The paper considers the memories of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust in Poland in the aftermath of the intense public debate about the Jedwabne massacre of July 10, 1941, since 2002 till the present. Jan Tomasz Gross’s slim monograph Neighbors, published in May 2000, triggered a debate that generated a process of self-critical assessments of the Polish national past in relation to Jewish and other ethnic minorities, the so-called cultural renewal of public memory. Ten years later there is still a sharp split between groups of Polish politicians, public intellectuals, journalists, historians and members of society at large in how they evaluate the dark aspects of the Polish-Jewish relations during and after WWII. The paper examines the main modes of remembering Jews and the Holocaust: “remembering to remember”, “remembering to benefit”, and “remembering to forget”, and the different manifestations of these three modes, and discusses what has made it difficult for Poles to integrate the dark past into popular historical consciousness and public memory.
The aesthetics and ethics of performative Holocaust memory in Poland
