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Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940-1945
Though the Nazis forced most of Warsaw’s Jews into the city’s infamous ghetto during World War II, some 28,000 Jews either hid and never entered the Warsaw Ghetto or escaped from it. This book―the first detailed treatment of Jewish escape and hiding during the Holocaust―tells the dramatic story of the hidden Jews of Warsaw.
Gunnar S. Paulsson shows that after the 1942 deportations nearly a quarter of the ghetto’s remaining Jews managed to escape. Once in hiding, connected by elaborate networks of which Poles, Germans, and the 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 the 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 the Jews, most stayed neutral; and that escape and hiding happened spontaneously, without much help from either the Polish or the Jewish underground. He suggests that the Jewish leadership was wrong to dismiss the possibility of escape, staking everything on a hopeless uprising. Paulsson’s engrossing book offers a new perspective on Jewish honor and Holocaust history.
Gunnar S. Paulsson shows that after the 1942 deportations nearly a quarter of the ghetto’s remaining Jews managed to escape. Once in hiding, connected by elaborate networks of which Poles, Germans, and the 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 the 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 the Jews, most stayed neutral; and that escape and hiding happened spontaneously, without much help from either the Polish or the Jewish underground. He suggests that the Jewish leadership was wrong to dismiss the possibility of escape, staking everything on a hopeless uprising. Paulsson’s engrossing book offers a new perspective on Jewish honor and Holocaust history.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 14, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 31, 2010
A word of warning: this book is very heavy on numbers, and it is not a good book to read if you don't already have a good grounding on the Holocaust in Poland and the Warsaw situation in particular. Dr. Paulsson, a professional historian and the son of a Holocaust survivor from Warsaw, uses statistical analysis of the available sources to arrive at some surprising conclusions. He leads the reader every step of the way through his reasoning, so you can see why he thinks as he did, and I came to agree with his ideas.
Most of the memoirs and other available literature about the Holocaust in Warsaw say it was incredibly difficult to survive in hiding on the Aryan side and pretty much pointless to try, unless you had money, connections and a "good" (that is, non-Jewish) appearance. However, Dr. Paulsson demonstrates that survival on the Aryan side was not nearly as impossible as the Jews believed. He calculates that about 28,000 Jews went into hiding in Aryan Warsaw. Of these, about 11,500 survived the war. 8,000 of the Jews that died were either killed in the Hotel Polski scheme in the summer of 1944 (where the Nazis tricked 3,500 Jews into turning themselves in) or in the Warsaw Uprising in August/September 1944 (where 25% of the city's population as a whole was killed, mostly in military action). If you discount those 8,000, nearly 70% of the Jews hiding on the Aryan side would have survived the war. And even the actual survival rate of 41% is much better than I've seen listed in other books ("almost all" or "five out of six" hidden Jews killed etc) and much, MUCH better than the survival rate within the ghetto itself, where about 99% of the occupants died. But the memoir writers and other scholars never sat down and actually analyzed the numbers; their estimates are more a matter of perception, and as Dr. Paulsson indicates that perception was seriously skewed out of fear.
As he points out, for the survival rate to be as high as it was, the Aryan population cannot have been nearly as vicious as most survivors and scholars make it out to be. Certainly the small number of monsters who denounced Jews and sent them to their deaths racked up a huge mortality rate; however, it appears that most of the Polish Warsovians, while antisemitic in principle, were not willing to actually murder individual people, or turn them in to the Germans which they knew was much the same thing. Dr. Paulsson gives a demonstration of this by relating a story from one of the memoirs he studied, where a Jewish woman on a crowded tram was recognized by a former classmate who called, "Jew! Catch the Jew!" She jumped off the tram and ran away and no one tried to stop her. Assuming that the crowd contained 50 people (a pretty conservative estimate), and working off the Jewish perception that the vast majority of Poles would have had them arrested if they had known their true identity, the fact that 49 of the people present did not try to hinder the woman's flight is nothing short of miraculous. Yet it happened again and again and again throughout the city; similar incidents are mentioned in many survivors' memoirs. This simply would not have been possible if the Polish population had been as rabidly prejudiced as the survivors believed.
