Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust(Modern Jewish History)

A summary of Polish-Jewish relations up to and during the Holocaust outlines how the Polish people were involved in the Holocaust as witnesses, the subsequent denial of involvement after the war, and the communist manipulation of Holocaust memory in the struggle between the Solidarity movement and the Polish government.

About the Author :
Michael C. Steinlauf teaches history at Gratz College in Philadelphia. A Fulbright Fellow in 1983-84, he was one of the first students allowed to study Jewish history in Poland. He has taught at the University of Michigan, Brandeis University, and Franklin and Marshall College and has been a senior research fellow at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York.

Review :
A very well researched and nuanced study of postwar Poland's efforts, first to deny then to begin to deal with the complex reality of the Holocaust and particularly the fact that Auschwitz and all other major death camps were located on Polish soil. . . . This very fine study of intellectual, cultural, and ethnic history deserves broad exposure.-- "Kirkus Reviews" Bondage to the Dead should be mandatory reading. . . . It is an exhaustive, lucid and compassionate account of an experience that is complex, tragic, and highly charged with emotion, one that is marked by stereotype, myth and stubbornly iconized memory. . . . The Polish trauma was exacerbated by several factors. One. was the memory of hundreds of years of Polish-Jewish co-existence before the Holocaust. Another was the complex Polish political scene in which antisemitism played a role before, during and after the war. Another was the fact that, as Steinlauf points out, Poles were more than just witnesses to the Holocaust: they themselves were also victims of the Nazis. On top of this was the added trauma of repressive post-war communist rule that manipulated Holocaust history for its own political aims and stifled any means of coming to terms with the past. . . . Only in the past decade has an open discussion of the role of Poland--and Poles--in the Holocaust been possible. Yet this new openness, too, entails anguish. Steinlauf does a masterful job in picking our way through the labyrinth.-- "Ruth Ellen Gruber, East European Jewish Affairs"