Gramatyka milczenia świadków
On the basis of Ludwik Hering’s short story Meta, Grudzińska-Gross discusses the language used to talk about the extermination of Jews in Nazi-occupied Warsaw.
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On the basis of Ludwik Hering’s short story Meta, Grudzińska-Gross discusses the language used to talk about the extermination of Jews in Nazi-occupied Warsaw.
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A monument is not an imitation or representation of the past, but a cultural construct. The choice of a theme and the way it is presented in a monumental sculpture show what a particular group considered important and worthy of commemoration. Although it refers to the past, it is primarily concerned with the reality in which it was created. It is a response to a demand. The monuments of Wojtek which were founded in Poland in 2013–2014 contributed to the consolidation and dissemination of ideas about the bear-hero of Monte Cassino. By exposing patriotic themes and national symbols, the fate of the bear has been linked with the history of Poland during and after World War II. This clear and unequivocal message about the unusual relationship between Wojtek and the Anders’ Army soldiers does not mention how the animal was treated. Thus, the chance to problematize the fate of the bear in man’s captivity has been missed.
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Poland and Polish nationalism are widely identified with Catholicism. However, the populationof the Polish state was not homogenous ethnically and religiously – in 1921 the number of ethnic/confessional minorities reached the high level of over 30 percent. The Second World Warwas a fundamental change in Polish history – the new people’s republic, formed after 1945, hasbeen a totally different state from the Second Republic of Poland, which existed 1918–1939.Unfortunately, very little is known about the impact of Churches (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox)in shaping the Polish, Ukrainian, Belorussian and German nationalisms during the wartime as wellas the attitudes of clergymen towards the German occupants.
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The history of Slovenian Catholic Church is a field, which is not well known in Poland. That iswhy this article aims to present one of the peculiar episode from the past of Slovenian Catholicism.The article covers the time of the Second World War and the govern of marshal Tito. During theSecond World War Slovenian Catholic Church existed under the occupation of the fascist countries – Italy and The Third Reich. In this period, the main offensive power was the communists,who were fighting against invaders and often had a negative attitude towards clergy. Their attituderesulted in collaboration of Slovenian catholic hierarchs with the communists. The communists’governs established in 1945 and the consolidation of Tito’s power situated the Catholic Churchin a new reality, which was Yugoslavian variant of communism called “Titoism”. This doctrineshaped terms of the existence of Slovenian Catholic Church until 1980 when the marshal Tito diedand the Yugoslavia’s breakdown began.
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Bus company cajoles visitors to the Nazi concentration camp by using emotionally charged images from the Holocaust.
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The following text is an analysis of the struggle for the independence of the Polish nation between the 19th and 20th centuries. This analysis takes an educational perspective and is based on a largely forgotten work of Bogdan Nawroczyński, Nasza walka o szkołę polską 1901-1917. When speaking about the freedom struggle one can distinguish between a more common meaning connected with military conflict, and a less common meaning connected with organic, cultural-based work. The second meaning is especially interesting due to the important role played by education therein. The organization of secret and official schooling in that period not only served to promote the spread of knowledge, but was also used for the rebuilding of the state. Nawroczyński's piece is also important from the point of view of contemporary problems and conflicts.
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The EU has been the prime institutional force behind internal reforms and regional co-operation in the Western Balkans since 1999. EU efforts have been to a large extent successful, forcing upon the local elites political choices that otherwise they would have found convenient to reject. Normalizing Serb-Kosovo relations since the latter’s declaration of independence in February 2008, or more accurately pushing forward a dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina has been among the greatest EU diplomatic successes in the Western Balkans since 2011. This paper analyses the changes that have taken in Belgrade’s policy vis-à-vis Kosovo, since February 2008 and the progress in the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue from March 2011 until February 2015, under EU’ influence and pressure.
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At the symbolic level, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the beginning of the economic transition, a process that involved over 30 countries. Although all these countries worked to overcome the transformational crisis as smoothly as possible, some were more successful than others. In addition to the baseline conditions, the transition from the transformational recession to further economic development was influenced by a number of other factors. This paper presents the mentioned factors in detail by using the examples of former “brotherly” Yugoslav republics of Slovenia, Serbia and Croatia.
