The Ukrainian police actively participated in the extermination of Ukrainian Jews. While in central and eastern Ukraine a signi????icant percentage of the Jewish population managed to survive the occupation, in its western territories (Volhynia and Eastern Galicia) more than 90 percent of the Jews were murdered. One important difference between western Ukraine on the one hand and central and eastern Ukraine on the other was nationalism. Western Ukraine was the home of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists which in the 1930s and early 1940s transformed into the main Ukrainian fascist movement and in 1943 formed the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Even though the Germans prevented the OUN from establishing a fascist state modelled on the Independent State of Croatia and arrested its commanders, the OUN sent its members to serve in the police which helped a small number of German functionaries with the ghettoization, appropriation of Jewish property, and extermination of the Jews. The extermination of the Jews was one of the main political goals of the OUN which used the German-controlled police to achieve it.

The article regards German Occupation Policy in Lithuania 1941–1944. The author integrates the context of war and warfare – with their needs for mobilization, stability, food and labor – into the picture. He clearly shows how each of these fields of politics was coined by antisemitism, which was central for all Nazi policies. The author integrates multiple perspectives of perpetrators, bystanders and victims as well, emphasizing specific Lithuanian political programs, which enabled certain Lithuanian political groups to join partly national-socialist policy.

In the studies published so far the Central Jewish Historical Commission (Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna, CŻKH) has been treated as a prelude to the target operation of the Jewish Historical Institute. Little attention has been devoted to its organizational structure and general operation, with emphasis laid on collection of testimonies, securing archives, and publications. Meanwhile, the CŻKH objectives and tasks, including its main task, that is, documenting and talking about the lot of Polish Jews during World War II, were much broader than assumed. This article is a sketch of the CŻKH history – its activity, programmatic assumptions, and Holocaust research methodology.

The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw was probably the only research institution in the Soviet Bloc and one of very few that undertook research on the Shoah during the 1950s. This article analyses the institute’s research and working conditions against the background of the general political regime under Stalinism in Poland. It argues that despite sometimes heavy-handed political biases in its publications, the institute made an important contribution to research on the Shoah. Its work also came to the attention of Jewish centers outside the Soviet Bloc, though it was seen through the prism of the Cold War.

An institution maintaining contacts with foreign scholars and the Jewish Diaspora around the world, the Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, ŻIH) became an object of interest of the Security Service (Służba Bezpieczeństwa, SB) in the early 1960s. The initial objects of surveillance were the ŻIH Director, Professor Bernard Mark, and his Deputy, Adam Rutkowski, for it was established that they maintained contacts with a number of foreigners and transferred information detrimental to People’s Poland. 13 October 1952 marked the registration of investigation code name ‘Kodak’, within the framework of which the SB counterintelligence (MSW Department II Section V) carried out surveillance of the ŻIH. Aside recruiting agents, mostly among the technical employees of the ŻIH, the SB used technical methods of surveillance (telephone and room tapping, correspondence control) towards the Institute and its employees. There were also several instances of secret entering the Institute to photograph documents. In 1965 all those actions led to a proposition formulated by the SB officer who was in charge of the investigation to accuse the Institute’s management of irregularities in employee remuneration so as to tarnish its reputation and exchange the ŻIH scholarly team for individuals of Jewish nationality loyal to the authorities. Those plans were not realized though, with the MSW Department III Section III, which carried out anti-opposition activity, taking over the surveillance of the ŻIH in 1965. The condition of the surviving operational materials does not facilitate a detailed analysis of the 1967–1968 surveillance of the ŻIH, but it was largely unsuccessful. Paradoxically, the SB learned more about the ŻIH’s situation after state institutions took interest in the Institute’s activity (particularly the Supreme Audit Office [Najwyższa Izba Kontroli, NIK]), beginning with the autumn of 1967. Similarly, research conducted so far does not make it possible to determine the SB’s influence on the activity of those institutions and communist Poland’s policy regarding the ŻIH, but it seems highly probable that the actions aiming at liquidation of the ŻIH undertaken in 1968 were inspired by the SB.

Jürgen Stroop, the SS general who led the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto and the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April–May 1943, was convicted by a Polish court in 1951 and executed in 1952. Bernard (Ber) Mark (1908–1966), Holocaust historian and director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, provided expert testimony for the prosecution at Stroop’s trial. Mark felt constrained to graft a communist-inflected narrative onto his account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and to shoehorn it into his expert testimony in court and then into his interpretation of the trial for a Jewish audience. He did his best to give the Jewish Fighting Organization, which spearheaded the uprising, and its Jewish fighters their due at a time when expression of unvarnished appreciation for Jewish heroism was risky, even while he was paying overrated tribute to the communist underground for its assistance to the Jewish rebels during the uprising. But he always stopped short of the line between conformity to and defiance of the communist regime

This article includes information about the currently edited collection of wartime recollective accounts of the Holocaust. It is an authentic record of field research conducted in the southern part of the Świętokrzyskie Province. The author presents the subject matter of these narratives, emphasizing their folkloristic character. He lays most stress on the largely unnoticed though still important current of folk reckoning with the war and occupation.

