Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland is a 2013 book about the Holocaust in Poland by Jan Grabowski. The 2013 English edition followed a 2011 Polish-language edition (published as Judenjagd: polowanie na Żydów) and was in turn followed by a 2016 Hebrew edition.Ofer Aderet, "'Orgy of Murder': The Poles Who 'Hunted' Jews and Turned Them Over to the Nazis", Ha'aretz, 11 February 2017.
The book describes the Judenjagd (German: "Jew hunt") from 1942 onwards, focusing on Dąbrowa Tarnowska County, a rural area in southeastern Poland. The Judenjagd was the German search for Jews who had escaped from the German-liquidated ghettos in Poland and tried to hide among the non-Jewish population.
Grabowski asserts that most of the Jews in hiding perished due to betrayal by local Poles, either via denunciation to German authorities or after being taken captive and being delivered by locals to the German gendarmerie or German-run "Polish police".
The book sparked a heated public debate, particularly when first published in Poland in 2011.
Contents The book describes the Judenjagd (German for "Jew hunt") that began in 1942 and focuses on Dąbrowa, a former rural county in southeastern Poland (till 1939; later part of a German-administered Kreishauptmannschaft Tarnów).Poland’s dark hunt, Macleans, 7 Oct 2013Holocaust writer Grabowski faces Polish fury, Jewish Chronicle, 18 Oct. 2013. Grabowski describes an entire system set up by the Germans to extirpate Jews:
According to Grabowski, Poles were responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of more than 200,000 Jews during the Holocaust.Jan Grabowski, Hunt for the Jews, 2013, pp. 3, 172. He held this estimate to be very conservative, as he did not include victims of the Polish Blue Police. "The great majority of Jews in hiding perished as a consequence of betrayal. They were denounced or simply seized, tied up and delivered by locals to the nearest station of the Polish police, or to the German gendarmerie."
In a later, 17 March 2018, interview in the Polish daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza – in connection with the 2018 publication of Dalej jest noc, a two-volume study co-edited with Barbara Engelking and now covering ten counties (Hunt for the Jews had covered one county) – Grabowski said that, while he did believe 200,000 Jews died while in hiding, he was unable to determine the exact percentage of that number who perished, directly or indirectly, due to acts by Poles; and that his claim that Poles were responsible for the deaths of over 200,000 Jews was a "research hypothesis", though he continued to believe that Poles were responsible for the majority of that number."Ale Historia: Prof. Jan Grabowski: Pomagaliśmy Niemcom zabijać Żydów", Gazeta Wyborcza, 17 March 2018: "A więc... ok. 200 tys. Żydów zostało zamordowanych, gdy się ukrywali po aryjskiej stronie?" – "Tak, i na podstawie szczegółowej analizy tego, w jakich okolicznościach ginęli, sformułowałem hipotezę badawczą, że większość – choć nie jestem na tym etapie badań w stanie powiedzieć, czy było to 60, czy 90 proc. – straciła życie z rąk Polaków albo przy ich współudziale." ("So... 200,000 Jews were murdered while hiding on the Aryan side?" – "Yes, and based on detailed analysis of the circumstances in which they perished, I formulated a research hypothesis that the majority – though at this stage of research I am not able to say whether it was 60 or 90 percent – lost their lives at the hands of Poles or with their complicity.") Nevertheless, in the same interview Grabowski said that the limited number (ten) of Polish counties covered in the research newly published in 2018 might lead other scholars to conclude that the research cannot be used to draw general conclusions."Ale Historia: Prof. Jan Grabowski: Pomagaliśmy Niemcom zabijać Żydów", Gazeta Wyborcza, 17 March 2018: "Bo ja te szacunki uważam za wiarygodne, ale jest to wyłącznie moje zdanie. Inni mogą sądzić, że dziesięć przebadanych powiatów to zbyt mało, aby ważyć się na jakiekolwiek uogólnienia.... Gdy skończyłem pracę nad powiatem Dąbrowa Tarnowska, zarzucano mi, że tak wąski teren badań nie daje podstaw do uogólnień... Ale to, że badacze mają różne koncepcje, jest naturalne." ("I believe these estimates to be reliable, but that is solely my opinion. Others might conclude that the ten counties studied are too few to venture any conclusions from.... When I had finished my work on Dabrowa Tarnowska County, [critics said] that such a small [geographical] area... provides no basis for generalizations... But it is only natural for investigators to have differing views.")
The 2013 English edition was based on the 2011 Polish edition, but improved and augmented with additional evidence, cases, and discoveries.Nissan Tzur, "Holocaust writer Grabowski faces Polish fury", The Jewish Chronicle, 18 October 2013.
Reception Awards and public debate In 2014 Hunt for the Jews was awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research."Hunt for the Jews snags Yad Vashem book prize", Times of Israel (JTA), 8 December 2014."Professor Jan Grabowski wins the 2014 Yad Vashem International Book Prize", Yad Vashem, 4 December 2014. The book sparked a heated public debate, particularly when first published in Poland in 2011, especially for its assertion that Poles were either directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of 200,000 Jews during the Holocaust. Grabowski had received death threats.Tzur, Nissan (18 October 2013). "Holocaust writer Grabowski faces Polish fury", Jewish Chronicle."Canadian historian joins uproar in Israel over Polish Holocaust law", CBC, 20 Feb. 2018.
