Abstract: In this paper I critically examine the conflation of Turk with Muslim, explore the Turkish experience of Nazism, and examine Turkey's relation to the darkest era of German history. Whereas many assume that Turks in Germany cannot share in the Jewish past, and that for them the genocide of the Jews is merely a borrowed memory, I show how intertwined the history of Turkey and Germany, Turkish and German anti-Semitism, and Turks and Jews are. Bringing together the histories of individual Turkish citizens who were Jewish or Dönme (descendants of Jews) in Nazi Berlin with the history of Jews in Turkey, I argue the categories “Turkish” and “Jewish” were converging identities in the Third Reich. Untangling them was a matter of life and death. I compare the fates of three neighbors in Berlin: Isaak Behar, a Turkish Jew stripped of his citizenship by his own government and condemned to Auschwitz; Fazli Taylan, a Turkish citizen and Dönme, whom the Turkish government exerted great efforts to save; and Eric Auerbach, a German Jew granted refuge in Turkey. I ask what is at stake for Germany and Turkey in remembering the narrative of the very few German Jews saved by Turkey, but in forgetting the fates of the far more numerous Turkish Jews in Nazi-era Berlin. I conclude with a discussion of the political effects today of occluding Turkish Jewishness by failing to remember the relationship between the first Turkish migration to Germany and the Shoah.
Abstract: The Shoah belongs to one of the most thoroughly investigated aspects of modern European history. Scholars have used the Holocaust methodology to study other genocides, or forms of ethnic or political violence. Nevertheless, our understanding of the extermination of the European Jewry is limited, fragmented, and changes constantly due to new investigation methods, research interests, and public debates. The first studies on the Holocaust were conducted already during the Shoah but because of different reasons historians in some countries such as Germany and Ukraine did not pay much attention to them and concentrated rather on the documents left by the perpetrators and their fate during the war. While in Poland the research on the Holocaust never stopped, even if it was subjected to various political and ideological limitations, and the Shoah has been publicly debated since the middle of the 1980s, this was not the case in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Nevertheless, in the last two decades, the importance of the Holocaust was discovered in these countries as well and it is currently conceptualized in the framework of regional, national, and European history.
Abstract: Drawing upon developments in cultural and social memory studies and Europeanization theory, this article examines the Europeanization of Holocaust memory understood as the process of construction, institutionalization, and diffusion of beliefs regarding the Holocaust and norms and rules regarding Holocaust remembrance and education at a transnational, European level since the 1990s and their incorporation in the countries of post-communist Eastern Europe, which is also the area where the Holocaust largely took place. The article identifies the transnational agents of the Europeanization of Holocaust memory—the European Union’s parliament, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, as well as the United Nations. It analyzes chronologically the key Holocaust-related activities and documents of these agents, highlighting East European countries’ varied and changing position towards them. It examines synchronically the outcome of the Europeanization of Holocaust memory by these transnational agents—a European memory of the Holocaust—identifying its key components, discussing the main aspects, and illustrating the impact of this process and outcome upon the memory of the Holocaust in the East European countries. The article argues that the Europeanization of Holocaust memory has significantly contributed to the development of Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe, although other agents and processes were also involved.
Abstract: This article addresses the persistence of anti-Semitism in Romania, placed in the context of some recent debates concerning the memory of the Holocaust in the country, as well as in the area of Central and Eastern Europe more broadly. It argues that, despite significant improvements in terms of legislation, the memory of the Holocaust remains a highly contested issue in contemporary Romania, torn between the attempts to join in the European memory of the Holocaust and local legacies that on the one hand focus primarily on the suffering of Romanians under the communist regime, and on the other perform a symbolic “denationalisation” of the Jewish minority in the country, whose own suffering is thus excised from national memory. It does so by focusing in particular on the debates surrounding the adoption of Law 217/2015, meant to clarify earlier legislation on Holocaust denial, and comparing them with those prompted by the Ukrainian “memory laws” passed in the same year. Taking into account both the national and international reactions to these very different pieces of legislation, the article shows the still-persisting discrepancy between a (mostly Western) “European” memory of the legacy of the twentieth century and local memory topoi characteristic of the countries that were part of the former socialist bloc.
