The article is both a reexamination of the history of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto as well as a novel attempt at the reinterpretation of its meaning. While the role of the Jewish Fighting Organization and of the Jewish Military Union (as well as the political movements which stood behind them) is a matter of well-established record, the essential participation of the civilian population has been underreported. The article provides also an extensive overview of the political situation inside the ghetto prior to the Uprising and the nature of contacts between the Jewish underground and the Polish resistance leadership on the ‘Aryan’ side of the city. Finally, the article looks at various ways in which the historical legacy of the Uprising has been used and abused, both in Poland and Israel.

The most valuable testimony about the Holocaust in Łuków, a county town in the Lublin province, was written by a man known as Stanisław Żemiński. Nothing else was known about the author of that shocking and emphatic diary. No biographical details – where he came from, where he lived, what happened to him after the war – could be established. The author of this article discovers Żemiński’s true identity. His real name was Stanisław Żemis. As a young man he was a teacher and Janusz Korczak’s coworker. During the occupation he was in Łuków, where he was active in a cooperative and in the underground. After the liberation he became the first mayor of Siedlce. He then settled in Warsaw, where, after losing his sight, he became engaged in efforts to help the blind.

In the state archive in Chełm there is almost no documentation directly describing the Holocaust. But there are dozens of documents which illustrate the clerical approach to that phenomenon, with that approach being clearly articulated at that. The reader can connect a given document with the Holocaust only by using his external knowledge. The most striking aspect, however, is the reasons why those documents were produced. Those were usually some prosaic matters: a cost breakdown, an explanation why some tools went missing, fire reports, etc. From them arises the prosaic nature of the Holocaust. In some of the documents the Holocaust is only alluded to. It is only owing to our general knowledge that we know that a certain document regarded, for instance, the tracking down of Jews in hiding.

The "Bednarz investigation" is the first investigation on the functioning of the death camp in Chełmno nad Nerem. The materials collected at that time were used, among others, during the Nuremberg trial and the post-war trials of Nazi criminals in Poland and Germany.

During World War Two, the urban structures along with buildings of several Jewish quarters in Poland as well as in other European countries were demolished by the Nazis to a great degree. After 1989, the process or recovering the memory of the Jews developed. Many buildings in the areas of former Jewish districts were renovated to serve as an element of local tourist offers. At the same time, non-commercial, educational and artistic projects commemorating the Holocaust were initiated. In this paper such issues are a reference point for analyzing the post-war history of “Podzamcze”, the former Jewish neighborhood in Lublin from the destruction of the historical Jewish quarter in 1942–1954, via creating a new urban structure
in its former location by the communist regime in 1954, to the initiatives undertaken on a wider scale since the 1980s focused on commemorating Jews of Lublin and the district itself within its former area.

This article is a revision of causes of anti-Jewish violence that swept through the provincial towns and villages in Central Poland (in Kielce Voievodship) in the years 1935–1937 and included well-known pogrom in Przytyk in 1936. By studying political activity of the National Party (Stronnictwo Narodowe) and its ‘young’ radical members in the years 1931–1935, it shows their role in implementation of specific political culture of anti-Jewish violence, radical modernist Antisemitism, fascism and militarism in the Polish countryside, that all became crucial context of events that took place in the subsequent years.

This article describes how Jewish communists associated with the milieu of the illegal Polish Workers’ Party were hiding in occupied Warsaw. The communists created an exclusive help network, which had substantial assets: opportunities for obtaining false papers, means of subsistence, and accommodation. It also gave one a chance to participate in the struggle against the Germans and a sense of meaning. The help network was not established for the purpose of helping the Jews – the Jews and their families were aided as party members, somewhat incidentally

This text analyzes how the underground civil and military judiciary (Special Civil Court and Special Military Court) treated the plague of blackmail and denunciations which threatened the Jews hiding in Warsaw during 1942–1944. A broad search query in archives has led to a review of several theses and opinions functioning in the subject literature. It occurred that the Special Civil Court in Warsaw passed the ϐirst sentences on the blackmailers a few months earlier than previously thought, though those sentences were not carried out due to lack of technical possibilities. The critical analysis of the sources also made it possible to disprove the belief that Jan Łakiński was sentenced and liquidated for his contribution to the discovery of the shelter where the creator of Oneg Shabbat, Emanuel Ringelblum, was hiding. The fact that Łakiński was liquidated shortly after was, as it turned out, only a coincidence. The person actually responsible for the discovery of the shelter and Ringelblum’s death was not found and punished by the underground. The author has exceeded his predecessors in terms of the level of detail exhibited in his reconstruction of the functioning of the Special Civil Court in Warsaw, his description of the manner and circumstances of carrying out of all the sentences passed on individuals found guilty of anti-Jewish activity, and his discussion on the issue of the effectiveness of the surveillance of blackmailers carried out by various structures of the Polish underground.

