The issue is devoted to the broadly understood problem of escapes from the Holocaust. The disgraceful attack by Vladimir Putin's Russia on Ukraine and its people has made this issue dramatically topical. Since the beginning of the war on February 24, 2022, Poland's borders have been crossed by hundreds of thousands of refugees from occupied areas and threatened by terror, unprecedented in the 21st century in Europe, on the part of the aggressors.

The choice of escapes as the most important topic of the volume was dictated not by the current context (Russian aggression could not have been predicted when designing this volume), but by the importance of this issue, which provoked various research questions. They concern, for example, the ways and possibilities of estimating the total number of ghetto escapees and their chances of survival.

Using the example of five biographies of Polish Jews, in his article the author analyzes the motives and ways of the escapes from the Germans. The sources are journals, letters, memoirs, early reports, and interviews. Analyzing the motives and circumstances of the escapes, the author compares two stages. The first one was just after the beginning of the German and Soviet occupation of Poland in September 1939 and the other one began after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. This comparison shows that despite the many differences, the similarities in the escapes’ circumstances were more numerous. In both cases, the following factors constituted a matter of life and death: the timing of the escape, the geographical proximity to the front line, the financial resources, the familial factors that accompanied the making of the decision to escape, and, last but not least, the age and gender.

In her article, Engelking analyzes the situation of Warsaw Jews during the Nazi occupation from the perspective of escapes. She discusses escapes from stigmatization (wearing armbands), hunger (from the closed ghetto, until the deportation), and death (during the Great Liquidation and later). Engelking lays particular emphasis on the Jews’ activity, agency, and determination.

This article summarizes a few dozen years of research on the Jewish-Highland smuggling networks which operated at the Polish-Slovakian border, particularly in Podhale and Spiš. It briefly presents the principles of their operation during the interwar period and the importance of the border for the inhabitants of the borderland. It describes the changes that occurred in the functioning and the role of the smuggling networks during World War II, when that illegal activity became the basis of the survival of Jews living in Podhale. The main part of the article reconstructs the network of relations and events during 1943–1944 which made it possible to use contacts with the smugglers and their paths in Podhale, Spiš, Orava, and Liptov so as to rescue hundreds of Jews from the General Government.

This article discusses the escapes of Jews from deportation trains going from the Białystok ghetto to Treblinka II. Based on the survivor testimonies regarding the two great deportation campaigns in February and August 1943, the author analyzes who, in what circumstances and how escaped from those trains, and whether those were spontaneous or organized escapes. The author pays particular attention to the Jews associated in organizations, who both individually and in groups made it possible for the deportees to escape from the freight cars, also in mass numbers. The escapes from deportation trains are seen as an important part of the Jewish resistance to the Nazi extermination policy

On the night of 1‒2 June 1944, a Home Army detachment commanded by Bolesław Kurpiewski “Orlik” attacked a Jewish camp at a swamp near the village of Podosie, on the border between Łomża and Ostrołęka Counties. Twelve Jews were killed. After the war, two trials were held, in which ten people were sentenced. This article describes the two trials, the testimonies of the accused and witnesses, and the later actions of the judiciary, also after the year 1989. It also discusses the current local memory of the crime. Bikont focuses in more detail on one of the men sentenced for the murder of the Jews at the swamp, Stefan Wyszkowski, and his son Krzysztof, who has been investigating the crime since the 1990s

Jan Karski’s meeting with Bundist Shmuel Zygielbojm has long been known from only one side. In an unstructured part of the Zygielbojm collection stored in the YIVO archives in New York, notes from the meeting written in Zygielbojm’s hand have been preserved. Using these previously unknown documents, this article allows us to look at that famous meeting, symbolizing wartime Polish-Jewish relations, in a new way and raise questions not only about the course of the conversation, but above all about the effect. The information obtained during it changed the way Zygielbojm looked at the situation of Jews in occupied Poland.

