Israel Gutman in memoriam

Dreams, typically used as material for psychotherapy, may also be a historical source, testifying to the experiences of specific people in a certain cultural context and at a particular historical moment. Dreams dreamed during the Holocaust illustrate the wealth of emotions of the victims, their unspeakable experiences, as well as their longing for their loved ones

The article analyzes how Jewish life during the Holocaust is described in orthodox historiography. The author draws attention to the methodological problems of traditional orthodox historical writings on the subject. She also indicates how useful internal rabbinical sources can prove to highlight new aspects of research in this field, especially relating to religious life. Orthodox texts tend to glorify those who diligently observed the rules of religious lifestyle and protected them even during the Holocaust. They also emphasize the great responsibility of rabbis because of the need to teach halacha in circumstances where everything was a matter of life and death. Such sources should be included in research projects, subject to careful critical approach and placing them in a broad context.

 The paper presents the development of oral history about the Holocaust from the first research projects undertaken immediately after the war to the modern, global initiatives of recording interviews with survivors, and archives providing thousands of such audiovisual testimonies. This development forms a part of the broader perspective of collective memory – especially in the U.S. – about the Holocaust and the changes in the perception of survivors–witnesses and their testimonies. A special place within such memory was given to the historiography of the Holocaust – using several vivid examples, the author shows different approaches to these sources: from wary and even suspicious, to uncritically affirmative. The conclusion outlines other than purely historical possible interpretations of these sources.

The Polish Supreme National Tribunal (NTN) was established in January 1946 for the purpose of bringing major Nazi perpetrators to justice. Between 1946 and 1948, the NTN heard the cases of forty-nine defendants charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. In sharp contrast to the numerous political trials carried out in the country during the same period, in which thousands of individuals accused of “hampering socialist reconstruction” were sentenced to death or long prison terms, the NTN’s proceedings applied conventional legal and moral standards comparable to those used in Western courts and investigated each case comprehensively on its own merits.

After the liberation of France, French authorities decided to purge the police forces of suspected collaborators and Nazi sympathizers. The Parisian police force (numbering close to 20 000 officers and civilian employees) – by far the largest in the nation, underwent a scrutiny of the specially-created Commission d’Épuration, whose mandate extended to all members of the force active during the 1940–1944 period. All in all close to 4000 officers were vetted by the Commission, and some of them for stood accused of involvement in persecuting the Jews. The officers involved were usually able to deflect the accusations, quoting orders of their superiors and lack of own initiative. Harsh verdicts in these cases were rare, and the suspects were usually treated very leniently.

From 1944 to 1960, Poland held at least 32 000 trials for war crimes and collaboration; in particular, those records generated by the investigations of crimes against Jews have been the basis for ground-breaking studies of the Holocaust in Poland for over a decade now. While Poland was a society without a Quisling, these studies have shown that the country was still very much part of a pan-European continuum in which local people took part in ethnic cleansing inspired by the Nazi occupation. The question remains, then, of how effective the postwar judicial process against the collaborators was. This article makes use of the records of over 450 trials of accused collaborators, held between 1946 and 1949 at the district courts of Warsaw and Siedlce, of which about one-third are cases involving crimes against Jews. These trials are used as the starting point for a wider discussion of post-war justice in Poland.

War crimes trials roused considerable resistance in Germany. Here the author analyzes opposition to the Malmédy Trial, conducted at Dachau in 1946, citing documents made available under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act – in particular those of Roman Catholic auxiliary bishop of Munich Johannes Neuhäusler and regional Protestant bishop Theophil Wurm of Württemberg. These clergymen helped reduce sentences and obtain clemency for perpetrators. Munich lawyer and activist Rudolf Aschenauer, a close associate of Neuhäusler, coordinated a large network devoted to thwarting the convictions of the former Waffen-SS men. The author traces U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) monitoring of both Aschenauer and the bishops.

The article reconstructs the biography of Dr. Julian Chorążycki, initiator and first leader of the organization which prepared the revolt in the Treblinka extermination camp

This document presents a study of the context of the creation of the Jewish Fighting Organization, the course of fighting in the Warsaw ghetto as well as in other ghettos and camps in 1943. It was written in the spring of 1944 by Icchak Cukierman “Antek”, at that time the commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization, and then sent along with other materials of the Jewish underground to London. After the war, it was published in Palestine and became an important source for historians of the history of Jewish resistance.

Chajka Klinger, born in Będzin, was an activist in the Jewish underground in the local ghetto. One of the founders of the Jewish Fighting Organization in Będzin, she was arrested by the Gestapo. Released after interrogation and torture, she escaped from the transit camp and secretly began writing memories on the HaShomer HaTzair and the Będzin underground. After she escaped Poland, arrived in to Palestine in 1944.

When Jürgen Stroop, the suppressor of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, was brought in 1947 to Poland, his trial was projected to be the most important of those held to date against prominent Nazi officials in Poland. According to the Jewish press it was to be a “small Nuremberg,” a final reckoning with the crimes committed against the Jews of Warsaw during the Holocaust. Yet, four years later, in 1951, when the trial finally took place, its proceedings were barely noticed, both by Poles and by the still numerous Polish-Jewish community. Despite the particular place of the Jewish ghetto uprising in the Holocaust historiography, significant organisational efforts and protracted dealings to obtain extradition rights, the trial was to fall victim to the new era of Polish politics and Stalinist propaganda, exemplifying the growth of politically-shaped historiography. This article looks at the proceedings against Jürgen Stroop and his co-defendant, Franz Konrad, and includes material from the trial, in particular Stroop’s testimony regarding the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

 Diary of Miriam Chaszczewacka, a teenage resident of Radom. She wrote it since August 1939 – she started on the eve of the Third Reich’s attack on Poland – until the end of December 1942, when she was killed during the liquidation of the ghetto. Written in Polish, conceived as a letter to the future generations, Miriam’s diary shows the daily life in the ghetto and the extermination of its population based on the example of Radom. Her diary entries are mostly spontaneous notes of a young girl writing about her life. But she also describes the deteriorating conditions of the life in the ghetto and the general political situation. This is a dramatic record of the increasing awareness of the inevitably approaching death.

What can we learn from the documents in the trial of Gustav Trapp, 101 Reserve Police Battalion, which took place in Siedlce in 1948? Trapp was described in a book by an American historian Christopher Browning, who analyzed the mechanisms of exceptional crimes committed against the Jews by „ordinary men” of the battalion in the Lublin region during 1942–1944, on the basis of their testimonies before the German justice system in the 1960s. While Browning writes almost exclusively about the murder of the Jews, the Siedlce trial accentuates the murder of the Polish rural population. What are the reasons for such parallel historical approaches?

In Warsaw’s Central Archives of Modern Records, in a collection of documents known as the General Government Administration set, there are dozens of letters and petitions sent between October 1939 and May 1940 by residents of occupied areas to the new German authorities, including the Governor General Hans Frank. In the collection there are also several letters (presented in Polish translation) sent by the Jews. While the Polish, Ukrainian and Russian authors represented a wide range of professions and social positions, and the petition themselves – a variety of issues, all Jewish letters were sent by members of the social elite, and the majority of them voiced their objection to the compulsory armbands with the Star of David, as the order to wear them accentuated the social exclusion of Jews in both practical and symbolic sense. Asking for permission not to wear an armband, the authors of letters referred to their service in the Austrian or German army, their lack of association with Judaism, etc. However, regardless of the arguments, the very act of sending those letters can be seen as a form of spontaneous opposition, described by the Polish historian and sociologist Marcin Kula as “rebellious action”.

David Wdowinski (1895–1970) was the best-known survivor of the Zionist Revisionist Movement in the Warsaw Ghetto. A prominent psychiatrist in Poland, after the war, he settled in New York and joined the faculty of the New School for Social Research. Wdowinski’s memoir, And We Are Not Saved (published in 1963), was one of very few memoirs of life and death in the ghetto written from a Revisionist perspective. In that book, Wdowinski expressed his vehement objection to any reconciliation with Germans and, in fact, any normalization of relations between Germany and the State of Israel. In June 1964, at the request of the public prosecutor in Hamburg, Wdowinski received a form letter from the German consul in New York, Shacco von Estorff (1922–1980), summoning him to give testimony on the Dienststelle des SS- und Polizeiführer Lublin. Wdowinski’s long and impassioned reply constitutes a personal “J’Accuse” against German society’s half-hearted efforts at de-Nazification and its failure to confront its murderous history.

