Published: 2021-05-18

A Compassionate Witness – The Third Who Brings Deliverance The Transmission of Trauma in a Polish-Jewish Family in Ewa Kuryluk’s Post-Memory Trilogy

Jan Borowicz Logo ORCID

Abstract

This article delivers an analysis of the functions performed by native Poles in the intergenerational transmission of the trauma of the Holocaust in Polish-Jewish families. For its source material, the author has chosen Ewa Kuryluk’s post-memory literature, textual testimonies by representatives of the second generation of mixed-background families: parents, one of whom survived the Holocaust, and the other, who, after the War, became a custodian of the secret and helped to put the traumatic experiences into written form. In the description of the complex processing of the trauma of the Holocaust, the psychoanalytic understanding of intergenerational transmission proves to be helpful. Similarly helpful is the idea of the “third”: a compassionate witness and mediator/transmitter of experience who makes deliverance possible. A close reading of Kuryluk’s post-memory trilogy allows for an inspection of a heretofore unexamined aspect of the intergenerational transmission of trauma.

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Citation rules

Borowicz, J. (2021). A Compassionate Witness – The Third Who Brings Deliverance The Transmission of Trauma in a Polish-Jewish Family in Ewa Kuryluk’s Post-Memory Trilogy. Narracje O Zagładzie [Narrations of the Shoah], (1(7), 119–135. https://doi.org/10.31261/NoZ.2021.07.07

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No. 1(7) (2021)
Published: 2021-05-18


ISSN: 2450-4424
eISSN: 2451-2133

Publisher
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego | University of Silesia Press

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