The article addresses the issues of various types of abuse in the presentation of the Holocaust in literature, art, and music. Kitsch is both ubiquitous and extremely difficult to define, and the Holocaust kitsch should not be separated from kitsch as a general category. The question is whether it is possible to talk at all about the appropriateness/inappropriateness of presentations of the Holocaust and where to look for benchmarks, standards, or criteria. The boundaries between evident abuse and artistically justification by provocation are sometimes difficult to define, as are the boundaries between aesthetic experimentation, which is intended to deepen the cognitive value of the presentation, and a trick calculated for commercial success. The presentation of the Holocaust falls within the field of tension between the “ethical content and literary form”, as Berel Lang puts it. The authors of the article suggest looking at the Holocaust kitsch from the perspective of the category of affect, pointing to various examples of the use of narrative techniques, which generate high-intensity emotions for the public, but which highlight the author himself, his writer, his emotional state, his concern or his transgressions. The presented world of the Holocaust becomes a pretext, background or decoration for showing the “Holocaust experiences” of the writer or poet himself. This narcissist characteristic seems to be one of the most pronounced manifestations of modern Holocaust kitsch. The authors' analyses also lead to the conclusion that Holocaust kitsch should be seen outside ethics and aesthetics as a tool for social influence and impact.

On February 17, 2021, Jan Jagielski, our Friend and member of the Scientific Council of our journal, died.

Probably every contemporary researcher of the history of Polish Jews has met, sooner or later, Mr. Janek, a man a legend, a man an institution. And everyone ended up in a large room at the Jewish Historical Institute, lined with shelves full of hundreds of binders. In each - dozens of photos documenting the material life of Polish Jews: no longer existing synagogues, cemeteries, and post-war commemorations. In front of the door, behind a massive desk, Mr. Janek, crowded with documents, was arranging another batch of photos ...

This article outlines the method of analyzing newest Polish poetry about the Holocaust from the perspective of ideological uses and abuses as well as interceptions, a method that makes references to the neo-Marxist ideology. The method of suspicious and critical reading of contemporary poems helps reveal the absence from the contemporary discourses of not only the Jewish experience, but also the Jewish Holocaust poetry which discusses it, both that produced in Polish and Yiddish. The analysis of Radosław Kobierski, Piotr Macierzyński, and Grzegorz Kwiatkowski’s works as well as the paraphrases, allusions, and quotations hidden in them reveals the ideological character of references to the Holocaust. By contrast, in a poem by Jacek Podsiadło the said references facilitate building a narrative about Holocaust poetry from scratch, which is the only way of saving it. The introduction of the conception of an archive-poem and a matrix-poem in contrast to a poem which absorbs other people’s voices and bases on abuses and interceptions, close to poetic survival, signals the insufficiently exploited potential of contemporary poetry which gives life to Jewish poetry and facilitates its survival.

This article is devoted to the phenomenon of fetishization of the authenticity of exhibits connected with the Holocaust and the space of museums/memorial sites, such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial Site or the Stutthof Museum in Sztutowo. This fetishization is founded on faith in the potency of Holocaust artifacts and it is manifested in the assumption that the artifacts are vehicles of the story about the victims and have an enormous potential of affecting museum visitors’ emotions. The fetishization is also connected with the sacralization of the artifacts and it results in the imperative to protect material traces of the Holocaust. This article presents various contradictions born from such assumptions and manifested in exhibition practices, conservation projects, principles of creating museum collections as well as ways of experiencing visits to museums/memorial sites and reception of exhibitions. The phenomenon of fetishization of authenticity is presented here in connection with the increase in the number of Holocaust representations in broad cultural circulation and the expansion of the multimedia culture and mass tourism, including Thana tourism.

This (abridged) article proposes a conceptual model of social interaction to consider the behavior of the ‘ordinary men’ of the Polish ‘Blue’ Police (Polnische Polizei) and the Holocaust. It suggests three key factors shaped the actions of its rank-and-file members: the German Order Police, the Polish Underground State, and the local population. This triangular matrix of pressures represents the structure within which the limited agency of the policemen must be placed. The analysis employs a broad, regional thick description of approximately 30 postwar trial proceedings of former members of the Blue Police and others tried or investigated on the basis of the August Decree of 1944, capturing some 70 named Blue Policemen. Its emphasis is on the so-called third phase of the Holocaust, characterized by widespread manhunts for fugitive Jews following the German deportation Aktions to death camps from mid-1942 to late 1944. The geographical focus of the investigation is the Subcarpathian region, which corresponded to seven counties (Kreise) in the eastern half of District Kraków of the General Government. The article finds that the behavior of the policemen was far more situational than it was ideological in nature. The case of the Blue Police points to a less determinate role of antisemitism in the spectrum of motivation. This does not negate the presence of antisemitism in its ranks or the deadly role the policemen played in relation to Jews in hiding, but it does question the attitude-behavior consistency as a sufficient explanation for participation in mass murder.

