scholarly journals Bombs in Vilnius: Radicalization of Antisemitic Attitudes and Practices Before World War II

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Judzińska

Bombs in Vilnius: Radicalization of Antisemitic Attitudes and Practices Before World War IIOn the eve of the Holocaust Poland saw enormous acts of antisemitic violence in every aspect of everyday life. This article proposes an analysis of antisemitic acts and actions that under Polish rule took place in Vilnius. In early 1937, the city witnessed a wave of antisemitic bomb attacks. Vilnius violence is set in the context of pogroms in other cities, but it remains an example and a specific model of unconditional radicalization of both nationalist attitudes and practices among Poles from different classes and social strata. The study focuses on the participation of students, prospective or actual members of the intelligentsia, in this “festival of violence”, and analyzes those events within the concepts of pogrom and Victor Turner’s social drama. Bomby w Wilnie. Radykalizacja postaw i praktyk antysemickich przed II wojną światowąW przededniu Zagłady przez Polskę przetacza się fala przemocy antysemickiej o charakterze pogromowym, która widoczna jest w niemalże każdym aspekcie życia codziennego. Niniejszy artykuł przedstawia analizę aktów i działań antysemickich, które zdarzyły się w Wilnie pod rządami polskimi. Na początku roku 1937 miasto zmierzyło się z serią zamachów bombowych. Chociaż omówiona przemoc osadzona jest w kontekście sytuacji w innych miastach, pozostaje jednak i przykładem, i swoistym wzorem bezwarunkowej radykalizacji nacjonalistycznych postaw i praktyk wśród nieżydowskich Polaków i Polek pochodzących z różnych klas i warstw społecznych. Autorka koncentruje się w badaniach głównie na udziale studentów – przyszłych członków inteligencji – w tym „festiwalu przemocy” i analizuje opisywane wydarzenia w ramach koncepcji pogromu oraz Turnerowskiego dramatu społecznego.

2021 ◽  
pp. 405-424
Author(s):  
Monika Borzęcka

A Few Words on the Margin of the Diary Written in the Djurin Ghetto by Miriam Korber-Bercovici The purpose of the article is to present fragments of the diary of Miriam Korber-Bercovici, a young Jewish woman deported with her whole family from Southern Bukovina to the Transnistria Governorate under the Antonescu regime. The excerpts translated from the original Romanian into Polish mainly concern the author’s experiences of deportation and everyday life in the Djurin ghetto. They were selected in order to acquaint Polish readers with the situation of the Jews of Bukovina and Bessarabia displaced to the Transnistria Governorate during World War II. The diary was first published in Romania in 1995 as Jurnal de ghetou. The presented translation is based on the second edition of the diary published in 2017 by Curtea Veche Publishing House and Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-42
Author(s):  
Goran Rajič

Within a mere hundred years from the appearance of the first telephone in Zagreb in 1881 until the establishment of the first electronic telephone exchange in 1981, telephony in Zagreb went through several formative periods to assert itself. Zagreb was transformed from a provincial town in the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy to the economic and cultural centre of Croatia. In that period, due to technological development, many changes took place that influenced the accessibility and price of the most popular telecommunications technology in the 20th century. At first a status symbol reserved for the wealthiest citizens, telephone gradually became accessible to all inhabitants of the city. In the decades after World War II, the new telephone infrastructure was constructed under the unfavourable conditions of technological underdevelopment, scarcity of professionals, and meagre financial resources. Nevertheless, despite all the aggravating circumstances, telephony managed to become an inevitable part of Zagreb’s everyday life. Modern telecommunications rest on these very steps that fixed telephony took in its development, and are therefore an indicator of the technological as well as cultural development of Zagreb.


2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-25
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Sztop-Rutkowska ◽  
Maciej Białous

The article presents the results of empirical research concerning the collective memory in Białystok and Lublin – two largest cities in the Eastern Poland. Before World War II they were multi-ethnic cities with big and important communities of Poles, Jews, Germans, Ukrainians and Belarusians. Their contemporary ethnic structure was formed as a result of World War II, in particular the Holocaust, post-war border shifts and intense migration from the countryside to the city in the next decades. Both Białystok and Lublin are an example of the typical cities in Central and Eastern Europe, which after World War II the memory politics was built on in the completely new political and social circumstances. We aim to confront the contemporary official memory of the cities, transmitted by major public institutions and the vernacular memories of their present inhabitants. Straipsnyje pristatomi Balstogės ir Liublino – dviejų didžiausių Rytų Lenkijos miestų kolektyvinės atminties empirinio tyrimo rezultatai. Prieš Antrąjį pasaulinį karą tai buvo daugiaetniniai miestai, turintys dideles ir svarbias lenkų, žydų, vokiečių, ukrainiečių ir baltarusių bendruomenes. Šių miestų šiuolaikinė struktūra susiformavo kaip Antrojo pasaulinio karo, ypač holokausto, sienų persislinkimų pokario metu ir vėlesniais dešimtmečiais vykusios intensyvios migracijos iš kaimo į miestus, rezultatas. Tiek Balstogė, tiek Liublinas yra tipiški Vidurio ir Rytų Europos miestų pavyzdžiai, kurių atminties politika po Antrojo pasaulinio karo buvo kuriama visiškai naujomis politinėmis ir socialinėmis aplinkybėmis. Straipsnyje siekiama palyginti šiuolaikinę oficialią šių miestų atmintį, kurios reguliavimas perduotas pagrindinėms viešosioms institucijoms, ir dabartinių miestų gyventojų vietines atmintis.


