"Qui si je criais...?"

"“Poklosie”, or Aftermath, touches on a subject that many Poles prefer not to discuss - cases where Poles were complicit with the Nazis in rounding up, and in some cases, killing Jews." Guess what the answer is yes, what a surprise !

According to Morde-khai Tenenbaum, commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization in the Bialystok ghetto, whose memoirs were published shortly after the war:

If it had not been for the Poles, for their aid--passive and active--in the "solution" of the Jewish problem in Poland, the Germans would never have dared to do what they did. It was they, the Poles, who called out "Yid" at every Jew who escaped from the train transporting him; it was they who caught the unfortunate wretches, who rejoiced at every Jewish misfortune--they were vile and contemptible.7

A somewhat more moderate but still strongly critical view was expressed by Emanuel Ringelblum in his Polish-Jewish Relations during the Second World War, written in hiding on the "Aryan" side in 1944:

The Polish people and the Government of the Republic of Poland were incapable of deflecting the Nazi steam-roller from its anti-Jewish course. But the question is permissible whether the attitude of the Polish people befitted the enormity of the calamities that befell the country's citizens. Was it inevitable that the Jews, looking their last on this world as they rode in the death trains speeding from different parts of the country to Treblinka or other places of slaughter, should have had to witness indifference or even joy on the faces of their neighbors? In the summer of 1942, when carts packed with captive Jewish men, women and children moved through the streets of the capital, did there really need to be laughter from the wild mobs resounding from the other side of the ghetto walls, did there really have to prevail such blank indifference in the face of the greatest tragedy of all time?