J.B. Michlic

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Senior Researcher at University College London

This essay does not claim to be a gender and quantitative analysis of rescue. Its modest aim is todiscuss complexities and diffi culties of studying the subject of rescue of Jews in wartime Polandfrom a gender perspective. The initial analysis put forward here is intended to investigate to whatextent gender mattered in the treatment of the non-Jewi...

Joanna Beata Michlic sees how much of the attention to child survivor histories can be traced to the experiences of Jewish children after the Holocaust. She criticizes the continuing attempts to draw a narrative of redemption and renewal from this history—and its uses as a paradigm—as simplistic and harmful. Instead, Michlic argues it is important...

A new publication on Children, war and genocide

The conference aims to draw international attention to the Lund University Library's unique and under-researched collection of testimony documents from survivors of Ravensbrück-Nazi German concentration camp for women. Various aspects of women and girls' experiences in concentration camps will be discussed, including psychological and sexual abuse,...

Nationalism, antisemitism , Eastern Europe

The History, memorialization and historical education about rescue of Jews in wartime Poland in a comparative perspective : new approaches and challenges

This chapter examines some key areas of the history of Jewish youth in Europe during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, paying particular attention to the significant shifts in the field over the last decade. It discusses how the field has been changing and expanding as a result of historians’ recognition of children’s agency with the rise of c...

On history and historiography of Child Holocaust Survivors

For many centuries Jews were renowned for the efforts they put into their children's welfare and education. Eventually, prioritizing children became a modern Western norm, as reflected in an abundance of research in fields such as pediatric medicine, psychology, and law. In other academic fields, however, young children in particular have received...

Jewish child survivors were the smallest youth minority among all groups of child‐victims in Nazi‐occupied Europe due to the systematic German extermination program. This chapter discusses key themes in the historiography of the destruction and survival of Jewish children and youth in Europe during and in the aftermath of World War II paying partic...

This chapter reviews the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust in Poland from a gender perspective. It focuses on 'dedicated rescuers' as the individuals who went above and beyond the call of duty to save Jews without profiting from their actions or taking advantage of their charges. It also looks at personal letters written shortly after the end of...

An emphasis on education has long been a salient feature of the Jewish experience. Historians of the early modern and modern era frequently point to the centrality of educational institutions and pursuits within Jewish society, yet the vast majority treat them as merely a reflection of the surrounding culture. Only a small number note how schools a...

The term ghetto represents a value concept with negative connotations and multiple meanings. It is frequently used to describe any dense areas of minority group residence, even if no compulsory and segregatory policies of residence were imposed in such areas. It is also a description of the geographical and social isolation of minorities other than...

The entry covers the origins of the use of the term “pogrom” and describes the nature and etiology of major pogroms against Jews at the end of the nineteenth century in the Russian empire, and the continuity of anti-Jewish violence in the twentieth century in Eastern Europe before, during, and after the Holocaust. It also discusses the historical a...

In 1945, only a few grasped the extent of the destruction of Eastern European Jews with their civilization and the implication of this loss for the region. Today, the Holocaust has become the European paradigm of lieu de mémoire (Diner 2007a) and the universal icon of evil. Most recently some have claimed the Holocaust as an international paradigm...

In this article, I examine Michał Głowiński's late-postwar autobiographical writings, arguing that the author's account of his wartime experience is a manifestation of the return of the repressed and self-censored self. I also examine the relationship between imaginative autobiographical Holocaust literature and Holocaust testimony produced by chil...

In Children's Exodus, Fast joins a steadily growing group of scholars who have written on the fate of Jewish children during the Holocaust and in its aftermath. Her book focuses on the immigration of Jewish refugee children to Great Britain from the first Kindertransport in December 1938 to the arrival of the last displaced youth in 1948. Fast's co...

Despite the Holocaust’s profound impact on the history of Eastern Europe, the communist regimes successfully repressed public discourse about and memory of this tragedy. Since the collapse of communism in 1989, however, this has changed. Not only has a wealth of archival sources become available, but there have also been oral history projects and i...

Life in Transit:Jews in Postwar Lodz, 1945-1950. By Redlich Shimon . Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010. xvi, 264 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. Maps. $45.00, hard bound. - Volume 71 Issue 2 - Joanna Beata Michlic

The paper considers the memories of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust in Poland in the aftermath of the intense public debate about the Jedwabne massacre of July 10, 1941, since 2002 till the present. Jan Tomasz Gross’s slim monograph Neighbors, published in May 2000, triggered a debate that generated a process of self-critical assessmen...

