A Report on the Banality of Integrity

An effort to explain a unique Bulgarian conduct in the midst of the Holocaust

Author(s): Toso Doncsev / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

“Rescuing Jews” in Bulgaria refers to the fact that during World War II in a Bulgaria allied with Nazi Germany there were two occasions when the nearly 50,000 Bulgarian-citizen Jews averted deportation at the last minute ina near-miraculous way. Th e outcome was that Bulgaria became the only European country whose Jewish population was larger at the end of the war than at the beginning. But I need to underscore that the story is limited exclusively to Jews who were Bulgarian citizens, because the other part of this history is of Macedonia, and Trakya (Thrace), in the Aegean Sea. These regions were turned over to Bulgaria administratively but not annexed,and with the aid of the Bulgarian authorities the nearly 12,000 Jews who lacked Bulgarian citizenship were deported in 1943. Since this occurred in an early stage of the Holocaust,hardly anyone survived. Th e Bulgarian historians and the country’s official policy deserve kudos in accepting responsibility for the events in the territories they were occupying militarily, and today, in 2015 they are increasingly sincere in facing up to their actions. Indirectly, this makes the actions of the heroes in “Old Bulgaria,” in other words, present-day Bulgaria, which rescued the Jews, even more praiseworthy.

Around the Bloc: Poland’s ‘Death Camp’ Bill Outrages Israel

Author(s): TOL TOL / Language(s): English / Issue: 02/06/2018

Two sides agree to talk about controversial legislation Warsaw says is necessary to counter fake history about the role of Poles in the Holocaust.

Artistic Memorialization of the Roma Holocaust in Romania

Rendering Visible the Historical Trauma and Documenting the Suffering

Author(s): Caterina Preda / Language(s): English / Issue: 12/2019

Although the Roma Holocaust in Romania has been documented, and there is an officialpolicy to recall this historical fact, its memory is marginal in contemporary Romaniansociety. This article analyzes four recent examples of art of memorialization of the RomaHolocaust in Romania and argues these artistic forms of memory play an important role inthe building of a more comprehensive public memory of the Porrajmos. The analysis usesan interdisciplinary approach, which combines theoretical resources that belong to the studyof cultural memory with a focus on artistic memory, and the analysis of the relationshipbetween art, politics, and memory. The examples of artistic memorialization have two aims:to render visible the historical trauma through the use of testimonies of the survivors and toprovide further documentary sources of this historical trauma.

Artysta w l'univers concentractionaire. "Kornblumenblau" Leszka Wosiewicza jako traktat o sztuce

Author(s): Katarzyna Maka-Malatynska / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 13-14/2009

The author of the essay considers Leszek Wosiewicz’s Kornblumenblau as a film about art and focuses on the self reflexive elements present in the film, particularly those referring to film conventions. This analysis examines the film in the context of the reflections about the meaning of art in totalitarian systems and situation of the artist in the reality of the concentration camp. Kornblumenblau depicts degenerated art as depriving of freedom and rescue, becoming another tool of oppression. Dehumanizing power of this art points at the final decay of man in the epoch of gas chambers.

Atitudinea autorităţilor române în anii ’70 faţă de victimele Holocaustului în contextul despăgubirilor germane

Author(s): Petre Matei / Language(s): Romanian / Issue: 55/2016

Although the Holocaust was neglected and minimized in communist Romania, starting with 1967 (restoration of diplomatic relations between Romania and West-Germany) the Romanian authorities made efforts to obtain compensations from West-Germany for the victims of Nazi persecutions. However, this meant no real change in the way Romania dealt with its own recent past (the anti-Semitic and anti-Roma measures during WWII taken by the Romanian authorities), which tended to be ignored. It was considered more profitable for Romania to externalize its own guilt by blaming exclusively West Germany, from which they hoped to obtain hard currency. The Romanian secret services played an important role in organizing this process. According to the way the Romanian authorities acted, the process had two phases: 1) 1967-1970 - unofficial phase (through intermediaries); 2) since March 1970 –official phase (the Romanian government decided to negotiate directly with the West-German authorities). Within a year, on March 2, 1971, more than 155.000 compensation claims were submitted (mostly for Jewish and Roma victims). In May 1971, fearing a domino effect, the German government decided to refuse any compensation payments to Romania and other communist states.

