„…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.

„Dopustite ljudima da vam kažu i krenite svojim putem”: osvrt na tekstove Vladimira Geigera o izložbi Ako tebe zaboravim… Holokaust u Hrvatskoj 1941. – 1945.: Zadnje odredište Auschwitz

Author(s): Nataša Mataušić,Rajka Bućin / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 3/2020

Reaction/Letter to the editor

„Gândind cu sângele”: psihanaliza freudiană și Holocaustul

Author(s): Florin Lobonț / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 4+5(20+21)/2020

Holocaust historians and philosophers have been repeatedly confronted with the finding that the Shoah’s unspeakable horrors cannot be rationally reckoned as being most plausible. This study argues that one of the alternatives to the established epistemological paths of historical reconstruction of the Holocaust is increasingly represented by psychoanalysis which, until recently, has played a relatively minor role in the study of the psychology of genocide. It is only relatively recently that scholars, researchers and analysts such as Jacques Semelin, Slavoj Žižek, Dominick LaCapra, Dan Stone, Judith Kerstenberg, Steven Baum, or Karyn Bell, have joined towering figures such as Saul Friedlӓnder, Hans Mommsen or Peter Loewenberg in looking at genocide in ways derived – more or less directly – from psychoanalysis. Their purpose is to deepen and diversify our understanding of social “decontamination” phenomena, whose extreme forms have been regarded by many as incomprehensible. Such a goal equires the rethinking of modern genocide and mass murder, firstly by moving them from the space of exception, into the very fabric of modern societies’ ethos and cultural frameworks. To the Freudian concepts already employed by specialists, the present study adds negative transference as a present collective psychological experience of hostile emotions of an unconscious past origin and singles out the Romanian Holocaust’s powerful revelation of these mechanisms.

„Język, którym mówi dzisiejsza władza, jest ideologiczny”. Wywiad z Michałem Głowińskim

Author(s): Uliana Sharpe,Michał Głowiński / Language(s): Polish Issue: 15/2020

Language can be not only a communication tool but also a dangerous weapon. In this interview, Michał Głowiński, Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Literary Research (IBL), writer, author of numerous literary and scholarly publications, including Zła mowa [Bad Speech], a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust, shares his traumatic memories and talks about verbal aggression, which is an alarm bell warning that physical aggression is to come. Following the tragic events of the mid-twentieth century, language can no longer be treated as “the house of being”: before the first brick of extermination camps was laid, the word of hatred had thundered first. This is why it is so important to remember the past and to carefully analyse the language of the present, so that the horrible story of the Holocaust can never happen again. The Holocaust is the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century, which brutally destroyed millions of Jews. It also put an end to survivors’ hope of achieving a harmony of self-identity. The Holocaust must be remembered. Literature is one of the tools for keeping it in memory and taking a closer look at all the crimes that were committed. The painful experience of the Holocaust has been reflected in the works of Jewish writers. It is also at the roots of tragic contradictions, the sense of internal emptiness and loss of empathy.

„Leszármazás szerinti állampolgárságát 90 napon belül igazolja!” Bepillantás a KEOKH kassai kirendeltségének működésébe

Author(s): László Bernát Veszprémy / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 4/2019

„Najlepsze dziecko Prezesa” – poczta w getcie łódzkim (1939–1944)

Author(s): Adriana Bryk / Language(s): Polish Issue: 16/2020

Following the announcement of the decision to establish the ghetto in Łódź, in February 1940 the German post office stopped delivering mail to Jewish addresses. The Eldest of the Jews, Mordechaj Chaim Rumkowski, established the Department of Mail within the framework of the administration in order to ensure uninterrupted delivery of correspondence to Jewish addresses. This article discusses the Department’s operation in as many dimensions as possible and systematizes our knowledge on its topic. It characterizes the rules which regulated the post office’s operation, the types of mail and addressees. It also discusses the censorship, that is the rules and criteria which the censors used when withholding ghetto residents’ correspondence. The reflections on the topic of the censoring practice are based on an analysis of annotations placed on mail and their relation to the content of the mail. This text is not a study on correspondence as a source for Holocaust research. It only signals the topic of treating correspondence in the form of postcards as a source for Holocaust research, as a testimony to the living conditions in the ghetto, to how people communicated with one another, and to how and what about ghetto residents informed others, and predominantly as a testimony of the victims. An important part of the article is a description of unsent postcards stored at the State Archive in Łódź in the fonds called “Przełożony Starszeństwa Żydów w Getcie Łódzkim” (Eldest of the Jews in the Łódź Ghetto).

