Talk:Secret City (book)

2004 Orbis Prize

I am having finding independent sources to verify this. It is mentioned by publisher/author (, , also ), yes, and on this blog(?) but crucially, it he is not listed on the official page(!) see (also, ). The award is clearly not billenial, btw, and associated with AAASS (American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies), not PAS (Polish Studies Association). I can't find anythign about the award being removed, or that there are two different awards. After some digging, I did find some info about PAS, the award, and the book: : "Starting in 2011, the Polish Studies Association will co-sponsor, along with the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the annual Jerzy and Aleksandra Kulczycki Book Prize." (which implies PAS was NOT involved in the 2004 award). This page does list some books, in 2-year (biennial) order, including 2003-2004: Gunnar S. Paulsson, Secret City. The list on PSA page is not clearly defined what is it a list of (it is under the paragraph defining the "The Kulczycki Prize" but it does not seem to have anything in common with the AAASS list above). Weird. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus|} 03:36, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

It was in the libel case (independent court reporter who wrote up a detailed report). If the prize changed hands (to a different sponsor, maybe name too), some weirdness on past winners might not be odd, though we would still want a good source.Icewhiz (talk) 03:45, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

Considering the mention of the biennial prize at , I am leaning towards thinking the PSA prize is a different prize from the Orbis one. Maybe around 2011/2012 PSA stopped issuing its own prize, and started co-sponsoring the AAASS prize. The prizes names had been merged into one, but pre 2011/2012 there are two lists since there were different. Might need to email the organizations to verify this... --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus|} 04:25, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

I am the author. This was a prize awarded by the Polish Studies Association and funded by Orbis Bookstore. It has now been replaced by the Kulczycki Prize, which is awarded by the AAASS as noted, but the criteria have changed and I think it is now annual rather than biennial. Apparently there was some sloppy editing by the curators of the PSA web page. As to the libel suit, the judgment issued by the court in my favour is more relevant than a reporter's account of the trial. I will post on ms.brocklehurst's web page User: GSPaulsson 17:10 27 September 2020 (UTC)

Cooper

This faithful summary of a review was cut down to 7 words, to which a clarify tag (for language in the source) was added. Furthermore, the editor in question seems to think this review belongs on the bottom, diff, unlike said editor's opinion in other articles on books regarding ordering. Is there any actual policy based rationale for this?Icewhiz (talk) 13:22, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

The relevant policy is WP:UNDUE. You found one negative review and appear to want to base the entire article around it. Can you also actually address the question of whether Cooper actually explains what these "numerous contradictions and faulty statistics" are? Or does he just shit on the book? Volunteer Marek (talk) 13:30, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

There have been quite a number of reviews, as well as a full fledged 30 page journal article by Dreifuss, that have challenged the numbers and statistics. I will note that I have added two positive (one even glowing) reviews to the article - so no, I am not basing the entire article on Cooper. Have you read Cooper's review (or other academic reviews, for that matter) before cutting down the rather short summary to seven words? The previous summary did expand on some points, as does the 2 page review in Slavic Review, which is a major journal in the field.Icewhiz (talk) 13:58, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

A faithful summary of a "review" that a court has declared to be defamatory, which in addition has no real relation to the book supposedly reviewed, in other words, is not only defamatory but fraudulent, is a faithul summary of defamation and fraud. I am blocked from editing, so I can't set the record straight, and all my efforts to persuade thos who are able to edit it have fallen on deaf ears. It is not a "negative review," it is a fraudulent review. Letting it stand is like representing the work of a Holocaust denier as legimate history, because, you know, people need to hear "both sides." This entire page is nothing but propaganda. Cooper's "review" is a faithful review of the kind of propaganda that is spewed here. A small example. Whoever vandalized it proudly asserts that 60% of the Jews were still alive on the eve of the Warsaw Uprising. Total Polish deaths from all causes in Warsaw are estimated at 200,000-250,000, while estimates of deaths in the uprising are around 150,000-200,000. This means that Polish deaths before the uprising were 50,000-100,000, or 5-10% of the non-Jewish population of about one million, which means that the death rate was 6-12 times higher for the Jews than for the Poles. Be proud of that, you Polack bastards. Be proud of using the fruits of my 15 years of labor to wipe your asses. Be proud of destroying my professional repuation and career. Be proud that Barbara Engelking, founder and director of the Centre for Holocaust Studies in Warsaw got a grant in 2016 to research "Jews hiding on the Aryan side in Warsaw" - the exact subject of my book - claiming that until then, there were only scattered works based on weak source materials, then publishing her results in Przegląd Historyczny based on the same weak sources, all of which I knew when I started my research and are listed in my bibliogaraphy. Here is how the subject is covered in the USHMM Encylopedia of Camps and Ghettos, in its entirety: "At the end of the revolt, more than 20,000 Jews remained, but it is impossible to know how many survived." It is very possible, it just takes excellent sources and alot of hard work, which you idiots have suceeded in completely erasing from the literature. The entire page is complete garbage, and the editors are fucking amateurs clowning around. Gspaulsson (talk) 02:55, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

