Hunt for the Jews

Jan Grabowski is Professor of History at the University of Ottawa and a founding member of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research. He is author (with Barbara Engelking) of The Contour of a Landscape: Rural Poland and the Extermination of the Jews, 1942-1945 (in Polish).72

...[A] grim, compelling work of research...The author followed the fates of 337 Jews who tried to survive in the county, of which 51 managed to hide until liberation, while 286 died between 1942 and 1945. Grabowski breaks down each group with meticulous research.(Kirkus Reviews) Eschewing facile generalizations about latent or active anti-Semitism, Grabowski considers the motivations of both those who aided Jews and those who attacked them...Grabowski's highly detailed reconstruction challenges the conventional wisdom of dividing the population into victims, perpetrators, and bystanders...Recommended for all serious Holocaust collections.(Library Journal) This important, often disturbing, exploration of how genocides happen is on par with works from Hannah Arendt and Gitta Sereny and is enriched by the author's clear compassion for those who were compromised or lost.(ForeWord Reviews) Now, in path-breaking research, Jan Grabowski . . . reveals what happened to those Jews who tried to hide in rural Poland after the Nazis violently emptied the ghettos.(Maclean's) Here is an absolutely essential addition to any Holocaust library or a read for anyone interested in Polish-Jewish relations.(AJL Reviews) One concludes from Grabowski's important study that without the often unforced, and sometimes enthusiastic, support of non-German volunteers and helpers, the Germans would not have succeeded as completely as they did during the Holocaust. . . . Recommended.(Choice) This book is a significant contribution to the scholarly and public debate on Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust. . . . All in all, Hunt for the Jews should become required reading for scholarsand students of Polish-Jewish relations.(Slavic Review) Grabowski has amassed an admirable amount of original research and presented to the reader a study that explains much about the mechanisms of destruction and how the Germans used local Poles in the Nazi extermination campaign against the Jews. Hunt for the Jews is one of a growing number of studies coming out of Poland that are puncturing the myth of Polish innocence during the Holocaust.(Journal of Modern History) Grabowski offers incredible insight into how Poles in rural Poland reacted to and, not infrequently, were complicit with, the German practice of genocide. Grabowski also, implicitly, challenges us to confront our own myths and to rethink how we narrate British (and American) history of responding to the Holocaust.(European History Quarterly) Hunt for the Jews is a must-read for all those interested in Polish-Jewish relations and Holocaust studies.(American Historical Review)

• AcknowledgmentsList of Abbreviations Introduction 1. Dąbrowa Tarnowska2. Jews and Poles in Dąbrowa Tarnowska Before 19393. First Years of Occupation4. The Destruction of Dąbrowa Tarnowska5. Judenjagd – Hunt for the Jews 6. Rural Society and the Jews in Hiding 7. In the Dulcza Forest 8. The German Police9. The Polish "Blue" Police 10. Baudienst11. Last Months of War12. Different Kinds of Help 13. The Righteous Conclusion Documents & TablesBibliography