Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

by Timothy Snyder

The creation of ghettos in the cities meant a basic transformation of the Polish landscape. Jews, who had been almost everywhere in prewar Poland, were now concentrated in a small number of urban neighborhoods. This made possible the theft by Germans of all of the Jewish property that they could take (as well as the rape of Jewish girls and women). The signal to the surrounding population was unambiguous. Jews had often been beyond the world of moral concern in interwar Poland; now they were beyond the reach of law and indeed the ambit of daily life. By the time ghettos were established and Jews deported to them, their Polish neighbors had been pauperized by German rule for about a year. This presumably made Poles more likely to steal from Jews when the opportunity arose. As was the case everywhere, people in Poland tended to hate those from whom they stole because they had stolen from them.