1
The Candidate’s Self-description
1. Name: Magdalena Gawin, born on 19 January 1972 in Warsaw
2. Diplomas, academic/artistic degrees, specifying the name of the degree, the place and year they were awarded and the title of the doctoral thesis:
Master of Arts in history from the Institute of History, University of Warsaw – 1996
Ph. D. from the Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences – 2002, the degree awarded on the basis of the doctoral thesis: Higiena rasy. Historia polskiego ruchu eugenicznego 1880-1952 (Racial hygiene. A history of the Polish eugenics movement 1880-1952). The thesis was written under the supervision of Professor Janusz Żarnowski.
3. Employment history:
Since 1996 – employed at the T. Manteuffel Historical Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw
4. a) Title of the academic achievement:
Spór o równouprawnienie kobiet 1864-1919 (The dispute on equal rights for women 1864-1919), Wydawnictwo Instytutu Historii PAN, Warszawa 2015 Editorial reviewers: Professor Grażyna Szelągowska and Professor Andrzej Chwalba
b) Description of the academic objective:
The book Spór o równouprawnienie kobiet 1864-1919 (The dispute on equal rights for women 1864-1919) shows an evolution taking place over several decades of the idea of women’s emancipation, with an emphasis on political rights. Thus, the book is neither a 2 history of the first wave of feminism nor an overview of milieus of active women. It is a book on the evolution of ideas and strategies conducive to women’s emancipation employed from the 1864-1864 January Uprising until the first parliamentary election in the restored Polish state in 1919. Naturally, the January Uprising viewed as a watershed does not mark the beginning of the emancipation of women as such, but it marks the beginning of its next stage, which differs from the earlier stages by demands for equal rights for women. The dispute mentioned in the title means both a debate and a polemic, which are a space of confrontation between various clashing ideas on women’s place and role in public life. This assumption is not identical with a dichotomous division into advocates and opponents of women’s emancipation. The challenge and response pattern, borrowed from Arnold Toynbee’s1 well-known conception has proved to be much more useful for my analysis. In terms of methodology, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s and Barbara Caine’s books have come in useful. The two last-mentioned authors attempted to demonstrate the various styles of thinking characteristic of Victorian culture by using examples of particular individuals, beginning with their biographies, education, careers as well as the intellectual circles they moved in2. Of major importance to my analysis were the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre, which drew my attention to the problem of axiology and suggested a number of interesting interpretation tropes3. The choice of the book’s protagonists may seem arbitrary, but a historian studying the history of the 19th and 20th centuries is always forced to select sources and individuals around whom he spins his narrative. The selection criteria may be limited to the editors of a single journal, to a single organization or a geographical area. I was not, however, interested in any particular territory in Poland, nor in a collective body in the form of a journal, but in culture in its one particular aspects, namely the place where culture and politics mutually permeate. I attempted to get to the most interesting and most inspiring voices of that era so as to avoid the risk of trivialization of ideas, which appears whenever we enter the realm of history of mentality4. Some characters open up the way for showing entire milieus; such is the
1 J. A. Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol. 2: Abridgement of Volumes VII-X, abridged edition by D. C. Somervell, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1985. Jerzy Jedlicki also uses this method (op. cit.). 2 B. Caine, Victorian feminists, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1992; G. Himmelfarb, The De-Moralization of Society. From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values, ed. Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1995. 3 Alasdair MacIntyre, After virtue, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana 1984. 4 Gertrude Himmelfarb points to a certain danger inherent in the history of mentality; the process of striving towards an identification of mental structures, such as sentiments, emotions, behavioural patterns, values and the mind, takes place at the expense of ideas that are an emanation of the best thinking styles of the era and its greatest writers. Historians of mentality tend to focus on second- and third-rate literature (acting on assumption that writings of this kind are better tools for exploring the past), ignoring the works of the best writers. She also criticizes the diminishing of the role of politics, an excessively suspicious view of ideas that are supposed to be 3 case with Kuczalska-Reinschmit, Rodziewiczówna and Szczerbińska, while others epitomize the important ideological currents of the time: liberalism (Orzeszkowa, Prus), socialism combined with aspirations to national independence (Kelles-Krauz) and nationalism (Dmowski, Balicki). I have also included figures who, though they were not, and are not, assigned to any particular ideological formations, seriously influenced the direction of the ongoing debate. This is true of the poet Maria Konopnicka as well as of the modernist actress and playwright Gabriela Zapolska. My protagonists are representatives of three generations of the intelligentsia and the landed gentry, major public figures who found themselves confronted with the idea of women’s emancipation5. The work is situated on a borderline between two different genres of historical writing: the history of ideas, mentality, social life and politics6. I was also inspired by books that do not directly touch on women’s emancipation, but from which I learned how to read that era’s intellectual climate, how to compare the values that were called for with those followed in real life, to confront opinions well-established in the existing literature with the sources, and, most importantly, to pay attention to axiological issues. ‘Liberal virtues’, ‘valour’, ‘modernization risk’, ‘the variant of separate spheres’, ‘heroic deed’, ‘social solidarity’, ‘work ethos’ and ‘equality and liberty’: as I kept reading through the sources, they emerged as the main slogans, explaining the way of thinking as well as the tactic employed by selected individuals and, occasionally, by entire milieus7.