This must be clarified. Cooper's "review" was declared to be defamatory in a judgment of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice dated 27 March 2015 and entered by the Registrar on 16 December 2016, with an award of 75,000 CAD in general damages, 1,000 CAD in punitive damages, 25,165.89 CAD in pre-judgment interest and 100,158.71 CAD in costs. The entry may be a faithful summary of the review, but nothing said in the review about my book is true. It is not a "negative review", but a fraudulent one, a textbook example of disinformation. This is a highly polarized subject, in which propaganda of all kinds floes around, and this "review" is an example. Major journal or not, the review cannot be relied on and should be retracted. Cooper's sole qualification for reviewing my book was that he had published a book of his own, Under the Shadow of the Polish Eagle: The Poles, the Holocaust and Beyond (Palgrave, 2000) which was reviewed in the Spring 2002 issue of Slavic Review by David Engel. Engel, who holds an endowed chair in Holocaust Studies at NYU (and gave me a glowing review) portrays Cooper as an opinionated amateur who asserts opinions based on his own experiences as a child in pre-war Poland, not on academic research, concluding that Coper's book is thus "worse than useless", "a step backward in a field that has made much progress", and should not have been published. Cooper's disinformation, published with the authority of a leading journal, has been widely believed and repeated. Thus a review by Havi Dreifuss in the 2010 issue of Gal-ed, the "full-fledged article" referred to, a Polish translation of that article in Zagłada Żydów - studia i materiały in 2014, and her further remarks in her book, Polish-Jewish Relations during the Holocaust in 2017, are all plagiarized from Cooper's "review". At the very least, my reply to Dreifuss's "review" in the 2011 issue of Gal-ed should be mentioned. The entire affair deserves an article of its own. User:GSPaulsson 17:10 27 September 2020 (UTC)

Since you are obviously familiar with those issues much more so than we are, could you provide links to any new sources you would like to add, and/or completely rewritten or new paragraphs you would like to see added? I am sure a number of volunteers including myself will be happy to review proposed changes. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 00:47, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Cooper does not just "shit on the book," he conjures up an imaginary book with the following plot: - It was easy to escape, even from the camps; - there was no antisemitism in Poland, or if there was, it was marginal and harmless; - living conditions were not much better for the Polish population than for Jews in the ghetto, and in some ways worse; - the Poles were well-disposed towards the Jews and would gladly have helped them; - thus if more Jews had escaped, many more would have survived; accordin to cCooper, this is "the main postulate put forward in thie book; - but the Jews were inhibited from escaping by the incorrect perception of Poles as hostile. This imaginary book consists of nothing more than bald "assertions," "claims," "hypotheeses" etc., unsupported or contradicted by evidence. The author presents "strange" estimates arrived at by "statistical juggling." Finally, he is "correct (!) to emphasize the help rendered by Poles to save Jewish lives ..., but he fails in his attempt to minmize the role of the Polish population in the death of many Jews. This is a textook example of disinformation, or what an English judge, Lord Ellenborough, aptly called "fiction for the pupose of condemnation." In academic terms, it is a politically-motivated ad hominem attack and a particularly flagrant example of academic fraud.

Secrret City, as its title announces, is a history of the remarkable underground community of Jews hiding "on the Aryan side" in Warsaw. It is intended to complement Israel Gutman's classic history of the Warsaw ghetto with a history of the community outside the ghetto, from the closing of the ghetto in 1940 to the end of the war. Together, the two cover the wartime history of the Jews of Warsaw, on both sides of the wall.

The impression Cooper creates is reinforced by the fact that the Polish right misrepresents it as speaking well of the Poles. In fact, it is not about the Poles at all, but follows the history of a Jewish community, in which Poles, Germans and others of various kinds appear in due proportion.

