Gspaulsson

Gunnar Svante (Steve) Paulsson

Gunnar Svante (Steve) Paulsson (born 1946) is a Swedish-born Canadian historian, specializing in the Holocaust in Scandinavia and Poland. He is mainly known for his article on the flight of Danish Jews to Sweden, “The Bridge over the Øresund: the Historiography on the Expulsion of the Jews from Denmark, 1943" (Journal of Contemporary History, 1995), later anthologized, and his book, Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940-1945 (Yale University Press, 2002); revised Polish edition Utajone miasto: Żydzi po 'aryjskiej' stronie Warszawy 1940-1945 (Znak, 2007).

Early life and education

Paulsson was born in Uppsala Sweden to Alicja Barbara Paulsson (nėe Pelcer), a Holocaust survivor from Warsaw, and Åke Paulus Paulsson. His mother and grandmother, Tatjana Pelcer (née Bogisz) were Holocaust survivors from Warsaw, who defied German orders to enter the Warsaw ghetto and lived in hiding "on the Aryan side." Tatjana survived in Saska Kępa, a right-bank suburb of Warsaw. Alicja was arrested in March 1944, tortured, offered her freedom if she agreed to inform on Jews and the Polish underground. When she refused, she was sent to Auschwitz in June 1944. In November, she was transferred to Malchow, a subcamp of Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women and children. She was liberated in the final weeks of the war by the Swedish Red Cross, was given a scholarship to study English at Uppsala University, where she met Åke. The couple divorced in 1950, and Alicja took her son to England, where she remarried, then emigrated to Canada in 1957.

Paulsson entered high school in Montréal, then Toronto, where he graduated in 1962. He enrolled in the Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry (MPC) program at the University of Toronto. In his second year, he transrerred to the Social and Philosophical Studied ("Soc and Phil") program, majoring in Economics an Political Science. In 1964, he transferred to Carleton University in Ottawa, where he eventually chose Psychology as a major. His honours thesis, submitted in 1968, was entitled "The Psychology of Rumour," which proved germane when he later became a historian.

On graduating, he entered the field of Data Processing (Information Technology), working as a programmer, systems analyst and systems programmer.

Paulsson says that he knew his mother's story from an early age, that it made a deep impression on him, and in the back of his mind he knew that someday he would have to do something with it. In retrospect, many of the 36 undergraduate courses he took along the way proved useful for that endeavour.

Early Research and Graduate Studies

When his mother passed away in 1985, Paulsson began studies leading to his acadmic career as a historian. He was particularly interested in the three years that his mother rarely talked about, her life "on the Aryan side" - not as genalogy, but as history. As he began researching the subject, he was surporised to learn that very little had been written about it. There was Emmanuel Ringelblum's Polish-Jewish Relations during the Second World War, written while hiding in a bunker in "Aryan" Warsaw, Michał Borwicz's attempt at a Europe-wide sythesis, Arishe papirn (Buenos Aires, 1955) and the condensed French edition, Les vies interdites (Casterman, 1969), a few aricles, and little else.

In 1987, Paulsson enrolled part-time towards an MA in Modern History at the University of Toronto, writing his Master's thesis, "Hiding in Warsaw," under the supervision of Michael Marrus. On graduating in 1992, he enrolled in the doctoral program at the University of Oxford, obtaining the degree of D.Phil. in 1998.

Academic Career

From 1994 to 1998, Paulsson held the post of Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at the University of Leicester. In 1998-2000, he served as the senior histrian in the Holocaust Exhibition Project Office at the Imperial War Museum in London. When the exhibition opened and his job ended, he took up the Koerner Fellowship (Visitn Professorship) at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. In 2002, he took up the Pearl Resnick Fellowship at the United STates Holocaust Memorial Museum, at the time the museum's premier research fellowship. He used the two fellowships to revise his dissertation for publication, supplementing his research using archival resources in London and at the USHMM. In the fall of 2002, he handed the typescript off to Yale Univerity Press, and with his wife returned to Toronto, where they still owned a house. His book, Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940-1945was published that year. Subsequently, the revised Polish edition, Utajone miasto: Zydzi po 'aryjskiej' stronie Warszawy 1940-1945 was publshied in 2007 by the Znak publishing house in Kraków.

Secret City: Subject, Sources, Methodology and Reception

Paulsson's book was intended to complement Israel Gutman's classic history of the Warsaw Ghetto, The Jews of Warsaw 1940-1943, with a history of the underground community of Jews hiding "on the Aryan side," from the closing of the ghetto to the end of the war. Together, the two books cover the wartime history of the Jews of Warsaw on both sides of the wall.

Sources

Secret City is based on more than 300 Jewish memoirs and testimonies, supplemented by extensive contemporary sources in archives in Israel, Poland, the UK and the US.

A remarkable discovery

While on a research trip to Israel in 1994, acting on a tip from Israel Gutman, Paulsson went to the Ghetto Fighters' House in Netanya and asked for the Berman archive, records preserved by Adolf Berman, chairman of the Jewish National Commottee (Żydowski Komitet Narodowy - ŻKN, an umbrella group for the Zionist parties. The archivist, Ewa Feldenkreis, brought him a concertina folder of racords, saying: "This is the Berman archive. His widow donated it to us in 1974, and no one has ever asked for it before."

The folder proved to contain extensive documentation of the ŻKN's activity on the Aryan side in Warsaw.

Paulsson relates that when he returned to Jeruslam and told Gutman what he had found, Gutman did not believe him: "Those must be post-war records of some kind. THey wouldn't have dared to keep such records: it would have endangered thousands of lives."

(Paulsson comments that all too often, assumptiona about what could have, would have or should have happened foreclose inquiry into what actually did happen.)

Later that year, Barbara Engeling put Paulsson in touch with Helena Merenholc, one of the ŻKN's surviving activists, who helped to authenticate them.

Among the records are Ringelbum's letters to Berman, which Samuel Kassow used for his biography of Ringelblum, borrowing for his title a question that Ringelblum posed to Berman: "Who will write our history? The letters themselves were later published in Zagłada Żydów - Studia i materiały, the official journal of the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research, with commentary by Gutman. Gutman vaguely mentions some other records, and acknowledges that they are, in effect, the continuation of Ringelblum's Oneg Shabbat (Oyneg Shabes archive.

Today, the records are accessible on the Ghetto Fighters' House website as part of the Berman Collection.

Methodology

The Bund's recipient lists were also preserved in the Modern Records Archive in Warsaw (AAN 30/III t.5), and lists of 494 Jews sheltered on his suburban estate by Maurycy Herling Grudiński -- a convert, but still Jewish in the eyes of the Nazie, supported at least in part by the ŻKN -- had previously been published.

Using those records, Paulsson constructed a database of 9368 entries, with information about 6515 recipients, including 4592 names. This means that the Jewish organizations, between them, reached almost one-quarter of the Jews who ever hid in Warsaw, more than one-quarter of those still alive on the eve of the Warsaw Uprising 1 August 1944, and more than twice as many as the better-publcized Polish organization, Żegota (the Council to aid Jews).

By comparing the names to an independent list of people known to have been hiding during the period covered by those records (September 1943-July 1944), Paulsson was able to estimate what fraction of them the Jewish organizations reached, which confirmed Berma's estimate that 15,000-20,000 Jews were hiding. However, they were the remnant of a larger number going back to 1940.

One has to take into account those lured out of hiding in the Hotel Polski affair (3,500, or according to a more recent estimate, 2,500), as well as those who were betrayed, murdered, packed off to camps, who retruned to the ghetto, died of "accelerated natural causes", left Warsaw or volunteered for forced labor in the Reich as a survival strategy. Taking them into account, Paulsson estimated that 28,000 hid in Warsaw at some time, of whom 17,000 were still alive on the eve of the 1944 Uprising.

Paulsson estimated the number of survivors using lists published by the Central Committee of Polish Jewry (Centraln Komitet Żydostwa Polskiego - CKŹP) in May and October 1945, the National Registry of Holocaust Survivors in the US and Canada published by the USMM, a card catalogue of 300,000 survivors at the Jewish Historical Instute in Warsaw, a list of 6,000 members of the Warsaw Landsmanshaft in the US occupation zone in Germany, and a list of 6,000 survivors who ended the war in Sweden. He also surveyed the 7,129 memoirs in collectio 302 at the Jewish Historical Institute, determining that about one-thirds of those who mention experiences on the Aryan side were from Warsaw. Mordechai Paldiel, director of the Department of the Righeous at Yad Vashem, told him that abbout one-quarter of his files were from Warsaw.

On that basis, Paulsson's estimate of 11,500 survivors projects to 34,500-46,000 nstionwide, in good agreement with Filip Friedman's generally accepted estimate of 40,000-50,000. However, Friedman counted only those who survived "on the soild of Poland." Taking into account some 3,000 survivors in the Reich and in Sweden, Paulsson's projection comes to 31,500-43,000, on the low side of Friedman's, and within the margin of error, not incompatible with Shmuel Krakowski's 1980 estimate of 30,0000.

Reception in Poland

Purely by chance, Secret City was released in the midst of an unprecednted uproar triggered by Sąsiadzi (2000)and the English edition Neighbors (2001), Jan T, Gross's account of the Jedwabne massacre, which filled the Polish media for two years and still simmers. Both sides took it to be a reponse to Gross and a "defense of the honor of Poland." In fact, it is much more closely related to Roman Polanski's film The Pianist, released in the same year as Secret City.

