The Łódź ghetto was established 80 years ago by order of the German authorities. One third of the city’s population was detained there and subjected to extermination. Wohngebiet der Juden — Jewish residential quarter — for that was how the ghetto located in Bałuty and the Old Town was euphemistically called, became the place of the ordeal of approx. 200,000 people from Łódź, nearby towns, and inhabitants of towns in the Reich and the Protectorate. Their tragic fate is undoubtedly one of the most important events in the social history of Łódź.

The said anniversary was a pretext for offering our readers this particular main theme of the 16th issue of the Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały periodical. But this was not our only inspiration. There has been more and more interest in the Łódź “closed quarter” in the scholarly world and mass culture in Poland and abroad, which has translated into a wide range of topics discussed. This publication undertakes to present at least part of the current state of research and/or the map of the topics taken up by representatives of various disciplines. Because of the subject dicussed in this issue, our editorial staff was joined by scholars associated with the Jewish Research Center of the University of Łódź, which is a co-publisher of this issue of our annual. We are convinced that this will contribute to an integration of the milieu of Holocaust scholars and will be the next step on the path to cooperation between the Warsaw and Łódź research centers.

This article is devoted to the Hakhshara programs operating during the first months of the Łódź ghetto’s existence. A few dozen groups associating Jewish youth were formed on abandoned farms in Marysin in the summer of 1940. They were formally incorporated into the Agricultural Department, which operated within the framework of the Jewish administration of the ghetto. They were divided into two types. Those named with letters associated people connected with Zionist Halutz organizations, that is, those who were preparing to play the role of pioneers in Palestine. By contrast, those marked with Roman numerals associated young people from very different milieus. Referred to in documents as kibbutzim, the groups were headed by boards elected by their members. They organized work on the farms on which the buildings they occupied were situated and they conducted cultural and sports activity. The level of those group’s independence decreased in the late autumn of 1940. Aside internal conflicts the factors which contributed to the fall of the Hakhshara movement were the worsening food supply in the ghetto (growing shortages of foodstuffs) and the necessity to organize the Departments of Labor, to which directed were the young people from Marysin

In the years 1940–1944, several dozen artists were active in the Łódź ghetto. Those were renowned artists – graduates of schools and academies and talented amateurs, who did not gain recognition as artists before 1939. Some came from the Łódź area, some came from abroad – on transports from Prague, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne or Vienna. In a closed housing district, artistic activity, subjected to administrative supervision was harnessed for propaganda purposes. In offices, institutions, departments and workshops, they made posters, commemorative albums, stamps, badges, emblems, and posters. On special commission, they painted portraits of Jewish dignitaries and German ghetto administration officials. Although the rationing of tools and materials: paints, cardboard, metals, ink was strictly connected with orders, the artists tried to create works that depicted the surrounding reality outside the official circulation and without censorship. The issue of artistic activity in the Łódź ghetto was discussed on the basis of examples of the functioning of selected departments and war-time biographies of the most renowned artists. This analysis makes use of different sources, from surviving archive documents to personal recollections, letters, testimonies, and existing works. Research results that, on the one hand, took into consideration individual information, and on the other – individual feelings of the victims and witnesses, are a starting point for further reconstruction of artistic activity in the Łódź ghetto

The tragic experiences of prisoners of the second largest ghetto organized by the Germans on Polish lands (after the Warsaw ghetto) were seldom incorporated into the sphere of official commemorations of World War II in communist Poland. This text attempts to retrace the increasing marginalization of collective memory in the Łódź ghetto during 1945‒1989 and point to the peculiar niches where its cultivation was permitted. The author is interested predominantly in the issue of the communist politics of historical memory with regard to the history of the ‘closed quarter’ in Łódź, that is manifestations of the top-down formatting of collective perceptions of the occupation-period history of the Bałuty quarter, which was isolated from the outside world. In the background of these reflections appears the issue of tension between official and popular memory and a question as to when and in what contexts the content of the latter could manifest themselves in the public space of the People’s Republic of Poland. The article’s source base is publications, periodicals, and selected documentation of institutions co-creating the communist politics of historical memory

