This article traces an unknown key figure in Jewish youth movements during the Holocaust: Matti’s Gelman (Wiener), who acted as a leading Komendant (Orthodox youth leader) prior to the war and during the Holocaust. Based on a variety of sources, the article traces his youth years in Vienna, the way he became attached to the court of the Gurrer Rebbe’s, and his development as one of the most prominent Komendants between the two world wars. It also depicts his role in organizing clandestine groups that maintained Hasidic life during the Holocaust, his perceptions regarding Nazi Germany occupation and the inspiration he gave to many other young Orthodox during the war.

Philological examination of the manuscript “sermons from the years of rage,” shows that the sermons were produced layer by layer, one proof succeeding another. Initial proofing appears in the body of the manuscript text; words are deleted by being crossed out, and added words and sentences are placed atop existing or deleted words. Further proofing is done by adding arrows to indicate supplemental text in the margins of the page. The graphic layout of the manuscript, in addition to the content, points to an exceptional psychological phenomenon. Many comments were written on the margins of the manuscript at the end of 1942, when it was already clear to the author that his chances of survival were diminishing, and that Polish Jewry would be annihilated. In such a situation, making changes in text, layer over layer, and often minor changes (male-female, singular-plural, etc.), all in parallel to the bitter reality outside – is an extraordinary human phenomenon. A person knows he is going to die, he has already lost his entire family, and what does he do? Corrections and editing his sermons! Moreover, this is done while there is no certainty that the sermons will be found in the future and that they will ever be published. Such a recording is an evidence of life with two extremes – on the one hand, death that destroys everything, and on the other hand, a literary creation – a new life. This paper examines Rabbi Shapira’s Ghetto writings in light of psychological and phenomenological models developed by Ernest Becker, Viktor Frankl, Lev Shestov and more, putting Rabbi Shapira’s scholarship in a universal human and not just Jewish context.

The last rabbi of Lublin, Hersz Majlech Talmud, held that position during 1936–1942. The main objective of this article is to tell his biography and present and analyze two letters he wrote in the rump ghetto at Majdan Tatarski in Lublin in July and October 1942, that is, shortly before the final liquidation of the ghetto. Both these texts constitute a unique testimony to the theological and existential dilemmas troubling Talmud in the face of the Holocaust drama unfolding before his eyes, with the place and role of God in that process being one of their basic threads discussed in those letters. The characteristic of the Lublin rabbi’s opinions has been supplemented with the historical context (a description of the everyday life in the ghetto at Majdan Tatarski based on witness testimonies and recollections) and the philosophical context (a brief juxtaposition of Talmud’s theological reflections with conceptions of several other Jewish writers and thinkers originating from the religious circles who wrote both during the war after its end).

This article is an attempt to understand the Polish Catholic Church’s silence on the Holocaust. How did it happen that the radical change in the surroundings of Polish Catholics, that is, the Holocaust, has been passed over in silence? This article consists of two parts. The first one recalls the consequences of research on the anti-Semitic history of Christian theology and the proposals of concrete changes to the Catholic teaching on Jews and Judaism. The other part reconstructs German Catholic theologian Johann Baptiste Metz’s theological conception of ‘post-Auschwitz’ reflection.

This article is based on the documentation of two August trials (procesy sierpniowe) and oral history from the Pińczów area collected by Professor Dionizjusz Czubala’s team. It reconstructs the reality of the Jews’ hiding in the forests of Mierzwin municipality in Jędrzejów county. The key event in that fight for survival was the manhunt conducted in the winter of 1943, organized by inhabitants of the village of Bełk without any participation of the Germans. It resulted from a misunderstanding regarding the system of control imposed by the occupier and connected with the category of hostages-pledgees-decurions.

This article analyzes the books and periodicals published underground in communist Poland in terms of their depiction of the stances of Poles towards Jews during the German occupation. It discusses the political commentary texts and historical articles which clearly highlighted the positive Polish stances, then moves on to those which focused on the negative stances, and last but not least, ends with voices of an ambiguous character. The next part of the text regards fiction and memoirs, while the last one pertains to the discussion on the ‘Jewish’ issue of the Aneks émigré quarterly. Grądzka-Rejak and Olaszek analyze publications issued by various milieus though belonging to the main opposition current. The analysis of the sources collected reveals two concurrent tendencies: the intention to affirm the aspects of history distorted by communism and the readiness to discuss difficult topics.

Stepan Bandera’s responsibility for crimes committed by the members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), partisans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), and also nationalists dedicated to him, who fought in other formations, has been discussed in academic debates and instrumentalized in political discourses. When some authors claim that Bandera was fully responsible for all kinds of crimes committed by the OUN and UPA, other argue that he cannot be responsible for these crimes because he was not directly involved in their execution or he was not in Ukraine when they were done. The article presents different kinds of crimes and massacres committed on Bandera’s order or by devoted to him actors, and explains to which extent and in which sense Bandera was responsible for them.

