Holocaust Research in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia. An Inventory

Südosteuropa ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marija Vulesica

AbstractThe Holocaust and other mass killings committed during the Second World War in the Yugoslav territories play a more significant role in current public debates than they do in education and research. 85% of Yugoslavia’s Jews were annihilated in the period between 1941 and 1945. In socialist Yugoslavia, it was Holocaust survivors in particular who collected materials that documented the execution of exterminist policies. How has the examination of the Holocaust changed since the dissolution of Yugoslavia; and how have the newly established states of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as Serbia coped with this part of their history? The author asks whether an exclusive exploration of Jewish suffering is possible—or even desirable—in today’s post-Yugoslav societies. She gives an overview of the evolution of a specific ‘Yugoslav’ approach to the history of the Holocaust, and depicts recent Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian efforts in this field. Furthermore, she looks at what kind of attention the Holocaust in Yugoslavia has received in international Holocaust Studies.

Author(s):  
Ivan Matkovskyy

The history of relations of the Sheptytskyj family and the Jewish people reaches back to those remote times when the representatives of the Sheptytskyi lineage held high and honorable secular and clerical posts, and the Jews, either upon invitation of King Danylo of Halych or King Casimir the Great, began to build up their own world in Halychyna. Throughout the whole life of Metropolitan Sheptytskyi and Blessed Martyr Klymentii, a thread of cooperation with the Jews is traceable. It should be noted that heroic deeds of the Sheptytskyi Brothers to save Jews during the Second World War were not purely circumstantial: they were preceded by a long-standing deep relationship with representatives of Jewish culture. In addition, the sense of responsibility of the Spiritual Pastor, as advocated by the Brothers, extended to all people of different religions and genesis with no exception. The world-view principles of Metropolitan Sheptytskyi are important for us in order to understand what was going on in the then society in attitude to the Jews. Also, of importance is the influence of the Metropolitan on Kasymyr Sheptytskyi, later Fr. Klymentii, because the Archbishop was not only his Brother, but also a church authority and the leader. And if from under the Metropolitan Sheptytskyi’s pen letters and pastorals were published, they were directives, instructions, edifications and explanations for the faithful and the clergy, and not at all, the products of His own reflections or personal experiences, which Archbishop Andrey wanted to share with the faithful. On the grounds of the available archive materials, an effort to reconstruct the chief moments of those relations was undertaken, aiming among others, to illustrate the fact that the saving of Jews during the Holocaust was not incidental, nor with any underlying reasons behind, but a natural manifestation of a good Christian tradition of «Love thy Neighbor», to which the Sheptytskyj were faithful. Keywords: Andrey Sheptytskyi, the Blessed Hieromartyr Klymentii Sheptytskyi, Jews, the Holocaust, Galicia, Righteous Among the Nations.


Author(s):  
Antony Polonsky

For many centuries Poland and Russia formed the heartland of the Jewish world: right up to the Second World War, the area was home to over 40 per cent of the world's Jews. Yet the history of their Jewish communities is not well known. This book recreates this lost world, beginning with Jewish economic, cultural and religious life, including the emergence of hasidism. By the late eighteenth century, other factors had come into play: with the onset of modernization there were government attempts to integrate and transform the Jews, and the stirrings of Enlightenment led to the growth of the Haskalah movement. The book looks at developments in each area in turn: the problems of emancipation, acculturation, and assimilation in Prussian and Austrian Poland; the politics of integration in the Kingdom of Poland; and the failure of forced integration in the tsarist empire. It shows how the deterioration in the position of the Jews between 1881 and 1914 encouraged a range of new movements as well as the emergence of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. It also examines Jewish urbanization and the rise of Jewish mass culture. The final part, starting from the First World War and the establishment of the Soviet Union, looks in turn at Poland, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union up to the Second World War. It reviews Polish–Jewish relations during the war and examines the Soviet record in relation to the Holocaust. The final chapters deal with the Jews in the Soviet Union and in Poland since 1945, concluding with an epilogue on the Jews in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia since the collapse of communism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 264-266

This chapter examines Relations between Jews and Poles during the Holocaust (2017), an English translation of Havi Dreifuss' Hebrew-language doctoral dissertation (completed in 2005). This book is a unique scholarly examination of Polish–Jewish relations during the Holocaust from a perspective of Jewish views. It is not a history of Polish–Jewish relations per se but rather a history of changing Jewish perceptions of Poland and the Poles from the beginning to the end of the Second World War. Based largely on unpublished wartime diaries and writings preserved in Yad Vashem as well as some materials from other archives, it also contains wartime photographs and a sizable, 60-page appendix of documents. The appendix itself, a rich collection of previously unpublished wartime testimonies, makes Dreifuss' book a valuable addition to any Holocaust library.


