Scholars and coming to terms with the Holocaust in Poland

Changing Perspectives on Polish-Jewish relations During the Holocaust, 2012

This essay discusses the memory of the Holocaust in Poland since the Jedwabne debate 2000–2002, and focuses on the specific developments between 2015 and the present. It briefly examines the achievements of critical history-writing field in postcommunist Poland, and discusses the ‘ideological war’ launched against that field by right-wing conservative pundits, historians, and politicians. It argues that radical agents within the PiS AQ1 government and its guardian institution of national memory, IPN ¶ , use three forms of amnesia to suppress and counteract the critical history-writing about the Holocaust in Poland: (1) repressive erasure by implementing legal measures and denying funding to academic institutions and individuals who conduct research on Poland’s dark past; (2) prescriptive forgetting of Jedwabne and other dark aspects of Polish–Jewish relations before, during, and after the Holocaust as a necessary measure in the interest of the entire Polish collective; and (3) amnesia as a constitutive element in the rebuilding and maintenance of an ‘ethno-nationalistic national identity.’ It contends that according to PiS’s historical policy, the historian can only be a servant of the state who remakes and reshapes history according to the orders of the state. This is the gravest danger to the historical profession and to democracy in Poland and elsewhere. There is no doubt that in the future the biggest challenge for professional historians in Poland and in other countries of post-Communist Eastern Europe will be integrating and synthetizing the soothing pages of the history of relations with Jews with the dark aspects of these relations before, during, and after the Holocaust. To achieve this, not only will historians have to permit different voices and interpretations, but also to reject current discursive schema of ‘black and white’ ideologically driven history about the collective past and the treatment of history as an ideological weapon.

Jewish Quarterly Review, 2022

is a history of the Jewish people during the period of Nazi rule, in which the central role is to be played by the Jewish People, not only as the victim of a tragedy, but also as the bearer of a communal existence with all the manifold and numerous aspects involved," argued in 1959 historian and Holocaust survivor Philip Friedman. 1 With his background as a scholar interested in the social and economic history of the Jews in Polish lands, emancipation, and local history, he now advocated for a "Judeo-centric" study of the Holocaust. 2 His approach echoed the practices of scholars and community activists who, already during the Holocaust, had strug gled to document the individual, familial, and communal responses to the German genocidal proj ect as part of the modern Jewish experience. 3 After the war, this mission was reinstated and carried forward by survivor-scholars such as Friedman, Szymon Datner, Rachela Auerbach, Michał Borwicz, and others. Although the Jewish experience was at the center of their attention, they sought to contextualize it with questions about the role of the local population, the attitudes of neighbors, and the scope of collaboration and assistance. 4 Polish Jewish Holocaust scholars continued these efforts under the umbrella of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and on the pages of its journals, in Polish and in Yiddish. This was a vision that-for a limited audience in Poland and

Journal of Holocaust Studies, 2019

Holocaust Studies

Nazis, to follow the Independence Day march. There are multiple issues here of how the Holocaust is represented and remembered and, indeed, of historical accuracy vs denial in a European context where antisemitism is mobilized again on the populist far-right (and some sections of the left). The issue of memory and commemoration here is essential to Jewish identity since the curse Y'mach sh'mo v'zichrono (may his name and memory be erased) has already befallen millions killed without a trace and is at stake in distortion and minimization of the Holocaust.

In post-1989 Poland, the primary struggle over the state-sponsored politics of memory revolved around the concept of "critical patriotism" (patriotyzm krytyczny). Advanced in the early 1980s by the dissident intellectual Jan Józef Lipski, and taken up in the 1990s by the left and liberal historians and journalists, this approach to collective memory calls for a critical inquiry into the darkest chapters of Polish xenophobiaincluding the history of anti-Jewish, anti-Ukrainian, and anti-German violence. 1 In more general terms, the advocates of critical patriotism argue that the state-sponsored politics of memory should promote critical reflection about the past as necessary to build a pluralistic and tolerant polity. 2 In contrast, the conservative milieu rejects this approach as a "pedagogy of shame" (pedagogika wstydu) and an attempt at "extinguishing Poland" (wygaszanie Polski). 3 Instead, the state-sponsored politics of memory should strengthen the national pride of the continuous fight for Poland's freedom and resistance against foreign oppression during the long nineteenth and the short twentieth centuries. The dramatic events of Polish history that became object of mnemonic tensions after 1989, like the Polish-Ukrainian conflict in 1943-44, the Warsaw Rising in 1944, the expulsion of Germans around 1945, the anti-Soviet resistance in the direct aftermath of the Second World War, the opposition to the communist regime in the 1970s and 1980s, or the round table agreement from 1989, are of little interest beyond East Central Europe. The exception here is the history of the Holocaust. The massive distortion of Holocaust memory and interpretation that can be observed in Poland since 2015, when the national-conservative Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) took power, illustrates the defeat of "critical patriotism." Remarkably, the leaders and supporters of the ruling party do not consider their memory politics as one of the two opposing strategies but as the only acceptable interpretation of the past. This anti-pluralist approach to history is rooted in the dogmatic assumption that Poland must "get up off its knees." Repeated countless times since 2015, this slogan is a reaction to the allegedly blind Westernization that shaped Poland's post-1989 history and an attempt to restore its lost dignity. 4 As one of the leading militant historians in the ranks of PiS stated few weeks

MA Thesis, 2017

2022

The book presents the reflections of these scholars and public figures whose work involves the subject of the Holocaust. We asked them to write about difficulties they have faced, and we posed several questions to them: Do the analytical tools of the scholar, the researcher, the philosopher, the sociologist, the artist, prove weak or ineffective in dealing with the Holocaust? More than sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, are we intellectually and emotionally baffled by the genocide the Nazis committed there? If so, what are the paths taken to overcome this? How and why continue work on this most perplexing subject?

2023

Following the collapse of Communism in 1989, a preoccupation with history and national memory developed in Central and Eastern Europe as a means of strengthening political support for post-Communist governments. In a new political environment in which the "former mechanisms of legitimacy" were socially and politically undermined and where major economic transformations resulted in mass unemployment in the immediate post-Communist years, a return to history helped strengthen democratic national movements. 1 Post-Communist governments were tasked with instituting some sort of transitional justice whereby perpetrators of previous regimes were held accountable and, in some cases, reparations were offered to victims. 2 Part of this process also included the adoption of a pan-European or transnational Holocaust memory, which served as a starting point for the institutionalization of a system of universal human rights across postwar Europe. Throughout the transitional 1990s and early 2000s, the Holocaust thus emerged as a European "negative founding myth"encompassing not only Western Europe but also members of the former Eastern bloc. 3 Consequently, the "Europeanization" of the Holocaust, especially in the aftermath of European Union (EU) enlargement in 2004, has forced numerous countries to confront their silenced pasts of dispossession, complicity, and active participation in genocide. 4 Despite many transnational Holocaust memory initiatives, the attitudes of post-Communist countries are often tactical and do not necessarily entail a genuine commitment to addressing the difficult pages of the region's past. Instead, post-Communist societies have often internalized the not entirely unfounded notion that their own suffering during the Second World War and under Communist regimes has been overlooked by Western Europe. This has resulted in a battlefield of memory in which competing narratives of the past are constitutive features of the region's contemporary political consciousness. It is within this context that discussions of the Holocaust in Central and Eastern Europe are taking place. 5