Z problematyki najnowszych badań nad gettem łódzkim

Author(s): Michał Trębacz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 01/2017

The author of the article embarks on an attempt at an aggregated review of scientific writings of the recent years connected with the history of the Łódź Ghetto. By presenting brief reviews of six publications, both monographs and source publications, he pinpoints not only the topics ignored by the researchers so far but first of all critically assesses the methods and methodology applied so far. The author looks at the consequences of the researchers’ approach and himself suggests taking a fresh look at the documentation left after the Łódź “closed-door district.” The key question he asks is about the right approach to the archives of the Jewish ghetto administration and the texts written by its employees. How can the credibility of these materials be evaluated? Were they subject to some form of censorship? What perspective to they offer? The article is not only a statement in the debate over the skills of the students of the Ghetto’s history but also the history of the Holocaust at large.

A befejezetlen küldetés

Author(s): András Pályi / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 2/2017

„Ertragen können wir sie nicht“... Martin Luther und die Juden

Author(s): Wilhelm Schwendemann / Language(s): German Issue: 1 (18)/2017

Martin Luther as anti-Semite? Anti-Semitism is defined as having various ideological justifications for a general hostility and vilification towards Jews. Luther has never been good friends with Jews. The biblical Judaism as well as the contemporary one remained estranged from him for his lifetime. His relationship to biblical related religions was embittered by the overall anti-Judaism of his times, by apocalyptic conceptions, by dangerous threats of pests and wars and finally by personal crises. In addition there was his Christological perspective on old-testament texts. Luther insisted on a literal exegesis of the sonship of Jesus Christ and he hoped that the Jewish community would accept this. The reformers wanted to convert their Jewish contemporaries. With regard to Luther we can not uphold to the idea of a racial anti-Semitism. Rather, he was a religious anti-Semite, more precisely a theologically motivated anti-Judaist. In addition to that he “does not refer to medieval anti-Semite stereotypes, but pushes for the correct interpretation of the scripture. In much the same way he imputes theological delusion as well as the wrong interpretation of the scripture to the Jews.” There is a need to reconsider and replace the understanding that the church respectively the Christian religious community replaced Judaism, and is now historically taking over Israel’s role in this world. There is a challenge to proclaim and articulate Christian faith in a way that does not harm the religious identity of Muslims or Jews.

Transitions Online_Around the Bloc-Moldovan Students Set to Learn More About the Holocaust

Author(s): TOL TOL / Language(s): English Issue: 08/15/2017

Critics say that teaching on the subject has been far too little, partly because of the sensitivity of discussing the atrocities committed by the Romanian fascist state.

Żydówki ze Szczuczyna

Author(s): Mirosław Tryczyk / Language(s): Polish Issue: 89/2016

Dzięki pomocy miejscowych mieszkańców - udaje się odnaleźć miejsce pochówku dwudziestu dwóch żydowskich kobiet, zamordowanych w pobliżu Bzur jesienią 1941.

Przełamać milczenie

Author(s): Wioleta Walewska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 89/2016

Autorka, wbrew oporowi swojego środowiska, konfrontuje je z prawdą o zbrodni w rodzinnym Radziłowie.

Szansa pięknej dziewczyny. Na ścieżce poszukiwania jeszcze jednej kategorii opisu doświadczenia lagrowego i Zagłady kobiet

Author(s): Barbara Czarnecka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2016

Te experience of the Holocaust and concentration camps has still been insufficiently described in the dimension of gender. Te experiences of women and men were different, and so are their respective accounts. Te essay A Beautiful Girl’s Chance proposes beauty as a category for describing the female experience of internment and extermination. It turns out that reading testimonies and literary texts through such a “filter” of corporeality reveals a lot of examples which show that beauty did play a role in extermination of women.

Atitudinea autorităţilor române în anii ’70 faţă de victimele Holocaustului în contextul despăgubirilor germane

Author(s): Petre Matei / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 55/2016

Although the Holocaust was neglected and minimized in communist Romania, starting with 1967 (restoration of diplomatic relations between Romania and West-Germany) the Romanian authorities made efforts to obtain compensations from West-Germany for the victims of Nazi persecutions. However, this meant no real change in the way Romania dealt with its own recent past (the anti-Semitic and anti-Roma measures during WWII taken by the Romanian authorities), which tended to be ignored. It was considered more profitable for Romania to externalize its own guilt by blaming exclusively West Germany, from which they hoped to obtain hard currency. The Romanian secret services played an important role in organizing this process. According to the way the Romanian authorities acted, the process had two phases: 1) 1967-1970 - unofficial phase (through intermediaries); 2) since March 1970 –official phase (the Romanian government decided to negotiate directly with the West-German authorities). Within a year, on March 2, 1971, more than 155.000 compensation claims were submitted (mostly for Jewish and Roma victims). In May 1971, fearing a domino effect, the German government decided to refuse any compensation payments to Romania and other communist states.

