EHRI Fellow Justyna Majewska: Jewish social transformation in the Warsaw ghetto as revealed in personal narratives

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Wednesday, 11 March, 2015

Justyna Majewska is an EHRI fellow and a PhD researcher with the Graduate School for Social Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland. Her research subject is "The change of the social structure in Nazi ghettos with the example of the Warsaw Ghetto".

I graduated from Cultural Studies at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland and had the privilege of attending the lectures of Professor Adamczyk-Garbowska from which I became interested in Jewish culture, with a focus on Jewish literature. I eventually switched my focus from fiction to history and finally from history to social science or historical sociology. I am especially interested in the everyday life of the Warsaw Ghetto.  

 In my research I explore how, in the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jewish pre-war social structure was transformed and a new society created under extreme conditions. What happened within Jewish society, when war changed the political situation? Did the ghetto government have any real capacity to control the society created within the ruthless boundaries established by the Nazi authorities? I explore the effects of “hard” changes, noticeable on a legal, political and economic level in official institutions, and “soft” changes that accrued within qualifications, knowledge, skills and mentality of social actors. I analyse the process of thinking and of decision making in response to particular aspects of Nazi policy in the broad context of Jewish daily life in the ghetto. I look for patterns of reactions to the same destructive factors in relation to the pre-war social position of the actors. In my work, I hope to bring together a comprehensive sociological analysis of social change in the Warsaw Ghetto. 

The EHRI fellowship gave me a unique opportunity to spend a month at Yad Vashem Archive and library. I would never have been able to go to Israel for such a period of time on my own. Only a few scholars in Poland use Yad Vashem’s sources in their research, so thanks to the EHRI fellowship my thesis will have very rich and unique archival sources. Apart from the access to one of the world’s most important databases, I also had an opportunity to use the library which gave me access to books and articles that are very hard to get in Poland. And last but not the least, I met with Yad Vashem staff and heard their feedback.

My fellowship is now over and I am back home and continuing to work on my PhD thesis. I gathered a vast amount of material, so it has taken me a while to process it. At this moment I am working on the article discussing how Warsaw Ghetto Jews, especially intellectuals, were thinking about Ghetto society and why they were so critical. Hopefully this time next year I will have finished and published my PhD thesis.