‘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.

“ÁRPÁD AND ABRAHAM WERE FELLOW-COUNTRYMEN”

Author(s): Szilvia Peremiczky / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2004

The earliest Jewish literary works in Hungary were late-medieval religious writings in Hebrew, and literary contributions in the Hungarian language only began to appear toward the middle of the 19th century. The first generation of Hungarian-Jewish writers firmly believed in the viability of a dual Hungarian and Jewish identity and in the prospects of Jewish and Hungarian coexistence, and these two concerns have remained central to Hungarian-Jewish literature ever since. Jewish emancipation was warmly supported by the intellectual and political elite of Hungary, and Jewish Hungarians gained full civil rights in 1867. However, to their bitter disappointment, they were soon facing a rapidly rising tide of anti-Semitism that ultimately led to the Hungarian Holocaust, in which over half a million Jewish Hungarians perished. Some Hungarian-Jewish writers responded to the rising tide of anti-Semitism with a classical dual identity position that censured assimilation involving a denial of Jewish identity, others responded by attempting to deliberately shed their own Jewish identities through conversion to Christianity or by becoming Communists, a handful of others by opting for Zionism, and in one controversial instance, by advocating the adoption of an ethno-national minority identity. After the Holocaust, many among the remnant Jewish Hungarians believed that Communism would help resolve the core existential questions facing them, but the studious silence of the totalitarian regime about the Holocaust merely left these sores festering in an unresolved limbo for decades. Curiously, the regime eventually did permit the publication of Fateless by Kertész, undoubtedly because of its anti-Nazi message, and quite missing the irony that its resolute anti-totalitarianism applied equally to them. During the 75 years between Emancipation and Holocaust, the magnitude of Jewish contributions to Hungary’s literature, journalism, scholarship, culture, science, industry, banking and commercial enterprise had been almost without precedent in the annals of diaspora Jewish communities, and post-Holocaust Jewish Hungarians continue to play a prominent role in the literary, cultural, political, and academic life of contemporary post-Communist Hungary.

“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.

“Beyond the Threshold of War, There Seemed to Be No Reality and No Past”: Third Generation Jewish American Writers and the Inherited Memory of the Holocaust

Author(s): Laura Gimeno-Pahissa / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

“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.

“Germans have killed our Jews, so we’re getting rid of them.” The case of Edward Toniakiewicz

Author(s): Barbara Engelking / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2017

The author investigates how corpses of murdered Jews were hidden in towns during the occupation. She examines the case of Edward Toniakiewicz and his murder of three Jews he was hiding in his cellar, and whose bodies he then attempted to dump into a nearby pond. The crime came to light due to his neighbour’s curiosity. The investigation was conducted by the Polish ‘blue’ police, and its documentation was used during Toniakiewicz’s trial after the war. This revealing paper acquaints the reader with various aspects of the fate of Jews hiding on the ‘Aryan side’.

“I’m a Survivor!” - The Holocaust and Larry David’s Problematic Humour in Curb Your Enthusiasm

Author(s): Jonathan Friedman / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2018

In 2004, Larry David’s HBO comedy series Curb Your Enthusiasm aired an episode entitled The Survivor, which featured two storylines-one about Hasidic Judaism and one about the Holocaust. In his writing for the comedy series Seinfeld, David created a world that had Jewish coding, but overt references to Jews and Jewish history were more oblique (“soup Nazi” and Schindler’s List episodes aside). In Curb Your Enthusiasm, David’s follow-up show about “nothing”, David frequently launched frontal assaults on everything Jewish, and many viewers found the Survivor episode beyond the pale. This paper investigates this particular episode as a case study to evaluate the broader issue of representing the Holocaust through the medium of comedy.

