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SHORT NOTES

authors to present their accounts. The successive chapters depict individual experiences of return, their interpretation in the context of individual biog-raphies, the significance of these biographies for collective memory, and the problem of returns as they were seen by Poles and Jews. The second part of the book analyzes individual biographies. The book is based on interviews with inhabitants of Israel, and on published reminiscenccs analyzed by the author according to the methodological principles of interpretative sociology. They have been supplementcd with materials which present Jewish expcriences from the point of view of the Polish inhabitants of these localities. (OL)

Monika Tomkiewicz, Zbrodnia w Ponarach 1941-1944 (The Crime at Ponary 1941-1944], Warszawa 2008, IPN, 444 pp., indexes, annexes, ills., series: Monografie

Ponary is a locality near Wilno, in the Second Republic’s old north-eastern borderlands. During the Second World War the Germans, who occupied these tcrritories sińce 1941, chose Ponary as a place for mass executions. Some 80,000 Polish citizens of Jewish origin, soldiers and activists of the Polish Underground State, clergymen, the Romani people, and Soviet prisoners of war were murdered thcre. One of the most important witnesses who publicised the truth about the genocidc at Ponary when the war was still going on was the Polish writer Józef Mackiewicz. In her book Monika Tomkiewicz presents the history of the German occupation in the Wilno region from July 1941 to July 1944, paying special attention to the persecution and extermination of persons regarded as enemies of the Third Reich. In the first part she depiets the structure of the German civilian and military administration and discusscs the activity of the Lithuanian police service, which collaborated with the Germans. In the second part she analyzes the successive stages of the extermination policy. In the third part she describes the Ponary region as well as the executions themselves and tries to estimate the number of victims. In the fourth part Tomkiewicz shows how the Germans, faced with ultimate defeat, tried to obliterate the traces of their crime. As in other places of mass executions, the bodies were exhumed, mainly by prisoners, and burned. The book ends with a description of the trials of the perpetrators of the Ponary crime (including the trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nurembcrg). The book is based on rich source materials from Lithuanian, German, Polish and Latvian archives. The names of persons cxecuted at Ponary are in the appendices. (KK)

Władysław Bułhak (ed.), Wywiad i kontrwywiad Armii Krajowej [The Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence Service of the Home Army], Warszawa 2008, IPN, , 424 pp., index of persons, an-nexes, series: Monografie

The following opinion expressed after the war by Colonel Jan Rzepecki, chief of the Information and Propaganda Bureau of the Home Army’s High Command,