Wąskie widzenie: granice kolaboracji w świadomości świadków w procesach sierpniowych. Biłgoraj i Izbica jako studia przypadku
The Boundaries of Collaboration in the Perception of Court Witnesses of the August Trials

Summary/Abstract: Drawing on court records of the post-war trials of Nazi collaborators accused of, among other things, crimes against Jews, this article examines the testimony of Jewish and non-Jewish witnesses and attempts to answer the questions of: first, how representatives of post-war local communities constructed the definition of “collaboration” as a set of morally reprehensible practices, which stigmatized the perpetrators and relegated them outside of the community vis-a-vis other forms of cooperation with the German authorities, which were considered morally neutral, socially harmless and undeserving of penalization; second, what forms of complicity in anti-Jewish violence were revealed in the very process of negotiating the definition of collaboration. Our microstudy focuses on five trials of Nazi collaborators from two former shtetls of the Lublin region, with sizeable Jews populations before the Holocaust: Biłgoraj and Izbica. Analyzing court proceedings under the so-called “August-decree” in the context of other sources, including Yizkor books, memoirs, oral-history interviews and individual interviews with local community members, Holocaust survivors and their descendants, this article probes into the implications that the definition of “collaboration” had for local Holocaust memory.

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