Polish Literature and Genocide
Polish Literature and Genocide

Author: Arkadiusz Morawiec

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-30

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1000534499

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Polish Literature and Genocide presents the attitude of Polish literature to the 20th-century acts of genocide. This volume examines the literary representations of the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the massacre in Srebrenica in a rich, detailed, and comprehensive way, expanding the existing research and, in some cases, challenging the former sometimes ossified ideas. Polish literature not only reflects the obvious extermination of Jews and Poles, but also records what had been largely overlooked: the extermination of disabled and mentally ill people, the Roma and Sinti, and the Soviet prisoners of war by the Nazis. This volume includes analysis of the literary works of Władysław Szlengel, the most prominent Polish-language poet in the Warsaw ghetto; the peculiar reception of Julian Tuwim’s famous poem for children "Locomotive;" the memoir of Leon Weliczker, a prisoner of the Janowska concentration camp in Lvov and a member of the ‘death brigade’ (Sonderkommando); the origins of Medallions by Zofia Nałkowska, who ‘processed’ historical documents into literature and contributed to the making of professor Rudolf Spanner’s ‘dark legend,’ and the textual origins of Tadeusz Różewicz’s ‘poetry after Auschwitz.’ Furthermore, this volume addresses issues related to the genesis and function of ‘genocide literature’ – aesthetic, cognitive, ideological, and social. This volume will be a crucial resource for academics interested in genocide and Holocaust literary studies.

Polish Literature and the Holocaust
Polish Literature and the Holocaust

Author: Rachel Feldhay Brenner

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2019-04-15

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 0810139820

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In this pathbreaking study of responses to the Holocaust in wartime and postwar Polish literature, Rachel Feldhay Brenner explores seven writers’ compulsive need to share their traumatic experience of witness with the world. The Holocaust put the ideological convictions of Kornel Filipowicz, Józef Mackiewicz, Tadeusz Borowski, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, Leopold Buczkowski, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and Stefan Otwinowski to the ultimate test. Tragically, witnessing the horror of the Holocaust implied complicity with the perpetrator and produced an existential crisis that these writers, who were all exempted from the genocide thanks to their non-Jewish identities, struggled to resolve in literary form. Polish Literature and the Holocaust: Eyewitness Testimonies,1942–1947 is a particularly timely book in view of the continuing debate about the attitudes of Poles toward the Jews during the war. The literary voices from the past that Brenner examines posit questions that are as pertinent now as they were then. And so, while this book speaks to readers who are interested in literary responses to the Holocaust, it also illuminates the universal issue of the responsibility of witnesses toward the victims of any atrocity.

Polish Film and the Holocaust
Polish Film and the Holocaust

Author: Marek Haltof

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0857453572

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During World War II Poland lost more than six million people, including about three million Polish Jews who perished in the ghettos and extermination camps built by Nazi Germany in occupied Polish territories. This book is the first to address the representation of the Holocaust in Polish film and does so through a detailed treatment of several films, which the author frames in relation to the political, ideological, and cultural contexts of the times in which they were created. Following the chronological development of Polish Holocaust films, the book begins with two early classics: Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage (1948) and Aleksander Ford’s Border Street (1949), and next explores the Polish School period, represented by Andrzej Wajda’s A Generation (1955) and Andrzej Munk’s The Passenger (1963). Between 1965 and 1980 there was an “organized silence” regarding sensitive Polish-Jewish relations resulting in only a few relevant films until the return of democracy in 1989 when an increasing number were made, among them Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Decalogue 8 (1988), Andrzej Wajda’s Korczak (1990), Jan Jakub Kolski’s Keep Away from the Window (2000), and Roman Polański’s The Pianist (2002). An important contribution to film studies, this book has wider relevance in addressing the issue of Poland’s national memory.

