Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust by Jan Tomasz Gross and Contributions by Irena Grudzinska Gross





Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust by Jan Tomasz Gross and Contributions by Irena Grudzinska Gross explores the photograph on the cover, widely believed to be taken at the Treblinka death camp shortly after the war.  Here, peasants are digging up the remains of Jews killed at the camp in search for valuables (mostly gold and silver).  They stop for a semi-causal snapshot before human remains, arranged for the camera.

As the subtitle suggests, the book investigates how the outrages of the Holocaust continued well after the war was over.  This is true not only of the dead, but of the living.  In many instances, Jews were killed in Poland and elsewhere following the liberation as they tried to settle in their former towns or retain lost property. This books shows that not even the dead were safe!  Their graves were desecrated with casual disregard and/or outright scorn.

People who study the Holocaust know this well; this book will not come as a surprise.  Most of the Operation Reinhardt camps in Poland continued to be desecrated until present times (all but Sobibor are now museums and protected, but in the past access to the sites were unrestricted).  This photo, although shocking and savage, is only a small slice of the lingering, shameful events of the post-Holocaust era.

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