Biography and Memory: The Generational Experience of the Shoah Survivors 9781618111180

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Biography and M emory

Jews

of

Poland

S e r i e s Ed i to r : Antony Polonsky—Brandeis University

Biography and M emory The Generational Experience of the Shoah Survivors

K a ja K A ŽMIERSK A Translated from Polish by K atarzyna Maciejczyk

BOSTON / 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A bibliographic record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.

This translation is based on the original Polish title: Kaja Kaźmierska. Biografia i pamięć. Na przykładzie pokoleniowego doświadczenia ocalonych z Zagłady. Zakład Wydawniczy NOMOS, Kraków 2008. The translation was supported by the University of Lodz.

Copyright © 2012 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-936235-78-0 Book design by Ivan Grave

Published by Academic Studies Press in 2012 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

How to reach —and should one — This subterranean world of memory Which is asleep and waits to be awakened For the grace of reconciliation with what happened . . . Julia Hartwig

Contents

Foreword to the English Edition and Acknowledgments  8 Introduction  10 Chapter I. Biographical Dimension of the Return to the Birthplace  23 1.  2.  3.  4. 

Why “the Return”?  24 Continuity, Identity, Memory  37 Place, Homeland, Roots  53 The Return as a Voyage/Pilgrimage  73

Chapter II. Social Frames of Memory  80

1.  Memory as a Form of Cultural Practice  83 1.1.  Nostalgia and Archival Memory  83 1.2.  Lieux de Mémoire  87 1.3.  Democratization of Memory  89 2.  Oblivion  91 3.  Collective, Social, and Biographical Memory  94 3.1.  Symmetry or Asymmetry of Collective and Biographical Memory  96 3.2.  The Paradox of Biographical Memory  97

Chapter III. Polish Memory and the Polish-Jewish Relations  102 1.  Introduction to the Subject  103 2.  A Few Remarks on Strangeness and Anti-Semitism  108 3. Wartime  123 3.1.  Being a Witness  123 3.2.  Separation of the Polish and Jewish Wartime Fates  128 3.3.  Poles Saving Jews  133 3.4.  Takeover of “Post-Jewish” Property  137 4. Polish-Jewish Relations after the War  146 4.1.  The Shoah in Postwar Collective Memory of Poles  146 4.2.  The Stereotype of a Communist Jew  156 5.  Jewish Lieux de Mémoire in Polish Milieu de Mémoire  162 6.  Meeting with the Local Community versus Liaison Work  179

Chapter IV. Jewish Memory  191 1.  Postwar Return  193 2.  Israeli Memory  205 3.  American Memory  231

Chapter V. The Voyage-Return in Narrative Interviews with the Israeli  239 1.  Characterization of the Gathered Material  240 2.  The Journey  248 2.1.  Journeys during the PPR Era  249 2.2.   Journeys with Israeli Youths  252 2.3.  Personal Journeys  253 3.  Language  255 3.1.  Linguistic Competence of the Narrators  255 3.2.  Learning Hebrew  258 3.3.   Assuming New Names  259 3.4.   “Abandoning” One’s Own Language: Contemporary Perspective  263 4.  Identity  267 4.1.  Identity after the Arrival in Eretz Israel  267 4.2.  The Problem of Identity Today  273 4.3.  Stereotypes  276 5.  The Shoah  281 5.1.  Attitude toward Places of the Shoah  281 5.2.  Mourning for the Loved Ones  284 5.3.  Intergenerational Transmission  286 6.  Memory  291 6.1.  Aspects of Memory Building  291 6.2.  Traumatic Experiences: Bad Memories  293 6.3.  Creating Space for Good Memories  297 6.4.  Rootedness in Memory of a Place  299

Chapter VI. The Return in Biographical Experience: Case Analyses  302 1.  2.  3.  4.  5.  6.  7.  8. 

Estera: The Return Process  303 Sara: Marginality  318 Rut: Rootedness in Polish Culture  333 Chana: Ambivalence and Rootedness  345 Processuality, Time, Biographical Work  352 Individual and Collective Aspects of the Return  356 “Polishness” and Israeliness in the Biography: Working Out the Balance  360 Marginality Once More  362

Conclusion  364 Bibliography  369 Index  390

Foreword and

to

the

English Edition

Acknowledgments

October 2007

This book, in this very form, would not have seen the light of day were it not for the help and kindness of many people. It is impossible to name all of them, especially the ones I met only in passing, during conferences or other social occasions. Talking to them has been constantly rekindling my interest in delving deeper into the themes I have been investigating. All these people have a special place in my memory. My deepest gratitude goes to the narrators, who gave me their time, took great emotional pains to relive their experiences, and trusted me. My heartfelt thanks go to Aliza Landau for her help, her care, and, most of all, for our friendship. Shimon Redlich and Rivka Landau, thank you for your help and keen interest. Especial thanks to Janusz Mucha and Andrzej Piotrowski, my first readers. Their comments helped me polish certain trains of thought and verify inaccuracies. I would also like to thank my colleagues from the Chair of the Sociology of Culture for factual support. I thank my parents for spurring me to work and my husband and sons for their help, understanding, and patience.

February 2011

The book, written by a Polish sociologist, was published in Poland in 2008. Hence it refers, to a large extent, to Polish literature, and it is also anchored in the rich tradition of Polish sociology, which is recognized for studies on culture and a culturalist-biographical approach represented by such scholars as Florian Znaniecki, Józef Chałasiński, Jan Szczepański, and Antonina Kłoskowska. One can easily get access to the ongoing debate of Polish collective memory related to war experiences. Since it is continuously developing, due to new voices and publications, I have added a few comments and enriched the text with new items (since 2008) of bibliography. I hope that an English-speaking reader would find it interesting due to specificity of sources and my background as an author. At the same time, the book is framed by general themes which, I believe, will be of interest to members of diverse disciplines. These are the universal sociocultural features of the biography, whose bearers long for a sense of continuity, and the exceptional experience of the Shoah, which disturbs this yearning. Kaja Kaźmierska

Introduction A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our doorstep once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after . . . Ryszard Kapuściński

The nineties of the previous century are embedded in the consciousness of Central and Eastern Europeans as a time of a breakthrough and a period of radical changes that influenced every important aspect of social life. Fascinated with their quality and intensity, we usually perceive them as a process that touched mostly those societies that have undergone these changes. However, the downfall of the communist system has not only opened new possibilities for the countries it affected directly, but it has also initiated a number of processes within Western societies. One of those processes is the phenomenon of a journey to the homeland experienced by the people who were born in Central and Eastern Europe, but who were forced to abandon their fatherland during the Second World War or because of the postwar border changes. Throughout Eastern Europe, national minorities who may or may not have been responsible for intercommunal tensions, were physically removed. From the point of view of modern governments (. . .) the results are extremely tidy. But the human cost was terrible. (Davies 1981, 517)

Massive displacements of people from their homelands were the consequences of those “tidy” solutions. Some of them, like the postwar displacement of Germans from Polish lands, took place on the strength

Introduction

11

of particular arrangements. Some resulted from individual decisions of particular people or whole communities and were taken under situational duress1 despite the lack of specific regulations that would force those people to relocate. However, the sociopolitical circumstances made them perceive the situation as threatening their own freedom and national identity. The emigration of Poles from the Eastern borderlands of the Second Polish Republic is an example of such a displacement. Finally, the displacement could be related to the collective definition of one’s biographical situation and be tied with one’s wartime experiences. The Jews who survived the Shoah could be seen as an example here, as they were leaving Poland because they deemed it a place of their nation’s and their loved ones’ tragedy. One of the ways to erase traumatic memories was disconnecting one’s self from the place of the trauma. Those attempts were further accelerated by the negative, or even hostile, attitude of Polish society and the prospect of the creation of the State of Israel. Krystyna Kersten (ibid.) calls the twentieth century a “century of the displaced,” for even though the displacements of large groups of people have always been a constant force in social life, this phenomenon was especially intense in the previous century, mainly because of numerous armed conflicts. Although it is the Second World War that provides the backdrop to further discussion, one has to remember that these conflicts and their consequent resettlements, displacements, and escapes, as well as their biographical and social consequences, have lasted throughout the entire twentieth century and are still affecting the present day. The starting point for my analysis is therefore the historical circumstances: first of all, the wartime and postwar displacements/ expulsions/emigrations that were being experienced as an abandonment of the homeland at the individual level; second, at the turn of the eighties and nineties, the opening of the borders of Central and Eastern Europe, which fostered journeys to the homeland, sometimes after a few decades of spatial isolation. The fall of the communist system lifted many limitations, and such journeys became quite common and deserved to be treated as a social phenomenon. Nowadays, it concerns Western as well as Central and Eastern European citizens. Since the fall of the iron curtain, they can travel freely across the former Eastern borderlands, once comprising the 1 

What I mean here is the direct cause of the relocations. The term “situational duress” applies to circumstances forcing one to move “because of a threat to one’s biological or sociological existence, under the influence of a real or perceived deprivation” (Kersten 1994, 5).

12

Introduction

republics of the USSR and now boasting the status of independent states. The change of political circumstances has, to a certain extent, influenced also the biographical perspective of the travelers, whose moral right to identify with their birthplaces has been socially accepted. For example, Polish citizens born in the Eastern borderlands could not openly speak about their wartime experiences and their roots before 1989. I analyzed this problem in my biographical studies on wartime narratives of people who had survived the war on Eastern borderlands of the Second Republic of Poland (Kaźmierska 1999). My narrative interviews were gathered between the years 1991 and 1993, thus only a couple of years after the issue of the Eastern borderlands and their newest history had entered public discourse. The narrators, when talking about their war experiences, often used very elaborate arguments explaining, or even validating, the very nature as well as the quality of these experiences, as oftentimes they have contradicted the official image of war created by the communist regime. Nowadays the situation is different. Borderland war experience has become a part of the canon collective image of the past, and borderland role in shaping a significant part of Polish society has won recognition. Due to these circumstances, the borderland returns have not only been strengthened in their individual aspect, but have often gained a more collective dimension, manifested, for instance, in collective efforts to help one’s former hometowns, supporting fellow compatriots still living there (Kabzińska 2000). The case of Polish borderland residents visiting their former homeland is just one example of such a journey. If we analyze the problem from the perspective of Polish society, social acceptance and understanding of such actions will turn out to be most profound. In other cases, however (for instance, those of Germans or Jews), social perception from a Polish point of view is a more complicated matter. The biographical situation of Poles and Germans is similar, as both nations were forced to leave their respective Eastern borderlands. From the Polish perspective it differs, though, in terms of the history of the social discourse concerning the loss of one’s homeland. German activity has been mostly perceived from its political and not its biographical angle.2 However, compared with Polish society, the German one (due to 2 

Here one can point to a certain differentiation between attitudes based on common experience. In the aforementioned narratives of Polish borderlanders, as well as in other publications (see Wypędzeni ze Wschodu [Driven from the East] 2001), the inhabitants of the former Eastern borderlands perceive the fate of the displaced Germans from a biographical perspective. Empathy, engendered by similar experiences, allows them to support the former inhabitants

Introduction

13

the political situation) was more prompt in reassuring the emigrants that they had the moral right to identify with their places of birth. Jews are in an even more complicated situation, as their journey to the homeland is a highly particular experience, whose social perception is frequently shaped by mutual prejudices and stereotypes. Up until now, I have consistently been using the term “journey to the homeland.” However, it is not the subject of my work to analyze the journey as such, but rather the process in which the journey is one of the components. This process was named by the biography bearers themselves as “the return.” I want to show the return to the homeland as a sequence of experiences, stretched across the biographical and social time, whose individual dimension intertwines with the collective one. Finding universal, common to all returnees, recurring circumstances for experiencing the return forms the starting point of my considerations. These circumstances consist of joint experiences of a given generation, linked to specific historical events, as well as of certain tendencies in the interpretation of one’s own biography, shaped from the perspective of the stage of life referred to as “late adulthood” and “old age.” At this point, one has to emphasize that this universality concerns a specific and still-considerable part of today’s society, which is better characterized by “traditional” and not postmodern attributes. Therefore, these are not people who stand out for their lack of identity, incoherence, and inconsistence in their actions or the fragmentary and episodic nature of various fields of their activities (Bauman 1993). On the contrary, what I mean here are people who build their collective identity on ethnic or national basis, who search for solid points of reference to define their experiences, and who feel a deep biographical need for roots. Even in postmodern times, culture still offers a wide variety of tools helping create a connection with one’s place of birth, nostalgia for the past, or compulsion to return to one’s roots or to search for a positive answer to the question “Where do I come from?”

of the Western borderlands in their sentiments for their lost homeland. Thus, in the case of Polish Eastern borderlanders, biographical interpretation often outweighs the political one. On the other hand, one should not forget that at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the problem of displaced persons has become an issue of public debate—not only a local (German), but also an international one (Pamięć Wypędzonych [Memory of the Expelled] 2003). It touches upon matters of collective memory and involves specific actions (for example, efforts toward property restitution).

14

Introduction

“Places exist at different scales. At one extreme a favorite armchair is a place, at the other extreme the whole earth. The homeland is an important type of a place in the middle of this scale” (Tuan 1977, 149). Even though this feeling of uniqueness of the homeland accompanies people throughout their lives, it can be strengthened by different events in their biographies, and it becomes particularly important in older age, when memories of childhood and adolescence are recalled not only more willingly but also with greater ease. At this stage of life, the long-term memory sharpens. Those psychological mechanisms are enhanced by the need to perceive one’s biography as a coherent whole, consisting of separate, identifiable elements. In this context, the return to the place of birth becomes a symbolic journey to one’s roots; it means coming full circle and completing the interpretation of one’s life. It can be said that for the people whose cases I analyze in this work, the need to sort out one’s biography was as common as the need to return to places of birth, the latter actually serving the first. However, satisfying this need is not that easy, as it requires a confrontation with the past and an evaluation of the present from its perspective. Even though the return to the place of birth is the direct point of reference in this case, and the displacement and migration processes form its general sociohistorical frame, it should be noted that it is nevertheless only an example of a multidimensional issue. This issue could be characterized as a need to see one’s own biography as a coherent whole, which in its final phase manifests itself in a desire for completeness—a need to come full circle. As I have already mentioned, this need is most prominently manifested in older age and, what should be noted, is felt with different intensities depending on the character of biographical experiences. Thus, while this need does not pose a problem for some people, others perceive it as an unsatisfied desire or an unfulfilled duty. The latter happens in case of biographies that are “broken-up” or disrupted, in which the sense of the continuum of experiences has been disturbed.3 The pattern of continuity that is inscribed in our culture and is manifested as a requirement to integrate individual experiences, as well as the generational continuity (lack of memories in either of those two dimensions is perceived as a pathology), leads to psychologically but also socially conditioned expectations toward 3 

This situation can be compared to a varied intensity of a biographical process and  a collective definition of national identity. It differs when we compare, for instance, the inhabitants of central Poland with the inhabitants of multiethnic, multicultural borderlands, where national and ethnic identity oftentimes forms a basis for orderly social interactions.

Introduction

15

the image of one’s biography—an ability to build a symbolic relationship between the past, the present, and the future. Being brought up in a culture of historical and therefore linear time, we feel how it goes by and how irrevocable it is. However, simultaneously, going back to the past (that is, to the memories), to the world encoded in memory, adds a non-linear aspect to the biography. We reach for and exploit the abundant resources from the symbolic universe that touches upon the sphere of sacrum, whose attribute is, among others, the revocability. The point is to have the possibilities to combine these two opposite dimensions in biographical interpretations— or in other words, to have something to return to while moving along the lifeline. When one is unable to do that, the issue of biographical coherence becomes not only one’s duty, but also a necessity to face a difficult, disrupted process of its reconstruction. This is the thesis that forms the starting point of my further considerations. Let us go back to the issues that I am touching upon in my work. As it has been indicated, there are two aspects that act as catalysts for the process of the return: a specific stage of the life cycle together with the experiences connected with this stage, which strengthen the sense of identity, and the sociohistorical circumstances, which strengthen the feeling of abandonment of a given place (sometimes through no fault of one’s own). The collective dimension of the experiences one is going through clearly shapes their individual perception and interpretation. Therefore, my intention is to show those mutual interdependencies. Characterizing the features of biographical experiences that are common to all the returnees, I will contextualize them and show how the process of the return is realized in personal and collective dimensions in the biographies of individuals belonging to a given social group. One has to agree with the statement that the return is always a monoethnic experience (Redlich 2002), and therefore it is undergone from the perspective of certain national identifications and, consequently, from certain interpretations of the past, a collective dimension of identity, etc. Pondering these issues, I could choose between two strategies: doing a comparative analysis of the returns (i.e., of Jews, Poles, Germans, etc.) or describing just one type. After some consideration, I chose the second option due to three reasons: First of all, the determinants resulting from the monoethnicity of the experience require detailed characterization from the perspectives of the collective and the individual social space in which this process takes place, making the return of a single social group a topic in itself. Second, focusing on a single case is conducive to a multidimensional

16

Introduction

and in-depth description—and this perspective, comparable to anthropological description, is close to my heart. And finally, choosing the returns of Jews resulted from the crystallization of my interests as I was working on narratives concerning wartime experiences of the Polish inhabitants of the former Eastern borderlands,4 interests on which I did not focus on then. The initial work I have done on this case provided me with a final confirmation that it constituted sufficient material for a book, as the issue is quite complex as far as biographical experiences and their collective interpretations are concerned, and that it required an extensive approach. However, I need to stress at this point that this is new territory for me. The studies of the Shoah form, after all, a separate, specialized and institutionally established field across which I am now moving not as an expert on the issue, but as a sociologist seeking material for my work. In other words, it is not the Shoah as such, but the biographical processes that it triggered that form the main reference point for my analysis. I will therefore try to show the constituents that build the characteristics of Jewish returns. At the same time, however, I want to explain to what extent Jewish returns are embedded in the universal pattern of a culturally conditioned perception of one’s biography. Anticipating further discussion, one could state that the universality of the return is juxtaposed with the specificity of an individual and collective experience. In other words, traumatic events of the Jewish past, in principle, do not create favorable conditions for a return, which is undertaken nevertheless, to symbolically close one’s biography or verify its continuity. The aim of this work is thus to conduct a certain case study. I want to present the circumstances that shape the experience of the return, how it is culturally and socially conditioned, and which interpretative strategies are employed by the returnees who describe their biographical experiences, while making use of certain resources from the symbolic universe. At the same time, I want to show how in certain biographical contexts the return becomes a universal process. It is this processuality and not the accidentality of the experience that constitutes one of its main regularities. Therefore, my aim is to show the Jewish case in the context of processuality of the experiences of those who—to stress it once more—seek for some stable points of reference for their identity and who feel the need to perceive their biographies as a coherent whole. Finally, my goal is to show the above 4 

Due to international agreements, the territory of Poland was changed after the war; thus, former Eastern borderlands belong now to such countries as Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus.

Introduction

17

phenomena as parts of a certain cultural trend that validates forging and maintaining a connection with the past—for paradoxically, in the times of dynamic postmodernism, which is not focused on having stable points of reference, we can also observe fascination with the past and nostalgia for the times gone by. The structure of the book’s aim is a realization of the goals I have mentioned, and although one could select and read through the chapters at random, their sequence has been designed so that a general perspective would lead to the details and the initial reflections which influence the later ones. Such a construction helps not only systematize the dissertation, but most of all it sets the epistemological frames of my project, since the starting point for this work is characterizing formal features of the biography, which is understood as a process of interpreting life experiences. Only then are those universal patterns imbued with content—that is, an analysis of a specific case. However, it is not my point to simply illustrate theoretical theses. My aim is to (using Anselm Strauss’s words) move from the formal into the substantial theory, where the case being considered empirically becomes an “independent” subject of analysis due to its complexity. In other words, even though my starting point contains certain universal features of the biographies, I will focus on the exploration of a selected community.5 Due to the fact that the return is a process, and therefore a sequence of certain experiences and events conditioned by particular circumstances, it is sometimes difficult to maintain the discipline of a lecture. This is why at some points some topics may be mentioned only to be discussed in greater detail further along in the work. I will also be recalling the things that have already been discussed, akin to the word game when you repeat words in a certain sequence and add a new one at the end. The sequentiality of the experiences I am analyzing sometimes enforces this repetitiveness to ensure that the next topic follows the previously covered ones.

5 

Of course, one needs to keep in mind that in the grounded theory, Anselm Strauss (1997) states that the substantial theory based on empirical experiences needs to be built up first, and only through the categories derived from the substantial level should the formal theory be built. And even though we face the opposite direction here, I want to relate to this comparison to stress the meaning of the substantial level. In my work, I perceive the Jewish example precisely in these categories. So it is not “some” illustration, but a complex research subject that enables typological representation.

18

Introduction

The book consists of six chapters6 divided into two parts. The first part is entitled “Biographical, Social, and Historical Dimensions of the Return to the Birthplace.” In the first chapter, I focus on the biographical aspect of the return. In the introduction, I provide an explanation of the term “return,” which as a word used by the biography bearers functions as a metaphor rather than an accurate description. The main objective of this chapter is to point out the most important universal determinants linked with the interpretation of biographical experiences as far as achieving a life balance or undergoing a return is concerned. These determinants could be grouped into three triads. The first one is “continuity, identity, memory.” Here I focus on those aspects of identity that help build and maintain a sense of continuity in a biography. Due to the issues that are of particular interest to me, memory is the key element of this continuity maintenance. The second triad is “place, fatherland, roots.” Here, I present culturally shaped strategies of building one’s relations with space that is perceived as biographically important due to an abundant number of symbolic resources and serves as a basis for the creation of individual and collective identifications. And finally, the last triad, “return, voyage, pilgrimage,” is directly linked to the issues I investigate. In this part, I seek for a proper formula to describe biographical experiences of the voyage to the place of birth. In the age of mass traveling and tourism development, the return cannot be described in categories typically ascribed to modern-day travels. It is best characterized in terms of a pilgrimage. While I try to capture the individual interpretation of a biography in the first chapter, the second chapter focuses on the collective dimension. In the context of the issues that I touch upon, it is created by the collective memory. Therefore, I present the basic mechanisms that shape the collective, social, and biographical memories and their mutual relations. Most of all, however, I point out the revived interest in the past and the fact that memory is being treated as a form of cultural practice. I also stress the significance of oblivion, which is equally important in this context. The circumstances I refer to form a background for the discussion of return, a background that is shaped by specific social, cultural, and intellectual attitudes toward the discourse about the past, which, due to the democratization of memory, tends to ennoble the witnesses. 6 

The Polish version consists of eight chapters. Due to the lengths’ limits of the English version, I excluded chapters in which I provide an analysis of texts biographical in nature, but going beyond typical biographical accounts.

Introduction

19

Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to Polish and Jewish memories. I do not analyze all of their resources, but I focus only on those issues that are important as far as the Polish-Jewish relations are concerned and those that influence the process of the return. In case of the Polish memory (chapter 3), having discussed its general frames (I touch upon the issues of antiSemitism and the problem of strangeness), I focus my attention on the war and postwar period. Sketching this outline is vital to presenting the context for the process of the return. Here, I discuss the experiences and memories of the returnees, as well as those of the people who witnessed the returns— that is, Polish society or, more precisely, local communities. Chapter 4 deals with Jewish memory. My presentation of the subject begins with a description of the postwar era, as I assume that Jewish wartime history is already known, at least generally. Therefore, I have tried to capture the collective image of the generation of modern-day returnees by describing the reality of the postwar life in Poland, emigration to Palestine/ Israel, and the Israeli memory that shapes the discourse of war and supports the ideology of the newly created country. Therefore, in the first four chapters I present the resources that the returnees more or less intentionally draw from while interpreting their own experiences or the decisions and actions of others. The second part of the book is entitled “The Voyage-Return to the Birthplace in Biographical Narratives.” The empirical material that I have used comes from a number of sources. The main part consists of twenty biographical narrative interviews with people who had left Poland after the war and with whom I spoke in Israel in 2004. The narrators, as well as the circumstances of the interviews, are presented in greater detail in chapter 5. Then some of the material is derived from published biographical memoirs and other cultural texts narrating biographical experiences, even though they are not autobiographies as such. I have included these nonstandard biographical sources in my work to show that they could also have significant biographical potential and therefore be well suited for analysis, or even that they deserve to be analyzed and should not be disregarded by researchers. I discuss these issues in detail in chapters 5 and 6. These two sources form the core of the empirical material. Clearly, in cases of published cultural texts, I had to make some selections. It is impossible to discuss all or even the majority of the material that has been published lately in such great numbers. Therefore, I am using selected examples. I supply these core resources with the material I have gathered

20

Introduction

in the course of my other two studies. Thus, I refer to the unpublished fragments of the interviews conducted during the project Biography and the National Identity,7 particularly when I present the Polish perspective on the wartime fate of the Jews. My second source consists of in-depth interviews (both narrative and expert8 in character) collected in Sejny during a study project entitled The Borders in Imagination and Actions among the Communities of the Eastern Borderlands Shortly before the Integration with the European Union.9 The title of the project signals a completely different field of interests. Carrying out this project and investigating the community of Sejny (a small town in the easternmost parts of Poland, where Jews used to make up 24 percent of the population before the war), I also managed to gather some data connected to the issues I am now exploring. It is important to mention the Pogranicze (Borderland) Center that functions in Sejny and fosters the memory of the town’s former Jewish citizens, among its other activities. I treat Sejny as a case of a small local community (amounting to around six thousand people), for which the memory of former citizens is/ought to be a part of the social memory. I assumed two ways of using the material. Recalling the classic division (after Helling 1990), the examples of the empirical texts I present in the book are used to answer the questions of what constitutes the content of biographical experiences and how their story is built. In the first case, the fragments I quote are used to illustrate the issues that are being discussed; in the second, I analyze the pieces of narratives to recreate the structures of individual meanings, the context of the creation of the story, the cultural patterns of its making, the way of reasoning, etc. My starting point is the perspective of interpretative sociology and, more specifically, the assumptions proposed by Fritz Schütze that concern the progress and then the analysis of the narration, which lies within its 7 

8 

9 

A project financed by the State Committee for Scientific Research and carried out by the members of the Chair of the Sociology of Culture of the University of Łódź between the years 1992 and 1994 The term “expert interview” refers to an interview during which the narrator focuses not so much on his/her own biographical experiences as on the stories of others, functioning of a gi-  ven institution, and professional actions. Biographical perspective is present to a certain extent as the narrator took part in the events described rather as an expert/informer (Menser and Nagel 2009). A project financed by the State Committee for Scientific Research, carried out between 2002 and 2005 by the researches from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Science, the Institute of Sociology of the Warsaw University, and the Institute of Sociology of the University of Rzeszów, Institute of Sociology of Łódź.

Introduction

21

formula. I try to follow the analytical procedure designed by the German sociologist. Therefore, I do not show the “back stage” of the analysis. Neither do I discuss all of the assumptions behind the method of the narrative interviews. I have done that elsewhere (Kaźmierska 2004), and apart from that, one can find other literature on the subject that is perhaps not that vast, but surely in-depth.10 Thus, I consciously refrain from conducting a systematic lecture. Nevertheless, when it seems necessary, I make brief theoretical comments, and in the footnotes, I explain the terms I use in the analysis. Finally, it seems fitting to conclude this introduction with a personal reflection. I have been dealing with the biographical method when gathering the material and conducting narrative interviews for a long time. This research technique creates a unique relationship between the narrator and the researcher. Even if it is a one-time contact only, its intensity leads to a certain kind of bond, which allows one to keep the meeting in mind for a very long time. As it happened, in the course of my scientific work, most of my narrators were elderly people. My meetings with them could always be defined in “postfigurative” categories (1970). Perhaps it was this circumstance which strengthened my conviction that discovering existent resources that—for various reasons—previously remained unknown, unnoticed, or perhaps unimportant is one of the key elements in dealing with others’ narratives. It is a vital process for the researcher, a process which one could call “growing up to . . .” or “opening one’s eyes.” I had experienced it when researching wartime narrations of the former Eastern borderlands inhabitants and then with a renewed force during the work on this book. In 1994, at an ISA (International Association of Sociology) Congress in Bielefeld, I met Edna Lomsky-Feder, a sociologist from the University of Jerusalem. I remember our conversation. She told me that after the congress she was intending to go to Poland. It was going to be her first visit, and she was feeling very apprehensive. Poland was an anti-Semitic country, and during the war, Poles did a great harm to the Jews. She was afraid of confronting Polish society and the place where her people suffered such a tragedy. I was astonished and irritated. I told her that she was wrong, that during the war Poles used to help Jews a great deal, even though they were risking death for doing so. Neither of us could accept the arguments of the other. This, however, did not affect our relationship 10   See Reimann, Schütze 1997, 2005, 2008; Helling 1990.

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Introduction

during subsequent congresses or an occasional e-mail exchange. When I visited Edna in Jerusalem, ten years have passed since our first meeting. I was collecting material for this book and had read a lot on this matter; thus, I could interpret our previous conversation in a completely different light. The topic recurred, but this time the conversation took a different path. Edna told me that for a long time, she had no idea what the German occupation meant for Poles and that helping Jews was punishable by death. “They didn’t teach us that at school,” she said. We both agreed that the matter is far more complicated than we once thought. During those ten years, we have “discovered” resources previously unknown, which only then enabled us to engage in a real dialogue. Thus, aside from meeting my academic goals, working on this book has been a vital personal experience, enabling me to discover previously uncharted fields of social reality and face the truth about ourselves, difficult though it may seem.

Chapter I

Biographical Dimension of the Return to the Birthplace

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Chapter I | Biographical Dimension of the Return to the Bir thplace

1.  Why “the Return”? Years have passed and I came back To you, oh grey and beautiful city, City which never changes Immersed in waters of the past. Adam Zagajewski

In written memoirs, autobiographical narratives, conversations, or books, one can often come across descriptions of experiences triggered by a journey to the birthplace. Although these journeys sometimes could be more accurately described as pilgrimages, the authors usually refer to them as “a return to the homeland” or simply “a return.” A return, according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, means “the act of coming back to or from a place or condition.” In colloquial discourse, the word “return” typically means coming back to a place of permanent residence, usually understood as home. The return should thus connect the action of arrival with the intention of staying. In cases of prolonged spatial isolation, it should involve a need for putting down roots, settling in, reestablishing one’s new place in the world. An archetype of such a return is personified by Odysseus, who—despite fate’s slings and arrows— laboriously and consequently was pursuing his destination. His story shows that it was not the dangers of the journey, but the passage of time that posed the main difficulty in this pursuit. However, such literal returns are quite rare, especially as far as oftentimes-forced postwar emigrations are concerned. Czesław Miłosz’s and Jan Nowak-Jeziorański’s biographies come to mind as spectacular examples. One could even venture an opinion that both of them are paragons of a late return to the homeland.1 For both of them, a prolonged spatial isolation was juxtaposed with closeness in a symbolic sense. For Miłosz, it was his literary work, written in Polish, whereas for NowakJeziorański, his sociopolitical activity, perceived as a mission. Both returned to Poland only in their old age, after the political changes initiated in 1989, with the intention to complete their respective last phases of life in their homeland. 1 

In case of Miłosz, born in the Eastern borderlands, it was not a return to the birthplace in its literal sense.

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Jan Nowak-Jeziorański decided to come back to Poland for two reasons: in his own words, a personal one—“I didn’t want to find myself in the United States completely on my own, after the death of my wife, and lose my fitness and health there. That would be the worst that could ever happen to me”—and one that could be described as a biographical need for fulfillment, for completing a self-imposed task: I think that in the old age comes a moment when you have to share the fate of the society, and not only look at it from afar, judge and assess, (. . .) my mission in Washington is over. (. . .) At my age I can only hope that I will be able to share my experiences, everything that I gathered during my lifetime, with other people. (NowakJeziorański 2003, 35–36)

The author of these words, to use Margaret Mead’s language (1970), has invoked the values of postfigurative culture, a culture emphasizing the experience and wisdom of a venerable old man. They could be fully experienced only in the homeland, for in spite of a long stay abroad, the relationships built there did not give him such opportunities nor free him from the feeling of being “alone in a crowd.” Therefore, in NowakJeziorański’s last years, the resources gathered during his lifetime with a view of serving the country have created a field of effective communication, aimed at (re)building bonds, which he considered natural. This problem was widely analyzed in numerous texts and poems by Miłosz, who shows the drama of the exile, in a biographical sense for an individual human being, as well as in a cultural one for a writer and poet. Thus, he writes about an effort to maintain “a postulatory and imaginary presence in the country,” that a writer makes his name in the process of a complex exchange with the readers, (. . .) shapes his image, seeing it with the eyes of those who react to his work. When he emigrates, this image becomes blurred, which makes him an anonymous part of the masses, [whereas] after years of exile one finds it difficult to imagine a life out of exile. (Miłosz 1990, 47–48) When at home, everyone has connections with his predecessors, for example with writers, if he’s a writer, with painters, if he’s a painter, etc. (. . .) Here, abroad, nothing of that remains, because we’ve been forced out of history, which is always a history of a specific area on a map and we have to face the—to use an emigrant writer’s expression—“unbearable lightness of being.” (Miłosz 1992, 179)

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Chapter I | Biographical Dimension of the Return to the Bir thplace

These are some of the thoughts derived from texts of a poet who, with an uncanny sociological intuition and sensitivity, describes his own biographical experience as an example of an artist’s exile. These ponderings relate especially to the time when Miłosz’s works were “exiled” from the Polish People’s Republic’s official version of newest history. The poet was well aware of the fact: “For a long time, I’ve been living in isolation and solitude, writing, as I thought at that time, to go to waste . . .” (1990, 389). After receiving the Nobel Prize, the “blurred image” of the poet has gradually sharpened. One could say that his return to the country, preceded by visits whose intensity increased after the year 1989, was thus possible due to his earlier return to the readers. Like in the case of Nowak-Jeziorański, it was connected with the aim of balancing his biographical experiences. In reference to Charlotte Bühler (1999, 261–270), who deals with the problem of the human course of life, one could say that for Miłosz and Nowak-Jeziorański alike, the return became a form of achieving fulfillment and satiation. “A need has a tendency to fulfillment, a task to a closure. Fulfillment is a subjectively and objectively successful life, as seen from the perspective of the whole.” Nowak-Jeziorański said it straight-out—a sense of fulfillment is expressed in one’s life perception: To have a mission and a goal . . . To know what you’re living for, working for, risking for. To feel, constantly, that you’re living by your vocation, which is clearly defined and concrete. It’s most important (. . .) In my life I was lucky enough that I don’t have to regret anything, I haven’t missed any opportunity. (. . .) I wouldn’t exchange my life for anything else . . . (Nowak-Jeziorański 2003, 38)

Miłosz, especially in his poetry, has shown that biographical work on achieving a life balance is not an easy task. To this very problem, he devoted his volume of verse entitled “To” (It), as an almost-ninety-yearold poet, in 2000. Two of his poems—“Po podróży” (After the Journey) (17) and “Obudzony” (Awoken) (39)—among others describe struggles characteristic of this phase of one’s biography (that is, the issues of fulfillment and the sense of life): Oh, what a strange, unfathomable life! Just as if I returned to it from a long journey and were trying to remember where I’d been and what I’d been doing. I’m not having much success with it, and the hardest thing is to see yourself. (17)

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In my deep old age, my health deteriorating, I woke up in the middle of the night and then I felt it. It was a sense of such great and perfect happiness, that in the past life I’d experienced only vague makings of it. And this happiness had no reasons. It erased neither my consciousness, nor the past I’ve been carrying along with my tribulations. And now it was suddenly incorporated as a much needed part of the whole (. . .). The calm which I felt was a calm of closing balance . . . (39)

Miłosz’s and Nowak-Jeziorański’s biographies differ in many respects, undoubtedly, if only in their courses of life, tasks, and social roles and in their respective places in the country’s social and cultural life. I do not aim at drawing exact comparisons and characteristics. I invoked these two characters only to present them as a kind of background to my further case studies, as I focus my attention on people who did not have an opportunity to experience the return to such a great extent. Literal returns are, after all, very rare. It is difficult to rebuild connections broken a long time ago or break off the ones that have been built over the course of decades spent in a new place to (re)create a social environment that would become a significant reference group. In the case of Miłosz or Nowak-Jeziorański it was possible, at least to some extent, because each of them, in his own way, had created a “meta-world” of social relations, which makes a return possible when “normal” relations cannot be rebuilt due to the passage of time.2 Of course aside from the biographical aspect of this experience, social or political context plays a large role here. It is this social or political context that creates a framework for defining a given situation. Thus, although one can negotiate biographical “obstacles,” the sociopolitical circumstances remain a major difficulty in a literal return. For instance, let us consider the aforementioned situations of Germans returning to the Recovered Territories (Polish Western borderlands) or Poles or Polish Jews, who left the country after the war, to the former Eastern borderlands. Each of these cases is governed by slightly different determinants, but they are always 2 

I admit that I did not carry out any systematic analysis of biographical material on this matter; therefore, I treat this thesis as a starting point for discussion. Perhaps those who, to use Adam Mickiewicz’s words, “suffer for millions” feel their exile most acutely. Compared with the so-called ordinary people, they find it more difficult to really put down roots in a new environment, build (in Stanisław Ossowski’s language [1984, 28]) habitual bonds, even though their social identity can facilitate assuming “citizen of the world” personas. In case of a return, however, they find themselves in a better position, because the difficulty of rebuilding basic relationships is compensated by the field of effective social communication.

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Chapter I | Biographical Dimension of the Return to the Bir thplace

steeped in history and collective memory, which in fact make it impossible to return to the birthplace completely on a mass scale. It is, however, intriguing that people who decide to visit their homeland after many years of absence call this experience “a return,” although when one takes into account the original sense of the word, it is a misnomer. Why then is the act of visiting one’s homeland, having all the formal characteristics of a journey (for example, set space- and timeframe, departure from a place of permanent residence, breaking up with daily routine, etc.), being called a return—that is, something more than a temporary change of place, involving overcoming a distance? Answering this question should become our starting point, enabling us a reflection on biographical, social, or historical aspects of this phenomenon. One should, however, remember that these contexts, at the same time, refer to two mutually permeating dimensions: individual and collective. Anticipating the conclusion drawn later on, we could venture an opinion that if one is brave enough to undertake such a complex and emotionally demanding biographical work, he or she is in fact returning to the place of birth. I am using the term “biographical work”3 after Anselm Strauss (1984). It means making an effort to interpret biographical experiences in relation to one’s identity, self-image, behaviors, actions taken or not taken, etc. “The actual contradictions and dissonances of experience that mark even relatively serene life courses require some ‘inner’ work yield a sense of sameness continuity of identity” (Strauss 1993, 99). Biographical work continues thusly throughout one’s entire life but intensifies during difficult, unexpected experiences, which force one to redefine one’s identity, changing one’s way of life. A sudden need for making one’s biography more coherent—in the situation when various life events prevent or disrupt this coherence—can be one of the circumstances fostering this work. Such circumstances are going to be the focus of my scrutiny. Biographical work demands not only a physical effort (undertaking a journey), but first and foremost an emotional return to the past. The quality of this work and the concomitant effort depend on unique circumstances, tied to individual experiences as well as their collective dimension. Hence in its course one can be, for instance, forced to examine his or her prejudices and stereotypes, to face old and long-forgotten suffering, or to confront 3 

Anselm Strauss—in the course of his research on ill persons, especially those terminally and incurably ill—has created many theoretical notions that can also be applied in different social contexts. “Biographical work” is one of them.

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past memory with the present. Each reconstruction of the past requires an effort, selective remembering as well, regardless of whether it involves inner work on one’s own biography or a public debate. Strauss emphasizes that biographical work refers to individual and collective dimensions alike. It is thus important to determine a relation between an individual and a collective scope of this work. Usually, this relation unfolds in two variants: mutual permeation and strengthening of the process, or antinomy of these two dimensions. In each case, individual biographical work is always inherently embedded in its collective context, also a historical one (ibid., 104–106). For the issues I am discussing this relation holds special significance. Biographical work on a return to the past, which is entangled with the war, cannot discount collective interpretations, which I shall discuss further in the next chapter. Now let us go back to the individual perspective. Biographical work on one’s emotions involves, then, both past and present experiences. Time provides its frame of reference. “The further life moves away, years pile up and material for interpretation grows, the more work is required for its interpretation, work which as a result allows one to find the meaning of life” (Czerniawska 1999, 80). It is a long and laborious work, which starts in fact from the very departure from the homeland and lasts all subsequent years. One can assess its intensity and dynamics only in retrospect, oftentimes during the return to the homeland after many years or even later. In retrospect, all consecutive events and emotions are starting to form a more or less cohesive, but always logical whole. The moment of return can play not inconsiderable a role in this process, because “events from the past, no matter how beautiful or unpleasant, transformed in the course of life into memories, should grow where they sprouted in their unchanged form” (Demetrio 2000, 61). Philip Marsden’s book The Bronski House (1995) is an interesting and, at the same time, literarily beautiful depiction of this process. “A young English writer travels with an elderly Polish lady to the long-gone world of Eastern borderlands, a place of her birth. He listens in amazement as she discovers a half-forgotten, no longer existent universe of her childhood; never-ending forests, mist over Niemen and a family, which she had lost forever.”4 4 

Norman Davies’s blurb on the cover of The Bronski House (from the Polish edition [1998]; my own translation—KM)

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Chapter I | Biographical Dimension of the Return to the Bir thplace

The Bronski House has been declared a travel book (it describes a journey to Eastern Europe) but could equally well be referred to as a biographical memoir. From diaries and memories, the writer recreates the biographies of two women—mother and daughter—who after many years return to the places of their childhoods. Fragments I quote below— out of necessity, shortened ones—illustrate certain elements of the return experience: leaving one’s birthplace, the awareness of one’s deprivation (which accompanies one throughout one’s entire life), and an ever-growing need to return. I draw from them, even though the narration is neither a direct (written by the biography bearer) account of biographical experience nor a historical document, but a literary fiction. However, the author’s great sensitivity, empathy, and, above others, unique ability to bridge a cultural gap have resulted in a very insightful description of the heroine’s experiences—a perfect depiction of the biographical processes being analyzed here. Zofia Brońska and her mother fled their family mansion in September 1939. An escape from the Soviet Army in a hostile atmosphere created by the Belarusian peasants, who were less than favorably disposed toward Polish “masters,” was their only chance for survival. They were fleeing on a farm cart, leaving behind all their valuables, their house, the family graves. The teenage Zofia was leaving home for the first time in her life, whereas for her mother, it was a second escape from the Bolsheviks (the first one took place in 1917) and also a complete loss of her possessions. The story exemplifies wartime fate of the Eastern borderlands Polish inhabitants. The women luckily escaped transportation to a Soviet camp, reached England, and spent the rest of their lives there. The mother never returned to the Eastern borderlands, and Zofia was given the chance only after fifty-three years. During that time she had no news from her native Mantuszki, which after the war became a part of the USSR—the Belarusian Peoples’ Republic. As for many others, who after the war settled in on the other side of the iron curtain, a return to the birthplace was possible only after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. “Look, I’ve got something to show you. Something extraordinary!” She stood, and from the next room fetched a large marquetry jewel-box. Among the strings of pearls, the amber brooches, the diamanté ear-rings, was a wedge of concrete. “It came last week in the post. Can you guess what it is?” I shook my head.

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“From Berlin! My cousin sent it.” She picked out the small relic and held it. “The wall. It’s a piece of the wall.” Zofia replaced the concrete fragment and closed the box. “I am going back, Philip. I don’t think I could die not knowing what happened. You will come with me?” (15–16)

The fall of the Berlin wall is a symbolic cornerstone, prompting the decision to go back. External circumstances were favorable, although a need to see the birthplace before one dies is a fundamental and chronologically earlier experience. Had the Berlin wall not fallen, would Zofia have visited her homeland? An answer to this question remains speculative. Theoretically, she probably could have, after many trials and tribulations and overcoming political and administrative red tape. Still, the difficult experiences of the past, together with a necessary confrontation with the system she escaped in 1939, could have rendered the return impossible. Zofia was waiting, so to speak, for the fall of the wall—a favorable political situation has reinforced a biographical aspiration. The piece of concrete, kept as a treasured memento, is a symbolic expression of these aspirations. Verbal expression of the will to see her birthplace is only one of the elements of the getting-ready process. Zofia must have been thinking about it for a long time, and it was not until a year later that she managed to carry out her goal. Like many other returnees, she needed time to put intention into action. “Are you afraid?” She looked up at me and nodded. “Of what?” “I don’t know, Philip. I just feel a deep apprehension. Perhaps this is all madness. I mean, how can we go back? How can we ever go back? (. . .) I don’t know, I just don’t know. (. . .) You remember what Konrad Lorenz said about those rats, how if one is killed they mark the place with their urine? Then the others know not to go back . . . and here am I—going back! It is madness!” (21–22)

This fragment illustrates the fears of facing reality, as well as the past. In that moment of the return process, the traumatic aspect of the past took precedence. Confronting it meant a necessity of facing a remembered fear, the last emotions connected to the abandoned place. At the same time, an escape and concomitant fear, experienced in her own biography, were once again repeated in her family story. Such a moment reawakens prejudices and stereotypes, engendered by one’s own experiences and preconcep-

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Chapter I | Biographical Dimension of the Return to the Bir thplace

tions.5 War is an event that fosters new and strengthens old prejudices, creating interpretative resources for them (Czyżewski 1997a). Memories, handed down by her mother, and her own experiences have filled Zofia with a downright irrational fear. The motif of apprehension, of fear—sometimes connected with psychosomatic symptoms—recurs in many narrations of this sort, especially in the Jewish narrations analyzed further on. Zofia sighed. She was looking out of the window, watching the trees slip past. I could sense her turmoil, could see in her eyes a shadow of the old catastrophe. We did not speak. (. . .) The Niemen was now quite close. Mantuski was less than an hour away. Zofia turned to me and smiled, whispering, “Philip, do you know I can hardly believe it! Before the sun sets I will be in Mantuski, after fifty-three years!—and I am being driven there by a Russian who seems in no way intent on killing me!” Leaving the main road, we drove down a barely metalled track towards Mantuski village. There was one long street and two rows of wooden cabins. Flashing between the buildings was the pale fishback blue of the river Niemen. We pulled up beside the village well. An old man was sauntering up the road, in and out the shade of the chestnuts. The sun was low behind the trees. The old man reached us. He looked up at each of us in turn, his head askew. Zofia shook his hands and said to him, “I am Panna Brońska. Zofia Brońska.” The old man blinked. “What?” “I am Zofia Brońska.” “Zofia Brońska?” “Yes.” He took off his cap, blinked again. He looked up at her and frowned. “Little Zośka?” She nodded. “Nie . . . Nieprawda . . . nieprawda, little Zośka on a pony! In a red dress with your hair in plaits by the river . . . Panna Zośka, Panna Zośka, nieprawda, nieprawda . . .” Then the tears overtook him and he could not speak. Zofia bent and kissed the old man and she too was weeping. “. . . my pony, yes, you remember, and the red dress . . .” The old man pulled away from her again. He looked up at her with flooded eyes. “But why,” he spluttered, “why you are so old?” (24–25)

The first meeting, probably a coincidental one, took place by the well. Its symbolism is, however, far from coincidental. First of all, the symbol of the well exists in primitive, as well as in antique or Christian, cultures. In each of them it signifies life, purification or renewal, or loftiness of 5 

I examine this issue in greater detail in my book on wartime experiences of the inhabitants  of the Eastern borderlands (Kaźmierska 1999).

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aspirations (Cirlot 2000, 389). Zofia’s return starting from this very place symbolizes, therefore, a renewal of the old life. Second, it is a place of meeting with someone who remembers her. The first meeting becomes thus a symbol of (re)creating human relationships, reentering the society, which allows her to shed the status of “the stranger” and assume one of “the homecomer.”6 Finally, the conversation itself is symbolic, as it depicts not only an irreversibility of the linear time, but above all an incompatibility of the pre and postwar perspectives. It applies to Zofia, and also to those who had remained, and finds an expression in the image of Panna Zośka frozen in the old man’s memory. The postwar world has changed completely. Due to a historical cataclysm, there no longer is a place for a girl in “a red dress with [her] hair in plaits.” The image of the young and the old Zofia Brońska symbolizes, thus, two divergent realities separated not only by the passage of time. The prewar world was encapsulated in prewar images, qualities, and behavior patterns. The war set an impassable barrier, imposing a strict scope for experience. This rhetoric of loss is quite common when creating an image of the prewar life. Above all, it is ever-present in reminiscences about Jewish society and mainly refers to the trauma of the Shoah. Nevertheless, the narration style of the returning Jews is similar to Zofia’s. The images of bustling shtetlach and streets lined with small Jewish shops are contrasted with the contemporary image of Polish cities and streets. The juxtaposition of prewar images cherished in one’s memory with the present ones often hinders the connection of the past and the present, or even makes it downright impossible. Behind an apparently childish reaction of an old man lies an overpowering, existential longing for the lost time, common to every human being. We can easily imagine an old emigrant, who, pondering on the land of his youth, realizes that what separates him from it is not only the number of kilometers, but also the lines on his face and grey hair, marks left by a strict border guard, the time. What, then, is an exile, if in this sense everyone is exiled? (Miłosz 1992, 183)

At first, Zofia returns to an “empty” place—her house (a small manor house) is gone; what remains is a ruined chapel with her father’s grave. The heroine finds it very hard to remember the topography, the details of 6 

The issues of the stranger and the homecomer—categories created by Georg Simmel (the stranger) and Alfred Schütz (the stranger, the homecomer)—are analyzed in greater detail in chapters 3 and 4.

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Chapter I | Biographical Dimension of the Return to the Bir thplace

the landscape. However, people who remember her—a substitute of the milieu—are still alive. Later on, it is they who provide her with an anchorage for memory. Zofia’s first return was dedicated to finding traces of her former presence: the chapel, the place where her house and the farm outbuildings stood, the spot where the family silver was buried before the escape— remembering favorite places, memories, and people linked to them. With time Zofia regained her sense of belonging there. In spite of many changes, thanks to memories, she found a substitute of her former identity. Two factors were especially decisive in this process: people remembering her and landscapes (remembered and experienced anew)—meadows, forests, and especially the Niemen river. The first journey turned out to be a success: “On the plane home, Zofia said she felt she had ‘closed the circle.’ That was why she had come all this way—to close the circle” (50). Two halves of a torn biography formed a whole again. A difficult, but ultimately positive experience led to other visits, aimed at restoring the family chapel where her father had been buried, among other things. On her last visit, she took part in a ceremonial consecration of the chapel. She then said the following: “This chapel (. . .) holds memories to my family, the Brońskis. Once they all lived here and used this chapel for Mass, for their baptisms and weddings, and for their burials. I remember my father’s burial sixty years ago—some of you told me you were here then too. That means an enormous amount to me. Thank you for coming. (. . .) [My father] loved the people here and the forests and it is in his memory that this chapel has been restored. But there is one thing you must understand. For more than half a century now, no Broński has lived here. Once this was our home, but not anymore. The family is scattered around the world and the life we knew here is gone. The restoration of the chapel is not for us; it is not for my family, but for you, for all of you—Belorussian and Pole, Orthodox and Catholic. You must look after it as your own home. (. . .) And be warned,” she smiled, “that if the chapel falls into disrepair, it will be my ghost that comes back to haunt you!” (239–240)

The next day, she said the following: “You know, Philip, (. . .) I honestly think that it was one of the best days of my life. Does that sound ridiculous?” “No, Zosia, it does not.” (240)

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After the celebration Zofia felt a great relief, caused not only by a passing emotion. It was only after completing the task—restoring the chapel—that she could “close the circle” by doing her duty by the dead and the alive alike. Hence, the chapel became a place bridging the past with the present and the future. As a fixed landmark it was supposed to ensure a long-lasting social memory of Zofia’s forefathers, her family, and herself— being not only a relic of the past, but also a “living” place. Fulfilling this task allowed her to “close” the part of her biography encapsulated in the past. “Philip, what do you think? Will I ever come back here?” “No.” She looked out of the window, watching the buildings of Nowogródek give way to the fields and the forest. The sun was low on the horizon. “No, I think you’re right.” Then she raised her chin and smiled her reckless half-smile. “But maybe when I’m very old I’ll come here in a car and stay in a little cabin near Mantuski and die there all alone!” (242–243)

We shall never find out whether Zofia would have realized this plan, because soon after her return to England she was diagnosed with cancer; she died a year later. I have quoted this story (very sketchily) to set a framework for my further analysis. In the above excerpts one can find traces of intimate experiences and emotions, a struggle to consolidate one’s biography, as well as being rooted in a given sociopolitical context, a reference to collective imagery. All this comprises the experience of the return, understood as a long process, in which the act of the arrival holds a very important place but only remains as one of its stages. The return is not therefore a one-time random episode, disconnected from the rest of the biography, but a result of a sequence of events and experiences. Thus, returning to the birthplace after many years cannot be treated as a mere visit; it has to be defined as a return within the scope of a given biography. Consequently, although it is not a return in a literal sense of the word, the term should be regarded as a metaphor to emphasize the biographical aspect of the experience. The second meaning of the phrase “the act of coming back to former condition” seems a completely adequate one. To organize the above explanations, one should recapitulate, first, that a return is a category drawn from the language of the narratives I have gathered, meaning a journey to the place of one’s birth; and second, that an analysis of the material substantiates the thesis that a return is also a sequence of events—that is, a biographical process, characterized by certain

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dynamics. These two meanings complement each other: the first one puts more emphasis on the experience of the journey itself; the second one, as it were, on the natural history7 leading to it. In my further considerations, I shall use both meanings, depending on the context, but the processual aspect will remain the main field of my interest. Therefore, one should think about what circumstances shape this process and influence its dynamics. The basic frame of reference is set by two biographically consolidated needs: maintaining continuity in time and putting down roots in space. “Continuity in time turns out to be an inalienable attribute of a person. A second matter is putting down roots in space. It reveals the importance of the genius loci for shaping individual biographies” (Czermińska 2000, 120).

7 

The phrase I am using is one of the fundamental terms of the Chicago school of sociology. Natural history means a certain series of events that, especially from the point of view  of the actor, was impetuous and uncontrollable, but at the same time—especially from the researcher’s point of view—predictable and governed by certain regularities (Szacki 1981, 649).

2.  Continuity, Identity, Memory Have you ever thought how deeply we are connected with the past? Not necessarily ours. Besides, what is our past? Where are its limits? It is something like an undefined longing, but for what? Maybe for this what had never happened yet it passed anyway? The past is only a figment of our imagination, and imagination needs yearning, it feeds with yearning. The past, you know, has nothing in common with time, as it is believed. Wiesław Mysliwski

The case of Zofia shows that a return to one’s homeland is an act of completing one’s biography, connected with a need for biographical continuity. History, that of groups or that of individuals, is affected by a constant “returning to oneself ” (Strauss 1959), because the present is, to a large extent, devoted to interpreting the past. It is very difficult to separate the individual and collective aspects of this experience. On one hand we have the biography—a life cycle of an individual who interprets his or her experiences to create a coherent whole out of them. From this point of view one could venture an opinion that what matters in a biography are not events or actions themselves, but first and foremost their interpretation, aimed at “validating” biographical experience so that one could perceive it as both constant and processual. On the other hand, these interpretations are based on circumstances that transcend individual aspects of perception. They consist of culturally founded patterns of biographical experience validation, specific historical events shaping lives of entire generations, resources of collective memory that set specific constrictions on a discourse about the past, etc. In this chapter I shall endeavor to present aspects assigned to the individual dimension of the biography, crucial for this book. What I mean here are experiences that are undergone independently, so to speak, from outside circumstances (if this can apply to Homo socius). They are both very personal and universal, because they involve everyone, regardless of specific historical or social events. These circumstances are, for instance, going through subsequent stages of life feeling a continuity of one’s biography, a sense of identity. In the context of the issues analyzed in this work, further reflections will concern a specific biographical “moment”—that is, a turn

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of adulthood and old age or an onset of old age. At this point it would be prudent to refer to the classic theory of Erik Erikson. Among the eight stages of development proposed by Erikson, the last one—integrity vs. despair and bitterness—refers to late adulthood. This stage constitutes a synthesis of all the other stages, according to Erikson’s general idea. Completing every stage is an identity-shaping process. Each stage is an alternative, as well as a challenge, which has to be faced by making the right decisions. In a biography, the mutual interdependence of specific stages, especially those markedly separated in time, can be less than obvious. However, undergoing subsequent identity crises—that is, tensions between choices, which lead to positive or negative changes in one’s self-image—is a result of previous stages and sets the following ones: “‘after’ should mean only a later version of a previous item, not a loss of it” (Erikson 1997, 63). The stage of late adulthood is a coping stone of these choices. “Only he who in some way has taken care of things and people and adapted himself to the triumphs and disappointments of being, by necessity, the organizator of others and generator of things and ideas—only he may gradually grow the fruit of the seven stages.” (Erikson 1980, 104). A similar perspective can be found among many authors dealing with the problem of old age. “One who reaches the old age resembles a mountain climber, reaching a bare peak. And when he turns his head, the life before him stretches before his eyes like a vast landscape (. . .) A peak is beautiful in itself, but an old age is beautiful in itself only when it’s rich with the past, which prepared it” (Leclercq 1978, 12–13). Thus, a need for a life-synthesis forces one to get a global picture of past experiences, and such a distant perspective makes “all past qualities of the past assume new values that may well study in their own right and not just in their antecedents” (Erikson 1997, 64), giving new meaning to old experiences. Their interpretation—filtered by one’s whole life, along with a desire for integrity—can facilitate the return to events and experiences that, due to their gravity (for instance, being potentially frightening or traumatic), were systematically erased from the biography. A desire for a consolidated sense of continuity and cohesion is thus forced by the conviction that these difficult experiences form an integral part of life. This conviction encourages one to search for a strategy of incorporating them, to start biographical work, or, in the words of Olga Czerniawska (1999, 79), to “clear the memory.” Erikson calls this process “philosophical ritualization,” whose positive aim is gaining wisdom, allowing one to understand “a meaningful interplay between beginning and end as well as some finite sense of summary” (Erikson 1997, 63).

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One of the vital elements shaping this perspective of one’s biography is time. In an elderly person’s life, time plays a most significant role. This role is mainly expressed in a change of perspective. Life becomes reoriented starting at the point of birth to the time left, while a subjective feeling of “running time” (so typical of the stage of adulthood) remains, even though various forms of activity (i.e., professional) have come to an end. Elderly people connect the sense of passing time not with an activity in itself, but with the value of time as such. What often results from this change is upsetting former proportions between past and future. Youth and, to a certain moment adulthood, are focused on the future, whereas old age is focused on the past. If we analyze this relation from a “timeeconomics” angle, we can refer it to two aspects: First, the elderly focus on the past because, having most of their lives behind them, they have a wide biographical resource material at their disposal. The mechanisms of memory, analyzed by psychologists, also play a significant role. In old age, long-term memory sharpens, while images of childhood and youth— previously absent, so to speak—return. Second, focusing on the past is a form of escape from the future, which in old age more often than not brings to mind the end of life, and not its thriving development. Here I shall focus only on this first aspect,8 when the time-perspective gradually starts to shift during the adulthood stage. It is then that the past starts gaining more importance; the memory’s role of being a reservoir for past experiences also grows. “It’s a memory of positive events, but also of failures, hurts, disappointments, disasters, disillusions, pains caused and suffered. A ‘half-life’s memory’ is a record of experiences which require ‘segregation and circumspection,’ organization and a new structure” (Ożóg 1999, 68). Here an explanation is necessary. The described biographical processes are a result of a sequence of experiences, whose timeframe cannot be pinpointed with any accuracy. Some “symptoms” of these experiences appear and disappear, to resurface once more after some time in a more tangible form. This is the case, for instance, with the idea of a return to the homeland, which stems from random, elusive, and passing thoughts— disregarded at first, but then reshaped into a systematic reflection on the 8 

Both aspects were described by a well-known Polish sociologist, Jan Szczepański (1999), among others, in Fantazje na temat czasu (Fantasies about Time). “Czas starości” (Old Age) is a very moving chapter, as one could suspect, not only a result of a sociologist’s reflection, but also a personal reflection of an old man.

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past, fostering a nebulous, but ever-growing intention to return. In most cases it applies to people who find themselves between the stage of adulthood and old age. Many of them may not pay any attention to synchronizing biological and social times with their own individual time sense. In other words, these people who, according to most widely applied definitions of biological age, could be considered elderly do not perceive themselves as such. I do not intend to create such classifications either; my intention is to draw attention to a specific tendency in orienting one’s biography toward the past. It appears during the stage of adulthood. Unnoticed at first, perhaps even disregarded or suppressed, with time it gains force. These initial symptoms are usually recognized only in retrospect, from a perspective of synthesizing certain biographical experiences. Therefore, it is not old age as such, but unique biographical processes, best crystallized at this stage of life, which are the subject of my scrutiny.9 As I have already mentioned, a yearning for consolidating one’s life experiences is a fundamental one. “Such a synthesis can be a description of life, an evaluation, an analysis aimed at discovering the meaning, an examination of one’s own life, but the most important thing is an attempt to harmonize the forms of time one has experienced” (Szczepański 1999, 131). In this case, it applies to a return to the time destroyed by war experiences— to use Erikson’s expression yet again (1980, 157), a situation when “time diffusion” takes place. “If in a ‘normal’ daily passage of time, during a time of peace, we have a sense of the past, present and future; an unusual situation—of war, occupation, changing all rules of life, changes also the sense of the time” (Engelking 1996, 7). This commentary refers directly to the time of war. From the present point of view, those experiences, occurring in a completely different frame of reference, have to be incorporated into a biography. Memories then become a tool for building bridges between the past and the present. The identity then should become a basic frame unifying even contradictory experiences into consolidated memories of a biography. 9 

I made the above stipulation for two reasons: First, it is not my intention to focus on the issues of the old age, which in sociology, and especially in social gerontology, are thoroughly analyzed in a wide body of literature. Second, I do not mean to show any disrespect to the narrators of the stories I quote, as was once the case. In one of my works, I have called the narrators “elderly people” or “people entering their old age.” Then coincidentally, it came to my notice that one of the narrators, a then sixty-something-year-old woman, was hurt by this classifi-  cation.

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Although the identity, according to certain sociological theories,10 is subject to constant changes, a person defining his or her biography usually concentrates on those experiences that allow him or her to see him- or herself as an individual and a coherent whole. This perspective becomes important in retrospect, when one is looking back at the entire life. It is especially vital in the elder life—in the time of general life examination and looking for meaning in one’s biography. At that time, life often seems to be a series of events whose common frame of reference is a relatively stable and constant identity. Each reflection on life is a symbolic act of organizing these events. The meaning of life experiences depends on how we interpret our past actions. If the interpretations are reliable, if we trust our own “terminology,” various events and motifs driving us become a single common meaning, allowing us to perceive life as a whole. “It is as if you were to tell the story of your life, epoch by epoch, making sense of each in terms of the end product. The subjective feeling of continuity turns not merely upon the number or degree of behavioral changes, but upon the framework of terms, within which otherwise discordant events can be reconciled and related” (Strauss 1959, 146). Duccio Demetrio presents a similar perspective, if from a slightly different theoretical angle (2000, 56), when he calls identity an “archipelago of beings, I’s still alive in memory or lost, which are trying to be resolutely and firmly connected and unified by time and autobiographical thought, using various methods.” “Focusing our attention on shaping our image, we discover that the mind revels in memories, organizes them, bringing some to the forefront and marginalizing others, establishes their proportions, length, divides them into types and sorts” (ibid., 21). Giving names to the events and actions and interpreting them allows one to incorporate them in a biography or exclude them from one, hiding them from view if they are interpreted as “deviant,” hence destroying the sense of continuity. There are also those that cannot be excluded—for instance, the ones apparently suppressed from memory, bad or traumatic ones, which resurface with time, as if demanding their own place in the biography. This situation especially calls for extensive biographical work. Passing over certain experiences, emphasizing others, giving new meanings to past actions—these are only some of the complex strategies for reworking one’s biography, aimed at presenting life as a coherent 10   I am referring to the interpretative sociology tradition, especially to Anselm Strauss and

Chicago School.

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whole. The sense of identity continuum seems to play a main role in this process. “The I is the richer, the more it sustained, the more experiences it gathered, the brighter and deeper its experiences were, its knowledge and individual culture shaped during lifetime. The I is richer, if it can call upon these memories, make them alive and use them in the process of constant self-creation. It requires a tremendous effort. ‘Being yourself is exhausting’—Bergson concludes” (Skarga 1995, 6). Therefore, what forms the content of our experiences is, to a certain extent, secondary to what meanings will be given to them in a biography; in other words, in what way, in the form of a memory, will they influence our present biographical choices? Duccio Demetrio (1996) in his book Raccontarsi. L’autobiografia come cura di sé (Autobiography as Healing of Oneself)11 describes a need for autobiographical reflection, growing with the passage of life. The author is trying to convince the reader that a reflection on the past should become a part of the identity-building process, from present and future points of view.12 Reminiscence is a key analytical category for describing the process of embracing one’s biographical past. Memories are an “amalgam of past experiences.” Necessarily, they have to be selective, for this is the nature of human mind. Feelings are their key catalysts; therefore, biographical experiences accompanied by especially powerful emotions usually gain the status of unforgettable memories in one’s biography. It is they who, with time, are invoked with increasing frequency, sometimes in the most unexpected and surprising circumstances. With time, the process of memory-resurfacing gains regularity and continuity (Demetrio 2000, 19). “Memory is a sign (signum), a permanent mark on the life. Past moments, being integral features of a thick net of interdependencies and connections, soon reform into images, single images or complex stories, made up of the past” (ibid., 46). An aspiration to embrace the past more actively, peculiar to a certain moment in life, awakens a desire to discover the memories and forge them into a bigger, coherent whole, whereas the awakening and the desire are vital requirements of shaping one’s relation with one’s biographical past. In this context, the 11   No English version, all quotes translated by myself—KM. 12   Simultaneously, Demetrio encourages the act of creative and, according to him, therapeutic

writing about oneself, which should be considered a basic thesis of his book. However, in the context of the problems I am studying here, the subject is of no academic interest  to me.

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nature of the resources contained therein is a secondary matter: “It does not matter if it [the memory—KK] is a sublime or a dishonorable and base one, if it comforts and gives peace or causes anguish, if it is liberating or obsessive” (ibid., 60). Thus, an awakened desire to return to the memories initiates an ever-intensifying process of building bridges between the past and the present. The author compares it to “casting a net” to fish for as many memories as possible and “trawling a net,” which is unifying discovered memories into a coherent whole (ibid., 37). That is exactly how Samuel Bak (2002, 153–154) describes his work on a book dedicated to life’s memories: My entire being has for the past several months been plunged into the creation of this memoir, this fragmented collection of recollections, reflections, and confessions. Unable to respect chronological order, since feelings rather than a need for documentation have guided this unusual journey, I spend more hours of my day in the late thirties and forties of Vilna than in my present Weston home at the turn of the twenty first century.

However, although it results from an “infatuation” with the past, its certain rediscovery, this process is also a very difficult one, because it often engenders negative emotions. A return to the past involves not only nostalgic, melancholic, and usually embellished pictures from childhood or youth. Memories activate other feelings too—anger, disappointment, suffering, responsibility for one’s actions, etc. They too need to be found a place in one’s biography, to complete its coherence and continuity. There are also memories whose incorporation into the present—that is, a confrontation with the reality—leads to a widely experienced sense of tension between the desire and the fulfillment. Characterizing this tension, Demetrio calls upon Seneca, who demonstrates that a desire for a return, nostos, can sometimes be replaced by an equally exciting need of potos— that is, desires of someone condemned to unfulfillment (ibid., 61).13 An example of the potos can be the previously mentioned memory of “panna Zośka in a red dress.” It evoked a positive nostalgia for an irreversible past. However, when confronted with reality (an old “panna Zośka”), it somehow disrupted the relation between the past and the present, breaking a “spell” cast on the image of a time long gone. 13   In Greek, the term potos refers to a need and, metaphorically, a container in which one stocks

and stores—thus, to some extent, restricts and suppresses needs (Demetrio 2000, 61).

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Therefore, in the face of difficult past experiences and a tremendous global event looming over one’s childhood, the task of returning to memories is extremely difficult, no matter what “travel strategy” one adopts. Still, you can’t not look behind, because there, in the land of your forefathers, your language, your family, remains a treasure more precious than anything money can buy, that is colors, shapes, intonations, details of architecture, everything which shapes us in childhood. Giving voice to our memory, we wake up the past (. . .) but a man devoid of memory is hardly a man, he is a crippled human being. Thus a contradiction is born, and you have to learn to live with it. (Miłosz 1992, 180)

As a consequence, a return to the past, homeland included, does not involve only an act of “dusting off ” one’s memories, but also a grueling task of facing them. The difficulties stem from various tensions between the nostos and the potos: a difficulty in finding a common denominator for problematic, contradictory experiences and an inability to create a whole due to a marked absence of connections (for instance, a lack of childhood memories or memory of past generations). Also, a return often forces one to reexamine former interpretations of past or present events (as it requires a certain readiness for a confrontation between the memories and the present), which have to find their places in a frame of reference creating one’s identity. Such can be the consequences of a return, but the very need for it comes from a desire for a sense of continuity. Hence, we have to deal with another tension, if not a contradiction: a return to the homeland has to foster a sense of biographical continuity, but, at the same time, often requires a reworking, a confrontation of past and present expectations, emotions, self-images, etc. A synthesis of past moments “revives the beauty of some, the painfulness and bitterness of others” (Szczepański 1999, 133). An inability to balance these contradictory experiences—“memory blessed and cursed” (Czermińska 2000, 120)—can become a “biographical trap.” I apply this term to a seemingly insurmountable sense of inability when taking up biographical work, whose aim is a coherent image of one’s identity, enabling a reconciliation of the present and the past from the whole life’s perspective. The experience of the return can become a biographical trap when the balance between nostos and potos is upset; the evaluation of the past turns out to be negative because, for various reasons, the positive event of “closing the circle” does not occur. Thus, instead of a sense of integrity comes despair and, consequently, bitterness, which “are not allied with

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constructive ideas and a life cooperation” (Erikson 1980, 105). In further parts of my work, when referring to specific biographical examples, I will be trying to find an answer to the question why, in some cases, the return becomes such a biographical trap, further complicating the uneasy task of working on one’s past. The recollections-building process can be disturbed by poor memory. It mostly applies to childhood recollections, which can be (re)created only on an individual level by the biography bearer. They usually comprise snapshots, retained in a child’s mind, and stories about ourselves, told by those closest to us. They form a so-called heart memory, “fundamental for family events, which are a leading thread for someone attached to one’s forefathers, brothers and sisters, friends, in other words—people who have influenced his or her emotional life during its initial stages” (Reboul 1993, 16). The borderline between an authentic memory and an “annotation” of a story is fluid, and its strict determination is of no great importance here. What suffices is an awareness of how complex and imperfect the process of (re)creating the memories can be. What is difficult to achieve in one’s childhood gains in value. A story about childhood often seems, thus, an initiation quest, whose difficulties become a subject of especial scrutiny. The memory is divided, the recollections evaporate, loose at the beginning, of course if there is any beginning, but then a shuttle will knit them together, although there will always remain a doubt as to its circumstances and details. An autobiographer will express his or her doubts. This doubting discourse will slightly rattle, but not shatter the credibility of the memories. Authenticity of an autobiography, which is a most fundamental issue, results, to some extent, from memory’s hesitation, whereas the value of a memory results from its frailty. (Lejeune 2001, 242)

However, some narrators of the cases I discuss later have been deprived of this possibility to create recollections from childhood. The process of discovering one’s memory resources, the “discussion” on their credibility, described by Philippe Lejeune, requires proper cultural and social references. It is formed, among others, by recollections of the past (for instance, grandparents’ or parents’ stories about their respective childhoods), stories about who we were during our own childhood, about our forgotten past, about people close to us. People I am writing about in the next chapters were deprived of family stories, because their families were either gone or did not want to revisit past memories after the war.

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The war has also disturbed the process of gathering images from the past, which should fill the memories of the narrators. “A common characteristic of childhood recollections is their lyricism. We find ourselves in the realm of faith” (ibid., 242). This conviction is shared in the psychological and protective concept of socialization (shared also by the popular opinion), which refers to childhood as a “safe haven” (Theiss 1996, 11). Wilhelm Dichter (2001, 72) calls upon this intuition when remembering the war: What scared me most was the return to the thoughts of my loved ones. A normal child trusts adults as a matter of fact. This guarantees him composure, smile and courage. My loved ones, being convicted to death, could not guarantee my safety. Fate was stronger than they were. What’s more, I didn’t know what they’d do, if taking care of me jeopardized their own rescue.

One’s childhood should be, thus, a time of care and protection, ensuring a full and unlimited development. One of the consequences of this process are good memories, which can be called upon in later life stages. The tragedy of wartime experiences, however, eradicates all the lyricism and nostalgia, even if the memory retains an image of normal prewar childhood. This part of the recollections—abandoned, absent from the family-stories reservoir—leaves a gaping hole in the biography. With time, however, it turns out that the absence of memories is worse than their excess, even if they are most dramatic. Therefore, returns to homeland often constitute an effort to (re)create childhood lyricism, in spite of the extreme difficulties caused by wartime experiences. Thus, we come across one of the most fundamental factors setting an interpretation frame for biographical experiences. Although this chapter focuses mainly on the individual aspects of experience, I cannot omit the collective ones. Individual biographies are always steeped in the history of the entire generation. For the generation upon which I am concentrating, war was a major point of reference. In a typology of life events, war is characterized as a very unlikely one, but if it occurs, it is experienced by the majority (Hoerning 1990, 131). Therefore, it belongs to a category of historical events that, first, usually disturb cultural landmarks molding life stages established in a given society (Hajduk 2001). Second, it “create[s] new dimensions of an individual’s life history” (Hoerning 1990, 127). Each of these factors has its own significance in the process of memory-building and, in the cases scrutinized later on, in forming and shaping the process of the return. A disruption of a normal life cycle is a difficult experience in

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every life stage. With reference to the war, what matters is not only a sudden departure from established patterns, but also an irreversibility of changes that, although at a macrosocial scale, affected individual biographies as well. This phenomenon is very evocatively drawn by Adam Zagajewski (1995, 4): My parents’ life was cut in two: before they left and after they left. And my life, too, except that my four months spent in that breathtaking city could in no way equal the experience of many years of mature existence. Yet no matter where one cuts and divides life, one cuts and divides it into two halves.

The author describes the experience of leaving Lvov, which he himself knew from family stories. He spent his childhood and youth in Gliwice. In the case of Zagajewski, leaving the city was not a normal change of place. It signified an irreversible process of change, which, both at an individual and collective level, was perceived as a loss—of roots, freedom, status, etc. The next generation was raised with this very belief: the war was a clear dividing line between that world and this one. I was brought there when I was barely four months old, and then for many years afterward I was told about the extraordinarily beautiful city (Lvov) that my family had to leave. So it is not surprising that I looked upon real houses and streets with a semicontemptuous air of superiority and that I took from reality only the bare necessities. (ibid.)

Hence, although Zagajewski was “only” born in Lvov, the power of family narrative—shaping his social, political, cultural, esthetic, etc., sensitivities—made him incorporate the experience of displacement into his own biography too. And although one could point out marked differences in the intensity of this feeling with subsequent generations (that, is the grandparents, the parents, the children), for each of them, in their own way, it retained its power. Małgorzata Czermińska (2000, 146–147), talking about the immediate postwar generation, uses the term “a-childhood-right-afterYalta,” which took place in a stirred-up space at a time of “just-arrived.” “Two places and the move between them. A childhood on the move. Torn between the past and the present, with a temporary background, striving to put down the roots or unwilling to do so” (ibid., 147). The aim of this digression, referring to the experiences of the next generation (after the one which is the subject of my scrutiny), was putting an emphasis on the effects of the war. This seemingly obvious statement gains,

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however, new meanings, when juxtaposed with the works of contemporary Polish writers and poets like Adam Zagajewski, Paweł Huelle, Stefan Chwin, and many others. The prose of the postwar generation shows the force of intergenerational narrative shaping the identity of subsequent generations and, at the same time, its overpowering character, stemming from the war drama. A postwar generation of the Jews whose parents survived the Shoah has a significant role here. The mechanisms of building a relationship with the past are similar to building a relationship with a place. However, different experiences and, above all, their interpretations lead to differing results. Stories about the past on which the generation was raised referred to two completely dissimilar phases of its parents’ biographies: the first was the prewar life (oftentimes a culturally unique world of the shtetlach); the second was the paralyzing time of the war.14 The tragedy of war experiences usually loomed over references to the prewar era. A narrative of war biography (one’s own and the entire nation’s) became, in Eva Hoffman’s words (2004, 186), a “gene in our collective cultural DNA.” It contains trauma, fear, and an image of the past consisting of death and destruction. Translating this to the language of stories about the past fitted into space; but interpreted from a contemporary point of view, Poland is regarded a “huge cemetery,” the site of the death camps, “a sinister and forbidden landscape; the place where one would not set foot, the imaginative locus of the most primitive and barbaric anti-Semitism” (ibid., 135). Those visiting Poland feel enmity and anti-Semitism “in the very air.” Drawing on the prejudices and preconceptions, they fall victim to certain notions and expectations, which can lead to overinterpretation. That is why the author questions these notions, asking, “How does one intuit anti-Semitism in the atmosphere? How does one sense a vast absence, or presence of the dead, in a place where one has never been?” (ibid. 2004). The answer, I think, lies in the content, as well as the form of the memories passed over to others, and in the resources of collective memory, which I shall discuss later. Coming back to the main thread of these reflections, in the case of people whose biographies form the main subject of my interest, it was their childhood that constitutes the disturbed life stage. Wiesław Theiss (1996, 7) calls living through this stage in the time of war “a captive childhood,” 14   I am leaving aside the, however fundamental, problem of posttraumatic silence, interfering

with intergenerational communication, especially family communication (Rosenthal ed.  1998).

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as it prevents one from normal psychological and intellectual development and deprives one of moral predispositions, emotions, and will. In such a situation, building recollections on lyricism and nostalgia is often difficult or downright impossible. From a contemporary point of view, it can prove to be a factor complicating the return process. On one hand, there is the compulsion to complete the life circle by incorporating the past into the biography; and on the other, there are often no means for doing so, as those stored in a symbolic universe of the group are often inadequate. One of the narrators described her experiences thusly: Nobody knew about my past, everyone thought I was a Jew born in Brazil. I closed that chapter completely and never spoke of it. Nobody knew I was born in Poland and that because of the war I had such tragic childhood, nobody knew anything. Then I had those best friends who later on found out and asked. “Why didn’t you tell us anything, such a good friend, why didn’t you say anything?” When they met my sister, my sister talked about it all the time, at any opportunity, I couldn’t listen to that, she got on my nerves terribly. When my friends found out from my sister all about our past, “Why didn’t you say?” There was nothing to tell, it died, for me it is. I was ashamed that I had such a poor and such an unhappy past, such a childhood. Everyone can tell how they played during childhood but me—what could I tell? It was better not to say anything, I was very ashamed and I couldn’t talk about it at all . . . (W 18)15

The quoted fragment confirms Lejeune’s characteristics of childhood memories mentioned above. An inability to connect with such an image of the past makes the narrator feel alienated and, as a consequence, ashamed. It is a shame relied to being deprived of an attribute possessed by other members of the peer group. It is quite symptomatic that this “deprivation,” 15   Quotes marked W 1, W 2, etc., come from narrative interviews I conducted in Israel. Every

fragment featured here contains the following symbols of transcription: Many, italics, signify an emphasis put on a word or an entire sentence; a divided sentence, he/she returned, signifies an abrupt pause; ellipsis, . . . , signifies silence; square brackets, [ ], contain commentary on the manner of speech, the narrator’s emotions, pauses, or disruptions in the narrative; (. . .)  means an omission of a certain fragment in the quote. In my work, I do not present a structural analysis of the text. I present only its final results or use interview fragments to illustrate my point. For this reason, I made the transcription more legible by editing the paralanguage (for instance, loud interjections signifying hesitation, such as “mhm” and “uh”) or repetitions where it would distract from reading.

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usually understood as a material loss, here refers to a very personal and at the same time universal experience—going through one’s childhood. The second of the circumstances mentioned is creating new dimensions of an individual’s life history. In spite of individual experiences, they usually also have a collective significance. As Erika Hoerning points out (1990, 128), these new experiences, engendered when “solving ‘critical’ life problems, are often of little use in new circumstances.” It impedes the process of consolidating biographical experiences and of imbuing them with common significance, especially a significance from the traumatic past. At the same time, these circumstances, untranslatable and unverifiable as they are, form a basis for a collective sense of destiny— a basis for giving a particular meaning to “our times.” This way, a new model of biography may emerge, an “alternative” one, in which the memory of the past—war, in this case—holds the main function. According to this model, a memory of childhood can, for instance, be relieved of lyricism, nostalgia, and a “magical” way of looking at things—characteristic of this stage of life. In such a case, an attempt to return to a traditional—for “normal” times—convention of talking about childhood can prove controversial. As an example here, one could invoke the controversies around Roberto Benigni’s 1997 film, Life Is Beautiful. A persistent adherence to the cultural model of experiencing childhood in a playful convention was shown as an informed choice of survival strategy. Critics and the public alike were divided in their opinions whether you should show the drama of a concentration camp using the language of the grotesque, which transforms the downright surrealist potential for evil (finding expression in a cognitive shock about how “people dealt this fate to people”16) in an equally unreal world of mystification. Another example is the history of the U.S. reception of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, which played a significant role in introducing the topic of the Shoah into public discourse. The interpretation of The Diary’s message was changing with shifting perspective on the Shoah’s role in shaping a collective identity of American Jews.17 At first, its universal values were highlighted. In the nineties, the critics began to notice that The Diary’s humanist character—emphasizing universal life values, childlike spontaneity, and trust—overshadowed the specificity of Jewish suffering, which leads to “a ‘de-Jewification’ of the Holocaust” (Rejak 16   A famous motto of Zofia Nałkowska’s novel Medallions, trans. Diana Kuprel (Evanston, Illinois:

Northwestern University Press, 2000), 2.

17   I analyze this topic further in chapter 4.

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2001, 207). In other words, the model of a childhood story set in the times of the Shoah rules out any lyricism and nostalgia, however defined. Still, Anne Frank’s memoirs prove that they can be retained. Phenomena and processes which I have roughly sketched in this chapter can be found in autobiographical relations quoted below. In each case, they assume a shape typical of given circumstances. However, these specific circumstances notwithstanding, their common characteristic is an experience of the return, interpreted as a “biographical compulsion.” I am using this term to sum up my reflections to this point. The return as a biographical compulsion is a consequence of the need for continuity, as well as rootedness, described further. It does not have to signify a literal return or even a journey to one’s birthplace (although such a journey is indeed usually undertaken). What it always signifies, however, is a need for evaluating life experiences. It can be done only by referring to the biographical past. Biographical compulsion, then, results from the processuality of life experiences, including the experience of the return. As I will be trying to show, especially in the second part of my book, biographical compulsion is often characterized as a sudden not-entirelyrational experience. Sometimes it becomes an impulse for biographical work, and sometimes it is a result of it. But it is always interpreted as a peculiar biographical determinant, which generally concerns everyone but comes to play especially in the case of people with “broken” biographies, requiring a special effort to achieve a sense of continuity. Various cultural texts induce me to venture an opinion that the need to interpret one’s biography as a meaningful (what I mean here is, of course, a subjective sense of meaningfulness) whole is a result of psychological, as well as cultural mechanisms, contained in such topoi as rootedness (characterized below, having one’s own place in the world, a home), linearity (that is, continuity of experience and, at the same time, cyclicality of culture and nature enabling a return), closing of the circle, and, finally, the tension between the sacred and the profane accompanying human existence. As I have already mentioned, the basic figure I am using is the voyage-return. I should also point out that the main emphasis is put on the journey, undertaken in time and space, as a stage of the return process. It is, however, but one of many variants of this “dyad,” as we can also talk about symbolic return voyages, in which the return to the past takes place via entering the world of memories without referring to the present. What I have in mind are people who intentionally do not undertake the project of the journey, who downright refuse to return to the place of their birth

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or youth, but at the same time live in memories and with memories of this place. Another variant is an imagined, but, for some reason, unrealized journey. A nostalgia for the past is thus strengthened by the sense of inability. Another “subjective” type is a journey not yet undertaken, but planned—that is, suspended between desire and fulfillment. It can be a transitory experience, a stage in the return process (at some point, it applies to everyone undertaking this journey). But it can also be a state of permanent biographical readiness for realizing this plan, which may still not come to fruition. Another point of reference for the variability of this experience is one’s generational affiliation. Finally, an extremely important factor differentiating the return voyage is not so much a biographical as a social definition of this situation. Is it a return voyage to “one’s own place,” to one’s homeland, which is defined by external (extra-biographical) categories? Or is it a sentimental journey to a place that has lost its original identity and, in a social sense, has become something else? One can thus talk about a peculiar typology of the return voyage. The possibilities listed above do not exhaust this subject. A biographical compulsion to create a full picture of the biography and, as a result, a coherent picture of one’s identity remains their common frame of reference.

3.  Place, Homeland, Roots Imagination and memory are the two demiurges of spiritual topography. Hanna Buczyńska-Garewicz

Places live in us . . . Nicholas Howe

Space—a place—is one of the most fundamental concepts in undergoing and interpreting life experiences. What I mean here is not merely “being” in a more or less defined geographical area, but a particular existential attitude toward a place. It is a conscious “being in the world,” incorporated into the process of imbuing one’s biography with meaning. As Mircea Eliade points out, this sense of meaning stems from a cultural (meaning human) and, as a consequence, universal tendency to perceive space as heterogeneous—always oriented. “Certainly, we know that man has never lived in the space conceived by mathematicians and physicists as being isotropic, that is, space having the same properties in all directions. The space experienced by man is oriented and thus anisotropic, for each dimension and direction has a specific value” (Eliade 1978, 30). Eliade refers to this attitude toward space as a man’s pre-experience, enforcing a continual symbolization of reality, independently from its histo-cultural context. In the case of the archaic man (who was, at the same time, a religious man), perceiving space as heterogeneous was expressed in the image of the world built around the juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane. “Religious man’s desire to live in the sacred is in fact equivalent to his desire to take up his abode in objective reality, not to let himself be paralyzed by the never-ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in a real and effective world, and not in an illusion” (1987, 28). The opposition of the sacred and the profane was thus based on the juxtaposition of existence and non-existence (Kłoczkowski 1991). Only sacrum, as a real existence, could define the world ontologically. Hence, in primitive—or, to use Eliade’s words, archaic—cultures thrives such a strong aspiration for creating connections with the sacred space. It finds its expression in a multitude of rituals, myths, and symbolic acts, aiming at sacralization of the space of human existence. The world, the city, the house—figures of space often invoked by Eliade—are three symbolic dimensions setting the

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scope of this experience: from humanity to society, to individuality and intimacy. For a contemporary man, the relation of the sacred and the profane ceases to be a universal means of organizing space; space itself, however, remains heterogeneous. Eliade asks then, “In what sense such experiences of the sacred space of houses, cities, and lands are still significant for modern, desacralized man” (1978, 30). The author does not offer any definite answer, since, as he often points out, it is not his aim to do so. Following his instructions, one could however make an attempt to clarify this notion. It is important for the problem scrutinized here, for a return to the homeland is a culturally and biographically important case of (re)creating ties with a place. It is such returns and their biographical significance that seem to corroborate the importance and relevance of this experience. Although the symbolism of the sacred and the profane is no longer so popular, the formal qualities differentiating important space (which gives meaning to experience and a sense of reality of existence) from alien space (which seems an “amorphous mass of infinite places”) still bear significance. This formal resemblance—with a sacred-profane antinomy concealed behind it—is, according to Eliade, substantiated. “It should be said at once that the completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit.” Therefore, the contemporary man finds it “increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies” (1987, 13). At the same time, he finds it difficult to be himself in this new situation and create “existential dimensions” expressing the contemporary, desacralized world. This inability to orient oneself at new models is contrasted with a richness of the “old world” based on the sacred. “But the modern man who feels and claims that he is nonreligious still retains a large stock of camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals” (ibid., 204–205). One could name a wide array of them. Many contemporary forms of activity have, for instance, retained the structure of a rite of regeneration, passage, or initiation. The “areligiousness” of contemporary society did not in fact free it from religious forms of behavior, from theology and mythology. Eliade, however, takes his interpretation one step further. He is not referring to perhaps temporary “deficiencies” of contemporary culture, which with time could distance itself from the sacred tradition. He is referring to fundamental, because they are tied to the condition of human existence, ways of experiencing the world, comprising both conscious activity and transcendental emotions. They are a reflection of two ways of “being in

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the world,” respectively, the profane and the sacred. “A purely rational man is an abstraction” (ibid., 209). Therefore, even if the contemporary man does not link his actions with the sacred sphere, he relates to it somehow, searching for an alternative to attributes of vernacular space, which oftentimes appears absurd and disorganized. This way, he is looking for his own place in the world. To illustrate this thesis, Eliade (ibid., 19–20) gives an example of a late-nineteenth-century historian Theodor Mommsen, who allegedly needed a servant to not get lost in contemporary Berlin. Yet he was well acquainted with the world of ancient Athens and the topography of the city from the times of Socrates. The venerable professor was not interested in his contemporary world, which he deemed chaotic and, hence, meaningless. His existential world, “where he could move, think, and enjoy the beautitude of being alive and creative,” (ibid., 19) remained the classic Greek-Roman universe. Eliade’s example can be supported by another one, directly related to the subject of this scrutiny. Adam Zagajewski writes about his grandfather (2001, 16): Thus I walked the streets of Gliwice with my grandfather—because it was he I accompanied most often—but in fact we were strolling two separate cities. I was a sober boy with a memory as small as a hazelnut, and I was absolutely certain that in walking the streets of Gliwice (. . .) I was where I really was. My grandfather, however, despite his walking next to me, was in Lvov.

