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ABSTRACT
This article analyzes the relentless attacks on the Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny; ŻIH) in Warsaw in 1967–1968 against the background of two narratives. The first narrative, focusing on the murder of Jews during the German occupation by Polish antisemites, was utilized by German revisionists connected with the Göttinger Arbeitskreis in order to assuage German guilt for the Holocaust. It operated in a manipulative manner, selectively choosing and distorting Jewish testimony and combining this with elements of Cold War-style anti-Communism. The second narrative was embraced by the nationalist faction of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) and offered the myth of the Polish nation as heroic saviors of the Jews. It, too, was based on selectively chosen Jewish testimony, with the goal of whitewashing Poles of involvement in antisemitic violence. ŻIH was caught in the middle, forced to defend itself against attacks coming from proponents of both narratives.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the two anonymous readers for their comments, as well as Michael Fitzpatrick for his English-language corrections of the text.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Rutkowski, “Schlägt jetzt die Stunde der Wahrheit?” Emanuel Ringelblum and his family were murdered by the Germans in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto in March 1944 after having been betrayed by Polish neighbors. On March 7, 1944, they were rounded up by German Sipo men and Polish policemen working within the Judenreferat of the Polish Criminal Police. Ringelblum, his wife, Judyta, and his 15-year-old son, Uri, had been hiding together with around 30 Jews in a hideout on Grójecka Street 81 in the Warsaw district of Ochota. After the planned raid they were all brought to the Pawiak prison and murdered in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto a few days later. The gardener Mieczysław Wolski, who had prepared the hideout (the so-called “Krysia” shelter), as well as his nephew, Janusz Wolski, were also shot to death, though the life of the gardener’s mother was spared. After the war, she testified that two Germans and two Polish policemen had searched her house. See Grabowski, “Hunting Down Emanuel Ringelblum,” 26–32, and n. 70.
2 See Chu, The German Minority in Interwar Poland, 40–49, and “Einleitung,” 35.
3 Examples include Erhard Riemann, head of the department of Rasse- und Volkstumsforschung of the Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit in Kraków (see Linnemann, Das Erbe der Ostforschung, 131) as well as the historian Theodor Schieder, who contributed to Nazi “Rassenpolitik” by producing memoranda and other writings. See Haar, Historiker im Nationalsozialismus, 340–345.
4 Ringelblum, “Stosunki polsko-żydowskie w czasie drugiej wojny światowej” (Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego).
5 Stosunki polsko-żydowskie w czasie drugiej wojny światowej.
6 See Person, “The Initial Reception and First Publications of Materials from the Ringelblum Archive in Poland, 1946–1952.” Based on this version, Jacob Sloan published an unauthorized English translation, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum in 1958, which made Ringelblum’s work known beyond Yiddish circles. The political pressure under Stalinism had an even stronger impact on the publications written by the institute’s staff, in which the situation in the ghettos was analyzed from the perspective of class struggle. The historian Jean-Charles Szurek recognized in this a “reductive Marxism” that misrepresented the question of Polish–Jewish relations. See Szurek, Témoin du stalinisme, 137.
7 Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto. See also Stach, “The Prospects and Perils of Holocaust Research in Communist Poland,” in this issue.
8 Ringelblum, Ksuvim fun geto.
9 See Z protokołu zebrania Podstawowej Organizacji Partyjnej w ŻIH, Warszawa, 17 kwietnia 1968 [From the minutes of a meeting of the Basic Party Organization in ŻIH, 17 April 1968], cited in Datner and Pieńkowska, Instytut, 133; Eisenbach, “Dokumenty i fałszerstwa.” A galley proof of the book can be found in the ŻIH library.
10 Ringelblum, Ghetto Warschau. See also editor’s note in Ringelblum, Stosunki polsko-żydowskie w czasie drugiej wojny światowej, 32. On the genesis of this book, see Stach, “It Was the Poles.”
