The Pazifizierungsaktion as a Catalyst of Anti-Jewish Violence. A Study in the Social Dynamics of Fear

Abstract

Recently the historian Christoph Dieckmann has pointed to what he regards as an ongoing weakness in scholarship on the Holocaust. While historians have made tremendous advances in understanding and reconstructing the Jewish experience of genocide, he states, the same cannot be said for their approach to the non-Jewish world. This observation may serve as a fitting point of departure into the subject examined here: peasant violence towards Jews who sought shelter in the Polish countryside between 1942 and 1945. In Polish historiography, there have been several publications in the last 15 years dealing with Polish society and the Holocaust, and these have done a great deal to bring the perspective of the Polish-Jewish victim into the national consciousness. A dominant motif in this reappraisal has been a stress on the experience of Jewish ‘fear’ during and after the war, a trend recently modified by the historian Marcin Zaremba, who has used an umbrella concept, the ‘great fear’, to integrate the social anxieties of various ethnic and social groups in the immediate post-war period in Poland. Drawing from a comprehensive set of sources that survived for the vincity of Radomyśl Wielki, this article will reconstruct the context of ‘Polish’fear in more depth and track its fluctuations within a broader canvas of ‘social processes and social dynamics’.

I thank Irene Eber, Stephan Stach and Natalia Aleksiun for their feedback on drafts of this article.