English-language reviews Glenn R. Sharfman, a professor at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, wrote that Grabowski's book complemented recent works by Jan T. Gross about murders of Jews away from the primary killing centers, providing evidence of the important role of Poles in aiding the Nazis. Sharfman wrote that any student of the Holocaust will find the testimonies and excerpts in the text useful, but readers with little background might require more context. He noted that Grabowski jumps from testimony to testimony without analysis. According to Sharfman, while most Poles were victims of Nazi aggression and have wanted to see themselves as purely its victims, Grabowski shows how some Poles played an official or unofficial role in the murder of tens of thousands, if not more, of Jews.
Przemysław Różański, a professor of history at the University of Gdańsk, reviewed the 2011 edition of the book and had a number of reservations, including Grabowski's presentation of forced participation of peasants as "cooperation", and his disregard, in relation to the paid rescue of Jews, of the dire economic conditions faced by Poles. He argues that extremely poor and often starving villagers couldn't be expected to provide shelter for Jews, risking a death sentence in the process, and that the high number of people lending such help questions Grabowski's claims of collaboration of the villagers. While agreeing on the nature of prewar antisemitism in Poland, he disagreed with Grabowski's suggestion of a causal relation between that and the events described in the book, instead explaining it as a result of Nazi propaganda. Różański concludes that, despite his reservations, the book is a "valuable and useful work" which "[illustrates the] changes in local pathology taking place under German occupation in ... the Generalgouvernement".Jan Grabowski: Judenjagd. Polowanie na Żydów 1942-1945. Studium dziejów pewnego powiatu (review), Przemysław Różański, Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, 61 (2012) H. 4
Timothy Snyder of Yale University called Judenjagd "the most important in the recent Polish debates about Polish responsibility for the Holocaust", and wrote that Grabowski and Barbara Engelking had recorded the "undeniable fact that most of [the Polish Jews who had escaped from the ghettos and camps] were murdered as well, perhaps half of them by Poles (following German policy and law) rather than by Germans."
Historian Shimon Redlich,WHAT DO HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS THINK OF ‘POLISH DEATH CAMPS’?, JPost, 3 Feb 2018 writing about the book in Slavic Review, criticized the book's structure, in particular the lengthy quotations and appendix, the careless "claim of 'hundreds of thousands' of Jews seeking shelter among the Polish populace", which according to Redlich cannot be extrapolated to the whole country based on one single area, as well as language that at times betrayed emotional involvement. However, Redlich said the book "should become required reading for scholars and students of Polish-Jewish relations".Redlich, Shimon, "Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland, by Grabowski, Jan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013", Slavic Review, 73.3 (2014), pp. 652-53.
Sociologist Larry Ray's review of Grabowski's book called it "a highly systematic and scholarly study of atrocities and collaboration", and "an essential contribution to knowledge of the Holocaust and Polish-Jewish relations".
Following the book's publication in Israel in 2016, Grzegorz Berendt, professor of history at the University of Gdańsk and historian for the Polish government's Institute of National Remembrance, wrote in Haaretz, in February 2017, that, in contrast to several other European countries, Poland's elite groups, in the underground or in exile, opposed Germany's policies toward the Jews, and expressed and acted on this opposition repeatedly. Anyone holding an official position inside occupied Poland, including the police, was obliged to follow German orders or face harsh punishment, which might be a beating or public execution. Conversely, prizes, including property plundered from Jews, were awarded for compliance. German-induced poverty in Poland—rationing of 400–700 calories per person, leading to black-market food at exorbitant prices—meant that "thousands of people discarded moral constraints and decided to assist the Germans in rounding up Jews for economic reasons". Berendt referred to Grabowski's statement in Hunt for the Jews that "the number of victims [in Poland] of the Judenjagd could reach 200,000" as "hot air", in that it substantially exceeds, he wrote, the approximately 50,000 Jews thought to have escaped from the ghettos in occupied Poland.
The following month, Grabowski responded in Hararetz that, until recently, Poles who were made Righteous Among the Nations often asked Yad Vashem to allow them to remain anonymous, so fearful were they of their fellow Poles' reaction. He argued that, although the Polish government-in-exile (which was based in London from 1940 until 1990) had indeed spoken out on behalf of the Jews during the Holocaust, they were not supported in this by the Polish resistance or the general population in Poland. Key members of the Polish resistance had referred to the "Jewish problem" or "Jewish question": Grabowski quoted one prominent member of the underground: "The mass murder of Jews in Poland carried out by the Germans will diminish the Jewish problem but it will not remove it altogether." As for the estimate that up to 200,000 Jews were killed by Poles, Grabowski defended the figure, claiming that it derives from careful research conducted by the Polish historian Szymon Datner. Datner, however, wrote that 200,000 was the total number of Jews who had escaped from the ghettos, of whom about half subsequently died from various causes.Statement on the crimes committed by the German Reich in occupied Poland and on the false information appearing in public, Institute of National Remembrance, https://ipn.gov.pl/en/news/1060,Statement-on-the-crimes-committed-by-the-German-Reich-in-occupied-Poland-and-on-.html Grabowski later admitted in a subsequent interview that Szymon Datner had not made the claim he attributed to him.