In this article I focus on two areas: first – the genre typology of texts that belong to the sphere of the so-called personal document, their specific character as a historical source for Holocaust studies; second –the methodological challenge this type of sources posits for the historiography (not only) of the Holocaust. I raise the following questions: what is the value of personal documents for Holocaust historians, being a formally diverse record of experiences; how are they used in their research; how do they read those personal narratives? A more general context for these considerations is the debate on the conditions for Holocaust historiography going on among contemporary theoreticians of history. One one form of this debate could be described as a conflict between “historical discourse” and ”memory discourse”.

Historiography of the Holocaust published in Poland in the period from the end of the Second World War and until the nineties seems rather complex. While it did not ignore the topic altogether, it avoided some topics. Especially in the period immediately after the war, Jewish historians in the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland engaged in research and published important pioneering studies along collections of documents. From 1968 until the 1980s. historical research on the fate of Polish Jews during the war became marginalized and was carried out almost exclusively in Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Despite a large number of local studies and research on the controversial topic of Polish-Jewish relations during the war, the historiography still lacks a more theoretical study and a new synthesis of the Holocaust of Polish Jewry has not yet been written.

The past can be described in different ways by historians and sociologists. They differ in their attitudes toward sources for their studies, and in terms of research sensitivity, which directs their analyses towards given aspects of the past. This text focuses on selected sociological studies of the Holocaust and issues of Polish–Jewish relations (before and during World War II as well as during the immediate postwar years). First I shall refer to sociological works using the historical prospective in their description of Polish–Jewish relations and/or the Holocaust, and, second, to studies (both historical and sociological) which employ categories of sociological analysis in their description. By referring to Nechama Tec's works, I shall present the methodological problems of sociological studies.

This article contains an analysis and extensive quotations from accounts of two Jewish women, the only survivors of prisoners' execution at the Poniatowa compulsory labour camp. This execution was part of a large-scale operation to physically liquidate Jewish prisoners, the so-called “Operation Harvest” (Erntefest), carried out in the first week of November 1943 at the camps in Trawniki, Poniatowa and Majdanek (in Lublin). Both women survivors,. Due to a number of coincidences, managed to get to Warsaw and, helped by the "Żegota” – Council to Aid the Jews, lived to see the liberation. In this article I also analyse the circumstances of both accounts, reasons for withholding their publication as early as war time, and the importance, for our knowledge, not only of the executions, but also for the nature of complicated Polish–Jewish relations during World War II, because it was the Poles' help that the fate of escaped prisoners hinged upon.

This article is based primarily on an analysis of hitherto unused trial records related to the so-called August Decree of the PKWN (Polish Committee of National Liberation), which was the basis for indictment of those suspected of committing crimes against Jews or complicity in such crimes. Additional sources are contemporary interviews with eyewitnesses of those events, known as “Oral History”. The authors attempt to analyse the then situation i rural areas in order to study, in this context, the typology of acts committed, the perpetrators , passive participants and eyewitnesses. The article contains rich sources to exemplify the events described.

This article aims to present the picture of Polish partisans in the accounts of Jewish survivors, based on materials from the Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute. This texts discusses the following Polish underground military formations: the Home Army, Peasants' Battalions, socialist armed groups, the National Armed Forces and the People's Guard /Army (GL/AL). In her discussion of pro-independence armed formations, the author emphasises. the feeling of danger still present in those accounts, fear of death even from the partisans. The accounts mention a number of murders as well as difficulties Jews encountered when they wanted to join partisan outfits, not to mention refusals of co-operation from Poles. Testimonies about GL/AL differ from previous ones by their “insider” perspective, as most of them come from Jews, GL partisans. Perhaps that is why they are dominated by a favourable picture of communist partisans, even though several accounts mention conflicts between the commanders and the Jewish GL partisan outfits

This article is an attempt at a critical analysis of the history of the Jewish Fighting Union (JFU) and a presentation of their authors based on documents kept in the archives of the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw. The author believes that an uncritical approach and such a treatment of these materials, which were generated under the communist regime and used for political purposes resulted in a perverted and lasting picture of the history of this fighting organisation of Zionists-revisionists both in Poland and Israel. The author has focused on a deconstruction of the most important and best known “testimonies regarding the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”, the development and JFU participation in this struggle, given by Henryk Iwański, Władysław Zajdler, Tadeusz Bednarczyk and Janusz Ketling–Szemley.
A comparative analysis of these materials, supplemented by important details of their war-time and postwar biographies, leaves no doubt as to the fact that they should not be analysed in terms of their historical credibility and leads one to conclude that a profound revision of research approach to JFU history is necessary.

Unknown letters of Emanuel Ringelblum written in hiding in the bunker on the "aryan side" and sent to the jewish conspiracy in Warsaw compiled, decoded and described bu Israel Gutman

The title of this text, From the Book of Madness and Atrocity, published here for the first time, indicates its generic and stylistic specificity, its fragmentary, incomplete character. It suggests that this text is part of a greater whole, still incomplete, or one that cannot be grasped. In this sense Śreniowski refers to the topos of inexpressibility of the Holocaust experience. The text is reflective in character, full of metaphor, and its modernist style does not shun pathos. Thus we have here meditations emanating a poetic aura, not a report or an account of events. The author emphasises the desperate loneliness of the dying, their solitude, the incommensurability of the ghetto experience and that of the occupation, and the lack of a common fate of the Jews and the Poles (“A Deserted Town in a Living Capital”; “A Town within a Town”; “And the Capital? A Capital, in which the town of a death is dying . . . ? Well, the Capital is living a normal life. Under the occupation, indeed . . . .”).

After the defeat in the Polish-German war of 1939, many people made plans to escape from the territories occupied by the Germans. As a rule, people escaped to the East, and among “castaways”, travelling the “Eastern route”, the percentage of Jews was exceptionally high, for quite obvious reasons. Some managed to leave the Soviet Union for Sweden, Palestine or even Japan. This, however, is another story.