Poles, Jews, and Historical Objectivity

Poles, Jews, and Historical ObjectivityAuthor(s): David EngelSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 46, No. 3/4 (Autumn - Winter, 1987), pp. 568-580Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2498105 .

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ONGOING DISCUSSION

DAVID ENGEL

Poles, Jews, and Historical Objectivity

There can be no complaint against the historian who personally and pri- vately has his preferences and antipathies, and who as a human being merely has a fancy to take part in the game that he is describing; it is pleasant to see him give way to his prejudices and take them emotionally, so that they splash into colour as he writes; provided that when he steps in this way into the arena he recognises that he is stepping into a world of partial judgments and purely personal appreciations and does not imagine that he is speaking ex cathedra.

Herbert Butterfield

More than fifty years have passed since Herbert Butterfield voiced his admonition against the writing of history as an act of partisanship.' That such a warning was deemed necessary ought perhaps to be taken as an indication of how great the temptation has often been for historians to assume the role of "the avenger . . . standing between the parties and rivalries . . . of bygone generations," who, "by his exposures and his verdicts, his satire and his moral indignation, can . . . avenge the injured or reward the innocent." And if such is a general hazard of the historian's work, how much greater must the temptation be when what is at stake is not a "game" played out in "bygone generations" but an issue still fresh in living memory that cuts to the heart of a people's self-understanding.

The relations between Poles and Jews during World War II are such an issue, and no doubt for this reason it has often been difficult for historians of those relations to free their works of partisan overtones. Indeed, the obtrusiveness of personal sympathies and antipathies in much that has been written on the subject is ostensibly what has prompted Richard Lukas recently to enter the ongoing debate. In his latest book, The Forgotten Holocaust, Lukas has devoted two of his seven chapters, as well as his entire afterword, to matters that have often painfully divided Jews and Poles, in the hope that his work might "open . . . the door, if only a little, to a broader, more objective view of the cataclysm that engulfed so many so terribly for so long."2

Thus far his efforts have been widely lauded; in the Slavic Review, Adam Hetnal praised Lukas's "pioneering attempt to examine a neglected and distorted topic with scholarly impartiality."3 Yet upon closer examination it appears that Lukas's expressed aversion to bias is itself distinctly one-sided. His rebuke is directed almost entirely against "Jewish historians," who, "preoccupied with the overwhelming tragedy of the Jews, . . . rarely if ever qualify their condemnations of the Poles" and who produce as a result "tendentious writing that is often more reminiscent of propaganda than of history" (p. 221). In contrast, lapses of professionalism by Polish historians are generally not pointed out, let alone

1. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1951), pp. 1-2. 2. Richard C. Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation, 1939-1944

(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), p. 223. Subsequent citations to this book will be indicated in the text by page numbers in parentheses.

3. Slavic Review 45 (Fall 1986): 579-580.



Ongoing Discussion 569

condemned.4 In fact, Lukas's own discusssion of Polish-Jewish relations during World War II hardly reveals an attitude of scholarly detachment. On the contrary, he himself has produced, under the mantle of impartiality, precisely that sort of righteously indignant defense of the downtrodden against whose pitfalls Butterfield so eloquently warned.

Lukas's thesis on Polish-Jewish relations, briefly stated, is this: Tension between Poles and Jews first arose only in the nineteenth century, when Jews declined to assimilate with the emerging modern Polish nation, choosing instead to accentuate their own national distinctiveness. This attitude was resented by Poles, as was Jewish dominance in Polish commercial life. As a result, in interwar Poland Jews met with a measure of discrimination in economic matters, although neither the Polish population nor its leadership can fairly be characterized as anti-Semitic. A certain amount of ill will toward Jews was in evidence during the war as well, but it was likewise not characteristic of the mainstream of Polish society. To the extent that it survived in the face of the German effort to obliterate both Poles and Jews alike, it was largely provoked by Jewish actions and attitudes. During the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, Jews actively collaborated with the Russian authorities against Polish interests, while throughout the war Jewish organizations abroad unjustly accused Polish leaders of anti-Semitism, helping thereby to undermine Poland's image in western public opinion. Yet despite this, and despite the terror and suffering to which they themselves were subject, "Poles increasingly responded to the Jewish plight" under the Nazi regime. On the whole the Polish people did whatever could be done to assist Jews, even in the face of mortal risk. Similarly, the Polish government-in-exile constantly sounded the alarm in the west on behalf of its threatened Jewish citizens only to have its appeals rebuffed by skeptical British and United States policymakers, while the Polish military underground gave encouragement and assistance to the Jewish Fighting Organi- zation before and during the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. If still more was not done, the reason is not the Polish people's lack of willingness to help the Jewish victims of Hitler's murder campaign but the fact that the Poles were themselves victims no less than were the Jews. Thus, according to Lukas, it is only against the background of this "forgotten Holocaust" that Polish-Jewish relations during World War II can be properly understood.

Of course the mere statement of such a thesis-despite its overwhelmingly positive portrayal of one of the two contending parties and its assignment of responsibility for the difficulties between them mainly to the other-is no more evidence of bias than is the statement of a thesis reversing the evaluations of the disputants. On the contrary, to the extent that it is derived from careful weighing and insightful interpretation of as broad a range of sources representing as many different points of view as possible, backed by thorough grounding in the secondary literature on the subject, it represents a legitimate position in an academic controversy with which other historians, in accordance with their own readings of the evidence, may agree or differ. Unfortunately, though, most of Lukas's contentions do not appear to have been so derived. It is for this reason, and not because of the content of his argument, that his treatment of Polish-Jewish relations cannot be regarded as objective or impartial.

To begin with, Lukas evidently does not read either of the languages-Hebrew and Yiddish-habitually employed by the Jewish party to the Polish-Jewish relationship. Nor does it seem that he has found it sufficiently important either to acquire these linguistic skills himself or to obtain assistance from someone who does possess them. This lack has perforce prevented him from taking into account significant manuscript materials in these

4. Lukas does note that "Polish writers tend to minimize Polish anti-Semitism and sometimes exaggerate the amount of assistance Poles gave the Jews" (p. 121). Such a statement, however, is the exception rather than the rule. Lukas's footnotes consistently chide Jewish historians only, while his concluding remarks are aimed at Jewish writers, with no corresponding discussion of the shortcomings of Polish historiography.



