English
Polish
Józef Górski, At the Turn of History
Jan Grabowski
grabows@uottawa.ca Bioprofessor of history at the University of Ottawa, member of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His publications include Judenjagd. Polowanie na Żydów 1942–1945. Studium dziejów pewnego powiatu (2011); 2013 saw the publication of the extended English edition of this book – Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland, while its Hebrew translation was published by Yad Vashem in 2016; editor of many collective volumes, for instance, Klucze i kasa. O mieniu żydowskim w Polsce pod okupacją niemiecką i we wczesnych latach powojennych 1939–1950 (2014, together with Dariusz Libionka) as well as critical editions of sources, for instance, Szraga Fajwel Bielawski, Ostatni Żyd z Węgrowa. Wspomnienia ocalałego z Zagłady w Polsce (2015), and „Szczęście posiadać dom pod ziemią”. Losy kobiet ocalałych z Zagłady w okolicach Dąbrowy Tarnowskiej (2016)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6916-9379
University of Ottawa
Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, 2008: Holocaust Studies and Materials, pages: 300-311
Publication date: 2008-12-01
Abstract
Presented below is a fragment of Józef Górski’s diaries regarding the situation in Podlasie in the first years of the German occupation. It illustrates the author’s view on “the final solution of the Jewish question”. Górski himself says that he looked at the Holocaust as a Christian, who feels compassion for the victims, and at the same time as a Pole and a faithful follower of Roman Dmowski. From the latter point of view, he clearly welcomed the Holocaust. Józef Górski’s diaries could certainly be classified as an “oddity”, and as one reads them a number of painful questions arise, primarily about the scale of (silent) consent to the murder. In other words, to what extent did Górski’s clear (although frightening) views fit the framework of the “ordinary people” of occupied Podlasie?
Keywords
diary, Polish-Jewish relations, Holocaust, collaboration with Germans, attitudes toward the Holocaust
License
Copyright (c) 2008 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
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