Literatura węgierska wobec Zagłady. Wokół kanonu

Author(s): Kinga Piotrowiak-Junkiert / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2015

The text presents a number of the most important figures of the landscape of Hungarian literature devoted to the theme of the Shoah, among others S. Márai, M. Radnóti, J. Pilinszky, F. Sánta, who faced the problems of memory, the torments of war and the experience of the “Jewish condition”. Each of the subsequent generations of writers engaged the subject of the Shoah in different ways, changing the conventions or the stylistic or genre-related resources, owing to which there emerged an extremely abundant literary material, varied as far as the form, volume, language, artistic freedom and references to the works which constitute the canon of writings devoted to this subject are concerned. One of the formal solutions which are unique on a world scale is the phenomenon of de-tabooisation, of choosing genres which are incongruous with the rules of aesthetic bienséance (irony, the grotesque, surrealism), whose presence is testimony to the lack of the presence of the Shoah in the social discourse and to a desire to restore it to its rightful place in the context of literary experiments which provoke but which also demand to be perceived and solved.

Zawsze fragment. O polskim literaturoznawstwie i jego kanonie (Zagłady)

Author(s): Paweł Wolski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2015

The author considers the status of the canon of Holocaust literary studies. Based on Jan and Aleida Assmanns’ well known thesis he proposes to consider this kind of writing as an Encyclopedia – a cumulative reading list of literary studies works considered canonical, and, on the other hand, as a Method, i.e. a model mechanism of creating an analysis and exegesis of the Holocaust writing. The author concludes that despite numerous attempts there is a dominance of canons which fall within the sphere of the first category whereas the second one still awaits fruition. According to the author, a crucial element of the latter would be to define the specific relation between a scholar and the object of his or her research as a particular feature of Holocaust literature and its theory.

Przekłady: Dzień w obozie koncentracyjnym (fragmenty "Państwa SS")

Author(s): Eugen Kogon / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2015

Ogród życia i ogród śmierci – dwie egzystencje w obozie. Eden kontra Auschwitz

Author(s): Agnieszka Kłos / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2015

In her article the author describes the ways in which the prisoners of the Sonderkommando KL Auschwitz-Birkenau experienced the space of the camp. The form of perceiving and describing the camp forces one to submit to the conditioning of the description by two interrelated topoi. The imagined garden of life and the garden of death, i.e. two areas which were experienced by the prisoners in the camp and which were traversed by them during their work, inspired in those prisoners a feeling of awe, of transgressing a taboo and of embracing the structure of a myth. The text indicates the factors which in the memories constitute the narration about the living and the dead areas of the camp, and which are an interesting instance of creating a memory about this place. Recycling the elements of life and death, the mixing of the categories of the living and the dead which attracts the attention of the reader of the memoirs of the former prisoners and of the one who engages in a conversation with them. An important role in the formation of these concepts is also played by the visual iconography which is analysed by the author (photographs taken in the camp, sketches and drawings made by the former prisoners). In the text an attempt was made to reproduce the structure of the extreme experiences of the prisoners of the Sonderkommando, by researching the particular elements of their accounts which refer to various recurrent themes such as the pure – impure opposition, the images of the bodies which fall out from the gas chamber, gassing people, the “dead area” (graves and post-incineration pits), nakedness and the camp trees as the permanent reference points which recur in the recollections of the prisoners.

Opowiedzieć niewidzialne. Próba analizy filmu "Ida" Pawła Pawlikowskiego

Author(s): Katarzyna Mąka-Malatyńska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2015

The present text is the first attempt in Poland at analysing the movie by Paweł Pawlikowski, "Ida". The author’s premise is that the cinematographic means of expression which are employed in "Ida" serve to convey meanings which do not result merely from the course of the action and which are not contained in the dialogues. A closer look at the camera work, at the relation between the image and the sound, the recurrent stylistic means in the film allows one to reach the meaning which results from the deep structure of the cinematographic message. The article frequently mentions the statements made by the makers of the film, the accounts from the shooting and the postproduction periods because here the process of the analysis is understood to a certain extent as the reconstruction of the process of creation. The fundamental aim of the analysis of Pawlikowski’s film is to situate it within a historical and cinematographic context, reference to which has direct justification in the structure of the film. Such an attitude opens Pawlikowski’s work to the subsequent stages of interpretation and facilitates a polemics with the reading of "Ida" which is already well-established in critical works.

Nieznani i mniej znani współpracownicy Ringelbluma, czyli co wynika z odczytania księgi kasowej Oneg Szabat

Author(s): Aleksandra Bańkowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 04/2015

The „Oneg Shabat” cash book is the only direct source material produced by the ring of Ringelblum’s associates that makes it possible to trace back its composition and evolution. Kept from November 1940 to August 1942, it contains the names of the persons who received hardship allowances or fees as authors and the names of those who subsidized the activity of „Oneg Shabat”. An analysis of recurrent entries of names makes it possible to revise the list of “Oneg Shabat” contributors known from literature. This means, for example, that one should reconsider the place of such persons as Izrael Winnik, Jakub Zylberberg, Rabbi Chitowski, Sz. Szajnkinder, Melech Fajnkind, Cwi Klejnman in „Oneg Shabat” group.