570 Slavic Review

two languages-including the records of the Representation for Polish Jewry, the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and the General Federation of Jewish Workers (Histadrut), as well as the thousands of testimonies and oral histories given by Jewish participants in the events he describes-in the formulation of his conclusions. It has also severely limited the extent to which he was able to master existing scholarship on his subject, much of which has been published in Hebrew or Yiddish only. By failing to acquire the necessary linguistic tools-and thereby tacitly declaring in advance that sources written in Hebrew or Yididsh are either insignificant or unworthy of consideration-Lukas has given his first indication of bias.5 That impression is only strengthened by his blanket dismissal of Jewish historiography on his subject, culminating in the cynical suggestion that for Jewish writers "who are so overwhelmed by the Holocaust and yet want to describe it . . . some fictional form of expression may be more suitable than history" (p. 222).6

- It appears that more than linguistic limitations have prevented Lukas from acquaint- ing himself with the full range of sources necessary for the formation of a truly blaanced, impartial appraisal of Polish-Jewish relations during World War II. Important Jewish archival sources containing materials primarily in Polish-in particular the voluminous archives of the office of Ignacy Schwarzbart, a Jewish member of the Polish National Council-have not been consulted by Lukas at all.7 In addition, a number of primary documents and secondary works that have been published in Polish or in western languages and that speak against Lukas's conclusions have been ignored altogether. So, too, have documents from archival and published collections that Lukas has exploited. At

5. In view of Lukas's statements about the biased nature of Jewish historiography on his subject, it should be pointed out that the writers who bear the brunt of his criticism-Lucy Dawidowicz, Yisrael Gutman, J6zef Kermisz, Shmuel Krakowksi, and Ezra Mendelsohn-all read Polish as well as Hebrew and Yiddish. In this respect, at least, they have a better chance of producing objective history than does Lukas. In addition, graduate students of the Holocaust in Israeli universities are trained in the Polish language.

6. The exordium for this statement is the sentence, "Lucy Dawidowicz states that Jewish writers 'are still mourning the loss of their past."' In typical fashion, Lukas has taken the eight quoted words out of context and assigned them an inappropriate meaning. In fact, Dawidowicz made this comment as part of an attempt to explain why contemporary Jewish historians, "under the prevailing influence of positivism and the paramountcy of empiricism . . . have avoided theorizing about the Holocaust in the perspective of Jewish history, leaving-such reflections to the philosophers and the theologians." She suggested that "Jewish historians are still too preoccupied with the building blocks and the scaffolding of the historical structure to be able to see it in' the landscape of historical time." In this sense, she wrote, "they are still too close to the events; they are still mourning the loss of their past." Dawidowicz's point is thus the opposite of the one Lukas makes: Jewish historians have not attempted to assign ideological meaning to the Holocuast and have concentrated on purely empirical research pursuits. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 140-141. Similar comments are offered by Yehuda Bauer, "Trends in Holocaust Research," Yad Vashem Studies 12 (1977): 8-9. One may disagree with this evaluation (assuming, of course, that one is thoroughly familiar with Jewish historiography on the Holocaust in all languages), but one may not misrepresent it.

7. The Schwarzbart archive is located at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem (record group M2). It consists of twenty linear meters of material, containing Schwarzbart's correspondence with members and institutions of the Polish government-in-exile and with Jewish organizations and their representatives, dispatches and reports from Polish and Jewish sources in occupied Poland, minutes of Schwarzbart's meetings with Polish and Jewish leaders, notes taken by Schwarzbart at plenary and committee meetings of the Polish National Council, and Schwarzbart's wartime diaries. A list of file groups and of names, places, and organizations mentioned in the materials, as well as an introductory survey of the collection, has been prepared in English, so that Lukas could easily have familiarized himself with its contents. Its existence is noted, among other places, in Emmanuel Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War, ed., Joseph Kermisz and Shmuel Krakowksi (New York, 1977), p. 3, a source to which Lukas makes repeated reference.




times, sources cited by Lukas in support of his contentions have been tendentiously misrepresented or misconstrued.

Such tendencies are evident from the very beginning of Lukas's discussion of Polish- Jewish relations, in his exposition of the background of wartime tensions between the two groups during the interwar years. From his footnotes, Lukas appears to have learned about this period mainly from three pages of Norman Davies's general, derivative history of Poland and from journalist Stewart Steven's attempt "to explain the Poles . . . to a world that . . . periodically woke up to their existence and then shamefully forgot them . .,' supplemented by a posthumous collection of publicistic and memoiristic articles written by Polish socialist activist Adam Ciolkosz from 1940 to 1978 and by a memorandum prepared for the British Foreign Office in 1944 by the counselor for the British Embassy to the Polish government-in-exile, Frank Savery.8 Of scholarly works of original research based upon primary sources and dealing exclusively or significantly with the history of the Jews in Poland during the interwar years he cites only those by Celia Heller and Ezra Mendelsohn and, then, mainly as authorities for statistics.9 Thus it must be concluded that Lukas is unfamiliar with most scholarship on this subject.'0 This, howeer, has not prevented him from either repeating or concocting on his own such sweeping and misleading generalizations as "few Jews understood, let alone spoke, Polish" (p. 123) and "Jews discriminated against Poles" (p. 124) or from uncritically affirming Davies's errone- ous denial that pogroms took place in Lw6w and Pifisk in 1918-1919.1l Since, however,

8. Norman Davies, God's Playground: A History of Poland (Oxford, 1981); Stewart Steven, The Poles (New York, 1982); Adam Ciolkosz, Walka o prawde: Wybdr artykuk6w, 1940-1978 (London, 1983).

9. Celia S. Heller, On the Edge of Destruction: Jews of Poland between the Two World Wars (New York, 1977); Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Blooming- ton, 1983). Mendelsohn's book is actually a general survey of Jewish life in seven countries, althQugh the chapter on Poland (pp. 11-83) is based upon original research.

