This article discusses the armed anti-Jewish violence and the events connected with it, which occurred in the Polish Tatra Highlands (southern Poland) during 1945–1947. The number of Jewish victims exceeded 30, including children from Jewish orphanages. Among the perpetrators of those acts of terror were partisans from the group commanded by Józef Kuraś ‘Ogień’, which is one of the most important symbols of the anti-communist resistance. This article is based on results of a few years’ research and highly diverse sources and its main purpose is to recreate those events, with particular attention given to the victims of those acts of violence.

At the beginning of the occupation, France, Holland and Belgium found themselves in a similar situation. But when we look at the ratio of victims and survivors during the Holocaust in Western Europe, France and Holland are polar opposites: in France 25 percent of around 320,000 Jews did not survive the persecutions, whereas the ratio in Holland was 75 percent of 140,000. Belgium lies in the middle of the scale – 40 percent dead out of 66,000 Jews. In order to understand the source of these differences, the authors compare the methods applied by the occupation authorities and their anti-Jewish policies, the involvement and the size of the local police forces and German police, as well as the jurisdictional disputes between these formations.

75 per cent of French Jews survived the war in France. They received help within the framework of individual initiatives, mutual help structures, and the resistance movement — mainly Jewish. The author reconstructs the legal situation, administrative division, military operations, and the involvement of the SS, SD, and French collaborators during 1940–1944 which led to the specific legal conditions and the atmosphere that enabled the French to act. The main problem the SS faced during the final solution’ was the lack of regulations prohibiting the French from helping Jews and ones that would have separated Jews from non-Jews. In an attempt to threaten the French, the Germans arrested the Jews, dismantled the help organisations’ structures, and arrested those suspected of provision of shelter to Jews. In 1943 the SD joined the SS in the carrying out of the ‘final solution’ and managed to significantly increase the number of French collaborators. The Germans gained momentum to hunt down Jews, which led to more arrests. In 1944 the resuming of the military operations in France made it enemy territory to the Germans. Repressions became more brutal and the 'final solution' policy ceased to consist only in arrests and deportations and began to involve dozens of executions of Jews conducted by the Germans and their French supporters. Every intensification of the brutality and repressions led to increased help.

This article tells the story of Jewish orphans evacuated with the Polish Army (Armia Andersa) in 1942 from the USSR to Iran in the context of the help they received from Anders’s Army and the Polish government in exile through the network of diplomatic posts of the Polish embassy in the USSR and the Ministry of Labour and Welfare (Ministerstwo Pracy i Opieki Społecznej). It shows the broad and often complicated and difficult cooperation of these institutions with Jewish organisations, including mainly the Jewish Agency. The authors characterise the various forms of help provided to Jewish children and analyse its motivation, often discrepant. Moreover, it asks questions about anti-Semitism in Anders’s Army and how it influenced the rescuing of Jewish children.

The Nazi looting of works of art and cultural goods during 1933–1945 is usually divided into organised and unauthorised. The former was conducted by special organisations and authorities, while the former, widespread mostly in the east, amounted to private looting conducted by many Germans on their own account. The author suggests introducing a separate category of qualified looting encompassing those who engaged in looting with premeditation – on their own account and/or on commission – and whose competence included evaluation of the sought artistic goods and knowledge of where and in whose possession they could be found. In the Reich and in occupied France and Holland there were many such qualified robbers, while in Poland their number remained small after the initial wave of official confiscations, with the exception of the Dutchman, Pieter Nicolaas Menten (1899–1987), who after the war was one of the wealthiest citizens of Holland and owner of a collection of works of art unavailable to the public. The scope, character, and methods of the looting conducted by Menten for his private use in Cracow and Lvov during the German occupation between early 1940 and the end of 1942 make him an exceptional case in the history of Nazi looting. These aspects are analysed on the basis of extensive archival materials and evidence collected in Holland and Poland during the investigations and trials against Menten (the first one took place in 1948 and was followed by next ones in the late 1970s), who was accused, for instance, of collaboration with the Germans and the massacre of Jewish inhabitants of the Galician villages of Urycz and Podhorodce in the summer of 1941. Menten was never sentenced for the looting of works of art in Cracow, where he was an appointed administrator of four Jewish artistic salons, and in Lvov, where he appropriated the collections from the homes of several Lvov professors murdered on 4 July 1941. He was never found guilty even though when in January 1943 he left the General Government and went to Holland he took – with Himmler’s special permission – four wagons of works of art, gold ware and silverware, antique furniture, and Oriental rugs. The collection of works of art in his possession has become dispersed.

The article tells the story of Henryk Ryszewski, who provided hiding to about a dozen Jews in his flat in the Warsaw district of Mariensztat. Accused after the war of blackmailing Jews (as I think, wrongly), he was convicted and spent several years in prison. His prosecutor fell victim of the ‘paper affair’ show trial and also spent a few years in prison.

