The lat­est book by Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty his­to­ri­an Jan Gross has already cre­at­ed a great deal of con­tro­ver­sy and con­ster­na­tion in Poland. Like his ear­li­er works, Fear: Anti-Semi­tism in Poland After Auschwitz and Neigh­bors: The Destruc­tion of the Jew­ish Com­mu­ni­ty in Jed­wab­ne, Poland, that exam­ine the 1941 Jed­wab­ne mas­sacre of Jews by their Pol­ish neigh­bors, Gross’s new book is intend­ed to pro­voke Poles into think­ing about their own role dur­ing the Shoah in a more crit­i­cal man­ner. He chal­lenges the dom­i­nant Pol­ish his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tive that empha­sizes Pol­ish suf­fer­ing and vic­tim­hood at the hands of the Nazis and char­ac­ter­izes Jed­wab­ne and the 1946 Kielce pogrom as mar­gin­al inci­dents com­mit­ted by demor­al­ized Poles. In this nar­ra­tive, Poles are depict­ed as self­less and hero­ic, fight­ing off the Ger­mans and when pos­si­ble aid­ing the vul­ner­a­ble Jews. Anti-Semi­tism in Poland is also min­i­mized. Gross has a dif­fer­ent and more nuanced view and this short, pow­er­ful book con­tin­ues the cor­rec­tion.

The start­ing point is a haunt­ing, grainy black-and-white pho­to­graph that shows a group of peas­ants and some sol­diers or mili­ti­a­men – dig­gers – atop a moun­tain of ash­es at Tre­blin­ka, where some 800,000 Jews were gassed and cre­mat­ed between July 1942 and Octo­ber 1943. Bones and skulls have been placed in an order­ly dis­play in front of the group. The peas­ants have been dig­ging through the remains of the vic­tims, hop­ing, expect­ing to find gold and pre­cious stones, giv­en the pre­vail­ing stereo­type extant in Poland asso­ci­at­ing Jews with mon­ey or gold.

This sim­ple image links two cen­tral aspects of the Holo­caust: the mass mur­der of Euro­pean Jews and the accom­pa­ny­ing loot­ing of their prop­er­ty, even after death and cre­ma­tion. The pil­lag­ing of Jew­ish prop­er­ty was not lim­it­ed to gov­ern­ments, con­quer­ing armies, Swiss banks, insur­ance com­pa­nies, or muse­ums. It was per­pe­trat­ed by local peo­ple, such as those depict­ed in the pho­to­graph. And as Gross points out, these digs, these ​“gold­en har­vests,” went on for decades at all the death camps. Local peo­ple par­took in it open­ly and in open coop­er­a­tion. They were not iso­lat­ed events per­pe­trat­ed by mar­gin­al­ized Poles. Gold­en Har­vest thus con­veys a deep­er truth about what hap­pened dur­ing the Shoah. Gross believes that the local pop­u­la­tions liv­ing along­side the Jews for cen­turies by and large appre­ci­at­ed the Nazi pol­i­cy of cleans­ing the area of Jews and tried to enrich them­selves in the process. The pho­to­graph and the his­to­ry he weaves around it that include dis­cus­sions of ​“Jew-hunts” in the coun­try­side, the black­mail­ers or schmalt­zown­icks who extort­ed mon­ey from des­per­ate Jews, the pil­lag­ing of Jew­ish prop­er­ty, shel­ter­ing Jews for exor­bi­tant pay­ment, all illus­trate a lev­el of indif­fer­ence if not enthu­si­asm for the Jew­ish tragedy. The geno­cide against the Jews almost suc­ceed­ed because it was greet­ed with a kind of con­sent in coun­tries that had been con­quered by the Nazis.

The authors have writ­ten a mov­ing, lyri­cal, and heart­break­ing book that evokes the com­plex­i­ty, as well as the inti­ma­cy, of the Shoah and con­tributes to the ongo­ing rethink­ing of Pol­ish-Jew­ish inter­ac­tions before and dur­ing the Holo­caust. It is high­ly recommended.