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The study analyses the reactions of members of the Slovak army stationed on the Eastern Front to the emerging genocide against the Jewish population in the conditions of Nazi occupation during the first weeks of the war. On the basis of the avail¬able sources, the author states that under the influence of the propaganda, which accused the Jews of supporting the Bolshevik regime, intense anti-Semitic feelings also resounded among the Slovak soldiers at the front. Many soldiers, including the highest representatives of the army, openly approved of violence against the Jews as an act of just revenge, even when it acquired the character of genocide. In some cases, there was voluntary participation by soldiers in anti-Jewish pogroms carried out by the local population. The author also analyses the official attitude of the leadership of the army to violence against Jews, and describes it as ambivalent. The author also considers the reaction of the Ľudák representatives in Slovakia, who increased their anti-Jewish rhetoric and radicalized their anti-Jewish measures including preparations to deport the Jews to the Nazi extermination camps, in spite of the fact that they knew that genocide was beginning.
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The subject matter of land reform and the related issue of ensuring that land was owned by ethnic Slovaks, had already appeared in Slovakia in the time of autonomy after 6 October 1938. Reflections about the change of land ownership from the beginning referred not only to Jews, but also to the land of foreigners, the land allotted within the 1st land reform, as well as to the land of Slovaks. The prepared land reform was supposed to compensate for the iniquities caused by the 1st land reform and return the land back “to the hands of those who truly work on it”. Unlike the owners of shops and enterprises, Jewish landowners did not represent a very large class of people, but even in spite of this fact, the following Aryanization of this Jewish land property was subject to corruption. The local and state authorities as well as common people participated in the process of transferring Jewish land into the hands of “Aryans”. However the Slovak government failed in its effort to create a strong middle class of peasants who would support Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party.
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The article describes Jehovah’s Witnesses women as one of less remembered groups among victims of the Nazi regime. What is pointed out, first of all, is the state of research on their history, especially pertaining to their camp experience, Western literature on the subject and a negligible number of Polish research works devoted to the topic in question, and also some methodological dilemmas related to researching it. The author presents the circumstances of German Jehovah’s Witnesses after Hitler’s seizure of power, their subsequent persecutions, and also – reconstructed on the basis of documents, witnesses reports, and the members of persecuted group themselves – the fate of female followers of this religion (“the purple triangles”) in concentration camps. The author’s main points of focus are, described by witnesses/beholders/onlookers of the events, acts and attitudes of “the purple triangles” marked by strong spirituality, at the same time unbreakable/intransigent in their defiance of/against violence and the authorities’ orders. (Everybody knew that Jehovah’s Witnesses could have basically “sign off” from the camp by putting their signature at the bottom of a declaration that they would renounce their faith and cease to practise their religion.) Such a defiance may be better understood, the author claims, by interpreting it in the light of the anthropological concept of emotional communities.
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The article is devoted to the analysis of testimonies, accounts, memoirs, ego-documents by concentration camp prisoners of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Stutthof, and Gross-Rosen. The source material kept in the said KLs’ archives contains a multitude of individual histories of survivors of the genocide, either described in detail or concisely noted down. What the author focuses on is the variety of those testimonies to suffering and tragedy of people incarcerated in concentration camps. At the same time, she observes that for the former prisoners, decades after leaving the camps, the Shoah and hell are synonymous with genocide. The most common terms used by them to describe genocide are: mass extermination, the Holocaust, Annihilation, hell, the Shoah, hideous violence, total annihilation – both physical and moral.
