Category Archives: Poland
Poland: ‘Torpedownia’
The link below is to an article that takes a look at a German torpedo testing facility that is still standing off the coast of Poland.
For more visit:
http://mashable.com/2015/08/09/abandoned-research-center/
To what extent did the populations of rural Lithuania and Poland engage in hostilities and Nazi collaboration against Jewish fugitives and partisans surviving in forests? (Part 2, by Jack Watt)
Traditional anti-Semitism was rife in pre-war Eastern Europe and was not a recent phenomenon. Yehuda Merin asserts that ‘most of the local population harboured feelings of hatred for the Jews in the family camps… well-rooted in past ages.’ This was certainly the case for many rural areas, where Catholicism was strong and integration between Jewish and non-Jewish communities was less developed. Such attitudes in Poland and Lithuania were encouraged by German propaganda, and the rhetoric of some nationalist political organisations (such as the Lithuanian Activist Front). In Poland too, ‘on the basis of anti-Semitism and anti-Sovietism, some groups even tried to get along with the occupier, thanks to a common ideological language.’
Thus, encroachment onto land, and theft of property by forest fugitives could be framed as a distinctly Jewish problem. Sakowicz echoes this kind of anti-Semitism in one of his diary entries, as Jewish activity around Ponary became more…
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To what extent did the populations of rural Lithuania and Poland engage in hostilities and Nazi collaboration against Jewish fugitives and partisans surviving in forests? (Part 1, by Jack Watt)
The forest is a hugely significant, but somewhat marginalised landscape of the Holocaust. Initially woodland was the chosen site of the Einsatzgruppen shooting squads, helping to facilitate the mass murder and disposal of thousands of Jews. However, they later became one of the few places where Jews could escape and attempt to survive either individually or in small groups and family camps, and even engage in violent acts of partisan resistance to impede German progress. Up to 80,000 Jews fled into the forests of Eastern Europe , where they could evade the continuous gaze of their oppressors, which plagued the experiences of ghetto and camp life.
However, there were still numerous other groups and actors in the forest landscape and its immediate periphery, including local collaborators, bystanders and righteous gentiles (those who aided the Jews). The title of this study, which isolates the relationship between Jews and local inhabitants, is…
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