Hersz Wasser. Sekretarz Archiwum

2014 ◽  
pp. 297-303
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Person

This article discusses the life of Hersch Wasser (1910–1980), secretary of the “Oneg Shabbat” and the closest collaborator of Emmanuel Ringelblum. Wasser, an economist from Łódź, who was a key personality in the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto. He was the one who coordinated its activities and recorded both its collaborators and incoming documents. He was one of the creators of the press department of the “Oneg Shabbat”, which provided information on the Holocaust to the Polish and Jewish underground press. As a secretary of the Central Refugee Commission, he interviewed refugees arriving in the ghetto and supplied the Archive with information on the persecution of Jews outside Warsaw. After the end of the war, Wasser played a key role in unearthing the first part of the Underground Archive in September 1946 and in preparing their first catalogue. Simultaneously, between April and September 1947, Wasser took out about 140 documents from the collection and together with other documents relating to the Holocaust (altogether 244) sent them to YIVO in New York, seeing it as a way of safekeeping them in the face of a dif????icult situation in post-war Poland. He emigrated to Israel in 1950.

Author(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Hans-Georg Gadamer ◽  
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

The three philosophers gather in a restaurant in Heidelberg to take questions from the public, while members of the press cover the event. The first question concerns the notion of responsibility, which becomes the leading motif of the entire discussion: Heidegger’s responsibility as a thinker who gravely compromised himself politically; his readers’ responsibility with regard to their own deep knowledge of this compromise in relation to other aspects of Heidegger’s work; the responsibility of philosophy itself, both intellectually and ethically. Questions are posed as well on Heidegger’s post-war silence on the Holocaust and his refusal to retract his own statements and actions in favor of Nazism in 1933.


Author(s):  
James A. Diamond

This chapter focuses on theological implications of the Holocaust, which was a time when suffering and loss were of such catastrophic proportions for Jewish history and theology. It talks about the Maimonidean view of evil as a ‘privation’ or an absence of good that is no longer acceptable in the face of a million children systematically gassed and burned. It also points out the acceptance of a theory of divine providence that conditions God's watchful eye on the development of one's intellect that is considered morally problematic and theologically offensive. The chapter concentrates on Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Piaseczner Rebbe who heroically persevered as a hasidic master that ministered to his followers during the Holocaust. It recounts how Rabbi Shapira delivered sermons and published posthumously as Holy Fire in the Warsaw ghetto between autumn 1939 and summer 1942.


2016 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Konrad Matyjaszek

Wall and window: the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto as the narrative space of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish JewsOpened in 2013, the Warsaw-based POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews is situated in the center of the former Nazi Warsaw ghetto, which was destroyed during its liquidation in 1943. The museum is also located opposite to the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes and Martyrs, built in 1948, as well as in between of the area of the former 19th-century Jewish district, and of the post-war modernist residential district of Muranów, designed as a district-memorial of the destroyed ghetto. Constructed on such site, the Museum was however narrated as a “museum of life”, telling the “thousand-year old history” of Polish Jews, and not focused directly on the history of the Holocaust or the history of Polish antisemitism.The paper offers a critical analysis of the curatorial and architectural strategies assumed by the Museum’s designers in the process of employing the urban location of the Museum in the narratives communicated by the building and its main exhibition. In this analysis, two key architectural interiors are examined in detail in terms of their correspondence with the context of the site: the Museum’s entrance lobby and the space of the “Jewish street,” incorporated into the main exhibition’s sub-galleries presenting the interwar period of Polish-Jewish history and the history of the Holocaust. The analysis of the design structure of these two interiors allows to raise a research question about physical and symbolic role of the material substance of the destroyed ghetto in construction of a historical narrative that is separated from the history of the destruction, as well as one about the designers’ responsibilities arising from the decision to present a given history on the physical site where it took place.Mur i okno. Gruz getta warszawskiego jako przestrzeń narracyjna Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich POLINOtwarte w 2013 roku warszawskie Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich POLIN stanęło pośrodku terenu dawnego nazistowskiego getta warszawskiego, zburzonego podczas jego likwidacji w 1943 roku, naprzeciwko powstałego w roku 1948 Pomnika Bohaterów i Męczenników Getta; jednocześnie pośrodku obszaru dawnej, dziewiętnastowiecznej warszawskiej dzielnicy żydowskiej i powojennego modernistycznego osied­la Muranów, zaplanowanego jako osiedle-pomnik zburzonego getta. Zlokalizowane w takim miejscu Muzeum przedstawia się jako „muzeum życia”, opowiadające „tysiącletnią historię” polskich Żydów, niebędące insty­tucją skoncentrowaną na historii Zagłady Żydów i historii polskiego antysemityzmu.Artykuł zawiera krytyczną analizę kuratorskich i architektonicznych strategii przyjętych przez twórców Mu­zeum w procesie umieszczania środowiska miejskiego w roli elementu narracji historycznej, komunikowanej przez budynek Muzeum i przez jego wystawę główną. Szczegółowej analizie poddawane są dwa kluczowe dla projektu Muzeum wnętrza architektoniczne: główny hall wejściowy oraz przestrzeń „żydowskiej ulicy” stanowiąca fragment dwóch galerii wystawy głównej, poświęconych historii Żydów w Polsce międzywojen­nej oraz historii Zagłady. Analiza struktury projektowej tych dwóch wnętrz służy próbie sformułowania od­powiedzi na pytanie badawcze dotyczące właściwości fizyczno-symbolicznych materialnej substancji znisz­czonego getta w odniesieniu do narracji abstrahującej od historii jego zniszczenia oraz odpowiedzialności projektantów wynikającej z decyzji o umieszczeniu narracji historycznej w fizycznej przestrzeni, w której wydarzyła się historia będąca tej narracji przedmiotem.


