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Review of: Kateřina Čapková, Michal Frankl: Unsichere Zuflucht. Die Tschechoslowakei und ihre Flüchtlinge aus NS-Deutschland und Österreich 1933-1938. (Reihe Jüdische Moderne, Bd. 13.) Böhlau. Wien u.a. 2012. 327 S., Ill. ISBN 978-3-412-20925-4. (€ 39,90.). Reviewed by Natali Stegmann.
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In a twofold comparative approach, the author intends to discuss the basic tendencies that have changed the journalistic discourse on Warsaw’s two uprisings of 1943 and 1944 in Poland and in the German-speaking sphere. Press responses initially varied from (National Socialist) publishing bans and (Polish) victim discourses, which, in both cases, also referred to the Jewish victims of persecution. Only gradually was the national Polish uprising of 1944 to become a central issue in the People’s Republic of Poland and allowed to be discussed controversially. Early retrospective views in Germany and Austria were characterized by belittlement and the relief of guilt, which, even then, was criticized by the Swiss writer Max Frisch several times. Behind the new front lines of the Cold War, the West German discourse emancipated itself with difficulty from the distorted images of Nazi propaganda. With regard to the Jewish uprising of 1943, this was achieved earlier, while attempting to come to terms with the past. The fact that Germans were also guilty of crimes against Warsaw’s civilian population in 1944 was only hesitantly recognized towards the end of the post-war era. This change of perspectives, however, did not go along with a thorough, self-critical reflection of one’s own memorial attitude. In Poland, under the influence of National Communism, there developed a denial of the Jewish element and a political instrumentalizing of the memory dedicated to the ghetto uprising, which was not opposed until the age of Solidarity. In the Third Republic, the attitudes towards the two uprisings have been characterized by controversies and contradictions to the present day. So far, it has not been possible to have them integrated into a new model of Polish memorial culture that might be able to overcome old differences.
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Review of: Josette Baer - A review of Jáchymov. Jeviště bouřlivého století (Jáchymov. A Theatre of the Stormy 20th Century) By: Klára Pinerová (ed.). Publisher: ABS, Prague, 2019.
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Italian fascism was not limited only to political issues, but it also covered important socio- -economic problems. The basic element of Italian political doctrine was corporatism, which had a decisive influence on the shape of Italian legislation process in the field of constitutional, administrative, tax, commercial, labor and social security law. Corporate solutions created relations of the individual towards nation and citizen towards the state. From one point of view, the fascist socio-economical program denied the liberal free trade economy, but from the other, it was a counterbalance for a developing social ideology of class conflict, which was proclaimed by the socialists and communists. The idea of fascist corporatism in Italy gave a vision of social peace. It also improved the functioning of the government by subordination of trade unions to the state and by suppressing social divisions on the employer – employee line. The purpose of this study was to present fascist commercial law and it’s importance for economic policy of Mussolini state. The basic legal acts from the period of 1922 till 1939, which are related to fascist economy, were analyzed.
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Interview with Stanisław Kozicki by Michał Gwalbert Pawlikowski (elaboration: Tomasz Sikorski and Adam Wątor)
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This article discusses the early life of Maksymilian Boruchowicz (1911–1987), a Jewish writer, publicist, and literary critic known in interwar Kraków, who changed his name to Michał Borwicz after WWII. Biographical information on his life before the outbreak of the war focuses mainly on his studies of Polish language and literature at the Jagiellonian University, where he was actively involved in student literary and cultural circles, as well as political journalism. During his studies and immediately thereafter, Borwicz published prolifically in various magazines and literary journals, and before the war published the novel Miłość i rasa (Love and Race), which was received positively by literary critics.
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Review of: Peter Trawny, Heidegger i mit spisku żydowskiego (Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung), trans. W. Warkocki, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warsaw 2017, pp. 254; ISBN 978-83-01-19259-4. Review by: Paweł Jasnowski
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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 one of the most dramatic shifts in the mnemonic landscape of contemporary Poland: the invention of the “cursed soldiers” (żołnierze wyklęci). Coined in the early 1990s, this term is nowadays not only a well-established and popularly accepted description of Polish partisans fighting against the Soviet and communist authorities around 1945, and the symbol of various forms of their commemoration. It is also a powerful tool of political mobilization, subject to an intellectual debate about historical facts and moral values, as well as an object of commodification. As shown in this article, the invention of the “cursed soldiers” consisted of three stages: their legacy was claimed by popular opinion from the late 1980s, gradually acknowledged by the state around 2011, and eventually taken over by one political force after 2015. By exploring the agency operating behind the transfer of the “cursed soldiers” from the margins of memory activism to the center of the state-sponsored politics of memory, this article argues for a comprehensive study of the social and political mechanisms of memory-making in modern Poland and beyond.
