Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940-1945

Although the Nazis forced most of Warsaw's Jews into the city's famous ghetto during World War II, some 28,000 Jews either hid and never entered the Warsaw Ghetto, or escaped from it in what Gunnar S. Paulsson calls "the greatest prison break in history". This book tell the dramatic story of the hidden Jews of Warsaw. Drawing on memoirs, diaries, testimonies, and the records of Jewish and Polish organizations that helped the fugitives, Paulsson shows that after the 1942 deportations nearly a quarter of the ghetto's remaining Jews managed to escape. Once in hiding, connected by elaborate networks of which Poles, Germans, and the Jews themselves were largely unaware, they formed what can aptly be called a secret city. Paulsson challenges many established assumptions. He shows that despite appalling difficulties and dangers, many of these Jews survived; that the much-reviled German, Polish and Jewish policemen, as well as Jewish converts and their families, were key in helping Jews escape; that though many more Poles helped than harmed the Jews, most stayed neutral; and that escape and hiding happened spontaneously, without much help from either the Polish or the Jewish underground. He also suggests that the Jewish leadership was wrong to dismiss the possibility of escape, staking everything on a hopeless uprising.