Irene Tomaszewski

Last updated

Irene Tomaszewski (also Irena Tomaszewska, born May 1940) is a Canadian writer, editor and translator of Polish descent living in Montreal, Canada. [1]

Contents

Early life

Irene Tomaszewski (Tomaszewska, in proper Polish usage, since she is female) was born in 1940 to Polish parents in the Soviet Union's Rosochy prison, in the Arkhangelsk Oblast gulag . In June 1941, after Germany attacked its former Soviet ally, the family was released from the gulag. [2] In 1942, along with tens of thousands of other Poles, they were evacuated from the Soviet Union to the Near East. On their way south, Tomaszewski's mother Anna, pregnant with Irena, and her two sisters Wanda and Halina, were separated from the children's father, Felix. [3] In 1949, after six years in an East Africa refugee camp, the family were reunited in England, and subsequently emigrated to Canada. [4] [5]

Career

Tomaszewski was a founding president of the Canadian Foundation for Polish Studies. She co-authored, with Tecia Werbowski, Codename Żegota: Rescuing Jews in Occupied Poland, 1942-1945, [6] [7] on a clandestine organization that helped Jews in Poland. [8]

Tomaszewski wrote the screenplay for the 1999 film based on the book, titled Żegota: The Council for Aid to Jews in Occupied Poland, 1942-45.

She translated the text and acted as editor for Inside a Gestapo Prison: The Letters of Krystyna Wituska, 1942-1944, published by Wayne State University Press in 2006. [9] The Tomaszewski translation was published earlier in 1997 under the title, I Am First a Human Being: The Prison Letters of Krystyna Wituska. [10] Books in Canada reviewed the work, noting that Tomaszewski first came across the letters while working on a documentary on Poland for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The translation draws on the earlier Polish language book by Dr. Wanda Kiedrzynska and from others who knew or were related to Wituska. [11] The book also contains an explanatory list of people mentioned in the correspondence. [12]

She is the editor of the Cosmopolitan Review, the quarterly, English-language magazine on Polish affairs. [4] [13]

In 1999, Tomaszewski was invited to give the ninth Milewski Polish Studies Lecture at Central Connecticut State University on the topic of: "The Holocaust: Remembrance and Education". Professor Stanislaus Blejwas, in his introduction to the published address, called Tomaszewski one of the thoughtful voices in the discussion between Jews and Poles about the Holocaust. [14]

In 2014, Tomaszewski was the keynote speaker at the opening of Toronto's presentation of an exhibit about Jan Karski, "The World Knew – Jan Karski’s Mission for Humanity". [15]

Along with Polish writer, Małgorzata Dzieduszycka-Ziemilska, she was instrumental in encouraging contact and dialogue between Jewish students and Polish students during the annual March of the Living program.

See also

Related Research Articles

Jan Karski Polish World War II resistance movement fighter

Jan Karski was a Polish soldier, resistance-fighter, and diplomat during World War II. He is known for having acted as a courier in 1940–1943 to the Polish government-in-exile and to Poland's Western Allies about the situation in German-occupied Poland. He reported about the state of Poland, its many competing resistance factions, and also about Germany's destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and its operation of extermination camps on Polish soil that were murdering Jews, Poles, and others.

Zofia Kossak-Szczucka Polish writer

Zofia Kossak-Szczucka was a Polish writer and World War II resistance fighter. She co-founded two wartime Polish organizations: Front for the Rebirth of Poland and Żegota, set up to assist Polish Jews to escape the Holocaust. In 1943, she was arrested by the Germans and sent to Auschwitz concentration camp, but survived the war.

Żegota Polish resistance organization during WWII

Żegota was the Polish Council to Aid Jews with the Government Delegation for Poland, an underground Polish resistance organization, and part of the Polish Underground State, active 1942–45 in German-occupied Poland. Żegota was the successor institution to the Provisional Committee to Aid Jews and was established specifically to save Jews. Poland was the only country in German-occupied Europe where such a government-established and -supported underground organization existed.

Irena Sendler 20th and 21st-century Polish activist and resistance fighter against the Nazis

Irena Stanisława Sendler, also referred to as Irena Sendlerowa in Poland, nom de guerreJolanta, was a Polish humanitarian, social worker, and nurse who served in the Polish Underground Resistance during World War II in German-occupied Warsaw. From October 1943 she was head of the children's section of Żegota, the Polish Council to Aid Jews.

