memory, writes: “Since the Jedwabne debate, a wave of Holocaust negationism has begun to rise in Poland, and for several years it has been spilling into the very center of public discourse. Not somewhere on the periphery, the margins, the pages of fascist magazines, in hidden samizdat, but precisely in the so-called mainstream. This negationism, however, does not consist in claiming that the extermination of the Jews did not happen at all, the gas chambers did not exist or were used for something else. Such a radical variant of it has not caught on in Poland […] The Holocaust negationism currently practiced, called deflective negationism by Michael Shafir, consists in denying the various forms of Polish participation in the Holocaust.” An expression of this “defensive negationism” is to minimize and downplay the contribution of one’s own people to the German plan to murder Jews. It is worth keeping this definition in mind when embarking on the reading of Michal Kowalski’s study.
And now the review.
We have met the author of the reviewed study before. Two and a half years ago, at a scientific session in Lublin, I listened (JG) to a paper by Michal Kowalski, who spoke about Polish-Jewish relations during the occupation in Sokolow Podlaski. At the time, he defended the thesis that the town’s Jewish population was isolated in a closed ghetto. This alleged isolation, according to the author, was supposed to contribute to the Poles’ lack of agency in matters pertaining to the “Jewish question.” In short, the Jews were isolated, and the Poles, although they saw everything, could do little with this knowledge. It was difficult for me then (as it is now) to agree with this thesis, which I expressed in the discussion. The Sokolow ghetto was – despite appearances – an open ghetto, where there was a fairly free flow of people and goods between the ghetto and the Aryan side.
On the other hand, two years ago, during a scholarly session at the Jewish Historical Institute, I (KM) had the opportunity to listen to a talk by Sister Elżbieta Monika Albiniak CSDP of the Military Historical Office, on the Sterdyn Ghetto. She based her research on interviews conducted with local residents in 2019. In these very late sources, there was no mention of Polish violence against Jews, but instead there was a frequent recurring motif of Jews going to their deaths while waving goodbye to Poles. In the discussion, Michal Kowalski said that the speaker’s findings coincide with the knowledge available in archival documents. It is difficult to agree with this opinion.
With such experiences, we set about reading the study by Michal Kowalski. This time Kowalski decided to trace the reactions of “Polish witnesses” to the liquidation of ghettos in the area of the “Kreishaupmannschaft Sokołów-Węgrów” (it should be “Sokolow-Wengrow,” but never mind) created by the Germans. The problems start from the very beginning and concern the research method, a matter quite fundamental in history. On the second page of the article (p. 333) we come across a disturbing passages: “In the article, I describe the liquidation of the ghettos in all the towns mentioned with the exception of Baczki Fabryczne (at the time a suburb of Łochów, where 1,400 Jews resided in May 1941), due to the lack of Polish sources” [emphasis ours – JG and KM], Kowalski writes. Methodology is, among other things, a matter of how to select sources, how to value them properly, etc. Let’s start with the question of what these “Polish sources” mentioned by the author are. Does the author intend to rely exclusively on sources from Polish archives? Do the testimonies of Polish witnesses contained in foreign collections also qualify? Does he mean testimonies given by ethnic Poles? Probably not, since many Jewish testimonies are included in the text. So we don’t quite know how the author selects these sources for himself, what his research is based on. Meanwhile, we know quite a lot about the liquidation of the ghetto in Baczki Fabryczne – also thanks to Polish witnesses. However, these testimonies apparently escaped the author’s attention, which is all the more strange since they were noted in the existing historical literature on the studied area.
Thus, we still have no idea of the research method adopted, and the matter is not made any easier by an exotic statement that – out of nowhere – appears in the second half of the text (p. 369), where we read: “The search associated with this article covered all existing sources from the area.” This is a truly interesting claim, because we are both involved in the study of history, but we have yet to come across a search that “covered all sources” from any area. A historian can never be sure that he or she has come across all the sources on a given topic. Another surprise about the research method adopted by Kowalski is the sentence we come across on page 338: “The perspective I adopted in the article is a critique of the sources found [though we still don’t know which ones – JG and KM] in the context of the assumptions of the forensic turn.” What is the “forensic turn”? Unfortunately, not a word about it in the text. Kowalski apparently assumes that the matter is obvious, and refers the uninformed to p. 129 of Ewa Domanska’s work “Nekros. “Necros. An introduction to the ontology of the dead body.”