Author(s):  
Marek Kosma Cieśliński

The image of Warsaw in ruins after World War II is an important motif in Polish documentary and feature cinema in the years 1944–1956. In the text, I discuss the images of the city captured by the first chroniclers as ‘basic’, which then became archetypical icons of the city’s destruction. I point out that the aesthetics of destruction, recorded in Andrzej Panufnik’s early film Ballada f-moll [Ballade in f minor], Jerzy Bossak’s Most [Bridge] and Tadeusz Makarczyński’s Suita warszawska [Warsaw Suite] proved to be exemplary for other artists. I show that the destruction of urban and architectural structures was inspiring for directors: it served as a documentary record, a basis forconstructing scripts, and dominant aesthetic, often providing a persuasive argument and serving to shape emotions. References to the resentments of the audience and the anatomy of the ruins were among the elements that shaped the ideological attitudes of various parts of Polish society. For some directors it was also a catharsis after the trauma of the Holocaust.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie Hubbard

The Werner von Boltenstern Shanghai Photograph and Negative Collection, housed in Loyola Marymount University’s William H. Hannon Library, is a series of photographs of 1930s–1940s Shanghai taken by Werner von Boltenstern. The images capture a time and place at a crossroads of culture and history. World War II and the Second Sino-Japanese War were raging and the city, a trade center populated by numerous peoples, including Chinese citizens, British, French, and American nationals, Sephardic and Russian Jews, and the occupying Japanese military, was receiving an influx of European Jews fleeing Nazi Europe. The rediscovery of this collection (it sat unused for many years) led to its digitization, a successful crowdsourcing effort to gather more metadata, and the incorporation of the collection into an LMU Literature of the Holocaust class digital project. Through these endeavors, the library has increased its understanding of the collection’s historical value, in particular as it relates to Holocaust studies and Jewish studies more broadly.


2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 26-29
Author(s):  
mayer kirshenblatt ◽  
barbara kirshenblatt-gimblett

Mayer Kirshenblatt remembers in words and paintings the daily diet of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust. Born in 1916 in Opatóów (Apt in Yiddish), a small Polish city, this self-taught artist describes and paints how women bought chickens from the peasants and brought them to the shoykhet (ritual slaughterer), where they plucked the feathers; the custom of shlogn kapores (transferring one's sins to a chicken) before Yom Kippur; and the role of herring and root vegetables in the diet, especially during the winter. Mayer describes how his family planted and harvested potatoes on leased land, stored them in a root cellar, and the variety of dishes prepared from this important staple, as well as how to make a kratsborsht or scratch borsht from the milt (semen sack) of a herring. In the course of a forty-year conversation with his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who also interviewed Mayer's mother, a picture emerges of the daily, weekly, seasonal, and holiday cuisine of Jews who lived in southeastern Poland before World War II.


Author(s):  
Emily Robins Sharpe

The Jewish Canadian writer Miriam Waddington returned repeatedly to the subject of the Spanish Civil War, searching for hope amid the ruins of Spanish democracy. The conflict, a prelude to World War II, inspired an outpouring of literature and volunteerism. My paper argues for Waddington’s unique poetic perspective, in which she represents the Holocaust as the Spanish Civil War’s outgrowth while highlighting the deeply personal repercussions of the war – consequences for women, for the earth, and for community. Waddington’s poetry connects women’s rights to human rights, Canadian peace to European war, and Jewish persecution to Spanish carnage.


2008 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 411-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Eskola ◽  
V. Peuraniemi

AbstractLake sediments were studied from four lakes in environmentally different areas in northern Finland. Lakes Pyykösjärvi and Kuivasjärvi are situated near roads with heavy traffic and the city of Oulu. Lakes Martinlampi and Umpilampi are small lakes in a forest area with no immediate human impact nearby. The concentration of Pb increases in the upper parts of the sedimentary columns of Lake Kuivasjärvi and Lake Pyykösjärvi. This is interpreted as being an anthropogenic effect related to heavy traffic in the area and use of Lake Pyykösjärvi as an airport during World War II. High Ni and Zn concentrations in the Lake Umpilampi sediments are caused by weathered black schists. Sediments in Lake Martinlampi show high Pb and Zn contents with increasing Pb concentrations up through the sedimentary column. The sources of these elements are probably Pb-Zn mineralization in the bedrock, Pb-Zn-rich boulders and anomalous Pb and Zn contents in till in the catchment area of the lake.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Duindam

Why do we attach so much value to sites of Holocaust memory, if all we ever encounter are fragments of a past that can never be fully comprehended? David Duindam examines how the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a former theater in Amsterdam used for the registration and deportation of nearly 50,000 Jews, fell into disrepair after World War II before it became the first Holocaust memorial museum of the Netherlands. Fragments of the Holocaust: The Amsterdam Hollandsche Schouwburg as a Site of Memory combines a detailed historical study of the postwar period of this site with a critical analysis of its contemporary presentation by placing it within international debates concerning memory, emotionally fraught heritage and museum studies. A case is made for the continued importance of the Hollandsche Schouwburg and other comparable sites, arguing that these will remain important in the future as indexical fragments where new generations can engage with the memory of the Holocaust on a personal and affective level.


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