A Velvet Empire: French Informal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century by David Todd (review)

Abstract

In January 1943, the force’s first leader committed suicide, to great elation in the ghetto. Having assisted in the deportation of some 265,000 Jews, the Jewish Order Service now played a marginal role and suffered the same fate as the others. Ringelblum had little sympathy: “In this way, the majority of the executioners of the Warsaw Jews—the officers of the degenerate and corrupt Jewish police—died along with their families” (p. 145). One subject that does not receive much attention in the book is Jozef Szerynski himself. As the Service’s first leader who then returned to oversee the deportations, he played a crucial role in the Service, yet readers learn little about him as an individual or as a police officer. The extent to which he moulded the Service in his own image remains somewhat of a mystery. Nevertheless, Person’s account is a methodical construction of the increasing violence and corruption that led to the Jewish Order Service’s participation in the deportations. She uses the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto (Ringelblum Archive) to great effect, painting a more complex picture of the Service than the harsh black-and-white portrayal up to this point. Her account reveals the grey areas of the Service, including that it performed many routine sanitation tasks, that some officers occasionally refused orders, and that many officers accepted bribes as part of a genuine belief that they deserved them because they risked their lives on a daily basis. She seeks not to defend the Service, but to remind readers that its officers were real people facing unprecedented times. Some were ruthless collaborators; others saw their participation as an act of self-preservation for both themselves and their families. With the aid of historical perspective rooted in the passage of time, Person offers a more nuanced history of the force than is currently available.