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Take part in the international conference "80 years after Aktion «Reinhardt» (1942-1943): social reactions and commemoration", organized by the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, the State Museum at Majdanek and the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute. The conference will be held in Warsaw on September 21-22, 2022. The conference program will be available soon.

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The Conference will be transmitted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnrOQFMOdpo

Read full conference:

In the spring of 1942, the Germans – under the codename Aktion Reinhardt – began to exterminate Polish Jews in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest World War II ghetto in German-occupied Europe. The largest number of Jews was transported to their deaths to the Treblinka death camp between 22 July and Yom Kippur (21 September) 1942. For eight weeks, the rail shipments of Jews to Treblinka went on without stopping. By November 1943, when the Treblinka death camp was closed, more than 1,5 million Jews from Poland and other European countries were murdered in the so-called Aktion Reinhard. The planned conference, held by the Warsaw Ghetto Museum and the Emmanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, marks the 80th anniversary of launching the annihilation campaign against Polish Jews. The conference is scheduled to take place in Warsaw in September 2022.

The first goal of this scholarly gathering is to explore the patterns of social and individual responses of the two societies, Jewish and Polish, during the period of terror and mass deportations to the death camps and the months of the extermination. The second goal is to explore and compare the course of the liquidation operations in the Warsaw Ghetto and different places of five districts of the General Government and their consequences for the Jewish communities and Polish-Jewish relations. Finally, the third goal is to examine the commemoration patterns of Aktion Reinhard’s former camps developed in Poland in the last decades. For example:

• Between rumours and facts: When did the news of the deportees’ fate reach the ghettos?
• How did the Jews in the major ghettos respond to the information about the fate of the deportees?
• The Jews in the small and peripheral ghettos: How did they respond to the information about the deportees?
• The encounter between Jews and Poles in the “open” ghettos in light of the news regarding the deportations.
• Hiding and escaping efforts: Response of the Jewish family, the Jewish woman and individuals to the information: Between knowledge, consciousness and action.
• Diaries and Letters: Writing about the deportations at the time of their occurrence.
• Witnessing deportation: Poles in cities, small towns and villages in the face of the liquidation of the ghettos.
• Polish society and the new “black hole”: Poles in small settlements in the face of the disappearance of the Jews and the issue of abandoned Jewish property.
• Poles near the death camps: Daily life next to the extermination apparatus.
• Patterns of rescue, denunciation and extradition: Main cities and peripheral and rural communities.
• Memoirs: Post-war Jewish and Polish writing about the deportations and Shoah.
• Artistic expressions of deportations and extermination (literature, arts, cinema, theatre)
• Commemoration: Extermination camps 80 years after Aktion Reinhard.

Organizing committee: prof. dr hab. Andrzej Żbikowski (JHI), dr. Martyna Grądzka-Rejak (WGM), prof. Daniel Blatman (WGM).

Conference organizers:

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Commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the extermination of Jews as part of the German Operation "Reinhardt" is under the Honorary Patronage of President of the Republic of Poland Andrzej Duda

The project "As if we had never existed" was co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage

The conference is organized as a part of the 80th anniversary of the “Aktion Reinhard”, a program financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.