The article demonstrates hitherto not described events from the history of the Home Army partisan detachment “Wybraniecki”, which was famous in the Kielce region. It was under command of the legendary Marian Sołtysiak (nom de guerre “Barabasz”), who was at the same time the commanding officer of the Kielce Home Army Sabotage Directorate (Kedyw). Initially, the detachment was a seven-person strong sabotage group. In June 1943 it already had a few dozen members and was quartered in a forest camp. In spring 1944 it was transformed into a partisan detachment, which belonged to the 4^th Infantry Regiment of the Home Army Legions and which participated in the Operation Tempest. The events described in the article took place between the autumn of 1943 and spring of 1944, when the detachment’s squads were quartered in a few separate places and met from time to time during the concentrations ordered by the commander. At that time some Jews in hiding were murdered. Among those shot were: the group kept in hiding by the Pole Stefan Sawa (posthumously decorated with the Righteous among the Nations medal) in a cottage near Daleszyce, Michał Ferenc – Zajączków municipality clerk, Roman Olizarowski “Pomsta” – a “Wybraniecki” detachment soldier, who was liquidated after the discovery of his Jewish origin, Izaak Grynbaum from Chęciny and about three Jews hiding in bunkers near Mosty. After the war the following people stood trial: Edward Skrobot, Józef Molenda, Władysław Dziewiór, Mieczysław Szumielewicz and Marian Sołtysiak. The authors reconstruct the facts of those executions, discuss the motivations of the perpetrators and analyze them against the background of the functioning of the underground judiciary, and call into question the validity of some of its sentences. They also discuss the methods and line of defense of the accused ex-partisans.

The text attempts to reconstruct the circumstances of the death of a few dozen escapees – Polish Army soldiers in September 1939 of Jewish origin – from the camp in Lipowa Street in Lublin at the end of 1942. The case has been the subjof the persons connected with the nationalist underground in the Kraśnik district. Even though those trials were partly political (hence, the sources required particular criticism), it was possible to establish that the perpetrators were from a detachment of the National Military Organization-National Army (Narodowa Organizacja Wojskowa-Armia Narodowa, NOW-AN) set up near Kraśnik, which was then incorporated into the National Armed Forces (Narodowe Siły Zbrojne, NSZ). The author also takes up the issue of the general attitude of the NSZ in that area toward hiding Jews.

The author analyzes help by Poles decorated with the Righteous among the Nations medal to Jews hiding in the countryside during the Nazi occupation. The author demonstrates that stories told many years later differ from immediate post-war recollections. A statistical analysis of the extensive material yields information on the various regularities related to help in rural areas: that the scale of help depends on the integration of the Jews with the Polish society, that they most often sought help close to their places of residence, that help came more frequently form the peasants than from the educated village dwellers, and that the greatest threat to the helpers were their own neighbors.

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.

This text analyzes personal documents, with emphasis laid on how certain Jews, authors of the works discussed, perceived Poles. It contains testimonies on the various aspects of Polish-Jewish relations during the occupation. In particular in focuses on: Anti-Jewish prejudice and stereotypes, the indifference of Poles toward the persecuted Jews, the actions of helpers and those aimed at offering aid to Jews, on acts of treason and violence, robbery and theft of Jewish property, as well as on acts of violence by Poles on Jews.

Dreams are most often used during psychotherapy. Nonetheless, they can also be a historical source – a testimony to the experiences of specific people in a certain cultural context at a speciϐic moment in history. Dreams from the Holocaust period show the diversity of emotions experienced by the victims, their inexpressible experiences, and their longing for their relatives.

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 associated with the site and how much has been forgotten about its history.

Franz Konrad, the head of the Werterfassung – and institution, which seized and secured the property the deported Jews left behind in the Warsaw ghetto – was one of the key ϐigures in the ghetto after the Great Deportation Operation. Up to 4,000 ghetto inhabitants worked in the Werterfassung collecting, sorting and transporting looted property. Even though the institution was believed to be a workplace that offered relative security, almost all of its employees were deported in April 1943. The article, based on the ghetto inhabitants’ memoirs, stenographic records of Konrad’s trial and his testimonies given right after the war, records the role that he and the property conϐiscation played both in the everyday life of the ghetto as in the implementation of Operation Reinhardt.

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. In all close to 4,000 ofϐicers were vetted by the Commission, and some of them stood accused of involvement in persecuting the Jews. The ofϐicers involved were usually able to deϐlect 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.

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 holders. The group was officially excluded from the eportations of Western European Jews to the Chełmno nad Nerem death camp in May 1942.

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

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 Nuremburg,” a ϐinal reckoning for 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 organizational 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.

In the spring of 1943, in the village of Kosowice (Opatów county), in the house of Józef Machula, 5 members of the AK (Home Army) murdered 5 Jews (personal details unknown), including a woman and a child. In 1956 the case was taken to the Provincial Court of Kielce (Radom Branch). The accused were punished as a consequence

The soldiers of “Barwy Białe” partisan detachment of the Home Army established in late 1943 in the Opatów District participated in at least several murders of Jews – the murders in Goździelin, Lisów and Siekierno forests are documented. The last crime was committed on 16 or 17 August 1944, when the detachment (at that time a part of the 2nd Infantry Division) was marching to aid fighting Warsaw (as part of Operation Tempest). While stationed in Siekierno, the detachment’s commanding officer Kazimierz Olchowik “Zawisza” issued an order to execute a large group of Jews (30–58 people) living in the nearby forest after their escape from a labor camp in Skarżysko-Kamienna. After World War II most participants of the murders were tried and punished. No punishment, however, was imposed on the detachment’s commanding officer Kazimierz Olchowik, nor the sergeant, who went by the alias of “Bolrok” – the two men chiefly responsible for the murder in the Siekierno forests.

The author visited the villages and towns where the murders of Jews hiding in the Kielce region after the liquidation of the ghettos took place (the deeds were described in Jerzy Mazurek and Alina Skibińska’s text published in this volume). Only a few of the inhabitants, who were there during the war, remain, but the memory of the murdered Jews is still present. Both the memory of those killed by the passing Home Army detachment (and who were buried by the locals who were ordered to do so) and the memory of those denounced by the locals, killed on the spot or escorted to a German police station. Memory does not always entail compassion. The article proves that ϐield research, even when conducted so many years after the Holocaust, can bring additional knowledge to historical research.

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”. 

Jan Górnicki’s notes, written in May 1945, concern the days of the great deportation action in the Warsaw ghetto in July 1042. He was a young boy then, living with his mother and trying to earn some money riding a rickshaw. He describes the deteriorating conditions of the life in the ghetto and people in quest of any means to survive. In the end he presents dramatic scenes from Umschlagplatz, where the ghetto inhabitants were gathered for deportation.

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 October 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.