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Not Just Witnesses: The Efforts of Polish Jewish Survivors and Organizations to Achieve Justice after the Holocaust
Olga Kartashova
ok763@nyu.edu Author BiographyOlga Kartashova is a Ph.D. candidate in Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University. She is currently writing her dissertation “International Networks and Jewish Efforts to Prosecute Nazi Criminals in Poland (1944-1959)” under the supervision of Professor David Engel. She specializes in the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, its aftermath, memory, historiography, and trials. She holds MA degrees in Comparative History from Central European University and Holocaust Studies from Haifa University. She completed internships at Yad Vashem, Ghetto Fighters’ House, and the Open Society Archives in Budapest. Worked as a researcher at the USHMM on a project broadly devoted to genocides and justice, with a special focus on legal aspects of the history of the Holocaust. For the past two years, leads a monthly research seminar on the East European and Jewish roots of international law in cooperation with the Minerva Center for Human Rights at Tel Aviv University, where she was a visiting fellow in 2021-2022. She was a fellow at the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellow in Advanced Shoah Studies. Most recently, She was a Manya Friedmann Memorial Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. She is engaged in Digital Humanities and is exploring ways to incorporate technology into Holocaust research, archives, and museums.
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6992-1586
New York University
Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, No. 19 (2023), Pages: 611-633
Submission Date: 2023-03-27Publication Date: 2023-12-23
https://doi.org/10.32927/zzsim.991
Abstract
The article explores the role of Polish Jewish organizations in investigations and trials of Holocaust perpetrators. It contributes a study of Jewish survivors’ agency in pursuing justice, their relationships with non-Jewish institutions and authorities, and the role of the international networks in these processes. At the center of the article are the Jewish national institutions operating in Poland in the 1940s, which represented the survivors and served as intermediaries between them and the authorities. In the conditions of anti-Jewish hatred, mass displacement, and the strengthening of communism in Poland, Jews treated collecting evidence and pursuing justice as a national mission, and perceived Jewish institutions, in this case the Central Committee of Polish Jews, as representatives of the victims and the Jewish people. The exchange of information between survivors, domestic and foreign Jewish communities, and lobby with national and international authorities, have provided a chance to supply lacking documentation and witness accounts, potentially increase the rate of punishment for perpetrators in Holocaust-related trials, and allow survivors to fulfill their moral obligation.
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