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In the essay the author analyses the problematics of genocide based on correspondence between Filip David and Mirko Kovač Kiedy kwitnie zło. Książka listow 1992–1995 (When evil flourishes. A book of letters 1992–1995) to later juxtapose it with studies on Shoah. She ponders the generational perspective of people whose lives were tarnished by the Nazi-Germany occupation (Filip David – born 1940, Mirko Kovač – born 1938). The article most of all aims at reconstructing the stances of the two authors of letters and showing genocide as a realm of incessant discussion, vague affects, unsystematized knowledge. The author undertakes an attempt to reconstruct only some of the topics and contexts accompanying the issues discussed in David’s and Kovač’s letters, particularly: the soul-searing descriptions of the Bosnian War of 1992–1995. She shows that the language facet of violence proves to be a challenge to reflecting on literature in the correspondence between the two intellectuals. When faced with the disintegration of hitherto social order in the former Yugoslavia, the nationalist discourse, as social studies and research on genocide suggest, prepares the ground for activation of violent behaviours, justifies them, and plays a key role in fomenting the genocidal repression. As a result of the said processes, the authorities create and reinforce nations’ cultural self-images, tighten the control over ethnic purity of collective identity, instigate conflicts between neighbours based on “the blood and soil myth,” cherry-pick the xenophobic discourse of the past, and force through with ethnical interpretations of culture.
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The article contains considerations regarding memory of the Holocaust in Polish contemporary prose and analyses the arguments for and against fictitious representations of the Shoah. The author discusses the changes in treating fiction which narrates the history of Jewish people during the Second World War – from works of fiction published after the war (e.g. Wielki Tydzień by Jerzy Andrzejewski) to popular thrillers written in the 21st century. The main part of this article is devoted to a novel Tworki written by Marek Bieńczyk in 1999, telling a story of young people – Poles and Jews – employed in a mental hospital during German occupation. The novel was at the centre stage of discussion about relationship between fiction and the Shoah theme, yet the author of the article argues that it may serve as an important stepping stone in exemplifying history. This literary vision of the Holocaust (defined as “pastoral thriller”) shows educational possibilities of fiction.
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This paper discusses racism, eugenics and biopolitics in Romania during WWII. The anti-Semitic and anti-Roma attitudes of prominent Romanian eugenicists were not the exception, but the norm in a period during which the Romanian state pursued policies of ethnic purification, ultimately leading to the Holocaust.
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The article discusses the origin of the cliché according to which, during the evacuation of the Romanian troops from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, in June-July 1940, Jews had perpetrated violent acts against the Romanians, out of hatred. Firstly, the article examines which part of the local population was involved in actions for the benefit of the USSR, against Romania, and who was purely opportunistic. This analysis is based on testimonies which suggest that most ethnic groups, including Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians, Gagauzes, and Bessarabian Romanians, initiated or participated in such actions, although Jews did play a more important part. The testimonies also indicate that the Jews in question belonged in particular to the disadvantaged social classes and/or to the younger generation. Secondly, the article provides several possible explanations for these actions. It analyses, among others, the impact of an anti-Semitic regulation dated June 26, 1940. Thirdly, the article argues that the above-mentioned cliché stemmed from a racially-biased article published on June 29, 1940 in the Italian newspaper Il Messagero and later quoted by the official newspaper România.
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This article offers an overview of the advantages, uses, and abuses of oral history as a method of historical investigation, by focusing on major traumatic events, such as the Holocaust. It argues that, in spite of some of its shortcomings, oral history has become an important and widespread method of historical investigation that gathers valuable primary sources – useful for reconstructing historical events, but especially for the meanings revealed even in the case of erroneous recollections and what they tell about the interviewees and their interests. Oral history seems to be especially useful in cases of marginalized and under-represented groups and cases of mass violence that leave no, very few, or distorted documents.
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This article tries to compare books read at schools in Germany and in Poland concerning Second World War und Holocaust. As there isn’t a fixed canon of books for German schools, an inquiry became necessary to find out the ‚secret‘ canon. In Poland there are not only established compulsory books but also textbooks are used in preparation to matriculation. An investigation of three Polish textbooks and the canonical authors (Tadeusz Borowski, Czesław Miłosz, Hanna Krall) is in the centre of this article.
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This article aims at presenting the way in which a doctor, who is at the same time a prisoner in Dachau and Auschwitz camps, manages to resist during three years of physical and mental torture in these camps and in the end to survive. From his experience in the camp, he discovered the way to escape from the horrors of everyday life, that is by psychically detaching from everything that was connected to pain. Being a specialist in psychiatry, the author analysed the behaviour of his colleagues and discovered that only by cultivating forms of art and by developing one’s sense of humor, one could cope with the injustice and cruel treatment from the camp. In the end, these tools of psychical detachment proved to be the only ways in which the prisoner could hope of survival. Therefore, there are many examples in which one can learn from the prisoners in the camp that by laughing or by trying to see the best in every circumstance, even in the worst ones, one can overcome any hardships.
