Censor Guarding the Church. Krystyna Modrzewska’s Censured Diary
Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, No. 5 (2009), pages: 371-393
Publication date: 2009-11-09
Abstract
In the three subsequent issues of The Bulletin of the Jewish Historical Institute of 1959 and 1960, the diary of Krystyna Modrzewska (Mendalbaum), submitted to the Central Jewish Historical Commission in 1947, was published. The first part, which opens with the outbreak of the war and ends with mass executions of the Jews in a forest near Krępiec, outside Lublin in spring 1942, was massacred by the censorship. The author writes, among other things, about hiding in the nunnery of the Congregation of Sisters of the Bethany Family outside Lublin, and she harshly judges the relations there. It turns out that the communist censor eliminated the record concerning critical views on the nuns’ mentality, their intellectual and moral standards. The censor did not approve of the comments about nunnery’s everyday life and church religious rituals, the clergy’s hypocrisy and the increasingly materialistic views of this group. The censor’s interference in the field of the author’s religious experience is even more acute as Modrzewska’s diary rates among a small group of testimonies describing adult Jews hiding in monasteries and convents. All those fragments has been restored in the current edition and placed in the context of the whole. Reading the integrated fragments of Modrzewska’s diary about hiding in the convent, it is worth pondering why a person (who had been baptized as a student of the university of Bologna, treating this ceremony very seriously, not opportunistically) experiences such a sheer disappointment in the convent near Lublin
Keywords
Holocaust, Jews–Poles 1939–1945, hiding on the Aryan side, help and rescue, the Catholic Church and the Jews 1939–1945
License
Copyright (c) 2009 Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Other articles by the same auhtor(s)
- Jacek Leociak, Marta Tomczok, Affective Holocaust Kitsch – Introduction , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 17 (2021)
- Jacek Leociak, Adam Mazur, Artur Żmijewski, “Berek is a voice of powerlessness in the face of cruelty; the desire that the Holocaust would not happen.” Jacek Leociak and Adam Mazur talk to Artur Żmijewski , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 17 (2021)
- Dariusz Libionka, Jacek Leociak, 75th Anniversary of Operation Reinhardt , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 13 (2017)
- Jacek Leociak, Editors, From the editors , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 5 (2009)
- Jacek Leociak, Literature of the Personal Document as a Source in Holocaust Research (a Methodological Reconnaissance) , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 1 (2005)
- Jacek Leociak, “… I Have Been Talking with God (You Are Smiling! He Is the Only One I Can Still Talk To!).” Prayer Lamentations in Karol Rotgeber’s Warsaw Ghetto Memoir , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 15 (2019)
- Jacek Leociak, Ginczanka , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 11 (2015)
- Jacek Leociak, Ewa Wiatr, Krystyna Radziszewska (red.), Oblicza getta. Antologia tekstów z getta łódzkiego , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 16 (2020)
- Jacek Leociak, Stanislaw Sreniowski, From a Book of Madness And Atrocity , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 1 (2005)
- Jacek Leociak, Understanding the Holocaust. A Task for Generations , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: 2008: Holocaust Studies and Materials