Marek Edelman - in Memoriam.

You shall remember.

The text deals with the attitudes of the Polish Catholic hierarchy towards the Holocaust. It describes the activities undertaken for the benefit of converts during in 1940–1941, how higher clergy perceived anti-Jewish incidents in Warsaw (spring 1940) and murders of the Jews in the Łomża region (summer 1941), and finally the immediate reactions of the bishops to the Holocaust on Polish territory. Particularly important is the explanation of the reasons why the extermination of the Jews was not mentioned in correspondence with the Vatican (Pope Pius XII and the Secretariat of State) during 1942–1943. Due to Adam Sapieha’s position in the Church structure during the occupation, the figure of the Archbishop of Cracow is the focus. The text also analyzes statements concerning the Jews and the Holocaust by the hierarchs outside Poland (Primate August Hlond and Bishop Karol Radoński). The text also discusses the attitude of the Church hierarchy’s representatives towards organized and individual actions to help the Jews. The author’s aim is to summarize existing knowledge based on Church sources (Polish and Vatican) available to researchers and documents of Polish underground, and to identify controversies present in the hitherto interpretations, as well as the directions and limitations of further investigation into the matter.

The response of Pope Pius XII to the Holocaust has been discussed since the Holocaust itself. A crucial episode was the events of October 16, 1943, when the SS seized more than one thousand Roman Jews and the Pope did little about it. The historiography has highlighted this “Under His Very Windows” drama. This article suggests that a number of issues weighing heavily on Pius at that time inhibited his response.

The article discusses the policy of Pope Pius XII on the international arena during World War II. Historians have extensively studied and discussed this policy. These problems always arouse many controversies, which are still intense although many years passed after the war’s end and despite the Pope’s death fifty years ago. The author of the article expresses the view that the main motive of the Vatican’s policy during War World II times was neither the anti-Communism of Pius XII or his pro-German views, but most of all – the doctrine of “absolute neutrality” in international relations. It was the key priority for the Vatican. The attitude towards Poland remains a clear example of limitations of this doctrine imposed by practice.

The attitude of the Catholic Church toward the Jews after World War II is a difficult issue in Polish–Jewish history, largely dominated by emotions and stereotypes. This text shows a fragment of the relations between the Church and the Jews since the end of military operations in eastern postwar Poland in the spring of 1944 until the Kielce Jewish pogrom in July 1946. The proposed chronology allows us to answer the question whether and to what extent the shadow of the Holocaust change theattitude of the Catholic Church toward the Jews. An examination of immediate postwar period is important because what had been worked in the early days influenced the Church’s position at such a dramatic moment as the Kielce pogrom as well as later. The paper presents the situation of the Church and the Jewish community the moment the war ended, and describes the mutual perceptions of the Church and the Jews in postwar realities. The text discussed how Jewish issue was presented by the hierarchs, the clergy, the Catholic press and the faithful.

The article discusses the policy of Pope Pius XII on the international arena during World War II. Historians have extensively studied and discussed this policy. These problems always arouse many controversies, which are still intense although many years passed after the war’s end and despite the Pope’s death fifty years ago. The author of the article expresses the view that the main motive of the Vatican’s policy during War World II times was neither the anti-Communism of Pius XII or his pro- German views, but most of all – the doctrine of “absolute neutrality” in international relations. It was the key priority for the Vatican. The attitude towards Poland remains a clear example of limitations of this doctrine imposed by practice.