This article discusses Jews’ membership in Soviet partisan units in the Vilna and Novogrudok regions during the German occupation (1941‒1944). The author discusses and at the same time sums up the existing findings of historians from various countries which have been absent from Polish historiography. Aside the extensive bibliographical references, the article includes basic information about the location and operation of the Soviet partisan units which had Jewish members as well as the Jewish survival groups and family detachments. It also discusses their specificity, operation, and significance as the main determinant of survival of the Jewish population on those territories.

New documents and testimonies concerning the infamous, but incompletely described process of the profanation of the Treblinka mass graves in the years after the war, show that it was a popular process, the scale of which has not been completely determined. The mass graves began to be dug up immediately after the Germans’ escape in August 1944. The practice continued, gaining momentum particularly throughout 1946‒1947. Testimonies dating back to that period are surprisingly convergent. From the materials collected emerge important threads of spontaneous or criminal organization of that practice, the system of middlemen who helped sell the unearthed valuables, and the astonishing paralysis of the law enforcement agencies.

This article concerns forgotten short stories, films, and plays written during the first years after the war (1945‒1949) which evoked the chronologically close Holocaust experience. The author ventures a thesis that during that short period emerged representations that touched upon the most difficult aspects of the Holocaust and the relations between the Jewish victims and the ethnically Polish witnesses. The re-articulation of those issues was possible only nowadays. The works which took up the topic of the Polish surroundings’ hostility to the Jews, the appropriation of Jewish property by the Poles and the their compliance in the Holocaust have either been forgotten or – as in the case of movies – their distribution was discontinued. The period immediately after the war facilitates a closer look on the Polish awareness of the wartime and occupation-period events and also shows how the dominant Holocaust narration which was being born at that time obscures those diagnoses.

This article examines the post-war correspondence between Fajga Ginsburg, a Polish Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust in Lwów (today Lviv in Ukraine), and Tadeusz Kobyłko – a Pole who hid her and her niece. Their letters offer a window into intimate dilemmas in the aftermath of the war. Their relationship exemplifies decisions made by survivors with regard to their identity. Fajga’s letters express the emotional trauma of Jews who survived the Holocaust and show the lasting effects of post-war choices made by the survivors. Her letters also reveal how differently Faiga and Tadeusz understood their relationship and subsequent separation, in part due to their addressing different audiences whilst writing. While Fajga wrote personal letters to her husband, Tadeusz’s letters were sent to various Jewish and Polish institutions and were more official in nature. His letters clearly echoed his anger at the “Jews” whom he blamed for the breakdown of his family, but they are also permeated by a sense of threat of post-war antisemitism in Poland, as he himself experienced it after Fajga’s departure. Although the exchange of letters between Fajga and Tadeusz is rich and full of understatements, it refutes the stereotypes of a “nationalist Pole” and a “self-conscious Jew”. Indeed, both categories turn out to be an oversimplification that does not reflect the complexity of the relationship, especially the one initiated under the duress of the Holocaust.

This article presents the biography of Feliks Tych, historian, researcher of the left, a long-standing employee of the Party History Institute of the Party History Institute of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, Central Archives of the the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, director of the Jewish Historical Institute. The text focuses on previously unknown threads of Tych’s life, concerning his Jewish home in Radomsko, and of his imprisonment and escape from the ghetto in the town on the eve of the great liquidation operation, as well as the circumstances of his survival in occupied Warsaw. The post-war fate of the historian is subsequently discussed, reflecting on the consequences of war-time experiences and their impact on Tych’s career choices.

The article is an introduction to the history of Polish Jews who, as a result of the agreement of the Polish and British Governments in 1942, landed in Jamaica, where they were placed in the in the Gibraltar internment camp. On their way to Jamaica, they were were under the impression that was the place where they could live and work as normally as possible. But the reality turned out to be disappointing, something that was reflected in letters of the interned which were sent to Ignacy Schwarzbart attached to this text, member of the National Council of the Republic of Poland in exile.