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Hal Foster explores the reasons behind the crisis of critical theory. He focuses on the critique levelled against criticism and critics, such as a postmodern depreciation of truth, or the fact that demystification becomes fetishized (Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière). He argues that these arguments lead to a vicious circle, and that criticism is essentially indispensable for the functioning of art in the contemporary world.
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This article discusses the armed anti-Jewish violence and the events connected with it, which occurred in the Polish Tatra Highlands (southern Poland) during 1945–1947. The number of Jewish victims exceeded 30, including children from Jewish orphanages. Among the perpetrators of those acts of terror were partisans from the group commanded by Józef Kuraś ‘Ogień’, which is one of the most important symbols of the anti-communist resistance. This article is based on results of a few years’ research and highly diverse sources and its main purpose is to recreate those events, with particular attention given to the victims of those acts of violence.
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At the beginning of the occupation, France, Holland and Belgium found themselves in a similar situation. But when we look at the ratio of victims and survivors during the Holocaust in Western Europe, France and Holland are polar opposites: in France 25 percent of around 320,000 Jews did not survive the persecutions, whereas the ratio in Holland was 75 percent of 140,000. Belgium lies in the middle of the scale – 40 percent dead out of 66,000 Jews. In order to understand the source of these differences, the authors compare the methods applied by the occupation authorities and their anti-Jewish policies, the involvement and the size of the local police forces and German police, as well as the jurisdictional disputes between these formations.
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75 per cent of French Jews survived the war in France. They received help within the framework of individual initiatives, mutual help structures, and the resistance movement — mainly Jewish. The author reconstructs the legal situation, administrative division, military operations, and the involvement of the SS, SD, and French collaborators during 1940–1944 which led to the speciic legal conditions and the atmosphere that enabled the French to act. The main problem the SS faced during the ‘inal solution’ was the lack of regulations prohibiting the French from helping Jews and ones that would have separated Jews from non-Jews. In an attempt to threaten the French, the Germans arrested the Jews, dismantled the help organisations’ structures, and arrested those suspected of provision of shelter to Jews. In 1943 the SD joined the SS in the carrying out of the ‘final solution’ and managed to signiicantly increase the number of French collaborators. The Germans gained momentum to hunt down Jews, which led to more arrests. In 1944 the resuming of the military operations in France made it enemy territory to the Germans. Repressions became more brutal and the 'final solution' policy ceased to consist only in arrests and deportations and began to involve dozens of executions of Jews conducted by the Germans and their French supporters. Every intensiication of the brutality and repressions led to increased help.
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The article tells the story of Henryk Ryszewski, who provided hiding to about a dozen Jews in his lat in the Warsaw district of Mariensztat. Accused after the war of blackmailing Jews (as I think, wrongly), he was convicted and spent several years in prison. His prosecutor fell victim of the ‘paper affair’ show trial and also spent a few years in prison.
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The article presents the scholarly achievements of Philip Friedman, an eminent historian from Lviv and survivor, whose wife and daughter died in the Holocaust. Friedman was a pioneer of Holocaust research. His contribution consisted in setting out research directions, developing the methodology and research tools, and documenting the Holocaust. Immediately after the war Friedman developed one of the irst Holocaust research programmes, which included topics such as: the place of Jews in Nazi ideology, the subsequent stages of persecutions of Jews, the description of Jewish life and resistance to the Nazi extermination policy, the Nazi genocide, the attitude of the non-Jewish population toward persecutions of Jews, and the response of the free world, including the Yishuv, to the Holocaust. Friedman was convinced that reactions of the victims and their life in the shadow of looming annihilation should constitute the foundation of research on the ‘inal solution’. The severely criticised the historians who based their Holocaust research solely on Nazi documentation, disregarding the Jewish perspective. Friedman himself was most interested in two issues: Judenrats and Jewish resistance. He examined the Jewish councils’ activity in the context of the inner life of ghettoes, the council’s inluence on the life of ghetto inhabitants. Carrying out research on Jewish resistance, Friedman created a broad concept of that stance – one that included not only military activity but also acts in the spiritual and cultural sphere. Philip Friedman was also one of the irst historians who paid attention to the universal signiicance of the Holocaust. He claimed that the human and moral implications of the ‘inal solution’ pertained not only to the Jews but also to all mankind. He also assumed that Jews were the irst but not the only victims of the Nazi extermination policy, as he discussed the extermination of the Roma as early as in 1950.