Presentation of the first interdisciplinary research on Szlamek (Szlama Winer), his family and his social (underground) circle. Collation of the existing knowledge about the author of the testimony on the Holocaust in Wartheland (“Szlamek’s testimony”, the “Grojanowski Report”) in the context of its importance for the Warsaw ghetto underground and the Polish Underground State, but the refugee’s genealogy well-documented in sources. The author has examined and analyzed the existing information on the compulsory gravedigger in the extermination center at Kulmhof, and compared the extant literature with archive research results, which makes it possible to broaden our knowledge of the most enigmatic conspirators of the Holocaust era as well as his closest relations. The historical and biographical investigations undertaken here and, consequently, verified, methodologically prepared historical data are to eliminate not only the spelling of the witnesses’ name accumulated and notoriously repeated errors in Holocaust historiography, but they are to serve as a supplement to the existing biographical entry, barely outlined on the basis of a surviving testimony and a fragment of the Warsaw–Zamość correspondence kept in the “Ringleblum Archive”

The subject of this article is war, and especially post-war, szaber – a phenomenon of mass looting of unattended property. The text is divided into three parts. In the first part, I attempt to explain theoretically the origin of szaber, indicating (among other things) its links with the culture of poverty and a necessary condition for the szaber to take place – a moment of chaos and a temporary decline of the power structures. In the second part, I formulate a hypothesis that ethnic difference was a necessary condition for szaber to emerge. I illustrate it with examples from September 1939, when first we faced a phenomenon of mass looting of unattended property. The article also deals with the pillage of the ghettos by Poles in 1942. The third part is devoted to the highest wave of looting, which took place mostly in the Regained Western and Northern Territories, immediately after the war. The text is constructed in such a way that at the end I return to the origin of the phenomenon, formulating a thesis that it created a certain szaber culture.

Saul Friedländer’s recent Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination offers a brilliant new literary mode for historical representation of extreme events such as the Holocaust. The article offers a comparative assessment of Friedländer’s achievement with regard to the integration of Jewish sources into the historical account. It begins with a contextualization of Friedländer’s book within a framework that compares the ways in which Jewish sources are addressed by different historio-graphical approaches. In the second part it seeks to contextualize analytically and critically Friedländer’s concept of „disbelief” – a concept by which he defines the role of the „victims’ voices” in his narrative. The article concludes by briefly suggesting some guidelines for an alternative approach to the study of contemporary Jewish Holocaust sources

The life of Julian Unszlicht (1883–1953) illustrates the case and process of the assimilation of Polish Jews. However, Unszlicht’s case is special as it shows that holding anti-Semitic views, which were to be a ticket to a Catholic society, guaranteed neither putting the roots down permanently nor gaining a new identity. The biography of a priest-convert allows to look closer at the processes of effacement and convergence of anti-Jewish rhetoric. The modern one, of the turn of 19th and 20th centuries, with Catholic anti-Judaism, which was constantly excused by religious reasons and at the same time, it often spread to the ethnic-racial mental grounds. Contrary to common definitions and distinctions, those two ways of thinking perfectly complemented and strengthened each other, both living using the other’s reasoning. The Holocaust added a tragic punch line to the embroiled story of the priest-convert.

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

Yet unknown diary of the 17-year old Jewess hiding in a barn near Przemyśl, Cesia Gruft, in the moths following the liquidation of the Przemyśl ghetto. It is preceded by an article briefly analyzing the difficult, complex and psychologically complicated relationships between the persecuted Jews and their rescuers. The analysis shows the difficulty of an unambiguous categorization of the rescuers’ motives and the diary’s text ends with a short comment on the background of help given as well as on the future fate of the people mentioned in the diary.

 In 1942, Gusta (Gustawa) Ehrlich landed in prison in Krzeszowice. This Jewess from Cracow tried to survive the occupation hiding near Cracow. She was denounced and arrested. The presented collection of documents includes her diary in form of the letters to her daughter, being at the same time the record of Gusta Ehrlich’s last weeks. The author described the conditions in the prison and relation with the fellow inmates. She also left information concerning the person who denounced her to the authorities, informing them of her origin. In the notes, there are numerous hints for the daughters, who remained at large, concerning both the personal and financial matters connected with running the business. Gusta Ehrlich’s letter of 1940 to the Metropolitan Curia, in which the author asks for baptism, is a supplement to the diary.

