Katarzyna Person, Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service During the Nazi Occupation (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2021), 232 pages.
An early testimony in the Yad Vashem Archives tells of a Jewish policeman from the Białystok Ghetto, who performed his duty to the best of his abilities, as long as he was tasked with maintaining order in the Ghetto. But at the beginning of the first Aktion, when he was ordered to look for Jews in hiding and hand them over to the Germans, that policeman decided that he refused to carry out the order and stayed at home. He knew that this choice could endanger his life and the lives of his family, but nevertheless decided that he was not willing to dip his hands in this despicable job. Respect, conscience, and the feeling of humanity should remain above all – he thought. At the end of the Aktion, the policeman was fired from his job, was taken to work in forced labor, and was eventually murdered in Treblinka with his family.
I recalled this story as I read the new book by Dr. Katarzyna Person, one of the leading historians who currently works in Poland on the field of Holocaust Studies. Person has been working at the Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny; ŻIH) in Warsaw for many years. Her book deals with the Jewish police, a topic that is ostensibly written about and is well known, but it seems that there is much more to reveal and investigate. Person took on this important task and examined the experiences of the Jewish policemen in the Warsaw Ghetto during the war years and even after it from various and innovative angles. She analyzes the subject, using extensive skillful quotes, memoirs, and interviews. The book consists of ten chapters and is also based on testimonies from the policemen themselves and other Ghetto inmates.
On 16 November 1940, the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto were closed to its 380,000 inhabitants. The masses of refugees who flocked to Warsaw from elsewhere increased the number of inhabitants to about 450,000, and over time tens of thousands perished from poor conditions, famine, and disease. About two months earlier, Adam Czerniaków, a 59-year-old engineer, had been elected to head the Judenrat (Jewish Council) of the Jewish community in Warsaw, and his job was to mediate between the demands of the Germans and the needs of the Jews. On the day of his appointment, the Germans ordered him to establish a Jewish police force as a department of the Judenrat.
