Availability, Proximity, and Identity in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Adding a Sociological Lens to Studies of Jewish Resistance

2020 ◽  
pp. 273-290
Keyword(s):  
Warsaw Ghetto ◽  
Jewish Resistance

The Author of Himself

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcel Reich-Ranicki
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
German Literature ◽  
Ground Level ◽  
Television Program ◽  
German Culture ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
Warsaw Ghetto ◽  
Jewish Resistance ◽  
History Of

The author of this book was born into a Jewish family in Poland in 1920, and he moved to Berlin as a boy. There he discovered his passion for literature and began a complex affair with German culture. In 1938, his family was deported back to Poland, where German occupation forced him into the Warsaw Ghetto. As a member of the Jewish resistance, a translator for the Jewish Council, and a man who personally experienced the ghetto's inhumane conditions, the author gained both a bird's-eye and ground-level view of Nazi barbarism. His account of this episode is among the most compelling and dramatic ever recorded. He escaped with his wife and spent two years hiding in the cellar of Polish peasants. After liberation, he joined and then fell out with the Communist Party and was temporarily imprisoned. He began writing and soon became Poland's foremost critical commentator on German literature. When he returned to Germany in 1958, his rise was meteoric. He claimed national celebrity and notoriety as the head of the literary section of the leading newspaper and host of his own television program. He frequently flabbergasted viewers with his bold pronouncements and flexed his power to make or break a writer's career. This, together with his keen critical instincts, makes his memoir an indispensable guide to contemporary German culture as well as an absorbing eyewitness history of some of the twentieth century's most important events.

How rebel groups form in genocide: The Warsaw Ghetto fighters

2021 ◽  
pp. 263300242110466
Author(s):  
Julia Reilly
Keyword(s):  
Capacity Building ◽  
Power Asymmetry ◽  
Warsaw Ghetto ◽  
Rebel Groups ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Jewish Resistance ◽  
Formation And Evolution ◽  
Rebel Group ◽  
Group Mobilization

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is emblematic of armed Jewish resistance to the Holocaust; it should also be emblematic of rebel organization formation and capacity building in the most extreme power asymmetry. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising happened because civilians who were directly experiencing a genocide formed rebel organizations that gained the capacity to hold territory. Drawing from video testimonies and memoirs of survivors, diaries of witnesses, and the work of historians, this study analyzes the formation and evolution of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB) to create and begin to validate a generalizable theory on how rebel organizations form in genocide, and how they create the capacity to hold territory from the genocidal opponent. The ŻOB evolved from a violent resistance organization to a rebel organization with a military infrastructure that could hold territory against the Nazis; further, it was this capacity to hold territory that allowed the ŻOB to win the survival of many Jews. These findings offer important insights on the possibility of rebel group mobilization against genocidal persecution, and can be used to understand contemporary genocide resisters.

Threat Assessment and Collective-Action Emergence: Death-Camp and Ghetto Resistance During the Holocaust

2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Einwohner ◽  
Thomas Maher
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Study Design ◽  
Threat Assessment ◽  
Five Dimensions ◽  
Warsaw Ghetto ◽  
Death Camp ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Jewish Resistance

Recent work in the field of social movements has argued for the importance of threat as a factor that explains the emergence of collective action. However, threat remains poorly specified and understood. This article seeks to refine the concept of threat and its role in mobilization with an examination of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Our study design compares two cases where resistance took place (the Warsaw Ghetto and the Sobibór death camp) with two cases where resistance did not occur (the Łódź Ghetto and the Bełżec death camp). Our comparison of these cases finds that mass resistance occurred only when and where Jews correctly assessed the threats facing them. We use these findings to identify five dimensions of threat: severity, temporality, applicability, malleability, and credibility. We argue that recognizing these dimensions and the ways they interact is especially useful for understanding action in repressive contexts.

Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw 1939-1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1982. Pp. 487.