Atrocity and Aesthetics. The Politics of Remembering and Representing the Holocaust in Polish Contemporary Art: Zbigniew Libera’s “Lego Concentration Camp”

Author(s): Ewa Janisz / Language(s): English / Issue: 6/2015

This paper discusses the politics of remembering and the representation of the Holocaust in Polish contemporary art referring to the Lego Concentration Camp (1996) by Zbigniew Libera. The paper presents the ways in which Libera’s work challenges the traditional ways of representing the Holocaust and how it engages with issues such as the relation between atrocity and aesthetics. The associations brought to this mode of representation by the notions of game and toys and whether theatricality and play are in dialogue with or violate the historical experience of the Holocaust is also discussed. The paper investigates the specificity of the Polish context in the way the Holocaust is approached and the reactions these artistic attempts raise in the public. Do the unconventional and shocking representations help understand the Holocaust or do they create the opposite effect of misguided and trivialised reading of history?

Auschwitz i nowoczesność

Author(s): Bartlomiej Krupa / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 18/2012

The text examines the relationship between the two categories – Auschwitz and modernity, in recognition of Jean Améry and Zygmunt Bauman, taking also into account the voice of the latter polemicists. In the first place is reconstructed Améry’s positive view on modernity with respect for the truth of the victims of Auschwitz. Then Bauman's critical position is discussed, indicating the modern provenance of the Holocaust and risk of recurrence of the Holocaust. Next the voices of Bauman’s opponents are presented. Yehuda Bauer, Henryk Grynberg, Andrzej Szahaj and Stefan Morawski pointed to the key role of ideology and irrational aspects of Nazism. At the end the common ground of Améry and Bauman is indicated – both turn to take the perspective of the victims.

Auschwitz jest metaforą wszystkiego. Przypadek „Oświęcimków” Wojciecha Albińskiego

Author(s): Joanna Nazimek / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 2/2016

The object of analysis in this article is the short prose collection entitled “Oświęcimki” (2014). Wojciech Albiński’s pieces reveal how strongly war and Holocaust clichés are rooted in the dictionary, gestures and collective bodily memory of contemporary generations. These texts can be also read as the critiques of the pop‑cultural infantilisation of the Shoah and the signs of tiredness due to the excess of traumatising testimonies on the events of World War II. As the author endeavours to demonstrate, Albiński’s texts reveal the empathetic unease and the real needs of approaching the past, understanding it, and searching for sense in it. “Oświęcimki” are analysed in the context of the issues connected with the functioning of the Holocaust in the permanently changing collective memory.

Auschwitz-tekercs

A pokol szívében

Author(s): Anikó Polgár / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 1/2017

Zalmen­ Gradowski:­ Auschwitz-tekercs.­ A pokol szívében.­ Fordította,­ szerkesztette­ és­ az­ előszót­ írta­ Hunyadi Zsombor.­ Budapest,­ Múlt­ és Jövő,­ 2016,­ 164­ p.

Autonómia Slovenska 1938 – 1939: Počiatočná fáza holokaustu a perzekúcií (Úvod)

Author(s): Martina Fiamová,Michala Lôncíková / Language(s): Slovak / Issue: 1/2019

The end of the 1930s was critical for the democratic regime of the Czechoslovak Republic and the international situation after the signature of the Munich agreement on 29th September 1938. The movement for autonomy for Slovakia resulted in the declaration of Slovak autonomy on 6th October 1938. The Hlinka´s Slovak People‘s Party (HSĽS) immediately started to establish a single ruling party system. During this relatively short 6-month period, until the declaration of the Slovak State in March 1939, significant political changes were dramatically implemented. The conservative, nationalist, and Christian regime of the HSĽS initiated the process of forming a “new” Slovakia under the protective umbrella of Nazi Germany, including the struggle against its enemies – real and also fictitious. The move to Slovak Autonomy represented a significant transition period when the planning and organisation of the initial phase of the Holocaust and the persecution of other potential opponents was begun by political representatives.

