Polish Literature and Genocide

Polish Literature and Genocide PDF Author: Arkadiusz Morawiec
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000534499
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Polish Literature and Genocide presents the attitude of Polish literature to the 20th-century acts of genocide. This volume examines the literary representations of the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the massacre in Srebrenica in a rich, detailed, and comprehensive way, expanding the existing research and, in some cases, challenging the former sometimes ossified ideas. Polish literature not only reflects the obvious extermination of Jews and Poles, but also records what had been largely overlooked: the extermination of disabled and mentally ill people, the Roma and Sinti, and the Soviet prisoners of war by the Nazis. This volume includes analysis of the literary works of Władysław Szlengel, the most prominent Polish-language poet in the Warsaw ghetto; the peculiar reception of Julian Tuwim’s famous poem for children "Locomotive;" the memoir of Leon Weliczker, a prisoner of the Janowska concentration camp in Lvov and a member of the ‘death brigade’ (Sonderkommando); the origins of Medallions by Zofia Nałkowska, who ‘processed’ historical documents into literature and contributed to the making of professor Rudolf Spanner’s ‘dark legend,’ and the textual origins of Tadeusz Różewicz’s ‘poetry after Auschwitz.’ Furthermore, this volume addresses issues related to the genesis and function of ‘genocide literature’ – aesthetic, cognitive, ideological, and social. This volume will be a crucial resource for academics interested in genocide and Holocaust literary studies.

Polish Literature and Genocide

Polish Literature and Genocide PDF Author: Arkadiusz Morawiec
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000534499
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book

Book Description
Polish Literature and Genocide presents the attitude of Polish literature to the 20th-century acts of genocide. This volume examines the literary representations of the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the massacre in Srebrenica in a rich, detailed, and comprehensive way, expanding the existing research and, in some cases, challenging the former sometimes ossified ideas. Polish literature not only reflects the obvious extermination of Jews and Poles, but also records what had been largely overlooked: the extermination of disabled and mentally ill people, the Roma and Sinti, and the Soviet prisoners of war by the Nazis. This volume includes analysis of the literary works of Władysław Szlengel, the most prominent Polish-language poet in the Warsaw ghetto; the peculiar reception of Julian Tuwim’s famous poem for children "Locomotive;" the memoir of Leon Weliczker, a prisoner of the Janowska concentration camp in Lvov and a member of the ‘death brigade’ (Sonderkommando); the origins of Medallions by Zofia Nałkowska, who ‘processed’ historical documents into literature and contributed to the making of professor Rudolf Spanner’s ‘dark legend,’ and the textual origins of Tadeusz Różewicz’s ‘poetry after Auschwitz.’ Furthermore, this volume addresses issues related to the genesis and function of ‘genocide literature’ – aesthetic, cognitive, ideological, and social. This volume will be a crucial resource for academics interested in genocide and Holocaust literary studies.

Polish Literature and the Holocaust

Polish Literature and the Holocaust PDF Author: Rachel Feldhay Brenner
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810139820
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
In this pathbreaking study of responses to the Holocaust in wartime and postwar Polish literature, Rachel Feldhay Brenner explores seven writers’ compulsive need to share their traumatic experience of witness with the world. The Holocaust put the ideological convictions of Kornel Filipowicz, Józef Mackiewicz, Tadeusz Borowski, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, Leopold Buczkowski, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and Stefan Otwinowski to the ultimate test. Tragically, witnessing the horror of the Holocaust implied complicity with the perpetrator and produced an existential crisis that these writers, who were all exempted from the genocide thanks to their non-Jewish identities, struggled to resolve in literary form. Polish Literature and the Holocaust: Eyewitness Testimonies,1942–1947 is a particularly timely book in view of the continuing debate about the attitudes of Poles toward the Jews during the war. The literary voices from the past that Brenner examines posit questions that are as pertinent now as they were then. And so, while this book speaks to readers who are interested in literary responses to the Holocaust, it also illuminates the universal issue of the responsibility of witnesses toward the victims of any atrocity.

