‘Turning Jews Over’ – the Participation of ‘Blue’ Policemen in Deportations of Jews Illustrated with the Example of the Radomsko County

Author(s): Ewa Wiatr / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/2017

Based on previously unknown archival documents, the author discusses the Polish Police functionaries’ participation in deportations of the Jewish population from Radomsko County to the ghetto in Radomsko or to death centres. The ‘blue’ policemen participated in the “Jewish campaigns” not only as guards, but they also took a direct part in both the loading of Jews and Jewish possessions and in the stamping of Jewish property. The policemen delegated from the local police stations to assist at the deportations were paid stipends from the budget of the Union of Communities in Radomsko.

“2,000 Jews Have Registered So Far” - Historiography and the Holocaust in Rostov-on-Don

Author(s): Christina Winkler / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2016

Rostov-on-Don is known for being the site of the largest massacre during the Holocaust in contemporary Russia and witnessed the annihilation of Soviet Russia’s third-largest pre-war Jewish community within only a few days. It is considered the Russian Babi Yar by some Russian historians. Yet, outside of Russia, the city’s tragic past is hardly known. In August 1942, a massacre was committed here by Sonderkommando 10a of Einsatzgruppe D. The numbers of victims of the mass atrocity diverge in the literature, in some cases considerably. A conservative estimate is that 15,000-18,000 Jewish men, women, and children were murdered within only three days on the outskirts of Rostov, near the Zmievka colony. Some scholars speak of even higher victim numbers. Nevertheless, the atrocity has not received much scholarly attention. The events in Rostov are but one example of the escalation that Hitler’s Judenpolitik had undergone between the beginning of ‘Operation Barbarossa’ on 22 June 1941 and the summer of 1942. It illustrates that it is vital to bring together all existing sources, including perpetrator documents, records of post-war trials, as well as Soviet files, because a one-sided focus on perpetrator documents in previous Western studies on Rostov does not allow for a full understanding of the scale and the course of events, as this article aims to demonstrate.

“A young boy attacked us once and started shooting; we didn’t even run any more.” Murders committed on Jews from the village of Strzegom by AK and BCh members

Author(s): Anna Bikont / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/2017

A group of more than 30 Jews was hiding in a dugout in a forest near Strzegom, a small village on the edge of a forest in the Świętokrzyskie Province. Attacked and robbed by the villagers who were members of the Home Army and Peasants’ Battalions, the Jews continued to hide in the forest in smaller groups. The same group of partisans that had attacked the Jews in the dugout continued to capture and murder them, including women and children. There were eight survivors: children and adolescents plus one adult. The article reconstructs the six-month period of hiding basing on a touching testimony of one of the surviving girls, Dora Zoberman, who gave it at the age of eleven, materials from the post war August Decree trials, and recent conversations with the survivors and Strzegom inhabitants. It also reconstructs the actions of the judiciary with regard to the crimes committed against the Jews. Sentenced to death, the murderers were pardoned and released after 1956. One of them received compensation in the 1990s for having been repressed because of his pro-independence activity.

“Abandoned Secrets”. The Question of the Holocaust Narratives in Ukrainian Literature

Author(s): Anja Golebiowski / Language(s): English / Issue: 12/2017

Golebiowski Anja, „Abandoned Secrets”. The Question of the Holocaust Narratives in Ukrainian Literature. “Poznańskie Studia Slawistyczne” 12. Poznań 2017. Publishing House of the Poznań Society for the Advancement of the Arts and Sciences, pp. 93–105. ISSN 2084-3011. The reportage Ukraine without Jews (1943) by the Soviet writer Vasilij Grossman is one of the earliest public reports on the Holocaust. Although Ukraine had been in the centre of the Nazi mass murder and single voices like the ones of Grossman or Il’ja Ėrenburg even called betimes attention to the ongoing genocide of Ukrainian Jews, any tradition of Ukrainian Holocaust narratives has not been developed yet. Since its independency in 1991, there are attempts to participate in the Western memory discourse, but by now, they have rather no broader impact. The reception of the debate on the Holocaust serves more likely as a backdrop for its own discourse of victimization, the Holodomor, which is used for developing a national identification within the current Ukrainian nation-building process. Since the Orange Revolution, as the Ukraine has found itself in a critical phase of a socio-political upheaval, some texts of leading Ukrainian writers (Marija Matios, Oksana Zabužko, Jurij Vynnyčuk) have occurred that carefully raise the subject of the Holocaust, or rather the gap in the Ukrainian consciousness. This paper gives an overview about the texts and works out the narrative strategies, whereby only the coming years will show, if these texts constitute the beginning of a Ukrainian Holocaust literature.

