This chapter lays out key questions and concepts in the book. It discusses the author’s concept, the atrocity of hunger, the intentional starvation of a group through the denial of access to food, and it includes more than just the embodied experience of starvation: the physical and mental suffering that humans undergo due to the physiological effects of starvation, as well as the transformation and breakdown of families, communities, and individuals whose lives and core beliefs are shaped by starvation. It is also the process as experienced by individuals, households, and communities as they move from food insecurity to a state of starvation. It outlines that the coping mechanisms employed by the Jews during this experience provide a window into their everyday life during the Holocaust. This chapter lays out the role of food access as a key factor of survival and frames this question squarely within the framework of genocidal famine. It lays out the differences between the three cities under consideration: Lodz, Warsaw, and Krakow.

The rise of right-wing populism, which followed the 2010 Smolensk catastrophe and laid the groundwork for the country’s recent shift towards illiberal democracy, coincided with a surge in the use of religious imagery. Catholic symbols thus came to dominate mainstream expressions of national pride and belonging. The conflict around the so-called “Smolensk cross” planted in front of the Presidential Palace in Warsaw and for six months fiercely defended by a group of the late President Kaczyński’s supporters provides an entry point to investigate the populist instrumentalization of Catholic symbols. The Smolensk cross defenders, protesting against the new, democratically elected, liberal president, Bronisław Komorowski, harnessed the symbol to frame an essentially partisan conflict in terms of a Manichean fight between good and evil. At the same time, pro-secularists, who opposed the presence of the cross at the seat of the country’s executive power, subversively hijacked the symbol to unsettle and provoke, enabling a carnivalesque “rite of reversal.”

Set against the background of the last, and the most tragic, nineteenth-century Polish insurrection and the patriotic fever that accompanied it, the story of how the cross became a political symbol in Poland opens with the figure of the Jewish defender of the cross, Michał Landy, shot dead while carrying a crucifix during an anti-tsarist demonstration in 1861. After Landy’s death, the cross was first used to voice protest, mobilize action, and convey a strictly political vision – in this case, that of an interethnic alliance of the East-Central European nations subjugated by the tsarist regime rising in a joint struggle for freedom, equality, and emancipation.

Chapter 5, “Information Wars,” is the opening case study of four intelligentsia-built resistance systems, which consider how the intelligentsia responded to Nazi persecution with projects bent on maintaining national traditions and rebuilding a Polish state. It examines the one that undergirds the rest: underground information creation and trafficking that kept the elite connected and funneled news into and out of the city. In response to the closure of Polish-language press, radio bookstores, and libraries, a number of educated Poles created an underground world of secret newsletters and journals to keep the city informed about occupier behavior and the circumstances of the wider war. This project involved entangled networks of individuals who were brutally punished if caught, and the work of writing, editing, couriering, and reading underground press initiated many Varsovians into anti-Nazi “conspiracies.” Information sourced in the occupied city was not merely for local consumption but was painstakingly smuggled out by a sprawling network of Polish and international couriers toting encrypted information to the states of the Grand Alliance. This chapter argues that the ability of Poles in Warsaw to counter Nazi propaganda narratives with their own information was essential to all later successful opposition.

Chapter 2, “The Killing Years,” explains the two-wave Nazi police genocide against the intelligentsia in 1939–1940, its fallout, and how these initial killing campaigns shaped the Nazi German occupation administration for Poland. German anti-intelligentsia campaigning was bloody but ultimately drove the resistance it attempted to thwart. The first campaign, codenamed Operation Tannenberg, was coordinated with the military campaign in 1939 but delayed in Warsaw because of the siege. Tannenberg went awry and was complicated by the circumstances of the invasion and incoming occupation. After Nazi Germany established a civilian occupation under general governor Hans Frank, Frank revived anti-intelligentsia killing with his new campaign, the Extraordinary Pacification Action (AB-Aktion). This campaign’s violence shocked Poles and provoked the resistance it was intended to achieve. This chapter argues that the two Nazi genocidal campaigns failed but shaped the nature of Nazi occupation administration, and encouraged the first violent Polish resistance in response.

Chapter 8, “Spoiling for A Fight: Armed Opposition,” begins a two-part examination of violent resistance and how, when, and why Poles embraced or rejected it. This discussion is deliberately postponed in the story, as much of the existing literature focuses on military resistance as a shorthand for resistance as a whole, which it was not. Polish military resistance efforts, initially launched by officers and soldiers of the Polish Army in hiding under occupation, remained fractured and hamstrung by vicious Nazi reprisals until 1942. Despite its danger, myriad groups organized around plans for insurrection, spanning the political spectrum from orthodox communists to the fascist far right, and including Polish-Jewish participation. After the destruction of many such initiatives and the merging and reformation of others, one increasingly grew in size and strength: the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) eventually dominated a chaotic resistance landscape through the support of the Western Allies. This chapter argues that violent resistance was initially a disorganized catastrophe, and only late in the occupation did a few surviving underground militaries achieve the ability to influence the Polish population or threaten the German occupiers.