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In my essay I investigated the case of some Hungarian Jewish women writers from Romania, whose work was forgotten, or never reached any wider audience. While belonging to a triple minority (Hungarian, Jewish, woman), one can hardly identify them as part of the (Hungarian) holocaust literature, or literature at all. The essay demonstrates a few cases and processes of how such works disappear from memory, parallel to the holocaust-memory. Due to the conflict of the authors with political regime and emigration, their work became completely invisible today.
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It was in 1975 that Tomas Venclova, writing in Soviet-occupied Lithuania, first trenchantly raised the hitherto largely avoided topic of relations between Lithuanians and Jews with special emphasis on issues of personal and national Lithuanian responsibility, guilt, and shame for Holocaust-related crimes. His essay evoked responses in both the Lithuanian underground and the Western diaspora press. A bit earlier similar questions of guilt and shame in various contexts were raised by the German-born U. S. philosopher Walter Kaufmann. This paper presents some of Kaufmann‘s views; juxtaposes them with some of Venclova‘s; and puts the issue of responsibility, guilt, shame, and punishment for major crimes in a theistic Christian framework which Kaufmann abjures, Venclova echoes, and this author largely accepts.
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Book-Review: Salmen Gradowski, Die Zertrennung. Aufzeichnungen eines Mitglieds des Sonderkommandos. Hrsg. von Aurélia Kalisky unter Mitarbeit von Andreas Kilian. Aus dem Jiddischen von Almut Seiffert und Miriam Trinh. Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag. 2. Aufl. Berlin 2020. 354 S., Ill. ISBN 978-3-633-54280-2. (€ 24,–.) ‒ . Stephan Lehnstaedt
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Book-Review: Marta Ansilewska-Lehnstaedt, Pole jüdischer Herkunft. Selbstdeutung polnischer Kinderüberlebender des Holocaust. (Studien zu Holocaust und Gewaltgeschichte, Bd. 2.) Metropol Verlag. Berlin 2019. 389 S. ISBN 978-3-86331-479-8. (€ 24,–.) ‒ Ursula Reuter
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Review: Irene Hauser: Dziennik z Getta Łódzkiego / Das Tagebuch aus dem Lodzer Getto. Hrsg. von Ewa Wiatr und Krystyna Radziszewska. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego. Łódź 2019. 142 S., Ill. ISBN 978-83-8142-453-0. (Nicole Silvia Widera)
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Why to go back to 1985 to discuss present-day key concerns of international relations fromthe perspective of World War II history during the Cold War? The May 5, 1985 Bitburg cemetery celebrations, when US president altogether with German chancellor (Helmut Kohl) paid tribute to WWII veterans (of both sides of the conflict) was an example of the Ronald Reagan administration’s public relations fiasco: the “Great Communicator” failed to refer to WWII history in a manner that would save him from harsh criticism. Importantly, the 1985 debate concerning the Bitburg ceremony and the moral aspects of a homage to German (Axis) WWII soldiers gave an incentive to “Historikerstreit” in Germany, a dispute regarding WWII history in a manner comparable to Holocaust responsibility as a collective burden carried by Germans. The Bitburg cemetery, since the 1930s a monument (Kolmeshöhe Ehrenfriedhof) to WWI German military victims, and then to their younger colleagues during WWII (Wehrmacht and, controversially, Waffen-SS) remained a broadly commented upon focal point of Cold War disputes, allowing such questions that might bring about a possibilityof ground-breaking change in present-day political rivalries caused by failed (or successful) Cold War propaganda related to WWII choices. The Bitburg case as a particularly illustrative one and could also shed more light on the post-Soviet Russian effort to increase its influence by relying on the myths of the “Great Patriotic War”.
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