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On the basis of abundant short-story and novelistic material the author presents the formation of the contemporary canon of the Shoah. According to Marta Tomczok, the domination of the short story over the novelistic form constitutes a result of the dialogue of generations and its influence upon the narrative situation of the prose by Agnieszka Kłos, Sylwia Chutnik or Magdalena Tulli. And in a deeper sense, which is discernible in "Czarne sezony" by Michał Głowiński, it involves a departure from the fictionalisation of the Shoah in favour of an autobiographical and memoir reflection. The author perceives the causes of such a state of affairs in the influence of "Sąsiedzi" by Jan Tomasz Gross upon Polish literature after 2000, and the rhetoric of cruelty, which is more and more discernible in it, as well as in the separation of the historiographical and the narrative discourses, which according to the author, influence each other in the case of the contemporary narrations about the Shoah, above all in the sphere of the popular novel.
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The article is an attempt to characterize the school canon of required readings concerning the Holocaust, as well as other books dedicated to the youngest readers. The author analyses the records of core curriculum and inspects books for children which were written in the first decade of the 21st century. In these recommended readings she notices a mechanism of creating the post-memory of young readers’ generation, which shape corresponds to the contemporary reflection on the Holocaust, undergoing constant changes which are a result of appearances of still new contexts. The researcher considers a trace to be a superior category which enables forming of contemporary remembering matrices. For the same reason the author pays special attention to this motive while analysing the chosen texts. It results in the conclusion that the presence of a trace generates nostalgia, which in turn leads to the feeling of loss, a category without which it would be difficult to imagine contemporary texts on the Holocaust for children.
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The article is a multicontextual interpretation of a poem by Wiktor Woroszylski entitled "Krzysztof Kamil B.", which was published for the first time in the 1988 volume entitled "W poszukiwaniu utraconego ciepła i inne wiersze". The work indicates one of the most distinguished Polish poets of the war generation, Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, who died at the age of twenty-three during the Warsaw Uprising. The poem by Woroszylski who was six years his junior has to do with the controversial question about the Jewish roots of the author of "Elegia o chłopcu polskim" (his mother, Stefania Baczyńska, had a Jewish background and was an assimilated, Catholic convert). The article firstly refers to various studies upon this subject which were initiated in 1979 by Józef Lewandowski’s essay. The studies were then engaged by a number of researchers and critics in the last decade of the 20th c. and at the beginning of the 21st c. They deliberate among other things whether this fact of the poet’s biography actually influenced his works. Theauthors demonstrate the manner in which Woroszylski reveals and at the same time nullifies the anti-Semitic overtones which such speculations feature, the attempts at a more or less categorical determination of someone’s national affiliation. For an important context for the interpretation of the poem "Krzysztof Kamil B." is furnished by its motto – an initial phrase of a famous statement by Marina Tsvetaeva, whose culminating point that “all poets are Jews” is placed by Woroszylski at the very end of his work, where he paraphrases these words.
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Theodor Adorno famously proclaims that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (285). Undoubtedly, he does not attempt to silence narratives of the Holocaust through this oft-cited remark. With this paradox began a conversation that proceeds to this day and resulted in a paradigm that haunts all trauma narratives: “who has the right to speak or write? What are the appropriate forms for their utterance to take?” and finally, “who is speaking, to whom, on whose behalf, and in what context?” (Godard 18).An author inevitably distorts and modifies an original traumatic experience by inserting his voice into the narrative via stylistic choices, formatting, narration, etc. By default, he is thus positioned as a liminal mediator between the experiencer of the story and the reader. He must ethically avoid distortions of the subject’s story, despite such responsibility creating a difficult paradox to resolve. I consider this conflict through Art Spiegelman’s Maus volumes I and II. Maus raises the same questions of censorship, authorship, and responsibility through its subject matter of the Holocaust and its medium as a graphic novel. I focus primarily on Art, the narrator, as a mediator between Spiegelman the author, his father, mother, and the written page.
