02438cam a2200313 i 4500 on1196841404 OCoLC ta 201028t20212021maua b 001 0 eng 9780674249134 (hbk.) 0674249135 (hbk.) (OCoLC)1196841404 JC580 .K67 2021 Kornbluth, Andrew, 1982- The August trials : the Holocaust and postwar justice in Poland / Andrew Kornbluth. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2021. 332 p. : ill. Includes bibliographical references and index. Introduction: The country without a Quisling? -- "There are many Cains among us" -- Crowdsourcing genocide -- Hearts grown brutal -- The special courts -- Rewriting the narrative of the past -- Between politics and retribution -- The district courts -- Cold War considerations -- The principles of socialist humanism -- The math of amnesty -- Conclusion: The conspiracy of memory. "When six years of resistance to Nazi occupation came to an end in 1945, a devastated Poland could agree with its new, Soviet-imposed rulers on little else beyond the need to punish German war criminals and their collaborators. But as the process of postwar retribution began to unearth evidence of enthusiastic local participation in the Holocaust, the hated government, traumatized populace, and fiercely independent judiciary found themselves struggling to salvage a sanitized vision of the past that could serve as the basis for national unity. Long dismissed as Stalinist farce, Poland's 32,000 trials for collaboration were in fact a scrupulous, complex search for the truth. Making use of unpublished memoirs, interviews, ministerial archives, and hundreds of individual case files, The August Trials documents how trials became the crucible in which the communist state and an unyielding society hammered out the foundational myth of modern Poland"-- Truth commissions Poland History 20th century. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Poland. Poland Politics and government 1945-1980. Poland History Occupation, 1939-1945. Poland History Occupation, 1939-1945 Collaborationists. Soviet Union Foreign relations Poland. Poland Foreign relations Soviet Union. lcc BK 0 0 0 0 PNLIB PNLIB GEN 2021-06-17 JC580 .K67 2021 PNLIB21062943 2021-06-17 2021-06-17 BK 3130 3130