NoZ, no. 6 (2020)

The article aims at presenting the new formula of <i>Narrations of the Shoah</i>, Polish academic journal. The idea behind the journal is linked to the conviction that the Holocaust is
the zero point of Polish culture and its conceptualisation, and broadly understood narrations are a necessary medium to recognise and depict complications resulting from this issue. This journal appears to be symptomatic of the state of research on the Shoah (and other genocides) in Poland; <i>Narrations of the Shoah</i> simultaneously probes and delineates the perspectives of its development. The formula of the journal responds to the challenges of contemporary humanities and fills the gap in Polish studies on the Shoah. <i>Narrations of the Shoah</i> is a <i>sui generis</i> laboratory of new methodologies, an interdisciplinary forum of cutting-edge ideas, but it also provides a continuation of the best practices of traditional philology and literary studies. Announced in the title of this article, the journal’s new opening will primarily consist in broadening its field of interest to include such issues as narrations of genocides other tham the Holocaust or the relation between Holocaust studies and ecocriticism, especially the notion of the Anthropocene.

A poem by Irit Amiel, "Her"

A conversation between Irit Amiel and Marta Tomczok on life and writing.

The article aims to present the mechanisms of collectivist logic as it functions in three areas: (1) in the historical comparative analysis of genocides – the basic method of genocide
studies; (2) in the activities of the organizations of victims and survivors, as well as in actions undertaken by animal rights activists; (3) in nationalist discourses and in the politics of memory. Collectivist logic is a set of operations that address human communities – groups of individuals linked together by significant social bonds and interests, and perceived as culturally distinctive – as the subject of history. As a result of the application of such logic, we may think about collective guilt and collective merit. The article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of historical comparative analysis as an essential methodological tool of genocide studies. The argument further focuses upon the use of the symbolic capital attributed to the term “genocide” in studies involving analyses comparing other crimes – as well as the industrial exploitation of animals – to genocides. Finally, the author describes the relationship between the state policy of memory, nationalist discourses, and the academic integrity of genocide scholars.

The article is dedicated to an analysis of the Holocaust uniqueness against the backdrop of other genocides. Most of all, the text follows the clues from Berel Lang, who interprets
the Nazi Crime as a perfect genocide, that is, such a genocide that implemented its ideological assumptions fully for the first time in human history. What transpired then was in fact a comprehensive synthesis of “idea” and “actions.” Therefore, the relation between the Holocaust and other genocides turns out to be one-sided: the Holocaust is a genocide but no other genocide is the Holocaust. The category of genocide was, first of all, introduced into international circulation by a Polish lawyer of Jewish origin Rafał Lemkin during the final decade before the outbreak of World War Two. Genocide has become an almost universally acknowledged term, reinforced by the UN declaration of 1947. Mass crimes occurred in human history since the time immemorial. However, their character fundamentally changed with the advent of modernity, when powerful nation states within the framework of ideological postulates managed to give a new dimension to their politics, the one including actions meted out against entire communities: ethnic groups or nations. The Nazi crime of the Holocaust seems to be a unique exemplification of “modernity” (the term introduced in this sense by Zygmunt Bauman), that is, the combination of technicalisation and mass production with strong bureaucratic structure, which resulted in an unimaginable deed of murdering millions of Jews while utilising technical methods. The killing took a form of “production tasks,” which made the moral problems of responsibility and guilt appear in a different light. In the article an attempt is made to show implications stemming from the acceptance of the Holocaust’s uniqueness as “a perfect genocide,” both in its political and social as well as philosophical and moral dimensions.

The article concerns the motif and theme of Soviet prisoners of war in Russian literature. It presents the most important historical facts, which are the sources of literary approaches, concerning the complicated fate of Soviet POWs during the German-Soviet war (1941‒1945) and after its end. It also shows the political and ideological determinants of the literary image of a prisoner (as a traitor and coward, a resistance fighter in camps and a partisan, victim). The subjects of the analysis are both fictive works and memoirs, among others Mikhail Sholokhov’s The Fate of a Man (Судьба человека), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich (Один день Ивана Денисовича), Vasily Grossman’s Life and fate (Жизнь и судьба), Andrey Pogozhev’s Escape from Auschwitz (Смерть стояла у нас за спиной).

