„Beznogi garbus o pięknej twarzy”. Szkic do portretu Sołomona Barta

Author(s): Marian Kisiel / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2018

The paper is devoted to Salomon Bart (1885-1941), a poet and an emigrant, who moved to Warsaw after the October Revolution. In the 1930s, he joined Literaturnoe Sodruzhestvo, which gathered Russian intellectuals and artists in Poland. He published five volumes of poetry, focusing predominantly on death. Even during his lifetime, he was considered a peculiar poet. In October of 1940, he was transported to and held in the Warsaw Ghetto, where he died of hunger.

„Biografie składają się również z zapętleń”. Nieopowiedziane życie Ireny Gelblum

Author(s): Elżbieta Dutka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2015

The article presents the book by Remigiusz Grzela entitled "Wybór Ireny" in the context of the contemporary controversies/debates about the biographies and the narrations about the Shoah. In this case the “biographical loops” result both from the life attitude of the female protagonists who are described as well as from the strategy that was embraced by the biographer. The messenger of the Jewish Combat Organisation disassociated herself from her past and created a new image and biography for herself. The writer is continuously poised between the truth that he intends to reveal and fiction – a mystification put forward by Irena Gelblum vel Waniewicz vel Conti Di Mauro. Thus a story emerged whose essence (and significance) consists not so much in familiarising the reader with the figure and the tragic experiences of one of the “scorched” ones but in the exhibition of the ethical and literary problems associated with an attempt at presenting such a story.

„Coraz to nowe żądania, coraz to nowe grymasy” – relacja władzy i podporządkowania między Polakami a Żydami w kryjówkach po aryjskiej stronie

Author(s): Justyna Kowalska-Leder / Language(s): Polish Issue: 12/2016

This texts talks about three single, uneducated Polish women living alone (a dressmaker, servant, and kitchen worker), who during the war sheltered Jews in their apartments in Warsaw and Drohobych. All three of them helped the Jews for money, but – as far as we know – none of them resorted to financial blackmail or any other major abuse of a financial character. Nevertheless, the war circumstances became an opportunity for them to fulfill their emotional needs, otherwise impossible to satisfy. They derived pleasure from having power and control over another person and their actions towards the Jews they sheltered also bore traces of a class revenge. The authors analyze the relations between the helpers and helps mostly on the basis of Jerzy Feliks Urman’s diary and memoirs of Karol Rotgeber and Calek Perechodnik. Aside from the sociological theory of exchange systems, another useful tool facilitating comprehension of the Polish women’s behavior and their interactions with the Jews in hiding, which are described in those texts, is Erich Fromm’s concept of human cruelty as a highly complex phenomenon that cannot be reduced to openly violent actions.

„Czarna, ogromna chmura wisi nad nami i na pewno spadnie…” Żydzi w miastach i miasteczkach Generalnego Gubernatorstwa wobec wiadomości o akcji „Reinhardt”

Author(s): Maria Ferenc Piotrowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 13/2017

This article regards the existential experience of Holocaust victims and the psychological and cognitive mechanisms in confrontation with the first news about the functioning of the death camps. It analyzes the testimonies of Jews from over 40 towns and small towns in the General Government regarding the gradual influx of news about the Holocaust and the consequent reactions. Initially, the hearsay came mostly from afar, and then from increasingly close localities. The Poles were the source of that (imprecise) information about the lot of the deported Jews, while in certain localities appeared escapees from the death centers who gave accounts of what they had witnessed. That hearsay and those testimonies met with different reactions – from despair, through denial, suppression, and resignation, to attempts to save one’s life. This article devotes special attention to a reflection on the possibility of death of oneself and one’s family as well as the phenomenon of denial and pushing the news about the Holocaust away from oneself.

„Es ist noch nicht vorbei, wir bleiben deutsch und treu“ - Nationalsozialismus und Postnazismus in der Fernsehkabarettsendung Das Zeitventil

Author(s): Eva Waibel / Language(s): German Issue: 1/2014

The Austrian television cabaret show Das Zeitventil was produced from 1963 to 1968 by the national Austrian Broadcasting Company under the artistic direction of the cabaret artist and musician Gerhard Bronner. The show saw itself as a decidedly political cabaret and expressed in numerous sketches and chansons its critique on current political events and social developments. In different contexts it also dealt with the issues antisemitism, National Socialism and the Holocaust in post-Nazi Austrian society, which was very progressive and unusual during this period of time in Austria. With reference to current socio-political events and media debates taboo subjects of the Second Republic were portrayed with the means of satire and parody: the failed denazification after 1945 and the consequent continuing effects of a widespread antisemitic Nazi ideology in Austria. The comedians parodied politicians who advocated for the amnesty and the concerns of former Nazis, caricatured German national and antisemitic individuals and organisations, themed the failed denazification and debunked antisemitic resentments and trivialisations of the Holocaust. However, the focus of the cabaret was, as selected examples will show, less on a confrontation with Nazi crimes, in particular the mass murder of the European Jews, but rather in demonstrating personnel continuities of former Nazis and their unwavering Nazi sentiments.