“Prosthetic” Memory, “Aftersights” of Memory, Memory “Easy to Consume”? A Few Words About Visual Remembrance of the Holocaust

Author(s): Urszula Kowalska / Language(s): English Issue: 12/2017

Kowalska Urszula, “Prosthetic” Memory, “Aftersights” of Memory, Memory “Easy to Consume”? A Few Words About Visual Remembrance of the Holocaust. “Poznańskie Studia Slawistyczne” 12. Poznań 2017. Publishing House of the Poznań Society for the Advancement of the Arts and Sciences, pp. 331–345. ISSN 2084-3011. Discussion about the borders restricting (unavoidable today) aestheticization of memory about the Holocaust experience is still valid – in the article are recalled some different strategies of remembering the Holocaust in the art using photography. Two of the artistic projects (Powidoki by Zbigniew Libera and Pocztówki z Auschwitz by Paweł Szypulski) are using authentic photographs to initialize the discussion about trivialization of image, removing it from its original context and, at the same time, “blunting” the sensitivity of the recipient. The other two works (Auschwitz, co ja tu robię by Mikołaj Grynberg and Miejsca nieparzyste by Elżbieta Janicka) are suspended between conversation and silence (two classic poles of memory about the Holocaust). All of these works are disputing with “fixed” models and imaginary experiences, deconstructing pathos, they are talking about the blurring memories and manipulating with memory, about competition of different historic narrations and attempts at overtaking the past, passing the traumatic experiences of the war and the Holocaust to the next generations.

“Schindlerin Listesi” Soykırım Öyküsünden Sinema-Mimarlık Arakesitinde “Berlin Yahudi Müzesi” Mekansal Çözümlemeleri

Author(s): Havva Alkan Bala / Language(s): Turkish Issue: Sp. Iss/2019

In this study, the art of architecture and an internal or external humanity occasion analyzed through the Museum of Libenskind and the films in the memory of the art of cinema. In other words, this study aims to cognitively compare the Berlin Jewish Museum as an architectural work piece and Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) as the work pieces of cinema, discuss the way this concept turns into an instrument of narration and expression through the opportunities of architecture and the art of cinema and reveal the similarities and differences. The Jewish Museum is almost a reincarnation of the memories which are denied and was aimed to live down. This vitality only may be provided through the virtue of apologizing of the human beings and the experiences related to human beings from the downtrodden people.

“Serbian Mother” Before the Court of Nation: Milan Nedić and Rehabilitation of Collaboration in Postsocialist Serbia

Author(s): Milivoj Bešlin / Language(s): English Issue: 2-3/2018

The paper presents a synthesized overview of the theory and practice of revisionist policies in the dominant parts of Serbian society and historiography. The paper focuses on the historical role of the president of the Quisling Government in occupied Serbia, Milan Nedic. Despite the unquestionable collaboration, which was not only political and institutional but also ideological and practical, which was manifested in the adoption and implementation of the “Aryan” racist ordinances and the Holocaust, social and media rehabilitation of Milan Nedic began in the first years after the breakdown of socialism. Different aspects of the society, from the church to the theater and the media, participated in these activities. The peak of the rehabilitation of the collaboration and of Milan Nedic in post-socialist Serbia took place in the first decade of the 21st century when the top of the state invited the public to honour the personification of Serbian quislings - as patriots and martyrs. The paper also analyzes the attempt of judicial rehabilitation of Milan Nedic.

“That load of Jews is finally dead.” Extermination of Jews as presented in 1942 letters of German soldiers

Author(s): Marcin Zaremba / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2017

The Home Army intelligence intercepted letters written by German officers and clerks to their families as well as those sent from Germany to friends and relatives on the front line. On the basis of that correspondence the Polish underground drafted special intelligence reports, which were sent to London. The selection of letters devoted to the Holocaust presented in this article can make it easier to describe and understand the stances and opinions of “ordinary Germans” regarding the “final solution.”

“True fiction” – the memory and the postmemory of traumatic war events in a picturebook

Author(s): Magdalena Howorus-Czajka / Language(s): English Issue: 3 (34)/2016

The World War II has left an emotional wound, and its direct victims as well as new generations have to cope with it. The main subject of my presentation will be an analysis of methods for presenting World War II history in against the background of a theory of memory and post memory of war’s trauma through the example of picture books which were published in Poland during the first two decades of the XXI century. I would like to discuss the main trends in presenting the issues pertaining to the war. The transcription of the Second World War memory into picture books is especially interesting for me as a historian of art. I analyze the artistic styles adapted by the artists to express difficult topics, such as the holocaust, the horror of concentrations camps, hunger, fear, loss of family, death. Composition, artistic techniques, color, vocabulary, typography – these are the tools in the hands of artists through which they can not only tell the story, but also stir up emotions and shape the personality. The picture book, like other types of art, operates through the language of fiction to tell the truth. Art is one of the languages of historical narration.

