Description: The starting point of Jan Gross's A Golden Harvest is a haunting photograph that depicts a group of "diggers" atop a mountain of ashes at Treblinka, where some 800,000 Jews were gassed and cremated. The diggers are hoping to find gold and precious stones that Nazi executioners may have overlooked. The story captured in this grainy black-and-white photograph symbolizes the vast, continent-wide plunder of Jewish wealth. Beginning with one photograph, this moving book evokes the depth and range, as well as the intimacy, of the final solution.
Review Quotes: "lucid and chilling book" --The New Yorker
"extraordinarily powerful account" --Neal Gendler, The American Jewish World"[Golden Harvest] is a remarkable, stunning work." --Gila Wertheimer, Chicago Jewish Star"Starting from a disturbed posed photograph of paesant gleaners in search of "post-Jewish" gold in the soil of Treblinka death camp, Jan Tomasz Gross and Irena Grudzinska Gross have created in this profoundly moving volume a chilling, sometimes shocking, passionate, and yet always balanced examination of the extent to which plunder of Jewish possesion was often a communal enterprise in wartime and post-war Poland." --Madeline G. Levine, Kenan Professor of Slavic Literatures Emerita, University of North Carolina"Jan and Irena Gross guide us expertly through the "Heart of Darkness" that was wartime Poland. Using a single, deeply disturbing photograph, this book captures brilliantly the whole terrifying rapaciousness of Polish -- and European -- society as the Jews face the specter of elimination." --Norman M. Naimark, Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies, Stanford University