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: At the time of writing, two major landmarks have occurred in what might be called the history of the ‘afterlife of Holocaust memory’ in Britain.1 Most recently, the beginning of a new academic year in schools and colleges in England and Wales brought the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the National Curriculum — an event of immense significance in relation to Holocaust education in the United Kingdom. Whereas previously the presence of the Holocaust in educational curricula varied considerably, the incorporation of the genocide into the statutory content for the first National Curriculum for History in 1991 ensured that school history would become a core conduit in the expansion of knowledge and awareness among a new generation of young people. Beyond the chalkface, the other noteworthy anniversary of 2011 took place on 27 January when Britain held its tenth annual Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD). A day which ‘provides an opportunity for everyone to learn the lessons from the Holocaust, Nazi persecution and subsequent genocides and apply them to the present day to create a safer, better future’, HMD speaks to and of a process of heightened insti-tutionalisation which began in earnest at the turn of the millennium and has continued unabated since.2 HMD thus provides an illuminating window onto the preconceptions, priorities and politics which currently envelop and influence the shape of memorialisation in Britain, but it also does much more than this: as one of the first such days to be created in Western Europe following the Stockholm Declaration of 2000, Britain’s HMD also gestures to a gamut of issues related to memorialisation in general and Holocaust memory in the contemporary world in particular. Amongst others, these include the practices and procedures of collective remembrance, the forces behind a ‘turning’ to memory in the postmodern epoch, and the rationale for (and consequences of) the emergence of the Holocaust as a global phenomena in the past quarter of a century.
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
Abstract: It is a fact, that the Holocaust of European Jews has marked in various ways the Jewish diaspora and the Jewish presence worldwide. In the case of the Jews who live in Greece and especially in the city of Thessaloniki, though the Community delayed to break silence about this traumatic historic event, this fact was never let slip from memory. In the public sphere of action, the updating of Holocaust takes place through community actions at first hand and, later, through initiatives from local authorities, by making mnemonic and memorial donations. For the past seventy-four years, Holocaust inheres as a memory in three post-war Jewish generations in Thessaloniki and seals diversely the identity of the social subjects. This mnemonic event in collaboration with the social and politic developments and turmoils, describes the identity of the Jewish element, both directly and indirectly. The presentation will be focused on qualitative empirical data of fieldwork, from a sociological analysis perspective. More specifically, in this paper it will be explored the way in which, the Holocaust of the Greek Jewry emphasizes on the individual and collective responsibilities and, at the same time, it’s function as a contemporary conservation mechanism of the Jewish identity, a cohesive bond of the Greek-Jewry in Thessaloniki.
Abstract: Autorka v tejto publikácii sumarizuje svoje aktuálne poznatky získané dlhodobým výskumom problematiky holokaustu na Slovensku, jeho reflexie v spomienkach pamätníkov i obrazy šírené v súčasnej spoločnosti Slovenska. Zamýšľa sa nad možnosťami metódy oral history pri výskume tejto témy , jej úskaliami i pozitívami. Významné je pre ňu využitie tejto kvalitatívnej metódy zameranej na mikroúroveň spoločnosti, na subjektívne prežívanie veľkých dejín, priamy kontakt bádateľa s človekom, ktorý tieto udalosti prežil. Predstavuje jednotlivé dlhodobé výskumné projekty, ktoré autorka realizovala, ich výskumné vzorky, spôsob a podmienky práce. V tretej časti predstavuje spomienky na holokaust z dvoch perspektív: obetí (židovských pamätníkov) a divákov (ich nežidovských susedov, ktorí boli svedkami, no nie priamymi aktérmi diania). V závere sa zamýšľa nad vzťahom pamäti spomienkového spoločenstva a jeho vlastnými identitami, porovnáva spôsoby spomínania u židovských a nežidovských respondentov a uvažuje, čo prezrádzajú o vzťahoch medzi nimi a o ich vlastných referenčných skupinách.
