Post-war Poland Research Articles

Malgorzata Fidelis, Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland

Malgorzata Fidelis, Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland

The Myth of Ritual Murder in Post-War Poland: Pathology and Hypotheses

The Myth of Ritual Murder in Post-War Poland: <i>Pathology and Hypotheses</i>

Israel in Poland: A Forgotten Moment in Postwar History

Long overshadowed by the regnant Jewish memory of postwar Poland as a vast graveyard from which anyone who could would flee, the little-told story of the revival of Jewish life in the 'Recovered Territories' of western Poland reveals what its backers saw as an alternative to Israel in Palestine for Polish Jewish survivors. Abetted by both Zionist and American narratives, that dominant memory has suppressed a tale of courage and determination among the most downtrodden of people to recreate a Jewish life on Polish soil. It is a tale of people who believed that Jews not only had the right to claim citizenship in the new Poland but also could fulfill there their Jewish national aspirations. Led by the industrious Jacob Egit, the Jewish survivors in Lower Silesia in the earliest postwar years developed industries and cultural institutions that could have sustained a renewed Jewish community. That their efforts were cut short by the forces of antisemitism and Communism does not vitiate their remarkable though short-lived achievement.

Women, communism, and industrialization in postwar Poland

Women, communism, and industrialization in postwar Poland

Three Colors: Grey Study for a Portrait of Bernard Mark

The article presents a profile of Bernard Mark (1908–1966), a Holocaust historian and the director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Mark’s biography is based on various materials, both published and unpublished, from his pre-war involvement in the Communist Party of Poland, through the war years spent in the Soviet Union, to his various activities in post-war Poland: a researcher and socio-cultural activist, including his publications on the Holocaust

The ethno-religious ambitions of the Roman Catholic Church and the ascendancy of communism in post-war Poland (1945-50)

ABSTRACT. This paper differentiates between centrifugal and centripetal aspects of ethno-nationalism to help account for the ascendancy of communism in the immediate aftermath of World War II in Poland. It argues that the directing of social antipathy to defined out-groups allowed the Polish Workers' Party (PPR) to manage social anger and that the Roman Catholic Church's ethno-religious agenda was aligned with the PPR's ethno-nationalist policy. Furthermore, it is contended that the Church's toleration of hostile actions directed at minority communities supported the PPR's management of social anger. The paper concludes that the Church, despite its manifest intentions and contrary to contemporary perceptions, played a role in the PPR's achievement of hegemony.

Imagining ‘the Jews’ in Stalinist Poland: nationalists or cosmopolites?

Despite the annihilation of 90% of the Jewish population of Poland during the Second World War, the new Communist regime's official fight against anti-Semitism and its granting of equal rights for the tens of thousands of survivors who chose to remain in their home country, the ‘Jewish question’ remained a burning issue in post-war Poland. Yet, after episodes of anti-Jewish violence in 1945–46, the issue seemed to vanish precisely at a time when it was manipulated through an ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign launched in the Soviet Union and spread through most of the Eastern Bloc. This paper focuses on the reaction of Polish authorities and society to this campaign. Could the slogan of ‘cosmopolitanism’ work against Polish citizens of Jewish origin viewed mostly, within Polish society, as non-national and communists? Did Poland follow a particular path during the years 1949–54, when compared to neighbouring countries of the Eastern Bloc; and if so, how can it be explained? The paper argues that a specific vocabulary was used in Poland and that the consequences of this campaign are more to be sought in the background and against ‘invisible Jews’ rather than in the spotlight of show trials or any persecution of the small Jewish community.

Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust, Avinoam J. Patt (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), xi + 373 pp., cloth $54.95

In Finding Home and Homeland, Avinoam Patt asks why so many young Jews formed Zionist groups soon after liberation. He studies the large youth segment of the Jewish Displaced Persons (DP) population to determine what Zionism meant to these survivors, and how deeply influenced they were by the ideology. Finding Home and Homeland is organized into three parts. Part One focuses on Jewish survivors in postwar Germany in 1945 and on young survivors in postwar Poland. Part Two explores Jewish DPs in kibbutzim in postwar Germany between 1945 and 1947, as well as the agricultural training they received there. Part Three focuses on aliyah and the demands of citizenship. In his study, Patt draws on a variety of sources to infer the reasons for the DPs' actions: records from DP social, cultural, and political organizations; DP camp newspapers; and diaries, letters, and testimonies. He demonstrates that Zionism was central to the formation of a postwar DP identity, particularly for those who found themselves in Germany, and that its appeal broadened as it seemed increasingly to offer the best answers to young Jews' most pressing problems. For example, most young DPs soon realized that they had no family remaining and were largely on their own. As recent survivors of trauma and tragedy, they preferred to put their lives back together in a supportive environment in the company of fellow survivors. The early kibbutzim organized by camp survivors in Germany and the Zionist youth movements in Poland provided the warmth, camaraderie, shelter, and security they yearned for after the war. Patt argues that the Zionist ideological aspects of the kibbutz were secondary; by joining a kibbutz, DPs had access to education in Jewish and Zionist history. Zionism functioned for them therapeutically and productively by providing work and a sense of family—in short, a structure that empowered them to embrace a new national identity.