10. Among book-length works in western languages or in Polish to which Lukas might have referred are Szyja Bronsztejn, Ludnos5 zydowska w Polsce w okresie mi4dzywojennym: Studium statys- tyczne (Wroclaw, 1963); Andrzej Chojnowksi, Koncepcje polityki narodowoiciowej rzqddw polskich w latach 1921-1939 (Wroclaw, 1979); Frank Golczewski, Polnisch-juidische Beziehungen, 1881-1922: Eine Studie zur Geschichte des Antisemitismus in Osteuropa (Wiesbaden, 1981); Bernard Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility: The General Jewish Workers Bund of Poland, 1917-1943 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1967); Pawel Korzec, Juifs en Pologne: La question juive pendant l'entre deux-guerres (Paris, 1980); Joseph Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919-1939 (Berlin, 1983); Ezra Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland: The Formative Years, 1915-1926 (New Haven, 1981). In addition, three major studies in Hebrew are basic works on aspects of the period: Rafael Mahler, Yehudei Polin bein Shetei Milhamot haOlam: Historiyah Kalkalit-Sotsialiyit le'or haStatistikah [The Jews of Poland between the two world wars: A socioeconomic history on a statistical basis] (Tel Aviv, 1968); Emanuel Melzer, Ma'avak Medini beMalkodet: Yehudei Polin, 1935-1939 [Political strife in a blind alley: The Jews in Poland 1935-1939] (Tel Aviv, 1982); Shlomo Netzer, Ma'avak Yehudei Polin al Zechuyoteihem haEzrahiyot vehaLe'umiyot (1918-1922) [The struggle of Polish Jewry for civil and national minority rights (1918-1922)] (Tel Aviv, 1980). This is not to mention a large body of articles, mostly in Hebrew and Yiddish but to an extent also in western languages, including Joshua A. Fishman, ed., Studies on Polish Jewry, 1919-1939: The Interplay of Social, Economic and Political Factors in the Struggle of a Minority for its Existence (New York, 1974). For a discussion of the literature on the interwar period, see Gershon David Hundert and Gershon Bacon, The Jews of Poland: Bibliographical Essays (Bloom- ington, 1984).

11. Lukas's statement regarding Jews and the Polish language is evidently based upon the fact that in the 1931 census "almost 80 percent of the Jews declared Yiddish to be their mother tongue." Lukas overlooks the obvious possibility of bilingualism, a possibility that could not be reflected in the census. In contrast, Celia Heller, basing her conclusions upon sociological investigations conducted under the auspisces of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Wilno during the 1930s, notes that in independent Poland linguistic acculturation was the dominant trend among the upper and middle strata of the Jewish populace and was gaining ground among the lower strata as well (Heller, On the



572 Slavic Review

these statements serve to support his basic thesis, he apparently did not deem it necessary to verify them against the findings of systematic academic research.

Yet it appears that more than simple lack of acquaintance with the relevant literature is responsible for his failure to present an accurate picture of Polish-Jewish relations between the two wars. In discussing physical attacks upon Jews in the early years of Polish independence, for example, Lukas observes in a footnote that "like other Jewish writers, [Ezra] Mendelsohn exaggerates the violence to which Jews were subjected in Poland," noting immediately thereafter that while "the Jewish Chronicle reported on 6 Dec[ember] 1918 that 3,200 Jews died in the Lwow pogrom, in reality 73 perished" (p. 252, n. 18). From this one cannot help but wonder whether Mendelsohn's alleged exaggeration is of the same order as that of London's leading Jewish newspaper. In fact, however, Mendelsohn does not mention any specific casualty figure for the Lw6w pogrom in the place cited by Lukas, and he states explicitly that "early reports of casualties were exaggerated."'2 Or consider Lukas's statement that "Poalnd's leading parties, the Socialists and the Peasant Party, rejected the Sanacja's anti-Semitic pogrom" (p. 126).'3 The support

Edge of Destruction, pp. 66-68). Lukas evidently read Heller's book but chose to overlook her comments on this matter. In support of his statement that Jews discriminated against Poles, Lukas offers no more than a lengthy quotation from a person identified merely as "one Polish Jew," previously quoted in Steven, The Poles, pp. 313-314. In Steven the source is simply "an Israeli friend" who had been born and raised in Cracow. Following Davies (God's Playground, pp. 262-263), Lukas writes (p. 125): "American and British observers discredited western reports of widespread pogroms in the early years of the Polish Republic. For instance, an alleged pogrom on Lw6w in 1918 was a military massacre in which more Christians than Jews perished. Another reported pogrom in Pinisk in 1919 was in reality the execution of thirty-five Bolshevik infiltrators, a judgment an American investigator considered justified in the circumstances." One wonders just who are the "American and British observers" to whom Lukas and Davies refer. An official United States commission of inquiry under the chairmanship of Henry Morgenthau was dispatched to Poland in July 1919 to investigate the reports of anti-Jewish pogroms; a similar British commission arrived in the country shortly thereafter. None of the four reports submitted by members of these commissions expressed conclusions bearing any resemblance to those affirmecl by Lukas. On the contrary, Morgenthau wrote of the pogrom in Lw6w (Lemberg) that "disreputabale elements [from the Polish army] plundered to the extent of many millions of crowns the dwellings and stores in the Jewish quarter, and did not hesitate at murder when they met with resistance"; he made no mention of Christian casualties. With regard to Pin'sk, after describing how a group of Jews meeting to discuss the distribution of relief funds from the United States had been summarily arrested by a band of Polish soldiers, he stated that "35 [Jews] . . . were shot with scant deliberation and no trial whatever." He also declared that "this mission is convinced that no arguments of bolshevist nature were mentioned in the meeting in question," and that "Maj. Luczyniski, the town commander, showed reprehensible and frivolous readiness to place credence upon such untested assertions, and on this insufficient basis took inexcusably drastic action against reputable citizens." The joint report of the two other members of the United States commission, Brigadier General Edgar Jadwin and Homer H. Johnson, essentially affirmed Morgenthau's evaluation of these events. Thus none of the three official United States investigators held the Pin'sk pogrom to be justified. The reports of the British investigators expressed similar conclusions. For the text of all reports, see National Polish Comittee of America, The Jews in Poland: Official Reports of the American and British Investigating Missions (Chicago, n. d.). Lukas has also ignored the substantial secondary literature on the pogroms; see especially Golczewski, Polnisch-flidische Beziehungen, pp. 182-264; Azriel Shohat, "Parashat haPogrom beFinsk beHamishah beApril 1919" [The pogrom in Pin'sk on 5 April 1919], Gal-Ed: On the History of the Jews in Poland 1 (1973): 135-173.

12. Mendelsohn, Jews of East Central Europe, p. 40. Celia Heller, the only "other Jewish writer to produce a scholarly work on the period that Lukas has consulted, does not mention the pogrom in Lwow at all. "Other Jewish writers" with whose work Lukas is not familiar consistently give the figure of seventy-two killed; see Korzec, Juifs en Pologne, p. 297 n. 18, and Netzer, Ma'avak Yehudei Polin, p. 106. This figure is based upon reports of contemporary Jewish observers and has long been accepted by both Polish and Jewish historians.