Curious, we reached for this book, but on page 129 we did not find the answers to the questions that plagued us. On the next page, however, Domanska writes: “in this book I use the term ‘forensic turn’ and propose to understand it broadly, not only as a phenomenon related to the study of the space of mass murders, their causes and methods of killing, and the identification of victims, but also the penetration and formation of the social imiganarium by images of crime scenes, the conduct of investigative groups (especially the increasingly sophisticated methods of forensic examination), exhumation and autopsy.”
Granted, it is understandable that crime scene accounts should be given special treatment – but what does this have to do with research, with the selection of “Polish sources,” with the methodology? No one knows. Well, and it is worth adding that the crime scenes where the “forensic turn” would have to be applied include, after all, not only the broadly defined Treblinka area, but all places where the Germans murdered millions of Polish and foreign Jews in Poland!
Equally unclear is the question of the study’s time frame: the liquidation actions described by Kowalski, can be understood in many ways. Do we mean only the hours and days when German liquidation squads were in the ghetto? Or do we include the time of detecting and murdering Jews hidden in bunkers and other hiding places within the ghetto after the Liquidierungskommando had already left the township? This question, – from the point of view of this very text – is of fundamental importance. But here, too, Kowalski was unable to offer anything concrete.
Despite the incomprehensible research method, the author puts forward firm, albeit poorly formulated, theses. The first is unoriginal and repeats earlier findings by historians. According to Kowalski, the Poles (and Jews) of the studied area were fully aware about what was happening at Treblinka II. This is obvious, and this phenomenon has been described extensively in the book “Dalej jest noc” (cited several times by Kowalski), in my (JG) study of the Holocaust in the Wegrow county, in its reworked English edition (“Night Without End,” published in 2022) and in the book “On Duty,” published six months ago (both books omitted by Kowalski).
The author’s essential and original thesis is to constantly emphasize the lack of agency of Polish “witnesses” during the liquidation of the ghettos. Let us instead of the author formulate this thesis correctly: Poles knew and saw what was happening during the liquidation of local ghettos, but – with infamous exceptions – did not play a major role in these tragic events. They hid at home, behind the fence, and watched the genocide “from behind the curtain.” As Kowalski writes, “What emerges from the collected accounts is primarily a picture of a community watching the deportation of Jews from behind the curtain, through the window, from afar” (p. 369). A little further on (p. 374) we read: “The number of the perpetrators’ helpers in the various actions is difficult to estimate. We only know Chaim Kwiatek’s account of nine Poles (firefighters) from Stoczek. In Wegrow, groups of firefighters and policemen, according to trial testimony, could number up to 30, so they were a minority in the units involved in direct deportation.”
Of course, that Poles were in the minority in the “units involved in direct deportation,” no one is claiming anything to the contrary. After all, it is known that the majority of Poles who contributed their three cents (or rather, considerably larger sums) acted in a less organized but very – as we know from various sources – effective manner. On the other hand, to suggest that the number of Poles who joined the liquidation operations in the two counties where more than 20,000 Jews were killed is closed by what the unfortunate Kwiatek from Stoczek Węgrów (whose testimony was introduced into scholarly circulation in the English edition of Night Without End, which Kowalski does not seem to have noticed) plus a group of firefighters from Węgrów tried after the war, is a farce.
The problem is that, reading Kowalski, we don’t have the slightest idea that other authors, writing earlier, had a completely different take on the participation of Poles in liquidation actions. In history classes, we teach our students that a historian’s primary duty is to set his or her own work in an established historiographical context. What has been written before us and what theses the other authors put forward. These are basic matters, and their absence immediately disqualifies not only a researcher publishing a scientific study, but any history student submitting a term paper.
