In an ongoing effort to understand what led to the crime of the Holocaust and why Jews were its target, researchers across various disciplines do not relent in providing new insights. The book by Andrew Kornbluth adds more structure to this joint endeavor to comprehend the Shoah as it zooms in on the enthusiastic complicity of local communities in the genocide conducted by the Germans in occupied Poland. It is based on many years of comparative studies of court case records regarding the Decree of August 31, 1944. In the actual effect until 1956, the decree made it possible to put on trial persons suspected of collaboration with the Germans, including those helping Germans murder Jews. Already vastly explored in earlier works by researchers such as Jan T. Gross, Barbara Engelking, Jan Grabowski, and Dariusz Libionka, as well as in other forms of powerful narrative (e.g., Henryk Grynberg's Dziedzictwo [Heritage, 1993], Piotr Łoziński's Birthplace [1992], and Piotr Chrzan's Klezmer [2015]), the nature of Poles’ complicity in the Holocaust was further specified in Kornbluth's book. This, however, happened while attempting to accomplish another research objective declared by the author. The primary focus was to examine the August Decree trials (so-called “sierpniówki”) in view of Polish State's attempts to come to terms with the violent past in the wake of the war. In the author's opinion, the nature and results of that reckoning with the past have reverberated in social and political attitudes in the country ever since.Despite a certain frugality with words, many titles of the book's ten chapters speak volumes, as in: “The Country Without a Quisling?” (introduction), “There Are Many Cains Among Us,” “Crowdsourcing Genocide,” “The Math of Amnesty,” or “The Conspiracy of Memory” (conclusion). What adds to the overall effect are powerful subheadings and evocative turns of phrases, such as “genocidal conveyor belt” (referring to rural denunciation and capture, pp. 66, 203) or the one about Germans whose insufficient presence in the Polish countryside effectively prevented them from combing the forests: they were therefore “outsourcing their workaday business of genocide” (p. 6) to “ordinary men,” that is, this time Polish, not German, policemen, firefighters, and village headmen.Based on research of 400 trials (concerning territories under German-ruled Generalgouvernement in Poland), Kornbluth establishes clear differences in crimes committed by Poles against their fellow citizens, depending on whether the victims were Christian or Jews. Crimes against Christians were rather rare and meant to settle scores between individuals, with perpetrators facing ostracism and risking vengeance from the Polish Underground. That same Underground, as court documentation shows, often instigated crimes against Jews. According to Kornbluth, both indirect and direct crimes by Polish Christians against their Jewish fellow citizens (i.e., denunciation, or physical elimination during which Germans were not even present) had all the trappings of ethnic cleansing. They were frequently an organized effort and free of stigma at the time of its occurrence. It was only after the war when perpetrators and witnesses of those crimes had to confront the memory of not only the German, but Polish crimes on Jews: “whereas crimes against Poles drove people apart, crimes against Jews brought people together, had a solidarizing effect, Jewish property was redistributed, guilt apportioned among numerous participants” (pp. 39, 148).As demonstrated earlier by Christopher Browning, genocide carried out by the Germans was not always characterized by anonymity and the use of the most modern means. It was conducted from behind the desk as much as directly, by bakers or cigarette sellers pulling the trigger and looking the victim in the eye. Polish “ordinary men” were guilty of a crime of an incomparably smaller scale, but of more intimate nature as they often attacked their own neighbors and acquaintances, and with the so-called low-tech (killing) tools for daily use as a pitchfork, axe, or hammer.Both the book by Kornbluth and the August trials have three sets of actors: the tormentors, that is, Christian Poles persecuting Jewish Poles (but solely in the countryside, with the word szmalcownik and the “urban” context virtually and remarkably absent from the narrative), the judges passing sentences after the war and the victims, that is, Jews. Of those three groups, judges are given the most attention, with Jewish victims and witnesses receiving considerably less of it. Kornbluth justifies these proportions by pointing to the fact that Jewish witnesses hardly had their voice heard during the trials (important in the context of the current dispute over these sources). Following the pogrom in Kielce, Jews would flee Poland in the midst of trials and refuse to testify in Eastern Poland out of fear of being identified by somebody who had known them before the war. On top of that, they had no confidence in the justice system. One can decide whether they were right to be suspicious by reading the chapters dedicated to the judges and the challenges that awaited them in the aftermath of the war.Kornbluth aptly describes the amount of damage that the Polish justice system suffered as a result of the war. On top of destroyed judicial infrastructure (even the most basic legal bulletins were nowhere to be found) and a drastic shortage of staff (a third of the legal profession perished in the war; for example, Białystok had only one prewar judge left), there were also legal and procedural hurdles associated with decisions in cases without a precedent. There were no laws against denunciation or escorting Jews to a German police station (hence the necessity to find a way around the legality principle nullus crimes sine lege).That said, Kornbluth's key argument, which in my view requires a more structured formulation, is that of a “fiercely independent judiciary” (p. 269). According to the book's author, shortage of staff coupled with the sense of lack of political legitimacy, made the postwar justice system less than fussy when it came to judges. Prewar right-wingers were welcome, irrespective of their anti-Jewish bias and the impact thereof on verdicts in collaboration and accessory to murder cases. Taking a closer look at selected bios of judges involved in the August trials (most insightful passages concern the Jewish judges), Kornbluth challenges the popular belief that “all justice in the communist Poland was Stalinist justice” (p. 10), represented by Communist judges hellbent on eradicating the Underground by any means necessary (during secret and show trials).The August trials resulted in a string of death and prison sentences. However, the analysis of court records and its findings allowed Kornbluth to produce an impressively long list of reasons why the judges failed to make sure that proper justice was served after the war. The political profile of many of the judges was just the tip of the iceberg. Both the State and the public had very good reasons for not going all the way with facing up to the past, as well as for “codifying a variety of exculpatory myths about the war” (p. 267) that have held a tight grip on the Polish public opinion ever since. The Communist regime did not want to further alienate its subjects by pressing the issue of their role as perpetrators. The public would rather nurture the sense of victimhood than reflect upon itself, partly out of fear of the gruesome findings. In part, however, due to the lack of remorse and the still prevailing mechanism of scapegoating Jews for whatever misfortune befell them.The list of mitigating circumstances put forward by the defendants and some of the judges is certainly an important finding and the book's strong feature. It includes a figure of the Jew as “the threatening victim” and “Jews as criminals.” Prevalence of wartime violence was considered a mitigating factor too, which led to a diffusion of individual culpability whenever a group was involved in a violent act. In the trials, the Blue Police was often portrayed as “helpless pawns” devoid of agency; some went even further, arguing that it was better for Jews to be beaten up by Poles than by Germans, thus turning an act of violence into a “crime out of compassion.”The book on such a topic cannot paint but a thoroughly depressing picture of those times. Could it be the need to seek consolation (but not symmetry) or perhaps the awareness of multiple exceptions to the rule, both during and after the war, that makes a reader look for an occasional recognition, or at least some reference to whatever little good was done for the Jewish fellow citizens in those turbulent times? Due to its important message, suggestive and impressive rhetoric, it would be a great loss if the book distanced those who in historiography value grays over black and white.While that was not its primary objective, Kornbluth's book fills in the gaps in our growing knowledge of the nature of Christian next-door neighbors’ participation in the Nazi genocide. It does so by shedding light on the history of the postwar justice system in Poland. A pertinent input into an ongoing debate around Poland's efforts to grapple with the past (Kornbluth's calls for rethinking the term “collaboration”), the book offers also valuable contribution to comparative analysis of how the various postwar justice systems tried both high-profile war criminals and so-called ordinary people.1