The article is an attempt to write a 'cultural biography' of the hair exhibited at the National Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum in Oswiecim. It in that hair has been treated a relic, remains and material constituting a source of various senses. The preface to the discussion regarding the Auschwitz hair is a presentation of their cultural and social significance and the way in which they are manipulated. Using factual data and the recollections of prisoners, the article describes German practices associated with obtaining hair in the concentration camps. The history of the hair in the museum is covered by a description of two successive exhibitions at the National Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, a presentation of the 'corpus delicti' rhetoric, a discussion of the conservation of the hair and, finally, what could be described as their sacralisation. At the end, the article raises the motive of the Auschwitz hair in art.
The article is based on an analysis of reports left by a very young person - almost a child - who in normal times belonged to the silent majority. The exceptional times of the Holocaust resulted in Dawid Rubinowicz keeping his diary. He did so in order to record the nightmare he was living through and to understand the world around him. Consequently, his 'Diary' become a record of the Apocalypse; he described a disturbed world in which moral standards did not prevail nor did the natural sequence of human fate but where chaos ruled. Dawid Rubinowicz's 'Diary' is a record of an individual's fate and a disturbed personality in conditions of traumatising stress. At the same time it shows the fate met by a typical Jewish community in a small town during the Holocaust. As such it is of great cognitive value to a historian. The 'Diary' allows one to recognise not just the facts and events but how they were understood and experienced by participants in historic reality.
The past can be described in different ways by historians and sociologists. They differ in their attitudes toward sources for their studies, and in terms of research sensitivity, which directs their analyses towards given aspects of the past. This text focuses on selected sociological studies of the Holocaust and issues of Polish-Jewish relations (before and during World War II as well as during the immediate postwar years). First the authoress refers to sociological works using the historical prospective in their description of Polish-Jewish relations and/or the Holocaust, and, second, to studies (both historical and sociological) which employ categories of sociological analysis in their description. By referring to Nechama Tec's works, shel presents the methodological problems of sociological studies.
This article aims to present the picture of Polish partisans in the accounts of Jewish survivors, based on materials from the Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute. This texts discusses the following Polish underground military formations: the Home Army, Peasants' Battalions, socialist armed groups, the National Armed Forces and the People's Guard /Army (GL/AL). In her discussion of pro-independence armed formations, the authoress emphasises. the feeling of danger still present in those accounts, fear of death even from the partisans. The accounts mention a number of murders as well as difficulties Jews encountered when they wanted to join partisan outfits, not to mention refusals of co-operation from Poles. Testimonies about GL/AL differ from previous ones by their 'insider' perspective, as most of them come from Jews, GL partisans. Perhaps that is why they are dominated by a favourable picture of communist partisans, even though several accounts mention conflicts between the commanders and the Jewish GL partisan outfits
The creation of the scholarly journal Studies on Fascism and Hitlerite Crimes was a result of a need to coordinate research led by scientists from the University of Wroclaw and employees of District Commission for the Examination of Hitlerite Crimes in Wroclaw which concerned the doctrine of National Socialism and its practical implications in the Third Reich. Such cooperation was primarily based on the contract signed on 22.03.1976 by the University of Wroclaw and the above- -mentioned Commission which established a framework for the joint effort to research fascism and Hitlerite crimes.
The text is an attempt at reading Kazimierz Brandys' prose from the perspective of two Jewish motives present in it. The considerations, based on analyses of fragments of the text, concentrate on the traces of Jewish origin in Brandys' autobiographical discourse. They also focus on Brandys' construction of protagonists, trying to find a place for a Jewish tradition in the shaping of a subjective self both in the 'I' in the text and in the biographies he constructed. The self is based on a difficult coexistence of the sense of Polishness and of belonging to Polish intelligence alongside the Jewish nation. The latter is built mainly of the negative, difficult experience. What links Brandys with the Jewish nation is the stigmata, persecution and humiliation. A memorable experience in thus formulated sense of the national self is the Holocaust, and a Brandys-like protagonist construction: a witness, who avoided extermination, but was forced to see the suffering of others. This, in turn, resulted in his painful feeling of guilt and condemned to constant returns in his memory to the difficult experience of war.
