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Reflexive ethnography of Poland’s non-memory about Jews and the Holocaust: Revisiting fieldwork, revising assumptions
Author(s): Kapralski, Slawomir; Niedźwiedzki, Dariusz; Nowak, Jacek
Date: 2021
Topics: Holocaust, Holocaust Commemoration, Interviews, Ethnography, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Memory
Abstract: The authors present their experience of revisiting the in-depth interviews collected in 1988–1993 in the context of new research on Poland’s memories of Jews and the Holocaust conducted by them in 2013–2017. The revisit, carried out in a radically different intellectual and socio-political context, helped the authors: (1) to change their focus from the past to the present in which the interviews were conducted and in which the respondents constructed their remembrance; (2) to understand memory as a contingent and contextual image of the past, functional in relation to the identity-management of the remembering subjects; (3) to discover the previously neglected importance of the non-discursive attitudes to the past, located between amnesia and remembrance, which the authors have called non-memory.
Beyond Antisemitism: Rethinking Poland’s Memories of Jews
Author(s): Niedźwiedzki, Dariusz; Nowak, Jacek; Kapralski, Slawomir
Date: 2025
Topics: Antisemitism, Antisemitism: Discourse, Antisemitism: Attitude Surveys, Attitudes to Jews, Holocaust Commemoration, Holocaust, Main Topic: Antisemitism, Memory
Abstract: On the basis of evidence collected in two research projects separated by almost three decades, the authors interpret the ways in which contemporary Poles (mis)remember former Jewish citizens and the Holocaust. We propose a situational theory of antisemitism which assumes that there are situations in which Poles reproduce antisemitic cultural codes that are taken for granted as elements of their culture, or as apotropaic rituals, unconsciously performed in times of crisis. Such situations are subsequently reproduced in memory, and the social exclusion of Polish Jews that used to exist before and during the Holocaust now becomes a mnemonic exclusion from Polish memories, which acquire the status of a theodicy.