REVIEWS 155 Friedrich, Klaus-Peter. Der nationalsozialistische Judenmord und das polnisch jiidische Verhdltnisim Diskurs derpolnischenUntergrundpresse (ig42-ig44). Mit einem Vorwort von Karol Sauerland. Materialien und Studien zur Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, 15. Herder-Institut, Marburg, 2006. ix + 246 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 33.00 (paperback). No subject ismore guaranteed to setpulses racing and voices raised in anger than the contentious one of Polish attitudes and actions towards theJews of Poland during theNazi occupation of that country in the Second World War. For those years, the lines of this difficult subject are easily drawn: towhat extent did endemic Polish antisemitism manifest itselfduring thewar, and if sowas this really a factor in themanner inwhich theNazi authorities killed nearly threemillion Polish Jews? Were the Poles able or willing to help the Nazi-oppressed Jews, and was what theydid sufficient? And ifnot, why not? Klaus-Peter Friedrich's meticulous studyof thePolish wartime underground press and itsresponses to theJewish question inPoland then isguaranteed to stoke the fires of controversy even further.This is because of the evidence he has uncovered of the extremes ? and some of it really is extreme ? of Polish anti-Jewish sentiment at a time when the Nazi authorities were methodically gassing Polish Jews in their extermination camps. Friedrich's study isbased on over 1,000 examples of thePolish underground press during the war, and represents the views of the whole gamut of Polish political and religious resistance to theGermans: The Home Army; the Government [in-Exile] Delegates; theLeft; theRight; the Sanacja Group, i.e. the Pilsudski clique; theNational Catholics; the Peasant Movement; and the Communists. Usefully, Friedrich begins with a survey of those groups and theirpublished views on theJews. The centre-piece of this study is the reaction of the Polish press to the elimination of the Warsaw Jewish ghetto in the summer and autumn of 1942, and the January and April 1943 anti-German uprisings in the ghetto. Yet whatever the topic, the comments quoted always need to be contextualized within a number of consistent anti-Jewish themes that frame the overall subject: Polish Jews, like theGermans and Russians, are the perennial enemy of the Poles; Polish Jews collaborated with the Communist authorities in anti Polish policies in eastern Poland after itsannexation by Soviet Russia on 17 September 1939; after thewar therewill be no place forJews in Poland; the Poles need to think of themselves firstand foremost, especially since the fate of theJews under Nazism could foreshadow the same for the Poles. Yet as Friedrich underlines, since the Poles (correctly) regarded themselves as victims of Nazi terror ? at the Nuremberg trials itwas asserted that almost one-third of Poles died under Nazism ? they inevitably regarded the fate of Polish Jews under Nazism exclusively from thepoint of view of theirown forms ofmartyrdom. It should also be remembered that Poles laboured under the German threat of execution ifcaught assistingJews. Not that such attitudesmeant that feelings of empathy or sympathy for the Jewish fate under theNazis were altogether missing. Time and again reports on the clearing out of theWarsaw ghetto in the summer of 1942 and the transport of theJews to be gassed at Treblinka (from their very beginning, I56 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 2009 reports were carried on the mass murder of Jews at named places such as Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor and Treblinka) prompted extensive comments on the 'bestiality' and cruelty of theGermans. A socialist publica tion,WRN, issued a call on 28 September 1942 that itwas 'the duty of every Pole to help the victims of German bestiality' (p. 93). However, a report in the 14October 1942 issue of Rzeczpospolita Polska (ThePolish Republic) of the Government-in-Exile Delegates summed up precisely the kinds of thinking to be found across the board of the underground press at all times and which are fully represented throughout this book. Admitting that that therewas not a party or person inPoland that did not consider theJews as the principal and most threatening enemy of thePoles, nevertheless, in the circumstances, Poles should react to theJews in the sense 'that they are humans' (p. 63). Interestingly, while there was much criticism of the 'passivity' of the Warsaw Jews in the summer of 1942when the ghetto was being...