The study deals with forms of the Slovak Republic (1939 - 1945) in Slovak theatre after the year 2000. We currently observe a strong dramaturgical tendency to bring to the stages the reflection of historical events from various historical periods, one of the most depicted being the period of World War II. Its themes are found in the productions of the original theatrical plays as well as in the dramatisation of literary works. The first part of the study is devoted to delineation of the Slovak Republic (1939 - 1945) in the productions after 2000 (Tiso [Tiso], Stalo sa prvého septembra [It Happened on 1st September], Rabínka [The Female Rabbi], Holokaust [Holocaust], Povstanie [Uprising], Obchod na korze [The Shop on the Parade], Polnočná omša [Midnight Mass], Tichý bič [The Silent Whip], Kým kohút nezaspieva [Until the Cock Sings]). The second part is focused on the analysis of the selected thematic elements offered by the productions falling within this circle and which appear in the new optics of the so-called second generation.
While anti-Semitism is usually perceived as universal phenomena, the Holocaust is often viewed as a unique and unprecedented event. However, when it comes to explaining the Holocaust, reference to anti-Semitism seems to be the only answer, the sole factor that led to the tragedy. But if – in one or another form – anti-Semitism is a constant feature, what makes the Holocaust an unparalleled experience? The aim of this study is not to investigate the uniqueness or “historization” of the Holocaust, but rather to analyse the relation between anti-Semitism as a phenomena and the Holocaust as an event. The concerned relation is studied on the example of Slovakia, in the period between the formation of Slovak national consciousness and the end of the Second World War.
This article considers the issue of multiculturalism in a specific example of small towns, namely the “shtetl”, which in the Yiddish language means town, a diminutive of ‘sztot’, meaning city. Shtetls were the main dwelling places of Ashkenazi Jews in Poland and in Russia, accounting for up to 70-80% of the population in these small urbanities. These enclosed towns allowed for the preservation and thriving of Jewish culture and traditions, where Jews were in the majority and could freely shape the social-cultural ways of life of the town. The ethos of the pious Jews dominated, dictated by the teachings of the Torah and Talmud, but also by town authorities. However, these small towns were also the meeting point of many cultures: the mixing of Polish and Jewish, and often also Ukrainian and Roma. Taking into consideration the specific character of these towns, their traditional atmosphere and multicultural and multi-ethnic flavour, the author points to the weight of cultural heritage that these shtetls left behind. The article paints a picture of the shtetl; the history of its foundation, as well as the reconstruction and changes in these multicultural spaces. Specifics of life in the shtetl, as well as institutions, schooling, the intelligentsia, social and religious life are also discussed in order to capture the processes and experiences of life in the small multicultural town. The author focuses on the dialogic aspect of these multicultural towns and their cultural heritage, which underscores the ethnic and religious relations that thrived within them.
The Holocaust shatters the Jewish belief in God, who takes care of his people, leads them to redemption. Extermination camps refuted the concepts of omnipotent, merciful and absolutely good God: if God is omnipotent and absolutely good how he allowed Auschwitz? Auschwitz calls the Jews for re-evaluation of their faith and their trust in God. Facing the destruction of the Jewish people a question is raised: In case Jews want to remain Jews how should they continue to live as Jews after the Holocaust? Jewish theologians struggled with this question and proposed either a new way of living for the Jews or a new definition of God. The article presents a few theological reactions which reflect deep and original Jewish thinking. The theologians discussed in this paper are: Richard Rubenstein, Emil Fackenheim, Eliezer Berkovits, Hans Jonas, Irving Greenberg and Ignaz Maybaum.
This study focuses on the reflection of the theme of the Holocaust in selected theatre texts which have appeared on Slovak stages after 1989 (Rastislav Ballek and Martin Kubran’s Tiso, Anna Grusková’s Rabínka [The Rabbi], Viliam Klimáček’s Holokaust [The Holocaust], Elfriede Jelinek’s Rechnitz). By analysing these productions, the author explores the possibilities of the aesthetic representation of a traumatizing past, both at the level of text and stage performance. The artistic coming to terms with the Holocaust is assessed with regard to its socio-political impact on the recipient of the work.
The author deals with only those threads of the March 1968 propaganda which are related to the Holocaust. He analyzes selected articles from the newspapers and magazines appearing at that time and to statements by politicians, but also refers to to pre-1968 texts. The article presents the dominant threads in the March discourse, such as the martyrdom sweepstakes, when the central question is 'Who suffered more, the Jews or the Poles'?; the blurring of the Jewish nature of the Warsaw ghetto uprising through its internationalization or Polonization; the division into 'good' Jews (who fought in the uprising) and the 'bad' Jews (Zionists from Israel); the motif of community of the Polish and Jewish fate, which was to be summed up in the identical prospects of biological extermination and joint struggle 'For Our Freedom and Yours'. The key topic of the then propaganda referring to the times of the Holocaust is Polish assistance to Jews, both military and civilian, the latter in the form of large-scale harbouring of Jews by Poles.
