Poland: "Many called Jews worse than Nazis"

I previously brought other quotes from this review of the book "The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939-1945".  I focus here on the antisemitic aspects of the Polish underground, but the article also brings examples to the contrary. 

Via Haaretz:

With Polish Jewish-tensions soaring, a new book delves into the heart of that divide with an eye toward reconciliation.

(...)

What he discovered is that they greatly differed depending on location, unit and person. Sometimes when going through officers’ reports, Zimmerman would see a word that alerted him that perhaps the author’s attitude was different than the norm.

“I would see, ‘Unfortunately, most people here are happy to see that Jews are gone,’” Zimmerman notes. “So you could tell that the person writing the report wasn’t an anti-Semite.”

(...)

But not all chapters paint as glowing a picture of Poles. Chapter 10 takes a very critical look at those Home Army commanders who committed real crimes against humanity. Their accounts are shocking and disturbing, told in graphic detail, attesting to how easily it was to turn entire units against Jews, even among those who weren’t openly anti-Semitic before the war. “They were all too eager to kill entire villages of Jews out of some misplaced sense of fulfilling a moral obligation to rid Poland of Jews,” says Zimmerman. “Many called Jews worse than Nazis. And yet, at the same time, in a different region, there are Jewish platoons fighting alongside Polish ones.”

In other words, there was great variation among the units.

read more