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“Beyond the threshold of war, there seemed to be no reality and no past” (Hoffman 13). In her celebrated book After Such Knowledge: A Meditation on the Aftermath of the Holocaust (2004), Hoffman discusses the pervading presence of the Shoah in Jewish culture and memory, its psychological, emotional, and the historical reverberations of such catastrophe but, above all, she analyzes the effects this has had on the survivors’ descendants. Also described by Hirsch, members of the second generation—like Hoffman and herself—established a strong relationship to “the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before” so much so that their parents’ memories “constitute memories in their own right” (Hirsch 5). This has had such a powerful influence on later generations who have grown up with such inherited memories of catastrophe and trauma, that many of them have started questioning some of these accounts. One such writer is the Jewish American author Nathan Englander who, in his critically acclaimed short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk Anne Frank (2012), engages in a discussion regarding postmemory and its influence on the creation of both a Jewish cultural narrative and collective memory, and how this affects the characters’ lives on many different levels, as well as the voices of third generation authors indirectly. In his work, Englander addresses the discussion of the memory of the Shoah and its later rewritings in quite a provocative way: by means of humor which, as scholars such as Rosenberg and Krijnen maintain, seems to constitute one of the main characteristics of contemporary Jewish writing (Rosenberg 2015; Krijnen 2016). Therefore, it is the aim of this article to analyze Englander’s use of such technique to provide new insights on what it means to be Jewish American today and the effects of the Shoah and its inherited memory on third-generation Jewish American intellectuals.
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Vittorio Strada, one of the most distinguished Italian scholars of 19th- and 20th-century Russian literature and political history, formulated his final interpretation of the Russian revolution and its internal stages, the relationship between Marx, Lenin and Stalin’s thought, the concept of totalitarianism and the troublesome comparison between Nazism and communism between the 1980s and the 1990s. Expanding upon Richard Pipes’s thesis about the preservation of a czarist, authoritarian spirit and corresponding institutions in the Soviet state and Brzeziński’s and Friedrich’s refinement of the well-known concept of totalitarianism, Strada perfected his own interpretation of Soviet communism and in turn made it more useful to analyze totalitarian systems and ideologies.
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Contemporary methods used by archeology create prospects for a fuller investigation of crimes against peace and humanity and of war crimes. Due to the lack of written sources or the limited scope of information that results from them, attempts can be made to find and interpret material sources directly related to the events under study. The methods used by archeologists can finally effectively verify information already obtained from archival sources. Today’s archeology extends its reach to the present, and new specializations such as archeology of armed conflicts or archeology of totalitarianisms contribute to a better identification of, among others, the contemporary history of Poland. These specializations are used all over the world in the process of investigating crimes against humanity and accompany ongoing criminal investigations.
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The subject of the article are the views of Zygmunt Cybichowski (1879–1946), professor of law at the University of Warsaw, on Italian fascism and German National Socialism. This Polish lawyer made a very interesting analysis of totalitarian systems. He was a supporter of the national method of interpreting law. He defined law as a product of the living conditions in a given country, “exclusive” to the solutions adopted in this field in other countries. He argued that the law cannot be invented, but only discovered through the exploration of specific living conditions. In his opinion, not all the law is to be found in the codes, so one should get to know a nation well to discover its laws. Cybichowski, as a supporter of the national-radical movement, looked at the German social and political transformations in the Third Reich with great sympathy. He was impressed by Adolf Hitler.
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The article aims to provide a comprehensive description of the legal order of the General Government (1939–1945) and thus systemize the sources of the reconstruction of legal norms used in the processes of applying the law in the studied area. The analysis will be focused on issues related to jurisprudence and extra-legal axiologies to which the law in the General Government was subjected. The article is based on a comprehensive approach to the law of the General Government. It describes the creation of law in the GG (where it came from), the application of the law, and the factors that influenced this process. The presented characteristics provide the basis to describe the synthetic features of the GG’s legal order. It also argues that the German authorities deliberately created a politicized, colonial, uncertain, unclear, and racist legal order in the GG. Despite emerging from the sources of European civilization (including the legal one), the Nazi German legal order in the General Government was a contradiction of legalistic principles, guarantees, and values developed over the centuries. Therefore, the term “legal (dis)order” should be considered a proper definition of the described phenomenon. The article uses the research methods appropriate to jurisprudence and to interpreting historical sources.