Zagajewski also writes about his father (2002, 167): Lvov has been for many years the single real place, the single image of the world for my father, who was born and raised there. He systematically refuses all opportunities to visit, though. I was born in Lvov but left before really seeing it. Recently, however, I returned from a trip to Ukraine and showed my father my freshly developed photos; he instantly recognized and identified every street, every alley, virtually every building—after fifty-six years!

A different type of this experience was described by Czesław Miłosz (1992, 179), remembering his initial years of emigration, or, to use the poet’s words, his exile: Living in Paris, for a long time I drew a line around several streets of the Latin Quarter, because I wanted to have a territory which I could call mine. The restaurant on the corner, the tiny bookshop,

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the café were one right after another when I was walking there every day, and gave me some form of security as I was looking at places already known.

A fundamental difference between an archaic and contemporary man does not, therefore, come from giving up on searching for the alternative for the profane, but from a change of reference point. A man of traditional community, trying to set his existence in a sacred space, was opposing the overwhelming power of infinite relativity of purely subjective experiences (Eliade 1996), whereas a contemporary man gives meaning to the space, above all, experiencing it individually. Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), emphasizing the uniqueness of this experience, calls it intimate, for it is no longer about transforming “a private situation into a model one,” like in traditional communities. That is why such experience is usually nontransferable. Its transfer is limited to its form (the admittance of its importance and quality), but not content (sharing similar emotions). Therefore, a place that seems utterly unattractive, sometimes downright ugly to some, by those born there is deemed extraordinary. To a displaced person, many is the time that the beauty of a certain new place cannot compensate for the nostalgia for a lost past. Home remains the fullest manifestation of an intimacy of a place. Its meaning is as significant in the traditional, as in the contemporary, culture. Home seems to be the best illustration of the above thesis. In spite of contemporary life’s desacralization, it is home that retains the features of the sacred. In memoirs, diaries, and autobiographies, one can find many examples of home descriptions and events, experiences, and emotions related to it.18 Here I shall invoke only one—a memory retained by Jan Szczepański (1993, 64 and 66). Home was of course an axis of the world, which was supported by it and evolving around it. (. . .) It was as big, constant and trustworthy as the parents. It was a component of the eternity of a child’s world. Home is not only peace. It also meant life order and organization. (. . .) The perfection of a homestead depended on the perfection of home. That’s why home had to be perfect. Children had to grow up

18   An analysis of this type of texts was conducted by Małgorzata Czermińska in her draft Dom

w autobiografii i powieści o dzieciństwie (Home in Autobiography and Story about Childhood), included in her book Autobiograficzny trójkąt (Autobiographical Triangle) (2000).

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to perfection. Home ensured not only continuity of generations, but also their quality.

Szczepański was born to a typical peasant family. These memoirs were written by an elderly person, a known and renowned sociologist. In a short chapter entitled “Home,” he recreated symbolic meaning of this place with a typically scientific accuracy and insight. The sentences quoted are just a short excerpt. We can see clear references to the sacred order. Home remained an axis mundi; it set order and security of the existence. At the same time, the apparent professionalism of the description aside, the author relies mainly on his own reminiscences, recorded in his memory with photographic accuracy—the position of the furniture, their purpose, shape, colors, family events. The reader has to focus really hard to create in his/her own memory such a clear picture of a place, where the author seems to ramble with no difficulty at all, including all the details: In the kitchen there was a table, wide benches, next to the oven a narrower one for pots. (. . .) Next to the table there was a deep niche in the wall, and inside—shelves made of very thick oak planks, kitchen dishes on top of them. (. . .) When I close my eyes, I can see this home of my early childhood very clearly. (65)

Szczepański’s narrative, like so many others, even though lacking in analytical threads, presents home as a reference point. “It is the null-point of the system of co-ordinates which we ascribe to the world in order to find our bearings in it” (Schütz 1976, 107). Home, or some symbol of it, is therefore a focal point for creating a connection with a place and surrounding it with memories. Simultaneously, the point is about internalizing a place and not remaining in a place. “Home is embedded in us” (Buczyńska-Garewicz 2006, 221). It is a universal experience—the need for having a home is a cultural (but according to Tuan, also natural) characteristic of the Homo sapiens. However, it is also nontransferable. “Home, as an internalized space, cannot be described, but it can be experienced, felt, sensed—and it is undoubtedly a universal and fundamental experience for a human being. Its universality, which cannot be realized descriptively, can, in this case, be conveyed by poetic imagery” (ibid., 220). As Czermińska (2000, 299) points out, Polish literature (and literature in general) often presents the image of home as a pars pro toto of the fatherland. That is why those who return to their homeland after many years of absence look for such a place, even if it was not the home

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of their birthplace and childhood, but, for example, a place of hiding or a temporary anchorage—“a pause in the movement,” as Yi-Fu Tuan says. This aspiration seems to be unrelated to the biographical moment of leaving home (although childhood undoubtedly has a large significance here). A story of an adult granddaughter talking about her grandfather’s journey may serve as an example: So my grandpa, a 96-year old! man at the time, went there, because he got an invitation from an elderly woman, a former servant of ours, so he got the invitation and went there. My mummy didn’t want to allow him. Because grandpa applied for a passport, a militsioner came to ask, if mummy agrees that such an old man should go? And what if something happens to him? Mummy went to see a doctor, whom grandpa—because grandpa had great trust in him, being a very religious and practicing Catholic, and the doctor as well, and that’s what they had in common—and says, “Doctor, can you make my father not go? It’s been so many years! And he’s so old!” (. . .) So grandpa wrote back to our servant, Andzia, that he won’t come, because his doctor is against it. She had stayed there, hadn’t repatriated, and then regretted it for a long time. But then she sent another invitation and then he didn’t ask for anyone’s opinion, for anyone’s advice, just went to the militia office and categorically demanded a passport (. . .). They gave him the passport. So a neighbor’s son, a twentysomething youth, drove grandpa to the border. And there, at the border, this Andzia was already waiting for grandpa (. . .). He took a small bag with a change of clothes, sleepers, a gift for this woman Andzia and a few other things . . . Well, “He is going to be back in three days,” My God . . . Three days have passed, a week has passed, and grandpa isn’t back. What has happened? Finally, after a lapse of two weeks or so, we’ve received a postcard from Lvov. He went there, he met his friends, remote relatives, and in the postcard he describes the way people live there (. . .) Well, he sent a few postcards from Lvov and from other places, too. (. . .) So he stayed there / and explained why only later on. When he went to a cemetery to visit the graves of our mmm, of my ancestors, there was my / Well, my grandparents had er a daughter, that’s my mum, my mum was their eldest daughter and then a younger son, who died of pneumonia at the age of 24 when he grad / was about to graduate from the law faculty. And he was my godfather. And for my grandparents his grave is a place . . . well a place of everlasting pilgrimage and contemplation. Naturally my grandpa went to the cemetery as soon as he arrived, together with Andzia. It turned out that robbers / the tomb was made of black marble / er black granite, a small tomb with a granite cross. And robbers wanted to steal it . . . /

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And the tomb was surrounded by a metal fence, a forged-metal fence with a wicket you lock with a key. So the robbers, to get to the granite gravestone, had to demolish the fence first, to tear it apart. But they didn’t manage to, they took fright. Andzia told my grandpa all that. So my grandpa met a fellow blacksmith, an elderly man too, who forged the missing pieces, put the fence together, they locked the wicket and my grandpa could then leave having peace of mind. And this is why he stayed there longer. Besides, he also had to go to Lvov, to see what remained there and what was destroyed and what . . . (. . .) And when he was in D. [the town where he lived before the war—KK] where the Soviets are now, he said, “I must see my house.” And Andzia says, “Don’t go there, the secretary of the communist party lives there and he won’t let you in.” And my grandpa says, “Why won’t he let me in? What can an old man like me do to him?” He went there. He rang the bell (. . .). He rang the bell, and a man appeared, what does my grandpa want? And my grandpa answered in Polish / my grandpa could hardly speak any Ukrainian, he spoke German but didn’t speak Ukrainian. So he says, “This is my house, I‘ve come to see what it looks like, I planted this spruce over there. It was tiny.” My grandpa moved, we moved there in 1935— “this spruce”—it was some kind of silver spruce—“it was tiny and now it is taller than the house.” And apple trees were there, too, since my grandpa bought some more land, an orchard, and he planted fruit trees there. And my grandpa says, “I planted all of these. These trees were so small and now, look, how huge these apple trees are.” The man kept listening to him and he was really gloomy, and so he said finally, “If you want this house back, go to the authorities in such and such street and ask there.” And my grandpa says, “Noo, I’m not here to claim my house back. I live in Poland . . . I went on a journey and I wanted to see this house. I wanted to see whether it is still here, and what it looks like / it used to have metal sheet roofing / I wanted to see whether, whether the roof doesn’t leak. What does it look like?” And . . . / they were talking through the closed door. He wouldn’t let him in (. . .). Finally he would. He opened the wicket, my grandpa went in, the bench / there was a bench in the yard, my grandpa / he asked my grandpa to sit down, and there was this yard, the lawn. My grandpa sat down and the man went / since it was fall he went to the garden, picked a few apples, a few pears and treated my grandpa. And my grandpa tried the fruit and asked him, “May I have some for my children?” “Yes, sure.” So he gave him a bag, and my grandpa brought it here / this happened the day before he left. Grandpa brought it over here and said, “Try our fruit.” (W 1)19 19

  Roman numbers mark the material I gathered for my Biography and National Identity project.

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This moving narrative illustrates what the need to return to one’s homeland really is. The case is quite exceptional, as it involves an aged man who was forced to leave his home when he was already an adult. The events presented in the story took place in the sixties of the twentieth century. So its protagonist, leaving the Eastern borderlands right after the war, must have already been sixty years old. Therefore, he returns not to his birthplace as such, but to his place, where he felt at home, literally and symbolically. As the old saying has it, a man should achieve three things during his lifetime: have a son, build a house, and plant a tree. I do not think that the narrator has intentionally fashioned her story around these points of reference, and neither do I suspect her grandfather to be driven by an archetypal message contained in this saying. It is amazing, however, that this is exactly what transpired. An old man, nearing the end of his days, returns to the source of meaning of his existence. He visits the grave of his son and one more time, probably the last, takes care of him; looks at his old house, which, despite having a new owner, still remains his home in a symbolic sense; looks at the trees he planted himself, and tries their fruit. The apples and pears brought from the journey symbolize the fruit of his old labors, a realized vocation, and a sense of being in place—which, although it had to be abandoned, remained a point of reference in his own biography.20 An important “variable” of this story, one setting its dynamics, is the age. It became a main interpretational frame for the people around—first as an obstacle in the way of the journey, then as a problem of potential helplessness and worry about a loved one’s fate, then as an argument in social interaction (“What can an old man like me do to him?”). Finally, for the story’s protagonist, it is a factor inducing him to take the journey. It is a symbolic return to a place “where he could move, think, and enjoy the beautitude of being alive and creative.” The returns in the nineties of the twentieth century concern people who left their homelands in their youth or even childhood. Their biographical departure point is thus different. However, the story quoted clearly shows that the thought of home, of the birthplace, of a certain moment in life transforms into an inexplicably intensive wish to return to 20   Incidentally, in memories, especially childhood ones, home is usually situated in a garden.

“The notion of a childhood as a life spent in a serene paradise landscape dates back to the at least medieval topos of a ‘walled garden,’ in which the Holy Child is playing under Mary’s watchful gaze” (Czermińska 2000, 304).

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the homeland. It can be clearly traced not only in one’s individual biography. Culture offers us numerous models of forming sentiments toward home. They come in the shape of universal literary topoi (and their embodiment is the aforementioned Odysseus), but at the same time they are very concrete in the resources of a given society. Consequently, in the case of Poland, what remains such a model, archetypal for literature is Pan Tadeusz (Czermińska 2000, 136), a romantic epic poem by Adam Mickiewicz. A common feature of such experiences is the need for rootedness in space, which one identifies as relevant and meaningful, no matter if it is a collective or an individual experience. At the individual level, it is expressed in searching for a positive answer to the questions “Where do I come from?” and “Where is my place?” It is difficult to decide if the need for rootedness forces one to look for one’s own place or if rootedness is a form of validating a strong identification with a given space. It depends on the biographical, cultural, and historical circumstances. In each case, the point is to establish a point of reference for identity. “To define one’s own identity, to define yourself—it seems necessary for an individual to establish a spatial affiliation, which requires a knowledge of one’s own ‘roots,’ of the place he/ she comes from in a social, historical, cultural sense” (Melchior 1990, 27). Therefore, each primitive community creates cosmogonic myths about the beginning of the universe, creation of the forefathers, affiliation to a given place. Collective notions build individual identifications. A common factor for these experiences is the very space. “Landscape is personal and tribal history made visible. The native’s identity (. . .) is not in doubt, because the myths that support it are as real as the rocks and waterholes he can see and touch. He finds recorded in his land the ancient story of the lives and deeds of the immortal beings from whom he himself is descended, and whom he reveres. The whole countryside is his family tree” (Tuan 1977, 57–158). From a postmodern point of view, attaching so much significance to identifying a place and with a place seems rather uncharacteristic of a contemporary man, who does not aspire to establish his identity in this way (Giddens 2002; Bauman 1993). This point of view also gives a different meaning to the idea of home: “The movement itself becomes home, the need for change and experiencing the world as a challenge to one’s identity, which never reaches stability and a sense of ‘family security’” (Burszta 2001, 8). However, numerous publications emphasizing the importance of collective memory and identity, a need for rootedness or the consequences of its lack, prove that this problem is still a relevant one. Therefore, I completely agree with Wojciech Łukowski (2002, 77) that globalization,

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being one of the factors weakening a connection with a place, “does not remove from the agenda the problem of having a fatherland and roots, even if in changed circumstances it will mean major difficulties and challenges for human identity (. . .). It does not however seem possible that rootedness would one day cease to be a vital human need, even if its fulfillment assumed unexpected and yet unknown shape.” Thus, having in mind the processes taking place in contemporary society, which make the problem of space identification even more complex and multidimensional, I shall remain in the area of critical thought that still deems this relation a significant one.21 “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community, which preserves in living shape certain particular expectations for the future. This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession, and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw well-nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual, and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part” (Weil 1952, 43). Simon Weil shows thus that rootedness, although it may appear to be connected with striving for constant reliable references, is a lifelong process of searching for identity anchorages. The author, talking about “natural” affiliation or “natural participation,” points out universal elements of the human life cycle—for example, social initiation, actions carried out during the lifetime, and an identification with a place. All this becomes a “space” for putting down roots and basing identity on them. Thus, space gains a new social dimension next to the physical one. In this sense, fellow human beings and relationships with them also become a place (Tuan 1977). This wide meaning of rootedness, which comprises consecutive biographical choices and the process of relating them to the identity, includes, one could say, its original dimension. I am returning, hence, to 21   It is otherwise known that the process of globalization has given an impulse for a “new

localization,” which proposes that individuals and communities search for places to put down roots. In many cases, these are new points of reference, but also traditional means of building a relationship with a place, searching for roots. An example here are regional border communities, but also a need for rootedness in a multicultural American society, where these interests have been reinforced, among others, by a renowned series, Roots. I will yet return to this problem when talking about the role of the Shoah memory for American Jews.

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my fundamental questions “Where do I come from?” and “Where are my roots?” They send one back to a place and community clearly defined in time and space. “A place, like a human being, has its name, which contains its entire individuality” (Buczyńska-Garewicz 2006, 28). The possibility of referring to this name, even if unsupported by one’s own memory, is a departure point for building one’s sense of biographical coherence. One should, at least, mention people who are deprived of such a reference, as they remain ignorant of their roots. This is a very common problem. One could scrutinize this occurrence in the case of whole communities—for example, those systematically deprived of collective memory by totalitarian systems. A space appropriated22 by the regime ceases to be a bearer of a given culture’s collective memory. Such perdition of the memory of the past makes it impossible to be rooted in tradition and space, which was, after all, granted some identity by the history. One could also look at it from the perspective of the already-mentioned crisis of contemporary culture or, finally, as an individual experience unique to certain biographical situations.23 In the context of this work’s subject, what matters most is the last case, represented, among others, by children who were taken away from their parents or orphaned during the war, especially children rescued from the Shoah who were raised in non-Jewish families and given a new identity. Many of them lived/live with an inner conviction that they are someone else. They keep looking for their roots and have a need for knowing the truth. Finding their own place intensifies with age. Cases like this are not the subject of my direct analysis, but I would like to sketch them roughly, referring to two examples. One of them is a literary description; the other, an autobiographical reflection.24 Hanna Krall (1995), in one of her novels, tells a story of a woman living in Silesia. Mrs. Elżbieta, who already has an adult son, faces the necessity of redefining her identity. 22   About social appropriation of the space, see Wojciech Łukowski (2002, 89–93). 23   Adoption is one of such biographical experiences. While it is not a problem related to the

subject of this book, it is still worth mentioning, because in the context of rootedness, it is a model example of a problematic situation for shaping one’s identity. These issues were addressed by Christa Hoffman-Reim (1994) in an analysis of adoptive families disclosing the child’s biological origin and the problems arising from this situation. 24   I am not analyzing them in detail, but rather treating them as a mere illustration of important phenomena, but ones that do not form the body of my further studies.

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I’m a no-nonsense type of person till the very end. On Christmas Eve I found out that I’m not a sister and I decided to get down to the bottom of this and discover who I am, exactly what kind of person. So, I went to Stasia [her sister—KK], the oldest one. She told me: you were sitting in a forest, on a rotten tree stump crying loudly. Mum felt sorry for you, so she took you in. (90)

Ever since that moment, Mrs. Elżbieta had been trying to trace her past. She asked every member of her family, until one of the sisters showed her a letter that her mother had written before she died. March 1st, 1954. Dearest Daughter, I’m writing this on your alleged birthday and I admit that I even don’t know when your real birthday is. Beloved daughter, don’t cry when you’re reading this . . . I’m writing it on my deathbed: You’re not my natural daughter. All I know is that you come from a Jewish family and that you are Jewish. (91)

Mrs. Elżbieta commenced a search. The information she gathered gave her hope that perhaps she belonged to a family living in the United States. They replied that a Jewish family from New York was looking for a girl named Sara, who apparently survived the war. They also sent me a copy of a photo, which they received from America. In the picture was a serene, smiling woman with black hair and a small girl on her lap. This little one was the Sara they were looking for. I looked closely at the woman and I was absolutely appalled. I said to my husband: I know this photo. It was in Pajęczyca, in our home. Don’t be silly, my husband said angrily. How can you remember this photo—when it’s been forty years? It must have been someone else. There are many women who have held children on their laps. (93–94)

In spite of her husband’s skepticism, Mrs. Elżbieta’s hopes were high. They rose even more when her cousin brought the photo she remembered from her family home. With time, it turned out that the photo was forged from the copy sent from New York. Mrs. Elżbieta was still deeply convinced that her family was living out there somewhere. Looking at it logically it is impossible that this woman should have anything in common with the New York family. She saw a photo of a woman and her little daughter . . . She thought: it would be nice to

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have a face like this little one—so cheerful and trusting . . . It would be nice to have a calm, serene mother . . . It would be nice to sit on her lap . . . It would be nice to come from somewhere, anywhere, not just from under a fence, a doorsill, bushes, a rotten tree stump . . . (102)

Krall, with her typical insight and intuition (not only literary), presents the very core of the problem—an inexplicable urge, forcing one to take irrational steps, just to know the truth of one’s biography. This urge does not ebb away even when one has a successful life and feels connected with one’s present environment and society. The sense of constancy and continuity is created when one is aware of one’s roots, even if one does not remember them. It suffices to know that they are there. “For being yourself and knowing yourself you need a place—in a literary and symbolic sense— where you can feel at home, which you can treat as a spatial validation and fortification of your own consciousness” (Wolicka 1998, 6).25 Another example of an attempt at finding one’s own roots—this time successful—is the priest Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel. Born in 1943, he did not discover his Jewish ancestry until 1978. Another fourteen years later, after a long quest, he also discovered his parents’ family names. In his autobiographical memoir (2000), Father Weksler-Waszkinel describes how he had been gradually reaching the conclusion that his mother was hiding portions of truth about his life history. Meanwhile, he had a feeling—at first unclear and then growing stronger—that he might be a Jew. It was related to signals that he received from people close to him—allusions or outright statements about his Semitic features, and, last but not least, his mother’s reluctance to talk about this problem or reminisce on the Jews living in their town before the war. As he found out later, his mother’s attitude was partially connected to his own behavior—an expressly negative attitude toward Jews when he was a teenager. With time, he understood who the Jews are/were and what their part in shaping the image of God was. Only then did his mother decide he was ready to know the truth about his roots: You had wonderful parents and they loved you very much—they were Jews; they were slain. I only rescued you from death. (. . .) You had a wonderful, wise and good Mother (. . .). I was afraid, I was very 25   In Mamzer (2003, 142).

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afraid. Rescuing a Jew, even a baby, as you were then, was punishable by death. As you know, we didn’t have an apartment of our own, we were renting a room (. . .). When I was in the Ghetto, I tried to explain it to your Mother. She was listening, but it was as if she didn’t hear me. (. . .) “HE sees everything,” she kept saying, “Life is in HIS hand, but you have to rescue at least the one who cannot rescue himself. Please, madam, save my child, my baby (. . .). You’re a woman of faith, a Christian; you told me a couple of times that you believed in Jesus: He was a Jew too! So please, save a Jewish baby in the name of this Jew, in whom you believe. When this tiny one grows, you’ll see he’ll become a priest, he’ll teach people . . .” (154)

This small fragment I quoted from his autobiographical narration can be interpreted on many different levels. The one that first comes to mind is connected to the emotional reception of the story and a colloquial observation that life is full of surprises. As in the case of, for instance, Władysław Szpilman, we are dealing with an extraordinary turn of events. What is more important, however, is an emphasis of biographical significance of these events in the context of rootedness. The discovery of father Romuald’s ancestry is further supported by the prophetic message of his Jewish mother. In this context, his Christian priesthood does not seem to be a dissociation from Jewish roots, but, in some sense, their discovery and continuation. Hence, likely, the tree metaphor: Finally it returned [the name—KK]—in the forty-ninth year of my life; or rather it was I, like a leaf torn in a hurricane carried by Fate’s mysterious ways, who has in some way returned to the surviving “remains of the tree.” I was yet given to kiss the feet of my father’s sister and brother. My heart was hurting and rejoicing; it is hurting and rejoicing . . . (9)

As I have already mentioned, I will not analyze further this most dramatic case of forging or, rather, trying to forge a connection with the past, as it would require separate studies.26 The examples described above can be placed on the very edge of the spectrum of situations initializing the problem of rootedness in biographical experience. Another of its “shades” is a return of people who know who they are and where they come from; 26   In Poland, this problem is dealt with by, among others, the Children of the Holocaust

Association. For instance, it issues memoirs of the survivors entitled Dzieci Holocaustu mówią (Children of the Holocaust Speak) (2001, 2002).

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however, due to their young age, they did not manage to retain the memory of their homeland. It is such cases that will form the body of my further scrutiny. For these people, the possibility of returning is tantamount to finding a lost and forgotten part of their lives. Visiting the places of their childhoods gives them a sense of rootedness in space and thus an organized biography. A return to the homeland can be, therefore, a biographical return, initializing the sense of connectedness and, as a consequence, one’s own “original” identity. The third and final case, a most widely represented one, is a return to well-known roots, a remembered homeland, a still understood—often much to their own amazement—language. When an identification with a place is supported by biographical memory, one should especially refer to the phenomenon of building a connection with the homeland and its consequences. Nostalgia is one of them. The term “nostalgia”27 first appeared in scientific discourse when referring to the characteristics of psychosomatic symptoms. It is believed that the term was coined by Johannes Hofer from Basel, who in 1689 gave this name to a disease affecting people departing their homelands (from the Greek words nostas, “a return,” and argos, “suffering”) (Zaleski 1996, 11). Its concomitant symptoms (crying, despondency, lack of appetite), which are now associated with depression and once were considered a cause of melancholia, were observed by Hofer among hired Swiss soldiers fighting away from the country (Turner 1987, 147–149). Stanisław Ossowski in Analiza socjologiczna pojęcia ojczyzny (A Social Analysis of Fatherland) also refers to this type of experience. He writes about Tasmanians relocated by the white men to Flinders Island in the nineteenth century and dying in large numbers due to “stomach disorders, which were caused entirely by an irresistible desire to return to their homeland” (Ossowski 1984, 20).28 Ossowski does not, however, attempt to describe specific psychosomatic symptoms caused by the biographical situation. What he describes is an attitude toward homeland, whose image emerges as a “correlation of specific psychological attitudes, forming a cultural heritage of a social group.” These attitudes point to the role “which is played by the notion of the homeland in the landscape of social reality” (ibid., 18). Hence, the Tasmanians’ feelings and the patriotism presented in, for instance, Pan Tadeusz, are treated by the 27   I will return to the problem of nostalgia in the next chapter, devoted to contemporary

representations of the memory.

28   Stanisław Ossowski quotes this sentence after J. Fenton’s A History of Tasmania (1884, 374), in

L. Krzywicki’s Społeczeństwo pierwotne (Warszawa, 1937, 186–187).

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author as phenomena of the same type, differing only in their depth or scale. In Ossowski’s reflections on fatherland,29 the notion of nostalgia is therefore connected to the patriotic attitude, which can be further differentiated according to biographical circumstances regulating the correlates of mental attitudes toward what is called the fatherland. Therefore, the author introduces a distinction between ideological fatherland, referring to the whole country, and a private one, in which the largest part of life was spent or where strong emotional connections were forged, especially during childhood (ibid., 26). The first one corresponds to an ideological bond, the second to a habitual one, which, in the case of leaving a private fatherland, causes nostalgia. For although one could say that an emigrant is merely missing the country (an ideological fatherland), the nostalgia in fact refers to his/her own biographical experiences of the place. An attachment to one’s homeland originates from the need for rootedness and can be considered an experience undergone if not by everyone, then by the majority of people. Moreover, as Yi-Fu Tuan points out (1977, 156), “Profound sentiment for land has not disappeared; it persists in places isolated from the traffic of civilization.” The author reaches these conclusions analyzing appropriate texts of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as observations written down by anthropologists of primitive cultures or twentieth-century publications explaining, for example, the idea of Heimat. All of them are characterized by a similar rhetoric. The attitude toward one’s birthplace becomes a private fatherland and a part of ideological fatherland only in relation to mental attitudes of a given society and is, one could say, a primordial experience. “The connection between an individual’s personality and his/her birthplace is magical in its character. (. . .) The predispositions caused by years spent in a town of one’s birthplace can be easily ascribed to the mere fact that it is the birthplace. This is how, by way of an incorrect generalization, the real connections with the environment are substituted by the magical connection to the place of birth” (Ossowski 1984, 44–45). Thus, we go back to initial reflections upon the sacral dimension of a space considered as significant. This “magical aspect” of the relationship with one’s homeland induces not only nostalgia, but also connects biographical experiences in the myth of the return (however realized). The culture is a vast reservoir of symbols and figures showing the importance of having one’s own place—“being in one’s 29   They are considered the best presentation of this topic in the field of sociology 

(Szacki 1984, 12).

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own world,” from errant knights to the Wandering Jews, damned souls who were deprived of this privilege, to those happily returning home. Odysseus again comes to mind, as his case proves that the longer the absence, the more difficult the return. However, its value, in some respects, increases. It is not difficult at all to return after a short while, when the connections with a birthplace have not been weakened, when the images of homeland in the returnee’s mind have not strayed from the reality, when—to use Alfred Schütz’s words (1976, 116)—“the magic fruit of strangeness” did not have time to get bitter. A longer isolation undoubtedly heightens the nostalgia. A sentiment for an abandoned place is usually formed by sensory experiences: remembered landscapes, colors, tastes, smells. With time, all of them—instead of fading—sharpen but often also stray from the reality encountered upon returning. Nostalgia is therefore characteristic of a specific situation: an isolation from a biographically significant place. This kind of sentiment, as Wojciech Burszta writes (1996, 102), assumes a movement in space that makes one believe that “my own place is always somewhere else.” It remains a “land of the heart,” which we carry our entire lives, constantly sensing the distance that separates us from the place where we could be happy (Howe 1995, 5). It is thus an individual experience, linked to a course of life of each man, but in specific historical and cultural circumstances, it gains a collective aspect when the biographees become actors of significant macrosocial processes like mass emigration, resettlements, etc. In the history of Eastern Europe (though not only), nostalgia has always played an important role, if one takes into consideration the experiences that were forced upon this part of the world. A sense of longing for the country affected many and did not have to be connected with the symptoms observed by the seventeenthcentury Swiss physician. Suffice it to mention Polish romantic literature, whose greatest creations were written in exile as a cultural expression of patriotic feelings, filled with nostalgia, which had been a source of suffering and artistic passion at the same time. Last-century history recreated situations in which these romantic standards could come to life again (Czermińska 2000, 309). “The aesthetics of nostalgia is spoiled, it is a beauty which engenders melancholia, a pleasure which causes pain” (Zaleski 1996, 13). I believe this thought is closer to the truth than the one expressed by David Lowenthal (1988, 8) that “nostalgia becomes memory, from which suffering has been removed.” I would rather call this kind of feeling sentimentalism. Of course nostalgia induces one to idealize the past, especially if it is also a return to childhood and youth, so these stages in

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a biography are of particular significance to each of us. From a child’s point of view, the past is always exceptional. Yet some doubts begin to surface. What happens if a nostalgic image of the homeland is sharply contrasted with the reality? What if the return depends on a verification of the idealized image and, finally, if biographical experiences make it impossible to erase the memory of pain and suffering inscribed in the once-abandoned space, and the urge for a return still remains? I will try to find an answer to these and similar questions, for these circumstances refer to the cases analyzed further on. Their general frame is a tentative definition of a biographical situation, which is also a collective experience of a given community. What I mean here is the case Ossowski failed to analyze in his draft on the sociological concept of a fatherland—resettlements and forced displacements. Examples here are the inhabitants of Eastern borderlands and the Germans inhabiting the western areas of Poland before the war. Although the circumstances of leaving their homelands were different, each of these groups lost a private fatherland and a part of ideological fatherland contained therein. Thus, even though the basic mechanisms regulating the correlates of mental attitudes were similar to the one described by Ossowski (of an emigrant leaving the country and emotionally keeping in touch with the ideological and private fatherland in exile), this relation is more complex. Do the cities of Lvov or Vilna, beloved by their inhabitants, still remain a part of their ideological fatherland? The same question applies to the Germans visiting Danzig or Breslau. The situation is further complicated in the case that I am analyzing in this publication. Did the Jews leaving Poland after the war leave their ideological and private homeland? In light of the problems analyzed here, this ambivalence is expressed in the difficulty of an unambiguous assignation of the terms “ideological” and “private” homeland, created by Ossowski. Until the crystallization of the Zionist ideology, whose significance was strengthened and enhanced by the tragedy of the Shoah, private homeland encompassed this unique gemeinschaft of the shtetl. This assertion can be derived from the rhetoric of prewar emigrants’ nostalgia, based on a mythologized image of the shtetl, which allowed for building biographical and social relations with the past. At that time, the term “ideological homeland” could refer to a big, socially and culturally different terrain—of Poland, for example (Orla-Bukowska 2004, 192). However, I am not convinced that the term “ideological homeland” is fully adequate here. What could speak in favor of this statement is a centuries-long “prescription” of Jewish society, which

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makes it indigenous. However, next to the “natural attachment to the land hallowed by the graves of the forefathers, a land societies and their histories put roots in,” it was not “a land which, according to the ideology, should be ruled over” (Ossowski 1984, 33); for centuries of exile, Canaan remained this land. For the war generation, which is the subject of my scrutiny here, the situation is much more complex. In many cases the description of the attitudes is rather complicated. In the biographical aspect, we come across an attachment to the birthplace and a building nostalgia, especially in older age. Usually, we would call this state a sentiment for private homeland. In this case, however, we should ponder on how much this “individual emotional relation” is really a source of a deeply “predestined bond,” strengthened by “ideological elements, which have no place in a similar attachment to unfamiliar environments.” In other words, “an attachment to the place where one has spent a long time and which brings to mind a wide variety of emotional memories is not enough to treat this place as one’s private homeland” (ibid., 36–37). Although Ossowski is referring to a habitual relation with an area defined as unfamiliar in national or generational terms, but familiar from a personal point of view (for instance, a Pole’s stronger attachment to Paris and Loire, if he spent a better part of his life there, than to, say, Warsaw, where he never lived), it can also refer to the question analyzed here. In the case of Israeli Jews, the individual “emotional relation” was embedded in the collective sense of fate and, above all, in its collective interpretation. The creation of Israel has clearly defined the area (geographical, symbolic, and ideological) of the ideological homeland. Reflecting on the relation between private and ideological homeland, the Polish sociologist was conspicuously emphasizing the interference of these two terms: holiness of ideological homeland transfers onto the private one. The second one, in turn, should serve the role of partis pro toto (ibid., 38– 39). In this light, it is difficult to give the name “private homeland” to the birthplace of people whose biographies are of academic interest to me. This conviction is also voiced by the already-quoted Samuel Bak, when leaving his home, Vilna: “It was at that point of leaving forever the country of my nationality (for what it was worth)” [my own emphasis—KK]. Due to these factors, I am consequently avoiding the term “ideological homeland,” using “birthplace” instead. It basically means the same as “homeland.” Ossowski (1984, 43–45), considering “homeland” and “birthplace” synonymous, points yet to a subtle difference: whereas

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homeland implies ideological bonds, birthplace puts emphasis on birth. I am not using the term “the land” or “the country” either due to the phrase Eretz Israel—the land of Israel, a destination to return to after a centurieslong exile—already existing in Jewish discourse. The above attempt at organizing terminology sets but the most general interpretative framework. The analysis of empirical material will show that the matter is far more complicated. Among the narrations I gathered there are cases of lifelong biographical work referring, among others, to defining a “convictional attitude” toward Poland, which before the war used to be an unquestionable private and ideological homeland. After the war, Israel became an ideological homeland and Jewishness, which prior to the war was a “recessive” element of identity and became a major point of reference. No doubt that the Jewish collective memory work, shaped by Zionist ideology, has made it possible to clearly define ideological homeland. I shall allude to this problem in chapter 4. As I have already mentioned, it is the final stage of the return experience, which starts the moment one leaves the homeland, then evolves into years of nostalgia for the “lost places,” and, finally, with the very moment of the return, which gains a new dimension. Hence, the act of a return to a private fatherland is not merely a visit or a journey, but a complement to a long process of complex biographical work. The aim of this work was and is a reflection on the past, linked with a need to give meaning to one’s biographical experiences—“reminiscence and expectation are the content of the present” (Lowenthal 1988, 3). They are verified in the moment of the arrival to/searching of one’s own place. Hence the act of the journey itself and the experiences connected with it are of utmost importance. It is, therefore, worth pondering how the journey (as a type of activity) imposes a specific interpretative frame on this experience.

4.  The Return as a Voyage/Pilgrimage Thus, voyages are a form of a battle with oneself, a test for stirred hopes, and often an experience of disappointments. (. . .) A voyage, like suffering, is a struggle with time. Jan Szczepański

Returning to the land of childhood requires the effort of a voyage. It is, above all, an emotional effort, yet also a physical one, especially if one considers the age of the returnees. Sometimes the voyages are undertaken against the odds to strengthen/renew a sense of rootedness in a “social, historical and cultural” sense, to fulfill the “most unacknowledged need of the human soul.” Sometimes the voyages are metaphorical, without any physical movement in space and with imagination as a form of “transportation.” Presumably the aforementioned father of Adam Zagajewski imagined many such journeys, never deciding to undertake a real one. For those who have visited their birthplace, a metaphorical journey of the imagination must have been one of the stages of the return process. Lately, the phenomenon of traveling and tourism has become a subject of great interest among social sciences scholars. It contributed to a creation of an entirely new branch of science. Since the nineties of the twentieth century, the symbolism of a journey has proved very useful for theoreticians of postmodern humanities (Podemski 2004, 23). In Polish sociology, the best-known examples include Bauman’s (2003) types of the tourist and the vagabond, reflecting personality models characteristic of postmodernism. Bauman treats the journey itself as a “metaphor of life in constant movement” (Tarkowska 1995, 14). In a book by Krzysztof Podemski, Socjologia podróży (Sociology of Travel) published in 2004, one can find a review of concepts fundamental to the sociology of tourism or, as the author prefers, sociology of travel. Their majority concentrates on an analysis of the phenomenon of contemporary travel, connected to the formula of (post)modern society. The development of means of transportation, the increase of the life standard enabling one to make an active use of one’s free time, a socially sanctioned readiness for taking up a journey, and a proliferation of tourism infrastructure, etc., have made travel a mass phenomenon. Therefore, the majority of concepts refer to the image

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of a contemporary tourist. The aforementioned metaphorical uses refer also to the basic characteristics of contemporary society. Thus, it is difficult to find among them the types of tourists that would adequately describe the situation of people traveling to their birthplaces. These typologies could probably describe their activities perfectly, if life circumstances or voyages were different. However, in the case of the returns, the returnees undergo a unique experience—one devoid of touristic impressions or expectations. Many times a homeland journey, although it could also gain so-called touristic attributes (for instance, an interest in a given land’s culture, attractions of the region, and search for relaxation), becomes intentionally deprived of such qualities. Focusing on a set destination and one’s own emotions can lead to indifference to other sensations. This is especially true if the models of experiencing these sensations or even narrating them are clearly defined. It is, for instance, the case for the Jewish returns. Regardless of any individual experience, the collective sense of fate makes the Jews set a journey destination and a way of experiencing it, which is also accompanied by a specific rhetoric. One of my Israeli interviewees, a woman born in Łódź and an Auschwitz survivor, said the following: KK: And after the war, have you visited Łódź? A: No, no, I haven’t returned to Łódź. KK: Why? You didn’t want to go back? A: I was / not because I didn’t want to go back to Poland, but if I went to Poland, how could I not go to Auschwitz? But when I passed the gate Arbeit Macht Frei [as a prisoner—KK], I didn’t believe that I would ever get out of there, and I don’t want to relive it again. (W 15)

One of the prominent features of Jewish journeys to Poland is visiting the sites of the Shoah. A journey, especially the first journey to Poland, without visiting Auschwitz is practically unthinkable, due to the significance of wartime experiences in Jewish collective memory.30 My interviewee was perfectly aware of this fact. The return would be too dramatic an experience due to her own memories, and therefore, she decided not to return. The returns are thus a particular type of journey. Retaining some of its formal features, they do not “fit in” typical characteristics of modern tourism. To describe the phenomena forming this book’s main topic, the 30   I shall analyze this matter in greater detail in the next chapter.

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concept of Victor Turner, referring to the phenomenon of pilgrimage, seems a most useful one. It is not my intention to apply it directly nor to review it in detail. The British anthropologist focused on religious pilgrimages, especially Christian ones. They formed the main body of his work. He did not however restrict himself to an ethnographical and anthropological description of this phenomenon, but placed it in a wider theoretical context, referring to Arnold Van Gannep’s (1960) concept of the rites of passage. In this wider perspective, one can find many direct or indirect references that aptly apply to the situation of the returnees. Therefore, I shall invoke here those threads of his concept that can serve to describe some of the dimensions of the travel/pilgrimage experience. First and foremost, Turner points out the processuality of pilgrimage, and a two-level one to boot. The first level refers to a macrohistorical perspective, which proposes analyzing the pilgrimage phenomenon as a social and cultural process. The point is to trace a given case of pilgrimage from its vision to ritualization. This perspective enables one to capture the dynamics and the constancy of change, as opposed to a static analysis of ideological patterns and cognitive structures. It emphasizes the collective aspect of pilgrimage, always supported by a certain ideology and its respective symbolism (Turner and Turner 1978, 25–27). To analyze this process, one could use pilgrimage narratives and other material describing the preparations for the journey, the arrival, the behavior of the pilgrims, and the return. All this forms a sequence of a social “drama” and a social “enterprise,” showing the intensity of the relations between the members of the pilgrimage group and other groups. Such an analysis may also illustrate cultural activity or political determinants of such a journey, its logistics, symbolic and social references during stops and movements, references to the sacred and the profane, and individual and collective experiences (Turner 1975, 169). The second level applies rather to the individual dimension, though also imbued with collective interpretations. The pilgrimage is not an isolated act, but a sequence of actions, feelings, and experiences that form a process subjected to a given logic. Turner refers to the ars magna of his theory, applicable not only to the phenomenon of pilgrimage. The starting point is a classic concept of the rites of passage, distinguishing three stages of experience and action: separation, exclusion from a former sphere of reference; liminality, a transition between the original and desired state; and, finally, aggregation, a reincorporation into the structure. The most important one, due to its quality and intensity, is the liminal phase. It is

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a state of complete isolation, also in a spatial and temporal sense, from the previously known patterns of behavior. The only point of reference for interpreting the liminal situation can be a contrasting experience, allowing one to discover patterns of behavior, value systems, etc., previously unknown and to which one is usually not entitled. Pilgrimages remind one of the liminal phase of the rites of passage. They are spatially separated from a vernacular center. At an individual level, they become a moment “in time and out of time,” whereas a communion with the sacred gives one a sense of inner and sometimes also outer transformation (ibid., 196–197).31 “The time of travel has the characteristics of the sacred time: an extraordinary, unusual time, disrupted and sometimes reverse, a time when things which are impossible in normal, daily life, become possible. A journey has, thus, some features of a holiday” (Tarkowska 1995, 12–13). Therefore, traveling is a process that consists of initial preparations; spatial and temporal isolation; experiences, emotions, and events uncharacteristic of daily life; and, finally, a return to the previous normal life, yet with the sense of a transformation. At the same time, however one could define these phases and assign specific forms of experience to them, one can never fully divine their content. The point of liminality is not the transformation itself (“what will happen”), but, above all, its potential (“what can happen”). That is what cannot be predicted (Turner and Turner 1978, 3). And although pilgrimage, embedded in the rite of passage, should protect one from negative outcomes of this potential, one should bear in mind that like every journey, it can “bring richness, experience, wisdom, freedom from daily routine. However, it [the journey—KK] is also associated with dangers and irreversible calamities, transforming the journey into a homeless wandering, a ‘journey to the end of night.’” It involves, thus, a threat of exile, as well as a promise of a return to a “Paradise Lost” (Wieczorkiewicz 1995, 47). These risks of the journey seem to be well observed by the already-quoted Adam Zagajewski (2002, 167): There is no point in visiting mythological sites, I thought. It’s not worth travelling to cities whose weight in our memory is as ponderous as a bronze monument. We shouldn’t do it simply because we won’t be able to cope with the experience, the intense emotion. 31   Other authors dealing with the issues of contemporary tourism also stress that each journey

contains references to formal distinctions between the profane (here, daily life) and the sacred (the journey). Its aim, however interpreted, is a sense of (re)creation (see Graburn 1989).

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It happens especially when the emotion has been enforced by a prolonged nostalgia, and the journey is supposed to fulfill expectations in which reality cannot live up to. The return-voyages are perhaps especially susceptible to the ambivalence of the travel’s very nature. The risk of failure is much bigger than in the case of an unsuccessful tourist trip, for the returnee would be enthralled by the images, colors, sounds, and smells. But the travel often puts him/her in situations when any pleasure is made impossible, confronting him/her with terrifying tragedies at an individual and a historical level, about which he/she feels helpless (Magris 1999). There are circumstances that somehow activate the tension noticed by Magris. In the case of war biographies, the need to see one’s birthplace is oftentimes accompanied by the fear of confronting memories with reality. Turning one’s gaze to the past enforces a necessity to revisit painful events and face one’s fears or prejudices. It is not always a positive liberating experience—a catharsis—enabling a smooth transition between the past, the present, and the future, although that is the aim of the returnee. It is akin to the situation when the voyage/pilgrimage is meant to serve as what in primitive cultures is known as a ritual of affliction. Its task is to curb the forces responsible for disease and misfortune. In the times when misfortune was considered a punishment for sins and pilgrimage an act of atonement and purification, one could make an analogy between pilgrimage and the rituals of affliction (Turner and Turner 1978, 12–13). However, considering this analogy a mere metaphor, one could compare the voyage/pilgrimage to an inner act of spiritual purification, to “curb the powers” responsible for “cracks” in the biography, a sense of its discontinuity. The act of the voyage/ pilgrimage can give or restore the sense of meaning to the biography, an ability to comprehensively look back on one’s life. The liminal nature of pilgrimage creates favorable conditions for these processes. A respite from daily life enables one to concentrate on one’s own experience and to feel its intensity and uniqueness. One could generally presume that every event experienced in that way will assume these qualities. It only remains to decide as to their meaning. In the case of pilgrimage, the point is to undergo a spiritual transformation to gain inner riches. That is why this process is often reinforced by opposing it to a “different reality,” a different religion (ibid., 10). In other situations (journeys retaining formal characteristics of pilgrimages), this “different reality” may prove to be a different culture or a social, ethnic, or national group. At an individual as well as a collective level, some form of intentional journey to a faraway destination, connected to the traveler’s deepest axiological values, is culturally universal, even if these

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behaviors are not religious in nature and take on different forms. Turner offers an example of the year 1976 in the United States, when American society was celebrating a form of vernacular jubilee, the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The Americans were flocking to famous battlefields and other historic places. These apparently recreational trips are also, according to the author, deeply significant, at least for some of the travelers. For instance, the Yellowstone Park closely resembles a place of cult. Some of the visitors contemplating the landscape want to renew their love for the country, expressed in “vernacular psalms,” such as “America the Beautiful” (ibid., 241). I am convinced that if the prematurely deceased Turner could observe the ever-more-intensive phenomenon of travel to Eastern Europe (for instance, the one of American Jews wishing to know their roots and visit the places connected to the Shoah), he would rate this activity among those described above. As a matter of fact, it is not a coincidence that the journeys of American Jews form a part of the phenomenon called a “civil religion.” I shall deliberate further on this in chapter 4. There still remains a question what this “different reality” means for those returning to their homeland. To give a satisfactory answer, one should not refer to the aforementioned formal features of the voyagereturn, but to the unique meaning of every such experience. An analysis of specific return cases, in turn, requires a more precise characteristics of their social and historical circumstances. Here the “specificity” is expressed in ethnicity, for a return, next to an individual aspect, and has an equally important collective dimension, linked with the social, cultural, and national affiliation of an individual. From this perspective, the return is always a monoethnic experience (Redlich 2002). In spite of the similarities, stemming mostly from a biographical significance of this process, there are marked differences between the returns of, for example, Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Germans, etc. It is impossible to analyze them all. As I have already stated at the beginning, I chose the Jewish returns. Their dominant characteristic is the suffering resulting from traumatic experiences and memories. This experience has an individual, a biographical, as well as a collective dimension related to the trauma of the entire community. In most cases, the return to one’s homeland makes one somehow relive these dramatic events. The memories are reawakened, the emotions intensify, and the negative experiences are strengthened, often due to the observation of the contemporary milieu, in which the memories of the prewar Jewish community are often already effaced. In such circumstances, the process

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of organizing one’s own biography can prove to be extremely complicated, because it is very difficult to work on one’s prejudices, negative emotions, and the pain resulting from traumatic experiences. As numerous publications show, most Jewish returns are of that nature. The trauma or grief for the lost loved ones becomes not only a dominant, but also a sole experience. This limits one’s ability perceive the past only through the prism of death. Limiting oneself to a thus defined past makes it impossible to assume a different perspective. The memories and remembered images of childhood inscribed in the homeland landscape are considered, in a sense, surreal, for they have no connection with the present. What remains, what one keeps returning to, is the story of the loved ones’ deaths and one’s own traumatic experiences. One could therefore pose a question why the return becomes a biographical trap for many Jews. Why can it not be transformed into a positive breakthrough in a biography? And, finally, why do so many return in spite of that? It is not easy to answer these questions. The difficulty results from the fact that every return is a personal experience of an individual human being—an experience that gains its significance because of one’s biography and also because of the circumstances of the return. These circumstances comprise people, events, places, sometimes mere coincidences . . . In the second part of the book, I will try to answer these questions, analyzing different biographical texts. However, to make this biographical context readable, it has to be placed in a broader spectrum. It is created mainly by the sphere of collective memory.

CH APTER II

Social Frames of Memory

The worlds of predecessors and successors extend in the two directions of the past and the future, of memory and expectation, those remarkable features of living together, first deciphered in the phenomenon of contemporaneousness. Paul Ricoeur

It is not a coincidence that the title of this chapter is borrowed from a classic by Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (On Collective Memory) (1969). The aim of these reflections is pinpointing specific formal traits of the social aspect of memory and characterizing unique cultural and historical circumstances, which set a framework of contemporary society’s memory. A characterization of these general relations will allow me to determine a symbolic area that contains biographical experiences and processes which are of particular interest to me. It is an essential starting point for explaining not only individual, but also collective mechanisms of the memory. In this chapter, I shall also present an array of concepts linked with memory, which I will discuss in the following sections of the book. Memory, especially in its social aspects, came into academics’ attention only a couple of decades ago. Concurrently, this attention is connected to a renaissance of national studies (Szacki 1997) and biographical method. It is often pointed out that sociology, especially in the English-speaking countries, for many years has been neglecting a reflection on these issues (Szacka 2003). When it comes to the issues of memory, a “serious gap in sociological thought” resulted from, first, a lack of interest in the achievements of psychology (and especially psychoanalysis) and, second, no reflection on the ideas of the classics like, for instance, Maurice Halbwachs (Hirszowicz and Neyman 2001, 24),1 whose work gained an unexpected acclaim only several decades after its publication (Ricoeur 2006, 157). “A new sensitivity and new ways of describing, assessing and 1 

The continuation of this reflection in Polish sociology, even though it was often not at the forefront of theoretical and empirical research, comes from a unique tradition of Polish sociological thought and its historical and cultural determinants. In this part of Europe, due to political and historical circumstances shaping the process of the nation’s creation, memory and historical sensitivity connected to it had a special significance (Radzik 1997). Polish output in this field is presented by Barbara Szacka (2005).

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looking at the world” (Szacka 2003, 3), and a growing interest in the issues described above paradoxically came to light in times when society is being diagnosed with not attaching any weight to its past, roots, or collective identity—especially the one with national or ethnic entanglements. Suffice it to refer to the statement of John Gillis (1994) that the nation remained a main frame of reference for the collective memory and identity from the times of the French Revolution until the Second World War. Still, in the social discourse, this conviction—that the “time of nations” or “time of history” is passing—is being undermined by the ever-so-frequent problems whose basic frame of reference is the remembrance of the past. It is important, as such debates often lose their local significance very quickly and achieve a status of international debates, which have also entered the twenty-first century.2 Jacek Żakowski (2002, 83) calls this phenomenon “a revenge of memory.” Żakowski makes a reference to Daniel Bell, who talks about the “revenge of the sacred,” a visible return to religiousness, which coincided with a crisis of modern ideas, supplanting it previously. In a formal sense, the “revenge of memory” is a variant of the “return of the sacred,” a result of a specific course of macrosocial processes in contemporary society. In some opinions, an interest in the issues of memory and forgetting “was caused not so much by the development of science, as by social and political events” (Hirszowicz and Neyman 2001, 24). It was those events that stirred up the interest of the scientists, including sociologists, who are “making sociological attempts at theming the memory” (Libera 2005) and, let us add, forgetting. Therefore, these issues, gaining in significance, apply to an everwider spectrum of phenomena. For the purpose of further reflections, I shall refer to chosen points connected to memory and the act of forgetting, as well as the relation between their individual and collective aspects.

2 

Examples here are the debate on Jedwabne or the dispute about the German expellees less than a year later, important as far as historical memory and current politics are concerned (Buras 2003), or the animated discussions about the Shoah in Europe, Israel, or the United States.

1.  Memory as a Form of Cultural Practice3 1.1  Nostalgia and Archival Memory

The twentieth century was characterized by exceptionally rapid changes in every aspect of social life. Their speed has increased in the second half of the century (and is still growing), thus enforcing the sense of a lack of reciprocity of perspectives, especially since subsequent generations are entering a completely different world. Although the technological development seems to illustrate this process most vividly, it appears, however, a “mere” impulse for experiencing the quality of those changes. It is the change, not the previous constancy, that is the basic characteristic of contemporary society. A contemporary man feels insecure about the future. He cannot predict it from an intergenerational tradition and sometimes cannot even picture the course of the rapid development. Oftentimes, what has previously belonged to the science fiction realm becomes reality. An uncertainty of the future makes one look back to the past. This diagnosis forms a starting point for Pierre Nora’s explanation of rapid changes of the social memory in the past few decades. He claims that an uncertainty as to which kind of knowledge about us could be useful to the next generations makes us record the memories about contemporary society uncritically. Since history cannot give us convincing visions of the future, “duty memory” comes to life, resulting from the emotions concomitant with the loss (Nora 1974, 16). A similar point of view is represented by David Lowenthal, claiming that social heritage starts to play an increasingly important role in creating and sustaining identities of contemporary societies. It applies to the individual (for instance, a family history) as well as the collective dimension, in which all the material and symbolic aspects of culture are becoming more important (Lowenthal 1988, 42–43).4 This type of memory is called 3 

I have borrowed this term from Wojciech Burszta (1996). I am quoting his explanation further on. Andrzej Szpociński (2005), referring to similar issues, calls memory “an element of contemporary culture.” 4   One has to point out that in sociology, it is an otherwise well-known concept. In Polish sociology, it is represented especially by Stanisław Ossowski (1984), Florian Znaniecki (1990), Józef Chałasiński, and Antonina Kłoskowska (1996). David Lowenthal, reflecting upon the significance and nature of heritage, stresses that in a formal sense, it shares the characteristics of collective memory—its meaning is a result of social (that is, subjective for each group) interpretations (Lowenthal 1988, 49). A comparison comes to mind,

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by Nora “archival.” The archival memory strengthens the attachment to the past, which displays a specific meaning of the notion of nostalgia. In contemporary culture, this notion has gained a much wider meaning. It not only lost its original quasi-medical sense and now is applicable mainly in the social discourse, but moreover, the term “nostalgia” is no longer associated with a longing for the homeland—that is, a “classical” interpretation presented in the last chapter. Currently, especially in Western literature, nostalgia is mainly interpreted as a sentiment toward the time past, which is always presented in an opposition to the present. The differences in significance hierarchy of the original and the more recent, currently discussed meaning of the word can also be seen in popular dictionaries. In Polish dictionaries like Słownik Języka Polskiego PWN (1995) and Słownik Wyrazów Obcych PWN (1996), there is only one definition: “nostalgia” is a longing for the homeland, the birthplace, whereas the Cambridge Dictionary of English (2008) gives also the second meaning—a sadness about things that happened in the past. David Lowenthal, writing about nostalgia, refers mainly to the second meaning. Nostalgia, understood as a fascination with the past, is thus in vogue. In a nine-page-long chapter about nostalgia published in his renowned work The Past Is a Foreign Country,5 only one-and-a-half pages are devoted to reflections on the longing for the homeland. A similar perspective is demonstrated by other authors, assuming that nostalgia has become one of the cultural worldview strategies. One could thus point out general interpretative frames of this notion. According to Bryan Turner (1987, 150–151), social and cultural discourse takes up the theme of nostalgia in reference to four dimensions: First, a sense of loss, connected to the longing for a mythologized past—the golden age. From this angle, the present is seen as a next stage of degradation. Second, nostalgia refers to the loss of the sense of continuity, wholeness, and moral certainties. Third, it is an awareness of a loss of individual freedom and

5 

with a theoretically better-founded reflection on the correlates of culture by Ossowski. Lowenthal structures his interpretation mainly around the word “homesick”—that is, referring to the original meaning of the word, the psychological and physical afflictions connected with the longing, and exemplifying it accordingly. Nostalgia becomes an unbearable longing,  a “psychosociological” problem (Lowenthal 1994, 11). According to the author, it is a less and less frequent phenomenon, and nostalgia is rather a state of mind than a psychophysical state. David Lowenthal clearly limits this aspect of nostalgia to an ethnocentric trap of being blind to new experiences. Therefore, unlike Ossowski (1984, 19–24), he does not reflect upon the reasons behind the homesickness.

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autonomy, concomitant with an extinction of authentic social relations. Finally, nostalgia is connected to a sense of disappearing simplicity, authenticity, and spontaneity of emotions. These dimensions refer to a specific way of experiencing and interpreting the world, which assumes the concept of linear time, based on a processual relation between the past, the present, and the future, and a longing for something lost and no longer present (Burszta 1996, 100–101). This experience refers to the sphere of collective interpretations of specific cultural phenomena, as well as individual biographies, whose bearers must face the existential problem of the passage of time while moving along the line of one’s own biographical time. These dimensions can be filled with specific content showing social situations in which nostalgia, being not so much an attribute of an object as a way of perceiving the world (Zaleski 1996), has transformed into a certain “feeling structure.” This structure can shape such a way of interpreting the reality, in which the past always appears a world of noble and positive values whereas the present is imperfect. An example of this perspective is an opinion that in the contemporary world, nostalgia became a means of the mass culture and consumptive lifestyle critique. An “intellectual’s homelessness” strengthens the conviction that mass culture leads to a loss of an individual’s autonomy and spontaneity for an illusion of naïve pleasures of daily life. The vulgarization of traditional forms of cultural expression in mass culture is juxtaposed with a nostalgia for an elite culture (Turner 1987, 153). Another example is an increase of conservative lifestyles, stemming from an attachment to a stable traditional, hierarchical society in the present era of fluidity and ambiguity, with the feeling of being lost among numerous cultural orientations (Tannock 1995, 455; Lübbe 1991, 186). This attachment can be traced in specific rhetorical practices, serving to search for a sense of continuity in social life and one’s own biography, respectively. The rhetoric of nostalgia makes use of figures such as the golden age, the downturn, the gradual decline, idyllic pieces, and homecoming stories. These are the threads deeply rooted in European culture, accompanying different phenomena of cultural expression: from mythical to biblical tales and literary motives to historiosophic concepts. Moreover, the rhetoric of nostalgia grows stronger in contemporary society, which, when compared with its predecessors, suffers from a lack of continuity between the past and 6 

I am quoting Lübbe after Korzeniowski (2005).

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the present (Tannock 1995, 463). In this situation, a return to a utopian past can be helpful in facing the reality, and mythologization of the past helps accept rapid social changes, role and position shifts, and life stages. This is why nostalgia can become an escape from reality and a life in the world of illusion, especially if we interpret this phenomenon as an answer to the failure of “collective faith in the modernization impulse,” to the compulsion of constant change, of constant “being on a roll” (Burszta 1996, 104–106). The paradox, however, lies in the fact that mass culture has transformed the need for nostalgia into a fashion. Memory became an object of consumption; it is being peddled in shops, and we can also see a widespread fashion for all things retro. The above phenomena clearly show that we are undergoing not another intellectual fashion, but a cultural shift, whose dynamics could even be compared to the mental transformations in the times of reformation (Gillis 1994, 17–18). From this point of view, nostalgia in its collective and individual aspects alike becomes a worldview strategy or, as Wojciech Burszta (1996) calls it, “a form of cultural practice” of contemporary society. Therefore, the recognition of the past, once characteristic of the elites, has nowadays become a mass phenomenon. For a long time, the sense of being rooted in time has been one of the elements of creating social identity. However, until the nineteenth century, people—apart from aristocracy—did not reflect much on their past. Usually, only the elites cared about preserving its memory. In the case of the so-called ordinary people, the past was a part of the present (Gillis 1994, 6). Besides, those of noble birth were more privileged as far as the sense of being rooted in time is concerned—what mattered were those having generations of ancestors before them, “those in whom the time of the family, being also the time of the history, condensed” (Guriewicz 2001, 117–118). Those who had no past were not people in the social sense. Roman law stated servus non habet personam. A slave had no political and social rights and no past. Once sold, he retained his name, but his story was starting anew—it was the story of his owner (Mauss 1973). Egalitarian tendencies in contemporary society have changed this way of things, and although the potential of feeling rooted in the past is still diversified according to the tradition of its safeguarding (here the difference between the elites and the masses is still visible), this phenomenon is common nowadays.7 7 

For example, in contemporary school curricula, one of the first history lessons is devoted to drawing a student’s family tree and tracing his/her ancestry.

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1.2  Lieux de Mémoire

A nostalgic attitude toward the past, nowadays considered a form of cultural practice, has—according to Pierre Nora—further consequences. A fascination with the past and its passionate archiving does not constitute a socially founded essence of contemporary society. Once, memory served to bridge the past with the present and the future and was predictable. Past was not foreign as it was recreated in the present over again. Nowadays past is a completely different, nontransferable world, and the future is uncertain. Contemporary society, due to a transition from continuity to change, has broken the natural connection with the past, which now is related to it only by “traces, mysterious signs” (Nora 1989, 16–17). Therefore, the contemporary man is trying to revive the past by the lieux de mémoire in order to minimize this distance. The term “lieux de mémoire,” sites of memory, plays a major role in the French historian’s explanation of the phenomenon of memory’s elevation in contemporary society. These are topographical places like archives, libraries or museums, and places or monuments such as memorials, cemeteries, architecture, symbolic places; anniversaries, pilgrimages, commemorations; functional places—fraternal orders, autobiographies, and handbooks (1989, 12). Sites of memory appear where there are no longer real environments of memory (Nora 1989, 7), because the process of transmission and conservation of collectively remembered values has been violated. In contemporary society, there are no milieux typical of traditional society—such as families, schools, churches—which served to transmit such traditions (Nora 1989, 7). Sites of memory come to life because the traditional attachment to constant values is gone. We would not need it if we were able to “live in memory,” if every action were rooted in the past, for tradition needs no history. Sites of memory are yet another example of the paradox of contemporary’s culture fascination with the past. They make their appearance by virtue of the deritualization of the contemporary world, which is in complete opposition to what those places represent. That is why they seem artificial, for they symbolize the rituals of a society with no rituals—a unity in a society emphasizing diversity; they are signs of social affiliation in a society proud of its individuality. Therefore, the lieux de mémoire are complex, hybrid, mutant. They belong to both life and death, time and infinity. They connect the individual and the collective, the sacred and the profane. Their aim is to stop time, to block the process of forgetting,

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to establish a state of things, immortalize death, and to materialize what is immaterial. All this in order to capture a maximum of meaning in the fewest of signs so that the lieux de mémoire could exist because of their capacity for metamorphosis and an endless recycling of their meanings (ibid., 19). Nora’s thesis could be interpreted thus: because “we cannot” remember, as our memory has no anchorage in the tradition or the group or the collective imagination. We feel obliged to remember (that is, archive everything), but it is a different way of cultivating the memory— an external, not an internal one. Andrzej Szpociński (2003, 21) calls this state “an inability caused by the collapse of the category of the long-lasting,” characterized by cultivating memory of the past, which was actually rooted in the cultural heritage. Nowadays, thus, one can talk not so much about the “memory of the past” as of “commemoration of the past” and a development of mnemonic techniques facilitating this commemoration (ibid., 19). Based on this, lieux de mémoire originate from a conviction that spontaneous memory is declining. It is confirmed in the activities of various minorities that protect their past by virtue of the lieux de mémoire. That is why they serve as anchors for duty memory, which could be considered another strategy of this cultural practice described by Nora. The less memory is experienced collectively, the more it involves the individuals in undertaking the memory recording themselves. To illustrate the power of this involvement, Nora gives an example of Jewish identity. Nowadays it is often no longer based on being anchored in the past and understood as a tradition of certain values—in this case, mostly religious ones—serving once as a basic repository for identity shaping. Nowadays the tradition is defined very hazily, having no history other than its own memory. In this situation, being a Jew is to remember that one is such. If this vision of memory becomes internalized, the questions that arises are “What is this memory?” and “What is its subject?” In a sense, the subject is memory itself. Such psychologization of memory transforms it into a duty. “Identity— like memory—became a duty, (. . .) a sense of duty creates a decisive bond between memory and identity” (Nora 2002, 65).8

8 

This problem is analyzed in detail by, for example, Jack Kugelmass (1993), researching the case of American Jews returning to Central and Eastern Europe. I shall return to this topic in later chapters.

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1.3  Democratization of Memory

A sentimental attachment to the past and elevation of the memory has yet another aspect. An “explosion” of memory was caused, next to cultural processes and by political changes, making it possible to reveal the once undisclosed and forbidden memory, leading to a democratization of societies. It enveloped not only Europe, but also Latin America after the fall of dictatorships, and Africa after the eradication of apartheid. Nora refers to these processes as a “decolonization of memory.” Thanks to this decolonization, the memory—or rather, its subject—became elevated. Those who up to this time had no say in shaping the history have gained the right to share their memories. This way, people marginalized in traditional history have entered the professional discourse (Nora 1989, 15). Decolonization of the “minority memory” refers to at least three socially important aspects: First of all, there is a literary decolonization— that is, an end to political dominance of the colonizing countries and an allowance to the downtrodden to have their say. Second, decolonization refers to contemporary Western societies that acknowledge the opinions of previously marginalized religious, regional, sexual, and/or social minorities. Finally, the point is to restore the memory suppressed by dictatorships and totalitarian systems (Nora 2001, 41). The aforementioned phenomena have also contributed to a democratization of history, which gave voice to the witness, as a representative of the “truth more real than the truth of history” (Nora 2002, 64). Oral history became a repository for research of the so-called social history and not only for sociologists, yet it also gained a status of a source material for at least some historians. This, in turn, makes one question its quality as far as its conception, subjectivity of the description, interpretation, or imperfections of human memory are concerned. These queries have inspired a reflection upon the quality of scientific discourse of the historians themselves. During the last few years, the very problem of their objectiveness, and especially of the interpretation of the findings, became a subject of scrutiny. It concerns numerous diverse issues, from an awareness that a historian’s reflection is inevitably tangled in a specific social and cultural context to a discussion of, if there exists what we are used to calling historic truth, or is all knowledge a result of constructed interpretations? Recently, historians have also been posing a very legitimate question if there exists one objective History, one Great Narration able to meet the requirements of objectivity (Ankersmit 2004)? The ever-more-prevalent conviction that a story created by the

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historian is not free from his or her beliefs and attitudes reinforces the significance of witnesses (Iggers 1997; Ricoeur 1993, 2006). These circumstances set a general framework for specific issues, interpretations of past events, and work on collective memory. One could thus say that social acceptance or even aiming at including the topics of the past and memory in public discourse, together with the elevation of an individual witness’s memory (“the truth of personal experience”) and processes of democratization in various parts of the world have given an impulse to take on issues that pose a problem for collective memory of individual societies. “We were supposed to build Europe of the future, but never before have there been so many debates on the past” (Krasnodębski 2003, 115). This statement can be illustrated with many examples of the discussion about memory.9 “The beginning of the 21st century is steeped in history. The further from the war, the more arguments about it and different forms of its commemoration” (Wolff-Pawęska 2005, 1). Their subject is mainly Nazism and Bolshevism, whose aim was to create “new memory and new humanity” (Ricoeur 2002, 45). The topic of reflection and work on remembering the most recent past nowadays seems to be taken up most often in the discourse on the issues of memory. A reflection on oblivion is its indispensable component.

9 

One of these widely discussed cases is the collective memory of Germans  (Buras 2003). Another well-known example is the debate on Jedwabne, caused by J. T. Gross’s book Neighbors (2000), or spectacular discussions about subsequent anniversaries—for instance, the one of the year 2005, concerning the Europeans’ memory of the AuschwitzBirkenau camp liberation, which in many Western media has been referred to as a “Polish concentration camp.”

2.  Oblivion To characterize the social context of memory, one should also analyze what in a given community becomes the object of oblivion,10 which is its opposite and complement as well. Memory has to be selective, for it is impossible to remember everything; therefore, at the individual and collective aspects alike, some content displaces the other. Some of it gains a fixed position in the landscape of memory (especially in reference to the canon of the cultural heritage of a given group), and some serve as passing elements, connected to the particularity of given times. Therefore, the process of inclusion and exclusion is constant and dynamic, and there is a constant tension between memory and oblivion at the individual and collective levels. In this context, Paul Ricoeur’s reflections seem especially important. The fundamental questions posed by the philosopher are what and how do we remember, what and how do we forget, and, finally, what purpose does remembering serve? In Ricoeur’s opinion, it is always a form of an answer to oblivion. The type of tension between memory and oblivion determines whether the answer is a creative one, offering a chance to work on the individual or collective identity, or one closing the road. The author, invoking the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud, calls the process of memory activating the “remembering work,” which can lead to a compulsion of repeating that “supplants the real memory, by virtue of which the present could cope with the past” (Ricoeur 1995, 33). We face this situation especially in the case of a “surplus of memory,” when “the events referring to a past grandeur or past humiliations are strongly resisting oblivion” (ibid., 22). This phenomenon concerns both the individual and the collective dimension. Hence, the processes typical of the individual memory—or rather oblivion—can also be traced in the collective dimension. Maria Hirszowicz and Elżbieta Neyman (2001, 27) distinguish here five similarities: “1) suppressing from the collective consciousness information which is somehow uncomfortable, disturbing the mental state of the community; 2) tendencies to unconsciously repeat certain behaviors suppressed from the informational register; 3) irrational reactions when facing the issues disguised in collective consciousness; 4) 10   This phenomenon exists under different names (for example, forgetting or selective memory).

Here I am using the term “oblivion” to emphasize the intentionality (though sometimes a veiled one) of this action.

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difficulties in accepting the previously suppressed information; 5) catalytic significance of the disclosure of this information.” These analogies shape the possible work on oblivion. The example of “Balkans culture”—a historically charged border between worlds, tribes, nations, countries, and religions, presented by Maria Dąbrowska-Partyka (1995, 39)—may serve as an illustration of this process. A specific distribution of memory resources, which the author calls good and bad memory, respectively, constitutes a symbolic reinforcement of this border. Memory of strangers is usually the bad one, fostering stereotypes and prejudices. “Bad memory is the ideogram of history, from which you can create the ever new images of murderous force” (ibid., 44). Good memory refers to its own glorified history, obstructing the view on what we had been capable of. The aim of good memory is thus to strengthen our own identity by unequivocally interpreting the past, comprising two contrasting images: the noble deeds of our own group and the shameful deeds of the foreign group. This interpretation entails an unambiguous identity of each group: the victim and the executioner, respectively. Such a relation to the history emerges especially if the group is constantly feeling threatened, if a centuries-long bondage absolves us from responsibility for our own history, and a struggle for freedom and identity suspends moral judgments about its ways. These reflections refer to the area of the former Yugoslavia, but as the author points out, it is but an exemplification of the processes that have to/can occur anywhere there is a strong culturally founded need for self-identification by way of creating a “negative identity” of the stranger (ibid., 41–42). Dąbrowska-Partyka bases her reflections on an analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature of the Balkan area. Good and bad memory, not only in this case, is shaped by symbolic culture, serving as a reservoir of interpretative resources for cultural or political elites. It is they who form collective ideas, with time transforming into generally vernacularly understood images of the others—interpretations of events being in fact culturally founded strategies of building the repositories of memory and oblivion. They are characterized, as Ricoeur shows, by the obligation of constant repetition. Thus, the memory repetition does not facilitate working on the past. Conversely, with time, it becomes a trap, making it impossible to renounce stereotypes and prejudices, for it is immune to any criticism. Memory reminiscence has entirely disparate features; it is a real memory, not a persistent repetition stemming from a “surplus of memory,” nor a silence caused by its deficiency. This process of building reminiscences leads

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to memory criticism, creatively enriching the identity (Ricoeur 1995, 33), which in itself is a result of the narration on the past. In this sense, the identity of individuals and communities is tangled in the process of constructing reminiscences, being a narration of memory, circulating in vernacular discourse and therefore keeping the relation of “continuity and affiliation to a specific, realized reality” (ibid., 29). The point is whether this image of the past will be dominated by the memory repetition or memory reminiscence, leading to memory criticism. According to the philosopher (1993, 99–101), this process can be properly directed by a “model of memory-exchange”—that is, giving voice to and hearing different narratives pertaining to the same memory, told by actors of different (individual and collective) identities.11 Hearing the story of the stranger is supposed to lead to a critique of our own memory, and the point is to look critically not only at perfective events of the past, but also imperfective events of the future. “Past is not, in fact, something past, something which took place and can no longer be changed, but lives in memory by virtue of arrows pointed to the future, which have not been shot or whose flight has been disrupted. (. . .) Freeing this future, which has not perfected itself in the past, is the greatest advantage which can be expected from crossing memories and exchanging stories” (ibid., 102). Thus, an exchange of memories is to facilitate the “remembering work” directed at our own memory (“a new look at our own story”) and in the long term taking into account the stranger’s perspective (“getting tangled in the stories of others”) and a “model of forgiveness.” It is created of the “obligation of memory,”12 especially of what comprises an experience considered dishonorable and shameful (Ricoeur 2002, 47–48). The “obligation of memory” is therefore related to the “remembering work,” which is indispensable on account of the forgetting process, which can take an active or passive form. Passive oblivion results from an attitude of avoiding confrontation with the past due to a premonition or even a conviction that the past can turn out to be problematic. Passivity manifests itself in a scarcity of active memory and taking up strategies replacing the duty to remember the past.13 “I mean an 11   An example of such activities are attempts to create a common field of discourse between

12   13  

representatives of conflicted groups—for example, Palestinians and Israelis, described in the book Bridging the Gap, edited by Dan Bar-On (2000). It is a viewpoint contrary to Nora’s, who thinks that the source of “obligation of memory” are emotions concomitant to loss and not a debt to an unprocessed past (Nora 2002, 61). Ricoeur is referring to Freud’s concept: the process of remembering is being  replaced by an action.

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oblivion based on excuses, signs of bad faith, centered around the avoidance strategy, which in turn is motivated by a vague notion of not knowing, not finding out, not investigating any evil committed in a direct neighborhood of the citizen”14 (Ricoeur 1995, 38). Active oblivion is an intentional action aimed at selective remembering, a covering up and concealing of a part of the narration of the past. Collective oblivion, as Marek Ziółkowski (2001, 5) points out, refers to the same dimensions as memory. Therefore, what is supposed to become an object of collective oblivion is, first, pushed into the subconscious (passive oblivion); second, eliminated from the discourse; and third, forgotten as a cause of individual or collective actions (active oblivion). “The meaning of one’s nation’s history is easier to capture when one omits the events which do not fit the picture: It is easier to cope with an irretrievable loss when only some of the memories are cultivated and it is also easier to fight for your own interests when you put a stress only on information from the past which validates your own claims, and disregard whatever could support the claims of the other side” (ibid. 2001, 8–9).

3.  Collective, Social, and Biographical Memory The issues presented above find their reflection in the frames of reference for given aspects of memory (and oblivion) distinguished due to their social context. These are collective memory (formal or official), social memory of a given society, and memory of individuals (Szacka 2000, 14),15 which I shall from now on refer to as biographical memory. Each of these levels is ascribed to specific categories of memory subjects. Consequently, collective memory is first and foremost created by state and local authorities; social memory, by social and civil authorities; biographical memory, by uninstitutional actors—circles of friends, informal groups, and families (Ziółkowski 2001, 6). The distinction of these three levels serves, among others, to show the dynamic aspect of memory, which undergoes transformations in diachronic and synchronic orders alike. The memory, always an attribute 14   Interestingly, in the procedure of analyzing a structural description of a narration text in an

autobiographical narrative interview, a similar role is played by the term Ausblendung— fading out of awareness (Schütze 2005, 2008). 15   The above division is but one of many. It allows to organize reflections about the mutual effects that specific subjects of memory have on each other. These effects can be compared to the phenomena occurring at a macro-, mezzo-, and microsocial scale, respectively.

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of a specific group, is constantly being (re)interpreted. This results from the unique role memory plays in the process of creating and sustaining identity. As Halbwachs (1980) notices, collective memory is always adjusted to societies’ needs by eliminating those memoirs that could disturb the sense of social order. In this context, the meaning of memory is not so much the content of the remembered events as their interpretation. Therefore, before we answer the question what the object of memory is, we should first explain how and why a given vision of past is created (Szacka 1995, 71), because “memory does not concern what really happened in the past, but what use current generation makes of it” (Ziółkowski 1999, 56). Whereas memory is indispensable for building identity (Halbwachs suggests that social frames of memory unify our thinking), the process of creating and sustaining memory is determined by identity. Both these phenomena are rooted in time: memory is resuscitating the past, and identity is based on the sense of continuity—that is, an awareness of existing in time (Szacka 2000, 1 and 6). Memory’s significance for the process of building and supporting identity stems not only from treating it as a source of knowledge about the past, but perhaps most importantly, it is also connected to a particular experience and linked structurally with our being in time (Skarga 1995, 5). The process of reworking collective memory is tangled up in the process of shaping collective identity. The sense of rootedness in the past raises one’s self-esteem and serves to transmit values, models of behavior, and builds a symbolic language of a group (Szacka 2000, 17–18). Therefore, the arguments about the content of collective memory are only seemingly arguments about the past, as the way of interpreting the past shapes the interpretation of the present. Thus, we have a dynamically changing structure of each generation’s memory on one hand, and on the other, the memory serves to sustain “a given society’s awareness of staying in time.” Therefore this phenomenon can also be looked at synchronically, and in two aspects at that. First, memory is ahistorical, whereas historical discourse assumes a linear time perspective and collective memory uses mythical time.16 “Past in it [the memory—KK] is a directionless antiquity. Distances between people populating it and events filling it are defined not by dates, but by affinities 16   It is worth noting that assigning memory, to put it briefly, to the sphere of the sacred rather

than the profane refers mostly to aligning it with the paradigm of historical knowledge. At the same time, the phenomenon of imagining the past as gone reality emerged in a specific moment of social history, along with the concept of linear time (that is, the vernacular one) and the division into past, present, and future (Szpociński 2005, 5–7).

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of the values they symbolize” (Szacka 2000, 14). Hence, memory has an affective and magical aspect and belongs to the sacred, whereas history to the profane (Nora 1989, 8–9). In the case of the latter, truth is the truth of reason; in the case of memory, truth of the heart (Szacka 2000, 13). Second, one should take into account the process of mutual influences of specific levels of memory in vertical order in a given time. Collective memory is, first and foremost, a communicational and ritual act, by virtue of which individual memories transform into a collective one (Kapralski 2000, 143). Thus, collective memory provides us with categories and keys for interpreting our own biographical experiences, and conversely, the content of collective memory is comprised of individual experiences (compare Szacka 2000, 14–15). However, the nature of these mutual interdependencies is extremely complex, as it is determined by historical, social, and biographical circumstances. We return to the fundamental question in pondering on the issues of memory: how and why in a given time the relations between specific levels of memory assume one shape and not the other. It is impossible to enumerate the origins of all the relations which can occur between individual levels of memory and their results. Symmetry or asymmetry of collective and biographical memory is one of the fundamental ones. 3.1  Symmetry or Asymmetry of Collective and Biographical Memory

A “memory community” of a given group is built on categories and schemata characteristic of the universe of its culture. Creating the ideas of the past occurs via institutional actions—for example, education, public discourse, and elites’ activities. Collective memory is not a sum total of individual experiences, but a result of a more or less intentional and always selective—in a certain sense—interpretation of the past. The most general frame for this selectivity is the point of view of our own culture and society (Holzer 1995). It sets the limits of memory and oblivion alike. Shaping ideas about the past is therefore always connected to its ideologization, originating from the aforementioned relation between collective memory and collective identity. Sometimes, especially in totalitarian systems, this ideologization is highly intentional and leads to creating a formal, official version of the past, which cannot be subject to interpretation. In this situation, we deal with adulteration of history and, most of all, with its instrumentalization, which aims at validating the status quo. These circumstances often lead to

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an asymmetry of collective and biographical past, and its consequences can be varied. Usually they can be connected to a certain tension caused by an inability to include one’s own biographical experiences in the “community of memory.” Depending on the circumstances, this state of affairs can foster a sense of social marginalization17 or even alienation, and it can also make one want to “shed” a part of his/her biography.18 Symmetry of collective and biographical memory can in turn lead to collective work on memory and oblivion. In later chapters, characterizing collective and biographical memory of the Poles and Jews, I shall refer to the cases of this symmetry and asymmetry, appearing in different social and historical contexts. Social memory of a given milieu usually constitutes a symbolic space where these two levels of memory meet. Social memory also becomes a repository of what I call a paradox of biographical memory, expressed in the tension between a common field of discourse for narration about biographical experiences and, at the same time, their nontransferability. 3.2  The Paradox of Biographical Memory

The term “biographical memory” suggests that it comprises an individual’s own experiences gathered in the course of his/her life. This memory is hence mostly an experience and not a knowledge about the past.19 However, “biographicity” not only means setting an individual perspective, but also suggests a constant work on the experiences which are undergoing (re)interpretation.20 Biographical memory, therefore, refers not only to the images and events of the past, stored in mind, but also their versions determined by an individual course of life, as well as a wider social 17   An example here are the postwar fates of the inhabitants of the former Eastern borderlands,

which I am describing in my other book (Kaźmierska 1999).

18   Such examples are presented by Małgorzata Melchior (2004) in her book Tożsamość i Zagłada

19  

20  

(Identity and the Shoah), where she describes the fates of the Jews who have survived the war in hiding, provided with Aryan documents. Some of them, on account of Polish society’s attitude toward Jewish people, tried to renounce their origin and stick to the “Aryan identity” also after the war. Barbara Szacka (1995, 68) stresses that collective memory refers to individual experiences in a very small degree but is founded on a set of concepts about the past already existing in a gi-  ven community. In fact, it is a form of knowledge about the past, rather than a memory of experienced events. From this perspective, the term “memory” is rather symbolic. Therefore, I am using the term “biographical” and not “individual” memory, having assumed that the first one explains the social and cultural context of this memory aspect better.

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and cultural context. This context shapes specific modes of remembering and, what is more important, recreating biographical experiences, which are, after all, always referred to on the level of collective memory. Memory, being first and foremost a communicational act, becomes an exchange of narratives about the past. Therefore, building memory via intergenerational transmission (including great and small narrations) links the perspectives of at least several former generations, which is why a meeting of memory and history spreads over at least one century (Ricoeur 1995, 22). Biographical memory forms a foundation for a common intergenerational discourse, where the lines between our own experience and what we were told can be blurred.21 I always have a story which can be told and whose hero I am. The story has some specific characteristics, which can cause a conflict and destroy the “selfness” which is being created. The reasons can be different. Firstly, the beginning of a story does not coincide with the beginning of my life, as I do not remember this, other people were its witnesses, it is from them that I gather the knowledge about it. My own story begins where my memory can reach, although it is possible that those first days or years could have weighed on its entire course. Therefore it is an imperfect story, its imperfection originates from the very nature of memory. Imperfect, uncertain and readily manipulated. (Skarga 1995, 6)

I have already referred to the resources gathered in that way as heart memory. Thus, from this angle, biographical memory is a result of a narration created for others, who in that sense become its cocreators, sharing at least some part of the story and including it in the repository of their own biographical memories. On the other hand, this process of memory transmission and creating a common space for biographical memory is extremely difficult, especially nowadays, when the quantity and quality of events engender an evergreater dissimilarity of generational experiences. This statement is further reinforced when, referring to Karl Mannheim (1952, 286–320), we consider the generations not only a biological sequence of parents and offspring, but 21   This phenomenon is most characteristic of childhood memories, but is not limited to these.

Also in other cases, due to a dynamic exchange of memories or reading matter (it concerns, for instance, war stories), one can find it hard to distinguish one’s own experiences from the outside images embedded deeply in memory. Psychologists’ research also confirms this fact (Szacka 2005).

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first and foremost a community of experiences and their interpretations. Generational shift is a constant process in its biological as well as its cultural dimension. Subsequent generations, entering social life, accept cultural heritage from the descending generations. Intergenerational transmission is fundamental in a given society’s existence. However, each generation is positioned (Lagerung) in a specific social and historical space. Anchoring an experience in a certain time and space always makes it, to some extent, nontransferable. Nowadays the intergenerational transmission is further disrupted by a paradigm shift in knowledge transmission. A postfigurative society is more suited to creating collective memory than a contemporary and prefigurative one (Mead 1970). An additional factor is the scope of possibility in creating a common area of discourse in specific situations. The experience of the Shoah seems to be a special case here. On one hand, it is apparently the most thoroughly researched, socially commented and archived event in recent history (Hoffman 2004); and on the other the reciprocity of the experiences, due to their nature, is rather limited. “This has to do with such literally extraordinary limit experiences— which make for a difficult pathway in encountering the ordinary, limited capacities for reception of auditors educated on the basis of a sense of human resemblance at the level of situations, feelings, thoughts and actions. But the experience to be transmitted is that of an inhumanity with no common measure with the experience of the average person” (Ricoeur 2006, 175). Charles Maier (2001) presents a similar perspective, calling the space built on shared biographical experiences and immersed in a given community’s experience a “community of memory.” Biography bearers belonging to the same generation but to different “communities of memory” find it difficult to not only empathize with but also interpret the experiences of others. Therefore, the case of the Shoah should be considered exceptional. On a smaller scale, however, we always deal with a certain paradox of biographical memory, which is not fully transferable and, at the same time, requires a common symbolic space to exist. It is thus obvious that the problems presented here most sketchily constitute one of the perspectives (and I am fully aware of the fact that it is not the most popular one) setting the frame of reference in describing contemporary society. However, this perspective is worth analyzing, which is also substantiated by the authors of the texts I quote and numerous debates of the past, which result in further publications aiming at systematizing

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the reflection on themes ever so often considered the domain of sociology of memory (Libera 2005). Whether this sub-branch of sociology is indeed fully constituted is another matter and one which is not being analyzed here. Summing up the issues presented, one should indicate the results of the phenomenon of, to use Nora’s expression, the “revolt of memory.” First, making memory a form of cultural practice undoubtedly leads to its commercialization and instrumentalization in numerous aspects, from political or cultural to tourist or economic. In social practice, it is noticeable in a conspicuous proliferation of anniversary celebrations in local communities and also in the area of collective memory and musealization of every possible area of activity and creation (Korzeniewski 2005), especially in creating a particular, according to Szpociński (2004), form of memory— the historical space. It is created by virtue of restoring historical monuments of “little value,” whose only redeeming quality is their “antiquity.” The aim of such historical space is to “prove the past really existed”—not only to the members of the local community cultivating this space, but also, or perhaps even above all, to those who do not belong to this community but could become potential consumers of the historical space, as they are governed by nostalgia for the past, its definition notwithstanding. Second, the “revolt of memory,” together with the processes of democratization, has led to rapid changes in the reflection on the past, especially the events of the last century. Countless debates have initialized a process called by Ricoeur “memory work.” It is being undertaken not only by professionals, the historians, but also by the witnesses of the events. This has undermined the historians’ right of monopoly on the interpretation of the past (Nora 2001, 43) and questioned the possibility of creating the so-called objective narration by the historians. Third and finally, these tendencies are mirrored in the dynamics of shaping collective memory of individual groups and biographical memories of individual subjects of memory. The object of my scrutiny in further parts of the book is, above all, biographical memory. As I have shown in chapter 1, it is that particular “logic” of biographical experiences, where memory plays a major role in sustaining collective identity, which generates phenomena constituting the main theme of this book. Simultaneously, these particular biographical circumstances make one think about the phenomenon of collective memory, shaping the interpretation of biographical experiences and memory thereof. Time is the fundamental factor strengthening this relation. The experience of the return is a result of a prolonged process of

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work on one’s own biography and memory, which was undergoing decades of subsequent transformations. It is not, to use Rober Traba’s term (2000), a “live memory,” created right after experiencing the events. Live memory is emotionally committed and, what is extremely important, relatively free from the collective memory, which is simultaneously also being created in statu nascendi and with time solidifies and starts defining the frames of public discourse. Biographical memory of the people returning now is not a live memory, so it is (has been) influenced by the aforementioned relations between the individual and the collective level of memory. Therefore, it is crucial to present, at least generally, the interpretation frames created over the years by the collective memory. According to what I have already said, these frames undergo dynamic transformations too. In the issues I am looking at, what interests me most is the part of collective memory that concerns the events of the Second World War, especially the Shoah. I shall try therefore to show the disparity between Polish and Jewish interpretative resources and present the changing dynamics of the discourse within each perspective. Presenting these general frames seems indispensable for characterizing the dimension of biographical memory and its influence upon one’s own biographical work. It is also important for social memory, which—for my own purposes—I am attributing first and foremost to the local community, which is a holder and a repository22 of a given group’s collective memory.

