Forced labor of Jews in the Szydłowiec ghetto during World War II - The nature of the work performed, its dimension and social aspects

Purpose of the study: The article contains information on the forced labor performed by Jews for the benefit of Germans during the Second World War. The research area was narrowed down to the area of the Szydłowiec ghetto and its vicinity (the Radom district in the General Government. The text presents the types of work performed by Jews, forms of forcing them to take up forced labor, and their attempts to bypass German restrictions. Methodology: This article is based on a comparative-historical method, the aim of which is to enable the researcher to identify Jews as a separate social group that was used by the Germans for forced labor. The use of this method is aimed at learning about the historical processes and mechanisms of functioning of selected Nazi restrictions in Poland. In addition, prosopographic and inductive methods as well as a method based on the grounded theory will be used. Moreover, due to the nature of the subject of the work, the research conducted in this field also requires the use of oral history. Main Findings: Extremely burdensome, in many aspects, compulsion for Jews was the almost slave labor they performed for the benefit of the Germans. Every Jew had to work at least one day a week for the Third Reich. Jews were used for various types of work, including snow removal from roads. Slave labor for the benefit of the Nazis was one of the causes of the increasing poverty of Jews. Application: The results of the research make a significant contribution to the knowledge of the history of Jews from Szydłowiec. This research not only broadens the knowledge about the history of the functioning of the Jewish community in Szydłowiec during World War II, but also broadens the knowledge about the history of the Holocaust and the mechanisms of crimes. These studies can be used to further analyze the situation of Jews during the German occupation in the territory of the Radom district, or more broadly, in the territory of the General Government. Novelty/Originality of the study: For the first time in this study, many fragments of Jewish diaries from the Memorial Book of Szydłowiec were used (some of the memoirs were published only in Yiddish). The article is the basis for further research on the history of Jews during World War II in the area of the Radom district.

The Bridge Connecting Silkworms to Mosquitos

This chapter relates the history of sugar, a thread that links the Silk Roads, Portuguese sailors, Atlantic islands, endangered seals, the African slave trade, and yellow fever, all because of our physiological need for glucose, which we satisfy with sugar. The chapter tells how from its origin in Southeast Asia, sugarcane, later called “Creole cane” and processing technology moved along the Silk Roads to Western Asia, then to Mediterranean islands. To begin with, Portuguese colonists transformed the Atlantic island of Madeira into a large sugar producer using slave labor until ecological and economic collapse forced production to move to São Tomé, using Angolan slave labor. After Portugal discovered Brazil, colonists took sugarcane with them, creating large plantations and initiating the enslavement and trans-Atlantic movement of millions of Africans. As the chapter shows, sugar production moved into the Caribbean and Central America, and African slave ships inadvertently carried yellow fever and yellow fever mosquito to the Americas.

Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value

This article takes the presentation of mechanical and informatic models in Samuel Delany's Neveryóna as an occasion to examine the relations of force, abstraction, information, and differential valuation that constitute racial capitalism. In order to do this, the article considers the continuities and divergences between the principles those models demonstrate, the lessons on value and economic determination that precede them, and Delany's subsequent presentation of surplus populations, intricated “free” and slave labor, and the modes of racialized differentiation that shape and are shaped in the interstices of those social formations. In Delany's sword-and-sorcery bildungsroman, the models illustrate the abstract logic of value, show that logic to be informatic in character, and point toward a dialectical relationship between this informatic logic and the concrete practices of dispossession that produce and operate through ascriptive race and gender regimes. Value's abstract operations are too often understood to be incommensurable with such regimes, yet Delany's presentation deploys the language and processes associated with informatics to reveal an essential relationship between the abstract network that results from value's mediating function and the modes of ascription and concrete violence that, as a result of such mediation, tend to be associated with precapitalist or noncapitalist social formations.

