Jews in Poland immediately after the Holocaust
Warsaw is the capital of Poland and also the largest city in the country (population in 2024: 1,863,845). It is located in the Mazovian Voivodeship on Poland's longest river, the Vistula. Warsaw first became the capital of the Polish-Lithuanian noble republic at the end of the 16th century, replacing Krakow, which had previously been the Polish capital. During the partitions of Poland-Lithuania, Warsaw was occupied several times and finally became part of the Prussian province of South Prussia for eleven years. From 1807 to 1815 the city was the capital of the Duchy of Warsaw, a short-lived Napoleonic satellite state; in the annexation of the Kingdom of Poland under Russian suzerainty (the so-called Congress Poland). It was not until the establishment of the Second Polish Republic after the end of World War I that Warsaw was again the capital of an independent Polish state.
At the beginning of World War II, Warsaw was conquered and occupied by the Wehrmacht only after intense fighting and a siege lasting several weeks. Even then, a five-digit number of inhabitants were killed and parts of the city, known not least for its numerous baroque palaces and parks, were already severely damaged. In the course of the subsequent oppression, persecution and murder of the Polish and Jewish population, by far the largest Jewish ghetto under German occupation was established in the form of the Warsaw Ghetto, which served as a collection camp for several hundred thousand people from the city, the surrounding area and even occupied foreign countries, and was also the starting point for deportation to labor and extermination camps.
As a result of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 18, 1943 and its suppression in early May 1943, the ghetto area was systematically destroyed and its last inhabitants deported and murdered. This was followed in the summer of 1944 by the Warsaw Uprising against the German occupation, which lasted two months and resulted in the deaths of almost two hundred thousand Poles, and after its suppression the rest of Warsaw was also systematically destroyed by German units.
In the post-war period, many historic buildings and downtown areas, including the Warsaw Royal Castle and the Old Town, were rebuilt - a process that continues to this day.
Stories in Photo Albums
The People's Republic of Poland was a socialist state in the Soviet sphere of influence that existed from 1944 to 1989 (until 1952 as the Republic of Poland). Its borders correspond to those of present-day Poland. The formal legitimization of the political system was based on the referendum of 1946 and the election of 1947, while the results of both were falsified. The parties of the so-called Democratic Bloc were forcibly united in 1948 in the Socialist Unity Party of the One-Party State, the communist Polish United Workers' Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, PZPR), which ruled until the end of the People's Republic.
Since photographs only played a subordinate role for many decades, both in historical research and within archives, in most cases there is no surviving information about the client or the photographer. In some cases, photos within individual collections became separated from the documents that they related to. Individual pictures were removed or lost, so that their background can no longer be reconstructed. This makes the collection of albums preserved by the JHI all the more valuable: here the photos appear as pictorial narratives and provide us with perspectives that were deliberately compiled for a particular audience. These collections were often produced by organizations such as the Central Committee of Jews in Poland (CKŻP)
Jewish life in post-war Poland
In
Lower Silesia is part of the historical region of Silesia, located in present-day Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic. Its borders roughly coincide with the former Prussian province of Lower Silesia with further areas in the north-west (parts of Upper Lusatia) and south, which also belonged to Silesia for a time, as well as part of the Voivodeship of Opole, which formerly belonged to the Duchy of Neisse. Its historical capital is Wrocław.
The Soviet Union (SU or USSR) was a state in Eastern Europe, Central and Northern Asia that existed from 1922 to 1991. It emerged from the so-called Soviet Russia, the successor state of the Russian Empire. The Russian Soviet Republic formed the core of the union and at the same time its largest part, with further constituent republics added. Their number varied over time and was related to the occupation of other countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Soviet republics that existed only for a short time (Karelo-Finlandia) or the division or merger of Soviet republics. In addition, there were numerous autonomous republics or other territorial units with an autonomy status that was essentially limited to linguistic autonomy for minorities.
Before its formal dissolution, the USSR consisted of 15 Soviet republics with a population of approximately 290 million people. At around 22.4 million km², it was the largest territorial state in the world at the time. The Soviet Union was a socialist soviet republic with a one-party system and an absence of separation of powers.
