Życie kobiet — więźniarek w obozie Auschwitz-Birkenau

The book by Halina Rusek Koleżanki z Birkenau. Esej o pamiętaniu [Friends from Birkenau: An essay on remembering] published by the University of Silesia is a kind of diary about the life of women in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The author describes the fate of her mother and her friends confined in one of the most horrific war camps. This publication, apart from descriptions and memories of female prisoners, contains original letters and photographs collected by families, which allows the reader to refer to the past more directly. The book was divided by the author into chapters which intensify the women’s experiences: from pre-war times through the war period to regaining freedom and returning to their family homes. Reading the book, one gets to know the early life of young girls who were unexpectedly captured and transported to the concentration camp. Their fates are intertwined with the struggle for existence, forced labour, camp experiences and the anticipated freedom. Important throughout the book is the documentation collected by the families of the prisoners. Post-war letters, mutual contacts, feelings and family memories make the reader feel close to the characters. The author tries to describe the lives of girls coming from different regions of Poland, whose fates were intertwined with each other. The book shows different ways in which the female prisoners were treated, based on their nationalities. In an attempt to make camp life more real for the reader, the author refers to prison correspondence. Halina Rusek’s publication shows young readers how important it is to remember the past and what concentration camps were.

Turn the pain and affliction into thinking about the beauty

The article reflects on the importance of opposing Polish women - prisoners of the German Nazi concentration camp FKL Ravensbrück - to the practices of the German authorities (guards and medical staff of this camp) used against prisoners. One of the forms of opposing the totalitarianism of the Third Reich was secret teaching. At FKL Ravensbrück, female teachers taught fellow prisoners - “the rabbits”. This term was used to describe the women who underwent medical experiments in the camp: 74 Polish women and 12 women of other nationalities. Professor Karolina Lanckorońska found herself in the camp's conspiratorial teaching staff. The source base for the analysis are the war memories of female prisoners, including Dr. Wanda Półtawska and Dr. Urszula Wińska. The summary shows the issue of the protection of values by people subjected - against their will - to life in extreme conditions.

Jack of all trades with a master’s degree. Review of the book “Obrazovatel’naya model’ svobodnykh iskusstv i nauk. Mirovoi i rossiiskii opyt” [Educational Model of Liberal Arts and Sciences. World and Russian experience]

Today when the remnants of a political system based on liberal values is finally breaking down all over the world and the values themselves are being subjected to purposeful profanation and relativization, an educational model based on academical freedom and development of a truly Renaissance breadth of scientific horizons – i. e. principles one would least expect to flourish in with the atmosphere of the forthcoming digital concentration camp – is gaining popularity with the pace none could have expected.. At least this is what the authors of the book in question are trying to convince us of. But despite all their efforts, reality – that is, who and why needs to rebuild the higher education system according to the model of the liberal arts and sciences – transpires before the attentive reader in all its inhuman pragmatism.

The Novel by Katja Petrowskaja “Perhaps Esther”: Fictional Topography of a Family

The literary debut, the novel “Maybe Esther” by Katja Petrowskaja, was published in 2014 in the Berlin publishing house “Suhrkamp” in German and immediately fell into the bestseller category. The work caused a considerable resonance in the German-speaking cultural environment. Even before the appearance of a full-fledged novel, the author received one of the most prestigious literary awards – the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for reading of a fragment from a future book, which would later appear in a work called “Babi Yar”. However, the laureate wasn’t an ethnic German woman, but an immigrant – Ukrainian by origin, born in Kyiv. The young author tells the story of his multicultural family (Ukrainian / Polish / Jewish / Russian) going deeper up to the 19th century. Through specific events of a small family such significant phenomena as revolution, war, ghetto, concentration camp, Holocaust, Babi Yar, occupation, various kinds of persecution etc. are seen. Therefore, a mosaic of small self-sufficient stories emerges, which create a large historical panel. The author is the bearer of a multifaceted and complex genetic memory.

‘I feel like I can’t do a lot’: Affectivity, reflection and action in ‘Transformative’ genocide education

Guided tours of memorial museums have sought to have an impact on visitors through an affective learning environment and critical reflection leading to ‘action’. However, there is limited work investigating the pedagogical underpinnings of such guided tours in order to understand whether they can facilitate action. This paper presents reflections of 21 students’ experiences of educational visits to the former Nazi extermination and concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland between 2017 and 2018. Students identified the guided tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau as having an affective dimension that enhanced understanding and brought about a perspective transformation but action was ill-defined. In considering ill-defined action, this paper attempts to frame understanding of the guided tour of the memorial museum within the context of Transformative Learning. It concludes that guiding practices should incorporate space for reflection and provide examples of potential ‘action’ so that visitors can mobilise their deeper understanding and experience long-term personal ‘change’.

Słownictwo obozowe w przekładzie ustnym na terenie Państwowego Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w opiniach tłumaczy i hiszpańskojęzycznych zwiedzających

Nazi Concentration Camp Vocabulary in Oral Interpreting in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in the Opinion of Interpreters and Spanish-Speaking Visitors The article presents some of the results obtained as part of multi-stage research project that was carried out in 2018-2020. Its purpose was to collect information on interpreting performed for visitors at the Auschwitz- Birkenau State Museum. The article discusses the difficulty of translating the camp vocabulary when performing the above-mentioned interpreting. Thirty interpreters shared their views on the oral translation as well as 96 visitors, for whom the information during the tour was provided by a Spanish speaking interpreter.

Shimmer and whisper

The author of the article, one of the acclaimed Polish cinematographers, describes his practical eforts involved in making two short documentary films on Holocaust directed by him. The first one,Sonderzug (1978), was based on Stok’s idea to recreate his first emotional reaction to the landscape around Treblinka in the film that lasts 9 minutes, as long as the way of the Jews from the ramp to their end in the death camp. The other film, Prayer (1981), is the portrayal of a Japanese Buddhist monk praying at the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The formal inspiration of the film came from Japanese visual art.

Survival in a Nazi Concentration Camp: The Spanish Prisoners of Mauthausen

Analysis of the extent to which higher social class (along with other demographic variables) was an advantage for Spanish prisoners at the Mauthausen concentration camp advances the study of the determinants of survival in contexts of indiscriminate violence. Use of Cox event-history models, based on detailed information collected by well-placed Spaniards at the camp, reveals that individuals from higher social classes who filled administrative positions at Mauthausen were prominent in support networks and had a good command of the German language were more likely to survive. The risk of death was highest among unskilled agricultural workers, followed by unskilled non-agricultural workers.