Shtetl: The History of a Small Town and an Extinguished Worldby Eva HoffmanSecker & Warburg269pp, £16.99 in UK
There is a small Polish town called Bransk, around a hundred miles from Warsaw, which has come to international prominence for various reasons. First, Marian Marzynski, who survived the war as a Jewish child in Poland, wanted to find out what happened in a shtetl not very different from where he grew up, but far enough away to be bearable. He made a documentary about Bransk entitled Shtetl, which formed a partial basis for Eva Hoffman's work.
Then Zbigniew Romaniuk, a young Polish historian living in Bransk, became fascinated with his town's Jewish heritage, but had not met any Jews. Lastly, Nathan Kaplan from Chicago, whose mother came from Bransk, became fascinated by his own background and began a correspondence with Zbigniew Romaniuk that ran to several hundreds of pages. The young Polish historian learned from Nathan Kaplan what it meant to be a Jew. The elderly American Jew learned what it meant to live in the shtetl that was Bransk.
Shtetl is not the first attempt to reconstruct a vanished world. Others have done it - Roman Vishniac through photographs, Theo Richmond through his astonishingly intense reconstruction of the Polish town his family came from, Konin. But Eva Hoffman's work is different. Although not intended to be a rejoinder to Daniel Goldhagen's shocking book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, about the willingness - or otherwise - of ordinary Germans to participate in the destruction of the Jews, it comes as a welcome antidote. The received wisdom is that ordinary Germans did not really want to destroy the Jews, but that the Nazis built the extermination camps in Poland because everyone knew that anti-semitism was endemic in Poland and that Poles would willingly take part in mass murder. Of course, the truth is much more complicated, and it is that subtle shading that Hoffman does so well.
First, she tells us the history of the Jews in Poland in general, and then Bransk in particular. She is at her most fascinating when she records people's memories of the Holocaust. There is the farmer who recounts, without emotion, the day he was asked by the Nazis to take a cart-load of Jews who had been killed to bury them in a mass grave. He tells her that he did not have any choice. But there is no sadness here, no horror. He continues by saying that they came back through the river to get rid of the blood on the cart. Hoffman is shocked. Her companion reminds her it is over fifty years since it happened, and that he had probably told the story over and over. And yet . . .
Or there is the man who celebrates with delight the fact that there are no more Jews in Bransk. A few of them tried to come back after the war, but one got killed and the rest were scared off. Not all were like this: there are more Poles honoured as Righteous Gentiles in Jerusalem than people of any other nation.
For there were remarkable Polish friends, such as Kozlowski, a farmer, who gave extraordinary help to Jack Rubin and his friend Ben. Despite extreme risk to himself and his family, he hid the men, fed them, and tried to soften their intolerable burden. When things got too dangerous, just before the Russians took over, they left. They hid briefly in a swamp, until they heard the Russians, were given American cigarettes, and made their way back. They were welcomed on the open road by Kozlowski, who said, "Nu, Pan Yankiel, you survived." And Jack Rubin broke down and cried.
This is a subtle, fair, scrupulously even-handed piece of work. It begs moral questions of us all. What would we have done if we had been there? Would we have been like Kozlowski? Few were, but those who showed such heroism were the unexpected ones, like those who helped Hoffman's parents, one of whom hid them for nearly two years. Often, as Eva Hoffman portrays so well, those wonderful people cannot explain even now why they did it. Was it from recognition of another's humanity? Was it heroism or decency? Hoffman gives no answers, but she asks the questions, and observes the moral hazards, with a rare sensitivity.
Julia Neuberger is Chancellor of the University of Ulster and Chief Executive of the King's Fund