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A revealing account of Polish cooperation with Nazis in WWII—a “grim, compelling [and] significant scholarly study” (Kirkus Reviews). Between 1942 and 1943, thousands of Jews escaped the fate of German death camps in Poland. As they sought refuge in the Polish countryside, the Nazi death machine organized what they called Judenjagd, meaning hunt for the Jews. As a result of the Judenjagd, few of those who escaped the death camps would survive to see liberation. As Jan Grabowski’s penetrating microhistory reveals, the majority of the Jews in hiding perished as a consequence of betrayal by their Polish neighbors. Hunt for the Jews tells the story of the Judenjagd in Dabrowa, Tarnowska,...
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 ...
As a unique and innovative addition to the scholarship on Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and modern Polish history, this volume provides fresh analysis on the Nazi occupation of Poland. Through new questions and engaging untapped sources the leading historians who have contributed to this volume provide original scholarship to steer debates and expand the historiography surrounding Nazi racial and occupation policies, Polish and Jewish responses to them, persecution, police terror, resistance, and complicity.
Poland, the epicentre of the Holocaust, began denying responsibility as soon as the Nazi atrocities ended. The nation's distortion of history continues today - with disturbing consequences. "Holocaust denial has now been replaced by a much more dangerous and insidious foe."—Jan Grabowski Poland is the place where the Holocaust was perpetrated – where close to 5 out of 6 million Jews were killed. Today, it is the place where a new threat is unfolding: the hijacking of history to transform the nation's past.Whitewash grapples with modern Poland's failure to acknowledge its role in the Holocaust. World-renowned Holocaust historian Jan Grabowski examines how the government, museums, schools and state institutions have been deployed to propagate a narrative of Polish national innocence. He recounts his own experience as the victim of smears and a notorious lawsuit for questioning the complicity of Poles in the destruction of the country's Jews, and explores the far-reaching consequences of Poland's historical distortions, which have been echoed and replicated worldwide to challenge the truth of the Holocaust.
Studies by Nechama Tec and others on the rescue of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland tend to underestimate the number of cases of help given in return for payment. Files of postwar trials of collaborators, many of whom committed crimes against Jews, and other materials show that the phenomenon of paid help was far from marginal. A Jew with money and other assets had much greater chances of being rescued than a penniless one. Polish society regarded the dispossession of the Jews as an act of social justice, and only resented the fact that Jewish properties were appropriated by a few individuals rather than being divided amongst the broader community. Many Jews rescued by paid helpers justified the...
Reined into the service of the Cold War confrontation, antifascist ideology overshadowed the narrative about the Holocaust in the communist states of Eastern Europe. This led to the Western notion that in the Soviet Bloc there was a systematic suppression of the memory of the mass murder of European Jews. Going beyond disputing the mistaken opposition between “communist falsification” of history and the “repressed authentic” interpretation of the Jewish catastrophe, this work presents and analyzes the ways as the Holocaust was conceptualized in the Soviet-ruled parts of Europe. The authors provide various interpretations of the relationship between antifascism and Holocaust memory in...
This multi-disciplinary volume is one of the few collections about social change covering various cases of mass violence and genocide. In life under persecution, social relations and social structures were not absent and not simply replaced by an ethno-racial order. The studies in this book show the influence of social structures like gender, age and class on life under persecution. Exploring practices in family and labor relations and of collective action, they counter claims of an atomization of society or total uprootedness of victims. Despite being exposed to poverty and want and under the permanent threat of political violence, persecuted people tried to develop their own agency. Case studies are about the Jewish and Armenian persecutions, Rwanda, the war of decolonization in Mozambique and civilian refuges in Belarus during World War II. The authors are a mix of experienced scholars and young researchers.
The closing decade of the 20th century witnessed dramatic upheavals across landscapes that had once housed most of the world's Jewish population: the overturning of the East European Communist governments and the fall of the USSR, accompanied by a major Jewish emigration movement. The experts contributing to this volume apply interdisciplinary approaches to analyze and interpret the shifting post-communist social and political realities and aid our understanding of recent events.
In light of Russia's aggressive 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a crucial, elucidative read, a sweeping epic chronicling a thousand years of strife, war, and bloodshed, from pre-Christianity to the fall of Communism—illuminating the remarkable cultural significance and richness of a place perpetually lost to the margins of history "Eastern Europe" has gone out of fashion since the fall of the Soviet Union. Ask someone today, and they might tell you that Estonia is in the Baltics or Scandinavia, that Slovakia is in Central Europe, and that Croatia is in the eastern Adriatic or the Balkans. In fact, Eastern Europe is a place that barely exists at all, except in cultural ...