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As the judicial practice of the Hungarian people’s courts (népbíróságok) in matters related to Katyń remains relatively unknown, this article’s objective is to address this area of historical (as well as legal) research. It focuses on demonstrating general outlines of the problem by a detailed analysis of some of the most notable cases against Hungarian major war criminals. It seeks to explain the role these proceedings played within the the policy of obliterating the memory of Katyń and why the members of pre-war ruling elite were charged on the grounds of their activities concerning the Katyń massacre. Furthermore, this article attempts to demonstrate in what way these accusations were important in proceedings against major Hungarian war criminals. What was the legal basis invoked whenever the defendants were accused of Katyń-related issues? How did the People’s Courts handle these charges? And finally, what (if any) was the eventual role of the Soviets in the proceedings? As the matter under examination lies at the crossroads of history and law (as legal judgments that mentioned Katyń in their content are the center of the analysis), the methodology used compiles the process traditionally used in historical research with standard legal interpretation tools. Combining both methods while analyzing the object through the lens of the judiciary perspective, this article places the outcomes of the examined legal proceedings in a broader historical context that allows noticing the legacies produced by People’s Courts sealing the Soviet lies in mid 1940s. This article posits that during proceedings and in judgments, Katyń was only discussed at the margins of primary considerations. Besides, at the current stage of scientific development, there’s a lack of evidence that the Soviets exerted any pressures on the Hungarian judiciary, at least in the aspects concerning matters related to Katyń. Neither were they interested in using Hungarian judiciary channels to pursue their own specific Katyń-related goals, still less to use them as a tribune to minimize their failure in attributing the responsibility for this crime to the Nazis in Nuremberg. It seems, therefore, that Katyń-related cases before the népbíróságok were solely intra-domestically oriented, and their goals never went beyond one of the instruments of obliterating the memory of Katyń within Hungarian society. Still, they produced some concrete social effects nonetheless. Firstly, as the criminal prosecutions were just only one of the plethora of instruments set in motion to eradicate the memory about Katyń in Hungary, their deterrent or dissuasive effect (especially during the Stalinist era) should not be underestimated. Secondly, by placing Katyń within the context of the antisemitic crimes for which some of the defendants were sentenced to death, the legacy left by the People’s Courts dramatically complicated the decoupling process of the Soviet murder of Polish officers from the rest of Nazi/Arrow Cross propaganda. This confusion makes the Katyń tragedy a hostage of the discussion on the People’s Court’s role as such. Finally, as the analysis below is limited to some most notable cases of Hungarian major war criminals, this article plays only an indicatory role. Therefore, setting aside these conclusions, one should not forget that many additional questions (e.g. the total number of people sentenced or otherwise punished for “Katyń propaganda,” comparative approaches with similar processes in other East-Central European states) still beg further research.
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The decomposition of the political camp of Józef Piłsudski after 1935 led to the increasing influence of supporters of stronger cooperation with nationalist groups, which concluded with the creation of the Camp of National Unity in 1937. The Camp was composed (among others) of a group of nationalist members of the ruling political camp, the so called “Jutro Pracy” group. After a period of harmonious cooperation, the number of clashes between leaders of the Camp and the group’s members led to the latter’s exodus from the Camp. In response to this exit, the chief of staff, and a supporter of totalitarianism, colonel Zygmunt Wenda, published a missive describing actions that should be taken by the leaders of the Camp in this situation. The analysis of content of the missive and parallel political events leads to a conclusion that the consolidation declared by political leaders of the Camp was only a facade, and differences of opinion within the ruling group were clearly visible.
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A Polemic with the Article Paszporty złudzeń. Sprawa paszportów południowoamerykańskich widziana z Będzina [Passports of Delusion. The Case of the Latin American Passports as Seen from Będzin] by Michał Sobelman (“Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały” 2020, vol. 16, pp. 700–717)
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Najnowszy numer rocznika „Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały” zawiera ciekawą, choć moim zdaniem całkowicie chybioną, próbę rozprawienia się z Listą Ładosia (Kumoch i in., 2019), publikacją pod moją redakcją wydaną po polsku w grudniu 2019 roku przez Instytut Pileckiego i przedstawioną w angielskiej – uzupełnionej i poprawionej – wersji (Kumoch i in., 2020) w lutym 2020 roku w londyńskiej Wiener Holocaust Library oraz siedzibie Światowego Kongresu Żydów.
