Traduire l’histoire : entre paroles et images

In an age when the global dissemination of digital information is transforming the way we read and write by foregrounding the interdependence of visual/verbal elements and languages, the reconstruction of identity and history in digital environments challenges binary translation processes. From this perspective, we interrogate the integration of visual and verbal elements in three Wikipedia articles, written in Polish, English, and Portuguese, about the topic “Polish death camp”. What is the role of translation in the semiotic construction of historical discourses in these articles? What are the conflicts generated by translated denominations? How do Wikipedia communities engage with the production of these cognitiverepresentations? This paper attempts to answer these questions.

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.

Genetic and phylogeographic evidence for Jewish Holocaust victims at the Sobibór death camp

Six million Jews were killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. Archaeological excavations in the area of the death camp in Sobibór, Poland, revealed ten sets of human skeletal remains presumptively assigned to Polish victims of the totalitarian regimes. However, their genetic analyses indicate that the remains are of Ashkenazi Jews murdered as part of the mass extermination of European Jews by the Nazi regime and not of otherwise hypothesised non-Jewish partisan combatants. In accordance with traditional Jewish rite, the remains were reburied in the presence of a Rabbi at the place of their discovery.

MEMORIAL SITE AS COMMITMENT SPACE. IDEOLOGICAL AND ARTISTIC CONCEPT OF THE MUSEUM AND MEMORIAL SITE IN SOBIBÓR

The implementation of the new ideological and artistic concept of the Museum and Memorial Site in Sobibór on the site of the former Nazi German death camp selected in the 2013 competition is discussed. The winning design is analysed; apart from the arranging of the area of the former camp, it also envisaged raising of a museum, the latter stage already completed with the building opened to the public in 2020. The concept of ‘commitment space’ is proposed by the Author as best characterising a memorial site created on the premises of the former Nazi concentration camps and death camps for the people of Jewish descent. As a departure point, earlier examples of commemorating similar sites are recalled, beginning with the early monuments from the 1940s, through the 1957 competition for the International Monument to the Victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp, the latter of major impact on the process of the redefinition of monuments. The then awarded design of the The Road Monument by Oskar Hansen and his team, however unimplemented owing to the protest of former Auschwitz prisoners, became from that time onwards a benchmark for subsequent concepts. Also the mentioned memorial design on the area of the former Belzec extermination camp from 2004 is related to James E. Young’s concept of a counter-monument. The main subject of the paper’s analysis is, however, the reflection on means thanks to which the currently mounted Museum and Memorial Site in Sobibór, including the permanent display at the newly-raised Museum, become ‘commitment space’ for contemporary public on different perception levels of their multi-sensual activity essential in the process of remembrance.

Mordecai Would Not Bow Down

Paradoxically, no other subjects of modern inquiry are as likely to generate false consolation as the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. Even as we acknowledge the enormity of these twin evils and resolve not to forget or repeat them, we deem them opaque or purely irrational phenomena, thereby minimizing them. We are tempted to relativize the effects of the Shoah and general hatred of the Jews by pointing to the emergence of the state of Israel on earth, or to the redemption of the elect in heaven, as compensation. More dangerously still, we blind ourselves to the objective causes of the pervasive malice by denying that there are objective causes. I argue, in contrast, that every Jew interred in a Nazi death camp was a prisoner of conscience, even as every Jew murdered by the Nazis was a martyr. It was Jewish conscience and Jewish faith themselves that the Nazis loathed and wished to eliminate by degrading and finally destroying the Jewish people. The pantheistic naturalism at the core of National Socialism—a.k.a. survival of the fittest—inevitably conflicted with Jewish moral monotheism. To this day, the erotic mind does not relish being dependent upon and decentered by God’s righteousness. If we insist the Holocaust was pure insanity without any objective basis, we fail to appreciate its radical evil. If we blind ourselves to how Christian supersessionism made the genocide possible (if not inevitable), we make the Shoah more likely to be repeated. This is not to blame the victims but to name the victimizers: our instinctually prideful selves.

Źródła do badań genealogicznych w zasobie Archiwum Państwowego Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau

The text is an attempt to create a mini-guide for genealogists looking for information about people who were prisoners of the former Nazi and German death camp KL Auschwitz-Birkenau. The article presents the most important groups of documents that may be useful in genealogical research. In addition, the basic search methods are also presented: from an internet search engine and collective studies to archival sources.