In Enemy Land

“Sara Bender’s In Enemy Land: The Jews of Kielce and the Region, 1939-1946, appears at a time when Holocaust history is under new pressures. These pressures are most evident in Poland, where a nationalist government has seen fit – and has largely failed – to limit certain kinds of Holocaust-related terminology if it ascribes guilt to Poles during wartime. … Bender’s carefully researched and tightly focused study of Kielce and its environs is not directly engaged with these discussions until its concluding chapter. But Kielce, as is well known, was the site, in the spring of 1946, of the worst postwar pogrom in liberated Poland.  Like the wartime events in the smaller northern town of Jedwabne, the events at Kielce, in which 47 Holocaust survivors were murdered in mob violence, remain a flashpoint in any postwar account of Polish-Jewish relations.” —Norman Ravvin, Canadian Jewish News

-- Norman Ravvin * Canadian Jewish News *

“Most [researchers] believe it necessary to study the Holocaust in Kielce to understand Polish-Jewish relations afterward. Sara Bender, a renowned Holocaust scholar and long-time professor of Jewish history at the University of Haifa, shares this conviction and devotes her book primarily to the Holocaust in the region. Her description of the murder of the Jews of Kielce by the Germans and their local helpers is so terrifying that writing a review of her text almost feels wrong. There is no doubt: thousands had been murdered in Kielce or sent from there to be murdered, and the details Bender provides highlight the magnitude of the crime.”

—Piotr J. Wróbel, University of Toronto, Holocaust and Genocide Studies