This article analyzes the Polish police narrative on Roma during the interwar time, unveiling attitudes and potential practices. According to the police journals and handbooks, Roma were mobile and disposed to theft and deceit. Their traditional crafts were merely a smoke screen for illicit activities. As countermeasures, searches of caravans, meticulous checks of identity documents, indiscriminate fingerprinting of Roma suspects, among several measures, were recommended. This narrative constituted part of a larger police professional discourse and is likely to be an indicator of practices on Roma. Polish police followed the contemporary European expertise on Roma produced by the fields of criminalistics and criminology. As there were no discriminatory laws targeting Roma in Poland, it appears that police used legislation against begging and vagrancy, among other tactics.
By
Piotr Wawrzeniuk
April 23, 2024
On the Watchpost. The complicity of the Polish and Polish Criminal Police in the Holocaust. Review of Na posterunku. Udział polskiej policji granatowej i kryminalnej w zagładzie Żydów Jan Grabowski 432 pages. Wydawnictwo Czarne, Wolowiec 2020.
By
Piotr Wawrzeniuk
April 22, 2021
This study offers the first analysis of anti-Roma propaganda in the District of Galicia (Distrikt Galizien, the DG), a part of the General Government (Das Generalgouvernement, the GG), by studying the dailies and several periodicals published in the District. It constitutes the first step in studying anti-Roma propaganda in the GG. While the wartime anti-Roma propaganda employed the pre-war images of Roma, those were manipulated, distorted and radicalized in accordance to the needs of the Nazi regime in the DG. The radicalization in the press paralleled introduction of regulations with anti-Roma edge and scaling up of Roma persecution in the GG. By 1943, the propaganda pieces alluded to solving “the Gypsy question” in the way that “the Jewish question” had been solved.
By
Piotr Wawrzeniuk
October 7, 2020
Richard Sakwa, Frontlinje Ukraina: Krisen i gränslandet mellan Ryssland och Europeiska unionen; Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands, Karneval förlag; London: I. B. Tauris, 2015, 349 pages
By
Piotr Wawrzeniuk
June 23, 2016
While the film Papusza certainly represents part of a growing interest in and awareness of Romani matters among the Polish and international public, one should not overestimate its value as an eye-opener to Romani history. Rather, it constitutes a fascinating and beautiful story of a lifetime on the margins.
By
Piotr Wawrzeniuk
May 12, 2015
+ Paweł Jaworski, Marzyciele i oportuniści: Stosunki polsko-szwedzkie w latach 1939–1945, [Dreamers and opportunists: Polish-Swedish relations in 1939–1945], Warsaw 2009: IPN, 448 pages
By
Piotr Wawrzeniuk
February 4, 2014
Issue 2024, 1-2: 
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.