Research Studies

Paul Sanders

On Duty - The Role of the Polish Blue and Criminal Police in the Holocaust

By Jan Grabowski

The Polish Police, commonly called the Blue or uniformed police in order to avoid using the term “Polish,” has played a most lamentable role in the extermination of the Jews of Poland. The uniformed police has been an enthusiastic executor of all German directives regarding the Jews.

Emanuel Ringelblum, Warsaw, 1943

Shortly after the occupation of Poland in the fall of 1939, the Germans created the Blue Police, consisting mainly of prewar Polish police officers. Within a short time, this police force was responsible for enforcing many anti-Jewish regulations issued by the Nazis. Who were these policemen, and how did they transform from ordinary policemen to murderous executioners? And what was the role of the Germans in this horrifying picture?

Moral Dilemmas among Jews in the Reality of the Holocaust

By Yitzhak Arad

It Happened on Our Planet offers a brutally honest insight into the horrifying decisions that the Jews had to make and the unbearable situations in which the Jews found themselves during this time. The publication of this important work presents generations to come with a better understanding of the complex reality of the Holocaust.

Christoph Schminck-Gustavus

Holocaust Survivors’ Emotional, Psychological, and Social Journeys in the Early Postwar Period

Editors: Constance Pâris de Bollardière and Sharon Kangisser Cohen

His reaction to my cautious questions about his parents, his brothers and sisters, his experiences in the concentration camp was characteristic. His only response was to let his head drop onto his chest. He remained sitting in this posture in silence for some time. It must be said here without pathos or literary embellishment that it is only now that he has been returned to normal life that this child feels the pain and torment of everything he has seen and experienced.

Hans Keilson

Edited by: Eliyana R. Adler and Natalia Aleksiun

The Nazi persecution and murder of the Jews of Europe led to the atomization of the social relationships of the victims. Families were ripped apart. Entire communities were ghettoized and isolated from the outside world. The forced removal of the Jews from the midst of the non-Jewish population facilitated the crimes committed against them, significantly limited the assistance they could rely on, and restricted the number of witnesses to their persecution and murder. However, despite the devastation, disruption, and loss brought by the Holocaust, prewar patterns and lationships continued to shape decisions and actions by Jews and non-Jews both during and after the war. Even in extremis, they often relied on established networks of support that had been forged in very different circumstances. Jewish victims as well as bystanders and perpetrators relied on the already familiar cohort of relatives, neighbors, peers, and colleagues to support and assist them during this time. Just as these networks brought people with various backgrounds together, Entanglements of War compiles a broad range of interdisciplinary perspectives to reveal invaluable findings about the relationships, choices, and actions that shaped these complex connections, and their impact on Jewish lives during the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath.

Edited by Dan Michman and Robert Rozett

The Holocaust unquestionably shattered most normative frameworks and cast the struggle for survival in its starkest form. Yet despite this, the Holocaust did not necessarily lead Jews to act as lone wolves, caring only about their own survival. This volume demonstrates that Jewish solidarity during the Holocaust is a multifaceted, multilayered issue, replete with complexities and shadings that reflect the diversity of Jewishness and Jewish existence, as well as the unprecedented dire situations that challenged it, and while solidarity was not a given and may not have predominated, it did not cease to exist.

Edited by Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking

Rika Benveniste

Edited by Christoph Dieckmann and Arkadi Zeltser

Sara Kadosh

Edited by Sharon Kangisser Cohen and Dalia Ofer

Miriam Offer

A last few words to honor you, the Jewish doctors. What canI tell you, my beloved colleagues and companions in misery?  You are a part of all of us. Slavery, hunger, deportation, thosedeath figures in our ghetto were also your legacy. And you byyour work could give the henchman the answer Non omnis moriar, I shall not wholly die. (Dr. Israel Milejkowski, Director, Judenrat Health Department in the Warsaw Ghetto, October 1942)

White Coats in the Ghetto narrates the struggle of the Jews to survive in the Warsaw ghetto while also preserving their humanity during the Holocaust. Based on a vast quantity of official and personal documents, it describes the elaborate medical system that the Jews established in the ghetto to cope with the lethal conditions imposed on them by the Nazis, and the tragic ethical dilemmas that the medical teams confronted under German occupation. 

Ilaria Pavan

Editors: Zeev Mankowitz, David Weinberg, Sharon Kangisser Cohen

In what sense was the European heritage responsible for Jewish cultural and intellectual development? How could one describe the events of the Holocaust? Was there a future for Jews in a reconstructed Europe? A group of scholars suggests a more nuanced view by examining the perspectives of ten survivors – philosophers, activists, and memoirists – whose attitudes towards the European past were characterized by conflicting feelings of alienation and attraction.

Yitzhak Arad

Edited by Dan Michman

During the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, the focus of research was directed at the actions of the murderers and at resistance. That situation changed gradually during the 1960s and 1970s. The rescue of Jews, a major aspect of Holocaust history, started to attract the attention of scholars. Still, the focus was mostly on governments and organizations. The initiation of Yad Vashem’s recognition program for the Righteous Among the Nations also drew public attention to the acts of individual rescuers in areas under Nazi control. Over the course of the last three decades, important studies have been published that investigated the rescuers and their acts. Yet even today, many aspects of the rescue activities require further research. Moreover, the aspect of Jewish initiatives and individual experiences deserves more attention. Yad Vashem’s eighteenth biannual conference, titled “Hiding, Sheltering and Borrowing Identities as Avenues of Rescue during the Holocaust,” brought together a large number of international scholars to discuss new approaches and the current state of research on the topic. This volume, based on a selection of papers that were presented at the conference, aims to provide an overview of the multi-faceted landscape of academic studies on the rescuers and the rescued.

Arkadi Zeltser

Editors: Dina Porat and Dan Michman in cooperation with Haim Saadoun

During the second half of 1942, several events signaled a shift on the fronts of World War II. The failed German summer offensive on the Eastern Front led to the encirclement of the Sixth Army in Stalingrad. In Northern Africa, Operation Torch marked the prelude to the defeat of the German Africa Corps. Since 1941, information had begun to trickle out about the German mass murder program in the occupied territories. The first counteroffensives of the Red Army had led to an initial understanding of the scope of the killings, but additional, reliable sources like the Riegner Telegram provided important details and indicated the shift to the industrial extermination of the Final Solution. As a result, the Allies and Jewish organizations published their first official statements that addressed the German murder operations. The Allies’ position and their response to the growing evidence of genocidal action remains a matter of debate among historians. Could the leaders of the Allied nations have understood the magnitude of the Final Solution sooner? Were they in a situation that would have allowed them to invest more resources to rescue its Jewish victims? Yad Vashem’s nineteenth biannual international conference gathered scholars from fifteen countries to discuss these questions from a wide variety of angles. This volume, edited by senior historians Dina Porat and Dan Michman, includes selected articles by contributing researchers with the aim to provide new insights and answers into the developments that unfolded during that critical phase of the war.

Pinchas Bar-Efrat

Havi Dreifuss (Ben-Sasson)

"As far as Polish‒Jewish relations are concerned, we need to devote at least a few words to the attitude of Jews toward the Poles.… even in their suffering, the Jews remember with deep emotion and gratefulness all the acts of kindness toward them and the helping hand extended to them by each of those Poles.… But, despite this, the insult and humiliation—which shall never be forgotten—no one wishes to remember."
(Anonymous, Warsaw Ghetto, 1942)

Lea Prais

Chaya Ostrower

Editors: Feliks Tych and Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska