Edward Kossoy (1913–2012) in memoriam

Photographs from Treblinka Memorial

Public impression of the Holocaust is unquestionably centred on knowledge about, and the image of, Auschwitz-Birkenau – the gas chambers, the crematoria, the systematic and industrialized killing of victims. Conversely, knowledge of the former extermination camp at Treblinka, which stands in stark contrast in terms of the visible evidence that survives pertaining to it, is less embedded in general public consciousness. As this paper argues, the contrasting level of knowledge about Auschwitz- Birkenau and Treblinka is centred upon the belief that physical evidence of the camps only survives when it is visible and above-ground. The perception of Treblinka as having been “destroyed” by the Nazis, and the belief that the bodies of all of the victims were cremated without trace, has resulted in a lack of investigation aimed at answering questions about the extent and nature of the camp, and the locations of mass graves and cremation pits. This paper discusses the evidence that demonstrates that traces of the camp do survive. It outlines how archival research and non-invasive archaeological survey has been used to re-evaluate the physical evidence pertaining to Treblinka in a way that respects Jewish Halacha Law. As well as facilitating spatial and temporal analysis of the former extermination camp, this survey has also revealed information about the cultural memory.

 In German-occupied Poznań during 1941–1943 there was the total of 29 forced labor camps for Jews. Those deported there were mostly women and men from the Łódź ghetto and the so-called provincial ghettos of Reichsgau Wartheland. They were assigned to hard earthwork in Poznań and its vicinity. Various regulations of the German administration of Reichsgau Wartenland regulated the living conditions of the prisoners, the way they were fed, accommodated, clothed and treated. The condition of the Jews detained in the camps was especially dramatic. They suffered from various infectious diseases, digestive tract diseases and had numerous ulcerations and wounds. Typhus fever, which spread especially fast, plagued most prisoners. Within the framework of the efforts to counteract its possible further spread, a few Jewish physicians were brought from Berlin to treat the prisoners. German companies’ owners also tried to bring physicians to the camps but they did that only to protect their interests. The physicians had limited possibility to help the sick due to the acute lack of medications and necessary medical instruments, ban on hospital treatment of Jews and impossibility to maintain standards of hygiene and cleanliness in the camps. The Jewish hospital set up in the city did not comply with any medical/sanitary standards, and many of its patients spent the last moments of their lives there. Out of nine identified Jewish physicians sent to Poznań only three managed to survive until the end of World War II.

This article attempts to reconstruct the ways in which the living handled the human remains at KL Auschwitz-Birkenau from the final evacuation until the establishment of the museum. The first part of the text describes the appearance of the camp after the Germans had abandoned it leaving the bodies, bones and human ashes. It then reconstructs the following actions: collection of the corpses, removal of the dead from the hospital, inspection of the places where the human ashes were, autopsies, religious ceremonies undertaken by the former prisoners, Polish Red Cross volunteers, medical personnel, etc. The text shows that those actions resulted in a creation of a new post-camp order administered by the Polish and Soviet authorities, initially represented by the military men, the Polish Society of Former Political Prisoners (Polski Związek Byłych Więźniów Politycznych) and the Catholic Church. The last part of the article describes the way of handling the corpses which developed in opposition to the official practice. That alternative order was developed by those who looked for valuables in the former camp where the human remains were.

Brandla Siekierkowa’s occupation-time diary and her 1949 memoir describe experiences which do not fit the main currents of Polish historical narration. After the liquidation of the Mińsk Mazowiecki ghetto in August 1942 the author, her husband and two sons found shelter in the Żwirówka village on the Bylickis’ farm. Brandla’s testimonies reveal a non-heroic dimension of the long-lasting and disinterested help, which occasioned mutual aversion. They fit neither the “positive” model of narration about the Righteous and the helpees nor the “fringe of the Holocaust” model where the Poles hurt the Jews. Brandla’s notes give us insight into the sphere situated between these two types of narration about the Polish-Jewish past