The Genes of Freedom: Genome-Wide Insights into Marronage, Admixture and Ethnogenesis in the Gulf of Guinea

The forced migration of millions of Africans during the Atlantic Slave Trade led to the emergence of new genetic and linguistic identities, thereby providing a unique opportunity to study the mechanisms giving rise to human biological and cultural variation. Here we focus on the archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea, which hosted one of the earliest plantation societies relying exclusively on slave labor. We analyze the genetic variation in 25 individuals from three communities who speak distinct creole languages (Forros, Principenses and Angolares), using genomic data from expanded exomes in combination with a contextual dataset from Europe and Africa, including newly generated data from 28 Bantu speakers from Angola. Our findings show that while all islanders display mixed contributions from the Gulf of Guinea and Angola, the Angolares are characterized by extreme genetic differentiation and inbreeding, consistent with an admixed maroon isolate. In line with a more prominent Bantu contribution to their creole language, we additionally found that a previously reported high-frequency Y-chromosome haplotype in the Angolares has a likely Angolan origin, suggesting that their genetic, linguistic and social characteristics were influenced by a small group of dominant men who achieved disproportionate reproductive success.

Analogous Labor To The Slave In The Brazilian Textile Industry

The institute of slavery has been present in humanity since the beginning of the existence of the human being. Slavery in Brazil has sustained the economy for centuries. Millions of Africans were taken from their homeland and placed in degrading conditions of life and work. The process of abolishing slavery was time-consuming and gradual. There were centuries of much struggle and suffering for the world to begin to realize the evil that slavery represents. Even after the abolition of slavery it was common to see the worker trapped in the field by debts, or by laws that empowered employers in relation to the employee. The objective of this research was to analyze the working conditions analogous to the slave in the Brazilian textile industry. It was carried out with bibliographic review and qualitative analysis. Due to his new clothing contemporary slave labor became invisible for some time. The factors that make it possible to commit this crime, even if in today, it is basically related to a tripod: impunity, poverty and profit. The situation of misery of the neediest population forces them to undergo types of work in subhuman conditions. These textile workers are mainly immigrants from neighboring, underdeveloped countries from Latin America. Brazil was one of the first countries in the world to recognize this type of work, and that jointly with the International Labor Organization (ILO) and oysternon-governmental entities seek to combat such criminal practice on their territory.

“Brick Dust and Ashes”: Liberation and Reconstruction

As the Red Army fought its way back west, it discovered a devastated land: thousands of villages burnt to the ground; Jewish civilians, along with those accused of partisan activity or Soviet sympathies, lying dead; and millions of young people sent to Germany as slave labor. Party activists were faced with reintegrating survivors and rebuilding the economy. In western Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Baltic states, nationalist guerrillas continued to fight against Soviet power. NKVD officials carried out “filtration” to identify active collaborators, and the Party and unions reviewed all members who sought reinstatement. The newly freed inhabitants were incorporated into the ration system and subject to mobilization for labor and the army. Many resisted mobilization, especially for work on distant sites, and rebuilding was complicated by nationwide shortages. The German High Command finally surrendered on May 8, 1945. People streamed into the streets to celebrate, dance, embrace, and toast the victory. Although reconstruction would continue for years, the war at last was over.

To Teach the University is to Teach Reparations: A Class Project

If scholars and activists have long noticed that discussions about reparations re-emerge during periods of intense racial strife, then perhaps it is not surprising that reparations have again become an increasingly mainstream conversation in the US. Significantly, the university has not been insulated from these discussions, but in fact has become an important site of this struggle. As of now, most critical attention both on the page and in the streets has been pointed at private, elite universities in which the fact of the university’s founding during the antebellum US becomes a flash point for the discussions of the legacy of slavery. However, using my own university teaching context as an example, I show that the discussion of reparations in the context of the American University need not – and indeed, as many scholars and activists argue, should not – be limited to those institutions that were funded from slavery’s profits or were literally built with slave labor. By discussing a course project that looks into my own university’s history, I model one strategy for educators to normalize the discussion of reparations as well as expand its reach to encompass more recent and ongoing injuries to African-American communities.