Although the book can be repetitive at times (Dr. Paulsson repeats his "dog didn't bark in the nighttime" analogy to the point of tediousness) and the number-crunching doesn't exactly make gripping reading (particularly in the last chapter, which Paulsson actually advises readers to skip if they don't care for statistics), I think this is a very fine work of history that all scholars of the Holocaust in Poland should read. It goes a long way towards correcting many myths and misconceptions about what was going on in Warsaw during that time.
Most of the memoirs and other available literature about the Holocaust in Warsaw say it was incredibly difficult to survive in hiding on the Aryan side and pretty much pointless to try, unless you had money, connections and a "good" (that is, non-Jewish) appearance. However, Dr. Paulsson demonstrates that survival on the Aryan side was not nearly as impossible as the Jews believed. He calculates that about 28,000 Jews went into hiding in Aryan Warsaw. Of these, about 11,500 survived the war. 8,000 of the Jews that died were either killed in the Hotel Polski scheme in the summer of 1944 (where the Nazis tricked 3,500 Jews into turning themselves in) or in the Warsaw Uprising in August/September 1944 (where 25% of the city's population as a whole was killed, mostly in military action). If you discount those 8,000, nearly 70% of the Jews hiding on the Aryan side would have survived the war. And even the actual survival rate of 41% is much better than I've seen listed in other books ("almost all" or "five out of six" hidden Jews killed etc) and much, MUCH better than the survival rate within the ghetto itself, where about 99% of the occupants died. But the memoir writers and other scholars never sat down and actually analyzed the numbers; their estimates are more a matter of perception, and as Dr. Paulsson indicates that perception was seriously skewed out of fear.
As he points out, for the survival rate to be as high as it was, the Aryan population cannot have been nearly as vicious as most survivors and scholars make it out to be. Certainly the small number of monsters who denounced Jews and sent them to their deaths racked up a huge mortality rate; however, it appears that most of the Polish Warsovians, while antisemitic in principle, were not willing to actually murder individual people, or turn them in to the Germans which they knew was much the same thing. Dr. Paulsson gives a demonstration of this by relating a story from one of the memoirs he studied, where a Jewish woman on a crowded tram was recognized by a former classmate who called, "Jew! Catch the Jew!" She jumped off the tram and ran away and no one tried to stop her. Assuming that the crowd contained 50 people (a pretty conservative estimate), and working off the Jewish perception that the vast majority of Poles would have had them arrested if they had known their true identity, the fact that 49 of the people present did not try to hinder the woman's flight is nothing short of miraculous. Yet it happened again and again and again throughout the city; similar incidents are mentioned in many survivors' memoirs. This simply would not have been possible if the Polish population had been as rabidly prejudiced as the survivors believed.
Although the book can be repetitive at times (Dr. Paulsson repeats his "dog didn't bark in the nighttime" analogy to the point of tediousness) and the number-crunching doesn't exactly make gripping reading (particularly in the last chapter, which Paulsson actually advises readers to skip if they don't care for statistics), I think this is a very fine work of history that all scholars of the Holocaust in Poland should read. It goes a long way towards correcting many myths and misconceptions about what was going on in Warsaw during that time.
May 22, 2014
This is, at times, a very dry read but in the end well worth persevering with. I have rated the book highly because of its impact on me; its informative content and even-handed yet critical analysis of a very difficult and sensitive topic. It looks at the Jewish experience in Poland during the Nazi Regime, and Warsaw quite specifically;
"Ninety-eight percent of the Jewish population of Warsaw perished in the Second World War, together with one-quarter of the Polish population: in all, some 720,000 souls, a number that dwarfs the destruction of life in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined and is undoubtedly the greatest slaughter perpetrated within a single city in human history. The flight of twenty-odd thousand Jews from the Warsaw ghetto seems by comparison a negligible phenomenon... Yet it was probably the greatest mass escape from confinement in history..."