This text presents the biography of Szama Gajer, the main collaborator in the Lublin ghetto. It discusses his prewar criminal activity (pimping, activity in the underworld, and incarceration), details of his activity during the occupation (predominantly the mechanisms of his collaboration with the Germans: collection of confidential information, blackmail, looting of property, spreading of disinformation and propaganda, participation in deportation campaigns from the Lublin and Warsaw ghettoes) as well as the circumstances of his death in the ghetto at Majdan Tatarski in the autumn of 1942. The figure of the ‘Jewish king’ from Lublin is presented in a wider context by recreating and describing, for instance, the composition, organizational structure, and specificity of the local network of Jewish informers. In the final part of the text the author attempts to explain Grajer’s motivation, including the reasons why he engaged in collaboration with the Germans and both sides’ expectations and requirements. Kopciowski also presents the ways of constructing the narration on Grajer in the testimonies of witnesses and the reference literature published so far as well as the evaluations of his figure present in both those sources

Institutionalized and unauthorized looting of works of art and other cultural assets constituted an integral element of Nazi persecutions in occupied Poland. It affected not only private and church collections, but also a relatively large number of private ones. With respect to Jewish property the looting had a total character. That fact has not found its reflection in the narration about the wartime losses incurred by Polish culture, which has somewhat automatically been treated as national culture. What is more, this narration has continued since the first years after the war. This article concerns the influence of this narration, which has been propagated by successive Polish authorities, and the practice of the restitution of works of art looted by the Nazis, those looked for abroad and those which were incorporated into public collections in Poland

The author presents unknown episodes of the underground activity of Józef Franczak, “Laluś”, a Home Army soldier during the German occupation. These themes are shown against the background of local history, taking into account the closest comrades of the main hero. Franczak is one of the main figures in the pantheon of “accursed soldiers” that is created by the state-sponsored historical policy. The paper analyses in detail the surviving documents of two events related to Polish-Jewish relations. It seems that they significantly, if not decisively, influenced post-war Franczak’s fate. A comparison of the fate of “Laluś” and that of his two subordinates demonstrates that membership in the Home Army and serious events that had taken place in the past did not determine the post-war fate of underground soldiers. Their fate was often determined not by an ideological choice but a combination of chance, pragmatism and utility for the new communist regime

This paper deals with the activities of members of the local structures of the National Armed Forces (Narodowe Siły Zbrojne, NSZ) in Pińczów and Miechów counties aimed at hiding Jews, and the murder of several men, women, children committed by a partisan detachment that for some time operated in this area. In the area in question, 34 people died at the hands of the NSZ. A further 11 were identified by people who admitted to be members of this organization to the German police and were subsequently murdered. The starting point for this analysis were investigation and trial documents concerning former NSZ members tried on the basis of the so-called “August decree”. The author’s purpose was to reconstruct these bloody events that took place from late 1943 to the spring of 1944 and to determine how the crimes against Jews were treated by county investigators from county and provincial security offices and by military courts and courts of law; finally the author deals with the controversial issue of witness credibility and the testimonies given at that time by the defendants and witnesses.

Danuta Dąbrowska was the first to research the history of the Łódź ghetto. Born in Germany, she survived the occupation in the Falenica ghetto, and was subsequently hiding on the so-called “Aryan side” in Warsaw. After liberation she took up arts studies and worked at the Jewish Historical Institute, where in the 1960s she prepared several scientific articles on the history of the Łódź ghetto. At the same time, she became involved in work on the Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, which was interrupted by the anti-Semitic campaign of March’68. It was then that Dąbrowska left Poland and settled in Israel, where she continued her scientific work at the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem

The paper presents Ignacy Gutman (1900–1972), engineer, architect, author of numerous designs of residential houses and public buildings in Łódź. Gutman survived five years of World War II in the Łódź ghetto. He was head of the Construction Department He drew the first plan of the ghetto and designed the banknotes that were used in the ghetto. After the war, he was a witness in the trial of Hans Biebow, who was the German administrator of the ghetto. In 1947, he was denounced and charged with crimes against the Jewish population, which he vehemently denied. His biography has been reconstructed on the basis of trial testimonies, emigration documents, the Gutman family archive, and oral history interviews