In the Shadow of Auschwitz
In the Shadow of Auschwitz

Author: Daniel Brewing

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2022-06-10

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 180073090X

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The Nazi invasion of Poland was the first step in an unremittingly brutal occupation, one most infamously represented by the network of death camps constructed on Polish soil. The systematic murder of Jews in the camps has understandably been the focus of much historical attention. Less well-remembered today is the fate of millions of non-Jewish Polish civilians, who—when they were not expelled from their homeland or forced into slave labor—were murdered in vast numbers both within and outside of the camps. Drawing on both German and Polish sources, In the Shadow of Auschwitz gives a definitive account of the depredations inflicted upon Polish society, tracing the ruthless implementation of a racial ideology that cast ethnic Poles as an inferior race.

Surviving Genocide
Surviving Genocide

Author: Donna Chmara

Publisher: Winged Hussar Publishing

Published: 2022-04-26

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 9781950423804

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The author describes the loss of er home in Eastern Europe during World War II, her family’s deportation to a Nazi labor camp, and our eventual arrival in the United States. Relying on historic sources, interviews with twenty survivors and personal experience, I focus on the danger of identifying solely with a group or ideology rather than with the fact of our shared humanity. Exiled from her home in Eastern Poland as a baby, the author chronicles the aggression against Polish citizens, Jewish and Christian, by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II. For many it will be the first time hearing about the deportation of thousands to the Soviet Union for forced labor, a topic they have not met in school or in the media. Nor do they know about plans to replace Christianity and all religion with deification of Hitler and the Nazi party. She weaves this type of information into true accounts of survival from 20 eyewitnesses whom I interviewed over the course of 10 years. Surviving Genocide: Personal Recollections expands our knowledge of World War II, that of the attempted genocide against Slavic Christians of Eastern Europe. Most books about surviving the war describe the struggles of one person or family. This book is different in that the people I interviewed faced diverse and generally unknown hostile environments. For example, a family is exiled to Russia near the Arctic Circle, women toil on the Kazakhstan steppe to produce food for the Soviet army, people in my village of birth in what is now Belarus face winter in holes in the ground, single girls are forced to work in German factories and as domestics, and a Catholic priest is used for medical experiments in Dachau. These survivors are primary sources who begin to demonstrate the full sweep of events as they shine a light on the dangers of identifying with a group or philosophy at the expense of our shared humanity. Surviving Genocide: Personal Recollections contains a foreword by British historian Norman Davies, an interview with Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, an annotated bibliography, photographs, and maps. Survivors’ statements have been fact-checked and are validated by citing historic sources. I will market the book through public speaking and use of social media platforms. The number of World War II survivors is dwindling. Their witness will ensure a broader knowledge about a particular time and place in history.

The August Trials
The August Trials

Author: Andrew Kornbluth

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2021-03-02

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0674249135

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The first account of the August Trials, in which postwar Poland confronted the betrayal of Jewish citizens under Nazi rule but ended up fashioning an alibi for the past. When six years of ferocious resistance to Nazi occupation came to an end in 1945, a devastated Poland could agree with its new Soviet rulers on little else beyond the need to punish German war criminals and their collaborators. Determined to root out the “many Cains among us,” as a Poznań newspaper editorial put it, Poland’s judicial reckoning spawned 32,000 trials and spanned more than a decade before being largely forgotten. Andrew Kornbluth reconstructs the story of the August Trials, long dismissed as a Stalinist travesty, and discovers that they were in fact a scrupulous search for the truth. But as the process of retribution began to unearth evidence of enthusiastic local participation in the Holocaust, the hated government, traumatized populace, and fiercely independent judiciary all struggled to salvage a purely heroic vision of the past that could unify a nation recovering from massive upheaval. The trials became the crucible in which the Communist state and an unyielding society forged a foundational myth of modern Poland but left a lasting open wound in Polish-Jewish relations. The August Trials draws striking parallels with incomplete postwar reckonings on both sides of the Iron Curtain, suggesting the extent to which ethnic cleansing and its abortive judicial accounting are part of a common European heritage. From Paris and The Hague to Warsaw and Kyiv, the law was made to serve many different purposes, even as it failed to secure the goal with which it is most closely associated: justice.

