Survivors: Warsaw under Nazi Occupation

It is undoubtedly a thankless task to deal with the history of Warsaw in World War II as a doctoral student: the literature and also the source collections fill many bookshelves, and very few sources have been turned over less than twice. The most important studies of everyday life by Tomasz Szarota or Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, for example, are far more than mere factographic reconstructions, and Warsaw is probably indeed the best-researched occupied European capital. The fact that it was in many respects the exception rather than the rule with regard to German acts of violence, however, makes it particularly interesting, not least when looking at intra-ethnic conflicts—a topic particularly popular in recent years and greatly advanced by Warsaw's Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów.Jadwiga Biskupska has taken on "the story of a handful of politically conscious Poles and the world they lost under occupation" (p. 1). She writes the history of the intelligentsia, the educated elite beyond administrative or economic top positions, which distinguished itself primarily through its self-reflection and handed-down writings. Of course, Polish self-assertion is not an entirely new topic,1 and particularly the years after the fall of the Iron Curtain led to a rediscovery of the many conservative thinkers and resistance fighters, who were so widely ignored during the communist era. And so we encounter a tableau of contemporary heroes such as Jan Karski, Witold Pilecki, Stefan Starzyński, Aleksander Kamiński, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, and even Karol Wojtyła (the later Pope John Paul II) —all of them as individuals well researched and widely revered. The most notable exception from this national pantheon is Władysław Studnicki, a Germanophile, who already during World War I had sympathized with the occupiers and now in vain tried to convince them of a joint undertaking against Soviet Russia.An unbiased, sober investigation of the commonalities of these individuals is therefore a meritorious thing. However, with so much already being published about the conservative intelligentsia, the book mostly becomes a great transfer and synthesis achievement. Biskupska has fought her way through the jungle of literature, absorbing not only Polish and English, but also many German titles. Often, though, she merely references them without critically discussing interpretations—for example, the controversial question of whether there was a German Sonderweg in the East as early as World War I (and, relatedly, whether the inhabitants of Warsaw had to assume the struggle for Lebensraum and total war as early as the siege in 1939—pp. 20–22 and 49), or the relevance of the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, for the Holocaust (at which the participants were by no means informed about the extermination camps Sobibór and Treblinka, because both were neither under construction nor planned, p. 118).But such points are not crucial in assessing Biskupska's study, which has a thematically broader yet narrower spatial focus. The chronological structure begins in 1939 with the German Einsatzgruppen's murders of the Polish elites and later their mass imprisonment in Warsaw's Pawiak jail, which served as a kind of catalyst for the processes of understanding among the Warsaw intelligentsia and at the same time became a symbol of the murderous Nazi policy towards Poland. The very generally and sometimes superficially depicted fate of the Warsaw Ghetto is mostly relevant in the sense that Catholic Poles were concerned with it: the passing on of information, the shock at the genocide, the not necessarily comprehensive help for the Jewish fellow citizens, and last but not least their resistance in 1943 as a model for their own activities. When the Jews went over to open revolt, the Polish intelligentsia still relied mostly on cultural self-assertion, for example in the form of underground classes or universities; and they relied on the Catholic faith as a spiritual and national anchor. As is well known, the uprising in the "Aryan" part of Warsaw did not occur until the summer of 1944, although the underground of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) developed some military activity against the occupiers before then.In all this, Biskupska is not concerned with the well-known real history, but with the behavior of the intelligentsia, their perceptions and interpretations. In the end, however, it is a bit unclear what the actual novelty value of the book should be: scholars of Warsaw or even of Poland during World War II will be familiar with almost everything said, for little is drawn from the many archives visited, simply because so much has already been established in the literature. As a recapitulation of the literature and overview of Polish Warsaw in World War II, which is also brilliantly written, the study does an excellent job, but again with the limitation that new interpretations or even perspectives are only rarely presented.