Introduction: New Directions in Rescue Scholarship, 1990s–2020s

This introduction situates the special issue Rescuers of Jews in Poland in a Comparative Perspective: History, Public Memory and Historical Education in the Post-communist Era within the broader historiographical, memorial, and educational debates surrounding the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust. It traces the emergence of the so-called ‘rescue turn’ in Holocaust scholarship since the early 2000s, highlighting key contributions that have challenged simplistic, biased, and hagiographic narratives of rescue by foregrounding moral ambiguity, Jewish agency, self-rescue, and the complex social environments in which rescue occurred. The introduction discusses the use of new concepts in rescue studies, such as Jewish agency and self-rescue, the gray zone of rescue, and righteous ingratitude, as well as new methodological innovations, including microhistorical and oral history approaches and the material and cultural turns, which have expanded scholarly understandings of survival, hiding, and memory. The introduction also examines the growing politicization and instrumentalization of rescue in contemporary memory cultures and historical education. Engaging with recent scholarship on the politics of Holocaust memory, it explores how narratives of rescue have been mobilized to construct affirmative national identities, obscure difficult histories, and marginalize Jewish experiences, especially in Poland. The comparative framework of the special issue brings together the cases of Poland, Bulgaria, and Germany to examine how rescuers have been represented in public memory, commemorative practices, and historical education across distinct historical and political contexts.