<i>Entangled in Fear: Everyday Terror in Poland, 1944–1947</i> [Wielka trwoga: Polska 1944–1947; Ludowa reakcja na kryzys]

“The atmosphere in which we are constantly living is loaded with electricity. The storm around us is over but, what is worse, it is still roaring inside us” (p. 205). This is how one journalist described the emotional state of Polish society in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Entangled in Fear is historian Marcin Zaremba's exploration of the combustible social atmosphere of postwar Poland, which the author frames under the umbrella concept of the “Great Fear” or Wielka trwoga. The long-awaited translation of the book into English comes ten years after its original publication in Polish in 2012. At the time, the author's sweeping and innovative historical synthesis appeared as something entirely new on the Polish historical scene, eliciting wide-ranging interest. A crucial background context was the book's relevance to Jan T. Gross's Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz: An Essay in Historical Interpretation, which first appeared in English in 2006, followed by an edited Polish version in 2008. As suggested by the title, Zaremba's concept of the Great Fear was in part a response to Gross's comparatively narrow understanding of postwar anti-Jewish violence, and a low-level disagreement with Gross regarding specific claims is scattered throughout the book. A decade later, Entangled in Fear has entered the canon as a foundational work in the social history of twentieth century Poland.The author borrows the notion of the Great Fear itself from Georges Lefebvre's study of peasant unrest on the eve of the French Revolution, namely the Great Fear (La Grande Peur) of 1789. Zaremba's three-year construct, the Great Fear of 1944–1947, spans the arrival of the Red Army in Polish territories in early 1944 to the January 1947 elections to the Sejm (p. 6). The decision for this analytical framing is rooted in the author's conviction that—though traditionally more applicable to less advanced societies than to modern ones—the popular frame of mind born of this period makes the term equally appropriate, considering the demographic peasant base of Polish society and the “civilizational regression” that took place during the occupation (pp. 17, 314). Though Zaremba sees postwar pogroms as “the last stage of the Holocaust,” he rejects their interpretation as “modern” (contra Zygmunt Bauman), describing the violence as largely “traditional” (pp. 7, 306).The overarching question of Entangled in Fear is how anti-Jewish pogroms inspired by the medieval myth of Jewish ritual murder could take root after the war and, of all times, in the aftermath of the Holocaust. As the author observes, the myth had pervaded popular outbursts of anti-Jewish violence in the cities of Rzeszów, Krakόw, Włocławek, Częstochowa, and Kielce in the years 1945–1946. Zaremba accepts the widespread estimate that the Kielce pogrom of July 4, 1946, the most lethal of all, claimed the lives of forty-two people, including three non-Jews (p. 302). In a more recent study Joanna Tokarska-Bakir has identified a higher death toll of forty-nine Jews and two non-Jews, though she admits that conclusive estimates are ultimately impossible due to incomplete documentation.1 In Zaremba's view, such pogroms were “the quintessence of the Great Fear” (p. 278). Each of the book's thirteen chapters represents a crucial context, a piece of a larger sociological puzzle, aimed at answering this larger question. Among the main archival sources that reveal public emotions used in the study are the thousands of private letters read by the Main Censorship Office of the Ministry of Public Security (MBP) in 1944–1946 and reproduced in its inner bulletins, reports from the provincial commands of the Citizens’ Militia (MO), public mood analyses conducted by the Polish Underground State, and various memoirs and newspapers.A core context was the war itself. Zaremba argues that ultimately “all postwar violence had its roots in the war,” which was essentially “a six-year course in killing, which taught aggression, stigmatization and humiliation—the preconditions for the subsequent ‘moral downfall’ of social norms” (pp. 150, 280, 305). In the spatial-psychological map proposed by the author, the General Government is identified as the locus of social breakdown, to a much greater extent than Poland's western territories annexed by the Third Reich. This regression brought social communication back to the “pre-Gutenberg era” of gossip, rumor, and hearsay, hence the book's focus on such forms of communication (p. 314). Students of the war will find the chapter entitled “The Trauma of a World War: Psychosocial Effects of the Second World War” to be especially insightful in pointing to the specifically Polish dimension of the war's consequences. Another crucial context was what the author identifies as a de facto “civil war” in eastern, southern, and central Poland following Soviet “liberation” between the new Soviet-backed Communist regime and Polish independentist forces—a view that is more prevalent in English-language scholarship (pp. 67, 100, 127, 165, 192, 195–196).According to Zaremba, the broader political context to anti-Jewish violence was one of