Gramatyka milczenia świadków
On the basis of Ludwik Hering’s short story Meta, Grudzińska-Gross discusses the language used to talk about the extermination of Jews in Nazi-occupied Warsaw.
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On the basis of Ludwik Hering’s short story Meta, Grudzińska-Gross discusses the language used to talk about the extermination of Jews in Nazi-occupied Warsaw.
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The study concerns the category of “purification” and contradictory meanings attributed to it in an essay by Błoński titled Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto (The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto) (1987). The first sense, for the author the only possible, refers to the Christian penitential order (complicity of Poles for the Holocaust – guilty conscience – religion – gaining forgiveness – purification). The two other senses come into conflict with the above characteristics. One of them is associated with social system of purity, which in the post-war Polish culture has appointed the status of dirty matter to the Holocaust. The last refers to the Polish affects that treat the Holocaust as what is disgusting. Three varieties of impurities (fault – dirt – disgust) imply three different ways of purification.
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This article discusses the armed anti-Jewish violence and the events connected with it, which occurred in the Polish Tatra Highlands (southern Poland) during 1945–1947. The number of Jewish victims exceeded 30, including children from Jewish orphanages. Among the perpetrators of those acts of terror were partisans from the group commanded by Józef Kuraś ‘Ogień’, which is one of the most important symbols of the anti-communist resistance. This article is based on results of a few years’ research and highly diverse sources and its main purpose is to recreate those events, with particular attention given to the victims of those acts of violence.
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At the beginning of the occupation, France, Holland and Belgium found themselves in a similar situation. But when we look at the ratio of victims and survivors during the Holocaust in Western Europe, France and Holland are polar opposites: in France 25 percent of around 320,000 Jews did not survive the persecutions, whereas the ratio in Holland was 75 percent of 140,000. Belgium lies in the middle of the scale – 40 percent dead out of 66,000 Jews. In order to understand the source of these differences, the authors compare the methods applied by the occupation authorities and their anti-Jewish policies, the involvement and the size of the local police forces and German police, as well as the jurisdictional disputes between these formations.
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75 per cent of French Jews survived the war in France. They received help within the framework of individual initiatives, mutual help structures, and the resistance movement — mainly Jewish. The author reconstructs the legal situation, administrative division, military operations, and the involvement of the SS, SD, and French collaborators during 1940–1944 which led to the speciic legal conditions and the atmosphere that enabled the French to act. The main problem the SS faced during the ‘inal solution’ was the lack of regulations prohibiting the French from helping Jews and ones that would have separated Jews from non-Jews. In an attempt to threaten the French, the Germans arrested the Jews, dismantled the help organisations’ structures, and arrested those suspected of provision of shelter to Jews. In 1943 the SD joined the SS in the carrying out of the ‘final solution’ and managed to signiicantly increase the number of French collaborators. The Germans gained momentum to hunt down Jews, which led to more arrests. In 1944 the resuming of the military operations in France made it enemy territory to the Germans. Repressions became more brutal and the 'final solution' policy ceased to consist only in arrests and deportations and began to involve dozens of executions of Jews conducted by the Germans and their French supporters. Every intensiication of the brutality and repressions led to increased help.
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The article tells the story of Henryk Ryszewski, who provided hiding to about a dozen Jews in his lat in the Warsaw district of Mariensztat. Accused after the war of blackmailing Jews (as I think, wrongly), he was convicted and spent several years in prison. His prosecutor fell victim of the ‘paper affair’ show trial and also spent a few years in prison.
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The article presents the scholarly achievements of Philip Friedman, an eminent historian from Lviv and survivor, whose wife and daughter died in the Holocaust. Friedman was a pioneer of Holocaust research. His contribution consisted in setting out research directions, developing the methodology and research tools, and documenting the Holocaust. Immediately after the war Friedman developed one of the irst Holocaust research programmes, which included topics such as: the place of Jews in Nazi ideology, the subsequent stages of persecutions of Jews, the description of Jewish life and resistance to the Nazi extermination policy, the Nazi genocide, the attitude of the non-Jewish population toward persecutions of Jews, and the response of the free world, including the Yishuv, to the Holocaust. Friedman was convinced that reactions of the victims and their life in the shadow of looming annihilation should constitute the foundation of research on the ‘inal solution’. The severely criticised the historians who based their Holocaust research solely on Nazi documentation, disregarding the Jewish perspective. Friedman himself was most interested in two issues: Judenrats and Jewish resistance. He examined the Jewish councils’ activity in the context of the inner life of ghettoes, the council’s inluence on the life of ghetto inhabitants. Carrying out research on Jewish resistance, Friedman created a broad concept of that stance – one that included not only military activity but also acts in the spiritual and cultural sphere. Philip Friedman was also one of the irst historians who paid attention to the universal signiicance of the Holocaust. He claimed that the human and moral implications of the ‘inal solution’ pertained not only to the Jews but also to all mankind. He also assumed that Jews were the irst but not the only victims of the Nazi extermination policy, as he discussed the extermination of the Roma as early as in 1950.