the property of a narrow elite. Cf. G. Himmelfarb, The New History and The Old. Critical Essays and Reappraisals, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge–Massachusetts–London 1987, p. 99. 5 The oldest characters depicted in the book either participated in the January Uprising or remembered it from the adult’s perspective, the middle generation is represented by people born in the 1860s and 1870s, while the youngest participants of the debate were born in the 1880s or slightly afterwards. There is ample bibliography on the generation-oriented approach to the history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; I would like to mention merely two books here: B. Cywiński, Rodowody niepokornych (The Lineages of the Haughty), Editions Spotkania, Paryż 1985; R. Wapiński, Pokolenia Drugiej Rzeczpospolitej (The Generations of the Second Polish Republic), Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, Wrocław 1991. 6 On the eclecticism of the research methods in the study of history, cf.: E. Domańska, Mikrohistorie. Spotkania w międzyświatach (Microhistories. Encounters in interworlds), Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, Poznań 2005; M. Kurkowska-Budzan, Historia zwykłych ludzi. Współczesna angielska historiografia dziejów społecznych (A history of ordinary people. Contemporary British social historiography), Towarzystwo Wydawnicze ‘Historia Iagiellonica’, Kraków 2003; J. Topolski, Jak się pisze i rozumie historię; tajemnice narracji historycznej (How one writes and understands history; the secrets of historical narrative), Oficyna Wydawnicza Rytm, Warszawa 1998. 7 It was the following works that made it possible for me to notice the dimension of axiology (I am listing the most important ones only): G. Himmelfarb, On Looking into Abyss. Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society, ed. Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1994; eadem, One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution, Random House Inc., New York 1999; S. Filipowicz, Pochwała rozumu i cnoty. Republikańskie credo Ameryki (In praise of intellect and virtue. America’s Republican credo), Znak, Fundacja im. Stefana Batorego, Warszawa 1997; H. Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1958; eadem, ‘Berliner Salon’, Deutscher Almanach, 1932. 4
In the existing literature on the subject, women’s emancipation is generally classified as a social rather than a political issue; it tends to be compared with the peasant or Jewish question, together with which it constituted a complementary part of the press debates of a modernizing society. In the analysis presented in this book, the main emphasis has been shifted to the spheres of culture and politics; granting vote to women meant their joining the political community and being given a possibility to determine its destiny. I was interested in the views of activists on modern ideologies, in their responses to political events, in ideas on women’s role and place in politics, in worldview issues and in their attitudes towards religion and the Church. The women’s emancipation process emerged as part of the rise of a modern representative democracy and the idea of universal vote. Opinions on women’s emancipation were often shaped by politics; the questions of ‘who’ and ‘in the name of what’ (a milieu, an ideology) propagated slogans of reform of the legal status of men and women, would obscure other, more rational social premises. Another question is that of relations between granting equal rights to women and women’s emancipation. The semantic scopes of the two terms are different, naturally, the former meaning aspiring to an equal status with men in legal terms, the latter covering social practices, morality, mentality and customs, in addition to granting equal rights. In the era under discussion, the two terms were mostly used interchangeably, as synonyms. There are contexts, however, in which the term ‘emancipation’ itself was interpreted and construed in various ways. For example, in the feminist discourse stressing the antagonism between the sexes emancipation means liberating oneself from the patriarchal ways of thinking, while in the modernization discourse of female Christian democrats it means overcoming passivity and abandonment of habits that ill-conceived tradition had instilled in women. I was seeking to bring out and take into account this identity-focused context of emancipation. Generally, the granting of equal rights to women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is identified with the feminist movement, i.e. with activists organised in feminist organisations, for whom gender was if not the chief, then at least the ordering criterion in perceiving social problems and politics8. Such a narrowing down of the field of observation