a reigning feeling of national defeat, despite Poland being on the winning side of the Allies, which “kicked off a mechanism for displaced aggression” (p. 306). In contrast to Gross, Zaremba points to the “grain of truth” in the postwar stereotype of “Jewish Communism,” in which a disproportionate number of Jews held top posts in the Communist state apparatus (p. 308). He assigns a critical role to members of the MO, who exhibited higher levels of anti-Soviet feeling than those of the Security Office (UB), which often translated to higher levels of antisemitism (p. 126). The author speculates that the MO served as a critical conveyor belt of the myth of ritual slaughter via the use of telephone (p. 302). The violence also had an economic backdrop, as the outbreak of pogroms coincided with local violence against returning Jews aimed at preventing them from taking back their property, as well as ongoing food shortages (pp. 271, 294).Further, Zaremba compares the politically hopeful and rebellious atmosphere of May 1946 to that of October 1956 or March 1968 (p. 208). This period saw the return from exile of Stanisław Mikołajczyk, who became a Deputy Prime Minister of the provisional coalition government as a member of the Polish People's Party (PSL), and with his return, the prospect of free elections. The occasion of Constitution Day on May 3, 1946, gave rise to street protests in Krakόw and other cities. Zaremba cites observers who feared an anti-Communist “tempest” (p. 209). But what followed instead in the atmosphere of disappointment and the onset of the Cold War was the Kielce pogrom of July 1946.Other contexts invite the reader to consider a whole web of hitherto unexplored connections. In addition to political conflict, the 1944–1947 period was one plagued by unpredictable violence of Red Army soldiers, joblessness, thousands of demobilized soldiers, beggars, and vagrants, gangs of roaming children, widespread looting, and unprecedented mass migrations. Crucially, the author notes that the wartime decimation of the intelligentsia had effectively deprived the Second Republic of its middle class or “Poland A”—its educated people, opinion makers, and civil servants. The “landscape after the battle,” to borrow a phrase from Tadeusz Borowski, was one in which “Poland B”—its impoverished and largely uneducated population, which identified more closely with the Catholic Church, was more conservative and traditional, and lived predominantly in villages and small towns—had found itself in a more dominant position (pp. 41, 311).The book's culminating chapter, “Ethnic Phobias and Violence,” may serve as the biggest eye-opener. Zaremba shows that among the most dire consequences of the war was the poisoning of ethnic relations: “The war had simplified national identities and pushed ethnic groups apart,” giving rise to “a xenophobic national community” (p. 305). Postwar anti-Jewish violence had lived next door to anti-German, anti-Ukrainian, and anti-Belarussian violence (pp. 282–289). For example, he points to anti-German “pogroms” in places such as Aleksandrów Kujawski and Nieszawa (p. 282). The “trauma of the Volhynia,” referring to the ethnic cleansing campaign of Poles carried out by Ukrainian nationalists, had hung over Polish-Ukrainian relations (p. 285). In this climate, rumors of Jewish ritual slaughter took on “modernized” variants of the medieval myth (according to which Jews returning from camps needed blood for transfusion or to help restore their health) and circulated alongside rumors of the retreating Wehrmacht poisoning wells and food, as well as Ukrainians making “sausage” from Polish children (pp. 283, 304, 316). In this socially unmoored and intellectually diminished climate, fortified by “magical thinking” (p. 275), postwar society was poised to believe almost anything. The implementation of the Nazi Holocaust on Polish soil had certainly already crossed all mental thresholds. The author also offers a compelling speculation that the moral panic surrounding the protection of “our children” in a period of increased child abductions may have been linked to survivors reclaiming Jewish children from Polish families, who had sheltered them during the war (p. 317).Entangled in Fear is a significant contribution to the historiography of emotions and everyday life. As an exercise in historical empathy and context, it is exemplary. Arguably its greatest achievement is to encourage readers to think about the war and its aftermath in sociological terms. What was described in general terms at the time as “demoralization” is reframed by the author in a robust language of modern sociology. The study is particularly welcome in English language scholarship on the German occupation of Poland, which tends toward Holocaust-centrism. Entangled in Fear should be read alongside other pathbreaking studies of postwar violence, such as Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48 (2014) and the previously mentioned monumental work of Joanna Tokarska-Bakir. With its broad framing, the book lends itself to a kind of comparative history, perhaps also signaling the long-awaited return of social class to the study of the Nazi genocide.Disclaimer: The views expressed here are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).