Early news of the Holocaust from Poland (original) (raw)
Related papers
An Open Secret? The Dissemination and Reception of News about Auschwitz in Hungary in 1944
S:I.M.O.N. SHOAH: INTERVENTION. METHODS. DOCUMENTATION., 2019
In this paper, I analyse diaries from 1944 to explore the extent to which ordinary Hungarian civilians were informed of the genocide of the Jewish population. The diaries indicate that information was sparse among the Hungarian population, and mainly obtained, directly or indirectly, from BBC radio broadcasts. The reactions of individual Christian and Jewish dia rists varied according to the amount of credit they gave to the broadcasts or the rumours circulating within their social circles. However, both Jews and Christians tried not to give credit to the rumours as the idea of gas chambers and mass gassings was simply inconceiv able to the majority of the examined diarists. Even Jewish diarists who had received news of the ongoing genocide and feared for their lives thought it more likely that they would be executed by volley fire. For them, this method of mass murder posed a more realistic danger. The issue of how much information contemporary citizens possessed about the Holocaust is still debated today, and it is especially important to examine this ques tion with regard to Hungary, for several reasons. Within the context of Holocaust history, the Hungarian Holocaust was a unique episode inasmuch as the Germans only occupied Hungary in March 1944, which meant that the deportations took place near the end of the war, by which time even ordinary civilians should have been able to access information about the genocide. Moreover, similarly to other Central Eastern European countries, Hungary has yet to confront its historical past, with postwar nonJewish generations still collectively exempting themselves from responsibility by claiming that they and their ancestors had not known about the death camps and were therefore in no way responsible for the genocide of the Jewish population. In order to debunk this myth of nonJewish ignorance, it is worth exam ining how much information ordinary citizens actually possessed of the death camps in the course of 1944. Due to a lack of available sources, contemporary horizons of knowledge, espe cially those of ordinary civilians, are rather difficult to trace, because diaries appear to be the only suitable sources on the subject. In terms of genre, diaries are non retrospective egodocuments that record what information was available to the dia rist at the time of a given event, which makes them especially useful for mapping the dissemination of information among contemporary civilians. However, Holocaust publishing continues to focus on victims, which is why I supplemented published or publically available diaries with privately owned and unpublished diary manuscripts written by bystanders and currently unknown in scholarly literature. In accordance with applicable Hungarian law on the protection of personal information, I com pletely anonymised the authors of the unpublished diary manuscripts. For my research, I examined eleven manuscripts written by ordinary civilians, meaning that these diarists did not belong to Hungary's political, military, or eco
Growing in the Shadow of Antifascism : Remembering the Holocaust in State-Socialist Eastern Europe, 2022
In this article, I analyze how antifascist ideology and political propaganda interfered with an emerging Holocaust memory in the GDR of the late 1950s and 1960s. I place three books that the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw published in cooperation with East German publishers at the center of this analysis: The diary collection Im Feuer vergangen (Gone with the Fire), Ber Mark’s Der Aufstand im Warschauer Ghetto (The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising) and the document compilation Faschismus—Getto—Massenmord (Fascism—ghetto—mass murder). Rather than the content of these books, I analyze how they were introduced to East German readers; received in the media; perceived in society; and used for educational projects, documentaries, and further artistic reflection on the Holocaust. I will show that the perception of these books, which publishers labeled as “antifascist literature” and reviews in East German Press presented as part of campaigns against Nazi criminals in West Germany, ultimately exceeded superficial propagandistic purpose.
Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały
The text talks about the reaction of the Polish government in London to the outbreak of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto and Szmul Zygielbojm’s suicide. The author analyses stenographic records of the sessions of the Polish government in exile, daily logs of the president’s and PM’s activity, stenographic records of the National Council sessions, correspondence sent by the government to Warsaw, the content of official declarations of the government, and the Polish press between April and June 1943. The author reconstructs the government’s state of knowledge regarding the situation in Warsaw and presents the chronology of its popularisation. He also wonders what influence the-then political crisis (the German propaganda’s revelation of the massacre of Polish officers in Katyń and Stalin’s severance of diplomatic relations with the Polish government) had on the government’s approach to the situation in the occupied country, particularly with regard to the fighting in the Warsaw ghetto.
Legacy, 2012
This article addresses how Polish Jews contended with the communications blackout imposed by the Nazi occupation authorities. It shows how in circumstances in which the legal press was closed down and other forms of modern communications were unavailable, the Jews were forced to resort to more primitive forms of communication. The communications blackout was especially severe during the period of the “Final Solution,” when information and assessments regarding the fate of the deported Jews had a considerable impact on the response of the Jews that remained in the ghettos. This article will present the efforts made by the Jewish leaders, members of the youth movements and rankand-file Jews remaining in the ghettos to obtain information using modern means, such as telephones, but especially by using messengers, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Some of these messengers reached the death camps and returned to the ghettos to report on what they had seen. The final part of the article discusses the internalization and dissemination of the information that was conveyed using these methods and tries to assess the extent to which this information motivated the inhabitants of the ghettos to act.