13. Sanacja refers to the regime installed in Poland by J6zef Pitsudski in 1926.




offered for this remark is an article by Edward Wynot, a scholarly piece of the highest quality and on the face of things a sufficient basis for Lukas's observation. Yet Wynot's few comments about the Peasant party indicate that it did not reject the regime's approach to the Jewish question but, rather, continually "pass[ed] over" the anti-Jewish declarations of the regime's political front movement, OZON.'4 Moreover, Lukas had available to him in Mendelsohn's book the section on the Jewish question of the Peasant party's 1935 platform, which does not differ significantly from the statements of Sanacja leaders quoted by Wynot.15 At best, then, Lukas has given an inaccurate and highly selective presentation of the findings of the few serious sources with which he was acquainted, in a tendentious fashion that hardly strengthens his claim to objectivity.

Lukas's tendency to draw comfortable conclusions from an insufficient source base, as well as to misrepresent and suppress evidence so as to advance his basic argument, is even more egregious when he deals with primary documents from the war years themselves. Consider his general characterization of Polish attitudes toward Jews. He maintains that, while "a small minority of Poles openly approved" of German anti-Jewish policies and "other Poles," although showing "no outward pleasure" at Nazi economic measures against Jews, were not themselves opposed to them, "still others quietly felt compassion for the Jewish people" and "a very active group of Poles" was "openly sympathetic" toward them (pp. 126-127). He bases this assessment on five archival documents, supplemented by the contemporary impressions of the Jewish historian Emmanuel Ringelblum, the postwar memoirs of one Jew, two secondary works, two interviews, and one piece of recent correspondence. Unfortunately, he presents this conclusion in summary fashion, without exposition or analysis Qf his evidence either in the text or in the notes. Upon checking the sources that are not exclusively in Lukas's hands, it appears that while the secondary works and the postwar memoirs do on the whole confirm this picture, and Ringelblum is clearly identified as a hostile witness, some of the archival documents are not entirely consistent with Lukas's portrayal. One, for example, reports the evaluation of the government-in-exile's delegate to the occupied homeland that "the country does not like .Jews" and that the exile regime was perceived as too pro-Jewish.'6 Another mentions three basic Polish responses to the Jewish plight: open delight over German anti-Jewish measures, qualified only by the fear that the Allies might demand their repeal upon Poland's liberation; quiet satisfaction over the removal of Jews from Polish residential districts and economic life, tempered by revulsion over the cruel fashion in which this was carried out; and open expressions of sympathy toward the beleaguered Jews."7 In no way, however, does this document suggest that the first response was exhibited by only a small minority of Poles; instead it specifically states that "a great many Poles [wielu Polakodw]" fell into the second category, while the third response was characteristic of only "a certain portion [pewna cz 'd]" of the population.

Of course Lukas may legimately argue that these discrepancies between the documents and his argument are insignificant. Although since these texts represent an important part of the basis upon which he builds a central contention in his thesis, they ought, for the sake of objectivity, to have been presented and analyzed explicitly rather than merely listed in a collective footnote as support for conclusions summarily stated. What is not legitimate is that only five documents have been selected as the basis for appraising the extent of

14. Edward D. Wynot, Jr., "'A Necessary Cruelty': The Emergence of Official Anti-Semitism in Poland, 1936-39," American Historical Review 76, no. 4 (1971): 1,055; compare also p. 1,040.

15. Mendelsohn, Jews of East Central Europe, p. 72. 16. "Sprawozdanie Celta," 1944, Archiwum Instytutu Polskiego [henceforth AIP], KOL. 25/9.

Compare the description in Jan Tomasz Gross, Polish Society under German Occupation: The General- gouvernement, 1939-1944 (Princeton, 1979), p. 185.

17. Mersin, "Sytuacja w Warszawie i w Generalnym Gubernatorstwie," 31.XII.1940, AIP, PRMK. 86; also in Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, Calif. [henceforth HIA], Tadeusz Komorowski, box 3.



574 Sla/vic Review

anti-Jewish feeling in wartime Poland, while any number of others that present evaluations contradictory to Lukas's thesis have been ignored. Apart from archival records that Lukas may or may not have seen, there are reports from the Polish underground concerning the feelings of the Polish population toward Jews that have been either published in full or quoted extensively in sources listed by Lukas in his bibliography and that must be taken into account if the objective of scholarly impartiality is to be met. There is, for example, the dispatch sent by the commander of the underground Home Army to the Polish government in London on 25 September 1941, stating emphatically that "the overwhelming majority of the country is anti-Semitic," which is quoted at length in a book that Lukas cites elsewhere throughout his work."8 A report by a Home Army officer sent to London on 6 January 1942, wondering "if the attitude of our people towards the Jews does not resemble that of the Germans" and declaring that "this is the only case where the principles of Christian justice based on charity have broken down completely," was quoted in an article to which Lukas makes occasional reference, if only to dismiss it and other works by its author as examples of pro-Jewish bias.'9 Emmanuel Ringelblum has amended to his book, which Lukas cites in connection with the very paragraph in which he states his position on Polish attitudes towards Jews, a 1943 memorandum by the head of the Foreign Affairs Commission in the office of the underground government delegate stating that, although "at this moment [in the aftermath of the mass murder of Jews], Christian compassion for the tormented Jews is predominant in the Homeland. . ., a very strong animus [still] prevails against the Jews in the eastern part of Poland" and warning that "the return of masses of Jews would be experienced by the population not as restitution but as an invasion against which they would defend themselves even with physical means.20 In addition, Lukas was either unaware of, or unimpressed by, the report delivered by the emissary Jan Karski to the government-in-exile in February 1940 (published in full in 1983), which declared that the attitude of "the broad masses of the Polish populace . . . toward the Jews is overwhelmingly severe, often without pity.2' Again, Lukas is entitled to be unmoved by such evidence, but if he claims scholarly impartiality he is not entitled to pay it no heed. Rather he is obligated first to set forth the range of available evidence as fully as possible, then to explain why he regards certain sources as more telling than others.

Lukas's discussion of the charge of Jewish-Soviet anti-Polish collaboration provides a still more blatant example of his own limits and biases at work. Lukas gives the charge unqualified endorsement on the basis of two collections of underground reports released during the war by the government-in-exile, as well as upon the minutes of a conversation between the Polish general Wiadystaw Anders and three Jewish political activists. Again, the specific content of these documents is nowhere presented, let alone analyzed. Thus Lukas does not note, for example, that in the conversation with Anders one of the Jewish leaders, the Bundist Wiktor Alter, maintained that alleged incidents of Jewish anti-Polish behavior during the Soviet invasion of September 1939 had been "negligible [znikome]," or that Alter's Bundist colleague Henryk Erlich stated that "these incidents were for him, as a Bundist and a Jew; at least as painful as for Poles."22 In such a case of conflicting Polish

18. Gross, Polish Society, pp. 184-185. 19. S. Krakowski, "The Slaughter of Polish Jewry-A Polish 'Reassessment'," Wiener Library

Bulletin, nos. 28/29 (1972-1973), p. 14. This article offers strong criticism of one of the two secondary sources upon which Lukas based his conclusions regarding the character of wartime Polish attitudes toward Jews.

20. "Excerpt from a Memorandum by Roman Knoll . ..," in Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations, p. 257.

21. David Engel, "An Early Account of Polish Jewry under Nazi and Soviet Occupation Pre- sented to the Polish Government-in-Exile, February 1940," Jewish Social Studies 45, 1 (1983): 10.

22. "Sprawozdanie z rozmowy Generala Andersa z przedstawicielami zydowstwa polskiego na terenie ZSRR," 24 October 1941, HIA, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, box 16, File "Polish Army in USSR: Jewish Question."




and Jewish evaluations, scholarly impartiality would seem to demand an independent effort to determine where the truth lies. Yet Lukas has made no such effort; indeed, his bibliography lists not a single title from the considerable literature on wartime Soviet- Jewish relations, much of which specifically concerns the situation of Jews in the occupied eastern Polish territories. Much of this literature is in Hebrew and Yiddish,23 but enough has been written in English to enable Lukas to balance the picture of a Jewry gaining power through Soviet largesse at Polish expense that the Polish documents convey.24 Had Lukas made use of these studies, he would have found the consensus of scholarly opinion holding that Jews did indeed by and large welcome the Red Army at first as a liberating rather than a conquering force but that for most the liberation was from potential German occupation rather than from Polish rule, which had already effectively collapsed.25 He would have learned as well that most Jews realized that the Soviet occupation would bring economic and cultural ruin but preferred this to the threat to their physical safety posed by the Germans. In the event, he appears to have been more interested in demon- strating that whatever.anti-Jewish feelings did exist among Poles were. rooted not merely in a perception of Soviet-Jewish collaboration but in the reality of it, with the implication that when the moral balance between Poles and Jews is drawn, such feelings ought to be regarded with charitable understanding. Thus he writes that "the Soviets with Jewish help shipped off the Polish intelligentsia to the depths of the Soviet Union," conveniently neg- lecting to mention that more than one-fourth and perhaps as many as one-third of the Polish citizens deported to the Soviet interior were Jews (p. 128).26

23. See, for example, Shalom Cholawski, Al Neharot haNieman vehaDnieper: Yehudei Byelorusiyah haMa'aravit beMilhemet haOlam haSheniyah [By the Nieman and the Dnieper: The Jews of western White Russia in the Second World War] (Jerusalem, 1982); Kalman Nussbaum, VeHafach lahem leRo'ets: HaYehudim baTsava haAmami haPolani biVrit haMo'atsot [The story of an illusion: Jews in the Polish People's Army in the USSR] (Tel Aviv, 1984); Ben-Cion Pinchuk, Yehudei Berit-haMo'atsot mul penei haSho'ah: Mehkar beVa'ayot Haglayah uFinnui [Soviet Jews face the Holocaust: A study in the problems of deportation and evacuation] (Tel Aviv, 1979); Solomon Schwarz, Di Yidn in Sovetn- Farband: Milkhome un Nokhmilkhome-Yorn, 1939-1965 [The Jews in the Soviet Union: The war and postwar years] (New York, 1967); Roman Bertish, "Pezurat Yehudei Polin beMilhemet haOlam haSheniyah . [Jewish emigrants from Poland during World War II .. .] Gal-Ed 1 (1973); Yosef Litwak, "She'elat haEzrahut shel Yehudim Yotse'ei-Polin biVrit haMo'atsot," [The question of the citizenship of Jews from Poland in the Soviet Union] Behinot 7 (1977). Had he been able, Lukas might also have availed himself of published Jewish primary sources in these languages, such as the report by Moshe Kleinbaum, "Tazkir al Matsavah shel Yahadut Mizrach-Eiropah beReshit Milhemet haOlam haSheniyah," [Memorandum on the condition of East European Jewry at the beginning of the Second World War] Gal-Ed 4-5 (1978), and the collection of testimonies reprinted in facsimile in M. Altshuler, Yehudei Berit HaMo'atsot baShanim 1939-1953 [Soviet Jews, 1939-1953] (Jerusalem, 1971).

24. See, for example, Yehoshua Gilboa, The Black Years of Soviet Jewry 1939-1953 (Boston, 1971); Dov Levin, "The Attitude of the Soviet Union to the Rescue of Jews," in Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Second Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, ed., Yisrael Gutman and Efraim Zuroff (Jerusalem, 1977); Shimon Redlich, "The Jews under Soviet Rule during World War II" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1968).

25. He would also have found upon further study that in some places Poles too at first looked upon the Soviets as allies, in the mistaken belief that Russian troops were heading west to fight Hitler. See Irena Grudziniska-Gross and Jan Tomasz Gross, War Through Children's Eyes: The Soviet Occupation of Poland and the Deportations, 1939-1941 (Stanford, Calif., 1981), pp. 5-6.

26. On the percentage of Jews among the deportees, see Kot to Mikolajczyk, 11 October 1941, in Stanislaw Kot, Conversations with the Kremlin and Dispatches from Russia (London, 1963), p. 62. Lukas is familiar with this document, as he cites it elsewhere (e.g., p. 254 n. 41). See also, Grudzin'ska- Gross and Gross, War Through Children's Eyes, p. xxiii; Nussbaum, VeHafach lahem leRo'ets, pp. 25-28; Yehuda Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective (Seattle, 1978), pp. 55-56. Lukas explicitly refers to the Jews' reception of the invading Soviet armies as "treasonable behavior" (p. 132).