Righteous Among the Nations Israeli honorific for non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust

Righteous Among the Nations is an honorific used by the State of Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination by the Nazis for altruistic reasons. The term originates with the concept of "righteous gentiles", a term used in rabbinic Judaism to refer to non-Jews, called ger toshav, who abide by the Seven Laws of Noah.

Kraków Ghetto Ghetto for Polish Jews during WWII in Kraków, German-occupied Poland

The Kraków Ghetto was one of five major metropolitan Nazi ghettos created by Germany in the new General Government territory during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It was established for the purpose of exploitation, terror, and persecution of local Polish Jews. The ghetto was later used as a staging area for separating the "able workers" from those to be deported to extermination camps in Operation Reinhard. The Ghetto was liquidated between June 1942 and March 1943, with most of its inhabitants deported to the Belzec extermination camp as well as to Płaszów slave-labor camp, and Auschwitz concentration camp, 60 kilometres (37 mi) rail distance.

Provisional Committee to Aid Jews

The Provisional Committee to Aid Jews was founded on September 27, 1942, by Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and Wanda Krahelska-Filipowicz. The founding body consisted of Polish democratic Catholic activists associated with the Front Odrodzenia Polski, Polska Organizacja Demokratyczna, Związek Syndykalistów Polskich and PPS-WRN. The codename for the organization was "Konrad Żegota Committee" and the same codename was retained for the direct successor, the underground Council to Aid Jews.

Wanda Krahelska-Filipowicz

Wanda Krahelska-Filipowicz, code name “Alinka”” or “Alicja”, was a leading figure in Warsaw’s underground resistance movement throughout the years of German occupation during World War II in Poland, co-founder of Żegota. As the well-connected wife of a former ambassador to Washington, she used her contacts with both the military and political leadership of the Polish Underground to materially influence the underground's policy of aiding Poland's Jewish population during the war.

Szmalcownik Polish collaborationist blackmailer

Szmalcownik ; in English, also sometimes spelled shmaltsovnik) is a pejorative Polish slang expression that originated during the Holocaust in Poland in World War II and refers to a person who blackmailed Jews who were in hiding, or who blackmailed Poles who aided Jews during the German occupation. By stripping Jews of their financial resources, blackmailers added substantially to the danger that Jews and their rescuers faced and increased their chances of getting caught and killed.

Julian Grobelny Polish politician

Julian Grobelny was an activist in the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) from 1915, in the lead-up to Poland's return to independence. During the interwar period he was a social activist. After the German-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, and the ensuing Holocaust, he became President of Żegota active in the General Government territory of occupied Poland. The clandestine organization was named after a fictional character Konrad Żegota born on the exact day of its inception in 1942. Grobelny served as president of Żegota until the end of hostilities.

Ferdynand Arczyński Polish politician

Ferdynand Marek Arczyński, cryptonym "Marek" or "Lukowski", was one of the founding members of an underground organization Żegota in German-occupied Poland, from 1942 to 1945. Żegota's express purpose was to help the country's Jews survive the Holocaust; find places of safety for them, and provide relief payments to thousands of families. Poland was the only country in occupied Europe with such an organization during World War II.

Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust

Polish Jews were the primary victims of the German-organized Holocaust in Poland. Throughout the German occupation of Poland, many Poles rescued Jews from the Holocaust, in the process risking their lives – and the lives of their families. Poles were, by nationality, the most numerous persons who rescued Jews during the Holocaust. To date, 7,177 ethnic Poles have been recognized by the State of Israel as Righteous among the Nations – more, by far, than the citizens of any other country.

Jerzy and Irena Krępeć, a Polish husband and wife, living in Gołąbki near Warsaw during Nazi German occupation of Poland in World War II, were the Righteous who rescued Polish Jews with families including refugees from the Ghetto in Warsaw during the Holocaust.

