scholarly journals Listy do Wilna

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 19-36
Author(s):  
Mariusz Pawelec

Years 1928–1948 were extremely important for Hajji Seraya Shapshal – an Orientalist and the spiritual leader of Karaims working in these years in Vilnius. In the first decade of this period he was a prolific researcher and an active spiritual and social leader in the what was then the Second Polish Republic nota bene very tolerant towards Karaim religion. The second decade of this period includes the years of the Second World War, the first short years of independent Lithuania along with the years of its German occupation, and, finally, a few years of the not less problematic Soviet rule. Seraya Shapshal’s played a key role in these hard times as the spiritual and secular leader of the Karaim community. The correspondence between him and Ananiasz Zajączkowski is therefore an extremely important source of information not only on Seraya Shapszal, but also on the whole Karaim nation.

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 00007
Author(s):  
B Dewi Puspitaningrum ◽  
Airin Miranda

<p class="Keyword">Nazi Germany used Endlösung to persecute Jews during the Second World War, leading them to the Holocaust, known as “death”. During the German occupation in France, the status of the Jews was applied. Polonski reacted to the situation by establishing a Zionist resistance, Jewish Army, in January 1942. Their first visions were to create a state of Israel and save the Jews as much as they could. Although the members of the group are not numerous, they represented Israel and played an important role in the rescue of the Jews in France, also in Europe. Using descriptive methods and three aspects of historical research, this article shows that the Jewish Army has played an important role in safeguarding Jewish children, smuggling smugglers, physical education and the safeguarding of Jews in other countries. In order to realize their visions, collaborations with other Jewish resistances and the French army itself were often created. With the feeling of belonging to France, they finally extended their vision to the liberation of France in 1945 by joining the French Forces of the Interior and allied troops.</p>


2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
Myroslav Shkandrij

<p class="EW-abstract"><strong>Abstract:</strong> When Dokia Humenna’s novel depicting the Second World War, <em>Khreshchatyi iar</em> (Khreshchatyk Ravine), was published in New York in 1956, it created a controversy. Readers were particularly interested in the way activists of the OUN were portrayed. This article analyzes readers’ comments and Humenna’s responses, which are today stored in the archives of the Ukrainian Academy of Science in New York. The novel is based on a diary Humenna kept during the German occupation of Kyiv in the years 1941-1943.</p><strong>Keywords: </strong>Dokia Humenna, <em>Khreshchatyi iar</em>, Second World War, OUN, Émigré Literature, Reader Response


Sowiniec ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (47) ◽  
pp. 35-63
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Wątor

This is another article devoted to Lt. Col. Bolesław Michał Nieczuja-Ostrowski “Bolko”, “Tysiąc” (1907-2008) who during the Second World War was an officer of the Polish Army, then of the underground Home Army (Armia Krajowa – AK), and since 1944 the commander of the great unit of the AK: the 106th Infantry Division. The article is associated with the investigations conducted against this man and with a trial as a result of which he was sentenced to death. The author used mainly the materials prepared by the functionaries of the Office of Public Security during the inquiry and the trial that were conducted. The information was compared and extended by the data contained in the publications of Lt. Col. Nieczuja-Ostrowski that appeared after 1989.Ostrowski was accused of participation in “illegal organisations” after 1945, and previously he was accused of the contacts that were maintained by the soldiers of the division that he commanded (the division operated on the areas of the AK “Maria” Regional Inspectorate) with the representatives of the German occupation authorities, as well as the supposed killings of Soviet soldiers, people of Jewish ethnicity and communist activists. In the years 1946-1956 he was arrested a number of times, he was repeatedly interrogated, imprisoned and as a result of this he was sentenced to death two times. After the amnesty his sentence was reduced to 12 years of prison (he spent a total of more than seven years in prison).


Author(s):  
Gaj Trifković ◽  
Klaus Schmider

The Second World War in Yugoslavia is notorious for the brutal struggle between the armed forces of the Third Reich and the communist-led Partisans. Less known is the fact that the two sides negotiated prisoner exchanges virtually since the beginning of the war. Under extraordinary circumstances, these early contacts evolved into a formal exchange agreement, centered on the creation of a neutral zone—quite possibly the only such area in occupied Europe—where prisoners were regularly exchanged until late April 1945, saving thousands of lives. The leadership of both sides used the contacts for secret political talks, for which they were nearly branded as traitors by their superiors in Berlin and Moscow. This book is the first comprehensive analysis of prisoner exchanges and the accompanying contacts between the German occupation authorities and the Yugoslav Partisans. Specifically, the book will argue that prisoner exchange had a decisive influence on the POW policies of both sides and helped reduce the levels of violence for which this theater of war became infamous. It will also show that the contacts, contrary to some claims, did not lead to collusion between these two parties against either other Yugoslav factions or the Western Allies.


