MetaFilter posts tagged with Poland and holocaust

"A Polish Village's Secret"

nonmerci — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 09:42:32 -0800

"A farming town hid a Jewish-born teacher during the Holocaust. I went to dig up what it had buried."

Though I grew up in America, I have been visiting my family in Poland since I was a child. But it is only recently, since the great debate began two years ago between [Jan] Gross and [Timothy] Snyder over the causes and extent of Polish co-operation with the Nazis during the Holocaust, that I thought to ask the old people of my family village about what happened during the war. My grandparents mentioned bits and pieces of our family’s World War II history over the years, but it often seemed too painful for them to recall, or as though they wanted the memories to simply be forgotten. When I finally decided to broach the topic with them, my grandmother repeated that she didn’t understand why I cared to dig so deep into the past, why I cared so much about Wladyslaw and his story.

Suzanne Rozdeba is a freelance journalist who writes on numerous subjects, including her Polish-American heritage.

Honor and Error

furiousxgeorge — Thu, 31 May 2012 18:14:33 -0800

In a high profile gaffe President Barack Obama has recently caused anger in Poland by referring to a Nazi death camp as a "Polish death camp" during a ceremony honoring World War II hero Jan Karski with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “The White House will apologize for this outrageous error,” Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski tweeted. Sikorski said that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk “will make a statement in the morning. It’s a pity that this important ceremony was upstaged by ignorance and incompetence.” The White House quickly expressed regret for the incident but Tusk does not feel the anger over the mistake is entirely out of line. “We always react in the same way when ignorance, lack of knowledge, bad intentions lead to such a distortion of history.” Sikorski was quick to place the blame on White House staffers who prepared the speech rather than the President himself. The debate over which words to use to refer to camps located in Poland is an old controversy. "Some 6m Poles died during the war, half of them Jews. The country is sensitive to anything that might imply, wholly incorrectly, any complicity in events that occurred when it was under Nazi occupation."

My Father, Always Fond of a Long Shot, Chose to Have His Cancerous Tounge Removed

Blasdelb — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 12:09:13 -0800

Diagnosed with cancer, my father decided to have his tongue removed. It’s an extreme treatment, but he’s always known how to make things work out.

Prisoner 918

zarq — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 12:21:42 -0800

802 Prisoners attempted escape from Auschwitz. 144 were successful. Kazimierz Piechowski, a Polish boy scout, was one of them. Today, at age 91, he tells his story. "Uciekinier (The Escapee)" is a 42-minute documentary about him. Here's an additional short (3-minute) documentary about / reenactment of his escape, narrated by Mr. Piechowski.

Poetry in Hell

zarq — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 18:37:01 -0800

Poetry in Hell contains a complete collection of poems recovered from the Warsaw Ghetto's Ringelblum Archives. The project, which took ten years to complete, gives English translations of poems that are shown in their original Yiddish. Background on the Ringelblum Oneg Shabbat Archives During the Holocaust, dozens of Jewish men and women trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto chose a special form of resistance: they chronicled their path to doom for future generations. Led by Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, an historian, 35,000 paper documents were collected that showed how the Nazis had deprived Warsaw's Jews of their rights, then tormented and finally killed them in the death camps. On Aug. 2, 1942, while German soldiers combed the streets outside, two young men buried 10 metal boxes and several metal milk cans containing this extraordinary archive in the basement of an elementary school inside the ghetto. They were recovered from the rubble in 1946 and 1950. Approximately 25,000 of the documents survived and are now housed in the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland and the United States Holocaust Museum. "The Archives comprise government documents, materials concerning the ghetto resistance, testimonies of the fate of Jewish communities during the Holocaust, literature, works of art and private correspondence collected by victims of the Holocaust in order to pass on information about the Holocaust to future generations. This collection is absolutely unique, both in terms of its origin and its historic value. It mainly concerns the largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe (approximately 500,000 inhabitants), but in fact it covers the whole of occupied Poland, documenting the Shoah, the fate of its Jewish community of 3.500,000 people. Nearly all the creators of the Ringelblum Archives perished, either in the ghetto or in the extermination camps."
The archive recovery and restoration efforts were documented in a 2007 book by American historian Samuel Kassow: "Who Will Write Our History?: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto". Some of it is available to view online at Google books, here. Book reviews and background on the recovery project: * Video: C-Span Book TV with Samuel Kassow * Los Angeles Times * Spiegel International * The Guardian * New Jersey Jewish News Background on the Poetry in Hell Project * Preface * Forward * Author's Note * Interview with Dr. Sarah Traister Moskovitz on J-Wire: "Warsaw Ghetto Poetry Now Online"

I Will Survive

andoatnp — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 11:08:42 -0800

Dancing Auschwitz
"Jewish artist defends YouTube video 'Dancing Auschwitz'"