This article analyses an unpublished fragment of the memoir written shortly after the end of World War II by the then 20-year-old student, later Professor Andrzej Wędzki. This document was found in the Poznań Branch of the Archives of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2020. After the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Andrzej Wędzki and his family were forced to leave their apartment in the city of Leszno, and via Krakow he reached Miechów. He stayed there from mid-1941 until the end of the war in 1945. Andrzej Wędzki witnessed the persecution and then the murder of a large local Jewish community, which he described in detail in the memoir. This document contains a comprehensive description of the Poles’ attitude towards the persecution of the Jewish and Polish population committed by the Germans. The memoir is an important document showing Germans’ crimes against the Jews in the Miechów region. At the same time the memoir contributes to the discussion on the attitude of the Polish population towards the Holocaust.

Digital games are the world’s most popular and profitable form of entertainment, accounting for 116 billion dollars in yearly revenue and 2.3 billion people playing in 2018. Games taking place during the Second World War and/or involving Nazis constitute a well-established sub-genre within this digital game culture. Given this background, comparatively little attention has been paid to the representation of Nazis in the medium and how this portrayal affects popular imaginations of Nazism and its crimes. This paper  aims to investigate these questions and discuss the impact of games set in WW2 on Holocaust memory using the example of the Wolfenstein Game series.

Online commemorations are associated with scandals and faux pases, but many content creators do not intend to offend anybody or become an object of online hate. Aside the existing methods of describing digital commemorations (content analysis, comparisons with the traditional media memory), the article makes use of netnography, that is observation and analysis of Internet users’ behavior. It also examines the ecosystem of the digital media in the context of platform capitalism. The research materials are: the yolocaust.de website, photographs of Auschwitz by Tomasz Lewandowski, and survivor Inge Ginsberg’s heavy metal performances.

This article analyzes three children’s books which talk about the Holocaust (Joanna Rudniańska’s Kotka Brygidy [Bridget’s she-cat], Grażyna Bąkiewicz’s Ta potworna wojna [this horrible war] with Artur Nowicki’s illustrations, and Agata Tuszyńska and Iwona Chmielewska’s Mama zawsze wraca [mom always comes back]) as well as scholarly and political commentary texts regarding this phenomenon. Holocaust children’s literature is often described as an educational medium that shapes young readers’ stances. Thus, it presents various values and constitutes a sphere of ideological tensions. Within this framework one can identify the abuses present in the works and discussed in the studies such as the characters’ moral ambiguity, using comedy and the comic book form, or aestheticization and commercialization of books about the Holocaust. These are the issues to which this article is devoted. It is to interpret the artistic phenomena and their reception by adult readers, who often adopt clearly subjective stances, expressing political and moral judgments on texts for non-adults and the images of the Holocaust presented there as well as the very act of writing for children about the Shoah.

The paper discusses the archival photographs from the death camps of Belzec and Treblinka, taken during the postwar investigations. Using the new theories of visual turn and forensic turn, the author examines its usefulness in the historical research and goes out beyond the traditionally considered categories of the historical sources and testimony. The essential notions of forensic aesthetics, forensic sensitivity and counter aesthetics are considered here not only as the theoretical approaches, but also as the practices of the critical writing of the testimonies from the mass killing cites. It sets the new research perspectives in the fundamental discourses of historiography and Holocaust studies.

The author reconstructs and critically analyzes contemporary models of social and cultural memory of the Holocaust and considers their consequences for the understanding of politics of memory. The subject of consideration are the dominant trends in memory studies, referring to Chantal Mouffe (the concept of agon) and, more deeply, to Mikhail Bakhtin (polyphony and dialogicity), i.e. the concepts of agonic and multidirectional memory. As a counterpoint to these concepts, the author develops threads underestimated in previous research: the issues of the social (class) condition of memory, symbolic violence and legitimacy, which shape cultural memory and representations of the past.