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The motif of Jewish anti-Polonism pervades Lukas's discussion of Jews in the various Polish exile armies as well. Here again, his contentions rest upon inadequate familiarity with sources combined with misrepresentation and suppression of evidence that was at his disposal. In his view, the charges of anti-Jewish discrimination in the Anders army and in the Polish forces in Great Britain voiced by western Jewish organizations between 1942 and 1944 were exaggerated and "exploited by left-wing Zionists for their own political reasons" (p. 130). Though there were some anti-Semites among his troops, according to Lukas, General Anders successfully restrained them; he refused to bow to pressure to impose a numerus clausus upon Jewish enlistments and issued a categorical order that Jewish soldiers were to be treated equally with Poles in the ranks. Whatever restrictions were placed upon Jewish service with the Polish forces were imposed by the Soviets for their own nefarious reasons. The same was true for the inclusion of Jews in the transports of Polish soldiers leaving the Soviet Union in 1942: The Poles did everything to get as many Jews as possible out of the country, but the Soviets were adamant that the Jews remain behind. Likewise, according to Lukas, the Polish military authorities in Great Britain showed sensitivity to the needs of Jewish soldiers stationed there and worked assiduously to establish solidarity between Poles and Jews in the ranks. Yet the Jewish soldiers, both in the Anders army and in Great Britain, responded to this irreproachable attitude by deserting in large numbers, while Jewish spokesmen in the west blamed the Poles for a situation that was entirely of their own and Soviet making and from which Soviet propaganda was the chief beneficiary.

The issue of Jews in the Anders army has been studied extensively on the basis of careful, systematic archival research.27 Lukas, however, lists not a single work on the subject either in his bibliography or in his notes, although two major articles are in English and easily accessible. This research, based largely upon the archives of General Anders and of the Polish military headquarters in the USSR-sources that do not figure at all in Lukas's account28 -stand in unanimous opposition to Lukas's conclusions. Solid documentary evidence has been uncovered, for example, indicating that Anders did indeed seek to impose a numerus clausus upon Jewish enlistments in his force and that Polish mlitary authorities sought to limit the number of Jews included in the evacuation transports in 1942.29 Even if Lukas had grounded himself fully in the available primary and secondary sources relating to this matter, it still seems doubtful whether he would have presented his conclusions any differently. He discusses, for example, the fact that on 14 November 1941 Anders issued an order to his troops stating that "we shall accord to Jews in the army the same rights as to Poles," citing a copy of the order located in box 16 of the papers of Stanislaw Mikolajczyk at the Hoover Institution Archives (pp. 131-132, 254, n. 43). He then notes that "later ... a Zionist publication alleged that Anders had indicated

27. Nussbaum, VeHafach lahem leRo'ets, pp. 53-75; idem, "'Legyon Yehudi' o Ahizat Einayim?" ["Jewish Legion" or delusion?] Shvut 10 (1984); Yisrael Gutman, "Jews in General Anders' Army in the Soviet Union," Yad Vashem Studies 12 (1977); Yosef Litwak, "HaYehudim beTseva'o shel haGeneral Anders," [The Jews in the army of General Anders] Shvut 5 (1977); Shimon Redlich, "Jews in General Anders' Army in the Soviet Union, 1941-1942," Soviet Jewish Affairs 2 (1971).

28. Another important source for several of these works, especially the one by Gutman ("Jews in General Anders' Army"), was the archive of Polish ambassador to the USSR Stanislaw Kot (AIP, KOL. 25) and, in particular, the file labeled "Zydzi" (no. 24). Although Lukas had access to this archive (he cites at least one other file from it; see p. 253, n. 24), he did not make use of a single document from the file on Jews in compiling his account of Jews in the Anders army.

29. See Nussbaum, VeHafach lahem leRo'ets, pp. 54-55, 64-69; Gutman, "Jews in General And- ers' Army," pp. 239-244, 281-294. Lukas bases his assertion that Anders rejected a numerus clausus upon a letter sent by Kot to Mikolajczyk on 11 October 1941, in Kot, Conversations with the Kremlin, p. 62. In the event, the passage dealing with the numerus clausus reads as follows: "Our military ... are already wanting to introduce a numerus clausus in the military institutions" (Elipsis in original). There is no mention of opposition from Anders.




in an [additional] order to his commanders in November 1941 that he understood the reasons for some of the anti-Semitic incidents in the ranks . ., but for political reasons, the troops should mitigate their anti-Semitism." Anders, he states, claimed that the order had been falsified, while he declares himself unable to determine "whether or not the controversial order was a falsification" (p. 132). In the event, the "Zionist publication" to which Lukas refers (it was Eshnav, the weekly newspaper of the Haganah Jewish defense force in Palestine, in its issue of 28 June 1943), printed not merely an allegation that such an order had been issued, but the full text of the order in Hebrew translation. The order was indeed genuine; in fact, a copy of it is located in the very same archival file from which Lukas took the text of Anders's first order promising equal treatment for Jewish soldiers in the ranks.30 It is, to say the least, highly suspicious that in a single file Lukas managed to find a copy of the first order, which is in keeping with his general portrayal of the attitude of the Polish authorities toward Jews in the Anders army, but not of the second, which contradicts it.3' Indeed, there appears to be strong reason to believe that Lukas had fixed his opinion about Poles and Jews in the Anders army in advance of undertaking even his limited and inadequate research on the subject and was not about to be dissuaded from it by additional evidence.32

Lukas would seem at first glance to be on firmer ground in his discusssion of Jews in the Polish Army in Great Britain; for at the time of his writing no serious secondary literature was available on the subject and he does cite over two dozen relevant archival documents.33 Yet precisely because of the lack of prior investigation, Lukas ought to have attempted to ascertain the completeness of the sources at his disposal before reaching his own apodictic conclusions. He relies heavily upon Polish Defense Ministry documents, particularly upon the report of the commission established by the ministry to investigate the causes of the desertion of sixty-eight Jewish soldiers (not seventy-nine, as Lukas

30. Dow6dztwo Polskich Sit Zbrojnych w ZSRR-Sztab, "Do r4k wiasnych Dowodcy," 30 November 1941 (L. dz. 607/tjn. Kanc. Sztab. 41), HIA, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, box 16, File "Polish Army in the USSR. Jewish Question." The order was also more severe in tone than Lukas indicates; it said, among other things, that "for now [emphasis added] no manifestations of the struggle against the Jews is . . . allowable" and that "when we are masters in our own home . . ., we shall dispose of the Jewish question as the greatness and sovereignty of our homeland and ordinary human justice require."

