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There But For The Grace of God Go I

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Growing up, I often read fiction about the Holocaust and wondered, "What if I was alive then? What if I was in Poland or Russia or Germany? What would I do? How would I react? Would I be a survivor or a victim?"

The books I read were all fiction. Or, they were accounts after the fact with the exception of "The Diary of Anne Frank". They weren't primary historical sources such as the letters in Richard Hollander's book.

Hollander's book answered my questions in many ways. His relatives who wrote the letters that make up his book all just lived their everyday lives as I live mine. You adapt to whatever surrounds you and most people are not prescient enough and willing enough to embrace change to ultimately survive unless they are incredibly lucky. To be a survivor means one has to be the recipient of a lot of luck in your favor.

Unfortunately, Hollander's relatives didn't survive. Neither did the rest of the approximately 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. For their sakes, we must all remain vigiliant against evil, Facism, totalitarianism and cults of personality.

The Situation Facing Polish Jews Immediately Before and After the German-Soviet Conquest of Poland

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The correspondence from Polish Jews living during the early phases of the German occupation of Poland has been well covered by other reviewers, and, instead of repeating them, I focus on the commentaries.

Christopher Browning gives the reader a good overview of the early years of the Krakow (Cracow) Ghetto. Nechama Tec does also, while also reaching back to prewar Poland and to the Germans' extermination of the Jews in later years. However, her analysis has a number of omissions and biases. To begin with, Tec mentions the prewar Przytyk pogrom (p. 63, 74) in a rather superficial manner. For a full description of this event, see the detailed English-language Peczkis review of Pogrom? Zajscia polsko-zydowskie w Przytyku 9 marca 1936 r. : Mity, Fakty, Dokumenty.

Tec repeats the familiar one-sided portrayal of pre-WWII Polish Jews and discrimination. Let's instead provide the context and perspective. Poles from peasant backgrounds were at a decisive disadvantage when competing with Jews for entry into universities, establishing of small businesses, etc. Jews, in contrast, had been well established in these endeavors for many generations. Using modern parlance, the formal and informal discriminatory practices enacted by Poles against Jews were forms of affirmative action designed to level the playing field. With these in action, the average Jew still remained wealthier than the average Pole. The Jewish share of university student populations, starting at 21.5% and eventually bottoming out at 8.2% (p. 64), was even then only slightly less than the Jewish share of Poland's population (10%).

According to Tec, Jewish investigator Szymon Datner estimated that about 100,000 Jews fled the ghettos to try to live among the Poles during the Holocaust, and, of these, 80,000 survived the war. (p. 76). Another cited Jewish author, Weinryb, suggested a figure of 40,000--60,000 Jewish survivors. Unfortunately, the significance of these figures is not explained. Many Holocaust materials cite a figure of 5% overall survival rate of Polish Jews, and claim this as proof of Polish indifference or hostility to the survival of Jews. The 5% figure is correct, but is used disingenuously. The 100,000 Jews were the only ones in a position to receive substantial Polish help, and they sharply contrast with the remaining 3,300,000 Polish Jews who stayed in the ghettos and perished almost to a person at the hands of the Germans and their Ukrainian and Baltic collaborators.

The 40%--80% survival rate of the 100,000 Jewish fugitives compares well with the Jewish survival rates in western European countries, where there were no ghettos, where the Jews were assimilated and relatively easy to disguise or hide, and where the German occupation was much milder. It also follows that Polish benefactors of Jews had to be relatively common and Polish denouncers or killers of Jews very rare--bearing in mind that the average fugitive Jew had to "run the gauntlet" of many Poles that he/she encountered, the fact that any eventual Jewish survivor benefited from a succession of Poles, and a single Polish denouncer or killer of Jews could eliminate many potential survivors.

Were benefactors rare and denouncers common, the 100,000 figure would've translated to a near-0% survival rate, not 40-80%. Finally, an unknown fraction of the 20%-60% of fugitive Jews who perished did so from Poles who were simply afraid of the draconian German reprisals, and from non-Polish causes entirely (suicide, wartime misadventures, belatedly caught directly by Germans, denounced by Polish-speaking German (Volksdeutsche), Ukrainian, or Jewish informers, etc.).

Hollander's father fought hard to try to save his family stateside

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Richard S. Hollander was cleaning his parents attic after their sudden tragic deaths in 1986 - what he found was life changing as he came across letters from a family he never knew he had, written over forty years earlier. "Every Day Lasts a Year: A Jewish Family's Correspondence from Poland" shares with the world Hollander's depressing discoveries, of his family trapped in Cracow, Poland, from November 1939 to December 1941. Each day was under the most extraordinary pain and stress, as Hollander's father fought hard to try to save his family stateside. Edited by a team of Richard S. Hollander (President of Milbrook Communications in Baltimore), Christopher R. Browning (Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), and Nechama Tec (Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Connecticut at Stamford), "Every Day Lasts a Year: A Jewish Family's Correspondence from Poland" will prove to be a vital pick for many Holocaust Studies libraries and for anyone who wants a great set of primary sources for the atrocity.

Interesting look at common family during the Holocaust

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"Every Day Lasts a Year" is an interesting look at the correspondence of the Hollander family from Poland during the Holocaust. It's a valuable resource because there isn't very much correspondence remaining from typical Jews from WW II. Most of their letters simply did not survive, just as they themselves probably did not survive the Nazi onslaught against the Jews.

The letters are put in context by three valuable essays. One, written by a relative of Joseph Hollander, isn't very well written but does provide some context to what Hollander tried to do to get himself and his family into the United States and what he tried to do to find them when he returned to Europe with the U.S. Army. The essay by historian Christopher Browning is particularly valuable because it details the conditions Jews lived under in the Jewish ghetto of Cracow, Poland where Hollander's family resided. The essay paints a picture of strict Nazi oversight of the Jews, which accounts for why many of the letters do not detail much detail concerning deportations and other horrible things the Nazis were doing in the Jewish ghetto.

The letters themselves are fairly unremarkable, but that's also what makes them special. They show what a normal Jewish family was concerned with during such trying times and how hard they tried to get out of their circumstances, even pushing Joseph Hollander for Nicaraguan citizenship long past the time when it would have done any good.

A glimpse into life under the holocaust.

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For all that we may learn about the holocaust, it is quite rare that we get to hear the actual voices of those who lived under its spectre in a personal tone. What we have here is a unique, nearly complete set of correspondence from a man's family, who remained in Poland after he moved to the U.S.

The letters in themselves portray some sense of everyday life at the time, while the carefully unobtrusive contextualization from the editors provide good insight and context.

It's touching and informative and an interestingly touching book for it gives a sense of what life was like for Jews living at that time and in that place, something which may be all but unimaginable for us.