In the article I analyzed different strategies of representing the Holocaust in initiatives commemorating Jewish communities in local Poland. The annihilation of the Jews is the example of a difficult memory. The social phenomenon undermines the group values and social norms. With regard to local communities the difficult memory has often stemmed from the experience of “being close to the Shoah”. The particular position toward suffering of Jewish community had become a ground for varied attitudes of (co)responsibility and (co)participation of members of local communities regarding the Holocaust. Generally, memory about those events was subject of a vernacular transmission after the war, yet it didn’t become public one. In the consequence, in towns inhabited by numerous Jewish communities till the Holocaust, a specific community of memory had been shaped aftermath: characterized mainly by conspiracy of silence regarding Jewish history and culture. Yet, in the recent time in those social spaces one may observe more and more commemorative initiatives which has been invoking various aspects of the local Jewish heritage. Usually, in commemorative practices and products a group portraits itself. Thus, referring – by almost exclusively non-Jewish social actors – to Jewish history and culture has raised some ethical concerns. In the article I took into consideration form, content and social actors involved in selected commemorative practices (such as days of memory, lectures, walks, performances) and commemorative products (books, documentaries, inhibits of local museums, memorials) which concern the annihilation of the Jewish community. It enabled me to characterize a self-perception (actual or desired) of a group in the context of invoked history of the Holocaust. Important was what in this specific representation of the past remained absent or silenced. In the article I distinguished three strategies of representing the annihilation of the Jews, which are as follows: 1) neutralizing and closing up difficult themes; 2) counterbalancing, excluding and subordinating history of the Shoah; 3) including and recognizing the Jewish memory. I applied critical discourse analysis referring to Elżbieta Janicka and Tomasz Żukowski’s study of philosemitic violence, among others. To this regard I related to sociological case studies carried on in Bobowa, Dąbrowa Tarnowska and Rymanow (2010–2016). I conducted desk research, both individual in-depth and focus group interviews, and participant observation.

During 5‒9 November 1941 5,000 Roma and Sinti were deported to the Gypsy camp established in an area portioned out from the Łódź ghetto. The conditions in the hastily organized camp, which consisted of only about a dozen buildings, were horrible. Due to the lack of lavatories and the horrific living conditions approx. 600 people died of a typhus epidemic over the course of the first weeks of the camp’s existence. The rest of the ghetto residents were deported in December 1941 or January 1942 to the Chełmno nad Nerem extermination center, where they were killed. This article is devoted to the history of that camp, particularly the process of its liquidation, which has constituted the least researched thread of the history of the Gypsy camp in the Łódź ghetto.

In pre-war Poland there was a large group of Jewish collectors and owners of works of art, paintings in particular. The names of some of them appeared in the catalogs of prestigious exhibitions organized in Warsaw, Cracow or Lviv, while many others did not make their collections publicly available or have done so incognito. Almost all of them perished in the Holocaust, and their works of Polish (including Polish-Jewish) and foreign artists and their entire assets were lost as a result of Nazi confiscation or misappropriation by non-Jewish population. After the war, the existence of this deserving group for culture and art was completely erased from collective memory.

It was only recently that the first publications devoted to certain representatives and communities of Polish Jewish collectors were published, combined with attempts to reconstruct their collections. These are isolated cases because they require difficult and often not fruitful archival research. One example of such an extensive and largely unresearched archive material is cited by the author of war loss questionnaires kept in many national archives. However, their usefulness in examining individual collections and their fate, as well as the fate of their Jewish owners, is limited. In this context, the greater is value of compensation files based on the the Federal Restitution Law (BRüG) adopted in 1957, held in the Berlin State Archives, since significant part of the holdings are applications of Polish Jews regarding their movable property appropriated by the Third Reich. This archive material, which has not yet been explored by Polish researchers, is a highly wealthy source of knowledge in many respects. There are files of tens of unknown (or completely forgotten) Polish Jewish art owners, including undeniable collectors. The compensation claims submitted by them or their descendants in the late 1950s and 1960s in West Berlin provide plenty of data on German robbery and its mechanisms; they sometimes include information on the origin of the collections, a list of lost works of art or their detailed description. The Berlin archives also allow you to learn about the occupation-time  and post-war fate of the robbed owners, as well as their pre-war status, lifestyle and the character of their collections. The author, on the basis of three claims by Cracow collectors, shows the significance and wealth of the sources discovered in Berlin: Artur Wohl, the lawyer Schilim Jung, and the owners of the carpet factory Jakub and Regina Mikenbrun.

In the music notation, a pause indicates the duration of the silence. Sometimes this silence is precisely dictated by the pace of the piece and the number of notes in the bar, in other cases it depends more on the inner sense of time of the player. It also happens that the composer writes down silence at the end of the piece, not trusting - perhaps rightly - the performer that he will be able to sense and understand it himself. Sometimes even the whole piece, as in the case of John Cage's famous 4'33, is actually written four and a half minutes of silence. Silence can be of great importance, it can be saturated with meanings or it can be completely empty. 

Why am I writing about this? 

...

This article/essay is an attempt to discuss and critically read the interpretation of the doctrine of National Socialism in the form of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kempf, and primarily the Polish critical edition and publishing circumstances of the Polish edition of the deadly book by the leader of the Third Reich.

