There are two central questions of the Holocaust: why it happened and how. A recent book, Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland, edited by the historian Jan Grabowski and by Barbara Engelking, the director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw, is a significant addition to our understanding about how the Germans pursued the so-called Final Solution in Eastern Europe—namely, with the help of local non-Jewish populations.
every Jew was a vast undertaking encompassing three continents. The Germans and their collaborators persecuted Jews from North Africa to Norway. They deported Jews to their deaths from the Channel Islands in the West and hunted Jews in the Caucasus in the East. The Germans killed Jews throughout the war, shooting Jews and their Christian companions barely 300 yards from the U.S. Army in Pisa in August 1944. Even within a global conflict that mobilized over 100 million men, the so-called Final Solution required considerable manpower and effort. Night Without End, a 546-page edited and abridged English version of a 1,700-page, two-volume Polish study, is part of a wave of recent historiography demonstrating how much of that effort came from the Jews’ neighbors.
Poland was the center of the slaughter. Of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, some 3 million were Polish Jews. There were 108,149 Jews in the eight Polish counties under examination before the mass killings of “Aktion Reinhardt” during 1941-43. Night Without End examines the fate of the 9,543 who survived this mass slaughter. By the end of the war, only 2,387 were still alive. The Germans called this final stage of the Holocaust—the elimination of the survivors of the initial waves of mass killings—the Judenjagd (hunt for Jews). It was a shared enterprise, involving Germans, the Polish authorities, and Poles who lived near the Jews.
The eight essays in the book use a microhistory approach, patiently sifting through inconsistent and difficult sources to describe the fates of individual Jews. One microhistory technique is to note evidentiary gaps, forcing readers to confront the absence of testimony and records resulting from murder and impunity. We learn, for example, that Władysław Węgrzyn, a member of the Home Army (Poland’s main resistance), agreed to hide Sabina Blaufeder and Genia Raber, prewar acquaintances. Węgrzyn later betrayed the women. We do not know why.