The article addresses the motif (and theme) of the Soviet prisoners of war in Polish literature. It presents historical facts which have inspired literary representations of
events concerning the complex fates of the Soviet POWs both during the German-Soviet war (1941–1945) and after it came to its end. It also offers a discussion on the political and ideological determinants of the literary portrayal of the prisoner of war. Texts subjected to analyses include both works of fiction and memoirs, such as, among others, Igor Newerly’s Chłopiec z Salskich Stepów (The boy from the Steppes of the Sal), Seweryna Szmaglewska’s “Zagrycha” (The snack), or Wiesław Kielar’s Anus Mundi. 1,500 Days in Auschwitz/Birkenau. Particular attention is given to Wisława Szymborska’s poem “The Hunger Camp at Jasło” (“Obóz głodowy pod Jasłem”).

The term “pariah” was used by Max Weber in his Ancient Judaism (published originally in the years 1917–1919) to describe the Jewish nation which, as he maintained, was
“separated, formally or de facto, from their social surroundings.” Inspired by Weber’s work, Hannah Arendt was the first to expand this concept to include the Roma people, albeit unwittingly. In the light of Arendt’s essay “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” the pariah is a “suspect” treated in accordance with the rules of an investigation, examination, or inspection. Constantly watched, spied on, or kept under surveillance, the pariah becomes hypervisible. The Roma pariahs have been immersed in the “ecology of fear” for ages. Never immune to accusations such as theft or fraud, they have always been construed as the criminogenic element of the society. The “suspicion” would all too easily turn into “prevention,” which would frequently take very radical forms. However, it was only in 1987 that the book The Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution by Ian Hancock cast light directly onto the Roma pariah. The figure of the pariah helps to reveal the essence of the uniqueness of Porajmos – the Roma genocide as a genocide parallel to the Shoah, yet driven by different causes, proceeding along a different course, and burdened with different consequences. One of these consequences was the fact that in the post-war period the extermination of the Roma gradually sank into oblivion and, thereby, into invisibility.

The article presents wartime memories of the families Krzyżanowski (after the war: Dębicki), Wajs, and Siwiak that were written down by Jerzy Ficowski in the late 1940s and early
1950s, and subsequently reprinted in consecutive versions of his monographs on Polish Romani people (Cyganie polscy. Szkice historyczno-obyczajowe and Cyganie na polskich drogach) and in his memoirs entitled Demony cudzego strachu. Wspominki cygańskie [The Demons of Other People’s Fears. The Gypsy Reminiscences]. The discussed narratives relate to experiences from Volhynia of the years 1942–1945. The article’s aim is to indicate the type and scope of alternations that Ficowski made while editing the memoirs in consecutive publications. A handwritten copy kept in archive is treated by the author of the article as the base version. The differences between the successive versions were divided into four groups: stylizations, fictionalizations, erasures and additions, ethnographical issues. What results from the conclusions of the presented analysis is the memoirs published by Ficowski no longer enjoying its status as a historical source relating to/pertaining to the wartime events in Volhynia. To the contrary, they are a testimony to the selfcensorship mechanisms implemented by Ficowski, who kept in mind the specificity of majoritydominated society members being the primary readership of his books on the Romani people.

The article is a personal reflection upon the themes of the past and the present, prompted by the author’s visceral reaction to a text entitled Babka Druga [The Second Grandma]
by Tamara Bołdak-Janowska. Coming into contact with a single, concise short story is here translated into an essay testifying to an individual experience the author has gone through, an experience of the kind mentioned by Francis Fukuyama in his considerations regarding human identity. Simultaneously, the author utilises in her investigations the poetics of experience, private world, and their literary depictions, observations based on the notion of individual experience moulded by classically understood modernity. Her aim is most of all indicating those (thematic and formal) aspects of the unconventional piece of writing by Bołdak-Janowska that refer to ramifications for one’s experience and personal identity stemming from the process of introducing into (almost pre-modern) social reality rational projects of the said reality’s development (especially including such drastic ones as those related to the Second World War).

