Rural areas
The issues of the attitude of villagers (with all of its variety) to the extermination of local Jewish communities and individual Jews, who (usually for some time) escaped death at the hands of the Germans and sought shelter in the country – is completely original. It has not been described at all. There are no - be it Polish or foreign – studies on this subject. Naturally, sample scattered bits of information on the subject can be found in different sources, but we do not have a systematic presentation of this issue.
Our project “Rural Population of the General Government vis-à-vis the Holocaust and Hiding Jews, 1942–1945” attempts to fill this gap. We are interested in the post-extermination period, when individual Jewish survivors were seeking refuge in the country. We intend to look at it from the Polish and the Jewish point of view. We plan to present the impact of German terror on the situation in rural areas, on the possibilities and readiness to offer help or the causes of failure to do so as well as hostile attitudes towards the Jews. Due to temporal limits and the costs involved, we intend to limit the scope of our research to a few district of the General Government, primarily: Warsaw, Lublin and Radom districts, and then compare them – if possible – with the other districts.
Knowledge of Polish-Jewish relations in rural areas will significantly enhance our understanding of the occupation experience of Poles and of the Holocaust. This research project will allow describing mechanisms of solidarity, aid and terror, fear, collaboration and betrayal in local rural communities; such knowledge will also allow for an analysis of the characteristic World War II phenomena of heroism, indifference and meanness. This project concerns matters yet unexplored and undescribed, its significance for the development of historical and social sciences, for the knowledge and understanding of totalitarian mechanisms, social phenomena as well as the impact of emotion on human motivations and behaviors – seems hard to overestimate.
Ultimately, the results of these endeavors will be published in a volume of studies: “Polish Rural Areas during the Occupation – a Sociological Approach”, “Jews Seeking Help in the Country”; “The Power of the Village over Rural Areas: Local Administration, the ‘Blue’ Police, German Gendarmerie, Night Guards”; “The Authorities and Milieus of Polish Underground in Rural Area, the Partisans”; “Help for the Jews in Rural Areas”; “Polish Peasants in Jewish Eyes”; “Post-War Account Settling in Rural Areas”; “Witnesses Before the Court”.