Kornelia Kończal: The Invention of the “Cursed Soldiers” and its Opponents: Post-war Partisan Struggle in Contemporary Poland, in East European Politics and Societies, 2020, vol. 34, no. 1, 67–95. (original) (raw)
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The article describes the contribution of the " Radosław " Group's soldiers in the so-called second conspiration after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising in September 1945 and also the efforts of Jan Mazurkiewicz " Radosław " and his soldiers in returning to civilian life after the end of World War II. The analysis of the subject was based on available literature and archival records. For many of the Radosław Group soldiers, the struggle for independence of Poland didn't end with the fall of the Warsaw Uprising. They took part in recreating the Directorate for Diversion and later served in the Organization " Nie " and the Armed Forces Delegation for Poland until the dismantling of the Home Army. Due to the political situation in Poland and shortage of supply, their actions were limited (especially the combat activity). After the amnesty in 1945 and subsequent actions, former Radosław Group soldiers turned to social and veteran activities focused around self-help and maintaining the tradition of the Home Army. This later become a reason for the Communist authorities to accuse, repress, and imprison after 1949.
The Untold Story of Polish Anarchist Resistance
The Polish anarchist movement suffers from a uniquely distorted and occluded history. Although it honourably defended by force of arms the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, with two Anarchist Federation of Poland militants later being hailed as "Righteous Among the Nations" for their sacrifice by Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial, and though it fought alongside the Polish Home Army in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, it has either been mischaracterised by historians as tainted by nationalism and/or bolshevism, or even completely erased from the history of the defence of the Jews and of Polish resistance to the Nazis. The imposed historical bias of more than 40 years of Soviet rule naturally accounts for much of the gap in the record, explaining why works such as George Bruce's The Warsaw Uprising, published in 1972 during the Soviet era, have no anarchist or syndicalist references in their narratives. But it is far harder to excuse recent studies such as the otherwise exhaustive 752-page Norman Davies work Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (2003) for demonstrating rank ignorance of this minority yet key aspect of the capital's dramatic resistance. This sketch, extracted from my forthcoming work In the Shadow of a Hurricane: Global Anarchist Ideological and Organisational Lineages, hopes to rectify these errors of commission and omission.
Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe
Contemporary Sociology, 2002
INDEX xii figures and tables 6.1 Schema of Kasciunai village 6.2 Venn diagram of Kasciunai village 6.3 Summary of movement during three occupations 7.1 The series of ruling regimes in Galicia and Volhynia 7.2 An example of occupier strategy 8.1 Hypothetical tipping points for various social groups 9.1 Cultural schema Tables 3.1 Groups in 1940-1941 Lithuania 3.2 Group memberships in Svainikai 4.1 Student elections at Kaunas in 1938
Veterans, Victims, and Memory: The Politics of the Second World War in Communist Poland
Studies in Contemporary History, 2015
In the vast literature on how the Second World War has been remembered in Europe, research into what happened in communist Poland, a country most affected by the war, is surprisingly scarce. The long gestation of Polish narratives of heroism and sacrifice, explored in this book, might help to understand why the country still finds itself in a «mnemonic standoff» with Western Europe, which tends to favour imagining the war in a civil, post-Holocaust, human rights-oriented way. The specific focus of this book is the organized movement of war veterans and former prisoners of Nazi camps from the 1940s until the end of the 1960s, when the core narratives of war became well established.
Journal of Modern European History, 2018
Collaboration and Resistance in Wartime Poland (1939-1945) - A Case for Differentiated Occupation Studies This article aims to diffenenciate the often simplistic depiction of war and occupation in Europe between 1939 and 1945 as a fight of good against evil. Such a description can be found not only in popular culture, but also, though less blatantly, in historical literature. Without questioning the overall responsibility of the Axis powers for the horrendous crimes committed during the war, this article argues for a more nuanced approach that takes into account the often complex nature of interaction between the occupiers and the occupied. Instead of invoking moral judgment, the authors aim to prioritize the historical analysis of the reality of Poland's occupation by the Nazis, recognizing that the parties involved had their own agency and often conflicting agendas. The authors apply this approach to two major phenomena: collaboration with, and resistance against the occupying...
Insurrectionary Anarchism in Poland: The Case of the People's Liberation Front
2024
The regime change in 1989 transformed nearly all elements of life in Poland, and the anarchist movement was not an exception. This article focuses on the Peoples' Liberation Front, the first postwar Polish anarchist group to use violence as its modus operandi. Their actions were rejected en masse by the rest of the Polish anarchist movement, and in particular by the Anarchist Federation, which was establishing itself as the dominant organisation within the Polish anarchist movement. The functioning of the Peoples' Liberation Front was and still is submerged in controversy. One allegation is that it was a false flag operation sponsored by the newly established civil counterintelligence service. Another view is that it was defined by a series of actions undertaken by youth fascinated by violence.
Paper presents an overview of the position of Polish World-War-One veterans in interwar period, framing theirs’ situation within a broader European context. I underline the dichotomy between ex-servicemen from former Austro-Hungarian, German or Russian armies (vast majority of veterans in the Second Republic of Poland) and the ‘independence fighters’ (i.e. soldiers from the voluntary Polish formations like Legiony Polskie) in terms of their legal and symbolic position in the state. State ideology often referred to the idea of the ‘independence deed’ and offered various privileges to the group of former Piłsudski’s Legionnaires and other ‘independence fighters’ Majority of ‘ordinary’ veterans was offered only ‘a pity’ and, unlike in Germany or France, they did not form any important mass movement, nor a ground for it. Dominating role of relatively small group of ‘Polish soldiers’ over masses of ‘soldiers-Poles’ could be therefore treated as rather specific feature of states like interwar Poland or Czechoslovakia.
“Our Goal is – Forward and Not to Retreat…” – Uprisings in the Small Ghettos Located in the Territories of Eastern Poland/Western Belarus and Ukraine – A Re-evaluation, 2024
The article analyses the phenomena of the revolts in small ghettos located primarely in the territories of current Belarus and Ukraine that used to be part of Poland during the interwar period. It suggests that one of the reasons for this phenomena was combined influence of life both in the interwar Poland and under the Soviet rule since september 1939 (untill the German-Nazi occupation in june-july 1941). Keywords: holocaust in the USSR; small ghettoes; revolts in ghettos; Jewish resistance during the holocaust; Western Belarus and Ukraine; interwar Poland Jewry This year (2023) we've marked the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. 1 This revolt became, to a large extent justified, a symbol of armed Jewish resistance in the urban area during the Holocaust (this alongside the partisan activity that existed by its very nature in the wooded and marshy countryside). 2 However, at that time there were cases of uprisings and active fighting in several small urban settlements as well as in the countryside, most of them in the territories of western Belarus and Ukraine (eastern Poland until the Soviet invasion to