7 - Rehabilitation of Individuals Suspected of Collaboration: The Jewish Civic Court under the Central Committee of Jews in Poland, 1946–1950

Summary

There is now an extensive literature looking at the intersection of law, war, and postwar consequences. This includes, in particular, the history of war crimes prosecution and the creation of new postwar legal systems and institutions, but also questions of retribution and repatriation. The last two decades have witnessed an increasing interest in the postwar efforts of European governments to come to grips with citizens who collaborated with the Nazis in their countries and in subsequent scholarship on the topic, including a debate on the issue of Jewish forced cooperation during the Holocaust and the role of the postwar discussion around it in the formation of a post-Holocaust collective of Jews from Poland. While this chapter fits into the scholarship by looking at how justice and accountability were understood in the aftermath of war, it will focus in particular on incorporating into the narrative those Jews who stayed in Poland, and it links postwar justice sought outside courtrooms (demonstrating the initiative and agency of survivors) to that within the official legal system. This will be done by analyzing rehabilitation requests addressed to the Jewish Civic Court in Poland and on this basis demonstrating creation of public knowledge regarding collaboration during the Holocaust, formation of audiences, and circulation of the information on this topic. Central to this chapter, therefore, will be noncombatant victims, who were stigmatized by those surrounding them, both from within and from outside their community.

The chapter will look at the pursuit of justice and accountability in the aftermath of the Second World War, focusing on the case of wartime Jewish collaboration with the Nazi authorities, as investigated by the Jewish Civic Court (known in Polish mainly as sąd obywatelski or sąd społeczny, and in Yiddish as folks-gerikht). The Central Committee of Jews in Poland (Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce)—the central representative body of Polish Jewry— operated the court from October 1946 to early 1950. During the time of its existence, the Civic Court investigated 147 cases of members of the Polish Jewish community, who “during the Hitlerite occupation [were suspected of activity] unbefitting a Jewish citizen, through participation and harmful activity on ‘Jewish councils,’ in the [ghetto police], in the administration of concentration camps, or any other type of collaboration with the occupier to the detriment of society.”