8 Cf. A. Górnicka-Boratyńska, Stańmy się sobą. Cztery projekty emancypacji (1863–1939) (Let us become ourselves. Four emancipation projects [1863–1939]), Świat Literacki, Izabelin 2001. The author narrows down women’s emancipation to feminism, so as to radically broaden the meaning of the term eventually to cover ‘all aspirations towards equal rights’. She counts figures such as the National Democratic MP Gabriela Balicka and an activist working with peasants, Irena Kosmowska, a United Landowning Gentlewomen’s Circle member, later close to the Zaranie weekly, among feminists. If we were to follow this line of reasoning, the ranks of feminists would have to include Orzeszkowa, Konopnicka, Skłodowska-Curie, Szczawińska-Dawidowa, Kretkowska, Walewska, Rodziewicz, members of female religious congregations without habits and numerous other women who, while striving toward equal rights for women, were not feminists. 5 may be justified in two cases only: in researching feminist thought or the history of the first wave of feminism9. The equal rights slogans were propagated by female members of socialist and peasant parties, of Catholic, charitable and educational organizations. In other words, while each feminist was striving to achieve a status equal to that of men, not each equal rights advocate was a feminist. Many females breaking with the roles attributed to women, such as the patrons of emancipation: Maria Konopnicka, a mother of several children, separated from her husband and the main provider for her family, a major public figure, Eliza Orzeszkowa, a divorcee and well-known writer and Jadwiga Szczawińska-Dawidowa, the founder of the Flying University, a breeding ground of emancipation advocates, all rejected the feminist identity, but at the same time supported reforms aimed at equal rights for men and women. While some maintained an amiable distance from feminism, others, like Szczerbińska, felt they were feminists, but did not fight for women’s rights under the banners of feminist organizations. I did not want to take away their identities from my protagonists, or to impose any identities on them, I have been seeking to respect their various identifications. To recapitulate, in the 1890s in the Russian partition and in the Austrian district of Galicia two separate women’s milieus began to organize themselves and eventually registered their associations after the revolution of 1905: the independence-oriented Christian democratic United Landowning Gentlewomen’s Circle (Zjednoczone Koło Ziemianek, abbr. ZKZ) and the feminist Union for Equal Rights for Polish Women (Związek Równouprawnienia Kobiet Polskich, abbr. ZRKP). In 1905, a third and youngest women’s milieu emerged, namely one bringing together secondary school pupils and university students connected with the circles of independence fighters. They were members of the women’s section of the Combat Organization of the Polish Socialist Party (Organizacja Bojowa Polskiej Partii Socjalistycznej, abbr. OB PPS) and of the patriotic academic associations in Galicia. Accordingly, Catholic social solidarity, feminism and independence struggle mapped out three parallel strategies of striving towards equal rights for women. While the city and the culture of the intelligentsia were the natural environment both for feminists and for independence activists, landowning gentlewomen brought the equal rights slogans to country mansions and into the countryside.10
9 On the successive waves of feminism, cf. K. Offen, European Feminism, 1700–1950. A Political History, Stanford University Press, California–Stanford 2000. 10 I will only mention here several works concerning women in the 19th and 20th centuries; these are, most importantly, studies edited by A. Żarnowska and A. Szwarc, Kobieta i społeczeństwo na ziemiach polskich w XIX wieku (Woman and society in Polish territories in the 19th century), IH UW, Warszawa 1995; Kobieta i edukacja na ziemiach polskich w XIX i XX wieku (Woman and education in Polish territories in the 19th and 20th centuries), IH UW, Warszawa 1992; Kobieta i świat polityki (Woman and the world of politics), Wydawnictwo 6
