Frozen in time: Five figures in a photograph

By the grave of Josef Sandel at the Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street, Warsaw, 1969. Standing from left to right: Norbert Wojtyczka, Szymon Datner, Ernestyna Podhorizer-Sandel, Ruta Sakowska (?), and Jan Krupka (?). Photo courtesy of Helena Datner.

I

A photograph: In the middle of the frame are five people standing behind a tombstone. The name of the deceased, Josef ben Awigdor Sandel, is engraved at the top of the matseyve in large Hebrew letters. Further down, there is an inscription in Yiddish. The first line reads: Forsher fun yidisher kunst (researcher of Jewish art); the rest is hard to decipher. Underneath, in Latin letters, is the name in Polish, Józef Sandel, without the patronymic, and in the following line, in Polish, what looks like “art historian” (historyk sztuki), mainly because we know it to be there. The full phrase, “art historian,” must have been in the place on the photograph where the emulsion is now missing – the print we have in front of us is damaged.

This is the grave of Józef Sandel, in the Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street in Warsaw.

We know from the brief annotation on the back of the photo that it was taken on December 1, 1969. In Poland it was already winter, which in those days meant frost and snow. (Indeed, the snowfalls in the winter of 1969–1970 were apparently unusually heavy, and December 1969 was considered the coldest in the twentieth century.¹) The winter days are short, often sunless. We see leafless tree branches in the photo, the faded colors of nature, which, along with the white snow, contrast sharply with the dark coats worn by four of the figures. The image itself is not of particularly high quality; the photographer was clearly an amateur. Add to that the likely dustiness of the negative. The condition of the photo is part of the story it tells … 

From the writing on the back of the photo, it is apparent that December 1, 1969 marked the seventh anniversary of the death of Józef Sandel, an art critic, historian, and art dealer before the Second World War. Immediately on his return from the USSR, where he survived the war years, he had become one of the most important figures supporting the few Jewish artists who had survived the Holocaust. He was determined, moreover, to keep alive the memory and oeuvre of Polish Jewish artists who had not survived. He pursued his goal tirelessly. In the 1940s, he traveled the length and breadth of Poland collecting their remaining works as well as their biographical information, which he supplemented in subsequent years. Following the closure of the Jewish Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts,² which had been reestablished in the fall of 1946 and which Sandel led, he began working at the Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny; ŻIH). From 1950, he directed the Museum Department at the institute and, within it, the gallery of Jewish art that had been transferred from the society. In 1953, ŻIH's director, Bernard Mark, closed down the gallery, limiting the museum’s exhibits to those from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and he fired Sandel, who, in retirement, intensified the work he was already pursuing.

Immediately behind the tombstone, in the middle and somewhat to the forefront of the others, is Ernestyna Podhorizer-Sandel, wife of the deceased. She was the person with whom he worked most closely, and she continued their joint activities following his death. They became acquainted after the war, which Ernestyna, then Podhorizer-Zaikin, widow of the historian Wacław Zaikin, had survived in the deep interior of the USSR. Upon her return to Poland in 1946, she began to work in the Education Department of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland.³ Subsequently, during the last months of the functioning of the Jewish Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts, she took on the role of secretary. In November 1949, she was employed in the Museum Department of the Jewish Historical Institute, where she worked under Sandel's direction, becoming his wife in 1950. When her husband was fired, she, too, left ŻIH. For the next several years, she received a pension as an invalid, while assisting her husband in the preparation of books on the history of Jews in Poland in the fine arts.⁴ In March 1969, she returned to ŻIH's museum, directed at that time – and for about half a year after that – by Ruta Sakowska.⁵ It was Szymon Datner, then head of the institute, who invited her to return.⁶ Podhorizer-Sandel continued to work for the institute for an additional five years following her retirement in 1974. She died in 1984.

