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Review of: Milan Řepa - Peter Hallama: Nationale Helden und jüdische Opfer. Tschechische Repräsentationen des Holocaust. (Schnittstellen, Bd. 1.) Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Göttingen 2015. 368 S., Ill. ISBN 978-3-525-30073-2. (€ 64,99.)
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Based on the content of stereotypes and labels about women drawn from our corps, we have come to the conclusion that most of women carry out negative beliefs or attitudes about them. The majority of such units express these attitudes quite explicitly such as hatred, contempt, anger, reproach, irony, ridicule, despair, contempt, resentment, disappoin-tment, disbelief, hostility, envy, jealousy, disgust, and many other attitudes of contempt for women. Such negative stereotypes and labels ideologically justify the inferiority of women in society. Therefore, through these linguistic units, speakers tend to reject women’s value or advantage and thus put them in lower social positions. The stereotypes and labels in the reviewed texts, especially those of folklore, have revealed that they are not merely offensive. Rather, they are calls towards contempt, disdain, inequality, discrimination, stig-matization, and violence against women. Therefore, such stereotypes and labels have a major impact on the rise of sexist attitudes. Thus, one of the factors that play a major role in increasing prejudice and stigmatization may be the exposure to discriminatory messages that these texts convey to women. Stereotypes and labels in the texts reviewed are not always based on negative attitudes and opinions about women. In some cases they are based on kindness, caring, admiration, gratitude, compassion, praise, or love for them. However, even in such situations, they make a link between inferior treatment and positive evaluation for women. This means that in any case, despite referring to women who hold different roles, they generally give an overview of their inferior position in society.
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This study compares the measures that serve women’s numerical presence in politics in India and Pakistan. Based on the selected indicators of women’s human development, the paper also outlines the socio-economic and cultural conditions under which these measures operate. Drawing mainly on the primary sources coupled with Indian and Pakistani movies, the paper concludes by exposing the gap between an average woman citizen and a woman politician that exists in both countries regardless of quotas and reservation policy.
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The article is a review of Arkadiusz Morawiec’s book Literatura polska wobec ludobójstwa [Polish Literature and Genocide], the first Polish literary study to address the acts of genocide that occurred before the Holocaust and the ethnic cleansing after World War II. The reviewer recognises the researcher’s scholarship and the ethical sensitivity with which he revises his previous theses about the uniqueness of the Holocaust. The book has been composed in a cross-sectional manner, the articles on Holocaust and Genocide Studies are accompanied by analyses informed by poetics and sociology of literature. Thus, the reader becomes acquainted not only with the historical realities of the described conflicts but also with the mechanisms of collective memory, which is shaped by both institutional activities (museums) and the reception of survivors’ testimonies.
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This article explores the United Kingdom’s response to the Rohingya Crisis which began in August 2017, resulting in the ethnic cleansing of 600,000 Rohingya Muslims in the first nine weeks of violence, with a minimum of 6,700 people being killed in the process. The United Kingdom reacted with condemnation, and began immediately calling for the safe return of refugees who had fled the violence, to their homes in Rakhine state, Myanmar. Using the testimony from Mark Field MP, Minister for Asia, in a Foreign Affairs Committee meeting, this essay assesses this policy of pushing for the return of the Rohingya to their homes. Using primary sources available to Britain at the time its policy was formed, this essay argues that Britain’s approach was not only unrealistic with regards to providing an environment in which Rohingya refugees would be provided safety, but also in relation to Burmese authorities’ desires to take back Rohingya refugees. Myanmar’s campaign of ethnic cleansing intentionally created the environment in which either the Rohingya would never return, or they would return to state-controlled concentration camps. Secondary material expires the history of violent state policies against the Rohingya in Myanmar, and Britain’s policy is shown to not only be unworkable due to such policies, but would actively endanger those refugees who chose to return.
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The attention towards the issue of the condition of Uyghurs in the People’s Republic of China that has spiked in the recent years is mostly directed via international media. However, to understand this issue on a deeper level, it is important to also pay attention on the way the aspects of this matter are covered within the internal discourse of both Chinese and Uyghur Nationalist media. This article analyses two texts from Chinese state website and an Uyghur Nationalist website that present different perspectives on the condition of Uyghur women in China. They are discussed in comparison, using the IPA method of propaganda analysis, to provide an observation of the role of women in Uyghur identity.