List do Ludwika (Eliezera) Hirszberga (7 lipca 1944)

Author(s): Hersz Wasser / Language(s): Polish Issue: 04/2015

Hersz Wasser (1910–1980), born in Suwałki, an economist and activist of Poale Zion – Left was one of the closest associated of Emanuel Ringelblum in the work of creating the Underground Warsaw Ghetto Archives. The letter referred to her concerns his activities following the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, notably his participation in the campaign pursued in 1943 and 1944 by Adolf Berman, member of the Presidium of the Jewish National Committee, to collect the recollections of Jews hiding on the “Aryan side” of Warsaw. Keywords: Hersz Wasser; Adolf Berman; memory of Holocaust

Zagłada żydowskiego miasta – likwidacja getta na Podzamczu

Author(s): Jakub Chmielewski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 04/2015

On the night of 16/17 March 1942, the Germans set out to carry out Operation „Reinhardt”, the goal of which was the biological extermination of the Jewish population. The first ghetto selected for the liquidation was Lublin’s Podzamcze. The deportations can be divided into two basic stages; the first of them was completed around the end of March, when it was suspended for 2 or 3 days, and until then the action was taking place only at night. Stage II went on from 31 March to 14 April, and the deportations continued both during the day and at night. It can be assumed that the liquidation of the Podzamcze ghetto was a testing ground and the experience gained in Lublin was to be used in the liquidation of subsequent concentrations of the Jewish population.The deportations from Podzamcze ghetto were preceded by actions aimed at the logistic preparation of the operation. The ghetto was divided into Part A and Part B, the latter being surrounded with barbed wire and set aside for the Jews classified as „useful”, with further rules being enacted that restricted the place of stay, the stamping of labour certificates was introduced and all the Judenrat sections and institutions were moved into the ghetto.The liquidation of the ghetto itself took a very brutal course, with many Jews being beaten up or shot dead inside its walls. The operation was performed by German units aided by auxiliary units from Trawniki, made up of Soviet POWs. Approximately 28,000 Jews were taken to the Bełżec death camp, while about 1000 were murdered on the spot. Just over 4,000 Jews were officially moved to the Restgetto on Majdan Tatarski, with about as many getting there illegally.

A holokauszt a világ emlékezetének gyújtópontjában

Author(s): Aleida Assmann / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 4/2015

Life, Death, and Survival in the Vapniarka Camp

Author(s): Ana Bărbulescu / Language(s): English Issue: 09/2016

Vapniarka is probably the best known camp operational in Transnistria under Romanian authority, being often recorded in connection with either its communist inmates, or the spastic paralysis epidemic that broke out in the early winter of 1943. The present study aims to present the complex history of the camp, with its different stages and different categories of inmates. A special attention will be given to the internal organization of the camp, the official structures, and its parallel developments.

“Balkanization” of National Memories and Identities Trauma:

Author(s): Danilo Trbojević / Language(s): English Issue: 09/2016

The politics of specific selective social/national memories in contrast with globally accepted and promoted pictures of the past happenings is always a very interesting field for anthropological research. This paper also deals with another social phenomenon — the political usage of the dead bodies, or “political lives of the dead bodies” of the Holocaust victims buried on ex-Yugoslavian territories. We will try to show and understand the process of changing political and historical context and its influence on the way Yugoslavia and, later, its independent states used history and traumatic social memory presentation to recreate new views on these happenings and, therefore, new national identities. Using this kind of analysis we will show how the “victim” and “perpetrator” identities were reconstructed and used in different ways and to different purposes. These recreated identities are supposed to be very important factors in the Euro integration, but also a part of the revisionism threat and power struggle in the Balkans today.

Simon Geissbühler, Iulie însângerat. România şi Holocaustul din vara lui 1941, Curtea Veche, Bucureşti, 2015

Author(s): Ioana Bujor / Language(s): English Issue: 09/2016

The triumph of societies, in the form in which they exist today, relies on the presence of an identity-based construction, deeply ingrained in the intimate structure of a nation. The consistency in time of this identity is guaranteed by memory, resulting from a temporal relationship between past and present.