This article surveys Bulgarian historical publications (collections of documents, monographs, collective works, and articles in periodicals) regarding the deportation of Jews from the territories annexed by Bulgaria during WWII (Vardan Macedonia, Western Thrace with a fragment of Aegean Macedonia that is, ‘Belomorie’, and Pirot). Such publications have been appearing on the Bulgarian publishing market since 1945, which testifies to Bulgarian scholars’ continuous interest in the issue of the fate of the Jewish minority, which remained under Sophia’s control. Until the fall of communism there were significant ideological limitations to Bulgarian historiography, while scholarly articles or books stressed the role of the communist movement (led by the future General Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Todor Zhivkov) and ordinary citizens in rescuing the local minority from deportation to the death centre in Treblinka. The dissolution of the Eastern Bloc and the freeing of historical research from the corset of ideological propaganda brought the first Bulgarian publications that stressed the positive role of King Boris III and certain Bulgarian politicians, for instance, Dimitar Peshev, who purportedly opposed the political pressure exerted by Berlin with regard to deportation of Bulgarian Jews. However, the issue of Bulgaria’s responsibility for deportations of Jews from the annexed territories remains sufficiently researched. One may also see the resistance offered by some scholarly milieus, which wish to regard their country as the only one that did not participate in the Holocaust.

The article presents the scholarly achievements of Philip Friedman, an eminent historian from Lviv and survivor, whose wife and daughter died in the Holocaust. Friedman was a pioneer of Holocaust research. His contribution consisted in setting out research directions, developing the methodology and research tools, and documenting the Holocaust. Immediately after the war Friedman developed one of the first Holocaust research programmes, which included topics such as: the place of Jews in Nazi ideology, the subsequent stages of persecutions of Jews, the description of Jewish life and resistance to the Nazi extermination policy, the Nazi genocide, the attitude of the non-Jewish population toward persecutions of Jews, and the response of the free world, including the Yishuv, to the Holocaust. Friedman was convinced that reactions of the victims and their life in the shadow of looming annihilation should constitute the foundation of research on the ‘final solution’. The severely criticised the historians who based their Holocaust research solely on Nazi documentation, disregarding the Jewish perspective. Friedman himself was most interested in two issues: Judenrats and Jewish resistance. He examined the Jewish councils’ activity in the context of the inner life of ghettoes, the council’s influence on the life of ghetto inhabitants. Carrying out research on Jewish resistance, Friedman created a broad concept of that stance – one that included not only military activity but also acts in the spiritual and cultural sphere. Philip Friedman was also one of the first historians who paid attention to the universal significance of the Holocaust. He claimed that the human and moral implications of the ‘final solution’ pertained not only to the Jews but also to all mankind. He also assumed that Jews were the first but not the only victims of the Nazi extermination policy, as he discussed the extermination of the Roma as early as in 1950.

Written on the ‘Aryan’ side, Doctor Chaim Einhorn’s diary contains recollections of the ghetto, particularly the deportation campaign period, and a few passages written during hiding in the Warsaw district of Praga – Doctor Einhorn and his wife were hiding with a few other Jews at teacher Romana Hanke’s home.

During the German occupation, a two-tier justice system was introduced in the General Government: Polish courts, with their pre-war structures, operated alongside German courts. The paper, based on records preserved in the State Archives in Piotrkow, is devoted to a trial before the Polish Municipal Court in Pławno near Radom. Karol Kuban was sued by Meir Wolberg, and the subject of the dispute was money owed for a horse. The most interesting part of the trial was the decision of the court ordering Kuban to take an oath in the parish church, as a result of which Wolberg was supposed to withdraw his claim. Kuban failed to appear in the church, and instead filed an appeal to a higher court, which overturned the previous verdict and ordered a retrial. Further legal actions were suspended due to the absence of Majer Wolberg, who was deported to an extermination camp at that time.

The text discusses the court files of the trial of an Oświęcim Camp Security guard, who in 1946, while on duty, shot an individual suspected of profaning remains of victims of the Auschwitz camp. This case remains the only known and such well documented instance of a killing of a ‘Canada man’ (Kanadziarz) by an employee of the Auschwitz Museum. The documents were produced by the Magistrate’s Court in Oświęcim, the Regional Court in Wadowice, and the Appellate Court in Cracow, where the security guard stood trial. The procedural materials, which include reports on interviews with witnesses and the defendant, the sentences passed by the two instances and their interpretations, and the appeals, are stored in the Archive of the Cracow Branch of the Institute of National Remembrance. They show how the territory of the former camp in Auschwitz was protected during the first years after its liberation. Moreover, they are a valuable source when it comes to research on profanation of remains of victims of the Holocaust and the former concentration camps.