22   Depending on the situation, the term “repository” can have a positive meaning, when it

refers to the cultivation of memory (guarding it), or negative, when it means “enclosure” or “protecting” it from others who are considered outsiders, having no right to this memory.  I shall return to this problem later on.

CH APTER III

Polish Memory and the Polish-Jewish Relations

Significant events which gain the meaning of cornerstones determine societies for generations (. . .) gradually they get the meaning of symbols and the knowledge about them is being shaped in canons, then, difficult to break. Jan Tomasz Gross

1.  Introduction to the Subject In the previous chapter, I have set a general framework for the memory discourse and pointed out formal features embedded in the cultural practices of expressing its individual levels. Therefore, the framework can now be filled with specific content. Taking into account the subject of my scrutiny, I will be interested in those spheres of memory and oblivion that can influence the definition of Polish-Jewish relations, perceived from both the past and present angles. Due to the biographical position (Lagerung) of the returnees and the uniqueness of their experiences, the Shoah is a focal point here. Therefore, I will try to demonstrate, at least generally, the process of shaping its collective memory in Polish, Israeli, and American societies, which play major roles in the discourse of the Shoah. I shall begin with a characterization of Polish collective memory, in which the Second World War has a very special place. In spite of the time elapsed, this event is considered the most traumatic one in recent history. What is more, in the case of Poland (though not only), the drama of war continued to spread over the postwar period as well. Being in the victors’ camp, Poland, due to the Yalta Conference stipulations, found itself in a lost position. In this respect, the consequences of the war and memory thereof should be measured not only with its direct losses, but also with its postwar fate—a political and economic dependence on the USSR. One should therefore agree with Jan Tomasz Gross (1998, 19) that the Second World War belongs to those breakthroughs in history that “have a life of their own, and although, to keep some order, we assume dates marking their begin and end, we still know that they transcend the limits set by the diplomats and professors, shaping the fates of the generations to come in many different ways.” The memory of war is still an authentic one because it belongs to its witnesses. Although for larger parts of the community it is becoming merely a piece of knowledge, for the oldest generation it remains a part of the biography. In spite of the passage of

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time, the war events are thus still a subject of discourse conducted by its witnesses. In the last decades, the process of activating the memory of war has been further sustained by at least three factors: The first one is the previously characterized phenomenon of biographical time, which fosters the looking back at the past—especially in older age—by the witnesses. The second one is the special time after the year 1989, which made it possible to rebuild the memory and incorporate into it those events and experiences that until recently were considered missing pieces in the PPR’s image of the war.1 Finally, the third factor is the previously described social and intellectual clime in which the past is thriving, history is undergoing democratization, and its witnesses get elevated. The anniversaries of wartime events (the breakout of the Warsaw uprising, the ghetto uprising, the breakout and end of the war, and the liberation of the Auschwitz camp) further foster memory activation. A special place of the Second World War in collective memory stems also from the fact that in Polish history, it became yet another mythical incarnation of the culturally founded ethos of heroism and martyrdom. Intergenerational transmission of this ethos has been taking place on the level of symbolic culture, education, and official forms of commemoration, as well as family communication. In children’s upbringing and education, a special emphasis is put on the period of the second world war and its occupation. The events and people connected to it are ubiquitous in TV programs, radio and newspapers. This topic is still alive in literature, scientific publications, film, theater, arts. (. . .) The atmosphere around it is also typically Polish. There are several hundred thousands of “monuments to struggle and martyrdom,” various plates commemorating execution sites, underground venues, the heroes of Poland fighting fiercely. (Szarota 1996, 2)

In 1995, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, the IMAS Linz, an international institute for market and social analysis, conducted a survey2 that demonstrated that among the six 1 

The best example of working on collective memory transformation is the war history of the Eastern borderlands. 2   The survey Traces of the Second World War in the Identity of Six Nations was conducted in Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, Russia, and Hungary. The results were

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nations, Poles were the ones most often safeguarding the war memory during family conversations and, together with Russians, were the ones acknowledging the legitimacy of cultivating this memory. The opinions expressed were coincident with the view in the need of either remembering or forgetting about the war crimes. Interestingly, they were also shared by the interviewed members of the younger generation (up to thirty years old). A total of 64 percent of the Poles were of the opinion that war should still be talked about. Moreover, the results of Barbara Szacka’s quantitative research in 1998 and group of interviews in 2003 show that the war remains “the most common topic in talks about the past within the friends and family circles. Such talks were conducted often, not that often and rather rarely by 98.2% of the respondents in 1988, and in 2003 83.4% of respondents in the higher education sample and 55.8% in the general sample” (Szacka 2006, 163).3 Therefore, at the level of the collective and the biographical memory, in public and private discourse alike, one could talk about a particular tradition of constructing the war narration, a tradition dating back to the rich symbolic universe shaped much earlier than the twentieth century, setting specific interpretative reservoirs influencing what should become the object of memory and commemoration, and how. One should therefore ask which place in so important an area of Polish collective memory falls to the Shoah. In answering this question, one should take into account not only the time of the war, but also the interwar period (and especially the years directly preceding the outbreak of the war, when the anti-Semitic feelings were running increasingly high)4 and the period after the war. It is not easy to analyze such a broad subject on several dozen pages. However, I do not aim at characterizing the dynamics of Polish-Jewish relations extensively and systematically, as each of these periods constitutes a topic in itself. In spite of there still being significant published in Gazeta Wyborcza on May 4, 1995, nr. 105, in Rokuszewska-Pawełek 2001, 168–169. 3   Those findings have been confirmed in the recent research on Polish collective memory about World War II (Kwiatkowski et al. 2010). 4   When I am referring, very generally at that, to the interwar period, I am not dismissing the history of the Polish-Jewish relations from before the Second Republic period. These relations were being increasingly characterized by “a waning symbiosis”—as Heiko Haumann, among others, writes (2000, 74–78)—since the end of the eighteenth century and bouts of antiSemitism, ever more frequent especially in the nineteenth century. I refer to the interwar period because of two circumstances: the dynamism of nationalist and fascist discourse pervading in Europe at that time and the fact that the generation I am dealing with belongs to that period, having been born and socialized at that very time.

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gaps caused by the years of marginalizing these subjects in public and scientific (and also private) Polish discourse, there is an increasing amount of valuable publications analyzing these issues in great detail.5 Being fully aware of the inevitable simplifications, I present it most generally to sketch a specific symbolic space, a task that seems crucial due to my scientific interests. These problems form specific interpretative resources, exploited (by the Poles) whenever the topic of Polish-Jewish relations is raised and, for instance, also in the case of the returnees. Concurrently, they create an image of Poles in Jewish minds. The returning Jews are using specific images of the stranger, which in turn are formed by their own collective and biographical memory. Michael Steinlauf (2003, 262), to characterize the Polish-Jewish relations, is using the metaphor of a palimpsest. Palimpsest is an ancient or medieval piece of parchment that has been scraped off and used again. Each consecutive writing has left, however, some traces. Each dimension of the Polish-Jewish relations can be compared to the palimpsest. A contemporary state of these relations, although influenced by current events, is to a large extent shaped by previous versions of cultural texts, which are persistently shown through attempts of rewriting. This metaphor is a particularly accurate one, especially in reference to the memory of the Shoah, which in the case of the Polish memory should be looked at from two perspectives: the one of anti-Semitism and of communism, making for years an open discourse impossible in a situation when problematic and difficult-to-dealwith aspects of war experiences required open, though painful, debate. Due to communism, it was postponed for decades. Therefore, drawing a symbolic circle around the prewar, interwar, and postwar periods, I am choosing the most significant issues. I am referring to the prewar period not so much factually as qualitatively, placing the Polish-Jewish relations in a wider context of the social and cultural interpretation of being a stranger. The subchapter “A Few Remarks on the Subject of Strangeness and Anti-Semitism” constitutes a certain introduction to the issue of placing Jews in Polish society. I am referring to classic concepts of sociology, the stranger, and marginality. It is a departure point for including or excluding the image of the Jews in/from Polish collective memory. 5 

I am using some of them in this chapter. In my opinion, these are the most basic ones, but of course, I am aware that they are but a sample of the works published on this matter.

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When referring to the war period, I shall attempt to set important thematic fields6 for memory (or oblivion) building, answering the question what could become a reference point in creating the image of the Shoah in Polish collective memory and what created Jewish memory, especially the one of Poland and the Poles. Taking into account the problems I am examining here and the books devoted to the issues of the Shoah, it is my opinion that one should analyze the following points: being a witness to the Shoah, the separation of the Polish and Jewish war fates, Poles rescuing Jews, and the takeover of Jewish property. These topics form a potential of memory (or oblivion), which is reactivated in every discourse on the Polish-Jewish relations and in forging these relations with the returnees. The postwar era is another stage in building the Polish-Jewish relations, especially in connection to the fundamental questions of that period: Polish memory of the Shoah and the image of the Jewish role in building the communist system. The choice I made is probably an arbitrary one. However, I shall emphasize it yet again: I do not strive to present the topic in great detail but sketch a general background. I would also like to quote Aleksander Hertz (2003, 256), who, when writing about the image of the Jew in Polish society stresses an inherent difficulty of a complete description. “If it is a live image, one really steeped in the body of direct collective experiences, it is a mosaic, changing in time and space, full of contradictions, rarely consistent, always fragmentary, very fluid.”

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I am borrowing the term “thematic field” from Gabrielle Rosenthal (1993). It refers to a reconstruction of a narrator’s knowledge and the interpretations and classifications he/she is undertaking, characteristic of individual thematic fields. They comprise events and situations connected to a given topic, which is embedded in the structure of the meaning of the entire narration. The topics raised in the narration are not only a result of the author’s interpretative work, but also originate from objective circumstances contained in the experiences, their specific place and time. An analysis of Rosenthal’s thematic fields refers to biographical narration; therefore, I am using this term metaphorically to determine specific topics (resources) of memory, creating fields for a synthesis of past events and experiences with  a present interpretative frame.

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2.  A Few Remarks on Strangeness and Anti-Semitism One can be different and not alien; one can be alien and not live in a state of isolation. And one can be isolated without being either different or even alien. Aleksander Hertz

To pinpoint any specific areas of memory characterizing the PolishJewish relationships, one should sketch a general framework for their creation. This framework is made of a unique set of Poles’ convictions about Jews. Aleksander Hertz (2003, 88) writes about a whole range of attitudes, contained within the scope of “differentness,” “strangeness,” and “hostility.” In its extreme form, it is anti-Semitism. In a gentler form, it is an ethnocentric exclusion leading to “reserve and antipathy”7 or a sense of “differentness.” In principle, only the last one is not negatively charged.8 The others reflect a style in which they refer, especially since the end of the nineteenth century, to the so-called Jewish question. Undoubtedly strangeness plays a major part here, becoming a frame of reference for shaping the attitudes toward the Jews. A common denominator for these “shades” of antipathy is attributing Jews with the identity of the stranger. It would be useful to pause for a moment and reflect on this statement in reference to a sociological concept of strangeness, whose authors usually refer to the example of Jews as the “classic strangers” in the history of European culture. Therefore, I am suspending my intended analysis for a short while to anchor it in a wider context of sociological reflection on the phenomenon of strangeness. Sketching a theoretical background of the specific phenomena discussed later will cast more light on them.

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What I am referring to here is a hypothesis by Ireneusz Krzemiński (2004, 80) that even though there are those distancing themselves from anti-Semitism, what prevails in Polish society is reserve and antipathy toward the Jews, who are considered rivals to the romantic and messianic model of a Pole and Polishness. It mostly concerns the time of the war and the Shoah, which have overshadowed Polish suffering and disrupted a monolithic image of Polish society as a victim. 8   Hertz (2003, 62) emphasizes that the feeling of differentness does not imply strangeness, whereas strangeness forces us to search the stranger for qualities that make us different from him/her.

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The most important one, as far as the problems I am analyzing are concerned, is a short essay by Georg Simmel on the stranger. Reflecting on the sociological form of “strangeness,” the German sociologist attributes this category to someone who, not belonging to a given group, is sharing its space. Strangeness is thus a synthesis of two opposing situations: a lack of attachment to space and a stable rootedness. It is also a synthesis of two opposing types of social relations: closeness and distance. A stranger is a person who “comes today, stays tomorrow” (2007, 295) and who, although is not “one of us,” becomes a permanent fixture in our community, even though is considered a person “without his/her place in the world.” The phenomenon of strangeness is thus about the synthesis of contradictions, reflected in “the history of the phenomenon of contrast, from the contrast of trade and landowning, participation and neutrality, warmth coming from an organic connectedness and cold, which comes from a sense of coincidental nature of all relations” (Waldenfels 2002, 37). This ambivalent position of the stranger does not have to be related to a negative attitude as far as the stranger and his/her milieu are concerned. It can however be a source of symbolic tension. “Simmel’s stranger is a constant threat to the world’s order,” (Bauman 1993, 59) based on clear categories and divisions into “we” and “they,” friends and enemies. His presence makes us realize that the possibilities of mutual understanding are limited, because “normal” patterns of divisions and categories are no longer adequate. Therefore, “the threat he carries is more horrifying than which one can fear from an enemy. The stranger threatens the sociation itself ” (ibid., 55). The stranger, though no enemy, possesses some of his characteristics—comes uninvited, becoming a subject of his own actions—and at the same time creates an excessive, for an enemy, sense of spatial and social closeness and wants us to be responsible for him, which is characteristic of relations with friends. An excessive closeness of the stranger starts to imply a moral bond. “He stands between friend and enemy, order and chaos, the inside and the outside. He stands for the treacherousness of friends, for the cunning disguise of the enemies, for fallibility of order, vulnerability of the inside” (ibid., 61). To avoid getting tangled in unclear situations caused by the stranger, it is better to stay clear of him by virtue of spatial isolation, especially a symbolic exclusion. Simultaneously, defining social position somewhere between closeness and distance is combined with the stranger’s objective position in the group. Distance gives a sense of freedom but can also cause alienation. Concurrently, a combination of closeness and distance makes one assume “a more abstract, by nature” type of relation toward the stranger. A sense

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of closeness refers only to the most general of categories, which, though potentially important, do not constitute a fundamental frame of reference for one’s identity-shaping. “The stranger is close to us insofar as we feel between him and ourselves similarities of nationality or social position, of occupation or of general human nature. He is far from us insofar as these similarities extend beyond him and us, and connect us only because they connect a great many people” (Simmel 2007, 297). Therefore, a sense of nearness and remoteness is built “on the more abstract nature of relation to him”—what often makes us perceive the stranger not as an individual subject, but as a “general category.” Florian Znaniecki (1990, 292–293), commenting on Simmel’s reflections, points out that strangeness seems a relative feature, one to which an individual is entitled only in specific circumstances—strangeness applies only to one considered the stranger. A marker of the “humanist test for strangeness” is thus a social contact experienced in relation to separable value systems. This tangency is a result of not only spatial proximity, but above all social qualifications ascribed to a given contact. Separable value systems emerge when the subject and object give different meanings to the same values. This process may concern various aspects of social life: language, norms, rituals, observances, beliefs, cultural activity, dress, etc. (ibid., 308). The experience of strangeness is thus relative; it appears only when social tangency happens within indivisible value systems. Znaniecki gives an example of the inhabitants of Poznań and their attitudes toward the newcomers before and after the year 1919. Before 1919, it was the Poles’ national leanings and aspirations that formed a basis for social tangency. In this case, the Germans arriving in Poznań were being treated as strangers, as opposed to other Poles, arriving from other partitions and sharing proindependence inclinations. After Poland’s regaining independence, this lineup lost its significance—the underlying tangency of Germans settled in Poznań and Poles from other parts of the country has changed. The Germans ceased to manifest their political aspirations and their contact with other Poznań citizens was based on shared value systems (for instance, economic and cultural lives, etc.). Consequently, incomers from other parts of the country have started to become strangers—because they did not share the cultural system of Poznań citizens (310). The process of changing the attitude toward the Germans meant giving up the antagonism toward the stranger, which in turn stemmed from the conviction that strangers represent values that deny the values of the group and are hence a symbol of danger—a source and reason of the group’s misfortunes (Hertz 1988, 52).

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Alfred Schütz in his text under the same title, yet more extensive in dealing with slightly different contexts than Simmel’s, is referring to specific types of social relations and determines exact conditions in which an individual gains the status of the stranger. Moreover, the author sets the limits for his own reflection upon the stranger, which is the moment of his/her getting closer to the group. Its consequence can be assimilation and social adaptation, a process that does not interest Schütz, who is only focusing on its initial conditions (Schütz 1976, 92). Therefore, his reflections are of lesser importance to the issues I am scrutinizing here. They are however worth mentioning, as they allow us to answer the question of the required conditions and the very nature of the assimilation process. In Schütz’s perspective, the assimilation process involves overtaking the system of common-sense knowledge of a given group. The nature of the stranger’s identity makes him/her negate this system. The stranger interprets the world from his/her point of view, thus questioning the group’s interpretative strategies. The process begins when the group that the stranger is approaching in a social sense ceases to be an object of his thinking and starts to become an object of his actions (ibid., 97). The stranger changes thus his position from an observer to an actor, and the new cultural patterns are filled with meaning. Distance transforms into contact, abstract notions into something concrete, which in turn leads to a confrontation of presumptions about the group with the reality. It turns out that the stranger’s knowledge, if at all useful, serves only as an interpretation of the foreign group’s actions but does not allow for any interpretation of interactions between the group the stranger belongs to and approaches. As a consequence of the assumed interpretative scheme, the stranger perceives the members of the group as mere objects (results) of his/her interpretation, and also as addressees of potential actions, but not as active subjects, whose reactions can be anticipated (ibid., 97–98). Schütz begins thus a characterization of the stranger’s situation with his/ her own experience of being unable to apply known interpretative schemes to a new situation and negate the significance of the interpretative schemes of the group he/she is approaching.9 That is the nature of biographical strangeness. As far as the problems analyzed here are concerned, Schütz and Simmel’s concepts of the stranger are complementing each other, as 9 

Both these processes are described by Schütz in detail; it is however unnecessary to quote it here.

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each of the authors accentuates slightly different aspects of strangeness. Simmel focuses more on its social definition rather than the experienced interactive dimension of worldview creation by the stranger coming into contact with a new reality. In other words, Schütz’s reflection focuses on the description of the stranger’s experience (shaping, of course, the group’s experience), whereas Simmel, above all, emphasizes the significance of the group’s definition of the “us-stranger” relation in the stranger’s perspective. Schütz assumes that a successful assimilation process (though in practice it can never be entirely completed), which means adopting commonsense knowledge of the group, can lead to shedding the category of the stranger. However, he does not specify whether he means the individual’s sense of strangeness or a social definition of his/her identity. The basis for this theory is an assumption that a complete cultural competence enables one to become a member of the group. Zygmunt Bauman claims, however, that—contrary to appearances—it is not the lack of native knowledge that makes the newcomer a stranger, but rather his inconsistent existential modality, “as being neither ‘inside’ nor ‘outside,’ neither ‘friend’ nor ‘enemy,’ neither included nor excluded” (Bauman 1993, 76). Simmel’s interpretation shows exactly this: being a fixed element of a given group does not negate strangeness. On the contrary, it can lead to a distribution of certain features ascribed to the stranger and set expectations connected to formal determinants of strangeness—that is, a relation to space and the stranger’s place, somewhere between distance and closeness. As a consequence, strangeness can be perceived as a constant and therefore familiar element of a given society’s life: it gains attributes originating from the group’s attitude toward the stranger and the group’s idea of his/her identity. As Aleksander Hertz points out, commenting on Simmel’s and Znaniecki’s reflections, “strangeness does not have to be a feature originating from the characteristics of an object, it can be a way of a subject’s reacting to an object or perceiving the object, the object’s real characteristics notwithstanding” (Hertz 1992, 155). He gives an example of two disparate attitudes: “A Polish nobleman deemed a Jew, his tenant, who was separated from him by a huge culture gap, his equal; whereas today’s educated antiSemitist [he means the interwar period—KK] treats an educated Jew as a stranger, even though there is no apparent difference in cultural or racial traits between them” (ibid., 154). A commentary to this thesis can be found in Hertz’s other book (1988, 51). “The categories of the kindred and the alien belong to the world of cultural values. We judge people to be kindred or alien in relation to certain value systems by which we live. Kindred is

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someone we place within those systems or within one of them, someone who ‘belongs’ there; anyone whom we believe ‘not to belong’ is alien.” The example of the Jews, thus, seems to illustrate the phenomenon of strangeness in Polish society as well. What we are dealing with here is the aforementioned tension between distance and closeness, the centurieslong familiarizing of the strangeness and, one could say, unique kinship, which linked the proverbial nobleman and tenant-Jew when local bonds were conducive to emphasizing the similarities and creating a sense of closeness. Many things could be said about the Jews, but the truth is that every Polish family had a favorite Jew, a favorite Jewish family. (W II)

This opinion was expressed in a narration on war experiences. Its author, while recognizing the power of local bonds in creating the sense of kinship, at the same time perceived Jews as strangers and exhibited a very prejudiced attitude toward them. Therefore, referring to his previous judgments, he begins the sentence with the words: “Many things could be said about the Jews . . .” This statement illustrates the uniqueness of Polish-Jewish relations, founded on a simultaneous sense of connection and exclusion. From this we can say that familiarity had its limits. It could form a basis for building individual sentiments towards specific people— “a favorite Jew”—but not towards the group as such. Strangeness could be suspended, but always under the condition of constant, unchanging interpretative frames, shaping the relations between “us” and “them.” In other words, the stranger could get close/closer by virtue of “similarities of nationality or social position, of occupation or of general human nature,” inasmuch as he/she maintained the identity. Paradoxically, trying to get rid of the boundaries by means of assimilation weakened the similarity perception and emphasized the differences. As a consequence, being a Jew—that is, the “characteristic of a subject” as such—led to creating a clearly defined category of strangeness, strengthening the differences and weakening the similarities. Therefore, the assimilation process often stopped at the marginality stage. Everett Stonequist (1961) treats marginality as a state between strangeness and assimilation. Like Simmel, he considers the lack of involvement in the social life of a group the stranger has approached his most important feature. Hence, a transition from strangeness to marginality takes place when he/she starts to feel the need for identifying with the group and makes an effort to integrate himself/herself with the environment

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in which he/she has been living for some time, but the group insists on keeping the distance. Thus, the process of transition from strangeness to marginality is connected with the attempts to change the relations between an individual and a group (178). The essence of this process is, above all, a change in the stranger’s definition of the situation, as the stranger is trying to undergo a transformation from an objective observer into an active member of the group, standing—as Schütz says—at the center of events. This status is however impossible to reach. Hence, strangeness transforms into marginality not due to the individual’s distance from the group, but the group’s from the individual. Therefore, Robert Park (1950, 354), characterizing the marginal man’s situation, uses the terms “strangeness” and “marginality” interchangeably. Referring to Simmel’s essay, he calls the marginal man a stranger par excellence. The marginal man’s situation, described by Park and Stonequist, shows that cultural competence as such, being the prerequisite of assimilation, does not, however, guarantee its success. The assimilation process depends not only on assimilation abilities of the individual, but also—and in some circumstances mainly—on the group to which he/she is aspiring, hence the phenomenon of the marginal man, who, due to the unique features of his biography, lives in at least two cultures. In each, he can move freely, thanks to the internalization of its patterns, but in neither one is he completely accepted, due to their mutual antagonism. As a consequence, he perceives himself on the margins of both environments. Moreover, identification with one of them becomes more predominant. Deciding factors here are the significant identity traits related to his origins—race or nationality. Stonequist’s and Park’s reflections can be related to Schütz’s perspective, as we find in them an indication of what can happen if Schütz’s stranger becomes acquainted with the group’s popular knowledge and starts treating it as his own. Potentially, it can initiate an assimilation process, even though the group will not change the definition of the stranger; and hence, instead of assimilation, marginality emerges. Therefore, if we analyze the situation from an individual’s perspective, marginality may originate from a sense of possibility of self-identity creation in relation to at least two culture systems of identification. Simultaneously, this process, due to definitions created by each of the groups, is difficult and usually impossible to complete entirely. A constant dilemma, uncertainty about one’s own identity-creation based on a desired system of reference makes the marginal man remain in a state of permanent crisis (ibid., 356). On the

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other hand, marginality enriches one spiritually, allows one a fuller—twodimensioned—interpretation of the world, stimulates the awareness of the importance of one’s roots (Stonequist 1961, 179). From the group’s point of view, the transition from strangeness to marginality is not so obvious. A change of the individual’s attitude toward the group and a wish to shed the stranger’s identity is not tantamount to the group’s redefinition. Therefore, in the eyes of the group, the marginal man remains the stranger in Simmel’s understanding. However, acting as a go-between—an intermediary between the cultures—he can contribute to transcending these boundaries, especially changing the “presumptions” of the group. Stonequist (ibid., 221) considers the marginal man “the key—personality in the contacts of cultures. It is in his mind that cultures come together, conflict, and eventually work out some kind of mutual adjustment and interpretation.” Therefore, he treats marginality as a social process rather than a personality type. Pondering on the social definition of marginality, Stonequist shows its different degrees, forming a wide spectrum of possibilities: from marginality leading to an almost-complete exclusion (the world of historic minorities’ ghettos, for instance, Jews’) to faint or even subtle differences characterizing, for example, the relations between the immigrants of Northwestern Europe and their progeny in the United States (ibid., 8). This spectrum of possibilities makes it difficult, or even impossible, to mark a boundary between strangeness, marginality, and assimilation, especially if one considers specific cases in their social, cultural, and historic entanglements. An example here can be the assimilation efforts of European Jews at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, who having penetrated the culture and customs of their respective societies were still considered strangers. For—as Hertz points out (1992, 153)—assimilation does not always mean giving up the stranger’s identity, and the group’s particular “opinions” sustain this definition in spite of a sometimes-prolonged, generations-long assimilation process. They are connected to a distribution of similarities and differences. A predominance of differences makes one perceive the subjects of these differences as strangers. However, determining the point where the predominance starts is extremely difficult. Actually, it is not a matter of identifying some set criteria, but more of experiencing it, which has both an individual and a collective dimension—the first one being a biographical experience of the person considered a stranger or marginal, and the latter the experience of the group establishing interpretative frames of the strangeness/marginality/ assimilation process.

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These generally sketched theoretical frames of the reflections on the strangeness phenomenon can be applied to the problems I scrutinize. What is important is that all the authors quoted here give the example of the Jews as a model exemplification of the strangeness phenomenon in European culture. Moreover, references to strangeness, not necessarily theoretical ones, can be found in most texts where the problem of PolishJewish relations appears. The Jews are thus referred to as “foreign bodies,” “the stranger’s designatum,” “perfect strangers,” “the Wandering Jews,” etc. “The facts of ‘separateness,’ ‘alienness,’ total ‘isolation,’ and social, political and cultural ‘autonomy’ were always accepted as self-evident by both Jews and Poles” (Hertz 1988, 13). Coming back to the reflections of this part of the book, ascribing the thusly defined identity of the stranger to Jews had manifold consequences. One of them was the Poles’ attitude toward the assimilation process, which intensified in the first decades of the twentieth century. According to Bauman, the process of cultural assimilation contradicted the ideology of hereditary and prescribed national status of the day. As such, it was not the “cultural affinity,” but its source (inheritance and not acculturation) that played a decisive role in dividing people into familiars and strangers (Bauman 1993, 115). “Polish poet Antoni Słonimski, born Christian of an already Christian father, inherited from his ancestors a distinctly Jewish face together with their passionate adoration of Polish culture: the second did not help him against the first. Like the others—the unconverted, those who openly flaunted their Jewish roots and those who tried to hide or deny them—Słonimski had been disqualified as a jew.”

This example shows how difficult it is to draw a line between strangeness, marginality, and assimilation. Generally, the poet’s case could be considered representative of all three categories, and none of them separately. In Schütz’s understanding, Słonimski was neither. From Simmel’s perspective, he acquired this identification, if one takes into account the definition of the distance (variously understood) between Poles and Jews. Was Słonimski a marginal man? In principle, no, because he was raised in Polish culture. If we talk about marginality, then only in its subtle “transient character,” to use Stonequist’s words. On the other hand, markedly Jewish facial features—a sign of racial affiliation—constituted a sufficient criterion of marginality. Finally, was Słonimski assimilated? Yes,

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undoubtedly, by virtue of “cultural affiliation,” but certainly not in a sense of the ethnic concept of a nation. An assimilating Jew changed his social countenance, changed the world of his values, and underwent a professional and economic transformation. Nevertheless, if he did not succeed through passing, that is, in changing his religion and in leaving the caste entirely behind, he would still be seen by the surrounding world as a man of the caste. (Hertz 1988, 126)

Słonimski’s example shows that a complete passing was extremely difficult. Meanwhile, during the interwar period, practically the entire Europe was undergoing a rise of anti-Semitism. Traditional anti-Semitism was prevalent at first, one “based on a religiously founded hostility towards the Jews, who are responsible for the death of Jesus” (Krzemiński 2004, 20). At the same time, modern anti-Semitism was coming to the fore, one based on ideological and political views. This attitude comprises convictions (contradictory, as a matter of fact) about the Jews’ unique flair for business, clandestine ruling over the world’s capital, richness, but also excessive liberalism, a penchant for communism, anarchy, etc. (ibid., 21–22). What caused this attitude was an ideology connected strongly, though not exclusively, with the economic dimension—competition on the job market or the fact that some branches of economy were dominated by the Jews. This type of anti-Semitism especially depicts the “Jews as a group of unbelievable capabilities, attributes to them a wish for world domination and mysterious abilities of insidious collective activity” (Kofta 2006, 16). In Poland, after the death of Józef Piłsudski, anti-Semitism loomed large over the entire political scene, apart from the Left. Terms such as “jewification,” “jewish plot,” and “disruptive element” permanently entered public discourse, along with the demands for more or less forced emigration or expulsion of the Jews (Cała 2007; Modras 2004). AntiSemitic attitudes were actively fostered by the Catholic Church by virtue of sermons preached from the pulpit, liturgical texts, and, above all, Catholic press.10 What is more, the church did nothing to dispel popular opinions 10   Ronald Modras (2004, 377), analyzing the activity of the Polish church in the years 1933–1939,

points, among others, to Odrodzenie (the Association of Catholic University Students) as the only Catholic organization actively opposed to the anti-Semitic nationalism of the National Democratic Party.

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and myths, such as the one about ritual murders of Christian children to gain blood for matzah.11 The rise of anti-Semitism was further influenced by the general situation of Jewish society in interwar Poland. Polish Jews, as opposed to Western European ones, remained mainly unassimilated. On the contrary, cultivating their uniqueness, they were “perfect strangers”: they looked different, dressed differently, spoke a different language, ate different food, believed differently, and prayed differently (Gitleman 2003, 273). Aleksander Hertz (1988, 60) even uses the term “caste” to express the nature of Jewish distinctiveness. Therefore, a feeling of cultural strangeness was a strong stimulant, especially for traditional anti-Semitism—Polishness and Catholicism, Jewishness and Judaism, meant belonging to completely disparate cultural communities. After regaining its independence, Poland was wracked with economic difficulties. It was also a multiethnic state, one building its collective identity on the grounds of ethnic and not political affiliation. All this, along with the feelings running high in prewar Europe, created excellent conditions for the spread of nationalism and prejudice. The situation translated into a specific “operationalization” of the attitude toward the Jews, which Krystyna Kersten (1992, 147–148) calls two forms of anti-Semitism: against Jewish community as such and against Polonizing refugees from this community. In other words, it was about a specific “interpretation” of the state and national integration, in which Jews would be granted the right of unencumbered economic, cultural, and religious development, and also a respect for the laws guaranteed by the constitution and the minority protection treaty from the year 1919; and Polish attitude toward the assimilation of those who were identifying themselves with Polishness. Rafael Schaff (1979, 118) sums up this period thusly: The Polish Jew, in retrospect, had the full right to complain about discrimination, unpleasant incidents, attempts at economic boycott, bench ghetto, the press egging people on, (. . .) but one should bear in mind that compared to what was happening in Germany after the year 1933, Jewish life in Poland was an idyll. There was a relatively free press, there were Jewish representatives in the Sejm and Senate, a relatively uncorrupted judiciary, prosperous free professions and 11   The entire repertoire of such myths—as a matter of fact, still alive in some parts—is presented

by Joanna Tokarska-Bakir (2004).

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burgesses, thriving and free cultural life—both in the Polish and Yiddish language—planes for political, cultural and social life, where the symbiotic tissue of common existence was forming (. . .) It is however a story of times long gone by, of a secondary influence on forming the opinion on the Polish-Jewish relations. An element overshadowing all this and deciding about Jewish life and mentality is the period of martyrdom and Shoah during occupation.

The relativization of the oppression experience, presented above, refers to the Jewish perspective—one eagerly applied, as it seems, also in Polish argumentation: “It was not so bad,” “Anti-Semitism in other places was far worse,” etc.12 If one looks at this problem bearing in mind subsequent events (the war and postwar period), the “quality” of Polish prewar anti-Semitism should be measured not in comparison to other European societies, but in its influence on the interpretation of later experiences. In other words, an intense anti-Semitic propaganda has left an indelible mark on Polish society. A common usage of the language of prejudice, racism, and antiSemitic clichés in public, private, press, and religious discourse in the interwar period has “prepared” Polish society for what it witnessed later on—to perceive it as something possible, something “thinkable” (Cała 2007, 9). “The war strengthened the prewar status quo, in which Jews were excluded from the society, because it turned out that practically anything can be done to them” (Kapralski 2006, 16). The Shoah was no turning point in the definition of the PolishJewish relations. Pointing to a prevalent tendency, one could say that the exclusion was sustaining dislike, indifference, and hostility, which were not overridden by sympathy and solidarity in suffering. As the example of Zofia Kossak shows, “religiously motivated anti-Judaism13 (even combined with verbal political anti-Semitism) did not have to lead inevitably to passivity in the face of the Holocaust. It was a matter of choice” (Szlajfer 2003, 32). However, during the war a dominant biographical choice was adopting the role of a passive witness, oftentimes regarding the actions of the Nazis as a variant of a drastic, yet expected “expulsion.” In spite of numerous 12   In prewar Poland, there were no official anti-Jewish laws, but many institutions were still

adopting anti-Jewish policies.

13   As far as the already-quoted divisions are concerned, Szlajfer’s term corresponds to traditional

anti-Semitism, and political anti-Semitism corresponds to the modern one.

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attempts to process this problem in a public debate on Polish memory of the Shoah, it can still be rated among fundamental areas of oblivion, with all its consequences mentioned previously. In this area one should also include the immediate aftermath of the war, teeming with acts of violence against surviving vestiges of Jewish society wracked by extermination. A culmination of this aggression—and from today’s perspective, its symbol— was the Kielce pogrom. This event, and especially an interpretation of its origins, is the subject of Jan Tomasz Gross’s book Fear. Its Polish edition became a certain commentary on the sixtieth anniversary of the pogrom in July 2006. As in his previous book, Neighbors, the author offers strong arguments. One of the most fundamental is that the postwar outbreak of anti-Semitism was caused by the Poles’ fear of the return of the Jews, perceived as a threat to the “won” economic position (by virtue of taking over Jewish possessions) and a moral accusation against those who in some way took part in harassing the Jews during the occupation (Gross 2006, 21). The author wants, above all, to provoke thought on Polish past and activate neglected memory processes.14 Similar intentions can be found in Jacek Żakowski’s interview with Paul Ricoeur (2002, 51–53), who said the following: You know, I have a friend, who’s been living for half a century with a terrible sense of guilt. He cannot come to terms with his memory. During the occupation of Paris he was riding a bus. At some stop a French policeman got on the bus, he was probably off duty and heading home. It was evening, so probably all passengers were going home after work. And suddenly this policeman spotted a Jew among other passengers. In front of everyone’s very eyes, he dragged him from the bus. The rest is not hard to guess. For half a century my friend has been plagued by the question why he didn’t do anything. It was just one policeman, no Germans in view. But everyone kept silent and he kept silent too. He is not guilty of the man’s probable death. The policeman is the guilty one. My friend is certainly no criminal. He didn’t collaborate. He is not politically responsible for the fate of the French Jews, but takes part in moral responsibility. And this has been tormenting him all his life. “Did you advise him to forget?” “He is not allowed to forget.” “So what did you advise him?” “That he should promise himself to be braver in the future. You 14   The author’s attempt to stimulate work on Polish collective memory is continued in his next

book, Złote żniwa (Golden Harvest) (2011).

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cannot escape responsibility, but you also cannot constantly berate yourself about not reacting the right way in the past. It’s important that we know how to react in future.” “But such a trial may never happen again.” “So my friend must settle for the conviction that he would pass the next trial better.”

Thus, evil or neglect—if it becomes an object of reflection or biographical work—can become a call for positive action in the future. Meanwhile, as Gross points out, the Shoah did not change Polish relation toward the Jews. One could even venture an opinion that the anomy of the war period has reinforced anti-Semitism, and the problem was not included in the repository of difficult issues, which require a careful processing, but was thoroughly pushed into oblivion in private and public discourse, especially in the Polish People’s Republic era. It is however worth mentioning that a lack of reflection on Polish anti-Semitism was backed up by a specific series of historic circumstances. In other countries, antiSemitic ideology was propagated by collaborating parties and governments, whereas the resistance was, as a rule, antifascist and pro-Semitic; therefore, the discourse on treason in these countries also included the problem of anti-Semitism. Poland was paradoxically the only country in which anti-Semitism retained not only its patriotic, nationalist legitimization (. . .) but also a democratic one. (. . .) Since Polish anti-Semitism did not carry the stigma of collaboration with the Germans, during the war it could thrive not only in the streets, but also in daily newspapers, political parties, military forces. (Smolar 1986, 99)

The very fact of the Shoah changed very little. This state of affairs appears to persist till this day and in some respects is becoming more profound. Surveys carried out in 2002 show that people declaring antiSemitic attitudes do not deem them morally reprehensible or improper (Krzemiński 2004, 63). It was also established that whereas in the years 1992–2000 the percentage of traditional anti-Semitists did not change (11.5 and 11.6 percent, respectively), modern anti-Semitism rose from about 17 percent to 27 percent (ibid., 29–31). If we sum up these results, we shall find that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, over 38 percent of the population manifests anti-Semitic attitudes, which are not considered socially reprehensible.

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In turn, from a survey conducted in 1992 (Żbikowski 1992, 65–95), it appears that family tradition was the main source of information on Jews—over 48 percent of the respondents admitted to talking with family (parents, grandparents) about these issues. The survey was also devoted to the topics of these talks. It turned out that they concerned culture and custom differences; social, professional, and religious dissimilarity of the Jews; and, much less frequently, positive examples of help given to them during occupation. In the gathered research material, the memory of the Shoah had a marginal place.15 Answers to other questions have simultaneously shown that intergenerational tradition fostered the creation of a positive outlook on Polish attitude toward the Jews during occupation. It also led to the assumption that the Jews had too great an influence on politics and economy in Poland and all over the world. A following picture emerges from these data: although war narrations are inscribed in a pattern of value-transmission, characteristic of our culture and respected in it (such as heroism, struggle, sacrifice, etc.) and undoubtedly remain an element of intergenerational discourse, they leave no place for a story about the Shoah. Jews appear in this narration either as a culturally foreign group or in contexts which give rise to stereotypes and prejudice. Suffice it to mention the previously quoted characteristics of modern anti-Semitism. Pondering on the sources of present-day anti-Semitism in Poland, Maria Hirszowicz and Elżbieta Neyman (2001, 39) point, above all, to the oblivion, whose consequences can be analyzed in relation to different already-mentioned aspects. First of all, the object of oblivion involves issues that were problematic to those participating in specific events. Their moral dimension is thus varied; they concern cases such as murder, szmalcownictwo (blackmail), making use of post-Jewish possessions, and being a witness to the Shoah—but all of them have been overshadowed. Second, the prewar social and ethnic situation of Jews is also an object of oblivion. The poverty of the majority of the population is not mentioned, along with the discrimination policies, especially in the second half of the thirties. Jewish input in Polish culture is passed over as well. Third, oblivion distorts the intergenerational tradition—a young Pole reflecting on the wartime fate of the Jewish nation is convinced that rescuing the Jews was 15   I have expressed a similar opinion when analyzing the narratives of Polish war

experiences among the inhabitants of the Eastern borderlands. The material  I gathered contained surprisingly few descriptions of Jewish extermination, even though the narrators had to know the fate of the Jews and were often witnesses to their deaths (Kaźmierska 1999, 75).

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a common practice, there were cases of their ingratitude, and no more Jews could be saved. This image is consolidated by the strategy of focusing on what the Poles cannot forgive of the Jews, not what the Jews cannot forgive of the Poles. It seems fitting, therefore, to look at these matters more closely.

3.  Wartime “Gaps” in the legacy and history of Jews and the Shoah are not only a result of the war massacre. They are also the work of premeditated amnesia in postwar public life, purposeful political actions or apathy and neglect or all these factors simultaneously. Ruth Ellen Gruber

3.1  Being a Witness

Before the Second World War, Poland was the country with the largest Jewish population in Europe—over 3 million. Jews made up 10 percent of Polish population, but there were cities (especially large ones) where this percentage reached 30 or even 40 percent (Tych 1999, 48). During the war, about 6.03 million Polish citizens died, including 3.4 million Jews (Kersten 1989, 84). These numbers correspond to 10 percent of Poles and 90 percent of Jews, respectively. Over half of the Shoah victims were Polish Jews, the inhabitants of the Second Republic. Poles (their attitudes toward the Jews notwithstanding, whether those engaged in rescuing the oppressed or not) saw the extermination of the Jewish nation—which took place not only, as Gross writes, “in intimate secret of the gas chambers, covered trucks and backwoods” (1998, 58), but literally before the very eyes of Polish country, town, and city dwellers.16 Poles were thus “sentenced to a punishment of bearing witness” (Smolar 1986, 101), 16   Gross gives an incomplete—as he stresses himself—list of forty-three towns, from small ones

like Kuty or Limanowa to large ones like Częstochowa, Lublin, or Kraków, where Jews were being murdered on a large scale during displacement actions. Now and then all names of Polish cities are written in Polish. The only exception is Warsaw instead of Warszawa.

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a crime that in consequence led to the total eradication of Jewish society from the Polish postwar landscape. Making an unavoidable generalization, one could state, as do the commentaries already existing in literature, that for the Poles witnessing it, the Shoah could become a source of “a mass psychic and moral trauma unprecedented in history” (Steinlauf 1997, ix). This trauma could lead to actual sympathy and solidarity with a suffering community, or to communing with a crime: the situation of an anomy in the social order led to a demoralization, which created a conviction that “murdering the Jews ceased to be anything extraordinary” and therefore was no traumatic experience (Ossowski 1946, 4). In this case, although it is yet another generalization, one could say that these experiences fostered two completely opposite attitudes:17 active help to the Jews and equally active support to the occupant (szmalcownictwo, or blackmail, murder).18 However, the most common attitude was that of a passive observer and/ or witness. Inertia in the face of the Shoah was symptomatic also of other countries embroiled in the war. The passivity of Poles, on one hand, concerned the situation of one “sentenced” to being an eyewitness to the events; on the other, it was marked by their own occupation experience, related to the terror and suffering, death penalty for helping Jews, the anti-Semitic atmosphere described above, and a sense of separate fates. All these factors, along with their concurrent specific circumstances, were creating the attitude of passivity. Each of them could serve as an argument in its defense (for instance, Szczypiorski 1979; Kłoskowska 1988) or critique (Błoński 1994; Gross 1998). I shall not recreate the discussion spread over subsequent decades with varying degrees of intensity, which shows that the very problem of passivity remains the major unprocessed topic in Polish memory and in its collective and biographical aspects 17   They are opposite in two ways. first, morally opposite; second, not so much in absolute

numbers, as in contrast with passivity of a vast majority of Polish society. Still, even this matter is not unambiguous. Among arguments stressing Polish participation in rescuing the Jews, it is often mentioned that many, usually anonymous, people had to be engaged in helping one single person; therefore, the estimated number of helping Poles should be increased accordingly. On the other hand, an analysis of archival documents points to the fact that “the szmalcownictwo phenomenon was no marginal issue, it was a source of income for thousands of people” (Grabowski 2004, 8). 18   A result of szmalcownictwo was death as well, though one at the hands of the occupant. However, the cases of Poles murdering the Jews are being discussed ever more frequently. It applies to isolated crimes, usually aggravated robberies, as well as planned actions like the Jedwabne massacre described by Jan Tomasz Gross (Gross 2000) or similar incidents in Szczuczyn, Stawiska, and Radziłów.

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alike.19 I would, however, like to refer to my own material showing biographical experiences, their memory, and oblivion. The example concerns an event described in two narrative interviews conducted independently with a brother and sister. One should point out that they included the story in their wartime narratives spontaneously. The woman, whom I interviewed first, was nine years old when the war broke out, and her brother was eleven. It would appear that a mere twoyear age difference should not determine a narration about biographical experiences, but it turns out that identities ascribed to the children significantly influence the scope of their experiences. The female narrator is building her story from the perspective of a little child, who remembers little, saw and understood little; therefore, her narration is typical of a child and depicts loose fragments of biography. Oftentimes, the fragments resemble memory snapshots, felt and seen with the eyes of a child. The story of the elder brother is different, told from an adult man’s perspective. His father designated him as such in September 1939, when he went to war. (“As it happened, I became the eldest man in the family. [. . .] So at eleven, yes, I took up such an important post like the awareness of what was happening.”) The father returned but died in 1941, so the narrator assumed the role of the eldest man in the family and, together with his mother, took care of the younger siblings. To attempt an analysis of the stories presented below, it is crucial to explain these circumstances: Woman: Because I also remember, well, during the German occupation, well, the massacre of the Jews living in that town. So I remember . . . I was aware that, of the fact that the Jews were, were being shot at, were being taken, taken somewhere outside the town. I knew that they were being executed by firing squads. I know that the Jews who escaped—because such a Jewish family came even to us, I even remember their name, Goldman was his name, a young Jew with his wife and two little daughters. And so he came, it was already evening and that, that “he’s escaping.” Of course the only possibility was to go abroad,20 but what chances did he have. He just knew he had to escape. But what next? So I knew that something like this was happening. (W III)

19   In my opinion, the fullest description of this attitude, its causes, and consequences is presented

in Gross’s book Upiorna dekada (The Nightmarish Decade) (1998).

20   The woman means escaping to USRR which frontier was close by.

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Man: Meanwhile, interestingly, which I’m sure my sister didn’t mention, so the Germans in our town organized a ghetto. And this is again an interesting story concerning human relations, which then—the Jews were trying to escape from this ghetto, when some of them, some of them were trying to escape somewhere. And actually some of them escaped and hid in the woods. In the woods there was our 17th division of the Home Army and those who got there somehow, men anyway, if there were any, were admitted to these troops. But most got killed on their way, because giving them help was punished, was punished by death to those who gave help. We were also, such a group of Jews ran also to us, a Jewish family came to our courtyard. Two Jews with children, young people, and I don’t know how it happened but anyway they probably were hoping that someone would help them, help them. Because not, well, no one knows what happened, maybe someone was following them, they just drowned themselves in our well. They jumped in the well, they were dragged from it afterwards, a man and a woman, and they had two children, they were holding them in their arms and—into the well. The well was deep and that’s how they died. Just a snapshot from the ghetto creation. (W IV)

From the first relation, we find out that the fleeing Jewish family was looking for shelter. Taking into account the aforementioned characteristics of the war biography (the story is told from a child’s point of view), one can assume that the girl saw the family knocking desperately on the door and asking for help, which they were probably denied. The Jews knocked on this door probably because they were known to the household members. The female narrator still remembers their names and the fact that the Goldmans had two little daughters. One can also assume that other family members did not know that the child (the narrator) saw this scene. The brother’s conviction that his sister did not tell about this incident suggests this interpretation. Probably what she heard and what she knew about the situation of the Jews (from adults’ talks) made her firmly believe that the escape was a desperate last resort in a hopeless situation. However, the fact of their deaths in the well of her own house was, as it seems, hidden from her—as she was a small child. One can also assume that even now this matter is not discussed between the siblings. Still, the female narrator found out more about the cause of the Jews’ escape than was expected of her. The second account abounds in numerous details. It is set in a wider context of the Jewish situation during the ghetto organization in a Polish

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town. Describing the escape of the Jews, the narrator limits its success to a possible prospect of joining the partisan resistance. He decidedly rules out any possibility of giving shelter to the fugitives, because helping the Jews was punishable by death.21 Then he describes the same event his sister has mentioned. His story is a certain closure to the description started by her. From the brother’s narration, we discover the subsequent tragic fate of the Jewish family. The incident was presented as though the man was not aware of the fact that the Jews were probably asking for help. Taking into consideration his sister’s version and the fact that due to the war he boasted the status of “an adult man,” one can assume that he is glossing over at least some of the circumstances. It is indicated, among other things, by the impersonal description of the victims, who, if they were known to the younger sister, had to be known to the brother as well.22 The way the narrator is narrowing down the description is symptomatic here: a group of Jews, Jewish family, two Jews with children, young people. The narrator does not, however, identify them entirely, because then (according to his style of narration characteristic to the whole story, while the narrator was particular about explaining all the local relations and social positions) he would have to admit what kind of relations linked the Goldmans to his family. This is probably why he did not mention their names and the fact that they were asking for help. However, the narrator had to find at least a partial explanation for the fact that it was in his well where the tragic incident took place. He finds this explanation in the supposition “they probably were hoping that someone would help them,” which is de facto an admittance that they did not get any help. Before launching into the story, the author plainly states that most of the fugitive Jews were killed, because no one helped them out of fear of death. This example illustrates several important issues, indicated also in other publications, connected to the attitude of being a witness. In the foreground, there is the help denial, even though neither of the narrators says it outright: the female narrator probably because she did not know, and the male narrator because he did not want to tell. The denial was caused by the fear of the sanctions (i.e., the death penalty). It is a factor explicitly 21   This argumentation is supported by the example (described just after the quoted fragment) of

a lone Ukrainian woman hiding a Jew she was acquainted with. Both were shot as a result of someone’s denunciation. 22   This assumption can be further corroborated by the fact that a plea for shelter usually resulted from a previous acquaintance.

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emphasized by the man. Characteristic also is the fact that the fugitive Jews were known to these Poles. All these circumstances influenced the behavior of the narrators’ family—that is, “the real situation of the people who had to make these horrifying decisions” (Gross 1998, 35).23 From this perspective, what seems most interesting is avoiding this subject in family discourse. Probably many Polish families “store” similar often-unvoiced stories. The above example is one of the shades of being a witness, very dramatic and escaping simple judgments. One should, however, mention other cases, like people riding a carousel just outside the Warsaw ghetto walls and watching those fighting in the uprising; considering deportations or massacres “something ‘thinkable’” (Cała 2007, 9); giving consent to killing people defined as strangers, or those socially excluded. An extreme example of “passive observation” can be Feliks Tych’s (2005, 237) story about the experiences of his sister hiding on the Aryan side. She was friends with one female neighbor of hers and during the Warsaw uprising they were watching the burning city, and my sister expressed her regret that it’s on fire. The neighbor replied, “You know, of course I feel sorry for the city, but when I think that the fire will kill the Jews, who are hiding out there like bugs, then I don’t feel sorry at all.”

As Paul Ricoeur points out (2002, 48), even the most justified passivity does not absolve from responsibility. “Even the most passive of witnesses have their part in an incident (. . .) each of the witnesses has to answer the awkward question which role he/she played. Again, it is not about guilt but memory and truth.” Polish memory undoubtedly needs a thorough processing. 3.2  Separation of the Polish and Jewish Wartime Fates

Due to a complete separation of the Jewish population and its being deprived of any rights, a new wartime reality was quick to emerge, a division into German, Polish, and Jewish worlds. The difference between 23   Gross ponders on this subject in his essay Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej, ale go nie lubię (This One Here

Is My Countryman, but I Don’t Like Him) (1998) and polemicizes with Andrzej Szczypiorski’s statement, published in Parisian Culture as a contribution to the discussion on wartime PolishJewish relations.

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the last two lay in the different fates designated to them by the occupant: the Jews were sentenced to an immediate and absolute execution, whereas Poles’ “sentence was suspended, allowing them to live a relatively normal life, though one under occupation” (Kersten 1989, 85). The separation of their fates was symbolized by the boundaries of the ghetto. Polish “city and town dwellers saw the extreme misery of the ghetto. They saw people more and more resembling skeletons and demons from the German propaganda. The words ‘Jews, lice, typhus fever’ on the gate of the ghetto created an unconditioned response of fear and revulsion” (Smolar 1986, 101) even toward former neighbors, acquaintances, or fellow citizens known by sight. As Marek Edelman points out (2005, 19), it was not only about the problem of different fates assigned to Poles and Jews by the occupant, but also about the dehumanization of the latter. “During occupation those imprisoned in the ghetto were second-rate people. Not only for the Germans, for everyone. If four hundred thousand people can be locked up and devoured by lice, die of hunger and do nothing, then they are subhumans.” Jews getting to the Aryan side were confronted with a world that, in comparison to the ghetto, retained the semblance of normality, thus becoming something simply unreal. In his memoirs, Władysław Szpilman (1999 110–111) recreates this experience very thoroughly. Next day I left the Jewish quarter for the first time in two years. It was a fine, hot day, somewhere around 20 August. Just as fine as it had been for many days before, as fine as the last day I spent with my family at the Umschlagplatz. We walked in a column in rows of four abreast, under the command of Jewish foreman, guarded by two SS men. We stopped in Żelazna Brama Square. So there was still life like this somewhere! Street traders with baskets full of wares stood outside the market hall, now closed and presumably converted into some sort of stores by the Germans. Gleaming sunlight brought a glow to the colors of fruit and vegetables, made the scales of the fish sparkle, and struck dazzling light from the tin lids of preserve jars. Women were walking around the traders, bargaining, going from basket to basket, making their purchases and then moving off towards the city centre. (. . .) At some point a vehicle hooted far down a side street, and the greygreen shape of a police truck came into sight. The traders panicked, hastily packed up their wares and fell over themselves in their efforts to get away. There was shouting and hopeless confusion all over the square. So even here everything was not all right!

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We were to work as slowly as possible on the demolition of the wall, so that the job would last a long time. The Jewish foremen did not harass us, and even the SS men did not behave as badly here as inside the ghetto. They stood a little way off, deep in conversation, letting their eyes wander. The truck passed the square and disappeared. The traders went back to their previous positions, and the square looked as if nothing had happened. My companions left our group one by one to buy things at the stalls and stow them in bags they had brought, or up their trouser legs and in their jackets. Unfortunately I had no money and could only watch, although I felt faint with hunger. A young couple approached our group, coming from Ogród Saski. They were both very well dressed. The young woman looked charming; I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her. Her painted mouth was smiling, she swayed slightly from the hips, and the sun turned her fair hair to gold in a shimmering halo around head. As she passed us the young woman slowed her pace, crying, “Look—oh, do look!” The man did not understand. He looked enquiringly at her. She pointed at us. “Jews!” He was surprised. “So?” He shrugged his shoulders. “Are those the first Jews you’ve ever seen?” The woman smiled in some embarrassment, pressed close to her companion, and they went on their way in the direction of the market.

Szpilman’s description relates to different dimensions of experiencing contrast. At first, to the forefront come sensory impressions, which the author perceives as harmonious for the first time in a very long while. The sun of the beautiful summer day is no longer a cause for torment; it does not cause unbearable thirst and exhaustion like on the Umschlagplatz, from which his entire family was taken on a different summer’s day. On the contrary, it is a source of life. It brightens the colors and lightens the world. Although this harmony was only superficial, because “everything was not all right,” chaos can be taken under control. Order can be easily restored, and even the executioners seem “better.” The author is observing the world from a distance. Even though it is within arm’s reach, it remains inaccessible. Szpilman can only observe its abundance. The first, sensual experience of the contrast evolves in the second part of the description. The image of a beautiful young woman symbolizes perfection and, simultaneously, unattainability of this world. If one took this fragment out of its context and suspended one’s knowledge of the war, ghetto, and Shoah for a while, this description would still depict exclusion, intransgressible barriers, and fate separation, which remained unquestionable to people on both sides.

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Szpilman’s narrative style corresponds to that of a fairy tale. He presents the world as perfect, in a sense, and thus unreal (“transformed” SS men, a girl as beautiful as a vision, colorful fruit, sparkling fish scales) and, above all, inaccessible. The excerpt quoted here shows how the Jewish isolation, set by the ghetto walls, gradually strengthened psychological and social barriers between people from “this” and “that” side (Melchior 2004, 115). As a consequence, a strong feeling of fate separation grew. Another example of this is the following fragment of narrative on wartime experiences in the Eastern borderlands of Poland. Of course there were arrests, of course there were, there was a ghetto. Of course there was persecution of the Jews, we were aware of that. The beginning was that the Jews had to wear, you know, them stars, then they couldn’t walk on sidewalks, they had to walk, so to speak, next to the sidewalk. Then it was known that they got locked up in the ghetto. Then it was known that they were shot. But there was no such persecution of Poles on such a scale like in Warsaw, no, there wasn’t, there wasn’t. (W V)

The “final solution,” whose aim was a total extermination of the Jewish nation, is the final stage of Jewish war history. It was preceded by ever-crueler discrimination policies, gradually depriving Jews of rights and human dignity. The closedown of Jewish shops and manufactures, property confiscation, the order to wear a yellow star, no admittance to various venues, a ban on walking the sidewalks, or finally the internment of the Jewish population in ghettos—all these happened under the very eyes of Poles. The above quote—a mere six-sentence fragment of a highly condensed statement, literally overflowing with content—depicts the entire fate of the Jewish population. The word “then,” used three times, marks the stages of this fate; according to the scenario of the occupant, each “then” is a passage onto the next stage. The narrator is recreating a structure of experience imposed by the Germans: gradual escalation of the persecution was supposed to lead to its “naturalization” and gradual widening of the distance from the victims. The words “of course,” used thrice as well, embed the process of Jewish persecution into the tissue of obvious elements of German occupation. And the usage of impersonal expressions—with one exception (“we were aware of that”)—like “the beginning was” and “it was known” emphasizes the distance from the Jewish fate and, at the same time, the awareness of their fate. It is worth mentioning that the narrator not even once speaks on her own behalf; she always uses the plural form and

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relates the Shoah not so much to her personal experiences as to collective ones. The author presents a perspective of the society to which she belongs and emphasizes the difference of occupation-time fates of the Poles and Jews. A definition of the stranger, reinforced by the occupant but previously founded culturally, has created an assumption that the Jews were “outside the universe of Polish obligations.”24 One of the examples of such an attitude are the statements included in the Code of Civic Morality (Szarota 1978, 560–572), drawn up in 1941 by the authorities of the Polish Underground State. All the regulations contained therein are directed at Poles treated as a national, not civic, community. Hence Jews, in spite of their being Polish citizens, were excluded from the thus-understood community of interests. The code did not include any regulations recommending social solidarity with the persecuted Jews, and the order of loyalty (i.e., a ban on denunciation of the enemy, which was punishable by death) was restricted to the Polish community (Grabowski 2004, 34–35). The Jews were excluded from the Polish war trajectory twice—by the Nazi judiciary and the tradition. As a result, they were excluded from Polish martyrdom (Cała 2006), which during the postwar era turned into a competition in suffering. “The fate dealt by Germans to Jews has compounded previous seclusion of Jewish community exponentially. Even when it caused sympathy for the victims, it seemed something happening outside of Polish society. It was them, their fate was not our fate” (Kersten 1992, 130). Thus the separation of Polish and Jewish fates during the war was reflected in memory building of institutional and informal resources alike. Also, public discourse usually deals with Poles and Jews separately. It is pointed out, among others, by Jan Tomasz Gross (1998), who spoke critically of his own omission of the Jewish issue, twenty years after the publication of his book on the German occupation of Poland (1979). In postwar discourse, there were attempts to emphasize a certain “homogenization” of Polish and Jewish fates, especially in the suffering context, pointing out that “the martyrdom of Jews was an integral part of Polish martyrdom” (Szlajfer 2003, 64–65). In light of the issues scrutinized here, the notion of Jewish and Polish communities of fates is a completely false one. 24   The term “universe of obligations” was used in this context by Helen Flein. See Steinlauf 2001,

footnote 44, page 58.

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3.3  Poles Saving Jews

Among the four aforementioned “thematic fields,” the issue of Poles saving Jews seems the most commonly recognized in popular consciousness. In the already-quoted survey of 2002 (Krzemiński 2004, 123–124), over a half of the respondents (55.1 percent) were of the opinion that Poles could not have saved more Jews, whereas the opposite answer was given by 25.7 percent of the respondents. These statements were not entirely translated into a feeling of moral responsibility for the fate of the Jews. Only 12.4 percent of the respondents thought that Poles had reasons to feel guilty about the Jews, and 71.1 percent resolutely rejected this thesis. Although the percentage of evasive answers (16.1 percent) outnumbered the percentage of those responding in the affirmative, 83 percent of the respondents were very firm in their opinions. It means that they are not an object of memory work, that “Poles are set in their beliefs on the German occupation and Polish-Jewish relations.” The results of the survey verify the popular opinion that Poles, although they were risking death for doing so, were helping the Jews and generally did everything they could during the heavy oppression imposed on them by the occupant. The image of a Pole sacrificing himself for others is an inherent part of the cultural ethos of heroism and struggle. It was thus, though not without some difficulty, included in Polish war narratives, where, in the context of Polish-Jewish relations, this very thread is being exposed most often. The medal Righteous among the Nations, bestowed by the Yad Vashem Institute on people who gave help to the Jews, is inscribed with a Talmudic sentence: “He who sustains one life, it is as if he sustained an entire world.” Among over twenty thousand bestowed titles, the greatest number—about six thousand—has fallen to Poles. Statistics, though incomplete, and a fairly common stereotype of an active (or at least sufficient) aid to the Jews create a positive image. However, the problem is a more complex one. In the narration on Polish involvement in helping the Jews, three discourses built from a Polish perspective can be distinguished: of the people rescuing the Jews, of an ideologized form of the collective memory of the Polish People’s Republic, and of the contemporary discourse, especially of the historians and researchers of this problem. I shall begin with the last one, as it requires making a reference to historical facts and circumstances. “Documents and diaries show that a dominant attitude during the war was indifference. Heroic acts of hiding the Jews or persecution of them were only incidental” (Szaynok 2006, 31). The indifference was expressed

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not only in passivity (oftentimes transforming into silent approval) toward the fate of the exterminated community, but also in a lack of approval for others providing such help. The researchers of this problem are unanimous about it (compare Gross 1998, 2000; Cała 2000, 2007; Melchior 2004): “It was the universally felt hostility toward the Jews which made it so extremely difficult to hide outside the ghetto (the only way to escape death at the hands of the Nazis)” (Gross 1998, 48). This hostility is apparent in the testimonies of the survivors (Bartoszewski and Lewinówna 1969; Melchior 2004) and in the fear of the helpers, who were above all afraid of their Polish neighbors. It was the antipathy, consolidated by prewar anti-Semitism, and a fear of Polish denunciation, not the Nazi death penalty (compare Gross 1998; Tych 2007), that are considered the main factor hindering the help and rescue of the Jews. Therefore, a popular assumption, shared by half of the population, that nothing more could be done, is becoming highly debatable. An additional difficulty in this debate is an inability to verify the statistics due to a lack of documentation. How many Poles were helping? How many were killed by the Germans because of that? And how many because of a denunciation? As Marcin Ursynowicz writes (2007, 6): Up to this day, two serious attempts have been made to count the Poles who were consciously and directly helping the Jews. Teresa Prekerowa in her book on “Żegota” as early as 30 years ago advanced a thesis that it had been 160–360 thousand people. Gunnar Paulson, using Israeli sources, reached similar conclusions: he estimated the upper limit at 360 thousand, and the lower one decidedly higher, at least 280 thousand. Who of this number met the requirements of the Yad Vashem, i.e. helped because of ideological, not monetary reasons? One should choose a number between 160 and 360 thousand.

If one assumes the upper limit and takes into account the fact that before the war, Polish population comprised 24 million Poles (65 percent of the population) and 7.3 million (23 percent) Ukrainians, Byelorussians, and Lithuanians, people helping the Jews constituted 1–1.5 percent of the general population. Help given to the Jews took different forms: providing monetary support, cooperating in smuggling things into the ghetto, tolerating onenight stays in village barns or sheds, helping procure fake documents and baptism certificates, giving shelter in cloisters, apartments, or specially

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prepared hideouts. Help was given selflessly or for a remuneration, individually or in an organized way, mainly in Żegota, the Council to Aid Jews. Up until Żegota’s creation in 1943, there were two institutionalized forms of help: until 1941, Rada Główna Opiekuńcza (Central Welfare Council), legally distributing gifts and donations; and the activity of Irena Sendlerowa, starting as early as 1939, which she continued later on under the auspices of Żegota and supported by this organization (Cała 2007). This huge extremely risky sacrifice was a marginal phenomenon in the scale of the whole society, as far as the undertaken actions and their symbolic meanings were concerned. Authorities of the underground state did not call for heroism. “Such a sacrifice was not considered an indication of struggle with the occupant” (ibid., 10), as the Jewish community interned in ghettos was not perceived as a subject requiring any material and moral support (Gutman 2003, 216). This perspective became more evident especially after the war, when mechanisms similar to the ones under occupation came to the fore. People hiding or helping the Jews were afraid to admit it publically, for that could expose them to ostracism of the local community. An example: here is Antonina Wyrzykowska hiding eight Jews from Jedwabne. After the war, she had to move away from that town. Several moves, each one farther away from Jedwabne, eventually drove her to the United States, where she settled to escape the aversion of her neighbors (Gross 2000). To this very day, some of the Righteous request that their names remain unknown to the general public, because they are wary of envelopes stamped with names of Jewish organizations (Szwajca 2007). “Therefore, in the light of all this, one should state most wholeheartedly that Poles saving Jews were not only Righteous among the Nations, but also Righteous among their own Nation” (Klugman 2007, 15). The second aspect of the discourse involves the relations of the helping people. One can distinguish two tendencies here: narration and silence. An example of the first one is the activity of Władysław Bartoszewski, a member of Żegota, who in spite of Stalinist repressions and indoctrination consequently aspired to include the narration of Poles saving Jews in Polish and Israeli public discourse. This activity led to awarding Żegota the Righteous title (Bartoszewski 2004) and in 1963, together with Zofia Lewinówna, publishing memoirs of the saving and saved ones in the book Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej (This One Here Is My Countryman) (1967). An introduction to this work, written by Bartoszewski, stands out for a completely different narrative style to the one presented above. The author writes mainly about the involvement of those who took up the

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difficult task of helping and saving. Drawing upon documents, he exposes this very aspect—for instance, from Zofia Kossak’s Protest, famous also (or perhaps mainly) for its anti-Semitic content, he only quotes fragments appealing to Poles for their help. He describes Żegota’s functioning in detail, comparing its institutional authorization as well as the complexity of underground procedures possible to achieve only with loyal cooperation of many people.25 There is no place for reflection on hostility or fear of Polish denunciation. The picture presented by Bartoszewski is painted from the angle of someone participating in the events. “Our task was to—generally speaking—save people from death” (Bartoszewski 2004, 34). This frame of reference is the focal point of the discourse. One can also reconstruct it from the perspective of the saved ones. “I, personally, came into contact with so many noble, beautiful people that for a long time after the war I have been thinking that the world consists mainly of honest and decent people. And in reality it was just a small circle of extraordinary people” (Tych 2005, 237). The second side of the rescuers’ discourse was its lack (i.e., silence). Its sources can be traced to the aforementioned fear of exposing oneself to the neighbors. The helpers were sometimes accused of placing the whole community (those living in the same village or tenement) in danger. Their “philo-Semitic inclinations” were presenting them in a bad light to the anticommunist underground, and last but not least, they were suspected of reaping significant financial benefits, as selfless motives were never taken into account. “It was easier to accept mercantile motifs of the aid than its heroism, humanity, holiness” (Szwajca 2007, 17). As a result, the silence of the Righteous lasts until this day as a continuation of their postwar loneliness and the instrumental treatment of their actions in the propaganda of the Polish People’s Republic at the end of the sixties. It was then (the third type of discourse), as a result of anti-Semitic ideology, that a propagandist cliché was coined, according to which “the noble Poles were risking their lives to save the Jews, sometimes against their will or overcoming ‘Jewish passivity’—and also ingratitude of the latter ones . . .” (Cała 2007, 11). This instrumental image, along with the gradual elimination of Jewish war history from Polish memory, met social expectations, creating set patterns of description. 25   Among the ones saved on the Aryan side, researched by Nochama Tec, 95 percent obtained help

from Poles (Tec 2003, 195).

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About the “industry” of rescuing, about prewar anti-Semites who turned out to be rescuers. About saving in convents. About brave housekeepers, who rescued their former employers, or at least their children, (. . .) stories about postwar loneliness and solitude of the rescuers and the ingratitude of the rescued ones, who have forgotten to whom they owe their lives. (Szwajca 2007, 17)

This aspect of wartime Polish-Jewish relations—apparently wellknown and perfectly embedded in the Polish war mythology—in closer scrutiny turns out to be “complicated, ambiguous and blurred” (ibid.). In light of the presented perspectives, one should pose a question whether the ever-more-famous case of Irena Sendlerowa,26 who saved over two thousand Jewish children (her recounting of her actions can be found in the book Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej) and the action of putting her forward to the Nobel Peace Prize, is yet another example of instrumentalization—as Szwajca calls it, a “troublesome ‘holiness,’” or is it a “blessed fuss?” (Wasita, undated). 3.4  Takeover of “Post-Jewish” Property

The fact of mass extermination of the Jewish population had not only a moral dimension, but also specific social, cultural, demographic, and economy consequences. Whereas social and cultural changes became more evident from a later perspective (the disappearance of Jewish society from a postwar Polish landscape led to a gradual disappearance of the culture of Polish Jews, developed over many centuries), demographic changes, and especially economic ones, were visible at once. It was as early as 1940 that the Germans issued a regulation that stated that means of production belonging to Jewish owners were to be taken over by Aryan administrators, whereas poorer Jews had to register their valuables with the police (Grabowski 2004, 19). “Aryan commissary administrators” were mainly Germans, whose aim was to take over the possessions of the richest members of the Jewish community: “scraps of this complete German takeover of Jewish property, like apartments or shops, were also thrown 26   Irena Sendlerowa’s activity was described in a book by Anna Mieszkowska, Matka dzieci

Holokaustu (Mother of the Holocaust Children) (2004), and John Kent Harrison’s film The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler (2009). She died at the age of ninety-eight in 2008.

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to the Polish population, having a fully intended corruptive effect” (Tych 1999, 48–49), for which one did not have to wait long. It was already during the war that the Polish population started to move en masse from the country to cities and towns, places abandoned by the persecuted Jews, and to take over property left out by the Germans (Kersten 1989).27 In 1943, according to one of the Polish government-in-exile reports, “The return of masses of Jews would be experienced by the population not as restitution but as an invasion against which they would defend themselves, even with physical means” (Steinlauf 1997, 32).” 28 Next to the Bolshevik revolution, a complete dispossession of the Jews caused the biggest change in property distribution throughout the entire modern and recent history (Tych 1999; Wyka 1984). Kazimierz Wyka calls this “a central psycho-economic fact,” connected not only to the redistribution of economy goods, but also to the shaping of specific attitudes. The process of taking over Jewish companies, real estate, or even furniture concerned not only the “adaptation” of abandoned property or, plainly speaking, the pillage of an abandoned apartment. Such situations usually take place in the case of social order anomy, a disintegration of the structures of social control, etc.—and war creates such favorable conditions. However, as shown in the sources, it was not only about behaviors like this. Poles did not infrequently take active part in the procedure of reclaiming Jewish property even before it was forcedly abandoned due to its owners’ ghetto imprisonment. It could be done by means of blackmail; denouncements informing about non-Aryan origins of shop, company, or apartment owners; aggravated robberies; or more refined “legal” ways of property appropriation.29 Making use of property left behind by the Jews who were sentenced to death (Wyka calls this procedure “petty necrophilia”) should raise a question about the moral evaluation of one’s own actions. This question remains valid even today, for, as the same author writes, “a golden tooth 27   In February 1946, city dwellers comprised 31.1 percent of the general population, almost the

28   29  

same as in 1931 (about 30 percent). Taking into account the fact that Jews lived mostly in the cities, a decline in city dwellers, estimated at about 5 million, was quickly evened out (Kersten 1989, 85). It is a fragment of a report sent to the government in exile in August 1943: “Remarks on Our Politics No. 1” AAN, 202/XIV–9, page 135, after Steinlauf (Steinlauf 1997, 32). The latter one included the act of “komisarszczyzna,” handing control over Jewish property to Polish administrators—attorneys, judges—under the pretext of saving the property from Germans. In actual fact, it was about granting the property to the lawyers (Grabowski 2004, 113–114).

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pulled from a dead body will always bleed, even though no one may remember where it came from” (Wyka 1984, 155–158). This “golden tooth” was often an imagined “heap of gold,” which, according to the negative stereotype, every Jew was hiding at home.30 However, the data concerning prewar Jewish population in Poland suggest that “most Jews were hardly well-off professionals or captains of industry. Typically, Jews were small shop keepers and artisans: tailors, shoemakers, bakers, living on the edge of survival” (Steinlauf 1997, 17). As a matter of fact, what was characteristic of the Jewish society “were throngs of people with no profession whatsoever, useless people, so called Luftmenschen living from hand to mouth” (Hurwicka-Nowakowska 1996, 34). Undoubtedly, the inability to give a full answer to this question stems from the fact that it was incorporated into the oblivion and selectiveremembering reservoir (Ziółkowski 2001, 14), rather than open memory. It is hard to admit that one’s own affluence was built at someone else’s expense. On the other hand, there had to exist—and it seems it does still exist— an awareness of the meaning of those actions, since as early as during the war in the quoted report to the government-in-exile, attention is drawn to an aversion toward the possible giving up of the claimed goods after the end of the war, which found its manifestation in the attitude toward those saved from the Shoah, who after the war were returning to their, usually already taken, apartments and houses. More or less articulated dislike toward the returning Jewish village, town, and city dwellers usually originated from the necessity of accounting for the property entrusted for safekeeping or “simply” appropriated. The fact of getting rich at someone else’s expense, often compounded by pillage or even robbery, led to a strong cognitive dissonance. Hatred toward the Jews, especially those returning to their houses, was a means of projecting this dissonance—the victim was becoming the perpetrator (Bilewicz 2006, 16). Let us remember that according to Gross, this issue was one of the major sources of postwar antiSemitism. This aspect of Polish-Jewish relations is still alive today and in recent years has gotten even stronger as a reaction to the phenomenon of vying to reclaim unlawfully appropriated private property. The problem concerns all 30   For instance, Jan Grabowski in his book quotes a testimony of a blackmailer, who stopped two

Jews on a street and, passing himself as a gestapo officer, wanted to extort money from them. The man confessed, “I wanted to take some money from them, because I know that Jews always have a lot of money” [emphasis mine—KK] (Grabowski 2004, 32).

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property, not only that belonging to Jews. Jews, like other Polish citizens, can demand its return under specific conditions. It also applies to reviving Jewish communities. Still, far more important than the legal regulations is the social interpretation of this fact. A Jew vying for a return of property is usually perceived differently than a Pole doing the same thing, even though as citizens of the Second Republic or their beneficiaries they are subject to the same law.31 Moreover, oftentimes, Jews arriving in Poland are treated as potential property rivals, even though it is a false category. Therefore, fear for one’s property can be a projection of the aforementioned negative stereotype of a greedy Jew, once again feeding on Polish hurt, or a projection of fears linked to one’s own ignoble actions. Such an interpretation, exposing the “bookkeeping” (as Gross calls it [2003, 22]), not the moral aspect of the problem, once again makes one postpone the reflection on the meaning of one’s actions and prevents from taking up memory work on this subject. A good illustration of this situation is the case of Toivi Blatt, described by Laurence Rees in his book Auschwitz: The Nazis & the Final Solution (2005, 284–285), who left Poland in 1957 and returned in the nineties to visit his family home in Izbica: He knocked on the front door and asked the man who now lived there if he would be happy to let him enter and look round the house in which he had been raised. (. . .) Initially the new owner was reluctant, but when Toivi pressed three American dollars into his hand he was allowed to enter. Toivi immediately noticed a chair in the living room and remarked that it had once belonged to his father. “Oh, no” the man replied. “That’s impossible.” So Toivi took the chair, turned it over, and there, written on the base of it, was his family name. At this the man said, “Mr Blatt, why the whole comedy with the chair? I know why you are here.” Toivi looked at him, bemused. “You have come for the hidden money,” the man continued. “We could divide it—50 percent for you and 50 percent for me.” Furious, Toivi Blatt left the house without a backward glance. (. . .) When he next returned to Izbica, Toivi passed by his old house and saw the place in ruins. He went to his neighbors and asked them what had 31   The matter concerns not only popular discourse and “normal people’s” opinions. An example

here are the voices raised in the debate over J. T. Gross’s book Neighbors. An argument was put forward that the facts described in the book can substantiate Jewish demands for compensations for the war damages (J. R. Nowak “Nasz Dziennik,” May 14, 2000, after Gross [2003, 19]).

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happened. “Oh, Mr Blatt,” they said “when you left we were unable to sleep because day and night he was looking for the treasure you were supposed to have hidden. He took the floor apart, the walls apart, everything. And later he found himself in the situation that he couldn’t fix it—it would cost too much money. And now it’s a ruin.”

This story becomes a graphic illustration of the topos existing in Polish culture. Rees calls it a morality tale. Indeed, the returning Jew and the Pole living in his former house are allegorical figures, personifying a struggle with deeply enrooted prejudices and their destructive consequences and, simultaneously, difficulties with overcoming them. Little is known about the Pole; presumably, he is not too rich, since after demolishing the house, he could not afford to renew it. Toivi Blatt is a prewar citizen of Izbica and now a U.S. citizen. In the eyes of the Polish resident, he is a rich Jew who came to Poland for a hidden treasure. The first part of this image seems corroborated: Blatt, as the author writes, was successful in the United States, so he is at least affluent. The Pole does not treat him as a guest. There is no place for the Polish hospitality ritual (Gość w dom, Bóg w dom), because the newcomer is defined as the stranger. A well-known cliché becomes activated yet again: the Jew pays the Pole—this time, for the possibility to enter his own family home, where, as it turns out, he finds his own postJewish property. Thus, presumably, the interpretation of the newcomer’s intention was considered the right one. Obsessive search for the “treasure” stemmed from faith in the assumed stereotype. There is no reflection about the fate of the guest and no attempt to accept other motivations.32 In turn, the Pole’s behavior confirms Blatt’s negative stereotype of primitive antiSemitism. The story can be completed with an image of the ruined house standing among other, neat-looking buildings. This image appears in the last episode of a BBC documentary series under the same title.33 32   Ireneusz Krzemiński (2004, 104) writes that during his stay in the United States in the years

1995–1996, he was presenting the results of his research conducted in 1992. Jewish auditors were interested mainly in the issue of returning former property. The author comments on this fact: “Jews—former Polish citizens—were very emotional about the issue, what they really meant was that with the property reclaimed—even symbolically, the memory of their centuries-long presence could return too. This element conspicuously surpassed purely financial calculations. Many conversations with these elderly people were very moving.” 33   The film Auschwitz: The Nazis & the Final Solution, directed by Laurence Rees and produced by BBC, was broadcast on Polish TV from January till March 2005, during the sixtieth anniversary of liberating the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.

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This incident can be treated as one of many examples defining the attitude toward Jewish property, in which “a certain psychosis of postJewish gold induced some to dig through sites of slaughter and death camps” (Cała 2007, 11). The existence of “post-Jewish” property in Poland has yet another additional aspect. Permanent fixtures of the landscape, surviving objects, smashed matzevahs, etc., are sites of memory. Around them centers the experience of the returnees. These lieux de mémoire testify, above all, to a relatively recent Jewish presence in Poland. Today they are signs of their absence. “Those who do not succumb to the myths about Jewish omnipresence, because they perceive the world around them as it really is, treat Jewish absence in Poland as something obvious, permanent, and do not really think where it comes from” (Tych 1999, 73). If we suspend the moral and social context for a while, we can assume that such thinking is governed by universal regularities connected to the process of change. For instance, objects transferred from one culture to another oftentimes lose/ change their original meaning, and the memory of them disappears along with a disappearance of the community (milieu de mémoire) to which they belonged. Such a perspective, especially in the eyes of Jews, seems to be represented by today’s owners of post-Jewish property. Objects that served religious purposes or daily home rituals, also within the sacred sphere, in the hands of their new owners became only objects, appropriated intentionally or thoughtlessly or found in deserted houses. These are, for instance, books, perhaps lying in the attic of some village house, whose current owners have little use of them. The awareness of this situation is yet another element increasing the suffering. Abandoned objects are mute witnesses to the tragedy, traces of people whose memory no one cherishes anymore, because there is no one to cherish it, even in the lieux de mémoire aspect. They are not related to the rhetoric of nostalgic remembrance of objects reminding us of people— those of Jewish origin became “impersonal.” A similar sentiment can be found in another report from a home-coming journey—this time, of a man born in America. Arthur Kurzweil came to Przemyśl in 1980 to visit the place where his great-grandfather was born and where his family had lived for five generations. His experiences from this journey are described in the story No More Jews (1981). Having heard so many family stories made him instantly recognize elements of landscape or cityscape, even though he was visiting

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it for the first time. Places created in imagination could be transformed into something tangible:34 I walked around the town, looking, listening, remembering. Seeing this place, walking its streets, smelling its smells, was one of the most emotional experiences of my life. (15)

In the town museum devoted to the history of the area, Kurzweil found only two showcases of Jewish items. A guard informed him that there were no other exhibits at the museum, but that his father, who was a collector, had some at home. Kurzweil visited him. Here comes the most dramatic part of the story. The collector received the guest cordially and was very eager to show him the items he had gathered. There were many: figurines of Jews, candlesticks, a menorah, brass cups, books (hundreds of them, according to the man), etc. He said that he had been collecting them for a long time and had many friends who had been Jews. Kurzweil is recalling his own reactions: On one hand, he was suspicious—he was aware how and in which circumstances Poles used to take possession of Jewish objects. On the other, he was trying to control his prejudices due to the host’s politeness. However, with the arrival of an ever-growing number of objects (the collector was constantly disappearing in the room next door and bringing new items), he was more and more haunted by the question “What were they doing here? Nothing. How did they get here? I was afraid to ask” (15). At some point, the man brought a necklace with a small amulet, containing a picture of Moses with the tablets and a Hebrew inscription on the other side. The necklace was found after the war in the Przemyśl ghetto. I kept imagining it hanging around the neck of a young Jewish woman, and that on her way to the death camp she’d discovered it was missing. Here it was now, just another curio; another item in an antique collection. I had to have that necklace. It needed a new home, perhaps around the neck of a free Jewish woman in America, perhaps on my shelf. (15) 34   Kurzweil is describing his experience in a way typical to the generation born outside Central

and Eastern Europe. A return to the roots—although it is not a return to one’s own biographical experiences—becomes a return to stories of others, among which one grew. An imagined world becomes tangible. Interestingly, it seems that the confrontation contains an element of a transcendental experience, a sensation of returning to the past foreign to one’s biography but considered one’s own. It can be compared to liminal experiences of Turner’s pilgrim.

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Kurzweil, in spite of the collector’s initial reservations, bought the necklace for fifty dollars, which in eighties Poland was a considerable sum. Then the collector brought out a Torah. Kurzweil was overwhelmed by its beauty and the excellent state it was in. The man, upon seeing his guest’s emotions, took the Torah away and disappeared. After a minute, he came with a single panel, which he cut from it. I was speechless. What could I say? What could I do? The Torah was cut. Should I attack the old man for performing such a crime? Should I grab the Torah and run, saving it from further destruction? Should I thank him for the panel he was about to give me as a gift? Should I cry, scream, pray, mourn? How could I explain to this man that what he did was worse than almost anything imaginable? He didn’t know. He was innocent. Innocent. For me that word in relation to Poland is unutterable. (16)

The story35 presents the most important frames of reference for the problem of today’s presence of Jewish objects. First, they are a testament to the destruction of their owners. A majority of them remain anonymous; the identity of people to whom they belonged remains a mystery. On the other hand, their origin is obvious—they are (post)Jewish objects. This general interpretative frame consists of two perspectives: of the Polish collector, for whom a necklace was found in the ghetto and is therefore such a postJewish object, and of the author of the text, for whom the story of a lost necklace symbolizes the fate of a specific, though unknown, woman. Her identity is determined by the collective trauma, and this is enough for the author. Thus, the object has different meanings for the collector and Kurzweil. Second, an important frame of reference is the definition of the claiming situation. Each party is ambiguous about it: the collector says that he had many Jewish friends; the author of the text says that he knows what the circumstances of appropriating Jewish things were. However, they contain completely different interpretations, which Kurzweil evocatively presents as a collector—vulture dichotomy. Both Appelfeld and Kurzweil resolutely deem the owners of Jewish items vultures—Jewish possessions were robbed from abandoned houses; people were getting rich through injustice and harm to others. From the collector’s point of view, the 35   Out of necessity, I quoted it in an abridged version. The author describes the drama of the

meeting in much greater detail, first and foremost focusing on his own feelings.

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objects were painstakingly and patiently gathered, as their former owners, sentenced to death, “simply” no longer needed them. Third, another frame of reference is the cultural significance of the items. Cutting the Torah with scissors proves the collector’s ignorance, which amounts to a symbolic sacrilege. It is not “merely” about Kurzweil’s feelings, for whom cutting the Torah is an act of a brutal profanation. It is also about the collector’s attitude toward the objects in his possession. A true collector takes care of his exhibits and gathers information about them. Even if he does not identify with them as far as his own culture is concerned, he can identify the symbolic value of individual objects; and finally, irrespective of the context, he has respect for books. The collector of Kurzweil’s acquaintance broke all these rules. Therefore, the author— accepting his ignorance or even crudeness—questions his innocence. The last sentence I quoted contains an indirect question about the limits of ignorance and responsibility. Thus, from a lost necklace and a cut Torah, the author proceeds to the fundamental question of creating (not only by him, after all) the image of Polish-Jewish relations. An attitude toward Jewish objects is one of the areas in which one can look for an answer to the questions about responsibility, innocence, complicity, or passivity in the face of the Jewish war fate. The returnees, arriving with a full repertoire of such questions, look for the answers not in the past as such, but in its contemporary interpretation.

