An astonishing and heartbreaking study of the Polish Holocaust survivors who returned home only to face continued violence and anti-Semitism at the hands of their neighbors “[ Fear ] culminates in so keen a shock that even a student of the Jewish tragedy during World War II cannot fail to feel it.”—Elie Wiesel FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD Poland suffered an exceedingly brutal Nazi occupation during the Second World War, in which 90 percent of the country’s three and a half million Jews perished. Yet despite this unprecedented calamity, Jewish Holocaust survivors returning to their hometowns in Poland after the war were further subjected to terror and bloodshed. The deadliest peacetime pogrom in twentieth-century Europe took place in the Polish town of Kielce on July 4, 1946. In Fear, Jan T. Gross addresses a vexing question: How was this possible? At the center of his investigation is a detailed reconstruction of the Kielce pogrom and how ordinary Poles responded to the spectacle of Jews being murdered by their fellow citizens. Anti-Semitism, Gross argues, became a common currency between the Communist regime and a society in which many were complicit in the Nazi campaign of plunder and murder—and for whom the Jewish survivors were a standing reproach. For more than half a century, the fate of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Poland was cloaked in guilt and shame. Writing with passion, brilliance, and fierce clarity, Jan T. Gross brings to light a truth that must never be ignored. Praise for Fear “That a civilized nation could have descended so low . . . such behavior must be documented, remembered, discussed. This Gross does, intelligently and exhaustively.” — The New York Times Book Review “Gripping . . . an especially powerful and, yes, painful reading experience . . . illuminating and searing.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review “Gross tells a devastating story. . . . One can only hope that this important book will make a difference.” — Boston Sunday Globe “A masterful work that sheds necessary light on a tragic and often-ignored aspect of postwar history.” — Booklist (starred review) “Astonishing . . . Gross supplies impeccable documentation.” —Baltimore Sun “Compelling . . . Gross builds a meticulous case.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) Jan T. Gross is the author of the widely acclaimed Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He teaches history at Princeton University, where he is the Norman B. Tomlinson ’16 and ’48 Professor of War and Society. 1 Poland Abandoned Wars in Europe have simultaneously been periods of social revolutions, and the Second World War is a good case in point.1 Indeed, one could argue that in Eastern Europe the entire decade from 1939 to 1948—despite the clear divide of 1945, which saw the defeat of the Third Reich—was one continuous epoch of radical transformation toward a totalitarian model of society, imposed first by the Nazis and then by the Soviets.2 While the war, it is true, had an enormous impact on every European society, producing both a new map of Europe and a new paradigm of European politics, Poland’s case was unique among the belligerent countries because of the scale of devastation and upheaval under the impact of Nazi occupation from 1939 until 1945 (supplemented by the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland from September 1939 until June 1941).* As a *On August 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union concluded a treaty of nonaggression, known in historiography as the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact after the names of the foreign ministers who signed the document in Moscow. A week later, on September 1, 1939, World War II began. As agreed between the signatories, the Red Army marched into Poland soon after the German attack. In the secret protocols attached to the August treaty, the Soviet Union reserved for itself a “sphere of interests” including Bessarabia, Estonia, Latvia, and the better part of Poland. The original demarcation line between the Nazi and Soviet zones of occupation—splitting the capital city, Warsaw, in half along the Vistula River—appeared in the September 25, 1939, issue of the main Soviet newspaper, Pravda. On September 28 in Moscow, the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty was signed and a somewhat modified territorial division of recent conquests was agreed upon. Stalin settled for only half of Poland’s territory and drew the frontier eastward, result of the war, the country suffered an unprecedented demographic catastrophe. It lost its minorities—Jews in the Holocaust, and Ukrainians and Germans following border shifts and population movements after the war. A third of its urban residents were missing at war’s end. Poland’s elites in all walks of life were wiped out. More than half of its lawyers were no more