In this essay, I discuss a particular narrative structure manifest in contemporary genocide narratives, a structure based on a distinctive presence of a first-person – usually male – narrator, who describes his experiences and reflections born in the course of his peregrinations to sites of mass extermination. Rooting my research in geocriticism, I explore ties between space
and memory, which allows me to distinguish several levels of analyzed texts, tending towards metaphysical generalizations of nihilistic or patriotic nature. I apply the said analytical categories to my study of selected passages of Dawid Szkoła’s and Przemysław Dakowicz’s respective essays.

The article describes Jehovah’s Witnesses women as one of less remembered groups among victims of the Nazi regime. What is pointed out, first of all, is the state of research on
their history, especially pertaining to their camp experience, Western literature on the subject and a negligible number of Polish research works devoted to the topic in question, and also some methodological dilemmas related to researching it. The author presents the circumstances of German Jehovah’s Witnesses after Hitler’s seizure of power, their subsequent persecutions, and also – reconstructed on the basis of documents, witnesses reports, and the members of persecuted group themselves – the fate of female followers of this religion (“the purple triangles”) in concentration camps. The author’s main points of focus are, described by witnesses/beholders/onlookers of the events, acts and attitudes of “the purple triangles” marked by strong spirituality, at the same time unbreakable/intransigent in their defiance of/against violence and the authorities’ orders. (Everybody knew that Jehovah’s Witnesses could have basically “sign off” from the camp by putting their signature at the bottom of a declaration that they would renounce their faith and cease to practise their religion.) Such a defiance may be better understood, the author claims, by interpreting it in the light of the anthropological concept of emotional communities.

The article is devoted to the analysis of testimonies, accounts, memoirs, ego-documents by concentration camp prisoners of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Stutthof, and Gross-Rosen. The
source material kept in the said KLs’ archives contains a multitude of individual histories of survivors of the genocide, either described in detail or concisely noted down. What the author
focuses on is the variety of those testimonies to suffering and tragedy of people incarcerated in concentration camps. At the same time, she observes that for the former prisoners, decades after leaving the camps, the Shoah and hell are synonymous with genocide. The most common terms used by them to describe genocide are: mass extermination, the Holocaust, Annihilation, hell, the Shoah, hideous violence, total annihilation – both physical and moral.

Hanka Grupińska's text, "Good Should Prevail over Evil. On Cultural, National, and Religious Extermination of the Tibetan People"

The present essay reflects upon the outstanding, from the reporter’s craft point of view, and unprecedented when it comes to empathy (which sometimes borders on European, colonial
complicity) books by Jean Hatzfeld (born 1949), which consist of five volumes on Rwanda: Dans le nu de la vie. Récits des marais rwandais (2000), Une saison de machettes (2002), La stratégie des antilopes: récits (2007), Engelbert des collines (2014), Un papa de sang (2015).

Various definitions of genocide (starting with the notion itself, authored by criminal lawyer, a Polish Jew Rafał Lemkin (1900–1959)), that were also formulated ad hoc in works of art (the
case of a feature film by Joanna Kos-Krauze and Krzysztof Krauze Ptaki śpiewają w Kigali [Birds Are Singing in Kigali]) prove to be a kind of Ariadne’s thread.

Embedding Hatzfeld’s reportages in the context of the notion of genocide aims at broadening the field of associations for both, the narrator himself and his Rwandan interlocutors, who
sporadically and comparatively/by way of comparison refer to the Shoah.