11 Pilichowski, “Dokumenty i fałszerstwa.”
12 This notion of “help” needs to be deconstructed from the perspective and experience of Jews on the ground. In fact, “in many cases precisely the same people who sheltered Jews ended up also denouncing them, at times even murdering them with their own hands." Bartov, “Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide,” 574.
13 See first footnote in Ringelblum, Ghetto Warschau, 17, which mentions Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego nos. 28–30 as a source.
14 See the 1956 Note by director Bernard Mark cited in Datner and Pieńkowska, Instytut, 94.
15 Archiwum Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego (AŻIH) 310/1180, note by Adam Rutkowski for Yad Vashem (1969), partly cited in Datner and Pieńkowska, Instytut, 138–140. See also Rutkowski, “Żydowski Instytut Historyczny i jego pracownicy,” 31–44.
16 See AŻIH, spuścizna Tatiany Berensztajn [Tatiana Berensztajn Papers], sygn. S 326/119 and S 326/118.
17 Datner, “Immediately after the War the Picture Was Complete,” 160.
18 Boaz Cohen has demonstrated that Holocaust research was “an existential imperative for survivor-historians.” Cohen, “Setting the Agenda of Holocaust Research,” 275.
19 According to Hayden White, “Narrativization is the product of a mode of emplotment used by the narrator to endow the events chosen for presentation with a value of a specific kind, cognitive, moral, ideological, religious, and so forth.” White, “Historical Discourse and Literary Theory.”
20 Leociak, “Instrumentalizacja Zagłady,” 446.
21 The government campaign of March 1968 also targeted protesting students and intellectuals such as Leszek Kołakowski. On a macro level, the emphasis on the antisemitic trope of a Jewish conspiracy and the singling out of Jews who were among the protesters was initially primarily aimed at distracting attention from the political conflict between the government and the opposition. Thus, in an article published on March 11, 1968 in Słowo Powszechne, an organ run by the pro-regime, pro-authoritarian nationalist Catholic PAX Association, the phantasmatic notion of “Judeo-Polonia” was used to discredit student protests in Warsaw; the claim was that a gang of Jews in alliance with West Germany and Israel were working toward the destruction of Poland by employing the devices of Stalinism and “Zionism.” The article listed names of the supposed leaders of the demonstrations, identifying them as Jews. On the connection between the students’ background – understood not in terms of origin but in terms of a specific sociocultural milieu – and opposition from the students, see Kowalski, Polens letzte Juden.
22 Głowiński, “Propaganda marcowa z perspektywy ćwierćwiecza,” 364.
23 See Cała, Żyd – wróg odwieczny?
24 Der Gegentypus was the title of a Nazi publication of 1938. See Mosse, “Racism and Nationalism,” 169.
25 Gross and Grudzińska-Gross, Golden Harvest, 72.
26 Feliks Tych writes: “The majority of people who turned the Jews in, and thus simply sentenced them to death, or blackmailed them, didn’t treat such behavior as collaboration. They believed that acting against the Jews didn’t contradict their patriotism, while others, who wouldn’t turn Jews in to the Germans, wouldn’t help them either. Polish underground courts did pronounce a number of death sentences, but the scale of this action was too small to scare the informers and blackmailers.” Tych, “What Do We Owe to the Righteous?” 21.
27 See Melchior, Zagłada i tożsamość; Janicka and Żukowski, “Przemoc filosemicka”; Janicka and Żukowski, Philo-Semitic Violence. Everywhere Jews lived in Poland, the following phenomena took place: “a lack of mercy and compassion for the persecuted Jews, mass participation in the German-organized plunder of Jewish property and finally in the tracking down and murdering of Jews trying to save their lives, hiding on the so-called Aryan side.” Gross, “Czy Zagłada jest ich historią, czy naszą?” 682. The chances of survival were slim even for those who hid on the “Aryan” side. For empirical evidence, see the articles in Engelking and Grabowski, Night without End.
28 See Bikont, Sendlerowa w ukryciu.
29 Tych, “What Do We Owe to the Righteous?” 21.
30 Grabowski, Rescue for Money, 43. For an overview of Polish historiography on helpers of Jews, see Libionka, “Polish Literature on Organized and Individual Help to the Jews,” 11–75. See also Koźmińska-Frejlak, “Gratitude and Oblivion,” 993.
