Antisemitizmo raida sovietinėje Lietuvoje 1948–1953 metais

Author(s): Justas Stončius / Language(s): Lithuanian / Issue: 68/2017

The article provides an analysis of anti-Semitic trends in the Lithuanian SSR in the period 1948–1953 based on the communist newspaper „Tiesa“ and reminiscences of Jews. Hostility towards Jews was instigated at a state level in the Soviet Union, yet it manifested itself differently in peripheral republics. Therefore this study attempts to analyze the development of campaigns against “cosmopolitanism” and “doctors-saboteurs” in Lithuanian SSR and to reveal Jewish experiences in the anti-Semitic discourse built by the Soviet propaganda. The following thesis is verified: propagandists employed anti-Semitism not so much to divert frustrations and dissatisfaction of the USSR citizens with the Soviet regime but rather to promote the assumption that the struggle against “enemies” inevitably requires reconciliation with systematic repressions targeted at certain groups within society.

Antysemityzm jako element konstytutywny polskiego habitusu

Author(s): Romana Kolarzowa / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 3/2018

Kolarzowa argues that Polish anti-Semitism is a continuous phenomenon that cannot be divided into “anti-Judaism” and “anti-Semitism”. Using the triangulation method, she indicates that all European anti-Semitism is embedded in traditional theological narratives and the resulting social options. She also discusses the reasons behind this continuity of Polish anti-Semitism, including the specificity of Poland’s social structure and the nobility’s objectives in instrumentalizing anti-Semitic discourses. Anti-Semintism was supposed to provide an inclusive option to the lower-ranking groups, while the term ‘nation’ was reserved for the nobility. This explains the prominent role of clergy in this narrative: the clergy was the only group capable of effectively shaping a collective identity of underprivileged social strata and presenting Judaism as an “antimodern,” so that anti-Semitism was associated with the identity of the modern nation.

Archiwum i obraz: fragmenty historii traumatycznej według H.G. Adlera

Author(s): Dorota Głowacka / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 5/2016

Głowacka’s article presents the writer and Holocaust survivor H. G. Adler, author of the first monograph on Theresienstadt concentration camp. The focus is on the early novels Panorama [Panorama] and Podróż [The Journey] – two fictional accounts of the writer’s experience at the Nazi camps to which he and his family were deported. Głowacka reads these novels through Walter Benjamin’s conceptualization of history as well as Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflections on the representability of the Holocaust. She compares Adler’s idiosyncratic use of visual representation to the painterly techniques of artists such as Fritta, Kien and Fleischmann, Adler’s fellow inmates at Theresienstadt.

Archiwum Ringelbluma. Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy, tom 15. Wrzesień 1939. Listy kaliskie. Listy płockie

Author(s): / Language(s): Polish / Publication Year: 2014

The volume consists of three very different parts. The first part includes documents related to the German aggression against Poland in 1939. They describe the first months of the war, mostly warfare, but focus is also given to the fate of Jewish soldiers – POWs. The second part contains private and official correspondence from and to the Jews of Kalisz sent between August 16, 1939 and December 31, 1941 from the Warthegau, the General Government, and from abroad. The third part contains the letters sent between February and June 1941 by the Jews deported in early 1941 from Płock to the General Government.

Archiwum Ringelbluma. Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy, tom 17. Prasa getta warszawskiego: Poalej Syjon Lewica i Poalej Syjon Prawica

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

The volume contains the clandestine publications of Poale’ Zion Left and Poale’ Zion Right. This press almost entirely belongs to the propaganda-political type of publications. It covers three basic segments: war communications, texts concerning the present situation of the Jewish population and historical-ideological essays. All data are interpreted most often through the socialist-Zionist doctrine. The most detailed are articles on the Warsaw Ghetto. However the majority of space was devoted to reports from Palestine and visions of the post-war Jewish future. There are also extensive texts on Jewish and universal history and culture.