The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture

The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture PDF Author: Bozena Shallcross
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253005094
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
In stark contrast to the widespread preoccupation with the wartime looting of priceless works of art, BoÅ1⁄4ena Shallcross focuses on the meaning of ordinary objects -- pots, eyeglasses, shoes, clothing, kitchen utensils -- tangible vestiges of a once-lived reality, which she reads here as cultural texts. Shallcross delineates the ways in which Holocaust objects are represented in Polish and Polish-Jewish texts written during or shortly after World War II. These representational strategies are distilled from the writings of Zuzanna Ginczanka, WÅ‚adysÅ‚aw Szlengel, Zofia NaÅ‚kowska, CzesÅ‚aw MiÅ‚osz, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and Tadeusz Borowski. Combining close readings of selected texts with critical interrogations of a wide range of philosophical and theoretical approaches to the nature of matter, Shallcross's study broadens the current discourse on the Holocaust by embracing humble and overlooked material objects as they were perceived by writers of that time.

The Ethics of Witnessing

The Ethics of Witnessing PDF Author: Rachel Feldhay Brenner
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810129752
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Winner, 2015 USC Book Award in Literary and Cultural Studies, for outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies The Ethics of Witnessing investigates the reactions of five important Polish diaristswriters—Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Maria Dabrowska, Aurelia Wylezynska, Zofia Nalkowska, and Stanislaw Rembek—during the period when the Nazis persecuted and murdered Warsaw’s Jewish population. The responses to the Holocaust of these prominent prewar authors extended from insistence on empathic interaction with victims to resentful detachment from Jewish suffering. Whereas some defied the dehumanization of the Jews and endeavored to maintain intersubjective relationships with the victims they attempted to rescue, others selfdeceptively evaded the Jewish plight. The Ethics of Witnessing examines the extent to which ideologies of humanism and nationalism informed the diarists’ perceptions, proposing that the reality of the Final Solution exposed the limits of both orientations and ultimately destroyed the ethical landscape shaped by the Enlightenment tradition, which promised the equality and fellowship of all human beings.

Polish Literature and the Holocaust (1939-1968)

Polish Literature and the Holocaust (1939-1968) PDF Author: Dorota Krawczynska
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
ISBN: 9783631672730
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 770

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Book Description
Polish Literature and the Holocaust (1939-1968) scrutinizes literary and documentary testimonies produced during or after the extermination of Jews in the Second World War and rooted in that historical, political, and anthropological context. Whether someone wrote a text during or after the war influenced the nature of what was communicated. Hence, the authors divided this publication to separately cover two periods: 1939-1944/45 and 1945-1968. This publication overviews belles-lettres, personal document literature, and press publications. Almost all texts were written in the Polish language. The genre category constitutes the basic compositional criterion. The individual parts of our publication discuss poetry, narrative prose, personal document literature, and the press discourse.

Polish Film and the Holocaust

Polish Film and the Holocaust PDF Author: Marek Haltof
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857453572
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
During World War II Poland lost more than six million people, including about three million Polish Jews who perished in the ghettos and extermination camps built by Nazi Germany in occupied Polish territories. This book is the first to address the representation of the Holocaust in Polish film and does so through a detailed treatment of several films, which the author frames in relation to the political, ideological, and cultural contexts of the times in which they were created. Following the chronological development of Polish Holocaust films, the book begins with two early classics: Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage (1948) and Aleksander Ford’s Border Street (1949), and next explores the Polish School period, represented by Andrzej Wajda’s A Generation (1955) and Andrzej Munk’s The Passenger (1963). Between 1965 and 1980 there was an “organized silence” regarding sensitive Polish-Jewish relations resulting in only a few relevant films until the return of democracy in 1989 when an increasing number were made, among them Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Decalogue 8 (1988), Andrzej Wajda’s Korczak (1990), Jan Jakub Kolski’s Keep Away from the Window (2000), and Roman Polański’s The Pianist (2002). An important contribution to film studies, this book has wider relevance in addressing the issue of Poland’s national memory.