"Arbeit Macht Frei" Sign Stolen

zarq — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:14:21 -0800

Poland has declared a state of emergency, after the infamous bronze sign reading "Arbeit Macht Frei" at former Konzentrationslager (concentration camp) Ausch witz was stolen yesterday. In Brussels, European Parliament president Jerzy Buzek, a former Polish prime minister, appealed to the thieves to return the sign: "Give it back out of respect for the suffering of over a million victims, murdered in this Nazi camp, the biggest cemetery of humankind," Buzek said.
According to the Auschwitz Memorial / Muzeum Auschwitz Facebook page, "the Director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum with approval of Minister of Culture and National Heritage Bogdan Zdrojewski has promised a reward of 100,000 zlotys (around $34,000)" for information about the theft leading to the sign's safe return. The Jerusalem Post reports that the Museum has replaced the original with a temporary duplicate.

Do you know these children?

Asparagirl — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 12:32:10 -0800

Do you, or an older relative of yours, recognize any of these children? More than 70 children separated from their families during WWII, now all elderly men and women, are using the Internet to try to find some answers about their pasts, their families, and sometimes even their own names. They are soliciting help and suggestions in the comments sections on each story. Sadly typical story: "The infant was hungry and crying, so her mother asked for milk from a Polish couple that happened to be on the train station. The Polish man brought milk for the baby. Then the Jewish mother asked if they would want to take the baby as their own because she could not keep it. This couple did not have any children, so after some consideration, they agreed. They asked the Jewish mother who she was, but she told them that it was better for them and for the baby not to know who she was. She then gave her newborn baby girl, who was probably one month old, to the Polish couple. The Polish couple raised the girl as if she was their biological daughter and never told her how she had come into the family. The girl grew up, married and had a son. It is this son who wants to find his Jewish roots..."

Bacterial marketing: the other Oskar Schindler

goodnewsfortheinsane — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 18:20:23 -0800

Upon the Nazi invasion of Poland, pediatrician Eugeniusz Łazowski and his friend Stanisław Matulewicz fabricated a fake typhus epidemic to save Polish Jews from the Nazis. Knowing that typhus-infected Jews would be summarily executed, non-Jews were injected with the harmless Proteus OX19, which would generate false positives for typhus. Anglicising his name to "Eugene Lazowski", the doctor moved to the United States after the war. He lived and worked in Chicago from 1958, and passed away in late 2006 at the vernerable age of 92, in Eugene (!), Oregon. Oddly little is written about Lazowski and Matulewicz on the web; although apparently there has been work on a documentary titled "A Private War" by a filmmaker named Ryan Bank. So feel free to add supporting links if you are aware of any.

"The Holocaust is ultimately a ghost story, and Poles have many reasons to be haunted."

matteo — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 08:25:52 -0800

In 1945-46, some of the (very few) Polish Jews who had survived the Final Solution returned -- sick, poor, wounded -- to Poland. In Elie Wiesel's words, "they had thought all too naively that antisemitism, discredited 6 million times over, had died at Auschwitz with its victims. They were wrong." In 2001 Princeton professor Jan T Gross published the story of the 1941 destruction of the Jewish community at Jedwabne, Poland, and proved how Jews were rounded up, clubbed, drowned, gutted or burned to death not by German forces as previously believed but by mobs of their own non-Jewish neighbors. Now professor Gross tells the story of the Kielce pogrom in his new book, "Fear". Of course, the Kielce butchery took place in 1946 -- more than a year after the end of WWII and defeat of Nazism. More inside.

Andrzej Munk: Wry Smiles, Suspicious Glances

matteo — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 11:00:57 -0800

Eroica. Film director Andrzej Munk’s tragic death at age thirty-nine might have formed the plot for one of his own darkly sardonic works: a Polish Jew and an active resistance worker during the war, he was returning home from shooting his film Passenger at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1961 when an oncoming truck struck his car. He left behind only four feature films, but his influence was prodigious. As one of the key figures of the postwar “Polish School” of filmmaking, along with Wajda and Kawalerowicz, he helped to shape a vision that broke with the official social realist optimism of Eastern-bloc dogma and cast a skeptical eye on official notions of heroism, nationalism, and life in the Stalinist-occupied state. Mentor to Roman Polanski and Jerzy Skolimowski, his influence can be felt even in the films of a later generation of Polish filmmakers — directors like Zanussi and Kieslowski. More inside.

The Story and Stories of Bruno Schulz

felix betachat — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 12:56:18 -0800

"For ordinary books are like meteors. Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame. For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes. With bitter resignation we sometimes wander late at night through the extinct pages that tell their stone dead messages like wooden rosary beads."