„Niech pani im to opowie…” niesłyszane głosy w Shoah Claude’a Lanzmanna

Author(s): Karolina Kwaśna,Magda Heydel / Language(s): Polish Issue: 38/2019

Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary Shoah (1985) is a rich source of knowledge on the Nazi extermination of Jews in Central Europe. Its main material consists of interviews with people who witnessed the Holocaust, conducted in the very locations of the wartime events. The present paper analyses an iconic scene from Chełmno on Ner, where between 1940–1943 and later 1944–1945 the first Nazi death camp was located. A group of locals – gathered in front of the parish church, around one of the survivors of the camp – recall the events, sometimes in stunning technical detail. Their Polish utterances are translated into French; English subtitles are based on the French of the interpreter. The Polish linguistic material is not neutral: it is marked with dialectal and sociolectal features; the speakers engage in conversation on the side, comment on the situation of the interview in various ways, verbal and non-verbal. In the translation, both into French and English, sentences are skipped, the plurality of voices is flattened, and differences in memory are smoothed out. The resulting text is rather a summary than a translation. The paper offers close-up analyses of chosen sequences from the interview to show the complexity of the communication situation and the extent of distortion caused by the way translation works in the film. It also offers an alternative translation, which aims at giving voice to the actual people of Chełmno and acknowledging as fully as possible the complication and difficulty of memory construction through language, especially in a highly traumatic area. It hopes to offer insights into the bystander position in Holocaust discourse.

„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.

ФИКЦИОНАЛНА ДЕЛА О ГОЛОМ ОТОКУ У СРПСКОЈ КЊИЖЕВНОСТИ КОЈУ ПИШУ ЖЕНЕ / ЖЕНЕ КАО ГЛАВНЕ, ФИКЦИОНАЛИЗОВАНЕ ЈУНАКИЊЕ У РОМАНИМА О ГОЛОМ ОТОКУ

Author(s): Slavica O. Garonja Radovanac / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 78/2022

In this paper, we consider the phenomenon of fictionalization of the theme of the Goli otok in novels (mostly written by women), as a kind of collective and ideological trauma, which has been a taboo topic in socialist Yugoslavia for more than 40th years. Biljana Jovanović (Duša, jedinica moja, 1984) and Boba Blagojević (Skerletna luda, 1991) started the topic of Goli otok in a women’s ideological novel and after that the topic of IB Resolution continued through different genres: publicist- memoir work (Ženi Lebl), autobiographical novel (Vera Cenić), or a real postmodern novel by Milka Žicina (Sve, sve, sve, 2002), all the way to a modern novel, with a fictional protagonist, which combines all the experiences of the Goli Otok`s victims (G. Zalad, Plava tišina, D. Grossman, Život se sa mnom mnogo poigrao). We divide the origin of these novels into the works of women writers who personally experienced torture of Goli otok (Ž. Lebl, V. Cenić, M. Žicina, Eva Panić), and those who were born much later, dealt with this topic completely through the fiction (G. Zalad, D. Ilić, D. Grosman). V. Cenić and M. Žicine also created several impressive literary heroines, whose degree of fictionalization we have specifically analyzed here as literary heroines (Brana Marković, Dragica Srzentić, Slavka Pogačarević, Eva Panić Nahir), as well as the type of antiheroine in the character of Marija Zelić, the warden of the camp on Goli Otok. These are works whose literary qualities should be much more present on our literary scene, and with a good film adaptation they should enter a much wider, public reception, especially since film as a medium is the main subtext of two modern novels about Goli Otok (G. Zalad, D. Grosman).

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.