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During the Holocaust, Polish bystanders were witnesses not only to Nazi crimes but also to their own collective violence toward Jewish neighbors. This book shows how these memories continue to be distorted and silenced in the Polish culture.
Considering the ways in which Polish culture displays symptoms of a suppressed and violent memory while obstinately refusing to see the meaning of such symptoms, the author shows how the narrative of the Holocaust, in threatening the self-image of the community, causes a continuous anxiety and thus compulsive and neurotic reactions. Through analyses of a wide range of literary, journalistic, commemorative, and cinematic texts, Forgetting Polish Violence Against the Jews sheds light on a set of narrative and discursive models connected with social practices, which serve to discipline individuals - especially Polish Jews - while generating pressure to defend both habits of silence and also an idealized selfimage of the Polish Christian majority.
This book will appeal to scholars with interests in memory studies, cultural studies, Holocaust studies, and psychoanalytic studies.
List of contents
Introduction: What We Know Doesn't Matter Part I: Bystanders' Trauma? 1. Witnesses to Their Own Aggression: The Beater by Ewa and Czeslaw Petelski (1963) 2. What the Excluded Say: Henryk Grynberg's The Jewish War (1965) and The Victory (1969); Pawel Lozinski's Birthplace (1992) 3. "Say I Am Innocent" 4. Jewish Graves as the Polish Unconscious: The Holocaust in Polish Cinema after 2000 Part II: Anxiety and Self-Image 5. First Reaction to the Holocaust: "Protest" by Zofia Kossak-Szczucka (1942) 6. Collective Aggression in Holy Week (1946) by Jerzy Andrzejewski 7. How Not to See What Has Just Been Said 8. The Same Story Whitewashed: Andrzej Wajda's Holy Week (1995) Part III: The Righteous - The Hinge of Self-Fashioning 9. Social Practice 10. The Rescue of Jews as a Polish Self-Portrait: The Samaritans: Heroes of the Holocaust by Wladyslaw Bartoszewski and Zofia Lewin (1966) 11. Narrative Patterns 12. Ashamed Jews: The Righteous During the 1968 Antisemitic Movement 13. Unique or Different Models? Part IV: The Antisemite Becomes Righteous 14. Discursive Model 15. Border Street by Aleksander Ford (1949) 16. 60 Years Later: In Darkness by Agnieszka Holland (2011) 17. Is an Alternative Story Possible? Aftermath by Wladyslaw Pasikowski (2012) Part V: The Same Once Again - Our Class by Tadeusz Slobodzianek (2010) 18. After Neighbors by Jan Tomasz Gross: Regress 19. An Unnoticed Part of the Drama 20. Reception
About the author
Tomasz ¿ukowski is Associate Professor of Modern Polish Literature and Culture in the Department of Contemporary Literature and Social Communication at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is the co-author of
Philo- Semitic Violence: Poland'
s Jewish Past in New Polish Narratives (2021), and the co-editor of
The Holocaust Bystander in Polish Culture, 1942-2015: The Story of Innocence (2021).
Summary
During the Holocaust, Polish bystanders were witnesses not only to Nazi crimes but also to their own collective violence towards Jewish neighbours. This book shows how these memories continue to be distorted and silenced in Polish culture.