Viktor Hahn’s Łódź ghetto diary is one of the few documents concerning the Warsaw ghetto that can be found in the Prague Jewish Museum, and is the only diary written in Czech. The testimony, rather small in volume, discusses two months of the author’s stay in the Łódź ghetto and a forced labor camp outside Poznań, but it nevertheless is an interesting source. On the one hand it presents the author’s war-time experiences, and on the other, is an excellent picture of the Prague Jewish community deported to the Łódź ghetto in the autumn of 1941, who lived in collective residences, the so-called “collectives”. The last entries are an exceptional testimony of a man whose name was included in the deportation lists and who by near miracle survived thanks to reporting for forced labor

In the summer of 1943, young members of the Shomer organization active in the Łódź ghetto carried out several interviews with random passers-by. It was a part of educational activity organized by Shomer tutors. The teenagers were tasked with interviewing and recording according to a preset format.

The material thus obtained turned out to be a valuable source about many aspects of life in the Łódź ghetto: family and financial situation of the interviewees, their physical condition and, let us stress, their contacts (protection). Equally important is information about the Shomers obtained during the interviews, their level of education, how they formulated conclusions, their involvement in the group. The material is not very extensive, but it turns out to be an important source for further research of the activity of youth organizations in the ghetto.

A collection of photographs from the Łódź ghetto is the largest surviving collection of this kind of photographs. The collection consists of several thousand photographs taken officially by members of the Jewish and German administration, and from hundreds of illegal copies, both those documenting the Holocaust and from private memorabilia. The collection was often used in publications and exhibitions, most often as illustrations. The author tired to systematize those photographs, analyzing individual shots, not only in order to identify the situations and people depicted and primarily the circumstances in which the photographs were taken, in a bid to interpret the intention of the photographer

For many years in historiography there persisted the conviction that the Łódź ghetto was completely isolated from the outside world. But recent research has proved that although the Łódź closed quarter was indeed more isolated than other ghettoes, it was definitely not hermetic as contacts, though on a small scale, were maintained throughout the occupation. This thesis finds confirmation in the help provided to Ruchla Frymar and Chaim Putersznyt by Ryszard Lerczyński. This individual story shows what the Polish-Jewish relations in Litzmannstadt looked like. The story of the only Łódź Righteous among the Nations makes it possible to understand the circumstances in which help was provided in that big city, at the same time leaving open the question as to why those instances were so few and far between

Mordechaj Żurawski’s testimony in the Yad Vashem archives concerning his imprisonment in the death camp in Chełmno nad Nerem , given in 1947 i Yiddish, is an important source that reveals how the death center functioned, and shows the experiences of one the few prisoners who survived. We also learn about the author’s earlier experiences in labor camps and in the Łódź ghetto. Żurawski, who usually used the names Mordechaj Maks, was a butcher. He resumed his career in Israel where he emigrated in the early 1950s. After the war he testified a number of times about the criminal activities of the Germans in Chełmno

Waldemar Szulc’s study is an unknown and previously unpublished document concerning the Kulmhof death center. The text was written by eyewitness Waldemar Szulc, who was staying in the center’s immediate vicinity during the final months of its operation. The study was made available by Waldemar Szulc’s son as late as in 2020.