Neighbors--Jan Gross's stunning account of the brutal mass murder of the Jews of Jedwabne by their Polish neighbors--was met with international critical acclaim and was a finalist for the National Book Award in the United States. It has also been, from the moment of its publication, the occasion of intense controversy and painful reckoning. This bo...

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz’s Massacre in Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, and After, (Mord w Jedwabnem 10 lipca 1941: przed, w czasie i po.) East European Monographs, Boulder, CO, 2005. Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York 2005. pp. 277.

Prudently, the Orlowskys and I decided not to mention my being Jewish. And so it was that I became an orphaned relative, surnamed Orlowsky, charitably taken in by the family. I was not apprehensive that Polish people who had known me five or six years before would recognize me. In 1944 I was a fourteen-year-old with long braids who spoke fluent, un...

HENRYK GRYNBERG was born in Warsaw in 1936 into an Orthodox Jewish family, and raised in the village of Radoszyna near Mińsk Mazowiecki in central Poland. He survived the Holocaust in hiding with his mother. He left for the United States in 1967 in protest at the Polish government’s antisemitic practices and the censorship of his writing. He is the...

Although the reconciliation of Jewish and Polish memories of the Holocaust is the central issue in contemporary Polish–Jewish relations, this is the first attempt to examine these divisive memories in a comprehensive way. Until 1989, Polish consciousness of the Second World War subsumed the destruction of Polish Jewry within a communist narrative o...

The term pogrom came into widespread use in Russia in the late nineteenth century. Originally it defined an organized massacre for the destruction or annihilation of any group of people. Since 1905–6, in the English‐speaking world, it evolved into a term chiefly used to describe any riots directed against Jews in the modern era. Both in Russia and...

The term ghetto is a concept with many meanings. It is frequently used to describe any dense areas of Jewish residence, even if no compulsory policies of residential segregation were imposed. It is also employed as a description of the geographical and social isolation of minorities other than Jews; for example, it is applied to African Americans a...

The article analyzes two opposing trends that have emerged in Polish postcommunist historiography with regard to the cliché of the procommunist and pro-Soviet and anti-Polish Jew. It traces the origins of this cliché and its development in Polish political thought during the interwar period and its persistence during and after World War II. At the...

In this provocative and insightful book, Joanna Beata Michlic interrogates the myth of the Jew as Poland's foremost internal 'threatening other,' harmful to Poland, its people, and to all aspects of its national life. This is the first attempt to chart new theoretical directions in the study of Polish-Jewish relations in the wake of the controversy...

Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19.3 (2005) 538-540 Among heretofore neglected dimensions of the social history of the Holocaust, rescue and Jewish survival in specific localities figures prominently. Gunnar S. Paulsson's Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940–1945 is welcome as a pioneering and long overdue work. However, in spite of his skill...

This paper analyzes the attitudes of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland towards the Jews and anti-Semitism during the first decade since the political transformation of 1989–1990. After discussing briefly the main patterns of the development of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland in the modern era I examine two opposing positions within the instit...

This thesis is a socio-historical analysis of the ways in which the myth of the Internal Threatening Other influences national politics and culture and inter-ethnic relations between the majority group (the dominant ethnic nation) and the minority (perceived as the foremost Threatening Other). The case-study under examination is that of the Polish...

This thesis is a socio-historical analysis of the ways in which the myth of the Internal Threatening Other influences national politics and culture and inter-ethnic relations between the majority group (the dominant ethnic nation) and the minority (perceived as the foremost Threatening Other). The case-study under examination is that of the Polish...

L'intelligentsia du ghetto de Varsovie entre 1940 et 1942 etait determinee a incarner la volonte et la conscience de la communaute juive. En depit de leur conscience de l'imminence de la catastrophe finale, elle avait a coeur de mettre l'accent sur son projet de survie nationale. En tant que peuple, les Juifs constituaient une collectivite distinct...

Unlike other Polish cities such as Gdansk, Kraków and Wroclaw, Lódz is a “young city” that emerged as a modern industrial metropolis in the second half of the nineteenth century. At first under Prussian rule after the partitions of Poland, the city fell to Russia after the Treaty of Vienna (1815). In 1825, Tsar Aleksander I visited the then small t...