La prochaine séance de l’atelier “Histoire des Juifs en Europe après 1945” aura lieu mercredi 29 janvier 2014, de 17h à 19h. Nous recevrons Lukasz Krzyzanowski, doctorant à l’Université de Varsovie, qui nous présentera (en anglais) une intervention intitulée “Hostilities in the Wake of the Holocaust: Anti-Jewish Violence in the Polish Town of Radom in 1945.” Sa présentation sera discutée par Daniel Blatman, professeur à l’Université hébraïque de Jérsualem.

La séance aura lieu au Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po, 56 rue Jacob 75006, salle du Traité (1er étage).

Résumé / Abstract

Hostilities in the Wake of the Holocaust: Anti-Jewish Violence in the Polish Town of Radom in 1945. In his dissertation Lukasz Krzyzanowski inquires Jews returning to Radom, a medium-sized city in central Poland immediately after the Second World War. By applying a micro-historical approach and tools available to social sciences, he is examining social trajectories of these Jews who were present in Radom in late 1940’s. Krzyzanowski is primarily interested in survivors’ adaptation strategies to new social, political, economical and legal realities they encountered upon their return (be it from the camps, hiding or the USSR). The study covers variety of topics but the most important ones are structure of survivors’ population (he makes the argument that the structure of returnees’ populations in medium-sized cities was very much different than in the settlements which were described so far: the big cities and former shtetlekh), forms of survivors’ social organization in Radom, survivors’ attempts to restore agency and to adapt to new economic environment of the city, property relations and restitution, and finally crime in the city and violence targeting the Jews. It seems that the main stream of the historiography on Polish Jewry immediately after the war focuses almost only on violence and anti-Semitism – which he thinks is important especially that we still have many deniers here – but it also causes that we know much more about death and destruction than about the return and life that preceded or co-existed with violence. According to Krzyzanowski it is possible to argue that one can more fully understand the tragedy of the Jewish returnees in Poland only by examining their everyday life and their daily interactions with the institutions of new regime and individual Poles. So this is a micro-historical case study with ambition to describe the social processes which took place in many locations all over Poland in late 1940’s. It is a study of material and social consequences of the Holocaust.

Biographie des intervenants 

Lukasz Krzyzanowski is a sociologist and a historian. He graduated from the Jagellonian University (Krakow) in 2007 and the University of Exeter (UK) in 2008. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the University of Warsaw. Most recently he acted as a Junior Visiting Research Associate at the Modern European History Research Centre at the University of Oxford. He was also awarded a Saul Kagan Claims Conference Academic Fellowship in Advanced Holocaust Studies. He has published several articles, most recentlyHomecomers: Jews and non-Jews in Post-war Radom (in English) in Jewish History Quarterly. His dissertation research is a study in social history of Jewish returnees to Radom, a medium-sized Polish, city in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It is an attempt to reconstruct social networks and daily interactions between Jews and non-Jews present in, and returning to, the city immediately after the Holocaust