Raul Hilberg in memoriam

This article discusses the history of the annihilation of sztetl Gritze, a Polish-Jewish town in Central Poland. In the first part of the article, the author describes the tragedy of the Jewish inhabitants of this small town: the creation and the destruction of the Jewish  ghetto and the hardships undergone by those who lived there, and who were subsequently deported to the Warsaw ghetto.  The history of the Grojec prisoners of the work camps in Skarżysko-Kamienna, Smoleńsk and Słomczyn are equally examined. In the second part of the article, the author analyses the Jewish-Polish relations in the occupied Grojec. She distinguishes two stages of these relations; the break between these two would have occured, she argues, at the time of deportation of the Jewish inhabitants of the town in February 1942 to the Warsaw ghetto. This event marked the beginning of the transformation of the sztetl Gritze into Judenrein, in which, up to now, the common Jewish-Polish past has been virtually non-existent/ obliterated.

The author discusses the history of the Jews of Chmielnik, a town situated 30 kilometres away from Kielce: from a short introduction covering the inter-war period, through the German invasion, ghetto formation, everyday life n the ghetto, deportations and the fate of the survivors. The author extensively describes social organisations and their activity in Chmielnik  (Judenrat, Ha Szomer ha-Cair), as well as the contacts between the Jews and the Poles.

The article concerns the conditions of life in the Jewish district and the ghetto closed since January 1942: food, forced labor, overpopulation, the religious, family and social life, for example there used to be a primary school there. It also refers to the help rendered to Jews by Poles, and generally the Polish-Jewish relations in that small town in the center of Poland inhabited by ca. ten thousand people, located on the District of Radom of the former GG. Jews constituted a half of the entire community of Kozienice, many of them were Hassids. It used to be one of the important Hassidic centers on the Polish soil, established in the 18th Century by tzadik Israel ben Sabatai nown as the Magid of Kozienice. In the article, also the action of liquidation of the ghetto in September 1942 is mentioned and the sale of the Jewish property taken from the people sent to Treblinka. The text is based on the archival documents (the files of Judenrat from Kozienice), the press (Gazeta Żydowska /The Jewish daily) and memoirs and testimonies as well as direct interviews.

The article deals with the history of the shtetl in Nowogródek, where, before the war about 6,500 Jews lived. When the Germans occupied Nowogródek, a ghetto was established in one of the suburbs, where all the local Jews were deported. The author describes everyday life of the Jews in the ghetto and their fate. Most of them were  killed in three mass executions: in December 1941, in August 1942 and February 1943. Many managed to escape to the Bielski partisan outfit, operating in the nearby Nalibocki Forest; the most spectacular escape was that of 232 Jews through a tunnel. These Jews had remained in the town after the mass executions.

The author discusses three issues: ghetto formation, Jewish workers and the living conditions, mainly based on examples from small ghettoes. from the very beginning, ghettoisation involved loss of property, privacy and autonomy. The author's analysis of the organisation of Jewish forced labour reveals a significant stratification among Jewish forced labourers. The economic aspects of the relations between the Jews and the local non-Jewish population was often omitted by Holocaust researchers, who focused primarily on the formation of German policy and its destructive consequences

The author analyses two testimonies from the Stanisławów ghetto: Eliszewa/Elza Binder's and  Juliusz Feuerman's. Binder's diary, found in the ghetto, begins on 13 December 1941 and ends on 18 July 1942, whereas Feuerman's notes are a chronicle of the ghetto and the destruction of its inhabitants. the purpose of this analysis, supplemented by a biographical context, is to portray - as well as Brenner can - the characters of their authors. The reading of these two accounts, written in the same historical situation is to demonstrate that both the ideological and the emotional reactions to the current events in the ghetto ghetto cannot be separated from their personal emotional situation or their pre-war lives.

The article deals with the most important events of the Holocaust in Denmark. The first part outlines the broader historical context of the events of October  1943 and the deportation of Danish Jews. It also contains a critical comment on the mainstream historical narration, particularly those aspects that concern the situation of Jewish prisoners at Theresienstadt. The second part is an overview of the latest research into the Danish aspects of the Holocaust, such as the expulsion of Jewish refugees, the rescue operation of October 1943, and the actual number of deportees. The author also presents results of her own research of the Danish remembrance culture.

In the early years following World War II, the Lublin region was one of the most important centres of Jewish life. At the same time, during 19441946 it was the scene of anti-Jewish incidents: from anti-Semitic propaganda, accusation of ritual murder, economic boycott, to cases of individual or collective murder. The wave of anti-Jewish that lasted until autumn of 1946 resulted in a lengthy and, no doubt incomplete, list of 118 murdered Jews. Escalating anti-Jewish violence in the immediate post-war years was one of the main factors, albeit not the only one, to affect the demography (mass emigration) and the socio-political condition of the Jewish population in the Lublin region

This article discusses the pre-war life of Emanuel Ringelblum – from the organisation of the Junger Historiker Krajz (the circle of young Jewish historians) at Warsaw University, through his YIVO activity, his involvement in the setting up of tourist associations, work for the Joint Distribution Committee as editor-in-chief of „Folkshilf”, active membership in Poale Zion-Left (he ran its most important education agency: the Ovnt kursn far arbiter) to his involvement in organisation of aid for Jews in the transit camp in Zbąszyń in 1938.

The author gives a profile of  Artur Eisenbach, a long-serving employee of the Jewish Historical Institute, and its director during 1966–1968

This text deals with the situation of the Jewish population of Hrubieszów between autumn 1941 and the first deportation action in June 1942. The author of the testimony is a woman by the name Dychterman, who came to Hrubieszów from the Warsaw ghetto. During the “action” she managed to leave for Warsaw. This testimony was written two weeks later, i.e. in late June 1942 by staff members of Ringelblum’s Archive. It stands out among other testimonies from Hrubieszów in the Warsaw Ghetto Archives, as it is full of details and complex description.  It also contains an interesting description of the Jewish community in the town, the living conditions and its everyday life. It also contains data of the Judenrat members as well as observations on the Christian-Jewish relations (i.e. between Jews and Poles or Ukrainians). The second part of the testimony describes the first liquidation action in Hrubieszów, the extermination action and the reactions of the Judenrat and that of the population towards the resettlement. The fate of the author remains unknown. Most likely she died during the “Great Action” in the Warsaw ghetto. This account has been used by historians, but never previously published.

This is a fragment of the diary of Hinda and Chanina Malachi, written in hiding on the “Aryan side” in Warsaw. The diary of the Malachi couple was written in Polish in a squared-paper arithmetic notebook. It covers the period between 9 October 1942 and 30 August 1944. The first part of the diary published here (until 3 August 1943), was written by Hinda and describes the fate of both spouses since they left their home in Ostrowiec and moved to Warsaw. Hinda and Chinina Malachi survived the war and in 1947 emigrated to Israel.

An unknown testimony from the Przemyśl ghetto of Esriel Leimsieder, submitted for publication after his death in 2006. The author concentrates on his own fate and experiences, particularly on those situations, when he narrowly escaped death. While most known testimonies do not mention the names of people they had contacts with, Leimsieder does name them, identifies places and comments on their behaviour. thus his reminiscences are a valuable supplement to several other testimonies from the Przemyśl ghetto

Purportedly, a Warsaw ghetto document addressed to posterity, a spiritual testament of a religious Jew, a Hassid who had fought in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, and in the last moments of his life describes his “endless road of suffering” to turn into a devoted prayer to his silent God.

Michał Borwicz's text published in 1955 in “Almanach”, a Yiddish periodical, is the first serious historical and literary analysis, which proves that Josl Rakower Addresses God supposedly an authentic voice from the burning Warsaw ghetto, is apocryphal. It is also the first important, voice in a discussion regarding the need to clearly separate the hic et nunc Holocaust testimonies from literary texts on the Holocaust (written ex post).

This text was inspired by Michał Borwicz's critical analysis written in the 1950s by a historian and writer, which exposed the purported document from the Warsaw ghetto: Josl Rakower Addresses God. Based on a recent “literary investigation” by a German journalist Paul Badde, the authors present the complex history of this article. They also add a few theoretical and theological reflections, borne out of their work on the Polish translation “Josl Rakower”.

At the turn of 1944 and 1945, Jewish underground activists wrote a number of letters. This was the last, no yet dispatched mail to London. During the Warsaw Uprising most of the ready material perished, thus this mail package was rather meagre when compared to the previous one of 120 pages. Another unusual aspect was the list of signatories, including some from right-wing Jewish parties, hitherto less known. as the Red Army was approaching, many Jewish underground activists began to ponder "what next?" It became evident that the obvious partners would now be communists and the Lublin "government". The correspondence reveals that the main link between the Jewish underground and the Polish government-in-exile was the funds channelled home by international Jewish organisations via the London government. Unlike other sources, these materials do not reveal a certain distance towards the London government, or the Polish underground as a whole. Certain issues such as those to do with Jewish conspirators in the Warsaw Uprising were described so as not to irritate the Poles. The presented mail contains a number of extremely important data on camps where the Jews were detained before and after the Warsaw Uprising, which demonstrates aid offered to the Jews by the Jewish National Committee (ŻKN), the Bund and the Council to Aid the Jews (RPŻ). Finally, it gives a synthetic description of Jewish underground activists and the Jewish population during the Warsaw Uprising.

This interview by the journalist Anka Grupińska, who, for a number of years, has documented the history of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising with Józef Grynblatt, one of the few surviving members of the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW), took place in 1990 in Warsaw. This is the first Grynblatt's testimony published in Poland. Many publications on the ŻZW do not even mention him. Józef Grynblatt talks about the formation and the functioning of the ŻZW (Jewish Military Union), his participation in the uprising and his post-war life. Grynblatt fought in the Polish-German War in 1939; when he returned from German captivity he got involved in the underground, took part in the April uprising in a group of fighters at Karmelicka Street No. 5, escaped with a group of fighters through the sewers at the end of April 1943 and reached Michalin. Then he was hiding in Warsaw. He left Poland  in 1946 and emigrated to the USA. Grynblatt’s replies are commented upon in the footnotes by Dariusz Libionka, a historian who deals with the history of the fighting organisation of Zionists-Revisionists. Libionka identifies numerous contradictions between Grynblatt’s confessions to Grupińska and his previous testimonies (given in 1958 and 1974) as well as discrepancies between his story and other ŻZW members’ accounts

The exchange of the Palestinian Jews, who at the outbreak of the war were staying in Europe for German residents in Palestine is a relatively unexplored aspect of allied efforts to save the Jewish population. The consensus reached after lengthy and arduous British-German negotiations enabled five such exchanges during 1941–1945. Three of them (in December 1941, November 1942 and January 1943) also included Jewish resident of the  Katowice Regierungsbezirk, who by being Palestinian citizens or by being related with Palestinian resident had the right to leave German-occupied areas.

Probably this enabled 332 people to leave eastern Upper Silesia. The activity of the German administration to do with the "uncovering" of Palestinian Jews staying in the Katowice  Regierungsbezirk, as well as the entire process of organising this action at the local administration level of eastern Upper Silesia was reconstructed on the basis of well-preserved and consistent German documentation from the State Archives in Katowice.

During 1945–1950 several trials of functionary prisoners of Nazi concentration camps were held in Poland. these trials brought about, particularly among former concentration camp prisoners, a painful debate on the involvement of KZ-lager victims in the terror system of the concentration camps.  This debate was the background of the polemic surrounding the Tadeusz Borowski's Auschwitz stories. Apprehensive of its impact on the image of their organisation and its members, the board of the Polish Union of Former Political Prisoners (PZbWP) attempted to silence this discussion. this policy was in line with that of PPR/PZPR. This debate upset the clear-cut division into victims and executioners, led to a disintegration of the already divided Polish society and dislodged the hard-achieved national consensus, largely based on the general hostility towards Germany. Thus it deprived the Communists of one of their chief arguments to legitimise their power. This debate was also embarrassing for a sizeable section of popular opinion, as it questioned the image of Poles as a nation of unfortunate victims and heroes. in the late 1940's, with the increasing Stalinisation, PZbWP and PPR/PZPR were largely able to silence the debate on the attitude of functionary prisoners. the dominant narration turned out to be that that portrayed KZ-lager prisoners as a solidary, international community of anti-fascist resistance movement led by the Communists.  The difficult and painful debates of the immediate post-war years are now largely forgotten. In this respect, one could even talk about a symbiosis of the "national" and "Communist" historical interpretations.

Last interview with Raul Hilberg

„Yad Vashem Studies”, „Yalkut Moreshet: Periodical”

Noach Lasman, Wspomnienia z Polski 1 sierpnia 1944–30 kwietnia 1957, Warszawa 1997; Celina Budzyńska, Strzępy rodzinnej sagi, Warszawa 1997; Marek Urban, Polska… Polska…, Warszawa 1998; Oskar Kofler, Żydowskie dwory. Wspomnienia z Galicji Wschodniej od początku XIX wieku do wybuchu I wojny światowej, Warszawa 1999; Chawka Folman – Raban, Nie rozstałam się z nimi…, tłum. z hebrajskiego Inka Wajsbrot i Dora Sternberg, Warszawa 2000; Janina Bauman, Nigdzie na ziemi, Warszawa 2000; Irena Śmigielska, Skradzione lata, Warszawa 2001; Jakub Bukowski, Opowieść o życiu, Warszawa 2002; Leokadia Silverstein, Tak właśnie było, tłum. z angielskiego Hanna Sochacka-Kozłowska, Warszawa 2002; Florian Majewski, Pustelnik, Warszawa 2002; Lili Chuwis-Thau, A jeśli Cię zapomnę, Warszawa 2002; Menachem Katz, Na ścieżkach nadziei, tłum. z hebrajskiego Jan Biełas, Warszawa 2003; Joseph Rosenberg, Nazywam się Józef Nowak, Warszawa 2004; Rachela Margolis, Wspomnienia wileńskie, Warszawa 2005; Icchak Sternberg, Pod przybraną tożsamością, tłum. z hebrajskiego Maria Perlberger-Schmuel, Warszawa 2005; Eliasz Bialski, Patrząc prosto w oczy, Warszawa 2006

Series„Write your story”, published by Makor Jewish Community Library: Halina Zylberman, Swimming under water, Melbourne 2001; Helen Leperere, Memoirs and reflections, Melbourne 2002; Hanna Ajzner, Hania’s war, Melbourne 2003; Gary Gray, A Spoonful of Soup and other stories, Melbourne 2003; Kitia Altman, Memories of Ordinary People, Melbourne 2003

Arnon Rubin, Facts and Fictions about the Rescue of the Polish Jewry during the Holocaust Tel Aviv Uniwersity Press, Tel Aviv 2003–2004

Tom I: Jewish Welfare Services in the Occupied Poland, tom II: The Council for Aid to the Jews – Żegota, tom III: Financial Help for The Jews in the Occupied Poland from Abroad, tom IV: The Panderers of Illusions. The Foreign Citzenship, tom V: The Statistucs of Destruction and Rescue, tom VI: The Kielce pogrom – spontaneity, Provocation or Past of Country-Wide Scheme?

International Conference “History and Memory after the Holocaust in Germany, Poland, Russia, and Britain”, University of Leicester, The School of Historical Studies, The Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust Studies May 8-9, 2007.

Polish-Ukraininan research topics - International Conference The Eastern Borderlands under Soviet Occupation 1939–1941; Ukrainian–Polish–Jewish relations, social life, and mutual relations in Lviv organized by Polish Center for Holocaust Research and “Tkuma” (“Renascence”) All-Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies.

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz’s Massacre in Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, and After, (Mord w Jedwabnem 10 lipca 1941: przed, w czasie i po.) East European Monographs, Boulder, CO, 2005.   Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York 2005.  pp. 277.