Mirosław Tryczyk’s first book on the participation of Poles in the HolocaustMiasta śmierci (cities of death), Sąsiedzkie pogromy Żydów (neighbors’ pogroms of Jews) was published in 2015. Speaking with the voices of the victims, perpetrators and bystanders, the author described the crimes committed in several places in Białystok in the summer of 1941. He reconstructed the appalling trajectory of the murders based on the repetition of similar sequences of events. The publication of Miasta śmierci did not lead to heated controversies boiling or mobilization on the side of the defenders of Polish innocence, who usually mobilize as soon as the subject of the participation of Poles in the Holocaust is brought light. For some reason Tryczyk was spared this spectacle of public chastising. In view of the silence of the usually sonorous defenders of the good of the  Poles, serious allegations against the author of the book were made in the historical reviews. What specifically did they relate to? What was the reception among historians ? What conclusions can be drawn from that discussion? The Article attempts to answer these and other questions.

The author discusses Miroslaw Tryczyk book Miasta śmierci, which allows him to consider the special nature of the “neighbors” pogroms in north-eastern Poland in summer 1941 against the background of attacks on various minorities in other parts of the world.

An essay written on the margin of The Black Book (in Polish edition). This is the volume of certificates about the Holocaust, which were gathered roughly in the former so-called pale of Jewish settlement by the Jewish Antyfascists Committee during or immediately after the war. The issue of the book was then retained by the Soviet authorities as part of the follow-up to the murder of members of the Committee. The author of the essay presents the source value of these certificates and some of their conclusions.

The article discusses the newest book by Michał Wójcik on the uprisings of Jewish inmates in death camps. On the one hand, it brings new information about various forms of resistance and heroic insurgents, whose attitudes are against the cruelty of the tormentors and the anti-Semitic prejudices of the Polish neighbors. On the other hand, with a strong empathy toward the Jewish inmates, it seems too critical to Polish fellow-prisoners, applying contemporary valuations to them.

Almost without exception, whenever Artur Zmijewski’s film The Game of Tag was screened, it was angrily received by viewers. In this article, Galit Eilat claims that the provocation created by the film and the anger it evokes are rooted in the struggle for the representation of the Holocaust and who was given the right to represent it. And so the debate, is there a ‘right way’ to remember Auschwitz, and if so, what is it? It is perhaps one of the ways to preserve the memory of the Holocaust in the present and not bury it in the past.

Photographs from the production of Artur Żmijewski's film Berek

In the fall of 2020 at the site of the former Sobibor German SS-Sonderkommando extermination center a new museum exhibition was opened to document the history of that place and commemorate its victims. The museum is located in a new minimalist building erected especially to that end. The exhibition has an exclusively documentary character. It makes limited use of multimedia and abstains from all forms of representation of history deemed inappropriate by the curators. It is not aimed at an artificial escalation of emotions. Instead, it is to be a place of “information, reflection, and mourning.” Despite its simplicity, it is extremely contemporary and it follows international trends in the sphere of commemorating genocides, particularly the Holocaust and other WWII crimes.

The presentation is based on the knowledge obtained during the archaeological works conducted since 2000, which have facilitated a verification of various information regarding the topography and history of the camp. They also brought to light thousands of artifacts which became the crux of the newly created exhibition, which is to constitute an introduction to visiting the historical site and make it easier for the visitors to “read to existing landscape.” The site of the camp still awaits ordering and commemoration.

Rzeszów belongs to this specific group of Polish cities which before the war were characterised by a large and dynamically developing Jewish community, which was then almost completely annihilated in the Holocaust. After World War II, no other city in Poland experienced a similar scale of socio-spatial changes and dynamic development. Jewish life, which until 1939 was a very visible element of urban space, does not exist today, and its remaining material traces are poorly identified by modern residents and are located on the absolute margins of their collective memory. This article deals with the problem of the disproportion between the rich history of Rzeszów Jews and their annihilation during the war, and the contemporary memory of them of today's residents. The text analyzes the history of the processes of symbolic commemoration of Jewish inhabitants and various forms of commemorating the Holocaust in the post-war period. This data is simultaneously confronted with regularly carried out research on historical awareness and collective memory on representative survey samples of the inhabitants of Rzeszów.

This article is a review of A Companion to the Holocaust – a collective work edited by Simone Gigliotti and Hilary Earl, which includes essays by Devin Pendas, Joanna Michlic, Aomar Boum, Tim Cole, and others. The author of the article situates the reviewed publication in a broader context of phenomena such as the ‘era of the post-witness’, the performative turn in Holocaust studies, the dominance of audiovisual media in memory, and post-memory of the Holocaust. The review reconstructs key areas of the subject matter discussed in the essays and divides them according to their main topic, such as, ‘new geographies’ and ‘new subjects’ in Holocaust studies and the role of the new media in Holocaust memory.