Az Auschwitzi jegyzőkönyv

Author(s): György Haraszti / Language(s): Hungarian / Publication Year: 2005

The Auschwitz Memorandum is the fundamental text of the last century. Two Auschwitz concentration camp inmates who escaped on April 1944 from the largest Nazi death factory wanted to tell the world the bad news in order to save the lives of hundreds of thousands. What they really presented was the supreme anatomy of evil that they personally witnessed in full bloom. Our publication is a collection of all the historical documents that reached the world from Auschwitz from 1942 to May 1944. The historian György Haraszti edited the documents and wrote the introductory essay. The Burning Secret is as exiting reading as a mystery novel. With the help of the testimony of Auschwitz inmates the reader learns much about the family of Nicholas Horthy, the inner workings of Zionist organizations as well as the politics of Roosevelt, Churchill and the Pope. Janos Kobanyai’s The Auschwitz Gospel asks the question of how the Auschwitz Memorandum could save only the majority of the Jews of Budapest? His investigating essay, which concludes our volume, is a dramatic presentation in a world historical setting. The secret was out and as a result many escaped death but since the news was not fully aired many more met their end in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Az Emberi Erőforrások Minisztériumának véleménye az Auschwitz-tekercsről

Author(s): Imre Sipos / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 1/2017

Az emberiség hajótörése. Spanyol és murciai köztársaságpártiak a koncentrációs táborokban

Author(s): István Szilágyi / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 1/2016

Az út szélén

Holokauszt-életek

Author(s): / Language(s): Hungarian / Publication Year: 2004

The book contains three Holocaust narratives. They are the recollections of ordinary people whose experiences comprise their sole writing, story and message. The three pieces are not just the narratives of three different fates, but also present three different sociological backgrounds, all characteristic of Hungarian Jewry. And emphasis is placed on three different stages in the Holocaust narrative. Pál Kádár’s story (“A körgyógynapszámos” [The seasonal healer]) presents the life of a village doctor and his family – until their deportation to Auschwitz. The narrative featured in the collection’s title (Kornélia Terner: “Az út szélén” [At the edge of the road]) describes all three stages: the uprooting of a Jewish rural household, the events at Auschwitz, and the emotional difficulties of readjusting to ordinary life under the communist system, as well as the wounds that would not heal and finally the outburst after the last political upturn in 1989. Júlia Fodor-Wieg’s piece “Ezekből az emlékekből fogok élni” [I am going to live on these memories] describes the Holocaust as it was experienced by upper-middle-class Jews. The other great Hungarian narrative on the Holocaust is the hunt for men in the jungle of Budapest. The focus of her story continues until her departure from Hungary in 1957. She tells of the demise of a plundered Jewish middle-class, a great and credible document of the will and capacity for life. All three pieces bring us closer to ordinary people who are also heroes. Visual records of the destroyed world illustrate the book. In the epilogue The Holocaust as Narrative, János Kőbányai, who collected the memoirs, analyses and typifies the Hungarian Holocaust as a historical and cultural phenomenon on the lines of Imre Kertész’s “great narrative”.

Az út szélén

Author(s): Kornélia Terner / Language(s): Hungarian / Publication Year: 0

Badacz i świadek drugiej generacji - O ratowaniu lokalnej pamięci zagłady Żydów

Author(s): Antoni Sulek / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 670/2017

W trzy czwarte wieku po II wojnie światowej zagłada Żydów jest nadal obecna w pamięci polskich wsi i miasteczek. Dotyczy to zarówno centralnego doświadczenia Holokaustu, czyli unicestwienia Żydów przez nazistowskie Niemcy, jak i doświadczenia pobocznego, tj. stosunku miejscowych Polaków do ginących Żydów. Pamięć Zagłady na polskiej prowincji jednak zanika, bo zapisana jest na mało trwałym nośniku — na korze mózgowej, a nie w tekstach kultury. Taka pamięć ginie wraz z jej nosicielami, jeśli wcześniej nie została komuś przekazana lub spisana. Pamięć Zagłady, która istnieje na wsiach, nie jest tym, co socjologowie nazywają pamięcią wspólną, podzielaną. Jest raczej pamięcią podzieloną, pamięcią poszczególnych ludzi na wsi, a nie pamięcią wsi. Nie jest pamięcią wspólną, ponieważ nie jest podtrzymywana przez komunikację i komemorację: o zagładzie Żydów mało się mówi i nie obchodzi się wydarzeń z nią związanych.