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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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The article addresses sources for understanding the complexion of the Shoah in Poland, through a focus on the Lublin District and Jewish forced labor there. From the opening story of the wedding of Shamai Grajer and Mina Fiszman in Lublin on April 17, 1942, the article extrapolates several central themes: two constants in Nazi policies and Jewish experience—forced population movements and forced labor, the behavior of the various actors involved in the story, and sources. The main individuals involved in the opening story highlight these subjects. Fiszman was a refugee deported in February 1940 from Stettin. Grajer, Fiszman, and Rabbi Zvi Elimelech Talmud, who performed the wedding, had all been selected as forced laborers when the majority of the Jewish community was murdered during the previous month, and they hoped that their labor would help them survive. The behavior of the main German actors in the story, Harry Sturm and Hermann Worthoff, was not uniformly evil, and the behavior of the Jewish actors was not uniformly “heroic.” The Bełżec forced labor complex in 1940 highlights the brutality and murderousness of much of the early forced labor in Poland. Yet, during the deportations to death in 1942 the Jews needed to “unlearn” the lessons of avoiding such labor if they were now to have a hope of surviving. Among the varied sources for this and the subsequent subjects addressed in the article, the Jewish sources provide a sense of what actually happened in these camps and situations.
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In 2007, Roman Shukhevych (1907–1950), the commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), was designated an official Ukrainian state hero. He has since become the object of an elaborate cult of personality. Lauded for his resistance to the Soviet authorities in 1944–1950, Shukhevych is highly controversial in neighbouring Poland for the ethnic cleansing that the UPA carried out in 1943–1944, as he commanded that organization. Over a few months, the UPA killed around ninety thousand Poles, expelling hundreds of thousands of others. The brutal efficiency of this campaign has to be seen in the context of the larger war, not least Shukhevych’s training by Nazi Germany, in particular the military experience he obtained as a captain in the Ukrainian formation Nachtigall, and as a commanding officer in Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201, which served in occupied Belorussia. This article is an attempt at reconstruct Shukhevych’s whereabouts in 1942, in order to establish the context and praxis under which Shukhevych operated until deserting the auxiliary police in January 1943.
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The attitude of the Polish Home Army (AK) to Nazi exterminationist policies is among the most controversial topics of wartime Polish–Jewish relations. Scholarly studies appearing since the 1980s have reconstructed the Home Army’s complex local and national organizations, its many sub-divisions and departments, its policies and objectives, as well as its sacrifice in the Warsaw Uprising of August–September 1944. In this article, I will analyze Holocaust survivor testimonies as a source for evaluating the attitude and behavior of the Home Army towards the Jews during the Second World War. Archival repositories used will include testimonies preserved at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem, the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, and the Shoah Foundation Visual Archive at the University of Southern California. I will demonstrate that the widely held view in collective Jewish memory and Jewish historiography that the Home Army was hostile is largely confirmed by these sources. At the same time, however, the same sources reveal that a substantial minority of the testimonies—approximately 30 percent—tells stories of a Home Army that rescued and protected Jews. The second part of this article compares testimonies to the documentary record, asking whether or not the behavior of the Home Army as a whole reflected the experience of Jews as reflected in postwar testimonies. The article will give more concrete form to the debate over the Polish underground’s attitude and behavior towards the Jews during the Second World War.
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The question, if and to what extent the Ukrainian nationalists murdered Jews in Volhynia and eastern Galicia during the Holocaust, has haunted Jewish and Ukrainian communities in various countries of the Western world during the entire Cold War. It also puzzled German historians of Eastern Europe and Nazi Germany. Historians, although in theory responsible for investigating and clarifying such difficult aspects of the past, have for various reasons not investigated them or they investigated only other aspects of the Holocaust in Ukraine. This article briefly explains how factions of the Ukrainian diaspora invented a narrative that portrayed Ukrainian nationalists as anti-German and anti-Soviet freedom fighters who did not kill or harm any Jews during the German occupation of Ukraine. In the next step, it shows how testimonies and other sorts of documents left by survivors from Volhynia and eastern Galicia can help historians understand the role that ordinary Ukrainians and the OUN and UPA played in the Shoah in western Ukraine. Finally, it asks why it took Ukrainian, German, Polish, Russian, and other historians so many years to investigate and comprehend the anti-Jewish violence of the Ukrainian nationalists, if relevant documents were collected and made accessible as early as in the middle 1940s.