„Facing a crisis unparalleled in history“ - Jüdische Reaktionen auf den Holocaust aus New York, 1940 bis 1945

Author(s): Elisabeth Gallas / Language(s): German Issue: 2/2014

Der Beitrag beschreibt und analysiert die Tätigkeiten zweier Expertenkommissionen für jüdische Politik und Gegenwartsanalyse, die 1940 und 1941 in New York entstanden. Am Research Institute on Peace and Post War Problems sowie am Institute of Jewish Affairs trafen sich jüdische Akteurinnen und Akteure, die auf Grundlage verschiedener Erfahrungen der Zwischenkriegszeit politische Strategiepapiere für den Umgang mit der apokalyptischen Gegenwart von der Vernichtung der europäischen Juden entwickelten. In der Tradition osteuropäischen Minderheitenschutzpolitik und dem jüdischen Abwehrkampf der Weimarer Republik stehend, versuchten sie Möglichkeiten der Rettung, aber auch der Zukunft jüdischer Existenz zu diskutieren. Dabei entstanden weitreichende Dokumentationen und Berichte zur Realität des Nationalsozialismus, die in ihrer Aussagekraft für die Frage nach der unmittelbaren Wirkung des Ereignisses auf die Zeitgenossen bedeutsam sind und davon zeugen, wie zeitgleich zu Krieg und Vernichtung in Amerika versucht wurde, zu handeln, zu verstehen, zu berichten und die Erinnerung an die Opfer zu bewahren ebenso wie neues jüdisches Leben nach der Katastrophe gestaltbar zu machen.

„Gdy rozbolały mnie zęby, poszedłem do pani L.”

Author(s): Mirosław Bałka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 13/2017

Pani L. to Lidia Wolańska, wtedy młoda dentystka. Mieszkała w domu należącym do rodziny Perechodników w Otwocku na rogu ulic Kościelnej i Kościuszki, tam też prowadziła swoją działalność stomatologiczną.

„Gdyby to był tylko głos nieba i chmur”. O (nie)banalności tła. Z fotograficznego albumu Karla Höckera

Author(s): Magdalena Szczypiorska-Mutor / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2016

This text is an attempt at interpreting the photographs depicting SS officers captured in the moments of holiday relax. After fulfilling their everyday duties in Auschwitz, the SS men – in Höcker’s pictures from his album – rest, walk, joke, sing, feast and flirt with women; they are cheerful, smiling and carefree. The study of the album – revealed only in 2007, consisting of 116 pictures taken between June and December 1944 – is an impossible study, a study of silence, of commenting voices, a study spread between black and white, photography and the world, words and aphonia, hell and its background. It is the account of helplessness – of the gaze, language and understanding.

„Ghetto beze zdi” – od wykluczenia do Terezína

Author(s): Joanna Brodniewicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 12/2017

Dana Kasperová, Výchova a vzdělávání židovských dětí v protektorátu a v ghettu Terezín, Filozofická Fakulta Univerzity Karlovy, Praha 2010, 224 s. Książkę Dany Kasperovej Výchova a vzdělávání židovských dětí v protektorátu a v ghettu Terezín opublikowało Wydawnictwo Wydziału Filozoficznego Uniwersytetu Karola w serii „Humanitas”, poświęconej naukom społecznym i edukacji. Choć ukazała się ona parę lat temu, warto o niej napisać, gdyż podjęte zagadnienie opracowane zostało niezwykle rzetelnie, wieloaspektowo, na podstawie różnorodnych źródeł. W 2011 roku publikację doceniła Rada Naukowa Uniwersytetu Karola, przyznając autorce Nagrodę Rektora za najlepszą pracę naukową, podręcznik i skrypt roku.