The rise in Europe of the phenomenon of ‘Catholic feminism’ was a sign for the champions of more traditional values to join into the struggle for equal rights for women. Thus, while Karen Offen11, Steven C. House and Anne R. Kenney12 rightly term the milieu of French Catholic women ‘feminists’, to do the same with regard to the United Landowning Gentlewomen’s Circle would represent an abuse, not because they did not apply the term, but because they rejected it. To me, free self-identification, defining one’s own position, is the key criterion in introducing and describing various figures and milieus. Consequently, a question remains how to describe Catholic movements in various European countries that were striving towards equal rights for women, given that the term ‘Catholic feminism’ is not capacious enough? The following are typical features of the Christian democratic agenda: invoking the encyclical Rerum novarum, criticising capitalist exploitation and traditional charity work, looking for a third way between socialism and capitalism, supporting the cooperative movement, an affirmative approach to religion and
Sejmowe, Warszawa 1996; Kobieta i świat polityki. Polska na tle porównawczym w XIX i w początkach XX wieku (Woman and the world of politics. Poland in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries – a comparative study), IH UW, Warszawa 1994, Kobieta i kultura. Kobiety wśród twórców kultury intelektualnej i artystycznej w dobie rozbiorów i w niepodległym państwie polskim. Zbiór studiów (Woman and culture. Women among the architects of intellectual and artistic culture in the partitions era and in the independent Polish state. A collection of studies), DiG, Warszawa 1996; Kobieta i kultura życia codziennego. Wiek XIX i XX. Zbiór studiów (Woman and the culture of everyday life. The 19th and 20th centuries. A collection of studies), vol. 5, DiG, Warszawa 1997; Kobieta i praca. Wiek XIX i XX. Zbiór studiów (Woman and work. The 19th and 20th centuries. A collection of studies), vol. 6, DiG, Warszawa 2000; Kobieta i kultura czasu wolnego. Zbiór studiów (Woman and the culture of leisure. A collection of studies), DiG, Warszawa 2001; Kobieta i małżeństwo. Społeczno-kulturowe aspekty seksualności. Wiek XIX i XX. Zbiór studiów (Woman and marriage. The social and cultural aspects of sexuality. The 19th and 20th centuries. A collection of studies), DiG, Warszawa 2004; Kobieta i rewolucja obyczajowa. Społeczno-kulturowe aspekty seksualności. Wiek XIX i XX (Woman and a revolution in social mores. The social and cultural aspects of sexuality. The 19th and 20th centuries); J. Dufrat, Kobiety w kręgu lewicy niepodległościowej. Od Ligi Kobiet Pogotowia Wojennego do Ochotniczej Legii Kobiet (1908– 1918/1919) (Women in the circle of the independence-oriented left. From the Women’s War Emergency League to the Voluntary Legion of Women [1908–1918/1919]), Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, Toruń 2001; eadem, W służbie obozu marszałka Józefa Piłsudskiego. Związek Obywatelskiej Pracy Kobiet (In the service of Marshall Józef Piłsudski’s camp. Women’s Civic Work Union), Avalon, Kraków 2013; E. Kostrzewska, Ruch organizacyjny ziemianek w Królestwie Polskim na początku XX wieku. Zarys dziejów w świetle prasy (The organisational movement of landowning gentlewomen in the Kingdom of Poland in the early 20th century. An outline history in the light of the press), Ibidem, Łódź 2007; D. Kałwa, Kobieta aktywna w Polsce międzywojennej. Dylematy środowisk kobiecych (An active woman in interwar Poland. The dilemmas of women’s milieus), Towarzystwo Wydawnicze „Historia Iagellonica”, Kraków 2001; N. Stegmann, Die Töchter der geschlagenen Helden
13 The attitude of the United Landowning Gentlewomen’s Circle towards capitalism and the free market is a factor that clearly differentiates the Christian democratic and the national democratic agendas. In this sense, the Christian democratic agenda functioned primarily as a social movement and was not translated into politics. In Polish politics, Christian democracy did not succeed in gaining a position analogous to that of the National Democracy or the socialist circles. 