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Język Polski
Looting Frenzy
Marcin Zaremba
mzar@isppan.waw.pl Author Biographyhistorian and sociologist, lecturer at the Institute of History of Warsaw University and the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, recently published: “Jak nie urok, to... Strach przed czerwonoarmistami 1944-1947” in W objęciach wielkiego brata. Sowieci w Polsce 1944–1993, ed. Konrad Rokicki and Sławomir Stępień (Warsaw, 2009) and “The Myth of Ritual Murder in Post-War Poland: Pathology and Hypotheses”, Polin 23. Currently deals with social emotions, primarily fear in post-war Poland. Publishes in the Polityka weekly
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5036-1793
Institute of History, Warsaw University; Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences
Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, No. 5 (2009), Pages: 193-220
Submission Date: 2020-10-16Publication Date: 2009-11-09
https://doi.org/10.32927/ZZSiM.312
Abstract
The subject of this article is war, and especially post-war, szaber – a phenomenon of mass looting of unattended property. The text is divided into three parts. In the first part, I attempt to explain theoretically the origin of szaber, indicating (among other things) its links with the culture of poverty and a necessary condition for the szaber to take place – a moment of chaos and a temporary decline of the power structures. In the second part, I formulate a hypothesis that ethnic difference was a necessary condition for szaber to emerge. I illustrate it with examples from September 1939, when first we faced a phenomenon of mass looting of unattended property. The article also deals with the pillage of the ghettos by Poles in 1942. The third part is devoted to the highest wave of looting, which took place mostly in the Regained Western and Northern Territories, immediately after the war. The text is constructed in such a way that at the end I return to the origin of the phenomenon, formulating a thesis that it created a certain szaber culture.
Keywords
looting (szaber) , war chaos , culture of poverty , property pillage
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Copyright (c) 2009 Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
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