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This article surveys Bulgarian historical publications (collections of documents, monographs, collective works, and articles in periodicals) regarding the deportation of Jews from the territories annexed by Bulgaria during WWII (Vardan Macedonia, Western Thrace with a fragment of Aegean Macedonia that is, ‘Belomorie’, and Pirot). Such publications have been appearing on the Bulgarian publishing market since 1945, which testiies to Bulgarian scholars’ continuous interest in the issue of the fate of the Jewish minority, which remained under Sophia’s control. Until the fall of communism there were significant ideological limitations to Bulgarian historiography, while scholarly articles or books stressed the role of the communist movement (led by the future General Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Todor Zhivkov) and ordinary citizens in rescuing the local minority from deportation to the death centre in Treblinka. The dissolution of the Eastern Bloc and the freeing of historical research from the corset of ideological propaganda brought the irst Bulgarian publications that stressed the positive role of King Boris III and certain Bulgarian politicians, for instance, Dimitar Peshev, who purportedly opposed the political pressure exerted by Berlin with regard to deportation of Bulgarian Jews. However, the issue of Bulgaria’s responsibility for deportations of Jews from the annexed territories remains suficiently researched. One may also see the resistance offered by some scholarly milieus, which wish to regard their country as the only one that did not participate in the Holocaust.
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This article presents the complexity of life of mixed married couples in two large cities, Wrocław and Hamburg, during the Third Reich. The stories of six mixed families outline the issue of help provided to Jews by their non-Jewish spouses. Each case is analysed in terms of the survival strategy, the changing family constellations, the methods and possibilities of provision of help, and the dangers and dilemmas faced by the families of the mixed married couples.
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In the irst half of 1942 pollsters of Oneg Shabbat’s underground archive of the Warsaw ghetto conducted interviews with eight Jewish intellectuals on the influence of the ghetto reality on the Jews’ social life and identity. Among the many topics discussed in those questionnaires, the author focuses on the respondents’ opinions on acculturation, which she presents in three contexts: the respondents’ personal experiences, their political views (almost all of them were Doikeit ideology supporters), and the pre-war discussion on the role of the Yiddish language and culture in formation of Jewish national identity. The respondents gave the acculturation in the ghetto a new dimension. Even though before the war Polonisation was not perceived as a deinitely negative phenomenon, in the ghetto it began to be interpreted as a conscious decision to reject Jewish identity. Acculturation, which according to the respondents was not imposed by the Germans, became the main form of pathology in the Jewish intelligentsia milieus. In their critical interpretation of the ghetto reality the respondents perceived those processes as a danger to their nation’s identity comparable to the destructive activity of the Germans.
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The author analyses fragments of testimonies about the Warsaw ghetto regarding children’s family relations. The article describes the demographic transformations that changed the social structure, which forced the families into functional adjustments. The most important change was the forcing of groups, which had not worked, that is children, to earn money. The article presents the consequences of those transformations for family relations and analyses the experience of childhood and parenthood in the ghetto.
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This text is not a review of Mikołaj Grynberg’s two books mentioned in the title but a proposition of their joint reading in the context of oral Holocaust history on the one hand and relection on the Holocaust heritage in the ‘second generation’, that is the generation of survivors’ children, on the other. I pursue the former goal by inscribing Ocaleni z XX wieku in the oral history documentary-research tradition, including an attempt to interpret the testimonies from that book in the categories of ‘deep memory’ and its types distinguished by Lawrence Langer in his excellent book Holocaust Testimonies. The Ruins of Memory, which has recently been published in Polish. To achieve the second goal, that is, to bring out the tensions between the irst and the second, post-Holocaust generation, I compare Grynberg’s two books with Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus. Last but not least, I inquire about the boundaries of the community of Holocaust memory as ‘family memory’.
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Written on the ‘Aryan’ side, Doctor Chaim Einhorn’s diary contains recollections of the ghetto, particularly the deportation campaign period, and a few passages written during hiding in the Warsaw district of Praga – Doctor Einhorn and his wife were hiding with a few other Jews at teacher Romana Hanke’s home.
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