This text discusses Edward Rajnfeld (1910–1983), who in September 1943 reached London through occupied France, Spain, and Gibraltar as the first eyewitness to the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. The first part of the text deals with Rajnfeld’s youth; his stay in the ghetto and escape to the “Aryan” side; his illegal departure to Paris facilitated by an intelligence officer from the Main Command of the Home Army, Kazimierz Leski; and the route and details of Rajnfeld’s journey. The next part discusses the reactions to Rajnfeld’s arrival in London (at that time Rajnfeld was using the surname of Tohari); his testimonies; his propaganda and information activity conducted by order of the Polish government; his service in the Polish Army in Scotland, particularly his activity in the context of desertions of Jewish soldiers; his participation in combat operations in the ranks of the first Armored Division; and his post-war fate. The annex contains a selection of Rajnfeld-Tohari’s 1943‒1945 testimonies and statements.

This article presents and compares the strategies of hiding the Jewish identity of members of the communist resistance movement (the People’s Guard/People’s Army). It uses the example of the wartime memoirs of Barbara Sowińska (1912–2004) and Gustaw Alef-Bolkowiak (1916–1979). They both grew up in Jewish homes, but their experiences in Polish schools were key for the development of their hybrid identity. In the fall of 1939 they both fled across the River Bug, but in 1941 they did not manage to flee into the interior of the Soviet Union. They returned to Warsaw, where they soon joined the infant People’s Guard. After the war, they played a significant though secondary role in the construction of the new political system. They both wrote best-selling memoirs about the period when they had fought in the communist resistance movement, where they hid their Jewish origin. However, they chose different camouflage strategies, the discussion of which constitutes the essence of this article.

The basic source materials are the following two books: Stanisława Sowińska’s Lata walki [the years of struggle] and Gustaw Alef-Bolkowiak’s Gorące dni [hot days], which are juxtaposed with archival documents (party resumes, testimonies written for the communist party history archive, testimonies, etc.), and later testimonies and manuscripts, created in exile or for a foreign audience. The comparative analysis of their content facilitates highlighting the self-strategies of escape: both during the occupation and in communist Poland.

This article reconstructs the biography and the complex, intercultural, and international identity of Judith S. Kestenberg (1910–1999) – a Polish Jew born in an Orthodox family in Galicia, Austria-Hungary; a medical student in Vienna; an emigrant to the United States; a pioneer of psychoanalysis and therapeutic work with Holocaust survivors, dealing with the trauma of a daughter of Holocaust victims; and, last but not least, a mother and wife. The text presents the complex circumstances of Kestenberg’s departure from Austria in mid-1937 and her metaphorical escapes from the unbearable reality of the war and the Holocaust, as well as her complicated, ambiguous, and evolving attitude toward the losses and traumas suffered as a result of the war, the Holocaust, and the emigration, as well as toward Jewish and Polish identity. The article presents Kerstenberg’s personal attitude toward the Shoah which resulted from her losing her parents and her obsessive dedication to therapeutic work with the Holocaust survivors. During the first post-war decades in the milieus of Jewish survivors, immigrants, and even mental health professionals (including psychoanalysts) dominant was the conviction that it was better to forget the war, trauma, and loss. In 1968 Kestenberg began to create a new field of knowledge dedicated to survivors who had experienced wartime persecutions at a very young age. She believed that the only way to deal with the difficult past events was to talk about them, acknowledge them, and preserve them in the individual and collective memory.

The author reconstructed the history of Kestenberg’s family history and her biography on the basis of archival sources. Official historical sources usually ignore the voices and experiences of minorities, including women, Jews, immigrants, and non-citizens. This is why this article utilizes personal history materials such as memoirs, letters, published and unpublished interviews, and oral history (speeches, and the conversations I have had) as well as Kestenberg’s texts about her research on survivors.

