The topography of the memory of the Holocaust in post-1989 Poland

Introductory remarks

Redefining the idea of Jan Józef Lipski, Robert Traba (2006) articulated further that Poles not only received the territory, but are also the spiritual successors of those lands. In other words, this is not our heritage, but we give a new sense and new life to this material and non-material space, whilst simultaneously not forgetting the former creators of this culture. This “not forgetting” requires memory, both individual and collective. Being a successor of Jewish culture in Poland requires particular attitudes, competencies and skills. The stakeholders which are involved in reconstructing the memory of Jewish life and death have a difficult task. They act in the context of open society – as Zdzisław Mach (2006, 102) described the scene of the memory of the Holocaust in Poland – with a “pluralism of memory and pluralistic interpretation of heritage” as opposed to the “closed society, xenophobic and dogmatic, with Jewish heritage excluded from the memory of Poles.”

According to Habermas (Habermas, Michnik 1994), what we learn can only be proven by our actions. Selected actions, in our case educational practices, provided the data presented in Part 3 of this publication. The aim was to demonstrate how educational practice can have an impact on attitudes and thus this part attempted to present how the Polish state and its institutions, teachers, NGOs activists, and students dealt with the vacuum and wounds left by the Holocaust. The earlier survey focused on attitudes toward the memory of the Holocaust in a wider context of attitudes toward others, minorities and Jews. Since the phenomenon of antisemitism is related to xenophobia, ethnocentrism and fear of the Other in general, it constituted the topic of the quantitative part of this study. In Poland, antisemitism has a cultural basis and, as is the case in some other European states (Germany in particular), it is connected with attitudes toward the Holocaust. The qualitative part of the study was focused above all on educational projects related to the memory of the Holocaust because they were prevailing among the initiatives focused on history and culture of Polish Jews, at least in secondary education.