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This special section examines how debates on local participation in the mass murder of the Jews during the Second World War have evolved in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. The comparative approach adopted in this collection has highlighted the common problems in these four countries in coming to terms with the “dark past”—those aspects of the national past that provoke shame, guilt, and regret. Like the contributors to this collection I believe it is debate among historians that offers the best chance to move forward and that the intervention of politicians has had a clearly deleterious effect. This debate needs to be conducted in an open and collegial manner although we may differ strongly in our conclusions. We should always remember that the past cannot be altered. We can only accept the tragic and shocking events that have occurred and try to learn from them. This is a process that could begin in northeastern Europe only after the collapse of the communist system—a coming to terms with the many neglected and taboo aspects of the past in all four countries. The first stage of approaching such issues has usually been from a moral point of view—a settlement of long-overdue accounts, often accompanied by apologies for past behaviour. It seemed that we were reaching a second stage, where apologetics would increasingly be replaced by careful and detailed research based on archives and reliable first-hand testimony.
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The Shoah belongs to one of the most thoroughly investigated aspects of modern European history. Scholars have used the Holocaust methodology to study other genocides, or forms of ethnic or political violence. Nevertheless, our understanding of the extermination of the European Jewry is limited, fragmented, and changes constantly due to new investigation methods, research interests, and public debates. The first studies on the Holocaust were conducted already during the Shoah but because of different reasons historians in some countries such as Germany and Ukraine did not pay much attention to them and concentrated rather on the documents left by the perpetrators and their fate during the war. While in Poland the research on the Holocaust never stopped, even if it was subjected to various political and ideological limitations, and the Shoah has been publicly debated since the middle of the 1980s, this was not the case in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Nevertheless, in the last two decades, the importance of the Holocaust was discovered in these countries as well and it is currently conceptualized in the framework of regional, national, and European history.
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Endangering people's lives are very present in all areas of social life, especially in armed conflicts. Armed conflicts persisted despite the great progress of human civilization. True, they have received a second physiognomy, but they still relate human lives and inflict suffering. More recently, aspirations have been expressed that give armed conflicts a different dimension, leading to an increase in civilian casualties relative to the military. International law on armed conflicts provides general but also special protection to certain categories of persons.
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This article discusses local cultures of remembrance of Yugoslav partisans fallen during World War II in Trieste, now part of Italy, and investigates the role of memory activists in managing vernacular memory over time. The author analyses the interplay between memory and the production of space, something which has been neglected in other studies of memory formation. On the basis of local newspaper articles, archival material, and oral interviews, the essay examines the ideological imprint on the local cultural landscape, contributing to a more complex understanding of memory engagement. The focus is on grassroots initiatives rather than state-sponsored heritage projects. This article argues that memory initiatives are not solely the outcome of national narratives and top–down ideological impositions. It shows that official narratives have to negotiate with vernacular forms of memory engagement in the production of a local mnemonic landscape.
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In this article, the author seeks to establish whether specific sites from Eastern Europe can be viewed as loci critiquing Pierre Nora’s seminal notion of lieux de mémoire. The sites in question are abandoned, clandestine locations of past violence and genocide, witnesses to wanton killings, today left with no memorial markers or inadequate ones. Without monuments, plaques, or fences, they might be understood as “completely forgotten,” as Claude Lanzmann once claimed. In opposition to that view, in the article the locations in question are interpreted as still potent agents in local processes of working with a traumatic past. Sites of mass violence and genocide are described as unheimlich and trigger strong affective reactions of fear, disgust, and shame whose actual causes remain unclear. This article analyzes possible catalysts of these powerful affective responses. The first hypothesis is grounded in the abundance of ghost stories in literary or artistic representations of the sites in question. The second hypothesis addresses the issue of the presence of dead bodies: human remains have never been properly neutralized by rituals. And finally, the third hypothesis explores the “effect of the affects” of non-sites of memory as the capacity of bodies to be moved by other bodies, the bodies affected in this case being those of the visitors to the uncanny sites.