„Hologramy Ciemności” — Paula Celana teodycea po Shoa

Author(s): Ewa Borkowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2018

Paul Celan’s (1920–1970) poetic cartography builds on the “holograms of darkness” (thus addressed by Amy Colin, an American Celan scholar), the metaphorical constellations which map the experiences of suffering, twilight and death. The poetry “after Shoa” of the Romanian poet of Jewish descent, writing in German, constitutes a particular landscape of his musical “death fugue” in which human suffering is depicted in surrealist images that silently express of the trauma of the Holocaust. Celan’s theodicy is created as the “rhetoric of the ineffable”, a silent dialogue with the Other (Lévinas) but also the absent Other, the No one with whom the poet converses and who becomes the addressee of his “poems-prayers” or “no-poems” (noems), as he calls them. It is the absent Other the poet worships and celebrates in his “poetry of silence”. Language also experienced suffering but was “enriched by it” and now can be heard “on the other side of silence”. Celan’s poetry is firmly anchored in the memory of the Holocaust and Jewish people’s traumatic experiences. To soothe his pain, the poet constantly returns to the “Brunnenland”, his birthplace located in Bukovina where he always found the spring that fueled his poetic soul and heart. The poet’s favourite metaphor is that of the meridian which marks the reference place on the cartographic grid of all his poetic images.

„I will survive” – reprezentacja Holocaustu w sztuce współczesnej

Author(s): Magdalena Maciudzińska-Kamczycka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 17-18/2011

Jane Korman, a Jewish artist, filmed the video „Dancing Auschwitz” on a trip to former concentration camps with her three children and her father, Adolek Kohn, who is a Holocaust survivor. The film shows three generations of an Jewish family dancing to the Gloria Gaynor song “I Will Survive” in front of Holocaust land marks in Poland, including infamous rail tracks and “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign and a memorial in Łódź, where Adolek Kohn and his wife spent most of his youth during World War II. This video is a demonstration of the will to survive. Moreover, Korman’film shows other places in Poland like The Main Market Square in Kraków, a Polish synagogue or one of the bus station from eastern Poland. These places may represent the sites and the traces of the History in the contemporary Polish reality which has been radically transformed after Auschwitz. Memories are a way to remain connected to the past. The great power of the images, the clichés of the unimaginable trauma of the Holocaust, is still in our imagination and in the landscape of Polish cities. In my presentation I will not only try to explain the above-mentioned case but I will focus also on some others examples of the idea. One of the Polish projects that bring about associations with the Holocaust and the memory of Nazi camps is „Swimming Pool” („Pływalnia”, 2003) by Rafał Jakubowicz (projection, two videos, postcard). By projecting the Hebrew equivalent of the word „swimming pool” on the wall of the former synagogue (in 1940 the Nazis converted synagogue into a swimming pool for the Wehrmacht), the artist managed to reactivate this place, to revive its memory and transform it into a living monument. In his video, entitled „Swimming Pool”(13 min.), Jakubowicz is showing the interior of the building that provokes the associations with the concentration camps.

„KAKO NASTAJU LOGORI? TAKO ŠTO SE PRAVIMO LUDI"

Author(s): Primo Levi,Enzo Biagi / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 506/2017

Interview with Primo Levi by Enzo Biagi

„Lost everyday life" – problems using materials diaries in research on occupational everyday life, based on the example of Krakow – observations on the margins of the study

Author(s): Anna Czocher / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2014

Materials about the nature of personal relationships are an important source of information about everyday life. This article bring information on daily life and attention is focused on the city of Krakow. In addition leading themes, personal relationships contain a lot of information about the difficulties with the supply and quality of housing, the attitude towards the changes taking place in the city, functioning within the official public life and privacy. The purpose of this article is not to criticize source materials such as memoirs, or reflections on the formation and functioning of the memory of the war and occupation.

„Ludzie opowiadali rzeczy potworne o tym, co się tam działo”. Dwa świadectwa Zagłady – Adama Ulricha z Zakrzówka i Stanisława Ż(Rz)emińskiego z Łukowa

Author(s): Alina Skibińska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 13/2017

Two accounts of Polish eyewitnesses (Adam Ulrich and Stanisław Żemiński) regarding the fate of Jews and the course of their extermination in two cities of the Lublin district, Zakrzówek and Łuków. The authors sympathize with the victims and, simultaneously with horror, observe the complicity of Polish neighbors in liquidation actions and property looting belonging to the Jews. Both accounts contain many important facts and observations, they are among the most important Polish testimonies of the Holocaust.