Early writings on the Holocaust: French-Polish transnational circulations
European Spatial Research and Policy
This article analyses the differences and similarities between documentation centres active in the aftermath of the Holocaust both in France and in Poland. While in Poland the task was from 1945 assigned to the Central Jewish Historical Commission, in France, the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation quickly overtook the lead on other minor centres established by Communist Jews or Bundists. The paper focuses on the links between those institutions, through contacts between members, exchanges of documentation, and parallel publications and exhibits. It shows that despite quite different political conditions, men and women working in these institutions shared a similar vision of transmission of history and memory of the Holocaust. They managed to implement their vision pa 19.03.2019 rtly thanks to their transnational links that helped transcend political and material difficulties.
Confronting the Holocaust Documents on the Polish Government-in-Exile's Policy Concerning Jews 1939-1945
This volume is the first attempt to demonstrate the conditions and mechanisms of actions implemented by the Polish Government-in-Exile towards the Jewish population during World War II. The documents presented, most of which have not been previously published, show the systemic and large-scale nature of efforts made by the Polish diplomatic and consular service to aid and rescue Jews during all stages of the war. They bring together the activities of the President, the Prime Minister, as well as individual ministries and offices, but above all reflect the constant work of the Polish diplomatic and consular posts and the relief agencies of the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare and the Polish Red Cross. The archival materials included illustrate the entire spectrum of actions undertaken: documenting information (about the situation of the Jews in occupied Poland), propaganda (aimed at mobilising the international community to stop the Holocaust) and legal activities (to file criminal charges against the perpetrators). At the same time, they point out that the extensive aid effort was not incidental but systematic and constituted one of the most important policies of the Polish Government-in-Exile. The actions documented in this volume allow us to put forward a thesis that Polish officials and diplomats organised one of the largest relief actions to help Jews, carried out by the state diplomatic services during World War II. The exceptional situation in which the Polish Government-in-Exile found itself is also reflected in the documents. Of all the European countries, it was in Poland that the largest group of people of Jewish identity lived: more than three million. Only the Soviet Union, a state which was much larger and more populous than Poland, had a comparable number of Jews. As a result, it was the Polish authorities and diplomatic posts that were asked for assistance by the largest group of people at risk, and therefore the activities of the Polish offices were incomparably more intense than those of the representations of other Allied and neutral countries. The published collection shows a less-known aspect of Polish-Jewish relations, which allows readers to look at this aspect of the history of World War II from a new perspective. It therefore facilitates new interpretations and in-depth assessments of the relief activities of the Polish Government-in-Exile. The volume also casts new
Denying the Holocaust in Poland
The Nazis carried out their mass extermination of the Jewish people mainly on Polish soil. Poles witnessed all the stages of this crime. For this reason, one might expect that "Holocaust denial" should not take root in Poland. But a kind of rivalry of Polish martyrdom's narration were already under way quite early after the war. Tradition of pre-war Antisemitism and the focus on dealing with own trauma were not conducive to an empathic contemplation of the Jew's tragedy during the Holocaust. Of course, such emotions among Polish society were an object of political manipulation of different fractions of communist regime. Due to this tensions a specific form of the Holocaust denying developed, especially in 1968. A kind of struggle over memory is still continuing in the contemporary Antisemitism in Poland. Remembrance is being divided between "Jewish" and "Polish" themes. This paper examines development of Holocaust Denying's propaganda motives and absorbing of elements of Auschwitz lie in Poland after 1989.
Rumor Culture among Warsaw Jews under Nazi Occupation: A World of Catastrophe Reenchanted
An oft-forgotten fact about Warsaw Jews during World War I I is that until they were deported to Treblinka, they lived in an urban space. In order to understand the wartime life o f Warsaw Jews, then, we must investigate the new modes of urbanism that evolved in those years. This article seeks to investigate the new modes o f communication that emerged during the war as a result of the transformed Warsaw Jewish public sphere. More specifically, it examines the new culture of rumors that emerged and prevailed during that time and that replaced the highly literate prewar Jewish public sphere of Warsaw. The first section of the article describes various aspects of this phenomenon, and the second section, which constitutes the bulk o f the article, focuses on rumor culture's semiotics and hermeneutical procedures. In so doing, this article uncovers a fundamental social practice o f the time, enabling us to scrutinize and map Warsaw Jews' wartime mentalite (popular beliefs, mindsets, and " mental " processes), which was completely transformed under Nazi occupation.