scholarly journals Ludobójstwo w świetle wybranych relacji więźniów obozów koncentracyjnych Auschwitz, Majdanek, Stutthof i Gross-Rosen

2020 ◽  
pp. 251-263
Author(s):  
Lucyna Sadzikowska

The article is devoted to the analysis of testimonies, accounts, memoirs, ego-documents by concentration camp prisoners of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Stutthof, and Gross-Rosen. Thesource material kept in the said KLs’ archives contains a multitude of individual histories of survivors of the genocide, either described in detail or concisely noted down. What the authorfocuses on is the variety of those testimonies to suffering and tragedy of people incarcerated in concentration camps. At the same time, she observes that for the former prisoners, decades after leaving the camps, the Shoah and hell are synonymous with genocide. The most common terms used by them to describe genocide are: mass extermination, the Holocaust, Annihilation, hell, the Shoah, hideous violence, total annihilation – both physical and moral.

Author(s):  
Dan Stone

In order to consider why concentration camps are so important to modern consciousness and identity, we need to understand what they are and how they have developed. ‘What is a concentration camp?’ provides a working definition: it is an isolated, circumscribed site with fixed structures designed to incarcerate civilians. The Holocaust has confused our understanding of concentration camps in that a concentration camp is not normally a death camp. They are the consequences of large numbers of opponents, far too many for the discipline, order, and expense of prisons. When the concentration camp becomes a permanency, it is the sign of a regime that knows it cannot command national support or even tolerance.


2010 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 576-600 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Wünschmann

Understandably, research has focused overwhelmingly on Jews in the camps of the Holocaust. But the nazis had been detaining Jews in concentration camps ever since 1933, at times in large numbers. Who were these prisoners? This article analyzes nazi policies that brought Jews into the concentration camps. It ventures into the inner structure and dynamics of one of the most heterogeneous groups of concentration camp inmates. By contrasting the perpetrators’ objectives with the victims’ experiences, this article will illuminate the role of the concentration camp as the ultimate means of pressure in the fatal process of turning a minority group into an outsider group: that is, the act of defining and marking the enemy which was the critical stage before the destruction of European Jewry. Furthermore, it will examine Jewish reactions to SS terror inside the camps.


Author(s):  
Ivana Milovanović

The most notorious Nazi extermination camps or death camps were Auschwitz, Belzec, Treblinka, etc. Apart from the death camps, the Nazis established concentration labor camps where they exploited the labor force. By its function, one of the unique concentration camps was Theresienstadt, which became a Nazi concentration camp for Jews in November 1941. In fact, Terezin was advertised as a spa center for wealthy senior citizens who were promised safety and luxury. Media articles on the topic of the Holocaust have become a significant part of the culture of remembrance. The American television mini-series Holocaust is one of the media narratives that deal with crimes against civilization and its premiere was in 1978. The concept of Theresienstadt in the series Holocaust corroborates the statement that this camp was used for the purpose of propaganda rearticulation of a crime against civilization and it reveals the hidden and repressed fear and horror underneath the smiling façade of Theresienstadt. The colorfulness of the exterior in the scenes which show Terezin, and on the other hand a horror interior, as well as everything that was happening behind the scenes expressed in the form of secret images of the artists, clearly emphasize the living conditions in Theresienstadt, as well as its role in Nazi propaganda.


2021 ◽  
pp. 192-250
Author(s):  
Martha Sprigge

Concentration camps were a central part of East Germany’s commemorative politics. National antifascist memorials opened at three former concentration camps between 1958 and 1961. The narrative visitors encountered at these memorial sites valorized the camps political prisoners and devoted little—if any—attention to other victims of the Holocaust. Running corollary to these antifascist memorials were efforts to memorialize political victims of the camps in music. This chapter considers two forms of musical activity involved in concentration camp remembrance: collecting songs from the camps as part of the nation’s antifascist heritage, and composing new works about the Holocaust. Both forms of musical activity involved engaging with the memorial traces and spaces of the camps, which inadvertently facilitated more complicated narratives of the Nazi genocide to be voiced in music.


2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Brown

This paper examines how gender and identity function in the personal memoirs of female Holocaust survivors. The memoirs of Nanda Herbermann and Sara Tuvel Bernstein, two survivors of Ravensbrück, the Nazis' concentration camp for women, are explored as case studies of how feminine gender identity influenced female inmates' experiences and recollections of life in Nazi concentration camps. The different backgrounds of these women, as a German Catholic and a Jew, respectively, also affected their lives as inmates, and influenced how they constructed their personal narratives and identities through memoirs. Thus, gender and other aspects of personal identity intertwined both during their time in Ravensbrück and in their writings of their experiences. Their memoirs, moreover, serve as means of personal empowerment as they rewrote themselves into history on their own terms. These memoirs, therefore, enhance our understanding of the gendered and the personal dimensions of the Nazi concentration camp systems and the Holocaust. 


