ABSTRACT Israelis widely recognize the Germans' primary role in orchestrating the Holocaust. However, there is a tendency among some to attribute a higher degree of complicity and direct involvement to the Poles than historical evidence supports. This extends beyond even the highest scholarly estimates of Polish involvement in the deaths of up to 200,000 Jews. The claim that ‘the Poles were worse than the Germans’ has become a familiar refrain in Israeli discourse, reinforced by statements such as former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s remark in 1989 that ‘Poles suckle antisemitism with their mother's milk,’ a sentiment echoed by Foreign Minister Israel Katz in 2019. What accounts for these Israeli attitudes toward the role of Poles in the Holocaust? Various explanations have been proposed, including the sense of betrayal by neighbors, the deep imprint of Holocaust memory on Israeli society, and the potential influence of Israeli high school trips to Poland. However, these factors alone do not fully explain the phenomenon. This article presents an additional and significant factor shaping Israeli perceptions: the bias of historical sources. Jews who were sent to extermination camps in Poland directly witnessed German perpetrators – whether during deportations, arrival at the camps, or in the gas chambers. However, as Primo Levi observed, ‘We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses […] Those who saw the Gorgon have not returned to tell about it.’ The vast majority of Holocaust testimonies come from those who survived, and in the case of Polish Jews, survivors frequently interacted with Poles while fleeing, hiding, or seeking refuge in forests. As a result, many survivors' experiences disproportionately emphasized Polish collaboration, betrayal, and antisemitism, reinforcing the widespread perception in Israel that ‘the Poles were as bad as, or worse than, the Germans.’

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the tradition of lighting six candles in memory of the six million Jewish victims of the Shoah. Combining the approaches of religious studies and art history, this interdisciplinary research seeks to enhance understanding of the six-candle ritual. It explores its impact in architecture and the visual arts, universalist adaptations, and evolving symbolism in response to regional practices and customs. It traces the origins of the ritual, its promotion by influential organizations, its impact on architecture and the liturgy, and concludes with a case study of the return of the Six-Candle Ceremony to the Czech Republic, from the ‘diaspora of remembrance’ to Holocaust-era countries culturally isolated by the Iron Curtain.

ABSTRACT This article examines the transformative role of fear in shaping Polish-Jewish relations under Soviet and Nazi rule between 1939 and 1945. Drawing on eight diaries, memoirs, and testimonies, it situates fear as both a personal and collective force that redefined behaviors, moral boundaries, and emotional norms. Tracing fear’s evolution from prewar Poland to post-liberation anxieties across three phases – early uncertainty (1939–1940), systemic repression (1940–1942), and genocidal annihilation (1942–1945), the article highlights how the war deepened existing fractures, giving rise to increasingly isolated emotional communities shaped by concealment, total silence, negotiation, and betrayal. Situating fear within the broader history of emotions, with which Holocaust studies must engage more deeply, this article argues that fear of one another often eclipsed fear of the Germans after 1942. By engaging with recent historiography on Polish-Jewish relations and social dynamics under Nazi rule, this article thus reframes fear as both a shield and a scar – an agent of survival and betrayal whose legacy persisted long after liberation.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the various forms of sexual violence experienced by Romani women and girls in occupied Poland during World War II. These acts were perpetrated by German soldiers and SS men and their collaborators, in particular Ukrainian nationalists, as well as by Soviet soldiers during the period of liberation. Romani women found themselves in an especially precarious situation due to both Nazi persecution as well as long-standing history of exoticization and sexualization of Romani women in Europe, dating back to the eighteenth century. The persecution of Romani people during WWII, including sexual violence and assault of Romani women and girls, still remains on the margins of Holocaust research. Moreover, the harmful and traumatic experiences of gender-based violence continue to remain taboo subjects within Romani culture. Drawing on testimonies of Romani survivors collected in Polish by the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, this article examines how the affected women and girls, as well as other survivors, talked or rather remained silent about sexual violence. I also discuss the forms, situations, and patterns of violence perpetrated by various groups and explore the influence of cultural assumptions and situational conditions on sexual and gender-based violence against Romani women and girls.

ABSTRACT This article analyses the wide range of representations of the actions undertaken by Jan Karski. Karski was a courier for the wartime Polish government-in-exile, engaged to report on the situation in Poland, to Polish politicians in France in 1940, as well as to government leaders in London and Washington in 1942/3. Karski’s book about his diplomatic endeavors was published as early as 1944 (Story of a Secret State), but thereafter he maintained a long silence, one that was only broken in 1978 when he was interviewed for Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985). From the 1980s onwards, Karski repeatedly testified to his wartime activities and experiences; he received numerous awards for his early warnings about the fate of the Polish Jews under the Nazis and became a celebrity among the ‘righteous’. Following his death in 2000, Karski’s mission has been reconsidered and subjected to wide-ranging interpretation. We take an arts and humanities approach to analyzing how far these shifting perspectives on Karski’s wartime undertakings respond to the different emphases in Karski’s postwar memoirs and his interviews in different media. The article therefore poses questions about narrative and aesthetic construction to compare Karski’s testimonies with the ways they have been represented in documentary film and fiction. We conclude that the idea of Karski’s mission has been adopted to diametrically opposed and polemical ends and attempt an adjudication between these often-incompatible representations.

