Jože Mihevc, Skozi taborišča do sreče
Review of: Jože Mihevc, Skozi taborišča do sreče, zbirka Zapisi iz zdomstva, Mladika, Trst 2018
More...We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
Review of: Jože Mihevc, Skozi taborišča do sreče, zbirka Zapisi iz zdomstva, Mladika, Trst 2018
More...
The biography of Dimitri (“Bazorka”) Giorgi Amilakhvari (1906-1942), the commander of the 13th Demi-Brigade of the French Foreign Legion, who died in the Battle of El Alamein during the World War II North Africa campaign, contains a number of unspecified facts. In September 2020, the French publishing house (Lemme Edit), which publishes historical literature on famous military and political figures, issued the book “Dimitri Amilakhvari - The Fighting Prince”. It was the first book in France to honor the memory of Lieutenant Colonel Dimitri Amilakhvari. The author of the book cites information about the noble house of Zedginidze-Amilakhvari. According to this information Ivane Amilakhvari (1829-1905), general of the cavalry of the Imperial Russian Army, who distinguished himself in the Russo-Ottoman and Caucasus wars, is named as the ancestor of Dimitri Amilakhvari. Dimitri Amilakhvari is mentioned as Ivane Amilakhvari’s grandson on the website of the French Ministry of Armed Forces. The issue of Dimitri Amilakhvari’s ancestors has not been specially studied in Georgian research literature. The scholars either do not address this issue at all or refer to him as the grandson of Ivane Amilakhvari. There are also a variety of Internet resources, family tree and genealogy archives which under the influence of multilingual online encyclopedia (mostly the Russian Wikipedia and the English Wikipedia), represents Dimitri Amilakhvari as a descendant of Ivane Amilakhvari, the famous general of the Imperial Russian Army. Finally, the book of the French historian Nicolas Ross “Between Hitler and Stalin: White and Soviet Russians in Europe during World War II”, reprinted in February 2021 in France, in which Dimitri Amilakhvari is considered as the representative of the Russian White Emigration. In fact, who was Dimitri Amilakhvari’s father – Giorgi son of Ivane Amilakhvari or Giorgi son of Otar Amilakhvari? Is it a coincidence that the name of Ivane (Niko) Amilakhvari is connected with the other branch of the noble house of the Amilakhvari? And what is the significance of establishing this fact? Through the documentary sources, genealogical lists of the Amilakhvari family, and information of genealogiy websites in the article is established that the ancestor of Dimiti Amilakhvari was not Ivane Amilakhvari, general of the cavalry of the Imperial Russian Army, but Otar Amilakhvari, descendant of another branch of this princely family.
More...
The article examines the Soviet nationality policy in Belarus in 1944–1947 during the population exchange between the Soviet Union and Poland. Unlike in Lithuania and Ukraine, the authorities in Belarus prioritized keeping the labor force over national homogenization, determined nationality by territory of birth, and attempted to keep the people by designating them as Belarusians irrespective of their self-identification. The article argues that in Belarus, the population transfer was a combination of an exodus of refugees with the expulsion of Poles by the state. Although the declarations about the voluntary character of the resettlement were false, the direction of the compulsion varied, and this ambivalence opened up a space of limited autonomy in which the people could exercise agency. The Soviet ethnic cleansing remained incomplete in Soviet Belarus because of the competing urge to keep the labor force. Paradoxically, much of the demographic de-Polonization of new western territories of Soviet Belarus was achieved without the state’s commitment to ethnic cleansing and without the involvement of Belarusian nationalism.
More...
The outbreak of communal violence against Jews catalysed by the German invasion of the USSR was long neglected by scholarship due to biases against eyewitness testimony and the opacity of local events to outside observers. A growing number of studies on the topic have recently emerged, drawing from the eyewitness testimonies of Jewish survivors and previously inaccessible Soviet archives. This article analyses the lesserknown audio-visual recordings of interviews with non-Jewish witnesses to communal violence in provincial towns and villages of Lithuania. Collected decades after the events, they relate the same cruelty and destruction as recalled by Jewish survivors. As insider accounts from the local, non-Jewish community, they disclose manifold and divergent subject positions in the face of extreme violence. Marked by a forensic mode of discourse that accentuates individual agency and responsibility, they diverge from the prevailing apologetics of national narratives of the period. Instead, they reflect an immediacy of apprehension rooted in the intimate topographical setting of rural Lithuania under German occupation, a local memory not yet assimilated to national narratives of heroism and suffering. Finally, they express the memory of mutual surveillance, intimidation, and coercion that would endure for decades after the end of the war in these locales.
More...
In the aftermath of the Second World War, displaced victims of war came to be seen as a symbol of post-war ruin and civilisational decline. Policymakers and relief workers envis-aged the rehabilitation of refugees as a vital element of the economic, cultural, and political reconstruction of Europe, the process underpinned by the discourse of civilisation. This article shows how these efforts manifested through material aid and, in doing so, it uses objects as a key to reading experiences of transition from war to peace in the early Cold War era. Four objects – a razor blade, a performance costume, a toolbox, and a mezuzah pendant – serve as starting points to illustrate wider areas of a recivilising agenda that were consid-ered to be necessary for the post-war reconstruction: health and cleanliness, the promotion of Western values and lifestyles, the rebuilding of identities and cultural life, and training and education.
More...
Scholars working in the field of Holocaust Studies rarely centre questions of money in their studies of Holocaust memory and memorialisation. This reticence is understandable given how easily such approaches devolve into cynical and reductionist readings of complex and painful historical phenomena. Yet, it also leaves us without sufficient research tools, and information, about the role that economics has played in creating and sustaining public awareness of the Nazi genocide in the post-World War Two era. This article represents an initial attempt to explore how we might responsibly undertake an economic history of Holocaust memory, focusing on two case studies from post-war Austria. In my discussion of the large “Antifascist Exhibition ‘Niemals vergessen!’” (“Never Forget”) that opened in Vienna in 1946, I suggest that the price people are willing to pay for memory-related activities can help us gauge their affective investment. Turning to the case of Simon Wiesenthal’s fundraising and philanthropic efforts throughout the 1960s, I then illuminate how the very act of fundraising can serve as a communal act of memorialisation.
More...
This article focuses on the testimonies of two teenage Holocaust survivors who were deported from Hungary via Auschwitz-Birkenau to Gusen II concentration camp. I pay attention to a key aspect of human experiences of displacement and persecution: Notions of place/ space and map-making in the example of two Holocaust testimonies from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.
More...
This article examines the persecution of Jews and Roma in wartime Slovakia, with a particular focus on the historically multicultural eastern region of the former Šariš Zemplín County. It studies the removal of Roma from Slovak towns and villages from 1941, and the 1942 deportation of Jews to occupied Poland. These events occurred concurrently with the regime’s “civilisation mission” in the peripheries. While it was Nazi Germany that fuelled the machinery of death and destruction that marked World War II, the speed and direction of ousting the Jews and Roma from Slovakia was not straightforward and depended on national and local factors and actors. The article shows that the racialisation of Slovakia’s borderlands was driven by both the urban elites in Bratislava who tried to appease Hitler and the national population, as well as the inhabitants of the volatile peripheries themselves. In this sense, the two processes of Jewish and Romani persecution were connected in the racial imaginings of the fascist Slovak state.
More...
Review of Ovidiu Raețchi, Istoria Holocaustului: Desființarea omului De la ascensiunea lui Hitler până la execuția lui Eichmann Litera, Bucharest 2022, 720pp.,ISBN: 978-606-33-8351-9 (Paperback)
More...