“Balkanization” of National Memories and Identities Trauma:

Different Discourses on Holocaust “Victim – Perpetrator” Identity and Its Specific Political Functions in Ex-Yugoslavia States

Author(s): Danilo Trbojević / Language(s): English / Issue: 09/2016

The politics of specific selective social/national memories in contrast with globally accepted and promoted pictures of the past happenings is always a very interesting field for anthropological research. This paper also deals with another social phenomenon — the political usage of the dead bodies, or “political lives of the dead bodies” of the Holocaust victims buried on ex-Yugoslavian territories. We will try to show and understand the process of changing political and historical context and its influence on the way Yugoslavia and, later, its independent states used history and traumatic social memory presentation to recreate new views on these happenings and, therefore, new national identities. Using this kind of analysis we will show how the “victim” and “perpetrator” identities were reconstructed and used in different ways and to different purposes. These recreated identities are supposed to be very important factors in the Euro integration, but also a part of the revisionism threat and power struggle in the Balkans today.

„…udostępnione jak najszerszym rzeszom czytelników…” Wydania krytyczne prac Centralnej Żydowskiej Komisji Historycznej

Author(s): Agnieszka Haska / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 16/2020

Powstała w 1944 r. Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna dziś jest kojarzona przede wszystkim z tytanicznym wysiłkiem zebrania wszelkiego rodzaju materiałów dotyczących zagłady Żydów. Bez spisywanych przez pracowników Komisji relacji świadków, uzyskanych pamiętników i dokumentów badanie Zagłady byłoby prawie niemożliwe; są one materiałem źródłowym wykorzystywanym w niemal każdym opracowaniu naukowym poświęconym losom Żydów w okupowanej Polsce.

„Panowie! Za co nas będziecie wybijać?”. Wołyńskie wspomnienia rodziny Krzyżanowskich w relacji Jerzego Ficowskiego

Author(s): Emilia Kledzik / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 6/2020

The article presents wartime memories of the families Krzyżanowski (after the war: Dębicki), Wajs, and Siwiak that were written down by Jerzy Ficowski in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and subsequently reprinted in consecutive versions of his monographs on Polish Romani people (Cyganie polscy. Szkice historyczno-obyczajowe and Cyganie na polskich drogach) and in his memoirs entitled Demony cudzego strachu. Wspominki cygańskie [The Demons of Other People’s Fears. The Gypsy Reminiscences]. The discussed narratives relate to experiences from Volhynia of the years 1942–1945. The article’s aim is to indicate the type and scope of alternations that Ficowski made while editing the memoirs in consecutive publications. A handwritten copy kept in archive is treated by the author of the article as the base version. The differences between the successive versions were divided into four groups: stylizations, fictionalizations, erasures and additions, ethnographical issues. What results from the conclusions of the presented analysis is the memoirs published by Ficowski no longer enjoying its status as a historical source relating to/pertaining to the wartime events in Volhynia. To the contrary, they are a testimony to the selfcensorship mechanisms implemented by Ficowski, who kept in mind the specificity of majoritydominated society members being the primary readership of his books on the Romani people.

„Podczas wojny przebywał w łódzkim getcie”. Portret architekta Ignacego Gutmana

Author(s): Joanna Król / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 16/2020

The paper presents Ignacy Gutman (1900–1972), engineer, architect, author of numerous designs of residential houses and public buildings in Łódź. Gutman survived five years of World War II in the Łódź ghetto. He was head of the Construction Department. He drew the first plan of the ghetto and designed the banknotes that were used in the ghetto. After the war, he was a witness in the trial of Hans Biebow, who was the German administrator of the ghetto. In 1947, he was denounced and charged with crimes against the Jewish population, which he vehemently denied. His biography has been reconstructed on the basis of trial testimonies, emigration documents, the Gutman family archive, and oral history interviews.