Chapter 1, “Warsaw Besieged: September 1939,” describes the September 1939 siege of Warsaw during Case White (the September Campaign or Polish Defensive War) by the German Wehrmacht and Nazi SS personnel and the city’s eventual capitulation. The first of four chapters on how Nazi Germany dismantled the Polish state and nation for long-term occupation by targeting the Warsaw intelligentsia, the description of the siege frames the project. The military invasion revealed German brutality and weak Polish military performance, and provoked a Polish government evacuation crisis. The evacuation created chaos, ruptured Poles’ faith in their government, and triggered the creation of a Polish government-in-exile in western Europe far from occupied Warsaw. The people of Warsaw, led by Mayor Stefan Starzyński, coordinated military-civilian cooperative defense efforts, setting the tone for elite behavior during the coming occupation. This chapter argues that the siege-time cooperation was the foundational experience of the capital’s intelligentsia, and framed responses to the persecutions of the coming occupation.

Chapter 9, “Home Army on the Offensive: Violence in 1943-1944,” dissects mature intelligentsia military resistance. As the tide of war turned and the Germans endured their first battlefield defeats against the Soviet Union, the consolidated Home Army grew aggressive. Its most effective move was a 1943 assassination campaign targeting Wehrmacht officers, Nazi police, and German administration personnel called Operation Heads. Heads intimidated the Germans and shifted occupation policy. The Home Army’s perceived success and the advance of the Eastern Front toward Warsaw in 1944 convinced underground military leaders that they were facing their last opportunity to launch a city-wide insurrection. Their rebellion, now known as the Warsaw Uprising, failed. Remaining German personnel in the city were reinforced and crushed the insurrection, slaughtered civilians, and destroyed the city. This chapter argues that military conspiracy, like Catholic resistance, had its successes but was ultimately dependent on the international situation and could not secure the practical support of the Grand Alliance in the face of both German and Soviet opposition.

Chapter 7, “Matters of Faith: Catholic Intelligentsia and the Church,” asks how Catholics behaved in Warsaw and why. Roman Catholicism was the religion of the majority of Varsovians and had played an important role in the development of the Polish national project. In the absence of a Polish government, the Church provided a potential locus of authority for Poles. Warsaw’s priests drew particular negative attention from the Nazi occupation for their potential influence and they were viciously persecuted, imprisoned, and often sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. Nevertheless, leaders of the Church, from the pope in Rome to local bishops, were hesitant to provide guidance, support Nazi occupation, or encourage opposition to it. Despite the lack of a top-down Catholic policy, this chapter argues that individual priests and lay Catholic leaders were motivated by their religious faith to form everything from charities to a postwar clerical state. Crucial among Catholics was the question of the developing Holocaust and the role of Polish Jews in Polish Catholic society, which sharply divided them.

Chapter 3, “Pawiak Prison,” places a spotlight on the main institution used to control the intelligentsia and their behavior: Pawiak prison. Nearly 100,000 “political criminals” – resisting elites, or those suspected of resistance – were held and tortured there between 1939 and 1944. The Warsaw Gestapo, working for Hans Frank’s General Government administration, utilized the former tsarist prison as a holding facility for Poles suspected of resistance to the occupation. It became symbolic of Nazi terror and hostility to the Polish national project, despite being confined behind the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto from fall 1940 on. The experience of confinement, mistreatment, and interrogation within the prison galvanized opposition projects for those who survived the experience. Nazi paranoia about potential Polish resistance kept Pawiak full and constant overcrowding demanded solutions: the mass execution of many prisoners, prisoner transfer to concentration camps in Nazi Germany, and the opening of a new concentration camp at Auschwitz to the southwest as an overflow facility. This chapter argues that Pawiak was both symbol and microcosm of how Warsaw’s German civilian and police administration attempted to control the Polish intelligentsia and its potential resisters after the killing campaigns concluded.

