„Praca będzie wymagała pewnych nieznacznych zmian”. Redakcja „Bleter far Geszichte” wobec dziennika Zygmunta Klukowskiego (1951)
“The work will require some minor change”. The Editors of Bleter far Geshikhte” on Zygmunt Klukowski’s Diaries (1951)

Summary/Abstract: In 1948 the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw started publishing “Bleter far Geshikhte”, a Yiddish periodical bearing the same title as a pre-war journal which used to be co-edited by Emanuel Ringelblum. The post-war continuation intended to be a forum for Polish Jewish historiography but the postwar conditions as well as emigration of many Jewish researchers turned “Bleter” into a hybrid-like periodical for the Jewish milieu in Poland and a handful of Yiddish-speaking researchers abroad. In the 1950s and 1960s the editorial board, consisting of Ber Mark, Tatiana Berenstein, Artur Eisenbach and Adam Rutkowski, struggled to keep the academic character of the journal while opening it also to authors from other Eastern European countries, mainly the USSR and Romania. Following Mark’s death, Berenstein’s and Rutkowski’s emigration from Poland and the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968, the journal got suspended in 1970 for the next 10 years, although minutes of meetings of the editorial board show that for all these years efforts were made to continue publishing the journal. It eventually reappeared in 1980 but as less and less researchers and editors were able to write and/or edit in Yiddish, the journal got finally closed in 1990. The article discusses the history of the journal as well as one particular case study of publishing excerpts from Zygmunt Klukowski’s wartime diary, regarding the Holocaust in Szczebrzeszyn. These excerpts were published in “Bleter” in 1951 and censored or changed to conform to the official vision of Polish-Jewish relations during the war. In the article the censored and/or changed fragments have been verified against the 1958 edition of the diary in a book-length form.

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