31 Maria Kann, Na oczach świata (1943), cited after the 2003 edition, in Janicka, “Świadkowie własnej sprawy,” 14. Elżbieta Janicka demonstrates that the pamphlet “Before the Eyes of the World” by Kann, which was ordered, published and distributed by the Polish Underground State, condemns the murder of Jews while at the same time articulating the need for eliminating them from Polish society.
32 See Gross, “Making History,” 18. At the same time, individual behavior of Poles toward Jews was explained as a function of character and thus depoliticized. See Bartoszewski and Lewinówna, Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej, 627.
33 A case in point is the temporary exhibition “Żegota. Ukryta pomoc” on display from November 16, 2017 to July 8, 2018 in the former administrative building of the so-called Oskar Schindler factory, which is part of the Historical Museum of the City of Kraków. The exhibition fails to mention that Żegota, the Council for Aid to Jews, was established after the Germans had murdered 350,000 Jews of Warsaw in the Nazi extermination camp of Treblinka. Another exhibition on Żegota, sponsored by the Institute of National Remembrance in November 2017 in Warsaw, attributes some of the “problems faced by Żegota” to the Jews. See Żegota. Rada Pomocy Żydom, 24–25.
34 Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead, 76.
35 Ibid., 85.
36 They were published in newspapers such as Trybuna Ludu and Walka Młodych. See Skalska, Obraz wroga, 240.
37 Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead, 85.
38 Before the Second World War, Pilichowski had joined the Fascist organization ONR (Radical National Camp). In 1966, he was appointed director of the Central Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes. After the Six-Day War of 1967, he published antisemitic articles in Trybuna Ludu, Walka Młodych, and Za Wolność i Lud, and he sought to appropriate the ŻIH archive, in particular, the Ringelblum Archive. See Wiesenthal, Judenhetze in Polen, 16–17. With an ideological foundation stemming from the National Radical Camp (ONR), Narodowy Siły Zbrojne (NSZ) units were responsible for the murder of Jews before and after the end of the war. See Szarota, Karuzela na placu Krasińskich, 187–192; Adelson, “W Polsce zwanej Ludową,” 393.
39 Bernard Mark noted in his diary that people talk and write about “six million murdered Poles.” Mark, “Dziennik (grudzień 1965–luty 1966),” 183. The number of “six million” victims is fictitious. It was invented by the security apparatus in Poland. See Gniazdowski, “Ustalić liczbę zabitych na 6 milionów ludzi.”
40 See Gutman and Krakowski, Unequal victims.
41 Lendvai, Antisemitismus ohne Juden, 169.
42 The term is used with reference to the political events in Poland from 1967 to 1968. They were “the most significant eruption of antisemitism in postwar Europe since the notorious anti-Jewish campaigns staged by Stalin in the UdSSR.” Tych, “The March ‘68 Antisemitic Campaign,” 451.
43 Datner and Pieńkowska, Instytut, 122.
44 Gomułka (19 June 1967), cited in Leociak, “Zraniona pamięć,” 46.
45 Mirski and Smolar, “Commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,” 102.
46 Wawrzyniak, Veterans, Victims and Memory, 178–180.
47 On relations between Moczar and Piasecki, see Kunicki, Between the Brown and the Red, 141–146.
48 See Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm, 328–329.
49 Notaka służbowa [memo], (26 November 1965), in Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (IPN), BU O 1124/993.
50 Cited in Libionka and Weinbaum, Bohaterowie, hochsztaplerzy, opisywacze, 174; for Bednarczyk's career, see 159–184.
51 Ibid., 280.
52 Bednarczyk, “Pomoc ekonomiczna,” 6.
53 Bednarczyk, Walka i pomoc.
54 According to Dariusz Libionka, 40,000 copies of Bednarczyk’s booklet were printed in May 1968. Libionka, “Polish Literature on Organized and Individual Help,” 30.
