Jan Peczkis’s 1,700 book reviews will improve your understanding of Polish-Jewish relations
Jan Peczkis has developed a comprehensive database that contains his reviews of 1,700 books on many aspects of Polish-Jewish relations. These can be easily accessed through his website at https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org,
Jan’s insightful analyses show why Polish-Jewish relations continue to be problematic, largely because of the many distortions that authors, most of whom are Jewish, have written about the history that encompasses longstanding interactions between Poles and Polish Jews. This is evident throughout the range of topical categories Jan lists on the website. You will discover facts about Polish-Jewish relations that these authors have ignored, altered, obfuscated, and even falsified. Some of many examples include: Jews collaborated not only with the Germans but also the Soviets; Hitler did not try to destroy all Jews as several classes of Jews were spared; fugitive Jews betrayed other fugitive Jews and Poles; the Polish Home Army executed betrayers of Poles and Polish Jews; Hitler considered Poles an existential enemy; Hilter committed genocide against Poles and Romany; Polish Home Army members fought alongside Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and some died; Poland was the first to warn the West of Hitler’s mass murder of Polish and other European Jews; Poland did not form a collaborationist government with the Germans; Poles also were murdered in Hitler’s extermination camps.
As Jan Peczkis points out on his webpage, he has been studying the Polish-Jewish encounter for decades and presents his reviews as a dutiful effort to improve public understanding of Polish-Jewish relations. The books reviewed are from different viewpoints and are old as well as new. They also include Polishlanguage books whose information is otherwise unavailable in the English language.
As he further points out on his webpage, the reviews are identified by keyword-phrase-identifiers. They are fully searchable, and the search box (below, right, on the webpage) has first-letter prompts for suggested terms to use. Viewers can also search (in the search box on the webpage) by book title (use caps for first letters), author, or year of publication.
You are strongly encouraged to use Jan Peczkis’s Topic Guide, which is accessed by clicking on “Topic Guide†in the webpage’s upper right. The Topic Guide provides an extensive list of phrases, each of which directs viewers to answers of many common questions related to Poles and Jews. The serious reader will appreciate the fact that the Topic Guide provides phrase-specific information with a very high level of granularity.