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The article is an attempt to examine the views and activity of the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Eastern Malopolska, the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, with respect to the Jews during the Holocaust. Sheptytsky's figure is examined not only in the context of ambiguous and tense Ukrainian-Jewish relations, but also in the light of Ukrainian-Polish, Soviet-Ukrainian and Ukrainian-German...
On 25 May 1988 the Commission for the Designation of the Righteous of the Yad Vashem Institute decided to award Zdzislaw and Halina Krzyczkowski the medal Righteous Among the Nations on the application of Marian Berland, who was hiding, together with four people, at the Krzyczkowskis' place during the occupation. In his letter he wrote that 'never throughout the entire period did they give us reasons...
The article is an analysis of Janusz Nasfeter's film 'Dluga noc' (A Long Night) (1967) and the discussion during the producer's screening in June 1967, concerning the film's merit and approving its distribution. Both the subject matter of the film (helping a Jew hiding in a Polish home during the occupation) and the circumstances of its producer's screening (several days after the Israeli victory...
The text is an attempt at a new, nuanced presentation of the relations between Poles saving Jews and the hiding Jews, based on several hundred accounts of survivors and those who helped them survive, given before Polish historical commissions after World War II. The analysed testimonies concerning the Kielce province, and, in part, the Kraków and Bialystok provinces, were given before the historical...
The set contains correspondence of the chief of the Jewish division of the Information and Propaganda Bureau of the Home Army High Command, Henryk Woliński, 'Wacław' with Adolf Berman. Eight letters were written by Wolinski, one by Berman. The letters are kept in the Beit Lohamei Hagetaot archive. They contain plenty of information regarding the contacts between Zegota and the Jewish National Committee...
The text is an analysis of the relations between a hiding Jewess, Fela Fischbein, and her landlady, a Polish woman, Katarzyna Dunajewska. In hiding, Fela wrote her diary, which was the basis for the description of her feelings, experiences, her perception of the Poles who helped her, and her change of attitude toward them. The hiding Jewess moves from gratitude to the Poles to disappointment and aversion,...
The presented materials come from the case files of Zofia and Marian Chomin, arrested in 1945 and accused of denouncing Jews living in a tenement house in No. 8a Jablonowskich St. in Lvov during the war, including the poet Zuzanna Ginczanka. During her stay in Lvov Ginczanka three times escaped arrest, and in her last preserved poem, 'Non omnis moriar', included the name of the denunciator, Zofia...
The branch office operating in Radom, known as the Special Prosecutor of the Criminal Court in Lublin, and the Prosecutor of the District Court in Radom that continued its proceedings, during 1945–1950 undertook around 1,200 investigations against Nazi criminals and Poles charged with broadly understood collaboration with the occupier. In the preserved files of both institutions one can find interesting...
The article discusses a book by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben 'Remnants of Auschwitz'. The authoress concentrates on three sets of issues, constitutive for the questions raised in the book: the issue of a specifically understood testimony, the issue of corporality (the figure of the 'Moslem'), and the issue of language (as well as of the subject), memoirs from the camp. The text is concluded...
The article contains a discussion and an attempt at analysis of the post-war investigation and trial materials regarding three different cases of murder or denunciation of hiding Jews by the local Polish population. The crimes discussed in the article took place in three villages, which during the occupation were located in the Kraków district: Falkowa, Wieniec and Janowice. After the war the perpetrators...
Marek Hlasko's short story 'Szukajac gwiazd' was published in 1963. It has all the properties of a parable and is a kind of parable about the Holocaust. Its conventional character points to the ethical controversies related to such a kind of Holocaust presentation, i.e. we deal here with the temptation of universalisation. The hero undergoes a specific rite of passage from childhood to adulthood,...
There is a consensus among Polish historians that helping the Jews under the occupation was a widespread phenomenon. Indeed, while some Poles helped the Jews on humanitarian grounds, many others considered it a very risky, but also a very profitable enterprise. In historical literature these people are referred to as 'paid helpers'. This text, based upon primary sources such as war-time court records,...
The texts deals primarily with two issues: means of support of the Jews who, despite the German's will, found themselves outside specifically designated areas (ghettos, camps), and the economic situation of the Aryan population, whose help was necessary for their survival on the 'Aryan side'. The author describes the process of gradual reduction of property remaining in Jewish hands, and, in part,...
Publications on the Holocaust and the history of Polish-Jewish relations quite frequently lead to historical debates in the Polish media. On the one hand, it is a unique opportunity to publicise unknown pages of history, and on the other, a potential threat to contemporary Piolish-Jewish relations.This article is an attempt to explain the Polish reactions to Jan Tomasz Gross 'Fear' and the character...
The following paper is based primarily on the extensive study conducted by Wolfgang Brückner in his book 'Arbeit macht frei: Herkunft und Hintergrund der KZ - Devise'. The article aims to present the origin, social context and ideological background of the motto 'Arbeit macht frei' and other related texts placed above the entrances to some of the Nazi concentration camps. The authoress raises the...
The article deals with the ways of describing the issue of individual and organised help to the Jews in Polish historical discourse during 1945-2008. The author analyses press statements, academic articles, and popular articles and, finally, books published in Poland (including publications by historians from the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw) as well as émigré texts. The article also discusses...
One central question in Dutch historiography is why such high percentage of Jews from the Netherlands died in the Holocaust. In this article, a recent dissertation on the rate of survival of Jews in the Netherlands is mobilized to shed light on the discussion on the low survival rate there. Wide variations in survival rates throughout the country call into question easy explanations for the overall...
The Mariavite Church is a religious movement which split some 100 years ago from the Catholic Church in Poland. The common fate (the persecution and pogroms of the Mariavites at the hands of Roman Catholics) as well as the Mariavites' tolerance of the other had a marked influence on the development of good relations with the Jews already in the early years of the 20th century and even more so during...
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