Jankiew Pat’s reportage presented here concerns the activity of the Central Historical Jewish Commission, which documented the Holocaust of Polish Jews, then headed by Filipa Friedman. The author, a pre-war activist of the Central Jewish Education Organization and of the Bund, was a talented journalist who frequently went on business trips. In 1938, he landed in the United States in order to solicit financial aid for Yiddish schools in Poland. As he did not manage to leave the US before the war broke out, he became involved with the Jewish Labor Committee. He was active on the Committee after the war as well. As a Committee’s representative, he came to Poland in 1946 in order to collect information about the condition of Polish Jewry and to offer financial help to survivors and the institutions that represented them

These are letters of the Warsaw physician Dr Józef Jabłoński, who as a Jew was hiding during the occupation in a village in the Lublin region. There are 13 surviving texts, written between September and December 1942. Unlike most of the information that came from those hiding, these are astonishing in their descriptions of pleasant situations. Some sound as if Dr Jabłoński had gone on holiday in the countryside, visiting friends. Naturally, the question arises, to what degree the published letters reflect the actual situation. It is clear that they certain kind of information could not be included in them. Nevertheless, for the author what he writes about seems to be rather true. How to explain that the author felt so good in hiding? Undoubtedly, he found himself among enlightened, good people. The statistical chance of finding such people by someone in need of hiding was nonetheless quite small. The commentary accompanying the publication analyzed elements of the social situation that in the case of Dr Jabłoński increased this chance.

The organizations mentioned in this article were tasked with preserving source material concerning the fate of Jews during the war and prepare preliminary studies on the topic. This task was carried out in a manner depending on external conditions and methodological differences.

In Warsaw, albeit in the underground, it was possible to gather materials from the entire territory of pre-war Poland. In Łódź, the “official” character of one’s work made it impossible to maintain full objectivity, especially in the field of health and deportations. In Łódź, the main source were official materials (documents, official interviews). In Warsaw, materials were sought not only in the existing canon of historical sources, but also among such sources that were the basis for sociological studies of that time.

Both collections survived the war, albeit damaged, and are the basis for research into the history of both ghettos, but the significance of the Ringelblum Archive is much greater in view of far more serious damages in official documentation. On the other hand, the Łódź ghetto collection have been used to a lesser extent. This is related to different stages of advancement of research into either of the ghettos and limited interest in the Łódź ghetto that lasted a long time.

Following the announcement of the decision to establish the ghetto in Łódź, in February 1940 the German post office stopped delivering mail to Jewish addresses. The Eldest of the Jews, Mordechaj Chaim Rumkowski, established the Department of Mail within the framework of the administration in order to ensure uninterrupted delivery of correspondence to Jewish addresses. This article discusses the Department’s operation in as many dimensions as possible and systematizes our knowledge on its topic. It characterizes the rules which regulated the post office’s operation, the types of mail and addressees. It also discusses the censorship, that is the rules and criteria which the censors used when withholding ghetto residents’ correspondence. The reflections on the topic of the censoring practice are based on an analysis of annotations placed on mail and their relation to the content of the mail. This text is not a study on correspondence as a source for Holocaust research. It only signals the topic of treating correspondence in the form of postcards as a source for Holocaust research, as a testimony to the living conditions in the ghetto, to how people communicated with one another, and to how and what about ghetto residents informed others, and predominantly as a testimony of the victims. An important part of the article is a description of unsent postcards stored at the State Archive in Łódź in the fonds called “Przełożony Starszeństwa Żydów w Getcie Łódzkim” (Eldest of the Jews in the Łódź Ghetto). The collection consists of over 22,000 postcards, vast majority of which are postcards written by people detained in the Łódź ghetto which were not mailed by the post office. They were withheld on the basis of a decision made by the ghetto censorship or due to a temporary suspension of Postsperre (mail stoppage) during the period when Jews were being deported to death centers

In the autumn of 1941, 20,000 Jews were deported into the Łódź ghetto from the Reich and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Most of them were elderly people, with many infirm ones. Their arrival exacerbated the already harsh conditions in the ghetto, but for them this change was quite drastic - they were crowded in so-called “collectives”, doomed to vegetate without basic facilities and increasing starvation. Ghetto administration established a special office to deal with these thousands of people: Department for the “Insettled”. It dealt with all the existential and organizational matters of the deportees. The article discusses the Department’s functions and activities and outlines the situations of the “insettled” in the ghetto on the basis of archival materials and personal documents