„Serdecznie dziękujemy za przybliżenie nam historii Polaków ratujących Żydów”. Recepcja polskich muzeów „Sprawiedliwych” w świetle wpisów w księgach gości – Apteka pod Orłem, Willa Żabińskich, Muzeum Ulmów

Author(s): Zofia Wóycicka / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 4/2020

The last decade has seen the establishment of no less than three historical exhibitions about Poles who rescued Jews during World War II: Tadeusz Pankiewicz’s Eagle Pharmacy in Cracow (2013), the Żabiński Villa in Warsaw (2015) and the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews in World War II in Markowa (2016). While these museums tackle similar issues, they differ both in the way they present their narratives and in how they present their exhibits. Examines their reception, Wóycicka asks what the intended message could be according to visitors; she asks whom and what they are supposed to commemorate. This analysis and comparison of entries in the guestbook allow her to demonstrate that despite the thematic overlap their reception is widely different.

„Sorstársaiknak árulói”? Az 1944-es magyarországi gettósítás során felállított vidéki zsidó rendőrségek

Author(s): László Bernát Veszprémy / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 1/2020

„Tak bliscy mi, jak sam sobie jestem bliski”. Jachimowicz o Schulzu i borysławskim „zagłębiu poetyckim”

Author(s): Stanisław Rosiek / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 14/2019

The paper is an extended comment on Marian Jachimowicz’s “Reminiscence of Bruno Schulz.” On the basis of ample unpublished archive materials, the author reconstructs Jachimowicz’s biography, paying the most attention to the period of 1938–1942, when Jachimowicz as an aspiring man of letters had close friendly contacts with Schulz as well as other artists and writers of the Drogobych and Borysław region, known as the “Borysław Poetry Zone” (Marek Zwillich, Anna Płockier, Henryk Wiciński, Juliusz Wit, Artur Rzeczyca, and others). It turns out that his relationship with Schulz was a formative literary experience for the young poet. As he admits, it was thanks to the access to Schulz’s library and his recommendations, that he came across the books by poets who became important for his own development. Meeting Schulz was also important for another reason: he was the first “great artist” whom Jachimowicz met in person, knowing his literary works – Cinnamon Shops and A Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass – and appreciating them highly. Jachimowicz’s attitude to Schulz was ambiguous, and this is what the present paper is mainly about. Starting with an analysis of an unpublished “source reminiscence” of 1948, the author approaches its subsequent versions published in journals (Twórczość, 1958 and Poezja, 1966). It was characteristic for Jachimowicz that his imagination and memory, fixed upon Schulz for several decades, pictured the Drogobych writer as “approaching.” Particularly in the first version of his text, Jachimowicz describes Schulz’s physique, doing it in a shockingly brutal, even abjectal, way. On the other hand, his essays demonstrate a more and more intense tone of mourning. The world of Drogobych and Borysław, to which both Jachimowicz and Schulz belonged before the war, appears in them as an irrevocably lost Arcadia, the only reality where the former did not feel all alone.

„Tymczasem palono Żydów”… Kilka uwag o stosunku Gustawa Herlinga-Grudzińskiego do żydowskości

Author(s): Giovanna Tomassucci / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 38/2020

For Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, the question of his own roots was a very private matter; he treated them as if they were not present in his life and wrote explicitly about Jewishness or Shoah only in his non-fiction work. Nevertheless, the themes of the historical anti-Judaic persecution and conversion to Christianity are constantly present in his literary work, with allusions to the twentieth century’s massacres. Numerous characters of Jewish origin, belonging to a harassed and destroyed community, appear in many of his literary texts. Certain victims, especially males, are infected by evil, others resist it: over the years, the opposition between these two categories became increasingly noticeable, while the topic of Shoah is faced in a more veiled way. It is indeed not a coincidence that Herling’s first tale about the persecutions of Jews, The Second Coming, was written in 1961, at the time of the Eichmann trial, and that later Don Ildebrando, The Bell-Ringer’s Toll and The Legend Of A Converted Hermit, showing Jewish opposing strategies toward evil, were composed after his visit to Majdanek in 1991. Herling looks at the post-Arendt discussion on complicity in evil, polarizing the opposition between good and bad victims already expressed in his narration of the Gulag: he does not envisage any intermediate category analogous to Levi’s Grey zone and does not examine in depth the manipulation of the victims in extreme conditions.