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During the Second World War, the village of Pawłokoma, nowadays located a dozen kilometres from the Polish–Ukrainian border, was an area of conflict between the two nations. It has been almost ten years since a ceremony was held commemorating the victims of the conflict. The ceremony was attended by the Polish and Ukrainian Presidents. Today, the village is a symbol of reconciliation between the two nations. This article analyzes the dynamics of local collective memory about the conflict, using the “working through” concept and works on social remembering as a theoretical framework. In my discussion of the causes and effects of the changes in dynamics, I use data from individual in-depth interviews with three categories of respondents: the inhabitants of Pawłokoma, local leaders, and experts. The aforementioned ceremony was an opportunity for working through the traumatic past in the local community of Pawłokoma. Although social consultations were held in Pawłokoma rather than a comprehensive working-through process, we should be talking about a symbolic substitute for this process. Despite the fact that material commemorations of the Polish and Ukrainian victims were erected, some factors essential to accomplishing the working-through process were missed, such as complex institutional support, the engagement of younger generations, and empathy towards the “Others” and their sufferings.
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In this article the authors discuss the role of Jasenovac Concentration Camp in Croatian and Serbian political and social spheres. Connecting the historical data with the analysis of the recent mutual accusations of genocide between the Republic of Croatia and the Republic of Serbia before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the authors demonstrate the pervasive presence of Jasenovac in Serbian and Croatian political discourse. Presenting different modes of social construction around Jasenovac, from the end of the Second World War to the present, the article proposes a specific reading of Jasenovac as a form of the “past that does not pass.” In this respect, Jasenovac is seen as a continuous reference point for understanding collective losses and group suffering, both past and present, in Serbian and Croatian society. Although historically distanced by seventy years, the events surrounding Jasenovac are still constantly recurring in both political and private, official and unofficial, spheres of life, functioning as a specific symbol around which narratives of ethnic, national, and religious understanding as well as inter-group conflicts are thought and constructed. The role of political and social factors in the construction of frequently incompatible narratives is further underlined by the analysis of selected oral testimonies related to the war in Yugoslavia in 1990s.
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The spring of 2015 marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the secret executions of approximately twenty-two thousand Polish prisoners, ordered by Stalin and the Soviet Politburo on 5 March 1940. The victims included, among others, nearly all of the Polish army officers held in Soviet custody after the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939. Although the killings were carried out by the NKVD in several locations—Katyń, Tver, and Kharkiv being the principal places—they are referred to by the collective term “the Katyń crime” or the “Katyń massacres.” Until 1990, the mass burial in Katyń near Smolensk, discovered by the German occupation forces and widely publicized by the Nazi authorities in 1943, was the only one of these locations that was known to the public. Today, despite some missing information and a relatively small number of the dead still unaccounted for, these mass killings constitute one of the most thoroughly researched of all Stalin’s crimes. [...]
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By appearance it would seem that Rodziny Katyńskie—the Katyń Families—are a veterans’ organization. The elderly, the last witnesses of the terrible Second World War, make up the majority of members. But these are not heroes, and they are not veterans. Who are they? In the first days after Poland regained its independence, after the first free elections of 4 June 1989, people from many cities leave the quiet of their homes and for the first time in their lives start talking about the history of their fathers, who had gone missing after 17 September 1939. The Katyń Families were formed. Statutes were written, and the aims of the organization were defined: explaining all of the circumstances of the Katyń Massacres, finding all of the locations where Polish prisoners of war died, and, finally, accomplishing their dignified burial in Polish War Cemeteries.
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The Polish case of Janowiec and Others v. Russia was initiated by a group of close relatives of victims of the 1940 Katyń Massacres. Only in 1990 did the Soviet Union recognize that it had perpetrated the massacres. The applicants in the Janowiec case alleged that the Russian investigation into the massacres, which commenced in 1990 as transparent proceedings but was terminated in 2004 in secrecy, cannot be considered effective under the Convention. Furthermore, inasmuch as the Russian military prosecutors and courts held that the Polish prisoners-of-war “had disappeared” in the spring of 1940 or—if “hypothetically” killed—there might have existed just cause for such an execution, the applicants complained that such statements denied established historical facts and were tantamount to the denigrating and inhuman treatment prohibited by the Convention. The Grand Chamber judgment was not in the applicants’ favor. By a majority, the judges either declined to hear the case on its merits or held that there had been no violation of the Convention, turning—as the four minority judges wrote in their dissent—“the applicants’ long history of justice delayed into a permanent case of justice denied.” This article is a personal account of the principal lawyer acting on behalf of the applicants in the Janowiec case.
