Poland’s parliament named 2014 the Year of Jan Karski, honoring the man who alerted the allies about the Holocaust and sought their intervention. Last week’s unanimous vote in the Sejm marked the centennial of the birth of Karski. Karski, not Jewish and born in Lodz in 1914, was a courier for the Polish underground resistance…
Archeologists working in the Krasinski Garden in Warsaw discovered fragments of two human skeletons that likely were buried there during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The park is located near the site of the former ghetto, but was never part of the ghetto itself. The archeologists are searching through the archive of the Jewish socialist party…
A memoir, “The Author of Himself: The Life of Marcel Reich-Ranicki published by Princeton University Press in 2001, recounts the unlikely story of how a Polish Jewish escapee from the Warsaw Ghetto managed to become the so-called “Pope of Literature” (Der Literatur-Papst) in postwar Germany. The critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who died yesterday at the age…
Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Germany’s best-known literary critic and a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, died on Wednesday aged 93, his publisher said. Reich-Ranicki, a Jew born in Poland in 1920, almost perished at the Nazis’ hands in World War Two but went on to become one of the leading advocates of German literature and culture during…
Friends and neighbors were stunned at revelations that an elderly suburban Minneapolis man was actually a wanted Nazi killer with ties to killings at the Warsaw Ghetto, the Associated Press reported. Michael Karkoc, 94, had lived for decades without anyone suspecting his past in a murderous SS unit, the report claimed. “I know him personally….
While an older generation of German historians focused on the crimes of the perpetrators of the Holocaust, a younger generation has turned to the stories of the victims. Opinion editor Gal Beckerman sits down with Dr. Andrea Löw, the author of a new book, Das Warschauer Getto, about everyday life within the Warsaw Ghetto.
● Vera Gran: The Accused By Agata Tuszynska Translated from the French of Isabelle Jannes-Kalinowski by Charles Ruas Alfred A. Knopf, 320 pages, $28.95 To contemporary American readers, the name Vera Gran may be unfamiliar. But Gran was a celebrated singer, a beauty with an unusually deep voice and a passionate following in Poland and…
A fight over memory overshadows Poland’s commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The controversy surfaced as the April 19 commemoration neared, with information from prominent Jewish activists that the government intended to use the occasion to announce plans for a monument to Righteous Gentiles on the grounds of the former ghetto,…
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