Jacek Leociak PhD | |
---|---|
Born | Warsaw, Poland | 2 June 1957
Occupation | literary scholar, author |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Polish Academy of Sciences University of Warsaw |
Academic work | |
Era | 20th century |
Institutions | Polish Center for Holocaust Research Institute of Literary Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences |
Main interests | Holocaust in Poland |
Jacek Leociak (born 2 June 1957,in Warsaw) is a Polish literary scholar and historian as well as author. He is a professor of humanities and an employee of the Institute of Literary Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw.
Leociak received a Ph.D. in 1996 at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences with a dissertation on the Warsaw ghetto. [1] He was awarded the title of Professor at the Academy in 2013.
Since 1997,Leociak was head of the research team on Holocaust literature at the Institute of Literary Research. He also joined the Polish Center for Holocaust Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. [1]
In 2008,he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta for "his important contributions to exploring,collecting,and popularizing the information on the Holocaust as well as his activism for remembering the history of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising". [2]
In 2015,he was awarded the Decoration of Honor Meritorious for Polish Culture. [3]
In January 2019,he became the recipient of the Kazimierz Wyka Award for his outstanding contributions to artistic and literary criticism. [4]
In May 2019,he received a nomination for Poland's top literary prize,the Nike Award,for his work Młyny boże. Zapiski o kościele i Zagładzie (Mills of God. Notes on the Church and the Holocaust). [5]
Leociak deals with the analysis of various forms of recording and of representation of the Holocaust experience. His research interests also include the narratives of victims,perpetrators and witnesses as well as the history of the Warsaw ghetto. [1]
Together with Barbara Engelking,he published the book The Warsaw Ghetto:A Guide to the Perished City ,which first appeared in Polish in 2001. It focuses on the Warsaw Ghetto and its almost four-year history. According to a review in Shofar:An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies ,the work is "a unique and detailed monograph that gives the reader an insight into the daily life of Jewish inhabitants of the closed district". At 800-pages,the book details "the institutional structure of the ghetto,its relations with the German Nazi government,important social institutions,and the economic and community life of the ghetto population," amounting almost to an encyclopedia. [6] A review by the Jewish Book Council finds The Warsaw Ghetto to be an "encyclopedic and impressive work" that does not make for an easy reading,but provides a rich and comprehensive portrayal of the life and fate of the ghetto community. [7]
Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of the Nazi ghettos during World War II. It was established in November 1940 by the German authorities within the new General Government territory of occupied Poland. At its height, as many as 460,000 Jews were imprisoned there, in an area of 3.4 km2 (1.3 sq mi), with an average of 9.2 persons per room, barely subsisting on meager food rations. From the Warsaw Ghetto, Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps and mass-killing centers. In the summer of 1942, at least 254,000 Ghetto residents were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp during Großaktion Warschau under the guise of "resettlement in the East" over the course of the summer. The ghetto was demolished by the Germans in May 1943 after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprisings had temporarily halted the deportations. The total death toll among the prisoners of the Ghetto is estimated to be at least 300,000 killed by bullet or gas, combined with 92,000 victims of starvation and related diseases, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the casualties of the final destruction of the Ghetto.
The Blue Police, was the police during the Second World War in German-occupied Poland. The entity's official German name was Polnische Polizei im Generalgouvernement.
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.
Gunnar Svante Paulsson is a Swedish-born Canadian historian, university lecturer, and author who has taught in Britain, Canada, Germany, and Italy. He specializes in history of The Holocaust and has been described as "an expert on that period". He is best known for his 2002 book, Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940-1945.
Alexander Donat, also Aleksander Donat in Polish, was a Holocaust survivor imprisoned at the Lodz Ghetto and several Nazi concentration camps during the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany in World War II. After the war, Donat, a chemist by training and journalist by profession, emigrated with his family to the United States, settling in New York City. As an eye witness to the Holocaust in Poland, he went on to write about his wartime experiences, collect documents, and publish the narratives of others.
Maria Ajzensztadt was a Polish singer, who was murdered in the Holocaust.
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews is a museum on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto. The Hebrew word Polin in the museum's English name means either "Poland" or "rest here" and relates to a legend about the arrival of the first Jews to Poland.
Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały is a Polish academic journal published yearly by a group of historians and researchers from the Polish Center for Holocaust Research created in 2003 in Warsaw. It is an annual devoted to the topics connected with the broadly understood Holocaust research. The target audience could include academics dealing with the Holocaust, but also college and university students, as well as broader public interested in this topic. Each volume forms individual and self-contained monograph. Authors of the articles represent various generations and scholarly approaches. The common characteristic is their frequent reevaluation of primary and secondary sources as well as the popular perception of truth. Important part of the journal consists of book reviews.
The Polish Center for Holocaust Research is an academic and research center at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. The center's director is historian Barbara Engelking.
Luba Bielicka Blum was a Polish socialist activist of the Bund, and a nurse in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Maurycy Allerhand was a Polish lawyer and the Professor of Law at the Lviv University. His authored more than 1,000 works including publications in the field of procedural law as well as civil and commercial ethnography. He was murdered in Belzec during the Holocaust.
Henryka Łazowertówna ; alsoHenryka Lazowert, or incorrectly Lazawert, was a Polish lyric poet. While in general deeply personal in nature and of great emotive intensity, her poetry is not devoid of social concerns and patriotic overtones. She is considered one of the eminent Polish authors of Jewish descent.
The Monument to the Ghetto Heroes is a monument in Warsaw, Poland, commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 during the Second World War. It is located in the area which was formerly a part of the Warsaw Ghetto, at the spot where the first armed clash of the uprising took place.
The Warsaw Ghetto boundary markers are memorial plaques and boundary lines that mark the maximum perimeter of the former ghetto established by Nazi Germany in 1940 in occupied Warsaw, Poland.
Mira Fuchrer was a Polish Jewish activist of the Jewish resistance movement in the Warsaw Ghetto during the occupation of Poland in World War II; member of the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB), and resistance fighter during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. Surrounded by the Germans and their auxiliaries in the ghetto bunker, she refused to surrender and committed suicide with the other members of the Jewish resistance.
Władysław Szlengel was a Jewish-Polish poet, lyricist, journalist, and stage actor.
Jan Grabowski is a Polish-Canadian professor of history at the University of Ottawa, specializing in Jewish–Polish relations in German-occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust in Poland.
Barbara Engelking is a Polish sociologist specializing in Holocaust studies. The founder and director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw, she is the author or editor of several works on the Holocaust in Poland.
Dalej jest noc: losy Żydów w wybranych powiatach okupowanej Polski, co-edited by Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, is a two-volume study published in 2018 by the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw, Poland. The book covers, in case-study analyses, the history of Jews during the Holocaust in nine rural areas of the German-administered General Government. An abridged English-language version of the book is planned for September 2022, to be published by the Indiana University Press.
The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City is a 2009 book by Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak. It was first published in Polish in 2001 as Getto warszawskie. Przewodnik po nieistniejącym mieście. The book focuses on the Warsaw Ghetto.