„Więcej nic nie powiem…” Rozmowa z Marianem Turskim – ocalałym z getta łódzkiego – przeprowadzona 28 sierpnia 2019 r. w przeddzień obchodów 75. rocznicy likwidacji getta łódzkiego

Author(s): Żenia Klimakina,Kamilę Litman,Arkadiusza Lubę,Jacka Tokarczyka,Ewę Tyszko,Marian Turski / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 16/2020

Interview with Marian Turski by Żenia Klimakina, Kamila Litman, Arkadiusza Lubę and Jacek Tokarczyk

„Wszystko zaczyna się od słów […]”. Filip David i Mirko Kovač: listy o wojnie w byłej Jugosławii

Author(s): Grażyna Maroszczuk / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 6/2020

In the essay the author analyses the problematics of genocide based on correspondence between Filip David and Mirko Kovač Kiedy kwitnie zło. Książka listow 1992–1995 (When evil flourishes. A book of letters 1992–1995) to later juxtapose it with studies on Shoah. She ponders the generational perspective of people whose lives were tarnished by the Nazi-Germany occupation (Filip David – born 1940, Mirko Kovač – born 1938). The article most of all aims at reconstructing the stances of the two authors of letters and showing genocide as a realm of incessant discussion, vague affects, unsystematized knowledge. The author undertakes an attempt to reconstruct only some of the topics and contexts accompanying the issues discussed in David’s and Kovač’s letters, particularly: the soul-searing descriptions of the Bosnian War of 1992–1995. She shows that the language facet of violence proves to be a challenge to reflecting on literature in the correspondence between the two intellectuals. When faced with the disintegration of hitherto social order in the former Yugoslavia, the nationalist discourse, as social studies and research on genocide suggest, prepares the ground for activation of violent behaviours, justifies them, and plays a key role in fomenting the genocidal repression. As a result of the said processes, the authorities create and reinforce nations’ cultural self-images, tighten the control over ethnic purity of collective identity, instigate conflicts between neighbours based on “the blood and soil myth,” cherry-pick the xenophobic discourse of the past, and force through with ethnical interpretations of culture.

„Wyprawa w świat”. Wywiady przeprowadzone w getcie łódzkim przez członków Ha-Szomer Ha-Cair

Author(s): Ewa Wiatr / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 16/2020

In the summer of 1943, young members of the Shomer organization active in the Łódź ghetto carried out several interviews with random passers-by. It was a part of educational activity organized by Shomer tutors. The teenagers were tasked with interviewing and recording according to a preset format. The material thus obtained turned out to be a valuable source about many aspects of life in the Łódź ghetto: family and financial situation of the interviewees, their physical condition and, let us stress, their contacts (protection). Equally important is information about the Shomers obtained during the interviews, their level of education, how they formulated conclusions, their involvement in the group. The material is not very extensive, but it turns out to be an important source for further research of the activity of youth organizations in the ghetto.

„ДАНАС ЈЕ ИСТОРИЈА” Хроми хијазам Амона Гета и превладање стилистике

Author(s): Oleg Soldat / Language(s): Serbian / Issue: 180/2021

We have tried to open some new and possibly undisclosed vistas on the famous scene in the movie Schindler’s List, by Steven Spielberg, by probing the famous question: can and should the Holocaust be represented. To the best of my knowledge, the famous speech of the main antagonist of the movie, Amon Goeth, “Today is history”, has not to this moment been treated in this manner, as the bearer of the insightful theories of style and philosophy. This is what we tried to remedy in this paper. We try to accomplish this by broadening the conceptual frames of the classical stylistics coming from structuralism of De Saussure, and by applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophy of the speech genre, to this particular scene. Starting hypothesis, relating to the gap between Western and Russian semioses, was that classical semiosis, best represented by Peirce and Umberto Eco, would not tolerate this broadening of the diegetic script towards the biblical levels of the meaning, which are absent in this capacities of Western semiosis. We assumed that this was the subconscious plan of the director, namely, to represent the German plan: to make Holocaust not only reach the biblical proportions, but biblical style and meaning as well, and thus to immortalize itself. During the analysis we have encountered certain similarities in the distribution and the behavior of the figure of speech asyndeton, in the diegetic script of the movie, and the attitudes of the modernity, as they are represented in Catherine Pickstock’s book After Writing: Liturgical Consummation of the Philosophy. Together with Bakhtins’ work, Pickstocks’ analyses served as our guiding and starting point of the observation and manipulation of the deigetic text. After having discovered the aborted patterns of the stylistic reconfiguration, towards which Nazi propaganda unsuccessfully aimed at, in order to accomplish the paschal rite de passage through controlling of the historical necessity, we moved toward the pictures of history, harboured in the depos of the Nazi understanding of what Jews and Germans are. We have found essential contradictions in this respect with the Nazis, stemming from the serious ontological error of confusing ancient Roman ancestral history and very deformed and reduced Judeo-Christian perspectives, which represent the only possible epistemological interface which can manouvre the Holocaust into description. Thus, we conclude, that this description is not only possible, but it is necessary, just like its counterpart, representation.