2018 ◽  
pp. 137-174
Author(s):  
Anthony Rimmington

During the 1930s, a series of reports generated by both German and Soviet intelligence fueled increasing alarm with regard to the perceived BW capabilities allegedly being developed by their potential opponents. After the onset of the Second World War, if either side was going to break the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use of gas and bacteriological warfare, to which they had both agreed to abide, then 1942 was the most likely year. However, a number of prominent scholars have strongly disputed Alibek’s account of the deliberate aerosol dissemination of tularemia by the Red Army at Stalingrad in the late summer of 1942. The occasional use by Soviet-supported partisans of biological agents against the German occupation forces is better documented but there is no evidence that these attacks formed part of a wider, centrally coordinated, campaign of biological sabotage by the Soviet authorities.


Author(s):  
Gaj Trifković

What transpired in Pisarovina, a small village located on the outskirts of Zagreb, is unique not only to Yugoslavia, but to the Second World War in general. Pisarovina was the location officially agreed by both the German occupation authorities and the Yugoslav Partisans to function as the center of the prisoner exchange cartel at the end of 1943. In order to facilitate this, the village and its immediate surroundings were declared a neutral zone, quite possibly the only such place in war-torn Europe. The system saved hundreds, if not thousands, of prisoners who faced an uncertain fate. Frequent contacts between the envoys provided both the Germans and the Partisans with a "back-channel" for talks on political issues and trade, as well as the opportunity to spy on each other.


Author(s):  
Jan Gross

This chapter describes stereotypes of Polish–Jewish relations after the Second World War. Even though most Polish Jews were killed during the German occupation, the stereotype of Judaeo-communism survived the war. If anything, it was reinforced by a widespread consensus that Jews assisted the Soviets in the subjugation of the Polish Kresy in 1939–41. The establishment of the Lublin government in the aftermath of the war served to perpetuate this stereotype still further. Popular sentiment attributed a nefarious role to the Jews and portrayed them as particularly zealous collaborators with the security police serving the new regime. Was it indeed the case that the dominant post-war Jewish experience in Poland was imposing scientific socialism on reluctant fellow citizens and persecuting ethnic Poles? The chapter argues that the dominant Jewish experience in Poland after the Second World War was fear. It also considers the Special Commission (Komisja Specjalna) established by the Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce (Central Committee of Jews in Poland: CKŻP).


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elke Weesjes

Informed by oral history and memory studies, this chapter draws on a series of interviews with 38 British and Dutch cradle communists and is dedicated to the impact of the Second World War and its aftermath, and the events of 1956 – the year of Khrushchev’s secret speech and the Soviet invasion of Hungary – on the Dutch and British communist movements. This chapter particularly examines how cradle communists in the Netherlands and Britain experienced the contrast between the communist movement’s zenith during the Second World War and its nadir in 1956. Within this context, it discusses the Dutch communist resistance during the German occupation, parental war trauma and transgenerational communication, and the impact of anti-communist measures in Britain and the Netherlands on participants’ lives.


Author(s):  
Gaj Trifković

This chapter contains a few concluding remarks. This book is the first attempt at a comprehensive analysis of non-violent contacts between the Partisans and the German occupation authorities in Yugoslavia in the Second World War. Far from being the final word on the topic, it is a starting point for further research on various aspects of POW history. Frequent exchanges of able-bodied prisoners between the occupation forces and a resistance movement, partly through a cartel negotiated directly between their high commands, was a distinctive feature of the Second World War in Yugoslavia. It was probably the only place in war-torn Europe where representatives of two irreconcilable ideologies, Communism and Nazism, met regularly at the negotiating table. Both were primarily motivated by the desire to save their own men, but the talks did mitigate, however marginally, the horrors of the war.


HISTOREIN ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Evelien Gans

This article elaborates on two antisemitic stereotypes or phenomena that show how the Shoah was turned against the Jews as early as 1945. The curse “they forgot to gas you” popped up immediately after the war, during all kind of public rows on the street with Jewish employers and neighbours. It was, so to say, the first antisemitic post-Holocaust stereotype that sent the Jewish survivor – verbally – to the gas chamber. Several Jews took cases to court. The insult “they forgot to gas you” was taken more seriously by Jews themselves and punished more severely by the court than the simple insult “filthy Jew”. The identification of “the Jew” and the gas chamber never disappeared but lives on – also within the football world, satire and anti-Israel demonstrations. It is a manifestation of what Theodor Adorno coined Schuld- und Erinnerungsabwehrantisemitismus (antisemitism based on a rejection of guilt and unwelcome memories). The same goes for the accusation that, during the German occupation, the Jews had offered no, or not enough, resistance against the Nazis. Others had to fight for them. Jews were neither fighters nor heroes; they depended on the courage of gentiles. Also this stereotype of the passive, obedient Jew would persist, for example, in a final school examination paper in 1983 and in some recent Dutch historiography on the Second World War and the Shoah. In this way the Shoah functioned as a point of fixation for postliberation – and more generally – postwar antisemitism.


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