Kulináris nosztalgia és poszttraumatikus stressz-zavar. Adalékok Király Kinga Az újrakezdés receptjei című könyvéhez

Author(s): Louise O. Vasvari / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 2/2021

Lágernaplók. Magyar zsidó deportáltak mindennapjai a koncentrációs és kényszermunkatáborokban (1944–1945)

Author(s): Heléna Huhák / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 3/2023

A significant part of the camp diaries of Jews deported from Hungary during World War II was written in the mostly unknown subcamps. By examining these texts, I seek to nuance the Auschwitz-centred historiography of the Holocaust. I interpret the diary writing as a historical event in the context of the final phase of the Holocaust, of local practices, of everyday life, of social gender and of the bodycentredness of camp life. I am interested in what the texts of the diaries, the practices of their creation and the lives of their authors can tell us about the experiences of Hungarian Jewry in concentration and forced labour camps and the ways in which these experiences are represented.

Beyond Camps and Forced Labour: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference (The Holocaust and its Contexts)

Author(s): András Szécsényi / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2022

Beyond Camps and Forced Labour: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference (The Holocaust and its Contexts). Edited by Suzanne Bardgett, Christine Schmidt, and Dan Stone. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 324 pp

Roma and the Question of Ethnic Origin in Romania during the Holocaust

Author(s): Marius Turda / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

This article suggests that the arguments used to justify the deportation of Roma to Transnistria in 1942 were racial and eugenic. As a selfstyled scientific theory of human betterment, eugenics aimed to sanitize Romania’s population, proposing a new vision of the national community, one biologically purged of those individuals believed to be “defective”, “unfit”, and “unworthy” of reproduction. Based on new archival material we suggest that the racial definition of Romanianness that prevailed at the time aimed to remove not just Jews but alsoRoma from the dominant ethnic nation (“neamul românesc”). To define Romanianness according to blood, ethnic origin, and cultural affiliation had been an essential component of Romania’s biopolitical programme since the 1920s. During the early 1940s, it served as the political foundation upon which the transformation of Romania into an ethnically homogeneous state was carried out. At the time, the “Roma problem”, similar to the “Jewish Question”, was undeniably premised on eugenics and racism.

Fatal Coincidence: On the Root Causes of the Roma Holocaust

Author(s): Sławomir Kapralski / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

This article puts forward a broad interpretive scheme to understand the deep causes of the Nazi persecution of Roma. It is argued that a reference to the interplay of modernity and colonialism is required to understand how Roma were constructed as different, how this difference became racialized, and how projects to eliminate this difference were drawn up. The author presents Roma as the main actors in the two most important European historical processes: modernization and colonization. Various modern strategies targeting Roma are described,together with the impact of the colonial experience that allowed Roma to be seen as the “savage within”, threatening the identity of German society. Finally, the similarities between colonial violence and persecution of Roma are brought into focus.

Representing/Roma/Holocaust: Exhibition Experiences in Europe and East Asia

Author(s): Kyu Dong Lee,Eva Rosenhaf / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

This article reflects on two exhibitions, in 2018 and 2019, about the Nazi persecution of German Sinti and Roma. One was produced by an Anglo-German curatorial team and toured Britain and Continental Europe. The second was designed by South Korean curators and installed temporarily in a gallery in downtown Seoul. The two exhibitions drew on the same photographic archive, narrated the persecution histories of Romani subjects of the photographs, and used the story of their relationship with the non-Romani photographer to ask questions about responsibility and to prompt visitors to reflect on their own status as “implicated subjects” in contemporary forms of discrimination. Given different expectations of the level of knowledge that visitors bring to the exhibition and different communicative tools familiar to them (the Seoul curators included creative artists), the two curatorial teams took very different approaches to informing and moving their audiences – and to meeting the recognized challenges of representing Romani history and identity – not least in the ways in which the exhibition’s message was mediated in face-to-face conversations on site. The aesthetic approach adopted in Seoul did not fully succeed in maintaining the balance between explanation and exoticization. The evaluation relies on visitor surveys (quantitative and qualitative) and interviews with guides.

Eliyana R. Adler and Katerina Capková, eds. 2020. Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath

Author(s): Anna Daróczi / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

Eliyana R. Adler and Katerina Capková, eds. 2020. Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath. Newark: Rutgers University Press.

„Post-testimony”. A tanúságtétel helye a soá történeti elbeszélésében

Author(s): Éva Kovács / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 11/2024

For a long time, the analysis of survivors’ testimonies did not find its way into historical writing. When it did, these testimonies were often used merely as illustrations of victims’ personal experiences within the Grand Narrative of historians. Over the past 20 years, however, with the opening of several digital oral history archives, these testimonies have become regular sources for historians. Additionally, the memory culture of the Shoah has fundamentally changed in the West since 1989, with the most significant change being the widespread introduction of the concept of trauma. It is widely recognised in psychological and sociological research on Holocaust testimonies and other ego documents that specific analytical methods are required for digital collections. However, Holocaust historians working with these sources have rarely applied such methods. This paper proposes sociological techniques for using and interpreting personal accounts in historical writing. It also examines the historical use of large testimony collections, drawing on current case studies of the Holocaust in Hungary.