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4.  Polish-Jewish Relations after the War Beyond a shadow of a doubt, what we call the Jewish question after the second world war has been a significant fragment of Polish reality in a moral and psychosocial sense. (. . .) It is widely known that matters concerning the Polish-Jewish relations are for both sides a minefield, treading on which may cause an instant explosion of attack or defense. Krystyna Kersten

Determining the general-area fundamental frames of Polish-Jewish relations after the war is for me equally crucial as presenting the important context of wartime experiences. I am fully aware that I remain within the sphere of difficult issues, oftentimes unprocessed and insufficiently discussed in public debates. Like before, it is not my aim to conduct a systematic lecture, but to point out the most basic areas determining the place of the Jewish issue in Polish collective memory. Using unavoidable generalizations, one can determine two such areas: first, the memory of the Shoah in postwar collective memory of Poles; second, the memory of Jewish contribution in the creation of a communist regime. 4.1  The Shoah in Postwar Collective Memory of Poles No one ever tried to tell the postwar generations of Poles who Jews really were and in what circumstances they disappeared from the Polish ethnic landscape. Feliks Tych

Setting the frames of the Polish Shoah memory, Paweł Machcewicz (2001, 12) enumerates the following: First, political taboo—a gradual elimination of the Shoah from public discourse. Second, social taboo— displacing the memory of the Jews in public discourse due to the issues that “even subconsciously, were considered embarrassing.” It was a very wide spectrum: from the memory of the Jedwabne incident, for instance, to an

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awareness of being a passive witness, to living in post-Jewish homes and using post-Jewish furniture. Third, a lack of community (milieu), which “would be a natural reservoir of the memory of Jewish fate.” Subsequent waves of emigration led to the fact that “old neighbors were gone, whole society was gone, people you met on the streets, whom you saw in your daily life. Memory of Jews became something abstract, there was no neighbor who would invoke the memory of their life, their death.” Fourth, a sense of uniqueness of the Shoah appeared relatively late in international discourse and very late in Polish discourse. It would be thus fitting to relate to these issues, the international aspect excluded, as I shall return to it later. The few years immediately after the war were a time to come to terms with a still-so-vivid, important, and difficult experience.36 The forties were, therefore, a time of “living memory” (Traba 2000), emotionally charged and similar to a live report.37 Simultaneously with the living memory, an ideologized image of collective memory was being created, one dominated by the nascent political system, which would soon determine the frames of public discourse on retaining war memories. One of its main goals was to distort a significant part of Polish war history. The distortion concerned, for example, the role of the Home Army, the war history of the Eastern borderlands, and, consequently, the role the USSR played in depriving Poland of its sovereignty. Strategies of these distortions took different forms (more or less dominant in subsequent decades of the PPR): from a complete falsification, to half-truths, to silence. In this context, the memory of the Shoah—incorporated in the collective memory discourse and expressed via specific forms of its manifestation, especially right after the war—started to be perceived as one of the elements of the communist propaganda. An example here can be the unveiling of the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in 1948, on the fifth anniversary of the uprising. At that time, the monument of the ghetto insurrects, along with the monument of the Soviet Army, was the only commemoration of the war in Warsaw. Polish society could easily read the intentions of the communist authorities: memory of 36   It was reflected, among others, in literature. In 1946, several books touching upon the subject

of the Shoah were published: Tadeusz Breza’s novel Mury Jerycha (Walls of Jericho), Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Wielki tydzień (Holy Week), and Zofia Nałkowska’s Medaliony (Medallions). In 1947, a collection of Polish poems was published and also ones concerning the Shoah (compare Cała 2000). 37   Unique features of the Shoah narrations, which were being created in statu nascendi, are analyzed by Jacek Leociak in his book Tekst wobec Zagłady (Text vis-à-vis Shoah) (1997).

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the Jewish fate had to be honored, whereas the memory of Polish struggle, especially the Home Army and the Warsaw uprising, was annulled (Steinlauf 1997, 49).38 This initially open-minded attitude of the authorities was gradually evolving, and although the issue of the Shoah was never reduced to a “gap” in official war history, its force in public discourse waned significantly in the next decades, as—to use Marcin Kula’s words (2000, 43–44)—“generally speaking, communism did not like to talk about the Jewish question.” According to the historian, it originated from a peculiar schizophrenia of the communist propaganda. On one hand, the extermination of the Jewish community was a perfect illustration of the fascist crimes. On the other hand, communism wanted to break free from the prevailing highly prejudiced term żydokomuna, therefore gradually marginalizing the Jewish issue also in reference to the war history. This marginalization was also manifested in specific institutional actions. An example here may serve the dissolution of the editorial team of the first postwar comprehensive encyclopedia in 1968, on account of overestimating Jewish suffering during the war. It was about the statistics of the labor and concentration camps victims. An ever-more evident strategy of reducing the memory of Jewish war fate stemmed also from the need of supporting the Polish martyrdom myth. It referred to the symbols of suffering, oppression, sacrifice, heroism, etc., embedded in culture, as well as specific political contexts. As Zdzisław Mach points out, showing historic foundations of the Polish-German conflict was a basic motif in building the memory of the past and the vision of the future by communist authorities. This, in turn, pushed the tragedy of the Jews into the background (Mach 1995, 21). In this context, the postwar history of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Oświęcim constitutes a totally unique example. In Auschwitz-Oświęcim, tens of thousands of Poles (members of the cultural and political elite included) were being imprisoned and slaughtered in the years 1940–1942. During the period 1942–1944, the camp was extended by four crematoria complexes and gas chambers in Birkenau-Brzezinka. At this time it became not only a labor camp, but also a place of extermination for Polish and European Jews. It is estimated that 960 thousand Jews, 73 thousand Poles, 21 thousand Romani people, 38   It is worth mentioning that this strategy worked also abroad, where even today the term

“Warsaw uprising” is usually linked to the ghetto uprising and not the August uprising organized by the Polish Home Army in August 1944 (Szlajfer 2003, 50).

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15 thousand Soviet war prisoners, and 10 to 15 thousand citizens of other countries were killed there. Meanwhile, “the Jewish pavilion in the Oświęcim camp museum was closed down, and the plaques stated that in Auschwitz Poles ‘and other nations’ were being killed, followed by an alphabetical list—Jews—Żydzi—at the end, because the word begins with a ‘Ż’” (Cała 2000, 178).39 As a result, the fact that in Auschwitz mainly Jews died was erased from Polish collective memory. An additional factor in favor of this conviction was a lack of Jewish milieu de memoir: “in a country bereft of Jews, the memorials can do little but cultivate Polish memory” (Young 1993, 116, 117).40 For a couple of decades, Oświęcim was a place linked with a specific national tradition in Poland and played a unique role in the symbolism of Polish suffering. It was recorded in private discourse, by means of biographical evidence, as well as school education or public discourse. A significant change in the “philosophy” of the exposition by introducing Jewish (and not only Jewish) memory into that discourse occurred only after the fall of communism and, consequently, democratization of social life. In a wider perspective, this change should be interpreted in light of Poland’s greater openness after the year 1989 (although this process has started already in the eighties) and in an increased number of visitors, which enforced a revision of the Polish perspective of the Oświęcim image.41 The necessity to face the international image of the Shoah is also 39   A conviction about the accuracy of this statement undoubtedly persists even today. It was

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brought to my attention during my classes with sociology students in 2005. Some of the students were of the opinion that the inscription about Polish victims of the camp also referred to the Jews, who were simply Poles of a different faith. Therefore, they deemed it an exaggeration, hurtful for Poles, that Jews were demanding an acknowledgment of their memory. My observations seem to corroborate, to some extent, Krzemiński’s thesis (2004), based on his research, that such convictions manifested by young people are a result of, on one hand, “a defensive attitude, caused by Poles being considered anti-Semites by the international public opinion” (113), and, on the other, young people being reluctant to refer to historical knowledge or ill acquainted with this knowledge (127). This hypothesis is well illustrated by the Oświęcim case. Among the respondents, young people, who comprise about 60 percent of the philo-Semite category (that is, people who think that Poles gained more good than bad from the Jews and the other way round) were convinced that the Auschwitz camp in Oświęcim is first and foremost a site of extermination of Poles (159–160). In the first fifty years, among 22 million people visiting Auschwitz-Oświęcim,  17 million were Polish. After the year 1989, Poles constituted only a half of the general number. Among other nations, Germans and Jews prevailed, including an ever-growing number of young Israelis (Steinlauf 1997, 135). As numerous incidents show (for instance, the argument about the Carmelite cloister,

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not insignificant. Jewish communities began to demand an at least symbolic return of the sites of memory (Kapralski 2000, 150–151), which—such as, for example, Auschwitz—did not exist, in a sense, beyond the iron curtain, and “as a place, its reality purely symbolic, purely about its meaning (or its lack)” (Steinlauf 1997, 143). A change of perspective is also reflected in the language. Until recently, the names Oświęcim-Brzezinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau camp— although referring to the same place in space—were symbolically different places, rooted in specific (in each case, different) symbolic universes. The history of the usage of the names Oświęcim and Auschwitz in a sense shows the dynamics of Polish and, generally speaking, non-Polish perspectives. “So long as Poland, in western eyes, continued to exist in a never-never land behind the Iron Curtain, there was little indication to connect Auschwitz with the place called Oświęcim” (Steinlauf 1997, 118).42 On the other hand, in Poland the name Auschwitz is being used ever more often. This tendency was especially visible during media reports from the celebrations of the sixtieth anniversary of the camp liberation in 2005. It has two explanations: First, it emphasizes that not only Poland has the right to cultivate the rituals of memory connected to the camp, which in non-Polish memory always existed under the name Auschwitz, as a place of the extermination of the Jews. Second, in light of the fact that the main act of the Shoah took place on Polish soil, using a German name symbolizes a distance from the sporadic opinions on the causes of locating the death camps in Poland, of all places.43 Next to the Oświęcim case, another example of limiting the memory of the Shoah is avoiding these issues in education.44 Jewish war history began to almost completely disappear from schoolbooks. The only point

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Kazimierz Świtoń’s act of erecting a cross on the yard of the camp, the controversies around the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the camp liberation), a revision of Polish perception is an extremely difficult process. These matters are analyzed in detail by, among others, Kapralski (2000) and Steinlauf (1997). Sławomir Kapralski (2000, 146), calling upon his didactic experiences with his American students, writes that he was once asked a question why Poles had changed the name of Auschwitz to Oświęcim. The question contained a veiled accusation of intentional appropriation of the Shoah tragedy. It is about the statement (denied yet still recurring) that it was Polish anti-Semitism that encouraged the Germans to build death camps in Poland. A survey conducted in 1992 showed that only 14 percent of respondents chose a school as a source of knowledge about Jews. For only 5 percent of this group, this choice was considered as the most important among other possible answers (Żbikowski 1992, 92).

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of reference remains the Warsaw ghetto uprising, shown as a break in the passive attitude toward genocide. It has been depicted as the only case of Jewish resistance, and the help of Polish resistance has been emphasized (compare Steinlauf 1997, 70–71), often even exaggerated. Therefore, one could safely venture an opinion that a contemporary Pole has no idea about the extent of Jewish resistance in ghettos, death camps, and, above all, partisan troops. Henryk Szlajfer (2003, 68–71), drawing upon publications devoted to this issue, shows that the image of passivity, manifested also in the lack of any resistance, is yet another unfounded stereotype. One can assume that the schoolbook tradition has been a result of the PPR ideology, feeding the historical awareness of their authors. An analysis of this tradition, in turn, allows one to imagine what kind of history image was shaping subsequent generations. Two postwar generations of Poles have been subjected to the whole education system with very limited possibilities of finding out that 3.5 million Polish citizens—Jews—were murdered on this soil, often under the very eyes of the local population. Hundreds of thousands of people had no idea that they were living in houses previously inhabited by Jews; many have known next to nothing about a big Jewish community, which for eight centuries had constituted an organic part of Polish population. (Tych 2001, 10)

Paradoxically, although the channel of historic tradition has been conspicuously blocked, literary narration on the Shoah created favorable conditions for this topic (Grynberg 2003). A question remains: to what extent have these possibilities been used? In the nineties, compared with the previous period, an evident change in the schoolbook Shoah narration took place. Still, even if an improvement is seen in the factual knowledge department, according to Feliks Tych, little has been done in interpreting the significance of the Shoah for Polish history (Tych 1999, 86–87).45 The case of Oświęcim and marginalizing the topic of the Shoah in schoolbooks are exemplifications of a much deeper problem of erasing the memory of Jewish fate. In this context, the image of war martyrdom became a common ground for communist and national taboo. The silence 45   A survey conducted in 2002 seems to corroborate this thesis. In spite of a change in answers,

compared with the year 1992, about 50 percent of the respondents (and often much more than half ) are still convinced that during the war no more Jews could have been saved, that Poles have no reason to feel guilty, that during the war Poles suffered more than Jews, etc. (Krzemiński 2004, 119–134).

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about Polish-Jewish relations was supported by PPR’s official policy, along with a social consent (Borodziej 2001, 11). Authors of publications devoted to this issue are generally unanimous that in the Polish myth of martyrdom there is no place for the Shoah.46 According to Ewa Koźmińska-Frejlak, this state of Polish war memory could be understandable if one took into account the role of collective memory in identity-building and ethnocentric tendency of each community to concentrate mainly upon itself, which often leads to a mythologized form of record. However, it is surprising that the topic of Polish-Jewish relations engenders such emotional reactions, as if reflections on Polish entanglement in the Shoah violated the sphere of national intimacy, as if they posed a threat to constitutional elements of Polish identity. “What is more, the problem of Jewish Shoah and Polish attitudes towards it causes strong emotions among intellectual elites (. . .) and people of lower social status alike—which is perfectly evident in popular experience” (Koźmińska-Frejlak 2000, 182). One could say that silence is a “complement” to this emotional reaction. Whereas there was a social need for disclosing the history of, say, the Eastern borderlands, which fitted perfectly in the ethos of heroism and the myth of martyrdom (from this perspective, the PPR’s image of the war has always been perceived as false, especially by those who knew the history of the Eastern borderlands from their own experience), the unspoken aspect of the Polish-Jewish relations clearly did not suit this ethos. As Michael Steinlauf points out (1997, 74), the official marginalization of the Shoah “doubtless reflected, after all, a popular need.” Thus, in reference to the memory of Polish war experiences, we were dealing with a marked asymmetry of the collective and the biographical or social memory. A falsified communist image of the war was being “set straight” by memory stored in family narrations and discussions of the opposition, and after the year 1989 it was easily incorporated into public and education discourse. In case of Polish memory of the Shoah, there was a symmetry of both memory levels. Marginalization of this topic in collective memory was also fostered by memory of specific local communities or biographical memory, whose bearers were prone to oblivion rather than open narration.

46   Such opinions are presented, clearly from different angles, by the authors of articles in 

Przegląd Socjologiczny (2000) no. 2, entirely devoted to the issue of the war and memory  (see Cała, Kula, Koźmińska-Frejlak, Kapralski, Melchior).

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The image of the Shoah was thus shaped by two factors fundamental to Polish memory: First, it was about a rivalry in suffering, a sense that the Polish martyrdom myth was being threatened by the Jewish one—that is (to use the already-quoted term by Charles Maier), a rivalry of memory communities. “A certain competition of victims took place, one lasting till this day, to boot. In the Polish martyrdom model, Jews were seldom considered co-victims, more frequently—wrongdoers. A far-reaching selectiveness was a consequence of that fact” (Kersten 1992, 131). As surveys conducted in 1992 and 2002 show, these opinions not only persist but run high. Within a decade, the percentage of people convinced about the greater suffering of the Jewish nation has lowered (46.1 percent, 1992; 38.3 percent, 2002) (Krzemiński 2004, 120). An analysis of these results shows that only those respondents who negated Polish suffering acknowledged a greater Jewish suffering. “It is evident that only an attitude of negating one of the strongest convictions about Polish history—that they were a source of great harm and suffering for the Polish nation—leads to a conviction that the Jewish nation suffered more” (ibid., 144). Second, it concerned problematic issues, burdens to the Polish version of the war myth. Therefore, for a couple of decades, difficult issues were excluded from collective memory: a complicity in crime, aversion to giving help, being a passive witness to the Shoah are themes—which, regardless of their scale, were rarely a subject of public and, apparently, private discourse alike. As a result, the memory of the Shoah was “simultaneously marginalized, subjected to required interpretation and selective amputation and anchored, in a very particular way, in Polish ‘memory community’” (Szlajfer 2003, 67). A rebuilding of this memory had to and has to include an attempt to process the above issues. This work on collective history can be compared to the process of biographical work. It is all the more difficult, as there are more problematic experiences in there (Jedlicki 2001). Therefore, this subject was broached rarely; and the sporadic, yet recurrent, voices laboriously paving the way for knowledge and understanding and making it impossible to forget (Szlajfer 2003, 15) can be considered milestones, spread over decades—creating a break in the sphere of silence47 and simultaneously depicting the moment in which Polish collective memory has found itself. 47   This prolonged silence (understood as a lack of a widespread debate) is called by Feliks Tych 

“a reflection of the state of mind,” pointing to the example that even the very case of Jedwabne could have been presented earlier, because the required material could be found in the

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Important texts of culture were, among others, Jan Józef Lipski’s essay Dwie ojczyzny, dwa patriotyzmy (Uwaga o megalomanii narodowej i ksenofobii Polaków) (Two Homelands, Two Patriotisms: A Note on National Megalomania and Polish Xenophobia), written in 1981; Claude Lanzman’s film Shoah, produced in 1986; Aleksander Smolar’s 1986 text Tabu i niewinność (Taboo and Innocence); Jan Błoński’s essay (1994) Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto (The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto), written in 1987 and published in Tygodnik Powszechny; Marcel Łoziński’s 1992 film Miejsce urodzenia (The Birthplace); and Jan Tomasz Gross’s books Upiorna dekada (The Nightmare Decade) (1998), Neighbors (2000), and Fear (2006), Złote żniwa (Golden harvest) (2011). In general, all of these books or films could initiate a great public debate. The dynamics of this discourse was however different at the level of the symbolic elites and the society.48 Above all, one should point to Jan Błoński’s essay, which, after the postwar debate, is probably the first text looking at Polish-Jewish war relations from the angle of “moral reflection on history.”49 The basic accusation leveled by the author is the indifference and passivity connected to being a witness, which should lead to a sense of co-guilt, stemming also from the attitude toward the Jews before the Shoah.The author postulated “confessing our guilt and asking for forgiveness.” The article was received as if Błoński was accusing Poles of complicity in the crime. At least that was the general tenor of polemics (Koźmińska-Frejlak 2000, 189). It was expressed by members of the symbolic elites and readers of Tygodnik Powszechny, a magazine that should also be considered elite. It was not until Jan Tomasz Gross’s

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archives of the Jewish Historical Institute. But “neither Polish, nor Jewish party was interested in raising questions which would—apparently—exacerbate the already not so great state of mutual relations” (Tych 2001, 18). It is difficult to determine the reasons of this differentiation explicitly. In the case of, for instance, Jan Józef Lipski’s essay, a lack of reaction on a social level could result from its underground publication in 1981. In turn, J. T. Gross’s Upiorna dekada, although it has met with a reaction of the symbolic elites (see the discussion in Więź magazine [1999] no.7), did not cause any social discussion, even though in my opinion the theses contained therein and the way they have been expressed could stir emotions no lesser than those caused by his next book, Neighbors. Discussions, because they could not be called great public debates, initiated by Błoński’s essay or Lanzmann’s film were described, respectively, by Ewa Koźmińska-Frejlak (2000) and Anna Sawisz (1992). Twenty years after the publication of this text Tygodnik Powszechny organized two debates in Kracow’s Center for Jewish Culture. Their participants were trying to answer the question “Where lies the relevance of Jan Błoński’s text, which according to some, has paved a way for Polish-Jewish dialogue?” (Sabor 2007, 21).

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Neighbors that a wider discussion took place.50 A debate on Jedwabne has shown how difficult it is for Poles to bear the burden of memory processing, especially the question of Polish-Jewish relations, where one has to admit that Poles were not only victims, but also executioners. This conclusion has engendered defensive reactions, aiming at rescuing the popular, acceptable vision of war identity. One of its strategies was, among others, an argument that the evil was perpetrated not by true Poles, but some dregs of society (Sztop 2001, 72).51 Strong emotional reactions to texts casting doubt on Polish behavior toward the Jews are commented on by Jerzy Jedlicki: For some [it is—KK] a moral unease, a sense of shame, for others accusations of falsification or even libel, others are calling upon circumstances which can diminish the weight of the perpetrators’ guilt or suggest a marginal significance of the incident. In Poland there is probably no other historical subject which would touch such a raw nerve of moral sensitivity or resentment, the passage of time notwithstanding. (Jedlicki 2001, 68)

Thus, it was only the case of Jedwabne that became a sufficiently strong blow “to penetrate our [Poles’] defensive walls and rouse the garrison of Polish stronghold. (. . .) One cannot rule out that (. . .) after the exchange of polemical thrusts, everyone will stand by his own truth, his own convictions, honed for a long time, in which he invested too much faith and emotions to question them now” (ibid).52

50   One of the reasons of there being no debate in the nineties was focusing on the previously

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hidden spheres of Polish history. “When PPR was coming to an end, it seemed to me that my professional, moral duty was overcoming the communist past, it being what surrounded us directly” (Machcewicz 2001, 18). Meanwhile, a conviction that one cannot deal with everything at the same time led to pushing other subjects to the background (compare Machcewicz 2001, 16; Tokarska-Bakir 2001). This conviction was, as a matter of fact, in keeping with the popular vision of historiography, separating the history of Poles from the history of Jews. Katarzyna Sztop points out that similar arguments appeared in interwar press of Białystok, as a commentary to the pogroms of that time (Sztop 2001, 72, footnote 7). Jerzy Jedlicki’s text was published in Polityka on February 10, 2001.

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4.2  The Stereotype of a Communist Jew Polish myth (. . .) materialized itself in the following cluster of ideas: Jews at power, power is the Jews. Krystyna Kersten

The second important context shaping Polish postwar collective memory about Polish-Jewish relations is the Jewish contribution in building the communist system. Like in the case of the Shoah reflection, which can be related to a specific time frame, in this case one should go back to the immediate aftermath of the war. It was a time when Polish society formed an opinion that Jews were the main actors carrying out political changes. This conviction was an “extension of the prewar cliché of żydokomuna,53 consolidated by the black legend of Jewish behavior under Soviet occupation” (Kersten 1992, 78). It was a common belief that the majority of people at power, both in structures of the party and the department of security (UB), were Jewish. Jewish participation in communist structures was indeed bigger than their percentage in postwar society.54 According to documents quoted by Krystyna Kersten (ibid., 84), at the end of 1945 in the UB apparatus (excepting the militia and KBW, or Internal Security Corps), Jews approximated 1.7 percent of the employees, whereas managerial positions were held by 13 percent. Therefore, taking into account the fact that in 1945, before a mass repatriation from the USSR, Jewish population did not exceed one hundred thousand, Jews were indeed overrepresented in the power apparatus.55 However, the scale of their activity never corresponded to the popular notion, expressed in the image of a communist Jew, especially a UB officer, tormenting a Home Army soldier during an investigation. Władysław Bartoszewski (2004, 26) reminisces that during 53   The prewar conviction, in turn, was also strongly mythologized. Jewish communists constituted

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a mere 5 percent of the electorate. “In the Jewish world, one dominated by Chasidism, orthodoxy, Zionism and Bund, communism was a marginal, yet appealling phenomenon” (Szlajfer 2003, 60). It was a result of the fact that communists who survived the war in the USSR escaped the Shoah and therefore were a statistically bigger group than before the war, when they constituted  a minimal proportion of the Jewish population. A similar opinion, based on an analysis of documents from the 1944–1956 period, is expressed by Andrzej Paczkowski (2001).

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his arrests and interrogations in the forties, “political prisoners were of the opinion that we are in the hands of Jewish communists.” The author deems this opinion an overawareness of the Jewish membership in the UB. This notion seemed to be corroborated by the system itself. Jerzy Andrzejewski remembers that in April 1945, ruins of Warsaw buildings were plastered with two posters: “‘Glory to the Heroic Defenders of Ghetto’ while alongside it declared ‘Shame to the Fascist Flunkeyes of the Home Army’” (Steinlauf 1997, 49). An additional factor strengthening the conviction about Jewish mass participation in the power structures was, as it seems, a certain “cognitive shock” related to any manifestation of Jewish presence in postwar public life. Sławomir Kapralski (2006, 16) comments on this situation: “I was once analyzing this problem from the angle of the social perception theory. It is by and large unimportant how many Jews joined the militia or UB. The problem was that some did, and suddenly they started to be at power. It must have been a shock for many Poles, especially if they have not seen Jews so high up the social ranks before.” Shock or, to put it mildly, surprise was experienced in light of two circumstances: first, in relation to the conviction that “so many” Jews survived; second, in comparison with Jewish presence in prewar institutions, when the percentage of Jewish employees was but a mere 0.68 percent (Szlajfer 2003, 54). The notion of active Jewish participation in creating the communist system was undoubtedly reinforced by an appreciative attitude toward the new order, expressed, to some extent, by the majority of the survivors. It did not have to translate into an active support of the authorities. It mainly referred to the general frames of interpretation of the postwar situation, which were diametrically different from the Polish perspective. “It is unclear to what extent Jewish community was approving of the communist system. One can however venture an opinion that most did not share the sentiment towards prewar Poland, in which Jews were ‘second-class citizens.’ It considered the Soviet Union a liberator (. . .) and therefore did not share the hatred towards this country, felt by a large part of Polish society—in spite of the full awareness what this totalitarian system was (many had a first-hand experience of it)” (Cała and Datner-Śpiewak 1997, 77). Thus, for instance, in the Zionist camp it was a common belief that Polish Jews were rescued from the Shoah by virtue of the Soviet Army’s liberation and the fact that a significant part of the survivors (220 thousand from about 300 thousand) lived through the war in the USSR (Aleksiun 2001, 238). This positive attitude was also connected to a radical change of Jewish position in postwar social structures. According to Irena Hurwic-

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Nowakowska, in interwar Poland, Jews were deprived of one of the most common possibilities of social upgrading, as they had virtually no access to civil work—intellectual or physical. They were not employed in communal and state institutions, and in non-Jewish private companies their work was often boycotted. The only way—though also limited—was free professions, trade, and craft. In postwar Poland, these restrictions were abolished, and in this respect Jews became free citizens (Hurwic-Nowakowska 1996, 34–35). A factor consolidating the image of the “Jew henchman of the system” was also the fact that after the year 1945, the authorities allowed for a recreation of Jewish community by creating representations, political parties (eleven Jewish parties were granted permission to operate), religious unions, and political, cultural, charity, and education organizations (see Redlich 2010). Jews were allowed to leave Poland, and until 1947 a blind eye was turned to entire organized groups leaving illegally (Szaynok 2001, 259). Until 1949, the authorities were also tolerating formally unregistered activity in the above-mentioned scope (Cała and Datner-Śpiewak 1997, 76). Although this initially favorable stance with time gradually toughened, especially after the year 1948 and against the Zionist movement and the state of Israel,56 at the level of stereotypes and collective imagination, Jews remained a group favored by the communist authority, especially in juxtaposition with restrictions on civil liberties of Polish society and repressions against groups unsupportive of the new system. These sketchily presented circumstances57 have created a negative stereotype of a communist Jew, or żydokomuna, expressed in the fairly common conviction of Jewish contribution to the communist system creation and also their using it against Poles. Kersten considers this conviction a significant social fact defining Polish-Jewish relations. What remains is ascertaining its origins. There are at least two perspectives: For instance, Feliks Tych and Michael Steinlauf emphasize the thesis that hostility toward Jews can be motivated psychologically and morally by war experiences. Jewish attitude toward Soviet occupation comes to the forefront. Anti-Semitism during the war was not feeding on prewar 56   The toughened stance was connected to Stalinist repressions and also included restrictions on

Jewish social life. Jewish schools, institutions, and craft cooperatives were nationalized; most political and religious organizations were abolished (Cała and Datner-Śpiewak 1997, 86–90). 57   As I have already mentioned, a detailed description is not my aim. It can be found in publications devoted to these issues—for instance, Kersten, 1992; Gross, 1998; Paczkowski, 2001; Szlajfer, 2003; Steinlauf, 1997; and Smolar, 1986.

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prejudices entirely. A new impulse was Jewish behavior during the Soviet encroachment in September 1939.58 The inhabitants of the Eastern borderlands I interviewed invoke the image of Jews hailing the invaders with red armbands, flags, and bows—which, next to a characterization of the Red Army, was one of the recurrent themes when describing the initial stages of Soviet occupation. These facts became main arguments serving to explain—or excuse—Polish behavior toward the Jews and strengthening of the prejudices. This argumentation appeared, for instance, during the Jedwabne debate. Thus, trying to use Jewish behavior during Soviet occupation and then in UB was “an attempt to create a moral alibi” for the attitude the Polish community presented toward the Shoah period (Tych 1999, 89). Krystyna Kersten (1992, 133) and Joanna Tokarska-Bakir (2004, 103) point to a slightly different rationale. An aversion toward the Jews in Polish postwar reality was related to the “aggression displacement mechanism,” which could not be expressed directly because of the alreadyconsolidating communist authority, supported by the USSR. The authors— and Henryk Szlajfer as well—go even further, and the reader finds it difficult not to agree with them. The postwar image of the Jews emerged as a continuation of previous prejudices and stereotypes, which lingered on in spite of the war, and the prewar anti-Semite attitudes—built, among others, around the myth of “Jewish economic might”—transformed into a stereotype emphasizing “Jewish political power” (Szlajfer 2003, 53). Thus, the images forming right after the war have not been new at all. They were another version of the old stereotypes of a Jew posing a threat to Poland.59 In their contemporary forms, the stereotypes have been manifested in the image of a communist Jew co-creating (especially in the UB structures) the externally imposed Soviet system. “As early as then, during the first years of communist regime, it was not as much the Jew who was the enemy, as the enemy, who was the Jew” (Kersten 1992, 79). Let us remember that Jan Tomasz Gross formulates a more radical thesis—postwar anti-Semitism 58   This problem is interesting in itself and difficult due to disparate Polish and Jewish

interpretations. Undoubtedly, each side should attempt to process it. It is analyzed by, among others, Szlajfer (2003, 72–76), Gross (1998, 61–92), Redlich (1971), and Pinchuk (2003). 59   Recently, this motif came to the forefront during the Jedwabne debate. As Tokarska-Bakir (2004, 102) points out, some voices clearly referred to “the old myth of ‘Jewish perfidy,’ ‘Jewish plot,’ which used to find an expression in accusations of poisoning the wells, profaning the Host and ritual murders. Eruptions of this polymorphic myth, occurring during events threatening social sense of security, are a dangerous violence fuse.”

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was revealed in the economic (appropriation of Jewish property by the Poles) and moral context, a dislike toward those who could elicit pricks of conscience in a not-insignificant part of Polish society. These, to put it mildly, negative notions shaped specific attitudes: from an indifference about Jewish war history to sustaining the barrier of strangeness to open aggression. The potential of dislike, even hatred, was staggering. In the years 1944–1948, numerous cases of murders and pogroms were recorded—more importantly, ones not directly linked to the accusations of a collaboration with communist authority, as it usually was a different type of Jew who fell victim to such violence. In a total number of at least several hundred murders, only a couple were politically motivated, as it usually were so-called ordinary people who got killed (Cała 2000, 169).60 Murders were carried out by partisan armed troops (the most notorious one was Narodowe Siły Zbrojne, or the National Armed Forces),61 treating all Jews as communist henchmen. Jews returning to their homes and demanding property restitution were also murdered (in this case, it was usually the neighbors or new owners who committed the killings); and finally, there were murders for no specific reason other than deeming Jews outlaws, as they were considered during the war (Cała and DatnerŚpiewak 1997, 15). These incidents found their culmination in the Kielce pogrom, during which forty-two people were killed in the building of the Jewish committee by a mob stirred up with gossip about the kidnapping of a Polish child (Żbikowski 2001, 42). The Kielce pogrom was the biggest and, symbolically, the most important incident in this context. “Descriptions of the pogrom—contemporary ones and ones written down after many years— show a staggering psychosis of hatred, cruelty and murder, unleashed during the riot against the Jews. The pogrom revealed that phobias, prejudices and myths, dating back to the Middle Ages, are still thriving in conscious and unconscious minds of masses” (Kersten 1992, 130). They survived in spite of the Shoah myth, which failed to give an impulse to an ennobling sympathy. Conversely, as it turned out, it became a “training field,” as a result of which “murdering Jews ceased to by anything extraordinary” (Ossowski 1946, 2). 60   Historians’ estimates are not unequivocal here. Steinlauf (1997, 52) writes about several

hundred victims, referring to David Engel’s Patterns of Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland: 1944– 1946, Yad Vashem Studies (1998) no. 28. Cała (2000, 169) writes about approximately one thousand killed, adding that the estimates fluctuate from 600 to 1,500 to 3,000 people. 61   The so-called railway action, attacks on repatriation trains from the USSR, was attributed to NSZ. Approximately two hundred Jews were killed as its result (Cała and Datner-Śpiewak 1997, 15).

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After the pogrom in Kielce and smaller ones in Kraków or Rzeszów, Jews started to leave Poland en mass. During the first five years after the war, migration involved especially the part of Jewish society that was religiously and culturally disparate. Therefore, the “Jewish question” began to concern “Poles of Jewish descent and Poles-Jews, who have distanced themselves from the Jewish world” (Kersten 1992, 152). This question was “solved” once and for all in 1968, when, as a result of communist propaganda initiating the so-called March events, approximately thirty thousand Jews left Poland.62 Only about fifteen thousand stayed in the country. As a result, the “Jewish question,” ceased to exist, at least superficially. “‘The space of knowledge’ between the two extremes—on one hand the negative stereotype, on the other the folklorized and gastronomized stereotype of the Jew (. . .)—was reduced to a number which was statistically irrelevant, invisible. A mythologized Jew was everything and everywhere, a real, flesh and blood Jew was hard to come by” (Szlajfer 2003, 80). Thus, as Aleksander Hertz (1988) predicted, living people were substituted by their ghosts.

62   As research (compare, for instance, Hurwic-Nowakowska 1996; Melchior 1990, 2004) or

personal relations (Wiszniewicz 1992) show, one should rather speak of Poles of Jewish descent. Those who have not left Poland in the first two postwar decades stayed with the intention of identifying with Polishness and building their identity on grounds of national culture. Their Jewishness was held against them; it became a token in political play. Thus, the majority was leaving under situational duress (Kersten 1994), caused by an unbearable social pressure.

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5.  Jewish Lieux de Mémoire in Polish Milieu de Mémoire How much memory can a memorial bury, and I suggest to never put an end to this tough and unfigurative debate. Henryk Grynberg

Jewish disappearance from Polish social landscape can be analyzed in relation to many different contexts. It would be worthwhile to enumerate the most important ones, though not all of them will become subject of my detailed scrutiny. Undoubtedly, the most fundamental matter—one being, as a matter of fact, a basic frame of reference for the rest of them— is the problem of the Polish attitude toward the Jews, especially the socalled anti-Semitism without Jews. Another important matter, especially in light of the issues I analyze here, is the way of incorporating (or, one should say, excluding) the fact of Jewish disappearance from Polish society into (or from) the collective memory: This matter includes the alreadyanalyzed problem of Polish memory of the Shoah. However, there is yet another aspect to this case. Jews inhabited Polish lands almost since the dawn of the statehood; therefore they can be considered a group of indigenous inhabitants which before the year 1939 constituted the second largest national minority, after the Ukrainians (Cała and Datner-Śpiewak 1997, 8). Before the war, Poland had the highest proportion of Jews in the world. Polish Jews were therefore “a pillar of European Jews’ culture.” An estimated two-thirds of today’s Jews all over the world are of Polish descent (Tych 1999, 139), and Polish Jews constituted 30 percent of those who arrived in Israel in the 1946–1950 period (ibid., 74). Meanwhile, for several decades (in some sense even today) in Polish collective memory, no attention has been paid to the circumstances in which so populous and settled a community disappeared from the Polish social and cultural landscape. It is, to use the words of Marek Ziółkowski (2001, 12–13) one of the biggest “skeletons in the closet of Polish collective memory.” The second matter, perfectly applicable to the discussed issues, is forgetting about the accomplishments and traditions of other ethnic groups. As in the case of the “first skeleton,” when a discussion about one of the aspects of recent Polish history was blocked for many years, the consequence of the second one was marginalizing and neglecting a widely understood cultural heritage of other groups. In case of the Jewish culture, this process turned out to

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be much easier, as there was no society that could serve as a repository of the group’s memory. That is why all points of memory, in Pierre Nora’s understanding, were deprived of the context of Jewish memory community. What remained was Polish memory and Polish milieu. Today’s generation of Poles becomes acquainted with a centurieslong Jewish culture, steeped in the history of our cohabitation by means of its absence. Neglected cemeteries and destroyed or devastated synagogues are the only remains of this old and rich culture. After the war, Polish and Jewish memory ceased to be built next to each other and started living away from one another. Jews were cultivating the memory or prewar life of the societies from which they came in their own communities, in their new homes. Due to the Jewish absence in contemporary Polish society, Jewish memory is no longer represented by its lawful bearers. It has led to a situation that James Young (1993, 113–117) characterizes as a monologue, not a dialogue of memory. In Poznań, where on my way to school I used a shortcut across a cemetery, which later turned out to be a Jewish cemetery (. . .) or a swimming pool I used to frequent, which later turned out to be a synagogue / previously. The thing is, I knew nothing about it, even about this city. It was like this: neither my parents told me anything, as they were not attached to this place in any way, nor at school there was nothing / I don’t know, nor at the church. So there was no way of / no chance of getting to know. (S50/20) The awareness of what had happened during the war was coming to us, children, very slowly. It wasn’t a subject of conversation. We were playing hide and seek on a neglected Jewish cemetery—at that time I had no idea this place was linked to some tragedy. For me and my friends it was just a deserted, wild part of the town. (Wujec 2006, 10)

Such recollections, referring to childhood experiences, are easy to come by. They illustrate contemporary silence of Polish memory in its social aspect (of the local milieu) and biographical one (of the family tradition). Jewish houses, shops, and workshops—as has already been mentioned—were appropriated by new owners; they quickly found new “guardians.” The remaining elements of landscape were gradually deteriorating.63 This applies mainly to cemeteries. “There are certain things 63   The town of Ostrowiec is an interesting example here. Its Jewish district was situated in the

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in life which cannot be given and taken. Cemeteries and a past history are among these.”64 However, after the war, Jewish cemeteries have sunk into oblivion and gradual devastation, contrary to the Jewish biblical tradition of marking the place of internment and safeguarding the memory of the dead. A cemetery is called Beit Chaim, that is House of Life, and the remains interred there are sacred. Soul and body remain inextricably linked also after death, disturbing the peace of the bones is tantamount to disturbing the peace of the soul. These overgrown cemeteries are the most graphic proof of the annihilation of Polish Jews. (JutkiewiczKubiak 2006, 7)

According to Norman Weinberg, main coordinator of the Poland Jewish Cemeteries Restoration Project, in Poland there were over one thousand necropolises at the time of the outbreak of the war. Nowadays there remains at least one gravestone on 487 of them, twenty to one hundred matzevahs are still standing on 134 cemeteries; on 83, one hundred to five hundred; on 37, five hundred to five thousand; and only 7 cemeteries have over five thousand headstones. Only 190 old Jewish cemeteries have been fenced or walled in, 399 have remained as Jewish cemeteries, 303 have been allotted for agricultural or housing purposes, and 72 have been turned into garbage dumps.65 From this data, it appears that almost half of the necropolises are in fact completely devastated, at most relics of their own previous purpose, especially since a cemetery can be liquidated if in the past forty years no interment took place there.66 Over one-third of Jewish necropolises have thus lost their original significance, oftentimes falling victim to profanation. Its most common manifestation is using the cemeteries as garbage dumps or as a source of building material, which is a practice started by the Nazis—matzevahs were often used as paving stones for sidewalks, yards, and small alleys (Young 1993, 189).

64   65   66  

center. It was completely devastated by plunderers inhabiting the area and then deserted. For over forty years, it has been a no-man’s land, where in time a dense forest grew. Today the town looks like it had been built around a forest. This way, Ostrowiec has unintentionally created a new place—memorial woods, commemorating its murdered Jewish inhabitants (Young 1993, 196). S. Maurice, I, the Jew (New York: 1927), after Stonequist (1961), 137. Source: a Web page forum of Polish Jews: http:/fzp.jewish.prg.pl Article 6, paragraph 1 of the January 31, 1959, Cemeteries and Interment Law.

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For example we’ve been at the river, visiting some people (. . .) and we’ve found that a path leading to the river was made of matzevas, so we took these stones, these matzevas, to the synagogue, and made a path out of normal stones. (S26/15)

The above is a quotation from an interview about contemporary events I carried out in 2003 with an employee of the Pogranicze (Borderland) Center in Sejny. It is but one of many such examples.67 Meanwhile, one could also point to positive examples of taking care of devastated cemeteries— for instance, the ever-more-intensive work on the cemetery in Łódź, the biggest Jewish necropolis in Europe, which now has begun to be considered a part of the city’s cultural heritage. Another example is restoring the stillremaining objects of sepulchral art. Sometimes gravestone fragments find their way to museums and thus can be rescued from total destruction. In other cases, broken matzevahs constitute building material for monuments or are simply stored at synagogues (like in the case of Sejny) or museums (for example, in Brzeziny). An interesting example is one of the biggest lapidaria in Kazimierz Dolny nad Wisłą, designed by Tadeusz Augustynek. It was created out of several hundred broken gravestones, used by the Germans to pave squares and streets in town. A “wailing wall” constructed out of the matzevahs is broken in the middle, which symbolizes the tragic fate of Polish Jews.68 James Young (1993, 185–186) notices an interesting relation here; monuments created of destroyed tablets and matzevahs represent contemporary Jewish memory, but simultaneously become a symbol of destruction and inability to rebuild the Jewish world. Vandalized matzevahs symbolize their own fragility. They are mere fragments and not a restored and reclaimed past. Emblems of brokenness, a depiction of an object’s destruction, are motifs typical of Jewish funeral tradition. Therefore, the gravestones depict broken candlesticks, bridges half torn away, and other elements symbolizing life interrupted by death. Thus, creating monuments or memory sites of incomplete, destroyed, broken tablets and matzevahs not only has a symbolic dimension—as it shows the destruction of the Jewish world—but is also firmly embedded in historic tradition of such images in Jewish culture. 67   They have been described in Midrasz 1 (2006), among others. 68   Source: Web page http:/www.kirkuty.xip.pl

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It is worth mentioning that care of neglected and devastated cemeteries is often initiated by individuals, not institutions. The January edition of the Midrasz monthly in 2006 was entirely devoted to originators of such actions. They were called rescuers of memory or, as Shewah Weiss said, “second generation of the Righteous among the Nations” (JutkiewiczKubiak 2006, 7). These people are usually inhabitants of small towns, where they find traces of old Jewish inhabitants. The memory-rescuing process usually begins with cemeteries, with physical work—clearing the area, digging out fallen matzevahs, or collecting them from the neighborhood. So far, several tens of Poles have been awarded certificates of merit for services in rescuing Jewish heritage. The certificates are issued by the Israel embassy, in cooperation with the Jewish Historical Institute during the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków. Articles and interviews with the memory rescuers published in Midrasz lead to several observations. The animators of these actions are usually “cultural leaders”: teachers and museum and library employees. Therefore, their actions are usually of educational nature and serve to promote such attitudes among young people. The best example is the “Antyschematy” program, initiated by Jerzy Fornalik. Its point of departure was clearing the local cemetery. With time, it developed into a project of cooperation for Jewish necropolises by Polish, Israeli, and German youth. Its aim is not only care of cemeteries, but also, first and foremost, promotion of respect and tolerance for others. Until 2006, over ten cemeteries have been cleansed. A group of young people permanently cooperating with “Antyschematy” amounts to about thirty (Schnepf 2006, 9). The activity of memory rescuers has to provoke specific reactions of the local milieu—that is, the authorities and the community itself. There is a whole variety of attitudes: from an active cooperation on the authorities’ part, to financial support, to disapproval, to open hostility. Although it is difficult to get a generalized picture from the texts published in Midrasz, information contained therein points to the fact that dislike and hostility are rare to come by; the more common reaction is silent consent or approval. Local authorities consider these actions an element improving the image of the town, sometimes a form of tourist attraction. There are also cases of treating them instrumentally. Jerzy Fornalik put it that way: As it happened, authorities sometimes used our work to get media attention. One of the restored cemeteries was visited by the then ambassador of Israel, Shevah Weiss. A celebration was organized. All

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the local officials, members of the regional council, were seated in front rows, and my young people—somewhere to the side, unnoticed by all and sundry. Shevah Weiss was repeatedly encouraging the “Antyschematy” members to take a stand, but the arrogant officials made it impossible. (Fornalik 2006, 12)

The perception of such action by the local community is another matter. Here, several extreme cases aside, it is difficult to talk about open hostility; in any case, the Midrasz interviewees were intentionally passing over unpleasant situations. However, a major issue in this case was the local community’s definition of the rescuers’ identity. A common pattern reemerges: a distinct definition of strangeness, the division into “us” and “them,” separating the fates of the Polish and Jewish cultures. Consequently, the animators of the described actions are considered Jews or beneficiaries of Jewish organizations. Neither is true. I shall return to this problem when describing the activity of the Pogranicze Center. Next to cemeteries, it is the synagogues that still remain lieux de mémoire. During the war, Germans destroyed every synagogue they could. Those made of wood were burnt down and demolished, but solid masonry constructions were more difficult to destroy and could serve other functions; therefore, many survived the war and are still standing. Most of them were adapted for other purposes—for instance, turned into a hotel in Biecz, a bakery in Gorlice, a factory in Radom, a cinema in Kazimierz nad Wisłą, a swimming pool in Poznań, a shop in Inowłódz, a library in Piotrków Trybunalski, etc. In many cases, especially if the postwar community consisted of incomers, nothing was known about the history of the place and the former use of the buildings, or no interest was paid to them. Suffice it to refer to the already-quoted reminiscence of a Poznań inhabitant, as the bulky mass of its synagogue (a freestanding building with domes) does not resemble a sports center. A statement of a Sejny inhabitant is very specific in this light. N: I also remember this. In today’s synagogue there was a storehouse of the Seed Center, we were storing corn there, of course with the authorities’ permission. And I remember I was standing by the window at a friend’s, on the first floor, across the street. In arrives a limousine, black, very elegant, and seven Jews get out, a sevenman limousine. And, you know, I was deeply moved, because they got to their knees and started circling this shul, on their knees. I was crying. These were human feelings! Whether it’s a shul, or a mosque,

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or a church, gotta respect that! [screaming] because someone was praying to this! And it hurt me a lot. And there—our seeds. I made a huge fuss, because I was an accountant, I made a fuss. And I say, “you, this and that, you just can’t do something like that!” and I show them this, you know. And indeed we moved out and made a storehouse at a priest’s, one near, near the cloister. But, you know, but it was already very damp in there, and still, it’s still damp [in the synagogue—KK]. You just don’t do it with people’s feelings. K: What year was it, more or less? N: Oh, dear me, what year was it . . . The storehouse was there for a very short time, it could have been something around sixty-nine, seventy, something like that. K: And then it stood empty /. N: Then it stood empty / I mean during the war, the Germans knocked out a door, not this one at the front, a side door (. . .) and there was written (. . .) in German, you know. And the council [she means a local government—KK] just eeer, was renting it, so the Seed Center rented it from them. And of course you had to pay the council for that. See what impudence, what fencing. I can’t agree with such things. But I’m already 70, what say do I have. Agree or not, you can’t turn back time. But this dampness, those pen-pushers, those penpushers. It should have been closed down, “you are not renovating?” “Then don’t renovate, but at least close it down, because these are someone’s feelings, someone was doing something here.” Everyone prays to one God, whether this way or that, it’s individual. And so, you see, then, after we’ve moved out, there was no one, eeeer, no one I guess . . . no one after this Seed Center. But this storehouse, then only sacks were left lying there. Still, dammit, can you imagine, what a nightmare. But what can you do, that’s what they did at that time. (S 71/3)

The described incident took place at the time of complete silence about Jewish history in general, including local history. Therefore, it is worth stressing that taking into account these circumstances, the narrator is exhibiting admirable sensitivity and empathy. What is equally interesting is they stem from religious feelings. Although in other parts of her relation the narrator’s language is ripe with prejudice, religious experiences (which were in fact one of the fundaments of traditional anti-Semitism) allow her to acknowledge the stranger’s perspective and sympathize with his/ her fate. The woman’s reaction can be a result of actually experienced emotions, an “eye-opening” to the power of the stranger’s experience.

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His/her closeness is created in reference to, using Georg Simmel’s words again, feeling the community of human traits—the experience of faith. This narrative confirms Pierre Nora’s thesis—lieux de mémoire deprived of the environment of memory lose their identity. In this case, the appearance of a milieu substitute (the seven Jews) led to an at least partial restoration of the memory. The fate of the White Synagogue in Sejny is worth a more thorough account. During the occupation, the building served as a German fire station. In the times of the narrative, it suffered the greatest devastation. Its restoration began in 1978 and lasted until 1987. Nowadays the synagogue is under the care of the Pogranicze Center. It houses art exhibitions, meetings with authors, performances, and concerts of a klezmer band.69 Another example is a synagogue in Kazimierz nad Wisłą, described, among others, by James Young (1993, 198–199). The building, located just off the market square of the town, was turned into a cinema. The interior remained intact. The building, destroyed during the war, was restored in 1953. The octagonal vault was reconstructed; the arcades were walled in and then knocked down anew in 1995. Talking to the manager, the author found out that transforming the synagogue into a cinema, of all things, was intentional. In the original plans from 1953, the aim was to restore the synagogue and turn it into a Jewish museum. However, as there were no Jews—neither in the area nor in general—to visit it, it was decided that the building should serve culture and community. Young overheard a conversation of teenagers leaving the cinema, discussing the film seen at “the synagogue.” He does not consider this fact an actual manifestation of the inhabitant’s memory, but a mere “dead metaphor” stored in the language, which does not hold any emotional or cultural significance. In this sense, the Kazimierz synagogue does not constitute a cultural correlate of this community. Rather, to use a term of evolutionist anthropologists, it remains a “cultural survival.” Nora’s thesis is yet again confirmed.70 One could, however, present a different perspective—even the “sleeping” lieux de mémoire have a potential for memory-freeing. This 69   Information derived from the leaflet of Pogranicze. 70   As in the case of the Sejny synagogue, the history of the Kazimierz building can be related

further. In 2003, the cinema was closed down. The main hall (previously the hall of prayer) remains unused. Furthermore, it is not open to the public, excepting groups, usually after an agreement with the Jewish community in Warsaw, which is now the owner of the synagogue. Side rooms of the building serve as hotel rooms.

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sentiment, as it seems, is expressed by Konrad Kucza-Kuczyński. “Perhaps the synagogue in Kazimierz is waiting for the challenge of conciliating the Old and the New Testament. It is no longer a challenge for the architects, but for us all—and the inhabitants of the 21st century Kazimierz.”71 A similar perspective is described by the Pogranicze Center members, talking about the beginnings of the group’s activity in the Sejny community: We were all from the outside. Nowadays the proportions in our Center are much more in favor of the locals, people from Sejny. But back then we kind of landed in the middle of the town, took possession of the former Jewish quarter and somehow settled there. So it’s not something considered normal in the local community. So you can expect different reactions: pushing us out or firmly rejecting. But now I’m thinking that if this place had no memory . . . about a place for others, about the fact that this community is shaped in such a way that there were always some strangers here. For example, if the Sejny tradition had been more homogenous previously, it would have been much harder for us to settle here. Yet, we took the place which was somehow naturally still there for someone else. Of course we had to take it as it comes, that is with some people’s kindness and unkindness of others. (S 50/20)

Therefore, according to one of the Pogranicze founders, the identity of the place, a former Jewish quarter, was not lost. In spite of there being no milieu de mémoire, the original characteristics of the place were retained— the strangeness/otherness, in the previously defined aspect. This original potential of the place allowed for a definition of the incomers (classic strangers in Simmel’s or Schütz’s understanding) and, later, the process of memory recovery—also the Jewish one. Incorporating the history of the Sejny Jews into contemporary local memory was undoubtedly Pogranicze’s achievement. “The price” for this activity was attributing Jewish identity to the activists of the center and viewing all its actions as a “Jewish matter,” although it is not true (Gurdała 2005). The inhabitants’ opinions are an indirect exemplification of a conviction that Jewish relics should be taken care of by the Jews themselves or their organizations. In other words, since the Pogranicze workers take care of commemorating the history 71   From a statement at an international seminar of Work Program of the UIA (International Union

of the Architects), “Sites of Cult,” in Warsaw, June 30–July 1, 2001 (Internet version).

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of the Jews, it means that they too are Jews supported by Jewish organizations. Since the beginning of the eighties, an interest in Polish Jews’ history has started to grow. The process was initiated, mainly, by the postwar generation, which was not a witness to the Shoah and did not remember the prewar world of Jewish culture (Steinlauf 2001). This interest mainly took the form of fascination with Jewish culture from its literature, history, and folklore to its cuisine. It was signified by the wave of publications, movies, concerts, and cultural events related to all things Jewish.72 In the nineties, a veritable breakthrough took place so that one could talk about a certain vogue for Jewish culture in Poland (Krajewski 2003).73 For example, in the years 1995–1996 alone, over five hundred titles of Jewish literature were published. It was a world record in translation from the Yiddish language. Even Israel or United States did not have as many translations (Gruber 2004, 28). This vogue undoubtedly initiates a process of restoring or, as Steinlauf says, memory regained and interest in Jewish lieux de mémoire. In the nineties, many restorations of culture monuments, synagogues, or cemeteries took place. At the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century, there were about 2,100 memorials of the Shoah in Poland—the greatest number in Europe (Young 1993, 207); and it is certain that in the next decades, the memorial number will increase even more. An example here can be Łódź, the city where I live. In 2004, on the sixtieth anniversary of the Łódź ghetto liquidation, a museum memorial was erected in Radegast station, from which trains transporting Jews to a camp in Chełmno were leaving. A Park of the Survivors project was also initiated—trees are planted by or for those of Łódź Jews who survived the war. Their names are commemorated by plaques laid down along the main park alley. The Memorial for Poles rescuing the Jews is also erected there. Until the end of the nineties, the main testament to the memory of the former inhabitants was the not-really-vandalized, but still-neglected Jewish 72   Andrzej Żbikowski (1992, 89) thus comments on the interest in Jewish literature at the

beginning of the nineties: “There are many signs that an increase in publications on Jewish matters noted in the last years [the turn of the eighties and the nineties—KK] has been noticed in literary circles, but did not cause any major change in literary preferences of our society.” A similar opinion was expressed by John Pawlikowski (2003, 116), who stated that an interest in Jewish culture is not in fact high and usually limits itself to spectacular actions, like the one of the Jewish Culture Week, for example. 73   This vogue was in line with a wider context of the renaissance of Jewish culture in Europe.

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cemetery (the biggest Jewish necropolis in Europe) and the constantly graffitied statue of Moses in Park Śródmiejski. Seen from this angle, the image of Łódź has changed dramatically in the last few years. The cemetery is undergoing maintenance and restoration works; there appeared the aforementioned sites of memory, marking the presence and, above all, the tragic fate of the Jewish community. They are constructed in such a way that they “encourage” remembering, showing the past in the context of the future. Yet other incidents are still taking place. A guidebook to Poland published in 1997 in Białystok states that during the war, Germans killed “about 50%” of the city’s inhabitants, not mentioning that they were almost exclusively Jews. The entry about Auschwitz contains information that Zyklon B was used for “mass killing of prisoners—Soviet prisoners of war and the sick” (Tych 1999, 76). In the guidebook Polska na weekend, published by Pascal (1999), similarly enigmatic information can be found. For instance, in a description of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum, there is no mention of the extermination of the Jews; in a description of Jewish culture monuments (for example, in Tykocin or Kraków), there is no commentary explaining why synagogues or former Jewish houses are now housing museums. Such cases are in line with the still-vast area of ignorance, whose other manifestation can be the constant yet diminishing overestimation of the extent of the Jewish population in contemporary Poland. In 2002, 27.5 percent were of the opinion that Poland is inhabited by many or a great many Jews, 2.5 percent estimated this population at several million, 9 percent at hundreds of thousands, 16.9 percent at tens of thousands (Krzemiński 2004, 96). Houses in Łódź and other cities are still covered with anti-Semitic inscriptions and pictures. To continue with the synagogues example, one could enumerate many (for example, the one in Kazimierz district in Kraków, Tykocin, Łańcut, Sejny) which after restoration, serve their former purpose or house museums illustrating the life of the Jewish community of old. They play the role of memory sites, which are, more often than not, a result of a reconstruction process rather than a relic of what has been saved. For instance, in the Tykocin museum, there remained not a single object belonging to the local Jews, who formed a majority of the town’s population. All the exhibits had to be brought from elsewhere (Gruber 2004, 45). An interesting example, illustrating a reference to both perspectives—a neglect of memory and a reflection on the identity of the lieux de mémoire—is an exhibit that was organized in September–October

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2007 entitled Z(a)miana: Synagogi w Polsce ([Ex]change: Synagogues in Poland). It was housed in Nizio, a cozy art gallery in Warsaw. In a bulletin prepared by the curator, Natalia Romik, we read: Inspired by the building of the prewar New Synagogue in Poznań (nowadays serving as a swimming pool), the exhibition is devoted to a break up, a transformation of sacral functions of synagogues for utility functions, non-religious purposes. A transformation which occurred as a result of the second world war, was encouraged in the times of the PPR, and nowadays—in spite of the voices pointing to the inadequacy of some “(ex)changes”—is still sustained. We were interested in finding out to what extent the new functions of these buildings underwent neutralization, to what extent they are considered obvious, constant, or resulting from violence, a plan of Jewish extermination carried out during the second world war. To what extent the memory or oblivion of their previous functions—and, above all, the abruptness of the break up—influences today’s character and perception of the buildings’ contemporary functions. The exhibition “(za)miana. Synagogi w Polsce” was intended to revoke the memory of the change, point to the movement, a shift of meanings, which architecture, space, undergo with time, with history. A very specific architecture in this case—due to the uniqueness of the fate of Jewish synagogues and community in Poland, during the second world war and after. We attempted to undermine the obviousness and absoluteness of the perspective of constancy, invalidating the history. To rattle the cage of perception which is undisturbed by doubt, unease, but also ethical obligation.

To realize these aims, the artists juxtaposed archival pictures of the synagogues’ facades with a film documentation of their contemporary interiors and functions. Each of the exhibited cases comprised thus of an archival picture, a contemporary image on a computer screen, and the sound recorded during the making of the documentary (it could be heard on the headphones). The creators of the exhibition thus presented five synagogues: one each in Inowłódz, Włodzisław, Poznań, Piotrków Trybunalski, and Opole—today, respectively, a shop, a ruin, a swimming pool, a library, and a TV station. To complement the exhibition, one could also watch film interviews with administrators or owners of the buildings, talking about the history of the places and expressing their opinions on the adequacy of their contemporary use. Two opinions especially caught

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my attention—a narrative of the owner of the Inowłódz synagogue and one of the manager of one of the sections in Municipal Public Library in Piotrków Trybunalski. In the first case, the owner bought the synagogue from the Jewish community in Łódź. The reason behind setting up a shop there was an economic one—he was also thinking about, among others, a Jewish restaurant or café, which would not, however, be profitable enough. The Jewish community agreed to the intended purpose of the building. As he said, Jewish community representatives explained to him that if there is no Torah, the synagogue ceases to be Beth Midrash (a place to study the Holy Scripture) and is no longer a sacred place. A notarial deed, however, stipulates that the place cannot serve as a bathhouse, slaughterhouse, meatprocessing plant, sex shop, or brothel. The owner, referring to his own cultural experiences (he had seen vandalized Polish churches in Lvov), tried to retain the original interior, especially the beautiful polychromes, which unfortunately couldn’t be renovated for financial reasons. The interior of the shop was furnished after a consultation with a conservation officer. The owner says that due to his purchase of the synagogue, he is often taken for a Jew. The very idea of the shop also gave rise to controversy. Although, according to him, 80–90 percent of the local community has accepted the enterprise, the initial stages were difficult, and some young people still cannot come to terms with the fact that the building of the synagogue is now a commercial place. The owner also mentions that he tries to take care of the area around the building as well, which is, in fact, often visited and photographed by Jews from abroad. The second example is the synagogue in Piotrków Trybunalski, since 1967 a municipal library. The building of the synagogue was then renovated with the intention of cultural activities in mind. Previously it housed a sports hall and club. This generated protests of the Jewish congregation. The woman working in the library stresses the building’s impracticality; moreover, its location in a busy street makes it susceptible to shocks, contributing to its disrepair and making work difficult. She would like, therefore, for the library to be situated in a different place (which is in fact about to happen soon); she also mentions the identity of the building. The synagogue remains a lieu de mémoire of a tragically afflicted society. It is also documented by a memorial wall plaque. Thus, the building brings up memory of the slaughter. The woman refers to the memories of the city’s older inhabitants, who remember the Jews, and her own experiences: when she is working night shifts in a deserted reading room, she has a pervasive sense of dread connected to the tragic history of Jewish community.

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Let us go back again to Natalia Romik’s text: These couple of journeys proved that the project is more about the Poles than the Jews. The action of turning old synagogues into new complexes is a Polish way of facing the “US-THEM” myth, with the local community, with the knowledge of our common past, as it were Poles who became administrators or owners of the post-synagogue buildings, often simply sold to them by Jewish communities. The project also allowed us to discern the need for organizing one COMMON way for Poles and Jews, finding a concept for reclaiming former shuls. But when shall a need for a two-side haskalah arise . . . ?

Therefore, the problem of safekeeping the memory of Jewish lieux de mémoire concerns not only the question of whether to cultivate this memory, but also how. The synagogue example is a very characteristic one, as in the Jewish tradition, it is not a sacred building—unlike Christian churches, it does not require a consecration ritual. Attributing it with a unique sacred significance in a sense changes its original intention by virtue of forcing a Christian perspective on a Judaic concept. Simultaneously, however, to use Romik’s words, “For Poles, synagogues should be sacred places in the sense of their commemoration.” The identity of a building is embedded not only in a specific cultural tradition of a group, but also in its tragic fate. The two above examples illustrate this difficulty: of cultural agreements, which in this case should be molded by ethical, rather than ethnological circumstances. One should emphasize that the growing interest in Jewish culture is not limited to Poland, although Polish interest is undoubtedly especially significant, since Polish Jews were “a pillar of the European Jews’ culture.” Ruth Gruber (2004, 27–28) traces the source of this increased interest in the universalization of the Jewish phenomenon and its place in European consciousness. At the same time, the author mentions that a renaissance of Jewish culture in Europe is a merely superficial return to its roots. In fact, it gives rise to something new, something that Gruber calls “virtual Jewishness” or a “virtual Jewish world.” Former Jewish districts’ renovations, folklore renewals, and synagogue restorations are manifestations of cultivating the lieux de mémoire, filled with an image of the world that “is built on a theater stage, shown in a movie, recreated in a museum. Changing definitions of Jewish culture, production, sale or presentation of what could be named its products (books, music, works of art, souvenirs) are subsequent aspects of

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this world, as numerous and different as the multiplicity of definitions of a ‘Jew,’ ‘Jewish identity’ or ways of understanding these notions as a model, metaphor, symbol or yet another useful tool.” The “virtuality” of this world, concerning Jews and Poles alike, engenders questions about identity, authenticity, or interpretation of the sentimental feelings for the resuscitated culture (let us invoke, for instance, the contemporary understanding of nostalgia). Consequently, questions of what this culture actually is and how to diagnose its authenticity and quality arise. In a society that creates Jewish culture without the Jews, laymen find it difficult to tell fiction from reality (Weiss 2006, 22). This area of fiction concerns two dimensions: First, an extreme oversimplification of Jewish culture can be noticed, reducing it to folklore. One can rarely encounter a reference to its sublime poetry, interesting music, or literature (Szwarcman-Czarnota 2006, 10). Second, even the folklore is subjected to a significant oversimplification or even deformation; it usually assumes the form of kitsch, which is considered authentic Jewish culture. “Jewish Disneyland is an instant light version, a form of McDonald’s. What is really devastating is the fact that it is being treated like a five-star, refined menu” (Weiss 2006, 23). This is the role the Kazimierz district in Kraków plays nowadays, according to the critics of this phenomenon—a former center of Jewish culture, a “family home” of all Polish Jews turned into “a huge, seedy, off-putting dive, overflowing with kitsch” (Halkowski 2006, 19). This lack of reflection on the quality of what passes for Jewish culture stems not only from ignorance, but also from specific attitudes favoring an acceptance of this image. An example here is the vogue for pictures of an old bearded Jew, preferably counting money. Many consider it a lucky charm, bringing prosperity and happiness. Therefore, it is a perfect gift for a bride and groom or a businessman (Robb-Narbutt 2006, 13). It is not difficult to trace stereotypes which, with proper interpretation, become part and parcel of today’s anti-Semitism. One can thus talk of a specific paradox—the renewal of Jewish culture often simultaneously leads to its degradation, whose causes can be traced not so much in the present, as in the consequences of the Shoah. The following description is a fitting commentary on this situation: I met professor Shevah Weiss in June 1999, during the 9th Festival of Jewish Culture in Kraków. I remember that during a great final

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concert on Szeroka street, where everyone was having fun, singing, dancing, he was the only sad, lonely person in the crowd. “I can’t forget those who used to live here. They are with me all the time, their death is a constant presence in my life,” he said.74

One should therefore ask about the meaning of Jewish lieux de mémoire for Poles, especially in local communities constituting milieux for sites of memory. The matter seems to be quite a complex one, and it is not easy to reach simple conclusions. If we refer to statistics, we will find out that 42 percent of the respondents think that relics remaining after Jews should be taken care of by “Jews and Jewish organizations,” and 26 percent and 23 percent, respectively, think that it should be the state and inhabitants, along with local authorities. Thus, less than one-quarter of the respondents feels obliged to cultivate this memory in their own environment.75 These opinions can justify the answer to the question whether Jews used to live in the respondents’ neighborhoods before the war. The percentage of people responding in the affirmative has diminished by 10 percent in one decade (1992, 57 percent; 2002, 47.5 percent). The percentage of answers that some relics remained after the survivors has also diminished (from 28 percent to 21 percent) (Krzemiński 2004, 100). Thus, the numbers are not too optimistic. The apparent interest in Jewish culture does not always translate to a knowledge about one’s own local community, which the prewar Jews formed a part of, and a personal willingness to cultivate their memory. It is enough to point out that the work of the aforementioned rescuers of memory relies on quality rather than quantity. In other words, it is an “off,” rather than mass, phenomenon. Other observations also confirm this. Since 1996, the KARTA Center is carrying out an education program entitled Historia Bliska (Close History). It is an annual contest for young people, whose aim is to sensitize them to the recent history, documented by them in their closest environment. The participants have to “discover” and process the documentary material themselves. Each year, a new topic is put forward.76 And so young people conduct archival and literature 74   J. Szwedowska from the cover of Ziemia i chmury (Earth and Clouds) (2004). 75   According to Jerzy Fornalik (2006, 12), “Ever since the Foundation for the Preservation of

Jewish Heritage in Poland has appropriated Jewish cemeteries, local authorities no longer feel obliged to take care of Jewish cemeteries, because it is Jewish property.” 76   For instance, “Family in the Whirl of History 1999/2000,” “Witnesses and Testimonies

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work, research into the resources of collective and biographical memory, and talk to eyewitnesses. I was curious how often Jewish issues appear among the subjects explored within the context of recent local history. Among 3,459 archived papers up to 2007 (three editions of the contest have not yet been archived digitally), Jewish issues are touched upon in 196, including 90 about the Shoah. In the 2001/2002 edition, “A Stranger among Familiars: The Experience of the 20th Century,” in the total amount of 473 papers, 80 were devoted to Jews; and in the contest “Arguments about Commemoration of the Past: Patrons, Cemeteries, Memorials 2003/2004,” 48 papers in 371 concern the Jews.77 Thus, in both cases, more than a dozen percent was devoted to Jewish matters, which to a large extent coincides with the aforementioned statistical data about the knowledge of Jewish culture and concern for it. I made myself acquainted with over a dozen papers dealing with these issues. These were the rewarded ones, hence their high quality (some of them met the standards of bachelor’s or master’s theses). Irrespective of specific topics, their common characteristic was a genuine discovery of the scrutinized issues. Until the moment of taking up work on the subject, their authors usually knew nothing or next to nothing about the history of Jewish community in their local milieu. A result of the search, undertaken with youthful passion, was—next to the satisfaction of a job well done—marveling at their previous ignorance and, above all, at the silence of the local community’s memory. Some of the fragments presented below make a fitting punch line to the issue analyzed in this subchapter. We were amazed that such important facts from the city’s history are often omitted, that no one cares about commemorating them. Moreover, we have grown to appreciate the importance of places we were previously indifferent to, we have taken an interest in their future fate.78

77   78  

1998/1999,” “A Stranger among Familiars: The Experience of the 20th Century 2001/2002,” “Arguments about Commemoration of the Past: Patrons, Cemeteries, Memorials 2003/2004.” I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Alicja Wancerz-Gluza and Iwona Surleta for their help in data gathering and conducting a survey of library holdings. The fragments quoted come, respectively, from following papers: M. Jarosik, M. Kardas,  W. Matyśkiewicz, J. Precz, Gdy wy będziecie milczeć, kamienie mówić będą (When You Keep Silent, the Stones Shall Speak); T. Borkowski, To ty, Oleś? (Oleś, Is That You?); A. Czyżyk,  A. Kiewczykowska, K. Kratiuk, and others, Żydzi włodawscy w latach 1944–45: Trudne powroty do domu (The Jews of Włodawa in the Years 1944–45: Difficult Homecomings).

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The new challenge was extremely captivating and consuming. An additional motivation was the fact that previously no one tried to form a unified whole of the fate of local Jews. Our work turned out to be pioneering. We were meekly facing difficulties, stubbornly pressing ahead. Everyone we have met in the course of our research has shown us kindness and offered help. However, we have also found out that not everyone is tolerant and not everyone respects otherness of faith or opinions. Still, it was worth it. We have overcome prejudices, stereotypes and our own weaknesses. We are spiritually richer.

6.  Meeting with the Local Community   versus Liaison Work An increasing number of publications point to the fact that sometimes the local community was not only a passive witness to the tragedy, but also its fellow perpetrator. These facts refer to mass executions, individual murders, mass graves, and completely forgotten gravesites of individual people. It is often a well-known but concealed truth, to which people from outside of the community have no access. In the past few years, Jedwabne became a symbol of such a community. But the problem refers to issues, events of various moral significance: from discovering one’s own complicity in a crime to an awareness that the crime was committed by other members of the society and an awareness of not giving help, to being a witness to the events—standing in the crowd, being a witness to suffering. Each of these situations deals with a slightly different source of mental discomfort. It can be fear of punishment or being stigmatized— shame caused by remembering events that, though justifiable, leave one with a sense of unease because they are against one’s vision of himself/ herself as an honest and reasonable person (Aronson, Wilson, and Akart 1997, 81).79 Zygmunt Bauman (2000, 205) considers this state of anxiety a moral obligation of a contemporary man: The inhuman world created by a homicidal tyranny and those who passively watched the victimization dehumanized its victims by pressing both to use the logic of self-preservation as absolution for moral intensivity and inaction. No one can be proclaimed guilty for 79   After Hirszowicz, Neyman (2001, 25).

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the sheer fact of breaking down under such pressure. Yet no one can be excused from moral self-deprecation for such surrender. And only when feeling ashamed for one’s weakness can one finally shatter the mental prison which has outlived its builders and its guards.

However, such shame is more often defined as discomfort, a kind of cognitive dissonance rather than a compulsion of biographical settling accounts with the past. Therefore, strategies of obscuring or even erasing some facts from memory are more common—both in individual and collective aspects (compare Hirszowicz and Neyman 2001, 25). Jews returning to their homeland to pay their respects to the ashes of their loved ones or find their graves or any other traces of the past force the community to face the memory of the war. They are perceived not only as strangers, but also as point-blank intruders, interfering with the intimate sphere of social memory and disturbing the specific state of balance, hammered out by silence, oblivion, and suppression—strategies of “neglecting” the memory of the past. This situation can cause various reactions: from a conspiracy of silence and denial to outright violence, but sometimes ends in cooperation. Here is an example of a successful one. And I can tell you about it, using the example . . . of the return of Max Furmański, this cantor, who was born in Sejny, who came here two years ago, completely terrified, mustered the courage to, after over fifty years, to show his wife and son—they literally wanted to drop in for a few minutes, and he wanted to show them Sejny . . . and his place. And they already started running away, but, as fate had it, they dropped by the synagogue, where a rehearsal of Dybbuk was taking place. And the longer they hung around, the more they were finding, and finally they ended at a klezmer band concert. And then they started with us . . . they visited people, who live next to the house where he was born . . . They spent two, three days here. Something was afoot. Well, he went away. Meanwhile, we’ve finally finished the monument at the Jewish cemetery, which we erected. “In memory of the Sejny Jews—the Sejny Inhabitants,” was the inscription. So we (invited him) to the unveiling of this memorial and another lady from Israel, whose father was probably buried in this graveyard. So these, you know, these celebrations started. It lasted four days, but . . . it was actually the entire drama. It was very dramatic, you know. At the beginning, on both sides there was this huge wariness, huge uncertainty, some kind of fear and dread, how this meeting will end. On Polish side it was like, “The Jews are

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coming back,” you don’t know if they will demand some of their property back or not, “what do they want?” “what are they going to ask about?” Our mayor, when asked, we asked him to say a word or two at the unveiling . . . all sheepish, “what should I say,” that we should tell him what to say, because he has no idea what to say and so on, and he’s afraid. The parish priest—you know, Max Furmański and us, we would visit everyone. We visited the mayor, we went to the priest. The priest said he would attend the ceremony, but he would not say anything, not at all, he would just stand somewhere behind, and that under no circumstances should we announce him. We went to the Sejny district starosta, it was a very interesting conversation too. And on the other side those Jews, also full of fear and dread, how they were going to be received, what they would find, and generally what was going on in this town and so on. So the script was that at first . . . we met them here, we showed them the film Tratwa muzykantów about this work between New York and Sejny.80 Then there was Max Furmański’s meeting with our students of the heritage class, our Sejny chronicles81 and teachers. The room is full, everyone’s sitting in a circle, Max mentions something about Sejny, Shevah Weiss pipes in . . . children start asking questions. It was slightly difficult to ask questions, so about the Sejny of old, what his life was like, who his first love was, but everything starts getting relaxed and suddenly . . . the children start, they offer that they will sing a Sejny song for him. They sing a Lithuanian one. Max responds with a song of his own. Then they sing a Polish song, of the Old Believers. The atmosphere starts getting . . . more emotionally charged. And to culminate all this, so to speak, Max Furmański and Shevah Weiss, like they have arranged it beforehand, stand at attention and start singing Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła. Impeccably, the entire Polish national anthem, teary-eyed. Suddenly everyone stood up and sang the rest of it together . . . Cry . . . Everyone was crying. This, this Max, this Shevah Weiss born in Borysław, they all knew 80   Tratwa muzykantów pomiędzy Nowym Jorkiem a Sejnami (A Raft of Musicians between New

York and Sejny) is a project of workshops devoted to klezmer music. Renowned American musicians visit Sejny and give musical workshops and concerts with the local klezmer musicians (Gurdała 2004). 81   Klasa dziedzictwa kulturowego (National Heritage Class) is a program for students of the Suwalszczyzna region, aimed at deepening the historical and cultural knowledge of their own parts. Kroniki sejneńskie (Sejny Chronicles) is a play featuring children from Sejny, Lithuanians, Russian Old Believers, and Poles, based on old people’s stories, carrying the memory of the multicultural Sejny of the past  (http://www.pogranicze.sejny.pl).

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this anthem from Polish school they attended. They had no idea, at least Max had no idea he remembered a single word of it. At some point it just came out of them, completely subconsciously. When this emotional bond with the Poles here suddenly became so strong, something like this just popped out of him. And then, from this meeting we went to the K i r k u t (Graveyard) exhibition prepared by our children. It’s an exhibition where the children as if imagined the matzevas, which disappeared from this k i r k u t and created them anew, according to their imagination. The children showed their works, which will later be set in, there already is a project of this wall, which is going to circle the graveyard, in which these children’s matzevas will be set. And then . . . we went to a meeting with Shevah Weiss and his book.82 People in Sejny already know Shevah Weiss, he was here in January and everyone liked him a lot. He’s, you know, so very direct. So again this spontaneous conversation, about Polish-Jewish relations, various difficult issues. But he can talk about it in a normal way, so that you suddenly feel that he’s one of us, that people in Sejny sense he’s one of us, you know, our Jew, our man, from here. And the next day there were celebrations at the cemetery, where you suddenly see the entire town, because you have to walk two kilometers to this Jewish cemetery. And all the authorities gathered. They mayor has prepared such a speech, that I was so proud of him, wonderful, as the host who welcomes the returning Jews in his town. A simply spectacular speech. The s t a r o s t a representative as well. Shevah Weiss makes his speech, Max sings the Kaddish. And suddenly our parish priest, who was supposed to be anonymous, comes forward and starts saying O u r F a t h e r in Hebrew, you know, spontaneously, and starts praying with this rabbi. The atmosphere is getting extraordinary, spontaneous. As if everyone wanted to give and say something best from himself to the other. And then in the evening there was the concert . . . it’s difficult to squeeze everyone in the synagogue, where the young klezmers from Sejny play with this Max Furmański. First, Max gave a concert. He is already over seventy-years-old. He sang arias, Chopin, old synagogue songs, and so on, but also Mozart and so on. A great effort on his part to sing something like this at all. Especially since he was so moved all the time that he had to, you know, through tears. And again it ended with an old Polish song W o j e n k o , w o j e n k o [laughter], Polish anthem J e s z c z e 82   It is about the book Ziemia i chmury: Z Szewachem Weissem rozmawia Ewa Szwedowska.

(Earth and Clouds: Shevah Weiss Talks to Ewa Szwedowska) (Ośrodek Pogranicze Sejny,  2002).

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P o l s k a n i e z g i n ę ł a , and so on. And meanwhile it so happened that people started coming to us and saying, “I remembered something,” that “you know, I remember someone from this Max’s family.” That they wanted to share some memories or knowledge, tell him more about his family and so on . . . What, what was previously hidden very deep and . . . You know, it actually took four days for people to release this good memory, which exists as if in an opposition to this bad, negative memory . . . And I tho-ught—that it was the sort of time when everyone was better than we normally are. But you know, people need . . . some kind of forum, I mean this possibility to release everything good they have for the others. Because there is something good in everyone. And sometimes it only depends on how you approach the person. You know, which memory you touch. If a dry Committee of Something or Other came, who would just point and say, “this is our Jewish property, give it back” and left the next day, then, you know, the attitude of the Sejny inhabitants would be totally different, you understand, than after meeting these people. This is so extremely important and it’s a task, I think, for us all, to create such spaces, such possibilities, such a forum, where this good memory could be released, because people have it inside. And these people have also a huge need for showing goodness to others, you know, these Jews, these neighbors, you know. Only the situation is constantly forcing them, or making them, you know how it is sometimes, with a couple in love. They can hate each other and sometimes they can’t tell, I mean there is no situation to say that they love each other, you know. They can drive each other to death, you know. So of course we in our social communication lack something like this, such tools. Especially here, in Eastern and Central Europe, after the communism, when they didn’t teach us to talk, you know, to relate to each other, everything was somehow . . . muted, ravaged, you know, pushed into a forbidden sphere and so on. So it’s also a kind of learning to talk with each other, being together. Here, in the borderlands, I found out that . . . that you know, of course there are many stereotypes, lots of hatred, all this you can find everywhere, anytime, as you wish. But at the same time in the same places, the same people, there is also tremendous will, this, you know, material to show goodness to others, to throw it at them, to release this burden that it couldn’t be done until now . . . But they don’t know how. Often there’s no place for it . . .

This extensive quote comes from a narrative interview with a representative of the Pogranicze—Sztuk, Kultur, Narodów Center

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(Borderland of Arts, Cultures, Nations) in Sejny. I have decided to present the entire story, because it shows a natural history of (re)creating the relations between the returnee and the local community. Significant is also the fact that it is not the returnee83 who narrates the story, but a representative of the local community.84 One should also stress the fact that the author not only tells about the events and their concomitant emotions, but also analyzes them. For it is an account of both a witnessparticipant and a creator of the event, which was inspired and animated by the Pogranicze Center. Therefore, one should look at the quoted fragment in these two planes. Let us begin with the account of the events that corresponds with Max Furmański’s standpoint. Although he promised to never return, two years ago he couldn’t resist the temptation to see the house where he grew up, and the synagogue where he studied and prayed. “I will step in just for 30 minutes,” he promised to his wife and son. “Then we will leave the place and find a happier one.” (Goldhammer 2002)85

A biographical compulsion to return proved stronger than the fear of confronting a traumatic past. The visit was supposed to be a very short one—just to see biographically important places: the house, the synagogue, the cemetery. A “chance” meeting with a group of teenagers having their rehearsal was a turning point as far as the events and their interpretation were concerned (Furmański extended his stay from “30 minutes” to two days, and only because the program of his Polish trip did not allow him to extend it any more). It is very significant and symbolic that the play rehearsed was The Dybbuk. This drama is considered, first, a typical example of Central and Eastern European Jewish culture. Second, it speaks of fundamental and universal values, like love and faithfulness. Third, it is about the power of the supernatural, escaping rational understanding. All 83   In March 2002, San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage published an article by M. Gold-hammer,

84  

85  

“Czasami można wrócić do domu” (Sometimes You Can Go Back Home). The author describes Max Furmański’s story and his first arrival in Sejny, as well as the preparations for the next journey to unveil a memorial stone placed in the Jewish cemetery. The article was based on an interview with Max Furmański and, aside from many facts mentioned in the quoted excerpt, contains some others as well; therefore, I am treating them as a supplement. One could assume that from the returnee’s point of view, the narrator is a re-presentative of the local community. Yet from the community’s perspective, the issue is far more complicated (compare Gurdała 2005). I shall return to this issue later on. From the text of an article published on Pogranicze Web site.

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these aspects can symbolize the image of contemporary relations between the returnees and the local milieu. The first two concern a discovery (incorporation) of the Jewish culture heritage by drawing upon its folklore and searching for its universal values. The third one depicts experiences and emotions of the returnees, which are oftentimes difficult to explain. There is also a fourth, profoundly symbolic, level of coincidence. In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is a “naked soul” of a dead person, who, unable to get peace, seeks for a living person with the intention of entering his or her body. A person whom the dybbuk enters would become possessed and speak in his voice. Only exorcisms could free him/her from this malignant influence. Thus, the already-mentioned magic of the rehearsal was not limited to irrational biographical reactions, yet connected to the return compulsion and experience. It also concerns a unique link with the past, with the Shoah victims—one’s own family and the entire nation. The survivor’s syndrome concerns an unwarranted sense of guilt about those who were not lucky enough to survive. Of course the fact that the Pogranicze team chose The Dybbuk, a play considered one of the best Jewish dramas, could be artistically motivated. However, the very choice was a secondary matter in the context of this specific narrated event, for it gained a new meaning due to this unique coincidence. This meaning became visible only ex post, as the consequence of interpretation of the entire sequence of events that can be described as Max Furmański’s return—one of the Sejny survivors of the Shoah returns to his birthplace, driven by a desire not fully explained. The moment of arrival is a purification—a catharsis—a kind of exorcism performed on the past. Thus, unforeseen circumstances turned Max Furmański’s first visit to Sejny into not only a stop in his journey, but also, above all, into a biographically experienced return. Yes, sometimes we get a chance to return home. Admittedly it will never be the same, but it’s enough to ease an aching heart and raise hope for the future. (ibid.)

One of the manifestations of this hope was his second stay, connected to the unveiling of the memorial stone in May 2002. In the quoted fragment of the interview, we find a description of this event, which in itself was a process of overcoming mutual fears and prejudices, gradual forming of interpersonal and social relations, and emerging of unexpected feelings. Consequently, mutual stereotypes were crushed, and fields of communication, formed by jointly experienced culture and its concomitant

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emotions, were (re)created. For every party present, these emotions were surprising, yet at the same time edifying. In the commentary concluding the quoted fragment, the author substantiates the need for creating such situations to activate positive emotions and good memory. This conclusion points to the second plane of the story, for the narrator was taking an active role in the process of creating relations between the local community and the returnee. The role of the Pogranicze Center is especially noteworthy. Its goal is a general86 creation of space for a multicultural dialogue, and a starting point for these activities was the (re)creation of memory of communities inhabiting Sejny before and now, including the Jews. The “chance” meeting of a troupe having a rehearsal of The Dybbuk, in fact, transcends simple coincidence, as it was no coincidence that the young people from the center took an interest in such matters. As I have already mentioned, from Max Furmański’s perspective, the group represented local community; but from the perspective of Sejny inhabitants, the Pogranicze activists—in spite of having lived there for the past dozen years—are hardly representative of the local population, although they are no longer Simmel’s strangers. Marginality of this situation (in Park’s and Stonequist’s understanding) determines the specific role of the center—that of both an outsider and an animator of actions that help overcome cultural barriers, often caused by bad memory.87 Fulfilling their role of a mediator between the cultures and societies, the Pogranicze members form the fundaments for the socalled liaison work (Hughes 1972). It is undertaken to build a sphere of effective communication of different cultures, environments, or language groups.88 The fragment quoted shows individual elements of this work, as far as practical actions and certain theory of social actions are concerned. If one were to ponder on the stages of this work in the context of a specific case (the described return of a former Jewish inhabitant of Sejny), one could say that the liaison work had begun long before Max Furmański’s 86   This activity goes beyond the cultural borderland of the Sejny region. 87   For the Sejny region, the most significant aspect are the Polish-Lithuanian relations.

88   Everett Hughes (1972), among others, exemplified liaison work by the case of Montreal, which

de jure remains in the French-speaking region of Canada, but de facto is a bilingual city. The author analyzes situations in which specific people—for instance, secretaries in large companies—knowing both languages take up the function of intermediaries between Englishand French-speaking employees and customers. This way, bilingualism becomes a part of social  organization.

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arrival. This statement refers to both the sphere of facts (the Pogranicze Center, in the first decade of its operation, has undertaken many actions to recreate the memory of the Sejny Jews),89 as well as to a retrospective assessment of the situation: Max Furmański’s arrival has made it possible to uncover the results of this work. In other words, if Max Furmański had not come to Sejny and had not met the Pogranicze activists, there would have been no proper context for the verification of actions to date and for their continuation in the given situation. The course of the second visit could be considered a veritable model of the liaison work. First, the Pogranicze activists designed the situation: they came up with the idea of funding a memorial stone and carried it out, invited guests, and agreed upon the program of the event (the unveiling was to take place only on the third day of the celebrations). What took place first were meetings with the guests (Israeli ambassador and Max Furmański) and occasional exhibitions. This design of the situation involved not only individual cultural events, but also meetings aimed at overcoming mutual fears and prejudices: “You know, Max Furmański and us, we would visit everyone.” This sentence contains the essence of the liaison work, which is about being a go-between for the two groups. The mediation involves both symbolic exchange of cultural meanings and a literal presence and movement between the two groups (Greenblat 1991). As a consequence, the Pogranicze activists became active mediators between the local community and the newcomer. Gaining this status was undoubtedly possible due to a twofold definition of their position: at the same time, being on the margins and in the center. Let us stress once more that the center, from the community’s point of view, is a marginal institution; but from the point of view of a Jewish cantor returning to Sejny after many years, it becomes a central point of reference for the return experience. The case of the Pogranicze Center is an example of an organized activity, which can be characterized as an intentional influence on social reality, supported by a predetermined theoretical project, hence my previous reference to the theory of social actions. Of course it is not about a theory in a formal sense, but about a conscious project, resulting not so much from institutional requirements as from an active creative vision. In Znaniecki’s language, the Pogranicze activists could be considered “men 89   For instance, creating a klezmer band, incorporating the history of the Sejny Jews into the

social memory of Kroniki Sejneńskie (The Sejny Chronicles), publications, art exhibitions, etc.