The mythopoeia in Stalinist propaganda of post-war Poland

This article analyzes the discourse of propaganda in the apogee of the Stalinist era in Poland (1949–1953) as creating a quasi-mythical reality (mythopoeia). The analysis draws on the structuralist conceptions of myth-making following the work of Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes expanded to the paradigm of social semiotics. The study demonstrates how the positioning of social actors creates cosmogonic relations between them. In this way, it subscribes into the project of sémiotique politique . It is argued that the key technique underlying the propaganda discourse is the dichotomization of reality reducible to a basic contrast between “communism” versus “capitalism.” Following Levi-Strauss, I analyze this dichotomization along the vertical and horizontal axes. I follow Barthes in treating myths not as a fundamental story but as a new unity of sense that is built over the common meanings. The material that informs this article is drawn from the early editions of the most influential daily newspaper in socialist Poland: Trybuna Ludu (People's Tribune) and a lifestyle weekly Przekrój .

„Tuż po Zagładzie”. Kościół wobec problematyki żydowskiej (VII 1944–VII 1946)

Stosunek kościoła katolickiego do Żydów po II wojnie światowej jest trudnym tematem w polsko - żydowskiej historii, w znacznym stopniu zdominowanym przez emocje i stereotypy. Prezentowany tekst przedstawia fragment relacji kościół - Żydzi: od chwili zakończenia działań wojennych na wschodzie powojennej Polski, latem 1944 r. do pogromu Żydów w Kielcach w lipcu 1946 r. Zaproponowana chronologia pozwala jednak odpowiedzieć na pytanie: czy i na ile cień Zagłady zmieniał traktowanie Żydów przez kościół katolicki. Przyjrzenie się pierwszemu okresowi powojennemu ma duże znaczenie, ponieważ to, co wypracowano na samym początku miało wpływ na stanowisko kościoła w tak dramatycznym momencie jak pogrom kielecki, a także w okresie późniejszym. W artykule przedstawiono sytuację kościoła i społeczności żydowskiej w momencie zakończenia działań wojennych, opisano wzajemne postrzeganie się kościoła i Żydów w powojennej rzeczywistości. Artykuł omawia jak tematyka żydowska przedstawiana była przez hierarchów, duchowieństwo, prasę katolicką, wiernych.

Citizenship, property rights and dispossession in postwar Poland (1918 and 1945)

After both the First and Second World Wars, the Polish state used nationality law as a tool for ethnic de-integration and dispossession, albeit in varying measure and with differing impact. After 1918, legislation and implementation focused less on economic interests than on those of the nation-state. Through the liquidation of private property against compensation, the German population, especially in Western Prussia, Poznań and Pomerelia, were to be persuaded to leave Poland voluntarily. These measures were within the legal framework set by the Versailles Treaties and the national tradition of civil law.

Dilemmas for Regional Development in the Concepts Seeking to Develop Poland's Spatial Structure

Bański J. Dilemmas for regional development in the concepts seeking to develop Poland's spatial structure, Regional Studies. Post-War Poland has seen work done on three spatial development concepts. The first – from the late 1940s – had as its task the decentralization of industry and the strengthening of regions whose development had been lagging behind. The second – drawn up in the 1970s – promoted the system of moderate polycentric concentration and a shifting of part of the country's industrial potential to more weakly developed areas. In turn, the third concept – from the 1990s – again concentrated on balancing regional development, albeit through the idea of priority being assigned to efficiency over equality. The aim of this paper was to analyse the aforesaid three concepts as regards the approach taken to the evening out of regional development. The primary thesis here is that the concepts studied strived in their various different ways to reduce regional disparities, but never actually had the ideas they came up with put into effect properly.