The Kasztner train is one of the most well-known episodes of the Hungarian Holocaust. The action played a highly controversial role in the history of the Jewish self-rescue actions that elaborated in recent historiography. Instead of examining the negotiations between the SS and the Hungarian Zionist Rescue Committee, this study explores how the passengers of the Kasztner train narrated their controversial plight in their diaries, memoirs, and interviews. The inquiry seeks to uncover the history of the Kasztner action from a bottom-up perspective focusing on what was the role of news and rumors about the release in the narratives of the survivors. Hungarian Jewish families, i.e. the “Kasztner Jews” aspired to travel to Palestine, landed finally in Switzerland but directly left from Nazi-occupied Hungary to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The majority of them were spending months in a special sector of the camp between June and December 1944. The circumstances in the Hungarian Camp where the inmates were treated as “hostages” by the Nazis were unusual compared to the other – ordinary – camp sectors of Bergen-Belsen or other concentration camps. Due to this special status, the “Kasztner Jews” were not in emergency considering they did not suffer from starvation, aggression, and illnesses that lead to death. However, they were held under Nazi jurisdiction and were imprisoned by the SS, and were not convinced about their long-awaited survival.

The accounts written during the months spent in Bergen-Belsen shed light on the flow of information between prisoners in a particular situation. Attitudes to the news and interpretations were influenced by the ideological, religious, and personal background of the “Kasztner Jews”. The differences within the group determined the access to information: the Zionist leaders and their families were much more informed but everyone became part of the information network created by the participants to a certain degree. The uncertain plight and the vulnerability to the Nazis evolved ideas and visions of the possible future. The so-called rumor culture was a major phenomenon that featured everyday life. People who were consistently isolated from credible sources of information became both the creators and the consumers of the news. Besides the uncertainty, the moral ambiguity of Kasztner action was reflected in the participants’ narratives. Their attitudes towards the news were largely determined by the conclusions they drew about their own situation and future, which were influenced not only by their political orientation but also by their family situation. The condition of the prisoners from Auschwitz aroused sympathy and pity among them. On the other hand, the poor physical condition of these prisoners reinforced their privileged position. News of potential deportation from Budapest was also at the center of the discussions. Those who feared for their family members and relatives who were on the train and those who stayed in Budapest were trapped. When they heard the good news, they were glad that family members who stayed in Budapest were secure from deportation. At the same time, the distressing news reinforced their decision to leave the country. Diarists and memoirists have struggled to narrate all of this contradictions.

This analysis of Jewish testimonies related to Treblinka Penal Labor Camp I reveals the history of that center, which remains largely unknown to the general public. It aims to formulate new research questions regarding the camp’s character and function in the context of the nearby Treblinka II extermination center. As early as in the 1960s it was emphasized that Treblinka I was not a labor camp but a concentration camp, where the Jewish population was exterminated, selections were carried out, and the prisoners were murdered with extreme cruelty. The article outlines this perspective as well as presents the history of the Jewish underground, the unsuccessful attempt to start a rebellion, and the massacre of those who survived in the camp until the end of July 1944.

The article undertakes an analysis of a cycle of satirical graphic works by Teofila Langnas created in the Warsaw ghetto, portaying the activities of the Jewish Council faced with numerous challenges during the war. I analyse the meaning of each drawing dedidated to respective dapartments and offices of the Judenrat, often coded by Langnas through allusions or rebuses difficult to decipher by outsiders unfamiliar with ghetto life and the Jewish Council structure. I place the “Satyrical Album” in the context of other works by the artist and identify their interrelations and dating. I make an attempt to reconstruct Langnas’ artistic education in the graphic and design courses organized in the ghetto by the Jewish Council. Finally the circumstances of the making of the “Album” and other works by Langas are discussed as well the role Marcel Reich might play in that process – and how her oeuvre can be understood in the light of other satirical works created in the Warsaw ghetto.

The goal of the paper is to show how Mordechai Anielewicz, the commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization, was remembered and commemorated immediately after war. The author analyzed grassroots commemorations of Anielewicz (texts written by people who knew him personally) and showed what were their perceptions of Anielewicz at a time when the ghetto uprising did not yet have an established, institutionalized social and political meaning.