The fundamental fallacy underlying the grotesque misrepresentation of thie book is the assumption that the Jews were passive and helpless. That leads to the right's portrayal of a fairy fantasyland populated by brave Poles stepping forward to "save," "rescue" or "bring aid" to the Jews, which leads to the further false assumption that big numbers make the Poles look good. All the intemperate attacks, by Cooper and others in his footsteps, are based on that false narrative. the Jews were not passive, nor helpless. They were intelligent human beings, capable of thinking, judging, deciding, acting, co-operating, organizing, and writing and recording, as Shimon Dubnov urged. They have a rich history of their own, which has been displaced by political agendas, all of which require them to be passive and helpless, so others can dish out credit and blame.

Because Cooper plays into stereotypes and received narratives, his fiction has been extraordinarily successful. This page was hijacked by partisans in controversies over the actions and attitudes of the Polish population and turned into nonsense that is completely irrelevant to the actual subject of the book.

There have been quite a number of reviews, as well as a full fledged 30 page journal article by Dreifuss, that have challenged the numbers and statistics.

Dammit, this isn't a question of "positive" or "negative" reviews, but of honest reviews vs. defamatory propaganda. Cooper's malicious hit-piece is as much a review of the book as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are the minutes of a meeting of Jewish leaders. Those who believe him, which is basically all the heavy hitters in the field, have been sucked down a rabbit hole that it will be hard for them to get out of.

The end result is that the subject that the book deals with, the product of 15 years of research, based on extensive, objective, contemporary sources, is covered in the USHMM's Encyclopedia, in its entirety, as follows: "At the end of the revolt, more than 20,000 Jews remained in Warsaw, but it is impossible to know how many surived." Another result is that Barbara Engelking, the leading Polish expert on Warsaw, obtained a grant to study "Jews hiding on the Aryan side in Warsaw," claiming that until then there were only "occasional publications" based on "weak source materials." The first publication issuing from that project, "Organizowanie pomocy dla Żydów po aryjskiej stronie Warszawy" (Przegląd Historyczny, tom CKI 20202 zesz. 3 pp. 571-591), could have been written 40 years ago. The most important sources for Secret City were records preserved at great risk by activists of the Jewish National Committee (ŻKN) and Bund, which I used to construct a database of 9368 entries, with information about 6515 recipients, inclding 4592 names. Engelking does not mention those sources, but swims around in a sea of opinions, claims and conter-claims, ending by saying that "the lack of crediblenumerical data" makes it "impossible to know even how many Jewa lived in hiding. Sure, it's impossible if all your information comes from articles and books published in 1982 or earlier, in complete ignorance of the most extensive, most credible sources.

The damage done by Cooper's "review" is enormous. It has set scholarship back by 20, if not 40 years, completely obscured the book's actual subject, and suppressed the fruitful line of research I started. Needless to say, anyone who believes Cooper wants nothing to do with me, so my professional career collapsed and I have been ostracized, with no effective way to fight back. Cooper learned his trade living in the Soviet Union under Stalin, and he is very good at it: a smooth, practiced liar. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gspaulsson (talk • contribs) 07:39, March 27, 2023 (UTC)

Vandalism

I am the author of this book, and the article completely misrepresents it. It does not belong in the category of Polish-Jewish relations; rather, it comes out of an entirely different line of historiography that runs from Emmanuel Ringelblum to the work of Michał Borwicz in the 1950s and '60s. It is a social history of the underground community of Jews who lived in hiding "on the Aryan side" in Warsaw. It is not, or is only incidentally, about the actions and attitudes of the Polish population towards those Jews. I estimate that about 28,000 Jews lived in hiding in Warsaw at one time or another, helped by 70,000-90,000 Poles (I should have said "people", since there were also Germans, Ukrainians and assorted others). What none of the commentators seem to grasp is that this was a highly select, hand-picked group of people, not at all representative of the Polish population, which everyone involved tried as much as possible to avoid. The underlying error arises from what I call the "rescue paradigm", which visualizes benevolent Poles reaching out to the Jews and "rescuing" them. But even a casual reading of the memoir literature reveals that in almost all cases, the initiative came from the Jewish side. The Jews weighed their options, and if they decided to take their chances "on the Aryan side", they escaped, then figured out how to survive. When they needed help, they sought out people whom they knew personally and thought they could trust, who could be Poles, Germans, Volksdeutsche, etc., but as ths community of hidden Jews expanded, were increasingly fellow Jews. In the fall of 1942 an organized leadership developed, eventually blossoming into an organized aid effort that dwarfed the better-publicized activity of the Polish organization Żegota. All of this is entirely lost on authors who stuff it into the familiar pigeonhole of "Polish-Jewish relations" and comment on what they think it says about the Poles. In other words, the actual book has been buried under a mountain of misunderstanding, misrepresentation, loud shouting from both sides in a controversy that has nothing to do with the book's actual subject matter. The entire article has to be rewritten, not by people who don't know the subject, but by me, the author. Others can then comment on it. But the article as it stands is totally misleading. GSPaulsson 17:52, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

