When peace is a hawk not a dove

Researching the history of a destroyed Polish shtetl, I met some of its survivors, among them Julius, an assimilated Jew, a fearless horse-rider, who had served in the army. He went home to Konin in 1945, alone and hungry, his sole possession a torn blanket. A council official told him, ‘The Jews wanted the war and deserved to be punished.’ A former neighbour, more sympathetic, presented Julius with a pistol, advising him to leave town. He heeded the warning, as did other returning survivors. Three Jews in a nearby village had just been murdered.

Julius’s story could come from the pages of Jan Gross’s Fear, a chilling, deeply researched study of the fate awaiting Holocaust survivors in Poland in the immediate post-war years. Written by a Polish-born, part-Jewish professor of history at Princeton, it could provoke media attention, some praise and much hostility in Poland as did its predecessor, Neighbours. If anything, Fear is the greater indictment.