31. On the slight possibility that this lapse is due simply to careless oversight and not to a conscious tendency to suppress evidence, it should be pointed out that Lukas had other means of determining the order's genuineness. The Polish text of the order was published in Stanislaw Kot, Listy z Rosji do Generata Sikorskiego (London, 1955), pp. 465-466; in the same book (p. 436) Kot indicated that "[Anders] met with very strong opposition [to his order of 14 November]; he then issued a follow-up order which contained several paragraphs that are politically touchy." These pas- sages were removed from the abridged English edition of the work (entitled Conversations with the Kremlin and Dispatches from Russia), which is the edition to which Lukas refers throughout his book; but there is no sound reason why Lukas should not have referred to the Polish original. Moreover, had he been familiar with Gutman's article, he would have found, in addition to the citation from Kot just mentioned, mention of an additional extant copy of the order in the Yad Vashem archives (Gutman, "Jews in General Anders' Army," p. 272). Had he read Nussbaum's book, he would have discovered additional indirect evidence of the order's genuineness (Nussbaum, VeHafach lahem leRo'ets, pp. 72-73).

32. In an earlier book Lukas wrote, on the basis of the abridged English version of Kot's dispatches from Russia, Anders's autobiography, and a single document from a published collection on wartime Polish-Soviet relations, that "Soviet discrimination against Polish Jews ironically led to Jews abroad blaming Polish authorities for anti-Semitism" (Richard C. Lukas, The Strange Allies: The United States and Poland, 1941-1945 [Knoxville, 1978], p. 177, no. 9).

33. Subsequently, a lengthy article has appeared examining the matter of the desertions of Jewish soldiers from the Jewish forces in Britain in detail; David Engel, "HaBerihah haHafganatit shel Hayalim Yehudiyim mehaTsava haPolani beAngliyah biShenat 1944," [The protest desertion of Jewish soldiers from the Polish army in Britain in 1944] Yahadut Zemanenu 2 (1985): 177-207.



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reports) on 16 January 1944. He does not point out, however, that both the Polish Foreign Ministry and the Polish National Council, among others, strongly criticized the War Min- istry's investigating commission and, indeed, the military establishment as a whole for its biased approach to the affair and that, following the subsequent desertion of two additional groups of Jewish soldiers, the National Council found it necessary to undertake its own independent investigation. The protocols of this latter investigation, as well as Foreign Ministry materials on the matter, are available in archives whose holdings Lukas used in other instances.34 These files already bring the number of relevant documents into the hundreds, making the two dozen-odd sources cited by Lukas a thin base for conclusions. In addition, the Schwarzbart archive at Yad Vashem contains thirty-eight files of original documents relating to the situation of Jews in the Polish forces in Britain in general and to the desertions in particular.

Yet even without examining these documents, Lukas could have avoided at least one of his most blatant errors in his account of the desertions had he taken the trouble to ground himself sufficiently in the available literature on Polish-Jewish relations in general. He claims that the desertions were largely the result of "Zionist agitation," particularly of the efforts of the Committee for a Jewish Army affiliated with the separatist right-wing revisionist faction of the Zionist movement. The head of this committee, according to Lukas, "took an active role in trying to convince the [British] Foreign Office of widespread anti-Semitism in the Polish army and in championing the cause of the Jewish deserters [whom] he wanted to organize into separate Palestinian Jewish battalions" (p. 138). Lukas did not consult the archives of the Committee for a Jewish Army, which are located at the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv, and he offers no documentary evidence in support of his conclusion other than speculation on the part of Polish and British officials. Had he had some basic knowledge of the relations between the Zionist revisionists and the Polish government, such an interpretation of events would have seemed to him highly suspect. The revisionists were the one Jewish group that consistently supported and sought close cooperation with Polish governments, both before and during the war. In fact, from the beginning of the war they had endeavored to obtain Polish backing for the Jewish army scheme and had advanced the idea that such an army ought to be placed under Polish operational command.35 Their leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, had refused at the outset of the war to join other Jewish organizations in criticism of the Polish government over alleged manifestations of anti-Semitism, arguing that whatever anti-Jewish feeling might exist among Poles was the result of objective socioeconomic conditions in Poland for which no Polish government could fairly be held responsible.36 Had this aroused Lukas's

34. HIA, Polish government, box 226, 227; HIA, Poland. Rada Narodowa, box 8, file 24. Lukas had access to the files of the Polish National Council located at the Polish Institute in London (AIP, A.5). These files in all likelihood also contain the minutes of the council's special investigating commission; but, even if they do not, sufficient criticism of the Defense Ministry's handling of the affair was voiced in plenary sessions to make Lukas aware of the perils of accepting the report of the ministry-appointed commission at face value.

35. On this see Pawel Korzec, "General Sikorski und seine Exilregierung zur Judenfrage in Polen im Lichte von Dokumenten des Jahres 1940," Zeitschrfitfiur Ostforschung, 30 (1981), esp. document 13. On general relations between the Poles and the revisionists, see Korzec, Juifs en Pologne, pp. 253-255; Melzer, Ma'avak Medini beMalkodet, passim; Wladystaw Pob6g-Malinowski, Najnowsza his- toria polityczna Polski, II. Wyd. (London, 1983), pp. 819-821; W. T. Drymmer, "Zagadnienie zydowskie w Polsce w latach 1935-1939," Zeszyty Historyczne 13 (1968): 55-77; Stefan Korbofiski, "[An] Unknown Chapter in the Life of Menahem Begin and [the] Irgun Zvai Leumi," East European Quarterly 13 (1979): 373-379.

36. Vladimir Jabotinsky, The War and the Jews (New York, 1942), pp. 96-101. Compare S. Gruszka to S. Kot, 16 January 1941, AIP, A.9. V/2. Since Lukas wrote his book, a study of wartime Polish-revisionist relations has been published; David Engel, "The Frustrated Alliance: The Revisionist Movement and the Polish Government-in-Exile, 1939-1945," Studies in Zionism 7 (1986): 11-36. Had Lukas been familiar with the archives of the Committee for a Jewish Army, he would




suspicions, he would have learned that in the event the deserters, not the Committee for a Jewish Army, had initiated contact between the two groups out of dissatisfaction with the response to their action by the representatives of Polish Jewry in London, who had instructed them categorically to return to the ranks, and that the committee had initially refused to handle the case, taking an interest only after the deserters requested to join Jewish battalions.37 Furthermore, he would have discovered that, far from supporting the transfer of the soldiers to the British Pioneer Corps, as Lukas believes, the committee opposed such a move, requesting that the soldiers be dispatched to the Italian front,38 and that it continued throughout the desertion episode to suggest creating a "separate Jewish regiment in the Polish Army, . . . with a non-Jewish commanding officer selected from Polish officers . . . popular among Jews."39 Even lacking the motivation of suspicion, his own professed commitment to impartiality ought to have led him to check the version of events put forth by the group whose culpability in them he seeks to prove.