Behind the Iron Curtain (4)

Author(s): / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 2016

This magazine is the English version of selected articles published in the pages of the review Paměť a dějiny (Memory and History) ISSN 1802-8241, which is issued by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes.This magazine is the English version of selected articles published in the pages of the review Paměť a dějiny (Memory and History) ISSN 1802-8241, which is issued by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. The original version of the journal Paměť a dějiny (Memory and History) is the part of CEEOL also.

Bernard Mark, powstanie w getcie warszawskim i proces Jürgena Stroopa

Author(s): Gabriel N. Finder / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 13/2017

Jürgen Stroop, the SS general who led the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto and the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April–May 1943, was convicted by a Polish court in 1951 and executed in 1952. Bernard (Ber) Mark (1908–1966), Holocaust historian and director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, provided expert testimony for the prosecution at Stroop’s trial. Mark felt constrained to graft a communist-inflected narrative onto his account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and to shoehorn it into his expert testimony in court and then into his interpretation of the trial for a Jewish audience. He did his best to give the Jewish Fighting Organization, which spearheaded the uprising, and its Jewish fighters their due at a time when expression of unvarnished appreciation for Jewish heroism was risky, even while he was paying overrated tribute to the communist underground for its assistance to the Jewish rebels during the uprising. But he always stopped short of the line between conformity to and defiance of the communist regime.

Between Homeland and Emigration. Tuwim’s Struggle for Identity

Author(s): Hans-Christian Trepte / Language(s): English / Issue: 6/2016

Julian Tuwim belongs to the pantheon of the greatest Polish writes of the 20th century. His Polish-Jewish descent, his attitude towards the Polish language, towards Jews in Poland, his political activities as an emigrant as well as his controversial involvement with the communist Poland still fuel many critical discussions. Polish language and culture were for him much more important than the categories of nation or state. However, whereas for Polish nationalists and antisemites Tuwim remained “only” a Jew, Jewish nationalists considered him a traitor. It was in exile that his attitude towards his Jewish countrymen began to change, especially after he learnt about the horror of the Holocaust in occupied Poland. Thus, he began writing his famous, dramatic manifesto, We, the Polish Jews. After World War II, Tuwim came back to Poland, hoping to continue his prewar career as a celebrated poet. His manifold contributions to the development of the Polish language and literature, within the country and abroad, cannot be questioned, and the dilemmas concerning his cultural and ethnic identity only make him a more interesting writer. Julian Tuwim belongs to the pantheon of the greatest Polish writes of the 20th century. His Polish-Jewish descent, his attitude towards the Polish language, towards Jews in Poland, his political activities as an emigrant as well as his controversial involvement with the communist Poland still fuel many critical discussions. Polish language and culture were for him much more important than the categories of nation or state. However, whereas for Polish nationalists and antisemites Tuwim remained “only” a Jew, Jewish nationalists considered him a traitor. It was in exile that his attitude towards his Jewish countrymen began to change, especially after he learnt about the horror of the Holocaust in occupied Poland. Thus, he began writing his famous, dramatic manifesto, We, the Polish Jews. After World War II, Tuwim came back to Poland, hoping to continue his prewar career as a celebrated poet. His manifold contributions to the development of the Polish language and literature, within the country and abroad, cannot be questioned, and the dilemmas concerning his cultural and ethnic identity only make him a more interesting writer.

Bezdroża polityki historycznej. Wokół Markowej, czyli o czym nie mówi Muzeum Polaków Ratujących Żydów podczas II Wojny Światowej im. Rodziny Ulmów

Author(s): Jan Grabowski,Dariusz Libionka / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 12/2016

Upamiętnianie Polaków ratujących w czasie wojny Żydów stało się w ostatnich kilkunastu latach jednym ze sztandarowych haseł polskiej polityki historycznej, której głównym celem jest wzmacnianie dobrego samopoczucia narodowego. Poszukiwanie prawdy historycznej o czasach okupacji schodzi tutaj – mimo deklaracji, że jest inaczej – na daleki plan. Liczy się przede wszystkim mitotwórcza wartość tych zabiegów. W walkę na tym froncie angażowały się m.in. Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych, Kancelaria Prezydenta RP, Ministerstwo Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego, Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich Polin, ks. dr Tadeusz Rydzyk wraz z Radiem Maryja i „Naszym Dziennikiem”, Fundacja Reduta Dobrego Imienia – Polska Liga przeciw Zniesławieniom, „Gazeta Polska” oraz liczne organizacje prorządowe i pozarządowe.