The woman to the right of Podhorizer-Sandel is presumably Ruta Sakowska, then using interchangeably the surname Sakowska (formed from her mother's maiden name – Sakow – with the addition of the polonizing ending -ska) and her family name, Pups, sometimes combined as Sakowska-Pups or Pups-Sakowska.⁷ Born in Vilnius, she was educated as a historian. More than a decade after the war, she returned to Poland during the repatriation of 1958, soon afterwards commencing work at ŻIH in the Museum Department. The primary source material and subject of her research – indeed, from the very beginning of her professional career until her death in 2011 – were the documents preserved in the collection of the clandestine underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, known as Oyneg Shabes or the Ringelblum Archive. (Sandel had taken part in the excavation in September 1946 that had uncovered the first part of the hidden archive.⁸) Her first scholarly articles began to appear from 1963 in the Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego. After she was accepted as a doctoral student at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1969, Sakowska applied to the management of the institute for leave without pay in order to prepare her dissertation; she obtained it – not without difficulty – a year later. After a three-year absence, she returned to ŻIH, where she continued her research and editorial work on the Holocaust, working there part-time even after formally retiring in 1986.

The figure to the right of Sakowska is most probably Jan Krupka, born in 1909.⁹ A historian by education, Krupka spent the war years in the USSR. After returning to Poland in 1946, he worked in Jewish institutions, first in the Youth Department of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland and later at ORT;¹⁰ in the years 1949–1954, he worked in the military, and subsequently in the realms of industry and education.¹¹ At the beginning of December 1969, he had been working in ŻIH's archive for three months, employed by Szymon Datner. Krupka worked at the institute until his death in 1988, serving as director of the archive for nine years, from at least January 1978 until January 1986.¹²

The bespectacled man standing to the left of Podhorizer-Sandel is Szymon Datner. The photograph belonged to him.¹³ At the time it was taken, he was 67 years old and had been serving as director of ŻIH for almost a year. (He would hold the position for only another nine months.) He was a historian of the Holocaust, specifically the history of the Jews of the Białystok region, which he studied throughout his life. He was also the author of groundbreaking studies of the Wehrmacht’s participation in the Holocaust. He appeared as an expert witness in several Nazi war crimes trials. Only a few weeks before this photo was taken, he had obtained his postdoctoral degree (habilitation). A year earlier, in October 1968, he had authored Las Sprawiedliwych: Karta z dziejów ratownictwa Żydów w okupowanej Polsce (The Forest of the Righteous: A Page in the History of Saving Jews in Occupied Poland), a surprising contribution to his output. In it, he advanced the notion of ubiquitous wartime assistance to the Jews on the part of the Polish populace – in opposition to his earlier conclusions, but in tune with the rhetoric of the antisemitic campaign of March 1968, the height of which coincided with its publication. It is difficult to provide a straightforward answer to the question of why Datner, who had previously (and subsequently) often demonstrated his courage in defense of the truth, sometimes paying a heavy price for so doing, on this occasion “was untrue to the truth and to himself.”¹⁴ But this publication speaks volumes to the climate of the times during which the photo was taken. Like Podhorizer-Sandel, he had previously worked at ŻIH (for almost five years, from August 1948) and had been fired in 1953 by Bernard Mark – in Datner’s case, in the wake of conflict with Mark and ŻIH’s management.¹⁵ Before his return to the institute as director in 1968, he had worked at a variety of jobs, among them, bricklaying, before procuring a job in line with his professional training at the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland. Upon retiring from the post of director of ŻIH in August 1970, he continued his research. Datner returned to the institute once again in 1980, after being elected to the Board of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute (the institute's supervisory body), serving at one point as chairman. He died in 1989.

