Book Review: The Polish Underground

In Poland, the history of the Second World War is closely tied up with the sense of national identity and is contested as in few places on earth. A director of museum about the war has been sacked because his exhibition doesn't toe the current party line (he, in turn, is suing the authorities) and it's a criminal offence to say the Polish nation had any involvement in or collusion with the Nazis' murder of Jews. 

Joshua Zimmerman's book was first published in 2015, but could not have greater relevance and importance today. The challenge he has taken on is heroic: to unpick decades of polemic and propaganda and to offer up a sober, dispassionate evaluation of the central organisation of the Polish resistance to Nazism, the Polish Underground. 

For those seeking to lay blame, claim exoneration, or to reduce the complexities of historial reality to political slogans, the result is of course inconvenient. Zimmerman sets out his stall thus: "to the question of whether or not the Polish Underground was antisemitic, the answer can only be a varied one."

The explanation for this is relatively simple- the social and political background of those who made up the Polish Underground spanned the full spectrum. Some factions of the Underground, such as the Cadre Strike Battalion, were extremely hostile to Jews and even collaborated with the Nazis in hunting for Jews in hiding. At the other extreme, the Undergound set up Zegota (The Council for Aid to the Jews), one of the largest and best-funded networks anywhere supporting Jews struggling for survival. Zegota's most famous representative was Irena Sandler, who saved around 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto- a paragon of "righteous gentile" conduct.