Emotional Geography of Revenge: Polish Jews and the Search for Postwar Justice in the Polish Countryside

Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture in Eastern European Jewish Studies The Workers Circle/Dr. Emanuel Patt Visiting Professorship Admission: Free Watch the video

While there is now a considerable amount of work showing the disintegration and extra-legal purges omnipresent in postwar Europe in the immediate aftermath of liberation, individual Jews were usually written out of this story. They were often considered physically and emotionally incapable of getting revenge. The notion of revenge as not only morally ambiguous, but also “irrational” and “uncivilized” as well as dangerous, potentially leading to communal unrest and a circle of violence, was also at that point reinforced by representatives of the Polish Jewish community. Katarzyna Person discusses how individual survivors, despite very few opportunities available to them, did attempt to get both physical revenge and retribution. Thus the Jewish search for justice can and should be discussed as part of the wider European postwar search for revenge and retribution, while at the same time can be clearly disentangled from the violence surrounding it.

About the Speaker

Katarzyna Person received her PhD from the University of London and her habilitacja from the Polish Academy of Science. She works in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, where she leads the Ringelblum Archive publishing project. She has published on the Holocaust and its aftermath in occupied Poland. Her most recent book is Warsaw Ghetto Police. The Jewish Order Service during the Nazi Occupation (Cornell University Press 2021).