The present issue of “Holocaust. Studies and Materials” continues the tradition which started with the publication of our first volume, two years ago. The articles and studies presented in the current volume represent a selection of materials which appeared in volumes 4, 5 and 6 of the Polish edition of “Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały” the sole Polish-language revue entirely devoted to Holocaust issues. We open with two studies by Dariusz Libionka. The first one concerns the issue of help offered to Jews by Poles. This is, quite likely, the most controversial issue in contemporary Jewish-Polish relations, and a theme that is constantly debated in the media. Libionka offers the first comprehensive and well-informed overview of the “help” discussion, starting with early post-war writings, through the miserable post-1968 studies deeply tainted by the anti-Semitic campaigns, and going all the way to recent years, when historians working under the aegis of the IPN (Institute of National Remembrance) set out to document the alleged war-time sympathy of the Poles toward their Jewish co-citizens. Libionka’s second essay touches on an equally delicate theme – the war-time actions and inactions of the Polish Catholic hierarchy. Did the Church do enough? Did the bishops, cardinals and the primate hear the pleas of the dying Jews? What was their reaction, when faced with this unprecedented tragedy? These, and other questions, are discussed by the author, who has recourse to various previously unknown documents taken from the Polish archives. Marcin Zaremba describes one of the most spectacular – if we may use this expression – phenomena of occupied Poland: the all-encompassing “szaber,” or smuggling, which by 1945 had become a way of life for large segments of Polish society. Barbara Engelking brings to light one of the most important diaries written by a Jew in hiding. Fela Fischbein’s diary (long overdue for publication) is a powerful, moving account of one woman’s resilience, resourcefulness, temerity and boundless courage in the face of horrible odds. Using Fela’s experiences, Engelking sets out to show the complex, unpredictable, and often treacherous relationships between Jews in hiding and their Aryan hosts. Aleksandra Ubertowska leaves the Polish scene, and writes about the universal problem of representation and misrepresentation of the Holocaust in literature. The remaining essays, materials and research texts have one thing in common: they bring to light little known (or unknown) historical and literary evidence. They also include several unique and new testimonies which complete the volume. The texts are in part based on recently uncovered archival sources, and in part on new approaches which help us to redefine our field of study.

It is our hope that this volume will further underline the crucial role of continuing Holocaust-related research. It is equally important, however, that this book shows clearly that there is no understanding of Polish history without understanding the history of the destruction of the Polish Jews.

The article deals with the ways of describing the issue of individual and organised help to the Jews in Polish historical discourse during 1945–2008. The author analyses press statements, academic articles, and popular articles and, finally, books published in Poland (including publications by historians from the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw) as well as émigré texts. The article also discusses the source basis used in the texts by Polish authors, their methods of analysis as well as the political conditions of the discourse concerning Polish-Jewish relations during the occupation, identifying the key time limits. Particular attention has been paid to the trends in historical writing in the immediate post-war period, in the mid-1960s (with the anti-Zionist campaign at the fore), in the mid-1980s, and, finally, during 2000–2006. The article discusses all the key publications regarding help to the Jews by: T. Berenstein and Adam Rutkowski, Szymon Datner, Władysław Bartoszewski, Kazimierz Iranek-Osmecki, Teresa Prekerowa, Jan T. Gross and the research and educational activity of the Main Commission to Investigate Nazi Crimes in Poland, the Society of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy (ZBOWiD) and the Institute of National Remembrance

The text deals with the attitudes of the Polish Catholic hierarchy towards the Holocaust. It describes the activities undertaken for the benefit of converts during in 1940–1941, how higher clergy perceived anti-Jewish incidents in Warsaw (spring 1940) and murders of the Jews in the Łomża region (summer 1941), and finally the immediate reactions of the bishops to the Holocaust on Polish territory. Particularly important is the explanation of the reasons why the extermination of the Jews was not mentioned in correspondence with the Vatican (Pope Pius XII and the Secretariat of State) during 1942–1943. Due to Adam Sapieha’s position in the Church structure during the occupation, the figure of the Archbishop of Cracow is the focus. The text also analyzes statements concerning the Jews and the Holocaust by the hierarchs outside Poland (Primate August Hlond and Bishop Karol Radoński). The text also discusses the attitude of the Church hierarchy’s representatives towards organized and individual actions to help the Jews. The author’s aim is to summarize existing knowledge based on Church sources (Polish and Vatican) available to researchers and documents of Polish underground, and to identify controversies present in the hitherto interpretations, as well as the directions and limitations of further investigation
into the matter