Contrary to Waffen SS and Kriminalpolizei, for many years after the war Ordnungspolizei and Schutzpolizei were not deemed criminal organisations. Finally, in the 1990s Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen publicized the crimes committed by the police battalions. But the involvement of many high rank police functionaries and officers in, for instance, Aktion Reinhardt or Aktion Erntefest remains insufficiently examined and described. The author of the article presents the content of the dispersed body of sources for research on police battalions. It contains files of postwar investigations conducted by the Dortmund, Ludwigsburg, and Coblenz public persecution services, the Kriminalpolizei documentation in the State Archive in Münster and Duisburg, documentation od the Stasi Records Agency, denazification proceedings files, and records of the Nazi Documentation Centre, the Wehrmacht Information Bureau in Berlin, the Military Archive in Freiburg, and others. The author discusses both the potential and the limitations of these sources. Using the example of Erich Steidtmann, she shows the German judiciary’s reluctance to prosecute those crimes, as police officer Steidtmann avoided charges even though in 1963 during his interrogation as a witness he admitted his participation in anti-Jewish campaigns in Warsaw. The documents which the author used to reconstruct Steidtmann’s biography show the whole spectrum of issues connected with using the said body of sources: they not only describe historic events, but also show the pursuit of criminals, the possibilities of covering up the crimes, and the mistakes and negligence during the post-war investigations. Nonetheless, if one makes an effort to find, compare, and link the dispersed information from the investigation files (witness testimonies), personal documents, and historical publications, it is possible to accurately reconstruct the biographies of Ordnungspolizei and Schutzpolizei functionaries and determine their role in the Holocaust.

During World War II the Polish legation in Bern provided considerable help to Polish Jews in Switzerland and occupied Poland, not only through financial and material support but also its engagement, for instance, in the campaign to aid Jews in Shanghai by offering its diplomatic channels to various organisations and mediation in obtainment of South American documents. Those activities would have been impossible without the support, engagement, and efforts of legate Aleksander Ładoś and his subordinates. The article discusses Ładoś and the role of the Polish legation in Bern in rescuing Jews.

This article presents the complexity of life of mixed married couples in two large cities, Wrocław and Hamburg, during the Third Reich. The stories of six mixed families outline the issue of help provided to Jews by their non-Jewish spouses. Each case is analysed in terms of the survival strategy, the changing family constellations, the methods and possibilities of provision of help, and the dangers and dilemmas faced by the families of the mixed married couples.

 In the first half of 1942 pollsters of Oneg Shabbat’s underground archive of the Warsaw ghetto conducted interviews with eight Jewish intellectuals on the inffluence of the ghetto reality on the Jews’ social life and identity. Among the many topics discussed in those questionnaires, the author focuses on the respondents’ opinions on acculturation, which she presents in three contexts: the respondents’ personal experiences, their political views (almost all of them were Doikeit ideology supporters), and the pre-war discussion on the role of the Yiddish language and culture information of Jewish national identity. The respondents gave the acculturation in the ghetto a new dimension. Even though before the war Polonisation was not perceived as a definitely negative phenomenon, in the ghetto it began to be interpreted as a conscious decision to reject Jewish identity. Acculturation, which according to the respondents was not imposed by the Germans, became the main form of pathology in the Jewish intelligentsia milieus. In their critical interpretation of the ghetto reality the respondents perceived those processes as a danger to their nation’s identity comparable to the destructive activity of the Germans.

The author analyses fragments of testimonies about the Warsaw ghetto regarding children’s family relations. The article describes the demographic transformations that changed the social structure, which forced the families into functional adjustments. The most important change was the forcing of groups, which had not worked, that is children, to earn money. The article presents the consequences of those transformations for family relations and analyses the experience of childhood and parenthood in the ghetto.

The article talks about using term ‘evil’ in professional historical science. The author convinced that in history we can use this term, what’s more, we should research the imagination of ‘evil’ in perpetrator’s minds to understand the genocide and mass murder in 20th century.

The article attempts to deconstruct the dominant Polish discourse regarding the ‘Polish-Jewish relations’. Its central figures are the logic of the golden mean as a tool to reach historical truth, symmetrization of Polish and Jewish wrongs and faults, and hospitality as the prevalent attitude of Poles towards Jews. The authors show its opinion-forming power using three examples: a review of Paweł Pawlikowski’s film Ida, the reception of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and a discussion on the Righteous monuments, which were to be erected in Warsaw.

This text is not a review of Mikołaj Grynberg’s two books mentioned in the title but a proposition of their joint reading in the context of oral Holocaust history on the one hand and reflection on the Holocaust heritage in the ‘second generation’, that is the generation of survivors’ children, on the other. I pursue the former goal by inscribing Ocaleni z XX wieku in the oral history documentary-research tradition, including an attempt to interpret the testimonies from that book in the categories of ‘deep memory’ and its types distinguished by Lawrence Langer in his excellent book Holocaust Testimonies. The Ruins of Memory, which has recently been published in Polish. To achieve the second goal, that is, to bring out the tensions between the first and the second, post-Holocaust generation, I compare Grynberg’s two books with Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus. Last but not least, I inquire about the boundaries of the community of Holocaust memory as ‘family memory’.