Recently conducted research has led to solving many key problems connected with the Łódź ghetto’s history. The German decision-making processes and reactions of the Jewish administration of the ghetto to the deportations to the death centers have been reconstructed. This text focuses on issues connected with the organization and course of the deportations from the ghetto to the death center in Chełmno nad Nerem (Kulmhof am Ner) between January and May 1942. It is an attempt to reconstruct the events which took place during the deportations (including at the Radegast station, where the deportees were loaded onto train cars) and during their journey to the extermination site

The economic dimension of the Holocaust in Wartheland has not been fully researched. In the looting of the property of the victims involved were, for instance, members of the personnel of the Kulmhof death center in Chełmno nad Nerem. Retracing various aspects of this issue has been possible owing to documents stored at the State Archive in Łódź. This article presents the operation of SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof in February and March 1942 in light of the operations on special account 12300, which was opened for the purpose of managing the financial assets looted from the Jews

This article is a comparative analysis of two descriptions of walking in ghettoes – the Warsaw and the Łódź one. Moving within the methodological framework of the spatial turn in the contemporary humanities and basing on texts produced then and there, the author analyzes the records of the experience of the Holocaust space in the two largest Jewish ghettoes in occupied Europe. Focusing on records of sensory experiences, he analyzes Stanisław Różycki’s texts from the collection „Street Scenes from the Ghetto.” Scenes from the Life of the Warsaw Ghetto and his study „The Street.” The Appearance and Social Life of the Street in the Ghetto (published in volume 1 of the English edition of the Ringelblum Archive), and also Dr. Bernard Heilig’s reportage from the Łódź ghetto entitled “The First Seven Months in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto” (published in The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto and in an anthology of texts from the Łódź ghetto entitled Oblicza getta [faces of the ghetto]). Based on these records of walking in the ghetto space, the author attempts to answer the question as to how exactly it was perceived and experienced by Jews locked inside them. This article is a contribution to broader reflections on the topic of the sensory experience of the Holocaust space

Reference literature casts Marta Puretz in a role of a Gestapo informer. However, a search query conducted in the large collection of documents stored at the Archives Nationales in Paris contradicts that. It is not by accident that Puretz is called a ‘purported agent’. This article constitutes a typical, meticulously documented reconstruction of her life – in Poland, in Hungary, and also in France after the war, for only such an outlook can facilitate a revision of existing opinions. The author describes the milieu of the assimilated Cracow Jewish intelligentsia which shaped her; her stay in the ghetto and fight for survival; her escape from the camp in Płaszów and the fortunate circumstance of her having two women on the ‘Aryan’ side – her nanny and former maid – who she could always count on. Before fleeing to Hungary she received help for several months from a group of her Polish friends, who sheltered her. Hungary was not a salvation to her. It was more of a trap. An unfortunate episode was her temporary dependence on a Polish Jew, a man named Faber, who later accused her twice of cooperation with the Gestapo. In Hungary she became romantically involved with Charles Heroz, an employee of the French attaché’s office in Budapest. Hiding at his place, she helped him conduct his underground anti-German activity. The couple got married in 1945 after the Red Army had captured Budapest. Accused by Faber of collaboration with the Germans, she was tried by the Hungarian People’s Tribunal, which acquitted her for lack of evidence. After Marta Puretz’s departure to France the Polish side unsuccessfully demanded her extradition for several years after putting her on a list of war criminals, to which significantly contributed Faber’s accusations.

This article is a critique of the phenomenon of Holocaust literature for children and young people from the perspective of ‘new sensitivity’. It is a category which sets the direction of thinking in anthropological-cultural studies inspired by the new humanities. Its essence is letting previously marginalized subjects (children, animals, plants, inanimate objects, that is ‘other’ subjects) speak and restoring their agency. Analyzing two examples of contemporary literature on the Litzmannstadt Ghetto (Joanna Fabicka’s Rutka, and Maciej Świerkocki and Mariusz Sołtysik’s Naród zatracenia [nation of doom]), the author proves that despite turning inanimate objects or animals into literary characters this literature has proved unable to face the Holocaust experience and that the forms of narration it generates do not fully capture the complex history of thousands of Jewish children. Many of them involve abuses in the formal sense (‘imitations’ of personal document literature) and, in the emotional sense, preying upon the vulnerable figure of the child (that is prone to being hurt again) and the historical atrocities it suffered.