ABSTRACT Between 1946 and 1949, more than 55,000 Holocaust refugees, 20 percent of them children and youth, were detained by the British in various camps in Cyprus, in order to prevent their entrance to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine). Relief organizations and emissaries from Eretz Israel were engaged in providing basic needs, occupation, and education to the detainees. Among other initiatives, art classes were organized for the young and adults alike, and occasional exhibitions were held to display their works. This paper tells the story of these exhibitions from different perspectives – therapeutic, educational, artistic, practical, and political. It exposes the politics behind the exhibits, as well as the competition surrounding them between the different political movements operating in the camps at the time. By analyzing the works of the young students in particular, and based on memories and research, the author shows how art was often used as an ideological tool as well. The youngsters had been directed to express their dreams of a wishful future in Eretz Israel, rather than their traumatic memories and losses in the Holocaust. Sculptures of Zionist leaders, models of kibbutzim, and displays of agricultural tools, among others, were common, while horrors of the war were hardly expressed in these exhibitions. One exhibition, displayed by the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement, serves as a case study in this paper. This unique project, called ‘To-No’ (Hebrew initials for ‘Youth Production’) is presented here through its numerous artifacts preserved to this day in archives in Israel, and through later exhibitions of them in Cyprus (2014) and in Israel (2017), accompanied by catalogs and articles of scholarly interpretation. They carry a universal message on the power and influence of artwork and artifacts as a means of resilience and rehabilitation, and as a model of spiritual and cultural resistance.

ABSTRACT This article reconstructs and analyses the spaces and visual narratives of two particularly important early exhibitions organized by Holocaust survivors: the one at the Jewish Pavilion in the former Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin (September 1946), and ‘Unzer Veg in der Frayheyt’ (Our Path to Freedom) made in the displaced persons camp in Bergen-Belsen (July 1947). Located in one of the barracks of the former concentration camp, the Jewish Pavilion in Majdanek was one of the first public commemorative sites expressing Jewish memory of the war in Poland. While presenting a history of the Holocaust, the display also established a space for mourning. ‘Our Path to Freedom’ was created on the occasion of the Second Congress of Liberated Jews in the British Zone. It also presented the Holocaust, while at the same time imagining the future life of survivors in Eretz Israel. Together, these exhibitions demonstrate the heterogeneity of Holocaust memory of that time. They pose questions about different ways of narrating history, pointing to exhibitions as a significant medium, while allowing for a combination of visual and spatial means of representation in order to create a multifaceted narrative about the past.

ABSTRACT This essay uncovers the systematic, intentional distortion of Holocaust history on the English-language Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia. In the last decade, a group of committed Wikipedia editors have been promoting a skewed version of history on Wikipedia, one touted by right-wing Polish nationalists, which whitewashes the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and bolsters stereotypes about Jews. Due to this group’s zealous handiwork, Wikipedia’s articles on the Holocaust in Poland minimize Polish antisemitism, exaggerate the Poles’ role in saving Jews, insinuate that most Jews supported Communism and conspired with Communists to betray Poles (Żydokomuna or Judeo–Bolshevism), blame Jews for their own persecution, and inflate Jewish collaboration with the Nazis. To explain how distortionist editors have succeeded in imposing this narrative, despite the efforts of opposing editors to correct it, we employ an innovative methodology. We examine 25 public-facing Wikipedia articles and nearly 300 of Wikipedia’s back pages, including talk pages, noticeboards, and arbitration cases. We complement these with interviews of editors in the field and statistical data gleaned through Wikipedia’s tool suites. This essay contributes to the study of Holocaust memory, revealing the digital mechanisms by which ideological zeal, prejudice, and bias trump reason and historical accuracy. More broadly, we break new ground in the field of the digital humanities, modelling an in-depth examination of how Wikipedia editors negotiate and manufacture information for the rest of the world to consume.

ABSTRACT The long-term historical demography of India is a highly intractable subject, due to a lack of reliable statistical data. Nevertheless, in recent decades, it has become increasingly common in popular and journalistic circles (including Le Figaro and The New York Times) to resort to the term ‘genocide’ in order to claim that a very large number of people were systematically killed in the process of the Islamic conquest of the area (c. 1000–1800 CE). This short essay examines the fragile basis of this claim, as well as the ideological programs underlying it. Effectively, such an abuse cheapens the term and devalues historical situations when genocide really occurred, including the Shoah.