The man with a beard at the leftmost side of the photo – taller than the others, which emphasizes his otherness – is Norbert Wojtyczka, also known as Arie Masonhercel (Masonherclowski), as well as by numerous nicknames: “Hermit,” “Pilgrim,” “the Great Mute,” “Dybbuk,” “Hassid,” “the Wandering Jew.”¹⁶ He was an amateur artist, originally from Silesia, a figure shrouded in mystery but easily recognizable by his appearance and behavior. He earned a living, among other ways, by unloading railway carriages, as a porter, a picture framer's assistant, a draftsman, and an artist who created postcards. Wojtyczka tied his fate to the Warsaw Jewish community for several decades. Born in 1924 into a well-to-do Roman Catholic family, he was, so it was understood, a graduate of the Gliwice Polytechnic. He moved to Warsaw sometime in the late 1950s thanks to the intervention of Józef and Ernestyna Sandel, who took care of him after finding him covered in newspapers in a nearby forest.¹⁷ Most likely thanks to them, he took up residence on ŻIH’s premises, and he later lived in publicly subsidized housing. He died in 1995. Wojtyczka demonstrated his attachment to the Sandels after the death of Józef, when he helped Ernestyna with routine chores. Every year on the anniversary of Sandel's death, he would go to the cemetery and decorate his gravesite. It is not known how long he kept this custom up and if he was still doing it in 1969, as no adornments are visible in the photo. Apparently, he decided to devote his life to making amends for the wartime crimes against Jews, though it is not clear what motivated him to do this. He considered himself a Jew, attending synagogue for many years. He had his silent periods that he devoted, it was said, to ”becoming worthy to be accepted into the Jewish congregation,”¹⁸ a formality that never materialized. He was well acquainted with significant figures in the Jewish community, including the artist Artur Nacht-Samborski, Bernard Mark, the director of ŻIH from 1949 to 1966, and, in a later period, Rabbi Hillel Levine from Boston.

Podhorizer-Sandel, Krupka, Datner, Sakowska, Wojtyczka. The first three were born in the first decade of the twentieth century; the others at the start of the third decade. All of them were adults (or, at least, young adults) during the war. Among them, only Datner survived the Holocaust under German occupation. The others survived in the USSR. (Wojtyczka's wartime whereabouts are not known.) Their political views differentiated them. Sandel, Podhorizer-Sandel, and Krupka were all active before the war in the Communist movement; she belonged to youth organizations in league with the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, while Krupka was a member of the Communist League of Polish Youth and the Polish Communist Party (KPP) and Sandel was in the Communist Party of Germany. All three were persecuted for their activism at the time, including by imprisonment in the case of Krupka and Podhorizer-Sandel. After the war, Krupka and Sandel joined the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), Poland’s ruling party, while Podhorizer-Sandel did not resume political activism. Datner, a convinced left-wing Zionist who had sympathized with the Hashomer Hatza'ir movement before 1939, never belonged to a political party, even after 1945. Not much is known of Sakowska's political views, though it is likely that, after a youth spent in the USSR, she was wary about making political declarations or joining any kind of political structure. Apart from Wojtyczka, the individuals in the photo were all university-educated, each graduating with a degree in the humanities. (Podhorizer-Sandel also studied mathematics and natural sciences.) Sandel himself only finished high school. Krupka completed his university studies at a relatively late stage in life, when he was in his fifties, several years after the war's end.