2004 ◽  
pp. 398-400
Author(s):  
Edward D. Wynot
Keyword(s):  
Daily Living ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Indiana University ◽  
Warsaw Ghetto ◽  
The Third ◽  
Collective Actors ◽  
Jewish Resistance ◽  
Hebrew University ◽  
The Many ◽  
Resistance Movement

This chapter reviews Yisrael Gutman's The Jews of Warsaw 1939–1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt (1982). Yisrael Gutman, Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Director of the Yad Vashem Research Center, has undertaken the challenging task of describing the major trends and developments that occurred in the Warsaw Ghetto during its unhappy existence. Himself a former resident of the Ghetto and participant in the Uprising, the author sets three major objectives for his work. The first objective is to consider the ‘character and conduct’ of the Warsaw Jews under increasingly stressful conditions. The second is to discuss the intellectual and psychological methods used to deal with the many pressures of daily living. The third objective is to analyse the evolution of the militant Jewish resistance movement that culminated in the Uprising. In pursuing his goals, Gutman focuses on the three main collective actors in this complex story: the Germans and their collaborators, their Jewish victims, and the Poles, both those in Warsaw and in the London-based exile government.

Research on Starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto – Ethical Problems

2010 ◽  
pp. 439-450
Author(s):  
Marta Janczewska
Keyword(s):  
Research Team ◽  
Ethical Dilemmas ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
Scientific Discipline ◽  
Medical Treatments ◽  
Warsaw Ghetto ◽  
Dying Patients ◽  
To Receive

Research team of physicians and lab technicians under Izrael Milejkowski’s direction undertook the effort to carry out a series of clinical and biochemical experiments on patients dying of starvation in the Warsaw ghetto so as to receive the fullest possible picture of hunger disease. The research was carried out according to all the rigors of strict scientific discipline, and the authors during their work on academic articles, published it after the war entitled: „Starvation disease: hunger research carried out in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942,” according to their own words, they “supplemented the gap in accordance with the progress of knowledge.” The article is devoted to the reflections over ethical dilemmas of the research team, who were forced in their work to perform numerous medical treatments of experimental nature on extremely exhausted patients. The ill, according to Dr Fajgenblat’s words,“demonstrated negativism toward the research and treatment, which extremely hindered the work, and sometimes even frustrated it.” The article attempts to look at the monumental research work of the Warsaw ghetto doctors as a special kind of response of the medical profession to the feeling of helplessness to the dying patients. The article analyzes the situation of Warsaw ghetto doctors, who undertook the research without support of any outer authority, which could settle their possible ethical dilemmas (Polish deontological codes, European discussions on the conditions of the admissibility of medical research on patients, etc.).

Apocrypha from the History of the Jewish Military Union and its Authors

2008 ◽  
pp. 147-176
Author(s):  
Dariusz Libionka
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Research Approach ◽  
Warsaw Ghetto ◽  
History Of

This article is an attempt at a critical analysis of the history of the Jewish Fighting Union (JFU) and a presentation of their authors based on documents kept in the archives of the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw. The author believes that an uncritical approach and such a treatment of these materials, which were generated under the communist regime and used for political purposes resulted in a perverted and lasting picture of the history of this fighting organisation of Zionists-revisionists both in Poland and Israel. The author has focused on a deconsturction of the most important and best known “testimonies regarding the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”, the development and JFU participation in this struggle, given by Henryk Iwaƒski, WΠadysΠaw Zajdler, Tadeusz Bednarczyk and Janusz Ketling–Szemley.A comparative analysis of these materials, supplemented by important details of their war-time and postwar biographies, leaves no doubt as to the fact that they should not be analysed in terms of their historical credibility and leads one to conclude that a profound revision of research approach to JFU history is necessary.

O niemieckim filmie propagandowym z warszawskiego getta. Przyczynek do analizy

2006 ◽  
pp. 351-373
Author(s):  
Maciej Kubicki
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Warsaw Ghetto ◽  
Visual Materials

This article describes the circumstances in which a German crew shot a film in the Warsaw Ghetto in May and June 1942. The author employs visual materials and eyewitness' accounts of Warsaw Ghetto Jews. They are an important counterpoint, revealing the background and the persuasive dimension of the Nazi message. The text is aimed at an understanding of the propagandistic intention, rooted in the specifically Nazi techniques of persuasion. To do this, the author refers to the sources of anti-Semitic imaginarium and the modes of depiction of the Jew as an enemy figure. The reconstruction of the image of the Jewish community in this film is reinforced by references to broader ideological and socio-cultural contexts.

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