Plunder and Loot during the Holocaust: A Few Thoughts on Jan Gross's Golden Harvest

Jan Tomasz Gross is a Polish historian best known for his book, Neighbors, which created a storm in Poland. In the present book, Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust, he begins with a photograph of some 20-30 peasants or grave diggers standing in a row; placed before them is a smaller row of skulls and crossbones. It is the argument of the book that the forcible, indeed violent, dispossession of Jewish property and belongings by the Germans and, just as much, Poles--events at the periphery of the Holocaust--was the largest property-transfer in history, and one in which millions of people took part. It is contended that this aspect of the Holocaust was overlooked; but what happened here went beyond the Holocaust as such, since millions of people took part appropriating Jewish property and belongs, some 95% of which was never returned to the Jews. This is one way in which Poles became complicit with the Germans; but the author points out that many Jews later remembered the Germans with less hatred than they did the Poles, perhaps because they saw the conduct of their fellow Poles as a form of betrayal by (to return to the other book by Gross) their neighbors. The book has some other insights as well though the arguments of the book are not surprising as such. A short but good read.