New release
Essays Commemorating Szmul Zygielbojm
This book brings together papers that were presented at a workshop in May 2018 to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of Szmul Zygielbojm’s protest suicide. The workshop was organised at The Polish University Abroad within the framework of an ongoing seminar series on twentieth century Polish history.5 The volume opens with a message from Zygielbojm’s grandsons, Dr Arthur I. Zygielbaum and Paul S. Zygielbaum, to participants of the workshop (see p. 11), in which they highlight the continuing relevance of their grandfather’s sacrifice (Michael Fleming, Introduction).
Szmul Zygielbojm was a Jewish socialist and a leading figure of the General Jewish Workers’ Union – the Bund. Between March 1942 and May 1943 he served as one of two Jewish representatives on the Polish National Council. The Polish National Council was the consultative body of the Polish Government in Exile that was based in London from 1940. Prior to the Second World War Zygielbojm had been a councillor in Warsaw and later in Łódź. Following the German invasion, Zygielbojm was sworn in as a councillor in Warsaw once more. He was among those Warsaw councillors taken hostage by the Germans to ensure that the city complied with German demands. In the first months of the German occupation Zygielbojm protested against German plans to establish a ghetto in Warsaw and was forced to escape Poland. He reached the United States in early 1940 where he stayed until he was asked, in February 1942, by the Polish Government in Exile to join the Polish National Council. Zygielbojm arrived in London in late March 1942. Zygielbojm tirelessly sought to draw attention to the situation of Jews in German-occupied Poland. In May 1942 a report sent by his Bundist colleagues in Warsaw via Polish intelligence channels arrived in London. It reported that 700,000 Polish Jews had been murdered by the occupying Germans. Zygielbojm took to the airwaves, wrote to leading political figures, spoke at public meetings, published the information from Poland and liaised with other socialists in London in an attempt to elicit a response to aid the perishing. His task was not easy. In addition to facing antisemitic sentiment among some Poles in London and less than fulsome support from Polish ministers, including the Polish Minister of the Interior, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, Zygielbojm had to negotiate a British context in which Jews were marginalised and stereotyped in various ways. News of atrocities was problematic in the British context. Such news was viewed by some through the lens of First World War propaganda and was doubted. Others, especially in the Foreign Office, sought to downplay the news of German atrocities against Jews due to concerns about the situation in the Middle East (focusing on Jews, it was feared, might alienate some communities) and a commitment to 1 2 refer to titular nationals (Poles, French, etc.). There was also concern about how news of atrocities would impact on British morale and a worry that reports of German actions against Jews would accentuate domestic antisemitism and thereby undermine national unity during the crisis of war.2 The Foreign Office adopted a position of strategic scepticism towards news of atrocities against Jews, especially during the summer of 1942. This practice undermined Zygielbojm’s attempts to elicit an adequate response. In addition, ongoing conflicts within the European Left in Britain limited Zygielbojm’s efficacy ((Michael Fleming, Introduction).
Information
Michael Fleming is a professor of history at the Polish University Abroad, London. He is also the conference secretary to the Institute for Polish Jewish Studies. He has previously taught at Jesus College and Pembroke College, Oxford University, and has been a visiting researcher at the Pułtusk School of Humanities and at the Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. In 2011, Fleming was a co-winner of the Aquila Polonica Prize. His current research examines Polish intelligence on the Holocaust. His most recent book is Communism, Nationalism and Ethnicity in Poland, 1944-1550 (2010, Routledge).
See also
A Generic History of Travel Writing in Anglophone and Polish LiteratureSeries: Textxet: Studies in Comparative Literature, Volume: 93A Generic History of Travel Writing in Anglophone and Polish LiteratureSeries: Textxet: Studies in Comparative Literature, Volume: 93Author:Grzegorz MorozAuthor:Grzegorz Moroz
Author/Editor:
E-Book (PDF) Availability: Published ISBN: 978-90-04-42961-1 Publication Date: 31 Aug 2020 Hardback Availability: Published ISBN: 978-90-04-42959-8 Publication Date: 03 Sep 2020
Grzegorz Moroz,A Generic History of Travel Writing in Anglophone and Polish Literature.Series:Textxet: Studies in Comparative Literature, Volume: 93
Author/Editor:
A Generic History of Travel Writing in Anglophone and Polish Literature offers a comprehensive, comparative and generic analysis of developments of travel writing in Anglophone and Polish literature from the Late Medieval Period to the twenty-first century. These developments are depicted in a wider context of travel narratives written in other European languages. Grzegorz Moroz convincingly argues that, for all the similarities and cross-cultural influences, in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century non-fiction Anglophone and Polish travel writing have dynamically evolved different generic horizons of expectations. While the Anglophone travel book developed relatively steadily in that period, the Polish genre of the podróż was first replaced by the listy (kartki) z podróży, and then by the reportaż podróżniczy.
Polish-Jewish Re-Remembering
Author/Editor: Sławomir Jacek Żurek
The title of this monograph, Odpamiętywanie polsko-żydowskie [‘Polish-Jewish Re-Remembering’], refers to the post-1989, thirty-year-long process of reviving attention to Polish-Jewish relations in historical, cultural, and literary studies, including the impact of Polish Jews on the development of Polish culture, their presence in Polish social life, and the relationships between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles. That process had been preceded by a long period of silence that fell on the centuries-old presence of Jews in the Polish Commonwealth after their extermination by the Nazis. Jewish studies in the years 1945–1989, concerning both the very presence of Jews and their annihilation in the Holocaust, were very limited: the Communist authorities were interested in neither. As a result, the majority of Poles mentally operate with the Jewish world from before the World War II and with the Shoah as mere artefacts of the cultural processes of post-memory. (From Introduction)
Reassessing Communism. Concepts, Culture, and Society in Poland, 1944-1989
Author/Editor: Katarzyna Chmielewska, Agnieszka Mrozik, Grzegorz Aleksander Wołowiec
The thirteen authors of this collective work undertook to articulate matter-of-fact critiques of the dominant narrative about communism in Poland while offering new analyses of the concept, and also examining the manifestations of anticommunism. Approaching communist ideas and practices, programs and their implementations, as an inseparable whole, they examine the issues of emancipation, upward social mobility, and changes in the cultural canon.