There is no easy way to describe the relations between Catholic and Jewish Poles during the German occupation. Conventional historiography has seemed to veer between mythologization and demonization, neither of which has proven to be very useful in understanding the complex dynamics of Polish-Jewish relations during the war. Postwar politics certainly did not help, where no serious discussion of the topic was even possible within the Soviet block, and current politics, it would seem, have only continued to muddy the waters. Yet there is much scholarship being carried out, in Poland and abroad, that reaches beyond reductive absolutes of collective guilt or common righteousness to find more revealing analyses of the complex of reactions among many different groups in Poland to the occupation and to the gathering Holocaust. In this spirit, this panel seeks to move towards more subtle interpretations of the relations between Polish Catholics and Polish Jews during the war, their very complex interactions, common and contrasting experiences of terror and persecution, and the wide range of responses from sympathy and self-sacrifice to hostility and betrayal.

Joshua Zimmerman will speak on the subject of the Polish Home Army (AK), the military wing of the Polish Underground and long a source of historical controversy. Based on research using Holocaust survivor testimonies and wartime documents of the Underground, he argues that the Home Army must be viewed as a complex combination of different bodies with widely varying attitudes towards the Jews and the Holocaust. A very different branch of the Polish armed forces, the Army-in-exile that had regrouped in France and then Britain, will be the subject of James Wald's paper, which will study the problem of antisemitism within the Exile forces. Here, the contrast between the firm and principled intolerance for antisemitism among much of the Polish Government-in-exile and the persistence of anti-Jewish sentiments and actions among the exiled Polish soldiery reveals troubling fissures between Polish leadership and a significant section of its citizens. Yet while antisemitism, often enough associated with Catholic Polish nationalism, was surely present among Polish officers and soldiers as well as among ordinary citizens, this does not tell the whole story. Paweł Skibiński will discuss the persecution and decimation of the Polish Catholic clergy by the Nazis, arguing that this stemmed not only from their position as moral and intellectual leaders of Polish society, but also from their vocal stance against Nazism and totalitarianism. This stance, dating back before the war, led members of the clergy and lay Catholics both to condemn Nazi policies against the Jews and to offer aid and rescue to the latter. Having focused on the attitudes of Polish elites, military and clergy, we will turn to how relations were among ordinary people under the occupation. Martyna Rusiniak-Karwat will present a case study of the Sokołów-Węgrów poviat, a part of the Warsaw district close to Treblinka, to examine on a local level the attitudes of Polish townspeople towards their Jewish neighbors and their willingness or ability to help them.