The powerful writings and art of Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto
Hidden in metal containers and buried underground during World War II, these works from the Warsaw Ghetto record the Holocaust from ...the perspective of its first interpreters, the victims themselves. Gathered clandestinely by an underground ghetto collective called Oyneg Shabes, the collection of reportage, diaries, prose, artwork, poems, jokes, and sermons captures the heroism, tragedy, humor, and social dynamics of the ghetto. Miraculously surviving the devastation of war, this extraordinary archive encompasses a vast range of voices-young and old, men and women, the pious and the secular, optimists and pessimists-and chronicles different perspectives on the topics of the day while also preserving rapidly endangered cultural traditions. Described by David G. Roskies as "a civilization responding to its own destruction," these texts tell the story of the Warsaw Ghetto in real time, against time, and for all time.
Warsaw Ghetto Police Person, Katarzyna; Nowak-Solinski, Zygmunt
2021, 2021-04-15
eBook
In Warsaw Ghetto Police, Katarzyna Person shines a spotlight on the lawyers, engineers, young yeshiva graduates, and sons of connected businessmen who, in the autumn of 1940, joined the newly formed ...Jewish Order Service. Person tracks the everyday life of policemen as their involvement with the horrors of ghetto life gradually increased. Facing and engaging with brutality, corruption, and the degradation and humiliation of their own people, these policemen found it virtually impossible to exercise individual agency. While some saw the Jewish police as fellow victims, others viewed them as a more dangerous threat than the German occupation authorities; both were held responsible for the destruction of a historically important and thriving community. Person emphasizes the complexity of the situation, the policemen's place in the network of social life in the ghetto, and the difficulty behind the choices that they made. By placing the actions of the Jewish Order Service in historical context, she explores both the decisions that its members were forced to make and the consequences of those actions. Featuring testimonies of members of the Jewish Order Service, and of others who could see them as they themselves could not, Warsaw Ghetto Police brings these impossible situations to life. It also demonstrates how a community chooses to remember those whose allegiances did not seem clear. Published in Association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The most detailed study ever undertaken into the fate of more than 800 Jewish doctors who devoted themselves, in many cases until the day they died, to the care of the sick and the dying in the ...Warsaw Ghetto.
Inspired by the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences,Mapping Warsawis an interdisciplinary study that combines urban studies, cinema studies, cultural studies, history, literature, and ...photography. It examines Warsaw's post-World War II reconstruction through images and language.Juxtaposing close readings of photo books, socialist-era newsreels called the Polska Kronika Filmowa, the comedies of Leonard Buczkowski and Jan Fethke, the writing and films of Tadeusz Konwicki, and a case study on the Palace of Culture and Science-a "gift" from none other than Stalin-this study investigates the rhetorical and visual, rather than physical, reconstruction of Warsaw in various medias and genres.Ewa Wampuszyc roots her analysis in the historical context of the postwar decade and shows how and why Poland's capital became an essential part of a propaganda program inspired by communist ideology and the needs of a newly established socialist People's Republic.Mapping Warsawdemonstrates how physical space manifests itself in culture, and how culture, history, and politics leave an indelible mark on places. It points out ways in which we take for granted our perception of space and the meanings we assign to it.
InA Minor Apocalypse, Robert Blobaum explores the social and cultural history of Warsaw's "forgotten war" of 1914-1918. Beginning with the bank panic that accompanied the outbreak of the Great War, ...Blobaum guides his readers through spy scares, bombardments, mass migratory movements, and the Russian evacuation of 1915. Industrial collapse marked only the opening phase of Warsaw's wartime economic crisis, which grew steadily worse during the German occupation. Requisitioning and strict control of supplies entering the city resulted in scarcity amid growing corruption, rapidly declining living standards, and major public health emergencies.Blobaum shows how conflicts over distribution of and access to resources led to social divisions, a sharp deterioration in Polish-Jewish relations, and general distrust in public institutions. Women's public visibility, demands for political representation, and perceived threats to the patriarchal order during the war years sustained one arena of cultural debate. New modes of popular entertainment, including cinema, cabaret, and variety shows, created another, particularly as they challenged elite notions of propriety. Blobaum presents these themes in comparative context, not only with other major European cities during the Great War but also with Warsaw under Nazi German occupation a generation later.
Jews in Nazi-oppupied Warsaw during the 1940s were under increasingthreat as they were stripped of their rights and forced to live in a guardedghetto away from the non- Jewish Polish population. ...Within the ghettos,a small but distinct group existed: the assimilated, acculturated, and baptizedJews. Unwilling to integrate into the Jewish community and unable tomerge with the Polish one, they formed a group of their own, remainingin a state of suspension throughout the interwar period. In 1940, with theclosure of the Jewish Residential Quarter in Warsaw, their identity waschosen for them.Person looks at what it meant for assimilated Jews to leave their prewarneighborhoods, understood as both a physical environment and a mixedPolish Jewish community, and enter a new, Jewish one. She reveals thediversity of this group and how its members' identity shaped their involvementin and contribution to ghetto life. In the first English-language studyof this small but influential group, Person illuminates the important role ofthe acculturated and assimilated Jews to the history and memory of theWarsaw ghetto.
In 1943, against utterly hopeless odds, the Jews of the Warsaw
Ghetto rose up to defy the Nazi horror machine that had set out to
exterminate them. One of the leaders of the Jewish Fighting
...Organization, which led the uprisings, was Yitzhak Zuckerman, known
by his underground pseudonym, Antek. Decades later, living in
Israel, Antek dictated his memoirs. The Hebrew publication of
Those Seven Years: 1939-1946 was a major event in the
historiography of the Holocaust, and now Antek's memoirs are
available in English. Unlike Holocaust books that focus on the
annihilation of European Jews, Antek's account is of the daily
struggle to maintain human dignity under the most dreadful
conditions. His passionate, involved testimony, which combines
detail, authenticity, and gripping immediacy, has unique historical
importance. The memoirs situate the ghetto and the resistance in
the social and political context that preceded them, when prewar
Zionist and Socialist youth movements were gradually forged into
what became the first significant armed resistance against the
Nazis in all of occupied Europe. Antek also describes the
activities of the resistance after the destruction of the ghetto,
when 20,000 Jews hid in "Aryan" Warsaw and then participated in
illegal immigration to Palestine after the war. The only extensive
document by any Jewish resistance leader in Europe, Antek's book is
central to understanding ghetto life and underground activities,
Jewish resistance under the Nazis, and Polish-Jewish relations
during and after the war. This extraordinary work is a fitting
monument to the heroism of a people.
The article focuses on the artistic activity of the Kamiński Theater in Warsaw (1/3 Oboźna Street) prior to World War I. First, it reviews publications related to the topic which present varying ...facts and dates. Then the author confronts these scholarly works with Yiddish dailies. Based on the Warsaw Yiddish daily Der Moment, she determines that Yiddish performances of the troupe run by Avrom-Yitskhok Kamiński started as early as June 1911, not 1913 or 1909 as previously thought. The Kamiński Theater building was used not only by Jewish but also by Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian theater troupes.
A vivid and unsparing memoir of the experiences of an eight year old child incarcerated in the Warsaw Ghetto. Her escape from the Ghetto and from Warsaw following the Uprising was due to her mother's ...resourcefulness. Settling finally into an outwardly comfortable American life she repressed her horrific memories until compelled to bear witness.