The text is an analysis of the relations between a hiding Jewess, Fela Fischbein, and her landlady, a Polish woman, Katarzyna Dunajewska. In hiding, Fela wrote her diary, which was the basis for the description of her feelings, experiences, her perception of the Poles who helped her, and her change of attitude toward them. The hiding Jewess moves from gratitude to the Poles to disappointment and aversion, which is caused by the attitude of the Poles to the Jews who needed help: financial exploitation of their situation and denouncing them to the Germans.

The paper is an attempt at outlining the esthetics of kitsch in Holocaust literature.  On the basis of Abraham Moles’ and  Saul Friedländer’s distinctions, the author analyses works of fiction, Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, and Littel’s The Kindly Ones, indentifying elements of kitsch in them: Perpetrator’s perspective narration, stylistic excess, shocking with cruelty, artistic conformism.  In the autobiographical works of Roma Ligocka and Marta Sztokfisz/Edyta Klein, the signs of kitsch mark the overly egocentric narrative perspective, as well as the camouflaging of the auto-fictional character of the alleged memoirs.

The subject of this article is war, and especially post-war, szaber – a phenomenon of mass looting of unattended property. The text is divided into three parts. In the first part, I attempt to explain theoretically the origin of szaber, indicating (among other things) its links with the culture of poverty and a necessary condition for the szaber to take place – a moment of chaos and a temporary decline of the power structures. In the second part, I formulate a hypothesis that ethnic difference was a necessary condition for szaber to emerge. I illustrate it with examples from September 1939, when first we faced a phenomenon of mass looting of unattended property. The article also deals with the pillage of the ghettos by Poles in 1942. The third part is devoted to the highest wave of looting, which took place mostly in the Regained Western and Northern Territories, immediately after the war. The text is constructed in such a way that at the end I return to the origin of the phenomenon, formulating a thesis that it created a certain szaber culture

The article presents a profile of Bernard Mark (1908–1966), a Holocaust historian and the director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Mark’s biography is based on various materials, both published and unpublished, from his pre-war involvement in the Communist Party of Poland, through the war years spent in the Soviet Union, to his various activities in post-war Poland: a researcher and socio-cultural activist, including his publications on the Holocaust

The life of Julian Unszlicht (1883–1953) illustrates the case and process of the assimilation of Polish Jews. However, Unszlicht’s case is special as it shows that holding anti-Semitic views, which were to be a ticket to a Catholic society, guaranteed neither putting the roots down permanently nor gaining a new identity. The biography of a priest-convert allows to look closer at the processes of effacement and convergence of anti-Jewish rhetoric. The modern one, of the turn of 19th and 20th centuries, with Catholic anti-Judaism, which was constantly excused by religious reasons and at the same time, it often spread to the ethnic-racial mental grounds. Contrary to common definitions and distinctions, those two ways of thinking perfectly complemented and strengthened each other, both living using the other’s reasoning. The Holocaust added a tragic punch line to the embroiled story of the priest-convert

On 25 May 1988 the Commission for the Designation of the Righteous of the Yad Vashem Institute decided to award Zdzisław and Halina Krzyczkowski the medal Righteous Among the Nations on the application of Marian Berland, who was hiding, together with four people, at the Krzyczkowskis’ place during the occupation. In his letter he wrote that “never throughout the entire period did they give us reasons to fear that they would denounce us or throw us out on the street. We survived that horrible time only thanks to them and their help.” However, Berland’s notes written in hiding reveal a totally different picture; the Krzyczkowskis are a couple of lumpenproletarians from Sienna Street, who constantly cheat and blackmail the Jews they are hiding

In the three subsequent issues of The Bulletin of the Jewish Historical Institute of 1959 and 1960, the diary of Krystyna Modrzewska (Mendalbaum), submitted to the Central Jewish Historical Commission in 1947, was published. The first part, which opens with the outbreak of the war and ends with mass executions of the Jews in a forest near Krępiec, outside Lublin in spring 1942, was massacred by the censorship. The author writes, among other things, about hiding in the nunnery of the Congregation of Sisters of the Bethany Family outside Lublin, and she harshly judges the relations there. It turns out that the communist censor eliminated the record concerning critical views on the nuns’ mentality, their intellectual and moral standards. The censor did not approve of the comments about nunnery’s everyday life and church religious rituals, the clergy’s hypocrisy and the increasingly materialistic views of this group. The censor’s interference in the field of the author’s religious experience is even more acute as Modrzewska’s diary rates among a small group of testimonies describing adult Jews hiding in monasteries and convents. All those fragments has been restored in the current edition and placed in the context of the whole. Reading the integrated fragments of Modrzewska’s diary about hiding in the convent, it is worth pondering why a person (who had been baptized as a student of the university of Bologna, treating this ceremony very seriously, not opportunistically) experiences such a sheer disappointment in the convent near Lublin

The presented materials come from the case files of Zofia and Marian Chomin, arrested in 1945 and accused of denouncing Jews living in a tenement house in No. 8a Jabłonowskich St. in Lvov during the war, including the poet Zuzanna Ginczanka. During her stay in Lvov Ginczanka three times escaped arrest, and in her last preserved poem, Non omnis moriar, included the name of the denunciator, Zofia Chomin. This poem became evidence in the case in question, which ended with the acquittal of Marian Chomin and the sentencing of Zofia Chomin to 4 years imprisonment.

In 1942, Gusta (Gustawa) Ehrlich landed in prison in Krzeszowice. This Jewess from Cracow tried to survive the occupation hiding near Cracow. She was denounced and arrested. The presented collection of documents includes her diary in form of the letters to her daughter, being at the same time the record of Gusta Ehrlich’s last weeks. The author described the conditions in the prison and relation with the fellow inmates. She also left information concerning the person who denounced her to the authorities, informing them of her origin. In the notes, there are numerous hints for the daughters, who remained at large, concerning both the personal and financial matters connected with running the business. Gusta Ehrlich’s letter of 1940 to the Metropolitan Curia, in which the author asks for baptism, is a supplement to the diary

In late November 1943, in Rędziny-Borek near Miechów, a group of armed men, barged into the house of a local peasant, and from a hidden chamber dragged out six Jews hiding there.  Then, having searched them thoroughly, and having taken away their valuables and cash, the victims were lined up against the wall and – one by one—shot in the back of the head.  The crime, however, was not perpetrated by bandits of some unidentified “forest people”, but a carefully planned ( and authorized by the District command) military operation of the Miechów Home Army structures

The article is a case study of hiding Lila Flachs in the house of an Orthodox priest, Jan Lewiarz.  It tells the story of a Jewish girl and an Orthodox priest of Polish nationality pretending to be Ukrainian siblings in a Lemko village and protected by the authority of a Ukrainian nationalist who was the priest's friend.  The confluence of the fate of a Pole, a Jewess and a Ukrainian, and their complex relations give a picture of reality with many hues of grey, with no black-white divisions.   There are few stories of saving Jews by village priests that are so well documented.  The wealth of sources produced at different times and by different people, allows not only a detailed examination and reconstruction of the story, but also an in-depth penetration into the relations between the protagonists, reflection on the influence of memory on the content and character of the story

The abuses in the presentation of the Holocaust in art, film, and literature have been extensively studied in contemporary humanist studies.  The analyses point to the phenomenon of the Holocaust’s McDonaldization, its political instrumentalization, ideological manipulation and commercialization.  The article is an attempt at a critical examination of a different dimension of the phenomenon in question, hitherto overlooked, namely the abuses in Holocaust research.  The author points at a number of dangers which appear in the academic Holocaust discourse – from the “source myth” to narcissistic temptations

The article contains a discussion and an attempt at analysis of the post-war investigation and trial materials regarding three different cases of murder or denunciation of hiding Jews by the local Polish population. The crimes discussed in the article took place in three villages, which during the occupation were located in the Cracow district: Falkowa, Wieniec and Janowice. After the war the perpetrators were indicted on the basis of the Decree of 31 August 1944, i.e. the so-called “August Decree”. According to the testimonies of the witnesses and the defendants, the main motive behind the murder of Jews or their denunciation to the occupier was the desire for quick material gain, and, secondly, the fear of the consequences if the information that the Jews were hiding in the village reached the authorities. Another important element of the incidents was the active or passive participation of numerous village dwellers in the crimes

The article is an analysis of Janusz Nasfeter’s film, Długa noc [A Long Night] (1967), and the discussion during the producer’s screening in June 1967, concerning the film’s merit and approving its distribution. Both the subject matter of the film (helping a Jew hiding in a Polish home during the occupation) and the circumstances of its producer’s screening (several days after the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War) enable it to be seen as a model: the film itself and its reception are largely characteristic of the Polish memory and attitudes to the Jews during the war, its forms of expression in Polish film, and the language of public debate on this issue.

Research team of physicians and lab technicians under Izrael Milejkowski’s direction undertook the effort to carry out a series of clinical and biochemical experiments on patients dying of starvation in the Warsaw ghetto so as to receive the fullest possible picture of hunger disease. The research was carried out according to all the rigors of strict scientific discipline, and the authors during their work on academic articles, published it after the war entitled: „Starvation disease: hunger research carried out in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942,” according to their own words, they “supplemented the gap in accordance with the progress of knowledge.” The article is devoted to the reflections over ethical dilemmas of the research team, who were forced in their work to perform numerous medical treatments of experimental nature on extremely exhausted patients. The ill, according to Dr Fajgenblat’s words,“demonstrated negativism toward the research and treatment, which extremely hindered the work, and sometimes even frustrated it.” The article attempts to look at the monumental research work of the Warsaw ghetto doctors as a special kind of response of the medical profession to the feeling of helplessness to the dying patients. The article analyzes the situation of Warsaw ghetto doctors, who undertook the research without support of any outer authority, which could settle their possible ethical dilemmas (Polish deontological codes, European discussions on the conditions of the admissibility of medical research on patients, etc.).

The article deals with a labor camp for Jews founded by the Germans in Cerkwisko near Bartków Nowy, Karczew Commune, was transferred to the village of Szczeglacin due to the works’ advancement along the river. The Jews who died in that camp performed work connected with water management which consisted in draining the farmland and engineering the Kołodziejka River a Bug tributary. The liquidation of the Szczeglacin camp probably took place in the morning of 22 October 1942.  Several hundred Jews were killed with a primitive tool – a wooden club. According to the witnesses, “when spring came,” probably of 1944, the Germans returned to the spot to conduct an exhumation of the remains in order to ultimately cover the traces. The article is based on various sources – from oral accounts, collected in 2009 in Szczeglacin and the neighboring villages, through records produced in 1947  (Josek Kopyto’s testimony) and 1994e manuscript of a peasant from Bartków Stary as well as regional publications

The article is a polemic with the pessimistic assessment of the current state of the Christian-Jewish dialog presented by Waldemar Chrostowski in his recent book Kościół, Żydzi, Polska [The Church, Jews, Poland]. The author criticizes Rev. Chrostowski for defining the Christian-Jewish and Polish-Jewish relations in terms of strict opposition and unavoidable conflict of interests, and for putting all blame on Jews, while absolving Christians from all their past and present sins which contributed to the tensions between the two communities.

The book Policjant konspiratorem (a beautiful edition, in hardcover, with an art paper insert with photographs) is quite an unusual document, if only because it is the first autobiography of a blue policeman that I ever heard of. Let us begin with the author: Krasnodębski was born in Wolbórz near Piotrków Trybunalski in 1916. In the late 1930s he graduated from the police school in Mosty Wielkie and shortly before the war broke out he was on duty as a constable in Dąbrowa Tarnowska. In autumn 1939 he volunteered for the blue police and remained in the force until summer 1944. At the same time, as an underground soldier, under the pseudonym “Kostek”, he was active in the Armed Combat Union (Związek Walki Zbrojnej, ZWZ), and later in the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK); he infiltrated the police, forewarning his “forest” commanders about the enemies’ moves. In summer 1944, “Kostek” deserted from the police and joined the partisans. After the Red Army’s arrival, Krasnodębski was still in the underground, this time in the NIE organization
and in Freedom and Independence (Zrzeszenie Wolność i Niezawisłość, WiN). He was in hiding until the early 1950s, when he was brought before a court and accused of collaboration and murdering Jews. He was, however, exonerated and returned to normal life; he devoted himself to professional work as well as patriotic and veteran’s activity. He wrote the autobiography in the mid-1980s. This is the author’s fate in a nutshell.