Abstract: This research contributes to the understanding of the process of reconstructing the memory of Jews in contemporary Poland. Focusing on a case study of a town in southern Poland, Mszana Dolna, the study analyses how Jewish/non-Jewish relations and the history of the Jews of the town are remembered by the current inhabitants of Mszana, as well as by Holocaust survivors and their families. The research is based on an interdisciplinary approach to the subject of memory, using in depth oral history interviews, archival and other written materials, as well as participant observation as sources of analysed data. The study concentrates on the memory of the life in Mszana before, during and after the war in terms of the coexistence of two communities, Jewish and non-Jewish ones. Focusing mainly on the annual commemoration of the shooting of the Jews of Mszana in August 1942 by non-Jewish members of the community and their participation in the educational programmes, the research elucidates the process of regaining the Jewish heritage of the town by non-Jewish inhabitants and incorporating it into the past of the community of Mszana. Identifying the variety of levels of interactions between Jews and non-Jews before the war, it argues that the interrupted coexistence of both groups in Mszana resulted in the void which remained after the destroyed Jewish community. The memory of Jews found its place in the oral history for several decades. Through examining the forms of remembrance of the Jews in Mszana, this study attempts to illustrate the transition of the memory of Jews from private sphere of life to the public discourse on the Jewish inheritance of the town.
Abstract: Several exhibitions in recent years – in the ‘Deutsches Auswandererhaus’ Bremerhaven and other museums in Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States – have used suitcases (and ‘the suitcase’) as a central symbol and metaphor for the migration process. Based on a variety of examples, the article discusses the idea and the use of memory containers – and their function as archives – in the context of emigration, transmigration, and immigration. Suitcases are the most obvious material objects relating to these processes and the connected cultural practices. They are concrete objects, but beyond that they have been used as symbols and metaphors for the experience of travel and of dislocation. Suitcases often contained, and therefore are connected to, other items of memory storage: photographs and personal documents (letters, diaries about the migration experience – documents that have been termed, in a different context, ‘Schreibakte auf der Schwelle’ – acts of writing on the threshold); manuscripts, farewell letters (written on the boat, in border stations, in port cities), memorial and yizkor books, songs and poems, self-drawn maps which show the stations of the journey. An analysis of such ‘things’ – material objects which often carried an emotional value – and their representation in museums and exhibitions opens up a wide and rich field of research for the ethnography of migration.
Abstract: Poland presents the most advanced case of the transformation of the memory of Jews and the Holocaust in
all of postcommunist Europe. For that reason, it can serve as a paradigm in comparative studies of the
scope, dynamics, complexities, and challenges of this memory transformation.
The memory of Jews and the Holocaust in postcommunist Poland has persistently occupied a central stage
in public debate since 1989. At present, the more than twenty-year-old boom of the “theater” of Jewish
memory shows no sign of declining. This does not, however, mean that the archeology of the Polish
Jewish past has been completed and that a broad public consensus has been reached on how to remember
the Jews and the Holocaust, especially the dark uncomfortable past in Polish-Jewish relations showing
Christian (ethnic) Poles in a bad light.
One can differentiate three key dimensions in this landscape of memory: “remembering to remember,”
“remembering to benefit,” and “remembering to forget.” The first underscores the void left after the
genocide of Polish Jewry, and Polish-Jewish relations in all their aspects. In “remembering to benefit,” the
key intention behind the recalling of the Jews and the Holocaust is to achieve tangible goals. In
“remembering to forget,” the memory of Jews and the Holocaust is regarded as an awkward problem.
In Poland’s immediate future, these three modes of remembering Jews and the Holocaust will persist. This
landscape of memory will continue to resemble a film with a multiple array of scenes—many fascinating
and intellectually and morally uplifting, others confusing, hypocritical, intellectually dull, morally
despicable, and opportunistic.
Abstract: Approximately one-third of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust were murdered in what Father Patrick Desbois has called the ‘Holocaust by bullets’ – mass shootings that largely took place across Eastern Europe in thousands of forests, villages, streets, and homes. In many instances, German perpetrators and their local collaborators eliminated entire communities in a matter of days or even hours.