„6 tys. [Żydów] co dzień” – „oczywiście na stracenie”. Opowieść o pierwszej depeszy Polskiego Państwa Podziemnego na temat Wielkiej Akcji w getcie warszawskim

Author(s): Adam Puławski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2017

On 22nd July 1942, Germans initiated the Grossaktion, i.e. the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. The first known piece of information from the Polish Underground State addressed to the Polish Government-in-exile in London is the dispatch of 26th July 1942 by Stefan Korboński. However, its complete content has been unknown to date. All the evidence suggests that the key sentence about the daily “contingents” of Jews transported for extermination was wrongly understood in London. Moreover, unlike Korboński’s intention, the dispatch was publicised via the radio, which contradicts the thesis about the silence of the Polish Government-in-exile (at least in the initial period).

„A Naye Yidishe Heym in Nidershlezye“ - Polnische Shoah-Überlebende in Wrocław (1945–1949). Eine Fallstudie

Author(s): Katharina Friedla / Language(s): German Issue: 1/2014

Heavy fighting around ‚fortress Breslau’ resulted in the German surrender on May 6, 1945 and almost completely destroyed the city. The following three years saw the ‚relocation’ of the city’s entire German population to the West. It was the beginning of the city’s great transfer period, which inevitably caused the losses of homes and identity crises: it included the ‚resettlement‘ of the German inhabitants, the settlement of Poles, the forced resettlement of the Ukrainian population, the expulsion of the returned members of the German-Jewish community as well as the directed settlement of Polish Shoah survivors. Breslau became Wrocław: the city was rid of German traces, utterly Polonized and, together with the entire area of Lower Silesia, celebrated as a „recovered territory“. The Polish settlers who surged into the city immediately after the end of the war, including Polish Jewish survivors, were supposed to find a new home there. This proved to be too great a challenge under the circumstances of the immediate post-war era: Wrocław was immersed in chaos and destruction, the presence of its German inhabitants was still apparent throughout the city (at least until 1948), the reorganization of the Polish state structures as well as the political consolidation of power was only just underway. Moreover, other factors also contributed to the demolition of initial prospects that Jewish life would be established in post-war Poland. This contribution aimed to analyse and illuminate these factors at hand of the example of Wrocław.

„Benzyny zużyto 8 litrów”. Prozaizacja Zagłady na przykładzie dokumentacji Archiwum Państwowego w Lublinie Oddział w Chełmie

Author(s): Adam Puławski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 14/2018

In the state archive in Chełm there is almost no documentation directly describing the Holocaust. But there are dozens of documents which illustrate the clerical approach to that phenomenon, with that approach being clearly articulated at that. The reader can connect a given document with the Holocaust only by using his external knowledge. The most striking aspect, however, is the reasons why those documents were produced. Those were usually some prosaic matters: a cost breakdown, an explanation why some tools went missing, fire reports, etc. From them arises the prosaic nature of the Holocaust. In some of the documents the Holocaust is only alluded to. It is only owing to our general knowledge that we know that a certain document regarded, for instance, the tracking down of Jews in hiding.

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, бог и „пацовски канали“ философије

Author(s): Oleg Soldat / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 22/2021

The subject of this paper concerns two mechanisms wich help philosophy to circumvente the subject of Holocaust. These are: the philosophy of Heidegger and the neo-marxists tenets of so called Frankfurt School, especially those of Theodor Adorno. While Heidegger is seen in this paper as a resulting prioritization of chtonic symbolism within the the culture of Wiemar Germany, which pushes out the alternative of Ernst Cassirer, the leftist matrix of Adorno’s thought is equally seen as a distancing paradigm that abolishes Biblical language, through metaphysics. Paper investigates in some details these mechanisms which aim at abolishing strategic solutions of both Jewish nation and Holocaust – in the package of Zionist ideals. Author sees philosophical fixation on generic trajectoria of man-as-species, as a way of devious handling of the specifics of the Jewish existence.

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