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This article surveys Bulgarian historical publications (collections of documents, monographs, collective works, and articles in periodicals) regarding the deportation of Jews from the territories annexed by Bulgaria during WWII (Vardan Macedonia, Western Thrace with a fragment of Aegean Macedonia that is, ‘Belomorie’, and Pirot). Such publications have been appearing on the Bulgarian publishing market since 1945, which testiies to Bulgarian scholars’ continuous interest in the issue of the fate of the Jewish minority, which remained under Sophia’s control. Until the fall of communism there were significant ideological limitations to Bulgarian historiography, while scholarly articles or books stressed the role of the communist movement (led by the future General Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Todor Zhivkov) and ordinary citizens in rescuing the local minority from deportation to the death centre in Treblinka. The dissolution of the Eastern Bloc and the freeing of historical research from the corset of ideological propaganda brought the irst Bulgarian publications that stressed the positive role of King Boris III and certain Bulgarian politicians, for instance, Dimitar Peshev, who purportedly opposed the political pressure exerted by Berlin with regard to deportation of Bulgarian Jews. However, the issue of Bulgaria’s responsibility for deportations of Jews from the annexed territories remains suficiently researched. One may also see the resistance offered by some scholarly milieus, which wish to regard their country as the only one that did not participate in the Holocaust.
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This article presents the complexity of life of mixed married couples in two large cities, Wrocław and Hamburg, during the Third Reich. The stories of six mixed families outline the issue of help provided to Jews by their non-Jewish spouses. Each case is analysed in terms of the survival strategy, the changing family constellations, the methods and possibilities of provision of help, and the dangers and dilemmas faced by the families of the mixed married couples.
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In the irst half of 1942 pollsters of Oneg Shabbat’s underground archive of the Warsaw ghetto conducted interviews with eight Jewish intellectuals on the influence of the ghetto reality on the Jews’ social life and identity. Among the many topics discussed in those questionnaires, the author focuses on the respondents’ opinions on acculturation, which she presents in three contexts: the respondents’ personal experiences, their political views (almost all of them were Doikeit ideology supporters), and the pre-war discussion on the role of the Yiddish language and culture in formation of Jewish national identity. The respondents gave the acculturation in the ghetto a new dimension. Even though before the war Polonisation was not perceived as a deinitely negative phenomenon, in the ghetto it began to be interpreted as a conscious decision to reject Jewish identity. Acculturation, which according to the respondents was not imposed by the Germans, became the main form of pathology in the Jewish intelligentsia milieus. In their critical interpretation of the ghetto reality the respondents perceived those processes as a danger to their nation’s identity comparable to the destructive activity of the Germans.
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The author analyses fragments of testimonies about the Warsaw ghetto regarding children’s family relations. The article describes the demographic transformations that changed the social structure, which forced the families into functional adjustments. The most important change was the forcing of groups, which had not worked, that is children, to earn money. The article presents the consequences of those transformations for family relations and analyses the experience of childhood and parenthood in the ghetto.
More...Wokół książek Mikołaja Grynberga Ocaleni z XX wieku i Oskarżam Auschwitz. Opowieści rodzinne
This text is not a review of Mikołaj Grynberg’s two books mentioned in the title but a proposition of their joint reading in the context of oral Holocaust history on the one hand and relection on the Holocaust heritage in the ‘second generation’, that is the generation of survivors’ children, on the other. I pursue the former goal by inscribing Ocaleni z XX wieku in the oral history documentary-research tradition, including an attempt to interpret the testimonies from that book in the categories of ‘deep memory’ and its types distinguished by Lawrence Langer in his excellent book Holocaust Testimonies. The Ruins of Memory, which has recently been published in Polish. To achieve the second goal, that is, to bring out the tensions between the irst and the second, post-Holocaust generation, I compare Grynberg’s two books with Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus. Last but not least, I inquire about the boundaries of the community of Holocaust memory as ‘family memory’.
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Written on the ‘Aryan’ side, Doctor Chaim Einhorn’s diary contains recollections of the ghetto, particularly the deportation campaign period, and a few passages written during hiding in the Warsaw district of Praga – Doctor Einhorn and his wife were hiding with a few other Jews at teacher Romana Hanke’s home.
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During the German occupation, a two-tier justice system was introduced in the General Government: Polish courts, with their pre-war structures, operated alongside German courts. The paper, based on records preserved in the State Archives in Piotrkow, is devoted to a trial before the Polish Municipal Court in Pławno near Radom. Karol Kuban was sued by Meir Wolberg, and the subject of the dispute was money owed for a horse. The most interesting part of the trial was the decision of the court ordering Kuban to take an oath in the parish church, as a result of which Wolberg was supposed to withdraw his claim. Kuban failed to appear in the church, and instead iled an appeal to a higher court, which overturned the previous verdict and ordered a retrial. Further legal actions were suspended due to the absence of Majer Wolberg, who was deported to an extermination camp at that time.
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