Paulsson goes on to investigate that escape, the difficulties that faced the Jews in the world outside the ghetto and the circumstances, and substantial network of support, that made Warsaw "the largest clandestine community of Jews anywhere in Europe, in fact probably the largest community of people that has lived in hiding in any city, ever." Half of those who fled perished, but so did 99 percent of those who did not flee.
A particularly touchy element is that of antisemitism amongst the Poles. Polish society had a large number of antisemites because of its Patriotic-Catholic tradition and the growth of a Nationalistic Right-wing movement prior to the re-establishment of the Polish State in 1918. I was, however, surprised to find how separate the Jewish community was considering how long it had been established in the old Polish Commonwealth; there were problems with language, behaviour and "cultural separateness". They weren't, on the whole, just that nice bunch of people next door who apart from eating kosher are no different than us; most of them lived very separate, and often isolated, lives. It is hardly surprising that Poles and Jews eyed each other suspiciously and each thought the worst of each other. This is something that comes across quite powerfully in the study; none of the resistance groups (Polish or Jewish) comes out smelling of roses - the real heroes are those who acted (Jew or Pole) despite their reservations, for whatever reasons. Even those Poles who stood and said nothing contributed towards the preservation of those endangered lives; "... if there was more antisemitism in Poland than in many other countries, there was also less collaboration."
This is an excellent study of the plight of the Jews in this tragic period. I would recommend that, if nothing else, all historians should read the superb conclusion.
"Ninety-eight percent of the Jewish population of Warsaw perished in the Second World War, together with one-quarter of the Polish population: in all, some 720,000 souls, a number that dwarfs the destruction of life in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined and is undoubtedly the greatest slaughter perpetrated within a single city in human history. The flight of twenty-odd thousand Jews from the Warsaw ghetto seems by comparison a negligible phenomenon... Yet it was probably the greatest mass escape from confinement in history..."
Paulsson goes on to investigate that escape, the difficulties that faced the Jews in the world outside the ghetto and the circumstances, and substantial network of support, that made Warsaw "the largest clandestine community of Jews anywhere in Europe, in fact probably the largest community of people that has lived in hiding in any city, ever." Half of those who fled perished, but so did 99 percent of those who did not flee.
A particularly touchy element is that of antisemitism amongst the Poles. Polish society had a large number of antisemites because of its Patriotic-Catholic tradition and the growth of a Nationalistic Right-wing movement prior to the re-establishment of the Polish State in 1918. I was, however, surprised to find how separate the Jewish community was considering how long it had been established in the old Polish Commonwealth; there were problems with language, behaviour and "cultural separateness". They weren't, on the whole, just that nice bunch of people next door who apart from eating kosher are no different than us; most of them lived very separate, and often isolated, lives. It is hardly surprising that Poles and Jews eyed each other suspiciously and each thought the worst of each other. This is something that comes across quite powerfully in the study; none of the resistance groups (Polish or Jewish) comes out smelling of roses - the real heroes are those who acted (Jew or Pole) despite their reservations, for whatever reasons. Even those Poles who stood and said nothing contributed towards the preservation of those endangered lives; "... if there was more antisemitism in Poland than in many other countries, there was also less collaboration."
This is an excellent study of the plight of the Jews in this tragic period. I would recommend that, if nothing else, all historians should read the superb conclusion.
June 26, 2015
A Look at Secret City – The Hidden Jews of Warsaw
January 3, 2014 by Elizabeth Rynecki
[original blog review posted here: http://rynecki.org/a-look-at-secret-c...]