@GSPaulsson: I moved your new section to the bottom per WP:BOTTOMPOSTING. Your argument above is extremly interesting, and I hope you can help us improve our coverage of related topics. I think you are the first professional historian of these topics to go as far as commenting on Wikipedia talk pages, and I hope you will consider helping us more. Wikipedia has a lot of impact on the public knowledge (see for example how many people read this very article - metric at the top or here), but is sadly written mostly by amateurs, some of which are sadly very opinionated. One thing I would hoever note is that it is worth to also read the WP:COI policy, and as such, you may want to 'test the waters' by editing some articles that are a bit less associated with you directly, such as general topics like Warsaw Ghetto or Rescue of Jews by Poles and similar, while for topics which are directly related to you, like this one, the best practices suggest proposing rewrites and like on the talk page and asking others to review those changes first. In either case, please do not hesitate to ask me for any advice or suggestions, as a fellow academic (albeit a sociologist, not historian), I would be very happy to 'show you around'. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 00:55, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

I have repeatedly complained, as the author of this book, that the Wikipedia page is so riddled with errors and misconceptions that it is worthless. It has been locked for editiing because it is supposedly "controversial". It is not controversial. It has been dragged into a controversy among politically-motivated amateurs and misrepresented by both sides. The fundamental misconception is that it is taken to be about Polish-Jewish relations, which it is not. It is a social history of a Jewish community. For there to be legitimate controversy, there would have to be a competing history of that community, which does not exist and is not likely to exist any time soon. This bilateral idiocy from the Polish side has in effect suppressed my research entirely, destroyed my career and now threatens to derail the Museum of the Warsaw Ghetto. I will create a new Wikipedia page. Please delete this one, since it is doing more harm than good.User: GSPaulsson 16:02 10 March 2021 (UTC)

Two years later and nothing has been done. User: GSPaulsson 11:36 26 March 2023 (UTC)

@GSPaulsson: Dear GSPaulsson, as I wrote before, I'd be happy to try to address your concerns, but I am unsure what you would like to see done, exactly? Perhaps you could quote here, on the talk page, exact parts of the article you'd like to see removed/changed, and/or add parts that you'd like to see added/rewritten? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:02, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 21 August 2024

Correct quotes. 64.189.18.44 (talk) 16:47, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. MadGuy7023 (talk) 17:07, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

The following description: "Paulsson used memoirs and statistics to analyze the circumstances and fate of the approximately 28,000 Jews who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto and found refuge on the outside. He estimates that out of the city's population of about one million, about 70,000 to 90,000 gentile Poles were involved in helping those Jewish escapees, while between 3,000 and 4,000 Polish criminals and profiteers, known as szmalcowniks, preyed on those Jews and their helpers, blackmailing them or betraying them to the German occupiers. Paulsson finds that about 11,500 or 40% of the Jewish escapees survived (in fact, 17,000 or about 60% were alive before the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 whose aftermath left the city in ruins), a number comparable to the Jewish survival rate in Western Europe. The Jews who survived where safeguard in the titular 'secret city', a loose network of Polish helpers, including the underground organization known as Żegota, or the Council to Aid Jews."

--My most important sources were records preserved by two Jewish organizations, the Jewish National Committee and the Bund, NOT Żegota. What I showed was that Żegota accounted for less than a third of the organized aid effort

-- the statistics are based on those records, which are extensive, contemporary, objective -- and thanks to the hijacking of my work by the POlish right to serve its narrative of Polish "angels" saving passive Jews, and the consequent abuse heaped on me by people who know it only fro the way the right misrepresents it, almost ompletely unknown.

-- the figures cited are correct but do not mean what the Polish right claims they do. Stop and think: Jews trying to survive in a hostile environment needed to keep a low profile, so the fact that a large number of Poles became involved with them, some with nefarious motives, is not evidence of some utopia populated by Righteous Gentiles, as the right would have you believe, but of the Jews' own desperate struggle, constantly on the run, with the result that 60% of them died, compared with 30% of the population of the ghetto before the deportations and 20-25% of the Polish population.