У борби против заборава: Јеврејска заједница у Југославији и очување сећања на Холокауст 1945-1955

Author(s): Davor Stipić / Language(s): Serbian / Issue: 2/2016

Under the influence of different historiographical interpretations in the late 90s in the professional community was actualized the idea arose in the sixties among American Jews. The idea that a decade and a half after the end of a war was a time of the conscious and deliberate suppression of Holocaust Remembrance. In modern historiography, numerous experts from David Cesarani to Hasia Diner constantly and successfully sought to prove that the Jewish individuals and organizations since the end of the war tried not to remain silent and wanted to speak about the horrors of Hitler’s concentration camp. An important place, especially in the socialist bloc, among those who spoke about their own suffering, almost immediately after the war, were Jews of Yugoslavia and this article deals specifically with Jewish activity from 1945 to 1955. Already in Yugoslavia in 1946 was built the first modest monuments, in 1948 was formally established the Jewish Historical Museum, and collecting documentation about the suffering and memories of survivors began soon after the restoration work of the Association of Municipalities in the early post-war years. The unveiling ceremony of five monuments in five Yugoslav cities in September and October 1952 was the culmination of efforts that the genocide of the Jews never forgets. Also, it was one of the most important an initiative of memorialization of Holocaust victims at that time in Eastern Europe, due to which the Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia became one of the pioneers in the development of awareness of the Holocaust as a phenomenon in the socialist part of Europe, at a time when in most countries of the Eastern bloc Stalin’s anti-Semitic purges were in full swing.

Холокауст као екстремни облик страдања цивила окупиране Србије – нумеричко одређење и квантитативна анализа

Author(s): Dragan Cvetković / Language(s): Serbian / Issue: 2/2018

The losses of Jews in the Holocaust were separated from the massive killing of civilians from the territory of occupied Serbia for many reasons. Destined in advance to destruction from the Nazis, Jews accounted to 11.20% of the losses, which was 33.94 times higher than their share in the population of the occupied territory (0.33%). Given the presence in the population, the real losses of the Jews were 36 times bigger then the number of killed Serbs who suffered the greatest number of civilian casualties (80.19%). The extermination of the Jewish community started in the ϐirst year of the war, and unlike all other nations, practically ended by its destruction in 1942, in which they represented two-ϐifths of the losses incurred by then (39.37%). In the Holocaust, destroyed Jews made up one third of the victims of the Belgrade region and two-ϐifths of the civilians losses in Banat. The share of women amongst the exterminated Jews (47.02%) was 3.61 and 1.97 times higher compared to the losses of Serbs and members of other and unknown nationalities, respectively. The Jews accounted for almost a third of all killed women (29.67%) in the occupied territory. Completely destroyed as a nation, Jews had a large share among the casualties under 15 and over 65 years of age (3.27 or 2.32 times more than Serbs), and they accounted for a quarter of all casualties aged up to 15 and a ϐifth of civilian casualties aged 65 and older. Their destruction left a major impact on economic and social development in post war peri od, since they represented one-ϐifth of the losses that businessmen, ofϐi cials and experts, secondary school and university students suffered. The loss of life that was associated with the previous stay in the concentration camp made Jews account for one third of the loss of civilians of the occu pied Serbia who were victims under these circumstances.

Холокауст у Србији (немачко окупационо подручје) – нумеричко одређење и квантитативна анализа

Author(s): Dragan Cvetković / Language(s): Serbian / Issue: 3/2017

An attempt is made to show the victims of the Jewish community from the territory of occupied Serbia on the basis of the partially revised list “Victims of War 1941–1945”. The article deals with the territorial belonging of the victims of the Jews, their gender, age and professional structure, as well as the circumstances and places of their destruction.

Холокауст: процеси идентификације и меморијализације. Поводом нових издања Института за етнологију Словачке академије наука (III)

Author(s): Sanja Zlatanović / Language(s): Serbian / Issue: 2/2016