Every year, in late October, residents of the town of PĆoĆsk, Poland, take a walk together. Since 2008 the townspeople, led by their mayor, walk silently along the same road that Jews from PĆoĆsk were forced to march along in 1942 by the Nazi SS (PĆoĆski Marsz 2008) . This silent vigil ends at the train station where Nazi authorities forced the Jewish families who had been living and working in the PĆoĆsk ghetto to board trains leaving for Auschwitz , where they planned to kill them. Once the group arrives at the station, their silence is broken with readings of eyewitness accounts. They add their own commitments to remember. A priest and a rabbi together offer a prayer.
The PĆoĆsk ghetto was in the center of town, on both sides of the main street. At the time of the German occupation many of the non-Jewish Poles of PĆoĆsk encountered the ghetto boundaries (usually houses with boarded-up windows and doors) and the German persecution of its residents in their everyday public activities. It is the recorded testimonies of these witnesses that are read aloud during the present-day âMarch of Silence .â These are CzesĆawa Stawiskaâs words, from a 2004 interview by a local archivist and read aloud in 2008:
âI was once a witness to something that I cannot forget to this day. It was when Germans caught Jews who were trying to flee out of the PĆoĆsk ghetto . They would do public executionsâthey gathered every Jew from the ghetto to the plaza at Warsaw Street, more or less across from the furniture store, and ordered them to bang together tins, to show that they âenjoyedâ the event⊠that they would remember that those who ran away would meet the same fate. And they brought out this Jew and beat him to death. Right when the Germans had killed him, that is exactly when I was going to Mrs. Mossakowskiâs for milk. I saw him. It was a young boy. I heard what he cried out: Mommy! My mommy! For a long time I could not forget those cries, that pleading. Because I heard it. Miss, he wanted his mother. The motherâ (Stawiska 2004).
This event at PĆoĆsk captures the contours and layers of memory activism , the central focus of this book. CzesĆawa Stawiskaâs words recall Jewish life and death through the material culture of the town, its streets, and buildings, as well as through the everyday routines of life. She presents her experience with the Nazi occupation as an interruption that is both physical, in that Warsaw Street bisects the ghetto , and psychological, in her confrontation with extreme SS terror tactics. The mayor and town residents, who in the 2000s incorporate Stawiskaâs memories into their own commemoration, do so through a public enactment at the sites of past persecution. They are memory activists, in that the location and form of the enactment allow for expressions of grief and the deliberate, scripted recall of a specific moment from the past. Their practice creates a historical narrative of PĆoĆsk in which the Jewish past figures prominently.
PĆoĆskâs âMarch of Silence â also raises some difficult questions about PolishâJewish relations and memory. First, Stawiskaâs testimony is not detached ethnographic observation. She represents her own traumatization as well as the event of Nazis killing a child to intimidate a captive community. The calling out, until death, for a mother who cannot respond seems to be more than she could take in. She begins at a distance, describing âGermansâ and âJews,â but then she moves closer, stunned at the âyoung boyâ who is no longer identified as a âJewâ but just a child who needs a mother, as she possibly was. Stawiska is herself traumatized by first witnessing, and then, identifying with the pain of the boy. What are we to make of this witnessâs trauma? What exactly does it represent, and what purpose does it serve for the present-day participants in commemoration? Second, and in parallel with the first, what are those participants grieving and acknowledging? Is it their own losses, the extremity of genocide as it occurred on their own streets, or the pain and loss borne by past Jewish neighbors? And third, what new meanings does the public march create for the participants and observers? Is it an act of reconciliation, and if so, reconciliation to what?
This book seeks to respond to these difficult questions through an analysis of a series of memory activist projects in post-1989 Poland. Memory activism , or the public advocacy for a change in how the past is remembered, became more frequent after the end of Communist Party government throughout Central and Southern Europe. In Poland, it was part of the proliferation of advocacy initiatives that filled the newly open space of civil society, a space that Padraic Kenney called âcarnivalâ in his study of the late 1980âs (2002). Like the March of Silence in PĆoĆsk , memory activism engaged residents of local communities to participate in scripted enactments aimed at challenging taken-for-granted understandings of Polish history, and creating new meaningsâoften based on the historical truths that had long been obscured or neglectedâthat the activists hoped would lead to specific outcomes.
In the cases presented in this bookâBrama Grodzka in Lublin, Pogranicze Sejny in Sejny, and the Center for Jewish Culture in KrakĂłw âthese historical truths centered on the relationship of Polish national identity to ethnic and religious âothers,â especially Jewish âothers.â Geography plays a powerful role here. Because of the location of these sitesâLublin, Sejny , KrakĂłw âon territory that so many Jewish families lived in, that so many nation-minded Poles wanted to claim for a Polish state, that empires wanted to contain and Nazis wanted to wipe clean, todayâs eastern Poland has legacies of hierarchy, exclusion and mass violence running through its past. Moral and historical questions about the role of non-Jewish Poles in the Holocaust as well as in other excisions and exclusions, such as of Ukrainians, Roma, and Belarusians, arose in the late 1980s and continue to be painful and unsettled.