This text is devoted to selected visual records produced in the face of the Holocaust by the following artists: Felicjan Szczęsny Kowarski, Krzysztof Henisz, Aleksander Świdwiński, and Mieczysław Wejman. Vast majority of these works of art comes from the war period (1940– 1944), with a few produced immediately after the war (1946–1948). The author analyzes predominantly their referential layer as well as the modes of representation they employ, the dating of speciϐic objects, and the references to their accompanying historical framework. She also reflects on identity, motivations, and the degree of existential, ethical, and artistic engagement of the artists in the face of the Holocaust, which was happening right before their eyes, in their immediate vicinity. The central question Nader directs not only at the artists and their works, but also at the field of art history is one that Jan Tomasz Gross has asked: “What did you do/What was done to help the Jews?” bearing in mind that doing nothing was also an action with consequences. The most important conception developed in this text is the category of the artist – a close observer of the Shoah. Moreover, this question about Polish bystanders also makes her inquire about the foundations of the field of art history as such. The author postulates changing the episteme in the space of the contemporary and modern history of art in Poland as there still has been no response to the challenge posed by works produced in the face of the Holocaust and from the Holocaust.

This article undertakes to critically analyze the descriptions of anti-Jewish violence in postwar Poland included in memorial books. Its objective is to familiarize the reader with the form, structure, and main threads of the narration about this subject matter. The author discusses, among others, the placement of the texts devoted to the postwar violence against Jews in memorial books, their composition, genre diversification, and also the issues connected with the multitude of points of view and the authors’ status (including testimonies given by direct victims of the violence, repatriates from the USSR, Jewish ‘travelers’ visiting postwar Poland, and Christian witnesses). Aside analyzing the descriptions of the acts of violence, the author focuses on several selected issues: the physical and mental condition of the survivors returning to their hometowns, the reaction to their returns on the part of the Christian population, and the reasons for the postwar violence (traditions of prewar Antisemitism, Polish complicity in the Holocaust crimes, and the demoralizing influence of the Nazi occupation). But the most important research problem is answering the question about the overall vision of Polish-Jewish relations immediately after the war present in the memorial books, as well as indicating this vision’s most characteristic denominators.

This article describes the course, scope, and results of the exhumation/archaeological excavation conducted in 2001 at the crime scene at Jedwabne and also the conclusions those works pointed to. The outcome of those works has never been presented to the public in a methodical and exhaustive way. Nevertheless, the issue of the unfinished exhumation of the victims of the 1941 pogrom of Jews constitutes one of the key elements in the revisionist current of the debate on Jedwabne. This article explains, for instance, the origin of the firearm ammunition elements found at the crime scene, the presence of which constitutes one of the fundamental arguments in the negationist discourse. The source basis for this text is mostly the files of the investigation conducted during 2000–2003 by the Białystok branch of the Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation.

In this article I describe the phenomenon of the false historical object in Holocaust research by analyzing the three Polish editions of Rutka Laskier’s diary (with particular attention paid to the latest one). I show that a false historical object is a result of the loss of material/physical contact with the historical source and that it attempts to substitute the document. This is why editions of certain novels stylized as personal document literature eagerly imitate the old texts both in the visual layer (the reader is faced with the manuscript’s facsimile, sepiacolored paper, and old photographs) and in the layer of the events presented (in the novel its author does not always specify that it is fiction). nThis essay also presents the key mistakes made while rewriting Laskier’s diary by its publisher; analyzes the visual and material layer of its third edition (which follows the ‘not a sin-gle page without a photograph’ rule) in reference to the rules adopted by the Polish Center for Holocaust Research and the Jewish Historical Institute for editing diaries (particularly those written by adolescent girls); and discusses the conceptions of necroesthetics and necropolitics, derived from new humanities, in the context of the practical aspect of the popularization of the diary, the history of how it was transported, and the interest taken in its author (particularly her appearance). In the part devoted to the conclusions Tomczok wonders why this type of practices is not accompanied with deepened scholarly reflection and why there is a marked quantitative and qualitative difference between the scholarly editions of Laskier’s diary and those addressed to the general audience.

After World War Two, particularly in the years 1945–1947, various Jewish organizations and newspapers sent their representatives and reporters to Poland to examine the destruction of the country and estimate the situation of survivors. Most of these travelers visited the sites of former concentration and death camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau The author discusses and compares reports from three such visits by Joseph Tenenbaum (written in English) and Jacob
Pat and Mordecai Tsanin (written in Yiddish). The article is annotated with a translation of four chapters from the discussed books. Three of them describe visits to Auschwitz and the fourth concerns the so called “gold rush,” that is looking for valuables in the ashes of former death camps by individuals and organized gangs.

The document discussed in this article was discovered by Alina Skibińska in the Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It is a memo written by Professor Olgierd Górka (1887–1955), a historian and the director of the Bureau for Jewish Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, concerning an audience with Cardinal August Hlond (1881–1948) in Warsaw on 3 June 1946 attended by the chairman of the World Association of Polish Jews, Joseph Tenenbaum (1887–1961).