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of letters.” Their goal is processing cultural problems of the borderlands to create a space for dialogue and creative activity. Simultaneously, it should involve a wide participation and be a “new form of active culture, based on co-creating something with the people and with the place we are in.” The described case of a positive (re)creation of relations illustrates what such a process can look like. As I have shown, its most fundamental element was the liaison work of the Pogranicze members. Its dynamics and drama also suggest that one of its key elements is meeting and accompanying the returnee, irrespective of social context. What I mean to say is that the case of Pogranicze stands out for their liaison work, supported by an institutional project. One can, however, point to other examples, when this work is undertaken90 as a result of intuition, rather than intention. The function of intermediaries can be served by the so-called ordinary people. Let us refer to the narration of Halina Aszkenazy-Engelhard: Some of the barracks were open. I entered. I was overpowered by the smell of decay, must and carrion, which transformed into the smell of death. There was something terrifying about it. (. . .) I was standing there motionless and dazed. I felt faint and dizzy. “It’s your first time here,” I heard a woman’s voice. Next to me there were two ladies and a young man. “It’s terrible,” said one of them, put an arm around my waist and accompanied me to the door. I was breathing in fresh air and slowly regaining my senses. “I’ve been here many times,” said the elder of the ladies. “Every time we have guests from the USA or Canada I show them this camp. I want them to know what cruelties and bestiality took place in here. This is my cousin from America, and this is my son. He drives us here.” After a moment she asked, “You’re a tourist, aren’t you?” “Yes,” I replied. “I’m from Israel.” “Now I understand. During the occupation I was a young girl, I had Jewish girlfriends and Jewish neighbors. And suddenly all of them disappeared. People were whispering among themselves that they were being finished off. I live nearby and I saw them being taken. I could smell the smoke, emanating from tall chimneys. Look, there,” she pointed to a tall chimney, maybe a kilometer or two from there, “that’s where the Jews were being burnt. When Russians entered and Germans fled, I went to this camp. I wanted to see what had been happening in here. The sight was so appalling that 90   An example of the liaison work is, among others, the activity of Marek Bem, the manager of

the Łęczyńsko-Włodawskie Lake District Museum in Włodawa (Bieniecki 2005), or of Zbigniew Romaniuk in Brańsk, described by Eva Hoffman (1998).

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I was completely stunned. Ever since then I bring people here, show them these atrocities.” We were walking a road. After a short silence, my new friend explained: “At the end of this road there are the gas chambers, and next to them—the crematoria.” These simple, direct words were said in a warm voice, slightly trembling with emotion. Her subtle face was full of compassion and radiated nobility and straightforwardness. There was something extremely pleasant and extraordinary about her. I was surprised by her confession, so direct, her desire to commemorate what was taking place in here. Her modest efforts to pass the truth about the Majdanek camp to her guests, in hope that they will pass it on. Looking at this beautiful figure against this cruel scenery, I was touched. We shook hands goodbye. (2004, 10, 12)

This event (as in the case of Max Furmański and many others) can be described as a meeting in Martin Buber’s understanding of the word (1992). It happens to two people whose lives and experiences cross. This crossing can take place only during the meeting and has no justification outside of it. A true meeting is coincidental (unplanned) and unpredictable in its drama; therefore, it requires an authentic focus on the other person. In this context, the time aspect is a secondary one; the key element is the way it is experienced and the other human being involved. The fragment I quoted contains all three elements. According to Buber, the motif of a road is a metaphor describing linearity and processuality of life experiences. “If we go on our way and meet a man who has advanced towards us and has also gone on his way, we know only our part of the way, not his—his we experience only in the meeting” (2008, 62). Apart from this metaphor, the story contains a literal picture of a road the narrator is walking with an unknown older woman, which becomes an act of solidarity in suffering with the victims, as well as the author, an inheritor of their trauma. The woman accompanies her in the mourning ritual. An episodic nature of the meeting does not prevent them from bonding. That is why the author calls the elderly lady her “new friend” and seals this relationship with a shake of her hand. Thus, this short interaction transforms into a meeting, experienced during a difficult moment of returning to the past. The biographical situation of the returnees is well in line with the road metaphor. The itinerary usually involves a family house and graveyards, sites of the loved ones’ suffering and death. All these create space for authentic meetings or quasi-meetings, dominated by predetermined patterns of thought. These can be stereotypes and prejudices, for instance,

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when a local community assumes that the visiting Jews will demand that their possessions be returned or when the Jews assume that the community will be hostile toward them. As the above examples illustrate, social rules conducive to effective communication, where the meeting can take place, are impossible to define. In the case of the elderly woman, it is a result of her individual biographical intention, related to an authentic sensitivity to evil. In the case of the Sejny inhabitants, it is a laborious process of work on memory and emotions, presumably difficult to implement without prior preparation of the symbolic space.

CHAPTER IV

Jewish Memory

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Oblivion is an exile, memory—a path to salvation. Baal Shem Tov

Whereas the previous chapter served to open the perspective of Polish memory, in this one, I am taking up the issue of the Jewish one. As in earlier chapters, I do not intend to carry out a systematic lecture but point to the most fundamental issues from the point of view of the second part of this book, where I am analyzing the return to the birthplace in biographical texts. Since the material I gathered comes from Israel, the main point of my analysis is Israeli memory. I would like to point to those processes that in their collective and individual aspects alike played a part in my interviewees’ lives. Thus, as if retracing the stages of their generational experiences, I begin with a characterization of the social situation in Poland immediately after the war, especially the circumstances that led to their mass emigration. Next, I present main frames of Israeli collective memory, shaped mainly by the Zionist ideology, the Shoah experience, and the creation of the state of Israel. In light of these processes, I also focus on the characteristics of American Jews’ memory, complementing, so to speak, the image of contemporary Jewish memory.

1.  Postwar Return1 It is difficult to understand what it means for an entire nation and its individual members, when all the loved ones, the whole community, the entire world created by them—perish, when in one of the most populated, thriving centers of life, which our country used to be for the Jews, the only thing to be found are nowadays ruins and mass graves. Alina Cała, Helena Datner-Śpiewak

From a Jewish population of over 3 million in Poland, about 10 percent survived the Shoah. Before the war, in some cities Jews comprised up to 40, sometimes even 50 percent, of the inhabitants. After the war, it was only a few survivors who returned to their hometowns. In the case of large cities like Łódź, Warsaw, and Kraków, those who returned were the former inhabitants and repatriates from the USSR, who, however, settled mainly in the Western territories—over a half of the Jewish population decided to live there. It was also where, according to Ewa Koźmińska-Frejlak (1998, 2; here 2003), attempts were made to recreate former Jewish enclaves to their fuller extent. It was as early as then that the so-called ziomkostwa started to form— communities of people united according to their prewar place of abode (Hurwic-Nowakowska 1996, 28–29).2 Jews were registering themselves with committees, which were a basic form of organizing the postwar life. The committees operated in places where Jewish population existed. They were subject to the Central Committee of Polish Jews (CKŻP), representing Jewish society to the authorities in Poland and abroad (Szaynok 2001, 258). 1 

In this chapter, I am using the word “return” in its wider sense. What I mean here is an attempt at returning to previous life, free from the dangers of the war, as well as an attempt— undertaken by at least a part of the Jewish society—to return to the place designated for them by their culture, religion, and tradition, and, in this light, continuing basic identity references; finally, I refer to individual returns to prewar places of abode. 2   From Irena Hurwic-Nowakowska’s research (1996), it appears that ziomkostwa emerged right after the war, uniting Jews from the same towns and cities, where local bonds were especially strong. After the wave of emigration, these ziomkostwa “moved” together with the Jews leaving Poland.

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According to the CKŻP data, in 1946, right after the repatriates’ return from the USSR, there were about 240 thousand Jews in Poland (Aleksiun 2003, 249). These postwar statistics can be considered incomplete, as people unregistered with Jewish organizations were not taken into account. Therefore, in Stanisław Krajewski’s opinion (2003, 292), the number 240 thousand should be extended by the marginal Jews;3 the author estimates it at about 300 thousand. The largest centers of the Jewish population started to witness a rebirth of social life. In the years 1944–1949, most political, social, religious, and cultural institutions were rebuilt (Aleksiun 2001, 232). Jewish schools, press, publishing houses, and artisan cooperatives came to life (Tych 1999, 111; see Redlich 2010). This activity concerned people who were planning to stay in Poland, as well as the ever-growing group favoring the Zionist ideology. Most Zionist parties and youth associations resumed their activities. There were Hebrew schools, kibbutzim, Zionist children’s homes, and the emigration bureau, who helped Jews immigrating to Palestine (Aleksiun 2001, 231). The activity of a population of over two hundred thousand survivors cannot be compared to the culturally and socially diversified life of the prewar population, amounting to 3 million. However, the dynamics and diversity of the postwar activity merits our attention. One should thus point to the causes explaining why the attempts to recreate the vestiges of the Jewish world during the first five postwar years were unsuccessful.4 The social and political developments of postwar Poland were consolidating pro-emigration and pro-assimilation tendencies. Neither favored a tendency of maintaining the cultural and social otherness of the 3 

According to Stanisław Krajewski, marginal Jews are (1) assimilated Jews who have no connection to Jewish life, (2) Jews hiding their identity, and (3) communists. Nowadays, in Krajewski’s opinion, in Poland, there are more marginal Jews than there are official members of Jewish organizations (2003, 292)—that is, Jews openly admitting to their identity. The author concludes this commentary with a statement that it is extremely difficult to estimate the number of people with Jewish origins, be it after the war or today. 4   Hurwic-Nowakowska (1996, XI), for instance, reminisces: “Gradually even these vestigial Jewish centers which I was researching during the end of the forties were disappearing. In 1947 Dzierżoniów (. . .) smacked of the atmosphere for which Antoni Słonimski is mourning in Elegia miasteczek żydowskich (An Elegy for Jewish Towns) (. . .). Dzierżoniów was a manifestation of a certain conscious tendency for local unification. Nowadays there are about a dozen Jews” (from a preface, which Hurwic-Nowakowska wrote in 1996, commenting that her research was conducted between 1947 and 1949).

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Jewish world, shtetlach, separate districts, etc. Those who did not want to emigrate were “sentenced”5 to assimilation, especially after the year 1949, when authorities withdrew from the policy of accepting an unlimited development of Jewish institutions and organizations. They were disbanded (for example, political parties) or appropriated by the state and made public (for instance, schools, sanatoria, hospitals, etc.) (Cała and Datner-Śpiewak 1997, 173–176). Emigration tendencies were galvanized, mostly, by changes in the social framework of the Jewish community’s operation: its biological substance was shaken, and the structural changes in Poland deprived Jews of their previous position in the social and economic systems.6 As anti-Semitism in Polish society started to increase, the state of Israel came to life. The enumerated macrosocial factors were in line with certain biographical circumstances. In the individual dimension, they concerned individual and therefore unrepeatable experiences. However, their major, most significant characteristic was their collective dimension. The universality of these experiences creates a sense of unique community of fate, whose point of departure was the identity of the survivors. Those were the people who either came out of hiding and after many years of illegal existence could “come out” as Jews, or people who had suffered tremendously in ghettos or concentration camps, or repatriates from the Soviet Union. (. . .) These people were not returning to their homes or families, because those ceased to exist. It was a group which survived a cataclysm. Probably never before have they been so united by virtue of their origin, which was further enhanced by the sense of danger, prevalent in this period. People in many respects extremely different, but of Jewish origins, were united by common fate. (Hurwic-Nowakowska 1996, 46) 5 

I am using the term “sentenced” in quotation marks, because a significant number of people willing to remain in Poland were aspiring to a full assimilation or had already assimilated.  I have used this term to emphasize the fact that in postwar Poland, there was actually no social and political approval for maintaining the identity and otherness of Jewish society. 6   Although the system transformation abolished the interwar restrictions on Jews as civil servants, the socialist economy deprived most Jews of their former jobs in trade and services. The problem of unemployment arose due to their inability to take up former jobs and lack of qualifications for others (Cała and Datner-Śpiewak 1997, 171–172). The strongest proemigration tendencies initially surfaced within those social layers that had no place in the new political and economic system—that is, traders and industrialists (Hurwic-Nowakowska 1996, 56).

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Therefore, the awareness of the collective dimension of their own experiences became an important biographical component in relation not only to the time of the Shoah, but also to the postwar period. Two of these experiences merit special attention: postwar returns to places of abode and strategies of planning one’s postwar life. The act of return to one’s prewar place of abode, and usually also birth, should be placed in two frames of reference: First, in the context of their own society and the tragedy of the Shoah connected to it. Second, in relation to the postwar society, which after the war consisted entirely of Poles. These frames determine a common ground—that is, contacts of the survivors with the local community. However, they also contain a separate dimension, resulting from different “communities of memory” of the two groups, determining a specific biographical experience and its interpretation. Let us begin with the significance of the return in the context of Jewish war fate. Traumatic experiences of the war made one focus on his/her own fate: survival was then the main goal. Often the fate of the loved ones remained unknown, giving hope that after the war scattered families would be reunited. Yet the return put an end to these hopes and became a time of visceral confrontation with the tragic magnitude of the Shoah. Deserted villages and towns, as well as the lack of family and neighbors confirmed the fact of total annihilation of the Jewish community—a fact that was not that clear during the war. One of Bożena Szaynok’s interlocutors (2003, 40) described this experience thus: After the war I came to Kraków, where part of my family had lived. I met those who survived the Shoah. It wasn’t until I saw those few, who could be gathered in one room, that I realized what be came of Polish Jewry because of the war.

Realizing the magnitude of the Shoah was connected to two experiences in the survivors’ biography: survivorship syndrome and grief for the loved ones. The survivorship syndrome was contained in a dramatic question: “Why was I saved?” As Bruno Bettelheim (1979, 25–28), a survivor himself, shows, commenting on the problem simultaneously from a witness’s and professional’s perspective. This question implies two feelings: guilt and unique obligation originating from the fact of finding oneself among the select few saved. Both feelings are as strong as they are irrational. The sense of guilt comes from the conviction that I have survived at the expense of

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the victims,7 which is a certainty that I might as well have been in their position. A sense of special obligation and responsibility stems from the fact that survival is connected to upsetting a popular understanding of the right to live, which should guarantee relative peace and security, not create conditions conducive to organized murder. Consequently, the survivors— taking this image of social relations for a rule—began to perceive their fate as an exception or even a miracle, which made them feel responsible. The irrationality of these convictions lies also in their mutual contradiction, which makes it difficult to cope with. It requires a deep, oftentimes yearslong biographical work. The moment of return also opened up a wound created by the loved ones’ death, loss, and suffering, which were held back during the war. At the same time, no biographical work was being undertaken, which usually resulted in an escape from actual mourning. After the war, silence “ensued.” The trauma of the Holocaust displays all the characteristics of a psychological trauma. There was an obsession of forgetting. It is not that the victims really wanted to forget the Holocaust; it would have been impossible. Everyone had their own story, everyone was telling it, and these were the stories of those who survived. Those who did not—that is a majority— had no story. (. . .) What people were saying about them was “They didn’t come back.” They did not say: my father, my brother, etc. was murdered, but: he was deported to Auschwitz and did not come back. The euphemism made the process of mourning impossible, and without this process those who survived could not, in fact, return to life. (. . .) The dead were not really dead, they were ghosts, without a headstone and a date of death, so you could still wait for them, for years. Memory was fading, you were living a different life, but you never lived to the full. (Heller 2001, 25)8 7

  Of course it is not about morally reprehensible acts, like food theft or sending others to their death. 8   Primo Levi (1988, 20–21) described an extreme version of such an attitude as consolatory “truth,” which deforms reality from the very beginning. He writes about Alberto, his friend from the concentration camp who “vanished during the evacuation march from the camp in January 1945. Strangely, without knowing Alberto’s behavior, his relatives who had remained hidden in Italy, escaping capture, also behaved in the same way, rejecting an unendurable truth, constructing a different one for themselves. As soon as I was repatriated, I considered it my duty to go immediately to Alberto’s home town to tell his mother and his brother what I knew. I was welcomed with courteous affection, but as soon as I began my story the mother begged me to stop; she already knew everything, at least as far as Alberto was concerned, and

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Agnes Heller’s diagnosis is confirmed by the reports of other survivors: Even when we were certain of the fate of our loved ones, as in the case of those murdered at Ponar, the setting evoked such horror that it offered no place to commune with the dead or search for solace. As there were no funerals and no rituals that could put these things in place, our mourning had to go on for years. (Bak 2002, 374).

In the case of the survivors, the process of building memory about traumatic experiences, especially including the memory of those who died, was connected to the “lack of grave syndrome.” Therefore, the first stage, so to speak, of creating the Shoah memory was building inner places (spaces) for the memory: imagined graves, sites of internment. It was only after creating such symbolic lieux de mémoire that the survivors could take up the effort of acting in physical space—erecting memorials, searching for graves, etc. (Young 1993, 7). In many cases, it was only the return, after several decades, which made it possible to continue mourning. The postwar return was taking place in circumstances that made it, in fact, impossible to successfully cope with the future. First, the awareness of the loss was also related to the collective dimension of the biography— the returnees were finding out that their loved ones were not the only ones dead, but “simply” everyone else was. Second, this very fact was causing difficulties with taking up work on one’s own biographical experiences. Perhaps it could have happened had it been possible to really return to one’s local communities. I used the word “really” to emphasize that I do not only mean spatial and chronological aspects of these actions—that is, coming to the place where one used to live before the war. What is more important in this context is the social significance of this act; and in this sense, it is difficult to consider this return “real”—as although in a biographical aspect there was no point in my repeating the usual horror stories to her. She knew that her son, he alone, had been able to slip away from the column without being shot at by the SS, he had hidden in the forest and was safe in Russian hands; he had not yet been able to send any word, but he would do so soon, she was certain of it; and now, would I please change the subject, and tell her now how I myself had survived. A year letter I was by chance passing through that same town, and I again visited the family. The truth was slightly changed: Alberto was in a Soviet clinic, he was fine, but he had lost his memory, he no longer even remembered his name; he was improving though and would soon return—she had this from reliable source. Alberto never returned. More than forty years have passed; I did not have the courage to show up again to counter pose my painful truth to consolatory ‘truth’ that, one helping the other, Alberto’s relatives had fashioned for themselves.”

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the Jews were Schütz’s “homecomers,” in the social sense they were, as a matter of fact, deprived of the homecomers’ identity. Rather, they became the strangers. The identity of the stranger and homecomer is different. The stranger approaches a group that was never his; the homecomer—a world he used to know. The stranger cannot refer to anything. Therefore, for the group, he is a man with no history. He can share their present, their future, but not their past (Schütz 1976, 106), as he does not take part in the social memory of the group. Thus, the stranger, having some past in biographical sense, does not have it in the sense of the social history of the group he is approaching. The homecomer only has to reach to his memories, although this can be a source of frustration or even suffering when the image of the group retained in memory does not correspond to reality. The problem of returning survivors was not the fact that their group of reference has changed, but that it no longer existed. They were thus deprived of the possibility to recreate the “we relation,” which always constitutes an attribute of a given group in a given time and space. What has thus disappeared is the sense of the relation’s intimacy, which Alfred Schütz compares to Cooley’s primary group, where the quality of the relation comes from a strong emotional attachment (ibid., 109). Not finding a support in the community, the homecomers, like the strangers, were in a sense deprived of their own history—which was the Shoah experience. Poles usually showed them no sympathy, no solidarity in their suffering. A separation of the Jewish war fate extended to a separation of the postwar fate, as Jewish experience of the occupation was different from the Polish one. Therefore, the fact that other people’s lives usually, to some extent, become a part of our own biography—an element of our personal history—in this case lost its significance when recreating the relations with the local community, as it already was an entirely different community, without those who had their share in the homecomer’s biography. Therefore, the lack of the “memory community” labeled the surviving Jews as the strangers, not the homecomers. They were feeling alienated in their own hometowns, where before the war the Jewish community often formed a majority of population. They were coming to deserted houses, burnt synagogues, or devastated or intentionally destroyed cemeteries, even sometimes leveled to the ground by the Nazis. They were met with indifference and often even hostility from some parts of the local Polish population. The surviving homecomers were usually coming to plundered houses, but more often than not, ones claimed by new inhabitants—their Polish

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neighbors or immigrants. As I have already demonstrated, this fact was one of the reasons for the dislike of the returnees. This disapproving attitude of the local community took different forms: from mistrust and “amazement” that the survivors did not die (“Oh, you’re alive?! You were saved?!—and you had to explain the fact that you are alive!” [Birenbaum 1991, 25]), to refusing to give back appropriated property, to open aggression and the murder of Jews who were considered rivals in the struggle for material goods.9 An example here is the report presented by a CKŻP representative from an inspection conducted in April 1945 in the Rzeszów and Tarnów voivodeships, describing, among others, the following case: Fajgenbaum Cham, 52 years old, wife and five children aged 7–18. Has some 6 acres of inherited land in the village of Swoszowa. Additionally, he dealt in cattle trade. Since 1943 was hiding in the woods with his entire family. At the end of March this year, the Fajgenbaum family reappeared in their home village Swoszowa, in the Jasło district, where a farmer who had claimed their property resolutely refused to let them in his patrimony. Weakened and devastated after his stay in the woods and the experiences of occupation, having no roof over his head nor food, Fajgenbaum turned to the local militia station, but to no avail. The despairing Fajgenbaum turned then to a commanding officer of the Red Army unit stationed in this village, who forced the farmer to leave Fajgenbaum’s farm. After many trials and tribulations Fajgenbaum managed to cultivate and sow most part of the field.10

Next, we find out that Fajgenbaum’s house was shot at and that one of his daughters was injured. Although he reported this incident, the militia did not intervene. The family, at their own request and with the help of a Jewish committee in Tarnów, was moved to this town. This case is one of many incidents characteristic of the homecomers’ situation and the attitude presented by the community and a lack of support on the part of local authorities. The Jews, for fear of their safety, oftentimes did not make any attempts to reclaim their possessions or resigned themselves to never returning to their hometowns and villages at all. 9 

For instance, in Kielce, in July 1945, thirteen Jews were killed; in ten cases, the crime motive was unwillingness to give back property left by the victims (Szaynok 2003). 10   The report can be found in the Archive of Jewish Historical Institute office, no. 138, after Cała and Datner-Śpiewak 1997, 25–26.

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It is worth noting that the quoted report is not a dry relation of the facts. The author emphasized Fajgenbaum’s legal (inherited land) and moral (patrimony) rights to demand a return of the property, describing his struggle to resume a normal life (trials and tribulations), and, above all, a lack of elementary sensitivity and sympathy offered to the suffering farmer by the local authorities (despite his being weakened and devastated after his stay in the woods and the experiences of occupation, having no roof over his head). The description contains, thus, a certain interpretation.11 Hundreds of such incidents12 not only resulted in a tragic fate of individual people, but also created a collective image of Polish attitude toward the Jews. More often than not, this image along with the trauma of war experiences was the only baggage brought from Poland, as such returns resulted in ever-stronger emigration tendencies. One of my interviewees said the following: My daddy went to Chorzów and he found nothing at all there, they didn’t let him into the apartment, his shop was taken and it turned out that our whole huge family from both sides, my mother’s and my father’s, was murdered, they were all murdered, no one survived in Poland and we have lost all we had all our fortune there was no one to talk to and in Poland there were also Jewish pogroms in 1946, in 1945/46, very difficult, I was a bigger girl back then, but it is difficult to describe Poland in 1945, for us it was a damned country, it was a country where we found death only nothing more and all those people who were there believed, we started to think how to leave Poland, what to do to lea . . . to depart from Poland. (W 18)

In a very condensed form, the narrator describes the tragedy of that time. It is especially evident in light of the rest of her narrative, in which she remembers her happy childhood—a large family (“we always went on holidays with the whole huge family where there were 25 of us”), with 11   I am presenting the perspective of the victims—that is, the disadvantaged. One could, however,

interpret this incident from the perspective of Polish society. The report quoted contains no information about it. One could presume—based on the aforementioned circumstances of the communist-Jew stereotype creation—that what was significant at that time was Fajgenbaum’s appeal to the Red Army soldiers when faced with no reaction of the local authorities. This could be considered cooperation with the communists. 12   A commentary on this problem and source texts can be found, among others, in the book Dzieje Żydów w Polsce 1944–1968 (The History of Jews in Poland 1944–1968), edited by A. Cała and H. Datner-Śpiewak, ŻIH, Warsaw, 1997.

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strong emotional bonds. She also talks about a sense of prewar stability, resulting from her father’s industriousness and resourcefulness. All this came to naught. Prewar components of their life ceased to exist: There were no people, home, or property. A memory of a happy life was overshadowed by the tragedy of the Shoah. Home became a “damned country.” Due to these circumstances, a departure was the only solution. These experiences were a contradiction to a “normal” course of events, in which a return home, especially from a child’s perspective, should be a positive experience. “A sight of a familiar place is its first harbinger, a sign that we have found ourselves in a familiar sphere, complemented by home, radiating from the center” (Czermińska 2000, 308). Thus, the act of the return to one’s place of abode often became a turning point in the biography to date. It precipitated a decision of emigrating from Poland, especially to Palestine and later Israel. It was one of two strategies determining the project of postwar biography. It was connected to the Zionist ideology, strengthened by the experiences of the war. Therefore, after the war, when giving reasons for emigration, especially initially, what people were emphasizing was not so much the fear of antiSemitism as deeper ideological and psychological reasons. Leaving the place of the Shoah was linked to a desire to get away from traumatic memories. Spatial isolation was supposed to be one of the remedies allowing them to return to a normal life. Such motifs can be found in the memorandum of CKŻP for the British-American Committee, quoted by Szaynok (2003, 41). Immediately after the war, next to the Zionist ideology, the experience of the Shoah, along with its consequences, became the main reason for emigration. It concerned especially young people—usually orphaned. This moment in her biography is described very suggestively by Halina Birenbaum (1991, 21). The experiences of a concentration camp made it very difficult for a teenage girl to adjust to the postwar reality, relate to her peers, and return to school and normal life. What saved me from these numerous trials and conflicts at home was the idea of emigrating to Palestine. (. . .) I welcomed this idea gladly. I was intrigued by the prospect of meeting new people, living in a community with other young people, who managed to escape the Shoah and reaching a faraway, unknown country. I was afraid of all this, but curiosity and a hankering after adventure got the better of me.

Another relation is a memory of a then-teenage boy:

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It was at the point of leaving forever the country of my nationality (for what it was worth) and my language. But it did not seem to matter. I felt indifference, perhaps a sense of liberation. What was important to me is that we were to travel in a wagon meant for humans, and not in a cattle car. I shall forever remember the pleasure of touching the rounded wooden seats, designed for real travelers, and looking at the glassy surface of a window through which I could see the station’s clock. (Bak 2002, 405)

Both fragments focus mainly on an individual interpretation of biographical experiences. Especially Samuel Bak is carefully reconstructing the moment of departure, invoking his feelings and impressions. On the other hand, the collective aspect is also very important in both cases. Birenbaum refers to a community of experiences and a “memory community” of people belonging to the same community of fate. Bak emphasizes the feeling of freedom, symbolized by means of transportation, which restores dignity—cattle carriages are changed into carriages for people. A young boy focusing on this detail symbolizes a metamorphosis of fate. The departure becomes a turning point not only as far as individual biographical choices are concerned, but also collective notions. Soon, because of aggression, murders, and pogroms, the antiSemitic motif came to the forefront. “Jews who survived the Shoah in the country had 5 years worth of constant threat and fear. Those returning from the USSR were carrying a fund of their own experiences. Their emotional immunity was minimal. Moreover, they were finding it difficult to understand that the Germans were gone, yet the Jews were still in danger. In these circumstances each act of violence caused strong reactions” (Kersten 1992, 109–110). Irena Hurwic-Nowakowska (1996, 56–57) called this reaction an “occupation complex” manifesting itself within a sense of “danger on the Polish ground.” In 1950, the author wrote: “I know people who came back to Poland after the war and became so paranoid that they were afraid to walk a street in big, quiet cities.” Therefore, an irrational, but in many cases entirely founded fear of life and the future of self and loved ones induced a departure even for those who probably had had no intention of emigrating before. The dynamics of emigration clearly illustrates this. Right after the war, until June 1945, over fifty thousand Jews left Poland; after the Kielce pogrom, over seventy thousand (June–December 1946); and after the proclamation of Israel, another twenty-eight thousand. In some towns, 30 percent of the population left (Szaynok 2003). According to other publications, in the years 1945–1947, 140 thousand Jews left Poland

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illegally, thanks to the ziomkostwa activity, and 25 to 50 thousand due to individual efforts (Aleksiun 2003, 256). Another biographical project was staying in Poland. This decision was taken for entirely different reasons. On one hand, Orthodox circles were of the opinion that the tradition and history of Polish Jews should be continued. On the other, the new political system was considered a chance for improving the social standing of the Jews in comparison with their position during the Second Republic. Communist ideology, which part of the Jews identified themselves with, was not an insignificant factor. In between these two perspectives was the ideology of the Bund relating a decision about staying in Poland to the conviction that in Polish society, there is a place for Jewish culture and community, whose identity was no longer supposed to rely on the orthodox aspect. According to the emigration data, faith in this strategy was gradually diminishing—at first due to the acts of anti-Semitism and a growing sense of threat, then because of an ever-less-favorable stance of the authorities. As a consequence, in the years 1945–1950, at least two-thirds of the Jews emigrated from Poland (Cała and Datner-Śpiewak 1997, 167); and after the year 1957, about 25 to 30 thousand remained (Kersten 1992, 160). As I have already mentioned, the final act of “solving” “the problem” of Jewish presence in Polish society occurred in 1968 (that is also when any remaining Jewish schools with the Yiddish language disappeared). However, an actual collapse of social life and culture of the Polish Jews who had survived the Shoah took place in the first postwar decade.

2.  Israeli Memory “Everything was supposed to be new and different than in Europe?” “No, everything was supposed to be old and different. We are going two thousand years back. We are renewing our life, because we are going back to our older, true life, our roots. Of course it’s historically impossible, but that was the ideology.” Shevah Weiss, interviewed by Joanna Szwedowska

I was glad when they said to me Let us go to the house of the Lord Our feet have been standing within your gates, O Jerusalem! Psalm 122

As Florian Znaniecki (1952) pointed out, a work on national consciousness should be connected to a process of building knowledge of and identification with national culture. The way Israel was coming to life is an example of a situation when this work had to be especially intensive, as it lasted not for centuries, but only fifty years.13 Therefore, the case of Israel is extremely interesting for a sociologist, a political scientist, or a historian of ideas. The process of this country’s creation allows one to closely examine the phenomena concurrent with the creation of national and state identity. Whereas in other cases these developments take place over a long time, here they manifest themselves in a consolidated form, and as a result one can clearly see the strategies (described, for example, by Znaniecki) of a spreading national consciousness and solidarity. On the other hand, the Israel casus can be in a sense problematic for social scientists, who are usually of the opinion that transformation extended in 13   Almost the same amount of time had passed since the first congress in Basle in 1897, when the

founders of the Zionist movement called to life the Zionist Organization and set forth a pro-  gram of creating a “Jewish national home” in Palestine. Theodor Herzl wrote down at that time: “In Basle I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. If not in 5 years, certainly in 50, [my emphasis—KK] everyone will know it” (after Bensimon and Errera 2000, 27–28).

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time—and not quick, radical actions—are more conducive to the stability and successfulness of state organisms.14 In the case of Israel, the radicalness and the speed of the changes concerned all aspects of social life, including those which are usually subject to the rules of evolution, not revolution, such as the language. The “awkwardness” of the Israel issue also concerns the question of defining the processes leading to the creation of the state itself. Political actions undertaken by the Zionists were intended to create a new state, so they were occurring according to the political concept of a nation. Simultaneously, cultural and ethnic factors played a crucial role when constituting the foundations of the newly created state. Therefore, I sometimes use the terms “state” and “nation” interchangeably, with complete awareness of this terminological inconsequence.15 I do not intend to describe the history of the Jewish state founding in great detail, yet these processes deserve some attention, since my interviewees, arriving after the war in Palestine (at first) and Israel (later), were witnesses and at the same time actors taking part in the drama of creating a new state. They became subjects and objects of the ideology supporting this process. This fact had a tremendous significance for biographical work on war experiences, on the process of shaping postwar identity (including the perception of one’s own roots), and on relating to the history of the Diaspora and one’s personal involvement in it. The Zionist ideology, which came to life in the late nineteenth century, advocated the establishment of a Jewish state. Although neither its founder, Theodor Herzl, nor other protagonists placed the idea of a Jewish state in the mythical Eretz Israel, Jewish masses imagined no other place besides this time-honored one (Bensimon and Errera 2000, 24–27). These eternal desires, impelled by the Zionist ideology, not only prompted political actions (leading to an official recognition of the Jewish nation’s return to Eretz Israel),16 but also initiated the process of immigration from the Diaspora to Palestine. “Practical” Zionists took up the task of slowly infiltrating the country by means of creating economic, social, 14   Writing about stability, I mean an efficiently functioning state, not a geopolitical stability,

which is most problematic in the case of Israel.

15   For example, for Znaniecki (whose remarks on the national awareness creation are an important

point of reference for me), nation and state are two separate types of organizations.

16   Subsequent stages of these attempts are creating a “Jewish Homeland” in Palestine in 1919,

the mandate over the lands of Palestine granted to the British government by the League of Nations, United Nations proclaiming the state of Israel in 1947 (Bensimon and Errera 2000, 377).

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administrative, and cultural structures laying the ground for the creation of the state of Israel. In spite of their differences, the propagators of these two concepts had the same goal—Jewish renewal in the land of their forefathers (Bensimon and Errera 2000, 28). Subsequent waves of immigration were a result of practical Zionism. The concept of fighting for a new country was anchored in the myth of the golden age of Hebrew culture ruling supreme in Palestine; therefore, an emphasis was put not so much on the fact of creation as on the recreation of a centuries-long national identity, based on native Hebrew culture (Zerubavel 1994, 106). This required strong ideological foundations. Even the very phrase “immigration to Eretz Israel” is very symptomatic here. The arrival is called aliyah, which in Hebrew means “ascent.” The immigrants, in turn, are olim, or “ascenders.” The opposite process—leaving Israel—is yerida, or “descent.” Until today, according to the meaning of these words, emigration from Israel has negative connotations, whereas leaving the Diaspora and choosing the land of the forefathers is deemed an exemplary behavior—a fulfillment of one’s duty. Jewish immigration to Israel is still one of the basic socially, politically, and economically defined processes in the state’s raison d’ȇtre. This notion is expressed also in a different term describing the process of immigration, kibbutz galuyot, meaning an ingathering, a unification of the Diaspora. This term, combining two opposites—“ingathering,” “community” (kibbutz), and “exile,” “dispersion” (galuyot)—is a symbolic bridge over this contradiction. As a result, what occurs is a union of Jews from different places of the Diaspora in “one large national Jewish home” (Rapaport and Lomsky-Feder 2001). Since its very beginnings, the immigration process had a specific dynamics, determined by various circumstances. The most general division one could make here is separating two periods of aliyah: immigration to Yishuv (that is, Palestine before the establishment of the state of Israel [1882–1948]), and immigration after the year 1948. Some attention is due to the first period, because it was then that the ideological and economy foundations of the future state were shaping. Subsequent waves of immigration are presented in table 1. The demographic structure of the individual groups of immigrants and their place of origin depended on specific political and social circumstances of a given period.17 The first wave of immigration started before the consolidation of political Zionism. 17   For example, the fifth wave of immigration comprised German Jews (due to the rise of Nazism).

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Ta b l e 1.

Immigration to Eretz Israel (1882–1948) Source: Bensimon and Errera 2000, 33

Period

Wave of immigration

Number

Main lands of origin

Main characteristics

Ottoman rule

1882–1903

First   aliyah

20,000– 30,000

Tsarist   Russia

Members   of the Hovevei Zion   and Biluim

1904–1914

Second   aliyah

35,000– 40,000

Tsarist   Russia

Socialist   workers—pioneers

British mandate

1919–1923

Third   aliyah

35,000

USSR,   Poland,   Baltic countries

Socialist   workers—pioneers

1924–1931

Fourth   aliyah

82,000

USSR, Poland, the Balkans, Middle East

Middle classes

1932–1938

Fifth   aliyah

217,000

Poland,   Germany

Technical   and academic   personnel

1939–1948

Sixth   aliyah

153,000

Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans

The survivors   from the Nazi Shoah;   mostly illegal   immigration

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Starting with the second aliyah, the newcomers—pioneers—were becoming better and better ideologically equipped for establishing their own country. This ideology involved two parallel processes: first, an engineered economic “conquest” of the Palestinian land; second, work on the future national identity. They were directed by, as Znaniecki would say, “men of letters.” Chief characters among them were David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. They advocated an ideal of “healing physical labor,” concurrent with all waves of aliyah, which was supposed to be a consolidating factor for all subsequent newcomers and, according to the slogan “conquest of Jewish labor,” was to compete with Arab labor. Its symbol was above all farming, thus a literal fight for the land—turning desert into ever-growing greenery, and especially developing areas for cultivating citrus trees (Bensimon and Errera 2000, 31). Ever since the beginnings of aliyah, the planting of trees had a symbolic significance, and with time it gained other meanings. The first level of symbolic references was connected to the campaign of afforesting Israel by the incoming pioneers, which was meant to turn the desert into an oasis. At the second, much deeper level, it symbolized rootedness after years of wandering, while the dispersed Jews could not put down real roots. Planting trees became an illustration of a return to the roots, even of those who were deprived of this chance—the war victims, hence the unique symbolism of trees as memory sites. Forest combines two meanings: safeguards the memory of the victims and includes them in a biblical figure of a return to the chosen land and state building. The link between the myth of state building and tree planting is still used. For instance, trees are planted on the Day of Independence. In Yad Vashem, the memories of the Righteous among the Nations is symbolized by trees. Important biographical events are also celebrated in this way—for example, birthdays, bar mitzvahs, weddings, and deaths (Young 1993, 231–233). During the second aliyah, a purchase of the land began, financed by the money collected by the Diaspora. As national property, they formed a foundation for collective farmsteads, so-called kibbutzim.18 The two aforementioned tasks were successfully realized there: the desert was and Polish Jews (due to the rapidly developing Zionist ideology and a rise in anti-Semitism). The profession and education of the immigrants were related to their origins. 18   The first of them was established in 1911. Nowadays 35 percent of the Jewish population lives in 268 kibbutzim. Although their role (economic and, above all, ideological) has diminished, they still supply 40 percent of Israel’s agricultural production (Bensimon and Errera 2000, 34).

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transformed into fertile farmland; and the newcomers were consolidated, working and living collectively, which included subjecting family to the community, as it was the community that took care of the children, including their rearing and education. The idea of a communal life in kibbutzim was put into practice by means of physical labor (especially farmwork), collectivism, and a rejection of private property. These premises were contained in the slogan “a renewal of nation by land and land by nation” (Bensimon and Errera 2000, 31–35). It is quite conspicuous that these ideals were shaped in an opposition to the life in the Diaspora, where Jews (for political and historical reasons) usually did not deal in agriculture and were citizens in communities respecting the right to private property. The idea of a different mode of living was thus connected not only to the immediate need—economic and military fight for the land required collective actions and a strong sense of group solidarity—but also to the project of building a new identity, rejecting old patterns and stereotypical images of Jews. Although the major part of Israeli society did not live in kibbutzim, they became a symbol of “Israeliness” and played a significant part in creating and cultivating a national ethos—a new life model, perpetuated as a contradiction of the Diaspora. Social, cultural, and economic existence in small towns called shtetlach, typical of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe, became an ideological cliché, symbolizing the backwardness of the Diaspora world. Life in kibbutzim was meant to break the previous modes of behavior established in traditional Jewish culture. The process of working on this new model was directed, mostly, at the young generation. Its rearing and education required a departure from a traditional family model, which in the Diaspora used to be a basic group of reference not only during the primary socialization stage. In the kibbutzim, this role was assigned to the peer group. The traditional image of home as a place of rest or meeting during a shared meal underwent a drastic transformation. Children did not live with their parents. The communal dining room, shared by all members of the kibbutz, served to change the family structure. A family meal in a Shtetl served as a “religio-psychological sacrament.” The religious component was expressed in adhering to traditional rituals and dictates (for example, those regarding the kosher food) and a psychological one: binding the family together and confirming social roles—especially that of the father who, as the head of the family, “sat at the head of the table and usually uttered the benediction” and of the mother, the nurturer and keeper of the hearth and home. Thus, “the children, ranged around the table, witnessed the continuity of Jewish tradition symbolized in the family meal, while

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consuming Mama’s dishes, and recognized Papa’s authority. A common dining room in the kibbutzim was breaking this structure” (Bettelheim 1970, 41). These and other socialization and education techniques led to radical changes. “I have never seen an entire generation so unlike their own parents” (ibid., 296), said Bruno Bettelheim after conducting research in over a dozen kibbutzim during the sixties. These changes were also visible in comparison with Israeli peers brought up outside of kibbutzim. And although—as I have already mentioned—the kibbutzim inhabitants did not constitute a majority, they indubitably became an ideological elite, propagating the ethos of the developing state, especially in the times of Yishuv and in the first years after the establishment of Israel. Next, waves of aliyah were thus welcomed by the “old” immigrants— the pioneers in the fight for Eretz Israel. They were creating a new personal model. As the first founders of kibbutzim and moshavim,19 they were passing on their experiences in modern agriculture methods and selfgoverning rules. They were fathers and mothers of the new generation born in the country, referred to by the special name sabra, from Hebrew tzabar, the fruit of a cactus (Indian fig opuntia). A sabra is prickly on the outside and delicate on the inside. This name was supposed to characterize the sabras—people with a rough exterior, but filled with strength, zeal, and sensitivity to the new ideas. As the first immigrants, the sabras started to embody the ideal of a “new Jew,” set in an opposition to the world of the Diaspora. Their goal was to establish and protect the country and create a new culture, detached from the history of the Diaspora (Bensimon and Errera 2000, 7). New models were promulgated, among others, by the cult of heroes. One of them was Yoseph Trumpeldor, who died in 1920 protecting the Tel Hai settlement against Arabs. In Zionist ideology, the battle of Tel Hai became the symbol of a first fight destroying the stereotype of a cowardly, nonresistant Jew. Trumpeldor soon became a national hero. His biography was a model example of moving from the Diaspora to the new society. Although he came from Eastern Europe, he never spoke Yiddish. He was born in a partly assimilated family and, as a tsarist Russian citizen, served in the army. Unlike other Russian Jews, he did not try to avoid the army 19   With time, next to kibbutzim there appeared moshavim (that is, collective villages), in which

individual family units were allowed. Still, all economic and social life was subject to the collective institutions of the village. Moshavim started to develop rapidly after the year 1948. They served mostly immigrants from the East, who could better adapt to such structures, rather than kibbutzim (Bensimon and Errera 2000, 41–41).

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service. He was proud of the fact that he was a soldier, and in recognition of his merits and bravery he was the first Jew promoted to the officer rank. He came to Palestine as a war veteran, without his left hand. His life was thus a complete rejection of a Jewish biography shaped in the Diaspora. Trumpeldor became not only the symbol of Diaspora contestation, but also a new paragon for the teething Jewish society. His cult spread very fast, assuming institutional forms as well. Trumpeldor was a hero of stories and school jubilees; his words were painted on school corridors. His memory started to wane with the establishment of the state of Israel. In the seventies, Trumpeldor’s legend faded to such an extent that a thorough analysis of his biography shows him rather as a “Russian immigrant,” who did not even know Hebrew—he was considered a “new Hebrew” (Zerubavel 1994, 106–115). One of the main symbols of the new culture since the ideology of establishing a new country was incepted has been the language. In spite of the initially skeptical attitude of the founder of Zionism (“We cannot converse with one another in Hebrew. Who amongst us has a sufficient acquaintance with Hebrew to ask for a railway ticket in that language!” [Bensimon and Errera 197]), the Hebrew language started to revive itself at the end of the nineteenth century, because of such “men of letters” as Eliezer Ben Yehuda (1858–1922). He came to Palestine during the first aliyah in 1881, with a mission of introducing Hebrew to daily speech. He is considered the creator of modern Hebrew. Its modernization consisted of simplifying and unifying grammatical rules and creating new words.20 Ben Yehuda devoted his life to the idea of propagating the Hebrew language. He thought it should be realized by three postulates: “Hebrew in the home, Hebrew in the school, Hebrew in the words” (Fellman 2007, 2). His son was the first native speaker of Hebrew since biblical times. The second postulate preached the introduction of Hebrew as the first language in schools. The third one was realized when Ben Yehuda compiled A Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew and established the Hebrew Language Council, later changed into today’s Hebrew Language Academy.21 Actions taken up by Eliezer Ben Yehuda could become successful due to active participation of the immigrants. Linguistic revolution was started by Zionist settlers (who often had already learned Hebrew in the Diaspora), the inhabitants of the kibbutzim. Hebrew became the language 20   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Ben-Yehuda. 21   Ibid.

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of the newly founded city of Tel Aviv and, in the twenties, the official language of the Jews living in Palestine and an everyday language for an ever-greater number of people (Spolsky and Shohamy 1997, 4). One should remember that Hebrew was previously not a completely forgotten language. It is estimated that at the end of the twentieth century, about 50 percent of (male) Jews understood the language of daily prayer, and about 20 percent could read Hebrew texts of average difficulty, with the proportion greater in Central and Eastern Europe and Northern Africa and Yemen. Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s influence on propagating the Hebrew language can be summed up thus: “Before Ben Yehuda Jews could not speak Hebrew, after him they did” (Fellman 2007, 6). “Several years ago in Palestine a staggeringly successful experiment was initialized, perhaps the only such case in history—reviving a language dead for 2000 years.22 The language of holy books suddenly became a language used in everyday life by the Jewish people” (Ossowski 1984, 61). Sanisław Ossowski wrote this in 1951, using the Jewish example to characterize historical and social circumstances in which the community has to use all possible means to forge national bonds, as language plays a unique role in their midst.23 In fact, the new Hebrew became part and parcel of the national renaissance process. The attempt at reviving Hebrew had manifold reasons: First, the language of Jews—a three-thousand-yearold one, at that—turned out to be a successful tool for reviving native Hebrew culture. Second, incorporating Hebrew in the profane sphere, whereas for ages it used to remain the language of the Bible, was a symbolic distancing from the traditional culture of the Diaspora, in which religious content was of prime significance. Third and finally, Hebrew was to become an important means of creating a new national identity, consolidating immigrants speaking different languages, including Yiddish, which in a way symbolized the Diaspora. “There was a motto, a slogan—daber Iwrit ve hivreita—speak Hebrew, you’ll be healthier” (Weiss 2002, 65). Therefore, it was about not only revitalizing the Hebrew language, but also turning into action the idea of a monolingual society—united in the myth of common origins, and, at the same time, being a conglomerate of languages and cultures. The idea of monolingualism was supported 22   Taking into account the aforementioned circumstances, it is difficult to consider Hebrew

literally dead. However, Stanisław Ossowski’s general intention seems right.

23   As a counterexample, Ossowski gives Switzerland, which did not have to seek for its own

language, being equipped with other strategies of upholding the national and state identity.

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by numerous premises and myths. Here are the most important ones: immigrants will not learn Hebrew if they can speak freely in their own languages. Learning Hebrew is the key to acculturation and integration; this process will slow down if the immigrants are allowed to live in the world of their own language and through it create a sentiment for the Diaspora. National unity depends on monolingualism; retaining other languages weakens national identity. The immigrants’ languages have no value whatsoever; therefore, forcing the immigrants to immediately switch to Hebrew will ensure their instantaneous integration: no languages other than Hebrew and English should be taught at school (Spolsky and Shohamy 1997, 5). Ben Gurion’s behavior in a camp of Bulgarian refugees right after the war exemplifies these convictions. When asked to speak Russian, which was understood by everyone, he replied: No. Although I am fluent in Russian, speak English, French and other languages, here I will speak only Hebrew—the official language of the future Jewish state, the language of the Bible. Whoever doesn’t want to listen can leave.

In another meeting with partisans and ghetto fighters who survived and reached Palestine, he called the Yiddish they were using a “jarring language” (Zertal 1998, 221). This aggressive Hebrewization, which aimed at monolingualism, also entailed the idea of monoculturalism, considered an opposition to the European Diaspora. The costs of this policy were high.24 From today’s perspective, one could say that the cultural potential related to the linguistic variety of the immigrants arriving in Eretz Israel was lost. The greatest losses concerned the Yiddish language. As a consequence of the Shoah, emigration, and the creation of Israel, Yiddish—used by 7 to 8 million people—became nearly extinct almost overnight. “The history knows no other example of a similar cultural catastrophe. Elsewhere, a phenomena of that kind would be a result of entire centuries. Here, everything was played out before the very eyes of one generation” (Tych 1999, 140). Cultural heritage of a two-thousand-year-old Diaspora was discredited. 24   In retrospect, especially when judging the effectiveness of this policy, it is evident that it was

the only viable strategy, as it created circumstances for forming the state organism and (re) creating the nation on the ground of the common present, not the disparate past. However, taking into account my interest in biographical experiences, it is not surprising that the individual cost of these processes comes to the forefront.

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People I have spoken to belong to this very generation, although for most of them, Polish—not Yiddish—was the mother tongue. They were also taking part in the experiment of reviving Hebrew. Learning a new language was a turning point between the “old” and the “new” life, usually marked by changing a Polish or Yiddish name to a Hebrew one. Today the narrators are describing it as an important biographical experience, one also interpreted from the perspective of the contemporary Israeli society, which returned to multilingualism, discerning its potential and not treating it as an obstacle in the process of constructing collective identity (Spolsky and Shohamy 1997, 9–10; see Elias 2008). The ideology of the new state was thus being created in opposition to the Diaspora. Until the war, the point was to distance oneself from the history of European Jews’ culture, especially the community inhabiting Central and Eastern Europe. Whereas in Western Europe, due to an ever-intensifying assimilation process, cultural differences were being eliminated; countries such as Poland remained centers of a rich traditional Jewish culture and until this day are symbolized by shtetlach, or small Jewish towns.25 Ever since the war, the extermination of the majority of their inhabitants became a part of the new image of the Diaspora—from then on perceived not only as “the old world,” but also as the place of the Shoah. This matter should be looked at from two perspectives: eliminating the topic of the Shoah from public discourse, which I shall analyze in a moment, and perceiving the Jewish war fate as a kind of consequence of the life in the Diaspora. Simplified Zionism deems the Shoah a culmination of the Diaspora, illustrating the consequences of the exile and thus ideologically validating the need for a new state (La Capra 2001, 157–164). According to this interpretation, created from the perspective of the aliyah pioneers, the death of the victims and the suffering of the survivors were consequences of their refusal to take up the Zionist challenge. This farreaching and gradually revised oversimplification shaped specific attitudes toward the survivors. They were arriving during the sixth aliyah, the last wave of immigration before the creation of Israel and after the year 1948, when, especially during the first five years (1948–1953), they formed the greatest group of immigrants. The sixth aliyah was mainly illegal due to the restrictions introduced by the British in 1939 on the number of Jewish people allowed to come 25   Interestingly, in English literature, the terms “shtetl” and “ghetto” are often used

interchangeably, whereas the difference is retained in Polish literature.

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to Palestine.26 The travel to Eretz Israel usually lasted more than a year. It involved long waits in refugee camps, moving from one concentration place to the next and finally boarding a ship heading for Palestine. In the refugee camps, to prepare people for living in a new country, representatives of the Jewish Agency—an organization for recruiting and integrating the immigrants—conducted Hebrew classes and army training, as well as propagated the ideas of Zionism, including, above all, the project of the future Israeli state. The journey to the land took place on extremely overcrowded ships, in total conspiracy. Characterizing the biographical and historical circumstances of this period, I shall make several references to Halina Birenbaum’s autobiography (1991), describing her own experiences against the backdrop of her generation’s fate. The journey was drawing out. Shortly after we found ourselves on the high sea the engine broke down. (. . .) People were suffering from seasickness, fainting. We were suffocating below decks, because we weren’t allowed to venture outside too often. The English were inspecting the sea from planes and special ships, to uncover illegal Jewish immigrants on their way to Palestine. (. . .) Usually we were lying in the stuffy belowdecks. Who fainted, received an additional glass of water and a slice of lemon. We were comforting ourselves with the vision of eating oranges soon enough. (94–95)

Many such ships never reached their destination—some of them went under; most were turned back to their home ports or temporary camps by the British authorities. “Illegal immigration is a countless sequence of human drama” (Bensimon and Errera 2000, 46).27 An important element of the immigration process was the Yishuv’s attitude toward the survivors. It was reflected both in the elite and the 26   According to the directives of the so-called White Book, the Jewish population of Palestine

could not exceed one-third of the total population of the country (Bensimon and Errera  2000, 45). 27   One of the most infamous cases was the death of 250 refugees in 1940, traveling on board of the Patria. The ship sank because members of Hagana planted a bomb in the hold, trying to prevent British authorities from turning the ship back to Germany. The explosive turned out to be too powerful. Another example is the death of 768 refugees traveling from Romania to Istanbul, who were refused disembarkation by the Turkish authorities, because the mandate government did not grant them Palestine visas (Bensimon and Errera 2000, 64). Another well-known example is the story of the ship Exodus, which in 1947 was carrying over four thousand Shoah survivors. The English turned the ship back to Hamburg, where the refugees were interned. This incident caused riots among the Jews in Palestine (Zertal 1998, 52–58).

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popular discourse. The former one is described by Idith Zertal (1998, 216– 217), when she analyzes the language of politicians and activists involved in the organization of the immediate postwar immigration. European Jews were being called refugees and not immigrants28 and sometimes referred to in very unfavorable terms: “All this filth,” low-class “human material,” “the fact that an individual was in a camp cannot be sufficient reason to sent him to Palestine. (. . .) Those who survived did so because they were egotistical and cared primarily about themselves.” The survivors were thus being treated as people damaged by the war and by the habits of the Diaspora, which had to be abandoned to accept the Zionist ideology of the new country. It was expected that the refugees would make psychological and physical efforts to unite with the Yishuv (ibid., 270). Simultaneously, the language describing the situation of people waiting in the refugee camps points to the fact that they were being considered a passive mass and not active subjects. Zertal (225) quotes phrases used in the Jewish Agency instructions: “gather together,” “send,” “strengthen” (morale), “teach,” “activate” (Jewish survivors), “transport,” “deepen” (the Zionist awareness), “impart language,” “organize,” and “transform” (into citizens of the Jewish state). Such a language set a very specific interpretative frame for defining the situation, especially the identity of the newcomers—that is, the refugees and the hosts or the pioneers and the sabras. The language was based on a juxtaposition of the Diaspora and Eretz Israel, stressing the extreme contrast between the two worlds: exile/home, catastrophe/strength, ugliness/beauty, sadness/joy, etc. It was evident not only in the discourse of the elites, but also in various cultural texts: literature, poetry, autobiographies, or the musealization of the history of Jewish society. Idith Zertal in her book devoted to immigration before the year 1948 refers to two texts: of Yitzhak Sadeh, the creator and first leader of the elite Palmach units, and Nathan Alterman, the most popular national poet of that time. I am quoting the fragments of the texts she cites. Both concern the situation of receiving illegal immigrants exhausted by a long and difficult journey, at night carried ashore by the members of the Yishuv. 28   As Idith Zertal (1998, 22) ironically states, the surviving refugees turned into ma’apilim

(“summit climbers,” a Zionist term for illegal immigrants) when they were on board of the Mossad ships and displayed their strength—protesting and fighting for reaching Palestine in spite of British restrictions. It was only then that they were becoming symbols of the Zionist revolution.

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Darkness. On wet sand, my sister stands before me: filthy, tattered, wild-haired, her feet are bare and her head bowed. She stands and weeps. (. . .) “Friend, why am I here? Why did they bring me here? Am I worthy that young healthy boys risk their lives for me? No, there is no place for me in the world. I should not live. (. . .) Before these sisters I kneel, I prostrate myself in the dust at their feet. And when I rise to my feet, straighten my body, raise my head upwards, I sense and I know: For these sisters—I am strong/ For these sisters—I am brave/ For these sisters—I will also be cruel/ For you everything—everything (264–265). At the night of unloading, with the star watching us/ As we shoulder those who arrive in the dark, as we carry their lives on our backs/ We sense the fear in their breathing and the moaning of their tortured and outcast bodies/ But also their hands closing on our throats. (269–270)

It is hard to disagree with Zertal’s interpretation demonstrating that, in both cases, this grandiloquent narrative—showing the drama of the return on one side and the devotion and helpfulness of the other—is but a mere outer veneer, hiding a completely opposite message. It refers to the “stigma of the ‘Diaspora-ness’ of this mass of people and branding an even harsher mark of blame on the nature, character, and actions of those who survived the Holocaust and that accounted for their survival” (264). The surviving refugees can pose a threat to the idea of Zionism, if they do not renounce their identity. The hand closed on a throat symbolizes fear engendered by the experience of the Diaspora and the war. In a newly created state, there is no place for such feelings. A similar message can be found in Halina Birenbaum’s memories: On board the ship there were a few young Jews born in Palestine. (. . .) They were our guides in this journey. (. . .) We looked at them with admiration, but also with a pinch of jealousy. They were handsome, athletic, strong. Confident, experienced in their mission—Hebrew was their native tongue. (. . .) They considered us strange creatures. Needy, weak . . . To them, we represented the old, disgraced world; they were to “lift” us up (as in aliyah) into the new, better one. That’s what they thought of us, Jews from the Galut. Even if it was far from the truth, they were staunch in their beliefs, which did nothing to improve our attitude towards them. Which one of them would believe that actually we were stronger than them? We had been able to survive in hopeless situations, situations simply inconceivable

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for them, and still we had enough strength to set off on a difficult, dangerous voyage for the high kibbutz ideals. No one realized it at that time. We felt inferior to them. (96–97)

The texts quoted previously were written from the perspective of Yishuv and Zionist ideologies. Birenbaum, on the other hand, presents the point of view of a refugee coming out of exile. The author recreates the events and emotions and interprets them from contemporary perspective. The experience of a jarring contrast again comes to the forefront—the handsome, young, athletic, against the voyage-weary, war-ravaged “Jews from the Galut” inspire admiration and jealousy. The minders’ attitude (a perfect illustration of Zionist ideals) deprecates the experiences of the survivors. The author recreates this feeling of deprivation, in retrospect interpreting it as a result of yielding to a false interpretative pattern. This reflection, a result of biographical work, came only later, which is also suggested by other memories. We, the newcomers from Europe, wanted to belong to them. In our eyes too they were better. But we wanted to prove first that we are not worse, then—that we are equal, and then that we are better. And we made it. It was an interesting life, a renewed one, so to speak. But now I know that I didn’t make it. I did not escape the Diaspora. The Diaspora came back to me, and I came to the Diaspora as well. (Weiss 2002, 68)

Getting ahead of the chronology of my narration, one should state that in contemporary Israeli society, the image of the Diaspora has changed to such an extent that it is being incorporated into the sphere of collective memory.29 At the same time, as Dominick La Capra (2001, 164) points out, although post-Zionist narration about the Diaspora has changed, it is still being marginalized and has not been read anew. Although the topic of the Diaspora has started to appear in collective memory, it is often being introduced by way of “old” interpretative frameworks. Including the memory of the Diaspora in present Jewish memory takes place in a unique way, one based on a contrast between the old and the new world, 29   The change in discourse is very conspicuous. The relation toward present-day immigrants is 

a good example here. Edna Lomsky-Feder and Tammar Rappaport (2000), writing about Russian immigrants visiting their homeland, are using the expression “their old home” and terms of nostalgia and separation. The immigrants of the immediate postwar period were not allowed to describe their experiences in that language.

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which equals the dichotomy death-life. The musealization of the history of European Jews is one of the examples here. Israeli museums devoted to the Diaspora, to a large extent, reflect this image of collective or official memory—the Diaspora is shown as a dead past.30 An example here is the museum in the Yad Mordechai kibbutz. Referring to the association aliyah-yerida, James Young (1993, 231–232) shows the presentation of the Diaspora—shtetl history. To enter the museum, one has to descend (yerida) down a narrow dark passage. The past is a few props: faded photographs, tattered books, two tarnished candlesticks, and Yiddish newspapers. These props buried in the mausoleum depict the shtetl life as very difficult and almost unbearable, and the way of life is reduced to the jobs performed—an umbrella maker, a belt maker, which now seem completely exotic, as they are so distant. Life in a shtetl is presented as a struggle built on trade, faith, education, and community. The history of the war or turning the shtetl into a ghetto seems a logical continuation of this image. Another stage is the exhibit on the second floor (so one has to climb the stairs—aliyah) in brightly lit rooms, presenting the kibbutz’s history. “On one side, we have light and life, (. . .) on the other side, darkness and death, starvation and destruction. On one side, freedom and the laws of Jewish state; on the other side, Nuremberg laws and yellow stars, Nazis and a synagogue going up in flames. Life is here, in the orchards, in hard work, in the freedom to be Jews. Death is there, in the musty shtetlach, ghettos, and concentration camps.” The next element of the exhibition is the “wall of the uprising,” emblazoned with the names of Jews fighting in ghettos, woods, and camps for Israel. Nothing is said about the victims of the Shoah.31 Thus, the museum comprises three 30   One should however point out that Israeli museums do show the history of the Diaspora,

whereas European ones usually focus on the Shoah and do not present the thousand-year-old Jewish tradition (Young 1993, 215). This could be explained by a lack of Jewish milieu for creating sites of memory in present-day Europe. The history of the Shoah remains, if individual countries want it or not, an element of common narration about war experience, whereas the centuries-long Jewish tradition is often excluded from the reservoir of a given society’s cultural heritage; therefore, it does not feel obliged to cultivate it. At this point, it is worth mentioning that in June 2007, a foundation plaque was set for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which will be erected in Warsaw next to the Monument of the Ghetto Insurgents and open in 2012. The idea of the museum is to show the entire history of Polish Jews. Thus, it will be the first and only museum in the world devoted entirely to the history of Polish Jews (http://www.jewishmuseum.org.pl). 31   Commenting on James Young’s observation, one notices that in the last decade, the narration about the Shoah has undergone a transformation. Giving a much-greater credit to the oral

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stories: one about the shtetl (life in exile), about the resistance, and about the redemption in the Promised Land. The past, the life in shtetlach—or in other words, the roots of the majority of those who came to Israel—is a picture of a very bleak existence. It can be even seen in the depiction of the groups functioning in the Diaspora, Zionist and other. Young Zionists in the pictures are always smiling, full of energy, strong, and optimistic, whereas the others are usually somber or sad. Interestingly, the picture presented in the museums does not correspond with the sentimentalized one in literature and art. As I have already mentioned, the way of building the narration about the Diaspora and, above all, the identity of its members translated not only to the attitudes toward the sixth aliyah, but also to the relation toward legal immigration after the creation of Israel. In this respect, both groups of immigrants were in a similar situation. However, the fact of gaining independence changed the circumstances of the immigration. It became legal, which—combined with the idea of Zionism—made it a mass phenomenon. The dynamics of the immigration can be illustrated with numbers: in the beginnings of the first aliyah in 1882, Palestine was inhabited by 24 thousand Jews; in 1917, 54 thousand; on the day of state proclamation in 1948, 650 thousand; and after a year, 1 million—one-third of whom were the most recent immigrants (Hacohen 2003, 252). In the years 1948–1953, the immigrants from Europe were the biggest group—48.6 percent (35.3 percent from Asia and 15.4 percent from Africa)—whereas in the years 1948–1950, when the population doubled, the immigrants from Europe constituted, respectively, 85.1 percent, 52.1 percent, and 49.8 percent of the total number of incomers. Polish Jews were the largest group—respectively, 32.0 percent (28,788 people), 20.2 percent (47,331), 15.8 percent (25,071) (ibid., 267–269). By the year 1948, the immigrants constituted 64.6 percent history, giving voice to its witnesses also changes the shape of the museum story, somehow making the visitor take part in the events presented and identify with people involved in these events. An excellent example here is a new exhibition opened in March 2005 in Yad Vashem, the most important institution cultivating the memory of the Shoah in Israel. The converted museum can be considered a narrative one—it is nowadays the biggest institution of such kind in the world. The history of the Shoah of European Jews is shown by relating them to their culture, personalizing the fate of the victims and with a great attention to ethnographic detail—for example, by recreating a fragment of Leszno Street in the Warsaw ghetto. The visitors walk a street paved with original Warsaw cobbles (Weiss and Epstein 2007, 75–78; Szuchta 2006, 1).

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(from Europe and Africa, 54.8 percent) of Israeli society, sabras 35.6 percent. In the next years, the percentage of new immigrants was growing. During the first decade of the new state, over a million Jews from all over the world settled there (Bensimon and Errera 2000, 58). Its declaration of independence proclaimed, “Israel will be open for Jewish immigration from the entire Diaspora.” Among the earliest legislation passed by the Israeli government was the Law of Return, according to which, every Jew could legally immigrate to Israel. This rule regulated the state’s immigration policies (ibid., 52). It was a realization of Zionism, for which the aliyah was a goal as well as a means of making the dream of a new/reborn state come true (Hacohen 2003, 1). Ben Gurion’s—the country’s first prime minister’s—aspiration was to increase the Israeli population to 2 million. This meant that each year, the country had to welcome 150 thousand immigrants (ibid., 129). It required specific institutional actions, determining the way of handling the newcomers. These actions can be analyzed from the perspective of effectiveness of coping with this economically and logistically difficult challenge, which probably could not have been faced without considering the ideological perspective. It has already been presented when describing the practical premises of Zionism, the idea of kibbutzim, and the place of Hebrew in the process of establishing Israeli society. All that remains is to focus our attention on additional actions taken after the proclamation of independence. One of them was establishing the Ministry of Absorption (Kelitah) responsible for directing the process of integration from the beginning to the end (from placing the immigrants in temporary camps, to providing them with place of abode, means to live, language education, etc.). The language used here is worth considering. The process of integrating the immigrants with the rest of Israeli society was called absorption, not assimilation or integration. Although these terms are closely related, absorption seems to be the strongest one, implying a total blending with the social organism. According to the presented ideological premises, that was exactly what was required of the newcomers. On the other hand, this process was difficult to realize at an economic level, especially in the first year of the country’s existence, when it seemed on the verge of economic crisis. Among 190 thousand immigrants, 45 thousand lived in temporary camps (ibid., 88). Living conditions were very harsh, especially in winter, during heavy rains, and winds. The rain was loudly beating down on the tarpaulin. It soaked in and made it stiff. A revolting stench of damp and mold. Cold to the bones.

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Aside from the downpour, a hurricane-like wind, effortlessly forcing its way inside. A wooden pole was “jumping” and bending every which way. Rain water was coming inside and flooded everything, bringing all kinds of garbage and taking things hanging on the pole. We managed to put the backpacks and shoes on beds, like before, in the concentration camps. (. . .) Mud splashing everywhere. We kept silent, as if we had nothing to talk about. Suddenly the boys started taunting each other, making fun of our past faith in theories and promises. They were remembering the stories of the envoys from Palestine and guides, comparing it with the reality we were facing. Why didn’t they tell us the truth—prepare us for such conditions? (Birenbaum 1991, 114–115)

This description perfectly depicts the mood of the immigrants, who started to actively protest when the situation did not improve. It did not change much, because the young country had bit off more than it could chew. Until the end of 1950, there were 100 thousand immigrants in the camps. In 1951, their number grew to 250 thousand. In mid-1952, the number did not decrease, which meant that one-sixth of Israel’s population lived in very harsh conditions (Hacohen 2003, 134 and 232). The comparison of temporary camps with concentration camps— made by Halina Birenbaum—was, as it seems, quite a popular one. Dvora Hacohen (84) quotes, among others, a journalist’s letter to Ben Gurion, in which he criticizes the organization of the absorption process: From a historical standpoint, the camps in Israel must be one of the most ironic failures in the world. Jews running camps for Jews. And it seems that they have learned nothing from their own tragedy.

The message of this statement gets even stronger, if we relate it not only to the economic aspect, but, above all, the sociological and cultural one. The point was not only that the new immigrants lived in terrible conditions, but also the fact that expecting their complete absorption (that is, renouncing their former individual and collective history), a social border was being built. The postwar immigrants once again somehow became Simmel’s strangers.32 They found the kibbutz lifestyle strange and hard to accept, and 32   An immigrant’s situation always generates strangeness. Yet comparing social and biographical

experiences of postwar and present-day immigrants (for instance, Russian Jews coming to Israel in the last decade), one can clearly see how the context of experiencing strangeness has changed. Nowadays it refers more to Schütz’s rather than Simmel’s definition of strangeness

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the kibbutzniks themselves were none too eager to include the newcomers in their society. The fifties of the twentieth century were a very difficult period in that respect. The gap between the newcomers and the veterans was getting wider. Both groups lived in two different realities, so to speak: two Israels (ibid., 244). The one stemming from the Yishuv, not the Galut, was the dominant one. Although the immigrants amounted to the majority of Israel’s population, their rich cultural heritage was considered worthless for the future of the country, a burden even. “In many circles, even among intellectuals and academics, ethnic diversity was regarded as a historical fluke that could soon be made to disappear if Israel adopted appropriate cultural and educational policies” (ibid., 248). This standpoint was fully understandable to the immigrants. Shevah Weiss (2002) commented on that phase in his biography as follows: Children born in Palestine, sabras, were a little contemptuous of us. Only after Eichman’s trial did they begin to think differently. And I decided to show them that they were wrong, that we were the better ones. That I can do anything and I can be better than them. And so it happened. It was also an attempt to disconnect myself from Poland, from the Polish language! (. . .) I think that this transformation, this drive for a new life, new language, sport, dancing, physical work in the Hadassim, it was my private fight with the Shoah. This metamorphosis, this turning into a new man was very painful. But I succeeded. I talked to my peers, who had similar war experiences and nowadays are well-known professors, politicians, and they all think that these first two, three years of transformation were the most difficult. This wish to be not only as everyone else, but even better, was a common one. (64–65)

These words express a sense of disparity and inferiority, a wish to measure up to the “better” “happier” peers. Simultaneously, concentrating the energy on the here and now, on the attempt to gain a rightful place in the Israeli society, the emotional, intellectual, and physical efforts became a strategy of suppressing the memory of the traumatic past. Although since 1954 the immigrants started to get permanent places of residence right after their arrival, temporary camps were a fixed element (Rapaport and Lomsky-Feder 2001). For example, Russian-language media have flourished in Israel since the onset of mass immigration from Russia. These include all kinds of printed media as well as radio stations, television channels, and Web sites (Elias 2008, 31–36).

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of Israeli landscape until the sixties, and the conditions in them remained rather primitive. I look around. Huge area, a little stony, a little green, separated from the country road by a strip of ploughed field, covered with deep, black ridges. On the square, several dozen asbestos barracks, and workers like busy little bees around them. The barracks haven’t been finished yet, so we hear hammering from every direction. (. . .) We are tired, dirty, hungry. Only a few hours by plane separates us from what we left in Warsaw—a bathroom with hot water, white kitchen with gas fittings, clean beds with warm bed linens and nightwear. (. . .) We get a room with a small table and some chairs, a primus stove, a can of kerosene, several kilograms of potatoes, a bottle of oil and some olives. Quickly, we make makeshift beds for the night and stuff ourselves with rolls and eggs, topped by Wedel chocolate. (Klugman 2004, 52–53)

It is a description of arriving in Israel in 1957. First impression is a sense of a huge cultural and—this can be strange, taking into account the image of Poland in the fifties—civilizational contrast. It refers to everything: food, living standards, technological facilities. Of course it is only the beginning of a long process of adjusting to the new conditions and initializing the process of absorption, quoted in larger fragments further on. The reflections presented thus far lead to two conclusions: First, in the case of postwar immigrants the experience of strangeness seems one of the basic frames shaping their biographies. In the process of transition from Polish context—where, depending on the circumstances, the experience of strangeness manifested itself during the prewar, war, or postwar period— into the Israeli one. We could determine subsequent “stages” of strangeness in Simmel’s or Shütz’s dimension. Second, the examples and data quoted, though very general, show the life situation of the immigrants. Taking into account the struggle with daily life difficulties, the postwar period became the next biographical challenge after surviving the war (of course, toute proportion gardée). First, coping with the hardships of refugee camps and traveling, then putting down roots (also in an existential sense) in Eretz Israel could hardly “compensate” for the war trauma. On the contrary, it was undoubtedly a source of difficult experiences, ones often close to trajectory.33 33   Trajectory (Verlaufskurven) denotes such a form of experience in which a person is subjected

to external circumstances he/she has no control over and influences his/her biography. Trajectory corresponds to the biographical rule of experiencing, and suffering is the basic form

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However, in retrospect, taking into account the great civilization leap Israel has taken,34 the former immigrants are nowadays beneficiaries of these changes—however difficult, tiresome, and full of sacrifice they might have been. These two circumstances, firmly lodged in the biography of the generation, have markedly shaped the process of building the identity and interpreting biographical experiences, which is made evident by the empirical material presented further. People whose biographies are the subject of my analysis usually arrived in Israel as a result of the sixth aliyah35 and right after the year 1948. As postwar immigrants, they were subjected to the described process of ideologization and the philosophy of absorption. A factor diversifying their situation was the experience of the Shoah. As I have already mentioned, next to the image of the Diaspora, it was chronologically the second but actually the first, most important point of reference in building a vision of the past. One should therefore show the place and role of the Shoah memory in Israeli collective memory. In the postwar period, the memory of the Shoah was considered an element hardly conducive to the creation of the new state. A new, teething society did not want to build its collective identity on symbols of sacrifice and suffering. “Memory of historical events and the narratives delivering this memory have always been central to Jewish faith, tradition and identity (. . .) the memory of historical trauma in particular has long played a pivotal role in Jewish national consciousness” (Young 1993, 209–210). However, to establish and consolidate the country, new myths and new models were needed. Therefore, after the war, Yom Hashoah—Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day (nowadays one of the most important dates in the calendar of official celebrations)—was universally ignored, and the Jewish war fate was barely mentioned in schoolbooks (Novick 1999, 148).

34   35  

of experience. Trajectory is related to a new situation in which one loses control over his/her life, as all previous models of orientation become inadequate. It is a long process, consisting of many stages described by Fritz Schütze. Breaking this experience can occur only when a person starts to work on new interpretations of the situation to at last gain control over the imposed circumstances—to “get out” of the trajectory. Gaining control over this process is tantamount to overcoming the biographical rule of being subjected in favor of acting (Riemann and Schütze 1997; Schütze 2005; Schütze 2008; Rokuszewska-Pawełek 2002). Positive aspects of a dynamic development were pointed out by Władysław Bartoszewski (2004) during his first journey to Israel in 1963. What I mean here is the main body of the material I have gathered. Among the accounts, there are also very interesting cases of the fifth aliyah and a slightly later immigration. Written autobiographical texts usually also concern this period, although later ones do occur as well.

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Thus, they were trying to forget about the Shoah. One could distinguish two parallel processes here: the biographical, concerning the survivors’ experience and their wish to forget or even deny traumatic experiences; and the collective, connected to the ethos of building a new state, ideologically supported by Zionism. Israeli society fighting for existence (in its military, political, and economic aspects) did not need any myths of sacrifice or narrations about suffering and helplessness—rather, stories about heroism, devotion, and valor were desired. According to the Zionist ideology, the Shoah was considered a consequence of life in exile. Dominick La Capra (2001, 157–158) calls such a picture an example of compensatory narration, invalidating the survivors’ war experiences, which no one listened to. Let us refer once more to Halina Birenbaum’s relation (1991, 116): “We know everything about you. We’ve heard about everything. It’s a shame to listen to this. You’d better not mention this. It can have a bad influence on our young people. You have to change. Become like us, Israelis. This wouldn’t have happened to us. We wouldn’t have gone to death without any fight . . . ! Our youth are brave, healthy, rather than the Galut youth.” That’s why they didn’t want to listen to our stories. Yet in these stories there were our dead, our lost families, their agony and blood. Their life and countless deaths. Not wanting to accept us with all this, the kibbutzniks were tearing down the bridge which should have connected and united us. This way they were keeping our mouths, hearts, souls shut. They were instilling in us contempt for ourselves and everything that was holy for us. They were teaching us to be ashamed of our past, culture and customs.

These individual and collective tendencies to forget was juxtaposed with the need for memory. On an individual level, this need referred to the inability to forget about the past, and on a collective one, to negating the truth that a community cannot erase its own past, especially a community in which memory plays such an important role in identitybuilding. Therefore, the history of Israeli confrontation with the West is referred to as “a great drama of denial and recognition.”36 Especially in the first two postwar decades, an ambivalent attitude toward the Shoah could be seen—a dilemma between the needs to remember and to forget. This situation was further complicated by the fact that the survivors accounted for about half of the new country’s population, and on the international 36   Segev after Rosenfeld (2001, 48).

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arena, the Shoah was undoubtedly one of the main arguments for creating Israel. Therefore, the initially disregarded question on how to incorporate the Shoah memory into the ideology of the developing country with time gained significance. The point was to create such a narration, which—while emphasizing the uniqueness of the Shoah—would not include the history of the suffering and helplessness of the Diaspora Jews.37 What is considered a turning point here is Eichmann’s trial in 1961, covered in the media and widely commented. This incident gave an impulse to take up collective memory work and to incorporate the Shoah narration into it. This required creating a new proper rhetoric, according to which the survivors were no longer considered victims, but heroes. Thus, the question “Did they fight?” was supplanted by “What was bravery in the light of the conditions under which Jews lived in World War II” (Young 1993, 211–214). Consequently, bravery was interpreted as a will to live in spite of the hell of the Shoah. Those who survived could build a new country. Such a revaluation made it possible to restore the role of memory, so important in Jewish tradition. Today, “in every community, in every corner of Israel’s landscape, one is reminded of the Shoah by a plaque, a building’s dedication, an inscribed tablet. (. . .) Over time, these markers recede into consciousness, as parts of an inanimate cityscape, but continue to function as the coordinates of daily life in Israel” (ibid., 216–217). Consecutive years, marked by the Israeli-Arab conflict, not only made the Shoah memory important in light of the Jewish war past, but also determined the interpretations of the present and in this form have been handed down to the next generations Israel is fighting for its own country so that the Shoah may never happen again. This way, the memory of the Shoah connects its victims with present generations. The victims are not forgotten; on the contrary, the memory of them is bequeathed (told)—they are the first heroes to have died for the new country. Similarly, Eichmann’s trial was a turning point in the process of activating the memory of the Shoah: “When the memory of those terrible events could no longer be taken for granted, there was suddenly a powerful reason to commemorate, to save both individual and collective recollections from oblivion” (Gillis 1994, 12). The Israeli-Arab conflict, and especially 37   According to Young (1993, 212–213), this dichotomy is reflected in Israel’s memorials devoted

to the Shoah; the victims are accompanied by the fighters, who hence had their hand in creating the new country. The message of Israeli memorials is thus as follows: death of the victims is redeemed by those who fought; the Shoah is redeemed by the founding of the state.

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the so-called Six-Day War, gave a new impulse to this memory. In view of Israel’s sense of loneliness and isolation, being surrounded by hostile Arab countries, the identity of the victim was spread to the present38 and was oftentimes instrumentalized by manipulation, aiming at using the sacrifice to rationalize current events. Israel’s spectacular victory in 1967 confirmed the Jewish nation’s determination in the fight for their own country. It was compared to the fight of David and Goliath.39 Paradoxically, however, along with a sense of triumph and victory, the tendency toward the rhetoric of the victim, related to the Shoah, has increased. The existence of Israel became the only guarantee of safety in the opinion of its citizens, as well as the Diaspora. “Jews from the West, especially the United States or France, have in a sense discovered the importance of Israel’s survival for their own existence. Ever since that time they have been living the same fear every time the country faces a threat, and they support it in every possible way in its struggle for survival” (Bensimon and Errera 2000, 172). Thus, the Shoah has started to justify contemporary actions. The victim has to protect himself/herself. According to this rhetoric, the Israeli soldiers—though superficially they take the form of Goliath—remain victims.40 What Manecham Begin stated in 1982, just before Israeli troops entered Lebanon, can serve as an example here: “An alternative to fighting is Treblinka, and we have resolved that there would be no Treblinkas” (Lang 1996, 14). Yet there were some voices, however different from the dominant opinions in Israel, that Israeli society suffers from excess memory, imposing a specific perspective on current events. Among them, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict comes to the forefront. It is not only about the fact that the Shoah constitutes a basic frame of reference for interpreting this conflict, and consequently Israeli society gains monopoly on the victim identity. Critics 38   The author of the term “spread identity” is Anselm Strauss (1975). The American sociologist

39

 

40  

referred it to the situation when sickness becomes the dominant image shaping an individual’s identity in the eyes of others. All other aspects of identity are disregarded or invalidated. In this case, we encounter a slightly different situation, as it is not the environment that imposes a spread identity on the individual, but the subject him/herself, shaping the identity by “spreading” the interpretation of the meaning of the Shoah. Interestingly, this comparison is also being used by the Palestinians, reversing the roles of David and Goliath. Arab children and teenagers, throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, are using biblical rhetoric, which aims at changing the identity of the victim. In this light, referring to the Shoah is an evident counterrhetoric (Kugelmass 1993, 426). Each officer in the Israeli army has to visit Poland and see the sites of the Shoah. The army organizes special trips for them.

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also point to the fact that the Shoah memory leads to a distorted morality of the next generations. What they mean is mostly the behavior of Israeli soldiers toward the Palestinians.41 Ill effects of this memory overshadow any reasonable solution to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.42 Generalizing, one could say that the discussion on the role of the Shoah memory wavers between the historical and moral imperatives to cultivate it and the threat stemming from perpetuating the victim identity (Rosenfeld 2001, 49). La Capra (2003, 79–83) presents it as a difference between historical and structural trauma. The first one is embedded in specific events from the past. The roles of the victim, perpetrator, and observer are clearly defined. Structural trauma implies ambivalence, referring to the pain and loss, as well as elation, pride, or sublimation. Structural trauma sets the area for collective and individual identity by creating specific frames of interpretation, shaping the discourse about the past and the present. In this context, the official narration created by the collective memory discourse, as well as the narration of a witness (a survivor), is being instrumentalized. The problem described does not concern solely the Israeli society. Instrumentalization of the Shoah has a far wider context. In the past few decades, the “Shoah topic” has entered collective memory of many societies, especially European ones, which would require a separate lecture. I am choosing only one example—and a non-European one at that—the American memory, as next to the Israeli memory, it is considered the most important center of building the memory of the Shoah. Israeli and American memory, and specifically the communities that are their bearers, have the greatest contribution in shaping Jewish attitudes toward Poles against the backdrop of the Shoah experience.

41   This problem is well presented from the perspective of individual biographical experiences

in the book Bridging the Gap (ed. Dan Bar-On 2000). This publication relates meetings with representatives of the opposing sides, among them Israelis and Palestinians. An exchange of narrations has shown the disparity of perspectives and the drama of experiences and, above all, has shifted the obvious—though, at the same time, opposite for each side—distribution of the victim-perpetrator identity. 42   Compare Elon and Elklan after Rosenfeld 2001, 48–49.

3.  American Memory The curiosity, which engaged me as an historian, had to do with why in 1990s America—fifty years after the fact and thousands of miles from its site—the Holocaust has come to loom so large in our culture. Peter Novick

Peter Novick (1999), in the introduction to his well-known book on the place of the Holocaust43 in American collective memory, poses two important questions: Why did the memory of the Holocaust, which took place in Europe, become so important for American society (where the Shoah survivors or their progeny account for but 1 percent of the population)? And what explains its specific dynamic—as with time the event becomes more intensive?44 The author is consequently trying to answer these questions, analyzing step by step, decade by decade, the process of creating the memory of the Shoah among American Jews and the entire American population. A conclusion of this analysis was that with time, a basic frame of reference for the discourse of this memory is determining the resources necessary for creating the identity of presentday American Jews. In the United States, the “Holocaust,” or “Shoah,” as an unequivocal term for the war fate of European Jews first appeared as late as 1961, during Eichmann’s trial. Before, their war experiences were not really mentioned.45 43   Until now, when describing the Jewish war fate, I have been trying to use the term “Shoah,”

44   45  

which in Hebrew means a total destruction or a calamity. The most popular name—especially in American discourse—seems to be, however, “Holocaust,” which stands for “a burnt sacrifice,” a sacrifice pleasing God. Therefore, many people, myself included, consider “Shoah” a more appropriate name, because it does not refer to the positive aspect of the holocaustum. Yet in this chapter, I am using the term “Holocaust” because it pervades American discourse. From the studies conducted in the sixties, Peter Novick draws a conclusion that in the first two postwar decades, the Holocaust had little influence on the inner life of American Jews  (Novick 1999, 105). Bruno Bettelheim (1979, 14) reminisces that in the forties, when he finally succeeded in immigrating to the United States, no one believed the stories about his stay in a concentration camp. No one wanted to publish his article about it. La Capra (2003, 153) ironically comments on this lack of interest: “It was almost like going from Auschwitz to Disney World—and in 

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In the sixties and seventies, the Holocaust memory was cultivated mainly in the context of Israel’s political problems. In the eighties, when the interest in Israel started to wane and the Israeli political situation stabilized, the topic of the Shoah was broached more and more often in the context of war experiences. Ever since then, the memory of the Shoah has started to play a more significant role in the process of supporting Jewish collective identity, and in the eighties and nineties, it even became a pivot for this identity. This tendency was in accordance with a wider pattern of identity building in the American society. The memory of extreme events turned out to be the only factor distinguishing individual groups in a country so devoted to assimilation, which evens out all cultural, religious, etc., differences. The phenomenon of creating individual American identities can be observed since the sixties, when as a result of the civil rights movement, the notions of rootedness and strengthening of identity began to thrive among AfroAmericans, American Jews, or Native Americans. The melting pot myth was replaced by the vision of a patchwork, consisting of various ethnic, religious, and national elements. This process also concerned the Jews. For Afro-Americans, slavery was the frame of reference. For Native Americans, their genocide after geographical discoveries. For Jews, it was the Holocaust that united everyone, no matter the ideological provenances (Young 1993, 347–348). In the face of no other common identification references (a role previously served by religion, culture, or, at some point, common beliefs in the state of Israel), only the Holocaust remained, or rather became the only element of collective identity shared by everyone—a form of civil religion (Novick 1999, 146), which created a sense of collective fate. It was expressed in a solidarity with the victims of the Holocaust and a conviction that only the fact of forefathers’ (parents’, grandparents’, greatgrandparents’) emigration saved the present generation from the tragic fate. In other words, in this sense, contemporary Jews are also victims. As Novick (1999, 190) a little ironically points out: “all Jews had their ‘honorary’ survivorship.”46 Therefore, a certain tendency to “internalize” the history of the Holocaust and treating it a “national treasure” can be seen. At the same time, it has led to an excessive popularization and exploitation of the Shoah and, consequently, desacralization of the victims’ and survivors’ suffering. The witnesses and their experiences have become a Disney World, people do not want to hear about Auschwitz. It is a very different context.”

46   For instance, some American Jews of the younger generation have their wrists tattooed with

camp numbers of their murdered family members (Lapierre 2006, 97).

