Katarzyna Person, "Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service During the Nazi Occupation" (Cornell UP, 2021)
In\xa0Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service during the Nazi Occupation\xa0(Cornell University Press/US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2021)\xa0,\xa0Katarzyna Person shines a spotlight on the lawyers, engineers, young yeshiva graduates, and sons of connected businessmen who, in the autumn of 1940, joined the newly formed Jewish Order Service.\nPerson tracks the everyday life of policemen as their involvement with the horrors of ghetto life gradually increased. Facing and engaging with brutality, corruption, and the degradation and humiliation of their own people, these policemen found it virtually impossible to exercise individual agency. While some saw the Jewish police as fellow victims, others viewed them as a more dangerous threat than the German occupation authorities; both were held responsible for the destruction of a historically important and thriving community. Person emphasizes the complexity of the situation, the policemen's place in the network of social life in the ghetto, and the difficulty behind the choices that they made. By placing the actions of the Jewish Order Service in historical context, she explores both the decisions that its members were forced to make and the consequences of those actions.\nFeaturing testimonies of members of the Jewish Order Service, and of others who could see them as they themselves could not,\xa0Warsaw Ghetto Police\xa0brings these impossible situations to life. It also demonstrates how a community chooses to remember those whose allegiances did not seem clear.\nKatarzyna Person is a historian specialising in the history of the Holocaust and its aftermath in occupied Poland, working in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. She is the author of\xa0Assimilated Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto\xa0(Syracuse University Press, 2014).\xa0\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law