Katarzyna Person is a Polish historian. Her work focuses on Polish Jews of the Holocaust and its aftermath.
Born in 1982, Person is the daughter of Polish journalist and politician Andrzej Person. She grew up and lives in Warsaw where she studied journalism at the University of Warsaw. In 2010 under the supervision of David Cesarani she obtained a PhD in history at the University of London for her thesis on aspects of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. [1] She received, a postdoctoral fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2016-2017, Institute of Contemporary History (Munich)) during which she worked on a project exploring relations between Polish and Jewish Displaced Persons in postwar Germany, focusing in particular on Bavaria, and postdoctoral fellowships from the International Institute for Holocaust Research in Yad Vashem, the Center for Jewish History in New York City and the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah (Foundation for the Memory of Shoah) in Paris. [2] , and a Maria Skłodowska-Curie fellowship in the Horizon Europe Programme (2020-2022, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich), a fellowship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation (2022-2023, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich). [3]
As head of the scientific department of the Jewish Historical Institute, she coordinated the publication of the complete edition of the Ringelblum Archive. [2] She still coordinates the English edition of this archival collection. In 2020, she obtained a habilitation in history based on the thesis entitled Dipisi. Polish Jews in the American and British Occupation Zones of Germany, 1945–1948 at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. [4] In 2024 Person was appointed deputy director of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum and continues (as of 2024) to head the scientific department of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute. [5] Person is director of the Full Edition of the Ringelblum Archive publication project At the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. [6]
Person was awarded a 2024 $300,000 Dan David Prize for her work on Holocaust archives and the recovery of marginalized voices at the Warsaw Ghetto Museum. [6] [7] For her book Policemen: the image of the Jewish Order Service in the Warsaw Ghetto, she was nominated for the 2019 Polityka Historical Awards [8] and the Kazimierz Moczarski Historical Award. [9]
The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of the Nazi ghettos during World War II and the Holocaust. 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. Jews were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto 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 Uprising 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.
Emanuel Ringelblum was a Polish historian, politician and social worker, known for his Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, Notes on the Refugees in Zbąszyn chronicling the deportation of Jews from the town of Zbąszyń, and the so-called Ringelblum Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The Ringelblum Archive is a collection of documents from the World War II Warsaw Ghetto, collected and preserved by a group known by the codename Oyneg Shabbos, led by Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum. The group, which included historians, writers, rabbis, and social workers, was dedicated to chronicling life in the Ghetto during the German occupation. They worked as a team, collecting documents and soliciting testimonies and reports from dozens of volunteers of all ages. The materials submitted included essays, diaries, drawings, wall posters, and other materials describing life in the Ghetto. The archive assembly began in September 1939 and ended in January 1943; the material was buried in the ghetto in three caches.
Umschlagplatz was the term used during The Holocaust to denote the holding areas adjacent to railway stations in occupied Poland where Jews from ghettos were assembled for deportation to Nazi death camps. The largest collection point was in Warsaw next to the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1942 between 254,000 – 265,000 Jews passed through the Warsaw Umschlagplatz on their way to the Treblinka extermination camp during Operation Reinhard, the deadliest phase of the Holocaust in Poland. Often those awaiting the arrival of Holocaust trains, were held at the Umschlagplatz overnight. Other examples of Umschlagplatz include the one at Radogoszcz station - adjacent to the Łódź Ghetto - where people were sent to Chełmno extermination camp and Auschwitz.
Following the establishment of the Second Polish Republic after World War I and during the interwar period, the number of Jews in the country grew rapidly. According to the Polish national census of 1921, there were 2,845,364 Jews living in the Second Polish Republic; by late 1938 that number had grown by over 16 percent, to approximately 3,310,000, mainly through migration from Ukraine and the Soviet Russia. The average rate of permanent settlement was about 30,000 per annum. At the same time, every year around 100,000 Jews were passing through Poland in unofficial emigration overseas. Between the end of the Polish–Soviet War of 1919 and late 1938, the Jewish population of the Republic grew by nearly half a million, or over 464,000 persons. Jews preferred to live in the relatively-tolerant Poland rather than in the Soviet Union and continued to integrate, marry into Polish Gentile families, to bring them into their community through marriage, feel Polish and form an important part of Polish society. Between 1933 and 1938, around 25,000 German Jews fled Nazi Germany to sanctuary in Poland.
Szymon Datner was a Polish historian, Holocaust survivor and underground operative from Białystok, who was born in Kraków and died in Warsaw. He is best known for his studies of the Nazi war crimes and events of The Holocaust in the Białystok region. His 1946 Walka i zagłada białostockiego ghetta was one of the first studies of the Białystok Ghetto.