The author employs the concept of ‘memoryscape’ (derived from the vocabulary of Arjun Appadurai’s theory) to explore memories of Jews that have been recently re-emerging in Poland’s countryside in various spatial layouts or the lack thereof. This complex process includes the phenomenon of ‘virtual’ Jewishness produced in essentially Polish ‘realms of memory’, simultaneously evoking the country’s multicultural past as a value, a moral obligation, a symbolic resource in the production of local identities, and a commodified resource for tourism. On this backdrop the author studies three main problems: (1) the presence/absence of the Holocaust in spatialized commemorative activities, (2) the impact of the restitution of Jewish communal property, and (3) the process of ‘decommunization’ of Polish public memory. The interplay of factors involved in these processes has in recent years significantly transformed Poland’s memoryscape, sometimes extinguishing certain forms of virtual Jewishness or nostalgic redefinition of the past, and sometimes fruitfully confronting Polish remembrance with a real, if only periodic, Jewish presence. The text concludes with an attempt to present a typology of various attitudes towards memory, space and identity which contextualizes and deconstructs Polish ‘memory of Jews’.
This text proposes an analysis of wartime diaries using a concept whereby diary is approached on a broader basis than just as a text, namely, as a writing praxis of one's everyday life, having three essential dimensions to it: existential-pragmatic, material, and textual. In all those dimensions, war exerts a critical impact on what shape the practice of keeping a diary takes. The existential-pragmatic facet primarily includes the various motivations for one to write down his or her diary (be it existential, social, historical, or pragmatic). Whilst being testimonies to the times of violence, killing, and annihilation, wartime diaries simultaneously become existential acts keeping up the space of what is human, in the face of the inhuman. Seen from the material angle, wartime diaries disclose their specificity both as regards their carriers (such as using some utilitarian 'carriers' of the printed word, such as pieces of packaging, labels, forms) and their look or physical shape (mutilations, gaps, destroyed or lost diaries). The textual dimension of wartime diaries is only mentioned in this article, as part of polemic with Jacek Leociak's book titled 'Tekst wobec Zaglady'. In the final section, the author indicates the way in which a contact or clash occurs, in all the three dimensions of wartime diaries (i.e. pragmatics, text, and diary's materiality), between the common and the uncommon, the everyday and the unusual, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the human and the inhuman. This particular trait is treated as the decisive one in terms of wartime diary's singularity against the textual cultural world's space.
This article tells a story of a literary forgery on a Jewish girl's wandering across Europe under German occupation. The book 'Surviving With Wolves', written as an autobiography, was greatly acclaimed in the U.S., and a movie was produced based on it in 2007. This latter circumstance provoked Belgian historians to embark on source research - and it eventually occurred
The article deals with several versions of the short story “Darkness Casts no Shadow” by Arnošt Lustig and the film adaptation of this work, “Diamonds of the Night”, directed by Jan Němec. Lustig has gradually expanded his story in new versions. The author, who lived in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s, obviously rewrote his text with regard to American readers. Jan Němec’s film adaptation, which premiered in 1964, is an experimental film that revaluates cinematic conventions. On the one hand, it uses surreal elements, on the other hand authentic devices.
This paper reviews characteristics of audiovisual testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other victims of Nazi crimes. It provides general reflections about the genre of survivor’s testimony, and underscores some challenges associated with this resource. Characteristics of eye witness accounts and their application to educational use are discussed in the second part of the paper. The research used data from the Visual History Archive of the Shoah Foundation Institute, a collection of 52 000 videotaped and digitized testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other victims of Nazi persecution. The Archive is now housed at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. It is the largest collection of eyewitness accounts of Shoah of this kind in the world, and a resource that “shifted the collection of testimonies to a new scale”.
The article presents one of the most crucial Polish writers raising the subject of Jewish Holocaust. The question of theodicy is analyzed here in particular. The author reconstructs the most essential questions and doubts Henryk Grynberg asks God in his works. They are all based on the philosophy and religion of Judaism. Although there are numerous Grynberg's poems which seem to deny theodicy (e.g. 'Rodowód'), the poet does not throw away faith in God. He assumes that after Auschwitz it is still better to trust the Creator than man.
