Jedwabne and Wizna

THE LOCALITIES explored herein, Jedwabne and Wizna, are both situated in the Łomża region of north-eastern Poland, close to each other. Only a few kilometres separate the two and yet what each can contribute and has contributed to local, regional, and national collective memory sets them oceans apart. The inspiration for this article was precisely this simple contrast. How is it that towns inhabited by persons of a similar culture evolve into symbols of radically different attitudes and actions taken by Poles during the Second World War?...

Bearing Witness

HENRYK GRYNBERG was born in Warsaw in 1936 into an Orthodox Jewish family, and raised in the village of Radoszyna near Mińsk Mazowiecki in central Poland. He survived the Holocaust in hiding with his mother. He left for the United States in 1967 in protest at the Polish government’s antisemitic practices and the censorship of his writing. He is the author of some thirty books of prose, poetry, drama, and essays, and his work has been translated from Polish into many languages. Titles. translated into English include ...

A Selection from Part 1 of Lev Levanda’s Seething Times

THERE is reason to believe that Lev Levanda (1835–88) composed Seething Times: A Novel from the Last Polish Uprising as early as the mid-1860s. Levanda’s novel was serialized in the St Petersburg-based Evreiskaya biblioteka (Jewish Library) in 1871–3. In 1875 a separate book edition was issued in St Petersburg by ...