The Holocaust in Poland was the ghettoization, robbery, deportation and mass murder of Jews, alongside other groups under similar racial pretexts in occupied Poland by the Nazi Germany. 3,000,000+ Polish Jews were murdered, primarily at the Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz extermination camps, who made up half of the Jewish Holocaust victims.
The Jewish Police Service, commonly known as Jewish Ghetto Police, also called the Jewish Police by Jews, were auxiliary police units organized within the Nazi ghettos by local Judenrat.
Calel (Calek) Perechodnik was a diarist who joined the Jewish Ghetto Police in the Otwock Ghetto during the Nazi German occupation of Poland. His wartime diaries were published posthumously as Am I a Murderer? in 1995 by the Karta Centre of Warsaw.
Abraham Gancwajch (1902–1943) was a prominent Nazi collaborator in the Warsaw Ghetto during the World War II occupation of Poland, and a Jewish kingpin of the ghetto underworld. Opinions about his ghetto activities are controversial, though modern research concludes unanimously that he was an informer and collaborator motivated chiefly by personal interest.
The Jewish Historical Institute, also known as the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, is a public cultural and research institution in Warsaw, Poland, chiefly dealing with the history of Jews in Poland and Jewish culture.
Polish Jews were the primary victims of the Nazi Germany-organized Holocaust in Poland. Throughout the German occupation of Poland, Jews were rescued from the Holocaust by Polish people, at risk to their lives and the lives of their families. According to Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, Poles were, by nationality, the most numerous persons identified as rescuing Jews during the Holocaust. By January 2022, 7,232 people in Poland have been recognized by the State of Israel as Righteous among the Nations.
Samuel D. Kassow is an American historian of the history of Ashkenazi Jewry.
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 Little Smuggler" is a famous poem by the Polish poet Henryka Łazowertówna (1909–1942). Written in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust, it tells the story of a small child who supports his starving family by — illegally, under Nazi dispensation — bringing over food supplies from the "Aryan side", thereby allowing for his family's survival while at the same time risking his own life. Indeed, the last stanza of the poem gives expression to the heroic child's fear — not of his own death but that of his mother who, in the event of the loss of her child, would be left without her daily sustenance.
Szlama Ber Winer, nom de guerreYakov (Ya'akov) Grojanowski, was a Polish Jew from Izbica Kujawska, who escaped from the Chełmno extermination camp during the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland. Szlamek is sometimes incorrectly referred to as Szlamek Bajler in literature by the surname of his nephew, Abram Bajler, from Zamość (see postcard). Szlama Ber Winer escaped from the Waldlager work commando at Chełmno, and described in writing the atrocities he witnessed at that extermination camp, not long before his own subsequent murder at the age of 30, in the gas chambers of Bełżec. The original testimony transcribed from Winer's testimony is called 'The Account of a Forced Grave Digger' and was recovered from the Ringelblum Archive after the war. This material was reworked and transmitted through the Polish underground. The deposition that was sent out through the underground is commonly known as the Grojanowski Report.
Frumka Płotnicka was a Polish resistance fighter during World War II; activist of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB) and member of the Labour Zionist organization Dror. She was one of the organizers of self-defence in the Warsaw Ghetto, and participant in the military preparations for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Following the liquidation of the Ghetto, Płotnicka relocated to the Dąbrowa Basin in southern Poland. On the advice of Mordechai Anielewicz, Płotnicka organized a local chapter of ŻOB in Będzin with the active participation of Józef and Bolesław Kożuch as well as Cwi (Tzvi) Brandes, and soon thereafter witnessed the murderous liquidation of both Sosnowiec and Będzin Ghettos by the German authorities.
Rokhl Auerbakh was an Israeli writer, essayist, historian, Holocaust scholar, and Holocaust survivor. She wrote prolifically in both Polish and Yiddish, focusing on prewar Jewish cultural life and postwar Holocaust documentation and witness testimonies. She was one of the three surviving members of the covert Oyneg Shabes group led by Emanuel Ringelblum that chronicled daily life in the Warsaw Ghetto, and she initiated the excavation of the group's buried manuscripts after the war. In Israel, she directed the Department for the Collection of Witness Testimony at Yad Vashem from 1954 to 1968.
Cecylia Słapakowa was a Polish-Jewish journalist and translator. She is most known for her work for the Ringelblum Archive, then code-named the "Oyneg Shabbos" project, established by Emanuel Ringelblum.