Subject Area
History
Description
Abstract: In 1945, Polish historian Zygmunt Lakociński embarked on a project to “document the truth against all myths.” Following the arrival of 7,300 Polish former prisoners, 6,000 of them women, to Sweden after liberation, Lakociński created the Polish Research Institute Archive (PIZ). The result was a collection of over 500 highly detailed and corroborated witness testimonies of Nazi war crimes at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. From its interview procedures and methodology to the composition of its staff, the Polish Research Institute Archive was utterly unconventional for its time. Aside from its scope, much of the archive’s importance lies in its distinctive role as a site of survivor-driven historical production in the immediate postwar period. This defining feature, however, has remained largely unrecognized in the historical literature on the Polish Research Institute. Alongside Lakociński were nine survivors of the concentration camps who brought lived experience, intellectual authority, linguistic skill, and intimate knowledge of camp structures and prisoner networks to the work of documentation. Drawing on survivor testimonies, internal meeting minutes, and project records, this work looks at how these nine “coworkers” conducted all the interviews themselves and played a central position in shaping how testimony was gathered, evaluated, and preserved, a role credited almost exclusively to the male academics associated with the project. Through a proper analysis of the role of these nine survivor-historians and an examination of the academic and archival norms that led to their exclusion, this project reframes the PIZ archive as a fundamental source of survivor-led historical production and a case study of the gendered dynamics of authorship, documentation, archival work, and credit in the Holocaust scholarship.
Publisher
Providence College
Academic Year
2025-2026
Date
Spring 2026
Type
Thesis
Format
Text
.pdf (text under image)
Language
English
Start Date
3-21-2026 2:45 PM
