Warsaw Ghetto Uprising - New Research

New Research

In recent years, research by historians Dariusz Libionka (Poland) and Laurence Weinbaum (Israel) on the ŻZW has called into question the validity of much of what was written on the Revisionist underground that fought in the ghetto. In particular, their work cast new light on certain Polish and Jewish accounts of dubious veracity that have been uncritically transmitted by many of those who wrote about the revolt. Over the years that deliberately misleading testimony found its way into many secondary sources—both popular and scholarly works by unsuspecting authors — as well as reference books. The research of the Polish-Israeli team claimed they have deconstructed and thorughly discredited the testimonies of Henryk Iwański, Kalman Mendelson, Tadeusz Bednarczyk, Henryk Roliard, Jack Eisner, David J. Landau, Maurice Shainberg, and a number of others who claimed to have fought in the ranks of the organization or aided it. On that basis, Libionka and Weinbaum maintain, for example, that Dawid Moryc Apfelbaum, who is often credited with having played a commanding role in the ŻZW, and for whom a square was named in Warsaw, was in all liklihood an entirely fictitious figure who never had any role in the Revisionist underground movement. These findings were the subject of considerable media attention in Poland.