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(More customer reviews)Some readers may find the title a bit misleading, as the protagonist was a Jew, not an ethnic Pole. Moreover, this book is primarily intended to promote a remembrance of the Jewish experience, not the Polish one.
In any case, Mayevski (originally Moshe Aaron Lajbcygier and then Majewski), was born in Sulejow. During the later German occupation, he hid and then fought in the surrounding area, located approximately 55 km SE of Lodz. His grandfather admired Trotsky, and had a picture of him on the wall. (p. 10). (Did this plant a seed of latent pro-Communism in Mayevski's thinking?)
While hiding from the Nazis among Polish villagers, he indicated little fear of denunciation. In fact, he freely traveled from village to village. At one point, he had worked at 20 different farms (p. 40), and felt so safe that he went out for walks in the evenings. (p. 41).
Mayevski eventually served in the AK as an incognito Jew. (p. 116). Considering the fact that many Poles could identify even well-assimilated Jews after getting to know them, and that the AK was sensitive about the particulars of its members, Mayevski's Jewishness must have long been an open secret. In any case, there were also openly-Jewish members of the AK, including its top echelons, as noted by Polonsky. (Introduction, p. 4).
Contrary to the lurid portrayals of the AK as an anti-Semitic organization out to exterminate Jews (e. g., Yaffa Eliach, Oskar Pinkus), Mayevski doesn't describe his experiences in the AK in any such terms. The AK did shoot one fugitive Jew for robbing farmers. (p. 121). He also discusses a group of renegade AK members who deserted, turned to banditry, preyed on both Poles and Jews, and got recruited by the Germans for collaborationist activities. (pp. 101-102). His AK unit liquidated them. [Well after the start of the second Soviet occupation of Poland, bandits of all sorts still preyed on the people. The bandits included German deserters and Vlasov soldiers. (p. 146)].
This work gives invaluable details on the methodology used by the AK to identify, trail, and liquidate informers. (pp. 98-101, 108-109). It was clearly an arduous, hazardous, and time-consuming process. (This clarifies recurrent Jewish complaints of the Polish Underground "not doing enough" to liquidate denouncers of Jews. These tacitly suppose that it was a straightforward task that required minimum resources.) The Polish informers had been motivated by hefty payments (p. 100), and reprieves from being sent to concentration camps in return for collaboration. (p. 109).
One former AK member I had interviewed confirmed Polonsky's claim that the AK often regarded individual fugitive Jews as a security risk. (p. 4). When caught by Germans, having nothing to lose and owing minimal loyalty to Poland, they promptly divulged everything that they had observed, often with dire consequences.
Both Mayevski (p. 112) and Polonsky (p. 4) label the NSZ fascist. They should know better. Evidently, Mayevski's falling for this Communist propaganda, and that which accused the NSZ of being out to exterminate Poland's surviving Jews, were major factors in his decision to abandon the AK in favor of the Communist AL. (p. 112, 118).
Polonsky has a good grasp of the modus operandi of the GL/AL: "The communist-controlled forces, which were quite weak, advocated an immediate confrontation with the Nazi occupier, both to take the pressure off the Soviet Union and in order to radicalize the situation in Poland by courting savage German reprisals." (p. 3).
Click Here to see more reviews about: Fire Without Smoke: Memoirs of a Polish Partisan (The Library of Holocaust Testimonies)
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