The Archives of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute contain autobiographical sources well-known to researchers, such as accounts, diaries or journals, grouped into three major collections: accounts (No. 301), diaries (No. 302) and the Underground Archives of the Warsaw Ghetto (the Ringelblum Archive). In addition, the archival holdings contain biographical documents scattered in many collections, sparsely used by the researchers, which include forms, surveys, registration lists, biographies, letters, and applications. These constitute not so much a complementary source of our knowledge of the Holocaust, but they help to expand it. They are invaluable given that they were written immediately after the war (mainly 1940s), and their authorship (survivors, their relatives, or witnesses). In these materials individual fates of Jewish citizens are focused, as well as tragic events in towns and villages overlooked in history books

 The Mersik–Tenenbaum archive is a collection of documents assembled in the Bialystok ghetto in the years 1942-1943 by Dror He-Chaluc activists: Mordechaj Tenenbaum-Tamarof, Cwi Mersik and Gedalia Petluk, consisting of accounts, diaries, records of the Jewish Council, leaflets, letters, and personal documents. These materials were hidden outside the ghetto in a house of a Pole, Dr. Bolesław Filipowski, in 1943 and found in 1944 or 1945 by Lejb Blumental, brother of the late Izrael Blumental, who was involved in hiding the documents. Some of the surviving material was sold to the Central Jewish Historical Commission and to this day remains in the archives of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, while others came to the Commission in duplicates, and some originals are in Israel, where they are scattered in the different centers. Most likely some part of the Underground Archive has not been found until today.

This paper presents two archival collections: death certificates of the Warsaw Jews (1939 and 1941), from the archives of the Jewish Historical Institute, and a collection of books kept in the State Archives in Warsaw, containing names of patients treated in 1939 and 1940 in the hospital at Czyste, and in the Bersohn and Bauman hospital. These collections are a part of official medical records, which today can be read as a record of the fate of the Warsaw Jews. These non-narrative documents are not the just the only testament to the existence of people claimed by the Holocaust, but they also reveal various aspects of their history to the modern reader, they become elements of a great historical fresco.

The article discusses three examples of literature concerning the fate of Jews during World War II, three attempts to bridge the gap between literature and document so as to work out an “optimal” way of writing about the Holocaust. All the texts taken into consideration were written, or rather composed as carefully edited collages of authentic documents. Read together, Peter Weiss’s The Investigation, Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust and Henryk Grynberg’s Children of Zion illustrate two significant processes: the implication of testimony in ideological causes and the purification of testimony from distorting, overtly political engagements.

Many cultural factors in Europe nowadays favor the closure of the issue of the Holocaust, making it a part of the past, something that no longer affects our serene and happy „today”. Forms of forgetting include, among others, forgiveness and reconciliation. Therefore, the memory of the evil of the Holocaust requires non-forgivingeness and non-reconciliation. The medium for memory can only be hatred. However, in the Christian tradition – based on keeping up appearances and pretending to be good – it is an embarrassing problem. Holocaust victims who do not want to give up hatred are once again accused and convicted, this time by their own hypocritical culture. The consequence of recognizing the inalienability of hatred as a medium is a demand for a reconstruction of basic metaphysical concepts of European culture, namely showing the illusiveness of metaphysics of good and beauty, exploring the metaphysics of evil, and the moral demand: décreation of the world, abolishing it as a vile and intolerable thing. Metaphysics of evil is an attempt to think in terms of experience contradictory to the most deeply embedded European intellectual habits. It is an attempt to think up a world where fundamental rules are disintegration, destruction, loss, distance, parting, separation, discontinuity, incompleteness. Where good – on the scale of cosmic entropy – is only an illusion, a transitional form (negative entropy), lasting shorter than a life single human.

This article is a critical discussion of the diary of one of the leading ideologists and politicians of the National Democracy in the twentieth century, Jędrzej Giertych (1904–1992). For more than half a century Giertych embodied everything that was considered political extremism in our nationalist tradition. Even in the late twentieth century, he symbolized the extreme fringe of the national traditions. Characteristically, for over a decade, in the face of political polarization in Poland, elements of that heritage have been included into the mainstream of thinking about public affairs.