Could Jewish and Zionist Leaders Have Done More to Rescue the Jews of Poland?

In the view of Philip Roth’s narrator in The Plot Against America—a fictional account of how fascism might have come to the United States in 1940—history as schoolchildren study it is the story “turned wrong way around”: a tale told after the fact, with “everything . . . chronicled on the page as inevitable.” By contrast, the narrator asserts, history experienced in real time is a story of the “relentless unforeseen.”

Historians have a term—“hindsight history”—for accounts that ignore the daunting uncertainties and moral dilemmas presented by history as it actually unfolds. That is precisely what Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit set themselves against in their important and provocative book The Road to September 1939: Polish Jews, Zionists, and the Yishuv on the Eve of World War II (2018). Bringing us right up to the edge of the destruction of European and particularly of Polish Jewry, they seek to recover the story of the “relentless unforeseen.” As they put it in the book’s preface:

We do not intend to describe the events by reading history backward. We have tried not to read the story from its endpoint, but rather to tell it as much as possible in the “present.” Before August 1939, as well as during that month, no one really knew what was in store. It is only a retrospective reading that determines that the events moved inexorably toward an unequaled calamity and that it was impossible to halt their course.