Hrubieszow at the Crossroads: Polish Jews Navigate the German and Soviet Occupations
In the fall of 1939, Jews across western Poland faced a momentous dilemma: whether to stay in their homes under Nazi occupation or to flee to the area controlled by the Soviets. The question was particularly acute for residents of Hrubieszów, mere kilometers from the new border at the Bug River. Testimonies and memoirs of Hrubieszower Jews illuminate the factors individuals and families weighed in making their decisions. They also highlight the importance of Jewish agency and choice during the Holocaust.
Quelle: http://hgs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/28/1/1?rss=1
Rescued from Oblivion: The Leyb Koniuchowsky Papers and the Holocaust in Provincial Lithuania
Much of our knowledge of the Holocaust in Lithuania is based on experiences in or near Vilnius and Kaunas. In the smaller towns, where tens of thousands of Jews lived before the war, so few survived that first-hand accounts are rare; all the less do official German sources offer a window onto events, recording little more than overall numbers. The present contribution draws attention to a lesser-known collection of survivor testimonies gathered after the war by Leyb Koniuchowsky, primarily in Germany's Feldafing displaced persons camp. Case studies of ritual humiliation of Jews by their small-town and village neighbors, experiences in a minor camp complex, and the pursuit of vengeance by one survivor who gained temporary employment in the postwar Soviet security services, point toward the place of oral testimony in elucidating events in hard-to-document places. They raise questions about whether events in better-known localities were "typical" or not.
Quelle: http://hgs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/28/1/85?rss=1
Allied Knowledge of Auschwitz: A (Further) Challenge to the „Elusiveness“ Narrative
Despite important corrective analyses, the narrative that reliable information about Auschwitz was "elusive" has predominated among scholars. Many argue that the Vrba/Wetzler report was the first information about the camp to reach the West and be accepted as credible. The author of this article offers evidence that this contention cannot be sustained. He traces the origin, path, and distribution of a Polish intelligence report from 1943 to show that information was available earlier, and was treated as credible. The Polish government-in-exile routinely distributed information it received about Auschwitz, but British government policy (and American government policy until early 1944) restricted its circulation. The author concludes that Polish-language and English-language scholarship on the subject must be linked in order to further our understanding of Allied knowledge about Auschwitz.
Quelle: http://hgs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/28/1/31?rss=1