One of the phenomena shown by the authors of “Night Without End” was – contrary to what Kowalski claims – the fairly widespread participation of the local population in the liquidations, and immediately after them. Participation in looting, in denunciation, not infrequently in murder. It was not only about blue policemen and Polish firefighters, but also about ordinary local residents who (for various reasons) joined the German genocide plan.
The Wegrow county – after the publication – in 2018 – of the Polish edition of the two-volume study “Night Without End” – became perhaps the most-studied area in Poland (with the possible exception of Jedwabne). After the publication of the book, in order to prove independent historians wrong, hosts of “historians” from the IPN and the Pilecki Institute rushed to the county (the latter even launched a special ‘dedicated grant’ which focused on this particular area), and the unfortunate county of Węgrowski was honored with the presence of Prime Minister Morawiecki himself, who unveiled monuments to Poles who saved Jews there, as a form of consolation, or reparation, for the bad publicity.
So we have books, articles, interpretations and counter-interpretations – and in the work of historian Kowalski – silence. Nothing. As can be inferred, Kowalski arrived first at the virgin territory of Węgrów County. I was nostalgic to recognize in Kowalski’s work the sources that at one time I (JG) found in the archives and included in the scientific circulation. And here it turns out that it was Kowalski himself who apparently brought them to light.
But let’s return to the study itself. Poles watch from behind curtains and from behind fences – with trepidation and helplessness – as the Nazis and their helpers (among whom are a few Polish policemen and firefighters) murder Jews and rush them to the nearest train station. The Polish witnesses (and Kowalski quotes many of them, although they are generally the witnesses cited earlier in the pages of my [JG] chapter in Night Without End) see and hear. And that’s it. I wonder if an analysis based on the “forensic turn” can help us here. Will this phrase help us understand that people rarely, without coercion, incriminate themselves or their loved ones, or their neighbors? That in order to understand the attitudes of Poles, we should draw with both hands on Jewish testimony.
And what does the author have to say about the numerous residents lurking along the railroad tracks in the Kreishauptmannschaft Sokolow-Wengrow area, hunting for Jews escaping from transports? Kowalski writes (pp. 346-47), quoting a Polish witness: “From July 1942, the drama of those who tried to escape from the transports played out around the Sokolow Podlaski station. At the stations and along the tracks the SS men stood on the steps of the wagons, and whoever escaped then while such a transport was moving, tearing the barbed wire, jumped out on the run, shot, so such a train passed, then they lay slaughtered.” And then the local peasants had to bury these slain Jews.
Kowalski apparently does not ask himself what also happened to the hundreds of Jews who survived the jump from the wagons and who made it to the forest. It would be worth referring the author to Zofia Nalkowska’s short story “By the Railway Track,” where one can learn more about the “Poles looking from behind the fence” who were thrown by fate in the vicinity of the railroad tracks along which the death trains rushed. And if fiction has no place in the work of a serious historian, we refer you to Adam Starkopf, who seems to know a bit more about the fate of Jews escaping from the transports than Kowalski. Starkopf, along with his wife and child, was hiding on Aryan papers in Sadowne, in the same Kreishauptmannschaft of Sokolow-Wengrow. So we can assume that the dynamics of Polish observation “from behind the curtain” should look like that in Sokolow and Wengrow there as well:
“The Christmas period of 1942-1943 in Poland was not a period of peace and goodwill. One frosty night in early January 1943, Pela and I had already fallen asleep when we were awakened by the noise of a passing train, followed by machine gun series. We heard the train slow down and stop. I went to the window. Soon neighbors came running over: “Didn’t you hear the commotion outside? Some Jews just escaped from the train and the Germans started shooting at them! They must have hit a few. Just think – all these Jews are lying on the ground, ready to be taken! This is just a treat! We can go out, collect them and hand them over to the Gestapo. We’ll take their clothes, clean out their pockets, and on top of that we’ll get a reward from the Germans for bringing them in. Come on! Everyone else in the village is going too, so we’d better hurry! Otherwise there will be no more Jews to catch!” A few minutes later we heard moans and screams outside as the wounded Jews were dragged through the snow to the barns and stables. The hunt continued all night.”