This article attempts to present the reception of the Holocaust in relation to the topics of the atomic bombs and Japanese war crimes. Author’s comparative analysis revealed a number of shared issues regarding the war memory mechanisms, and also the characteristic style of Japanese narration centered on the key word ‘peace’. After the testimony period we are slowly entering the post-testimony era, when there will be no living witnesses. But it is also a period which enables researches to conduct a distanced analysis of the political and social discourse on war, particularly regarding Japan, whose post-war historical memory was built with the use of language of ambiguity and omissions. Using the comparative approach makes it possible not only to show the similarity of a number of issues regarding narration about the war, but it also conditions new narrations, which move beyond paradigms of national memory.

Michał Borwicz was a Polish poet, prose writer, and a publicist of Jewish origins. During the Nazi occupation he was resettled to the Lvov getto, and in the years 1942–1943 he was imprisoned in the Janowska concentration camp. He managed to escape and next he was active in the resistance movement. After the war as a director of the Jewish Historical Commission in Kraków he tried to collect and publish testimonies of the Holocaust survivors. In 1947 he decided to emigrate to France. In 1953 Borwicz defended his doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne. The dissertation was published the same year. It presents writings of people “condemned to death” under Nazi occupation, and is considered a pioneer study of literature and writing practices in the camps and ghettos. Unfortunately the singularity of the author and the strength of his work are still underestimated.

The article presents a selection of immediate post-war testimonies of Polish railway workers, who served at train stations at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka. Testimonies, collected during investigations conducted by Polish authorities regarding the death camps, reviles the level of awareness of Polish witnesses to the crimes conducted at the Operation Reinhardt death camps.

The materials presented above include a file with the correspondence between Władysław Wójcik and the director of the Jewish Historical Institute Bernard Mark, located in the institute’s archive, as well as fragments of Wójcik’s memoir from the Yad Vashem Archives. In all of Wójcik’s writings, there is a discrepancy between the declared unselfishness, and ingratitude he had been experiencing after the war from the Jews. His claims relate, on one hand, to the lack of compensation from the mother of a girl, whom he helped to hide during the occupation, and on the other, from the JHI’s – due to his role in discovery and saving the second part of the Ringelblum Archive and Chaim Aron Kapłan’s Diary. The motive for his efforts to obtain payment are Wójcik’s financial problems after he emigrated to the USA.

he materials presented in the article include documentation of the German Special Court (Sondergericht) in Warsaw proceedings against Tadeusz Puder, a Catholic priest of Jewish origin arrested by the Gestapo in the spring of 1941. His imprisonment was a consequence of a denunciation made by Fr. Stanisław Trzeciak, one of the leading Polish anti-Semites. Sentenced to several months in prison, Puder managed to escape from the prison hospital in autumn 1942 and survive in hiding. He died a few days after the liberation of Warsaw in a car accident. Despite the cooperation with the German security police, Trzeciak was among the victims of mass executions during the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944. The introduction of the article presents a broader context of Trzeciak’s anti-Semitic activity and the reasons for his personal hatred for Puder, as well as unknown details of collaborative attempts in the first months of German occupation.

Two accounts of Polish eyewitnesses (Adam Ulrich and Stanisław Żemiński) regarding the fate of Jews and the course of their extermination in two cities of the Lublin district, Zakrzówek and Łuków. The authors sympathize with the victims and, simultaneously with horror, observe the complicity of Polish neighbors in liquidation actions and property looting belonging to the Jews. Both accounts contain many important facts and observations, they are among the most important Polish testimonies of the Holocaust.

In 1942 the Jewish Social Self-help (Żydowska Samopomoc Społeczna, ŻSS) was the only central Jewish organization in the General Government, with branches in over 300 localities. From the very beginning of Operation Reinhardt the ŻSS Presidium in Cracow had received official letters from the local branches and letters from private persons containing information about “deportations in an unknown direction,” that is, to death camps. This article analyzes the content and language of that correspondence and describes the actions undertaken by the ŻSS Presidium with regard to the collected information. During the first weeks those were attempts to confirm the transports’ destination and negotiations with the German administration of the General Government regarding provision of decent living conditions in the places of ‘resettlement’. Those efforts were discontinued with the gradual advent of the awareness of the extermination. From then on the Presidium concentrated on protecting its own employees from deportation and increasing their number. Moreover, it also encouraged its local branches to establish work co-operatives for artisans, which was thought to enable the employed to avoid deportation. In the end all those efforts came to no avail. The ŻSS continued its activity, in a significantly reduced dimension, under a changed name (Jüdische Unterstützungstelle, JUS) until July 1944.