55 Blumental, “The Jews Fought Alone,” 2–3.
56 Bednarczyk, Walka i pomoc, 6.
57 See Kühling, Erinnerung an nationalsozialistische Verbrechen in Berlin, 366–416.
58 Wulf, “Dialog polsko-żydowski.” For a detailed analysis of Wulf’s text Polish-Jewish Dialogue within the broader context of discussions on Polish participation in the Shoah, see Kempter, Joseph Wulf, 107–110.
59 Wulf writes that, for an entire month, Armia Krajowa (AK) partisan groups had been searching for his son and wife, who were in hiding at a Polish farmer’s house. They interrogated the farmers in the village concerning the question of “where this Jew with the child is hiding.” According to Wulf, “the same partisan AK men (partyzanci akowscy) murdered three of his “colleagues from the Jewish Fighting Organisation who […] had tried to establish contact with them […].” Wulf, “Dialog polsko-żydowski.”
60 Letter by Józef Wulf (in Polish) to the editor of Wiadomości, in Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, B 2/1, “Korrespondenz” 02.15, 399, Briefwechsel mit der polnischsprachigen Zeitung “Wiadomości,” Nr. 717 (p. 6). The authors wish to thank Aurélia Kalisky for providing them with a copy of this document.
61 Ibid.
62 Henryk Grynberg, Monolog polsko-żydowski.
63 Kietliński, “Nikczemność,” cited in Rutkowski, Nauki historyczne w Polsce 1944–1970, 491. See also an entry in the newspaper Życie Warszawy, dated 6 April 1968.
64 Dahlmann, Antisemitismus in Polen 1968, 305.
65 Leociak, “Instrumentalizacja,” 454.
66 According to Elżbieta Janicka, its “beginnings date back to the years 1942 and 1943 and to statements by [Żegota activists] Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and Maria Kann.” “Z Elżbietą Janicką o pomnikach Sprawiedliwych rozmawia Michał Siermiński,” online at http://lewica.pl/?id=29760&tytul=El%BFbieta-Janicka:-Zderzenie-cywilizacji%20 (accessed 5 July 2023).
67 However, as Jan Gross emphasizes, as opposed to the rescue of Jews, “in other activities, including those carried out under the threat of death by Germans, Poles got involved en masse.” Gross, “Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej, ale go nie lubię,” 20.
68 Lang, The Future of the Holocaust, 120. According to Yad Vashem guidelines, the designation “Righteous among the Nations” “is reserved for gentiles (1) who aided Jews in danger of being killed or being sent to concentration camps; (2) who were aware that they were risking their lives in providing that aid; (3) who acted without requiring or expecting material reward; and (4) whose aid was active, not passive (as when ‘rescuers’ only refrained from turning someone over to the Nazis).” Ibid., 122. Ewa Koźmińska-Frejlak emphasizes that [w]ith time, the interpretation of the formal requirements concerning the medal and the honorary title “Righteous among the Nations” were modified. Koźmińska-Frejlak, “Gratitude and Oblivion,” 228.
69 Żukowski, “Fantazmat ‘Sprawiedliwych,’” 2.
70 Mark, “Dziennik (grudzień 1965–luty 1966),” 183.
71 See Bartoszewski and Lewinówna, eds., Ten nie jest z ojczyzny mojej (summary), 626.
72 Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead, 84.
73 Żukowski, Wielki retusz, 215–216.
74 See Bikont, Sendlerowa w ukryciu, 311–312.
75 Berenstein, Rutkowski, Assistance to the Jews in Poland.
76 B.C., “Fałsz i oszczerstwo,” in Żołnierz Wolności (4 April 1968), 4.
77 See Stoll, “Transcending the Divide between History and Memory”; Datner, Walka i zagłada białostockiego ghetta.
78 During this period, Datner edited many volumes of source material pertaining to the German Nazi crimes against Poles and Jews in German-occupied Poland. Regarding the Jewish perspective, Datner translated the notes of Zalman Lewental, a member of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau, from Yiddish and Hebrew into Polish. See Datner, Szukajcie w popiołach.