14 The members of the United Landowning Gentlewomen’s Circle identified themselves more readily with the ‘Catholic socialism’ motto, which placed them in opposition both to Marxist socialism and to the National Democracy. The problem of religion in social history has been discussed in numerous articles and monographs, notably ones devoted to convents and monasteries. Religion, as a point of reference and a multi-aspect part of the identity of the emancipating women has been most exhaustively presented in the book: U. Philips, Narcyza Żmichowska. Feminizm i religia (Narcyza Żmichowska. Feminism and religion), transl. K. Bojarska, Fundacja Akademia Humanistyczna, IBL PAN, Warszawa 2008; and in a collective work: Kobiety i kultura religijna. Specyficzne cechy religijności kobiet w Polsce (Women and religious culture. The unique features of women’s religiosity in Poland), ed. J. Hoff, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Rzeszowskiego, Rzeszów 2006. 15 In this chapter I discuss the strategies of other feminist organisations, including the Union for Equal Rights for Women in Galicia. I also discuss the causes of the disproportion between the sizeable representation of suffragettes from Galicia, the Congress Kingdom of Poland and the Taken Lands as compared to a minute one from the Wielkopolska region. As I write in the introduction to my book, it was better to take this disproportion into account rather than model it to the state of desirable equality. The ways and strategies for action employed by women’s organizations were due to differences in the political systems, law and culture between individual partitions. 8 and the Union for Equal Rights for Polish Women. In Chapter Ten, ‘Towards equal rights’, I analyse draft constitutions of the Interim Council of State and the Regency Council, which did not provide for granting vote to women, mediation by suffragette circles, a crisis in the Women’s War Emergency League, the position of the Episcopate and the clergy on political rights for women and Józef Piłsudski’s role in forcing through universal vote without regard to gender. My book deals with the birth of a modern democracy with its distinctive feature of universal voting rights, with an interpretation and reinterpretation of the concept of citizenship, an attitude towards the ideologies of liberalism, nationalism and socialism, the ethnic versus the political definition of the nation; the whole complex of questions and problems that emancipating women faced at the turn of the 19th century. The problem of women’s emancipation was closely related to the issues of culture and civilization advancement in the 19th and 20th centuries. These issues found their reflection in a collection of essays entitled Bilet do nowoczesności. O kulturze polskiej w XIX-XX wieku (A ticket to modernity. On Polish culture in the 19th and 20th centuries, Warszawa 2014) and in a book written together with Bogusław Dorpat and Tadeusz Epsztein: Historie Polski w XIX wieku (Histories of Poland in the 19th century), edited by Andrzej Nowak, vol. 1 Kominy, ludzie i obłoki: modernizacja i kultura (Chimneys, people and clouds: modernization and culture; DiG, Warszawa 2013), chapter: ‘Przemiany cywilizacyjne na ziemiach polskich w XIX wieku’, (Civilization changes in Polish territories in the 19th century, p. 177-266).
5. Presentation of the remaining academic (artistic) achievements
My second academic interest is the history of science, notably physical anthropology, psychiatry, serology, venereology and eugenics. This is reflected in my doctoral thesis on the Polish eugenics movement (published under the title: ‘Rasa i nowoczesność. Historia polskiego ruchu eugenicznego 1880-1952’ [Race and modernity. A history of the Polish eugenics movement 1880-1952], Neriton, Warszawa 2002). After completing my doctoral dissertation I initiated and organized (in cooperation with Dr S. Kuźma, American Studies Center, University of Warsaw) an exhibition on the Polish and foreign eugenics movement, describing its origins, its dynamism in the years between the First and the Second World Wars, the period of Nazi racial hygiene in occupied Poland and the gradual decline of Polish and foreign eugenics in the aftermath of the Second World War. The bilingual multimedia 9 exhibition, presented in April 2008 in the hall of Warsaw’s University Library, met with a favourable reception from an international group of scholars. I also organized an international scientific conference accompanying the exhibition. Cooperation with Oxford Brooks University resulted in a book (Eugenika – Biopolityka – Państwo [Eugenics – Biopolitics – State], eds. M. Gawin and K. Uzarczyk, Warszawa 2010).