'Behind the Iron Gate' is the name of the massive-scale housing estate in the centre of Warsaw, consisting of 19 apartment blocks, 16 storeys each, designed by a team of Polish architects (Jan Furman, Jerzy Czyz, Jerzy Józefowicz, Andrzej Skopinski) between 1966-1970. This realisation has been interpreted as one of the far-reaching consequences of the Athens Charter which commited CIAM to a single type of urban housing, described as high, widely-spaced apartment blocks wherever the necessity of housing high density of population exists. In the 1970s, the Behind the Iron Gate housing estate was considered a symbol of Polish socialist prosperity. The principles of so-called modern rationalism - that is, 'Siedlungen' responding to the drastic housing shortage, and 'Existenzminimum' understood as the apartment for the minimal existence - became subject to a political propaganda which affected the post-war urbanism in Poland as the country behind the Iron Curtain. Since 1989, the Behind the Iron Gate area is one of the most active construction sites in the city, attracting foreign investments, and gradually shaped as a 'Warsaw Manhattan'. Former green zones and playgrounds now host parking lots, bank and insurance company buildings, business centers, and exclusive hotels. At the same time, the Behind the Iron Gate housing estate is a rather neglected part of the city; the pre-fabricated apartment blocks are often referred to as 'architecture on pension', 'slums' or even 'pathological substandards'. 'A Surplus of Memory' is the title of memoirs by Yitzhak 'Antek' Zuckerman, a member of the Jewish Fighting Organization Command, who took part in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Behind the Iron Gate housing estate was designed upon the field of ruins of the so-called 'small ghetto' liquidated in August 1942. On today's map of Warsaw, there are only few ruins in this highly built-up area that constitute the Jewish Route of Memory: a part of the ghetto wall, a gate, fragments of the original pavement and rails, and some pre-war 'memory places', such as the sites of non existing houses: of Isaac Bashevis Singer at Krochmalna street and of Icchok Lejbusz Perec at Ceglana (now Pereca street). Designed as a narrative walk along the contemporary streets and squares of the Behind the Iron Gate area, the paper examines the specificity of urban memory and questions the notion itself. Paul Ricoeur's description of the threefold, interpretative nature of the historiographical operation (as demonstrated in his 'Memory, History, Forgetting') is referred to the concrete urban site with its ambiguous character. Acknowledging the reciprocity of writing history and collecting memories, as well as the difference between the ontological question and the 'hauntological' description, the paper discusses the possibilities of historiographical and commemorative tasks of architecture. The Behind the Iron Gate area with its contemporary in-fills, socialist blocks and ruins, where architecture is not turned into a timeless monument or a museum-district, serves as an example of both the space of memory and the space of forgetting.
Facing the decisive struggle between Nazism and Soviet communism for dominance in Europe, in 1942/43 Polish communists sojourning in the USSR espoused anti-German concepts of the political right. Their aim was an ethnic Polish 'national communism'. Meanwhile, the Polish Workers' Party in the occupied country advocated a maximum intensification of civilian resistance and partisan struggle. In this context, commentaries on the Nazi judeocide were an important element in their endeavors to influence the prevailing mood in the country: The underground communist press often pointed to the fate of the murdered Jews as a warning in order to make it clear to the Polish population where a deficient lack of resistance could lead. However, an agreed, unconditional Polish and Jewish armed resistance did not come about. At the same time, the communist press constantly expanded its demagogic confrontation with Polish 'reactionaries' and accused them of shared responsibility for the Nazi murder of the Jews, while the Polish government (in London) was attacked for its failure. This antagonism was intensified in the fierce dispute between the Polish and Soviet governments after the rift which followed revelations about the Katyn massacre. Now the communist propaganda image of the enemy came to the fore in respect to the government and its representatives in occupied Poland. It viewed the government in-exile as being allied with the 'reactionaries', indifferent to the murder of the Jews, and thus acting ultimately on behalf of Nazi German policy. The communists denounced the real and supposed antisemitism of their adversaries more and more bluntly. In view of their political isolation, they coupled them together, in an undifferentiated manner, extending from the right-wing radical ONR to the social democrats and the other parties represented in the underground parliament loyal to the London based Polish government. Thereby communist propaganda tried to discredit their opponents and to justify the need for a new start in a post-war Poland whose fate should be shaped by the revolutionary left. They were thus paving the way for the ultimate communist takeover.
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