My bookshelf and reading lists are filled with Holocaust memoirs. In part I read these books because I have an insatiable curiosity about World War Two survivor chronicles and in part because I seek to fill in the ellipses of my family’s own story of survival. While many are well written, they are very hard for me to read. I begin to worry about where I might hide or how I might provide for my family if presented with similar circumstances, and although rationally I can tell myself how unlikely those circumstances are, there are tragic modern examples of genocide to demonstrate that similar horrors are not beyond the realm of possibility. I can’t read camp survivor stories late in the evening – the chills and nightmares they give me are too real as my overactive imagination reflects on the fates that befell most of my family as well as countless others. But I continue to read them at other times, finding occasional nuggets of stories, information, or context that give me a better glimpse into my family’s story. I did get a small trove of personal history in the memoir my grandfather George hid in the trunk of his car before he died in 1992. Though the manuscript was an incredible, and personal historical account, I was still unable to find a reason- a person, a story, a turning point, about why they survived when so many did not. From what I have pieced together, they survived due to an unlikely, but powerful combination of factors, including a solid command of the Polish language (and particularly not having a strong Yiddish accent), bravado, and access to money. In the end, even with those advantages, they had to get lucky- my grandfather spent the latter part of the war in prison, with the Nazis possibly thinking he might be an agent of some sort rather than a Jew, and was in the process of being marched to a concentration camp when the war ended.
Though my father agrees with my theory as to why our family survived when so many did not, I was never able to check my hypothesis with another source until recently, when I read Gunnar S. Paulsson’s Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940-1945. It’s easier to say what kind of book Secret City is not than to say to what it is. Partly that’s because it’s really unlike any other WWII book I’ve ever read. His book, based on his doctoral thesis, is not a memoir and is not a chronology or history of life in Warsaw during the war. Rather, it uses memoirs and draws upon testimonies and historical records to show how Jewish Poles were able to survive in the city of Warsaw (not the Ghetto) without much help from the Polish or Jewish underground. It is an in-depth examination that at times I found daunting. But I kept reading because within his anecdotes and statistics I saw more concrete outlines of my father’s story. By reading this book I finally felt like I had found an author whom if I said, “my father and his parents were Polish Jews who survived living on the Aryan side” would simply nod his head and know what I meant. I finally feel like I’ve found the book that not so much tells his story, but explains how it could happen.
There’s another reason I like Paulsson’s book quite a bit, and that’s because he addresses another part of my family’s story I have struggled to comprehend – the story of my great-grandfather’s decision to bundle up and hide his paintings, approximately 800 works, in and around Warsaw with “people he thought he could trust.” This phrase has become embedded in my telling the story of my journey of searching for the art in part because it’s part of my family’s story, but also because the choice to trust others always seemed like a unique component of my family’s tale. Imagine, then, my thrill to discover in Paulsson’s book a section titled “Other forms of Robbery and Exploitation,” about people who hid personal property with friends, hoping that they would care for it, protect it, and eventually return it when the war was over. He writes:
To avoid being left destitute by blackmailers, or to keep their property from being “Aryanized” by the Germans, many Jews left goods for safekeeping with friendly Poles, or signed assets over on the understanding that they would be returned after the war. But this left them open to more genteel forms of robbery. Many people who would never have dreamt of accosting anyone on the street and demanding money, let alone collaborating with the police, nevertheless found reasons why they should simply appropriate the property that had been left in their care. In most cases the rightful owners had perished in Treblinka, and the trustees could therefore help themselves with a relatively clear conscience. Who would know or care after all? And were they not entitled to some compensation for the inconvenience and the risks they had run? (page 152)
While this opening section suggests that there were those who did help themselves to the property when it did not seem that the original owners would return, Paulsson does not believe that robbery by ones friends or contacts was all that common. He concludes his three pages on the topic with the sentence, “Thus, the silence of most memoirs on the subject should be taken again as evidence that extreme behavior was the exception rather than the rule, that in most cases people whom Jews had chosen specifically because they believed them to be honest and decent behaved as one would expect, that is to say, honestly and decently.” Of course, with most of the Jews dead, and the remnants scattered, it’s very hard to say what happened in many cases. Clearly, life in the aftermath of the Second World War was complicated. Honestly, Warsaw was mostly destroyed in the war, and people were focused on finding their surviving families and rebuilding their lives. In my own case, it’s not clear how many of the bundles of my great-grandfather’s work survived, although given the numbers of paintings I know about, it had to be at least 3 or 4. Gathering up fine art and returning it to the Rynecki family would not have been easy nor would it have been anywhere near the top of people’s to-do-lists. I think the truth is complicated, so I approach my need to find my great-grandfather’s lost paintings in much the same way I approach my father’s story of survival. While I know I’ll never be able to collect all my great-grandfather’s work, I may be able to discover most of what was there.
