Feliks Tych

Feliks Tych (born July 31, 1929 in Warsaw ; † February 17, 2015 there ) was a Polish historian . He survived the Holocaust , studied history in Poland and was a professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences . He was director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.

Facing the Nazi genocide , Metropol , 2004

Life

Feliks Tych was born in Warsaw in 1929 as the ninth child of the Tych family. Until the outbreak of war he attended the Polish elementary school in Radomsko near the German border, where his father owned a small metal factory. One of the first ghettos of the General Government for the occupied Polish territories was established here in December 1939 . In the summer of 1942 there were increasing signs of an imminent "action" against the residents of the ghetto. As a precaution, the parents decided to secretly let Feliks flee to a Christian Polish acquaintance who was willing to take him secretly to Warsaw, where he survived with forged papers as the orphaned “nephew” of a Polish high school teacher and was able to stay in the post-war period , because his parents and siblings were murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp .

In 1948 Feliks Tych began studying history at the University of Warsaw and, because of his qualifications, received a scholarship for postgraduate studies at Lomonosov University in Moscow. There he obtained his doctorate in 1955 with a dissertation on the revolution from 1905 to 1907 in the Kingdom of Poland , which was published as a book in an expanded Polish version. He then worked as a research assistant at the Institute for History of the Polish Academy of Sciences . In 1970 he was appointed associate professor and in 1982 full professor of history. In the waves of purges that began in 1968, which also had an anti-Semitic thrust, Feliks Tych and his wife Lucyna, née. Berman pushed out of her jobs as a theater director.

After 1990 he held several visiting professorships at various German universities. In 1990 he received the Austrian Victor-Adler State Prize for his work on the social history of the labor movement . The historical processing of the Holocaust and investigations into the consequences for the Eastern European countries came more and more into the center of his research - for example his book in Polish: The long shadow of the Holocaust (1999). Between 1995 and 2006 he was the director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, which he expanded. In 2002 he was a Franz Rosenzweig visiting professor at the University of Kassel.

On January 27, 2010, Tych gave a speech in front of the German Bundestag as part of the memorial service for the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of National Socialism .

On November 7th, Feliks Tych received the “Against Forgetting - For Democracy” award from the association of the same name. The laudation was given by Joachim Gauck , chairman of Gegen Vergessen - Für Demokratie e. V.

Fonts (selection)

• The Social Democratic Party of Galicia within the Austrian party as a whole. From the Hainfeld party congress to the collapse of the monarchy. In: Erich Fröschl, Maria Messner, Helge Zoitl (eds.): The movement. Hundred years of social democracy in Austria. Vienna 1990.
• Leo Jogiches' criticism of the Bolshevik Party and the situation in Russian social democracy. An unpublished manuscript by Rosa Luxemburg from 1891. Both in: International scientific correspondence on the history of the German labor movement (IWK). Vol. 27 (1991), H. 3.
• Poland's participation in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. In: From politics and contemporary history . 1992, B 36.
• Karl Kautsky and the Polish Question. In: Jürgen Rojahn, Till Schelz, Hans-Josef Steinberg (eds.): Marxism and democracy. Karl Kautsky's importance in the socialist labor movement. Frankfurt am Main / New York 1992.
• Lodzer Poles, Jews and Germans in the Revolution of 1905. In: Jürgen Hensel (Ed.): Poland, Germans and Jews in Lodz 1820–1939. Osnabrück 1999.
• Długi cień Zagłady ( The Long Shadow of the Holocaust ). Warsaw 1999
• Germans, Jews, Poles: The Holocaust and its Late Effects. Bonn 2000
• The Polish year 1968. In: Beate Kosmala (ed.): The expulsion of the Jews from Poland 1968. Anti-Semitism and political calculation. Berlin 2000.
• Holocaust lessons in schools and universities in Poland today. In: Eduard Fuchs, Falk Pingel, Verena Radkau (eds.): Holocaust and National Socialism. Vienna 2002.
• Witnesses to the destruction. Poland and the Holocaust. In: Dialog. German-Polish magazine. Polsko-Niemiecki magazine. Vol. 60 (2002).
• The influence of Leo Jogiches on Rosa Luxemburg during her time in Zurich. In: Rosa Luxemburg in the international discourse. Berlin 2002.
• Life sketch as well as the relations in the triangle Poland - Jews - Germans 1939–1945 and the later consequences. Both in: Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik (Ed.): Confrontations with the destroyed Jewish heritage. Franz Rosenzweig guest lectures 1999–2005. Kassel 2004
• ed. with Alfons Kenkmann , Elisabeth Kohlhaas, Andreas Eberhardt: Children about the Holocaust. Early references 1944–1948. Berlin 2008, ISBN 3-938690-08-9 (interview protocols ).

As a narrator

• The Warsaw Ghetto 1940-1943. 912 days. DVD, director: Tomasz Pijanowski, 45 min., Produced by TPS Film Studio, Poland. Advice: Jewish Historical Institute Warsaw, Jewish Historical Institute Warsaw.

Web links

• Literature by and about Feliks Tych in the catalog of the German National Library
• Winfried R. Garscha : Congratulations to ITH honorary member Feliks Tych on his 80th birthday , International Conference of Labor and Social History
  • dsb., obituary , ibid. February 2015
• International Rosenzweig Society / Visiting Professorship ( Memento from October 22, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
• Germans, Jews, Poles: The Holocaust and its Late Consequences (excerpts), Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Chronicler of horror. On the death of the Polish-Jewish historian Feliks Tych , Jüdische Allgemeine , February 17, 2015, accessed on February 19, 2015.
2. ↑ Languages: Polish, English, Yiddish, German. In 3 parts: History of the Warsaw Ghetto (37 '), Children in the Ghetto (4'), The Ghetto Uprising (4 '). Original recordings of the time from archives, about everyday life and death in the ghetto, the armed resistance and the destruction of the ghetto and its inhabitants. ( Trailer ( Memento of the original from December 27, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. )