Common to all of them on the seventh anniversary of Sandel's death was a sense of Jewish identity. It is possible that this meant something different to each one of them, and it is possible that they did not analyze the feeling, at least not in any detail, taking it as something self-evident. In light of the fact that Datner, Sakowska, and Podhorizer-Sandel had been pupils at Jewish schools – Datner in a cheder and then at the ”Hebrew School” in Kraków, Sakowska at the Zofia Gurewicz gymnasium in Vilnius,¹⁹ and Podhorizer-Sandel in the Jewish gymnasium in Lwów²⁰ – it appears that these three, at least, came from families that were well established in the Jewish community. Sandel, for his part, had been a student at the Baron Hirsch school in Kolomyia.²¹ (There is no information available about Krupka in this regard.) It is also known that Datner and Sakowska spoke Yiddish fluently, it being, at least to some extent, their family tongue; Datner spoke with his father in Yiddish, and with his siblings in Polish. (Sandel, who had spent his youth in Germany and did not publish in the Polish language, possessed a written Polish that was apparently ”fairly rough.”²²) Datner was also fluent in Hebrew. (Wojtyczka was self-taught in adulthood.) It can be said with some certainty that neither Podhorizer-Sandel²³ nor Krupka²⁴ spoke either Yiddish or Hebrew. It is also possible that of this group only Datner (and later also Wojtyczka) took part in the religious life of the Jewish community throughout the entire postwar period. Datner was the only one who had worked in Jewish institutions prior to September 1939; he had been a teacher in Jewish schools, first in Pińsk and later in Białystok. Podhorizer-Sandel and Krupka only sought employment in Jewish institutions directly following the Holocaust, in the second half of the 1940s. (Sandel had contributed to the Jewish press prior to the war, and he also played ”an active role in Jewish artistic circles in Vilnius.”²⁵). Sakowska, Podhorizer-Sandel (initially together with Sandel), and Datner, from as early as the 1940s and 1950s until the end of their lives, regarded their fundamental task as documenting the Holocaust. They took to it with a passion, each pursuing a specific project. The Sandels worked on a lexicon of Jewish artists active in Poland in the previous 100 years;²⁶ Sakowska devoted herself to the preparation and publication in print of the materials of the Ringelblum Archive; and Datner was engaged in writing a monograph of the history of Jews in the Białystok region. None of them were able to finish the undertaking they had committed themselves to, in part because they felt impelled to provide as complete an accounting as possible in the face of the fathomlessness of the Holocaust, and such attempts were inevitably doomed to failure.

Linking Datner, Krupka, Sakowska, and Podhorizer-Sandel (and Sandel himself) was also the fact that they, unlike the majority of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, rebuilt their post-Holocaust lives in Poland, even though this was where they had lost members of their families – often their closest loved ones, as was the case with Datner, who lost his wife and two daughters, and Podhorizer-Sandel, who lost her first husband – not to mention friends and acquaintances. Moreover, the communities in which they had been born and raised were almost completely erased. (This may also have been the case for Wojtyczka.) They remained in Poland despite continuing antisemitism, violence and pogroms that enveloped the country in the immediate postwar period, and periodic paroxysms of antisemitic violence, as in 1956; and they stayed in the country in spite of the antisemitic campaign of March 1968, which drove out many of the remaining survivors and their offspring. In the end, Datner, Krupka, and Podhorizer-Sandel, like Sandel, found their final resting place in the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. But during their lives in postwar Poland, their safe harbor was, at times, ŻIH. It was so at the moment when the photo was taken, in the immediate aftermath of March 1968, as well as it had been just after the war and would continue to be in the 1970s and 1980s.

Apart from the five people by Sandel’s graveside, no other figures are visible. The unknown photographer who documented the meeting is beyond the frame, though members of this small group are well aware of this person's presence as they gaze directly at the lens. They are huddled together for the shot, yet each stands alone, as if trying to avoid contact with the others. There is no sense of camaraderie. They seem harrowingly lonely. They are deathly serious, with no trace of a smile: They look as though a heavy sadness is literally grinding them down. This is not despair for the deceased, as seven years had passed since Sandel's death. What comes through in this winter scene amidst a background of trees covered in snow, fragments of matseyves and graves, and here and there plants emerging from under the snow, is a world imbued with a deafening silence.

Mordechai Tsanin, a journalist and writer sympathetic to the Bund, survived the war outside Poland and then, as with a not inconsiderable number of other Polish Jewish survivors, returned to Poland to see for himself what was going on. In a series of articles published in the New York-based Forverts, he reported on several visits in 1946–1947 ”to one hundred annihilated Jewish communities in Poland.”²⁷ In the book based on his reportage that was published several years later, Tsanin devoted the three opening chapters to an account of his stay in Warsaw; the second chapter deals in its entirety with his visit to the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw: ”After the desolate deathly atmosphere of the [destroyed Warsaw] Ghetto, in the Gęsia cemetery you feel as if you were among the living. Who could imagine that graves would pulsate with so much life[?]”²⁸

In opening this special issue of East European Jewish Affairs with a reading of a photograph taken at that cemetery in 1969, we are suggesting that this image may serve as a window on the Jewish community in Poland at the time of a key moment in its postwar experience, and also beyond. In many ways, as will be seen, ŻIH played an important role in this experience.