2020 ◽  
pp. 372-388
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Czyżak

The article contains considerations regarding memory of the Holocaust in Polish contemporary prose and analyses the arguments for and against fictitious representations of theShoah. The author discusses the changes in treating fiction which narrates the history of Jewish people during the Second World War – from works of fiction published after the war (e.g. Wielki Tydzień by Jerzy Andrzejewski) to popular thrillers written in the 21st century. The main part of this article is devoted to a novel Tworki written by Marek Bieńczyk in 1999, telling a story of young people – Poles and Jews – employed in a mental hospital during German occupation. The novel was at the centre stage of discussion about relationship between fiction and the Shoah theme, yet the author of the article argues that it may serve as an important stepping stone in exemplifying history. This literary vision of the Holocaust (defined as “pastoral thriller”) shows educational possibilities of fiction.


2004 ◽  
Vol 77 (197) ◽  
pp. 437-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Snowman

Abstract This article reflects upon some of the issues arising from the author's work on the ‘Hitler émigrés’. It looks in particular at the reasons for the huge recent resurgence of scholarly (and popular) interest in the history of the Second World War, Hitler, Nazism and the Holocaust; the relevance – or otherwise – of the Jewishness of many of the ‘Hitler émigrés’ to what they went on to achieve; and finally culture and identity among asylum-seekers and immigrants, then and now.


2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 470-479
Author(s):  
Pieter Emmer

The Netherlands is not known for its opposing regimes of memory. There are two exceptions to this rule: the history of the German Occupation during the Second World War and the Dutch participation in the Atlantic slave trade and slavery. The relatively low numbers of survivors of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, as well as the volume and the profitability of the Dutch slave trade and slavery, and the importance of slave resistance in abolishing slavery in the Dutch Caribbean have produced conflicting views, especially between professional historians and the descendants of slaves living in the Netherlands.


Südosteuropa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ljiljana Radonić

AbstractThe Polish and the Hungarian governing party, PiS and Fidesz, are mnemonic warriors who had already tried to enforce their memory politics during their first government terms, as their flagship museums, the Warsaw Rising Museum, opened in 2004, and the House of Terror in Budapest, opened in 2002, show. In museums they ‘inherited’ from their predecessors, the current governments either change content, as PiS at the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, or ‘only’ battle against the directors in office, as happened at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest. Yet even mnemonic warriors cannot ignore international developments like the ‘universalization of the Holocaust’. As the author shows, the Polish and the Hungarian governments favored opening new museums over changing existing museums identified as ‘Jewish’, including those that explicitly deal with Polish and Hungarian complicity. New museums, like the Ulma Family Museum in southeastern Poland, the House of Fates in Budapest, and the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, focus on rescuers of Jews and uplifting messages of Polish and Hungarian heroism.


Aschkenas ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nils Roemer

AbstractIn addition to being witnesses of a vanished past, ruins refer to the former building and tell the story of its destruction. Two ruins, which can also be described as memorial sites, can exemplify different strategies of dealing with these material remnants: the destroyed synagogue of Worms and the St Nikolai Church in Hamburg. The destroyed synagogue of Worms was rebuilt as a symbol of the history of the Jewish community prior to 1933 and as a memorial to the Holocaust. In contrast, the St Nikolai Church in Hamburg was left in ruins which constitute a memorial for the air raids as well as a reminder of the Nazi crimes. The following article will reflect on these different strategies and on the reactions and perceptions of the visitors. Furthermore it will try to reveal the different levels of meaning and the interconnectedness of the memories of the German-Jewish past, the Second World War and the Holocaust.


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