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Secret city: the hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940-1945

2003; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 41; Issue: 01 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5860/choice.41-0489

1943-5975

Gunnar S. Paulsson,

Polish-Jewish Holocaust Memory Studies

Although Nazis forced most of Warsaw's Jews into city's famous ghetto during World War II, some 28,000 Jews either hid and never entered Warsaw Ghetto, or escaped from it in what Gunnar S. Paulsson calls the greatest prison break in history. This book tell dramatic story of hidden Jews of Warsaw. Drawing on memoirs, diaries, testimonies, and records of Jewish and Polish organizations that helped fugitives, Paulsson shows that after 1942 deportations nearly a quarter of ghetto's remaining Jews managed to escape. Once in hiding, connected by elaborate networks of which Poles, Germans, and Jews themselves were largely unaware, they formed what can aptly be called a secret city. Paulsson challenges many established assumptions. He shows that despite appalling difficulties and dangers, many of these Jews survived; that much-reviled German, Polish and Jewish policemen, as well as Jewish converts and their families, were key in helping Jews escape; that though many more Poles helped than harmed Jews, most stayed neutral; and that escape and hiding happened spontaneously, without much help from either Polish or Jewish underground. He also suggests that Jewish leadership was wrong to dismiss possibility of escape, staking everything on a hopeless uprising.