Paulsson ends his book by noting the remarkable achievement involved in successfully hiding thousands of Jews in Warsaw between 1940 and 1945. He concludes that it “casts a welcome and entirely unfamiliar light on the Holocaust as a whole…” (page 248) which makes it worthy of further “reflection and study.” I wholeheartedly agree, not only because I think it will help to further elucidate how people like my father and his parents survived, but because it also reflects my thinking about the value of my quest for my great-grandfather’s missing paintings. Moshe Rynecki’s body of work is unique for its combination of artistic aesthetic and subject matter, but I search for more pieces not just because they survived, and not just to see more of Moshe’s work, but because his pieces tell a larger story of a world vanished under the weight of occupation and subsequent Holocaust. From my perspective, that too is worthy of further reflection and study.
January 3, 2014 by Elizabeth Rynecki
[original blog review posted here: http://rynecki.org/a-look-at-secret-c...]
My bookshelf and reading lists are filled with Holocaust memoirs. In part I read these books because I have an insatiable curiosity about World War Two survivor chronicles and in part because I seek to fill in the ellipses of my family’s own story of survival. While many are well written, they are very hard for me to read. I begin to worry about where I might hide or how I might provide for my family if presented with similar circumstances, and although rationally I can tell myself how unlikely those circumstances are, there are tragic modern examples of genocide to demonstrate that similar horrors are not beyond the realm of possibility. I can’t read camp survivor stories late in the evening – the chills and nightmares they give me are too real as my overactive imagination reflects on the fates that befell most of my family as well as countless others. But I continue to read them at other times, finding occasional nuggets of stories, information, or context that give me a better glimpse into my family’s story. I did get a small trove of personal history in the memoir my grandfather George hid in the trunk of his car before he died in 1992. Though the manuscript was an incredible, and personal historical account, I was still unable to find a reason- a person, a story, a turning point, about why they survived when so many did not. From what I have pieced together, they survived due to an unlikely, but powerful combination of factors, including a solid command of the Polish language (and particularly not having a strong Yiddish accent), bravado, and access to money. In the end, even with those advantages, they had to get lucky- my grandfather spent the latter part of the war in prison, with the Nazis possibly thinking he might be an agent of some sort rather than a Jew, and was in the process of being marched to a concentration camp when the war ended.
Though my father agrees with my theory as to why our family survived when so many did not, I was never able to check my hypothesis with another source until recently, when I read Gunnar S. Paulsson’s Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940-1945. It’s easier to say what kind of book Secret City is not than to say to what it is. Partly that’s because it’s really unlike any other WWII book I’ve ever read. His book, based on his doctoral thesis, is not a memoir and is not a chronology or history of life in Warsaw during the war. Rather, it uses memoirs and draws upon testimonies and historical records to show how Jewish Poles were able to survive in the city of Warsaw (not the Ghetto) without much help from the Polish or Jewish underground. It is an in-depth examination that at times I found daunting. But I kept reading because within his anecdotes and statistics I saw more concrete outlines of my father’s story. By reading this book I finally felt like I had found an author whom if I said, “my father and his parents were Polish Jews who survived living on the Aryan side” would simply nod his head and know what I meant. I finally feel like I’ve found the book that not so much tells his story, but explains how it could happen.
