This volume contains a selection of articles from Holocaust. Studies and Materials published by the Centre for Holocaust Research during 2014–2016. This is already the fourth English volume intended to familiarise the foreign reader with the newest Polish research on the Holocaust and also introducing unknown documents from Polish archives into scholarly circulation. The previous editions were published in 2008, 2010, and 2013.

The several dozen texts in this volume are arranged in an order modelled on the Polish-language version, though it was decided not to include a selection of the reviews printed in our periodical.

During the occupation, the Germans re-organised the Polish police forces. The regular police, henceforth known as ‘blue police’, resumed its duties under the supervision of the German Order Police [Orpo – Ordnungspolizei], while the secret police, now called Polish Criminal Police, was incorporated into the German Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo. Although there have been no historical studies of the Polish Kripo, it seems that this organisation played an essential role in tracking down and killing the Jews in hiding. This article, which largely draws on previously unknown archival material, focuses on the Warsaw section of the Polish Criminal Police. More specifically, it discusses the creation and the role of several specialised units, created for the sole reason of hunting down the Jews in hiding, in Warsaw, during the 1943–1944 period. The units have been responsible, among others, for the detection and arrest of Emanuel Ringelblum, the founder of “Oneg Shabbat”, the underground archive of the Warsaw ghetto.

The text talks about the reaction of the Polish government in London to the outbreak of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto and Szmul Zygielbojm’s suicide. The author analyses stenographic records of the sessions of the Polish government in exile, daily logs of the president’s and PM’s activity, stenographic records of the National Council sessions, correspondence sent by the government to Warsaw, the content of official declarations of the government, and the Polish press between April and June 1943. The author reconstructs the government’s state of knowledge regarding the situation in Warsaw and presents the chronology of its popularisation. He also wonders what influence the-then political crisis (the German propaganda’s revelation of the massacre of Polish officers in Katyń and Stalin’s severance of diplomatic relations with the Polish government) had on the government’s approach to the situation in the occupied country, particularly with regard to the fighting in the Warsaw ghetto.

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 industry affair’ show trial and also spent a few years in prison.

The Nazi looting of works of art and cultural goods during 1933–1945 is usually divided into institutionalized and unauthorized, that is, wild one. The former was conducted by state and party special organizations and authorities, while the latter, widespread extensively in the east, was practiced by many Germans on their own account. The author suggests introducing a separate category of “specialized

looting”, encompassing those who engaged in looting with full awareness – on their own account and/or on commission – and who were proficient in evaluation of the artistic goods and knew where and in whose possession they could be found. In the Reich and in occupied France and Holland there were many such expert robbers. In Poland their number remained small after the initial wave of official confiscations. The most notable exception was the Dutchman, Pieter Nicolaas Menten (1899–1987), who after the war became one of the wealthiest citizens of Holland and owner of a private art collection unavailable to the public.

The scope, character, and methods of the looting conducted by Menten for his private use in Kraków and Lvov during the German occupation between early 1940 and the end of 1942 make him a very special case in the history of Nazi looting. These aspects are analyzed 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 the late 1940s and was followed by next ones in the late 1970s), who was accused 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 Kraków, where he was an appointed forced administrator of four Jewish artistic salons, or in Lvov, where he appropriated art collections and furnishings 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 railway carriages of valuable works of art, gold and silverware, antique furniture, and Oriental rugs. The post-war collection of works of art in Menten’s possession wasn’t liable to confiscation under Dutch law and has become dispersed.

This article discusses the armed anti-Jewish violence and the events connected with it, which occurred in the Polish Tatra Highlands (southern Poland) during1945–1947. The number of Jewish victims exceeded thirty, including children from Jewish orphanages. Among the perpetrators of those acts of terror were partisans from the group commanded by Józef Kuraś ‘Ogień’ – one of the most important symbols of anti-communist resistance. This article is a results of several years of research and is based on highly diverse sources. Its main purpose is to recreate those events, with particular attention given to the victims of those acts of violence.

A comparative analysis of the two monuments erected on one of the streets in the area of the former Warsaw Ghetto, the Umschlagplatz monument (1988) and the Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East (Pomnik Poległym i Pomordowanym na Wschodzie) (1995), shows how the equation of Nazism with Stalinism, if not with communism, has become inscribed in the symbolic topography of that place. The stake in this operation is the ‘Holocaustisation’ of the “Polish fate,” epitomised by deportations into the interior of the USSR and the massacre in Katyń. The anticommunist discourse with a still un-defused anti-Semitic potential (the myth of Judaeo-communism, the double genocide theory) constitutes the overall narrative framework. The result is the rationalisation (presentation as a well deserved punishment or self-defence) of the stances of the majority of Polish society and its behaviour toward Jews during the Holocaust. Instead of upsetting the heroic-martyrological narratives about the dominant group’s past, the increasing knowledge about the facts leads only to their mutation and strengthening. The context of this phenomenon is the politics of memory adopted by Poland and the Baltic states on the European forum. Its dynamic consists in shifting the limits of the European memory compromise, that is, in rationalisation of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism in an attempt to preserve one’s image as the hero and victim.

