Around the time of the mass liquidations of ghettos across occupied-Poland in 1942, thousands of Polish Jews fled to the homes of former gentile neighbours, friends, colleagues, as well as strangers, in search of a precious and necessary resource: shelter. Once these liquidations were deemed complete and the majority of Polish Jews had been transported to their deaths at the extermination camps, remaining alive was itself a crime for Polish Jews. One common survival strategy was to hide in the homes of Polish gentiles, as other options, such as hiding in the open, necessitated further preparation; false documents, fluency in Polish, and connections in the gentile community, for instance. Drawing upon diaries, postwar testimonies, and oral interviews with Jews who experienced part of the occupation in hiding with Polish gentiles, this thesis highlights the multifaceted nature of relations between Jews and Poles in hiding, and argues that the behaviour of Polish aid-providers during the Holocaust in Poland unsettles distinctions between perpetrators, rescuers, and bystanders. Significantly, such categories have been rigidly maintained in much of the existing literature on Polish aid-providers. The individual chapters are devoted to the prevalence of payment for shelter, particularly in non-currency means such as property exchanges and services, and coercive, nonconsensual sexual relations in hiding. The final chapter focuses upon the region of Sokołów County and illustrates the constitutive and contextual differences between short and long-term shelter, the denunciation and murder of Jews in hiding by their Polish helpers, and the “unrighteous” actions of those declared Righteous Among the Nations. Each chapter traces the diversity of threats faced by Jews in hiding. To date, scholars have emphasized the great threat posed by the Germans gendarmes and the Polish “blue” police to Jews in hiding, and neglected the internal threats. The testimonies discussed in this thesis expose the multiple ways in which gentile aid-providers could endanger Jews in hiding.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/39371 |
| Date | 03 July 2019 |
| Creators | Brethour, Miranda |
| Contributors | Grabowski, Jan |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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