Summary 819
ghettos and camps. Almost all periodicals had permanent columns for domestic and world news. They included information on the fate of the Jews in ghettos and camps in territories occupied by the Germans. They wrote about the fate of the Poles, about the arrest and murder of university professors in Krakow, deportations of the local population, and about the death of important figures from Polish socialist organizations. They also raised problems of Polish-Jewish relations.
The world news included reports from fronts and battlefields, and they presented every failure of German and the Axis armies with particular scrutiny. Very little was written about the situation in the Warsaw Ghetto. The Bund activity was almost uncovered. Writing about victories and failures at the African front, for example, was meant to move the attention of people away from the dark problems of everyday life, and give hope that the war would soon end and Hitler would fall.
They tried make sense of the war. In many articles there was a vision of the world rebuilt in a better way, based on equality and peace. At the same time, the articles of the summer 1942 were meant to prepare the population for the “Resettlement” or “Aktion” (deportation to death). Some articles give us an insight into the extent of people’s awareness of that time and they also show how quickly information from the external world would reach the ghetto.
All the issues of the Bund and Tsukunft underground press collected in this one volume are published in Polish for the first time. Many of them, damaged and dispersed in various archival collections, are availble for the first time. By publishing this volume we express our hope that it will be read not only by professional historians and those interested in Jewish matters, but also a much wider readership including experts of the Second World War and of military history.
The volume contains a glossary of specific terms, a bibliography, indices of persons and geographical names and a list of archival collections in which the edited documents are now kept.
Translated by Eleonora Bergman