A group of more than 30 Jews was hiding in a dugout in a forest near Strzegom, a small village on the edge of a forest in the Świętokrzyskie Province. Attacked and robbed by the villagers who were members of the Home Army and Peasants’ Battalions, the Jews continued to hide in the forest in smaller groups. The same group of partisans that had attacked the Jews in the dugout continued to capture and murder them, including women and children. There were eight survivors: children and adolescents plus one adult. The article reconstructs the six-month period of hiding basing on a touching testimony of one of the surviving girls, Dora Zoberman, who gave it at the age of eleven, materials from the post war August Decree trials, and recent conversations with the survivors and Strzegom inhabitants. It also reconstructs the actions of the judiciary with regard to the crimes committed against the Jews. Sentenced to death, the murderers were pardoned and released after 1956. One of them received compensation in the 1990s for having been repressed because of his pro-independence activity. 

This article is an attempt to analyse the historical memory of Witold Pilecki functioning in the reference literature and collective consciousness. The author concentrates on their idealising and simplistic elements, which lead to mythologization of Pilecki, and asks about the genesis and purpose of creation of myths about the Captain. Basing on an analysis of the sources, Cuber questions the legitimacy of the two popular expressions used with regard to Pilecki, that is, “volunteer to Auschwitz” and “the author of the first report about the Holocaust.” In this way the author points out the necessity to correct and supplement Pilecki’s biography by means of a careful and cautious analysis of all the available sources.

Based on previously unknown archival documents, the author discusses the Polish Police functionaries’ participation in deportations of the Jewish population from Radomsko County to the ghetto in Radomsko or to death centres. The ‘blue’ policemen participated in the “Jewish campaigns” not only as guards, but they also took a direct part in both the loading of Jews and Jewish possessions and in the stamping of Jewish property. The policemen delegated from the local police stations to assist at the deportations were paid stipends from the budget of the

The article presents – based on a review of Sławomir Buryła’s book Tematy (nie) opisane – a polemic with the approach to the Holocaust as an element of the historical process, an element, which can be isolated from modernity and to which loftiness can be assigned. Czapliński contrasts it with the conception of the ‘Auschwitz virus’, according to which morality, economy, and science after the Holocaust shall never be able to separate themselves from it.

The article attempts to deconstruct the dominant Polish discourse regarding the ‘Polish-Jewish relations’. Its central ϐigures are: the logic of the golden mean as a tool to reach historical truth, symmetrisation 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.

The author discusses the most important phenomena in Polish historiography and the selected publications about the Holocaust released during 2003–2013. Similarly to ‘narrativists’, Krupa is interested in the shape, the language, the storytelling manner, and the metaphors used.

Having indicated the most important scholarly centres and publications of sources, the author concentrates on the camp monographs, syntheses and regional studies produced during that period, and then concludes that most of them are written in a very traditional way.

The year 2000, when [the Polish edition] of Jan Tomasz Gross’s book Neighbours was released, proved to be a breakthrough year for [Polish] historiography. Before analysing the far-reaching consequences of this publication, Krupa briefly discusses the polemics surrounding the other books by that author. On the one hand, they led to the birth of the historiographical ‘shadow cabinet’ –

a mobilisation of the milieu concentrated mostly around the IPN and directed at disparaging the significance of Gross’s publications. On the other hand, the most important consequence of Gross’s critical thinking about the Polish stances was the birth of the ‘peasant trend’ in [Polish] historiography. The books by Andrzej Żbikowski, Barbara Engelking, Jan Grabowski, as well as the collective works such as Prowincja noc and Zarys krajobrazu described, in a committed and interdisciplinary way, the shameful stances of the rural community – the denunciations, rapes, and even murders of Jews, with Tadeusz Markiel’s shocking testimony holding a special place among these publications. The works that acclaim the Polish stances and stress the Polish engagement in the rescuing of Jews (particularly those published within the framework of the IPN project „INDEX – In memory of Poles murdered or prosecuted by the Nazis because of their assistance to Jews”) are to constitute a counteroffer to the critical “peasant trend” within the framework of the “shadow cabinet.”

At the end of the article Krupa discusses the books that regard the unknown pages of the Holocaust history in Warsaw written by Agnieszka Haska, Barbara Engelking, Dariusz Libionka, or Libionka’s collaboration with Laurence Weinbaum, which are not revolutionary in the sphere of language but nonetheless broaden the knowledge on the Holocaust. The author ends his discussion with a reference to the monumental work Jewish Presence in Absence. The Aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland, 1944–2010, without which, just as without reflecting on the consequences of the Holocaust in general, it is impossible to understand Poles and the situation in Poland.

The author investigates how corpses of murdered Jews were hidden in towns during the occupation. She examines the case of Edward Toniakiewicz and his murder of three Jews he was hiding in his cellar, and whose bodies he then attempted to dump into a nearby pond. The crime came to light due to his neighbour’s curiosity. The investigation was conducted by the Polish ‘blue’ police, and its documentation was used during Toniakiewicz’s trial after the war. This revealing paper acquaints the reader with various aspects of the fate of Jews hiding on the ‘Aryan side’.

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.

The Home Army intelligence intercepted letters written by German officers and clerks to their families as well as those sent from Germany to friends and relatives on the front line. On the basis of that correspondence the Polish underground drafted
special intelligence reports, which were sent to London. The selection of letters devoted to the Holocaust presented in this article can make it easier to describe and understand the stances and opinions of “ordinary Germans” regarding the “final solution.”

The article presents a selection of documents from the files of several precincts of the Warsaw ‘blue’ police, which illustrate the involvement of Polish officers in the search for the Jews in hiding, during the 1942–1944 period.