2012 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Krzywiec

Global theses with local omissionsTimothy Snyder’s book is an ambitious monograph which attempts at placing Shoah in a more appropriate context of the murderous fight between the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Russia from the perspective of civilian victims. However, the book offers no new evidence or new arguments. On the one hand, most of the interpretations come from established scholars. On the other hand, Bloodlands presents a sort of synthesis of the latest discussions of the Holocaust historians and Eastern European experience of the Soviet rule. Nonetheless, as Snyder himself has stated, the novelty of the book lies rather in a parallel insight into systems and events. Such “parallelism” must, and surely will, trigger a wealth of reflections.The review article focuses on one particular aspect of the book. One of the most suggestive assumptions of Snyder’s method is that the book overcomes national narratives by examining the cruelest period in the 20th century from the above-mentioned universal point of view. However, for Snyder, a leading scholar of Eastern European, and first and foremost, Polish history, these “national” motifs play a significant, and often even crucial role in his book.Yet, as it is claimed in the review, the author frequently cannot free himself from them. On the contrary, his narrative delivers systematic permeations of Polish martyrological stereotypes and biases, which in the end results in a reproduction of many handbook schemes and even metaphorical figures from the so-called Polish “historical politics”. This also leads to many false and misleading juxtapositions with the most striking one being the comparison between the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and Warsaw Uprising.Interestingly enough, evading many national particularities, Snyder relapses in deeply rooted national, and to be specific, Polish tales. He proves to be more “national” than many other “national” scholars critical in their research of this period.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-176
Author(s):  
Philip Kiszely

This article considers the depiction of region and materiality in Thames Television’s Man at the Top (1970‐72). Dealing with the present by looking to the past, the series critiques the architectural reconstruction that changed the face of the country during the post-war years and beyond. This transformation is seen through the jaundiced eye of series protagonist Joe Lampton, a 1950s anti-hero recycled for a more uncertain age. He finds himself caught between the pull of tradition and the push for progress ‐ forces aligned respectively with the industrial North (his native Yorkshire) and the cosmopolitan South (his contemporaneous London-based life). Why, in the broader context of the early 1970s, must Lampton’s North be identified with the past? How does materiality work to frame remembrance? The article responds to these questions by mapping the series, along with television culture more generally, onto its socio-political moment. It arrives at conclusions via a constructionist analysis that draws on ‘New Left’ inflected discourses, on the one hand, and philosophies relating to collective memory and materiality on the other.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 306-330
Author(s):  
Aleksey Petrov

Six New Year (eonic) poems by M. V. Isakovsky, written between 1942 and 1972, are examined in the article as a non-author's cycle with its own ‘plot’. It captured such philosophical phenomena as death, guilt, suffering, chance, etc., which revealed themselves in a sacred moment of time — the New Year. The three “battlefield” toasts reflected Isakovsky's sense of guilt before himself and the people; the desire to cast a spell on hostile forces and thus bring victory closer. The humorous post-war toast of 1948 demonstrated the return of life in the USSR to a peaceful track, which was signified by the restoration of state and family holidays, dinner parties. The official ‘newspaper’ toast “for 1958” expresses the idea of “new happiness” that emphasizes the motive of peaceful labor exploits of the Soviet people, while the poems “for 1973” can be classified as confessional. Isakovsky's New Year poems are also analyzed in the context of two traditions — Russian aeonic poetry and ritual toasts. Connections with poems by V. A. Zhukovsky, P. A. Vyazemsky, M. I. Tsvetaeva, A. T. Tvardovsky are traced. New Year poetic toast, on the one hand, became one of the many genres that contributed to the unity of the Russian people in the face of mortal danger during the war; on the other hand, it preserved a number of archaic topoi (the experience of the New Year’s transition as a sacred time; ritual magic formulas that invoke Death, Time and Fate; the biblical archetype of the chosen people, etc.).