An important part of the article is an analysis of selected examples of the Holocaust kitsch connected with the subject matter of the child and the Holocaust, including interpretations of the depictions of the great blockade (Ger. – Sperre, Pol.– szpera) (in novels by Leslie Epstein, Steve Sem-Sandberg, Fabicka, Świerkocki, and Sołtysik), which are of key importance in maintaining appropriateness by works about the Holocaust addressed to the young reader. Basing on the conclusions made by Barbara Engelking, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Jacek Leociak, and Boris Cyrulnik, the author concludes that postmemory proves particularly harmful in generation of narrations of this type. Writers and scholars are diverting from this phenomenon’s definition formulated by Marianne Hirsch. Hence, it is becoming an interpretation framework used with regard to all art about the Holocaust, which is to make its recipient suffer endlessly and turn him into an open wound which never heals.

In the context of Abram de Swaan’s research on mass murder, summed up in his monograph The Killing Compartments. The Mentality of Mass Murder (2015), this article discusses the subject matter of the ‘blue’ police in light of Jan Grabowski’s book Na posterunku. Udział polskiej policji granatowej i kryminalnej w zagładzie Żydów [On duty. Participation of the Polish ‘Blue’ and Criminal Police in the Holocaust] (2020)

This article was written in response to the publication of the book Lista Ładosia [Ładoś’s List] that contains a list of 3262 names of Jews who had Latin American passports issued during the war by the Polish Legation in Switzerland. Based largely on materials from the Będzin ghetto, the author polemicizes with the main thesis of the book that “carrying a Ładoś passport offered a person in danger of death in the Holocaust a greater chance to survive.” He claims that a large group of Jews, in particular members of Jewish organizations, did not attach a special importance to the fact of holding such a passport, and in many cases they were even unaware of it. Regardless of this, the issue of the so-called South American passports and the involvement of the Polish Legation in Switzerland had been known for many years to historians, Polish historians included

Looking on the past of every city, we can identify various events that remain in the memory of its inhabitants, images transmitted from generation to generation – in the case of Łódź it is undoubtedly the functioning in the city of the Jewish ghetto. But it has not always been so: the memory of the history of the Jewish community underwent transformation for the long decades of the 20th century, only to become part of the canon of events that are important for the city. As late as 15–20 years ago, images of Łódź focused on the multicultural history of the city wee not so common, and were rather an element of collective oblivion. But since then, something that we can red from the contents present in everyday press, in the calendar of anniversary celebrations or the topographical tissue of commemoration, the memory of neighbors of other nationalities returns.

Within the framework of the research project that was the starting point for this paper, studies of the collective memory of Łódź inhabitants were carried out, and focused precisely on these carriers. Beginning with the reflection related to the memory canon and the role of memory images of the multicultural Łódź in the context of other themes of collective memory (diagnosed by means of surveys questionnaires), reflections on the Jewish Łódź were also deepened by observation of specific commemorative actions and the material manifestations of this memory – statutes and plaques that are gradually appearing in the city in the early decades of the 21st century.

And although research results show that blank spots have been temporarily filled by frequent cultural references in culture, tourism or art, it is worthwhile to ask to what extent this memory is rooted in the actions and emotions of contemporary Łódź inhabitants.