Kielce (population 2024: 180,537) is a large city in south-eastern Poland and also the capital of the Holy Cross Voivodeship. Kielce has been known to exist since the 11th century and was granted the Magdeburg city charter in 1364. Its successful development in the early modern period was based on its lead, copper and iron ore resources. The Swedish occupation during the Second Northern Shia War (1655-1660/61) and the subsequent unrest brought a break. It was not until the 18th century that the town recovered from the armed conflicts. With the 3rd Partition of Poland, it initially fell to the Habsburg Monarchy, from 1809 it belonged to the Duchy of Warsaw and from 1815-1918 to Russia. During the Second World War, the city was one of the most important centers of resistance against the German occupation. A ghetto was set up in Kielce in 1941-1942, from which many people were deported to the Treblinka concentration camp and killed. Immediately after the end of the First World War on November 11, 1918 and on July 4, 1946, pogroms of the Jewish population took place in the city, the second of which was bloodier with 37 deaths. Today, the city is an important industrial and commercial location and home to several universities.
For the majority of holocaust survivors, Poland resembled a gigantic cemetery, a place where millions of Jews who had been murdered by the German occupiers lay buried. This experience, together with the escalation of violence that continued even after the war, were the main reasons why many of the survivors had emigrated by the end of the decade.
Visions for the future: to go or to stay?
Title page.
The Mandate of Palestine was created as a result of the First World War and the territorial reorganization of the eastern Mediterranean territories (Levant) in the post-war years, which had previously belonged to the defeated Ottoman Empire. In the course of the war, the areas to the west and east of the Jordan River, which were historically also referred to as Cis- or Transjordan and correspond to the present-day states of Israel, Jordan, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, came under British rule. From 1916, Great Britain had decisively supported the regional Arab independence movement in the Arab Revolt (1916-1918), but subsequently divided the militarily conquered territories between itself and France. Even before the end of the war, Great Britain had assured not only the Arab but also the Jewish population of the region of support in achieving political independence and creating their own states (Balfour Declaration, 1917). The San Remo Conference, which decided on the division of the Ottoman Empire in April 1920, confirmed the British territorial claims. In 1922, the League of Nations also officially granted Great Britain a mandate over the territory.
As early as 1923, Great Britain divided this first Mandatory Palestine into two territories: “Transjordan”, which became independent in 1946 and has officially been known as Jordan since 1950; and the area still known as the Mandatory Palestine, which now comprised the historical Cisjordan or the part of the historical region of Palestine located west of the Jordan River and the Negev Desert to the south and which still had access to the Gulf of Aqaba and thus to the Red Sea.
The period of the Mandate was characterized by ongoing unrest between the Arab and Jewish populations of the Mandate territory. After the end of the Second World War, Great Britain gave up the Mandate and returned it to the United Nations (as the successor to the League of Nations), which then developed a partition plan for the region. However, this plan was never implemented, as tensions in the mandate territory escalated into the Palestine War (1947-1949), during which Israel was able to declare and successfully assert its independence.
The image shows a map of the British Mandate in Palestine between 1945 and 1947 (Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
The district-free city of Łódź (population 2024: 645.693) is located in the voivodeship of the same name in the center of Poland. The small town, which was insignificant until the 1820s, experienced an enormous boom after becoming the leading industrial center in the Autonomous Kingdom of Poland and one of the most important industrial centers in the entire Tsarist Empire. Because of the dominant textile industry, the town was nicknamed the "Manchester of Poland". However, housing construction and the expansion of infrastructure did not keep pace with the expansion of industry, so that in addition to magnificent palaces, large sections of the city's population lived in precarious conditions, often without sewers and without access to education.
After the end of the First World War, Łódź became part of the restored Polish state. In addition to rebuilding the war-damaged industry, there was also increased investment in improving the living conditions of the city's population. After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the city was incorporated into the German Reich and its official name was first changed to Lodz and then to Litzmannstadt. Between 1940 and 1944, the city was home to one of the largest ghettos in the Reich, in which, in addition to almost the entire local Jewish population (around 220,000, around a third of the city's population), Jews from other parts of Poland and abroad as well as Sinti and Roma were interned in a very small space. Only a few people survived the ghetto or the place where they were subsequently deported.
After the end of the Second World War in 1945, Łódź was an intact city. As the largest city in Poland at the time and due to its proximity to the formal but almost completely destroyed capital Warsaw, it functioned as the seat of government for three years.