This article gives an overview of various aspects of the Jewish religious life as presented in Gazeta Żydowska, a Nazi reptile newspaper. They were discussed in texts devoted to the subject matter of religion, in regular columns, such as the Weekly Jewish Calendar, and also as one of the topics of articles about history, the society, politics, or economy. The subject matter of Judaism also appeared in literary texts published in the newspaper, particularly in stories and poetry.

A merchant and dental technician, Karol Rotgeber wrote his Warsaw ghetto memoir while hiding on the ‘Aryan’ side between April and June 1943. The fragments of the memoir presented here were selected mostly to show the thread of religious meditations which intertwines with a narration about the fate of the author, his family, and the Warsaw ghetto community.
Two different discourse orders clash in Rotgeber’s text: the diarist narration and theprayer-lamentation dimension. They co-exist. They do not merge or overlap, but intertwine with each other. There is no transition between them. The diarist narration is suddenly interrupted with an ejaculatory prayer, a supplication, a complaint, a call for help and revenge,a confession of faith, or an act of hope. And then, equally suddenly and without a warning, Rotgeber resumes his previous thread, comes back to the everyday life in the ghetto, a list of tortures and persecutions, to the concrete and the topography, and his private life.

In the autumn of 1941 approx. 20,000 Jews were deported to the Łódź ghetto from the Reich and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Among them were highly assimilated individuals, including converts. A large group of Catholics arrived from Vienna and this text is devoted to them. A letter addressed to the Center for Aid to Non-Aryan Catholics, which operated at the Archbishopric of Vienna, became an impulse for writing this article. The Viennese Catholics concentrated around Regina Fuhrman, a member of the Carmelite secular order, and they established the Catholic Community. The Jewish administration of the ghetto allocated a prayer room to be used by all Christians in the ghetto. The Christians were deported to the death center in Chełmno nad Nerem on 9 May 1942 within the framework of a large-scale deportation campaign which encompassed unemployed Western-European Jews. Many of them volunteered to leave, maintaining family or religious ties.

The author presents fragments of the diary of rabbi Josef Guzik’s from Dukla. In the introduction Farbstein characterizes the diarist and also discusses the tragic fate of the local Jewish community. Guzik kept his diary in hiding during 1943–1944. He wrote in Rabbinic Hebrew, using expressions and references to Jewish sources despite not having access to the books he was quoting. He treated writing as a mission to bear witness for the sake of the future generations. Josef Guzik’s writings go back and forth between the internal and the external world, revolving around four axes of time or space which intertwine in every
entry. The original text did not survive. The incomplete copy of the diary is stored at Yad Vashem.

This text consists of two parts. The ϐirst one presents Rabbi Josef Lejb Gelernter’s biography. Gelernter had been a rabbi in Skępe since 1931, after which he was in the Warsaw ghetto, where he became engaged in the organization of social welfare for Orthodox refugees and DPs. The second part contains three primary sources: a testimony about the expulsion of Jews
from Skępne in 1939 and the special role Gelernter played in his community; Gelernter’s report on the issue of kosherness among refugees in the Warsaw ghetto, and an appeal attributed to him which regards the neglect of burial customs in the Jewish district.

The author discusses the operation of the underground courts martial using the example of the files of the court martial which operated at the Main Command of the Home Army (Komenda Główna Armii Krajowej). The documents are kept in the Central Archive of Modern Records. The court martial tried crimes committed by soldiers of the Union of Armed Combat-Home Army (Związek Walki Zbrojnej-Armia Krajowa, ZWZ-AK) and also those aimed against the underground. This text gives examples of cases against people who exposed Jews and did not belong to the underground structures. The ϐiles of the cases discussed contain: the indictment, the minutes of the trial plus the verdict, and the liquidation order. Attached to every indictment is abundant evidence including reports prepared by various underground cells and the results of the surveillance they carried out. The article presents previously unknown court cases regarding crimes against the Jews, and it also allows taking a closer look at the procedures and the operations of the underground judiciary.

Róża Berger is the only conϐirmed casualty of the Krakow pogrom, which took place on 11 August 1945. The woman died in her own apartment at Wolnica Street 4. The press did report on her death, but the exact circumstances of the crime remain unknown. New light on those events has been shed by a folder containing ϐiles of the investigation launched in August 1945 against Citizens’ Militia ofϐicer from MO Station II in Krakow. These documents not only provide detailed information about the circumstances of Róża Berger’s death, but also make it possible to reconstruct the atmosphere of the pogrom conducted in the vicinity of the building where the murder was committed. Supplemented with information from archival ϐiles, the documentation discovered also makes it possible to paint a group portrait of MO policemen from a station located 80 kilometers from the crime scene.

The text is a preliminary discussion about the Holocaust semantic neologisms and it is based on reϐlections on the Nazi codename for Aktion Erntefest (3–4 November 1943). These reϐlections have a few different dimensions: a linguistic one (etymology, the metaphor, references to the LTI), a comparative one (the Polish and German perspective), and
also a contextually historical and anthropological one (the category of festivity and celebration). According to the author, rooted in the very codename was an instruction manual, the genocidal practice.