Abstract: Rozsáhlá monografie odborníků z pražské právnické fakulty pod vedením Jana Kuklíka a Reného Petráše se věnuje problému majetkových ztrát židovského obyvatelstva za druhé světové války a různým metodám odškodnění. Publikace má široký historický a komparativní záběr, obsahuje podrobnou analýzu právních aspektů a zabývá se i dodnes nedořešenými otázkami. Nejpodrobněji je v knize zastoupeno území bývalého Československa, ale pozornost je věnována i vývoji v dalších státech: Německu, Rakousku, Polsku, ale také v zemích s velmi odlišnou situací, jako jsou Velká Británie, Bulharsko či Švýcarsko. Výklad u jednotlivých států obvykle zahrnuje nástin vývoje postavení Židů v daném regionu v posledních desetiletích před holocaustem, jsou však naznačeny i starší, středověké tradice. Jádrem práce je zachycení často až pozoruhodně různorodých metod záborů židovského majetku zejména v době druhé světové války a jeho restitucí nebo různých odškodňovacích akcí, které probíhají až do současnosti.
Abstract: British state-supported Holocaust remembrance has dramatically grown in prominence since the 1990s. This monograph provides the first substantial discussion of the interface between public Holocaust memory in contemporary Britain and the nation’s changing religious-secular landscape.
In the first half of the book attention is given to the relationships between remembrance activities and Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and post-Christian communities. Such relationships are far from monolithic, being entangled in diverse histories, identities, power-structures, and notions of ‘British values’. In the book’s second half, the focus turns to ways in which public initiatives concerned with Holocaust commemoration and education are intertwined with evocations and perceptions of the sacred. Three state-supported endeavours are addressed in detail: Holocaust Memorial Day, plans for a major new memorial site in London, and school visits to Auschwitz. Considering these phenomena through concepts of ritual, sacred space, and pilgrimage, it is proposed that response to the Holocaust has become a key feature of Britain’s 21st century religious-secular landscape. Critical consideration of these topics, it is argued, is necessary for both a better understanding of religious-secular change in modern Britain and a sustainable culture of remembrance and national self-examination.
Abstract: Cet ouvrage dirigé par Jacques et Ygal Fijalkow découle du colloque qui s'est tenu en 2011 à Lacaune sur le thème des voyages de mémoire de la Shoah (colloque soutenu par la Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah). Enseignants, personnels des musées mémoriaux, témoins de la Shoah, acteurs institutionnels, experts et universitaires y livrent leurs regards et leurs analyses sur les voyages d'étude sur la Shoah.
Enseigner la Shoah n’est pas chose facile. Tous les enseignants le savent. Dans le souci de développer des formes nouvelles d’enseignement, certains ont trouvé une solution : sortir de la classe et aller avec leurs élèves sur des lieux de mémoire. Cette façon de faire, dans un contexte de développement des voyages en général, est en plein développement.Du côté des pouvoirs publics, la formule a plu et les soutiens arrivent de sorte que le nombre de voyages augmente d’année en année. Le succès aidant, un débat est né : qu’apportent véritablement ces voyages de mémoire aux élèves qui y participent ?
C’est sur cette toile de fond que cet ouvrage a été rédigé. On y trouvera des éclairages sur ce qu’apportent les institutions spécialisées dans ce domaine. On pourra y voir également comment les choses se passent, aussi bien lors de la préparation que sur les lieux de mémoire eux-mêmes. Et ceci en France mais aussi chez nos voisins anglais, belges, espagnols, italiens, suisses, ainsi qu’en Israël. Le cas d’Auschwitz est privilégié, mais d’autres lieux sont également examinés.
Abstract: Auschwitz, Holokaust, antysemityzm...