I have carried out preliminary research (archives, scientific articles, biographical themes) on the writings of one of the most prominent European serologists, Professor Ludwik Hirszfeld. I am currently working on an article on the change in research paradigms in sero-anthropology in the late 1920s and the early 1930s. In the 1930s, Polish anthropologists put forward a thesis concerning an inconsistency between the so-called racial type and the blood type (based on the results of the examination of 80 000 soldiers, from whom anthropological measurements and blood samples were taken). They also questioned the practice of identifying nationality with the anthropological type or with the category of race in general. The divergent paths followed by Italian, German and Polish anthropology and eugenics in the 1930s are an interesting example of diversification of scientific communities under the pressure of growing eliminative anti-Semitism in the Third Reich and fascism in Italy. I would like to demonstrate how far the Nazi system deviated from the accepted research paradigms, replacing them with purely political slogans. The involvement of German scientists in criminal totalitarian practices (mandatory sterilization, experiments carried out in camps, the so-called euthanasia campaign) is indisputable, but it was not medical knowledge that was the source of opinions on the genetic transmission of diseases or the purported connection between blood types and racial types. The reason for the involvement of German scientists and physicians in these criminal practices was essentially their extreme political opportunism. While the eugenic idea, indisputably a negative phenomenon, did carry a distinct discriminatory component, it did not lead directly to the extermination of entire groups of people. Nor was there a single eugenics, but a number of variants of eugenics (even within Germany itself until 1933) without the potential for extermination. Based on new research, the theme of sero-anthropology will also be included in the English edition of Rasa i nowoczesność that is currently being prepared. I am also working on a review of the most recent book by Paul Weindling, one of the most outstanding historians of science, devoted to medical experiments in Nazi concentration camps (Victims of Nazi Human Experiments. Science and Suffering in the Holocaust, Bloomsbury, 2015). The book is based on a wide variety of sources. Materials collected in archives in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, 10
Poland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States were used. In Germany alone, the research was carried out in ten archives. Unlike popular science works or fragmentary studies, Weindling’s research shows the numbers and state affiliations of the victims and (in some cases) their nationality as well as the direction in which the criminal research was headed, the goals that had been set and the results obtained. The author locates the origins of medical experiments not in the occupation realities but in the period preceding the outbreak of the war. He shows the transformation of the Third Reich’s legal system in the 1930s, which gave German doctors the right to carry out mass sterilizations and to harvest the victims’ organs for experimental purposes. No lesser role was played by reformed or new research institutions closely connected with Nazi power centres.
3. Yet another academic interest of mine is the microhistory of the German occupation in Poland and the subsequent bringing the perpetrators of the wartime crimes to justice in the Polish People’s Republic, as exemplified by the Ostrów Mazowiecka county (Polish: powiat, German: Kreishauptmannschaf). I became interested in the Second World War in the course of my research into Nazi racial hygiene; this interest of mine has been reflected both in books and articles. For over two years, I have been carrying out library research in archives in Warsaw (the Archive of the Capital City of Warsaw, the Institute of National Remembrance, the Archive of New Records in Warsaw), Lviv (the District Archive in Lviv), Katowice (the State Archive in Katowice), Cracow (the Jagiellonian University archive), Pułtusk (Pułtusk Branch of the State Archive) and Ludwigsburg in Germany. I have made a few dozen scheduled interviews with the witnesses of events and their families. I have obtained the consent of the prosecutors from the Institute of National Remembrance to examine the files of all investigations concerning Ostrów Mazowiecka carried out by the Central Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland (Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce, abbr. GKBZH) in the Polish People’s Republic. I have acquainted myself with the secret investigations carried out by the Security Office/Security Service (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa/Służba Bezpieczeństwa, abbr. UB/SB). Furthermore, I have gained access to the private archive of the late historian Dr Mieczysław Bartniczak, who between the 1960s and the 1980s collected eyewitness accounts of German crimes, of the former concentration camp inmates, Home Army servicemen, soldiers fighting in the defence war of 1939 and the witnesses who gave testimony before the Central Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland. At the same time, he corresponded with the German and Israeli embassies and stayed in contact with the Polish-Jewish diaspora in Israel and the USA. Both the secret 11
Security Office investigations and the private correspondence complement the official testimonies before the Central Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland, revealing the less well known areas of the realities of the German occupation of Poland. The records of the county authorities’ office for the German period are also an excellent source for reconstructing various aspects of daily life, the functioning of Poles under the German administration, the brutally exploitative German economy, the size of the county population with a break-up into men and women and the waves of wartime migrations.