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an often abused “common good.” “Suddenly, everyone began calling himself a survivor. Having compared Harlem to the Warsaw ghetto and Vietnam to Auschwitz, a further step has now to be taken: some who had spent the war on a Kibbutz or in a fancy apartment in Manhattan, now claim that they too have survived the Holocaust, probably by proxy” (Wiesel 1975).47 The consequences of such a way of memory building are worth a brief mention. One of them are the very forms of commemoration, which, according to some, have far exceeded the “normal” strategies of creating the memory field. The American image of the Holocaust is being shaped by symbolic elites, creating various cultural texts: from professional discourse of philosophers, historians, sociologists, scientific symposia, university courses; to an extensive publishing market, media discourse supported by opinion-forming elites, musealization; to Hollywood films and TV series. All this leads to a persuasive sacralization of the Holocaust, which for many American Jews became something of a “mysterious religion” (Rosenfeld 2001, 54). Jewish history is thus a history of the victims,48 while the memory of the Holocaust is an “ideological construct of unalienable rights” (Finkelstein 1998, 4).49 Critics of the Holocaust awareness emphasize the utilitarian function of this memory, demonstrating that it mostly became a means for strengthening ethnic identity and supporting various political interests. One of its most stalwart opponents is Norman Finkelstein, the author of the controversial term “the Holocaust industry.” In his opinion, it is created by those people and institutions who use the genocide of the Jewish nation during the Second World War for their own political and financial agenda (Finkelstein 2000). According to Finkelstein, the literature of the “Holocaust industry” makes use of two dogmas: First of all, it presents the Holocaust as a one and only unique incident in history. Second, it depicts it as a culmination of irrational hatred on the part of non-Jews. These dogmas become a useful token in political play—Jewish suffering gives unique moral privileges and absolves from any hostility toward the Jews, which is considered utterly irrational. In actual fact, “the Holocaust industry” does not represent any victims or their progeny nor the still-living survivors, but it is an attempt at extorting moral privileges under the cover of Jewish 47   E. Wiesel, “For Some Measure of Humility,” Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility, no. 5:

314–316, after Bettelheim (1979, 96).

48   It is very significant for the biographical process of imbuing one’s own experiences with

value—past is death, not life; overcoming this attitude is very difficult.

49   After Rosenfeld 2001, 55; Finkelstein 2000.

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suffering. This way, the status of the victim becomes instrumentalized and exploited for industrial production of memory, aiming at achieving specific financial profits. Novick’s (1999, 273) point of view is less radical, yet also critical. He points to the fact that many important institutionalized forms of shaping the memory of the Holocaust were undertaken without any contribution from the survivors. The role of history witnesses increases only when specific institutions, like museums, come to life. They become exhibition guides and share their experiences during meetings, among others. All this, however, takes place according to a predetermined strategy of building the narration about the Holocaust,50 in which the survivor becomes a certain symbol, whose authenticity is verified by institutionally determined designates.51 The museums of the Holocaust have, to a large extent, educational functions, which activate and strengthen the identity. As a result, instead of learning about the Holocaust by means of Jewish history, one learns Jewish history by means of the Holocaust, which makes the Shoah the main reference point for the identity of American Jews. Consequently, American non-Jews also know nothing about the history of European Jews (Young 1993, 349). This way, the Holocaust became a “moral reference point” not only for American Jewry, but for all Americans, as it remains the only common element for citizens of so ethnically, politically, ideologically, etc., diverse a country (Novick 1999, 13); and at the same time, it becomes a compensatory event. Thus, the instrumentalization of the Shoah memory, has, first of all, marginalized the real victims and exploited their experiences. Second, the thesis about the uniqueness of Holocaust has deprived other victimized nations of their right to sympathy and proper attention (see Kohlhammer 2001). Third, focusing on the Shoah has made it impossible for American Jews to anchor their identity in American culture. Fourth, it is believed that the Holocaust narration poses a threat to religious faith. “Every Jewish 50   Interestingly, according to the same author, the way of commemorating the Holocaust often

takes non-Jewish forms, even apparently Christian ones. For instance, in the majority of museums, the way visitors should move from one place to the next brings to mind the Way of the Cross. Different fetishized objects resembling the cult of the relics can also be seen (Novick 1999, 11). 51   For instance, “when a documentary on survivors was show in Atlanta a few years ago, a poster was designed to advertise it. The face of a survivor was needed for the poster. There were many survivors in Atlanta, but none of them had that ‘survivor look,’ so a local Jewish man of the right age (. . .) was recruited. His face, it was explained, would better ‘reflect the spirit of the show’” (Novick 1999, 273).

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community, regardless of its size, has a far greater attendance during yearly celebrations related to the Holocaust than at the synagogue during Passover” (Goldberg 1995, 4).52 It is also about a tendency to avoid confrontation with one’s own moral and historical responsibilities for other crimes. Siegfried Kohlhammer calls this moral and political consequence a moral capital, which can lead to seeking refuge in a state of unactionability (Korzeniewski 2001, 60).53 Hypertrophy of the victim identity built on a structural frame ensures a politically, not only morally, privileged position. One should also point out that the memory of the Holocaust in America is cultivated in entirely different conditions than in Europe or Israel. First of all, sites of memory—memorials and/or museums—are removed from the context of place and time. They refer not so much to the history as to the idea. Ever since the Holocaust became a main point of reference for the present as well as the past of American Jews, the need for getting to know the sites of the Shoah has also arisen. These tendencies converged with a partial and, after the year 1989, a complete opening of Eastern European borders. As a consequence, at the turn of the eighties and nineties, the number of American Jews visiting Poland has markedly increased. This phenomenon is described in detail by Jack Kugelmass (1993, 420–422), who calls these visits “rites of the tribe.” Their goal is to confirm the (“tribal”) identity by fitting oneself into the trauma of one’s nation. Although they are not religious in nature,54 they share many of their characteristics: They are a collective and constitute a form of obligation, aimed at merging fundamental inconsequences (for instance, the difference between American Jews and their European forefathers, the dead and the living), making use of a specific rite, comprising a unique plan of the journey and a concomitant rhetoric. The latter consists of various strategies showing the participants what they will see or, rather, what they should 52   After Rosenfeld 2001, 50. 53   As Bartosz Korzeniewski points out, in political play, it is nowadays more effective to pass

oneself as a victim rather than a powerful opponent. It takes on different forms: for example, recent displays of German suffering during the Second World War—“We were victims too”— say, for instance, the heirs of Leipzig bombarded by the Allied forces; or the kind of opinions presented by people like Gleb Pavlovsky, the Russian political scientist and President Vladimir Putin’s adviser, who in an interview for the Third Program of Polish Radio (February 28, 2007) said that recently strong prejudice against the Russians could be observed, and are expressed in the same language that was used in prewar anti-Semitic propaganda. 54   These also exist but concern a different group of Jews—the Hasidim—visiting the graves of the tzadikim. Such voyages/pilgrimages usually last forty-eight hours. The pilgrims visit the grave and the synagogue, have a kosher meal, and board a plane (Fenton 1990).

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see visiting subsequent places, how they should experience it, and how they should talk about it. The journey, accompanied by a sense of mission, and thus called, should have the traits of a catharsis. Its participants are encouraged to talk about their feelings and about the day’s events during the evening discussions. The destinations are usually concentration camps and other places connected to the Holocaust. The greatest interest is taken in the remains of the Jewish culture—the shtetlach. The visitors have no interest for what is not Jewish—that is, Polish culture and Polish cultural heritage. One of the basic elements of the journey’s rhetoric is confirming a presumption—perceiving Poland as a dead past, equated with death camps. Because of that interpretation, Poland becomes a real element in collective history supporting the identity and a designate of a specific symbolic. Grandparents’ and parents’ narrations cease to be a myth hidden in mysterious town names. One’s own experiences imbue them with meaning and tangibility. Poland ceases to be some phantom existing only in the imagination. As a place of the Holocaust, it is also a “secularized vision of hell,” a negative center (like, for instance, Katyń or Chernobyl), a warning, which makes one seek the real center elsewhere. Focusing on martyrdom leads to the paradox of negating the prewar Jewish culture and the efforts of today’s Polish Jews are making to maintain it (Kugelmass 1993, 416–437). La Capra (2001, 162) calls this phenomenon constructing a “negative myth of origin.” Jews who live in Poland, however few of them, undermine this myth to a certain degree. Therefore, many American Jews are not convinced of the need to support the Jewish revival. “It’s a waste of time and money. If they really want to be Jewish, they should go to Israel” (Gitelman 2003, 285). Therefore, meetings with the Jews living in Poland are few and far between; and if they do occur, the question usually posed—a rhetorical one, in the opinion of the visitors—is, “Why do you live in Poland and not in Israel or America?” One could presume that a visit to Poland—organized and experienced in this way, if we invoke Victor Turner’s liminal aspect of every journey—becomes a specifically defined experience not only in a biographical but also in a collective aspect. It translates to strengthening one’s own biography, usually built in opposition to Polish society and, interestingly, in fact in opposition to the history of European Jews. Zvi Gitelman (2003, 283–287) points out that among a substantial number of studies on the attitudes or stereotypes in American society, there is practically none that would show the attitude of American Jews toward others. They usually scrutinize the others’ attitudes toward the Jews.

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If a study concerns American Jews, it does not investigate attitudes toward Poles. Therefore, Gitelman shares his own observations. Since 1989, he participated in several group trips of middle-aged and elderly American Jews traveling to Poland. In 1997, he accompanied his students on the March of the Living. For many years, he has been taking an active part in the workings of Jewish organizations. He observed that many American Jews consider Poles to be anti-Semites and that almost all of them entertain negative stereotypes about Poles. Its cause, among others, is the fact that the image of a Pole was shaped not directly, but via collective memory of the immigrants and does not change—whether the immigrants came to the United States back in the nineteenth century or before or after World War II. All these groups have remembered the acts of anti-Semitism, so it became deeply embedded in the “folklore of Jewish immigration.” A second-generation friend recently told me that she cannot bring herself to go to Poland (a common sentiment among quite a few Jews). “I’m afraid of the Poles,” she said. “Of course, that’s not true of my mother. She grew up there, she knows the place. But I only got all those awful stories from her.” (Hoffman 2004, 143) When I come to Haifa, I meet many friends who always ask me: Is there still so much anti-Semitism in Poland? And I say to them: like in other European countries. They hold onto their old, bad memories and don’t want to get rid of them. I’m sure that when someone is coming from Germany or France, they don’t ask him that. (Weiss 2002, 107)

The first quote illustrates a common, as Eva Hoffman says, belief of American Jews. It also shows the power of intergenerational tradition. The second one, of Israeli memory, shows the constancy of negative stereotypes and prejudices, especially those supported by personal experience. The other texts as well confirm that the stereotype of Polish anti-Semitism persists among Jewish society in America and Israel alike. For the majority of American Jews, Poland is thus the place of the Shoah.55 This situation leads to a selective perception of the past and present and of turning one’s back to the process of memory exchange—as a result, both sides know nothing about each other. For example, in a 1995 55   For example, some newspapers use the term “Polish concentration camps” to emphasize that

they were situated in Poland, yet the reader could infer that they were run by the Poles. Even camps located outside of Poland, like Bergen-Belsen, are referred to as Polish.

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guidebook 270 pages long about the March of the Living, not a single page was devoted to Polish history and culture, with only thirteen to the prewar history of Polish Jewry. “It is as if Polish Jewry existed in a vacuum or could just as easily have been in some other country” (Gitelman 2003, 283–286). Aside from the Pole-as-an-anti-Semite image and its concomitant dislike toward anything Polish-related, there are also other circumstances conducive to the persistence of the negative stereotype. One of them is the negation of the Diaspora as such. All other places, apart from Israel and America (because “America is different”), are seen as unfamiliar.56 America’s “difference” lies in the fact that although it is not exactly a “promised land” (a land of the forefathers), it remains a “golden country,” a place that can be treated as a real home as far as pragmatic existence is concerned. According to the American Jews, being an American citizen is a virtue, unlike being a citizen of any other country in the Diaspora, especially in Central and Eastern Europe (Woocher 1985, 161). In light of the above reflections referring to Israeli as well as American memory, one could ask, What is the image of the Diaspora in the eyes of the generation born there? Interestingly, taking into account what has already been said, the term “Diaspora” mainly refers to the area of Central and Eastern Europe. It leads to a certain simplification and narrowing of this notion. Yet in practice, that is the context where it is being used.

56   The author quotes a common, in his opinion, exchange between an American and European

Jew: “Why don’t you go to Israel?” “Why don’t you?” “Ah, but I live in America and you live here. This is no place for a Jew” (Gitelman 2003, 284). The United States is populated by 44 percent of the world Jewry, whereas Israel is by 34 percent, with this number increasing from 28 percent in the eighties due to the last immigration from Russia. One could say, thus, that it is the American Jews who make the kibbutz galuyot (the ingathering of the exiles) idea quite utopian, even though it is the raison d’être of the Israeli state. Jews from the American Diaspora are rather disinclined to return to the newly found homeland (Bensimon and Errera 2000, 52–53, 386).

CHAPTER V

The Voyage-Return in Narrative Interviews with the Israeli

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I decided to return to Poland to look for myself. From interview 18

1.  Characterization of the Gathered Material Now I shall focus on the research material I managed to gather during my stay in Israel in 2004. I conducted twenty biographical narrative interviews with people born before the war, who left their homeland and came to the “Land” (Palestine or later, Israel).1 Two of the narrators did not represent the right-after-the-war aliyah. One (born in 1915) came to Palestine in 1934 due to her Zionist inclinations (her family stayed in Poland, and everyone died during the war); the other (born in 1936) left Poland in 1968. These two narrations are the two extremes bridging other narrators’ experiences, not only chronologically. Nine out of twenty narrators were born in the years 1928–1931, five in 1925–1927, and five in 1934–1938. Among them were nine men and eleven women. I could conduct most of the interviews in Polish. Two were in English, and four were carried out in Hebrew (I was accompanied by a person translating them into English). The narrators were choosing English or Hebrew because they were not able to create a story in Polish, although they used to know the language. It is a very important matter, not only as far as the communication and interaction are concerned; therefore, I shall give it some more attention. The interviews took up between forty-five minutes and two hours and were transcribed on about 150 pages (fifty lines a page). Thus, it is a rich collection of research material, containing many interesting analytical threads, which I will focus on later. First, however, I would like to look at the material with a critical eye, presenting the context in which it originated. The choice of the narrators was intentional. I wanted people who left their birthplace after the war, settled in Israel, and after some years did or did not return to their homeland.2 Subsequent narrators were being found 1 

Regardless of the moment of arrival or its specific reasons (like the Zionist ideology), this was the term used by all the interviewees—Eretz Israel, or the Land of Israel. 2   Among the narrations I have gathered, there are two such cases that I treat as a frame of reference for the main subject of my scrutiny.

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by snowball sampling, but the majority of meetings were possible thanks to the kindness of the person who made the effort of organizing my stay in Israel and locating my contacts. Thus, I had no direct influence on the choice of the narrators, except for determining the already-mentioned general traits. It was not a comfortable situation as far as the research procedures are concerned. However, it was the only possible option, taking into account the circumstances of my stay, which could only last two weeks. Designing my project, I was aware of the limitations. Another way of gathering material of that type could be conducting interviews with the returnees in Poland.3 However, because of the circumstances, I decided to give up this idea. First of all, I wanted relations built from the perspective of time and distance, when the emotions related to the return experience could have been worked through and incorporated into a biography. One could say that the aim of biographical narrative analysis is observing the process of recreating biographical experiences, giving meaning and significance to the specific experiences from the past and present perspectives. Practical experiences of the researcher seem to corroborate this assumption—it is not easy to get a narration about past experiences in statu nascendi, especially if they are difficult and not entirely processed.4 Additionally, the liminal character of the experiences of the journey fosters focusing on reliving them, rather than talking about them. Narration occurs later. It serves to organize the experiences, giving them biographical meaning and activating the past via story (Bruner 1987). Second, people visiting/returning are either doing it anonymously (reaching them is difficult then) or traveling in a group (which is not conducive to organizing a meeting to conduct a narrative interview) to take part in different sorts of celebrations. It is during those times that accessing them is the easiest, but their presence is often related to the public and media sphere. The returnees sometimes give interviews published in local newspapers; however, this situation does not create a desirable interactive atmosphere for building a narration. The researcher becomes one of many faces requesting an answer and can get a generalized relation, created for 3 

For instance, in Łódź (where I live), there are many possibilities to do so. In 2004 and in 2009, the sixtieth and the sixty-fifth anniversaries of the ghetto liquidation were commemorated, and in 2006, the two hundredth anniversary of the Jewish community’s establishment. Such occasions always gather former Jewish inhabitants of the city, returning to their roots. 4   For instance, it is difficult to get a narration about suffering when trajectory is the predominant structure.

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a “generalized interviewer.” Gathering the material in the narrators’ own environment was more likely to result in a spontaneous story. The narrators came from three kibbutzim, a small town, Jerusalem, and Be’er Sheva. The material allows for a contrasting comparison and identification of many common threads, some of them enabling theoretical saturation (Glaser, Strauss 1967). It is worth mentioning that among the interviewees I have not encountered anyone presenting an anti-Polish attitude. Only in one case, a narration of a woman’s from the first aliyah, could one find many negative stereotypes about Poles—sometimes even the language of prejudice. This attitude was, however, neutralized by her great openness and willingness to contact Poles. In other words, among the narrators, there were no people presenting anti-Polish attitudes that are common in Israel and mentioned by the narrators themselves. It is actually very interesting (. . .) why this negative feeling towards Poland, more than any other country. I was trying to see it for myself, and [the attitude] about Poland is terribly, terribly negative. (W 14)

What I encountered was rather a kind of “political correctness.” Many people referring to their negative experiences connected to instances of Polish anti-Semitism were trying to “tone them down” by simultaneously referring to positive experiences as well: KK: What made you leave Poland? N: Well, first of all, I mean, some signs of anti-Semitism. Maybe it wasn’t about me, directly, because I can’t say it was a coincidence I was in this pogrom [this refers to a pogrom in Kraków in 1946—KK], which died down immediately, anyway. But I didn’t get it at the university nor from the professors. I was passing my exams, in person, after the war. (W 10)

It is a fragment of the narrative in which I was asking additional questions. A fragment similar in its construction can be found earlier, when the author in the main part of the narration talks about five postwar years spent in her native Kraków. After the mention of pogroms (in Kraków and Kielce) follows a sequence of memories about her postwar stay in Poland, focusing on an attachment to the place (Kraków), Polishness, and a conclusion: “For me these were five very good years, although there were also less good episodes.”

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My lack of contact with people presenting strong prejudices had two reasons: The first, in my opinion, was a decisive one. The fact that the person looking for my potential narrators was likely unwilling to put me in a difficult situation and chose them in such a way as to eliminate those who would present extreme attitudes. Second, I can assume that such people would be more reluctant to share their experiences, especially with regard to their return. This lack of contact with such cases resulted in a certain “isolation” from some research areas. At the same time, I have to admit that this situation was far easier and more comfortable for me.5 Because of a kind introduction and the very welcoming attitude of the narrators, I was made comfortable everywhere that I went. Each meeting was accompanied by some snacks. I was shown pictures, newspaper clippings, books, etc., and people were very interested in my work. I would like to thank everyone once more for such a warm welcome and the time my narrators have given me. Simultaneously, I have to stress that irrespective of the above factors determining the choice of my narrators, there was a general frame of reference that set the possibility of interaction and communication—and it was the readiness to talk. From my reflections up to now, it is evident that a return to the memories in the case of a traumatic past is extremely difficult. The generation of Shoah survivors has gone along the path described in the previous chapters: from denial, own silence, and silence of collective memory to incorporating the past into private and public discourse. Conducting the interviews in 2004, I came into contact with people who were ready to share the story of their lives. This fact requires an additional commentary, with regard to different interpretative aspects of my meetings with the narrators. Asking about their biography, I did not expect them to talk about the war. I was, first and foremost, interested in the story of their arrival in Israel and their return to the homeland. I asked them to put it in the context of the rest of their lives. Yet I gave them freedom as to the choice of war memories,6 knowing that they can involve strong emotions. However, most of my narrators embarked on this topic as well, talking 5 

It was only once that I came into contact with someone like this, indirectly. It was the husband of one of the narrators. Although our conversation lasted only a few minutes, I found the situation difficult and uncomfortable. 6   It is worth noting that memoirs of the Israeli living in Kraków before the war published in 2004 (Pordes and Grin 2004) have a similar form. The narrators focus on their prewar and postwar lives; what separates these memories is a sentence-long information about their war experiences.

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about their war experiences in detail; and in the rest of the narratives this subject played an important part too, though it was not placed in the narration chronologically. Thus, war experiences determined a basic frame of the issues I was interested in and had a similar role in the structure of the narration (they usually followed chronologically after reminiscences about childhood and the life before the war), but their significance for the context of the entire story was different. None of the narrators was speaking of their war experiences for the first time. Many of them took part in meetings with young people; some of them visited Poland with groups of youths as guides—witnesses to the Shoah. Thus, they were ready to share the accounts of their war experiences. Each of them had his/her story to tell, which he/she considered a duty and obligation, especially to the young generation. Right after the war, while the public discourse was dominated by silence, nowadays these individual stories are incorporated into the collective memory. “My story” becomes, thus, a part of collective story about a nation’s suffering, and the living survivors are bearers of the memory passed on to the young generations. The transfer of “my story” became not only an exchange of information, sharing one’s life experience, but also a form of ritual of bridging the past (represented by the survivors) and the present (represented by the young generation).7 This obligation of sharing witness comes from the conviction about the uniqueness of the Shoah and an imperative of remembering inherent to Jewish culture. In Hebrew liturgy, the phrase le dor va dor, “from generation to generation,” is constantly present. For Jews, passing on tradition has always equaled remembering. “I remember, therefore I am,” as keeping collective identity has always depended on memory (Richmond 2001, 13). In this respect, war accounts in the narratives I have gathered are biographically worked through and constitute an often-emotional recreation of these experiences. Thus, it is difficult to talk about spontaneity of narration in regard to this part of the stories. However, this was not my main interest.8 7 

One of the narrators, aside from the interview, told me this: During one of her visits to Łódź, she went alone to the cemetery to visit the grave of her grandfather. There, she met a group of young people from Jerusalem. She approached them. They were very surprised that she knew Hebrew. When she explained that she was also from Jerusalem, they were surprised even more. “What are you doing here on your own? Aren’t you afraid?” they asked. After her explanations, they asked for her story. She told them about her war experiences. 8   Methodological rules of a narrative interview analysis require the narration to be spontaneous—that is, not prepared beforehand and not routine (Schütze 2005, 2008), for

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What is also an important interpretative framework for my contact with the narrators is the fact that I was not the first person with whom they shared their traumatic memories of the war. One could say that these meetings were not therapeutic in their character if one assumes that in certain autobiographical circumstances, a narrative interview can be “some form of therapy for the person interviewed” (Rokuszewska-Pawełek 2002, 66–70). It mainly concerns traumatic experiences that—often denied, hidden, unprocessed—can be suddenly revealed to the researcher gathering the material. The best-known situations here are the narratives about war experiences, especially Jewish. Traumatic memories, suppressed for many years, were often revealed for the first time to strangers (not family or friends)—for instance, to researchers gathering autobiographical narrations for various purposes. In some scientific projects, the therapeutic context was not only expected, but also fully intended as an important part of the research process, which required a specific knowledge from the interviewer. Sometimes such therapeutic work is evident in the way of presenting the problem. The style of discourse used in a publication allows one to determine how the researcher feels about the interviewee and his or her dedication to the process of biographical work taken up by the narrator (comp. Engelking 1994, 1996). Moreover, in some cases the therapeutic element is considered an element of the research procedure. Some of Gabriele Rosenthal’s works can be an example here. Her narrative interviews became a form of social and therapeutic intervention, aimed at eliminating communication disturbances—for instance, between the generations in a family environment (comp. Rosenthal 1998, 2000). This was not my intention, but I was aware that the meetings can be moving or upsetting9 or, to some extent, have some therapeutic value for the narrators. It might have been attributed to the mere fact of talking to someone from Poland who was interested in hearing their biographies. This could also have led to breaking/weakening certain stereotypes and prejudices. In this regard, though I would hate to overestimate my role, my meetings could be a form of liaison work. During some of them, at first, I sensed tension or uncertainty about meeting a Pole. These feelings then one can expect homology between the structure of biographical experiences and the order of the story. 9   I know that at least one of them was. A man quoted further on (W 4), who was telling me the dramatic fate of his family, was so profoundly moved by this meeting that he could not sleep all night afterward.

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would disappear during the narration. What made me feel this way were not interaction details recorded in transcription, but rather my own impressions. In most of the cases, I had a feeling that by means of the task I had given them, the narrators were returning to the memories of their birthplace, language, and roots. It resulted in many positive emotions, which sometimes would surprise them. These are my feelings, rather than distanced conclusions coming from the analysis of the material. There was only one time these suppositions of mine were confirmed. After one of the meetings, a narrator called the person who organized it to express her gratitude. The chance to speak Polish and my hearing out her story were positive impulses to resume her biographical work. These circumstances require a more detailed commentary on the role of the researcher in the process of gathering biographical material. As Alicja Rokuszewska-Pawełek (2002, 68–69) points out, a “narrative situation” of the interview deprives the researcher of the basic tool of domination, typical for such an interaction in general and a sociological study in particular—that is, a ready-made set of questions, usually anticipating the answers. In a narrative situation, the researcher listens in order to penetrate an unstructured world of the narrator. However, the researcher is not a passive listener, but an active participant in the situation, which can be called a meeting with a stranger. This meeting is always defined in social and above all ethical categories; and in this respect, it goes beyond a simple relation between the researcher and the researched. In other words, the researcher meets a person who entrusts him/her with the story of his/her own biographical experiences. Such a story cannot be listened to with only scientific interest. One has to attempt to define the researcher’s image of his/her own identity in the process of gathering the material. Coming back to my meetings with the narrators, I certainly did not set myself the same goals Rosenthal, for instance, did. Simultaneously, I was aware of the fact that my meetings were gaining a specific interpretative dimension—for example, due to our respective national identities, a Pole (generationally the same age as the children of the narrators) interested in the fate of Polish Jews—this created a sphere of interpretation transcending an interview situation. In general, it could have fostered certain prejudices or stereotypes or verify them in a way. In the latter case, socially and morally, my meetings were undoubtedly therapeutic—most of them at least, hence my previous mention of the liaison work. Thus, from this perspective, it is difficult to talk about the researcher’s total detachment from the process of gathering the material. What is more, if one tries to

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do so, he/she fails to see the researcher-narrator situation as meeting the Other. Coming back to the general characteristics of the material, one has to point out that an important factor determining the interactive situation and the way of building the narration was the language of communication. The majority of the narrators spoke Polish, although for some of them, it is a “dead language” in a sense, as they have not used it for decades. Therefore, they were often experiencing a cognitive dissonance. On one hand, they wanted to speak Polish; however, on the other, especially at the end of an interview, they would express their dissatisfaction, as they would have been more able to verbalize their emotions in Hebrew: I’m embarrassed when I talk, if I said the same thing in Hebrew it would be completely different, it’s as if I’m completely stupid [laughter] no accent, no words, no nothing. (W 2)

With regard to these words, one could assume that in the case of people with linguistic difficulties, their narration does not render their intentions completely, especially when it comes to emotions or argumentations. On the other hand, building a story in a language used so long ago should be considered phenomenal in itself. The aim of the above reflections was an introductory characterization of the narrators—an attempt to assess the general quality of the gathered material, comprising not only issues of methodology, but also the extremely important context in which the narrations came to life. I have divided the analysis into two parts: In the first one, drawing upon all the narratives, I will point out the most important recurring topics. In the second, I will present an analysis of four cases. First, however, some attention should be given to the construction of the narrations, for their structures are quite similar. The narrators build it in reference to specific turning points in their biographies. Sequences of events are usually presented as thus: (1) life before the war, (2) war, (3) return home after the war, (4) preparation for departure/departure, (5) life in Israel, (6) returns. Essentially, all the narratives share this structure; they differ only in the proportions of each part. Usually, the war is the dominant sequence. In the case of people born in 1925–1927, the first part of the narration is more developed. This structure, common to all the stories, is caused by two factors: First of all, the narrators share, in Mannheim’s sense, common generational

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experiences, additionally determined by a major historic event. Thus, they confirm the thesis that regardless of individual fates and experiences of the storytellers, their biographies show social processes determining the course of history at micro- and macroscales. Second, this construction shows that the narrators could refer to a specific pattern of telling a story about themselves in the context of the events they witnessed and participated in. “My story” serves a major role here; therefore, the war part of the narration is usually quite extensive. A similar construction of the narrative is conducive to distinguishing its common traits not only on a structural level. The themes I present later on, after an analysis of the material, are the fields determining interpretative frameworks for the narrators’ experiences. They have been singled out because of the processual experience of the return, which is of special interest to me. Their characterization allows me to show social, biographical, or interactive contexts of this experience. It is difficult to establish a hierarchy of subjects due to their different placements in individual narrations. The sequence of presenting the themes is thus not a reflection of their structural or qualitative order. Rather, it serves to organize the reflections about particular experiences recreated in the narrations. One could even say that individual themes complement each other and that only their combination or, even better, superimposition gives a full meaning of the process that interests me. I have distinguished five themes, each of which includes several aspects. Not every aspect is present in every narrative. In such a case, its lack or presence testifies to the diversity of biographical experiences in this area. Also, not all of the themes recur with equal intensity. Fragments I am quoting below, illustrating individual themes, are the cases that further describe observations to their fullest extent, characterizing the themes that are more than conspicuous in certain narratives allowed me to identify them in others, where they were present only in their vestigial forms.

2.  The Journey The return, understood as a process, and the very act of the journey were the major subjects of my interest. In some stories, it was present in its recessive vestigial form, outweighed by the war experiences. Then, however, they would constitute a unique point of reference in the interpretation of short, but emotionally and essentially condensed return descriptions. A characterization of the return as a biographical process requires a detailed

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explanation; therefore, I am undertaking it further on when describing select cases. Here, I shall refer to the descriptions of return voyages. As in each case, regardless of its specific, unique circumstances, the return had to be an organized and planned journey. In the material, one can distinguish three different types: visits during the PPR era, usually in organized groups, taking the form of tourist or business trips; visits organized by the Israeli side after the year 1989 (usually with a group of young people); and individual journeys, usually with family or friends. The following characterization of each case serves not so much analytical as descriptive purposes; it shows the background and ethnographic framework of the return-voyage experience. In this respect, I am slightly “objectifying” the journey. 2.1  Journeys during the PPR Era

Some visited Poland before the year 1989 or in the years 1989–1990, shortly after the political transformations and border opening. Yet from an economic point of view, the immediately post-1989 period can be included in the PPR era, judging by the narrators’ observations and feelings. All persons who visited Poland back then returned also in the second half of the nineties or after the year 2000, and therefore they would stress the contrast between the previous and the current images of Poland. In Poland, there was communism till the year 1988. In ’88 I went to Poland for the first time. It was still during the communism. My wife went a year earlier than I did, and she visited the cloister where they hid her. There, she met a woman, who had also been there during the war. She and her husband were here (in Israel) as well, they visited me, we were to holy Christian places, they gave me their address and invited me to come over. I stayed in a hotel, but I contacted them and asked them for dinner. I asked her husband if he could drive me to this village. He didn’t have the time but decided to lend me his car. He lent me a car which looked like a motorbike! A motorbike engine and a car body. You’d feed it gas and oil. There used to be fuel ration coupons. He gave me a canister with fuel. I would have to drive 180 kilometers there. And the gas stations . . . Poland was such a mess back then! I don’t know if you remember this. I took the car, took a ride around Warsaw, around the Ogród Saski, where there is this grave of the Polish Unknown Soldier, the street was paved with

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these stones, the car started shaking. My wife is asking, “Are you out of your mind, you want to drive a car like this? In 30 kilometers you’d be stuck in some forest or other, and who’s going to save you?” I turned back and talked to a guide. He suggested I should go to Wilanów. Saw my car and suggested we take a taxi. How much could it cost back then? So that evening I returned the car to my friend and did not go to the village. And this is how my first stay in Poland ended. In 2001 I pronounced that we should take a video camera, go to Poland, rent a car and go to this village. For the past ten years Poland has been free, on TV you could see Lech Wałęsa going to the USA, he’s also been to Israel. So I asked one of my sons to take a 2 week holiday and go with me, so we could recreate my trail, my wartime via dolorosa. In Warsaw we rented a car and set off the next day. I said to him, “Listen, we must first reach a town by the name Sokołów Podlaski. In Tel Aviv I went to the Polish Embassy to gather some information, I got a map, I bought guidebooks to Poland.” (W 9) I went there for the first time a month or so after the elections, the communists were still there and it was difficult, very difficult, because when we crossed the Polish border they took our passports, kept them for some 30 minutes, but then gave them back and everything was alright. When we came for the first time, I went to Łódź, to see Łódź and where did we stay, in a hotel, the Grand Hotel, not far from, on the Piotrkowska Street, where we used to live, and I remember this hotel from before the war and it looks [laughter] like before the war, er. Morning we had to be back, it was on Friday, we were with my brother and his wife, and we needed to get back on Sunday, because my brother needed to go to work in Germany, so we went to Orbis, there was still Orbis back then, to buy tickets and go abroad by train. There was a line and they were giving us a hard time, my brother was trying hard, he knew the train stations in Łódź, he went there with someone from the hotel, and he thought he’d get the tickets on the station. But a man came, everywhere there’s someone like this who does this line thing, tries to, and he got something from my brother, and made us tickets from Wrocław, a train. We reached Wrocław by car, from Łódź. (. . .) And that was the first time. Me and my wife, we would walk down Piotrkowska Street, there was a shop there, with some glassware, my wife wanted to buy, on a display, they were on a display. I wanted to, so I come in, in Polish somehow that my wife wanted to buy these things. And she says, “It’s only on the

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display, it’s not available [laughter] there is nothing.” It was the first time. (W 12)

Several shared traits of the above descriptions are noteworthy. They recreate experiences, which at that time were common daily occurrences for Eastern bloc inhabitants (for instance, taking away the passports, rationing of certain products, and low technology development) and for Western incomers used to be a form of metareality, bordering on the absurd. Although (as I have already pointed out) Jewish trips to Poland usually lack the “tourist aspect,” typical for today’s culture of traveling, these accounts are redolent of other descriptions of that kind, created from a foreign tourist’s perspective—Schütz’s stranger, in that case exposing the grotesqueness of socialist reality. Such extensive descriptions of Polish reality can be found only in this place. Moreover, they seem so overwhelming that they make it impossible to focus on the goal of the journey. Movement restrictions and organizational difficulties made these first visits to Poland “false starts” of a kind. Only during the second journey could a “deeper” return take place. It is well illustrated in the first fragment, in which the author, describing his second visit, shows how such a journey should be organized. Of course it is not a universal rule, but in other narratives, due to different journey arrangements, visits to biographically important places were possible even in the PPR era. From what I have observed, everyone who made it was accompanied by Poles of his/her acquaintance, who would lend a hand in prosaic but problematic matters such as transportation or accommodation. Yet in every case, severe restrictions were indeed experienced. And after the year 1990, during the next visit, this disappeared. A sense of restriction and “dissatisfaction” was oftentimes a cause for a later journey. The narrators would follow the political situation in Poland and wait for changes, asking friends who had already been there for their insights. During the second visit, everyone noticed a huge contrast between then and now. Journeys in the PPR era can be considered “paving the way” for later mass visits initiated in the nineties. The first visitors were pioneers in building experiences, whose social and biographical significance was revealed only a decade later. In the eighties, the topic of the return was absent from the public discourse. On an individual level, it translated into a lack of socially validated language for building stories of a biographical journey into the past.

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2.2  Journeys with Israeli Youths

Some of the narrators would travel to Poland with Israeli schoolboys and schoolgirls as witnesses to the Shoah. I was there. I went. I would like to go there once more. One of my daughters was there too /I have yet another daughter. I would like to take her. She will go too. My granddaughter wishes to go as well. We will think of something. You know, I went as a witness with young people, because young people go there. Children of seventeen, eighteen years old, they go there and learn, and they see all these places. I went there once with such a group. We prepare them at first, these people, these children, we, we, six months earlier they are taught. They watch films. I tell them what I’ve just told you. I tell them everything so that they know, because they’re far away from these things. They are being prepared for six months before they leave. There is this histo . . . histo . . . a lady, a lady, a historian— yes, a lady who tells them about Poland as well. So I went there, and between ourselves, all together, we showed those kids. They saw these camps and where they had burnt people and then also good things. We saw the place where I had gone to school, me, because I was there, and this historian lady wanted to show where I lived through this and where I later escaped to in Mielec. But I couldn’t. I don’t know where this house is. I have no idea. (. . .) It’s been so many years, I went there, and it was very difficult. After fifty years, I went there, and I had to talk about it there. I showed them where I was and where I lived. Yes, I went to Poland. But I want to go there one more time, without, because when I was there with these young people, I was bound to them. I couldn’t walk these parks the way I pleased, where I used to roam all the time. I couldn’t share such things with them. They wouldn’t understand. It was teaching, yes. KK: But why do you think they wouldn’t understand? N: They would, they would. But . . . but to be on my own, not with . . . I couldn’t leave them. I had to be there all the time. I couldn’t just go somewhere at night. I had to—it was my job. They understood. They were very interested that it used to be my home and my school. It was on Sunday, and it was closed. I wanted to step in, but it so happened that we couldn’t. But when I go there for the second time, I will step in this school. (W 16)

Talking about the way such trips were organized, the narrator touches upon subjects that I shall analyze further on in the next part of the material

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characterization. The most important ones are the intergenerational tradition and the role the surviving witnesses play. However, what comes to the forefront in the above description is the experience of the narrator with regard to renewing bonds with a place and an inability to communicate fully with representatives of another generation, due to Mannheim’s understanding circumstances of generation, a lack of reciprocity of perspective concerns—mostly, the intensity of personal experiences—caused by rediscovering the intimacy of one’s own place after many years. Assuming the role of the witness to some extent formalizes the visit. Accompanying the youths is considered a duty. The narrator even calls it her job. Such traveling entails a sense of responsibility for the group, a necessity to fulfill the duties one has taken on. Although the witness knows the young people in question and in difficult moments gets moral support from them, specified circumstances (like, for instance, the itinerary and day schedule), as a rule, limit the spontaneity of experience as far as one’s own biography is concerned.10 It seems that their intimate character (at least to some extent) can be shared only by the members of one’s own family, especially children and grandchildren. In this case, sharing this experience is synonymous with passing on specific heritage of one’s own identity and, consequently, (re) creating roots of the loved ones as well. The narrator senses this difference. Therefore, her next journey is supposed to be informal and, above all, familial. The other narrators who used to come with young people also traveled individually, with family. 2.3  Personal Journeys

I shall characterize such a return in greater detail further on when analyzing select narratives. Yet it is already worth mentioning that in the case of individual travels, the traveler was never on his/her own, but rather 10   On an interactive level, the situation is actually quite complex. It is not only about the

experiences of the survivors, but also of the young people. Halina Birenbaum (2003) presents an interesting example of such a journey. She talks about one of the many travels with young people in which she participated as a survivor. In 2003, she arrived in Poland with Orthodox Israeli schoolgirls. This journey, governed by religious requirements, has shown how its very script (that is, the places visited, the pace of sightseeing, the abundance of impressions, the interpretations of the teacher) influences the interpretation of this experience in the eyes of the young generation, as well as that of the survivors. In the case described by Birenbaum, the motive of the Shoah and the Diaspora were overshadowed by the religious motif.

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accompanied by family or friends; sometimes both spouses would return together. Thus, it was a community experience, in a sense, although the presence of the loved ones was supposed to foster an intimate character of the experiences. In spite of a lack of formal organizational requirements, unlike in the case of group traveling, such a journey would always be carefully planned. The script of the return was determined by personal biographical events, places of death of the loved ones, and sites of the nation’s martyrdom. The itinerary was dependent on these places and shaped the dynamics of the concurrent events. Each individual site of memory gains a specific meaning due to its symbolism (individual and collective), but also its state (quality) as an element of fixed space (for example, whether the family home still exists or is devastated, pulled down, etc.). It is impossible to establish a sequence of events, because it depends on individual circumstances. Generally, the first destination is the birthplace. AuschwitzBirkenau is also a common site of martyrdom of the loved ones and/or one’s own persecution. Continuous lines show not so much an established route as symbolize a net of relations between the visited places, which emerges ex post, and by the act of the return becomes reintegrated into the image of one’s biography. The dotted line symbolizes other places, because the return—and especially the first journey—does not always include them, as it requires a specific biographical work. The strategy of the travel itself is also interesting. In the case of individual visits, the narrators (and not only them) would often make use of services of professional drivers, who specialize in traveling around Poland with Jewish families and organizing such visits. Unfortunately, all my information about them comes only indirectly from some of the narrators. Thus, although I cannot be more specific about this issue, I would like to stress its importance as an analytical category, showing a unique net of interaction in the process of organizing such a journey (Turner’s social enterprise). Although, as I have shown in chapter 1, Jewish travels to Poland are not what we would call “postmodern tourism”; from the point of view of people who make such journeys easier, this definition could perhaps be apt. These professional drivers would, then, be among the creators of “the enterprise called travel.”

3.  Language As I have already mentioned, language of the narration became one of the most important factors shaping the interview situation, the way of telling the story, or, finally, the narrators’ reflections about their biography. One could say that in the context of my meeting with the narrators, the language became something more than just a means of communication and expression. Therefore, it requires some more attention. It appears in several aspects: linguistic competence of the narrators and, consequently, the causes for which some of them had lost the ability to speak Polish; learning Hebrew, assuming new names, and giving names to their children; the experience of “abandoning” the language. 3.1  Linguistic Competence of the Narrators

Among the twenty people I interviewed, fourteen decided to speak Polish, while eight of them had some problems with verbalization. There were also cases of narratives whose language can be described as “exceptionally beautiful Polish.” It concerned not only linguistic correctness or verbal efficiency, but also the melody of the language and its unusual richness—even by today’s standards. A unique example here is a woman born in 1915, who after finishing her gymnasium (high school) left for Palestine before the war started. She was using astonishingly beautiful Polish, though a little archaic at some points, which made her story even more enchanting. All other issues aside, listening to this narrative was a unique aesthetic experience for me, as even in Poland rarely can one meet someone talking like this. Maintaining a high linguistic efficiency was determined by specific biographical and social factors. Among the former is the age of the narrators. Older people, who managed to graduate from their gymnasia before the war or were in the middle of their high school education, spoke Polish very well. Their linguistic competence was, however, not only a result of education,11 but also of cultivating the language for the rest of their lives, mainly by reading books or, less often, by using the language 11   In this case, it was not only about linguistic education, but also literary one. The narrators

knew Polish literature and had a positive emotional attitude toward it. They would also voice their high opinion about the high quality of education before the war.

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on a daily basis. The latter one was determined by social circumstances. For instance, people living in the so-called Polish kibbutzim—that is, the ones housing Jews from Poland—had an easier time retaining the ability to speak Polish. However, regardless of these determinants, all the narrators kept an impeccable Polish accent and intonation and general correctness of syntax and inflection (though there were some mistakes here). None of them spoke with a Jewish accent. In most cases, Polish was their first language. References to Yiddish occur when they talk about the language of their parents. Difficulties, if any, were present on the lexical level. When a Polish word was missing, it was replaced with a Hebrew or English one or a gesture. Sometimes I would suggest the right expression. Here are the examples:12 N: I could say that my memory is very trif / how do you say it . . . ? KK: It’s not clear. It’s foggy. N: It’s not clear, but there are some awful scenes which I remember vividly. (W 18) N: I was born on December 23rd [she says the numbers in Hebrew, then in Polish] 1929, in Łódź, on er [in Hebrew]. I had had a little sister. She was five years younger [in Hebrew]. (W 8) N: And one, how do you say it, for water . . . ? KK: A bucket. N: One bucket. We were traveling there for two, three days, I don’t even know. It was awful. People got, how do you say . . . ? KK: Nausea? I don’t know . . . N: No [shows] KK: Diarrhea. N: Diarrhea. People got it, and it was awful . . . (W 2)

These difficulties stemmed from the fact that these people had not used Polish for several decades and therefore lost their linguistic competence in various degrees: from a virtual loss of any Polish, which made communication difficult (for instance, one narrator who spoke only Hebrew said one sentence in beautiful fluent Polish, “I used to speak Polish fluently, but I haven’t used that language for sixty years” [W 13] 12   One should keep in mind that the original transcripts are in Polish language.

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and then resumed talking in Hebrew), to the above examples of impaired, yet understandable communication in Polish, and to “faults” that were imperceptible to me, the listener, but sensed by the speakers themselves. KK: And how was it when you arrived here speaking Polish? You speak Polish so beautifully. N: Well, for sixty years, almost sixty, I haven’t used Polish in conversation. But it was my native language, the language I was born to. Prettily, I wouldn’t say so myself, because I’m constantly grasping for words, which I’m missing. It’s not the language which I use on a daily basis, but I read, I write—I will never forget this language. (W 15)

It is also noteworthy that many of these people knew Polish poetry by heart and would recite it to me. Depending on the age of the narrators, these may have been primarily poems for children, especially those by Julian Tuwim, or lullabies; in the case of the older narrators,who had attended Polish schools, serious works of poetry like Ojciec zadżumionych by Juliusz Słowacki was mentioned several times. Thus, a question remains as to the cause of these exceptionally high (taking into account a several-decades-long linguistic isolation) language standards in the field of accent or intonation and, at the same time, of the loss of ability to speak it. The most fundamental cause was the alreadymentioned linguistic isolation, which had its source in social, ideological, and individual aspects of the narrators’ biography. Those who had problems with the language lived in kibbutzim populated mostly by non-Polish Jews. For instance, one of the kibbutzim I visited was inhabited by Jews from Argentina, who were unburdened by traumatic experiences of the Shoah. Polish Jews would attempt to close the war chapter of their biographies, which was fostered by the macrosocial circumstances described in the previous chapter. Learning a new, completely different language which was supported by the ideology of the newly created country, was conducive to these aspirations. Rejecting the language was a consequence of rejecting the past. The need to learn Hebrew was also a contributing factor. Simultaneously, it is worth emphasizing that these phenomena did not involve all of the narrators to such an extent as to influence their linguistic competence. These people would take a conscious effort to cultivate the language, and it seems that it did not have to be related to one’s involvement in, for instance, Zionist ideology. An example here can be the already-quoted woman (born in 1915) who—in spite of her Zionist

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opinions and knowledge of Hebrew dating back to before the war, an anti-Polish attitude, and leaving Poland in 1936—retained an exceptional mastery of the language. N: I feel sorry for Poland. I always miss Polish landscapes and Polish language. I no longer speak like I used to. KK: You speak beautifully. N: But not as fluently. I miss a word here and there, but it is why I enjoy speaking Polish. I always enjoy reading a Polish book. This nation, this Polish nation . . . where did I learn heroism, from whose history? Where did I get an example of a nation fighting for freedom, if not in Poland? (W 17) 3.2  Learning Hebrew

An important element of isolating oneself from Polish was entering the world of Hebrew. It happened in a variety of ways: Well, to be honest I never learned any Hebrew, I just started reading them books in Hebrew, which I already knew, having read them in Polish. And so, every word which I didn’t know at all, I would look up. But it was actually my own learning, at that time it wasn’t organized, there were some groups which before coming to the kibbutz were in a different kibbutz, young people they were, and they were taught a thing or two there. But I immediately joined the army and from there went to Gaza, this place, so I didn’t have these privileges to learn with a teacher or something, you had to do it on your own and I made it . . . (W 3) This Hebrew I would learn with a kerosene lamp, by a kerosene lamp, 50, 80 words each day, and I knew thousands of words, but I couldn’t connect these words at all, so it was a big problem, and till this day all these other languages were like a leg or an arm [shows] and here it was more practical. (W 10) He [the narrator’s father—KK] spoke Hebrew and I didn’t, so he said that we are no longer speaking Polish now. It was like this, a child comes, who speaks only Polish, my aunt barely spoke Polish, because she couldn’t remember it anymore, but she did. And he spoke Hebrew well and I arrive at the land and he refuses to speak Polish with me. So I simply learnt it in maybe three weeks,

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I was twelve and I would just walk and meet other children in the streets and I would ask and I learnt these first words, what is it, and I would write it down right away and I learnt very fast. I know, after only three months I wrote a story, and this teacher couldn’t believe I wrote it myself. (W 14)

These quotes suggest that learning Hebrew was not easy, not only due to its otherness, but mostly on account of the social context of this task. Let us remember that Hebrew became one of the basic tools for creating a new identity. People arriving in Israel were under great pressure to master the language as soon as possible and treat it as their own. In spite of the fact that in other social contexts it did not have to be like this at all, especially if we take into account the fact that Polish Jews comprised a significant group among the ranks of postwar emigrants. This strong ideological pressure was accompanied by specific biographical expectations. Entering a culturally and linguistically different world made it easier to distance oneself from the past. Focus on a new language was also enhanced by collective actions, such as learning in kibbutzim organized in the Diaspora, so even before arriving in Palestine/Israel, as evidenced by the quoted fragments, biographical circumstances encouraged the effort of learning. Although from the very beginning one could learn the language in class and from 1950 this practice was institutionalized by creating ulpans (schools of intensive Hebrew classes for the newly arrived immigrants [Hacohen 2003, 170]), many people would learn it individually. In a frenzy of new duties, any consistent learning was impossible so people would come up with their own methods. This strategy of “spontaneous acquisition of linguistic skills” is often applied by immigrants, irrespective of their situational context (Franceschini 2006, 38–39). Next to a fast language acquisition, one of the key elements of the newcomers’ “Hebrewization” process was assuming new names. 3.3  Assuming New Names

A change of name or assuming a new, different name is a widely observed custom present in many cultures (from primitive to contemporary ones), which symbolizes a change in status or identity—a turning point in a biography, especially since “names, language creations though they are, are also means of orientation within a society” (Milewski 1963, 39). Each name has a specific meaning and carries a specific intention. It is related

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to one of the psychological characteristics of language, distinguished by Edward Sapir (1921), which is the fact that language permeates the experience, which creates a sense of sameness or a close correlation of word and object. “A name was thus a unique sound amulet” (Fros and Sowa 1982, 12). With time, names started to form a system, which were part of laws and customs in every society, embedded in its culture (Bubak 1993, 6). Thus, for instance, “biblical and generally Semitic names reflect a type of Eastern piety and use of metaphors, where the contacts between human and god were very close and animated” (Fros and Sowa 1982, 13). In Jewish culture, a traditional name was passed on to the next generations. It was a part of the nation’s identity—speaking metaphorically, its destiny. “What’s in a name? An identity, a presence signified in sound and sense and thus linked to a culture, a dream word that articulates the shape of the inchoate wish inscribed in a future mode that backshadows the present; a destiny” (Kahane 2001, 49). Traces of this tradition can be found in the narratives as well: I gave birth to my first daughter Helena, my mother’s name, (. . .) I gave birth to my second daughter, Iryd. Iryd is the name of everyone, together [members of the family, who died in the war—KK], I took one letter from here, another one from there, and all combined it created Iryd.13

Among twenty narrators, four persons did not change their names. In that number, two already had Hebrew names. The change usually involved finding a Hebrew equivalent of the Polish or Yiddish name, one which would have a similar meaning or sound. My name is Ruth. In Poland, it didn’t sound good, so they would call me Rudka. My name is Bozia, because I was born on Christmas Day [Boże Narodzenie—KM], so they named me after that. And after the war in Poland, I said I was Basia. My birth certificate says Bronia, Brandidish. KK: And what’s your name now? N: A flower, a flower, Kanbatia in Hebrew. 13   Because I am using real names of the narrators at this point, I am not divulging the numbers

of the interviews.

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Fayvel, that’s in Jewish [in Polish Paweł, and that’s what the narrator is called by the friends with whom he came to Israel after the war—KK], but there’s nothing like that in Hebrew. There’s one in Aramaic. That’s the old Hebrew, and it’s Shraga. Because Fayvel comes from Phoebus—Apollo. One of my ancestors had a child, a very beautiful one / it wasn’t me, and so was given the name Phoebus. Phoebus is also the god Apollo and god, not of sun, but of light. Candle is shraga in Aramaic, and so I became Shraga.

A change of name was supposed to mark a symbolic turning point in the narrators’ biographies. Thus, it was not only a “cosmetic treatment” that would make the pronunciation or spelling of the name easier. Assuming Hebrew names would occur in relation to the tradition—the return to the roots. Simultaneously, it was yet another means of distancing oneself from the Diaspora. A new name symbolized a “new man”—an Israeli. The tendency to change names was so popular that people who did not do it would bring it up spontaneously. My father always used to tell the story that when I was born, he went to the Register Office to register me and said, “My daughter’s name is Miriam,” and the official lady said, “You want to call her Miriam,” she says, “it’s not a good name in today’s Poland, better call her Maryla, Marysia, Maryja, and not a Jewish name, because it’s not suited for today,” and perhaps it was a good advice, but my father was very content with his Jewishness, he was a very proud Jew, so he said, “My daughter will be Miriam.” Lucky for me, if I may say so, because he didn’t know I would be living in Israel someday [laughing]. At the ulpan our Hebrew teacher, from Poland by the way, so he knew Polish, upon hearing my name Ewa, reacted immediately. “You know, why should you be Ewa, you’re in Israel, so you’ll be Hava.” It pissed me off, so to speak, so I said, “Me, Hava, a fat chance! No way, no way, that’s what my mother called me till the very end, until the day she died, and it will be my name until I die, and I don’t want to hear anything about it anymore.” And that’s how I remained Ewa.

Whereas the first example is in line with a then-common practice of name changing and is a kind of positive meta-commentary on this phenomenon, the second one illustrates the mechanism of ideologization. It comes from a commentary of a woman who left Poland in 1968. It clearly shows a difference in readiness for taking a specific road of identification with a new homeland. It shows a generational change, expressed in an

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attitude toward one’s own past in clear, extremely personal references. It reveals an intention of a complete breakup with the past, even in its family aspect, in return for a new present and future. What in Ewa’s case was a “natural reflex” of identity, in the case of the generation I am talking about was a long multistage process, as evidenced by the following fragment: When I came to Israel my mother was already in Israel. She left Cyprus a month before of me, because there was a war. But law was that children who have parents in Israel or don’t have parents at all can come and I was with my mother. So one of the people there said, “Go you first and then she will have a mother in Israel, she can come.” So that’s what they do. And when we come tooo Israel, the people there they were asking me, “What was your father’s name?” And I knew that my father’s name was Marcel. But I knew also that Marcel is a Polish name and I was in the period of my life that everything has to be Hebrew. I didn’t want Yiddish, I didn’t want Polish I, I/ just knew Hebrew. I knew the name Mordecai because I was in kibbutz and we learned and heard about Mordecai Anielewicz from the ghetto in Warsaw, the commander of the ghetto, I said “Mordecai.” (. . .) Estera is also not my name of course, because when we came to Israel, they changed our names to Hebrew. It was such a period. And I was very happy about it. I would never choose the name Estera [laughing] myself, but they said “Estera,” I said “Okay! That’s good! That’s Hebrew?” “Yes” “That’s okay.” (W 20)14

During her first return voyage to Poland, from the documents obtained at the Register Office, the narrator found out what the real name of her father was—Meleh. That’s funny but I wanted to give my father back his name. I thought it’s enough that he doesn’t live, doesn’t have a grave, doesn’t have a gravestone, nothing, nothing and now I take away his name also? . . . But it was a process. I couldn’t go just the same day and said/ So it took a while but I decided: yes I’m going to change my father’s name in my ID. (W 20)

The author of the narrative commenced a complicated bureaucratic procedure, because she had to overcome the officials’ reluctance, but she finally managed to change the name of her father in her documents. 14   This interview was conducted in English, and it is presented in its original version.

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The above example can be a conclusion to all the cases presented earlier. The narrator was only ten at that time. During her two-year journey to Israel, she lived in kibbutzim and learnt Hebrew. She describes these experiences from a current perspective, having gained distance from her naïve childhood zeal. Yet this slightly ironic story leads to a serious biographical self-reflection. The narrator does not criticize the system or ideological pressure, but consequently strives to correct her own mistakes, committed when the past was universally deprecated; and she—as a child of the Shoah, wishing to reject the war trauma—was only too eager to take up this task. In a different fragment, she tells how in her childish naïvety she believed that painful past can be forgotten. This fragment shows that reaching a certain vision of one’s biography—symbolically manifested in the “father’s name problem”—was a long process in the individual and collective dimensions of experiences. This conclusion leads to the final significant context. 3.4  “Abandoning” One’s Own Language: Contemporary Perspective

A several-decade-long distance from the Polish language, resulting in a loss of linguistic competence, is in retrospect perceived as a loss on biographical and collective levels alike. The interview situation, which made the narrators take up the authentic challenge of speaking Polish in spite of a sense of their linguistic deficiencies, was an impulse to reflect upon the language they used to know proficiently and which, in many cases, was their first language. The term “mother tongue” is a problematic one, similarly to the terms “private homeland” and “ideological homeland.” The narrators are surely building their identities on a Hebrew, not Polish, ground. On the other hand, their memories—embedded in biography— had put their roots in the Polish language and, with time, have begun to seem a positive experience, one enhancing a nostalgic attitude toward the past. It was noticeable when the narrators were returning to Poland after several decades of absence and noticing with amazement that they understood Polish, could communicate in this language and build a specific sense of familiarity, especially compared with those traveling companions (spouses, children, friends) who did not have Polish roots. Sometimes it gave an unexpected, irrational sense of familiarity being at home. When we were in Poland, I understood all notices, signs. And when we were traveling with this driver, Polish started to come back. (W 13)

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We took the plane, and I heard it as soon as on the plane, suddenly a live language, and we landed in Warsaw, I was at this airport and everyone was speaking Polish, I was, I had this shock, but this Polish suddenly started co . . . coming out of me very naturally, as if I spoke it all the time. I didn’t know, I didn’t know I was speaking Polish so well, where it suddenly came to me, I had this good feeling, when I came to Poland, as if I’d returned to a place very well known, which I know. (W 18) N: I don’t know what to say, but I say this. We, as I’ve already said, traveled maybe not all over the world, but traveled a lot, and Poland is the place I enjoy most. Why, I walk a street, and I understand everything which is being said. I don’t speak, but I understand everything. It’s very pleasant, because we were . . . were once to England, Sweden, all these languages, when I understand nothing, I get scared. But there I understand everything. M: Well, speak Polish then. N: [In Hebrew] I’m embarrassed when I talk. If I said the same thing in Hebrew, it would be completely different. It’s as if I’m completely stupid [laughter]—no accent, no words, no nothing. (W 2)

The last statement illustrates how language became a tool for building good memories, augmenting the nostalgia. A sense of embarrassment can be considered a creative feeling—one engendering a sense of loss of something that, according to the narrator, is a source of good memories. In a wider perspective, going beyond the biographical aspect, from today’s perspective, the sense of loss is perceived as an intentional goal impoverishing the group (the right-after-the-war aliyah), aimed at shaping its identity. The thing with the language is that me and my husband, we are both from Poland. (. . .) He speaks Polish the way I do. When we arrived, we spoke it, but they didn’t let us speak, back then. Now it’s different, then they used to say, “You have to speak only Hebrew, forget what there might have been, now we’re building anew, everything is new.” Now they see their mistake. I . . . I wanted to speak it, why should it matter if anyone knows yet another language. My two daughters, I have two daughters, they understand this and that, but they didn’t let us, and even the children themselves wanted it, they wanted to be like everyone else. They call it sabras, those who were born here, them too. One was born here, the other was 8 months old, so

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it’s almost like she was born here. They didn’t let us speak Polish, they were ashamed, even. So we’d with the children, we would speak Polish at home and we have many friends, so wherever we met them, we’d speak Polish, but it wasn’t a nice thing to do. “One has to speak Hebrew. New nation . . . everything new.” And it was a mistake, because now everyone says, “what a shame, what a shame,” even Polish, that out there it’s different, people don’t understand, but it’s still a language and has its literature and we’ve got books, what a shame. But they used to pay a great attention to that and the children didn’t want to, they wanted to be like everyone else. (W 16)

What we find here are basically all the aspects of the attitude toward the Polish language. The narrator lives in a Polish kibbutz, and her husband speaks Polish. These circumstances let her keep a high linguistic competence. At the same time, the fragment shows social context of her biographical situation, in retrospect seen as a conflict between the new country’s ideology and the cultural identity of the citizens forming it. The statement “Now everyone says what a shame, what a shame,” refers to both the revision of the situation decades ago and the present one as well, as immigrants, for example from Russia or Ethiopia, are nowadays encouraged to cultivate their own language along with Hebrew.15 The Ministry of Education worked out proper procedures for this situation (Spolsky and Shohamy 1997; Dolberg 2007). The narrators have noticed this change and perceive their own assimilation process all the more acutely—for instance, language assimilation. Drawing up a life balance is conducive to such reflections. It is thus symptomatic that most of my narrators feel that in their biographies, Polish is (was) an identity-enriching component, not a heavy burden, symbolically carrying a whole universe of memories. It was manifested in the effort to create a narration in the language of their childhood or youth. The author of the fragment quoted above speaks Polish very well. The sense of loss she expresses is thus not related to her own linguistic competence, but to a sense of cultural deprivation caused by an enforced resignation from an identity based on a “pre-Israeli” symbolic universe. The narrator is drawing a clear line between the group she represents (us)—the right-afterthe-war immigration—and the sabras (them). This distance is conspicuous from the use of third person plural (for example, “They didn’t let us speak”). 15   For instance, Russian can be heard in the streets, and some foodstuffs favored by the immigrants

from Russia are labeled in Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian (see Elias 2008).

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These examples show the significance of the language in the narrators’ biographies, in the process of building a new identity, and, above all, in its role in the return process. The Polish language became a means and strategy of returning. In each of the cases, the narrators coming to Poland would (re)create the sense of familiarity by virtue of linguistic experiences—even if their competence was limited. These reflections require an additional commentary. As I have already emphasized, for the people I met Polish was their first language. Some of them grew up “surrounded” by Polish and some by Yiddish (for instance, when the parents spoke Yiddish between themselves and Polish with their children). Taking into account the fact that Yiddish, not Polish, was mame-loshn16 (the ‘mother tongue,’ used by the majority of Jews), my interlocutors were not representative of the prevalent culture. Shevah Weiss writes about mame-loshn with fond sentiments, referring not so much to his own biographical experiences as to the memory of the Diaspora culture, destroyed by the Shoah and neglected for many years. At the beginning of the sixties, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a Center for Yiddish Language was established. (. . .) I was one of the three students learning there. (. . .) Today the Center has expanded. Among the Ashkenazy Orthodox Jews Yiddish is a language of daily usage, like it used to be in Poland in the past. Among themselves they speak in the mame-loshn, and pray in the holy language, Hebrew. Among elderly people there are many still speaking Yiddish. Among the young one can also feel some kind of longing for Yiddish, in line with the trend of returning to the roots. (Weiss and Epstein 2007, 36).

Traces of nostalgia for the mame-loshn are also to be found in biographical memories: I began gradually to absorb the new language. As the week passed Yiddish became increasingly familiar (. . .) and through the years my life’s changing circumstances have overlaid it with other languages. Yet for me Yiddish remains the language of affection. The mere thought of it generates nostalgia for the whole world. (Bak 2002, 277–281) 16   Mame-loshn is “mother tongue” in Yiddish, as opposed to loshn-koydesh, the “holy tongue” in

Hebrew, used in prayer and books. Mame-loshn was cultivated for centuries by the Orthodox Jews and the activists of the Bund movement (Weiss and Epstein 2007, 31–32).

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Coming back to my interlocutors and their “nonrepresentativeness” in the context of the larger part of Jewish community, I consider this factor, in a sense, secondary to the formal similarity of the biographical situation definition. Regardless of whether their “abandoned” language was Yiddish or Polish, a sense of cultural loss, especially from the perspective of their present life stage, is interpreted in a similar way.

4.  Identity Considering identity one of the narration themes is quite an artificial distinction, if one takes into account the fundamental aim of this book, for from this perspective, identity constitutes a main frame of reference, rather than a sub-subject. The identity of the narrators was shaped by biographical experiences, tangled with historical events. Working on the biography, including the return process, is an answer to the questions “Who am I?” and “Where do I come from?” From here derives my initial hesitation if identity should be distinguished as one of the separate subjects. On the other hand, the narratives contain sequences (usually in the form of self-commentary) in which the narrators speak directly about the problems of shaping the identity, the sources of self-identification. The aim of this subchapter is thus showing what the narrators say about themselves and which periods of their lives entail their identity comments—in other words, at which point of the narrative they occur. One can distinguish two important moments here: coming to Palestine/Israel right after the war and contemporary selfcharacterizations, undertaken from current perspective, due to the return experience. 4.1  Identity after the Arrival in Eretz Israel Today it’s easy to say. But when I arrived, I was 10 years old. I was a small child. I survived the war, then the way to the land, this travelling, this waiting, constantly somewhere else, different languages. I had terrible problems who I was. I wanted to forget the war. When we arrived, I was riding a bus to the kibbutz, I was on the bus and they were to take us to the kibbutz and suddenly a woman with a child saw me in the window / when we were in Cyprus, they would tell us how beautiful everything here was, how abundant, that we would be lying in a tree shade, just stretch a hand

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and pick oranges straight from the trees whenever we wanted. And this woman with the girl pointed to me and gave this girl something, and she gave it to me. It was a paper bag with dried fruit. I tasted it, and it was so sweet and I felt I was at home, that I was finally at home, that this was my home. (W 20) Everything was erased, I became an Israeli girl, up to 12 years, everything till 12 years was erased, I was born in Israel, I mean being 12 years old, I was very ashamed of my Polish accent, not Polish, foreign accent, I was ashamed I knew nothing at all of various Jewish historic events, who Moses was, and who was, nothing, I just knew nothing and the children would laugh their heads off, but they accepted me very kindly because I was good at sports and so I lived as an Israeli girl among the Israelis. (W 14)

In the above fragments, the narrators recreate their childhood experiences. In each case, though slightly differently, it is evident that the arrival was a turning point in the biography leading to a rapid creation of the identity of a “new man”—an Israeli. If we consider these quotes in the context of the entire narratives, we could say that in both cases the strategy of rapid reorientation of the identity was a successful one. Adaptability to new conditions—characteristic of young age—led, though not without pain, to a fast acculturation. Therefore, unlike in other narrations (see the one below), there are no commentaries from the point of view of Schütz’s stranger, who senses the otherness of his/her cultural patterns acquired in childhood and youth. On the other hand, an analysis of these narratives reveals that the monolithic character of the new Israeli identity in retrospect, especially in the context of current life stage of the narrators, was superficial. Rejecting the past—the memory of childhood and the identity following from it—is in retrospect considered a “strategy for surviving” against important questions of one’s concept of self, while the process of breaking the homogeneity of Israeli identity leads not so much to questioning as to “overcoming” it. All the narrators unanimously have a strong sense of belonging: they are Jews—Israelis. However, from the perspective of their current life phase, this sense of identity has started to be built also on the basis of a validated incorporation of identifications rooted in the past. In the case of people who were slightly older (over eighteen to twenty), when arriving in Palestine/Israel, the need for reprocessing the identity was instantly interpreted in a wider context.

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I’ve been here for 56 years, and because I attended a Hebrew school I knew things, it wasn’t so hard with the language, but in general it’s not easy to change everything, your whole life, it wasn’t easy, because the war started at once, me—from one war to the other [she means the Arab-Israeli war—KK], they would shoot here. We had no weapons, and it was the war, it was the war and [indistinctly] they began to shoot and we with the children, whoever had children, we were evacuated to Jerusalem, we lived in this monastery in Jerusalem and later they brought us some beds and two cows so that the children have something to . . . It was hard. It was hard. It was the war, the men remained here, whoever didn’t have children as well and and in Jerusalem there was no water at all, no water, but we survived somehow and then we came back, how long we were there, a year I guess, and they were building building, there was very little at first, there were rocks here and when I arrived, they’d only been here for nine years, only, those who came here first, I was younger than them, but nine years, in the meantime it would grow, it was after the war, then there were other wars. But this liberation war, like it’s called, in the year ’47, in ’48 it stopped, I mean ended. But it wasn’t the end, because there was also the one in ’56, and again, yes, it was all the time and it hasn’t ended and you can’t see the end at all. It’s not easy but people live. What can you do, we have no other place, no. There’s anti-Semitism in the world. And I don’t know, I don’t know, we all think that perhaps if we had someone to talk to, it would be a different mentality. Those Jews who came, like me for example, there are many from Europe, their mentality is European. And this mentality here is completely different. There are many Jews from, I didn’t even know someone like this existed, they came from Yeme . . . Yemeni . . . Yemenites, I didn’t even know who they were, or the black ones from Ethiopia, I didn’t know either, they are closer. But for us it was something entirely, that was something . . . If anyone was the leader, it wasn’t those Yemenites, but those who came from Europe. And I think they don’t understand till . . . till now, they are trying to understand them. But no, because them, who live here in the Middle East, that’s what it’s called in Polish, their way of thinking is completely different and for them this strip of land is the most important thing. They won’t give it away, they will kill, and so on. Because if they agreed to share, maybe we could live somehow, but they didn’t, and now everyone is badmouthing us, but why didn’t they then, why doesn’t anyone remember that maybe it could have been done then. Nowadays it’s not so simple anymore, I’d say. It’s difficult to live, people do because there is nowhere else to go, nowhere. But there are also those who are so fierce, they are

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like this, and they also think that no, they want, they want as much as possible for themselves, for themselves, themselves, there are are many different people here and that’s why it’s hard to lead them. If we had someone to talk to, the neighbors. If you live in Europe, you may not understand it, how could you—even Poland always had something with Russia, because it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t easy, Russia always wants to, always wants to lord over Poland, I mean. But still, it’s different, it’s different and I don’t know how it will end here, but it’s not easy. (W 16) So I’ve just come to this desert, from the wonderful Kraków, coming to this desert, where there previously used to be a Bedouin camp, no light, nw water, and I immediately started working, which saved me and gave me this opportunity to build this this country, build this new society [indistinctly]. They would come from all over the world, so because I knew French I could talk with all them from North Africa. I learnt some Arabic, to have this basic communication, then from India, so I spoke with them in English. They would also come from Europe, mostly Romania, so I spoke with them in German, they know German. (. . .) And basically my life centered around two most important things—the memory of the Holocaust, to which I devoted a lot of time, I don’t know if you’re interested in this, but I devoted a lot of time and a lot of myself in many forms, and the absorption of these emigrants. And because these were very hard times and the foundations of the new country, I would work 18 hours a day, with no respite, because, for example, there would come Jews from Morocco, from the Atlas mountains. I had no idea such Jews even existed, I only knew European Jews. And you had to start from scratch with them, instruction, hygiene, you had to take them to school, you had to convince their parents that instead of working, they should learn, and drag them away. We had this institution in the kibbutzim that they would take them in and teach them really good basics, so they could function somehow then. And this was a job that preoccupied me completely. And I was feeling very guilty, because of him, because I already had two children and echoes of my experiences haunted me as well and I was suffering greatly from depression. So all this combined together wasn’t easy and wasn’t simple. But we had lots of enthusiasm and zeal that it is the only place and the last place, and it is our home, and that’s where we belong, so we had to invest a lot in here, both mentally and physically. (W 10)

These quotes share some characteristics and complement each other. Upon their arrival, both women were young, yet fully formed in a so-

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cial sense: the first one had a child; the other, after finishing her studies, was joining her future husband. In both fragments, the narrators point to a cultural detachment between Europeans and the rest. Thus, on the collective level, we encounter a dichotomy: Europeans versus the strangers, which equals domination versus subjugation. In this respect, both narrators represent a typical, one could say Eurocentric, point of view: it is the Europeans (in this case, European Jews) who set the living standards, and their rejection by the Middle Easterners, combined with a different cultural code of this population, leads to an unsolvable conflict. It is noteworthy that the first narrator is using a certain mental shortcut, initially pointing to the deepest cultural and social divide in Israel—the divide into the Ashkenazi (European) and Sephardic (Middle and Central Eastern) Jews (Bar Yafe 1992, 62) as the source of the greatest distance. Then not mentioning any transition to a different context, she starts talking about the Arab-Israeli conflict. The division into “us” and “them” is retained, although in the first part of the statement it referred to the differences between European and non-European Jews, whose cultural otherness also became a prevailing argument in the description of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The differences between the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews could have been abolished (though, in the narrator’s opinion, not nullified) in the name of common Jewish identity. In the case of the Arab-Israeli conflict there is no such field of communication. Showing this conflict from the angle of cultural differences, the narrator fails to deal with the most fundamental issue: the reasons for the dislike of Israel in the Middle East. Moreover, she “shirks” this issue, stating further that anti-Semitism is a world-wide phenomenon and that Eretz Israel remains the only alternative. This reveals the second way of describing the Europe-versus-Jews relations. The argument given in the first fragment, “we have no other place, no. There’s anti-Semitism in the world,” often recurs in the other narrations; moreover, the narrator is using the argument of perspective untranslatability due to the contrast between Europe and the Middle East. What we get is a very convoluted construct: the Europeans (including Jews) differ from the inhabitants of the Middle East. The Europeans (non-Jews) are unable to understand the conflict there. The narrator, extrapolating from her own difficult experiences (“it’s not easy to change everything, your whole life”), creates a theory of cultural and political relations linked with a specific image of the collective identity. The second fragment shows this theory put into practice. The narrator speaks about the specifics of absorbing the Sephardic Jews and

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of her own cultural shock, and eventually transfers these sensations onto a purely individual level. This statement, energetic and culturally colorful, is permeated with the motif of processing one’s own identity. Living in a new world and throwing oneself into work are the remedies against the necessity to process one’s war biography and a cultural sense of loss. This is symbolized by the image of abandoning Polish (European) culture for the primitivism of a Bedouin camp. The narrator’s statement, especially the last sentences, is imbued with a sense of authentic hardship and struggle with a culturally foreign reality in the name of the new country, a theme known also from other accounts (compare Birenbaum 1991; Klugman 2004). Some of the narrators, referring to this ideology, present their new identity showing, above all, the creative aspect of their lives’ experiences. I belonged to an organization of Zionist youths, it was a Scout-like organization and our goal was to go to the land. At this time it hasn’t been Israel yet, it was Palestine and even at the ghetto we’d organized ourselves, we were young people with a goal, and we’d prepare ourselves, living with a hope that we will survive all this. In any case it had a very positive impact on my life, that there was this goal. (. . .) My ultimate goal was going to Palestine, to achieve something like this was extraordinary, because it was my goal and my childhood dream. The war lasted five years, five and a half at our place. And as you see, I live in a kibbutz because I was raised to live in a collective, work with everyone else. Everyone according to his strength, everyone according to his needs, etc. So this was, this was the idea of this this youth organization. And that’s where I’ve been all these years. In the meantime, there was the liberation war, I took part in it as well, I don’t have much to say apart from the obvious facts that I got married, I have three children, two daughters and a son, seven grandchildren. It means that I’m alive . . . I’m alive because when I’m no longer here, every day, it it is it is for me something which I have never imagined that I would reach this age, and at least someone would remain and I did my share, my share. (W 15)

The authors of such self-presentations, characteristic especially to the kibbutzim inhabitants, do not problematize the difficult experiences of identity shaping at the individual or the collective level. What comes to the forefront is the ideologically grounded conviction of fulfilling their duty and making a good choice. One can assume that people presenting their identity this way are making biographical simplifications. They omit the dramatic experiences that were undoubtedly important for the identity-shaping

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process.17 As I have shown in chapter 4, building this country was difficult and tumultuous as far as organization and existence were concerned, as well as identity—collective and individual. Lack of such accounts results from a generally positive outcome of life and identity balance, from the angle of collective references. As I have already mentioned, collective identity of the narrators is built on a clearly defined sense of belonging and identification with a place (Eretz Israel). From this perspective, the self-identification process is placed in the context of the effort taken in the name of the country and of the comparison of its immediately-after-thewar image and the present one: “We came here and started to build, clearly I can say that my life wasn’t in vain” (W 3). Thus, problematizing identity—if it does occur—does not involve the Israeli stage of the narrators’ biographies, but that of what happened before. It is about working out a strategy of including earlier biographical experiences into the current perception of identity, because in this phase of the life cycle, it “demands” an interpretation. 4.2  The Problem of Identity Today

The narrators share a sense of having their own place, being at home in spite of constant political difficulties. However, in relation to the present perspective, the biographical past gains significance. A return to the birthplace and to an often forgotten language and incorporating this part of biography into the concept of self raise the question of identity as far as the entire life is concerned. The question “Who am I?” is, in this context, replaced by the question “Where do I come from?” “Where are my roots?” As I have already mentioned, this is a fundamental question, especially for those who are unable to give a clear answer. Then they take up the effort of biographical search, to an extent depending on the scale of the biographical loss. One extreme of this process is laborious and complicated archival research, tracking down trails and “circumstantial evidence.” The other is setting off to the place of birth, known from stories, pictures, or one’s own memories. The motif of looking for an anchorage in the past can be found 17   For instance, the narrator who left Poland before the war in the name of Zionist ideology did

not mention during the interview that her husband died in a fight with Arabs attacking the kibbutz. She was left alone with three children. Her son died in one of the wars. I found out about it only after the interview, from the person who organized our meeting.

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in every narration. Interestingly, in some of them the answer to the question “Where do I come from?” is brought about by administrative or legal circumstances. I am talking about obtaining/confirming Polish citizenship18 and consequently a right to a Polish passport, and transferring this right to one’s children. Having a Polish passport means belonging to the European Union, which grants one specific rights in the Union countries. Thus, it suggests that such endeavors are for one’s own self-interest. However, even if such a reason is taken into account, it turns out that a point of departure is the answer to the question what the consequences of having a Polish passport are, if any—in other words, whether it has an impact on the image of one’s own identity or results from it. In the narrations, two opposing viewpoints can be found. KK: Thank you very much. I would also like to ask you something. Polish was your first language? N: Polish, Polish, Polish, I write very we . . . flawlessly in Polish. And I wanted to get a Polish passport here, because it is it is my homeland, my first one, this here as well. But I wanted, and I went, and I couldn’t find my . . . my birth certificate. I was born in Olechów, and I already got this letter from the Polish embassy that they didn’t have it, because it was lost during the war. So they say that that if I want to, I have to go as far as to Warsaw and swear an oath there or something and say it’s me. I have to do it myself. I went to a lawyer, and I don’t know, maybe he will help. KK: And this passport, you would like it for yourself? N: For myself, yes, I will go as well. I wanted to [laughter]. All the holidays, we’d / I mean I was born there, me, this is my homeland there, and this . . . this is what I dream about. One can dream, as they say . . . (W 16)

The topic of the passport was prompted by the question of the mother tongue. The narrator takes it up herself in the context of her strong identification with her birthplace. She is even using the word “homeland,” very rarely used in the narratives when referring to Poland. As I have mentioned, using the terms “private homeland” and “ideological homeland” is quite problematic when it comes to the issues scrutinized here. Yet in this case, the birthplace remains a private homeland. The language, the place, 18   According to the consecutive laws, Jews leaving after the year 1945 would lose or keep Polish

citizenship. This is a political matter—Polish citizenship was revoked in accordance with legal regulations concerning Jewish emigration.

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and a sense of identification with space are the components of identity shaped during the first stage of the narrator’s life. A passport is a “natural” consequence of this perception of her biography. The memory of a private homeland activates the potential for positive emotions expressed by the nostalgia for the birthplace. One can also assume that in this case having a Polish passport would have a symbolic meaning, as in a sense it validates the Polish phase of the biography. This quote comes from the same narration in which the narrator expresses her regret and sense of deprivation about a collective rejection of the Polish language in the first postwar decades. Therefore, having Polish citizenship can be considered an objection against symbolic violence against the narrator’s generation and herself, manifested after years of silence. The second example illustrates an opposite attitude, though one based on similar arguments, which, however, serve different interpretations. KK: And could you imagine not going to Poland at all? Not being in Poland? N: No, no, but . . . but let’s say I have a huge problem with getting a Polish citizenship. Almost all my friends and acquaintances got one. “You’ve got Polish citizenship. You said Polish citizenship?” [indistinctly in Hebrew]. And all the time, I’m thinking if I should do it and why I should do it. And I have this friend who is very attached to me, a child as well, who since . . . since our mothers were friends. And he’s waiting for me. He wants this citizenship so much and is very eager to go to Poland with me. This time I am going there with a female friend of mine, because I want to show her Poland, but he’s waiting for me to decide. So I say, “Listen, I’m hesitating, I don’t know why I should have my Polish citizenship back, I have my own citizenship and this is enough.” But there’s something more to it, I haven’t yet realized why I am hesitating so much, why it is actually a problem, because after all, it’s only natural that a person, if they take his citizenship, he wants it back. And I’m angry because I was driven out, because I had to run away, that after the war, that my father was afraid to come back to his town, that we had to leave everything and run away, that someone drove me out of the country. And even now, whenever I go back to Poland, I sometimes hear, “Why did you hide? You’re a blonde—I have to dye my hair [laughter], but you don’t even look a Jewess.” These words or when I sometimes hear someone saying “kike,” I was once walking a street and I see a mother and a child, the little one was maybe six, and she’s holding his hand and says, “Don’t you shuffle your feet like some kike.” Or when I see— there are these sculptures of Jews, some of them actually looked like

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this, true. But this is the symbol of a Jew in Poland, and people who know nothing see the Jews like this. Hunchbacks with a nose like this, and it’s official. I often see this on displays. There is a display, and Jews are here and next to them various witches and, er—how do you say, devils and such with scythes and various others?—not Jews but such figures. And all this on the display, or I go there, and I see / I take a picture. I see this swastika and this gallows, and on this gallows hangs the Star of David and sometimes other things. (W 14)

The subject of citizenship, as in the previous case, came up in relation to the place of birth. The narrator visits Poland often and cannot imagine discontinuing these journeys and contacts. However, having a Polish citizenship would be problematic for her because—not regarding it as a legal formality—she does not find a sufficient justification for this choice. She does not call Poland her homeland; unlike in the previous case, it’s quite the opposite. She clearly points to a different point of reference for her identity (“I have my own citizenship, and this is enough”). When she is referring to Poland, what comes to the forefront is not the nostalgia, but, first of all, a more or less reflexive anti-Semitism. The narrator is thus focusing more on the question “Who am I?” rather than “Where do I come from?” The construction of this fragment shows that the problem of citizenship combining seemingly ambivalent matters in reality complement each other, as they in fact come from the same source. Assuming Polish citizenship against the fact of its previous illegal revoking entails a demand for respecting one’s civic and, above all, human dignity. Being reluctant to accept it means one declines this right. Yet after this fragment follows a sequence of anti-Semitism examples. Thus, in the process of creating attitude toward Polishness (the one of decades before and the one today), anti-Semitism appears to play the main role. In this situation, accepting the citizenship would be more of a consent to, rather than a protest against, these actions, and this is problematic for the narrator. A lack of “identity agreement” would make the passport nothing but a tool, which the narrator wants to avoid. 4.3  Stereotypes

Time spent traveling and observing a foreign environment is always a chance for concepts about others to crystallize. In the case of tourist trips, the memories brought home are often a result of superficial observations

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spiced up with a commercial tourist offer. It often comprises a kitschy and usually simplified homogenized version of folklore and mass culture. The result is in a stereotype—for instance, of a typical Italian or Greek. The returnees have also come across situations conducive to forming of stereotypes. In this case, they concern Jewish images of Poles and images that Poles, in their opinion, have of Jews. These stereotypes were invoked among their impressions about the return to Poland. Some of the narrations contain accounts of meeting Polish people or observations of their behavior. Although all the interlocutors would quote some stereotypes,19 especially the one of a Polish anti-Semite, few of them would recreate scenes that foster the creation or perpetuation of the stereotypes of others. Therefore, it would be difficult to treat the stereotypes as a separate, significant narrative theme. On the other hand, the examples quoted below deserve attention and commentary. I include them here, because the formation of every national or ethnic stereotype is tangled with identity issues. In the case of Polish-Jewish relations, this entanglement seems especially significant. For example, in the year ’88 I was in Kraków. We were sitting in a café in the market square, the Stary Rynek, it was summertime. There was a mother and daughter. I said I would sit next to them, at the next table. A waiter appeared and asked what we wanted. I requested a black coffee. Back then there was no real coffee in Poland. Only chicory! I was speaking in Hebrew, and the daughter asked her mother where we were from. The mother replied that maybe from Italy, maybe Yugoslavia. It was interesting to check if people know what it means, “Jew.” Everyone thinks Jew is the fellow with sidelocks, wearing a shabby old coat and a fur-lined hat. (W 5) A lady in Lublin, who’s a lecturer at a university there, once said to me, when I was there, “Madam, there are two students here who have never seen a Jewess [loud laughter], could they come and see you?” I said, “But of course.” They came in and just stood there, looking. I stood up and said / turned around and said, “I forgot my tail at home” [laughter]. (W 14)

In the first fragment, the author is referring directly to the stereotypical image of a traditional Jew from Central and Eastern Europe. The ignorance 19   I am using the verb “quote” intentionally, because some of the narrators distanced themselves

from this stereotype, simultaneously incorporating it into the collective image of Poland and Poles.