Secondly, the author focused on the emergence of institutional and collective memory of the leader of the ghetto uprising in the first years after the war. How did stories about him resonate with various postwar political realities of the communist Poland? What were the major narrating patterns along which Anielewicz’s life was rewritten shortly after his death? Analysis of Anielewicz’s ‘afterlife’ is vital for understanding the social, political, and historical meaning of both the figure and the uprising. The article is concentrated on post-war political struggles regarding Anielewicz’s status and his ideological position (the stake was the ‘ownership’ of the hero). By looking closely at the very beginning of the emergence of the myth the author demonstrated what Anielewicz had been embodying for historians, public, and survivors’ community, and how this meaning was being constructed (and manipulated).

Organized in cooperation with the Council for the Protection of Monuments of Struggle and Martyrdom, the nationwide ‘reconnaissance’ conducted by the Polish Scouting and Guiding Association was held in 1965. It was to commemorate the 20^th anniversary of the Polish People’s Republic by recognizing its achievements and commemorating those who had died in the fight against Nazism or had fallen its victims. The purpose of the alert was also to supplement the ROPWiM’s records of the places of national memory with new, previously uninventoried and unknown locations on a wider scale. The three-day intense ‘reconnaissance’ resulted in the drafting of thousands of reports which were sent to the ZHP Headquarters. Among the reports there were also those concerning the Holocaust, namely reports on execution and burial sites. The alert’s special value consists in the fact that the teams had to find places in their immediate vicinity (up to eight kilometers from their school). Consequently, they interviewed the local witnesses. In the reports created during the campaign, one can find traces of hesitation and linguistic incongruence when the report authors were referring to unmarked mass graves. The hand-drawn maps prepared by the scouts, which were included in the reports, are also highly valuable. This rich source material should be analyzed while bearing in mind the political and propaganda activities accompanying that campaign. Their recognition can be aided by reading the surveys conducted during the reconnaissance. The analysis of this material can constitute a step toward understanding the dynamics of the formation of places and non-places of memory and the local processes of remembering.

This article discusses Rafał Lemkin’s historical statements through the prism of the category of universal history. Lemkin is the author of an unfinished book which was to present the history of mass violence on all continents from antiquity to the recent times. He also wrote numerous commentaries, scattered across various works, where he compared past and contemporary violence using the concept of genocide. These statements are connected and ordered by the concept of universal history, which refers to the esteemed tradition of practicing historiography that began to develop in the 16th century. Driven by the idea of universalism, that approach based on the belief that there was only one history shared by all humankind. That universal history includes only the phenomena that affected the present shape of the world, has a center (Europe), can judge the past, and, last but not least, is expressed in the form of a coherent comprehensive story, the sense of which is progress. The category of universal history makes it possible to ask Lemkin’s writings new questions, to supplement our knowledge about his intellectual biography and his definition of the concept of genocide by bringing up questions such as relations between Europe and non-European countries, the idea of progress, the definition of humankind, and the genesis of international law.

The author presents a little-known collection of testimonies of refugees who fled to Palestine. The testimonies were recorded in 1940 in Tel Aviv by the United Committee for Help to Polish Jews. They were published during the war, from May 1940 to September 1941, in Polish as well as in Hebrew and English. This selection includes testimonies of people who discussed the details of their escape from occupied Poland. The bulletins that include the testimonies are stored at Yad Vashem: fond M.4, Rescue Committee (Vaad Hahatzalah) of the Jewish Agency for Eretz Israel, file numbers 219 and 220.

The article concerns yeshiva students as well as rabbis who found themselves in the Soviet Union during World War II. The author analyzes the diary of Rabbi Chaim Stein, trying to answer the following questions: How did the yeshivah students and the rabbis cope with life in the Soviet Union? Was any semblance of yeshivah life possible in the Soviet kolkhozes? What did they know about the war and about the fate of their families? How did they perceive events from their religious viewpoint?