The area under investigation: In the interwar period, the 18th Light Artillery Regiment was stationed and an Infantry Officer Cadet School was based in the town of Komorów. During the war, the borders of the Ostrów Mazowiecka county were changed: its eastern part was incorporated into the Łomża district, and the western part, expanded through the incorporation of the Pułtusk and Ostrołęka counties, was turned into the occupation Ostrów county (German: Kreishauptmannschaft Ostrau). This was the northernmost administrative unit of the General Government, bordering on Bezirk Bialystok along a 65-kilometre stretch; it comprised three towns: Brok, Ostrów Mazowiecka and Wyszków as well as rural communes (Brańszczyk, Czerwin, Długosiodło, Goworowo, Małkinia, Poręba, Sominka, Wąsewo). The communes encompassed two hundred and sixteen villages. Until 1941, the border with the USSR was situated two kilometres away from Ostrów Mazowiecka. In the local forests (Puszcza Biała) there was a strong (first anti-German and later anti-communist) partisan movement; it was also in those woods that groups of Polish citizens of Jewish nationality were hiding. In Ostrów itself, the first case of mass extermination of Jews occurred (11 November 1939), and in the Ostrów Mazowiecka county (as it was under the German occupation) one of the greatest mass murders in the Polish countryside was committed (Lipnik Majorat, 2 September 1944, over 400 victims). The Treblinka extermination camp was situated less than twenty kilometres away from Ostrów Mazowiecka, while in Grądy and Komorów there were stalags (prisoner-of-war camps) for Soviet soldiers. 16
16 Foreign scholars take an interest in the mass extermination of Ostrów Jews; the most extensive account is provided by Roth, A. Schmidt: Judenmord in Ostrów Mazowiecka: Tat und Achtung, Berlin, Metropol Verlag 2013; it is also mentioned by Christopher Hale in Hitler's Foreign Executioners: Europe's Dirty Secret, The History Press, 2011; Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Jochen Böhler und Jürgen Matthäus: Einsatzgruppen in Polen: Darstellung und Dokumentation. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Stuttgart 2008. None of the works quoted above have taken into consideration the four-volume 1971 investigation file from the Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw 2009. The extermination of the Ostrów intelligentsia is mentioned by M. Wardzyńska, Był rok 1939. Operacja niemieckiej policji bezpieczeństwa w Polsce
Project description: The region is also interesting in view of its ethnic make-up. The presence of Jews is obvious, what is less noted is the German settlement (some villages, such as Płatkownica, were purely German, while others had ethnically mixed populations). In Polish historiography there is a shortage of studies on the microhistory of the Second World War for particular regions of Poland17; what is lacking is a description of the attitudes of the civilian population in the face of terror, the survival strategies adopted first vis-à-vis the German occupying forces and later vis-à-vis the communist authorities, the various forms of collaboration, the liquidity of national self-identification (Volksliste) and daily life. What is also missing is research into the fates of individuals disgraced by collaborating with the Germans and their subsequent reintegration in society in the framework of the communist system after 1944. I will analyse the dynamism of filing charges in the postwar period and investigations into collaboration with the occupying forces (what are the periods in which the most charges are filed and why this tendency discontinues afterwards), the asymmetry of the activities of the Security Office/Security Service (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa/Służba Bezpieczeństwa, abbr. UB/SB) with respect to the underground fighting for independence and
