Holocaust History, Holocaust Memory: Jewish Poland and Polish Jews, During and After the Holocaust

✍ Scribed by Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz (editor), Lea Ganor (editor)

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 261
• Series: Routledge Studies in Second World War History
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume is both a study of the history of Polish Jews and Jewish Poland before, during, and immediately after the Holocaust and a collection of personal explorations focusing on the historians who write about these subjects.

While the first three parts of the book focus on "text," the broad nature of Polish Jewish history surrounding the Holocaust, the last section focuses on subtext, the personal and professional experiences of scholars who have devoted years to researching and writing about Polish Jewry. The beginning sections present a variety of case studies on wartime and postwar Polish Jews, drawing on new research and local history. The final part is a reflection on family memory, where scholars discuss their connections to Holocaust history and its impact on their current lives and research. Viewed together, the combination sheds light on both history and historians: the challenges of dealing with the history of an unparalleled cataclysm, and the personal questions and dilemmas that its study raises for many of the historians engaged in it.

Holocaust History, Holocaust Memory is a unique resource that will appeal to students and scholars studying the Second World War, Jewish and Polish history, and family history.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Part I: Introduction and Overview
Introduction
1 Jews in 20th-Century Poland
Part II: Studies of Wartime
2 The Capacity of the Tzadik in the Late 1930s in Poland According to the Akedat Yitzchak Book
3 “I’m Being Punished Despite My Complete Innocence!”: Soviet Secret Police (NKVD) Meets Holocaust Refugees from the German-Occupied Part of Poland, 1939–1941
4 “Maybe the Afterlife Will Be Better” – Letters from Włodawa County during the Holocaust
5 Jews from Markowa: Life, War, and the Struggle to Survive
6 Josef Bürger – The Executioner of the Jews in Łuków
7 Jewish Initiatives of Rescue by Means of Labor and Jewish Self-Help in the Face of Aktion Reinhardt
8 February 1943 in the Białystok Ghetto: The Writings of Mordechai Tenenbaum-Tamaroff
Part III: Postwar Jewish Life, Historiography, Commemoration, and Representation
9 Holocaust Monuments in Poland: Forms, Meanings, and Messages
10 Passports from Switzerland: How History Becomes Politics
11 My Love Affair with Jewish History: From Small Town to Source of Identity
12 In Search of the Victims’ Agenda: German Scholarship on Polish Jews During the Holocaust
13 March 1968 – The Last Chapter in the History of Polish Jews – Reflection and Representation of the Events of March 1968 in Polish Films
14 Two Jewish Traitors from Ostrowiec: The Zeyfman Brothers
15 “Windows of Memory. The Jewish Community of Bochnia” – Exhibition Organised by the Stanisław Fischer Museum in Bochnia
16 21st-Century Polish Literature and the Shoah: The Struggle for the Memory
Part IV: Family History, Family Memory
17 In Search of the Lost Tydors: An Exercise in Holocaust Documentation
18 “My Parents Left Poland, but Poland Didn’t Leave Them”: History and Personal Memory
19 Dis-location: Past – Present – Future in a Changing Silesian Town
20 My Jewish Kraków
21 Following My Roots: Building the Unknown Puzzle of My Family Roots in Poland
22 Can I Be a Good Historian?
About the Contributors
Index Names
Index Places