In addition to the observation “from behind the curtain” and “from behind the fence”, we note here disturbing behavior on which Kowalski exercises great restraint. Fact, it’s a Jewish and not a Polish voice – can we also apply the “forensic phrase” to it, whatever it is supposed to mean in this case?
Whether we read about Węgrów or Sokołów, the same omissions, understatements appear, whose sole purpose is to prove that Poles did not take part in the destruction of their Jewish neighbors during the liquidation. The same lack of involvement of the Polish population can be seen, according to the author, in Stoczek and even in Kosow Lacki. If Kowalski had been interested in the final liquidation of the Kosovo ghetto (which did not take place in February 1942, as the author writes, but a year later, see p. 337), he would have learned about how a Jewish girl managed to survive a gendarmerie raid, but failed to survive a denunciation by Polish neighbors, who spotted (probably from behind a curtain) a fleeing Jewish child in the darkness and reported to German policemen where to look for a dangerous enemy. But these documents are omitted by the author for some reason.
Anyway, why multiply examples that give the lie to Michal Kowalski’s negationists theses. It is enough to simply refer to the chapter “Night Without End” dedicated to this very area. This text is well known to Kowalski, as it is from it that he draws, “after careful consideration,” some sources and chooses to bypass others. Here are a handful of quotes that show how misguided Kowalski’s thesis is:
One can use an excerpt from Bielawski’s Shraga from Węgrów: “Restaurateur] Fiszel [Chudzik] dug a hiding place for his family under the floor of his house. When it became too uncomfortable and cramped for them to lie under the floor, Fiszel sneaked out at night to a nearby village, in search of a new hiding place. [Before Fiszel returned, the Poles combed the house and found his wife Tojbe and the girls. They called Giller, who came and dragged the four of them out in front of the building. It was close to our store and we heard every word. The children cried and begged Giller: – Herr Giller, let us live!!!”.
From his hiding place Sewek Fiszman witnessed the following scene: “The Poles cried out: “give us your shoes!” And she said: “don’t you want to wait until they kill me?”; at which the German ordered her to take off her shoes. So, she slapped the German and they killed her near the pump. And then the German said to the Poles – ‘now take her shoes’”.
How about this quote from a Jewish witness to the extermination of Węgrów: “The screams of the Jews mixed with the shrieks of the Germans and the laughter of the Poles. Children cried out to their mothers: “Mama, I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!” Everyone knew where they would be taken and what would happen to them there. Throughout the day, the SS men, with the willing help of the Poles, loaded the Jews onto open trucks, which drove off in the direction of Treblinka.”
But one can also cite the words of a Polish witness that Kowalski missed – although he also appears in the chapter “Onward is the Night,” which he knows very well. “ On the day of the liquidation, at around 2 p.m., a gendarme identified as “Hans” shot a fleeing Jew in the groin, after which he gave his rifle to Witecki and ordered him to kill the man lying in the street. “Witecki came up to him and wanted to shoot him in the head from the front, so the Jew couldn’t look, he just circled around several times, and Witecki overlapped him until he got tired of overlapping and shot him in the head from behind with his rifle,” one witness to the incident testified after the war, ”I saw all this with my eyes, because it was happening in my yard and I saw everything from the beginning.
But enough quotations; readers wishing to learn more about the Poles’ participation in the liquidation action in Węgrów are simply referred to the first volume of the Polish edition of Night Without End, a study devoted to the Węgrów district. I (KM) have devoted much time and energy in recent years to restoring to Polish memory texts originally published in Yiddish. One of these was the testimony of Simche Polakiewicz, from which, it turns out, Kowalski also richly benefited. It’s a pity that he used it not often enough. On p. 336 of the reviewed study, we read: “At the end of August [1942], panic broke out in Sokolow Podlaski as a result of rumors of an impending liquidation action in the ghetto, and many Jews fled the city, only to return to it a dozen days later.”