An analysis and interpretation of Dora Sztatman’s text, part of a folder of documents in Ringelblum Archive (Ring I, 1092; nowa sygn. ARG I 288). The text is an account of a young Jewish woman’s encounter with two German officers in the Municipal Courts building in Leszno Street and their walk together to the “Aryan side”. It is an attempt of looking at the historical document not only as a testimony of actual events, but particualrly as a trace of “mental facts” – desire, dream, denial

This document from the archives of the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London, is a record of the observations made by an unknown Dutchman in a Warsaw prison in early 1942. According to documents a major concern of “Polish patriots” was to solve “the Jewish issue” in Poland after the Allied victory in the war. The document is an interesting contribution to the knowledge of Poles’ moods during the occupation.

Research team of physicians and lab technicians under Izrael Milejkowski’s direction undertook the effort to carry out a series of clinical and biochemical experiments on patients dying of starvation in the Warsaw ghetto so as to receive the fullest possible picture of hunger disease. The research was carried out according to all the rigors of strict scientific discipline, and the authors during their work on academic articles, published it after the war entitled: „Starvation disease: hunger research carried out in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942,” according to their own words, they “supplemented the gap in accordance with the progress of knowledge.” The article is devoted to the reflections over ethical dilemmas of the research team, who were forced in their work to perform numerous medical treatments of experimental nature on extremely exhausted patients. The ill, according to Dr Fajgenblat’s words,“demonstrated negativism toward the research and treatment, which extremely hindered the work, and sometimes even frustrated it.” The article attempts to look at the monumental research work of the Warsaw ghetto doctors as a special kind of response of the medical profession to the feeling of helplessness to the dying patients. The article analyzes the situation of Warsaw ghetto doctors, who undertook the research without support of any outer authority, which could settle their possible ethical dilemmas (Polish deontological codes, European discussions on the conditions of the admissibility of medical research on patients, etc.).

The aim of the article is to present the way in which new forms of film narratives (that emerged in the 1960s) influenced the development of cultural images concerning the Holocaust. The author’s opinion is that the development of film poetics and popularization of psychoanalysis in public consciousness contributed in that period to shaping new forms of expression in the cinema, such as post-traumatic retrospective. Since then, cinematic depiction of the Holocaust is characterized by deepened portrait of the inner life of a character and an attempt to picture individual techniques to cope with the trauma of past events. Andrzej Munk’s Pasażerka and Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, due to their inventive use of retrospection, will serve as ideal types of the phenomenon in question.

The review of the book I Looked at the Lips… Diary from the Warsaw Ghetto describes the editorial form of the text, preserving transcription of the writing in the same position as it was written in the original (a line of printed text on the oddnumbered page completely corresponds with the line of the manuscript on the even-numbered page). The reviewer notices that the editorial form of the diary fits in those currents of contemporary humanities, which on the one hand recognize the physical appearance of the text as a crucial element of the content, but on the other hand – they emphasize the ethical dimension of the testimony’s appearance as a unique literary genre, together with a complicated attribution of the text’s authorship. The author of the review also underlines the limitations, which an editor faces when he wishes to preserve the physical appearance of the testimony, which (in a present-day editorial form) must take the form of an index of the testimony’s appearance, not its icon.

The article presents and analyses the Vatican’s official position on the Holocaust, from the declaration “We Remember” of 1998 to Benedict XVI’s speeches. The author indicates a certain ambiguity of the Catholic Church’s attitude to anti-Semitic and Holocaust issues, as well as the reluctance to recognize the role of the Catholics’ in the Holocaust. The contentious issue of the beatification of Pius XII is also discussed.

Contemporary interpretations of the pontificate of Pius XII (1939–1958) are divided into those that condemn the Pope for his silence and inactivity during the Holocaust, and those that defend him for his help to the Jews. These divided opinions are illustrated by the summary of the Pope’s activity during the Holocaust, which we can find at the Yad Vashem exhibition of 2005. It is the most controversial issue in the relations of the Holy See and the State of Israel, especially that it is an obstacle in Pius XII’s canonization process. In this article, seven Yad Vashem theses concerning the Pope’s role during the Holocaust, are analyzed in order to establish to what extent they are justified or unjustified doubts concerning the canonization of Eugenio Pacelli (1876–1958).