The sources presented in this article are closely connected with the article entitled “Survival Networks – Smugglers from Podhale and Spiš During the Holocaust,” published in this issue of our journal and the fate of its protagonist, Benzion Kalb during 1943–1945. During the war, Kalb operated in the smuggling networks on the Polish-Slovak border. Between 1943 and 1944, he used his contacts and routes to smuggle hundreds of people across the border between occupied Poland and Slovakia as well as across the Slovakian-Hungarian border.

This article is based on, for example, Jadwiga Loria’s recollections. It concerns the arrest of the socialist activist Anna Golde in Warsaw in 1943. The woman had been hiding on the “Aryan” side. She was denounced by her partner, arrested, and executed. The author determines the circumstances of that crime against the background of the underground activity of her ex-husband, Zbigniew Mitzner

The author’s reflections are not a review of Anna Bikont’s Cena in the strict sense of this word. Instead, the author uses her book to reflect on the issues it raises. What does the proper name mean to the survivors? What is the survivors’ escape from post-war Poland, not only from the historical, but also from the philosophical point of view? How should one understand the concept of gratitude to those who helped Jewish children during and after the war? What is the testimony’s status? What is the connection between memory and imagination when we talk and write about the Holocaust?

The author of the book reviewed analyzed the channels through which news about what was happening beyond the Warsaw Ghetto walls filtered inside it – directly and on the front lines of World War II. This important topic only rarely attracts historians’ attention. But the reviewer is interested in which issues often studied by historians can be illuminated by the extreme ghetto situation. These issues are highly diverse. One is the spread of news in different societies and conditions, another one is the act of analyzing the news through the prism of past historical events known to the given community.

In 2020 Jelena Subotić published an article devoted to the appropriation of Holocaust memory in post-communist Eastern Europe, where history has become the “handmaiden of populism”. Subotić analyses the central role that collective memory played in the establishment of populism and the rise to power of right-wing movements in Europe, pointing to 2010 as the starting point of these tendencies. She concludes that appropriations of the past stand at the core of populistic resentment. Similar diagnosis of the Polish discourse was posed by Kornelia Kończal, who described these phenomena with the term mnemonic populism, which transforms various available and pluralistic politics of memory into uniform and homogenous populistic propaganda

The year 2015 marks the beginning of a radical and fundamental reorientation of Polish state memory politics, as well as of narratives generated by dominant symbolic elites, on the Polish-Jewish past. The aim of this text is to outline and categorize this phenomenon with the theoretical category of katoendecja (catholic national democracy) coined by Jan Tomasz Gross. Far from having the ambition to systematically analyse the discourse on Polish-Jewish past produced since 2015, the author would just like to point out key moments of these de- bates and to offer preliminary interpretation as a contribution to further studies.

This article analyzes the exhibition Called by Their Name, which opened in Warsaw in 2020. It commemorates the ethnic Poles who were murdered by the Germans during the war for helping Jews. Through a detailed analysis of the exhibition, the author of the text reveals the assumptions and objectives of the Called by Their Name Program, carried out since 2019 by the Witold Pilecki Institute of Solidarity and Valor, which the media call “Polish Yad Vashem.”

The article discusses the permanent exhibition Silent Heroes. Resistance to the Persecution of the Jews in Europe 1933–1945 opened at the German Resistance Memorial Centre in Berlin in October 2021. There have already been several other temporary exhibitions showing the issue of the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust in a broader European perspective. The Berlin exhibition, however, is the first permanent museum display of this kind. Moreover, it presents the phenomenon in a much more in-depth and extensive way than previous exhibitions. While relatively simple in terms of design, the exhibition has a very thoughtful and interesting structure. Instead of presenting cases of Jewish rescue country by country, the curators strived to systematize the phenomenon, which allows problematizing and historicizing the topic. By presenting both, Jews and non-Jews as equal protagonists of the events, the exhibition also breaks with the stereotypical divide between passive Jewish victims and active non-Jewish helpers.