After the First Vienna Award and the occupation of southern Slovakia by the Hungarians in 1938, the Jesuits from Košice had to move from the newly built house to a new residence in Spišská Nova Ves. The small community repaired the church and the habitation in which it lived. The order took over the rights and duties of the vicariate, so it had to teach religion in the city and its surroundings. The Jesuits often had to deal with personnel issues and especially the problematic figure of Father Ján Guga, who had a close relationship with the Orthodoxia and Russia. In the city, they watched the movements of the troops and experienced the atmosphere of war. The most unpleasant situations were connected with the persecution and deportation of the Jewish population, whom the superior of the house, Štefan Kramár, tried to help by baptizing them. The documents of the house were preserved in the Michal Lacko´s Centre of Spirituality East-West, where they are stored, only until August 1943. For this reason, we only know detailed information about the life of the Jesuits in Spišská Nová Ves until this period.
More...
Understanding the socio-historical processes after the April War of 1941 and the dismemberment of Yugoslavia presupposes a deeper knowledge of opposing national perspectives since 1918, when this country was created, of the events between the two world wars, as well as their multidimensional characters, since they largely determined wartime polarizations and alignments. The Second World War is one of the most problematic historical periods in the post-Yugoslav area, from a scientific and political point of view. With numerous relief and insufficiently explored components, it still belongs to the so-called "hot memory". The disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1941 was greeted by its peoples and political subjects with different visions of whether (and if so: how) a new Yugoslavia should be established. The anti-fascist struggle was led by a partisan movement with the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) playing a dominant role. Each Yugoslavia ("old" and "new") also meant "a new constitutional concept of the relationship between its main peoples/political groups” (Dejan Jovic). The history of the Slovenes, wrote Edvard Kardelj at the end of the thirties of the 20th century, "is nothing but a long chain of oppression and trampling of a small nation”. After the First World War (the “Great War”), the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and the collapse of Austria-Hungary divided the Slovenes among four countries. The parcelization of the Slovenian ethnic space did not end there. The territory of Slovenia (Drava Banovina) after the fragmentation of Yugoslavia in 1941 was divided between Germany, Italy and Hungary, into six parts, with different administrative regimes. The Slovenian people were torn apart, humiliated, threatened with destruction and disappearance from the ethnic map of Europe. This people was one of “the most fragmented in Europe and all the occupiers planned to wipe it out through persecution, assimilation and denationalization. Research on refugees and exile is closely related to issues of human rights, nationalism, genocide and ethnocide. This issue has a humanitarian, political, legal and moral dimension. Part of the exiled Slovenes also came to Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1941, which was part of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). Slovenes have a specific place in the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina since the end of the 19th century. They also contributed to the development of the National Liberation Movement ( NOP) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by acting in an illegal revolutionary movement and partisan units, as well as participating in the constitution of the new government and defining the future internal structure of post-war Yugoslavia. The war in the territory of occupied Yugoslavia was, among other things, a civil war that destroyed the idea that this monarchist state can be restored in the form in which it was created in 1918. The ranks of the NOP included Slovenians who lived in Bosnia and Herzegovina before the war, as well as those who came as exiles in 1941. Major events related to the construction of the “new” Yugoslavia took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which Slovenians participated, important for the history of Slovenia as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina. By actively participating in the anti-fascist war, the engagement and visions of their prominent representatives at the top of the NOP (Edvard Kardelj and others) and in the activities of the AVNOJ in 1943, determining and making its landmark decisions, the Slovenians had a significant share in the victory and establishment of a new, federal the Yugoslav state and the construction of the statehood of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Complex Yugoslav federalism, with scattered forms and models, represented a specific historical phenomenon.
More...
