and hunger belong to the Jewish narrative of Rut and Jurek, while minor sabotage, the Pawiak prison, razzias and street executions form part of the Polish narrative of Łucja and Leszek. The two strands are woven into a unified tale about the past, as each of them refuses to appropriate Polish or Jewish memory, which results in the elimination of all divisions. The imperative to retain memory in its communal shape is most emphatically expressed in Jurek’s letter to his Polish friend:
You can’t even guess how much we were comforted by the thought that somebody was waiting for us on the other side, that they worried about us and wouldn’t let the memory of what we’d achieved die along with us.
Thank you for everything!
In the worst moments, I took refuge in the memories of “our times,” our childhood days.
Farewell, Leszek. […]
Remember me. Your Jurek.86
Undoubtedly, the concept of memory has been inextricable from Holocaust literature since its very beginning. To see how this concept works in contemporary literature for a young readership, I have examined the following texts: Arka czasu [Rafe and The Ark of Time] by Marcin Szczygielski, Kotka Brygidy [Brigid’s She-Cat] and XY by Joanna Rudniańska, Bezsenność Jutki [Jutka’s Insomnia] by Dorota Combrzyńska-Nogala, Ostatnie piętro [The Top Floor] by Irena Landau, Wszystkie moje mamy [All My Mothers] by Renata Piątkowska, Szlemiel [Schlemiel] by Ryszard Marek Groński, Wojna na Pięknym Brzegu [War at the Jolie Bord] by Andrzej Marek Grabowski, Jest taka historia [There Is a Story] Beata Ostrowicka, Pamiętnik Blumki [Blumka’s Diary] by Iwona Chmielewska, Po drugiej stronie ←42 | 43→okna [Across the Window] by Anna Czerwińska-Rydel, Zwyczajny dzień [An Ordinary Day] by Katarzyna Zimmerer, Ostatnie przedstawienie panny Esterki [Miss Esther’s Last Performance] by Adam Jaromir, Wszystkie lajki Marczuka [All the Likes of Marczuk] by Paweł Beręsewicz and the Mr Inkblot trilogy by Jan Brzechwa.87
I believe that these books for young readers can effectively serve as an introduction to later reading practices involving the junior and senior secondary school “canon,” which should not be reduced to a catalogue of texts about the Holocaust. Rather, it should be augmented with a historical and cultural context of Polish-Jewish co-presence, which may encourage young readers to include the category of the trace into their individual and cultural experiences of the past. Only then will the history of Jews – and not only of the Holocaust – cease to be a footnote to Polish history, becoming an integral part of it instead.
If this indeed happens, Masłowska’s macabre “twist” on the canon – in her “over dead bodies, dead bodies, dead bodies” – will stand as a challenge that postmemory poses to literature and education. And then, poets will appeal in vain to open windows and air rooms88 because even nurseries will have already been infected with the virus of Auschwitz.89
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1 Dorota Masłowska’s Między nami dobrze jest (literally: Things are Good Between Us) has been translated into English by Artur Zapałowski as No Matter How Hard We Tried, or We Exist on the Best Terms we Can and published in (A)pollonia: Twenty-First Century Polish Drama and Texts for the Stage, eds. Krystyna Duniec, Joanna Klass and Joanna Krakowska (London: Seagull Books, 2014). The quotation here does not come from this translation.
2 Aleksandra Ubertowska, “Historia bez Ojca. Postmemorialne kobiece narracje o wojnie i Holokauście,” in Aleksandra Ubertowska, Holocaust: Auto(tanato)grafie (Warszawa: IBL, 2014), pp. 182–210, on p. 197. Throughout this book, quotations from non-English sources are provided in translation by the translator of this volume, if not indicated otherwise.
3 Written in 1938, “Locomotive” is an extremely popular children’s poem which set the standard of Polish poetry for children for many years. The rhythm, rhymes and onomatopoeic devices used in it perfectly capture the movement of a speeding train. The poem would later be referenced by Stanisław Wygodzki, a Polish poet of Jewish descent, who lost his wife and daughter in truly tragic circumstances (realising what was awaiting them at Auschwitz, all of them took luminal on the train from the Będzin ghetto to the camp; Wygodzki himself survived). His bitter poem “Locomotive,” which alludes to Tuwim’s popular pre-war text, is a heart-rending elegy for his lost child.
4 Masłowska (born in 1983) uses the topos of the train, one of the most popular images shaping Poland’s historical landscape. In Polish culture, the train is associated both with the Holocaust (as the Nazi “technology” of the Holocaust accorded a very special role to railways) and with the year 1968, when Polish citizens of Jewish origin were forced to leave the country. An estimated twenty thousand people emigrated from Poland then. The enforced exodus was symbolised by the Gdańsk Station in Warsaw, from which trains had been departing to the Treblinka extermination camp during the war. The train topos also features profusely in the tradition of Polish martyrdom linked to Soviet oppression. The train route to Siberia has been re-cast as a symbolic Calvary. Masłowska’s rhythmical reiteration of “dead bodies, dead bodies, dead bodies” insists that the history of Poland is founded on suffering and death.
5 See Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, IL, and London, UK: Chicago University Press, 1992).
6 Aleksandra Boroń, “Holocaust i jego reprezentacje w przestrzeni pamięci i tożsamości,” in Aleksandra Boroń, Pedagogika (p)o Holocauście. Pamięć. Tożsamość. Edukacja (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2013), p. 93.
7 Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London and New York: Verso, 2000), p. 150.
8 Finkelstein’s book provoked some quite sharp responses, for example from Alvin H. Rosenfeld. See Alvin H. Rosenfeld, “The End of the Holocaust,” in Alvin H. Rosenfeld, The End of the Holocaust (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011), pp. 238–270.
9 Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), p. 123.
10 Berel Lang, The Future of the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 175.
11 Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 37–53, on p. 37.
12 Linda Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History,” in Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, eds. Patrick O’Donnell and Robert C. Davis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 151–170.
