The dissertation examines the role of Polish Catholic domestic workers employed in middle-class Jewish households during the interwar period and the ways that the relationships that developed in the domestic realm influenced decisions to seek or provide aid during the Holocaust. It argues that the relationships that sometimes formed in the domestic realm caused Polish Catholic domestic workers to see their Jewish employers as belonging to their own community of obligation and to sometimes then aid them during the Nazi persecution. In addition, this work examines how middle-class Polish culture was transmitted to Jewish children by their acculturated parents, sometimes via the family's Polish Catholic maid and the ways this maid also familiarized her charges with Polish Catholic peasant culture. This dissertation asserts that this familiarity with Polish culture and the hybrid identities the children of these households sometimes formed was useful in later allowing them to pass as Catholic Poles on the so-called Aryan side if the opportunity was present during the Nazi Occupation period. The dissertation is comprised of two parts. The first examines the prewar period to explore how Polish Catholic women from the countryside made their niches within urban Jewish households, how Polish middle class culture was transmitted to children in acculturated Jewish homes, and to examine how these children then further developed their hybridic Polish Jewish identities while in the public realm, away from the control of their parents and caregivers. The second part of the dissertation examines the initial responses of the domestic workers and their Jewish employers to the Nazi invasion of Poland and the ghettoization of the Jewish population, how it was decided to place Jewish children and families into hiding outside the ghetto, and case studies of children hidden with their former Polish caregivers.
Read