One of the important measures of the communist government after the Second World War was the change of ownership of private property and the property of religious communities. For the mentioned changes in the field of ownership, numerous regulations were passed, which related to the nationalization, confiscation and expropriation of real estate. The regulations were for the purpose of the legitimate action of the state in terms of changing the ownership of real estate. With these measures, the entire waqf property, which until then was outside the scope of state interventions regarding the change of ownership, came under attack. The aforementioned processes were carried out in a short period of time and very radically, whereby in many cases the established legal procedures adopted by the communist authorities were not followed. Through nationalization, confiscation and expropriation, significant property of the Islamic community in Bosnia and Herzegovina was usurped. The usurpation of property significantly weakened the Islamic community economically, which had an impact on the work of its most important institutions. Due to additional government measures, the most important religious and educational institutions of the Islamic community, such as madrasahs and sharia courts, ceased to exist, while the number of schools was significantly reduced. With the usurpation of property, the Islamic community lost a significant economic support, which had an impact on its further functioning and influence on the wider masses, which to a good extent were very quickly affected by the process of atheism, which was one of the important goals of the communist government. The Islamic community in the Brcko region had significant waqf property at its disposal. It was about various properties, which were of great importance in the religious, educational, economic and social segments in the places where the waqfs were located. The Islamic community in the area of the municipality of Gornji Rahic, which was located in the Brcko region at the time, had significant waqf real estate, especially land holdings. Until the establishment of the communist government, they were used to support religious buildings in this area. With the establishment of the new government, according to the available data of a significant land area, four waqfs in this area were hit by the measures of the new communist government. It was about the foundation of the Gornji Rahic mosque, the foundation of the Ogratlenovac mosque, the foundation of the Iptidaija school in Gornji Rahic and the Fatima Kujundzic foundation. The aforementioned waqfs came under attack based on the Law on Agrarian Reform and Colonization, because they had more land than was determined by the said regulation. Therefore, already in 1946, the government carried out the process of expropriation of the land of the mentioned waqfs and took a total of 66 dunums of land and 320 m 2 from them, while leaving a total of 17 dunums and 532 m 2 of land to the Islamic community, i.e. the mosque waqf in Gornji Rahic. The Islamic community sent a series of complaints to the competent institutions regarding this attitude of the authorities, which were not accepted. So it was left without an important economic basis necessary for its continued existence. The aforementioned expropriated land was included in the land fund as state property, which was allocated to various users: agrarian interests, agricultural cooperatives and other state institutions. It is interesting that the waqf property, which had the status of a cemetery (cemetery), was the subject of expropriation in this case. In the process of cadastral marking of expropriated land, numerous mistakes were made, which in the later period represented a problem in the implementation of the process of registering the allocated land in the ownership of agrarian stakeholders. The mentioned problem in the paper is treated on a micro level, but the available facts indicate that it was an established practice of the communist government, which was widely used immediately after the Second World War, related to the change of property ownership of religious communities, including the Islamic community. In this way, the economic strength of the Islamic community was significantly reduced, which will have an impact on its overall status in the time of socialism, which was also shown in the example of the usurpation of the Islamic community's waqf in the municipality of Gornji Rahic in Brcko county.
More...
The paper carefully deals with the constitutional aspect and the development of education in Yugoslavia, with special emphasis - Albanians. After the Second World War, Yugoslavia faced numerous problems both politically and economically. The first reforms that this country had to undergo initially required help from countries such as the Soviet Union. Among the first steps to be taken were the legislative reforms undertaken in 1946 by adjusting the Yugoslav Constitution. This constitution sanctioned important aspects of the political, economic, educational and cultural life of the country. The political life after the Second World War in Yugoslavia had undergone radical changes making it possible for countries like Macedonia to become independent states or to be created from scratch. The only country which was politically eliminated in this aspect was Kosovo, which was left under Serbia