Władysław Strzemiński’s “Moim Przyjaciołom Żydom” (To My Jewish Friends) consists of ten collages. It was created right after World War II. Strzemiński did not date or sign the works. His works are collages of drawings, photos and expressive inscriptions. The interpretation proposed in the article bases on an attempt to identify the visual material and to analyze the relations between the text, drawing and photograph and on analyzing them in the political context of Poland in the late 1940s. All photographs Strzemiński used have a documental character. But they differ in the perspective from which they were taken. I would like to ask the following research questions. What can we see in the photos? Who took them and from what perspective? What is the connection between the photographer, the photographed and the viewer? In what way does Strzemiński’s cycle problematize the notion of the observer? In the article I try to metonymically read Strzemiński’s collages taking into account their materiality, the chain of meanings they create and the loops of gazes in the photos and their trajectories. I simultaneously determine the function of the “To My Jewish Friends” cycle in the context of the historical events taking place at that time (e.g. the Nazi war criminals’ trials or the Polish debates on Holocaust memory) while treating the collages not only as a testimony but also as a call for testimony addressed to the future. I also prove that the category of an affect (especially guilt and shame) is useful in the analysis of Strzemiński’s cycle and that in fact the works base on affectiveness and that they transmit specific affects. I ask what affects are the basis for Strzemiński’s cycle and what affects arise during their viewing. I reflect on their critical potential, the possibility to deal with them and the connection with memory and remembrance. My analysis reveals the category of “affective remembrance” of the Holocaust, which opens the present and the past to the horizon of hope and subject/political change.

 The article deals with rumors, which were circulated in the Białystok ghetto. It seems that a rumor is a form of collective interpretation of reality whose function is to structure equivocal situations by explaining events or predicting them. The mood and behavior of individuals and groups may be influenced by rumors, in particular if they find themselves – as the Jews in the ghettos – in an exceptional and lifethreatening situation characterized by insecurity, isolation and uncertainty. The article analyzes rumors relating to the deportations of Jews from the ghetto and German mass murder actions. It addresses the following questions: Which impact did the different rumors have? How did the Judenrat and the ghetto population react to them? The article demonstrates that Jews acted upon their apprehension or misapprehension of events and that their subjective evaluation of the German extermination policy influenced their behavior and decisions

Drawn from archives of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), and mainly the files of the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) and regional court records, this essay analyzes two lesser-known trials of Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust in wartime Galicia. One case features a typical German gendarme convicted but released from prison in the 1950s; the other features a married couple who shot Jews and others on an SS agricultural estate. Both cases highlight East German investigation methods and prosecutors’ use of evidence, while the second affords an opportunity to consider gendered aspects of wartime crimes and postwar trials. On the basis of these cases the author examines how evolving political considerations in the 1950s and 1960s shaped investigations, judicial process s, and sentences against Nazi perpetrators

This article presents the biography of Cywia Lubetkin focusing on her fate during the German occupation and the period of her activity in the Jewish underground, her engagement in the combat and her hiding on the “Aryan” side. It bases mostly on Cywia’s interviews and texts and talks about the evacuation of the fighters after the fall of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and the fate of that handful of survivors. They contacted the Polish underground, cooperated with Żegota (Council to Aid for Jews [Rada Pomocy Żydom]) helping many hiding Jews, preparing for further combat against the Germans and planning post-war life in the Jewish state. Cywia was actively engaged in that activity, she provided inspiration and help and organized the everyday life of the group of people living together. The Jews also participated in the Warsaw Uprising and after its fall a few of them were successfully evacuated from a house in the Żoliborz district of Warsaw, partly thanks to Cywia’s initiative.

During 1912–1942 the Orphanage was the main ground of Henryk Goldszmit/Janusz Korczak’s educational practice (1878–1942, physician, educationalist, writer), who was its director non stop since its establishment until the Orphanage’s extermination in Treblinka during the summer 1942 Warsaw ghetto liquidation action. The war losses included not only the casualties but also the institution’s own documentation, which is why all available surviving sources, even those of uncertain origin, are important while researching its history. A copy of undated 20 letters (or diary entries, some in German) of a new young employee, who wrote about the wartime everyday life in the Orphanage during 1940–1941 (original in Beit Lohamei Haghetaot in Israel) is such a source.