There’s another reason I like Paulsson’s book quite a bit, and that’s because he addresses another part of my family’s story I have struggled to comprehend – the story of my great-grandfather’s decision to bundle up and hide his paintings, approximately 800 works, in and around Warsaw with “people he thought he could trust.” This phrase has become embedded in my telling the story of my journey of searching for the art in part because it’s part of my family’s story, but also because the choice to trust others always seemed like a unique component of my family’s tale. Imagine, then, my thrill to discover in Paulsson’s book a section titled “Other forms of Robbery and Exploitation,” about people who hid personal property with friends, hoping that they would care for it, protect it, and eventually return it when the war was over. He writes:
To avoid being left destitute by blackmailers, or to keep their property from being “Aryanized” by the Germans, many Jews left goods for safekeeping with friendly Poles, or signed assets over on the understanding that they would be returned after the war. But this left them open to more genteel forms of robbery. Many people who would never have dreamt of accosting anyone on the street and demanding money, let alone collaborating with the police, nevertheless found reasons why they should simply appropriate the property that had been left in their care. In most cases the rightful owners had perished in Treblinka, and the trustees could therefore help themselves with a relatively clear conscience. Who would know or care after all? And were they not entitled to some compensation for the inconvenience and the risks they had run? (page 152)
While this opening section suggests that there were those who did help themselves to the property when it did not seem that the original owners would return, Paulsson does not believe that robbery by ones friends or contacts was all that common. He concludes his three pages on the topic with the sentence, “Thus, the silence of most memoirs on the subject should be taken again as evidence that extreme behavior was the exception rather than the rule, that in most cases people whom Jews had chosen specifically because they believed them to be honest and decent behaved as one would expect, that is to say, honestly and decently.” Of course, with most of the Jews dead, and the remnants scattered, it’s very hard to say what happened in many cases. Clearly, life in the aftermath of the Second World War was complicated. Honestly, Warsaw was mostly destroyed in the war, and people were focused on finding their surviving families and rebuilding their lives. In my own case, it’s not clear how many of the bundles of my great-grandfather’s work survived, although given the numbers of paintings I know about, it had to be at least 3 or 4. Gathering up fine art and returning it to the Rynecki family would not have been easy nor would it have been anywhere near the top of people’s to-do-lists. I think the truth is complicated, so I approach my need to find my great-grandfather’s lost paintings in much the same way I approach my father’s story of survival. While I know I’ll never be able to collect all my great-grandfather’s work, I may be able to discover most of what was there.
Paulsson ends his book by noting the remarkable achievement involved in successfully hiding thousands of Jews in Warsaw between 1940 and 1945. He concludes that it “casts a welcome and entirely unfamiliar light on the Holocaust as a whole…” (page 248) which makes it worthy of further “reflection and study.” I wholeheartedly agree, not only because I think it will help to further elucidate how people like my father and his parents survived, but because it also reflects my thinking about the value of my quest for my great-grandfather’s missing paintings. Moshe Rynecki’s body of work is unique for its combination of artistic aesthetic and subject matter, but I search for more pieces not just because they survived, and not just to see more of Moshe’s work, but because his pieces tell a larger story of a world vanished under the weight of occupation and subsequent Holocaust. From my perspective, that too is worthy of further reflection and study.
January 31, 2022
3.5 stars
Quite a dense read- it was a good thing the inter-library loan lasted so long, because this took some focus and patience to get through it. I'm guessing this would find a place on the reading list for higher-level college courses about European or WWII history. I chose it because I've been interested in the topic of the Warsaw Ghetto and the "Secret City" since learning about Irena Sendler. (spoiler alert: There was very little about her specifically in this book.)
An undertone that runs throughout the book is the author's trying to challenge, and even disprove -- maybe the nicer words are to clarify and correct --- some assumptions about the situation in Warsaw from 1940-1945. Some of them: that it was foolish that anyone would try to escape the ghetto and live in hiding, or the flipside and painfully question in hindsight - why did not more attempt it; that most poles were on the lookout to rat out the Jews among them; clarification of how crowded the ghetto and escapee housing situations actually were... some misinformation that the author claims many historians have taken at face value and failed to fact check -- then Hollywood or writers of historical fiction have exaggerated. It was crowded, yes, but seven bodies per room was the exception -- not the rule. Certainly, horrific living situations existed but it is also true that stable and comfortable (except the part about living in fear and a nearly full-time lie) "melinas" were secured by many Jews attempting to live on the "Aryan side."
I thought the book did a balanced job of sharing both sides of the coin, the unbelievable brutality and the worst of human nature, and also the kindness and humanity of the majority of Poles in Warsaw, a secret city that the author estimates was between 70,000 to 90,000 individuals, one-twelfth of the population.