Archiwum Ringelbluma. Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy, tom 19. Prasa getta warszawskiego: Hechaluc-Dror i Gordonia

Author(s): / Language(s): Polish / Publication Year: 2015

The volume contains the underground press published by Hechalutz-Dror and Gordonia, youth organizations politically affiliated with the Labor Zionism and belonging to the Hechalutz movement which trained pioneers for work in agricultural collective farms in Palestine. Publishing the underground press was a part of wide clandestine activity of the two organizations in the Warsaw ghetto. Their primary objective was to undertake the educational and formative activities addressed to the youth, including the reinstatement of the agricultural training farms. Education and training were among the most important subjects the press dealt with.

Archiwum Ringelbluma. Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy, tom 20. Prasa getta warszawskiego: ugrupowania prawicowe

Author(s): / Language(s): Polish / Publication Year: 2015

This volume consists of press materials issued probably from 1941 (or 1940) until 1943 by the right-wing circles: Agudat Israel, Betar (revisionists), General Zionists, and the so-called assimilators associated with the group Żagiew. In general their authors distanced themselves from leftist views but each community focused on the problems most important to them. For Agudat Israel, these were religious issues; for Betar – those related to the life and ideology of Vladimir Jabotinsky; for General Zionists – future life in Palestine and the current problems of education and upbringing; for Żagiew – the on-going struggle against the occupier and the post-war life in the restored Poland.

Archiwum Ringelbluma. Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy, tom 23. Dzienniki z getta warszawskiego

Author(s): / Language(s): Polish / Publication Year: 2015

The volume contains the first complete edition of the diary of Abraham Lewin and the collection of other diaries and testimonies from the Warsaw ghetto. Abraham Lewin was a member of the executive board of Oneg Shabbat. His diary covers the period from April 1942 to January 1943 and is one of the most important documents dealing with history of the Warsaw ghetto, in particular with the great deportation of July–September 1942. Most of the other testimonies were written in 1941 and 1942. While some authors are anonymous, others are well-known associates of Oneg Shabbat, including Jechiel Górny, Eliasz Gutkowski, Menachem Mendel Kohn, Mordechaj Szwarcbard, and Nechemiasz Tytelman.

Archiwum Ringelbluma. Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy, tom 24. Obozy pracy przymusowej

Author(s): / Language(s): Polish / Publication Year: 2015

This volume illustrates the working and living conditions of the Jewish forced labourers in the labour camps. The testimonies refer mainly to the years 1940–1942 and to the places where Warsaw Jews worked: Bełżec, Chełm–Włodawa, Kampinos, Wilga, Łowicz and Drewnica. Part one of the volume features documents about the early stages of staying in the camps (roundups, medical examination before deportation to the camps, etc.) or general issues, while part two contains descriptions of individual camps. The testimonies are completed by some official German and Jewish documents.

Archiwum Ringelbluma. Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy, tom 28. Cwi Pryłucki. Wspomnienia (1905-1939)

Author(s): / Language(s): Polish / Publication Year: 2015

The volume consists of a single document – a memoir of Cwi Pryłucki, dictated by the author to his daughters in the Warsaw ghetto. The twelve notebooks that survived in ARG cover the period 1905–1912. Cwi Pryłucki was a supporter of the Zionist movement and co-worker of the Hebrew press: the editor of the first Warsaw Jewish daily “Der Weg”, a co-editor of the newspaper “Unser Leben” and an editor-in-chief of the daily “Der Moment”. In his memoirs he mentions a number of figures important to the history of Jews in Eastern Europe and Eretz Israel before 1939.

Archiwum Ringelbluma. Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy, tom 33. Getto warszawskie, cz. I

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

The two-part collection of materials on life in the Warsaw ghetto includes the documents issued by official structures, German and Jewish, as well as the documents of the Jewish underground. The first part includes the following chapters: Images of the ghetto (social conditions and daily life); Education (the fate of Jewish children and youth, and schooling under the German occupation); Religious life (texts deriving mostly from Jewish orthodox circles); Refugees and deportees; Struggle with typhus; Letters (both sent to and received in the ghetto); Persecution and Destruction.