To understand the paradoxical reception of Paulsson's book, hailed by one side and condemned by the other, it is helpful to compare The Pianist and Stephen Spielberg's film, Schindler's List. In Spielberg's, the Jews were at the mercy of their captors, so it is fair to say that Oscar Schindler saved their lives. But to apply the same premise to Polanski's protagonist Władysław Szpilman and the thousands of others like him, who escaped captivity and stuggled very actively to survive, according to Paulsson constitutes misappropriation of voice, which has led Polish commentators astray.

The controversy triggered by Neighbors concerns the actions and attitudes of the Polish population towards the Jews, invariably referring to the Jews themselves in the passive voice. Both sides misread Secret City, and the critical reception by those embroiled in that controversy is very wide of the mark.

Reception by mainstream Holocaust historians

David Engel wrote: "this is a book that will richly repay a careful reading, fostering subtle and sophisticated thinking about formidable historiacal problems"

Gabriel Finder wrote: "Thanks to his adept use of these and other sources, a significant achievement of this book is to endow hidden Jews with self-respect by showing with great empathy— Paulsson is himself the son of a hidden Jewish survivor in Warsaw — how much initiative, resourcefulness, clear-headedness, and sheer nerve life in hiding demanded of Jewish fugitives from Nazism."

Reception by survivors

In a review on Amazon, Zenon Neumark, a Bundist survivor from Warsaw, wrote:

This well-researched, well-documented and well-written book is a masterpiece. It is also unique in the way it deals with the subject of escape in Nazi-occupied Poland. The author desribes in great detail the life and experiences of those who chose evasion - hiding under false identities - as a response to the Holocaust. He also presents accurately and with an amazing perceptivity the relationships between the Jews in hiding and the Poles who hid them. As one who survived on the Aryan side of Warsaw, Paulsson's writings resonate with my own experiences. A terrific book!

Elizabeth Rynecki, the daughter and grandaughter of survivors, wrote on her family website, later reposted on Goodreads:

Though my father agrees with my theory as to why our family survived when so many did not, I was never able to check my hypothesis with another source until recently, when I read Gunnar S. Paulsson’s Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940-1945. It’s easier to say what kind of book Secret City is not than to say to what it is. Partly that’s because it’s really unlike any other WWII book I’ve ever read. His book, based on his doctoral thesis, is not a memoir and is not a chronology or history of life in Warsaw during the war. Rather, it uses memoirs and draws upon testimonies and historical records to show how Jewish Poles were able to survive in the city of Warsaw (not the Ghetto) without much help from the Polish or Jewish underground. It is an in-depth examination that at times I found daunting. But I kept reading because within his anecdotes and statistics I saw more concrete outlines of my father’s story. By reading this book I finally felt like I had found an author whom if I said, “my father and his parents were Polish Jews who survived living on the Aryan side” would simply nod his head and know what I meant. I finally feel like I’ve found the book that not so much tells his story, but explains how it could happen.

Reception: Summary

Reviews cannot be classified as "positive" or "negative." Those who read through the prism of political agendas, whether "positively" or "negatively," simply misunderstand it. Reviewers outide the Polish politisphere, and survivors who gauge it by their own experiences, are uniformly positive, sometimes glowing, with some minor caveats. One thing repeated even by some astute reviewers is that Secret City "contradicts" Gross's book. Paulsson states that there is no contradition: he and Gross were simply researching different things.

Publications

Monographs

Utajone miasto: Żydzi po „aryjskiej” stronie Warszawy 1940-1945 (Kraków: Znak, 2007) (Revised Polish translation of Secret City )

Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940-1945 (London: Yale University Press, 2002)

Compilations and translations

The Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum (London: Imperial War Museum, 2000)

[as editor] Barbara Engelking, Holocaust and Memory (London: Leicester University Press; translated from Zagłada i pamięć: Doświadczenie Holocaustu i jego konsekwencje opisane na podstawie relacji autbiograicznych (Warszawa, IFiS PAN 1994)

[as curator for the Gianfranco Moscati online exhibition at the Imperial War Museum] Collezione Gianfranco Moscati: Documenti e Immagini dalla Persecuzione alla Shoah (Napoli, 2003)

Anthologized Articles

In D. Cesarani, ed., The Holocaust: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies (London: Routledge, 2004) 6 vols.:

“The Bridge over the Øresund: the Historiography on the Expulsion of the Jews from Denmark, 1943’, vol. V, 99-127

   (Originally in Journal of Contemporary History 30(1995) 431-464)

“The Demography of Jews Hiding in Warsaw, 1943-1945”, vol. IV 99-125

(Originally in Polin 13 (2000) 78-103)