Katarzyna Person. Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service during the Nazi Occupation.

Abstract

Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service during the Nazi Occupation addresses a taboo subject—one that almost disappeared from the postwar public domain, which was dominated by the history of uprisings in ghettos and camps (153). Though participation by the ghetto police in the Holocaust was not mentioned in the postwar memoirs of many survivors, the opposite was true in the wartime writing of ghetto inhabitants (156). It remains a controversial subject that Katarzyna Person thoroughly examines for the first time. The author documents the truth in the tradition and words of Emanuel Ringelblum. She quotes Ringlebaum, who tried to document the Jewish experience in the ghetto “however bitter it would be” (77). And according to Ringelblum, the bitter reality of the ghetto included the existence of the Jewish Order Service (JOS), which was seen as a collaborationist organization that betrayed its own community by carrying out German orders and taking part in the killing of Jews. Person outlines the origin and development of the JOS, introducing its leading figures and stressing the diversity of their attitudes and motivations. Clarifying that their participation in murder was the result of German policy, Person aims to discover precisely how they got there: how people who belonged to the victimized group became part of the perpetrators’ machinery. Jews were lured to the JOS with privileges: exemption from deportation, health care (including vaccination against typhus), protection against forced labor, apartment requisition, a chance to leave the ghetto temporarily (27, 90).