II

Like the people in this photo, most of the contributors from Poland to this issue of East European Jewish Affairs have a connection to ŻIH, including one former director (Eleonora Bergman) and four current or previous employees (Aleksandra Bańkowska, Helena Datner, Ewa Koźmińska-Frejlak, and Katarzyna Person). All five are authors and editors of books published by ŻIH. Moreover, all the authors in this issue have made use of the institute's archive, library, publications, and other resources; and ŻIH and people associated with it have figured in articles and books produced by most of them.

To open this issue, Stephan Stach describes ŻIH's significant immediate postwar contribution to Holocaust research in Poland and beyond the Iron Curtain in the face of political pressure to distort the history of the Holocaust in the service of Communist dogma, ascribing ŻIH's survival during the first two decades under Communist rule to the pragmatism of the institute's director, Ber Mark. Perhaps ŻIH's signature achievement is the 36-volume publication of the Ringelblum Archive. The Ringelblum Archive is the invaluable collection of documents gathered and generated in the Warsaw Ghetto by members of the clandestine group Oyneg Shabes under the direction of Emanuel Ringelblum. The first systematically organized volume of documents from the Ringelblum Archive appeared only in post-Communist Poland in 1997. The piecemeal struggle to publish documents from the Ringelblum Archive during the Communist period was impeded by government censorship – the subject of the article by Katarzyna Person, who also examines the role of self-imposed censorship on the part of a few of ŻIH's researchers in an effort to sanitize the occasional negative depiction of Jews in the ghetto.

Two articles focus on Ber Mark, ŻIH's longest serving director, from 1949 until his premature death in 1966. Specifically for this issue, Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov has produced the first English translation of the diary that Mark kept in Yiddish between December 1965 and February 1966. Supplemented by Nalewajko-Kulikov's introduction to the diary and her extensive annotations of it, the diary enables readers to inhabit Mark's psyche half a year before his death – his loss of hope in the viability of a Jewish community in Poland, his disillusionment with the Communist system, and his embrace of Israel. Mark was deemed by many to be a regime historian. Mindful of widescale criticism of Mark's scholarship, Tom Navon resurrects Mark's neglected work in Yiddish – Di geshikhte fun yidn in poyln (bizn sof fun XV y[or]h[undert]) (The History of Jews in Poland until the End of the Fifteenth Century), published in 1957. This work, Navon argues, reflects Mark's effort in the last decade of his life to free himself from Communist historiographical dogma.

Another pivotal individual in ŻIH's history, Artur Eisenbach, is the subject of a biographical sketch by Aleksandra Bańkowska. A prolific scholar, Eisenbach assumed direction of the institute in 1966 after Mark's death – and on the eve of the government's so-called anti-Zionist campaign, when the Jewish community came under attack by pro-regime forces with the active support by a large segment of Polish society. ŻIH was not spared. Unable to forestall the state's appropriation of a large share of ŻIH's archival collections, Eisenbach resigned in protest in June 1968. Stephan Stach and Katrin Stoll's analysis of the virulent attacks on ŻIH in 1967–1968 underlines the propaganda campaign – led by extreme antisemitic nationalists in the Communist Party, reinforced by popular support – to whitewash Poles’ grim record of antisemitic violence during the Holocaust and to replace it with a myth of the ”Polish Righteous,” according to which the majority of Poles sought to assist Jews, with many even risking their lives to save Jews from the Nazis. ŻIH, for its part, was criticized in the government-controlled press for trying to sabotage this patently false image of the Polish nation's sacrifice on behalf of Jews. Like thousands of other Polish Jews, many of the institute's researchers left the country after 1968. One key figure who remained was Ruta Sakowska, the subject of Samuel Kassow and Eleonora Bergman's biographical essay. Unmatched in her intimate knowledge of the contents of the Ringelblum Archive, Sakowska was the driving force behind the publication of the first two editions of the Ringelblum Archive in 1997 and 2000, respectively. In her pathbreaking book Ludzie z dzielnicy zamkniętej: Żydzi w Warszawie w okresie hitlerowskiej okupacji, październik 1939-marzec 1943 (People from the Closed Quarter: Jews in Warsaw under Nazi Occupation, October 1939–March 1943), Sakowska developed the concept of ”civil resistance” to describe the resilience of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, epitomized by the construction of an extensive self-help network (Aleynhilf), in their daily struggle to survive under German oppression.