In the essay the author analyses the problematics of genocide based on correspondence between Filip David and Mirko Kovač Kiedy kwitnie zło. Książka listów 1992–1995 (When evil
flourishes. A book of letters 1992–1995) to later juxtapose it with studies on Shoah. She ponders the generational perspective of people whose lives were tarnished by the Nazi-Germany occupation (Filip David – born 1940, Mirko Kovač – born 1938). The article most of all aims at reconstructing the stances of the two authors of letters and showing genocide as a realm of incessant discussion, vague affects, unsystematized knowledge. The author undertakes an attempt to reconstruct only some of the topics and contexts accompanying the issues discussed in David’s and Kovač’s letters, particularly: the soul-searing descriptions of the Bosnian War of 1992–1995. She shows that the language facet of violence proves to be a challenge to reflecting on literature in the correspondence between the two intellectuals. When faced with the disintegration of hitherto social order in the former Yugoslavia, the nationalist discourse, as social studies and research on genocide suggest, prepares the ground for activation of violent behaviours, justifies them, and plays a key role in fomenting the genocidal repression. As a result of the said processes, the authorities create and reinforce nations’ cultural self-images, tighten the control over ethnic purity of collective identity,
instigate conflicts between neighbours based on “the blood and soil myth,” cherry-pick the xenophobic discourse of the past, and force through with ethnical interpretations of culture.

The author of the article carries out an analysis of texts by two writers who present the Shoah from different perspectives. At the onset he points out two layers of looking at the
Holocaust in fantasy writing. The first one results from the said theme filtering through into the genre directly, the second is an intermediary one, namely, through the popular after the Second World War post-apocalyptic narratives where the Shoah is thematised as, for instance, the annihilation of the human race resulting from nuclear conflict or the spread of a deadly virus. The article analyses both mentioned layers using particular examples.

Polaroidy z Zagłady [The Shoah/Annihilation Polaroids] by Paweł Paliński is a tale of an individual Shoah. What constitutes the analytical framework here are the titular pictures, which translate into a genre, nowadays rarely practised, called the literary picture. In the course of reading one recognises the triangle of attitudes: victim – witness – torturer. Even if the said triangle has been criticized by historians, it nonetheless decisively appears in the text owing to its layout.

Requiem dla lalek [Requiem for Dolls] and Holocaust F written by Cezary Zbierzchowski are, respectively, a short-story collection and a novel, set in the fictitious world of Ramm. It is known from the very beginning that the world is doomed to be annihilated, the harbinger of which is God’s departure. In the short stories other signs of extinction are, among other things, euthanasia, the problem of immigration etc. The plains of annihilation recognized in the course of interpretation: metaphysical, social, and personal, compose a part of philosophical reflection on consequences of catastrophes being one of the spheres of the analysis undertaken. What also arrests our attention, and thereby is reflected upon, is the highly intertextual background of Zbierzchowski’s oeuvre. A prominent place is given to the analysis of the novel’s final chapter entitled Heart of Darkness, both referring to the famous novella written by Joseph Conrad and more than sufficiently justified by the text composition itself.

The article’s conclusions both position the texts in relation to other works of Polish fantasy genre and indicate their role as examples of various absorption by popular culture (here fantasy) of the Shoah-related issues.

Two short stories by Maria Zarębińska-Broniewska

Opowiadania oświęcimskie (Auschwitz stories) by Maria Zarębińska-Broniewska was first published in a book version in 1948. All the texts included in the book, however, had been
written earlier. First of them were initially released in a daily Polska Zbrojna (Armed Poland) in early June 1945, just a few days after the author’s return from a concentration camp. They were one of the first accounts which concerned women’s concentration camps. The book which was published later included nine out of eleven short stories written by Zarębińska. There is also an extant manuscript a novel’s synopsis. However, a very ambitious project of creating tens of short stories was not completed due to the author’s death. This article is a description of the history of Auschwitz stories and their particular editions; it also includes two forgotten stories which were not included in published collections.

Whether or not we understand the Holocaust to be unique or following a series of catastrophes in Jewish history, there is no doubt that the writing that came out of those traumatic
events is worth examining both as testimony and as literature. This article looks again at Holocaust poetry, this time circumventing Adorno’s much-cited and often misquoted dictum on
poetry after Auschwitz. The essay challenges the binary of either “Holocaust poetry is barbaric and impossible” or “art is uplifting and unaffected by the Holocaust.” I analyse three individual cases of Holocaust poetry as a means of both survival and testimony during the Holocaust – not retrospectively or seen by poets who were not there. Aesthetic and ethical issues are very much part of a writing in extremis which is conscious of the challenge well before Adorno and critical theory. In a comparison of Celan, Sutzkever, and Miłosz we can see their desperate attempt to write a poetry that meets the challenge of the historical moment, for all the differences between them in their cultural backgrounds, language traditions, and literary influences. As I argue, although scholars and critics have read these poets separately, they should be studied as part of the phenomenon of grappling with an unprecedented horror which they could not possibly at the time understand in all its historical dimension and outcome. We should no longer ignore their sources and antecedents in trying to gauge what they did with them in forging a “Holocaust poetics” that would convey something of the inadequacy of language and the failure of the imagination in representing the unspeakable, which they personally experienced on a day to day basis. By not reading “after Adorno” we can arrive at a more nuanced discussion of whether there is
a Holocaust poetics.