A velencei kalmár a Nemzeti Színházban, 1986

Author(s): Zoltán Imre / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 69/2017

The study focuses on the staging of The Merchant of Venice in Hungary, which took place in 1986 after the forty-six-year silence following the previous premiere of the play in 1940. The article deals with the long hiatus and the new staging, primarily focusing on why The Merchant was considered a “problematic” play within the socialist universe of the Kádár Regime. As a result, the article draws attention to the ways in which the dominant ideology of the Kádár Regime influenced the interpretation of Shakespeare’s play; why it silenced the play to finally acquiesce in a production solely focusing on an apologetic Shylock.

Fantazmat Julii Brystiger

Author(s): Piotr Forecki / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2017

The ‘Kike Communism’ cliché holds a special position in Polish antisemitic discourse, where it has different functions. Having been replicated over time, it has been reinforced and become a social platitude, a matrix of popular thinking about history, a descriptive category applied by journalist and academic discourses and a keyword in discussions on Polish-Jewish relations. “Kike Communism” is a cultural topos and a condensation of meanings and interpretations that have been adopted and familiarized so well that it is difficult to see, let alone undermine its roots. Apart from the narration about the harm suffered by Polish patriots at the hands of Jewish Communist torturers the names of those torturers hold an important place in the structure of this topos. It is actually difficult to imagine its content without the symbolic figures such as Jakub Berman, Anatol Fejgin, Roman Romkowski, Stefan Michnik, Helena Wolińska-Brus, Julia Brystiger and Józef Różański. For years they have played the iconic roles assigned to them in the Polish antisemitic discourse. Julia Brystiger, or rather her mythologized image, deserves particular attention in this group. Nicknamed ‘Bloody Luna’ she surely is among the most demonized female Communists in Poland. The objective of the considerations in this paper is to try to demonstrate the construction of the phantasm surrounding her on the basis of a thorough analysis of different texts in Polish culture, ranging from literature to film.

Around the Bloc: Bulgaria Under Pressure to Stop Neo-Nazi March

Author(s): TOL TOL / Language(s): English Issue: 02/06/2018

For 15 years, extremists have annually honored a Nazi ally accused of signing death warrants for thousands of Jews.

Around the Bloc: Ukrainian Nationalist Militia Seeks Legal Status

Author(s): TOL TOL / Language(s): English Issue: 02/13/2018

Rightwing groups also protest against Polish law making it a crime to deny atrocities committed by Ukrainian nationalists during WWII.

Around the Bloc: Polish Prime Minister’s Holocaust Remarks Irk Israel

Author(s): TOL TOL / Language(s): English Issue: 02/20/2018

Swastikas drawn on the gate of the Polish embassy in Tel Aviv mark the latest developments in the Polish-Israeli row over Holocaust remembrance.

Bernard Mark, powstanie w getcie warszawskim i proces Jürgena Stroopa

Author(s): Gabriel N. Finder / Language(s): Polish Issue: 13/2017

Jürgen Stroop, the SS general who led the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto and the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April–May 1943, was convicted by a Polish court in 1951 and executed in 1952. Bernard (Ber) Mark (1908–1966), Holocaust historian and director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, provided expert testimony for the prosecution at Stroop’s trial. Mark felt constrained to graft a communist-inflected narrative onto his account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and to shoehorn it into his expert testimony in court and then into his interpretation of the trial for a Jewish audience. He did his best to give the Jewish Fighting Organization, which spearheaded the uprising, and its Jewish fighters their due at a time when expression of unvarnished appreciation for Jewish heroism was risky, even while he was paying overrated tribute to the communist underground for its assistance to the Jewish rebels during the uprising. But he always stopped short of the line between conformity to and defiance of the communist regime.

Michel Borwicz: między Polską a Francją, między literaturą a historią

Author(s): Judith Lyon-Caen / Language(s): Polish Issue: 13/2017

Michał Borwicz was a Polish poet, prose writer, and a publicist of Jewish origins. During the Nazi occupation he was resettled to the Lvov getto, and in the years 1942–1943 he was imprisoned in the Janowska concentration camp. He managed to escape and next he was active in the resistance movement. After the war as a director of the Jewish Historical Commission in Kraków he tried to collect and publish testimonies of the Holocaust survivors. In 1947 he decided to emigrate to France. In 1953 Borwicz defended his doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne. The dissertation was published the same year. It presents writings of people “condemned to death” under Nazi occupation, and is considered a pioneer study of literature and writing practices in the camps and ghettos. Unfortunately the singularity of the author and the strength of his work are still underestimated.