„Meine Familie hatte es gut in Auschwitz“ - Das Leben der Lager-SS in Auschwitz-Birkenau nach Dienstschluss

Author(s): Anna-Raphaela Schmitz / Language(s): German Issue: 2/2018

For SS personnel, the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp was a workplace and residence. This article focuses on the lives of the male perpetrators after official hours and explores what influence this had on their work within the camp complex and vice versa. Family structures as well as comradeship among perpetrators were meant to help maintain a subjectively experienced sense of ‘normality’. Retrospectively, it seems difficult to imagine that the SS families managed to have a ‘normal’ life in close proximity to the concentration camp. They benefited from the amenities of the infrastructure that developed around the camp complex. They often took advantage of the practice of robbery and appropriation of the prisoners’ goods. Since work life and private life in Auschwitz-Birkenau were intertwined in this way, the Holocaust and the mass crimes should also be examined from this perspective.

„Mnie zawsze fascynowały wszelkie powtarzalności”. O topice Zagłady z Janiną Abramowską rozmawia Paweł Wolski

Author(s): Janina Abramowska,Paweł Wolski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2016

„Mruży oczy noc ormiańska” – wokół metafory ikonicznego losu w poezji Jerzego Ficowskiego

Author(s): Daria Nowicka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2016

In his work, Jerzy Ficowski – the author of “Odczytanie popiołów”, “Ptak poza ptakiem”, “Demony cudzego strachu” and “Czekanie na sen psa” – concentrates on the borderland in its broad sprectrum. “Tryptyk bizantyjski” – the subject of this study – is a piece in which the author emphasises the need for memory and emphatic writing, which is especially visible in its third part, devoted to Armenian memory. Being a reminder of the tragic history of the forgotten nation, the poem is simultaneously a cry for literary presence and audibility. This cultural, historical and literary borderland, significant in Ficowski’s poetry, appears also in the gesture of rewriting an icon and in the creation of oxymoronic poetry.

„Naši úbohí židovskí bratia“. Švédske snahy o záchranu židov na Slovensku počas II. svetovej vojny

Author(s): Denisa Nešťáková,Eduard Nižňanský / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2019

The article describes a largely unknown Swedish effort to intervene in deportations of Jews in Slovakia between 1942 and 1944. Swedish officials and religious leaders used their diplomatic correspondence with the Slovak government to extract some Jewish individuals and later on the whole Jewish community of Slovakia from deportations by their government and eventually by German officials. Despite the efforts of Swedish Royal Consulate in Bratislava, the Swedish Archbishop Erling Eidem, and the Slovak Consul Bohumil Pissko in Stockholm, and despite the acts taken by some Slovak ministries, the Slovak officials including the President of Slovak republic Jozef Tiso revoked further negotiations in autumn 1944. However, the negotiations between Slovakia and Sweden created a scope of actions to protect some Jewish individuals which were doomed to failure due to the political situation. Nevertheless, this plan and the previous diplomatic interventions are significant to describe the almost unknown Swedish and Slovak efforts to save the Jews of Slovakia. Repeated Swedish offers to take in Jewish individuals and later the whole community would have likely prepared the way for larger rescues. These never occurred due to the Slovak interest in deporting its own Jewish citizens and later due to the German occupation of Slovakia.

„Nie myśl, że to pisze obłąkany”. Listy rabina z Grabowa i jego misja informowania o Zagładzie

Author(s): Adam Sitarek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 15/2019

In early January 1942 escapees from the nearby death camp in Chełmno nad Nerem reached Grabów, a small locality in Regierungsbezirk Litzmannstadt in Wartheland. At that time the German Nazis were liquidating the nearby ghettoes one by one, deporting their residents to Chełmno, where the victims were murdered. In Grabów the survivors met with the local rabbi and gave testimony about the crime they had witnessed. The rabbi almost immediately decided to send a letter to his family and friends warning them against the deportations. The escapees also informed Grabów inhabitants about the tragic news in his house. The next day the rabbi wrote another letter. Other Grabów inhabitants followed his example. Consequently, the information about the mass murder was spreading. A lot suggests that the Grabów rabbi’s initiative might have been the ϐirst organized attempt to warn Jews detained in ghettoes of Regierungsbezirk Litzmannstadt in Wartheland against the approaching extermination. This means that the rabbi played an important role in the transfer of information about the murder committed in the nearby camp in Chełmno nad Nerem. Consisting in spreading news about the deportations’ objective, his activity hampered the work of the German oppressors and enabled the victims to verify the German’s assertions about the deportations purported aim (labor) and learn about the actual fate of their families and friends deported to Chełmno.

„Nie spieszy mi się domykać kanon”. Rozmowa z Profesorem Davidem G. Roskiesem, współautorem książki "Holocaust Literature. A History and Guide"

Author(s): Paweł Wolski,David G. Roskies / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2015