Nation and Empire: Dilemmas of Legitimacy during Stalinism in Poland (1941–1956)

IntroductionIn 1944 Poland was re-established for the second time in the twentieth century. Between the Lublin manifesto of 22 July 1944 and the Potsdam conference of summer 1945 a communist-dominated regime had formed, which was had little in common with the Second Republic that had been founded between the declaration of independence on 9 November 1918 and the peace of Riga with Bolshevik Russia signed in March 1921. Post-war Poland was significantly smaller, geographically further to the west, and ethnically more homogeneous. The Holocaust had destroyed Europe's most sizeable Jewish population, the loss of thekresy(eastern borderlands) to the USSR had reduced the size of eastern-Slavic minorities and the expulsion of the Germans from East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia further helped to create an ethnically homogeneous country. For the first time in her history, Poland had the structure of a nation-state. Through the destruction and catastrophe of Nazi occupation and genocide the goal of firebrand Polish nationalists such as Roman Dmowski had been achieved: a Poland inhabited by ethnic Poles. Still, the new Poland was less independent than its predecessor; from 1944 onwards it was part of the emerging post-war Soviet Empire. Polish sovereignty had fallen victim to Stalin's “revolutionary-imperial paradigm.” Expansion of Moscow's power was as much a priority of the Soviet leadership as the export of Bolshevik revolution.

A Clean Sweep? The Politics of Ethnic Cleansing in Western Poland 1945-1960

With the darker side of contemporary Polish nationalism once again gracing the international news, the publication of this insightful study into how ethnic cleansing has shaped and defined post-war Poland cannot have come at a better time for those wishing to grasp the historical roots of Polish nationalism and the lasting legacies of post-1945 population displacements in eastern Europe. In his exploration of these themes, David Curp concentrates on Poznań and the Wielkopolska—an area, he argues, which makes a fitting case-study. Focus of the radical Polish nationalism of the Endecja (the National Democrats), as well as of successive Germanisation efforts, Poznań was where the ‘lines of division between Poles and Germans became sharpest’ (p. 5) and was at the forefront of Polish secessionist movements after the First World War. But it was as ‘the epicentre of Poland's postwar [i.e. 1945] transformation’ (p. 5) from multi-ethnic Saisonstaat into ‘ethnographic monolith’ (p. 3)—from a state of nationalities into a nation-state—that the region is most significant. Drawing on archives of the Poznań area, as well as those of neighbouring Zielona Góra and of the records of the Urząd Bezpieczeństwa (UB, or secret police), this study, then, looks locally in order to think more generally about Poland's post-war ‘national revolution’.

'The Second Shore': The Poetry of Male and Female Political Prisoners in Postwar Poland

This essay explores a body of 340 poems created by political prisoners who were accused of and imprisoned for anti-state activity in late 1940s and 1950s Stalinist Poland. Evaluating prison poetry as a historical source, I understand the process of composing a poem as the result of a prisoner’s need to document the world around her/himself, as a psychological activity that contained diffi cult prison experiences, as a negotiation of emotional and often conflicting states, and as a social practice through which prison poets affected themselves and the people around them. Situated somewhere at the intersection of the personal and political, poetry became one of the most powerful sites of resistance. In addition to evaluating prison poetry as a historical source, this essay also explores gender differences and similarities in the body of 340 poems discussed here and in the social function of the prison poems.

A Tale of the Murdered Shtetl: The Image of the Shtetl in Yiddish Literature in Post-war Poland

This article discusses an ambivalent portrayal of the shtetl presented in the prose works of five Yiddish writers who were creatively active in the communist Poland: Leyb Olitsky, Mendel Tempel, Shlomo Strauss-Marko, Lili Berger and Kalman Segal. The theme of the shtetl is of a particular importance in Yiddish literature of that time since it makes it possible to realize how difficult Yiddish writers' situation was under communism in the post-Holocaust era. The literary image of shtetl in their prose works is conditioned by two contrasting perspectives: ideological critique and a sense of loss. In comparison to the classic texts there is a substantial shift – the continuity of the shtetl life with the cycle of the holy history of the Jewish people is interrupted, and religion is substituted – at least ostensibly – by the ideology of communism. The writers criticize the traditional way of life, known as Yiddishkayt, the mentality associated with it, as well as the crisis of the moral value system. Nonetheless, as if in opposition to communist literary critics, all of them unanimously emphasize the values of the Jewish world that are worth remembering, such as the language, folklore, customs and traditions, and also domestic religious rituals, and even certain aspects of religion.