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of the woman at the café makes the narrator assume that this is how Poles imagine a Jew. This statement itself transforms into a stereotype of the image of Jews in the eyes of Poles, according to today’s Israelis, although this scene does not suggest that. The woman with the child was unable to identify the language that the man at the next table was speaking. One can attest to the woman’s lack of knowledge, if Hebrew was mistaken for Italian or a South Slavonic language, and only her lack of knowledge. Her ignorance does not, however, suggest that she had a specific stereotype of a Jew in mind. It was the narrator who created a stereotype in a highly farfetched way. It is also noteworthy that he voiced this opinion sixteen years after this incident. One could assume that it was not the first time he had been telling this story as a kind of anecdote, a vignette from his journey, and the stereotypes expressed in it are being strengthened and perpetuated. There is no commentary verifying (positively or negatively) the observation of that time. If we confronted this image with contemporary reality, we could notice that it is ever more present in the tourist pop culture and in places that seem to refer to the actual traditional Jewish culture. In other words, an exchange of stories of that kind, supported by the observation of the tourist offer—in which next to the Wawel dragon stands a figure of a “Jew with sidelocks, wearing a shabby old coat . . .”—can enforce Jewish stereotypes of Polish notions about Jews. In the second fragment, the frame of reference is the statement that young people in Poland “don’t know what Jews are.” This time, this conviction is voiced by the Poles. Like in the previous example, the narrator feels that “the normalcy” of being Jewish is debatable. In the first fragment, the problematization of normalcy manifests itself in the supposition that Poles, using a false stereotype of a Jew, do not know that Jews are normal people, indistinguishable from other representatives of a contemporary society and citizens of a modern country. In the second fragment, this thought is expressed far more strongly. It is the narrator, who ironically problemizes her normalcy, making references to non-human world: “I forgot my tail at home.” The problem does not lie in using a stereotype based on ill-chosen repertoire of cultural knowledge, but a complete distance from the world of culture and referring to the world of nature. Thus, we have got a distant, but still–present, analogy to the times of the war, when the Nazis’ point of departure was identifying someone as a Jew and then depriving him/ her of humanity—Untermensch. The narrator invokes these associations, repudiating the motifs of the “onlookers,” of which they themselves were perhaps unaware. The message of this scene is further augmented by the

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fact that it took place at the university, and its actors were a lecturer and students. Undoubtedly the interactions described here can influence the formation or consolidation of the negative stereotype of Poles. The line between a negative stereotype and prejudice is obviously very thin, and a return fosters forming or consolidating notions about other people. The key element here is the departure point—the attitude toward others and a readiness for potentially working it through. In the case of prejudices, the process of biographical work is very difficult. The following statement can attest to that: When I was in Łódź, I went to the Grand Hotel, Grand Hotel— I used to think the world of the Grand Hotel, but according to European standards it is very low. The staff polite, but full of hatred. I cannot begrudge them, because they didn’t say a word, they didn’t say “Jews,” they didn’t say “Poles,” they didn’t. But you feel it, there are things which you just feel. Because it was very, Grand Hotel for me, in my eyes it was very, but the standard was very low, those tiny towels, everything. (. . .) Grand Hotel reminds me this, and this, this grandeur was, it was a testament to opulence. I have never been there before, but these paintings were such that it was no art, not this type of art, not Matejko’s art, maintained, but very poor. Łódź is so poor, Łódź is poor, it’s even difficult to look at it. I remember Łódź, it used to be crowded, you had to cross Piotrkowska street, it was difficult, so crowded it was, but now it’s, there are no trams at all and such a wide street can be crossed so slowly, what a shame, it’s not crowded. (W 17)

We can see a disparity between the account of events and their interpretation. About human relations, the narrator states that “the staff was polite, but full of hatred.” This conviction comes from intangible feelings. The narrator just felt it was like this. Strong anti-Polish prejudices (expressed in other parts of the interview as well) did not allow for a different interpretation of the situation. It is an account of a journey undertaken at the beginning of the nineties. As I have already shown, the narrators emphasize the contrast between the communist reality and the contemporary Western world. In this case, the contrast is shown (and rightly so) as a civilizational degradation, and then it is extended into the experience of confronting memories with the present. What prevails is a sense of disappointment, referring to her own biographical experiences as well as the imagined prewar world (although the narrator had not been

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to the Grand Hotel before the war, she assumes its standard was at the European level). What is usually considered a positive transformation in the image of Piotrkowska Street (I will comment upon it further later on) the narrator deems a degradation. Such an attitude makes it difficult to work through stereotypes and prejudices. The above case contrasts with a story about an incident that took place when one of my narrators, working with an Israeli television team, was recording an interview with an owner of a kosher shop in the Warsaw district of Praga. And so we went to Praga, and she was conducting this interview in Jewish, he’s standing on the doorstep of the shop and suddenly I hear—there was this shop and right next to it a shack or something like this—and suddenly, from this shack, I hear “ush, ush, vash, you Kikes,” and I was so, so to speak, awfully, so to speak, I don’t know, suddenly, I normally don’t react like this, but then I did. I waited till the end, we finished shooting and started to pack. And so I went to this shack, and I see this scene: at the table, it was a lived-in shack, there lived a man, and of course a bottle of vodka on the table, he’s clutching this bottle and rocking in the chair and humming, so to speak, under his nose, this “ush, ush,” so I come nearer and I say, “Sir, tell me please” and I said it in a completely calm voice, no nothing, “why do you hate Jews in general? Why do you react this way? Tell me, if Jews have ever done you any harm, stolen something from you, or, heavens forbid, killed someone you knew?” And he looks me in the eye, drunk, and says—I saw this moment, it was as if he suddenly sobered up—and says—“Oh, madam, please sit down, no, they’ve never done me any harm. Madam, they’d always help me, give me money, I don’t know, I don’t know,” he says, “madam, you see, I’m drinking, I’m drunk, this is why.” So I say, “Sir, when you get drunk, you speak your mind, that’s the normal reaction.” And he was so completely, suddenly he felt, I suspect that it was the first time someone spoke to him this way, without anger, I just wanted to know why a man like this, he, who must have known Jews. As a matter of fact he said so himself. Alright, so I left him and in the meantime the team packed and suddenly this man comes to me, right in front of the team, the TV team was there, as usual, and he says, “Madam, it was the first time someone spoke to me like this, I didn’t even realize, I’m so sorry, madam, I, I think it was the last time it entered my mind.” (W 19)

The basic frame of reference in interpreting this scene is the identity of the narrator, who calls herself a marginal person (her father was Polish,

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mother Jewish). This fact, in her opinion, stimulates her to work through stereotypes and prejudices in anti-Semitic situations in Poland and antiPolish ones in Israel alike. This vignette illustrates the social context of the language of stereotypes, oftentimes used unthinkingly. One can picture this scene clearly, considering it quite a common way of commenting on Jewish visits in Poland. Of course I do not mean the exact wording, but the general way of building such comments in similar situations. In this case, the main problem was not so much the man’s anti-Semitism as the possibility of taking up a dialogue with him. We do not know if the man has fulfilled his declarations. In the context of the issues scrutinized here, much more important is the stance of the narrator, who not only forces her interlocutor to a, perhaps temporary, reflection on his behavior, but most importantly works through her own biographical experiences. The material I have gathered and books I have read suggest that this attitude is rare because it is difficult to accept. Such an incident would deepen the stereotypes rather than stimulate their reprocessing. In this respect, the Stonequistian marginality of the narrator constitutes a major frame of reference for the latter possibility.

5.  The Shoah The Shoah tragedy, comprising both one’s own biography and the history of the victims (the loved ones’ and the entire nation’s), constitutes a basic point of reference for experiencing the return. As I have already mentioned, the motive of war experiences is present in every narrative, and with regard to the return itself, it occurs in three important contexts: the attitude toward places of the Shoah, mourning for the loved ones, and intergenerational tradition. 5.1  Attitude toward Places of the Shoah

One could ascribe it to two dimensions: one’s own biography and the experiences of the entire nation. A symbol of the second case is AuschwitzBirkenau (which I have already described), visited by all the returnees. A visit in Auschwitz is thus considered a duty.20 The returnees would visit 20   Resigning from this duty is possible only in the case of multiple visits to Poland and processing

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other sites of the Shoah as well, those connected to the fate of the loved ones. The experience, although different for everyone, in each case was difficult. In the woods near Białystok, that’s where they brought all the Jewish intelligentsia from Białystok and told them to dig a grave with their bare hands, and when they finished digging, they took machine guns and shot everyone, it was in ’44, we already knew what was going on there, Hebrew papers said that the earth was shaking. They covered, the rascals, they covered this awful grave. The earth was shaking for a few days, that was the news “the earth is shaking.” I visited it later. I stood there, looking if it’s still shaking. I was sure it’s still shaking, it was an illusion, but it was an awful experience. (. . .) I went to Poland for the first time with a group, with my students— ten of them—but it was a big group. The roles changed, once I was the one protecting and taking care of them [the narrator worked in a kindergarten—KK], then the other way round. I was standing there and looking, and I was sure the earth was shaking, I was ready to faint, and suddenly someone, someone hugged me from behind. I looked and there’s my student, she used to be in my kindergarten, “You’re tired, there, there, there’s the bus,” how these roles change. (W 17) KK: And why didn’t you want to go to Poland this first time? You said you didn’t, when you had been delegated? N: I didn’t want to experience it, hard . . . being in Poland was very difficult. Each time I experience the Jewish tragedy, because in these streets, this road to Tremblinka or Majdanek, I served in Majdan . . . when I was in the Polish army,21 our headquarters were in Lublin. Majdanek is in this city. Right after the liberation, I was in Majdanek, and everything there was how the Germans had left . . . left it. Then they made it into a museum [indistinctly, very quietly]. In Oświęcim this museum, where his fates and [very quietly]. I cannot agree with this. How can they make a museum out of such a tragedy this is somehow [indistinctly, very quietly]. (W 3) Let me tell you, all this time, I don’t know, I’m not a psychologist, but this Holocaust is heavy on my head. I don’t know if that’s how you say it in Polish, because my wife is also there, there’s not a single day we don’t talk about it. And I also wanted the children to know trajectory experiences, which I analyze later on.

21   In 1945, the narrator enlisted in the Polish army to fight the Germans, but he was not sent to

the front.

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about it. I would walk this gate to Oświęcim (Arbeit macht frei) day in, day out, we walked it with the guards, with the SS-men, dogs, we were beaten, etc., etc. And it was so heavy on my heart, I promised myself once, “If I can, I will go there and walk this gate slowly” and then, when I was there for the first time, in ’87 I guess, everyone was staring at me, but I was completely dazed, you know, I walked it fifty times, to and fro, to and fro. Yes, no one, no one beat me, beaten me, no one beat me / but there was, I saw it from afar, there was the 12A block, it was closed, well that’s all. (W 1)

A common characteristic of all these descriptions of visits to the sites of the Shoah are strong emotions, and the differences stem from the context of a specific biography. And thus, in the first case, it is an account of a woman who, thanks to her prewar emigration to Palestine, avoided the persecution, but her entire family remaining in Poland was murdered. The narrator’s brother was killed in the execution she describes. The woman calls upon her experiences from over decades ago, when she was living through the tragedy of her nation and those closest to her from afar. A very graphic description of these events shows the power of the emotions. An optical illusion (“the earth is shaking”) during her visit to Poland symbolically bridges the moment of visiting the site with the past crime. Additionally, this experience triggered psychosomatic reactions. Important aspects shaping interpretative frames of this experience are the mourning for the loved ones and creating intergenerational bonds. The second quote comes from a narration of a man who first survived the war in a ghetto and then was hiding on the Aryan side. Thus, the man was not a concentration camp prisoner, but he knew what they were and saw what they looked like. In Treblinka, his entire family perished. Coming to the place of the Shoah entailed recreating the memories in which the camp was the place of the closest ones’ deaths and, at the same time, a place of the nation’s tragedy. The dramatic question (though expressed indirectly) about the way of cultivating memory refers to these two dimensions. In both cases, the institution of a museum “desacralizes”22 the place of mourning, which becomes an additional source of pain. In the third fragment, what comes to the forefront are the biographical experiences. The account suggests that the narrator had “designed” his confrontation with the site of martyrdom, so he must have thought about 22   I am using quotations here because this expression serves as a metaphor, as it does not refer

to the actual meaning of sacrum in Judaist and Christian tradition (compare Kapralski 2000).

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returning. A repeated passing of the gate had both a cathartic meaning (releasing the suffering of an enslaved man) and a symbolic one (combining the past and the present by passing biographical experiences to the next generation). 5.2  Mourning for the Loved Ones

Mourning for the loved ones is a very important motif accompanying the return. Again, it can be analyzed on two planes: a collective and an individual one. The former is related to the fact that every returnee is a survivor, next to millions of victims. Although mourning for loved ones is experienced individually, mourning in general is a collective experience that involves all survivors. The individual dimension involves the biographical experiences of each of the narrators. You see, that is, I said that I didn’t want to go to Poland, and at the same time, I felt this heavy burden. To walk this road to Treblinka, because my sist . . . my sister and my mother were taken to Treblinka. I know this, because I asked, and there were those who told me, witnesses, that they stayed, they were at the Umschlagplatz before they took them to Treblinka. My father was in a work camp in ’42. They were building this camp in ’41, and when he was finally unable to work anymore at the . . . they brought him home. He was all bones and dysentery. He would lie there. Let’s say it was . . . it was Friday evening, and on Thursday, he asked to prepare him some carrots and me, who was then between the ghetto and the Aryan side. I had this, one of my friends [indistinctly] was a Volksdeutsch, and he could buy in shops for Volksdeutsche . . . KK: Carrots? N: Carrots, no, but raisins. And he bought the raisins, and we prepared these carrots, and you know, like a Friday night in a Jewish house, after each meal, there’s also singing. Whole family is singing, and because of that that that . . . [indistinctly], but my father is buried in Warsaw, a separate grave. And as the son, I said Kaddish by his grave. And the rest of the family has no grave. It’s a little, very, Oświęcim, but this, that I can’t have another grave of my family, it’s a sign of my past, yes. (. . .) And to Poland, I . . . I . . . I didn’t want to go, but I felt obliged to walk this road to Tremblinka on foot, again and again. And this road, I feel this road which my mother and my

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sister walked. I don’t know, some kind of force, which you can’t, illogical, just [indistinctly] to walk this road. (W 3)

This account has a lot in common with the other narratives—about the story of the victims and the way of experiencing mourning. The narrator recreates a typical (if one could use this word here) path of his loved ones— from the Umschlagplatz to transport to Treblinka and, finally, to the gas chamber. A common thread is the mourning for the loved ones who fell victim to mass extermination and a perceived duty to be present at the site of their death. In the case of executions, it is an effort to find the place of internment or graves. In most cases, it concerns visiting places of the Shoah and feeling deprived of the loved ones’ graves. The quoted fragment shows the tension between suffering caused by confronting the past and the necessity to return to it. At a biographical level, it is manifested as a reluctance to come to Poland, where the tragic events took place, yet simultaneously a compulsion to see the places of the loved ones’ deaths. The narrator calls this compulsion an “illogical force,” making him take the emotional effort. As in the other cases, also at a collective level (for instance, Marches of the Living), walking the last road of the slaughtered loved ones becomes a synonym of visiting their graves—a way to express the mourning and honor their memory. Fulfilling this duty, in spite of the emotional hardship, serves as a catharsis. The motif of walking this road appears in many narratives. It was in Oświęcim, such an experience, there I, I had this feeling that my mum was walking with me. I was dressed like a bear, and she only in this shirt. It was cold, it was in March, and to top it all it was snowing. I felt cold, awfully cold, I felt her suffering, I walked, it was the road of death. (W 17)

A graphically described empathy is a very common characteristic of the account of such mourning rites. The narrators also bring up their psychosomatic experiences, the occurrence of which illustrates the force of internalization of these experiences, defined as solidarity with the victims’ suffering. When it comes to stories about the Shoah victims, the account of the father’s death from the previously quoted narration holds a very special place. Although he was also a Shoah victim, he was allowed to die at home, surrounded by family celebrating their Sabbath night—a solemn meal

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consisting of products that were then difficult or impossible to obtain.23 The depiction of this death shows what is often said indirectly in other narratives: such a nonanonymous death—experienced in a family circle, although also a result of persecution—was perceived (especially in retrospect) as a good death, one that did not deprive one of his/her human dignity, determined the place of interment (a grave), and, most importantly, freed one of the gas chamber nightmare. For the author of this narration, mourning and memory have significant meanings also in their collective aspects. In his kibbutz, the man set up a memorial garden where among the trees he placed rocks engraved with the names of his loved ones who did not survive the war. Every family has their own rock. Next to it is a playground for children, a natural bridge between the past and present. It is a symbol of connecting the generations. “It concerned me a great deal that we should know our past, that the sons should know where they came from—their roots.” An intergenerational discourse plays a major role not only in this narration. 5.3  Intergenerational Transmission

As I have shown in the previous chapters, the Shoah is one of the main frames of reference for building the identity of the survivors and the next generations alike. Therefore, intergenerational communication, especially passing the experiences of the survivors on to the next generations, plays a vital role. As we know, in the course of many years, this process has been shaped by macrosocial circumstances, crystallized in the image of collective memory. At the time I was gathering the material, it had already been over ten years since the opening of Eastern European borders for the narrators to travel freely, and over several decades of social acceptance or even demand for the history of the Shoah. Moreover, the narrators have reached a stage of their life cycles marked by a need to share their memories. All these circumstances combined to make the return also a part of intergenerational dialogue concerning simultaneously personal histories, family, and the entire nation. The way of building this communication is different in each case. Here are the examples: 23   The motif of a last shared meal appears, among others, in the story of Władysław Szpilman.

When waiting for the transport from the Umschlagplatz, the pianist’s father bought a candy— irys—for a usurious price and shared it between all family members.

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I wanted very much, I wanted very much to go there. I wanted, first of all, as I told you, I wanted so that my children knew, for example I took my children, my son and daughter, to a mine, where I worked in Jaworzno. I entered this mine and I said to them, “This block in Brzezinka, my block is still there, this barrack still stands there, this is where I was lying, this is where I was summoned, this is where I got beatings, this that, and so on.” I wanted them to know, I wanted to walk the gate on my own. They knew. For example there are families who don’t talk. We reminisced like this on many occasions. There was a family, we had parents, they somewhere—for example my daughter, when there was a holiday, they didn’t have, I mean different, when they would come, the entire family would come, and we were only four people. There was no family, there was no one. (. . .) Let me tell you, the situation today is that even those who live in this country, in Israel, the Jews who didn’t go through what I did, my wife, they don’t understand, they can’t imagine anything like this, I didn’t want my children to be like this. (W 1) It gives us some comfort and courage that our sons visit it and not only visit, beforehand they speak to their comrades from the kibbutz who survived and have a sign, where the synagogue was, where they prayed, where father used to work. And with each visit our sons always look for these places and have some rituals there and recollect this kibbutz member. It gives them an awareness, not millions, no, but personally, this is a personal access to someone I know, someone I see there. And it has a completely different impact on young people. (W 3)

The common trait of these fragments is stressing the importance of personal testimony by means of which the younger generation takes over (of course, if it is at all possible) the experience of the elders. This process is juxtaposed with building false (“they don’t understand it”) or abstract impersonal (“not millions, but personally”) notions. The first fragment highlights the theme of family tradition, focusing on one’s own biographical experience. It is a very common motif, because the returnees are most often accompanied by their families (spouses, children). The second example shows a wider context—personal, not necessarily family testimony is a means of building individual memory of place and fate. The following statement contrasts with the above examples: My son was in Poland with such a group, like the ones they organize here. He went with his schoolmates, from school, but then he asked

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me, “Mum, are there only concentration camps in Poland?” It’s as if they only took them from camp to camp. I reacted immediately. It took a long time. Now it’s apparently slightly different, they even combine it and go to Hungary as well, I guess, and even to Germany. I actually think that you should begin such a trip to Poland from Germany, from where the tragedy of the Jewish nation started, don’t you think, and only later go to Poland. I explained to my son that the concentration camps were in Poland because Poland had the largest number of Jews in the whole Europe, whole Europe, whole Europe, the largest number of Jews was in Poland. And Hitler had this devilish, so to say, plan, that it’s best to destroy them where there’s most of them. (W 19)

The presented pattern of building memory about Jewish war fate has indeed been changing during the last few years, but at the beginning of the nineties, it prevailed. An image out of context not only distorted the vision of Poland, but also of the Jewish Diaspora by focusing on the trauma and ritualization of suffering24. Another narration contains a much more complex example of building intergenerational communication. In this case, the process took years. The narrator is describing it in great detail. In spite of her daughter’s pleas, she had kept silent about her war experiences for many years. She decided for the first time to tell the story to the students at her teenage daughter’s school. I felt that if I tell about it in class, and not face to face, it will be easier. And this is what I did. But my sons / it’s typical, they did a lot of research about it, that in every family of survivors one of the children takes on the responsibility of getting to know this story. The other children feel exempt from this duty. And I know my sons know, because she told them. (. . .) Two years ago my granddaughter asked me, “My class is going to Poland, but I can’t, will you forgive me if I don’t go?” I said, “Do what you want, if you don’t feel up to it, then don’t go.” (W 20)

Thus, at the time of the interview, neither the daughter nor her children (the narrator’s grandchildren) have ever been to Poland. The 24   Magdalena Kuleta-Hulboj (2009) describes the complexity of this process when analyzing

Poland-Israel youth exchange.

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story, however, continues.25 The daughter, although she had never been to Poland, supported her mother in her journeys and eventually expressed a wish to come along. Unfortunately, she could not accomplish this goal, as she died of cancer. Afterward, her daughter (the narrator’s granddaughter) decided to accompany her grandmother on her next journey to Poland. It was an organized school trip of a group of young people, in which the narrator participated as a witness to the Shoah. She renovated the grave of her grandfather, who died in the Łódź ghetto, and in the presence of her granddaughter and the young people, the narrator said the kaddish and read a letter to her grandfather. I witnessed this event, but because I did not understand Hebrew, I focused on observing other participants. The young people were listening attentively, while the granddaughter was crying. Afterward, she hugged her grandmother, and many of the other young people did the same. I asked the narrator to translate the text: Dear Grandpa Icek, Standing by your grave with my granddaughter (fifth generation of yours), my thoughts are with you during these terrifying days, when Grandma Chaja was taken to Oświęcim and you never saw her again. When your children and grandchildren were expelled from the ghetto and you never found out if they died or perhaps remained alive. Thanks to your youngest daughter, who managed to hide you in the ghetto, you stayed there until your death on May 11, 1944. You were buried in the cemetery in a marked place. Your daughter Cesia, who hid you in the ghetto and was the only one of the eight siblings who managed to survive, came here in 1982 and had a concrete gravestone erected, with your name and day of death. During my first visit to Poland in 1999, after a great deal of effort I managed to find the remains of your previous grave, completely ruined. And your grandchildren, living in Israel, erected a memorial for you. In the family who perished, you are the only one with his own grave. Could you have imagined during those terrible times that a fifth generation of yours would be here, and that soon there would be more to come? If you could only see these young people, these boys and girls surrounding your grave. These wonderful youths, who are an extension of this destroyed generation to which you belonged. And they are a testament to the fact that no one will ever be able to destroy us physically, spiritually, like they tried to do. Sleep well, dear 25   I know it because I keep in touch with the narrator (see chapter 8, “Estera”).

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Grandpa, and know that we are still here, pursuing your unrealized dreams.

This brief description of the events does not give justice to the concomitant emotions that played a major part in the return process of not only the narrator (her case will be a subject of a detailed analysis further on), but also her family members. An undisputed animator of these events was her late daughter, who played a part of a go-between between the mother’s painful past and the duty to pass it on to the next generations. The letter read out by the narrator clearly states this duty. The thread of the family’s personal history was conspicuously incorporated into the experiences of the entire generation; and these, in turn, were passed on to become a common heritage. In this specific case, we can see a gradual process of “opening oneself up” to the past—from suppressing memories to sharing them with others (including family), and, finally, to the mission of influencing the next generations.

6.  Memory In the previous chapters, I have devoted a lot of space to the role of the recollections and collective as well as biographical memories in the return process. The topic of memory and recollections was recurring in the narratives in several aspects, which I have called the aspects of memory building, bad memories/traumatic experiences, creating space for good memories, rooted in the memory of a place. All the aspects analyzed below can be considered variants of this category, resulting from different strategies of referring to the past. 6.1  Aspects of Memory Building

The narrators build their memory around two points: the experience of the war and the prewar period. I have intentionally listed them in this order, although it is not in accordance with biographical chronology. This is, however, how the narrations are presented—focusing on the Shoah trauma usually leads to a “calming down” with memories of prewar childhood. The latter ones were still there, and if the narrators drew upon them, they activated a mechanism typical of these circumstances that brought to mind detailed pictures:

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A small town, I knew every house, I could draw a map even now, this is where so-and-so lived . . . (W 1) I remember practically everything, (. . .) every, every, every meter of the pavement, I, I / that’s where we used to play, that’s where we used to argue, everything was there. (W 5) My parents were from Nowy Sącz, from very pious families. But when they married, they decided to abandon religion, religious life, and move out of Nowy Sącz and begin a new, assimilated life. And so they moved to Chorzów. And there my father had a shop with furniture, a furniture shop. And we had a good apartment, and he was doing very well. I was the second child in the family, in a family which had only just started to assimilate. So in my house we would speak two languages, among themselves our parents spoke Jewish, and to us, with us Polish. I also had a Polish nanny Agnieszka, who liked me very much and she was the one who brought me up. My mother was always having heart problems so she’d stay at home and mind the children, we also have beautiful pictures from Chorzów. We were doing very well and everything was more or less fine. (W 18)

As the above examples show, the memory of the prewar period is the memory of the place, people, and childhood. In each case the narrators compare their memories with the present. The town has changed a lot. The center did not change, but our house—we lived in the town center—all this, this center was burnt. So for example, we lived in a small house. Now there’s a two-storey house. “I’m building a white 100-storey house”—that’s what Tuwim wrote [smiles]. And for example, another one, one street was burnt during the war, and now there’s a new one built. The same . . . the same town, but you couldn’t see people there, you couldn’t. When we lived there, there were ten thousand people—5 percent of them were Jewish. They were bustling around, the shops were open, and now there are no shops. Second, I was very young. Now I’m older, so it’s changing. After the war—now, no, not now, a couple of years ago, we were in Łódź. I remember the Piotrkowska Street as a street, houses not too high, the same Square of Liberty. It was in ’45 or ’46, but it’s all slightly . . . KK: Smaller?

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N: Smaller, these houses are smaller, and this whole Square of Liberty is smaller. Then, in ’45, there was no Kościuszko monument. There was a grave of the unknown soldier. And now the whole world is changing, we as well. (W 1)

This description contains most common observations and impressions, whose main motif is the confrontation of memories and reality. The juxtaposition concerns two planes: the topography of a place and the society creating it. Using Pierre Nora’s terms again, it is about the relation between the remembered and contemporary lieu and milieu. In the case of this story, the place was both destroyed and remained unchanged. The house—the center of the prewar world—was destroyed, but its closest surrounding changed only to such an extent as to still be identifiable to the narrator. In the case of the milieu (as in the other narratives), a significant change occurred. The narrator points to the contrast between the image of the prewar, thriving neighborhood and today’s void (“you couldn’t see people there”). It is a typical description; many narrations and memoirs contain such juxtapositions: open/closed shops, hubbub/silence, people in the streets/absence of people, colorful/gray, etc.26 The rhetoric of contrast serves not only to describe observations and impressions, but also becomes a metaphor of the biographical and collective sense of loss—the absence of those who formed this prewar world. Another common motif found in this quote is comparing childhood or teenage impressions with a contemporary perspective. In this case, the narrator “discovered” that the image he remembered is slightly exaggerated. One can also find examples of cases when changes in the architecture (positive as they are) disturb the process of identification with a place: I showed where we used to live, and the street was changed, the street was changed, when I went there the second time I didn’t recognize the street, because they built a pavement there, they took my tram lines. I remember that I rode to school, I went to school at the Square of Liberty, there was a Jewish Bund school, and I would take a tram, and I rode to Piotrkowska and I didn’t recognize the street any more. (W 12) 26   The last juxtaposition is characteristic especially to the impressions of visits during the PPR era

or to former Soviet republics—for example, today’s Belarus.

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The narrator saw Piotrkowska Street before its transformation, when he first returned to Łódź in 1989. In spite of positive changes, which undoubtedly took place during the last few years, what comes to the forefront are not the aesthetic values of the newly restored and rebuilt street, but the very fact of its changed appearance—which to some extent deprived the narrator of an anchorage point for his memories. It’s as if the narrator is blind to the aesthetic impressions, or even questions them. Grotesque though it may sound, the dramatic phrase “they took my tram lines” is in fact a lament for alienation from a once-known and biographically significant space. The second aspect of memory building refers to the war biography. It is about the memory of one’s own suffering and the martyrdom of the closest ones. I have already analyzed this problem when writing about the attitude toward places of the Shoah and mourning for the loved ones. I shall briefly return to that quote, whose author is describing his return to the places of his war experiences. Showing his story to his children, he makes them anchored in the history of Polish Jews. From this perspective, the answer to the question “Why don’t we have any grandparents?” gains a more profound meaning. In this case, passing on one’s own story and creating memory—so important for the author’s identity and his family— does not result in caging oneself in the trauma and focusing solely on the bad memories. The latter case is, however, far from rare; therefore, it requires more attention. 6.2  Traumatic Experiences: Bad Memories

This thread is present in every narrative. Every narrator (apart from the woman who left Poland before the war) is a survivor—a witness to the Shoah. Each of them, thus, has bad memories of his/her own experiences and those of their loved ones, who were more often victims rather than survivors. One could even venture an opinion that since the Shoah is the original frame of reference for the dynamics of the return process, bad memories are the point of departure for experiencing it. On the other hand, a certain diversification in the mode of narration about bad memories is also evident. Most of all, one has to note that none of the narrators focuses on the trauma so much as to completely close himself/herself to other experiences. A particular example here is the case of a man who as an eleven-year-old boy was hiding in the country with his entire family. He

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was the only one who survived. His parents and five siblings were killed. Three out of seven family members died at the hands of the locals. It is a very dramatic story, though expressed in a simple language—understated as far as the description of the events is concerned. It is the key to a very short account of a return, contained in questions and answers, because the author finished the narration with the account of his departure to Israel. It is difficult to convey the drama of the events and experiences; one would have to quote the entire story. Yet to get the context of the fragment quoted below and its significance, it is crucial to explain at least some details. The entire family was hiding in the woods and villages, often spending a night or two in cowsheds or barns until the owners discovered their presence and demanded that they leave. When they could not find such a shelter for a long time, the parents and elder brothers would dig a burrow in the woods. It is there the mother and one of the brothers died, killed by the inhabitants of a nearby village. The rest of the family buried the dead and left the shelter. The father and the younger siblings were caught during a manhunt. Only the narrator and his brother remained. Together, they would hide for a year in dreadful conditions, and then the brother was murdered in one of the villages. It is unknown who shot him, but it was likely one of the locals. The narrator managed to escape and until the end of the war was hiding alone. When the war ended, he was thirteen. N: My mother and one brother were definitely killed by the locals, the second older brother as well. But I don’t know who killed my father and younger siblings. They took them, on July 16th, of that I’m sure, but I don’t know what happened to them. I was trying to find them after the war, by various organizations, Joint. But no one found anything. KK: Did you visit Poland afterwards? N: Yes. I came with a group of young people, high school students. My son was among them as well. As a witness to the Holocaust, they allowed me to take the entire group to my former town. We spent the whole day there. I walked them through all the places. KK: When was this? N: In 1993, I think. KK: Had you thought about visiting Poland before? N: Frankly speaking, I had nothing to look for. I was looking for information from all the possible sources in here. The only place I

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know for sure is where my mother and brother are buried. Where the others are buried, I don’t know. KK: So what made you visit Poland after all? N: Mostly it was because of my son. My daughter went to Poland as well, later, also with school. We went looking for my house. We found it but couldn’t go in because it was closed. Someone told me it was sold to a party activist, who used it as a summerhouse. A local priest told me this. KK: Could you describe what you felt, arriving at your hometown after so many years? N: I had to be a “hero.” I couldn’t suddenly just burst into tears when I was telling them about all these places, but at some points, I got speechless. But I had no choice. After all, I wanted to show them everything. KK: But what did you feel inside? N: It was very difficult for me. First of all, all the Jewish symbols were gone. The synagogue turned into a coal storehouse, no roof. The cemetery disappeared completely, no wall, not even one matzevah. I didn’t find a single piece of stone. Marble gravestones were made into pavements. KK: Did you meet anyone you knew from before the war? N: No. KK: No neighbors? N: No. I didn’t meet anyone. Here in Israel, sometimes I do. But because I was small at that time, I didn’t know many people—maybe aside from family and closest neighbors. KK: Was it your only journey to Poland? N: Yes. I have friends who went there several times, always with the same purpose. KK: Are you planning to again sometime? N: If there was someone who’d tell me, “Go to Poland. Find the bones of your mother and brother and bring them to Israel,” I would do it. But as it is, I don’t have any reason to do so. Besides, there are still at least two places were my family members are buried. KK: How did you try to find out what had happened to them? N: I was trying to do it in every possible way, by Joint, by the Jewish Agency, embassies. Before, I didn’t even have any picture of my family. What you saw, this picture, I got it from distant family who

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immigrated to Palestine back in the twenties. I have no documents, neither mine nor the rest of the family’s. (W 4)

This short account about a return to the homeland gains a full significance in the context of the war story. If the narrator had left it out, it would have been unintelligible. What comes to the forefront are the individual dimension of biographical experiences related to the suffering after losing the loved ones and a sense of alienation, which still accompanies the author. This sense of alienation concerns several aspects: First, it is the solitude of a child in hiding; second, solitude stemming out of the inability to discover the fate of his father and of the rest of the siblings; third, being deprived of any traces of his own past (both at the individual level [lack of documents] and the collective one [no traces of the prewar milieu]); fourth, social alienation. As a small child, he did not establish social relations that could be recreated after the war—for instance, by being a member of a ziomkostwo; and finally, he experiences solitude due to the intensity of his own feelings, which cannot be revealed: “I had to be a ‘hero,’ I couldn’t suddenly just burst into tears.” The narrator could not release the suffering and the emotions. Thus, he recreated his biographical situation from fifty years earlier when as a lone boy in hiding he had to be a “hero” as well. He could not afford emotions normal at his age. The narrative is very dramatic: One can see the trajectory experience in the simple, understated description, whose author has no point of reference apart from the bad memories. In spite of that fact, he does not reach conclusions akin to the story of, for example. Aharon Appelfeld27— that is, converging into an unambiguous declaration of confining oneself in the past in the traumatic war experience in spite of having many good memories at his disposal (a happy and abundant childhood). In other narratives as well, it would be hard to find an example similar to Appelfeld’s. I think it derives from the narrators’ clearly specified identity. People who expressed a wish to talk to me have previously taken up the effort of biographical work, which resulted in interpreting the war in such a way 27   Aharon Appelfeld, an Israeli writer born in 1932 in Bukovina—before the war, a part of

Romania; after the war, the USSR; and today Ukraine. His story, “Buried Homeland,” was published in November 1998 in the New Yorker magazine. In his case, the experience of the return is described as a failure or even a biographical trap: “I had been enveloped in sorrow,” “outside is an alien world,” “what there was dwells only within me.” In this story, one can hardly find a readiness for processing biographical experiences in such a way that they could also serve as an incentive to create a sphere of good memory.

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that they were able to “go beyond” bad memories. It is a departure point for creating space for good memories. The progress level of this work varies; therefore, the theme of good memories does not recur as often as the one of bad experiences. 6.3  Creating Space for Good Memories

The “good memories” category needs a narrowing down. I am using it when referring to two stages of the narrators’ biographies: First, I am referring to prewar memories (or, very rarely, war memories) related to the childhood period, which I have already analyzed. Second—and this is what I am going to analyze now—I mean good memories formed during a journey to Poland, transcending history or in spite of the war history of the Jewish community. What prevails in this category are definitely the memories from childhood. The latter ones occur quite rarely. Typically, the narrators do not mention meetings with Poles that made a positive impression upon them, nor good impressions isolated from the basic script of the journey, determined by the birthplace and martyrdom. This is one of these atypical examples: Poland was very poor, the man who went with us, a Pole, said, “Today we’re going to eat in a restaurant.” We arrived at a restaurant, there was no food for thirty people, there simply wasn’t at that time. So we went and bought bread, tomato, we ate in a park. It was very pleasant. Then we went to Zakopane, we bought some things. But it was so inexpensive that for us it was as if it was for free. A tie [laughter] in France cost 40 dollars, and there it cost 5 dollars, it was something dreadful but pleasant to be in there. (W 2)

The narrator is remembering her first journey, back in the PPR era. Such stories usually formed a background that consolidated bad memories or at least the impression of a contrast. The gray picture of the PPR reality contributed to the image of Poland as the damned land. In the quoted fragment it is the opposite: In spite of evident shortages and difficulties (“dreadful” from a newcomer’s perspective [lack of food supplies, queues, etc.]), the narrator finds pleasure in small episodes, like a meal in the park or shopping in Zakopane. These, not other pictures, were invoked as memories from the journey. Further on, the woman states that in spite of

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having traveled abroad a lot, she feels “best in Poland.” One can juxtapose these words with a pronouncement of another narrator: “It’s very hard for me to be in Poland, each time I am affected by the whole Jewish tragedy.” In this case, being affected by the journey to Poland is/has to be a part of individual and collective suffering experience. The female narrator, however, spontaneously separates the experience of traveling around Poland from the experience of a traumatic war history. An attitude like this can result in an attempt to abandon the scheme of the journey, which I have presented before. Places unrelated to the traumatic history of the family and Jewish society (in the picture marked as secondary activity) can be incorporated into the journey plan or become dominant. Yet it never concerns the first visit. N: Well, for example I thought for a very long time that I couldn’t go on holiday, have fun, I thought so for many years, but . . . KK: At all? Or just to Poland? N: No, no, to Poland specifically, because there are, every place is related. But for example, now I broke free from that and visited these places. I mean, there are some fragments in life. Some things have to mature. Some things have to re-layer. These are, human is an unknown creature, and all these conflicts, all these . . . now you really see them in a different light, in retrospect. Yes, for example, this last return to Poland was for me. Although I lived in a house right opposite to my old house, I had an apartment there. My friends gave it to me. But now I did things which I enjoyed, for the first time, not like this, absolutely not like this. And so it was very tiring and painful, acutely painful for me, when I went there first during communism, and there wasn’t even mentioned that those had been Jews. And in general, it was somehow, some things, that I felt as if I was going to have a heart attack. But . . . but now it went away completely, and now there really is this wave, that you return, that you lived there for a thousand years and neighbors, sometimes good, sometimes bad. But now it’s more of getting closer to one another. And you meet young people. It’s a completely new platform. (W 10)

We are dealing here with a self-commentary, in which the narrator is recreating her biographical work on the significance of her returns to Poland. An initial tension between the socially and morally defined duty (“I couldn’t go on holiday, have fun”) and biographical experiences, creating space for good memories, is very conspicuous. As the narrator

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notes herself, this process required time. What influenced her attitude were not only changes in her own interpretations, but also a positive outlook on the transformations occurring in Polish society. Both quoted fragments show that the attitudes of the biography bearers have a major significance in creating space for good memories. This significance is attained mostly via interpretation of specific experiences. And so the female narrator remembers the pleasure of a simple meal in a park, not the discomfort of being deprived of a hot meal in a restaurant. This, one could say banal, example illustrates a problem that in other circumstances can become fundamental in building the return experience. What comes to mind is Max Furmański, whose chance meeting with a theatrical troupe rehearsing their Dybbuk performance has made a space for (re)creating a part of his biography. 6.4  Rootedness in Memory of a Place

The last important aspect of activating the narrators’ biographical memory is anchoring in their own place. One could say that the aim of each return to the homeland—birthplace—is a symbolic recreation of the bonds, the so-called return to the roots, and passing this message on to the family. Therefore, in each case, it is an important theme, yet articulated with various intensities. In the statement quoted below, the narrator specifically stresses the biographical significance of the place itself, so that the memory of it is synonymous with a sense of rootedness. N: Ever since that time, I have been in Poland eight times. I told you, before I returned to my house, my apartment, home. It was as if we left it the day before. Everything was where it used to be— the same windows, the same doors, those door handles, those, everything the same. Nothing’d changed. (. . .) I, one could say, I left Poland. I was thirteen, ten, when the war started, then these three years ’til the year ’43, and then there were camps upon camps and camps, from one camp to the next. KK: Well, and could you tell me how it was when you returned to Radom? Did you remember a lot? N: I remember almost everything. Also today, when I go with the children, once in a couple of years. I don’t go anywhere, but every meter of the pavement. I . . . I there, there we’d play. There we’d argue. Everything was there at the same place. I remember, one could say

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that Radom hasn’t changed much, almost . . . You know there is this weaponry factory. It used to be big, so a large number of Radom citizens worked in this weaponry factory. And the neighbors were only ours. The neighbors were only Polish (. . .). KK: And when you were in Radom, did you meet anyone from before the war, some . . . ? N: No, no . . . KK: Those Poles, for example. N: Of those Poles, I met one, you could say, with whom I’d played. We’d been at the same grade, he was a policeman, but everything was cold, you could say. But no, no, I didn’t meet any elderly people. Just think, it’s been fifty years, almost. So I didn’t know them. I didn’t know them. Children, they forgot . . . KK: And did you plan to visit Poland before, when there was no such possibility, prior to ’90? N: I would write. From Israel, I wrote many letters to neighbors. I didn’t get any an . . . answer. Why? Maybe they controlled it somehow in Poland (. . .). KK: Well, and how did you, what did you feel, when you went to this apartment of yours and knocked at the door? How was it? N: “Who are you? Where are you from? How much does it cost to travel by plane? Where do you have the money from?” It’s not much money—it’s our past. Those people, those people did not understand what past is—when a man is expelled from home. He thinks all the time, ‘This is where I was born. This is where I lived. This is my home.’ And you think about it all the time. I thought about it all the time. I—no—I didn’t forget my past. Also today I live my past. I remember every trace of my past. So you could say in short that I had those bad things there, but that’s my first home. That’s what I think. Maybe not yet, maybe I’m not ready to live there in Poland, but you say in Jewish, don’t spit into the pond where there’s a source you drank water from. KK: And in Polish, you say that you don’t soil your own nest. N: I know.

The narrator has many memories from his childhood, anchored in the lieux de mémoire. A lack of the milieu refers to two aspects: First, he is not in Poland now. Second, due to his age, he did not manage to establish social relations before the war, which could become a foundation for creating a bond in a ziomkostwo organization. However, the lack of

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milieu does not stop him from building a deep symbolic relation to a place, which in his opinion has not changed. He does not even comment upon the difference of a child’s and an adult’s perspective, so often noticed by the others. Everything is the same, which allows him to get rooted in the place, which he simply calls “my first home.” Thus, we have a reference to Eliade’s center of the world—a source, the sacred sphere. Its symbolic meaning is further emphasized by a proverb. It is noteworthy that such an open description of a bond with a place, which after all brings to mind the traumatic parts of his biography as well, does not occur in the narratives too often. A special significance of this statement increases even more, if one recalls the previously analyzed process of building a bond with a birthplace, especially the problem of defining what homeland (private and ideological) is/was for the narrators. Here, rootedness in memory of a place is juxtaposed with the perspective of a Polish milieu. People lodging in the narrator’s old apartment do not seem to understand the returnee’s intentions. From their point of view, what matters most is the financial aspect (perhaps it is about another verification of the rich Jew stereotype?), which the narrator interprets as a figure to explain his intentions: there are things in life that cannot be rationalized; spiritual values are more precious than material ones.

CHAPTER VI

The Return in Biographical Experience: Case Analyses

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The interview fragments quoted in the previous chapter illustrate the described themes recurring in the collected material. Above all, I was trying to emphasize what the narrators were saying. I focused less on how they created their story. In the further part of this chapter, I shall focus on several select cases to present them as a whole, showing the context in which specific biographical experiences were forming and developing. I treat these narratives as core cases in the context of the analysis of all the biographical interviews I gathered, as they depict basic biographical and social processes related to the return to the birthplace. Fritz Schütze points out that in the course of work on the narrative material, the researcher chooses one of the two strategies establishing the relation between the social and biographical process: One way is to formulate a theoretical model by studying the entanglement of the individual’s biography in a given social process. The description of these social processes will constitute a “natural history” (in Park’s terms), the concatenation of typical stages and turning points that are subject analysis. Another way is to define typical relationships that exist between processes and studied social phenomenon. Thus, the researcher acquires a general knowledge of the phases of a given process. This knowledge is used to describe the way the process unfolds in the life history of a given individual. In a further analysis, I make use mainly of the second strategy, which assumes that the biography bearer is entangled in a specific social process. Thus, I will try to show what— biography-wise—the return process is and how it is realized in different biographical conditions.

1.  Estera:1 The Return Process I felt like somebody that put his foot in the door and can’t close the door. Estera

The case of Estera is a special one. If one takes into account my contact with the narrator and the possibility of gathering additional 1 

According to the rule of anonymity of a biographical interview, the names of the narrators have been changed. However, I have not changed the names of big cities, to which the narrators return, as the memory of a place is to some extent connected with its traits.

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material by means of observing and conversing with her, this situation, therefore, requires a commentary. I came up with the concept of analyzing these issues in 1998. One year later, I fortuitously met Estera, who came to Poland with the intention of finding her roots. Born in 1938, she could not remember the prewar times. She did not know where her house stood, in which she spent the first year and a half of her life. With time, biographical compulsion of recreating the past was becoming ever stronger. Estera decided to travel to Poland and return to her birthplace. During her first stay, which was extremely important biographically, she could not find her home. I decided to help in her search. This case reinforced my research plans, but the main motif of my actions back then was not research or information, but rather solidarity—expressed in a spontaneous and, as it turned out, also slightly naïve2 declaration of help. Following an archival search and talks with the inhabitants of the located building, I managed to not only pinpoint the place where Estera lived before the war, but also find one of the neighbors—a Polish woman, a teenager during the war, who remembered Estera’s family, having sometimes babysat for her as a neighborly favor and, with a curiosity typical of a teenage girl, observed the life of a Jewish family. For Estera, the woman’s recollections were the main resource for creating an image of her prewar past. This part of Łódź—which before the war was in the suburbs, surrounded by greenery and woods—was inhabited mainly by Poles and Germans. Estera’s family represented a small part of the Jewish population in this area. Our chance meeting gave a start to a closer acquaintance, which soon transformed into friendship. In 2004, I conducted a biographical interview with her, which will later be the subject of my analysis. Since 1999, Estera has been visiting Poland regularly each year—since 2001, with groups of school students, as a survivor and a witness to the Shoah. The visits have a fixed schedule, but I always get a chance to contact her. These yearly meetings are a source of additional information for me and a chance to observe the participant and her continuing return process. The particularity of this case refers thus to the possibility of a prolonged observation of biographical 2 

My naïvety stemmed from an unawareness of the procedures (for example, being unacquainted with the procedures of archival search), a false idea of administrative borders of the prewar Łódź, and, last but not least, social definition of the task I have taken on myself. In many places, during various stages of my search, though not directly, the disinterestedness of my intentions was questioned.

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processes described in her narrative. Simultaneously, I am aware of how special this particular relation of the researcher and the narrator is, as I find it hard to be fully objective in this case. Estera’s narration is completely devoted to the return process, presented in the context of her entire biography. The story concerns thus a detailed description of a sequence of events preceding her return to Poland and a description of her first and second journeys. The main line of narration is intertwined with retrospective commentaries, in which the narrator explains the motifs of her actions. Complimenting this part are the answers to my follow-up questions—in which Estera, in fact, continues her story, adding some details and explaining some of the threads. It is also the only interview in which the narrator does not speak about war experiences. The war period is encapsulated in the sentence opening the narration: I was born in Łódź in 1938. I was a year and a half when the war started, and till ’45, when I left Poland, I had a very traumatic life here but . . . I managed to stay alive.

The narrator was intentionally not expounding on this subject, because I was already acquainted with her war fate, and she did not want to go back to memories of difficult experiences. Their short presentation is, however, crucial to understanding the context of the experiences described in the narration. Due to her age, the narrator does not remember the prewar period nor the beginning of the war. Her memories were resurfacing gradually, and rather than a sequence of events, they created a patchwork of remembered images. A part of what Estera knows about her war fate was derived from the stories of others. Still, her own memories play a major part. Estera’s father was in hiding from the time the war started, and her mother with two children (Estera had a brother five years older) fled the ghetto. Since that moment, the family was hiding together in various places. Her mother, due to her “proper looks,” would organize food supplies and next hideouts, while her father stayed with the children. Images Estera remembers from that time are an escape during a massive snowfall, feeling a terrible cold; a loaf of bread instead of a birthday cake bought for her third birthday (still remembered as the best birthday cake she has ever gotten); Brzechwa’s and Tuwim’s poems; and Polish lullabies recited and sung by her father. She remembers them even today, although she has lost full language competence. She retained a passive knowledge of the language. She

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understands Polish—her pronunciation is flawless, but she cannot speak fluently (the interview was conducted in English). Right before the end of the war, in Southeastern Poland, the most tragic moment in her war biography took place. It was early spring, the family was hiding in the woods; her mother went in search for food. Meanwhile, Estera’s brother died of starvation. The same day, she and her father—carrying the body of her brother—were captured by German troops, made to stand over a huge hole in the ground, and shot at. Estera fell in the hole together with her murdered father, who was still holding her dead brother. There were also bodies of other victims. She does not know why they did not kill her. At night, when everything calmed down, on her last legs, she got out of the hole and crawled to the village. Local farmers rescued her from death by starvation and took care of her. Soon, the war was over. Due to a lucky chance, Estera was found by her mother, who had been convinced that her entire family was murdered in the woods. They returned to Łódź and shortly, in an organized group, illegally left Poland. The journey to Israel/Palestine took a year and a half. Estera never told her mother about what had happened in the woods. Neither did they ever speak about the war and the prewar period. What remained from that era was a box of photos, taken by her mother as the only thing from Poland. Estera knew nothing about the majority of people and places in the pictures. Now let us return to the narration. The author begins with a short characterization of her postwar life. When she arrived in Israel, she was less than ten. Like the others, she would live in a kibbutz. She was quick to adapt to new conditions, although she was still carrying the past inside. Thus, she consciously decided to suppress the traumatic experiences from her memory. And there was a little pond outside with gold fish and around this pond was, you know, things that you, that grow near water. It was like a / it was my hiding place. (. . .) And I remember that I was sitting there and I remember the sun and I remember the thing you know, the picture’s now in my eyes that I was sitting there and I decided, I said to myself, “I’ll never talk about it so after a while I will feel that it never happened.” I was 9, 9 and a half years old and I said, “I will never talk about it, so till it goes away.” (. . .) But as we know it never goes away, so it was hidden for 30 years, all the 30 years and I think, it was right, because if I was bothered by this I couldn’t have raised my family, I couldn’t be normal.

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As the narrator notes, her decision was a successful strategy for working through the traumatic past by pushing it away. And although in retrospect, as in many cases, this suppression turned out to be superficial, right after the war, Estera considered it the only acceptable one. As an argument for it, she gives a story of twin sisters—her peers—who committed suicide because they could not distance themselves from their war past. One of the consequences of this perspective was, as in many other cases, rejecting the language of the past: I was in the period of my life that everything has to be Hebrew. I didn’t want Yiddish, I didn’t want Polish, I I / just knew Hebrew.

Thinking about returning to the roots: The talks we had between all my group in the kibbutz, (. . .) we children from Europe after the Holocaust, from Poland, from Romania, from Czechoslovakia, you know things like this, and we talked about if we want sometime to go back to our countries where we were born. And everyone said, “No, never, I will never go there.” And I also felt the same.

In this moment of her narrative, Estera proceeds to tell about her first journey to Poland in 1999, fifty-three years after her departure. This fragment takes up several pages. I present it in its entirety, with a few abbreviations. I felt like somebody that put his foot in the door and can’t close the door. I felt that if I want to come to Poland once, at least once . . . I couldn’t shut the door, I always will have my foot in the door and the door and I couldn’t shut the door, I couldn’t shut the door on my past. But, as you say, I wanted but I was afraid. And all years I had some thoughts, “yes, no, maybe once, who knows” [smiling] you know. But I / it never come to a real decision—yes or no. The problem raised again like 5 years ago approximately or . . . maybe more maybe like 7 years when cousin of my husband that was born in Israel, and never was in the war here, my age. She found in her / his father’s pocket a letter from his mother that came to his wedding in Dresden. And when she came back to Łódź, she sent them a postcard that she is safe at home. And this man hold this postcard all his life in his pocket. And when he died, her daughter opened his p o r t f e l (wallet). She found this card, she was so excited about this and she started to talk to me and she said, “Estera, let’s go to Poland to, to see. I have an address, maybe we can find where you lived” and I said,

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“Maybe one day.” Always when she talked to me about it, I said to her, “mm, we will see once.” And every few months she reminded me, “Come with me to Poland, come with me to Poland” and I [smiling] I wanted but I was afraid. I didn’t know how I will respond to it, what I will feel. I just, you know, I just thought about it, “Maybe one day, we’ll see.” And then in the beginning of the year 1999 she said to me, “Okay, you have to decide, we have to go to Poland” and I said to her, “Ooo, I have other problems now before the wedding of my son, and I’m thinking only about this.” She said, “Okay, after the wedding.” After the wedding [laughing] she called me again. I said, “Nooo, I probably must have an operation also.” But the funny thing was that when I had my operation and I was under anesthetic and the nurses in the recovering room tried to wake me up, I heard them talking to me, “Estera, Estera” and I said to them, in my mind of course, “You don’t know but I’m going to Poland.” And it was such a funny thought because it doesn’t leave me / I was 3 days in the hospital, when I ca-me home, I just put away the things from the hospital, and took the phone and I said, “Miriam I’m going with you to Poland.” And she was struck because / she said, “You came just from the hospital!” [pretends to shout and laughs] I said “Okay, if you want to go with me to Poland, I’m going to Poland.” We took a flight with Air France because we said, “After the trauma of visiting Poland, we will spend a few days in Paris.” So we went to Paris and we were like 3 hours at the airport and then we took the plane to Warsaw. And when the plane started to land [smiling] I started to cry and I said to Miriam, “I’m not going down from the plane.” And she said “Estera, don’t make me [laughing] problems, please!” [laughter] I said “No, I’m not going down, I, I can’t step on this earth, I, I can’t.” I was crying, the people around me were looking at me like, “A crazy woman, why does she cry?” [laughing] but I don’t know, the plane stopped and Miriam took my hand and she [laughing] pull me out . . . And I went down from the plane, and I was, I was quite dizzy, really I / my head was like on wheels . . . What made the things a little bit . . . softer was that a woman that I know from Israel, her husband was working here in Poland. And she told me, “You are not going to the hotel in Warsaw, you are coming to us.” And this really was very good solution because I felt at home. I felt with my people, we talked Hebrew, and it makes the whole thing a little bit softer. And the day after we took a train to Łódź. And the first day, I remember we took a walk on the Piotrkowska street, and I remember that my house / My mother often was saying something about 42 Piotrkowska, but I didn’t know what was there, but I went there, I took pictures, but I really didn’t

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know what happened there. And then we went to Plac Wolności and after Piotrkowska there is Nowomiejska and a friend of me told me, “Oh if you will find the street Nowomiejska, my grandparents lived there on number 13.” So I went to the corner of number 13, I took the picture of the house. And Miriam told me that she has this card of his father that her parents / her grandparent lived on yy u l i c a (street) Północna, I said, “Okay” [smiling] I didn’t know, and then I turned myself and I was speechless. I took Miriam, and I said “Look!” And she said “Ooo! Półnokna.” I said “It’s Północna,3 [laughing] now I understand the meaning of the word” [Northern]. But we were very excited. And we walked the whole day around the, the, ghetto, the streets of the ghetto. And then we went to the Archives. And the woman there told me, “I found your certificate of birth and your father’s” (. . .) [and also her brother’s—KK]. It was the first time that I learned that my brother’s name Maurycy Henryk because I know him only like Rysiek. Rysiek is not a name it’s / that I didn’t know of course, I knew that his Jewish name after my grandfather. I was called on the name of my grandmother, the mother of my mother. I never knew the name of my grandmother because . . . like a lot of people when I asked my mother or I asked my older cousins about the family, they didn’t want to talk about it. I think they didn’t have the strength to talk about it. You know that I have the package of the, the photos that my that / was the one thing that my mother rescued from the war. She gave it away to the Polish neighbor to keep it for her and when she came for / after the war that’s the thing she got, and it was like a treasure but she never can, told me whom the people are, she didn’t have the strength to deal with it. So . . . we had all the papers and Miriam wanted of course the birth certificate of her grandmother (. . .) I went back to this Archive and the woman who was with us the day before, she looked at me and said, “Is something wrong?” And I said to her, “No, everything is okay, but we need the marriage license of her grandparents. (. . .) And if you can arrange for me to have a marriage license of my parents and a birth certificate of my, of my mother, I’ll be more than grateful.” The woman said, “I’ll try.” And we sat there for 45 minutes and she came back with the marriage license of Miriam’s grandmother, the marriage license of my parents and the birth certificate of my mother [smiling]. And I started to cry, and I had in my pocket a little silver Hamsa4 and I gave it to the woman and 3  4 

In Polish language, the letter c is never pronounced as k. Hamsa is an old type of amulet, whose tradition probably dates back to the pre-Judaism era. It is in the shape of an open palm. Today it is a popular decorative motif in jewelry and wall decorations.

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I said, “I want you to have it.” And she said “Noo, it’s my work, I don’t . . .” I said “I know it’s your work but I want you to have it, you gave me my life back. You know what you did for me now? You gave me all my life back.” So she took this and we were so excited too and Miriam was excited because she learned to know that her, her grandmother’s name was L. and I had the names of my grandparents, at least at the moment I know what happened at 42 Piotrkowska, it was the address of my mother when she was living there by a family called family G. And I know the name, I know the, the man, he was a / he, he was alive after the war, he survived and he came to Israel and I was in contact with him and I was so [smiling] I was so pity that I didn’t ask him all these questions that my mother couldn’t / I don’t know if he could give me, but somehow / he doesn’t live anymore of course, so I was so sorry that I didn’t ask him about a lot of things. But then I learned that it was their home there. (. . .) And I was quite disappointed not to find the place where I was born, the house. I had a picture that I felt maybe this is the house, I don’t know how I know this because there are many houses there on the pictures, but somehow I felt something about this photo and I did find my grandfather’s grave in graveyard. So I decided then that I have to make a new stone on my grandfather’s grave but I wanted to talk first to the other grandchildren that are alive. So I came back home and I did it. (. . .) And I remember like today, it was June 2000, it was a Holiday in Israel, it’s called Shavuot. (. . .) So as usual I had a lot of people for the meal in the evening and I said my husband, “Don’t wake me up in the morning, let me sleep a little bit.” But 9 o’clock, he already was [laughing] very excited and he wake me up. “Get up, get up, you have been found your house where you lived and baby sitter.” And I jumped out of the bed and run to the computer and saw your letter that you sent me about all the / how you found [clears throat] the place and a week after I was here with my son M. He is camera man in television, and the same day, I remember it was Sabbath and we went to see the lady Pani Nowak and I won’t forget that when we were standing at the door and she said to me “P a n i G i z e l a , 5 p a n i j e s t t a k p o d o b n a d o m a m u s i ” [Mrs. Gizela, you look just like your mommy] and it’s right I look very like my mother and it was very exciting for me, really I was so excited. I don’t know if you saw it but I was like shivering inside. And she was telling me stories about my brother that nobody told me. She told me, “You were strong, you ate well and he was a poor eater.” And at that 5 

Estera’s name before the war.

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moment I thought that his death is my, in my life. I I remember that I eat the, that those leaves and those you know those worms from the / and he couldn’t touch it and [she is very touched]. So I was of course very excited, I remember we went together and we found the house of my grandparents and the house of my cousin. I took pictures of everything and Zielony Rynek where they come from. And and [a sigh] somehow I felt, at that moment at this time I felt that I completed the puzzle . . . It’s still a puzzle, it’s not the whole picture because here and there something is missing, something . . . I’m not sure about the / because I was very little and I can’t remember everything. So I have some gaps in in my life, in my past but somehow I feel, I complete picture. It’s, it’s like almost to put the last piece of puzzle in the picture [smiling] and I’m very happy I did it. I was so afraid, I was so afraid, I remember before I took the first flight with Miriam I bought a little tape recorder and I hold it with me and just yesterday I listened in the morning to the recorder, I said, “I don’t know what I’m going to find there, and I hope I won’t be disappointed.” And I wasn’t and I really. I’m very happy I did it. I don’t know how to say it but yes I feel connected again to Poland. My feelings to Polish, Poland, Polish people was very ambivalent because Polish people are known in Israel at least and between Jews like very antiSemitic. And I said I’m very ambivalent because I live because of good hearts of Polish people that put their life how can you say, er, they were risking their lives because if the German would know that the there were Jewish people, they would be killed. So humanity you will find over the world even when, when the worst in the worst times you can find humanity. And it was a little bit too hard . . . [smiling]

This story continues as far as subsequent biographical experiences, described further in the narrative as well as those following the interview after the year 2004 are concerned. They are worth a brief mention before I proceed to analyzing the quoted fragment. Estera is the one who, upon arriving in the country as a child, gave her father a false name and after several decades took an effort to change it in her documents for the real one. One year after the interview, she proudly showed me her ID with the real name of her father. In fall 2004 she came to Poland again, with her granddaughter, I have already mentioned this part of her biography. In 2005, Estera asked for a tree to be planted in the Survivors’ Park in Łódź. At the same time, she gathered all the documents needed to get a Polish citizenship. She wanted to do it earlier but needed the time to get ready

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for that decision. The person who talked her into it was her late daughter, who was of the opinion that a Polish citizenship would be the ultimate symbolic seal on Estera’s return to the roots. I accompanied her when she was submitting the documents; she could not account for her nervousness, and only when it turned out that the documents were complete and accepted did her tension subside. During her last stay in Poland, she told me that when she got the notice her citizenship was confirmed, she cried all day long, reminiscing upon her past experiences and the way they linked with the role her late daughter played in recreating Estera’s biography. These facts are an indispensable supplement to the fragment of the narration I have presented, which tells the story of the two first journeys, constituting a biographical key to the return experience, while the entire quote shows its processuality. The main factor molding the return process is time. Experiences and emotions that govern the decisions have to mature. It is an “uneven” time, as it does not relate to unambiguous, clearcut intervals. There is no rational reasoning behind a sudden acceleration of the decision or a prolonged waiting and passivity. It is also non linear time, in a sense, because it is abundant in returns to the previous state. It is a time of biographical maturity. The narrator, describing this process, uses a visual metaphor of a foot trapped in a door, which symbolizes an impasse between the inability to include or exclude the first stage of biography in/ from her life history. This sense of inability lasted several decades and was experienced with varying intensity. It concerned two aspects of the biography: First, a reluctance to return to the past and thus an inability to perceive life as a coherent whole, of the past and present; second, a lack of memories related to the first stage of her life, an inability to create a full picture of her biography. The former type of inability led to fear of confronting an excess of memory about the traumatic past. The second generated wariness of a lack of memory—that is, a confrontation with a biographical void, with no traces of the milieu and lieu. A significant stage in the return process was undoubtedly the moment of telling the story of her life. Estera told it for the first time in the mid seventies, about thirty years after the war ended, and she made the decision to erase her tragic past from memory and her life. In the presented fragment, we come across yet another important stage—domesticate to the thought about a journey to Poland. I think that this term is the most apt one to express the nature of biographical work, taken up due to a gradually crystallizing, initially vague desire, which in

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its final stage is usually experienced as a biographical compulsion. In her narration, Estera describes all these stages—from a vague “maybe once, who knows,” to getting support from the significant others, to reaching the final decision. In many cases, the others play a major role, supporting the returnees or even motivating them to take up biographical work. Usually, these are the family members, oftentimes children wishing to discover the past of their parents or grandparents. The very moment of making this decision was, however, unexpected. After coming round, the vague, oftensuppressed idea turned into a biographical compulsion—a determination to realize the intention of returning, escaping rational thought. It was thus a certain turning point in the return process. One cannot, of course, pronounce that the process of reaching this decision is similar to Estera’s. Simultaneously, however, it always gains a special biographical significance. It is often described as a strange, inexplicable, often downright obsessive conviction that one has to visit the homeland. In other words, the intensity and dynamics of these experiences escape reason, and the narrators themselves often perceive it as a mystery, a type of metaphysical experience. Talking about the preparations for the journey and her experiences, Estera recreates the process of constructing the return, which comprises both its interpretation, taken up ex ante, and the process of building the experiences in statu nascendi by living through subsequent events. Some of them were within the journey project; some were completely unpredictable. It would be interesting to analyze the narration from this angle. The traveling women assumed from the start that a visit in Poland would be a difficult experience; what is more, Estera calls it a traumatic experience straight-out. This assumption was, first of all, related to the collective aspect of memory and the socially defined image of a journey to Poland—the place of the Jewish Shoah. Therefore, especially the first journey could hardly avoid being traumatic. The women chose Paris as a certain liminal space, dividing Israel and Poland—places embroiled in the discourse of memory.6 This strategy of softening down the experiences was used again in Warsaw, when the narrator has built an “extraterritorial” asylum, spending the night in an apartment of an Israeli family. Then she drew a clear line between her own world (“I felt with my people, we talked Hebrew”) and her destination (“I can’t step on this earth”). 6 

Although she does not mention it in the quoted fragment, the return journey was also via Paris, where the women spent several days.

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The arrival itself (the plane landing) is a very dramatic moment in the return experience. The scene recreated in the story suggests a great emotional tension, which Estera had to feel during the whole flight (likely also at the Paris airport). Such a strong reaction was surprising. These experiences were somatic in nature. For some time, she could not control her feelings. Interestingly, the description of these experiences somehow echoes her earlier metaphor of a foot trapped in a door. The juxtaposition of these two images expresses the narrator’s ambivalence: striving for a return to her biographical past and being afraid of it. In the next sequence, Estera proceeds to talk about her arrival in Łódź and gradual getting domesticate to space. Due to her age, this process was not about visiting places she remembered, but rather about discovering them. In a formal sense, this was similar to the process described by Eliade (1987)—of transforming the profane space (“an amorphous mass of an infinite number of places”) into the sacred one (“relevant and meaningful”), where one does not choose the place himself/herself, but discovers it. Ascribing specific meaning to certain buildings or streets (for instance, 42 Piotrkowska Street) allowed Estera to define unfamiliar—new and unremembered—space as one “ontologically establishing” the prewar stage of her biography. It is also the moment when Estera’s perspective is markedly different from the perspective of her companion, Miriam. Until this moment, Miriam was the guide, the biographical protector of the narrator. In Łódź, it was Estera who was the one better acquainted with the names of the streets and the language, though to a limited extent.7 The described process of identification with space led to deciphering biographical connections with a place, something that was lacking in Miriam’s experience. The next step was searching for the documents concerning significant moments in the life of the narrator and her family. This search was symbolic in nature, as the documents were not needed for any specific administrative or legal purposes (for instance, applying for other documents). They were supposed to be a “proof of existence”—a palpable trace of Estera’s connection with a specific time and place. This plan could have easily 7 

During her next trips to Poland, Estera was working on her language skills. Traveling with groups of Israeli youths, she would even serve as a translator (from Polish to Hebrew). When during her last stay, at the airport, she asked someone in Polish where the bus stop was, she heard, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Polish.” This scene, rapidly turned into an anecdote, was yet another contribution to her feeling at home in Poland, at least partially.

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failed if Estera had not found any documents.8 The sentence she recorded herself—“I don’t know what I’m going to find there, and I hope I won’t be disappointed”—refers to this situation as well. As it happened, the turn of events exceeded her expectations. Estera literally discovered the history of her closest family—she found the real names of her father and brother, saw hand signatures of her father and grandfather, and collected the birth certificates and marriage certificate of her parents. These documents were the first material sign of her roots in the past—lieux de mémoire. “You gave me all my life back” is the conclusion of this stage of the return. The next stage was finding the house where Estera was born. Having far too little memory and knowledge, the narrator was unable to find it herself. The background for this search are the significant others who never passed this knowledge on to her. The generational aspect of memory is clearly visible here, one built by living with and in the stories of others. Let us invoke again Ricoeur’s statement (1995) that narrations specific to a given generation contain the narration of one or two previous generations. In Estera’s case, like in many others, such an “embroilment in history” was lacking. The gap in her biographical memory, thus, was not a result of a defective memory, but an absence of memories created by the stories of others. The narrator was fully aware of the consequences of this silence, when she came up with the idea of giving her biography a coherent form. And although she understood her mother’s, as well as her own motivations (she did not ask and share her memories with the others). The dominant feeling was a sense of loss, augmented by intuitive expectations. “I had a picture that I felt maybe this is the house.” Although the narrator does not say it, I remember that during her first visit, she was walking the streets with Miriam and with the picture in her hand in search of her house. This endeavor was merely symbolic, taking into account the chances of succeeding in it. The next important step in the return process is finding the grave of the grandfather, who died in the ghetto and was buried in a separate plot, which could be identified. The grave was located in a neglected part of the cemetery.9 It was devastated. Estera renovated it and visits it each time she 8 

The narrator is talking about the archives, but in fact, it was the Office of Vital Statistics, which keeps all the documents for one hundred years. I accompanied Estera on her first visit to it, and I have to add that obtaining all the possible documents was made possible by the official, who was servicing Estera there. I was impressed by her obligingness, politeness, and authentic human—and not bureaucratic—involvement in the search. 9   It is worth noting that since 1999, the Jewish cemetery in Łódź has undergone many positive

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is in Łódź.10 Recently, she has told me she felt a strong connection with this place, although she never knew her grandfather. He is the only member of her closest family who has his own grave in Poland, and therefore, the place is very special to her, as I mentioned earlier, quoting the letter to him which she read aloud in the presence of her granddaughter. Remembering the dead is a duty, but simultaneously a sign of being anchored in a place. Hence, finding the grave of her grandfather was an extremely important event in the return process. Thus, during her first return, which lasted only several days, the narrator has gone a long way—starting with fear of confrontation with the reality she would find and then, surprising even herself, discovering a positive relation with the place (thanks to a limited but existent linguistic competence and deciphering places known from vague stories): the shock of getting tangible traces of anchorage in space and previously unknown information about her closest ones. Her return narrative, however, does not stop at this point. Estera does not conclude the story of her first journey with any commentary; she does not recapitulate on it. Instead, she proceeds to tell about her second journey, taken up almost immediately after receiving the message that her birthplace has been located. The script of the second journey was therefore different. The narrator did not need any liminal space to unwind after her Polish experiences. She flew in with her son directly from Israel.11 They devoted this time to visiting places related to family history. I know that during the period between her first and second visit, Estera asked all her few living relatives about the facts from the past known to them. These scraps of memories allowed her to recreate family history, at least as far as subsequent places of abode were concerned. What is more, they proved useful in my search for the narrator’s family home, which turned out to be a small tenement house, where her parents rented a kitchen and a large room. The apartment was quite spacious and comfortable. Estera’s premonitions were right—it was the house from the photograph. The narrator does not relate her visit to this house. We went there with Mrs. Nowak, who showed us which windows belonged to

10   11  

transformations. Subsequent parts of the necropolis have been cleared and renovated. In 1999, where the narrator’s grandfather had been buried, there was one-meter-high grass. Nowadays the entire alley is very spruce. Recently, she has been adorning the grave with flowers and candles, which is hardly a Jewish practice. As she mentions it later in the narration, he was the one who suggested he would accompany her.

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Estera’s apartment. We did not enter. This is where the narrator gave vent to her emotions—she hugged her son and started to cry. The sight of her family home was a symbolic return to the place. But the actual turning point was meeting the neighbor who remembered Estera and her family. The narrator brought the box with photographs which her mother had taken from Poland. Mrs. Nowak recognized some of the people, interpreted some of the scenes, and talked about family reunions of the neighbors. These were the memories of an observer, rather than a participant in the events. The meeting had a profoundly symbolic value. In Estera’s biography, Mrs. Nowak took up the role of the repository of good memories—the heart memory, which serves to create a picture of one’s biographical beginnings. These memories, little details, made it possible to take the biographical story further (“She told me, ‘You were strong . . .’”). It was during this meeting that I learned about Estera’s war experiences. Previously I did not ask, knowing from Miriam that these experiences had been very dramatic indeed.12 Since then, Estera tries to visit Mrs. Nowak in her journeys to Łódź. She calls the elderly lady “my first nanny,” jokingly but also lovingly. These meetings, in which I also take part, always go according to the already-established ritual: an exchange of gifts, a meal (always ample), and talks about family and reminiscing times before the war. The reminiscences are always the same and concern scenes observed by the teenager: admiring the beauty of some young women (most probably Estera’s father’s sisters), the figure of an old gentleman (Estera’s grandfather), and stories about her brother and parents. These memories assume the form of typical anecdotes told at family meetings, which everyone knows all too well but listens to anyways, with various degrees of patience. Estera is always a keen listener. Both women await each meeting with impatience. Only after finishing the story of her second trip does Estera close the entire narration with a coda, comprising an interpretation of her return experience, and then a general commentary, which can be considered a sketchily drawn frame of reference for overcoming stereotypes and prejudices. Summing up her experiences, Estera interprets them as a biographical completion—not a full one, but sufficient to create a coherent image of one’s own life. In this aspect, the return process can be considered complete. The initial fear of confrontation with an unknown world was 12   It is worth noting that it was another moment in the return process when Estera had strong

somatic symptoms. This time, they were not related to fear of confronting the reality, but experiencing a return to the biographical past.

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substituted with a sense of having her own place, in which the story of a happy childhood can be put, although not remembered. In spite of her ambivalent feelings about Poland and a clear picture of her current identity, Estera found space (in a physical and a symbolic sense) for her own place in Poland. On the other hand, one could say that the return process continues as far as subsequent journeys and actions are concerned (for example, the effort she has taken to change father’s name in her ID and confirm her citizenship or, recently, to contact her husband’s relatives living in Poland whom she previously could not reach, although it turned out to be very simple—only requiring getting the number from a telephone information service). It is difficult to find logic behind the rhythm of these actions, as she says it herself, “I needed the time, I couldn’t do it all at once . . .” This case illustrates the dynamics of the return process. Its characteristics and actions, as well as experiences, make the return possible. Estera has probably used up all possible ways. Let us recapitulate: looking for the places of biographical memory—traces of presence, like documents, graves of the loved ones, living people sharing the memory of the past, and, finally, contemporary meetings with people who sometimes become unwitting mediators between the past and the present.

2.  Sara: Marginality It’s not healthy when you cannot integrate all the pieces, as if there were many people living in a single body. Sara

Although every narration describes the unique biographical experiences of their authors, it is possible to distinguish similar themes, patterns of biographical experiences, and, most importantly, a common ground (in spatial and symbolic sense) for these experiences. In this aspect, Sara’s narrative seems a special one. Its particularity refers to the symbolically and spatially defined ground in which her biography was located. The narration itself retains the structure of the other ones. The narrator talks about her childhood before the war, war experiences, her life afterward, and the return to Poland. Relatively much attention (in comparison with other narratives) is given to the postwar period. There are many more

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or less extensive self-commentaries. These two structural features of the text, although hardly different from other narrations, still make the story special. The other narrators were usually not that much forthcoming about their postwar life. The entire period was often described through the prism of a happy family life (having children and grandchildren) and a sense of having found one’s own place in Israel. As I have already noted, it is typical that the narrators spoke very little about the hardships of their postwar lives, which they undoubtedly suffered as well. They are outweighed by today’s experiences of a good, abundant life in spite of the country’s difficult political situation. From this perspective, Sara’s narration, in which she describes her postwar problems as well, illustrates subsequent stages of biographical work and stands out conspicuously. As an aside, it is worth stressing that viewing a biography from the angle of family life in this case escapes judgments typical of a biographical evaluation. In other words, in the case of the narrators, these declarations are not “biographically banal.” Generational continuity in the context of the Shoah refers not only to the individual aspect of an individual’s biography, but also to the collective identity of a nation sentenced to a total obliteration. Thus, let us go back to Sara’s case. I will begin with a short overview of her life story. When the war started, Sara was five. So she remembered her childhood before the war, which she remembers as being very happy and abundant and spent in a large multigenerational family. The war broke out when she was on summer holidays with her whole family. The first days constituted a pattern typical of the so-called September Trajectory 1939 and then the Soviet occupation13—fleeing past crowded roads, which in Sara’s case ended in Lvov, giving the family a short period of respite and stabilization. From her closest family, only her grandmother remained in the German-occupied land, as the escape was organized straight from the vacation spot. The narrator’s father did not consent to a Soviet citizenship, and everyone was exiled into the Archangelsk area, where they lived for over six months in very harsh conditions. After the German attack on the USSR, Sara’s family, like the other deportees, moved south to reach Samarkand; and there they lived through the end of the war. Neither Sara 13   Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany on the first of September 1939 and then on the

seventeenth of September by the Soviet Army. The territory of Poland was divided between those two occupants. The Soviet occupation lasted until June 1941 when Germany attacked the USSR.

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nor her parents were aware of the terrible fate of Jews. They discovered the truth only after their return to Poland in 1946. We didn’t know anything, we were innocent people, we didn’t know anything about those crimes done to Jews in Poland, you haven’t heard anything, we lived there like some forsaken tribe in some forsaken world, we have only understood the vastness of this tragedy after our repatriation to Poland.

And here the known scenario repeated itself: every member of the family who had remained in Poland was dead, and the apartment and father’s shop were already taken. Leaving Poland seemed the only alternative. The family left for Brazil, where some of their relatives lived. At that time, Sara was twelve. She lived in Brazil for eighteen years. At the age of thirty, she came to Israel for a scholarship, and while there she met her husband and chose to remain. Since then, she has been living in Israel, and she has three children. The key facts of this life history determine subsequent stages of the narration, in which the author gives meaning to individual biographical experiences. The first stage is the life before the war—a happy childhood in an affluent home, surrounded by a large family and accompanied by a sister older by five years. The second stage is experiencing the war from a child’s perspective—the disintegration of the childhood world and the shock caused by it, with terrible scenes, including the deportation. I can say for myself that as a small six-year-old child for me this reality was terrible and I couldn’t accept it. I was very . . . I’d shut my eyes and I’d live in my dreams, I had my world, it was my, I had only one friend and it was my sister, I only talked with her, but mostly I was with my thoughts alone with my thoughts, because I couldn’t stand what was going on around me, then in the later years people would call me a sleeping beauty as I was always somewhere [smile] somewhere else, not here and now, and it was a good way back then to avoid this total fate, but but I can say that now I am still a dreamer, I like writing poetry, I like literature and and today it is not that important but back then, in those years, it was the only way to survive.

This withdrawal, building a barrier of alternity, in time will become a main feature of the narrator’s biographical experiences and then a way of creating her identity. In this phase of her biography, an important element of experience was the Polish language.

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My sister, who was 5 years older than me—I was 6 at that time, almost 7 and she was 11, so she’s already gone through school in Poland she’s learnt, she was a very smart kid, and she taught me to read and write, she taught me the love for the Polish language, because of her I know Polish language and literature and I have read Polish poetry and until this day I here and there I can read Mickiewicz or other poets, Julian Tuwim. And I must say now my sister was mine, my only teacher through the war years and my only friend.

This stage ended with the repatriation. The narrator has lived through the war unaware of the Shoah and simultaneously witnessed death, hunger, plagues, and inhuman life conditions. Chapter, that war chapter, I turned the page and started a new chapter, new page, new language, but at that time I already knew three languages, ’cause I spoke then Polish, Yiddish and I spoke Russian ’cause we were in Russia for so many years, six years, five years Russian in Russia. We came, Portuguese language had to be learnt and I was a strange child, I was 11, 12-years-old, and I can say I had never attended school and suddenly they sent me sent me to a Brazilian school where there were normal children, who had been born there. I didn’t know the language, I think that if there was ever a crisis in my life it was not the war time when all these these tragedies happened, ’cause our tragedy was not worse than others. There were people like us everywhere. But this meeting with a normal, ordinary world and ordinary children who were in a faraway place who have heard about this war but that was so far away from that war, I couldn’t adjust to it, no, not because of intelligence as I was very intelligent. When I went to school I picked up the language very quickly, ’cause ’cause I had already known three so the fourth wasn’t that bad, you could learn the fourth one, I learnt very quickly like my sister and and all those subjects. I was a very brilliant . . . student, very smart. I don’t know how it happened, I became the best student straight away, I understood maths and the language and Latin you’d, you’d learn Latin there. I liked Latin, liked languages but during the breaks and the children played together I didn’t. I didn’t know this, I couldn’t adjust to ordinary children, a wild child I was, I came back home and cried and I didn’t want to go to school but they said, “You get such good grades, you’re a brilliant student, better than others.” “I am the best student but I don’t want to go to school” and I stopped going to school, I stopped going to school but I had to do something, there were organizations of Zionist youth in Brazil. They were all over

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the world, back then they were, Israel was being born then, I entered one of those organizations and there I found children and youth who were closer to me, they understood more of this emigrational problem and I had someone to talk to. I didn’t want to go to school, I didn’t go to school at all, I learnt at home and I kept learning from my sister, until I was perhaps 16 and then I took those external exams to get the [indiscernible] and I never had any problems with studying. I had a social problem, I had problems with communicating with my peers. And I took those exams and at that time I decided then, the youth, Israel existed already, it was 1948, people were already doing it, emigrating to Israel, the youth mostly to kibbutz. But I wasn’t identified either so to say, I didn’t feel I belong enough to to that country, because I felt I I practically didn’t belong to anything at all and I never knew. I also lost the chance, some feeling towards the language as I had no language that would be mine, after the war my father didn’t want to speak Polish language at all. It is anti-Semite, he won’t be speaking this anti-Semite way with his children, he stopped speaking Polish altogether. He speaks, spoke Yiddish only and my mother spoke Polish and I spoke Polish only with her, my sister and me spoke Portuguese, we’ve learnt that country’s language. So I didn’t feel here, neither here, nor there, nor there, I decided to go to university to study and I graduated biology and got my MA in biology and I worked as a biologist and then I was already, I have already left that that Jewish company, the organization and I’ve adjusted to to the Brazilian youth at university, not the Jewish. I was a completely assimilated Brazilian, in Portuguese I had no I had no foreign accent ’cause I was only 11 years old, my sister was 15, so she had some accent, Polish accent, I had no accent and my best friends at university were Jews, they were all Brazilians all of them, nobody knew about my past, everyone thought I was a Jew born in Brazil, that I was born there. I closed that chapter completely and never spoke of it and nobody knew I was born in Poland, that I was, because of war, that I had such tragic childhood, nobody knew anything.

This fragment refers to the next “Brazilian” stage in Sara’s biography. One can see a sharp contrast between a subjective experience and an objective perspective. On the outside, the narrator is a good student, friend, and Brazilian. As far as her own interpretations are concerned, these outer socially acknowledged elements of status do not compensate for a sense of not belonging. When she was a child, this sense was expressed in difficulties with peer contact. Later, the sense of alienation resulted: first, to use

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Mannheim’s term, from a Lagerung of her own biographical experiences, which was different to the one of her peers; second, from an inability to get a sense of continuity in her own biography and, most importantly, a fixed point of reference for identity—a sense of its anchorage. Thus, the narrator shows the process of developing an identity of the stranger. It actually started with the outbreak of the war, when an escape into the world of dreams allowed her to distance herself from the reality. However, the first moment when Sara realized her own position was when she was confronted with “normal” Brazilian children, unaffected by the war. Therefore, she perceives this experience as biographically more difficult than her war experiences, especially since this sense of alienation would accompany her throughout her entire life. At this point, the language she uses to describe her biographical experiences needs some specification. The rhetoric she uses initially makes one think of the terms “otherness” and “the stranger.” Yet Sara is in fact no stranger—neither in Schütz’s understanding (she is fast to assimilate, accepts the patterns of the group, and becomes a Brazilian) nor in Simmel’s (the group did not distance itself from her). This subjective sense of alienation can be best expressed in Stonequist’s categories of marginality, developed due to specific biographical experiences and their accompanying interpretation. Simultaneously, in Sara’s case, it is not so much about difficulties with cultural or social assimilation, as those had been overcome as the problem of coherence of the biography. It turned out that thusly defined marginality, though in a different dimension, became a prevalent experience in the next life stage. I had this gap year, and I could do my specialization in Jerusalem at university. And anyway I had better conditions in America, but I decided to come to Jerusalem, ’cause I had this intimate relationship with Zionism—my father was a Zionist, the feeling that I am a Jew, and that perhaps here I would find a place for myself better. I came here alone I came, for a year I studied here. I was thirty-one years old, and I didn’t speak Israeli, and I worked at university as an assistant. And there I met my husband, a few months after my arrival, and we understood straight away that it was our destiny [laughter]. So I got married and had three babies, and I stayed in Jerusalem, stayed in Jerusalem, and here started a new charter. How do you say that . . . ? KK: Chapter. S: A new chapter of my life. And there were problems with the language. It was a problem. Now go and study in Hebrew. It was

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something completely different. I had no talent for it at all. Because between this and that, I have learnt other languages. I spoke English. Now everyone speaks English. Everyone learns. I learnt some French at school. But my husband—he’s French—he was born in France, and he’s got the Holocaust past too, my husband has. He was kept undercover as a child, as a Catholic child. So I came, and I met him, and we spoke French from the start. Then we came to France, so I know French very well too, and then I learnt Hebrew and so on. So I know many, very many languages. But anyway I was a biologist. In Israel, there are many people who belong to Holocaust, but me, I don’t belong to anything. So I too don’t belong to Holocaust either, but anyway my husband does belong. And one day there was this workshop in Yad Vashem, and at this workshop, people who had this Holocaust past had to learn, could learn how to talk about the things they’d gone through, a technique, it was a technique. And he went there, and I asked them if I could participate in this workshop, so they asked where I was during the war, and I said I was in Russia. “So you don’t belong,” that’s what they said. “But you can come and listen.” I was very interested in this in how you talked about it. Mostly the people who came there had terrible past, who were in camps, in Auschwitz. I went there, sat aside, and I listened. And this . . . this . . . this psychologist who led the group, he said, “You can come too, and you can tell about your life. Maybe we’ll invite you. Tell us what . . . what happened to you.” And I spoke more or less five minutes he gave me to tell about my life. I told about my life during the war, and I was very moved because I had never spoken openly in front of a group about those things, and I saw that others were very moved by my story too. And when I finished, that psychologist said, “If you’re not a child of the Holocaust, then who is?” And he invited me to take part in the workshop. And I . . . I felt I was one of them. When they interviewed me later to tell my story in greater detail in Hebrew, I . . . I was a bit afraid of those people that they’d shrug off my story. But they were very interested, and they saw me as another witness and another relation of this terrible and dark history of humankind.

Coming to Israel was thus an intentional choice, dictated by the narrator’s biographical search. Therefore, staying there due to a series of events was not a tough decision to make. On the contrary, setting up family in a place she already knew symbolically (“I had this intimate relationship with Zionism”) was considered a positive turning point in her biography. At first, the only difficulty with assimilation was posed by the language. The problem with mastering Hebrew is contrasted with the narrator’s

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previous experiences, as she claims to have been a gifted student who had no academic problems whatsoever and one blessed with linguistic skills to boot. These initial difficulties were overcome—in another part of her narration, Sara says that she writes her poems in Hebrew. The real problem concerned not a cultural adaptation, but defining the narrator’s identity in the eyes of the others. Paradoxically, what Sara previously defined as a “surplus” of experiences (war childhood), making her adaptation in Brazil difficult, now became a “lack” of experiences in the eyes of other people, which proved an obstacle in establishing the narrator’s identity as far as the Shoah was concerned. The next stage of her biography was also marked by marginality. An important role in this process was played by her husband, which leads to yet another paradox in creating the narrator’s identity. Thanks to him, Sara had a chance to (re)create her identity from her new/old rootedness—she had returned to Eretz Israel. On the other hand, due to her husband’s war biography (“he’s got the Holocaust past too, my husband has (. . .) I don’t belong to anything, so I too don’t belong to Holocaust either”). In the context of his biography, the war experiences of the narrator were stripped of the attributes of a Jewish experience. It is quite symptomatic that Sara says, “I don’t belong to Holocaust,” and not, for example, “I did not live through the Holocaust.” Therefore, an important element of working on identity was the meeting with the group of survivors and confirming the community of fate14 and then the chance to relate her experiences and bear witness to the time of war. This symbolic inclusion in the group, marking her belonging, did not overrule her biographically defined sense of marginality. The narrator continues: As you see, my life is made of pieces, pieces I cannot connect. That is too difficult for me, I cannot scramble it all together. I see there . . . there’s a lack of . . . of continuity, lack of continuity. And when there’s no continuity in life, it’s no good a feeling. Something’s missing. It’s not healthy when you cannot integrate all the pieces, as if there were many people living in a single body. I’ve written a couple of poems about it, about it, and lately, I’ve been trying to bring to the surf . . . bring to the surface this Polish history of mine. It’s more powerful in my life now than it used to be. It is very dear to me, that’s why I went back to Poland, I’ve decided to come back to Poland to find myself 14   The narrator does not say it directly, but her story suggests that she arrived at the meeting

labeled as “the one who does not belong to the Holocaust,” a label probably given to her by her husband as well.

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and to find my grandma. At home, the atmosphere was very against anti . . . anti . . . KK: Anti-Polish. R: Anti-Polish, nothing strange, nothing strange. They even forbid us to speak Polish, so I never thought about going back. But after all those things at Yad Vashem when I started speaking talking about it all, writing poetry about those problems, about my internal problems and conflicts that I still have, about those issues. Mostly when I have to make a choice, I am a very hesitant person, and I’ve decided to look after myself a bit. Yes, so I took my colleagues with me, a married couple born in Israel. And with my husband, we decided to go back to Poland after sixty years. At this time, my mother died in Brazil. My sister died of . . . she had cancer. My father died in Israel, as he came to me to Israel. When I emigrated, he followed me. He died, so there’s no one left alive from my family. I felt I had this must, this, I had to . . . KK: Obligation. S: Obligation to tell this history. Maybe my grandchildren, my grandchildren, and I’ve got three already. Children don’t want to listen to this story. They’re allergic to the Second War World War. They don’t want to listen about it. So I have this obligation, so we went to Poland. It was a very important journey, and I had no . . . I didn’t know how I’d feel there. I had no hunch, but I thought that one chapter I had to do it—I had to go back to Poland. And we took a plane, already on the plane I heard the Polish language, suddenly a living language. And we got off in Warsaw, and I was at this airport, and everyone was talking Polish. I had I was in a shock, but suddenly this Polish language started to . . . to come out of me very naturally as if I’ve been speaking it forever. I didn’t know, I didn’t know that I spoke Polish so well. Suddenly it came back to me. I had some good feeling when I came to Poland, as if I’d come to some very familiar place, someplace I knew very well and someplace that . . . that brought some emotions, very emotional that that for a while, I had a time of happiness. I felt happiness and love, and I liked everything. Suddenly I liked the people in the streets, the taxi driver. And we started visiting all those Holocausts, and all that [pause] and all that I’d thought would make me feel very bad in Poland and . . . and . . . and that I’d want to leave straight away, but I had some very positive feelings there. They were even all angry with me. Why are you so happy there? That they’d killed so many and . . . and there was such a tragedy there, and I couldn’t live there at all and . . . and . . . and why

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do I . . . I feel so well. And I spoke to the people in the streets there, and I had this feeling that maybe the Poles weren’t that horrible as . . . as all those stories, so anti-Semitic—that maybe they were the victim to this whole war, to all of this too. Everything turned in my head when I came to Poland.