And yet these Killing Sites remain relatively unknown, both in regional histories and in the larger remembrance of the Holocaust. With the passing of both survivors and witnesses, efforts are underway by a range of actors who are determined to locate and preserve these sites and to name their unidentified victims.
Recognizing the importance and urgency of this work, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) launched a Multi-Year Work Plan project on Killing Sites in 2011 to raise public awareness, offer support and expertise to diverse initiatives in this field, encourage further research, and pursue commemoration for educational purposes. As the first milestone of this plan, IHRA experts convened a major international conference on Killing Sites in Krakow on January 22–23, 2014.
As this volume reveals, the ambitious program brought together an impressive mix of organizations, scholars, and experts who examined a range of subjects, including the state of current research; promising pilot projects; complex national and religious legal issues; developments in forensic archaeology; and regional efforts to integrate Killing Sites into educational curricula, among others. Just as important, however, the Krakow conference highlighted the challenges that remain and the vital importance of the work that must still be done.
This publication includes nineteen articles based on the papers presented at the conference, reflecting both research and fieldwork. The participants in this book share with each other and with the reader the various challenges that they have faced, as well as their successes or lack thereof in overcoming obstacles. They tell of challenges of identifying mass Killing Sites; tracing the story of each site; legal, Halakhic (Jewish law), cultural, and political issues; efforts to involve local people and authorities as well as national authorities in the preservation and commemoration of these sites; conflicting memories that could lead to distorted commemoration, as discussed for example by Father Jacek Waligóra; or a desire to forget the events and the mass killings in some cases.
Abstract: Neighbors — Jan Gross’s stunning account of the brutal mass murder of the Jews of Jedwabne by their Polish neighbors — was met with international critical acclaim and was a finalist for the National Book Award in the United States. It has also been, from the moment of its publication, the occasion of intense controversy and painful reckoning. This book captures some of the most important voices in the ensuing debate, including those of residents of Jedwabne itself as well as those of journalists, intellectuals, politicians, Catholic clergy, and historians both within and well beyond Poland’s borders.
Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic introduce the debate, focusing particularly on how Neighbors rubbed against difficult old and new issues of Polish social memory and national identity. The editors then present a variety of Polish voices grappling with the role of the massacre and of Polish-Jewish relations in Polish history. They include samples of the various strategies used by Polish intellectuals and political elites as they have attempted to deal with their country’s dark past, to overcome the legacy of the Holocaust, and to respond to Gross’s book.
Abstract: Germany’s acceptance of its direct responsibility for the Holocaust has strengthened its relationship with Israel and has led to a deep commitment to combat antisemitism and rebuild Jewish life in Germany. As we draw close to a time when there will be no more firsthand experience of the horrors of the Holocaust, there is great concern about what will happen when German responsibility turns into history. Will the present taboo against open antisemitism be lifted as collective memory fades? There are alarming signs of the rise of the far right, which includes blatantly antisemitic elements, already visible in public discourse. But it is mainly the radicalization of the otherwise moderate Muslim population of Germany and the entry of almost a million refugees since 2015 from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan that appears to make German society less tolerant and somewhat less inhibited about articulating xenophobic attitudes. The evidence is unmistakable—overt antisemitism is dramatically increasing once more.
The Future of the German-Jewish Past deals with the formidable challenges created by these developments. It is conceptualized to offer a variety of perspectives and views on the question of the future of the German-Jewish past. The volume addresses topics such as antisemitism, Holocaust memory, historiography, and political issues relating to the future relationship between Jews, Israel, and Germany. While the central focus of this volume is Germany, the implications go beyond the German-Jewish experience and relate to some of the broader challenges facing modern societies today.