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Convictions for genocide in relation to the war in Bosnia (1992–1995) provide the strongest sense of justice-having-been-done to victims and their families. But at the ICTY, the reputation of which has been marred by a series of controversies, the few perpetrators found guilty of genocide were involved in the Srebrenica massacres of July 1995. Other courts have convicted individuals from a range of different locations (and periods) in the war, giving arguably a more complete sense of justice to victims, and a more accurate contribution to the historical record. It is widely perceived that the Genocide Convention has been narrowly interpreted. As most genocides do not result in total destruction, what counts as “part” of a group, especially when combined with other acts, is a key issue explored here. Two cases (outside Srebrenica) in which genocide indictees were not held responsible for genocide are examined, with the Jelisic case, involving a foot-soldier of genocide, the main focus for critical analysis. Reflection on the implications for Bosnian society are given in conclusion.
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The Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland had several phases. First, Jews were marked with the Star of David badge, then isolated in ghettos, and—at the end—they were murdered in the extermination camps. But thousands of Jews had managed to escape both from ghettos and from camps. Often they were jumping from the trains going to Treblinka, or—after surviving a shooting—escaping from a mass grave. All of them wanted to survive the war. Some tried to stay in the cities; others were looking for help in the countryside. The article is about those Jews who wanted to live through the war among Polish peasants but were betrayed, denounced to the Germans, or murdered.
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This article concerns some characteristics of the so-called third stage of the annihilation of Polish Jewry during World War II, after sending most of them to the killing centers. That phase consisted of individual—not mass—murder that took place “among Poles” and before their eyes, frequently with their participation, when Jewish refugees attempted to hide from persecutors or blended into the anonymous crowds of the larger cities (on the so-called Aryan side) or hid in hardly accessible rural areas poorly controlled by the German police. Most hiding Jews were hunted down and murdered by special Kommandos of the German gendarmerie in the first weeks following deportations in a given area. Unprepared for hiding for an extended period, they found hideouts and trusted their financial means to Polish friends. In my opinion, in 80 to 90 percent of the cases, Poles rescued Jews for money or other material gain, and when the funds (or other valuables) were exhausted, the attitude to those rescued changed radically. The purpose of this article is to present an outline of how a certain structure functioned—the “Night Guard” (peasant or rural, part of the occupation-era administrative and coercive apparatus), which can be found in wartime historical sources and in the immediate postwar investigation and trial files based on the August Decree of 1944 (on account-settling with the past regarding collaboration with the German occupier) as well as in testimonies of Jewish survivors. The guards were obliged to hunt hidden Jews, and the score of their activity was very high.
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Although the starting point for all the Polish postwar pogroms (save for one) was a blood libel, this particular motif did not attract the historians’ attention until recently. Theories on plots devised by “Soviet advisors” or “Zionists” enjoyed an incomparably greater popularity. This article, based upon the documentation of the Rzeszów and Kielce pogroms, the most recent ethnographic resources (2005–2009), the documentation used in Marcel Łoziński’s documentary Świadkowie (The Witnesses; made in 1980s), and an intensive search at the National Remembrance Institute (IPN), reveals a uniform social-mental formation of those partaking in the pogroms—the attackers and militiamen disciplining them, public prosecutors, and judges. All of them—including militiamen and Security Service officers—were subject to a blood libel suggestion. Traces of this thread have survived till this day in some segments of Polish society—not only in the countryside population, despite any appearances. This article aims at showing how an anti-Jewish alliance was getting formed in the first years after the liberation, on the grounds of a gradually strengthening “Polish national socialism,” and along with it, a synthesis of religious anti-Semitism (Jew as a “kidnapper/bloodsucker”) and a modern anti-Semitism (Jew as a “capitalist/bloodsucker” and “Judeo-communists” contaminating a sound national/party organism).
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