The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland

The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland

Author: Anat Plocker

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2022-03

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0253058643

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In March 1968, against the background of the Six-Day War, a campaign of antisemitism and anti-Zionism swept through Poland. The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland is the first full-length study of the events, their precursors, and the aftermath of this turbulent period. Plocker offers a new framework for understanding how this antisemitic campaign was motivated by a genuine fear of Jewish influence and international power. She sheds new light on the internal dynamics of the communist regime in Poland, stressing the importance of middle-level functionaries, whose dislike and fear of Jews had an unmistakable impact on the evolution of party policy. The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland examines how Communist Party leader Wladyslaw Gomulka's anti-Zionist rhetoric spiraled out of hand and opened up a fraught Pandora's box of old assertions that Jews controlled the Communist Party, the revival of nationalist chauvinism, and a witch hunt in universities and workplaces that conjured up ugly memories of Nazi Germany.


Wladyslaw Gomulka

Wladyslaw Gomulka

Author: Anita Prazmowska

Publisher: I.B.Tauris

Published: 2016-04-18

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9781848851337

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Wladyslaw Gomulka was a key player within Polish politics for over four decades and one of the most influential of the East European Communist Party leaders. As the architect of the 'Polish road to socialism', he claimed for Poland the right to define its own model of economic and political development, yet he was nevertheless committed to Poland's membership of the Soviet bloc. Anita Prazmowska here traces Gomulka's progression from a poorly educated worker in the Krosno district of Poland, to his election as First Party Secretary in 1956 and finally to his forced resignation in 1970. She considers Gomulka's pivotal role in building a communist-led resistance in occupied Poland during World War II as well as the critical part he played in post-war Polish politics and the 'de-Stalinization' process. Incorporating recently released and previously unpublished sources, this book provides a vivid picture of how Communism functioned in Poland and an original analysis of Poland's international role in the Cold War era.


The Generation

The Generation

Author: Jaff Schatz

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2021-05-28

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 0520370600

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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.


"Them"

Author: Teresa Torańska

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13:

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This book, which could not be published in Poland (except in samizdat), contains interviews conducted in 1981-1984 with five formerly prominent Polish Communists (Edward Ochab, Jakub Berman, Roman Werfel, Stefan Staszewski, and Julia Minc, wife of Hilary Minc) who had leading roles in the Stalinist system in Poland in the years 1944-1956. Their frank statements and recollections, under the sharp questioning of a talented journalist, are remarkably revealing both of their mentality as loyal Stalinists (still loyal, for the most part, despite all the subsequent events) and of the political issues and struggles of that time, including the dramatic events of 1956.


Veterans, Victims, and Memory

Veterans, Victims, and Memory

Author: Joanna Wawrzyniak

Publisher:

Published: 2015-12-15

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 9783631640494

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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."


The Rape of Poland

The Rape of Poland

Author: Stanislaw Mikolajczyk

Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing

Published: 2017-06-28

Total Pages: 549

ISBN-13: 1787205797

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First published in 1948, this is the inside story by the former head of the Polish Government in Exile, and more recently head of the Peasants’ Party in Poland, which tried to find a way to co-operate with the Soviets. “A raging question in Poland has become, ‘How long will it take them to communize us completely?’ “To my mind, however, the question is badly framed. I am convinced that human beings cannot be converted to communism if that conversion is attempted while the country concerned is under Communist rule. Under Communist dictatorship the majority become slaves—but men born in freedom, though they may be coerced, can never be convinced. Communism is an evil which is embraced only by fools and idealists not under the actual heel of such rule. “The question should be phrased: How long can a nation under Communist rule survive the erosion of its soul?”—Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, Preface


Germans to Poles

Germans to Poles

Author: Hugo Service

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-11-26

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781107595484

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At the end of the Second World War, mass forced migration and population movement accompanied the collapse of Nazi Germany's occupation and the start of Soviet domination in East-Central Europe. Hugo Service examines the experience of Poland's new territories, exploring the Polish Communist attempt to 'cleanse' these territories in line with a nationalist vision, against the legacy of brutal wartime occupations of Central and Eastern Europe by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The expulsion of over three million Germans was intertwined with the arrival of millions of Polish settlers. Around one million German citizens were categorised as 'native Poles' and urged to adopt a Polish national identity. The most visible traces of German culture were erased. Jewish Holocaust survivors arrived and, for the most part, soon left again. Drawing on two case studies, the book exposes how these events varied by region and locality.