What is worth remembering from the quoted sentence is that as a result of the panic “many Jews fled the city” (in fact, almost half of the ghetto’s population fled), which indicates the illusory nature of the borders of the supposedly closed ghetto. Secondly, it is worth paying special attention to the words: “to return to it [Sokolow – KM] after a dozen days or so”. The question that the reader of Kowalski’s text may ask himself (and the question that the author should also ask himself) concerns the reasons for the return of Sokolow’s Jews to the doomed ghetto. Were they driven from the forests by the chill of the coming autumn? Or did they recognize that the Germans would change their genocidal policies? No, nothing of the sort. Polakiewicz – whom Kowalski does not quote this time – writes openly about the reasons for the return of the harassed fugitives:
“Scattered over fields and forests, the Jews of Sokolow hid in dense bushes, high in trees, in haystacks and in cavities dug in the ground. Wherever it was possible to hide and hide from the bright daylight, there people sought shelter and rescue. Among Poles, hostility to Jews flourished. Christians, themselves persecuted by the Germans, with the name of God on their lips made a pact with the murderers, a pact aimed at the Jews. Gangs of robbers lusting for “Jewish gold” prowled the countryside. They persecuted and hunted wandering Jews with sticks and knives in their hands. With the help of the Polish robbers came fugitives from the camp in Sukhożebry and Russians hiding in the forests. They looted everything, ripping even diapers from the bodies of tiny children. Only a few individuals who escaped from the ghetto came across Poles with human feelings, who gave them a piece of bread, a sip of water and sometimes even a hiding place. However, these were unfortunately rare cases.”
How this quote fits with the author’s theses about “the lack of involvement of the Polish population in the process of ghetto liquidation” is better left to the imagination of readers. How about this scene from the day of Sokolow’s liquidation, to Kowalski (and the volume’s editors), to remember:
“When the trucks filled to the brim with people started on their way to Treblinka with great noise, two peasants came to the ghetto gate, leading with them a deathly frightened young woman.
The disheveled band of Polish peasants shouted:
– To the ghetto! To the ghetto!
In the middle of the Small Market they ordered the woman in torn clothes to stop. She stood broken, trying to keep standing with the last of her strength. One of the peasants with a cross on his neck, which was visible from under his unbuttoned shirt, took off his cap and in a servile tone addressed the German with a corpse skull on his uniform.
– We have brought a Jewess who was wandering on the road between villages.”
So much for the comments on the thesis of Poles deprived of agency , looking “over the fence”.
On pages 355-358 Michal Kowalski describes in detail the trial of the Polish voluntary firefighters from Węgrów accused of participating in the liquidation of the local ghetto in September 1942. It’s a well-known trial, I describe it in fact (JG) in “Night Without End,” and Kowalski – once again – chooses the quotes that suit him from the text. What is most disheartening is that the author takes at face value the testimony in the courtroom of the Siedlce court. So we learn that the indictment went sour, that witnesses changed their testimony and stopped incriminating the firefighters. But why did they change? Why were most of the defendants (almost all but one) acquitted? Why was the testimony of two key Jewish witnesses rejected? Why was the Siedlce District Court in “Jewish” cases dysfunctional? After all, the answers to these questions are known to any serious Holocaust researcher. But this is no longer of interest to Kowalski.
If the description in “Night Without End” does not convince Kowalski (and yet this should be emphatically stressed) then it would suffice to reach for the excellent book “The August Trials,” by Andrew Kornbluth, who writes extensively about the Siedlce court. Among other things, he cites the memoirs of Wladyslaw Grzymala, at the time a prosecutor in Siedlce. We read in Kornbluth’s book: “For Grzymała, the Jews were ethnic and racial enemies of the Polish nation, who, after liberation, ungratefully, began to harm their Polish fellow citizens.”
