Harvard University Press is
publishing a new book on the August trials in post-World War II Poland.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The first account of the
August Trials, in which postwar Poland confronted the betrayal of Jewish
citizens under Nazi rule but ended up fashioning an alibi for the past.
When six years of ferocious
resistance to Nazi occupation came to an end in 1945, a devastated Poland could
agree with its new Soviet rulers on little else beyond the need to punish
German war criminals and their collaborators. Determined to root out the “many
Cains among us,” as a Poznań newspaper editorial put it, Poland’s judicial
reckoning spawned 32,000 trials and spanned more than a decade before being
largely forgotten.
Andrew Kornbluth reconstructs
the story of the August Trials, long dismissed as a Stalinist travesty, and
discovers that they were in fact a scrupulous search for the truth. But as the
process of retribution began to unearth evidence of enthusiastic local participation
in the Holocaust, the hated government, traumatized populace, and fiercely
independent judiciary all struggled to salvage a purely heroic vision of the
past that could unify a nation recovering from massive upheaval. The trials
became the crucible in which the Communist state and an unyielding society
forged a foundational myth of modern Poland but left a lasting open wound in
Polish–Jewish relations.
The August Trials draws
striking parallels with incomplete postwar reckonings on both sides of the Iron
Curtain, suggesting the extent to which ethnic cleansing and its abortive
judicial accounting are part of a common European heritage. From Paris and The
Hague to Warsaw and Kyiv, the law was made to serve many different purposes,
even as it failed to secure the goal with which it is most closely associated:
justice.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Kornbluth is a Research
Fellow at the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the
University of California, Berkeley. He is a former fellow of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against
Germany.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Note on Polish Pronunciation
Introduction: The Country without
a Quisling?
1. “There Are Many Cains among
Us”
2. Crowdsourcing Genocide
3. Hearts Grown Brutal
4. The Special Courts
5. Rewriting the Narrative of the
Past
6. Between Politics and
Retribution
7. The District Courts
8. Cold War Considerations
9. The Principles of Socialist
Humanism
10. The Math of Amnesty
Conclusion: The Conspiracy of
Memory
Archival Abbreviations
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
More info here
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