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On April 13-19, the Spring School took place in Kraków and Warsaw (Poland), during which a joint seminar involving students from Jagiellonian University and the HSE’s Faculty of History was held on the topic ‘Fascist Atrocities in the USSR during the Second World War’

On April 13-19, students in the research seminar ‘The Second World War: New Sources and New Approaches’, taught by Professor Oleg Budnitskii, took part in the Spring School in Kraków and Warsaw, Poland, during which a joint seminar involving students from Jagiellonian University was held on the topic ‘Fascist Atrocities in the USSR during the Second World War’.

On April 13-19, students in the research seminar ‘The Second World War: New Sources and New Approaches’, taught by Professor Oleg Budnitskii, took part in the Spring School in Kraków and Warsaw, Poland, during which a joint seminar involving students from Jagiellonian University was held on the topic ‘Fascist Atrocities in the USSR during the Second World War’.

Six fourth-year students and two first-year students from the Faculty of History visited several of the more well-known sites of World War II remembrance in Poland, including the Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzhets, Majdanek, Chełmno, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps. It was here that Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and Soviet POWs were killed alongside people of other nationalities and other people selected for their political or religious beliefs and even sexual orientation.

On the first day, participants in the school were given a detailed tour of Kazimierz, Kraków’s Jewish district, as well as the Kraków Ghetto where the city’s entire Jewish population was resettled after the start of the war. The tour made ​​a strong impression. Passing through the quiet, narrow streets, where parents now walk peacefully with children in strollers, where elderly residents walk slowly with their pets, and the sound of the tram wheels comes from afar, it is hard to imagine that only a few decades ago this area was filled with weeping and sorrow, that in a building now housing a bank the Germans shot children right in their beds, and in another building patients lying in the hospital. Only commemorative plaques and fragments of the wall that surrounded the ghetto serve as reminders. The wall was built by Germans in the form of tombstones found in Jewish cemeteries; it is in this symbol that the whole tragedy of the Holocaust and the war is most clearly reflected. These monotone grey, low walls continue to stand, reminding us of the innocent victims of this monstrous time.

The next day the school proved especially meaningful for participants. Researching the war and the Holocaust, in particular their social ‘everyday’ aspects, working with the diaries and memoirs of concentration camp inmates and witnesses to mass extermination, many of the students have often said that it is difficult to read these lines. It is easier for researchers to distance themselves from what happened in order to provide objective analysis. But on the second day, the future historians saw first-hand what they had only read about up until then. The students spent more than six hours at the Auschwitz-I and Auschwitz-Birkenau camps near the town of Oswiecim. It was quite difficult to put into words the experience of they saw. Not only is the scale of the camps with barracks for many tens of thousands of people striking, so too are the ‘factory-like nature’, the ‘consistency’ and the ‘practicality’ with which these camps were built: the rails to the Birkenau death gate, the unloading platform, and path to the gas chambers and crematoria, all of which were developed for the most rapid and cost-effective murder possible. The Nazis tried to hide their traces by blowing up the crematoria; only one, the very first, remained at Auschwitz-I. You enter a dark room, stepping onto a floor where a few decades ago people stripped naked were suffocating from Zyklon B before being sent to the crematorium. A stretcher trolley for corpses. Everything is filled with death. It is really quite scary.

Behind the glass in one of the barracks, several tonnes of prisoners’ hair are piled up: nothing was to be spared in the economy of the Reich. Mountains lie behind the glass showcase. Some instinct for self-preservation remains at Auschwitz to this day – you distance yourself, not even realizing the scale and reality of what took place. Hundreds of tourists act as if they do not understand; they smile and simply listen attentively to the guide. Because otherwise it is unbearably difficult.

. . .

An important component of the school was the seminar held jointly with the students from Jagiellonian University, which included presentations on the study of the war and the Holocaust. Students from the HSE’s Faculty of History gave presentations that focused on the memory of Auschwitz among Soviet citizens, the concentration camp on the territory of Krasny state farm near Simferopol, Nazi persecution and extermination of the Roma population, the Siege of Leningrad, the Holocaust in the Odessa region, and anti-Soviet propaganda in the occupied territories, among other topics. One of the most interesting reports was made by a student from Jagiellonian University – Barbara Mroczek – on sexual violence by German invaders in the Soviet Union. The report provoked a lively discussion regarding the historiography of the problem, as well as sources containing statistical data on the subject. The seminar concluded with a general discussion of issues related to occupation and the Holocaust.

During the following days, participants in the school visited two Kraków museums devoted to Schindler's factory and the occupation of Kraków, as well as an exhibition at the Galicia Jewish Museum dedicated to the memory of the Jewish population’s mass extermination in Poland. The major advantage of these relatively new museums lies in the fact that their exhibits and interior rooms “immerse” visitors in the eras depicted, forcing them to reflect on the events and effectively fulfilling the function of memory preservation.

The next and final point on the school’s agenda was a visit to Poland’s capital – Warsaw. The city in itself is the strongest and most expressive memorial to the war. Razed to the ground by the Germans, it very clearly depicts the scale of what happened. The city was fully rebuilt. Walking through the streets of Old Town among recently built “antique” palaces, churches and homes, one cannot help but feel the criminality of the war. Participants also visited the Warsaw Ghetto, as well as other places associated with the war – the eternal flame in the arcade of the destroyed Saxon Palace and the enormous monument to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 located in the building of the Supreme Court of Poland.

In conclusion, it is worth noting that the school also had an artistic aspect, with participants preparing several presentations related to architectural monuments in Kraków and Warsaw. Studying the history of the Second World War, the students played the role of tour guides, telling each other about the changes in the historical development of the cities and the distinguished examples of Polish architecture.

Author: A. Starkov