Authors

Discussion

This paper aims to problematize the scholarly consensus on the memory of the Holocaust during the Cold War.

First, it challenges the scholarly view that the 1960s in the Eastern Bloc witnessed a sustained attempt at forgetting the Holocaust. While the death camp memorials indeed almost never mentioned Jewish victims, this paper proposes to look outside of the camps. It spotlights a chain of Holocaust memorials erected in the 1960s in southern Poland. The monuments marked killing sites and mass graves as specifically Jewish spaces with inscriptions in Polish and Hebrew and with the word ‘Jews’ used to describe the victims.

Second, this paper moves away from the existing paradigm which depicts Jewish life in Socialist Poland as a story of decline and passivity where the only option for exercising agency was migration. It interprets the ambitious programme of memory work as part and parcel of the efforts to maintain Jewish life in Poland and to create new forms of Polish-Jewish identity. 

Third, the present research focuses on the transnational dimensions of memory work. It demonstrates that even in the late 1950s and early 1960s the Iron Curtain was far from an impenetrable barrier. Rather, the paper maps the network of activists spanning New York, Geneva and Kraków. It suggests that even at the height of the Cold War local memory work was conducted in the global milieu of transnational memory activists.