Search results

Your search found 4 items
Sort: Relevance | Topics | Title | Author | Publication Year
Home  / Search Results
Date: 2012
Abstract: Poland presents the most advanced case of the transformation of the memory of Jews and the Holocaust in
all of postcommunist Europe. For that reason, it can serve as a paradigm in comparative studies of the
scope, dynamics, complexities, and challenges of this memory transformation.
 The memory of Jews and the Holocaust in postcommunist Poland has persistently occupied a central stage
in public debate since 1989. At present, the more than twenty-year-old boom of the “theater” of Jewish
memory shows no sign of declining. This does not, however, mean that the archeology of the Polish
Jewish past has been completed and that a broad public consensus has been reached on how to remember
the Jews and the Holocaust, especially the dark uncomfortable past in Polish-Jewish relations showing
Christian (ethnic) Poles in a bad light.
 One can differentiate three key dimensions in this landscape of memory: “remembering to remember,”
“remembering to benefit,” and “remembering to forget.” The first underscores the void left after the
genocide of Polish Jewry, and Polish-Jewish relations in all their aspects. In “remembering to benefit,” the
key intention behind the recalling of the Jews and the Holocaust is to achieve tangible goals. In
“remembering to forget,” the memory of Jews and the Holocaust is regarded as an awkward problem.
 In Poland’s immediate future, these three modes of remembering Jews and the Holocaust will persist. This
landscape of memory will continue to resemble a film with a multiple array of scenes—many fascinating
and intellectually and morally uplifting, others confusing, hypocritical, intellectually dull, morally
despicable, and opportunistic.
Date: 2002
Abstract: The debate about Jan Tomasz Gross’s Neighbors (2000) in which the author gave a detailed description of the collective murder of the Jewish community of Jedwabne by its ethnic Polish neighbors on July 10, 1941, has been the most important and longest-lasting in post-communist Poland. The publication of Neighbors raised important issues such as the rewriting of the history of Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War, of modern national history, and the reevaluation of the collective self-image of Poles themselves as having been solely victims. The article places the discussion within the context of two approaches to the collective past—first, the self-critical approach that challenges the old, biased representation of Polish-Jewish relations and the Polish self-image
as victims; and second, the defensive approach that seeks to maintain the older representations of Polish-Jewish relations and the Polish self-image. A general description of the debate is presented, followed by an analysis of
its various stages and dynamics. The conduct of the investigation by the Institute of National Memory (IPN) into the Jedwabne massacre and the official commemoration on the sixtieth anniversary of the crime are two crucial events that demonstrate that important segments of the Polish political and cultural elite are capable of overcoming its dark past. At the same time, reactions of the right-wing nationalist political and cultural elites and their supporters reveal that the defensive approach continues to exert influence in public life. Only time will tell if this latter phenomenon
will become marginal.