Memories of My Life in a Polish Village, 1930-1949
Memories of My Life in a Polish Village, 1930-1949

Author: Toby Knobel Fluek

Publisher: The Experiment, LLC

Published: 2024-05-21

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 1891011693

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Available again for the first time in decades, this jewel of a memoir is the poignant story of a young Jewish girl growing up in a Polish farm village, from the peaceful early 1930s through the tragic war years, and finding safe harbor at last. “Deeply moving”—Elie Wiesel “A tone poem evocative of a vanished world”—Chaim Potok In her own words and with her own beautiful paintings and drawings, artist Toby Knobel Fluek (1926–2011) lovingly unfurls a unique view of Jewish life. She introduces us to her village, to her family, to the people among whom they lived; she shows us how customs and holidays were observed; and, with both feeling and restraint, she illustrates how this long-enduring way of life was shattered by World War II. She depicts her family’s experiences through Russian occupation and the devastation wreaked by the Nazis—and, finally, her new beginning in America. New to this edition is a foreword by Rakhmiel Peltz, PhD, PhD, Founding Director of the Judaic Studies Program at Drexel University, which he led for twenty years.

Poland and the Holocaust in the Polish-American Press, 1926-1945
Poland and the Holocaust in the Polish-American Press, 1926-1945

Author: Magdalena Kubow

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2020-07-23

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1476670528

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Contrary to the common notion that news regarding the unfolding Holocaust was unavailable or unreliable, news from Europe was often communicated to North American Poles through the Polish-language press. This work engages with the origins debate and demonstrates that the Polish-language press covered seminal issues during the interwar years, the war, and the Holocaust extensively on their front and main story pages, and were extremely responsive, professional, and vocal in their journalism. From Polish-Jewish relations, to the cause of the Second World War and subsequently the development of genocide-related policy, North American Poles, had a different perspective from mainstream society on the causes and effects of what was happening. New research for this book examines attitudes toward Jews prior to and during the Holocaust, and how information on such attitudes was disseminated. It utilizes selected Polish newspapers of the period 1926-1945, predominantly the Republika-Gornik, as well as survivor testimony.

The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture
The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture

Author: Bozena Shallcross

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2011-02-21

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 0253005094

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In stark contrast to the widespread preoccupation with the wartime looting of priceless works of art, BoÅ1⁄4ena Shallcross focuses on the meaning of ordinary objects -- pots, eyeglasses, shoes, clothing, kitchen utensils -- tangible vestiges of a once-lived reality, which she reads here as cultural texts. Shallcross delineates the ways in which Holocaust objects are represented in Polish and Polish-Jewish texts written during or shortly after World War II. These representational strategies are distilled from the writings of Zuzanna Ginczanka, WÅ‚adysÅ‚aw Szlengel, Zofia NaÅ‚kowska, CzesÅ‚aw MiÅ‚osz, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and Tadeusz Borowski. Combining close readings of selected texts with critical interrogations of a wide range of philosophical and theoretical approaches to the nature of matter, Shallcross's study broadens the current discourse on the Holocaust by embracing humble and overlooked material objects as they were perceived by writers of that time.

The Ethics of Witnessing
The Ethics of Witnessing

Author: Rachel Feldhay Brenner

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2014-06-30

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0810129752

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Winner, 2015 USC Book Award in Literary and Cultural Studies, for outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies The Ethics of Witnessing investigates the reactions of five important Polish diaristswriters—Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Maria Dabrowska, Aurelia Wylezynska, Zofia Nalkowska, and Stanislaw Rembek—during the period when the Nazis persecuted and murdered Warsaw’s Jewish population. The responses to the Holocaust of these prominent prewar authors extended from insistence on empathic interaction with victims to resentful detachment from Jewish suffering. Whereas some defied the dehumanization of the Jews and endeavored to maintain intersubjective relationships with the victims they attempted to rescue, others selfdeceptively evaded the Jewish plight. The Ethics of Witnessing examines the extent to which ideologies of humanism and nationalism informed the diarists’ perceptions, proposing that the reality of the Final Solution exposed the limits of both orientations and ultimately destroyed the ethical landscape shaped by the Enlightenment tradition, which promised the equality and fellowship of all human beings.