This is the first part of the narrative about the return. In spite of the recurrent themes (coming with close people, searching for places of childhood, and visiting Shoah sites [which the narrator describes in the second part]), one can notice a certain difference: it is the contrast between the collective (represented by the husband and friends) and individual experiences of the journey to Poland. Although Sara says that she was going to Poland without any concrete convictions, they can be reconstructed in the narration. The key motif of the journey was biographical compulsion, which in this case is not described as an inner and not entirely rational conviction, but rather an aware decision to work on her biography. What in the case of other narrators took time to crystallize, in Sara’s case was a problem defined a long time ago—a lack of biographical continuity limited the possibility of creating a coherent identity image. A return to Poland undertaken at this life stage, when one returns to childhood, was supposed to be an attempt (one of the attempts) to (re)create the coherence of the biography. Probably due to the complexity of her experiences, the narrator did not have any specific expectations, and unlike Estera she did not harbor any fears of confronting the reality. What mattered was only the fact of making an effort to commence a biographical search.15 On the other hand, when Sara says, “I had this feeling that maybe the Poles weren’t that horrible as all those stories, so anti-Semite,” one could presume that—like her traveling companions—upon arriving in Poland she had a stereotypical image of Poles and Poland as an anti-Semite country, perceived solely through the prism of the Jewish nation’s tragedy. This stereotype, however, undergoes a gradual transformation such that the narrator even tries to take into the account of the perspective of the Other—“that maybe they were the victim to this whole war.” This shared (collective) point of view crumbles as early as on the plane, when the narrator rediscovers her language competence. Like in the other life stages, when subsequent 15   One has to emphasize that the term “biographical search” pertained to different things in

Estera’s and in Sara’s cases. Whereas the former was literally looking for her own traces, and discovering places connected to her biography, the latter was looking for a point of reference for taking up biographical work on her identity.

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languages marked every new chapter of her life, now it is also the case. By means of the language, Sara opened up to new, unpredicted, as it seems, positive emotions—“happiness and love and liking.” It can be defined as a biographical metamorphosis,16 for the narrator has discovered experiences, to some extent unknown and unexpected, in the process of working on her identity. They were new as far as her individual experiences were concerned. During her intense liminal journey experiences, Sara could suspend her marginality. They were also new as far as collective imagination was concerned—in the eyes of the narrator, stereotypical notions of Poland and Poles did not find any substantiation; neither did the return prove to be extremely difficult or painful. The metamorphosis was further augmented by the contrasting sensations of the narrator’s traveling companions. Their identity is thus worth stressing. It was a married couple born in Israel, the so-called sabras, so one can presume that they are people viewing Poland according to the previously described patterns of collective memory. A similar attitude was presented by Sara’s husband as well. From their point of view, there was no possibility of forging positive bonds with the place; but for the narrator, “the damned land” was also a place of good memories. Thus, Sara’s journey allowed her to take up biographical work on her identity, to determine areas in which she could, to some extent, overcome the sense of marginality. Simultaneously, however, from the perspective of consecutive collective identifications, this marginality was sustained or even strengthened. Continuing her story, Sara mentions places she visited. Among them were her hometown and the apartment where she spent the first five years of her life. She decided to knock on the door. The current resident, living there for over a dozen years, did not mind letting her in. I walked around and around, and I remembered a little, a little. Not much, mostly I saw my grandma, who’d always come here. We stayed maybe 10 minutes and we went to the park, I had the same photo, in this photo I’m in this park. And we saw that very same park and it was all so close to my heart and so familiar, not in my memories but at heart. 16   Biographical metamorphoses represent an unpredicted positive change in one’s life, allowing

one to discover new heretofore unknown possibilities. Simultaneously, it is characteristic of the initiation of this change that it cannot be introduced via a biographical action scheme; on the contrary, it occurs so suddenly that it usually requires a change or even a retransformation of identity (Schütze 2005).

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Thus, the narrator managed to revive heart memory. A return to real memories had a secondary function to the fact of arousing positive emotions and feelings. An important element of this process was the memory of her grandmother. It was her figure who appeared in the memories triggered by the place. We come across a motif already known from other narratives, a motif of the dead victims’ assistance. Although all her relatives who remained in Poland were killed, Sara’s grandmother was the one symbolizing the sense of loss and survivors’ guilt. Therefore, the narrator felt a special obligation toward her and (re)creating her memory. The family—her father, most specifically—fleeing Poland in 1939, decided not to take his mother along. She died in the war, and her fate remains unknown. Although the narrator does not mention it, one can assume that her father was wracked by a sense of guilt. Perhaps, especially when one takes into account the history of Sara’s family, the elderly lady could have been saved. This sense of guilt was passed on to Sara. An additional goal of her journey was, thus, discovering the fate of her grandmother and finding her grave. Sara found out that she was probably shot in 1940, along with other elder ghetto inmates. The narrator visited a Jewish cemetery, the mass grave, and the memorial commemorating victims of the ghetto. Thus, she fulfilled her obligation. In the local museum where, among other things, the relics of former Jewish inhabitants are kept, Sara left pictures of her parents and grandmother. The journey to Poland was, therefore, a very important element in the process of return and biographical work. However, in spite of many positive experiences bordering on metamorphosis, the return to the Polish stage of her life was but a beginning of the next phase of biographical work on identity. Therefore, summing up her story, Sara presents herself as a marginal person, torn between different stages of her biography and, most of all, looking for its coherence. New observations, new understanding, I understand better what had happened. And I fear those terrible emotions less, less. And I’ve written about those subjective matters in my poems. It was possible to write them, as earlier I had had no contact with those . . . those keys. Now I’ve got contact . . . And I’m no longer afraid of this poor girl, this poor child I’d locked up somewhere inside in my stomach or in the heart, and I’m not afraid to look her in the eye. And . . . and I can talk about it now. A few years back, I couldn’t talk about it. I didn’t want to talk about it and didn’t want to have anything to do with history. I think I will return to Poland, as I have a lot of friendly

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feelings towards . . . towards the people who are interested in my life and who want to listen to my story, who’re interested in it. It is a Polish history, and I think that this whole itinerant life that I’ve had and that anyway I have done everything that was to be done. I’ve studied, and . . . and I’ve had a normal family, and I’ve got a nice house, and I’ve got everything I need. I’ve got many friends, and . . . and I’ve traveled a lot and everything that a regular person can do, but . . . those wounds will never heal. There’s some sensitive . . . KK: Sensitivity. S: Sensitivity that disturbs your life, disturbs it a lot. And anyway if I hadn’t been, if . . . if . . . if I had been in Poland, was born and lived there, probably I wouldn’t have chosen the same profession. And I would have built my life in a completely different way, if all those chapters hadn’t got . . . got . . . mixed up. And you can never put them back together, make them whole. There are always some fragments left, but maybe you can come to terms with it. (. . .) Listen, I really don’t belong to the Holocaust. I wasn’t at any of the death camps. I don’t know what it was like. I’m on the verge of the Holocaust. Had it not been for my husband, I wouldn’t I . . . I . . . I wouldn’t be there at all. I don’t belong anywhere—that’s the thing. The only thing that can save me . . . save me is to tell this whole story and to find some string. How do you say that . . . ? KK: Strand. S: Some common strand to write it down or tell it. I can talk about it now. I’m no longer afraid of it. It brings me some relief, some relief. But the language is the problem—in what language should I be writing it down? It is not an easy problem. It is a very complicated problem.

Undoubtedly, the interpretation of biographical experiences presented in this narrative is related to the narrator’s exceptional sensitivity. On the other hand, this sensitivity was shaped by a specific turn of events in each of her life stages. Marginality in the face of the Shoah experiences has thus a most important role in the process of biographical work. It is a marginality imposed and perceived. A biographical rip in linguistic and cultural worlds always occurred in the context of Jewish identity and the fate of the victims and Shoah survivors. From this perspective, Sara’s Polish history appears to be the key element of this marginality: the place of a happy childhood, the cursed land of the Shoah; the place of her mother tongue (first language), the language she rejected and forgot; the place of bad and difficult memories of the war, positive and good ones of the return.

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In the quoted fragment, Sara is trying to find a key to her experiences— a strand, as she calls it, to connect them. Intuitively, she calls back on her rootedness in space—in Poland—as her own place and anchorage in the language she could consider her own. Sara’s history is in line with a culturally well-known motif of looking for one’s own language, perceived not only as a means of description, but also of experiencing the world. This search is undertaken by people socialized in many languages, changing their “linguistic worlds” in different life stages, which can lead to a sense of variously defined marginality. Such people are not always perceived as marginal, but they always have a sense of biographical marginality caused by the necessity to establish their relations with various languages, accompanying them through life. It is a common frame of reference for experiences of that type, which can be filled with various content. Sara’s case is but one variant. Another one can be found in Elias Canetti’s book The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood (1979, 10), where he describes the process of finding his own language: To each other, my parents spoke German, which I was not allowed to understand. To us children and to all relatives and friends, they spoke Ladino. That was the true vernacular, albeit an ancient Spanish. I often heard it later on and I’ve never forgotten it. The peasant girls at home knew only Bulgarian, and I must have learned it with them. (. . .) All events of those first few years were Ladino or Bulgarian. It wasn’t until much later that most of them were rendered into German within me.

However, the writer was quick to forget Bulgarian, because at the age of six he moved to England and attended school there. Then he learnt English, which became a language of daily communication, and ever more eagerly read books. When he was eight, his father suddenly died. His mother decided to move to Vienna and started teaching the boy German. The dreadful cut in her life, when, at twenty-seven, she lost my father, was expressed most sensitively for her in the fact that their loving conversations in German were stopped. Her true marriage had taken place in that language. She didn’t know what to do, she felt lost without him, and tried as fast as possible to put me in his place. (70)

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When his father was still alive, Canetti already sensed how much intimacy his parents imbued the German language with. For him, it was an unknown and yet coveted world; therefore, when his mother let him in, it caused an instantaneous and strong identification with the language, which became his language. I cannot say exactly how this happened. I don’t know at what point in time, on what occasion, this or that translated itself. I never probed into the matter; perhaps I was afraid to destroy my most precious memories with the methodical examination based on rigorous principles. I can say only one thing with certainty: The events of those years are present to my mind in all their strength and freshness (I’ve fed on them for over sixty years), but the vast majority are tied to words that I did not know at that time. It seems natural to me to write them down now; I don’t have the feeling that I am changing or warping anything. It is not like the literary translation of a book from one language to another, it is a translation that happened of its own accord in my unconscious. (10)

Thus, for Elias Canetti, what became his language was one that— although it accompanied him since childhood—for a long time remained a world of unintelligible sounds and was first discovered “emotionally,” as it was considered inaccessible and mysterious, like the world of the parents’ intimate relations, and only afterward was fully acquired. It is, however, interesting that Canetti—a German-speaking writer—felt his autobiographical book needed an “adjusting” of language perspectives, characteristic of individual life stages, especially childhood. A similar motif, though resolved in a slightly different way, can be found in the alreadyquoted book by Samuel Bak (2006, 9–10).17 I wrote it [the book—KK] in English, a language I use most often these days. I made this choice after a long consideration. As I have mentioned earlier, my vagabond life has taught me to make use of many languages (. . .) The more I strive to express the entire complexity of thoughts and experiences, the more limited the choice. There are several reasons for that. I have almost forgotten Polish and Russian, my two first mother tongues, the third one—Yiddish— so close to my heart and most suited to describing my childhood, once fluent and rich, now is also very limited. German and Italian 17   Introduction from the Polish edition.

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as well. (. . .) No matter the language, recounting old memories causes pain and anguish. At some point, however, I reached a conclusion that—since most of what I’m talking about happened before I got to know English—using this international language can prove helpful. It allows me to get a proper perspective and some measure of objectivity. A downside of this choice was the constant feeling that in other languages I could have found more appropriate words.

Let us remember that Bak, as a painter, considers this sphere of activity his main medium of self-expression. The notion of distancing himself from his own memories by describing them in a “neutral” language is presented as one of the possible, yet imperfect, but to some extent effective strategies of retelling one’s biographical experiences—especially when it is impossible to find rootedness in one’s own language.

3.  Rut: Rootedness in Polish Culture I have a great sentiment for the past itself, for the Polish culture, for literature, for art, for everything, Polish painters. Rut

When the war started, Rut was fourteen. She distinctly remembers the prewar period, not only as the time of her childhood and adolescence, but also as the time of intellectual and cultural development. Therefore, Rut begins her narrative from memories of her life before the war and then refers to this stage of her biography in other parts of the story, pointing to its role and influence on her later biographical experiences. The narration is structured similarly to the others: after the story of the prewar period comes an extended account of her war experiences (the narrator and her mother were camp prisoners in Płaszów, Birkenau, and Ravensbrück; her father and brother were killed). Rut proceeds to tell about her five years of studying in Poland, her involvement in the Zionist movement, and her departure for Israel. Then she speaks briefly about her life in the new conditions and working for the country. After this sequence follows an account about her travels to Poland, chronologically disorganized, as in this case it is not pertinent to the main interpretative frame the author

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is using—namely, an extremely emotional and, one could say, intimate relation with Polish culture. My family was, you could say, quite assimilated—except that we celebrated Jewish holidays—but I didn’t know Hebrew, nor Jewish, only Polish. But my father placed a great emphasis on education and taught me languages from the start, you could say since I was a child. When the war broke out, I already knew French well, I knew German, which helped me a lot, and in a way even saved my life. And I attended a Polish school, a school named after Maria Konopnicka, and like all the children I sang Kiedy ranne wstają zorze. And I was very, we were very, we were a very Polonized family of patriotic— of course we were loyal. And until the outbreak of the war I managed to finish two grades at the gymnasium. I was learning Latin and we were travelling of course, because my parents were affluent, so of course every summer holidays we would spend in Krynica, there we had this summer cottage. In wintertime I would go to Zakopane, we had a large family so I visited all of my relatives. And my childhood was idyllic, I was surrounded by great love and prosperity, and, well, like every young girl I dreamt of a good future. Because my father paid so great an attention to raising and educating the children, as far as the humanities were concerned, I mean, he, school wasn’t enough, I had this Miss Bronia, who would walk me in the Planty Park, under the swans, and I would talk to her about all these books I’d read, and heroes, and descriptions. And even today, my children laugh at me that I know these things. Because what I’m saying is that the Polish school was a great school, it gave me wonderful rudiments of knowledge, this is what you remember. What you soaked in as a child, you you have for the rest of your life. And aside from that of course I played the piano, and had ballet classes and everything you could afford in such a bourgeois family so that the kids would get a very thorough general education.

The narrator points to the sources of this special relation. There are the macrostructural factors—the family’s financial status—and the social ones—probably her father’s striving for assimilation by educational and cultural means. Rut was being raised into “a well-bred young lady from a good family,” a personality model universal to some social circles, whose habitus was formed of a broad humane and artistic education, solid general education, savoir-vivre. The narrator emphasizes her individual perspective as well—the “idyllic” childhood gave grounds to good memories, the heart memory, and an internalized fascination with Polish

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culture. High standards of the Polish school cannot be overestimated here. This conviction was consolidated after the war, when Rut passed her final exams and started university. She left Poland only after finishing her studies. The war was over, but there was still anarchy and a sense of being lost, and we felt like . . . we didn’t exactly know what to do with this freedom, what to do with ourselves. But I said first thing, I must learn, but I knew at that time I had no possibility of doing so. So I got on a tram and said to myself, “Well, I’ll take a ride around this Kraków of mine.” So I sat down in this tram, it was summer, it was June, I’m sitting on this, this, and right next to me there is this elderly lady and she says, “And you, my child, where are you going, what you this, what you that,” so I reply, “I’m just riding around aimlessly,” “What does it mean, aimlessly?” So I say, “Well, I have just returned from this camp,” and anyway I had the number and she saw it, and she says, “So you’re getting off with me,” and so I I walk with her and she says, “Come on, I’m taking you home.” It turned out it was professor Słonimska, a wonderful person, a humanist, a beautiful Polish woman with tradition, and she says, “Don’t worry, I will prepare you for your finals, you will be able to study anything.” I’m looking at her, how, how come, I lost so many years and all that . . . She was a professor of English and French philology. So she says, “First you need to pass your final high school exams, I have to prepare you.” But that she prepared me, it’s nothing, all my friends went through that room of hers and all of them . . . no, when she said it, that she’d prepare me, I say, “But professor Słonimska, I have no means, I say, we have nothing.” I barely had some flimsy dress, or something, and I changed the shoes from the camp to these Dutch clogs. So she says, “I’m not talking about money at all, I’m not asking.” (. . .) And I passed the exams, and because I was in a great rush, I simultaneously did my junior year at the Jagiellonian University. And of course this professor Słonimska was encouraging me all along, etc. But then there were these sad events, there was this pogrom in Kielce and also the one in Kraków, which was suppressed at once, and I was right in the middle, but nothing happened. And I decided, there was this slightly unhappy love and it wasn’t easy for me, because I was immensely attached to everything Polish, and Kraków, I really was a patriot. I was building this—then the war started, I got pneumonia, all these, you had to, those ditches and I couldn’t imagine life anywhere else at all. We, at home, had nothing in common with Zionism, no, but afterwards I saw that I must indeed prepare my future. And back then there was no Israel yet, but

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the activity was already there, and the attitude was very friendly and you could cross the border illegally, etc. I went abroad completely legally . . . I got this ID, I mean they revoked my citizenship, but I had this ID, which I have until this day. And I finished my studies, and for me these were five very good years, and although there were also less good episodes, but in general, in general, these five years gave me a lot, I made up for all the gaps I had in my education. And well and because my husband, who is also from an extremely assimilated family, even more than myself, who knew not a single letter of Hebrew, he came here as well in ’48 and fought in the liberation war. And because he was in this part of Negev Desert Słowacki’s writing about, that’s what he’s writing about in Ojciec zadżumionych, well, he decided to stay here. And because we already knew each other from Kraków, but didn’t marry, and he was here for three years, I finished my studies and well and I came to this desert.

This fragment consists of two themes, which can be called the Polish and the Israeli ones. The Polish theme prevails, and the Israeli one is recessive (it will be expounded upon later). As far as the Polish part of her biography is concerned, Rut managed to recreate a substitute of the prewar world in the realm of education, although it would occur in completely different circumstances, as her world actually ceased to exist. Apart from her mother, all the relatives were dead; she had traumatic camp experiences, and her financial status changed as well—her mother had lost her business and apartment, and their prewar affluence was but a memory. All these negative experiences seem, in a way, compensated by the biographical action scheme, consisting of first making up for the gaps in education (passing her exams) and then continuing into further studies. This way, the narrator returned to her biographical project destroyed by the war. After the war, it was being realized in accordance with Polish heritage as well. The chance to take it up, a strong identification with Polish culture, a peer group (in an omitted fragment, the narrator talks about Polish and Jewish friendships from that period, which last until this day)—all contribute to a positive balance of this time. As she says herself, “for me these were five very good years.” Thus, the quoted fragment is dominated by the sense of Polishness. It is worth noting that this theme is similar to Polish narrations. In interviews about Polish war experiences, one can find the same biographical schemes, realized especially by women. Acquiring education in spite of an economic and social degradation (loss of parents’ social and financial statuses) seemed a fundamental life goal. The style and

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language of the narrative are also similar. Of course the similarity pertains to narrators of specific social strata, especially the intelligentsia and landed gentry. They, like Rut’s family, represented a paragon of living in culture, focusing on high values, connected to the conviction of an attractiveness of the symbolic culture and referring to national values like patriotism.18 Considering this background, the author is very enigmatic about the problem of anti-Semitism and the need for looking for her own place, which she otherwise describes referring to the repertoire of Polish symbolic universe (Ojciec zadżumionych). Only the next fragment of the narrative allows us to see the context explaining Rut’s decision to leave. R: I actually had all the papers required in America, because I have family in America. And they took care of everything so that I could come to America, because they said I knew English, etc. But my experience of the Shoah taught me that the most important thing in life is to belong. This term “belonging” they use so often, sociologists use. And I realized I had to be somewhere where I was wanted, that I can give something from myself, that I can, that it can be accepted, and I can create something, and that this home will be real as long as I don’t have any problems with my identity. Anyway, when I was leaving, there was this funny scene. They were taking away all your things. It was the Stalinist regime. There’s no use talking about it. One of the guards and I took all my indexes and my MA diploma with me, he says, “And you, comrade, where are you going? There’s a war there after all, and there’s . . . life there’s so hard, not like here.” And this higher education, that was something, if you also knew foreign languages and had this education, there were diplomatic posts, you could have a career, and he asks where . . . where I’m going. And then I said to myself, I knew that hard times were awaiting me, but after this awful hell that I lived through, to be insulted or disrespected, I said to this, I joined this Zionist organization, a very Socialist one. KK: But it was still in Kraków? R: In Kraków, in Kraków, and . . . and there I started a little. I knew relatively little about Jewry. Much more, I didn’t know any Jewish literature—nothing, nothing. And when we were visited by these people from Palestine, who told us things, they only spoke Yiddish, so I had to learn. I didn’t know it at all. It was quite a lot, 18   Analyses of Polish war narrations showing these formal similarities are presented, among

others, in the following publications: Kaźmierska 2002; Marciniak 1997; and Piotrowski 1997.

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but I understood that the only real place where I can be equal to others is there. So I said that if I want to have a family, if I want to get to these roots and the place where they need me—because then, actually, when it comes to workers, I had six jobs, because there were none at all. So in retrospect and generally now, when you’re a man of the end of your life, as Osborne said, you don’t look back with anger and rage—you look at it with indulgence and understanding. And so I think I made the right decision. Never, even when I had a really tough time, there was never a conflict that perhaps I did wrong that I didn’t go to America, that they have it better there. Then they sent me to America for work, and I saw that they indeed have it better, but it never made any impression on me. I mean when I sum it up, “recapitulate” is not the right word, but I think that my decision was right—both emotionally and logically.

The narrator describes the process of identity transformation in relation to two frames of reference: Polishness and a “variant” of Jewishness. In each case, it is about a slightly different referential system. America versus Israel is the juxtaposition of values such as affluence, easy way of life, a sense of stabilization with everyday hardships: lower life standards, lack of comfort, but simultaneously a strong ideological entrenchment, giving a sense of rootedness and belonging. In this case, Rut has no doubts about her previous biographical choices. Israeli identity, especially in retrospect, is considered more “resounding” than an identity of an American Jew. One could say that as far as her attitude to Polishness is concerned, the author does not regret her choice either, but its characterization is more complex. Rut had to face the fact of abandoning her cultural and social identity. By cultural identity, I mean not only the anthropological aspect of behavior patterns (very important otherwise), but also a deep rootedness in symbolic culture. As Antonina Kłoskowska (1991, 58) writes, “Symbolic culture does not act automatically by the very existence of its signs. It is being realized only in its reception, in an active participation of members of a cultural community, who in their experience recreate symbolic meanings.” For Rut, the reservoir of symbolic culture was the Polish national culture, with which she identified completely. The necessity to leave this world was thus a difficult biographical challenge, which is confirmed by many elements of her narration, when she talks about it more or less explicitly. The two quoted fragments, in which are extensive argumentative commentaries concerning the narrator’s links to Poland and justifying her immigration to Israel, show that this experience was difficult and required complex

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biographical work. On the other hand, Rut never abandoned Polish culture completely, unlike Estera, Sara, or other interviewees of mine. In spite of a personality model of “a new Israeli,” Rut cultivated her sensitivity to values of symbolic culture, shaped during the Polish phase of her biography, invariably contextualized in Polish culture. The two fragments below depict that. The narrator refers to the memories of the era right after her immigration, when the newcomers were expected to create a new identity, as we remember, by means of rejecting or deprecating biographical past. Rut, to a large extent, managed to resist this pressure. I have a great sentiment for the past itself: for . . . for . . . for the Polish culture, for . . . for . . . for literature, for . . . for . . . for art— for everything, Polish painters. Really, when I arrived, everyone was saying, “So you remember all of them?!” But it’s because ours was a home where you really spoke only Polish. R: My children speak Polish. My son better, my daughter not so grammatically, and then [she means the fifties, sixties, when her children were young—KK] they wanted to crucify me. What does it mean? How can you, to your children, one more language, and Polish at that, and so on and so forth. So I said, “All right, I’m choosing my own path.” KK: They learnt Polish at home? They had no special classes? R: At home, of course, only at home, from us.

These otherwise-difficult choices let her keep the sense of biographical continuity and set an area for (re)creating bonds with Polishness in current perspective. It resulted in the narrator’s frequent contact with Poland and Polish people and working out emotional attitudes toward space—place. When talking about it, Rut refers to three important aspects of biographical experiences. First of all, it is the biographical work process, which started as soon as the war ended, connected to personal and collective traumatic experiences. The narrator was suffering from depression, which, among other things, contributed to an open family discourse about the Shoah. Rut never hid her war biography from her children—creating, as she calls it, “a community of fate” with them. It allowed her to avoid difficulties characteristic of families in which war experiences were never mentioned and pass an obligation originating from this “community of fate” on to her children and then grandchildren. All of them have been to Poland, prepared themselves for the journey, and acted as inheritors of the survivors.

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Meanwhile, the collective aspect of war experiences in the narrative refers to the process of working through the attitude toward the past, actors, and witnesses. On several occasions, Rut stresses that her perspective has changed from a radical one to Ricoeur’s model of forgiveness. An initial uncompromising and clear-cut evaluation stemmed from a collective version of memory, imposing generalizations and collective interpretations. It was a result of her own experiences and solidarity with the suffering of others. The narrator calls this time a period of rebellion against the evil embodied in the actions of individuals and simultaneously spread over the image of the entire group. I worked for Yad Vashem, people would talk about terrible experiences. And there were also, there were experiences, when when a slice of bread could have saved lives, thrown to those halfdead. And there were those who were indifferent and uncaring, but there were also those who would intentionally give others away, just for sport, for pleasure. And some people, these testimonies, who talked to me about really hard things. At that time I was undergoing a rebellion of sorts, why people can do such things to other people, why, it hadn’t been like that before. Well, there was the death penalty, but in different circumstances, many years ago, but here, to willingly, for a kilogram of sugar, for for for just for something or other. And then I had this period that I rebelled, but then reason prevailed, that you can’t judge this collectively, and I also think that you can’t, I mean friendly with nations, or hostilely, but only with individuals. This is this platform and this, and this is actually most important, to have some measure of forgiveness, because without it’s, it’s impossible. Because these were so terrible, such terrible conflicts in such terrible times, that that if you think in normal categories, it it is just impossible, impossible. (. . .) I never generalize, I mean I have these good memories and these less good memories, and these were the times of contempt, and the norms weren’t normal. So in retrospect, I don’t judge it so harshly like I used to, and I have a great sentiment indeed for the past.

Although Rut does not say it explicitly, the context of her narration makes it quite clear that the rebellion against collectiveness concerned Polish society. Undoubtedly, the contrast between a sentiment for Polish culture, embedded in her biography, and the negative attitude toward the way Poles behaved during the war were major biographical problems. One can assume that it was the identification with Polishness in the symbolic

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culture aspect that made it easier for Rut to take up biographical work, leading to overcoming prejudices and stereotypes and realizing the forgiveness model. It must have been a difficult process, as far as individual experiences as well social and collective memory were concerned—the latter fostering the rhetoric of generalization and seeing Poland as the “damned land.” Successful biographical work led to opening up for interpersonal relations and searching for a possibility to recreate an intimate relation with space-place. Therefore, the second important aspect of biographical experiences are meetings with people—friendships struck up in Poland and sustained. In a conversation we had before the interview, Rut told me that in her case the return took place not because of places, but because of people. She does not expound on this subject in the narration; when asked about it, she merely repeats, “Because of people, only people in my case, yes.” However, when referring to the Polish context, she talks about university friendships lasting until this day and about new friends she frequently corresponds with. The main animator of her relations with Poland was a Polish friend of hers who died in 1999. It was largely due to her that Rut’s ties with Poland never broke, and the relationships she established with her help never died down, even after her friend’s death. Thus, meetings with people still continue, and they concern the war history of the Kraków Jews, the interwar period, and the current fascination with all things Polish. It seems that the intensity of these contacts allowed Rut to take up work on her feelings toward space, which constitutes the third important dimension of biographical experiences recreated in the narration. Rut has a great sentiment for the place of her childhood and youth, as well as the places with special significance to her biography. She traveled to Poland for the first time at the beginning of the eighties. Like others, she juxtaposes experiences from the PPR era with contemporary ones. When I went to Kraków for the first time, I cried so much. I saw this gray Kraków and such sad people. “God,” I said. And now I see this splendor and it is indeed a great step forward, and now if Poland only could make it, when entering euro, if it only made no harm to so many of your farmers mostly, and the competition will be huge, and this globalization, which is a threat in general everywhere. (. . .) Well, for me Kraków is, it is the place / I was walking the streets of Kraków and I was soaking it in and I was dazzled and Kraków is back what, who it used to be.

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The language suggests a profound identification with the place, which even becomes personified (“who it used to be”). The picture of a “gray Kraków” engenders not so much negative emotions, making her reject such experiences as regret, sympathy, and solidarity in misery. Today this identification turns into a solidarity in successful transformation. Sadness caused by the city’s misery has been replaced by authentic satisfaction with its prosperity. These experiences are an operationalization of muchdeeper emotions and a complex biographical work, aimed at interpreting personal nostalgic attitudes toward space and the past anchored in it, not always corresponding to collectively defined behavioral patterns and their interpretations. One of these patterns is mourning, combined with the obligation of cultivating the memory of the victims by visiting the lieux de mémoire. Sara was undergoing a similar experience; however, in her case, positive impressions were to a certain degree unexpected. In Rut’s case, they were linked to a biographical concept and a reflection about the individual and collective aspects of the past. I thought for a very long time that I couldn’t go on holiday, have fun, I thought so for many years. (. . .) But . . . now I broke free from that and visited these places / I mean, there are some fragments in life, some things have to mature . . .

This process of biographical maturation resulted in a decision to plan a trip to Poland so that it could become a nostalgic journey into the biographical past included in the heart memory: I had a wonderful month in Poland, I reached all the places I used to feel good in, and this time I said to myself, “I’m not going to any camp,” because all the time it was from one camp to the other, from ghetto to ghetto, this time I said “no,” only this idyllic childhood and all these wonderful meetings with friends, who were doing all they could to make me enjoy myself even more. My father’s mother is from Przemyśl, so we went to Przemyśl and Bielsko, there are some remaining relatives there. And all the . . . and I went to Szczyrk, and I walked these paths I padded when I was a child. So it was so full of nostalgia and longing for what’s no more, but I did it anyway. And I was very pleased and relatively well, because after the camps I still suffer from some diseases. But in Poland really, Polish cuisine has no other equal. I would go some places, pierogi, pancakes, all this, what they can’t do here, they will never reach this level. And for the

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Israelis it was great fun, and so maybe I will manage to visit Kraków once more in my lifetime. And actually this time, this month was unforgettable and I wrote about it a lot, to myself and to others.

Here we find a reference to all the dimensions of experience enumerated above, which the narrator defines as biographically significant. Thus, there is the distance from models of experiencing the journey determined by collective memory. There are people surrounding Rut— friends and acquaintances, as well as places in which the narrator could (re)create positive biographical experiences. Finally, there is also a fourth dimension: sharing these experiences with others (“I wrote about it a lot, to myself and others”). The rhetoric of this description differs dramatically from the other narrations, whose authors—even if they had positive memories—would put them in perspective of traumatic war experiences. One has to stress once more that this way of experiencing the journey to Poland was a result of a long process of biographical work. On numerous occasions, the author emphasizes the evolution of her own attitude, ways of interpretation originating from biographical experiences and perceiving the past from the angle of the entire life. It does not, of course, nullify the war biography and the awareness of the Shoah’s meaning in the past and present history of the Jewish nation. However, Rut developed an ability to create separate interpretations for these two very different dimensions of the Polish part of her biography. It is this perspective that she wants to pass on to the next generations, which she mentions at the end of the narration. The children are, so to speak, very attached to this place and I couldn’t imagine, my children for example, would never leave the land, but many do. Because the situation now is awful, but they would never leave, no. I wrote them in last will, in my [smiling] will, I’m laughing. But in this letter I wrote after I returned, that we returned from Poland, they were, they had a speech at Auschwitz. Everyone was prepared. And and I’ve been to all these places, where there’s selection, etc. So I wrote in the ending that that they should never lea . . . that they should never leave this land for good and for bad, because this is all that we have. So in this respect they are very, so to say, devoted to this place and responsible. And and I think that I invested a lot and pensioned early [she means retired—KK]. No one believed I would do it, because I was crazy about my work, but

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it was to give, to give them, these humanist values I had brought from Poland. And different things which were important to me, I think, that that I got this education in Poland, not only literature, but music, I attended these music matinees, and this is so important in a man’s life, and painting, and art, and all this I wanted. I knew school wouldn’t give them that, no, school doesn’t give that. And that’s why these grandchildren of mine are so attached to me, I think that even more than my children. And I mean, this this gives me satisfaction of some sort, that after all, because sometimes you invest and nothing comes out of it. But I think I will go with them once.

Thus, memory of the Shoah is presented as one of the constitutive elements of Jewish identity, defined as Israeli identity. Individual identification is embedded in collective memory and in collective image of identity. This message for the younger generations is called a “will.” On the other hand, Rut is trying to pass on values unrelated to the traumatic part of her own and collective history, yet also rooted in the Polish part of her biography. She calls it an investment (in a symbolic and an emotional sense) and thus repeats the scenario she knows from experience. She took up the role of her father, who once took care of her education. The assumed way of interpretation is of vital importance here—in a formal sense, Rut returns to Polish culture. Of course it is no longer about Mickiewicz or Słowacki, but about “humanist values I had brought from Poland.” Thus, rootedness in Polish culture refers not so much to the substantial layer—knowledge of Polish heritage—as to the internalization of universal models of artistic, aesthetic, or moral sensitivity, which is a result of communing with high culture. In other words, for Rut, entering Polish culture was not defined as an exclusively assimilative strategy, but an otherwise very effective one. Communing with high culture became a source of a profound, one could say, personalized internalization of values represented by this culture. This determines the area of answers to the question how the narrator managed to accomplish so complex a biographical work that she was able to return to Poland, seen as a land of childhood and adolescence.

4.  Chana: Ambivalence and Rootedness I’m always happy to return to Poland (. . .) but of all places I have to have this certainty that I’m here. Chana

Chana was born in 1938. She lived through the war in a convent, among other places, hidden by nuns. Her mother was killed. Chana left Poland with her father at the age of twelve (that is, in 1950). I have already referred to her case in writing about language and identity. She is the girl who learnt Hebrew in three weeks, because after the departure, her father stopped speaking Polish to her. Chana, though not without problems, adjusted to the heretofore-unknown reality. The process of identity transformation was fast and effective. It led to a new identification and rootedness by rejecting the past. The narrator soon lost the ability to speak Polish, although before the departure her language competence was considered very high, and she always got the highest grades in Polish at school. Creating a new identity resulted in a still-very-clear sense of having found her own place, being at home. Chana has no doubts about who she is and what her basic frames of reference in identity-building are—“being an Israeli among Israelis,” as she says, living on one of the Jerusalem hills with an awareness that this is her place. I want to be here, here, just opposite, I have this Yad Vashem, I have these, this this carriage from Oświęcim, which enters my living room and my / not anymore, because the trees are obscuring it. Shame that you can’t see it [when I visited Chana, the whole area was enveloped in fog—KK] and here is where I feel best.

What remained from the past are memories to which she did not feel the need to return for a long time and the memory of the language melody, which was a starting point for a literal recreation of language skills after several decades.19 The first impulse to return to the language 19   I have to emphasize that had the narrator not described the process of returning to the Polish

language (by recounting the melody and the words and by returning to reading and eventually writing) I would not have realized that I was talking to someone who for a long time not only had not spoken Polish, but also completely forgotten it. A flawless Polish accent, rich vocabulary, and only tiny flaws did not suggest it. This note concerns my “aural impressions.” 

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appeared during her first journey to Poland in 1984. Now I shall quote her description. It is quite an extensive story, which I had to abbreviate due to its size. What I left out are numerous digressions and details. I concentrated on the main narrative line. C: In the year ’84, Professor R told me that there was a trip to Poland from the Hebrew University. At that time, I have already completed my second title. After a long break / “Do I want to come?” I said, “Hell no” [smile]. I couldn’t sleep at night, as suddenly everything came back, and I was missing Helenówek. Everything— everything came back. I just couldn’t sleep. After two days, I called the university office. They said it’s already fully booked. So I said, “It’s fully booked, so I will go without any booking” [laughter]. Suddenly I wanted to go so much. I started in the last possible moment. I had to have a visa. Someone resigned, by chance, and I went. It was a group of professors and students. (. . .) And we arrived in Poland at the break of dawn. It was a mixed group, Professor Z, Professor R, Professor B, and others, and some students who at that time had nothing to do with Poland, though now some of them are already professors today. And I didn’t know Warsaw. I . . . I was a child. We came for the unveilment of the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto. Do you say unveilment . . . ? KK: Unveiling. C: Unveiling. And I read some poem. I remembered as much. It was back in ’47, I guess. But all this in a Warsaw I didn’t know. First of all, it was March. I immediately saw this grayness of Warsaw, wide streets, everything empty, no cars, nothing. (. . .) I decided to visit the three most important places of my life—that is, the apartment where I was born, the convent and Helenówek, and Łódź. In Łódź, where my cousin lived, because I was from Helenówek. And these were tough experiences for me. I didn’t want anyone / one of my friends suggested to . . . to go with me. I didn’t want to. I didn’t, but yes, what was most important in this return of mine is hard to explain. Yes, the time which had passed, and I wasn’t aware of these changes, my changes. I mean, yes, I returned to B exactly. I went with a driver, husband of this friend of mine. I knew exactly how to get there. Everything was tiny, probably that’s what everybody says, where is my great gate, for me the convent was a fortress, and A transcription of the narrative has revealed some of her linguistic imperfections. Yet one has to consider that it is a recording of a spoken language, which, in its referential version as a text,  always turns out to be quite imperfect.

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suddenly it’s a house [indistinctly] these houses, I mean these you build for many people, these houses, estate . . . KK: A block. C: A block, a block. I’m looking for this gate. Where is this gate? There is a tiny little gate, the nuns are small. I remember how I used to kiss a cross of this nun, hanging from her belt, and I had to stand on tiptoes to do it. And . . . and I was suddenly very embarrassed, because I didn’t know if I should kiss their hands or not. Everything was for me something. (. . .) And I awfully wanted to return to those corners of my life, how I was going over a fence to school, and I only saw myself—I mean myself and my memories. I went to M, and it was the same. This distance from my house to the church, these were really hard experiences, when I returned to this house. And this woman was terrified that I, I mean, “I have all the papers. I bought it for real, and something.” I said, “I don’t want to take it away from you, I just.” She let me in. In the second apartment, they started casting stones on me. Just like this. I went there once more, and it was the same. All they needed was to see me taking pictures. It is the year ’84, people are extremely terrified. And in this apartment, it was so funny that afterwards I, when I described it, it was so funny. In this house of ours, where I was born, she let me in. I didn’t know this apartment, it was my parents’ apartment. But they were talking about a palace or something, and it was this tiny little apartment. So this is how people imagine that what they left behind is so dear, “a huge garden, everything was huge.” And suddenly, in reality, although we were really, maybe we called ourselves rich people. My father had a telephone / I mean, how do you say, the mayor of the city had number one, and we had number three, I guess. There was a phone in the house. Meetings with people, I was just standing on the market square. I saw some old people, went to them, said, “I’m the daughter of N. Did any of you know my father?” A woman came to me, and I was just holding her hands, because she took my hand and started to cry and said, “My father was a baker and was bringing bread to the ghetto” and says that pictures of my father, his picture was in the photo shop on a display, and all the Jewish girls wanted to marry him [laughter]. I know, he danced very nicely. (. . .) In Helenówek, everything’s changed. Everything was destroyed so much . . . KK: There is no . . . C: No, there’s nothing there. And from this place, I had very good memories. The toughest meeting was with the manager of our children’s home, Mrs. K and Helenka. I mean I was so afraid

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of K, but with Helenka, I had a great love for Helenka. She was my tutor, and we met in Mrs. K’s apartment. And I also brought some sardines, because they gave me an address to a shop for foreigners, I brought many things for supper. But I was crying all the time, I couldn’t calm down, only with them. I mean I always kept everything to myself, and I swallowed everything, and I had these meetings. I don’t want to talk about it, how this baker showed me the bed of my parents [laughter], he had this bed at his place, it was something like a fairy tale with a nut / made of walnut and everything. And I also remember, this driver said, “You’ve got nerves of steel, Jews come here and I drive them around, and they cry all the time, and you, you’ve got nerves of steel, you see and look and observe, but you don’t cry.” But I blubbered at her place. I just couldn’t calm down. No, I can’t, it’s as if a ball made of ice started to melt. I returned to Israel (. . .), when I returned to Israel / before we returned on the last day, there was this meeting in Warsaw, and everyone was talking about their experiences. It was very interesting. When I had to say something, I didn’t want to share my memories with anyone. I said, “I have to tell you one thing—that without you, I wouldn’t have been able to survive it. With you, I felt like someone just tore a piece of Israeli land, and we on it just like in Chagall. This whole group comes with this, I had to have such roots underneath, it goes, and it visits different places, and together we come back. And even if you weren’t with me, you were, and I felt that when I’m coming back, I belong to that land, it gave me strength to survive all this, because otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.” And when I returned, Professor R asked me to tell about my experiences at the university. And I remember I started talking about shops, with flowers, vegetables, and fruits, and that you can only buy flowers there, and that there are lines, and that everything is gray and grim, and people are so miserable. And he said, “Chana, talk about yourself.” And I couldn’t, and he understood. I was sure in no way did I want to talk about my experiences. And suddenly I heard one student saying, “Look, and here I thought she was born here.” And suddenly I was so happy I belong to this place, that I simply crossed everything out, put it, because I was driving, I was writing all the time in the car. All the time I was writing, and I put it in a drawer and forgot all about it. And five, seven years passed. In ’91, I went to Poland once more, and since then, I’ve been going practically every year. And I have to say, for me, Poland is a trauma . . . traumatic place, although I have wonderful friends there, like M, and I think that everyone reacts in a different way. There are some who just love going to Poland, and

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I’m always afraid that someone will force me. Because for me, Poland is not hatred towards Poland. I also have wonderful friends there, but for me, Poland is a trembling land. I mean this is solitude, this is childhood, that a child is completely alone—no one looks after her. I mean they looked after me, but I’m a free bird, and even till this day I can’t stand anyone forcing me to do something. I want to do whatever I want. In two hours, I can pack my dresses in a suitcase and go someplace else. And I have these memories of a child no one looked after, only a group of children—always a group, group, group. As if I was completely crossed out then. And here I feel as if all my roots were here, this certainty and all my achie . . . achievements? Achievements and a successful life, I mean, belongs only to this place. There is this, er, poor child. I always heard it, “This poor child.” No one wants to go back to this. Yes, and I feel, in Poland I was very liked, I mean I don’t feel I was rejected or something, I always found myself even in the convent, I always remember the good things, no no. Everyone drags different memories. And I never thought about this moment, what I felt, I’m always happy to return to Poland, I mean I feel good there, pleasant and all, but not only of Poland. Of all the places I have to have this certainty that I’m here.

The main motif of this story is the ambivalence of experiences. It found its rhetorical manifestation in what the author describes as paradoxes. She begins with a firm refusal to go (in keeping with her resolution to never go back to her Polish past) and then starts to identify completely with the idea of going. What in Estera’s case was a long process Chana describes as a sudden and tempestuous impulse, which, in a sense, is hard to rationalize, if one considers the power of her emotions. The next contrast is the confrontation of childhood memories or pictures formed by the imagination from the stories of others, with reality. This contrast concerns two aspects: a comparison of childhood memories and a comparison of a former and a contemporary state of biographically important places. What the memory preserved as grand, great, and unlimited seems small and pretentious. The narrator—while noticing this contrast—is at the same time aware of universal regularities: a child’s and an adult’s perspective differ, whereas nostalgia beautifies and exaggerates the reality (“they were talking about a palace or something, and it was this tiny little apartment”). It seems that an awareness of these truths protected Chana from a complete demythologization of her past memories. The story of confronting childhood memories with the perspective of an adult is simultaneously a metaphor. Unawareness of the change symbolically determines the

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need to confront previous life stages and incorporate them into current biography. The past means not so much memories as the image of identity, so different from the contemporary one, rooted in Israeliness. The contrast between the remembered image of a place and its current appearance (for instance, Helenówek) is in turn a cause for ambivalent emotions: sentiment due to the fact of having returned to good memories; pain due to a material decomposition of the place, milieu de mémoire; emotions of meeting elderly people who remembered the narrator’s family (the baker’s daughter); and brutality of the truth about past events (the bed of the parents in the baker’s house). Another contrast is the need for experiencing the journey to the past in solitude and simultaneously the need for a sense of community, originating from traveling with a group. A comparison to Chagall’s paintings and a sense of the others’ presence, different from other narrations, are atypical here. Usually, if the narrators mention their journeys at all, they say that during them and the visits to biographically important places they sense the presence of the dead—family members and victims of the Shoah. Chana, however, feels a sense of community with the group she arrived with. It is yet another instance of how she emphasizes her identity. Referring to the metaphor derived from Chagall, she graphically describes the sense of her rootedness (“a piece of Israeli land torn away . . .”). Chana’s first journey fulfilled her sudden awoken need for returning. Like the others, the narrator planned it around the most important places of her life: the place of birth, war, and period after the war. Simultaneously, she rejected emotions and experiences concomitant with the journey. Perhaps this abrupt dynamization of returning to her previous life stage led to a “false start” in her biographical work. Chana was not ready to take up this work. A great intensity of emotions (“a ball made of ice started to melt”) was accompanied by silence (“I didn’t want to share my memories with anyone”) and a sense of rootedness in Israeliness (“And suddenly I was so happy I belong to this place, that I simply crossed everything out”). Thus, the narrator returned to a common strategy, often used after the war, of suppressing the past. This state lasted seven years. It was the time Chana needed to take up the task of confronting the Polish stage of her biography again. The facts and circumstances described in this story suggest that the general outcome of this return is a positive one. Chana has recreated her lost-language competence. This was not without an effort, but with a great involvement and satisfaction from reentering the universe of the Polish

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language. She struck up friendships and acquaintanceships which she nurtures every time she is in Poland. Since the beginning of the nineties, she has been coming almost every year. However, these experiences do not nullify the biographical tension between positive emotions and traumatic past experiences. This contradiction is evident in, for instance, her language, with contradictory expressions like “Poland is a traumatic place,” “I’m always afraid,” and “I feel good there, pleasant.” Chana’s case shows that to the repertoire of traumatic memories next to the concentration camps one has to add hiding, transportations, and staying in a convent. The perspective of an external observer is conducive to judging and hierarchizing these experiences. Sara’s and Chana’s narratives show that as far as an individual biography is concerned, it is not the situation itself, but the way of experiencing it that determines its drama, intensity, and biographical significance. Perhaps it may seem all too obvious, but in conjunction with Chana’s account, in which she describes her childhood as solitude in a group, this obviousness gains additional meaning. Thus, this narration encompasses two important frames of reference for creating an image of the biography. The first one is Israeliness— rootedness in a place defined both symbolically and spatially with geographic accuracy. The sentence “I have to have this certainty that I’m here” refers both to the sense of belonging and this particular hill opposite Yad Vashem. Undoubtedly, this frame of reference serves a major role in the narrator’s biography, and in general, Chana would not need any other to build a coherent image of her identity, were it not for the fact that a part of her biography consists of a Polish past. It constitutes the second frame of reference. What is “Polishness”20 in this case? Certainly it does not have such a symbolically and spatially resounding meaning as it does in Rut’s case. But it is an important, though not a dominant, element in creating biographical identity: the “trembling land,” people casting stones, solitary childhood, anti-Semitic scenes witnessed during her visits (she talks about them in other parts of her narration) and, on the other hand, a fascination with the Polish language, relations with people, and frequent journeys. She finds it difficult to distance herself from the Polish part of her biography and simultaneously incorporate it to the full extent. A manifestation of this ambivalence is the already-mentioned reluctance to apply for a Polish 20   I am using quotation marks here, because I do not mean national identifications, but cultural

and emotional ones.

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citizenship. A Polish passport would legalize Chana’s symbolic belonging, of which she is not sure herself when it comes to this Polish stage of her biography. The question of what “Polishness” is for Chana can be posed in a different way: What is one to do with a Polish past when one has such a strong and unequivocal sense of rootedness in Israeliness and, at the same time, feels a temptation to reenter the universe of the Polish language and a desire/need to travel to Poland? Both the fragment quoted and the entire narrative depict an intense biographical work on the past and current experiences, including a return to biographical past. The narrator herself points out that so far she has not taken up any systematic reflection aimed at giving names to these experiences and organizing them (“I never thought about this moment, what I felt”). Thus, if one compares the scope of Chana’s and Rut’s biographical works, one could say that the former is “halfway” to the latter. It is not, of course, about judging the quality of this work as far as the external results are concerned (working out a positive attitude toward Poland and Polishness), but about biographical results—that is, working out such a formula of incorporating the Polish phase of life as to achieve a biographical coherence. Numerous ambivalences in the narrative suggest that the author is in the process of difficult work on her biographical identity. We can observe the development of this process: from a sudden clash with biographical past in 1984, to an attempt to close this stage of life for the next seven years, and, finally, to a new return to experiencing the past, also in a linguistic sense. The aim of this analysis was not to construct any form of typology. These chosen cases constitute an exemplification of the biographical return situation. It is difficult to schematize this type of biographical experience, yet one can point to common narrative traits. They concern the structure— the discourse—as well as the content of biographical experiences. Starting with the latter, I will gradually move on to the former.

5.  Processuality, Time, Biographical Work An indubitable common characteristic of the presented narratives (and other narrations I gathered) is the processuality of the return experience. Time and being ready to take up biographical work seem constitutive factors here. Time, as an element determining the dynamics of the return process, appears in every case—most distinctly in the case of Estera, who

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makes her experiences relative, embedding them in subsequent stages of her life cycle, determined by biographical and social time. Moreover, she defines time straight-out as a factor animating her biographical decisions (“I needed the time . . .”). The other narrations as well contain evident references to time. Rut draws comparisons due to her past and present perspectives, showing a transformation of her attitudes and an evolution of interpretative frames significant for her biography. In Chana’s life story, we come across sudden accelerations (false starts) and equally sudden stops in the return process. Finally, in Sara’s case, subsequent life stages become particularly embedded in chronological intervals of her biography. Thus, we can talk about the varying dynamics of this process, determined by means of “activating time” in the biography. Undoubtedly, two factors mentioned on numerous accounts objectively play a significant role. These factors are: the currently experienced phase of the life cycle—between late adulthood and old age—and macrohistoric circumstances, allowing for a trouble-free (in comparison with previous decades) realization of biographical aims, returning to one’s homeland. The second important factor is the readiness to take up biographical work. It is connected to time, which determines its beginning, length, and intensity. The cases I presented show a particular relation: the more biographical time has passed, the greater is the readiness to take up biographical work. It is a relation that contradicts an intuitive interpretation of life experiences, especially one undertaken from the perspective of previous stages of the biography, when one usually considers past less important than the currently experienced present and future challenges. But, like Estera said, “It [that is, the past—KK] never goes away.” On the contrary, the need to return to the past increases. One can analyze this need on two planes: first, a biographical compulsion to return to the past, to close one’s biography, and to imbue one’s life with coherence; second, a plane of revising one’s attitudes and reflecting upon a change of perspective. In the first case, we usually encounter the mysticism of experiences, already mentioned on several occasions. The biographical compulsion to return is often quite unexpected a feeling. Even if one makes preparations beforehand (as in Estera’s case) and commences biographical work, the “eruption” of emotions can be surprising and difficult to rationalize. In some sense, it is perceived as a loss of control over stabilized biography to date, a biography of an adult person entering the stage of old age. These experiences or uncontrollable emotions often do not “fit” the image of self in a stabilized biography.

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The second plane is a change of attitude toward the others, a redefinition of interpretative frames. It is a result of biographical work and the passage of time, which leads to a change of perspective. Ricoeur’s words (2002, 53–54) describing a meeting with a Polish Jew during a conference about concentration camps illustrate it perfectly. [A man—KK] who survived all this. He told me that before World War Two, when he was a boy, his father used to say “life is good.” And now, at the end of his life, having all this behind himself, he— like his father, repeats that “life is good.” (. . .) This sort of wisdom of ordinary people, or perhaps old ordinary people, is getting closer to my heart as well.

In Erikson’s language, it is about processing the challenge issued to the identity of old age—a choice between integrity and despair and bitterness. Although this process is at its most conspicuous in Rut’s narrative, the remaining cases also illustrate this thesis. Another common characteristic is a distinct division of biographical work into distinguishable stages: before the journey to the homeland, during, and afterward. The intensity of work during these individual stages is determined by objective and subjective circumstances alike. Among the former is the length of each stage. Of course the time before the journey is the longest—in most cases, these are several decades of spatial isolation, but also cultural, often symbolic, and emotional. A rejection of traumatic past, supported by the requirements of collective identity and biographical motives, has stopped the process of biographical work for a long time. With time, it has become more intensive, and its specific dynamics was determined above all by particular biographical circumstances and individually defined readiness for this undertaking. The stage of the journey, due to the liminal nature of experiences, predetermines their great intensity and, consequently, the need for taking up biographical work. The extent to which a person can face this challenge is an individual matter. Chana’s case shows that during her first journey she was actually unable to process her past experiences so as to incorporate them into the picture of her entire biography. At this point, one has to go back to the statement expressed in the fragment on processuality—that an excess of experiences causes a sense of losing control over biography. It is one of the basic symptoms of the trajectory experience (Reimann and Schütze 2005); therefore, the readiness to take up biographical work—determined by emotions and defining

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experiences from the angle of stereotypes and prejudices as well—can be a major turning point in the return experience. If the returnee manages to take up this work, a return to the homeland—including visiting sites of death or graves—becomes a cathartic experience. However, if this work is not initiated, losing control over redefining experiences will lead to focusing solely on the suffering, which is the prevalent experience in trajectory. In other words, whereas the stage before the journey, though in a different way, leads to a decision of returning to the homeland and in this respect is shared by all the returnees and can be described as intentional and planned (biographical action scheme), the stage of the journey itself causes a significant differentiation of biographical work and, as a consequence, of the interpretation of experiences. This, in turn, determines the next stage—after the journey. In case of people for whom the return became a biographical trap, constituting yet another part of the trajectory, biographical work comes to a standstill. As I have already mentioned, in the material that I gathered there is no such case. Even Chana, initially rejecting the experience of her first return, “returns” to it—taking up a difficult and, as the narration shows, still-unfinished biographical work. It can result in a metamorphosis, leading to a discovery of new interpretations of biographical experiences or even new repositories of these experiences. Estera’s and Sara’s narratives are examples here. Both women, each in her own biographically founded way, discover positive aspects of the past that, to a large extent, change their outlooks. It is not a radical change, like in a model metamorphosis, for a complete change of identity is not needed. Yet taking into account specific biographical circumstances and their collective dimension, it is so important an experience that it merits the name of metamorphosis. Finally, Rut is an example of a biographical action scheme, aimed at such processing of the return experience so as to get a chance to distance oneself from the traumatic part of biographical experiences. One has to stress once more that in each case the moment of the journey to one’s homeland—and, simultaneously, the place of the Shoah—is a traumatic event and remains a point of departure for every returnee. Stopping the experiences at the point of departure—that is, at the experience of suffering—allows only for a return to the traumatic time of the war and the Shoah, which overshadows every other experience. As a consequence, it is impossible to go beyond this experience. A return to the birthplace—combined with good memories, an openness to positive emotions, and rationalizing the disparity between the current and the remembered image of memories—makes it possible to incorporate past into the biography and experience the catharsis. It

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concerns mostly the aforementioned point of departure—that is, the previous and currently experienced suffering. Thus, its processing is possible actually only on the plane of interpreting journey experiences as positive too. As Sara’s and Estera’s cases show, an intensity of emotions fosters this process. Not all of them have to be positive to the core. However, interpreting them as important and biographically significant leads to a positive evaluation of the results of biographical work. The quality of these emotions can be compared to the liminal phase of initiation rituals, during which boys—by means of difficult, often painful trials—create a positive experience of a position and social role change (Eliade 1994). Chana’s case shows biographical work in statu nascendi. Due to the processuality of the return process, it would be difficult to state that biographical work ends at some point. However, cases like those of Estera or Rut show that certain stages of this work can be considered finished or at least “closed.” In this regard, Chana’s narration—full of contradictions, inconsistencies, and ambivalent statements—shows that the author was literally in the middle of processing the experiences related to biographical return, defining her current attitude toward “Polishness.” Last but not least, Rut’s case shows such a possibility of processing the past that it allows for a certain distance from its traumatic aspects. It concerns the individual as well as the collective dimension of biography. Rut has managed to work it out by virtue of her rootedness in the universe of Polish culture and working on her emotions—sometimes more intentionally, sometimes less.

6.  Individual and Collective Aspects of the Return On numerous occasions, I have emphasized that one of the main frames of reference for biographical experience of the return is the aspect of collective memory and identity. It refers both to the experiences themselves (the collective nature of trauma) and the way of talking about them (cultural conventions of talking about the journey/return to Poland). All the cases presented in this book exemplify it. Their authors, each in his/her own way, refer to this aspect. One can distinguish, above all, two common fields characteristic as far as the narration level, as well the experiences retold are concerned.21 21   It should be noted that a narrative interview allows one to identify the discursive layer

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The first is interpreting the voyage-return as a difficult, traumatic experience. As it is, all of the narrations, especially the beginning of the first journey, are described in a language typical of trajectory experiences— focusing on the suffering, lacking control over emotions, having a sense of inner void, etc. One could even venture an opinion that the returnees come to Poland with a ready-made set of symbolic means for describing anticipated experiences. Estera’s story comes to mind—when planning the journey. She chose Paris to return to normalcy to unwind after the experiences she had foreseen. Rut’s story illustrates the long process of working out a strategy for distancing oneself from such a model of experiencing the journey to Poland. Sara’s narrative is special here, as she questions collective notions from the very beginning. While experiencing the journey in a different way, she does not even try to “camouflage” it by referring to a social pattern of storytelling, but presents her own story, which, as we remember, triggers a negative (in a sense, even violent) reaction of her traveling companions, representing a collective model of telling one’s biography. It has to be stressed that although the cultural convention of building a story and the aspect of biographical experiences are clearly visible, in most cases, there is no dissonance in this respect. The trauma of the Shoah, deeply anchored in authentic biographical experiences, is conducive to this type of narration—one could say that it is a point of departure common to everyone. In other words, the collective story model is in line with the level of biographical experiences. One should thus consider what the consequences of such a storytelling are and whether and when one can attempt to rework this model. As it is, biographical accounts as well as published theoretical texts (for instance, Ricoeur 2006; La Capra 2002; Bettelheim 1979) show that connecting biographical experiences solely with the rhetoric of suffering makes it impossible to process them, whereas on a social plane it strongly prevents one from taking into account the perspective of the Other, taking up work on one’s own prejudices and stereotypes and creating space for Buber’s meeting. The biographical accounts I have presented suggest that an impulse for reworking the rhetoric of suffering appears when it ceases to be an effective way of describing one’s experiences. It is very difficult to pinpoint a turning point here, as I have shown; the change or, rather, reformation of perspective is a result of a complicated process of working on one’s (showing how you talk about biographical experiences), as well as the contents (showing what contributes to it).

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biography, including identity. Simultaneously, “liminal conditions” of this process remain unchanged, for the narrators have not abandoned their identity—they have not even questioned it. On the contrary, in each case their Israeliness has remained an unquestioned, fixed collective reference. Therefore, it has been a very difficult process and—as evidenced by Rut’s case, for example—one which requires time. In the context that I reflect upon here, it is about creating a new language of description whenever there occurs an inconsistency between experiences and their interpretation by means of collectively acknowledged symbolic categories. They have to be incorporated into a biographical story by using a “new terminology” (Strauss 1959, 38) sans a simultaneous questioning collective identity. Thus, the process can be difficult at not only a biographical, but also a social level, as exemplified by Sara’s marginality that the intentional project of transcending the trauma conspicuously diverges from socially acknowledged frames of creating a narrative. Liaison work and experiencing an authentic meeting support this process. The second important sphere refers to the returnees’ notions about Poland and Poles. Each story contains references to this matter. They suggest that this image is clearly defined—it presents Poland as an antiSemitic country. This rhetoric has various consequences. One of the most fundamental ones is frequently experienced fear and a sense of threat linked to traveling around Poland. One should consider to what extent this fear is a result of enmity toward the stranger—the Jew, acquired due to an intergenerational tradition (that is, referring to an old cultural cliché)—and to what extent it is corroborated by actual acts of dislike or hostility. Other consequences are: interpreting all Polish behavior in this vein (vide the purported anti-Semitism of the Grand Hotel in Łódź) and anticipating such attitudes and commenting upon the collective image. The latter is a result of biographical work on one’s own stereotypes or prejudices, usually undertaken due to positive experiences. Then the image ceases to be homogenous. The narrators usually do not reject the collectively acknowledged notion completely; however, they focus on the positive examples, showing their role in their own biographical experiences. Thus, the above reflections can be illustrated graphically. In each of the dimensions, one can distinguish four corresponding spheres. It is clearly visible that the collective sphere provides everyone with interpretative resources for defining biographical experiences. Thus, at an individual level the collective tradition is transmuted, which, on one

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Return Co ll e c t i ve d i m e n si o n

In d i v i d ua l d i m e n si o n T h e Sh o ah

1. C o l l e c t i v e memory 2. Mass returns 3. Cu l t u r a l c o nv e n t i o n s   of talking   about   t h e r e t u r n, journey 4. S o c i a l f r a m e s of defining biographical   past

Identity

Biographical Wo r k

1. B i o g r a p h i c a l memory 2. I n d i v i d u a l a s p e c t of the journey— “c l o s i n g   the circle” 3. N a r r a t i ve a b o u t the experience   of return-voyage 4. St r a t e g y o f c o p i n g with biographical compulsion • Wo r k   on suf fering • Interpretation of emotions • Rationalization of motifs

The Return: Collective and Individual Dimensions

hand makes it easier to create a biographical story and incorporate it into the community image—solidarity in suffering, a collective sense of fate, etc. On the other hand, it impedes an interpretation of one’s own experiences, if they do not correspond with the collective dimension. It is most evident during biographical work, aimed at creating biographical coherence in relation to one’s experiences, as well as the collective identity and the image of the Shoah.

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7.  “Polishness” and Israeliness in the Biography:   Working Out the Balance An analysis of the material and other published biographical texts makes one reflect upon the return process in relation to one’s rootedness in Israeliness and “Polishness” during the first life stage. As I have already noted, “Polishness” in this case concerns a slightly different sphere of associations than in the case of Poles. It is defined from the perspective of being a Jew and, simultaneously, feeling attached to Polish culture (sometimes a being fascination with it). Of course it does not involve the entire, very diverse, population of Jews inhabiting prewar Poland. It is mostly about the group assimilated or just at the beginning of the assimilation process, which usually starts with entering the universe of the Polish language. Such people are usually the authors of published autobiographical texts and collections of narratives. Having this in mind, I would like to show a relation, recurring in biographical material, between what I call rootedness in “Polishness” and rootedness in Israeliness. The intensity of the relations between Israeliness and “Polishness” is determined generationally as well. Older people—who when the war broke out were teenagers, high schoolers, or gymnasium students—worked out deeper links with Polish culture. As I have already mentioned, the quality of prewar education cannot be overestimated here. The biographical moment of leaving Poland after the war is the stage of entering adulthood and an ever-clearer consolidation of identity. Therefore, in spite of rationalizing the decision about the departure, the experience was biographically and culturally difficult. Polish postwar aliyah was enforced mainly by situational duress (Kersten 1994). Only for declared adherents of Zionism the departure was a realization of a biographical project, often conceived before the war. For the rest—although many left with the help of Zionist organizations—the departure was a consequence of war and postwar experiences previously unconsidered in a biographical and a social plan of life. Leaving Poland made it possible to cast the label of Simmel’s stranger, but arriving in Palestine/Israel—however different the circumstances— initially entailed keeping this identification and Schütz’s sense of alienation. And it was not merely about the anthropologically defined contrast between the culture of Europe and that of the Middle East or difficulties in adapting to new conditions (very arduous ones, for that matter), but with the requirement to abandon previous models and a cultural assimilation of a new model—that of an Israeli. As we know, it was constructed in an

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opposition to biographical past. Arriving in Eretz Israel involved—as far as the project of collective identity was concerned—rejecting the life-inthe-Diaspora model, rather than continuing it. It was supposed to take effect at an action and social roles level—the language, work in kibbutzim, farming, etc.—as well as, more importantly, at a symbolic level. From this perspective, it was easier to assimilate younger people, those who were children when arriving in Eretz Israel.22 Estera and Chana were quick—though they did not avoid some difficulties as well—to embed their biographies in the new reality, expecting a constant and clear reference for building collective identity. Putting roots in Israeliness was thus successful and unproblematic. With time, these generational determinants no longer mattered. A few years’ difference—which makes for such divergent experiences of a child, adolescent, and adult (in the case of elderly people, in equal measures)— shapes the biographical compulsion to return to the past. In this context, a return seems easier for people more rooted in the past, generationally and culturally. As evidenced by the presented narrations, it is not only about the possibility to draw upon the reservoir of memories, but most of all the ability to working out symbolic means that make it possible to (re) create the bonds with the Polish part of one’s biography. In other words, what—in the case of generationally older people—impeded the process of assimilation and building Israeliness at the same time enabled a future return and work on biographical coherence. One has to stress once more that for these people as well, it is the Israeliness that remains an integral, fundamental frame of reference for collective identity. It is not only about being a Jew—an Israeli—and having the sense of having one’s own place, which additionally has a particular historic, cultural, and religious meaning: Eretz Israel. In her studies on the issues of nationality, Antonina Kłoskowska (2001, 150) refers to two of its aspects: national identity and valence— that is, the assimilation of culture. “Cultural valence is the feeling of affiliation with the ethnic or national culture recognized as one’s own, constituting the cultural heritage of one’s own group not only in the sphere of competence acquired through education, occupational specialty or participation in the wider, supranational communities.” In the case of the narrators, the national identity is unambiguous—they are Israelis. When it comes to cultural valence, the matter is more complicated. The 22   I omit other aspects of identity matters, like the necessity to rework the suffering.

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narrators underwent the process of primary socialization in Poland— that is, in an environment that can be considered a mixture of Polish and Jewish culture models, or in Polish culture. Secondary socialization took place in Israel, whose culture would be difficult to define explicitly—let us assume it is an amalgam of Ashkenazi and Sephardic models. This situation makes one call the narrators’ cultural competence a bivalence— that is, referring to two cultures: Israeli and Polish or Polish-Jewish of the time of their childhood and adolescence. Nevertheless, it is a hidden or “latent” bivalence. A return to the birthplace is an activating agent. A journey to Poland opens up the experience of “familiarity”—being in a known place or, for some, in their own place. For many, the “Polishness” component is a recessive one. For some, like Rut, cultural bivalence is the essence of biographical experiences. Therefore, the key problem emerging in the context of biographical work is working out a way of coping with the following dilemma: how to create a biographical coherence, depending, among other things, on the positive relation with the past and on the nostalgia for “Polishness” when the currently dominant model is the Israeliness.

8.  Marginality Once More The scrutinized material allows one to examine the return phenomenon from the angle of Stonequistian marginality. One can distinguish three areas of experiencing it. First of all, the wartime experiences and the process of normalization of the postwar biography fostered an identity crisis and raised questions like “Who am I?” Sara’s case is a unique example of this situation, as it was marginality that became the main interpretative frame for her whole biography. In every other case, it does not assume so clear a form, but there are recurring problems of finding one’s identity and striving to build a clear system of reference and “shifting” the biography from its position in between different worlds. It is evident, for example, in Rut’s narrative. A sense of marginality, typical for the time of the aliyah, was created in relation to the sabras and the model of the newly developing country. This type of marginality, stemming from a sense of alienation, is somewhat “historic,” as it referred to postwar decades of putting new roots in Israeli society. With time, the difference between the sabras and the newcomers was eliminated. From a current perspective that past marginality fosters

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a return to biographical past, as a sense of belonging to an abandoned world, it was never entirely negated. It leads to the second type of marginality related to the cultural convention of talking about the return, which shapes the way of interpreting biographical experiences. As I have shown, a far-reaching reprocessing of the return experience falls to few. Even if the returnee manages to pass the stage of focusing on the trauma, rarely can he/she build an image of the place (Poland), “suspending” the drama of the past. Rut, as a result of extensive biographical work, managed to distance herself from the commonly acknowledged rhetoric of describing the journey to Poland, as well as the socially accepted model of experiencing the return. Finally, the third area of marginality is represented by Sara’s story. It is the marginality in relation to the Shoah. Let us remember that this marginality did not emerge due to her biographical experiences, but because of the inability to give a “proper” account of them. Sarah was tragically experienced by the war—her story is perfectly in line with the Polish rhetoric of suffering, particularly of the Poles from the Eastern borderlands. But it is “not good enough” for a story about the Shoah, as it does not follow the pattern of “the Holocaust narration.” A sense of marginality that was formed in such a way shows most clearly social expectations of how a narration should be constructed. At the same time, it is also about defining one’s experiences. Sara represents a group of survivors who, apart from the initial stage of the war, were not constantly threatened with the Holocaust because of their relocation to the USSR. As Maria Orwid23 (2005, 21) says, “The total and complete threat to one’s dignity and identity” that resulted from being a Jew was never experienced by those sent to Siberia.24 On the other hand, those who survived it still experienced a great sense of loss, as they had nothing to return to. Therefore, some of the researchers of this issue and those who indisputably “belong to the Holocaust” are in favor of an “extensive approach,” one extending the category of survivors. Thus, we can observe a conspicuous tension between the individual dimension of the experience and how its narration is constructed and its collectively sanctioned understanding.

23   Prof. Maria Orwid was a psychiatrist and a child of the Holocaust. She was in charge of the

program of psychotherapeutic help for the Children of the Holocaust in Poland.

24   The Soviet regime was not directed against Jews in terms of Nazi extermination, and it was

equally oppressive to all, being under the Soviet occupation (Gross 1988, 225–240).

C ON C LUSION Anyone, who aside from traveling has also experienced emigration, knows that it is not so easy. Especially if the emigration entails having two homelands—emotional and sensuous homeland of the childhood and a mental homeland of adulthood. Then, you are forever torn. Shevah Weiss

To sum up the reflections comprising this book, I will reflect back to the beginning and the goals set therein. I leave it to the reader to decide if I managed to accomplish them. When I was starting to work on my book on Jewish issues, I was aware I was sailing into difficult and unknown waters. Simultaneously, my departure point was to be a general perspective—the universality of the return as a process typical of specific biographical circumstances. In other words, I wanted to treat the “Jewish case” as an exemplification of the experiences common to the generation of the “century of the displaced.” My project falls therefore within the frames whose major points of reference are the uprootment, biography, life cycle, identity, and memory—all operationalized in the experiences of a specified social group. The rationale behind such a perspective is presented in the first chapters of my work. However, I have to admit that apart from the content-related reasons (which I firmly believe in), I did not want my project to end up being classified as a book solely about the Holocaust and it being labeled thus, instead of it being associated with “sociology” or “biographical research.” This intention comes from two reasons: First of all, as I have already mentioned, I do not specialize in the Holocaust studies. Second, I am aware that, after all, this is a popular subject. Therefore, working on the topic that interested me, I wanted to

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avoid being accused of opportunism in terms of the selection of my subject. However, the longer I worked on the book, the greater was my need to link the collective and the individual image of the Shoah and its meaning in the biographies of individuals and communities. And so the initial intention to “distance” myself from the Shoah (understood in whichever way) failed in the end, which is also reflected in the title of my work. As even though I started from a general perspective, the focus of my work is set on the Jewish experience in which the wartime fates of the individuals, as well as those of the whole community, form the main point of reference for the present. This personal reflection in regard to the process of working on the book and the necessity to make choices and face their consequences leads to a more general conclusion. Pondering on the above-mentioned issues in the context of the relations between the universality of the experience of the biographical return and the particularity of the Jewish case, one has to notice a specific tension that forms the core of Jewish returns. Biographical experiences of the returning Jews—despite the trauma of the war, their uniqueness, and the attempts to erase them from their memories—all fall within the universal pattern of experiencing one’s biography that I describe at the beginning of my book. And so the returns to one’s beginnings, to one’s roots—initiated by the biographical urge to come full circle—are realized as if against the generational definition of the biography. Its basic regularity (both at collective and individual levels) is drawing a clear demarcation line between the war trauma and “the new life.” Assuming such a perspective fosters biographical segmentation rather than its consolidation, even though we do know—and the narrators themselves confirm it as well—that such a strategy proves unsuccessful. Nevertheless, especially in the initial phase of the process, the clearly stated uniqueness of the war experiences and the collectively embedded rhetoric of the Holocaust seem to influence and shape the return as part of biographical work that needs to be undertaken to confront the past with the present. And this is precisely the reason thatthis process is particularly difficult for the returning Jews. Looking upon this problem from the perspective of the survivors’ generation, one could say that this voyage-return is the last chapter of their war experience. In a certain way, it is also a part of experiencing the Shoah through the prism of the entire life: one’s old age, the time for processing and consolidating the biography. While working on this book, I realized that one of my goals should be a description of the return experience specifically from the above-mentioned perspective.

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At this point, one should ask if this process could take a different course. Could the universality of the biographical compulsion be dominated by the particularity of experiences, thus highlighting sentiment and nostalgia, rather than pain and suffering? From the point of view of individual biographies, it is impossible to answer this question (or rather, the answer would be different each time), for every life, in spite of social determinants, is unique—and the narratives I presented testify to that. From a collective point of view, which shapes social memory, a socially accepted way of experiencing and narrating biographical events allows for a different social script. Still, it would require tremendous work on collective memory, stereotypes, and prejudices, taken up by both the Polish and Jewish sides. This book was devoted to the phenomenon of biographical return, which I consider not only an important personal experience, but also a significant social phenomenon at the turn of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries—a “coda of generational narrative.”1 Of course it is not a universal phenomenon. Not everyone returns. There are also those who intentionally draw a line between the past and the present, closing the chapter of painful experiences and not wanting to go back to it ever again. They do not take up the emotional challenge of traveling to places from their past. It is difficult to determine the proportions between the returnees and non-returnees. I think that it has yet to be studied. If we were to, we should first establish interpretative frames of the definition of the return. My own point of reference were the carried-out return voyages. But to what extent do those who do not return, really not return? For instance, people I mentioned in this book: Adam Zagajewski’s father, cherishing the remembered topographical details of his beloved Lvov, or Miriam’s (the cousin of Estera’s) father, who all his life carried the postcard from Łódź, sent by his mother, who (like the rest of his family remaining in Poland) died in the Shoah . . . None of them wanted to set out to their birthplaces; and each of them, in their own way, cultivated the memory of the past. Does the term “return” apply to them and many others? I hope that the 1 

A coda—or ending of a story—is required of a live narrative. It aims at linking past aspects of the recounted events with a contemporary perspective. In a coda, the narrator sums up the influence past events had on his/her current situation, especially when it comes to the transformation of identity (Schütze 2008). Here, I use the term “coda” metaphorically, like the term “generational narrative.” What I mean is the socially, historically, and individually determined conditions of experiencing one’s biography, originating from one’s generational allocation.

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book contains at least a partial answer to this question; however, it merits a separate study. A qualitative analysis enables a profound multidimensional examination of a given problem. At the same time, one of its characteristics (of biographical analysis especially)—which some consider a disadvantage and others an advantage—is a lack of closure, an “openness” to interpretation. An analysis of that kind, while filling in some areas, opens up other ones, which seem equally important and scientifically interesting. It is also the case here. Thus, I am aware that I have described only one specific aspect of a bigger whole. At this point, I have to fall back on the thread pointed out at the beginning, which I intentionally did not develop further—of comparing different cases. The analysis I have performed corroborates the significance of this perspective as well. Therefore, it would be interesting to show in what aspect the biographical returns of the Shoah survivors, all the uniqueness of this experience notwithstanding, is similar to biographical experiences of the displaced and expelled—to what extent the general frame determining experiences of that kind, comprising circumstances conducive to “cracks” in the biography, is common to everyone and to what extent it is differentiated by the monoethnicity of this experience. For example, to what extent can we talk about the similarity between the experiences of the survivors leaving Poland, the inhabitants of the Polish Eastern borderlands, leaving their private homeland, and the forcibly displaced Germans? Identifying these similarities would allow us to distinguish formal characteristics of the process of interpreting biographical experiences carried out by the biography bearers as if “above” or despite a specific social and historical context. It is an interesting and simultaneously difficult problem, for it would not be enough to analyze specific structures of experience and the process of their interpretation in a narration. It would be equally important to scrutinize the extent to which a certain universality of experience can or should translate into, for example, the universality of the language used in the narrative. I shall refer to the example I quoted elsewhere (Kaźmierska 2007, 99). In the biographical narratives of Germans speaking about their experiences of displacement included in the book Wypędzeni ze Wschodu (The Expelled from the East) (2001), I took notice of the language the authors were using. At times, it distinctly reminds one of the Shoah narration language. There are mentions of the ghetto, wearing armbands, humiliation, traveling in cattle cars, loading heaps of clothes on the train platforms, etc. One could ask if the authors of these memoirs, calling upon their own traumatic experiences, should anchor their language in history—

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that is, present their experiences in light of more general macrohistorical determinants, putting their fates against the backdrop of the others’ fates. Or does biographical “distinctiveness” of one’s own experiences exempt their bearer from such relativizations? It is a problem requiring a thorough and, to my mind, difficult discussion; and by invoking it, I wanted to give just one example of possible research areas linked to the issues of the return. Another interesting analytical thread would be to ponder on the nontragic cases—that is, the ones unmolded by historic events or social changes fostering biographical disruptions. What I have in mind are “Bergman’s wild strawberries,” 2 whose taste and smell were encapsulated in the memories of childhood and adolescence. Here, closing the biography means a nostalgic return to the past, giving new meanings, or rather returning to the old ones (lost in the course of life), experiencing the constancy of space, which in a symbolic sense was never abandoned, because—as Wilhelm Dichter said (2001)—“Please remember, that we don’t know the future, we only know the past. This is where all the questions and answers are.”

2 

I am talking about Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957), a film that tells the story of an aged academic who leaves to collect a university prize; this trip turns into a sentimental journey into the world of childhood and adolescence memories.

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Index aliyah 207-209, 211-212, 215, 218, 22022, 226, 240, 242, 264, 360, 362 anti-Semitism 19, 48, 105-106, 108, 117-122, 134, 139, 141, 150, 158-159, 162, 168, 176, 195, 202, 204, 209, 237, 242, 269, 271, 276, 281, 337, 358 - modern 117, 121, 122, - traditional 117-119, 168 archival memory 83-84 asymmetry of memory 96-97, 152 Aszkenazy-Engelhard, Halina 188 Auschwitz 74, 90, 104, 140, 141, 148, 149, 150, 172, 197, 231-233, 254, 281, 324, 343 Bauman, Zygmunt 13, 61, 73, 109, 112, 116, 179 Bettelheim, Bruno 196, 211, 231, 233, 357 biographical action scheme 328, 336, 355 biographical compulsion 51-52, 180, 184-85, 285, 304, 313, 327, 353, 361, 366 biographical continuity 37, 44, 327, 339 biographical experience 14-16, 18-20, 26, 28, 30, 37, 40, 42, 46, 50, 63, 66, 68, 70, 72, 81, 96-100,

115, 125, 143, 196, 198, 203, 214-215, 223, 226, 230, 241, 245-246, 248, 266-267, 273, 279, 281, 283-84, 287, 296, 298, 303, 311, 318, 320, 323, 330, 333, 339, 341, 343, 352, 355-58, 362-63, 365, 367 biographical memory 67, 94, 96-101, 105-106, 152, 178, 299, 315, 318 biographical metamorphosis 328 biographical process(es) 14, 16, 30, 35, 39-40, 233, 248, 303 biographical time 85, 104, 353 biographical trap 44-45, 79, 296, 355 biographical work 26-29, 38, 41, 44, 51, 72, 101, 121, 153, 197, 206, 219, 245-46, 254, 279, 296, 298, 312-13, 319, 327-30, 339, 34144, 350, 352-56, 358-59, 362-63, 365 Birenbaum, Halina 200, 202203,216,218- 219, 223, 227, 253, 272 Bruner, Jerome 241 Buber, Martin 189, 357 Bühler, Charlotte 26 Bund 156, 204, 266, 292 Canetti, Elias 331 - 332 catharsis 77, 185, 236, 285, 355

Index

childhood 14, 29, 30, 39, 43-51, 56-58, 60, 67-69, 73, 79, 98, 163, 201, 244, 263, 265, 268, 272, 290292, 296-97, 300, 318-20, 322, 325, 327, 330-34, 341-42, 344, 349, 351, 362, 364, 368 collective memory 18, 28, 37, 48, 61, 63, 72, 74, 79, 81-83, 90, 94101, 103-107, 120, 133, 146-47, 149, 152-53, 156, 162, 192, 219, 226, 228, 230-31, 237, 243-44, 286, 328, 341, 343-44, 356, 366 cultural valence 361 Demetrio, Duccio 29, 41-43, Diaspora 206-207, 209-215, 217-22, 226, 228-29, 238, 253, 259, 261, 266, 288, 361 Dybbuk 180, 184-86, 299 Edelman, Marek 129 Eliade, Mircea 53-56, 301, 314, 356 Eretz Israel 72, 206-208, 211, 214, 216217, 225, 240, 267, 271, 273, 325, 361 Erikson, Erik 38, 40, 45, 354 fading out of awareness 94 fatherland 10, 18, 57, 62, 67-68, 70, 72 Gross, Jan Tomasz 90, 103, 120-121, 123-125, 128, 132, 134-135, 139-140, 154, 158-159, 363 hamsa 309 heart memory 45, 98, 317, 329, 334, 342 historical trauma 226 homecomer 33, 199, 200 Hoffman, Eva 48, 99, 188, 237 homeland: - ideological 70-72, 263, 274 - private 70-71, 263, 274-74, 267

391

Identity: - collective 13, 50, 82, 91, 95-96, 100, 118, 215, 226, 232, 244, 271, 273, 319, 354, 358-59, 361 - Israeli 268, 338, 344 - Jewish 88, 170, 176, 271, 330, 344 -national 11, 14, 20, 59, 207, 209, 213-214, 361 - Polish 152 - spread 229 intergenerational communication 48, 286, 288 intergenerational transmission 98-99, 104, 286 Israeli-Arab conflict 228 Journey 10-14, 24, 26, 28, 30, 34-36, 43, 51-52, 58-60, 72-78, 142, 175, 184, 216-218, 226, 235-36, 241, 248-49, 251-54, 263, 276, 278-79, 289, 295, 297-98, 305307, 312-313, 316-318, 326-29, 339, 342-43, 346, 350-51, 35457, 362-63, 368 kibbutz 194, 207, 209-212, 219-20, 222-24, 227, 233, 242, 256-59, 262-63, 265, 267, 270, 272-73, 286-87, 306-307, 322, 361 kibbutz galuyot 207, 238 Kłoskowska, Antonina 9, 83, 214, 338, 361 La Capra, Dominique 215, 219, 227, 230-231, 236, 357 liaison work 245-46, 358 Lejeune, Philippe 45, 49 Levi, Primo 197 life balance 18, 26, 265, 273 life cycle 15, 37, 46, 62,, 273, 286, 353, 364

392

Index

language: - Hebrew 143, 182, 207, 211-218, 222, 240, 244, 247, 255-66, 269, 275, 277-78, 282, 289, 307-308, 313314, 323-25, 334, 336, 345-46 - Polish 224, 256, 258, 263, 265-66, 275, 309, 320-22, 326, 345, 351-52, 360 - Yiddish 119, 171, 204, 211, 213-215, 220, 256-260, 262, 266, 267, 307, 321-322, 332, 337 le dor va dor 244 lieux de memoire 87-88, 142, 162, 167, 169, 171-172, 175, 177, 198, 300, 315, 342 liminal/liminality 75-77, 143, 236, 241, 313, 316, 328, 354, 356, 358 linear time 15, 33, 85, 95, 312 Lowenthal, David 69, 72, 83-84 loshn koydesh 266 mame loshn 266 marginal man 114-116 marginality 106, 113-116, 186, 281, 318, 323, 325, 328, 330-331, 358, 362-63 memory work 72, 100, 133, 140, 228 meeting 189-190, 247, 357-58 Miłosz, Czesław 24-27, 33, 44, 55 Nora, Pierre 83-84, 87-89, 93, 96, 100, 163, 169, 292 Nowak-Jeziorański, Jan 24 -27 milieu de memoire 142, 149, 162, 170, 350 “my story” 244, 248 oblivion 18, 90-94, 96-97, 103, 107, 120-22, 125, 139, 152, 164, 173, 180, 192, 228 Ossowski, Stanisław 27, 67-68, 70-71, 83-84, 124, 160, 213

Oświęcim 148-151, 282-285, 289, 345 own place 51-52, 55, 61, 63, 68, 72, 253, 273, 299, 318-319, 331, 337, 345, 361-62 place of birth 13-14, 18, 28, 68, 273, 276, 350, prejudice 13, 28, 31-32, 48, 77, 79, 92, 113, 118-119, 122, 141, 143, 148, 159-60, 168, 179, 185, 187, 189, 235, 237, 242-43, 245-46, 279-81, 317, 341, 355, 357-58, 366 profane 51, 53-56, 7576, 87, 95-96, 213, 314 Ricoeur, Paul 81, 90-94, 98-100, 120, 128, 315, 340, 354, 357 rites of passage 75-76 sabra 211, 217, 222, 224, 264-65, 328, 362 sacrum/sacred 15, 51, 53-57, 75-76, 82, 87, 95-96, 142, 164, 174-75, 283, 301, 314 Sejny 20, 165, 167, 169-70, 172, 18087, 190 Schütz, Alfred 33, 57, 69, 111-112, 114, 116, 170, 199, 223, 226, 251, 268, 323, 360 Schütze, Fritz 20-21, 94, 226, 244, 303, 328, 354, 366 Simmel Georg, 33, 109-115, 169-170, 186, 223, 225-226, 323, 360 sites of memory 87, 142, 150, 172, 177, 220, 235 social memory 20, 35, 83, 94, 97, 101, 152, 180, 187, 199, 366 social time 13, 40, 353 Stonequist, Everett 113-116, 164, 186, 281, 323, 362

Index

Stranger 33, 92-93, 106, 108-116, 118, 128, 132, 141, 168, 170, 178, 180, 186, 199, 223, 245-46, 251, 268, 271, 323, 358, 360 Strauss, Anselm 17, 28-29, 37, 41, 229, 242, 358 structural trauma 230 Szacka, Barbara 81-82, 94-98, 105 Szacki, Jerzy 36, 68, 81 Szczepański, Jan 9, 39-40, 44, 56-57, 73 Zionism 156, 207, 212, 215-216, 218, 221-222, 227, 323-24, 335, 360

393

survivor’s syndrome 185, 196, 198 symmetry of memory 96-97, 152 trajectory 132, 225-26, 241, 282, 296, 319, 354-55, 357 Turner, Victor 75-78, 143, 236, 254 Ulpan 259, 261 yerida 207, 220 Zagajewski, Adam 24, 47-48, 55, 7376, 366 Znaniecki, Florian 9, 83, 110, 112, 187, 205-206, 209 Żegota 134-136