Te trzy słowa symbole ewokują całą listę pytań badawczych. Czym jest dzisiaj dla nas - mieszkańców Polski - Auschwitz? Jaką wiedzę na temat obozu posiadamy, zwłaszcza czy wiemy, że Żydzi stanowili największą grupę ofiar? Czego symbolem jest dla nas – Polaków – Auschwitz, szczególnie czy jest raczej symbolem polskiego męczeństwa, czy żydowskiego Holokaustu? Jaki jest stosunek Polaków do Żydów? Jak szeroko rozpowszechniony i jak głęboki jest antysemityzm w Polsce, w jej różnych regionach i środowiskach? Czy mamy do czynienia z jednego rodzaju antysemityzmem czy z różnymi antysemityzmami? Co o Auschwitz, Zagładzie i Żydach wiedzą i sądzą młodzi Polacy? Jak efektywne są rozmaite działania edukacyjne i informacyjne dotyczące Zagłady i Auschwitz? Jaki skutek odniosły debaty o stosunkach polsko-żydowskich wywołane publikacją książek Jana Tomasza Grossa? Jakie doświadczenie wizyty w miejscach pamięci, takich jak Auschwitz, Majdanek czy Treblinka, zmienia myślenie młodych? Czy wzrost wiedzy o Zagładzie i Auschwitz zmienia postawy, zwłaszcza czy eliminuje antysemityzm?
Niniejszy tom zawiera artykuły, w których podjęto próbę udzielenia odpowiedzi na te pytania.
Abstract: Yellow Star, Red Star asks why Holocaust memory continues to be so deeply troubled—ignored, appropriated, and obfuscated—throughout Eastern Europe, even though it was in those lands that most of the extermination campaign occurred. As part of accession to the European Union, Jelena Subotić shows, East European states were required to adopt, participate in, and contribute to the established Western narrative of the Holocaust. This requirement created anxiety and resentment in post-communist states: Holocaust memory replaced communist terror as the dominant narrative in Eastern Europe, focusing instead on predominantly Jewish suffering in World War II. Influencing the European Union's own memory politics and legislation in the process, post-communist states have attempted to reconcile these two memories by pursuing new strategies of Holocaust remembrance. The memory, symbols, and imagery of the Holocaust have been appropriated to represent crimes of communism.
Yellow Star, Red Star presents in-depth accounts of Holocaust remembrance practices in Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, and extends the discussion to other East European states. The book demonstrates how countries of the region used Holocaust remembrance as a political strategy to resolve their contemporary "ontological insecurities"—insecurities about their identities, about their international status, and about their relationships with other international actors. As Subotić concludes, Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe has never been about the Holocaust or about the desire to remember the past, whether during communism or in its aftermath. Rather, it has been about managing national identities in a precarious and uncertain world.
Abstract: Silence appears frequently in discourses of the Holocaust – as a metaphorical absence, a warning against forgetting, or simply the only appropriate response. But powerful though these meanings are, they often underplay the ambiguity of silence’s signifying power. This article addresses the liminality of silence through an analysis of its richly textured role in the memorial soundscapes of Berlin. Beyond an aural version of erasure, unspeakability, or the space for reflection upon it, I argue that these silent spaces must always be heard as part of their surrounding urban environment, refracting wider spatial practices and dis/order. When conventions are reversed – when the present is silent – the past can resound in surprising and provocative ways, collapsing spatial and temporal borders and escaping the ritualized boundaries of formal commemoration. This is explored through four different memorial situations: the disturbing resonances within the Holocaust Memorial; the transgressive processes of a collective silent walk; Gleis 17 railway memorial’s opening up of heterotopic ‘gaps’ in time; and sounded/silent history in the work of singer Tania Alon. Each of these examples, in different ways, frames a slippage between urban sound and memorial silence, creating a parallel symbolic space that the past and the present can inhabit simultaneously. In its unpredictable fluidity, silence becomes a mobile and subversive force, producing an imaginative space that is ambiguous, affective and deeply meaningful. A closer attention to these different practices of listening disrupts a top-down, strategic discourse of silence as conventionally emblematic of reflection and distance. The contemporary urban soundscape that slips through the silent cracks problematizes the narrative hegemony of memorial itself.
