Secret City

When the Nazis forced most of Warsaw's Jews into the city's infamous ghetto during the Second World War, some 28,000 Jews either hid and never entered the Warsaw Ghetto, or escaped from it later in what Gunnar S. Paulsson calls "the greatest prison-break in history". This book – the first detailed treatment of Jewish escape and hiding during the Holocaust – tells the story of these hidden Jews of Warsaw. Using memoirs, diaries, testimonies and the records of Jewish and Polish organizations that helped the fugitives, Paulsson shows that after the 1942 deportations nearly a quarter of the ghetto's remaining Jews managed to escape and, despite appalling difficulties and dangers, more than 11,000 of them lived to see the end of the war. Connected by elaborate networks of which Poles, Germans and the Jews themselves were largely unaware, they formed what can aptly be called a secret city. Paulsson challenges many established assumptions. He shows that, despite the social gulf that separated Jews and Poles, enough private contacts existed to make escape on a large scale possible, without much help from the Polish or Jewish underground; that the much-reviled German, Polish and Jewish policemen, as well as Jewish converts and their families, were key in helping Jews escape; and that many more Poles helped than harmed the Jews, though most stayed neutral and often expressed antisemitic sentiments. He argues that the Jewish leadership was wrong to dismiss the possibility of escape, staking everything on a hopeless uprising. Paulsson's engrossing book offers a new perspective on Holocaust history.