The other parts of Lukas's discussion of wartime Polish-Jewish relations contain additional examples of distortion, misrepresentation, and inaccuracy, although those presented here are the most blatant. From their elucidation it should be clear that Lukas's treatment of the subject is not only unreliable but thoroughly tendentious.40 His treatment does not seem to be primarily the product of scholarly curiosity or of a commitment to the search for truth, no matter how unpalatable that truth may be; rather its germ appears to lie mainly in Lukas's passionately felt conviction that the historical profession has done the Polish people a colossal wrong. Historians of the Holocaust, most of them Jewish, he argues, have, out of their own grief over the fate of their people, made it appear that Jews were the sole objects of the Nazis' murderous designs. In order to strengthen the exclusivity of the Jewish claim to victim status, these historians have, according to Lukas, turned the Poles-"the nation that suffered the cruelest occupation policies under Hitler" (p. ix)-into "scapegoats to explain the monumental Jewish losses of the war years" (p. 221). Lukas therefore feels aggrieved, and he demands that the historical record be righted. In order to restore a sense of proportion to that record he stresses the Poles' role as "co-victims of the Holocaust" destined to share the fate of the Jews had the war been prolonged (p. 4 and

have found that it had been approached in August 1942 by a Jewish soldier who had deserted from the Polish army with a request for assistance. The committee, rather than publicizing the rather serious charges of anti-Semitism in the Polish ranks that the soldier raised, referred the letter to the Polish prime minister Wiadystaw Sikorski, with a covering communication indicating that the committee was "fully aware of the attitude of genuine friendliness of Your Excellency and Your Govern- ment towards the Jewish people and consider[ed] that the unsatisfactory position disclosed by the enclosed leter and similar documents in our possession is in no way a result of policy, but rather the inevitable consequence of pre-war conditions in Poland" (J. Rosenberg to J. Helpern, 19 August 1942, Jabotinsky Institute Archives [henceforth JIA], H3A/3/75; Helpern to Sikorski, 25 August 1942, JIA, H3A/3/57).

37. See "The Jewish Army Committee and the Polish Jewish Soldiers," 25 April 1944, JIA, H3A/3/75. On the attitude of the official leadership of Polish Jewry in Britain to the desertions, see the declaration by I. Schwarzbart and A. Tartakower in the name of the Representation of Polish Jewry, 19 January 1944, Yad Vashem Archives, M2/100. Compare E. Scherer to Polish Commander- in-Chief, 24 January 1944, from the private collection of Synaj Okret (copy in author's possession).

38. Helpern to Sir J. Grigg, 23 February 1944, JIA, H3A/3/48. 39. "Persecution of Jews in the Polish Army," 21 April 1944, JIA, H3A/43/75. 40. This is not to say that there are not items of value here and there in his work. In particular,

his discovery of a copy of Stefan Korboniski's message of 26 July 1942 regarding the beginning of the mass deportation from the Warsaw ghetto adds an important element to the ongoing discussion of the Polish role in transmitting information about the Holocaust to the west. Unfortunately, it requires an expert to tell the substance from the froth.



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passim)./" When this situation, and the limited possibilities for Poles to come to the assistance of their Jewish fellow citizens to which it gave rise, are taken into account, he argues, Polish behavior toward the Jews must be regarded as essentially praiseworthy.42 Jewish behavior toward the Poles was, on the other hand, in his view essentially negative. This version of events represents to his mind "a more objective and balanced view" of the relations between Poles and Jews during World War II than historians on the subject have hitherto produced.

Unfortunately, Lukas's account can be regarded as "balanced" only in the sense that it strives to equalize the Poles' and Jews' shares in the moral capital that is the stock in trade of so many of history's victims. This, however, cannot be what historians mean when they speak of "objectivity," for it makes the test of objectivity the content of a thesis rather than the nature and use of the evidence marshaled in its support. Totally dispas- sionate treatment of any historical subject is difficult in the most distant of matters, let alone in one so timely and emotionally charged as Polish-Jewish relations. The historian who investigattes this subject must, therefore, make special effort to expose himself to as wide a range of source materials, representing as many different points of view on both sides of the relationship, as possible. He must also be critically aware of his own emotioal stake in the outcome of his research, as well as of the way in which this unavoidably influences the meaning he gives his sources, and consciously strive to overcome its effects. It is according to his success in these two tasks, not according to the conclusions reached in investigation, that a historian's objectivity must ultimately be judged. For in the end, as Peter Loewenberg has noted, "distortion arises from the failure to account for the observer in each act of knowledge; it is particularly marked where the historical material mobilizes unconscious anxiety which is then defended against by unconscious denial, obviation, misunderstanding, ambiguity, reversal, or even neglect of material."43

According to these tests, Richard Lukas has failed in his quest for objectivity. Until he is capable of passing them, he would be well advised not only to avoid speaking so apodictically about Polish-Jewish relations, but also to refrain from gratuitous comments about the relative suitability of history and fiction as means of expression for those who disagree with his views.

41. Space does not permit an extended discussion of whether or not this appraisal of German intentions toward the Poles is valid. Lukas cites some evidence in its support, but he has hardly undertaken a systematic analysis of German attitudes toward Poland based upon research in German archives. Such an analysis, which would be an invaluable contribution to the overall understanding of World War -II, has yet to be made. In the meantime, a preliminary investigation has turned up evidence that, although from time to time the idea of launching a total murder campaign against the Poles similar to that being carried out against the Jews was broached in Nazi circles, it was invariably rejected on ideological grounds. See Uriel Tal, "On the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide," Yad Vashem Studies 13 (1979): 38-41.

42. It should be pointed out that Jewish historians, among them those with whose work Lukas is familiar, have in fact taken these items into consideration in their discussions of Polish-Jewish relations. See, for example, Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective, p. 59; Yisrael Gutman, "HaPolanim nochah Gerush Yehudei Varshah beKayits 1942," in Nisyonot uFe'ulot Hatsalah biTekufat haSho'ah, ed. Yisrael Gutman (Jerusalem, 1976), pp. 331-332. Lukas lists both works (the latter in English translation) in his bibliography.

43. Peter Loewenberg, Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach (Berkeley, 1985), p. 12. Loewenberg continues, "The identification of subject with object calls, not for denial and defensive maneuvers, but for a conscious policy of rational management and exploitation in the service of objectivity" (p. 13).



Poles, Jews, and Historical Objectivity

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