Archiwum Ringelbluma. Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy, tom 34. Getto warszawskie, cz. II

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

The two-part collection of materials on life in the Warsaw ghetto includes the documents issued by official structures, German and Jewish, as well as the documents of the Jewish underground. The second part is divided into the following chapters: Statistics (data covering various domains of life of the Jewish population); Economics; Shops; Forced labour; House Committees (playing an important role in ghetto self-government); Political and civic organisations and the underground (e.g. resistance movement, including preparations for the uprising); Jewish Order Police; “The Thirteen” (German secret service unit in the ghetto).

Armed Peasants, Violent Intellectuals and Political Guards.

Trajectories of Violence in a Failing Nation State, 1918–1940

Author(s): Gábor Egry / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2017

Interwar Romania was infamous for its many violent political and social scenes. Some of these scenes represented exclusionary violence in its basic form, such as riots against Jews (and sometimes against other minorities) in 1922 and most prominently in 1927. But many other forms of violence were customary in Greater Romania. Clashes between villagers, destruction of memorials and statues, armed violence against the opposition electorate, beating up of politicians and occasional revolts against the authorities concerned an ever-growing state security apparatus that was rarely able to control these eruptions. Their persistence makes them suspicious of being a systemic phenomenon. In this article I argue that violence in this widespread form was a structural characteristic of Greater Romania, the result of systemic factors in the new state. A loosening of moral constraint due to the preceding first world war, subsequent revolutions (and paramilitary endeavours) and the deficiencies of the state together had a decisive impact on the formation of a political culture that fostered violence from time to time. These factors on the one hand legitimized violence as a form of political action and, on the other hand, they resulted from and impeded successful nation building, and the realization of the state’s promises for the nation. Thus, interwar Romania became a failing nation state and as such it facilitated popular forms of violence that was widely felt being justified by the legitimacy enjoyed by the ideology of the nation-state.

Arnošt Rosin és Czesław Mordowicz 1944-es szökése az auschwitz-birkenau koncentrációs táborból Szlovákiába

Kísérlet a magyarországi zsidók 1944. évi deportálásának megakadályozására

Author(s): Eduard Nižňanský / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 1/2018

There were two couples of Jewish people who managed to escape from the Auschwitz–Birkenau concentration camp, all the four had successfully managed to get to Slovakia in 1944. The story of Alfréd Wetzler and Rudof Vrba is well known. But, on the contrary, the escape of Rosin and Mordowicz is for the wide audience, in essence, unknown. The fleeing of the Slovak Arnošt Rosin and the Polish Czesław Mordowicz together was not only an attempt to change their fate, but they also wanted to let the world know how the killer Auschwitz–Birkenau concentration camp operates. They believed that the information they shared could terminate the deportation of Jews from Hungary in 1944. But their reports could not halt the tragedy.

Around the Bloc: Bulgaria Under Pressure to Stop Neo-Nazi March

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

For 15 years, extremists have annually honored a Nazi ally accused of signing death warrants for thousands of Jews.

Around the Bloc: Far-Right Croats Commemorate Bleiburg Massacre

Author(s): TOL TOL / Language(s): English / Issue: 05/15/2018

Some say that the event, which the Croatian parliament sponsors, has become the largest annual gathering of neo-Nazis in Europe.

Around the Bloc: Far-Right National Militia Swears Loyalty to Ukrainian People

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

Some worry about cooperation of extremists with the police to patrol city streets.

Around the Bloc: Outrage Over Children Displaying Neo-Nazi Symbols at Football Game in Bulgaria

Author(s): TOL TOL / Language(s): English / Issue: 05/01/2018

Racist and far-right incidents at games in the Balkan country have been frequent in the past few years.

Around the Bloc: Poland Clashes With Both EU and U.S. Over Recent Moves

Author(s): TOL TOL / Language(s): English / Issue: 03/13/2018

Ruling party, risking EU voting rights suspension, appoints own nominees to judicial watchdog, while Holocaust law might cost Warsaw U.S. funding for military projects.

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

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

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