This article attempts to trace the way in which the war-time sources created during 1939–1942 in Janusz Korczak’s Orphanage have survived. It talks mostly about Korczak’s Ghetto Diary written in the ghetto from May to 4 August 1942. It also discusses the issue of the collection of documents revealed in Israel in 1988 which regarded the war-time fate of the Old Doctor, the children from the Orphanage and the Main Shelter Home (the place where Korczak also worked from a short period of time). Basing on the testimony the author of the text suggests a possible version of the events which contributed to the fact that the text left the closed district and survived the war

In fall 1941 the Jewish administration of the Łódź ghetto headed by Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski was ordered to receive 20,000 deportees from the Reich and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Rumkowski immediately began the preparations. Significant forces and resources of the Łódź ghetto administration were engaged in the operation. The Judenrat head’s documentation shows him as an able organizer, who personally oversaw the proceedings and held numerous meetings with his subordinate clerks. His actions fit a certain model of activity of representatives of ghetto administration toward the newcomers from the Reich and the Protectorate. Such persons were e.g. separated from the others and placed in the co-called collectives. Rumkowski established a special administrative agency to deal with the newcomers – the Newcomers Section

At the end of 1941 20,000 Jews were deported from Western Europe to the ghetto in Łódź. Among them there were a few hundred World War I veterans, many of whom were Iron Cross knights. The group was officially excluded from the deportations of Western European Jews to the Chelmno nad Nerem death camp in May 194 

The article presents the life of Jew Zygmunt Messing — a long-standing collaborator of the German secret services. One of the best Łódź ghetto Gestapo agents, he organized his own network of agents who mostly counteracted smuggling but who were also quite successful at carrying out surveillance of the resistance movement. After the war the Polish security organs frequently tried to recruit him

The article attempts to present two radically different interpretations of the book Szukajcie w popiołach. Papiery znalezione w Oświęcimiu (Look in the Ashes. Papers Found in Auschwitz) by an unknown author. The conflict aroused during the translation of the notes when the Italian translation editors questioned the Polish thesis that Willy, i.e. the letters’ addressee, was invented by the author. I tried to find out which party of the dispute was right. To that end I analyzed the text juxtaposing it with other texts e.g. with those of Sonderkommando members.

Another aspect included in the text is the instruction as to how the reader should read the book in order to fully understand the author’s message. Lastly, I wanted to discuss the problem faced by a translator who undertakes to work on a translation while using the target text instead of the source text

Survivors from Nazi concentration camps, who were brought to Sweden as refugees during the last month of the Second World War and during the summer that followed, were often required to supply information about personal details to the authorities. Much of the information was later stored in written form in the Swedish National Archives. Antisemitism among the refugees and enmity between the Jewish and non-Jewish Polish refugees caused the authorities to include their ethnic or religious affiliation in many records and documents. Using mainly two collections from the Swedish National Archives it is shown that substantial differences existed between Jewish and non-Jewish Polish refugees with respect to their age, education and the length of their war experiences. These differences, in addition to the existing socio-geographic, demographic, cultural and ethnic differences led to inevitable clashes between the two groups. The Swedish authorities who first regarded all refugees of Polish citizenship as one national group had to revise this attitude gradually during the administration of the refugees

In 1945 the building of the Central Judaist Library was inhabited by ca. 30 illegal tenants. After the real estate had been taken over in February 1946 by the Central Commission of Polish Jews most of them moved, but one family refused to leave the apartment they had been living in. Certain files that have survived in the Legal Department of the Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute contain correspondence regarding the rooms on Tłomackie Street, which allow for a reconstruction of the dispute that began in 1948 and which this article describes. Aside from the profiles of the illegal tenants we also present the profiles of the legal tenants of the building at Tłomackie Street No. 5