-- the basic problem is that the controversy over Polish-Jewish relations is a controversy among Poles about Poles, having no relevance to the actual subject of my book. It is the only empirically well-grounded study of Jewish life in hiding in Warsaw, or anywhere. By delving into Jewish records and the work of Emmanuel Ringelblum in particular, it completely demolishes the myth planted by Raul Hilberg in The Destruction of the European Jews that the Jews were passive and disorganized. They were excellently well-organized, but they were fighting a different war: an ideological one, which began in 1933, not 1939, to which the appropriate response was to maintain solidarity and seek support -- which the Jews did. Then the Poles jumped in, eager to push back against allegations of complicity in the Holocaust by stressing their efforts to help Jews, with particular emphasis on prominent antisemites and right-wing extremists, taking all the credit and figuratively shoving the Jews into the gutter. It is a simple question of voice. Hilberg used German records and saw the Jews through the eyes of the perpetrators; the Poles use Polish records and see them through the filters of their own political battles. I used Jewish sources and saw the Jews through their own eyes, not as passive cvictims or passively "saved," but as the protagonists of their own survival drama. One of them was my mother, who survived via the Aryan side in Warsaw, Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, Malchow, and the Swedish Red Cross. I have reflected on her experiences for 72 of my 79 years, and I regard my work as a sacred duty owed to her. It took me 15 years to research and write. It is leading-edge, award-winning, Oxford doctoral quality scholarship. Letting the Poles loose on it was to quote Lloyd George in another context, like giving a watch to a monkey. Gspaulsson (talk) 20:50, 9 March 2026 (UTC)

I have been blocked from editing this article about my book as well as the article about me personally. This entire article is unsalvageable. The editors lack the subject-area expertise to understand my work, the basic framing is wrong, the content is cherry-picked to fit the framing, and much of it is malicious gossip. They stuff it into the familiar category of Polish-Jewish relations, spinning it as supporting the Polish right's narrative of Polish "angels" saving passive Jews, then cite various "reviews" by similarly misinformed reviewers, or cut legitimate reviews to suit their cloth. , salted with malicious gossip. There are no "negative" reviews.There are reviews by Holocaust scholars and survivors who know what they are talking about, and reviews by opinionated amateurs who have no idea. The pivotal misconception is the identification of organized aid to the Jews with the Polish organization Żegota, while not mentioning the much more extensive aid effort of the Jewish National Committee and the Bund, which between the reached moire than twice as many people as Żegota. Not a single reviewer even mentions the extensive, contemporary, objective records that Jewish activists risked thousands of lives to preserve, documenting their activity "on the Aryan side" and the lives of those they supported. These records, the organizations' internal correspondence and their correspondence with their counterparts in London, as well as more than 300 Jewish memoirs and testimonies, conclusively demolish the myth of Jewish passivity, which underlies all the misconceptions. This is my contribution to scholarship. The polemical warriors seem incapable of imagining that the Jews had a well-documented history of their own, which they know nothing about and which does not interest them in the least. Secret City is leading-edge, award-winning, Oxford doctoral quality scholarship, a product of a lifetime's reflection as the son of a survivor and 15 years of intensive research. It is not a book for amateurs. Much of this article's content derives from Leo Cooper's discredited "review" in the Summer 2004 issue of Slavic Review, which 11 years after a court judgment declared it to be defamatory the journal still refuses to retract. It is not a matter of a few errors that could be corrected in a letter. Cooper's review, and this article, per COPE retraction guidelines, are both "so seriously flawed that [their] findings and conclusions should not be relied upon," COPE's criterion for retraction, whereas "Partial retractions are not helpful because they make it difficult to determine the status of the article and which parts may be relied upon." This article must be retracted. You are wary of authors using Wikipedia for self-promotion, but the end result of blocking me is that anyone can say anything they want about my book, true or mostly false -- except me, the author. Instead of a preview, I get: "You are using this template in the wrong namespace. Use this template on your talk page instead." Don't effing presume to tell me my business.Gspaulsson (talk) 03:03, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

You were making a technical mistake of putting your comment into an "unblock" template, which is why you were getting that "wrong namespace" thing. I've fixed it for you. You haven't personally been blocked from editing this article; rather, this article is what we call "semi-protected"; it's in the category of topics that are so contentious that we require an editor to first have a minimum number of edits. --jpgordon^{𝄢𝄆𝄐𝄇} 03:38, 10 March 2026 (UTC)