Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz - Content

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Gross begins the English version of Fear with a chapter summarizing the devastation of Poland during World War II, including the physical destruction of Poland's Jews; the initial partition of the country between Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler; the subsequent Nazi crimes; the Katyn massacre of Polish army officers by the Soviets; the Warsaw uprising of 1944; the Soviet decision to postpone their advance until the German army had defeated the Polish Armia Krajowa, which resulted in the total destruction of Warsaw and the abandonment of Poland by Britain and America at the Yalta Conference, knowingly consigning it to Soviet communist domination.

Gross estimates that approximately 250,000 Polish Jews returned home at the end of the war. In his chapter "The Unwelcoming of Jewish Survivors," Gross describes how returning Polish Jews were subjected to a wave of violence and hostility, with up to 1500 murdered either individually or in pogroms. Often they would find their property occupied by non-Jewish Poles or taken over by the communist government, which nationalized much of the Polish economy. According to Gross, the expropriation of Jewish property continued a trend that occurred throughout the war years, with non-Jewish Poles acquiring the property of Polish Jews who were sent off to extermination camps, and in some instances, carrying out the killings themselves. Gross describes how the looting of property extended to digging through the ashes of Treblinka for gold fillings. He discusses the alienation, hostile atmosphere, and violence experienced by some Jews and the inability of Polish elites to prevent it. Gross makes additional claims about the Kielce pogrom, arguing that the crime was initiated not by a mob, but by the police, and that it involved people from every walk of life except the highest level of government officials in the city.

According to a Piast Institute's online summary, Gross concludes by writing that some Poles, especially in rural areas, participated in the Nazi wartime effort to annihilate and despoil the Jews, and this was the cause of postwar anti-Semitism in Poland. The fear of punishment for their own crimes, according to Gross, was what drove them to continue attacking Jews after the war. Historian David Engel describes the following quote as a "summation of basic thesis:"

We must seek the reasons for the novel, virulent quality of postwar anti-Semitism in Poland not in collective hallucinations nor in prewar attitudes, but in actual experiences acquired during the war years.... Living Jews embodied the massive failure of character and reason on the part of their Polish neighbors and constituted by mere presence both a reminder and a threat that they might need to account for themselves.

The Polish version of Fear differed from its English language original because Gross assumed that his Polish readers were familiar with the tragic history of wartime Poland. The first chapter of the English version was replaced by a chapter documenting Polish awareness of the German Nazi genocide of the Jews. Fear includes several photographs taken by Julia Pirotte.