At the core of much of the reflection, rhetoric and debate about these legacies of violence is the question, what does it mean to be Polish? Barbara Engelking , writing for a Polish audience, puts it this way: âThe experience of the Holocaust seems to me to lay an obligation on us all. An obligation which is paid off individually, on the basis of recognizing that particular event in the history of mankind as part of our own heritageâ (Engelking 2001 [1994], p. 330). Taking the lead from Engelkingâs contextualization of history as a summons to responsibility, one could restate the core issue as two steps: to what degree were non-Jewish Poles implicated in anti-Jewish violence, and in what way should Polish national identity accommodate or disavow such implication? These two steps structure the environment in which historians in Poland and elsewhere have pursued these questions, as they publish work documenting the âparticular eventsâ (step one) that constitute âour own heritageâ (step two). Examples include BoĆŒena Szaynokâs Pogrom Ć»ydĂłw w Kielcach (1992), which brought to the forefront the 1946 murder of Jews who had survived the war by civilian Poles; Jan Grossâs Neighbors (2001 [2000]), which documented the round-up and mass killing of the Jewish members of a small town by their non-Jewish neighbors; Jan Grabowskiâs Hunt for the Jews (2013 [2011]), about the practices by Poles of seeking out Jews in hiding during the war to turn them over to the Nazis ; and Barbara Engelkingâs Such a Beautiful Sunny Day (2016 [2011]), about the refusal of rural Poles to take in Jews fleeing violence. Each of these was published in Polish prior to publication in the United States; the Polish publication date is in brackets.
Each of these works also sparked controversy in Poland upon publication; Jan Grossâs Neighbors provoked perhaps the most deeply probing response. Scholars had documented postwar pogroms before his book and indeed had published articles on the town of Jedwabne during the Nazi occupation. But Grossâs determined pursuit of the numbers of the dead, his privileging of testimony, and his insistence on connecting historical findings to questions of moral obligation elevated Neighbors to what one might call a memory crisis event. There was no easy way to downplay the truth that civilian Polesâindeed, Catholic Polesâhad taken advantage of their long-time neighborsâ sudden disempowerment under German law, and had forced Jewish men, women, and children into a barn to be burned to death.
Many readers reacted to Grossâs arguments with defensiveness and anger, in part because of their challenge to the preexisting understandings of Polish national identity. Deep disillusionment was also a common reaction. The prominent liberal and editor of Res Publica Nowa, Marcin KrĂłl, led off a special issue on history and memory with these observations: âFor me, [Jedwabne means] an end of the possibility of Poles thinking about ourselves in a certain way, bound up with tradition⊠I have written about how this âfatherlandâ [ojczyzna] is essential for us⊠No longer. That âPolishnessâ and that âfatherlandâ are no longer aliveâ (KrĂłl 2001: 6). In the same issue, PaweĆ Ćpiewak worried about the attacks on Gross, which included challenges to his evidence: âThis [criticism of Gross] is not about information, but rather about a mode of thinking about ethnicity,â that is, Polishness (KrĂłl 2001: 8). For Ćpiewak the uproar over Neighbors came from its threat to a specific view of Polish national identity.
The reality that people who were Polish behaved immorally, not as individuals, but as a community, and not only any community, but one defined in the Jedwabne case as almost all those in the town who were not Jewish, challenged the taken-for-granted notion of Polishness as essentially moral. In this default position, Polishness is essentially moral because of the Polish nationâs ostensible historic powerlessness (ignoring periods of dominance over others). Expanding empires and states had taken away by force the territory of Poland, in the 1700s, the 1800s to 1919, and then again in 1939. International actors had dictated and shaped Polandâs borders and place in Europe, in 1919 and then again in 1944. This history renders Poland, in terms of this commonly accepted identity, an innocent.
Moreover, Neighbors provoked such emotionally charged reactions in part because the individualâs attachment to the innocence of Polishness is itself a matter of emotion rather than historical fact. Indeed, we can say for many communities across the globe, attachments to âhomeland,â patria, ethnic identity, or religion were and are highly charged. They are part of the âpractice of nationalism,â in Brubakerâs terms (1996)âthe process of creating and sustaining a unified concept of âPoland.â In the case of Poland, this charge is organized such that âparticular eventsâ outside of its rationale cannot be integrated into it. Engelking labels this attachment a âmartyrologyâ (2001); Joanna Tokarska-Bakir calls it an âobsession with innocenceâ (2001). These terms may not be precise enough. The psychic investment in oneâs communityâs innocence is, as these terms suggest, outside of the realm of historic argument, but this is the case with any psychic investment. It may be enough to say that such an investment is a formidable obstacle to those who would like to create change, be they historians or memory activists.
The challenge for activists, who do not pursue these questions via research, was and is to develop strategies that can somehow work with the investment in a pre-existing attachment to a specific dominant identity to create room for an alternative. One risk is that their intended audience may reject or evade their efforts, either to preserve the long-standing identification or to continue on in complacence. Another is that a superficial version of acknowledging Polandâs implication in past violence may arise, as a substitute for the more difficult alternative.
This book chooses to focus on three organizations, out of the many memory activist initiatives that dotted Polandâs social landscape after 1989, for several reasons related directly to the discussion above. First, as will be outlined below and developed further in the chapters of this book, these organizations took up the unsettled and still painful issues of Polish identity ...