Jan T. Gross, a Princeton professor, has written an astonishing book, an exposé of vicious anti-Semitism, complete with medieval, murderous pogroms raging in Poland -- after the end of World War II.

"Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz" (Random House, 336 pps., $25.95) documents in meticulous detail how, after the Nazi defeat, Polish citizens of all classes set upon the remaining Jews in their communities and murdered them outright. During the 1946 Kielce pogrom, soldiers who were called to the scene to restore order instead tossed women out of windows. In the courtyard below, townspeople finished off those not yet dead.

Blood pooled in the streets as people executed their Jewish neighbors mercilessly. An infant was shot in the head, its mother already dead, because, the murderer says, "It was crying." On trains, boys in a youth group dutifully move from car to car singling out the Jewish passengers, the more readily for them to be murdered at the next stop, where a bloodthirsty mob waits impatiently.

Gross supplies impeccable documentation: witness testimony, court testimony from the desultory trials (most of the killers got off), letters, diaries, films. All tell the same story: Anti-Semitism was so embedded in the culture of Poland that even witnessing the outrages of Auschwitz and Treblinka, which were not concealed from sight, did not dissuade large sections of the Polish population from the murderous project of cleansing their country of Jews. Only in their being less well-organized did they differ from their Nazi occupiers.

The old order and the army, the new Communist apparatus, the cardinal and his bishops -- all conspired to kill Poland's remaining Jews (90 percent already had perished) or to drive them out of the country for good. Gross exposes how this brutality unfolded in contradistinction to the "Romantic" Polish tradition, he writes, "of nurturing the weak and defending the persecuted."

Many Poles who had shielded or rescued Jews from the Nazis tried desperately to keep their identities secret so that their neighbors would not murder them. In one of his very helpful and copious footnotes, Gross invokes that paradigmatic scene from Primo Levi's classic "Survival in Auschwitz." Levi, newly arrived, was dying of thirst, longing for a drink of water which was not, of course, forthcoming. At last, he seized an icicle and lifted it to his lips, only for it to be knocked away by a guard. Perplexed, because he was a young man and not yet initiated into the Nazi landscape, Levi asked: "Why?" The guard offered a ready answer: "Hier ist kein warum": Here there is no why.

Gross dutifully attempts to examine why so many Poles of all social classes revealed themselves to be so brutish and lacking in compassion as to have excluded themselves from civilization itself. He can discover no answer.

Gross wonders whether the Nazis had corrupted many Poles by exterminating the Jews openly. But then he notes that pogroms were flourishing before the time of the camps. Gross finds no explanation for these horrendous deeds because there is none. He is looking at pure, unregenerate evil.
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