Benedict XVI’s speech in Auschwitz may be interpreted as a form of justification of the Germans’ submissiveness toward the Nazi ideology. The Pope did not probe into the Germans’ enthusiasm for the Nazis (Christian anti-Semitism, for instance), he also avoided the subject of passiveness and submissiveness of German churches to the Nazis, which failed the test of that time. Accusing atheism of being a source of Nazi crimes serves as means of averting one’s eyes from one’s own guilt.

Christian-Jewish dialogue is one of the most distinguishable results of the Conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate, issued by the Catholic Church on 28 October 1965. The theological implications of the declaration are visible in Catholic theologians’ reflection, especially in the USA and Western Europe. The echoes of this debate are barely audible in Poland. Similarly to Judaism, also in Christianity there is no one and only answer to the Holocaust. It even seems that the attitude towards this event, to large extend, polarized Catholic theologians. It so happens that conservative tendencies in theology are usually connected with the unwillingness to incorporate the Holocaust into the reflection on the essence of Christianity. At the same time, open theology discerns a necessity not only to include the Shoah in the theology, but even to perceive it as an indispensable point of reference as well. Particularly distinctive in the Christian-Jewish dialogue in Poland is the opinion of Father Waldemar Chrostowski. Apart from him, this subject was dealt with by Fathers Michał Czajkowski, the Jesuit Stanisław Musiał and Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel. Besides, Father Wacław Hryniewicz presented an interesting suggestion.

Discussion of the Holocaust is often obscured by the story of a resistance heroism. It is illustrated by Rapoport’s Warsaw monument of Warsaw Ghetto Heroes. That there are no words suitable for a discussion about the Holocaust reality is becoming evident when we speak about the purpose of the ghetto uprising. The Warsaw ghetto victims should be revered regardless of the uprising and be given voice in order to place the innocent victims in the central position. On the monument in Birkenau the inscription, concerning „the Auschwitz heroes”, says that they fought “for human freedom and dignity, for peace and brotherhood of nations.” Such words in a place where more than a million Jews who did not fight were gassed, are totally inadequate, even insulting. The recent history of the term “Holocaust” (its spread and acquisition of more profound sense, its abuse and attempts to appropriate it) is an example of the significance of Jewish fate for global civilization. The most tragic fragment of the recent Jewish history received a ennobling name. We can say that it is a story of another Jewish “success.”

A critical review of educational files prepared by the Institute of National Remembrance. The author points out that the proposed educational material regarding the Polish Righteous Among the Nations does not provide exhaustive knowledge of Poles rescuing the Jews. The editors of the educational package were motivated by vague and non-substantial criteria of selection of the text used. Most of them contain numerous errors. The value of the lesson plans and the competent article by Grzegorz Berendt’s prepared for the package is undisputed.

The project “Meeting after Years” of the Museum of the Łęczna-Włodawa Lake District is an opportunity to acquaint the European society unique testimonies of the tragic events of World War II. The product is a unique archival and documentary package for the European education system and materials for international conferences, meetings and debates. Furthermore, the results of the project were used as the academic background for the first European temporary exhibition “From the Ashes of Sobibór”. This even was a special kind of summary of the hitherto collaboration of the Sobibór Museum with those states whose citizens had been murdered in the extermination camp. The authors of the project hope that its results will help foster those relations and enrich the European awareness of the responsibility for Sobibór remembrance

The article is a polemic with the pessimistic assessment of the current state of the Christian-Jewish dialog presented by Waldemar Chrostowski in his recent book Kościół, Żydzi, Polska [The Church, Jews, Poland]. The author criticizes Rev. Chrostowski for defining the Christian-Jewish and Polish-Jewish relations in terms of strict opposition and unavoidable conflict of interests, and for putting all blame on Jews, while absolving Christians from all their past and present sins which contributed to the tensions between the two communities.