from 1945. By oppressing Kosovo politically in all aspects of life, Serbia exercised a segregationist policy towards the Albanian people of Kosovo. Harsh measures were exercised against the Albanian minority, including their relocation to Turkey through various Yugoslav-Turkish agreements, the imprisonment of many political personalities, etc. Political rights of expression were denied and political pressure continued at the national level. These forms were present continuously and did not stop until 1968 when the political situation began to change. Indeed, the Albanian minority in Yugoslavia made good use of the political circumstances after 1968 when, in general demonstrations in all the cities of Kosovo, they opted for more national rights and requested the establishment of the University of Prishtina. Non-Albanian minorities were included in the Yugoslav republics in all spheres of life. Since they were not in large numbers, their presence was not revealed apart from the Hungarians. The Hungarian minority also began to enjoy greater rights with the amendment of several articles of the constitutions of 1946, 1953, 1963 and 1974. The presence of Hungarian schools was evident with several such schools and a lot of students who were allowed to use and be instructed in their mother tongue. Other small minorities such as Russians, Bulgarians, Germans and others were few in number. The Albanian population in Yugoslavia was distributed across several republics such as Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and to a lesser extent Croatia and Slovenia. Political power in Yugoslavia which was largely led by Serbs until 1966 through the iron hand of Alexander Rankovic did not allow the Albanians to even use their national flag and to express any kind of dissatisfaction through various demonstrations or manifestations. The period between 1966-1974 was decisive for Albanians in Yugoslavia, especially since many important steps were taken in political terms, such as the replacement of Serbian politicians with Albanians, the establishment of many different schools and the massification of higher education in general. The Yugoslav constitutions with their reforms changed the direction of comprehensive development of political, social, economic and cultural life for all non-Albanian and Albanian minorities in Yugoslavia. The author has followed the descriptive and analytical scientific methods for dealing with this important issue for general historiography. A serious Yugoslav and Albanian literature covering this socially and scientifically important study has been used.
More...
Review of: Salim Kadri Kerimi, SUDBINATA NA ORGANIZACIJATA JUDŽEL- SUDSKIOT PROCESPROTIV JUDŽELDŽIITE (SUDBINA ORGANIZACIJE JUDŽEL - SUDSKI PROCES PROTIV JUDŽELDŽIJA), Adeksarn, Gostivar 2022, 370 str.
More...
Jakie było Węgorzewo i kim byli węgorzewiacy w pierwszej dekadzie powojnia? „Karta” podjęła już temat (nr 87/2016). Chciałbym dorzucić jeszcze jedną perspektywę, inną w sposobie narracji i interpretacji źródeł.
More...
Review of: OTA KONRÁD, RUDOLF KUČERA, Cesty z apokalypsy. Fyzické násilí v pádu a obnově střední Evropy 1914–1922, Praha 2018, Academia – Masaryku° v ústav a Archiv AV ČR v. v. i., 368 s., ISBN 978-80-200-2874-7; ISBN 978-80-87782-82-8.
More...
Review of. IDAN SHERER, Warriors for a Living. The Experience of the Spanish Infantry during the Italian Wars, 1494–1559, Leiden 2017, Brill, 304 s., ISBN 978-90-04-33772-5.
More...
This contribution is based on a comparative analysis of images of important turning points (symbolic centres) of Czech and Sudeten German history created in 1938–1945 by Czech and Sudeten German historiographies. Its aim is to describe the main strategies these historiographers used to refute or at least compensate the image or interpretation of a historical phenomenon as described by the ‘rival’ historiography. Based on a generalisation, this contribution off ers a classifi cation of typical strategies which were used to this purpose. It turns out that on this general level, and although the nationally conditioned content was diff erent, strategies used by the Czech and Sudeten German historiographies were identical. Th e analysis and generalisation are introduced by a theoretical introduction which off ers arguments for the still sadly neglected use of comparative and relational-historical approach to the history of Czech historiography.
More...
The article presents the life and public activity of Marian Kiniorski. He studied at the University of Agriculture in Dublany, the University of Berlin and the School of Political Sciences in Paris (until 1899). He was a modern landowner, striving for the industrialization of property, the use of new agricultural techniques and agricultural progress. He belonged to a number of societies and landowners’ organizations (including the president of the Central Agricultural Society). At the same time, he was an active political activist associated with the National Democracy (a member of the National League, then the Board of the National People’s Union and the authorities of the National Party). A member of the Russian State Duma, then a senator of the Republic of Poland, participated in debates on the land reform. Active journalist, author of specialist articles on agricultural and social topics. In 1930 he withdrew from public life, focusing on the farm. He died in Warsaw.
More...