Chapter 6, “School of Hard Knocks: Illegal Education,” considers the second great intelligentsia occupation success: illegal underground education. From fall 1939, the Nazi General Government administration closed schools, universities, seminaries, and conservatories that served Polish students, arresting and imprisoning teachers and professors. This was a deliberate German attempt to control Poles in the long term and ensure German control over Lebensraum in the Polish space, since Nazi plans intended to utilize Poles as unskilled laborers and wanted to deprive them of education and the opportunity for social advancement. Warsaw University and city high schools re-formed underground, and “illegal” education taught pupils from childhood into their twenties. Studying initiated young people into underground political conspiracy, exposing them to great danger. It also kept teachers and professors employed and trained a new Polish intelligentsia to replace those killed in the genocidal campaigns of 1939-1940. As occupation continued, teaching and studying increasingly became the purview of Polish women as more and more Polish men turned to violent resistance. Despite draconian punishments, underground education was one of the most important successes of the occupation.

Chapter 4, “The Warsaw Ghetto: A People Set Apart,” considers how Polish elites grappled with Jewish victimhood in their midst and differentiates between Nazi targeting of Polish elites and the better known targeting and murder of Polish Jews. It traces initial Nazi persecution of Warsaw’s Jewish community, ghettoization in 1940, persecution within the ghetto, and its liquidation to the death camp at Treblinka in 1942, and the outbreak of violent resistance in 1943. This is contextualized against Polish antisemitism before and during the war and particular Polish elite reactions to the developing Holocaust. A handful of intelligentsia figures who reacted strongly to antisemitic persecution in various ways demonstrate the complexity of Polish response to the Nazi Holocaust and how prewar and wartime antisemitism widened gulfs between ethnic Poles and the Polish-Jewish community. It argues that, because of a combination of targeted Nazi violence and native antisemitism, Polish elite response to Jewish persecution arose very late, typically only in 1943 with the outbreak of the ghetto uprisings, which captured the attention of resistance-minded Poles.

Poland’s loss of independence and the partition of its territory by the three neighbouring states (Russia, Austria and Prussia) had a significant influence on the development of musical life and institutions during the nineteenth century. In spite of some limitations, Polish theatres presented high artistic standards in Warsaw (Russian partition) and in Lviv (annexed by Austria). Krakow (part of the Austro-Hungarian empire) did not have a permanent opera stage, but the opera ensemble from Lviv was a frequent visitor.

From its first appearance on Polish stages, French opera – particularly the works of Meyerbeer and Massenet – was in competition with Italian works, as well as the German ones in the Prussian partition. Carmen was first staged in Warsaw in 1882, and then in Lviv and Krakow (both 1884). The libretto was translated into Polish, and translations of popular arias entered the repertoire of many soloists. This chapter will address the reception of Carmen in Poland, local and transnational influences on the circulation of operatic repertory and performance traditions, institutional collaboration and social and economic aspects of musical life at regional and European levels.

This chapter will show that although Warsaw is not a city readily associated with the global success of operetta, it was the place where operetta performances were not only popular but lucrative, and that they rivalled Vienna and Berlin with the quality of their productions and star-studded casts. Before World War I, operetta had no competition in Warsaw: it had publicity, stars, excellent productions, stunning stage sets and the latest lighting and stage equipment. Polish musicians, actors and directors had direct links with European theatres, and Warsaw was close to such operetta centres as Vienna, Berlin and Budapest. Warsaw operetta divas were celebrities adored by the public and critics alike. Some of them died leaving astronomical fortunes and lasting memories and recordings, some died tragically, and some died in complete oblivion. The chapter will look at the most significant operetta theatre not only in Warsaw but arguably in the whole of Poland, Teatr Nowosci, and some of the people who made it one of the city’s biggest attractions: Ludwik Sliwinski, Wiktoria Kawecka, Kazimira Niewiarowska, Jósef Redo and Lycina Messal.

This chapter examines the home leave granted to soldiers during the Second World War as a fundamental dimension of private life for millions of Germans in wartime. It explores the topic from a number of different perspectives. It outlines the regime’s policies and propaganda regarding home leave as a privilege, focusing on the regime’s goals and its conflicting impulses both to control the time men spent away from their military duties and to allow some degree of undisturbed privacy. The chapter then examines personal letters between home and front in order to explore the expectations and experiences relating to home leave on the part of the men on leave and their wives or girlfriends and families. Finally, it uses cases from military and civil courts to show instances of marital conflict and domestic violence associated with home leave.

This chapter uses space as an analytical category to examine the living situation of inmates of ghettoes in occupied Poland, exploring the efforts by Jewish ghetto residents to secure and uphold vestiges of privacy under the conditions of dangerous overcrowding imposed by the Nazi authorities. Drawing on personal letters and diaries kept by ghetto inmates, it distinguishes between the initial phase of ghettoisation, involving radical upheaval and shock for those involved, and a subsequent phase of temporary relative stability, in which ghetto inmates developed a variety of social practices for coping with privation, including the deprivation of privacy.