YEAR 2022

Fleeing the Holocaust

We wish to devote Holocaust. Studies and Materials 18 (2022) to FLIGHTS. We are interested in flights not only in the literal but also metaphorical sense. The former instance consisted of a Jew spontaneously leaving the place he was staying in or the endangered area or his pursuing a well-thought-out and meticulously prepared strategy of survival. Those could be ‘internal’ flights where the refugee changed only his place of stay but remained in the danger zone (for instance, Warsaw, the General Government, and other occupied areas and countries) or ‘external’ ones — going across the border of the occupied territory on which the Holocaust was taking place. In the case of flights in the broader, metaphorical sense, the object of our reflection shall be, for instance, the victim’s reaching a certain psychical state triggered by the conditions of extreme oppression, enslavement, degradation, the incessant threat of death, and desire to save oneself, one’s humanity, internal freedom, dignity, etc. It is important to find a difference between psychical resistance and flight in the metaphorical sense as well as look for answers as to how that could be done and whether that was actually possible. Last but not least, final acts — taking one’s life — were a form of flight too.

 List of suggested topics to be discussed:

•       Flight in the physical space:
  • flights on the territories where the Holocaust was taking place: on the eve and during extermination campaigns, from closed areas, transports of death, labor camps, and death camps. We are also interested in individual cases, predominantly analyses of the scale and conditioning of flights from smaller and, particularly, large ghettoes;
  • flights outside the Holocaust area: individual and organized flights to territories that were not areas of extermination campaigns;

•         flights in the metaphorical sense:
  • flight from the Jewish identity (‘Aryan’ papers, change of appearance, change of the social code of behavior and customs, change of religion, etc.);
  • various forms of psychical/emotional flight from oppressive and dangerous reality (reading, participation in cultural life, recording Holocaust testimonies, love, etc.)

●        suicides

Text submission calendar and procedure

November 30, 2021 –deadline for sending in article proposals containing:

• an overview of the article comprising: the title, main theses, methodology, and sources; up to 1,800 characters,
• a short biographical note about the author with information about his/her academic career, current affiliation, research interests and achievements, and a list of major publications.

The article proposal should be sent by email to the editorial staff: redakcja@holocaustresearch.pl

December 15, 2021 – deadline for the editorial staff’s decision as to which proposals are accepted and which texts are commissioned

February 1, 2022 – deadline for sending in the texts