This special issue on ŻIH closes with Helena Datner's examination of the role the institute played in the Jewish community during the years of Communist rule. Datner's methodological focus on social history expands our view of ŻIH from that of an essentially academic institution responsive largely out of necessity to ”the spirit of the times” (as Mark intimated in the introduction to his 1959 version of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising) to one of public advocate for the political interests of the Polish Jewish community and guardian of its cultural heritage. ŻIH's interventionist role grew in correlation with the government's concerted efforts to weaken Jewish institutional life and the exodus of Jews from the country in the wake of successive waves of antisemitic intimidation. Indeed, not only during Communist rule in Poland but also in post-Communist Poland, ŻIH has been firmly embedded in the social fabric of the country's Jewish community.

In sum, the contributions to this special issue of East European Jewish Affairs not only amount to an institutional history of ŻIH, but also reclaim the memory of the many people who created and sustained it. Although separate articles are devoted to Mark, Eisenbach, and Sakowska, others who were associated with the institute also figure in these pages, including Szymon Datner, Tatiana Berenstein, Daniel Grinberg, and Feliks Tych, to mention but a few. However, Mark is clearly the volume's center of gravity. Mark's personal journey during his directorship of ŻIH, which found expression in his scholarly trajectory, from faith in the Communist system to disillusionment with it, in many ways mirrored the paths taken by other members of the institute and other Jews in his immediate orbit.

There are many reasons for devoting an issue of East European Jewish Affairs to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. ŻIH was – and still is – one of the leading institutions worldwide for the study of Polish Jewry and the Holocaust in Poland. ŻIH played an important role in bringing Nazi criminals to justice. ŻIH has played a constitutive role in the life of the Jewish community. Ultimately, the history of ŻIH, in both good times and bad, is embedded in the history of postwar Polish Jewry. For these reasons, the history of Jewish life in Poland after the Holocaust cannot be written without a proper examination of this distinctive institution.

Translated by Marek Gwizdalla and Magdalena Dmowska

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ewa Koźmińska-Frejlak

Ewa Koźmińska-Frejlak, sociologist, author of articles and book chapters on Jewish life in Poland during and after the Holocaust, and editor of several books. Since 2014 she has managed the Jewish Historical Institute’s Editorial Committee for Critical Editions of Publications of the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland, which originally were written in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. Her recent monograph is Po Zagładzie: Praktyki asymilacyjne ocalałych jako strategie zadomawiania się w Polsce (1944/45–1950) (2022), which examines Jewish survivors’ strategies of adaptation in immediate postwar Poland.

Notes

1 See https://naukaoklimacie.pl/aktualnosci/polskie-zimy-w-xx-i-xxi-wieku-cz-1-272 (accessed 10 October 2023).

2 The Jewish Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts was established at the beginning of the 1920s, its main aim being to provide material assistance to Jewish visual artists. The society organized exhibitions and popularized art among the Polish Jewish community.

3 See employment questionnaire for Ernestyna Podhorizer-Zaikin (12 November 1974), AŻIH 310/1193, k. 11. After the war, the Central Committee of Jews in Poland was the largest Jewish institution in the country, bringing together representatives of most of the legalized Jewish political parties and community organizations, and it officially represented Polish Jews to the state authorities and various international Jewish organizations. During the second half of the 1940s, it was active in almost all areas of Jewish life in Poland, with the exception of religion. The statutory aims of the committee were implemented by specialized departments; at the local level, tasks were carried out by units of the appropriate rank (provincial, district, municipal).