Abstract: Dévastée et démantelée par l’occupation nazie, lieu principal de la Catastrophe, la Pologne a un statut particulier pour la mémoire juive et la mémoire de la Shoah. Depuis une quinzaine d’années, un réexamen de cette époque est devenu possible. Avec la démocratie et l’intégration à l’Union européenne, on voit naître un vif intérêt pour cette histoire dans les nouvelles générations et de grands débats publics émergent. La recherche historique est libre, ouverte et riche. La culture et le patrimoine juif sont étudiés et restaurés. Des artistes en interrogent la mémoire. Des festivals, des journaux, des émissions de radio ou de télévision, des programmes éducatifs touchent la jeune génération. Une petite communauté juive reprend vie. Bien entendu, la mémoire du génocide et la responsabilité des témoins sont au cœur des commémorations et des discussions sur ce passé. La Fin de l’innocence entend faire connaître ce travail de la société polonaise sur elle-même et sur son passé. Texte de voyage, construit autour de l’évocation des lieux de mémoire, texte de conversations, qui présente des portraits entretiens des principaux acteurs de ce renouveau, et texte de réflexion, cet ouvrage est à l’image du foisonnement et des interrogations qu’il présente.
Abstract: Aim. This paper analyses the inherent paradoxes of Jewish-Polish relations. It portrays the main beliefs that construct the contradicting narratives of the Holocaust, trying to weigh which of them is closer to the historic truth. It seeks for an answer to the question whether the Polish people were brothers-in-fate, victimized like the Jews by the Nazis, or if they were rather a hostile ethnic group.
Concept. First, the notion of Poland as a haven for Jews throughout history is conveyed. This historical review shows that the Polish people as a nation have always been most tolerant towards the Jews and that anti-Semitism has existed only on the margins of society. Next, the opposite account is brought, relying on literature that shows that one thousand years of Jewish residence in Poland were also a thousand years of constant friction, with continuous hatred towards the Jews. Consequently, different accounts of World War II are presented – one shows how the Polish people were the victims, and the others deal with Poles as by-standers and as perpetrators.
Results and conclusion. Inconsistency remains the strongest consistency of the relations between Jews and Poles. With the unresolved puzzle of whether the Polish people were victims, bystanders or perpetrators, this paper concludes with some comments on Israeli domestic political and educational attitudes towards Poland, that eventually influence collective concepts.
Cognitive value. The fact that the issue of the Israeli-Polish relationship has not been deeply inquired, seems to attest to the reluctance of both sides to deal with what seems to form an open wound. At the same time, the revival of Jewish culture in Poland shows that, today more than ever, the Polish people are reaching out to Israelis, and are willing to deal with history at an unprecedented level. As Israelis who wish to promote universal values, a significant encounter with the Polish people may constitute a door to acceptance and understanding of others. Such acceptance can only stem from mutual discourse and physical proximity between the two peoples.
Abstract: La disparition de la quasi-totalité des Juifs de Pologne pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale est due à leur assassinat systématique par les Allemands. Mais que sait-on des comportements de la population polonaise ? La paix revenue, que sont devenus les derniers survivants ? Que nous dit aujourd’hui l’irruption de ce passé dans la société polonaise ? Comment vivre avec la mémoire d’Auschwitz, de Treblinka, de Belzec, autant de mémoriaux situés en Pologne ?
Depuis une quinzaine d’années, des historiens de ce pays ont montré combien il était difficile aux Juifs qui tentaient d’échapper aux tueurs de trouver appui auprès des populations locales, surtout en milieu rural, tant en raison de la politique de terreur menée par l’occupant que de l’hostilité de la société polonaise à l’égard des Juifs. Leurs travaux font désormais autorité dans le monde entier. Pourtant, depuis quelques années, les autorités de Varsovie mettent en œuvre une « politique historique » qui vise à minorer, voire à nier, la participation de franges importantes de la population polonaise à la traque des Juifs.
Sur place, malgré les embûches et les intimidations, les historiens travaillent, publient, organisent des colloques, forment des étudiants. Les auteurs réunis dans cet ouvrage témoignent de la vitalité de cette historiographie. Faire connaître aujourd’hui la fécondité scientifique et la portée critique de la nouvelle école historique polonaise est une exigence intellectuelle, morale et politique.