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This article investigates how the Holocaust was recollected, presented, and interpreted in Ukraine and Belarus during the Soviet era. It further examines the changes that have taken place in the representation of the Holocaust in Ukraine and Belarus in the postcommunist period. First, the article aims to explain the ideological reasons why the Jewish origin of many Nazi victims was largely played down or ignored in the Soviet historiography. Second, it investigates the new political dynamics in independent postcommunist Ukraine and Belarus that have influenced public discourse and historiographical reflections on various issues of the Second World War, including the persecution of the Jews. As well as historiography, the article investigates the developments that have taken place in contemporary Ukraine and Belarus regarding commemorative practices, monuments, museum exhibitions, and education initiatives to honor the victims of the Holocaust and to promote knowledge about this event.
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The Holocaust is the darkest page of Lithuanian history: Nearly the whole Jewish community in Lithuania was destroyed, while a part of ethnic Lithuanians participated in this destruction. This article discusses three layers and periods of the Holocaust in Lithuania that have made a considerable impact on the perception of this traumatic period in Lithuanian society. The first period deals with the Lithuanian–Jewish relations during the German occupation in Lithuania (1941–1944). The second one is related to the Soviet reoccupation of Lithuania and discussions among Lithuanian émigrés in the West (1944–1990), which shaped the history of the Holocaust in Lithuania from the ideological (Soviet) and defensive (Lithuanian émigré) perspectives. The final part of this article discusses the historiography and Holocaust memory in independent Lithuania after the 1990s. Almost thirty years of independence mark not only the re-creation of some old myths and stereotypes in Lithuania, but also new groundbreaking and open discussions in society, concerning the perception of this dark page of Lithuanian history.
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The article discusses a shift, of the paradigm structuring Polish official memory of World War II and the state-socialist period from antifascist to anticommunist, that took place in the post-1989 Polish parliament. Based on the example of the political struggle in parliament over the memory of May 1945 (Victory Day) that occurred on three consecutive major anniversaries of this event (1995, 2005, and 2015), the article shows how the right-wing post-Solidarity camp dismantled and eliminated the antifascist narrative that was based on a symbolic continuity between 1945 and 1995–2005, respectively, and was promoted by the postcommunists, replacing it with a primarily anticommunist narrative about “two totalitarianisms,” founded on a symbolic continuity between 1939 and 1989. Within this new paradigm, May 1945 was made into a merely formal commemorative point of reference devoid of any symbolic power.
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Bulgaria was amongst the first states in Europe to hold trials with an exclusive focus on anti-Jewish persecutions during the Second World War. On 24 November 1944, a chamber solely dedicated to the prosecution of anti-Jewish crimes was established within the People’s Courts (1944–1945). This judicial action thus constitutes a unique experiment in the qualification of crimes, the use of material/testimonial evidence, the establishment of proof, and the devising of sentencing policy. Seen as a stage on which several contenders fought over the reading of the recent past and the present in the making, the Court also offers a lens on the complex interplay between the prosecution of war crimes and the crafting of revolutionary changes as well as on the relations between Jews and non-Jews at the end of the war. Drawing on a diversity of archival records (accusation files and protocols of the hearings among others), the article will underline two paradoxes. First, the chamber established to prosecute anti-Jewish crimes ended up building a master narrative of “collective innocence” centered on the “rescue of the Bulgarian Jews,” which has remained dominant in Bulgarian public discourse to this day. Second, the communist Jews who had fought for the recognition of Jewish suffering ultimately took part in the euphemization of Jewish experiences of the war. In resorting to justice, they hoped to convince the local Jewry to stay in Bulgaria and build socialism there. For that purpose, they had to prove that the wartime policies were the deeds of a handful of “fascists.” Henceforth, they embraced the official discourse of interethnic solidarity in combat and sorrow, thus downplaying the specificity of the Jewish predicament.
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Historians have long assumed that Germany closely followed a take-no-prisoners policy in dealing with captured communists in the East. That was the direct conclusion to be drawn from Hitler’s notorious Commissar Order issued on the eve of the Barbarossa invasion, which prescribed summary execution of all communists and communist officials. Data published in the Soviet Union largely confirmed this impression, reflecting a dramatic reduction in Communist Party members during the first six months of the war in the East. New data suggest, however, that far from annihilating communist cadres as part of the so-called “Jewish-Communist” threat, the German occupation authorities instead recruited many former communists for service in occupation governmental work, as spies, or in other roles vital to German authorities in eastern zones. Post-Soviet archives offer profound insights into the development of Stalin’s special policy towards these suspected communist turncoats.
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