79 From 1948 to 1953, Datner worked for ŻIH. However, he was dismissed because of a political conflict with the institute’s director, Ber Mark.
80 In 1973, Pilichowski backed out of a contract signed in 1967. Under its terms, the commission had agreed to publish Szymon Datner’s manuscript titled Zbrodnie Wehrmachtu na włoskich jeńcach wojennych (Crimes of the Wehrmacht against the Italian POWs). It also failed to publish in its entirety his two-volume anthology of documents in German and Polish concerning crimes of the Wehrmacht. Moreover, the commission failed to consider his pioneering work on the Soviet prisoner-of-war camps established by the Germans in German-occupied Poland, a topic first tackled by Datner and that, to this day, has not been the subject of German historiographical examination. See letter by Szymon Datner, dated 25 September 1980, to the Basic Party Organization of the PZPR in the Ministry of Justice, in: AŻIH, Spuścizna Szymona Datnera, sygn. S/340/13. Datner sent a copy of the letter to the Instytut Historii PAN, the Historical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
81 See Stoll, Herstellung der Wahrheit.
82 See ibid.
83 See Czesław Pilichowski, “ … wspólny nam dom zburzony.” Pilichowski used the notion of “6 million Polish citizens” as a weapon to attack Jews, dead and alive, over many years. In this 1981 article, he claims that out of six million Polish citizens “2,700,000” were Jews, thereby drastically reducing the real number of murdered Polish Jews.
84 See Datner, “Niektóre dane o zbrodniach hitlerowskich na Polakach ratujących Żydów.”
85 Libionka, “Polish Literature on Organized and Individual Help,” 39.
86 Datner, “Immediately after the War the Picture Was Complete,” 160.
87 Ibid., 160.
88 Datner, “Niektóre dane o zbrodniach hitlerowskich na Polakach ratujących Żydów,” 158.
89 Datner, Las Sprawiedliwych, 9.
90 Ibid., 10.
91 “Poles behaved toward the Jewish problem with great dignity and in a general human way.” Ibid., 16.
92 “Rozmowa z dr. Szymonem Datnerem”; Stoll, “Szymon Datner – Historyk białostockich Żydów,” 244–246.
93 After having successfully escaped from the Białystok ghetto on June 3, 1943, Datner survived as a partisan in the forest, receiving food from inhabitants of the village Dworzysk. He fought in various partisan units, at first in a Jewish unit, Forojs, and in the summer of 1944 in the 26 let Oktiabra, unit, which was part of the Kalinowski Brigade. See Datner, “Wymarsz.”
94 “Rozmowa z dr. Szymonem Datnerem.”
95 This work is scheduled to be published by ŻIH in 2023 as part of a special series titled “Critical Reedition of Central Jewish Historical Commission’s Publications in Poland.”
96 Datner, “Eksterminacja ludności żydowskiej w okręgu białostockim.” Stoll, “Szymon Datner—Historyk białostockich Żydów.”
97 Datner mentioned the case of Antonina Wyrzykowska, who rescued seven Jews who had managed to escape being murdered by Poles, in Jedwabne in July 1941. However, as Dariusz Libionka points out, he shifted “the time of her involvement to November 1942!” Libionka, “Polish Literature on Organized and Individual Help,” 35. Datner, Las Sprawiedliwych, 61–62.
98 Tych, “The Emergence of Holocaust Research in Poland,” 243.
99 For a photograph depicting Szymon Datner in front of the “Wall of the Righteous” in the institute, see IPN, BU 1585/730, 6.
100 Szymon Datner, Ściana Sprawiedliwych, in idem, Szkice partyzanckie i inne, 129–32, unpublished, private collection of Helena Datner.
101 See Głowiński, “Marcowe fabuły (Rzecz o propagandzie roku 1968).”
102 Pierre Bourdieu writes: “Symbolic domination is exerted only with the collaboration of those who undergo it because they help to construct it as such. […] it is not granted by a conscious, deliberate act; it is itself the effect of a power, which is durably inscribed in the bodies of the dominated, in the forms of schemes of perception and dispositions (to respect, admire, love, etc.), […] beliefs which make one sensitive to certain public manifestations, such as public manifestations of power.” Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 71.
103 Bourdieu, Masculine Domination.
104 He had been a secret collaborator of the SB from the early 1950s; see Rutkowski, Żydowski Instytut Historyczny i jego pracownicy, 33, n. 15.
105 Wein, “The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw,” 213.
106 For a general overview of ŻIH’s publications of this period, see Stach, “The Prospects and Perils of Holocaust Research in Communist Poland.” The volume in question is Eksterminacja Żydów na ziemiach polskich w okresie okupacji hitlerowskiej.
107 Berenstein et al., eds., Faschismus – Getto – Massenmord. On the German edition, see Stach, “The Jewish diaries […] Undergo One Edition after the Other.”
108 See Rutkowski and Berenstein, “O ratownictwo Żydów przez Polaków.” According to Dariusz Libionka, “the inspiration and the point of reference was beyond doubt, apart from Ringelblum’s essay, the pioneering work of Philip Friedman.” Libionka, “Polish Literature on Organized and Individual Help,” 22.
109 For further information on this book in the context of the debate on the “Polish Righteous,” see Stach, “Gerechte und Ungerechte?”
110 Datner and Pieńkowska, Instytut, 132–133.
111 AŻIH 310/1180 Adam Rutkowski, note for Yad Vashem on the situation in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw (February 1969), 7.
112 Ibid.
113 It was published as Bleter far geshikhte. Zaytshrift fun yidisher historisher institut in poyln 17 (1969).
114 Letter by Artur Eisenbach to Polskie Wydawnictwo Naukowe, cited in Instytut, 130, AŻIH 310/1180, 8.
115 Dąbrowska and Dobroszycki, Kronika Getta Łódzkiego.
116 Sitarek, “Danuta Dąbrowska,” 319.
117 Eisenbach, “List do redakcji ‘Dokumenty i fałszerstwa,’” Trybuna Ludu (5 July 1968).
118 Nalewajko-Kulikov, “Dzieje publikacji Kroniki getta warszawskiego w Polsce,” quote on 390, examples on 398–402.
119 See the response to Artur Eisenbach in “List do redakcji ‘Dokumenty i fałszerstwa,’” Trybuna Ludu (4 July 1968).
120 Dahlmann, Antisemitismus in Polen, 306, Rutkowski, Nauki historyczyne w Polsce 1944–1970, 492.
121 Ibid., 494.
122 Letter from the Secretary of Department I PAN to the Supreme Audit Office (22 April 1968), in Archiwum Akt Nowych (AAN), 237/XVI–619, 87; cited in Rutkowski, Nauki historyczyne w Polsce 1944–1970, 495.
123 Czesław Madajczyk, “Remarks on the Activity of the Jewish Historical Institute” (30 May 1968), Archiwum PAN, Wydz. I PAN, wyk. 555/126; cited in Rutkowski, Nauki historyczne w Polsce 1944–1970, 495.
124 Polonsky, “Artur Eisenbach a historia polsko-żydowska,” 10.
125 See Dahlmann, Antisemitismus in Polen, 307.
126 Interview with Stefan Krakowski (29 April 1969), The Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Oral History Division of the Hebrew University (50) 31, tape 1503, 15–16.
127 Rutkowski, Nauki historyczne w Polsce 1944–1970, 496.
128 AŻIH 310/1180, 4.
129 Ibid., 4–5.
130 See Dahlmann, Antisemitismus in Polen, 307.
131 Artur Eisenbach do Ząrzadu Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, in IPN, BU 15851/7369, 5–6.
132 Horn, “Działalność Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego w Polsce,” 9.
133 AŻIH, Dział Kadr, teczki personalne, sygn. 80, 90.
134 “Ringelblum wird ‘korrigiert’ – Geschichte des Warschauer Ghettos ‘neu geschrieben,’” Das Ostpreußenblatt (10 May 1969).