And Grzymała himself put it as follows in his memoirs: “ After the Red Army entered all major cities, Jews sprang up from the ground like mushrooms after the rain. Perhaps it is a good testimony to the Poles … that a significant number [of Jews] survived. Only very rare [Poles] handed them over to the gendarmerie, and most often in fear for their own lives. Therefore, it was not without surprise that we observed the mass enlistment of surviving Jews in the UB and MO [Polish communist secret service and the militia]. Their activities in these organizations began with acts of revenge against Poles suspected of any antipathy to fellow Jews. Torture and arrests multiplied. These actions in turn provoked a counter-reaction from the Poles.” So much for the Siedlce court at the time the Wegrow firefighters were acquitted.
Finally, a handful of minor errors that simply show the sloppiness or lack of knowledge of the author. Already on the second page (p. 333) we learn that the post-war fate of Ernst Gramss, the bloody head of the consolidated district, “remains unknown.” This is not true, as it is known where Gramss found himself after the war. His fate was researched by German historians, including Markus Roth, who included his findings in his book “Herrenmenschen: Die deutschen Kreishauptleute im besetzten Polen – Karrierewege, Herrschaftspraxis und Nachgeschichte.” And if Kowalski would also like to know where and when Gramss died, he can turn to the present reviewers for information.
On page 334 the author quotes Mendel Rzepka, changing his name to “Rzepko” for an unknown reason (just as on page 341 in footnote 35 he changes the name of Golde Hochberg to “Chochberg”). Rzepka, in his original account in Hebrew, mentions the cooperation of the Polish police with the Germans, and says that although there was no ghetto in Kosovo (by this he means that there was no fence/wall, as the entire town was “Jewish”), if a Jew wanted to leave the town, he could be shot by the Germans or the Polish police. He also reports that the Poles knew about the extermination because the Ukrainian guards of Treblinka would come to them to drink alcohol and then tell them what was happening there. He also reports that Polish police took part in the liquidation of the Kosovo ghetto, that Poles looted Jewish property. These quotes from Rzepka’s account do not appear in Michal Kowalski’s article.
Writing about Sokolow, Kowalski cites the accounts of Polish witnesses (including a Righteous among the Nations), but omits the important account of a Polish policeman, Ksawery Jaroszuk, who took part in the liquidation of the ghetto. Any reasons why?
To sum up: the study by Michal Kowalski is an attempt to defend the thesis that Poles did not take part in the liquidations of the ghettos of the consolidated Sokolow-Wengrow district. If we were to assume, even for a moment, that Kowalski’s thesis about the lack of agency of Poles during the days of the liquidation actions has any validity, it would fundamentally undermine the findings of the authors of “Night Without End” which include the three editors (and co-authors) of “Oto widać i oto słychać.”
Is the inclusion of Michal Kowalski’s study in the volume under review an attempt to put to doubt the previous findings? After reading Kowalski’s work, did D. Libionka, A. Skibińska and B. Engelking came to the conclusion that their previous conclusions and research findings regarding Miechow, Bilgoraj and Bielsk Podlaski, need to be revised? After all, all of the chapters of Night Without End were bound together by a common methodological framework, borrowed from my (JG) previous book entitled “Judenjagd.” If the Poles in Sokolow and Wegrow had (almost) nothing to do with the liquidation actions, then, of course, the same assumption should be extended to the other towns and counties that were the subject of the Center’s research in previous years. But, as we have shown above, Kowalski’s text is incredibly clumsy, the methodology – immature, the author’s theses cannot withstand even a cursory criticism. One wonders, did the editors read the text carefully? Did they read it at all? Or did they let a young, inexperienced historian “sail” straight onto the rocks?
If Michal Kowalski’s study had appeared as a publication of negationists from under the sign of the Pilecki Institute or the IPN, there would have been nothing strange about it, and we – would dismissed such a text without second thought. The fact that the text appeared as a publication of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, that it was introduced into the scientific mainstream, is – as we do not want to assume ill-will at this stage – a sad testimony to the vanishing standards in Polish humanities.
We ended our reading of the volume “Oto widać, i oto słychać” with Michal Kowalski’s study. Just as a drop of vinegar spoils the taste of wine, the chapter in question effectively took away our desire to continue reading the volume published by the Holocaust Research Center.
Katarzyna Markusz
Jan Grabowski
