In the Shadow of the Facts

Summary

DAVID ENGEL's book In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Governmentin- Exile and the Jews, 1939–1942, appeared in 1987. Although the period since that date has seen a revival of Polish Jewish studies and a growing interest in the government-in-exile, the book has not yet received, as it should have, a review in Poland. It is without doubt one of the most important publications on the subject of Polish Jewish history, and is also of value to those interested in other aspects of the period of the Second World War. This does not mean that one has to accept all the author;s views. On the contrary, a number of the judgements he makes are, in my opinion, controversial, unsubstantiated, or biased. In this review I concentrate on those theses and arguments of the author with which I disagree. The areas on which my critique concentrates constitute only part of the book and do not affect my positive general assessment of it. It is certainly the product of extensive and impressive research. The author has worked in eleven Polish, Israeli, British, and American archives in London, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Stanford. His bibliography includes 40 periodicals, 103 collections of documents, and 141 other books and articles in six languages. One would be hard pressed to find another monograph on Polish Jewish history with such a wide source-base. The book's scholarly underpinning is also impressive: endnotes fill 90 pages while the index comprises another 17.

In the preface the author states that his subject is the thinking of Polish leaders in exile on the subject of Jews, and above all the political guidelines followed by the Polish government on this subject. The book is the first part of a work which embraces the war years, and Volume II, Facing a Holocaust, appeared in 1993. This first volume ends in December 1942 with the declaration of the Allied governments and the Polish statement which together revealed to the world the news that the Nazis were carrying out the extermination of Jews.

Chapter I describes Polish-Jewish relations in the interwar period. In preparing this chapter the author has relied mostly on the research of other historians, and he refers most often to the work of Emanuel Meltzer, Celia Heller, and above all Pawel Korzec.