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"Deportations from Poland"
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War Through Children's Eyes
On September 17, 1939, two weeks after the German invasion of Poland, Soviet troops occupied the eastern half of Poland and swiftly imposed a new political and economic order. Following a plebiscite, in early November the area was annexed to the Ukraine and Belorussia. Beginning in the winter of 1939–40, Soviet authorities deported over one million Poles, many of them children, to various provinces of the Soviet Union. After the German attack on the USSR in summer 1941, the Polish government in exile in London received permission from its new-found ally to organize military units among the Polish deportees and later to transfer Polish civilians to camps in the British-controlled Middle East. There the children were able to attend Polish-run schools. The 120 essays translated here were selected from compositions written by the students of these schools. What makes these documents unique is the perception of these witnesses: a child's eye view of events no adult would consider worth mentioning. In simple language, filled with misspellings and grammatical errors, the children recorded their experiences, and sometimes their surprisingly mature understanding, of the invasion and the Societ occupation, the deportations eastward, and life in the work camps and kolkhozes. The horrors of life in the USSR were vivid memories; privation, hunger, disease, and death had been so frequent that they became accepted commonplaces. Moreover, as the editors point out in their introductory study, these Polish children were not alone in their suffering. All the nationalities that came under Soviet rule shared their fate.
eBook
The First to be Destroyed
The Jewish community of the city of Kleczew came into existence in the sixteenth century. It remained large and strong throughout the next four hundred years, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it constituted 40-60% of the total population. The German army entered Kleczew on September 15, 1939, shortly after the outbreak of World War II. The communities of Kleczew and the vicinity were among the first Jewish collectives in Europe to be totally destroyed. The events presented in this book reveal that the organization of deportations and the methods of mass murder conducted in this district, by Kommando Lange, served as a model that would be applied later in the death camps during the mass extermination of Polish and European Jewry. If so, it was in the woods near Kleczew that the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” began.
eBook
Uprooted
With the stroke of a pen at the Potsdam Conference following the Allied victory in 1945, Breslau, the largest German city east of Berlin, became the Polish city of Wroclaw. Its more than six hundred thousand inhabitants--almost all of them ethnic Germans--were expelled and replaced by Polish settlers from all parts of prewar Poland. Uprooted examines the long-term psychological and cultural consequences of forced migration in twentieth-century Europe through the experiences of Wroclaw's Polish inhabitants.
eBook
Intimate Violence
Why do pogroms occur in some localities and not in others? Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg examine a particularly brutal wave of violence that occurred across hundreds of predominantly Polish and Ukrainian communities in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The authors note that while some communities erupted in anti-Jewish violence, most others remained quiescent. In fact, fewer than 10 percent of communities saw pogroms in 1941, and most ordinary gentiles never attacked Jews.
Intimate Violenceis a novel social-scientific explanation of ethnic violence and the Holocaust. It locates the roots of violence in efforts to maintain Polish and Ukrainian dominance rather than in anti-Semitic hatred or revenge for communism. In doing so, it cuts through painful debates about relative victimhood that are driven more by metaphysical beliefs in Jewish culpability than empirical evidence of perpetrators and victims. Pogroms, they conclude, were difficult to start, and local conditions in most places prevented their outbreak despite a general anti-Semitism and the collapse of the central state. Kopstein and Wittenberg shed new light on the sources of mass ethnic violence and the ways in which such gruesome acts might be avoided.
eBook
Revisiting the \Cosel Period\
Between August and December 1942, western deportation trains heading from Drancy, Westerbork, and Mechelen/Malines to Auschwitz were stopped in Cosel (today Kędzierżyn-Koźle, Poland, Upper Silesia), a town situated forty miles northwest of the death camp, by the SS and order police. During this so-called Cosel period, nearly 9,000 able-bodied men aged between sixteen and fifty-five were made to step out, while the elderly, the women, and the children rode on to Auschwitz, where they were murdered in the gas chambers almost immediately.
From Cosel, the men were distributed among forced labor camps specifically set up for Eastern Upper Silesian Jews from the fall of 1940. These forced labor camps, superintended by SS Special Commissioner Albrecht Schmelt, were operated independently from the Auschwitz concentration camp and its satellites, hence the men were selected in Cosel and not on the ramp of Birkenau. The Cosel stops thus facilitated the transfer of western deportees into a secluded camp system that existed in parallel to the subcamps of concentration camps. The camp system was intrinsically linked to the construction of the “thoroughfare IV” to the Ukraine, supervised by the Reich Highway Company (Reichsautobahn), which had begun to use Jewish forced labor on a large scale.
Most of the men taken off the trains in Cosel perished due to the adverse conditions in the camps. Based on survivor testimonies, this paper aims to providing the first detailed analysis of the Cosel period, while equally addressing the profound psychological trauma it effectuated.
Journal Article
European Arrest Warrant
What practical problems are at stake in current EAW surrender proceedings?The research project Improving Mutual Recognition of European Arrest Warrants through Common Practical Guidelines of which the three country reports for Greece, the Netherlands and Poland are now published, is a follow-up of an earlier project that led to the publication of.
eBook
“Don’t Give Up Your Ration Card”: Beggars, Noise, and the Purpose of Music in the Warsaw Ghetto
From its 1940 establishment to the Great Deportation of 1942, accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto testify to the misery of beggars within its walls, who drew attention to their plight using songs, cries, shouts, and other sounds. Diaries, reports, and song texts from the ghetto, alongside memoirs and testimonies, reveal beggars’ struggles—as well as non-beggars’ often hostile reactions to their songs and other sounds. Drawing on scholarship in sensory history and cultural histories of the Holocaust, this article reveals that these reactions perpetuated established critiques of shund (artistic “trash”) and tapped into longstanding anxieties about the Jewish community’s status as modern, civilized, and European. However, certain beggars’ songs overcame listeners’ hostility by directly confronting inequality and ghetto authorities’ abuses of power. Beggars and their music were intrinsic to the Warsaw Ghetto’s soundscape, and the debates they engendered reveal how Polish Jews imagined their community’s future, even amid its destruction .
Journal Article
Entangled Memories: Wartime Experiences in the Soviet Interior in Postwar Holocaust Testimonies
This article probes the ways in which two purportedly distinct Polish Jewish survival experiences of World War II are in fact entangled. Although living through the Holocaust in Poland and flight into the unoccupied regions of the USSR have generally been presented as separate-with the Holocaust largely overshadowing survival in the Soviet Union-both during the war and afterward, many individuals, families, and communities experienced them as linked. Examining the interconnections helps to chart the development of Holocaust memory.
Journal Article