Bloodlands @the-histories - Tumblr Blog

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Drowning of Marzanna celebrated in Poland, c. 1970s.

Images via Polska Times.

sovietreality-blog

A citizen burning Soviet propaganda in Budapest, November 5th, 1956.

ww2inpictures

A Soviet soldier embraces family members before being deployed to the front. Bryansk, Soviet Union. 1943.

salahmah

Hungarian Revolution, 1956.

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“Refugees stand in a group in a street in La Gleize, Belgium on January 2, 1945, waiting to be transported from the war-torn town after its recapture by American Forces during the German thrust in the Belgium-Luxembourg salient.”

(AP)

peashooter85

Top:German soldier with bust of Stalin

Bottom: Soviet soldier with bust of Hitler

sixpenceee

Sir Nicholas Winton is a humanitarian who organized a rescue operation that saved the lives of 669 Jewish Czechoslovakia children from Nazi death camps, and brought them to the safety of Great Britain between the years 1938-1939.

After the war, his efforts remained unknown. But in 1988, Winton’s wife Grete found the scrapbook from 1939 with the complete list of children’s names and photos. Sir Nicholas Winton is sitting in an audience of Jewish Czechoslovakian people who he saved 50 years before.

WATCH FULL VIDEO HERE

sixpenceee

This post gained more than 100,000 notes in over a day. One of the most powerful things I ever posted.

salahmah

Hungarian Revolution, 1956.

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“If someone is being murdered in front of me, I should come to his aid, right? And if I don’t, because I’m scared, or stunned, because the situation is too much for me, I’d blame myself, not the victims.”

— Anna Bikont, from The Crime and the Silence. Read an excerpt here.

This is very surprising, to say the least. Jan Gross is a phenomenal writer and has made enormous strides in modern European historiography in his career. I use several of his works regularly in my writings. Some context: In communist Poland, the government deliberately shaped the official history of the Holocaust and World War II to cultivate a myth of resistance and triumph over fascism. While there was undoubtedly an impressive network of resistance in Poland, there were also instances of Polish complicity with German orders. When the communist states of Eastern Europe collapsed in 1989-1991, they were faced with groundbreaking realizations that their national histories were manipulated. This has been very traumatic and difficult for these countries; history and memory's return to these nations was unforgiving. Gross's book 'Neighbors' shed light on questions of agency and complicity during the Holocaust. He did not try to pin responsibility on the Polish population as a whole, nor did he attempt to undermine the legacies of resistance that still stand. Rather, he only evaluated the social dynamics of genocide in smaller, rural areas; he wished to restore a balance to the bigger picture. I will post more news as it comes out, as well as some excerpts I have saved from Gross and his contemporaries.