Poland's Holocaust

Poland's Holocaust PDF Author: Tadeusz Piotrowski
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786429135
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 451

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Book Description
With the end of World War I, a new Republic of Poland emerged on the maps of Europe, made up of some of the territory from the first Polish Republic, including Wolyn and Wilno, and significant parts of Belarus, Upper Silesia, Eastern Galicia, and East Prussia. The resulting conglomeration of ethnic groups left many substantial minorities wanting independence. The approach of World War II provided the minorities' leaders a new opportunity in their nationalist movements, and many sided with one or the other of Poland's two enemies--the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany--in hopes of achieving their goals at the expense of Poland and its people. Based on primary and secondary sources in numerous languages (including Polish, German, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Russian and English), this work examines the roles of the ethnic minorities in the collapse of the Republic and in the atrocities that occurred under the occupying troops. The Polish government's response to mounting ethnic tensions in the prewar era and its conduct of the war effort are also examined.

The Holocaust Bystander in Polish Culture, 1942-2015

The Holocaust Bystander in Polish Culture, 1942-2015 PDF Author: Maryla Hopfinger
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030664082
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
This book concerns building an idealized image of the society in which the Holocaust occurred. It inspects the category of the bystander (in Polish culture closely related to the witness), since the war recognized as the axis of self-presentation and majority politics of memory. The category is of performative character since it defines the roles of event participants, assumes passivity of the non-Jewish environment, and alienates the exterminated, thus making it impossible to speak about the bystanders’ violence at the border between the ghetto and the ‘Aryan’ side. Bystanders were neither passive nor distanced; rather, they participated and played important roles in Nazi plans. Starting with the war, the authors analyze the functions of this category in the Polish discourse of memory through following its changing forms and showing links with social practices organizing the collective memory. Despite being often critiqued, this point of dispute about Polish memory rarely belongs to mainstream culture. It also blocks the memory of Polish violence against Jews. The book is intended for students and researchers interested in memory studies, the history of the Holocaust, the memory of genocide, and the war and postwar cultures of Poland and Eastern Europe.

In the Shadow of Auschwitz

In the Shadow of Auschwitz PDF Author: Daniel Brewing
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 180073090X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
The Nazi invasion of Poland was the first step in an unremittingly brutal occupation, one most infamously represented by the network of death camps constructed on Polish soil. The systematic murder of Jews in the camps has understandably been the focus of much historical attention. Less well-remembered today is the fate of millions of non-Jewish Polish civilians, who—when they were not expelled from their homeland or forced into slave labor—were murdered in vast numbers both within and outside of the camps. Drawing on both German and Polish sources, In the Shadow of Auschwitz gives a definitive account of the depredations inflicted upon Polish society, tracing the ruthless implementation of a racial ideology that cast ethnic Poles as an inferior race.

Genocide and Rescue in Wołyń

Genocide and Rescue in Wołyń PDF Author: Tadeusz Piotrowski
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786407736
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
After the 1939 Soviet and 1941 Nazi invasions, the people of Southeast Poland underwent a third and even more terrible ordeal when they were subjected to mass genocide by the Ukrainian Nationalists. Tens of thousands of Poles were tortured and murdered, not by foreign invaders, but by their fellow citizens, who sometimes turned out to be their neighbors, relatives, and former friends. Other Ukrainians took terrible risks to protect Poles from the slaughter, and often paid for their compassion with their lives. The children who survived them vividly remember these atrocities and now, many decades later, tell their tragic tales. These accounts, never before published in English, describe the brutal murders these children witnessed, their own miraculous survival, and the heroic rescues that saved them. Demographic and other statistical information on the area is provided. Also included are appendices listing the Ukrainian victims and providing additional stories from other provinces, as well as ample Ukrainian, Polish, Soviet, German, and Jewish documentation and a comprehensive chronology. An index and bibliography are also included.