2019 ◽  
Vol 168 ◽  
pp. 507-520
Author(s):  
Ewa Szperlik

Notes from “the city of the dead”: Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška concentration camps in thanatological narratives and in the memory discourse of the post-Yugoslav areaThis paper discusses selected Holocaust narratives of the post-Yugoslav area, which were set in the history of Hitler’s Europe due to the establishment of the pro-Nazi Pavelić regime The Independent State of Croatia. They were also set in the context of the concealment policy, when both places and events related to concentration camps, Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška, were ousted from collective memory by the authorities of communist Yugoslavia. Concentration camp memoirs and records — autothanatographies J. Derrida, A. Ubertowska — reflecting on the post-Yugoslav area of Tito’s epoch had been a tabooed realm of unsolicited truths S. Buryła for a few decades due to political reasons and have recently been reintroduced into official discourse of memory. They also address the questions of the end of Western civilisation, the topos of the concentration camp as the territory of the reign of death and struggle for survival. The five selected thanatological testimonies present the Holocaust and the nightmare of World War II as an essential part of reflection on the human condition H. Arendt and they also show the phenomenon of collective trauma D. LaCapra.  Bilješke iz „Grada Mrtvih”. Konclogor Jasenovac i Stara Gradiška u književnim tanatološkim naracijama i u diskursu kolektivnog pamćenja na području bivše JugoslavijePredmet razmatranja u ovom tekstu su odabrani autobiografski zapisi o Holokaustu sa područja bivše Jugoslavije, stavljene u vizuru povijesti hitlerove Europe povodom osnivanja režima Ante Pavelića kakva je bila NDH. Istodobno vrlo je važan u ovoj analizi kontekst politike prešućivanja te brisanja iz kolektivnog pamćenja mjesta i dogaᵭaja vezanih uz logore smrti: Jasenovac i Stara Gradiška koje su vlasti komunističke Jugoslavije nakon II svjestkog rata uspješno poricale. Vraćene u zadnje vrijeme javnom pamćenju sjećanja i uspomene na logor – „autotanatografije J. Derrida, A. Ubertowska – bile su nekoliko decenija prešućivane ili od javnosti skrivane u Titovoj državi te zbog političkih razloga spadale su u zonu nepoželjnih istina S. Buryła. Zabilježena vlastita sjećanja na konclogora – kasnije proskribiranih autora/svjedoka – bave se univerzalnom temom smrti, rušenja civilizacije zapadnog kruga, konclogora kao područja svevladajuće smrti, istrebljivanja i životnjske borbe za preživljavanje zatočenika. Pet odabranih logorskih testimonija prikazuje traumu II svjestkog rata D. LaCapra te govori o stanju čovječanstva u postratnom razdoblju H. Arendt.


This chapter reviews the book The Story of an Underground: The Resistance of the Jews in Kovno in the Second World War (2014), by Dov Levin and Zvie A. Brown, translated by Jessica Setbon. The Story of an Underground is about the Jews of Kovno (Kaunas) who founded an underground movement during the Holocaust. The armed underground developed a plan to escape to the forests and join the partisans. The ghetto was liquidated in the summer of 1944. Many of the remaining Jews were sent to the Stutthof and Dachau concentration camps. The book highlights the dilemmas of Jewish armed resistance such as difficulties in obtaining weapons and training, some of the failures of the resistance, and some of the positive aspects of those who thought differently from members of the armed resistance.


2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Mathias Daven

If we wish to understand a totalitarian system as a whole, we need first to understand the central role of the concentration camp as a laboratorium to experiment in total domination. Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism in the twentieth century shows how a totalitarian regime cannot survive without terror; and terror will not be effective without concentration camps. Experiments in concentration camps had as their purpose, apart from wiping out any freedom or spontaneity, the abolishing of space between human beings, abolishing space for politics. Thus, totalitarianism did not mirror only the politics of extinction, but also the extinction of politics. As a way forward, Arendt analyses political theory that forces the reader to understand power no longer under the rubric of domination or violence – although this avenue is open – but rather under the rubric of freedom. Arendt is convinced that the life of a destroyed nation can be restored by mutual forgiveness and mutual promises, two abilities rooted in action. Political action, as with other acts, is identical with the ability to commence something new. Keywords: Totalitarisme, antisemitisme, imperialisme, dominasi, teror, kebebasan, kedaulatan, kamp konsentrasi, politik, ideologi, tindakan


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