Authors

Janek Gryta¹;  ¹ University of Wales Trinity Saint David, UK

Discussion

This paper aims to problematize the scholarly consensus on the Polish-Jewish past in two ways. It focuses on the Małopolska region and on Gierek’s tenure to offer a new narrative on Jewish life and attempts to commemorate the Holocaust in Poland.
First, it moves away from the existing paradigm which depicts the Jewish life in Communist Poland as a story of decline and passivity where the only option for exercising agency was migration. Rather it uncovers the traces of Jewish agency and attempts and building Jewish life in the 1950s and the 1960s. It considers an ambitious programme of memory work created jointly by the religious and secular organisations and suggests that this was a programme answering the needs of the living as much as it was commemorating the dead.
Second, this paper draws scholarly attention to the forgotten Jewish monuments commemorating the Holocaust as a Jewish tragedy per se erected as an outcome of the aforementioned programme. Reaching out from regional centres and encompassing local sites of killings, those memorials challenged the Communist memory work which tended to omit the Jewish suffering. They marked the villages, towns and cities with references to the Jewish past. They have successfully prevented it from disappearing. By recreating the memorial landscapes, this research highlights the scale and longevity of the Jewish memorial project. It also challenges the existing interpretations of the Holocaust memory