The Play within the Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection. (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 112) by Gerhard Fischer, Bernhard Greiner

MLR, 104.2, 2009 54i a defence of ethics and morality against barbarity and falsification, a defence of freedom against repressivemeasures' (p. 171). There is something doubtful about the triumphalist tone, and the uncritical refuge taken in a concept such as sovereignty, which shakes one's faith slightly in the good work thatunderpins this study. Finally, Olszewska asserts, contemporary Irish writers are engaged in a 'trans lation' of Ireland, a manoeuvre that involves projection', a manoeuvre that is, furthermore, not quite so appropriate in a Polish context. Throughout this study Communism is invoked as the quintessence of the alien and the inhospitable. Given this, the 'imagined homeland' of post-war Poland is awarded greater coherence than the imagined Ireland of contemporary writing as itattempts to critique both 'traditional definitions of Irishness' and 'thenationalism of the sovereign republic' (defined by the?restrictive?values ofChurch and State) (pp. 169-70). This book isperhaps most interesting in the account given of key Polish journals such as Kultura, and the contexts inwhich specific debates took place; and in the translations of Polish texts thatunderpin the argument. It ismuch more obviously a book about Polish struggle than it is a genuinely comparative study. If the debates within the book could be revisited, it is arguable that they should become more nuanced, less dogmatically asserted. University of Leeds Fiona Becket The Play within thePlay: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection. Ed. by Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner. (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 112) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2007. xvi+460 pp. 96; $134. ISBN 978-90-420-2257-7. There are precious few texts devoted to the question ofmetatheatricality, despite its centrality to the history and practice of theatre as an art form. The Play within thePlay thus piqued my interest,not least because its title, as a term, seems both curiously dated and suggestive of potential contemporary relevance. A generation of playwrights emerging in the last twentyyears,writers as diverse as Tony Kushner, Martin Crimp, and Suzan-Lori Parks, have made the playwithin theplay a key com ponent of theirdramaturgy. Unfortunately, thebook's real subject turnsout tobe less 'theplay within the play than the conference proceedings within the book'?and it provides an object lesson inwhy publishers now generally frown on the lattergenre. 'The essays in the present collection', its editors explain, constitute a selection of papers delivered at the 2004 Sydney German Studies Symposium', which they convened. With thirtyessays spread over 460 pages, there does not appear to have been a particularly rigorous 'selection' process, and thisproblem is compounded by the fact that the eclectic contents have not been arranged in any very coherent man ner. There are five subsections, but their titles are bewilderingly imprecise. Part 1, for example, 'The Play within the Play and the Performance of Self-Reflection', is followed by Part 11,'The Play within the Play andMeta-Theatre', with its subsection titles 'Self-Reflection and Self-Reference' (so, the same as Part 1 then?) and

Who Am I? Jewish Children’s Search for Identity in Post-War Poland 1945‒1949

Who Am I? <i>Jewish Children’s Search for Identity in Post-War Poland 1945‒1949</i>

A clean sweep?: the politics of ethnic cleansing in western Poland, 1945-1960

'A Clean Sweep? The Politics of Ethnic Cleansing in Western Poland, 1945-1960' examines the long-term impact of ethnic cleansing on postwar Poland, focusing on the western Polish provinces of Poznan and Zielona Gora. Employing archival materials from multiple sources, including newly available Secret Police archives, it demonstrates how ethnic cleansing solidified Communist rule in the short term while reshaping and 'nationalizing' that rule. The Poles of Poznan played a crucial role in the postwar national revolution in which Poland was ethnically cleansed by a joint effort of the people and state. A resulting national solidarity provided the Communist-dominated regime with an underlying stability, while it transformed what had been a militantly internationalist Polish Communism. This book addresses the legacy of Polish-German conflict that led to ethnic cleansing in East Central Europe, the ramifications within the context of Polish Stalinism's social and cultural revolutions, and the subsequent anti-national counterrevolutionary effort to break the bonds of national solidarity. Finally, it examines how the Poznan milieu undermined and then reversed Stalinist efforts at socioeconomic and cultural revolution. In the aftermath of the Poznan revolt of June 1956, the regime's leadership re-embraced hyper-nationalist politics and activists, and by 1960 Polish authorities had succeeded in stabilizing their rule at the cost of becoming an increasingly national socialist polity. T. David Curp is assistant professor in the Department of History at Ohio University.

Die Rolle der katholischen Kirche Polens in der Nachkriegszeit

This essay describes developments in the Catholic church in post-war Poland. The author shows the failure of the attempts by the new Communist rulers after 1949 to repress the church by draconian measures. In fact, such attacks only led to the institution's unprecedented strength. An important contribution came from those opposition forces who were more or less atheists, at least until the mid-1970s. Later they came to recognize that any repression of the faithful church-goers was incompatible with democratic social goals. The author describes the clever tactics adopted by the Polish Cardinal Wyszynski as well as by the Polish Pope John Paul II in their dealings with the Communist authorities.