„Czarna, ogromna chmura wisi nad nami i na pewno spadnie…” Żydzi w miastach i miasteczkach Generalnego Gubernatorstwa wobec wiadomości o akcji „Reinhardt”

Author(s): Maria Ferenc Piotrowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 13/2017

This article regards the existential experience of Holocaust victims and the psychological and cognitive mechanisms in confrontation with the first news about the functioning of the death camps. It analyzes the testimonies of Jews from over 40 towns and small towns in the General Government regarding the gradual influx of news about the Holocaust and the consequent reactions. Initially, the hearsay came mostly from afar, and then from increasingly close localities. The Poles were the source of that (imprecise) information about the lot of the deported Jews, while in certain localities appeared escapees from the death centers who gave accounts of what they had witnessed. That hearsay and those testimonies met with different reactions – from despair, through denial, suppression, and resignation, to attempts to save one’s life. This article devotes special attention to a reflection on the possibility of death of oneself and one’s family as well as the phenomenon of denial and pushing the news about the Holocaust away from oneself.

„Zaprowiantowanie obozu jest podobno wzorowe…” Wiedza więźniów getta łódzkiego na temat ośrodka zagłady w Chełmnie nad Nerem

Author(s): Adam Sitarek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 13/2017

Information about the extermination conducted in the Chełmno nad Nerem death center reached the Łódź ghetto in the spring of 1942. An important link in the information transmission chain was Grabów, reached by the first escapees from Chełmno. Rabbi Jakub Szulman played a large role as he started sending letters with information about the crime obtained from the escapees. The letters he wrote reached Łódź together with people resettled from the provincial ghettos of Wartheland, from whom the Łódź ghetto residents heard a confirmation of the information about the purpose of the Chełmno nad Nerem center. The information flow was also affected by the information blockade campaign conducted by the Germans followed by a misinformation campaign regarding the actual lot of the people deported to Chełmno.

Funkcjonowanie urzędu powierniczego na przykładzie Chełma

Author(s): Adam Puławski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 13/2017

The Treuhändstelle in Chełm administered real estate in the city (for some time a city with city rights) and in the Chełm country district. In 1940 their joint office was at Orlicz-Dreszera Street 6. The former Treuhändstelle were probably subordinate to the district Treuhänder. The Chełm Treuhändstelle took over more than 600 houses from their Jewish owners, with participation of the municipal authorities, including pre-war Polish clerks. The Germans made a profit on that property, at the expense of the Jews. Ordinary inhabitants of Chełm, various institutions, and Catholic priests sought to trade that real estate.

Zabiegi likwidujące skutki obrzezania wykonywane w Warszawie w czasie drugiej wojny światowej. Wstępna próba opisu zjawiska

Author(s): Maria Ciesielska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 13/2017

Men’s circumcision is in many countries considered as a hygienic-cosmetic or aesthetic treatment. However, it still remains in close connection with religious rites (Judaism, Islam) and is still practiced all over the world. During the Second World War the visible effects of circumcision became an indisputable evidence of being a Jew and were often used especially by the so-called szmalcownicy (blackmailers). Fear of the possibility of discovering as non-Aryan prompted many Jews hiding on the so-called Aryan side of Warsaw to seek medical practitioners who would restore the condition as it was before the circumcision. The reconstruction surgery was called in surgical jargon “knife baptizing”. Almost all of the procedures were performed by Aryan doctors although four cases of hiding Jewish doctors participating in such procedures are known. Surgical technique consisted of the surgical formation of a new foreskin after tissue preparation and stretching it by manual treatment. The success of the repair operation depended on the patient’s cooperation with the doctor, the worst result was in children. The physicians described in the article and the operating technique are probably only a fragment of a broader activity, described meticulously by only one of the doctors – Dr. Janusz Skórski. This work is an attempt to describe the phenomenon based on the very scanty source material, but it seems to be the first such attempt for several decades.

„Świadek zeznał, co następuje...”. Protokoły przesłuchania polskich pracowników kolei pracujących na stacjach w okolicy obozów akcji „Reinhardt”

Author(s): Justyna Majewska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 13/2017

The article presents a selection of immediate post-war testimonies of Polish railway workers, who served at train stations at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka. Testimonies, collected during investigations conducted by Polish authorities regarding the death camps, reviles the level of awareness of Polish witnesses to the crimes conducted at the Operation Reinhardt death camps.