4 Letter from Ernestyna Podhorizer-Sandel to the management of the Jewish Historical Institute Association (20 July 1970), AŻIH 310/1193 k. 81.

5 Letter from Ruta Pups to Dir.[ector?] of ŻIH (8 June 1970) requesting a reference based on her work in the Museum Department from January 1967 to June 1969, AŻIH 1188. k. 190.

6 Letter to the ŻIH directorate (12 March 1973) requesting full-time employment, AŻIH 310/1193, k. 75.

7 See Sakowska-Pups, “O działalności teatralnej w getcie warszawskim”; Pups-Sakowska, ”Opieka nad uchodźcami i przesiedleńcami żydowskimi w Warszawie w latach okupacji hitlerowskiej.”

8 See Getka-Kenig, ”Problem badań nad historią 'sztuki żydowskiej' w komunistycznej Polsce,” 51 (n. 36).

9 With heartfelt thanks to Monika Taras from the ŻIH archive for her assistance in identifying Jan Krupka and Ruta Sakowska in the photograph.

10 ORT – Organization of the Development of Industrial, Trade, and Agricultural Activity in the Jewish Population. ORT was active in Poland from the 1920s, sponsoring training programs in trade and agriculture, providing tools, and organizing technical education. ORT resumed its activities in 1946, was disbanded in 1950, reactivated in 1957 and continued its work until 1967.

11 See Jan Krupka, curriculum vitae (1 September 1969), AŻIH 310/1041, k. 3–4.

12 See letter from Jan Krupka to the ŻIH directorate (21 October 1985) requesting permission to resign from the post of manager of the archive effective 1 January 1986, and contract of employment (31 December 1977), confirming Krupka's taking on the post of manager of the archive effective as of that date, AŻIH 310/1041, k. 36 and k. 71, respectively.

13 The photograph is currently in the family archive of Helena Datner.

14 Quote from Helena Datner, sociologist and historian, in a biographical text on Szymon Datner; see idem, ”Szymon Datner: Życie i praca.”

15 Ibid.

16 See Cofałka, ”O Ślązaku, który stał się Żydem Arie Masonhercel czyli Norbert Wojtyczka,” 252; I would like to thank Bella Szwarcman-Czarnota for her help in identifying Norbert Wojtyczka in the photograph.

17 The details about Wojtyczka presented here are based on the conclusions of Jan Cofałka, who used the information gathered by Hanna Szmalenberg and Dorota Szwarcman, in ibid., 260.

18 Ibid., 268.

19 For more details, see Samuel Kassow and Eleonora Bergman's ”The Scholary Legacy of Ruta Sakowska,” in this issue.

20 See Mórawski, ”Ernestyna Podhorizer-Sandel (1903–1984),” 256.

21 See Podhorizer-Sandel, ”Wspomnienie o Józefie Sandlu (w dziesiątą rocznicę śmierci),” 111.

22 See Piątkowska, ”Żydowskie Towarzystwo Krzewienia Sztuk Pięknych (Jidisze Gezelszaft cu Farszprojtn Kunst),” 69.

23 Yiddish was not among the languages indicated by Pohhorizer-Sandel in the personal data questionnaire submitted on 16 November 1951, when she was employed by the institute; see AŻIH 310/1193, k. 100.

24 Jan Krupka did not indicate a knowledge of Yiddish in the personal data questionnaire submitted on 24 February 1981, during the course of his employment at the institute; see AŻIH 310/1041, k. 7.

25 See Podhorizer-Sandel, ”Wspomnienie o Józefie Sandlu, ”115.

26 See Getka-Kenig, ”Problem badań nad historią sztuki żydowskiej,” 51.

27 These articles were later published in book form under the title Iber shteyn un shtok: A rayze iber hundert khorev-gevorene kehiles in poyln (Tel Aviv: 1952).

28 Tsanin, Iber shteyn un shtok, 14. Before the Second World War, the Jewish cemetery on Okopowa St. in Warsaw was known as the cemetery on Gęsia (St.).