The Kulmhof death center in Chełmno nad Nerem is a unique space due to the role it played during the Holocaust. Despite the magnitude of the crimes committed there, it underwent a depreciation during the postwar period. Recent years have brought an intensification of efforts to properly commemorate this place of memory, for instance, the 2019 opening of a permanent historical exhibition in the place where the camp used to be located and which this text concerns

Kulmhof in Chełmno nad Nerem was the first Nazi death center in occupied Europe and one that operated the longest. It became the site of the extermination of Jews from the territories incorporated into the Reich, including the Łódź ghetto and other countries in Europe. That place had been forgotten for a long time. It was only in December 2019 that a new permanent historical exhibition was opened at the former death center in Chełmno nad Nerem. The terrain was cleaned up and marked. Excavations conducted over the last several decades in both Chełmno nad Nerem and the nearby Rzuchów Forest have facilitated a more precise recreation of the topography of the crime and have unearthed a number of precious personal effects of the murdered. Despite or perhaps owing to this modest form of commemoration this place’s unique character has been highlighted. It was neither a concentration camp like those in Dachau or Buchenwald, where the architecture constituted a bold expression of the Nazi ideology, nor a ‘factory of death’ – a site of industrialized mass murder like Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was a grange in the countryside hastily transformed into a mass extermination center

The author discusses and qualifies the results of recent research of the German repressions for help offered to Jews in occupied Poland during World War II. Another layer of the paper covers an analysis of the political underpinnings of research conducted in today’s Poland, and their entanglement in the official politics of memory. The construction and the language of publications analyzed and presented in this text reveals areas of existing taboos and shows the defensive character of the contemporary discourse of rescuing Jews

The author discusses the interdisciplinary volume Świadek: jak się staje, czym jest? [Witness: how does one become one, what it is?], edited by Agnieszka Dauksza and Karolina Koprowska that summarizes the long debate on the significance of testimony and the function of witness of various forms of violence. She focuses on the Holocaust witness that plays a substantial role in the research of the attitude of Poles to Jews during the war, showing how imprecise this category is and how it calls for more precision in its formulation. She also touches upon a problem of non-human witnesses as well as the scope of power of the witness and the testimony, and the institution that control it in different ways

The Polish publishing market has recently seen at least several novels with striped fabric and barbed wire on the cover, embellished with the mandatory “...from Auschwitz” in the title. Most of these publications belong to the misery literature, or mis lit genre, and more precisely, one of its subgenres that can be called the Holocaust-camp kitsch. The paper is a brief analytical reconnaissance of the phenomenon of the “from Auschwitz” literature and shows its characteristic features and the various aspects of its enormous popularity among Polish readers

This paper analyses the Toruń Park of National Memory “They behaved decently”, dedicated to Poles who rescued Jews, organized by the “Lux Veritas” Foundation. The author looks at the project and compares them with other Tadeusz Rydzyk’s initiatives concerning Polish help and the role of the Toruń media in spreading anti-Semitic content. What is remarkable is the magnification of the number of rescuers and rescued, the symbolic merging of the Righteous with the so-called “accursed soldiers” and the emphasis laid on the role of Poles as victims and the failure to commemorate the Holocaust. The author shows how the Toruń park promotes the narration of Poles-Catholics as a nation of rescuers

The article is a response to a critique of The Ładoś List made by Michał Sobelman in his article “Illusory passports”. Basing himself on source materials from Swiss and American archives, the author rejects Michał Sobelman’s main supposition, namely that the passports from Bern were in their overriding majority produced solely by Jewish organizations. He polemicizes with the thesis that, in essence, the Ładoś passports did not save lives, observing that at least 15% of their holders in occupied Poland and as many as 60% in the occupied Netherlands survived the Holocaust. The present article also contains a partial discussion of the state of research into Aleksander Ładoś, with the author concluding that, through their failure to make full use of available sources, historians have overlooked many aspects of this rescue operation, among others the activities of one of its main executors, the Polish Consul Konstanty Rokicki, who falsified the greater part of the Paraguayan documents.

Ed. note - despite the fact, that this article was published by the author previously in the journal "Studia nad Totalitarzmami i Wiekiem XX" vol. 4. Editors of "Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały / Holocaust Studies and Materials", feeling the obligation to maintain the consistency of the circulation of scientific debate, in agreement with the author and the editors of the place of the first printing, decided to place a PDF of the text in the "Polemics" section. 

Article by Michał Sobelman, Illusory passports. The case of South American passports as seen from Będzin