There were, mercifully, some safe cafes and place to gather and escape the stress of their reality. One of the things I liked most about this book were the many first-hand accounts of a variety of situations. (There weren't many, but it was a nice break from the rest of the book.) That was eye-opening and was a way to see things as they were, in the middle of the conflict, and added a human-element to all of the fact-checking that is clearly the main objective of this book. There were a lot of pages with data and charts, lines of comparison, that were beyond my minimal efforts to comprehend :) I glossed over things here and there to arrive at the summary and conclusions. My wish to someday visit Poland is as strong as ever.
Quite a dense read- it was a good thing the inter-library loan lasted so long, because this took some focus and patience to get through it. I'm guessing this would find a place on the reading list for higher-level college courses about European or WWII history. I chose it because I've been interested in the topic of the Warsaw Ghetto and the "Secret City" since learning about Irena Sendler. (spoiler alert: There was very little about her specifically in this book.)
An undertone that runs throughout the book is the author's trying to challenge, and even disprove -- maybe the nicer words are to clarify and correct --- some assumptions about the situation in Warsaw from 1940-1945. Some of them: that it was foolish that anyone would try to escape the ghetto and live in hiding, or the flipside and painfully question in hindsight - why did not more attempt it; that most poles were on the lookout to rat out the Jews among them; clarification of how crowded the ghetto and escapee housing situations actually were... some misinformation that the author claims many historians have taken at face value and failed to fact check -- then Hollywood or writers of historical fiction have exaggerated. It was crowded, yes, but seven bodies per room was the exception -- not the rule. Certainly, horrific living situations existed but it is also true that stable and comfortable (except the part about living in fear and a nearly full-time lie) "melinas" were secured by many Jews attempting to live on the "Aryan side."
I thought the book did a balanced job of sharing both sides of the coin, the unbelievable brutality and the worst of human nature, and also the kindness and humanity of the majority of Poles in Warsaw, a secret city that the author estimates was between 70,000 to 90,000 individuals, one-twelfth of the population.
There were, mercifully, some safe cafes and place to gather and escape the stress of their reality. One of the things I liked most about this book were the many first-hand accounts of a variety of situations. (There weren't many, but it was a nice break from the rest of the book.) That was eye-opening and was a way to see things as they were, in the middle of the conflict, and added a human-element to all of the fact-checking that is clearly the main objective of this book. There were a lot of pages with data and charts, lines of comparison, that were beyond my minimal efforts to comprehend :) I glossed over things here and there to arrive at the summary and conclusions. My wish to someday visit Poland is as strong as ever.
June 15, 2021
Just finished Secret City by Gunnar Paulsson (248 pages, 2002).
Yale University Press does a decent job with a review / recap (se below). Should the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto risked everyting for a chance on the "Aryan side" of Warsaw? Paulsson studies the tactic of "evasion" on a massive scale as means of survival.
Although some of the statistical modeling and analyses techniques were of questionable foundation I found the book informative while also challenging many old assumptions about what drove Ghetto inhabitants to make the decisions they made. Well sourced leading to a lot of new study ideas.
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/97803...
Yale University Press does a decent job with a review / recap (se below). Should the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto risked everyting for a chance on the "Aryan side" of Warsaw? Paulsson studies the tactic of "evasion" on a massive scale as means of survival.
Although some of the statistical modeling and analyses techniques were of questionable foundation I found the book informative while also challenging many old assumptions about what drove Ghetto inhabitants to make the decisions they made. Well sourced leading to a lot of new study ideas.
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/97803...
October 2, 2025
As other reviewers have already stated, this is not a leisurely read. Those well-steeped in WWII history, especially the Holocaust, will find this a scholarly addition to the many published works on the Holocaust.
Want to read
April 18, 2011This book is mentioned in The Zookeeper's Wife. It's a study of Jews who lived on the Aryan side of WWII Warsaw.
September 10, 2011
Many Jews lived in an underground movement in Warsaw, Poland, during World War II. This is the story of their struggle to survive.
September 28, 2014
Hard read, very academic, astonishing quotes from dairies, memoirs, etc
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews