In memory of Krystyna Kersten

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

There is a consensus among Polish historians that helping the Jews under the occupation was a wide-spread phenomenon.  Indeed, while some Poles helped the Jews on humanitarian grounds, many others considered it a very risky, but also a very profitable enterprise.  In historical literature, these people are referred to as “paid helpers”.  This text, based upon primary sources such as war-time court records, war-time diaries, early post-war Jewish narratives, and the post-1945 “August” trials, seeks to shed light on the scale of the phenomenon of paid help, as well as on the quality of help offered under these circumstances. It also offers an analysis of relationships between the Jews and their paid helpers

The texts deals primarily with two issues: means of support of the Jews who, despite the German’s will, found themselves outside specifically designated areas (ghettos, camps), and the economic situation of the Aryan population, whose help was necessary for their survival on the “Aryan side”. 

The author describes the process of gradual reduction of property remaining in Jewish hands, and, in part, the phenomenon of taking over the property of those already exterminated. The sources of legal and illegal income to cover maintenance are identified. The author indicates the dynamics of predatory exploitation of Polish territories by the German occupier and concludes that an overwhelming majority of Aryan but non-German inhabitants of Poland, during the mass escapes of Jews from the ghettos and camps (1942–1943), were not in a position to offer them long-term, disinterested material help. The article deals with both those offering help for humanistic reasons and those who treated the Jews as a source of additional income, either fulfilling the arrangements or failing to do so to the detriment of the Jewish contractors.

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 text is an attempt at a new, nuanced presentation of the relations between Poles saving Jews and the hiding Jews, based on several hundred accounts of survivors and those who helped them survive, given before Polish historical commissions after World War II. The analysed testimonies concerning the Kielce province, and, in part, the Cracow and Białystok provinces, were given before the historical commissions in Łódź, Cracow, Przemyśl and Białystok (the archives of the Jewish Historical Institute, fond 301). Assuming that an adequate historical analysis without a correct morphological and linguistic analysis is impossible, the author develops her own terminology, abandoning the honorific term “Righteous”, which makes the situation of saving heroic, as well as resigns from the objectifying term “survivors” [lit. ocaleni, saved]. A supplementary category of sources are ethnographic interviews, conducted in selcted localities of the Kielce province during 2004–2008

One central question in Dutch historiography is why such high percentage of Jews from the Netherlands died in the Holocaust. In this article, a recent dissertation on the rate of survival of Jews in the Netherlands is mobilized to shed light on the discussion on the low survival rate there. Wide variations in survival rates throughout the country call into question easy explanations for the overall (low) rate. In particular, the greater success of the Sicherheitspolizei in hunting down hidden Jews in certain parts of the country calls for more attention

The article is an attempt to examine the views and activity of the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Eastern Małopolska, the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, with respect to the Jews during the Holocaust. Sheptytsky’s figure is examined not only in the context of ambiguous and tense Ukrainian-Jewish relations, but also in the light of Ukrainian-Polish, Soviet-Ukrainian and Ukrainian-German relations. Sheptytsky’s views regarding the Jews were formed under various, sometimes contradictory influences. However, in comparison with the non-Jewish inhabitants of Nazi-occupied Europe, and in comparison with the position of the Orthodox Church, the Vatican and the Ukrainians, Sheptytsky’s speeches and his activities with respect to the Jews allow his inclusion among those felt responsible for their brothers’ fate.

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.

Małgorzata Melchior’ interview with Professor Nechama Tec

The article presents a selection of documents from a 1949 trial, which concluded with the sentence of three ZWZ-AK members, Opatów district, by the Court of Appeals in Kielce – Józef Mularski, Leon Nowak and Edward Perzyński – for complicity in the murder of 12 Jews from the Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski ghetto in a forest near Kunów. Two of them, severely wounded, returned to the ghetto; one of them survived the war (Szloma Icek Zweigman), and after emigration submitted a detailed and extensive testimony regarding the incident. Zweigman’s testimony was the foundation of the investigation and the indictment. Mularski and Nowak, sentenced to death, were subsequently pardoned and released from prison after 1956, as was the third convict. The case was closed as follows: sentence of 1957 to pardon Józef Mularski, followed by another verdict of 2000 that provided for a high compensation. The presented materials are not only proof that members of the Polish underground committed crimes against Jews, but also demonstrate how the Polish judiciary and the Main Commission to Investigate Nazi Crimes in Poland operated. The latter clearly conducted a policy of papering over those criminal cases in which Poles were the perpetrators. The issues raised in the article are inadequately researched, not only in Polish historiography. The presented trial materials come from the Archives of the Institute of National Remembrance

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.

The set contains correspondence of the chief of the Jewish division of the Information and Propaganda Bureau of the Home Army High Command, Henryk Woliński, “Wacław” with Adolf Berman. Eight letters were written by Woliński, one by Berman. The letters are kept in the Beit Lohamei Hagetaot archive. They contain plenty of information regarding the contacts between Żegota and the Jewish National Committee and the Home Army and the Government Delegate Office from January to July 1944 (one letter of February 1943). The letters also contain information regarding the personal relations between the two. Woliński’s correspondence with Berman has been supplemented by two materials. The first are reports written on the spot, sent by Adolf Berman to the presidium of the Council to Help the Jews concerning the circumstances of Berman’s blackmail of 4 January 1944. Another supplement dated 1957 is Henryk Woliński’s letter to the then director Bernard Mark. It is one of the few post-war accounts by Woliński. None of the documents have been published before.

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.

Marek Hłasko’s short story Szukając gwiazd was published in 1963. It has all the properties of a parable and is a kind of parable about the Holocaust. Its conventional character points to the ethical controversies related to such a kind of Holocaust presentation, i.e. we deal here with the temptation of universalisation. The hero undergoes a specific rite of passage from childhood to adulthood, centred around the Holocaust, being at the same time a mythical “original event”, underpinning the existential condition of “a man without innocence” – a figure designed by Marek Hłasko. The boy will later become all the men in the writer’s stories and novels. What is interesting is the superposition of a typical Hłasko motive, i.e. frustrated love, on the Holocaust situation, and the resultant impossibility of an authentic encounter between the I and the Other. Existential loneliness and being lost in the world are combined with the memory of the Holocaust.

Marek Hłasko’s short story Szukając gwiazd was published in 1963. It has all the properties of a parable and is a kind of parable about the Holocaust. Its conventional character points to the ethical controversies related to such a kind of Holocaust presentation, i.e. we deal here with the temptation of universalisation. The hero undergoes a specific rite of passage from childhood to adulthood, centred around the Holocaust, being at the same time a mythical “original event”, underpinning the existential condition of “a man without innocence” – a figure designed by Marek Hłasko. The boy will later become all the men in the writer’s stories and novels. What is interesting is the superposition of a typical Hłasko motive, i.e. frustrated love, on the Holocaust situation, and the resultant impossibility of an authentic encounter between the I and the Other. Existential loneliness and being lost in the world are combined with the memory of the Holocaust.

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.

Mariavite Church is a religious movement which split some 100 years ago from the Catholic Church in Poland. Common fate (the persecution and pogroms of the Mariavites at the hands of Roman-Catholics) as well as Mariavites’ tolerance of the other had a marked influence on the development of good relations with the Jews already in the opening years of the 20th c. and even more so during the inter-war period. During the war there were several prominent members of the Mariavitte Church who became involved in saving the Jews, both as members of “Zegota” and on individual basis. One has to list here sister Makryna (Natalia Siuta), bishop M. Franciszek Rostworowski, rev. M. Szczepan Zasadziñski, Mariavite nuns from Felicjanów and others. It seems that the Jews sought Mariavites’ help assuming that the latter would be more inclined to help than the rest of the local population.

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.

The branch office operating in Radom, known as the Special Prosecutor of the Criminal Court in Lublin, and the Prosecutor of the District Court in Radom that continued its proceedings, during 1945–1950 undertook around 1,200 investigations against Nazi criminals and Poles charged with broadly understood collaboration with the occupier. In the preserved files of both institutions one can find interesting materials related to the Holocaust. The first group of materials concerns representatives of the Nazi power apparatus involved in murders of Jews, comprising criminals from the forced labour camps in Bliżyn, Radom and Sandomierz. The second group concerns those who denunciated refugees from the ghetto, engaged in physical and psychological violence toward Jews as well as their economic exploitation. It comprises German civil employees from industrial plants in Radom and Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, and Poles from various central localities on Polish territory. The third group of materials contains data on help offered by Poles and so-called “ethnic Germans” (Volksdeutsche) to Jews, which consisted in providing them with food and shelter.

The following paper is based primarly on the extensive study conducted by Wolfgang Brückner in his book Arbeit macht frei: Herkunft und Hintergrund der KZ –Devise. The article aims to present the origin, social context and ideological background of the motto “Arbeit macht frei” and other related texts placed above the entrances to some of the nazi concentration camps. The author raises the question, to what extent was the act of placing of such a motto in a KZ a mere sign of cynism or a conscious demonstration of ideological conviction of the SS-members, internalized in the process of bringing up and socialization in a specific environment.

The identification photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoners are a Holocaust icon. Photography, particularly identification photography, seems especially ambiguous in the context of the Holocaust, and the manner in which it was used and then conceptualized seems especially problematic. The remnants of the postwar photographic practice of former concentration camp prisoners are all the more puzzling: some of them had their photographs taken in concentration camp stripes in professional photo studios. Some dozen photos taken during 1945–1947 show survivors who decided to record their images as ex-prisoners. By doing so they referred to the prewar portrait photography tradition and repeated the gesture of putting on concentration camp outfits and (perhaps) the experience of being photographed in the camp. Compared with the practice of taking identification photographs, the portraits turn out to be a material whose interpretation problematizes the issue of radically different ways of using photography as an institutional tool of oppression on the one hand and as a tool of individual confrontation with the traumatic experience on the other. The comparison of identification and portrait photographs is an occasion to reflect on the ways in which photography was used in the context of the Holocaust and at the same time on the condition of photography as a medium

The article presents different ways of looking at the issue of hiding Jews during the war.

Publications on the Holocaust and the history of Polish-Jewish relations quite frequently lead to historical debates in the Polish media. On the one hand, it is a unique opportunity to publicise unknown pages of history, and on the other, a potential threat to contemporary Polish-Jewish relations. This article is an attempt to explain the Polish reactions to Jan Tomasz Gross’s Fear and the character of similar debates in Polish media. Thanks to the achievements of experimental social psychology (attribution errors, social identity theory, and the sleeper effect), we can now understand why certain books spawn a media debate while others do not; why the contents of the contested books reach the consciousness of a broader audience and why the debates that surround such books less and less resemble true discussion, in which people cease to talk to one another and engage in polemics against the position of their opponents.

The article discusses a book by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. The author concentrates on three sets of issues, constitutive for the questions raised in the book: the issue of a specifically understood testimony, the issue of corporality (the figure of the “Moslem”), and the issue of language (as well as of the subject), memoirs from the camp. The text is concluded with a polemic with Agambena’s theses.

The Dreyfuss‘ family in Auschwitz