(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)October 16, 2012

(MAHWAH, NJ)- Dr. Irena Grudzinska Gross, co-author with Jan T. Gross ofGolden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2012), spoke on October 16 about “Plunder from Jews during the Holocaust.“ Ramapo College’s Platinum Series supported the event, and it was co-sponsored by the Law and Society program and the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

The grainy black-and-white photograph on the cover of Golden Harvest ?¦ of a group of peasants digging atop a mountain of ashes at Treblinka, where some 800,000 Jews were gassed and cremated, symbolizes the vast, continent-wide plunder of Jewish wealth that went hand-in-hand with the Holocaust.

The seizure of Jewish assets during World War II generated widespread attention when Swiss banks were challenged to produce lists of dormant accounts, and when national museums were forced to return stolen paintings.However, among the countless people who in one way or another during the Holocaust obtained or helped themselves to Jewish property were mainly ordinary people. For a variety of reasons, as Grosz explained, this was especially true in Poland, which had pre-war Europe’s largest Jewish population. Nevertheless, Golden Harvest, often in lyrical and heartbreaking terms, exposes the economic plunder of Jewish property across the entire continent of Europe.

Especially in Poland, as Gross made clear, uncovering the truth has not been an easy process. It had to wait until now for honest public dialogue to begin because, like elsewhere in Europe too, a narrative about the Second World War existed in which Poles saw themselves only as victims of Nazi oppression. Relatively recent revelations about Poles having carried out pogroms against Jews and having betrayed Jews in hiding have opened the possibility of a more nuanced assessment of the role of Poles in the Holocaust.

Dr. Gross teaches East European literature at Princeton University. She emigrated from her native Poland after the student unrest of 1968. She studied in Italy and in the United States. A graduate of Columbia University (1982), she has taught at Emory University, New York University and Boston University.

In addition to Golden Harvest, her books include CzesÅ,aw MiÅ,osz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets (Yale University Press, 2009) and The Scar of Revolution: Tocqueville, Custine and the Romantic Imagination (University of California Press, 1995). She edited books on literature and the transformation process in Central and Eastern Europe and is the author of numerous book chapters and articles on these subjects published in the international press and periodicals.

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