135 Janicka, “The Square of Polish Innocence,” 210.
136 Datner, “Tuż po wojnie napisali już wszystko: Radykalni publicyści i pisarze o antysemityzmie.”
137 Grabowski, Rescue for Money.
138 Janicka, “Obserwatorzy uczestniczący zamiast świadków i rama zamiast obrzeży.”
139 Janicka, “A Triumphant Gate of the Polish Narrative.”
140 Kichelewski, et al., eds., Les Polonais et la Shoah.
141 Grudzińska-Gross and Matyjaszek, Breaking the Frame.
142 Elżbieta Janicka explains: “In the Polish language of the occupation, the verb rozpoznać – ‘to recognize’ – did not mean to ‘identify someone whom one had already met,’ but to ‘identify someone as the phantasmatic Jew.’ The ‘recognition’ of those fighting for survival on the so-called Aryan side was a murderous anti-Semitic ritual practiced individually and collectively, for money and ‘selflessly.’ Those who did it for money, jewelry and other goods were called ‘szmalcownicy,’ and ‘szmalcownictwo’ was an informal, but popular and lucrative profession. Blackmail was based on alternatives: money or death (by handing the Jew over to the Polish police or German authorities). Both forms of ‘recognition’ – for ‘selfless’ reasons and for money – posed a mortal danger to the victims. The first followed the second. Stripping Jews of money, jewelry, and other things was no minor crime because it meant depriving them of any chance of survival. The condition for being able to take advantage of the Polish ‘business of help’ was the possession of significant financial resources.” Janicka, “Herbarium Polonorum,” 83, n. 53.
143 Stoll, “Documenting the Truth of the Murder of Jews in Poland.”
144 Stoll, “Traces of the Holocaust in Nachman Blumental’s Archive.”
145 It was Jan T. Gross who dared to do this with his book Neighbors in 2000 (Polish edition) and 2001 (English edition): “[I]f Grynberg described how Poles murdered Jews, then Gross made us all aware of the fact that the Holocaust reflex is part of Polish normality – a readiness to annihilate everyone […] of the Jews living on the margins of local communities.” Przemysław Czapliński, “Recovering the Holocaust,” 231.
146 Berenstein and Rutkowski, “Obóz koncentracyjny dla Żydów w Warszawie.”
147 See Hochberg-Mariańska, “Wstęp,” XXXII.
148 In his 1952 book on the resistance in the Białystok ghetto, Ber Mark dedicated a chapter to Polish, Russian and Belarusian, and German antifascists as allies of the Jewish fighters, see Mark, Ruch oporu w getcie białostockim, 193–201.
149 Stach, “Gerechte und Ungerechte?” 71–72.
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Stephan Stach
Stephan Stach is a historian whose research focuses on Polish and East-Central European history, Jewish history and Holocaust memory. Among his recent publications are Growing in the Shadow of Antifascism: Remembering the Holocaust in State-Socialist Eastern Europe, co-edited with Kata Bohus and Peter Hallama (2022), and Religion in the Mirror of Law: Eastern European Perspectives from the Early Modern Period to 1939, co-edited with Yvonne Kleinmann and Tracie L. Wilson (2016).
Katrin Stoll
Katrin Stoll is a historian and a Holocaust researcher based in Germany and Warsaw, Poland. Between 2019 to 2023 she was a staff member at the Imre Kertész Kolleg, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany, and from 2018 to 2023 she was a member of the editorial board of the open access journal Studia Litteraria et Historica. She is the author of Die Herstellung der Wahrheit. Strafverfahren gegen ehemalige Angehörige der Sicherheitspolizei für den Bezirk Bialystok (2012) and the co-editor of a number of volumes on the Holocaust and its legacies, among them Personal Engagement and the Study of the Holocaust (with Noah Benninga, 2016) and Leerstelle(n)? Der deutsche Vernichtungskrieg 1941–1944 und die Vergegenwärtigungen des Geschehens in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland nach 1989 (with Alexandra Klei, 2019).