This article regards the existential experience of Holocaust victims and the psychological and cognitive mechanisms in confrontation with the first news about the functioning of the death camps. It analyzes the testimonies of Jews from over 40 towns and small towns in the General Government regarding the gradual influx of news about the Holocaust and the consequent reactions. Initially, the hearsay came mostly from afar, and then from increasingly close localities. The Poles were the source of that (imprecise) information about the lot of the deported Jews, while in certain localities appeared escapees from the death centers who gave accounts of what they had witnessed. That hearsay and those testimonies met with different reactions – from despair, through denial, suppression, and resignation, to attempts to save one’s life. This article devotes special attention to a reflection on the possibility of death of oneself and one’s family as well as the phenomenon of denial and pushing the news about the Holocaust away from oneself.

Information about the extermination conducted in the Chełmno nad Nerem death center reached the Łódź ghetto in the spring of 1942. An important link in the information transmission chain was Grabów, reached by the first escapees from Chełmno. Rabbi Jakub Szulman played a large role as he started sending letters with information about the crime obtained from the escapees. The letters he wrote reached Łódź together with people resettled from the provincial ghettos of Wartheland, from whom the Łódź ghetto residents heard confirmation of the information about the purpose of the Chełmno nad Nerem center. The information flow was also affected by the information blockade campaign conducted by the Germans followed by a misinformation campaign regarding an actual lot of the people deported to Chełmno.

During World War II conversion came to mean something completely different than during the pre-war period: it became one of the survival strategies used by Jews on the territories under German occupation. Some Jews changed their religion because they married a Catholic. For others it was an escape from the categorization under German law and inclusion into the group with which, as they declared, they had had little in common. Others still saw baptism as a real chance of surviving the occupation. Conversion was a path to obtaining ‘Aryan’ papers, and thus acquiring a new identity necessary to survive beyond the walls of the Cracow ghetto and Płaszów camp. The objective of this article is to focus on the history and declared motivations of those who decided to apply for conversion after the outbreak of World War II. The archive of the Metropolitan Curia in Cracow includes documents and applications submitted by people intending to convert. That process began with the occupation and was officially and successfully continued almost until the end of 1942. This date is connected with the German ban on baptizing Jews under threat of severe punishment introduced on 10 October 1942. However, Jews continued to be baptized, though in secret, without applications to the Metropolitan Curia or public statistics.

This text is an attempt to reconstruct the history of the Main Shelter Home (Główny Dom Schronienia), that is, the largest orphanage for youngest children operating in the Warsaw ghetto. Witkowska-Krych presents its history, which goes back to the mid-19th century, and its situation during the first year of the war and during its move into the ghetto and until the deportation to the death camp in Treblinka in August 1942. In light of the surviving official, press, and personal sources the author sketches the circumstances in which that unique institution had to function. She also writes about the individuals connected with that institution and those who worked for its benefit.

The Treuhändstelle in Chełm administered real estate in the city (for some time a city with city rights) and in the Chełm country district. In 1940 their joint office was at Orlicz-Dreszera Street 6. The former Treuhändstelle were probably subordinate to the district Treuhänder. The Chełm Treuhändstelle took over more than 600 houses from their Jewish owners, with participation of the municipal authorities, including pre-war Polish clerks. The Germans made a profit on that property, at the expense of the Jews. Ordinary inhabitants of Chełm, various institutions, and Catholic priests sought to trade that real estate.

Men’s circumcision is in many countries considered as a hygienic-cosmetic or aesthetic treatment. However, it still remains in close connection with religious rites (Judaism, Islam) and is still practiced all over the world. During the Second World War the visible effects of circumcision became an indisputable evidence of being a Jew and were often used especially by the so-called szmalcownicy (blackmailers). Fear of the possibility of discovering as non-Aryan prompted many Jews hiding on the so-called Aryan side of Warsaw to seek medical practitioners who would restore the condition as it was before the circumcision. The reconstruction surgery was called in surgical jargon “knife baptizing”. Almost all of the procedures were performed by Aryan doctors although four cases of hiding Jewish doctors participating in such procedures are known. Surgical technique consisted of the surgical formation of a new foreskin after tissue preparation and stretching it by manual treatment. The success of the repair operation depended on the patient’s cooperation with the doctor, the worst result was in children. The physicians described in the article and the operating technique are probably only a fragment of a broader activity, described meticulously by only one of the doctors – Dr. Janusz Skórski. This work is an attempt to describe the phenomenon based on the very scanty source material, but it seems to be the first such attempt for several decades.

When we are talking about Polish history, hardly can be admitted - not breaking the convention of good language use - that we are considering primarily (only?) the fate of Poles. In that sense, Polish history would be simply the narrative about Poles. But we can't by so simple anymore.