Abstract: Relatively little comment has been passed on the role of the Holocaust at the Imperial War Museum (IWM). There is a critical discourse about the role of the exhibition in the museum of course, and Rebecca Jinks’s and Antoine Capet’s essays contribute admirably to that discourse, yet the specific question of the relationship between thinking about the Holocaust and thinking about Empire and imperial genocide has seldom been asked. Yet as Jinks’s essay makes clear, Britain has an imperial past and as such it is not possible for the Holocaust exhibition to just avoid that context. It would be very difficult anywhere in Britain, but in the IWM, the official repository of the nation’s war memories, it is impossible. What is more, the IWM specifically tasks itself, in its Crimes Against Humanity exhibition, to engage with genocide in a wider context and as such to place the Holocaust in that context. And the British Empire was a site of genocide. One might expect then to find that the IWM grapples with the problem of genocide in the British Empire (in Australia, in Ireland, in India for example). It does not. As such, I want to use this commentary to think more about the relationship between the galloping British memory of the Holocaust that Capet identifies, and Britain’s memory of genocide in its Empire that Jinks highlights, using the IWM as a case study.
Abstract: n the last decade or so, research has begun to address the ways in which global discourses of memory, within which the Holocaust is paradigmatic, often ‘borrow’ Holocaust iconography and tropes of memorial-isation to discuss or commemorate other tragedies.1 This utilisation of Holocaust memory is indicative of the position that the Holocaust now generally holds throughout the Western world, and yet it also raises questions about how we represent, and respond to, the other tragedies of the twentieth century. In this vein, this chapter explores the interactions between the memory of the Holocaust and other contemporary mass atrocities in Britain, using as case studies the Imperial War Museum’s (IWM) Holocaust exhibition, which opened in 2000, and its Crimes Against Humanity exhibition, which first opened in 2002 and then moved to a different part of the building in 2009. While on the face of it, the sheer difference in size and visitor numbers between the two exhibitions could easily function as a metaphor for the disparity between the status of Holocaust memory, and the memory of ‘other genocides’ in Britain and the West, my object is to explore the symbiotic and perhaps even dependent relationship between the two exhibitions, and by extension the wider categories of ‘Holocaust’ and ‘genocide’.
Abstract: It can be supposed that most people interested in twentieth-century history are familiar with the Imperial War Museum (IWM) and that most will have visited its permanent Holocaust exhibition since this was formally opened in June 2000. What Suzanne Bardgett, the curator who runs the exhibition, calls its ‘artifacts’ cover 1,200 square metres but before 2009 it showed only one piece of ‘art’ indirectly derived from the discovery and liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by the British Army in April 1945: Edgar Ainsworth’s drawing Wem Berger, Aged 13, after a Year in Ravensbriick (near Bélsen), April 1945 It is not always realised that the IWM has, in fact, many more drawings and paintings connected with what is now known as Holocaust Art. The museum now publishes a history of the ‘hangings’ from which each of these works has benefited and this indicates that, while there were many hangings immediately after the war, there was then a long period of ‘purgatory’ from which these works are only now re-emerging. In a revealing article of 2004, Bardgett suggested that it was the whole issue of representing the Holocaust in the Museum which was taboo until the 1980s.2 Inevitably, the paintings and drawings suffered from this reticence, which largely explains their neglect as an iconographie source for Holocaust studies in Britain.
Topics: Holocaust, Holocaust Commemoration, Holocaust Education, Holocaust Memorials, Holocaust Survivors, Holocaust Survivors: Children of, Jewish Community, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Post-Colonial, Post-War Reconstruction, Restitution and Reparations, Memory
Abstract: Książka jest wynikiem interdyscyplinarnych badań dwudziestu ośmiu autorów pracujących przez trzy lata systemem seminaryjnym pod kierownictwem Feliksa Tycha, autora projektu, oraz Moniki Adamczyk-Garbowskiej. Przedstawia próbę kompleksowego zbadania wpływu Holokaustu i okupacji niemieckiej na kondycję nielicznych - w porównaniu z przedwojenną liczbą - ocalałych Żydów polskich. Autorzy wprowadzają czytelnika w świat życia żydowskiego i stosunków polsko-żydowskich w powojennej Polsce od roku 1944 po pierwszą dekadę XXI wieku. Teksty zostały ułożone w czterech blokach tematycznych, które w znacznej mierze odpowiadają istotnym etapom życia żydowskiego w Polsce i jego postrzegania przez większość społeczeństwa, czyli kolejno latom szacowania strat, nadziei i odbudowy, okresowi tabuizacji, zacierania pamięci, wreszcie - sytuacji obecnej. Adresowana zarówno do specjalistów, jak i szerszego kręgu odbiorców książka ta może służyć jako źródło wiedzy, swoisty przewodnik, a także inspiracja do dalszych badań nad następstwami Zagłady w Polsce i w innych krajach. Jest to pierwsza zakrojona na tak szeroką skalę publikacja, która na przykładzie Polski - przed wojną największego skupiska Żydów w Europie i drugiego, po USA, na świecie - ukazuje wpływ Holokaustu na powojenną kondycję Żydów oraz całego społeczeństwa polskiego.