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The aim of this article is to show, in which way art can be used as an instrument, of self-conquest, self-finding and self-rescue as not to be forgotten by creating the appropriate distance, saving us from brutality and severity of reality and given times in which we live. The example of the Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon of approximately 1325 painted sheets, from which 769 represent her biographic-historical masterpiece Life? or Theatre? A song play. It illustrates like a play in the form of a storyboard in word and picture her quite short life, her childhood and adolescence in the times of Weimar Republic, her antisemitic experiences at the Academy of Art, the machinery of the Nazi regime. She created her series of paintings over the duration of approximately eighteen months between 1940 and 1942. Salomon intertwined factual details from the memory of her childhood and adolescence and exile life. It is a reenactment, a conflation that raises compelling questions about the formation and operation of memory, showing both sides: the traumatic memory of the tragic family history and the present historical events of the Second World War, which she experienced and witnessed by herself. Charlotte Salomon created a multimedia work by combining colour, literature and music in an expressionistic way, using techniques from painters like van Gogh, Chagall, Munch and Nolde, to visualize in form of comics and musical settings, consisting of the chosen palette of music pieces from classical music to modern pop songs. Her complex drama is divided into three parts in a prologue; a main part and an epilogue like a theatre play. Her work is nothing else as a synthetic depiction of life and unfulfilled love, suffering and death, created to survive. This intention of Charlotte Salomon confirms especially her own words, of the last gouache from the postscript on her back: Life? or Theatre?
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The biography of Ernő Ligeti (1891‒1945), a writer, journalist and Holocaust victim from Cluj, and his family in Budapest, is rather incomplete and often inaccurate in Hungarian literary history sources. Using the results of his research, the author has now filled in or clarified some of these data. Accordingly, many biographical data on the members of the Ligeti family are now being published publicly for the first time, with the sources indicated. The persons concerned are the author's parents, József Ligeti (Lichtenstein) (1860‒1924) and Júlia Diamant, his son Károly Ligeti (Charles Moshe Ligeti; 1928‒2015), his wife Margit Szántó (1899‒1945) and her parents Soma Szántó (Steiner) (1864‒1935) and Szeréna Schück (1876‒1961).
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The aim of the article is to briefly summarize the evolution of the approach of the German judiciary to the prosecution of the perpetrators directly involved in the extermination of Jews, pri- marily in the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibór camps. Initially proposed by Fritz Bauer, the model of responsibility for aiding extermination by everyone belonging to the camp staff (the so-called Bauer formula) was immediately rejected by the judiciary, which, together with the dogma of criminal law and the legislator (the Dreher Act), dealt with searching for such interpretations and legal solutions which made it possible not to bring charges against any of the members of the death camp staff. This approach was abandoned only in three judgments, against Ivan Demianiuk in 2011, Oskar Gröning in 2015 and Reinhold Hanning in 2016. In opposition to the original approach of the German judiciary, the position of the Polish judicature remains as presented in the process of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in 1947. The model of responsibility adopted at that time is still valid, both in terms of the legal foundations still in force (the so-called August decree) and in terms of the dogmatic model of assessing complicity to genocide.
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During World War II, some 6000 Hungarian citizens were deported to the Serbian town of Bor for forced labour. On their return journey to Hungary, about 3000 forced labourers reached the brick factories of Chervenka in the Western Bácska region. In the night of 7 October 1944 about 700 to 1000 Jewish forced labourers were killed there by German soldiers with the assistance of Hungarian troops. Among the surviving labourers a further 400 were killed by the Germans on the way from Chervenka to the border of present-day Hungary. In the brick factories and along the roads the corpses remained unburied. The local people and the representatives of both the old and the new regime did make efforts to inter the dead, but these only yielded partial results. Of those killed in the brick factories, which have been continuously functioning ever since, as well as of those slain along the march, some fifty percent still rest on or near the very spot wehere they were killed. The only registered Chervenka mass grave, that in the Jewish cemetery of Zombor, contained the remnants of about 700 Jewish forced labourers of Bor.
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