Many analyses of the Holocaust’s influence on Jewish theology emphasize the dimension of the lack of continuation. From this perspective, the Holocaust, as an unprecedented event, made the Jewish theology face new inquiries, at the same time radically questioning the traditional answers. The wartime letters written by Orthodox rabbis who were witnesses to and victims of the intensifying repressions constitute a fascinating primary source, the analysis of which makes it possible to paint a picture of the transformation of Jewish theology in reaction to the Holocaust. Krawcowicz presents an interpretation of rabbi Szlomo Zalman Unsdorfer’s wartime sermons, laying stress on the many dimensions in which Unsdorfer’s thought is a continuation of selected threads of rabbinical tradition and the way in which it fits into the framework of the traditional Jewish theological responses to historical catastrophes rather
than reach beyond them.

 In early January 1942 escapees from the nearby death camp in Chełmno nad Nerem reached Grabów, a small locality in Regierungsbezirk Litzmannstadt in Wartheland. At that time the German Nazis were liquidating the nearby ghettoes one by one, deporting their residents to Chełmno, where the victims were murdered. In Grabów the survivors met with the local rabbi and gave testimony about the crime they had witnessed. The rabbi almost immediately decided to send a letter to his family and friends warning them against the deportations. The escapees also informed Grabów inhabitants about the tragic news in his house. The next day the rabbi wrote another letter. Other Grabów inhabitants followed his example. Consequently, the information about the mass murder was spreading. A lot suggests that the Grabów rabbi’s initiative might have been the first organized attempt to warn Jews detained in ghettoes of Regierungsbezirk Litzmannstadt in Wartheland against the approaching extermination. This means that the rabbi played an important role in the transfer of information about the murder committed in the nearby camp in Chełmno nad Nerem. Consisting in spreading news about the deportations’ objective, his activity hampered the work of the German oppressors and enabled the victims to verify the German’s assertions about the deportations purported aim (labor) and learn about the actual fate of their families and friends deported to Chełmno.

The author emphasizes the significance of the Serbian town of Šabac for Holocaust studies (in both Serbia and Europe). Basing on scholarly articles and books available in Serbian, she reconstructs the events connected with the tragic fate of the Jewish refugees from Central Europe and the Jewish inhabitants of Šabac. In September 1940 that Serbian town received emigrants from Central Europe who had been stopped on their way to Palestine on the border between Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia (the Kladovo Transport). In October 1941 they were liquidated along with Jewish inhabitants of Šabac as a result of German retaliatory actions.

The article discusses the stance of the Catholic Church in Poland towards the Jewish issues after World War Two. The aim of the analysis was the content of selected texts published by in Catholic press that were subjected to censorship. The article examines texts retained by the censorship offices as well as the character of the message on the Jewish issue published by Catholic press. An important part of the presented text is also description Jewish issues in Catholic press that were available in public.

This article outlines the process of the destruction of Jewish cemeteries on the territory of today’s Poland during World War II (beginning with 1933 in the case of the parts of the country which were within the German border before the war), including the destruction resulting from military operations or actions of the occupation authorities or the civilian population. It also briefly says what happened with the Jewish cemeteries after the war.

 The question of property of pre-war Jewish communities was an important issue after the war for both Jewish survivors and non-Jewish inhabitants of small towns, as well as for the public administration structures, which were slowly stabilizing. While the real estate and personal effects the Jews had left behind quickly found new residents or users the buildings which had belonged to the religious communities – synagogues, cemeteries, and mikvehs – had been and still are been much more visible signs of the former multi-denominational communities of those towns. Analyzing documents of the Department of Denominations of the Ministry of Public Administration and the documents of the Legal Section of the Central Committee of Polish Jews (Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce, CKŻP), the author describes the official mode of transfer of real estate, types of decisions made, and relations between the institutions of Jewish life and the central and local administration.

Drawing on a wide range of commemoration practices (politicians’ and bishops’ speeches, museum exhibition, monuments, press articles, memorial ceremonies), the article examines the memorialization of rescue in Poland as a nationalist narrative of heroic victimhood, most fully realized in the state-sponsored cult of the Ulma Family. Considered for sainthood in the Catholic Church and portrayed as typical and representative, the Ulmas are appropriated for the ultraconservative, right-wing model of Polishness. The narrative of rescue framed as Christian martyrdom imbues Polish death with symbolic significance denied to Jews, and establishes Poles as victims of the highest order. This, the article argues, constitutes a return to a decades-old competition of suffering, a memory mode capable exclusively of mourning its own, ethnically defined victims.

During World War Two, the urban structures along with buildings of several Jewish quarters in Poland as well as in other European countries were demolished by the Nazis to a great degree. After 1989, the process of recovering the memory of the Jews developed. Many buildings in the areas of former Jewish districts were renovated to serve as an element of local tourist offers. At the same time, non-commercial, educational and artistic projects commemorating the Holocaust were initiated. In this paper such issues are a reference point for analyzing the post-war history of “Podzamcze”, the former Jewish neighbourhood in Lublin from the destruction of the historical Jewish quarter in 1942–1954, via creating a new urban structure in its former location by the communist regime in 1954, to the initiatives undertaken on a wider scale since the 1980s focused on commemorating Jews of Lublin and the district itself within its former area.