German Jews in Jelenia Góra immediately After the End of the Second World War (original) (raw)
Related papers
History of Polish Jews, Postwar Years, from 1944 to the Present
Polin. 1000 Year History of Polish Jews (eds. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Antony Polonsky), Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw 2014. Chapter “Postwar Years, from 1944 to the Present,” by Stanislaw Krajewski, pp. 351-401.
This is the last chapter in the catalogue of the exhibition in the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, POLIN, in Warsaw. It covers the history of Jews in Poland after World War II. In the preparation of the English version I was greatly assisted by Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. In the catalogue, this text is complemented by many illustrations and extensive captions written by me and several other authors who had worked on this section of the core exhibition. (Page numbers refer to the catalogue.)
The history of Breslau/Wroclaw mirrors all the catastrophes of the twentieth century: racially based nationalism, the mass murder of Jews, the nonsense of war, flight, expulsion, displacement, and other consequences of totalitarianism. After the Second World War, the Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust were resettled in the region of Lower Silesia and in Wroclaw especially. What deserves particular attention is the return of a group of more than sixteen hundred German-Jewish survivors from Breslau to post-war Polish Wroclaw. For the German-Jewish survivors from Breslau, who had survived the National Socialist regime in hiding places, concentration or forced labour camps, May 1945 brought their long-awaited liberation. But the fact is that for this group of survivors, the following months were full of new traumatic experiences. They were treated by both the Soviet military and the Polish administration in the same way as the German citizens of the Third Reich. Parallel to the ongoing resettlement of German inhabitants from Breslau/Wroclaw in the years 1945 to1948, German Jews suffered persecution, expropriation, and expulsion for the second time. On the basis of numerous witness testimonies and archival documents, I wish not only to reconstruct those events in the first post- war years in Wroclaw and Lower Silesia but also to answer questions pertaining to social framework, concepts of identity and strategies of self-assertion, and, finally, to the rift between western and eastern European Jewry.
Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung (ZfO) , 2024
Joanna T o k a r s k a-B a k i r is a professor of cultural anthropology at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw who has already produced important scholarship on what she calls an "ethnography of the Holocaust" 1-"a kind of documentation in which the main role is played by local factors, expressed in the language of the peasantry and the inhabitants of small towns." Her latest contribution, Jewish Fugitives, continues this work with its focus on the period following the ghetto-clearing operations (known in Polish scholarship as the "third phase" of the Holocaust or the Judenjagd), a period during which, in the author's rendition, the "Germans barely feature in the frame, there are only Jewish and non-Jewish Poles, and the relations between them" (p. 15). Indeed, the German occupation authorities make no appearance in the book. Jewish Fugitives consists of twelve chapters that are not directly connected with each other, seven of which have previously been published as journal articles or essays in edited volumes (Chapter 12 is presented in its German version). The same collection is also available in Polish, published under a different title. 2 The book will no doubt help to bring the author's important to the attention of English-language readers. The book is loosely bound by the theme of "Jewish fugitives in the Polish countryside," a hotly contested area of research, as witnessed by the controversy surrounding the publication of Night Without End, a collection of nine county-level case studies of Jewish survival in the General Government (GG) and Bialystok District (Bezirk). 3 In contrast to the comprehensive statistical and regional thrust of the latter, the ethnographic approach taken by T.-B. is narrower in geographical scope, focusing primarily on localities in the southern
JEWISH STUDIES IN POSTWAR POLAND
Scripta Judaica Cracoviensia, vol. 11, 2013
Abstract: The tradition of Jewish studies in Poland has been drastically interrupted by the Second World War and the Holocaust. In the immediate postwar period the process of re-establishing research on Jewish history and heritage was undertaken by the Jewish Historical Commissions and later Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. More examples of the individual and group initiatives can be traced only in the 1970s and 1980s. The real happened in the late 1980s with Kraków as one of the first and main centers of revitalized Jewish studies in Poland. The first postwar academic institution in Krakow specializing in Jewish studies – Research Center for Jewish History and Culture in Poland – was established already in 1986 in the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. More than a decade later, in 2000, it was transformed into the first Poland’s Department of Jewish Studies (Katedra Judaistyki) – now the Institute of Jewish Studies. Nowadays there are more similar programs and institutions – at the universities in Warsaw, Wrocław and Lublin (UMCS). Also other academic centers tend to have at least individual scholars, programs, classes or projects focusing on widely understood “Jewish topics.” Jewish studies in Poland, along with the revival of Jewish culture, reflect the contemporary Polish attitude to the Jewish heritage, and their scale and intensity remains unique in the European context. The growing interest in Jewish studies in Poland can be seen as a sign of respect for the role of Jewish Poles in the country’s history, and as an attempt to recreate the missing Jewish part of Poland through research, education and commemoration, accompanied by slow but promising revival of Jewish life in Poland.
Early 2011 saw the publication in Poland of three noteworthy studies exploring Polish behaviour toward the Jews during World War II and the various forms of Polish participation in the Holocaust. These publications clearly advance the state of research, although they do not completely exhaust the topic, or even come close to that. They interrogate the image of the Holocaust as a largely German undertaking that has had a strong presence both in German and Polish research down to the present. The existence of this image is bound up with the historiographic circumstance that now as before, German Holocaust research is more closely connected with the German regime of occupation or the German Einsatzgruppen and execution units and less with the population under occupation, and in this way concentrates on the perspective of the German perpetrators. There is a concomitant tendency to neglect the perspective of the non-German perpetrators (and in part also that of the victims). By contrast, Polish Holocaust research has until recently viewed the Poles solely as victims of the National Socialist regime of occupation, and seen the murder of the Jews as an exclusively German matter. All three publications are written contra these continuing tendencies in thought and inquiry.
The publication of the Galicia Jewish Museum „Witnesses to Polish-Jewish History. The Stories of Holocaust Survivors, Former Prisoners of Nazi German Concentration Camps and Righteous Among the Nations” includes the stories of Holocaust survivors, former German Nazi concentration camp prisoners as well as the Righteous Among the Nations. It includes contextual articles which are an introduction to 20th century Polish-Jewish relations as well as the contemporary ones; 9 biograms of witnesses to history which are connected to Krakow and the Małopolska region, completed by their photographs and excerpts from their memoirs as well as two articles devoted to the late witnesses to history, who were for many years cooperating with the Galicia Jewish Museum. The publication was issued as part of the project financed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland and it was published in three languages, Polish, English and German. The publication may be used as a supporting material in the field of education.
Polemics on the survival strategies applied by Jews on the Aryan side of Dębica county
UR Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences
For years historians have discussed the attitude of Poles towards Jews during the Holocaust. Tomasz Frydel’s article on the survival strategies applied by Jews during the German occupation in Dębica county is one of the contributions to this discussion. The authors of the present article wanted to draw the reader’s attention to Frydel’s somewhat simplified approach toward the issue of Polish -Jewish rela-tionships. The first part of this article is a critical analysis of accounts and testimonies given by persons who survived the Holocaust around the current Subcarpathian Province. This part also illustrates the reality of Polish residents of Dębica county during the German occupation, which was one of the main causes for their attitude towards ghetto runaways. The second part describes the attitude of the Home Army towards Jews hiding on the Aryan side in Dębica county during the German occupation. It analyses Frydel’s findings concerning the numbers of murdered Jews and circumstanc...