2017 ◽  
Vol 36 (6) ◽  
pp. 69-98
Author(s):  
Monika Bednarczuk

The paper deals with biographical, ideological and artistic links between Julian Tuwim, Alfred Döblin and Kurt Tucholsky. On the one hand, the basis of comparison are biographical similarities, the Jewish origin of those three writers, their family dramas, the experience of politically opressive school, the trauma of revolution or war, and the exile to name just a few. On the other hand, the article demonstrates the ways the modernity has influenced the attitudes and texts of Döblin, Tucholsky and Tuwim. While talking about modernity, the author focuses on such phenomena as secularisation and urbanisation processes, mass political movements, and new cultural challenges.Tuwim, Döblin and Tucholsky were born into assimilated Jewish families. Their perspective on the stereotypical Jews (the orthodox Jews as well as Jewish bankers or manufacturers) is marked with antipathy, or even contempt. The writers’ ambivalence towards the diapora and towards their own origin illustrate “Jewish self-hatred”; however, all three authors change their opinion on Jewry in the face of the growing anti-Semitic and Nazi danger, and especially the Holocaust. Döblin is proud of being Jewish after his visit to Poland in 1924, Tucholsky warns German Jews against the consequences of their passivitivy, and Tuwim publishes in 1944 his agitating manifesto We, Polish Jews. Last but not least, the three authors go into exile because of their Jewish ancestry and sociocultural activities. Therefore, it is no coincidence thatone cannot help having associations with Heinrich Heine: his biography can be interpreted as a prefiguration of a Jewish artist’s biography.Furthermore, Tuwim, Döblin and Tucholsky are notably sensitive to social questions, and their sensitivity to such issues results to some extent from their difficult childhood and youth. Especially significant seem in that respect family conflicts and the moving from city to city, since such experiences increase the feeling of loneliness and the vulnerability to depression. Nevertheless, Döblin, Tucholsky and Tuwim come with impetus into the cultural life of Germany and Poland and work in the areas of literature, cabaret (satire) as well as journalism. They share sympathy for the political left and fears of the orthodox communism. They are simultaneously advocates and ardent critics of great cities. They pay attention to new phenomena (the popularity of cars, the role of the press, the new morality) and react to them. Their aim is creating a culture which appeals to the masses and educates them in a non-intrusive way. However, the awareness of their own intellectual superiority imposes distance towards lower social groups. The distance stems, firstly, from the universal ambivalence artists feel towards the masses, and secondly, from the ideological moderation characteristic of petit bourgoisie and of the political centre. In general, Döblin, Tucholsky and Tuwim are idealists who hope for a humanitarian world which is impossible in the era of extrem political violence leading to the Holocaust.


Anos 90 ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (42) ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Rozas Krause

Profile pictures from gay dating sites of young men posing with the stelae of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe in Berlin have been subject to an art exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York and a tribute online blog. This paper unveils the meaning of these pictures on this particular site, in an effort to understand why these men chose to portray themselves at the Holocaust Memorial in order to cruise the digital sphere of gay dating websites. In three consecutive sections, the paper asserts that, on the one hand, the conversion of the Holocaust Memorial into a cruising scenario is facilitated by a design that —putting forward autonomy and abstraction— allows and even invites its constant resignification in terms of everyday practices. And, on the other hand, it posits that the images exhibited at the Jewish Museum can be interpreted as a performative memorial which reinscribes sexuality and gender into Holocaust narratives. 


Author(s):  
Allison Aviki ◽  
Jonathan Cedarbaum ◽  
Rebecca Lee ◽  
Jessica Lutkenhaus ◽  
Seth P. Waxman ◽  
...  

In New York Times Co. v. United States,1 the Supreme Court confronted a problem that is inherent in a democratic society that values freedom of expression and, in particular, the role of the press in challenging the truthfulness of claims by the government, especially in the realm of national security. On the one hand, as Justice Potter Stewart wrote in his concurring opinion, “it is elementary” that “the maintenance of an effective national defense require[s] both confidentiality and secrecy.”...


2014 ◽  
pp. 304-316
Author(s):  
David Silberklang

 Józef Kermisz (1907–2005) was a historian and an archivist who helped lay the foundations for Shoah research in Poland and Israel. In 1944 joined the Central Jewish Historical Commission where became the chief archivist. Since then his life has been devoted to retrieving wartime archival material. As archive director (in the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland and at Yad Vashem in Israel) he sought to develop an archive both for future historical research and for trials of suspected war criminal. He played a major role in discovering and preserving important documentation on the Shoah in Poland. Among his major professional achievements were preparing documentation for the prosecution in the Eichmann trial, and publishing Czerniakow’s diary and the full edition of the underground press of the Warsaw ghetto. He was one of the world’s leading experts on the Ringelblum Archive and other hidden Jewish documentation from the Holocaust. Kermisz left behind a legacy of a vast research infrastructure that he created and that will occupy scholars for generations.


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