Feliks Tych, Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska Przedmowa 7
KRAJOBRAZ PO WOJNIE 13
Albert Stankowski, Piotr Weiser Demograficzne skutki Holokaustu 15
Alina Skibińska Powroty ocalałych i stosunek do nich społeczeństwa polskiego 39
Andrzej Żbikowski Morderstwa popełniane na Żydach w pierwszych latach po wojnie 71
Tamar Lewinsky Żydowscy uchodźcy i przesiedleńcy z Polski w okupowanych Niemczech 95
Ewa Koźmińska -Frejlak Kondycja ocalałych. Adaptacja do rzeczywistości powojennej (1944–1949) 123
August Grabski Żydzi a polskie życie polityczne (1944–1949) 157
PRÓBY ODBUDOWY ŻYCIA ŻYDOWSKIEGO 189
Grzegorz Berendt Życie od nowa. Instytucje i organizacje żydowskie (1944–1950) 191
August Grabski, Albert Stankowski Życie religijne społeczności żydowskiej 215
Helena Datner Dziecko żydowskie (1944–1968) 245
Joanna Nalewajko-Kuliko V, Magdalena Ruta Kultura jidysz po II wojnie światowej 283
Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Magdalena Ruta Literatura polska i jidysz wobec Zagłady 305
Renata Piątkowska Żydowskie życie artystyczne po Zagładzie 339
Grzegorz Berendt Wpływ liberalizacji politycznej roku 1956 na sytuację Żydów 359
Feliks Tych „Marzec’68”. Geneza, przebieg i skutki kampanii antysemickiej lat 1967/68 385
Edyta Gawron Powojenna emigracja Żydów z Polski. Przykład Krakowa 413
PAMIĘĆ I ZAPOMNIENIE 439
Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Adam Kopciowski Zamiast macewy. Żydowskie księgi pamięci 441
Eleonora Bergman , Jan Jagi elski Ślady obecności. Synagogi i cmentarze 471
Robert Kuwałek Obozy koncentracyjne i ośrodki zagłady jako miejsca pamięci 493
Sławomir Kapralski Od milczenia do „trudnej pamięci”. Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau i jego rola w dyskursie publicznym 527
Bożena Szaynok Kościół katolicki w Polsce wobec problematyki żydowskiej (1944–1989) 553
Małgorzata Melchior Zagłada w świadomości polskich Żydów 583
Hanna Węgrzynek Tematyka Zagłady w podręcznikach szkolnych (1945–2009) 597
Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs Świadomość Holokaustu wśród młodzieży polskiej po zmianach systemowych 1989 roku 625
TU I TERAZ 659
Helena Datner Współczesna społeczność żydowska w Polsce a Zagłada 661
Monika Krawczyk Status prawny własności żydowskiej i jego wpływ na stosunki polsko-żydowskie 687
Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Magdalena Ruta Od kultury żydowskiej do kultury o Żydach 715
Dariusz Libionka Debata wokół Jedwabnego 733
Joanna Tokarska-Bakir Następstwa Holokaustu w relacjach żydowskich i w pamięci polskiej prowincji w świetle badań etnograficznych 775
Ewa Koźmińska-Frejlak Wdzięczność i zapomnienie. Polacy i Żydzi wobec Sprawiedliwych (1944–2007) 813
Antoni Sułek Zwykli Polacy patrzą na Żydów. Postawy społeczeństwa polskiego wobec Żydów w świetle badań sondażowych (1967–2008) 853
Informacje o autorach 889
Wykaz skrótów 895
Indeks 897