Madajczyk, PWN Warszawa 1965. On the town of Ostrów Mazowiecka, its history and the progress of the German occupation cf. M. Bartniczak, ‘Eksterminacja ludności w powiecie Ostrów Mazowiecka w latach okupacji hitlerowskiej (1939-1944)’ (The extermination of the population in the Ostrów Mazowiecka county during the Nazi occupation [1939-1944]), Rocznik Mazowiecki 1974, Issue 5, idem, Grądy i Komorowo. Z dziejów Stalagów 324 i 333 (Grądy and Komorowo. From the history of Stalags 324 and 333), Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej, Warszawa 1978; Od Andrzejewa do Pecynki (From Andrzejewo to Pecynka), Książka i Wiedza, Warszawa 1984; Ostrów Mazowiecka i okolice. Panorama historyczno-krajoznawcza (Ostrów Mazowiecka and its environs. A historical and tourist panorama), Instytut Wydawniczy Związków Zawodowych, Warszawa 1987; Gimnazjum i Liceum Ogólnokształcące w Ostrowi Mazowieckiej 1909-1999 (The Grammar School in Ostrów Mazowiecka 1909-1999), ed. J. Dzieniszewski and A. Dobroński, the Circle of Alumni of the Grammar School, Ostrów Mazowiecka 1999; and numerous other works concerning the history of the region. 17 The Second World War microhistories in Poland usually concern either the history of the Holocaust or the history of the armed underground struggling for independence during the Second World War and in its aftermath. I will mention just a few examples: J. T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2001; J. Grabowski, Judenjagdt. Polowanie na Żydów 1942-1945. Studium z dziejów pewnego powiatu (Judenjagdt. A hunt for Jews 1942-1945. A study from the history of a certain county), the Polish Center for Holocaust Studies, Warszawa 2011; M. Bechta, Między Bolszewią a Niemcami. Konspiracja polityczna i wojskowa Polskiego Obozu Narodowego na Podlasiu w latach 1939-1952 (Between the Bolshevia and the Germans. The political and military conspiracy of the Polish National Camp in the Podlasie region in 1939-1952), The Institute for National Remembrance – Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, Warszawa 2008; K. Krajewski, Żołnierze wyklęci Mazowsza i Podlasia 1944-1952 (The ‘cursed soldiers’ of Mazovia and Podlasie 1944-1952), IPN, Warszawa 2011; Powiat Siedlce w pierwszej dekadzie rządów komunistycznych (The Siedlce county in the first decade of the communist rule), IPN, Warszawa 2011; Powiat Pułtusk. Materiały z sesji naukowej: Represje i opór przeciw rządom komunistycznym w powiecie Pułtusk po 1944 roku (The Pułtusk county. The proceedings of an academic session: Repression and resistance against the communist rule in the Pułtusk county after 1944), IPN, the Historical Department of the Pułtusk Academy of the Humanities, ed. K. Krajewski, Warszawa 2008; Sokołów Podlaski. Materiały z sesji naukowej: Represje i opór przeciw rządom komunistycznym w powiecie Sokołów Podlaski po 1944 roku (Sokołów Podlaski. The proceedings of an academic session: Repression and resistance against the communist rule in the Sokołów Podlaski county after 1944.), ed. K. Krajewski, IPN, ŚZŻAK, Oficyna Wydawnicza Rytm, Warszawa 2007. 13 individuals collaborating with the Germans; a numerical comparison between investigations and convictions in both types of cases, the effectiveness of the persecution of German criminals: a list of names, investigations and convictions in the Polish People’s Republic, the post-war survival strategies of individuals accused of cooperation with the German occupying forces. In connection with my research at the Institute of National Remembrance, there is an ongoing prosecutor’s investigation instituted at my request (the prosecutor in charge: Edyta Myślewicz). In 2016 I will publish the first articles on the German occupation and on bringing the perpetrators of the wartime crimes to justice; also, I will continue my archival research. Beginning in December 2015, I am also starting work on the conception and scenario of an exhibition under a working title: ‘The Birth of the Government System in 1944-1956’, to be organised under the patronage of the Museum of Polish History in 2016.