The crisis in the textile industry began in the 1980s, only to collapse shortly after the political transformation began in the early 1990s. The city plunged into a deep crisis, as a result of which its population fell by 200,000 between 1989 and 2022. Łódź fell from second place in the ranking of the country's largest cities to fourth place after Krakow and Wrocław. In the 21st century, investment in redevelopment, the expansion of transport infrastructure and the cultural sector contributed to a significantly improved image of the city, which is now considered one of the most important locations for education, culture, the design industry and the film industry in Poland.
The albums of the two youth organizations illustrate the heterogeneity of Jews in Poland and their different visions for the future of the Jewish community. The Tsukunft album also makes it clear that, at least initially, many planned to remain in Poland.
Commemoration: Anniversaries of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
The first anniversary of the uprising took place while the German occupation was still ongoing.Participants in the uprising and Jews who were living in hiding secretly commemorated this act of opposition, which was the largest to take place during the Holocaust. On the second anniversary on 19 April 1945, a few people including survivors and former fighters as well as members of various Jewish parties met in the middle of the sea of ruins into which the Germans had transformed the ghetto when they suppressed the uprising. German troops had been forced out of the city in January of the same year, but the war was not yet over. The return of the population of the city of Warsaw following its deportation in the course of the uprising by the Polish Home Army in August and September 1944 had only just begun. But even at this early stage, the collective commemoration of the Uprising was considered so important that the CKŻP commissioned professional photographers to document the gathering.
Hope and a fresh start: Jewish life in Lower Silesia
Dzierżoniów (population in 2024: 30,312) is a county city in southwestern Poland in the Lower Silesian voivodeship. The city is located on the eastern edge of the Owl Mountains, on the Piława River. It is one of the oldest cities in Lower Silesia which obtained city rights around 1250. From 1392 it went to the Bohemian Crown and as a result belonged to the Habsburg Monarchy from 1526. In 1742 it fell to Prussia. Until 1945 it was known under its German name Reichenbach which was initially polonized to Rychbach, while the current name was given in 1946 to commemorate the priest Jan Dzierżoń (Johann Dzierzon), an outstanding Silesian bee researcher
![Zwei Mitglieder der jüdischen Selbstverteidigung bewachen das Kulturhaus; aus dem Album „Fotoreportage über jüdisches Leben in Niederschlesien“. Die Aufnahmen entstanden 1945–1946 in Rychbach [heute: Dzierżoniów]. Jüdisches Historisches Institut Emanuel](/sites/default/files/styles/content_d2/public/externals/a0e18142a26dd42ca84dafbb66ca193b.jpg?itok=QMFceJ56)
The Kielce Pogrom in the photographs by Julia Pirotte
How Julia Pirotte herself perceived the widespread violence against Jews in her homeland is not known. However, as a journalist for Żołnierz Polski (Polish Soldier), the weekly magazine of the Polish military, she was an attentive and critical observer. At the request of her editor, she travelled to Kielce during the night of 4-5 July, after news of the pogrom had spread. In a report about her experiences leading up to the funeral on 8 July, she quotes the following statement from one of the victims: “We lay the whole night outside the hospital. The doctors wouldn’t admit us. They also believed we’d killed a Polish child.”1 The antisemitic accusation of a ritual killing which sparked the pogrom, together with the persistently hostile attitude of the non-Jewish population towards the victims, are aspects that remain outside the photographs. And yet, these photos are special: Pirotte was one of only a few photojournalists at the scene. Her photos, three rolls of film containing 118 pictures, were lost shortly afterwards under circumstances that remain unclear until today. Pirotte made new negatives of some of the pictures from the few contact prints she had already made. Some of them were published in a report on the pogrom in Żołnierz Polski in 1946. However, the images – like the public memory of the pogrom – then disappeared for several decades. It was only on the 1991 anniversary of the pogrom that the photographer brought the photos from her private archive back to the public again.
Private perspectives, invisible realities
Photos capture moments that later turn out to have been fleeting. In 1947, Julia Pirotte photographed a banner in a Jewish workers’ cooperative in Warsaw. In Yiddish it says that the Polish People’s Democracy guarantees the free economic and cultural development of the Jewish population in Poland. Only two years later, however, the government had dissolved almost all Jewish organizations, and most of the Jewish inhabitants had left the country.
Info section
Authors
