In Enemy Land

Reviews / Votes

"Sara Bender's In Enemy Land: The Jews of Kielce and the
Region, 1939-1946, appears at a time when Holocaust history is under new
pressures. These pressures are most evident in Poland, where a nationalist
government has seen fit - and has largely failed - to limit certain kinds of
Holocaust-related terminology if it ascribes guilt to Poles during wartime. ... Bender's
carefully researched and tightly focused study of Kielce and its environs is
not directly engaged with these discussions until its concluding chapter. But
Kielce, as is well known, was the site, in the spring of 1946, of the worst
postwar pogrom in liberated Poland. Like
the wartime events in the smaller northern town of Jedwabne, the events at
Kielce, in which 47 Holocaust survivors were murdered in mob violence, remain a
flashpoint in any postwar account of Polish-Jewish relations." -Norman Ravvin, Canadian
Jewish News -- Norman Ravvin * Canadian Jewish News * "Most [researchers] believe it necessary to study the Holocaust in Kielce to understand Polish-Jewish relations afterward. Sara Bender, a renowned Holocaust scholar and long-time professor of Jewish history at the University of Haifa, shares this conviction and devotes her book primarily to the Holocaust in the region. Her description of the murder of the Jews of Kielce by the Germans and their local helpers is so terrifying that writing a review of her text almost feels wrong. There is no doubt: thousands had been murdered in Kielce or sent from there to be murdered, and the details Bender provides highlight the magnitude of the crime."

-Piotr J. Wrobel, University of Toronto, Holocaust and Genocide Studies