The article contains considerations regarding memory of the Holocaust in Polish contemporary prose and analyses the arguments for and against fictitious representations of the
Shoah. The author discusses the changes in treating fiction which narrates the history of Jewish people during the Second World War – from works of fiction published after the war (e.g. Wielki Tydzień by Jerzy Andrzejewski) to popular thrillers written in the 21st century. The main part of this article is devoted to a novel Tworki written by Marek Bieńczyk in 1999, telling a story of young people – Poles and Jews – employed in a mental hospital during German occupation. The novel was at the centre stage of discussion about relationship between fiction and the Shoah theme, yet the author of the article argues that it may serve as an important stepping stone in exemplifying history. This literary vision of the Holocaust (defined as “pastoral thriller”) shows educational possibilities of fiction.

In the text, the author takes a closer look at Ida Fink’s symbolic “return” to school. The writer, who had to abandon her studies in piano at the Lwów Conservatoire as a result of the
Third Reich’s attack on the USSR in 1941, since the end of 1990s has been a frequent presence on Polish school curricula and exams. The essay analyses the very manner in which her works appear within the school canon, student’s books, as well as the Matura examination sheets. What is more, some of the rudimentary biographical mistakes and simplifications are reviewed in the text. Ida Fink’s case analysis also formed a basis for a wider glance at the evolution of the Shoah theme’s presence in Polish school.

The article presents findings contained in the work by Arkadiusz Morawiec entitled Literatura polska wobec ludobójstwa. Rekonesans [Polish literature faced with genocide. Reconnaissance]. The scholar from Łódź calls into question the hitherto established hierarchy of genocides. Extensive comparative research into literary representations of particular wartime massacres is what constitutes the thematic pivot of the said treatise, which joins in the discussion scope outlined by genocide studies. Subsequent chapters of the presented book are devoted to literary reverberations of the Armenian Genocide perpetrated by Turks, the Nazi-Germany extermination of persons with physical and mental retardation as well as Sinti and Roma, the Srebrenica massacres carried out by Serbs. The remaining chapters deal with the Holocaust literature and, according to the author’s intentions, an attempt to enrich the state of research, and sometimes – to amend some of their findings.

The article undertakes the topic of forced population displacement seen through the eyes of a child from Zamojszczyzna along with war-time fates of Polish families deported during
the Second World War. The history of Zamojszczyzna lands is composed of tragic experiences of people forced out of their family households, imprisoned in the transit camps, deported to be involuntary labourers in the Third Reich, or murdered in concentration camps KL Auschwitz and KL Lublin (Majdanek). The survivors had to carry on throughout their lives with an indelible mark left by war-time childhood reflected by the name “a Child of Zamojszczyna” (the said status was granted to persons who were prisoners of the transit camps in Zamość and Zwierzyniec [solely children until the age of fourteen] and those imprisoned in concentration camps [for at least one day]).

The text is a discussion and comparison of two books by authors representing the postmemory generation who fled Poland after the events of March ’68. Dziecko w śniegu by Włodek
Goldkorn and Dom z dwiema wieżami by Maciej Zaremba Bielawski, respectively written for Italian and Swedish audience, are to acquaint their primary readers with important cultural and
historical events of 20th-century Poland. The present interpretative essay includes issues touched upon by the two authors: anti-Semitisms, the Holocaust witnesses’ silence, childhood in post-war Poland, description of communist realities, the role of memory. Differences between the writers relating to their attitudes, style, and the question of Jewish identity are presented.

Homage to Professor Ewa Wiegandt

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