Częstochowa Ghetto Nazi ghetto in occupied Poland

The Częstochowa Ghetto was a World War II ghetto set up by Nazi Germany for the purpose of persecution and exploitation of local Jews in the city of Częstochowa during the German occupation of Poland. The approximate number of people confined to the ghetto was around 40,000 at the beginning and in late 1942 at its peak, immediately before mass deportations, 48,000. Most ghetto inmates were delivered by the Holocaust trains to their deaths at the Treblinka extermination camp. In June 1943, the remaining ghetto inhabitants launched the Częstochowa Ghetto uprising, which was extinguished by the SS after a few days of fighting.

Leon Feiner

Leon Feiner was a Polish-Jewish lawyer, an activist of the General Jewish Labour Bund in Poland and between November 1944 and January 1945 the director (prezes) and vice-chairman of the Council to Aid Jews "Żegota".

Stanisław Krzyżanowski Polish physician (1874–1917)

Stanisław Henryk Krzyżanowski was a Polish physician. Alternate birth (1877) and death dates are given on the Otwock-History blog. He was among the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (PSP).

Front for the Rebirth of Poland

Front for the Rebirth of Poland also translated as the Front for a Reborn Poland was a clandestine anti-Fascist organization formed in 1941 in occupied Poland during World War II, by a group of secular Catholics of Warsaw led by Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and Father Edmund Krauze. The Front upheld Christian ideals of the prewar Catholic Action movements existing in the Polish Second Republic as part of the cross national European groupings of lay Catholics.

Zofia Rudnicka - Polish lawyer and judge, social activist, member of the Council for Aid to Jews at the Government Delegation for the Country "Żegota". After the war, she worked in the judiciary, for twenty years she was the chairman of the Civil and Audit Department of the Provincial Court for the Capital City of Warsaw.

Irena Scheur-Sawicka was a Polish archaeologist, ethnographer, and educational and communist activist. During World War II she joined the Polish Workers' Party. She was active in the Polish resistance during World War II and, together with Żegota, in helping Jewish refugees from the Warsaw Ghetto. She died in the Warsaw Uprising.

References

  1. ↑ "Inside a Gestapo Prison | Wayne State University Press". www.wsupress.wayne.edu. Retrieved 2018-06-23.
  2. ↑ Tomaszewski, Irene; Werbowski, Tecia (1999). Żegota: the Council for Aid to Jews in Occupied Poland, 1942-45. Price-Patterson. ISBN   9781896881157.
  3. ↑ "Profile". KresySiberia. Retrieved 23 June 2018.
  4. 1 2 "How to honour the victims of communism". Ottawa Citizen . 26 June 2015. Retrieved 23 June 2018.
  5. ↑ "DePaul and Screen New Film on Jewish Rescue". wdat.is.depaul.edu. Retrieved 2018-06-23.
  6. ↑ ABC-CLIO. "Code Name Zegota". www.abc-clio.com. Retrieved 2018-06-23.
  7. ↑ "The exhibition about Jan Karski in Toronto within the Holocaust Education Week". toronto.mfa.gov.pl. Retrieved 2018-06-23.
  8. ↑ "Zegota : the rescue of Jews in wartime Poland / Irene Tomaszewski and Tecia Werbowski - Collections Search - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum". collections.ushmm.org. Retrieved 2018-06-23.
  9. ↑ Tomaszewski, Irene (2006-05-18). Inside a Gestapo Prison: The Letters of Krystyna Wituska, 1942-1944. Wayne State University Press. ISBN   9780814338872.
  10. ↑ I am First a Human Being : The Prison Letters of Krystyna Wituska. Worldcat. OCLC   40939768.
  11. ↑ Maria Kubacki. "Epistolary Contraband - bearing witness to remaining human". Books in Canada. Retrieved 2018-07-03.
  12. ↑ "Bibliographies: Poles". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . Retrieved 2018-07-08.
  13. ↑ "Irene Tomaszewski — The Cosmopolitan Review". cosmopolitanreview.com. Retrieved 2018-06-23.
  14. ↑ Irene Tomaszewski (2000). Stanislaus Blejwas (ed.). "Milewski Polish Studies Lecture" (PDF). Occasional Papers in Polish and Polish American Studies. Central Connecticut State University. ISSN   1092-4280 . Retrieved 2018-07-08.
  15. ↑ "CIJA partners with the Polish and Jewish communities". Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. November 21, 2014. Retrieved 2018-07-08.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.