Polish weekly of the Catholic intelligentsia Tygodnik Powszechny in 1987, the essay by the eminent literary critic has ever since been an effective trigger of public debate on the moral responsibility of Poles for the fate their Jewish neighbours suffered during the Second World War.
56 Among a multitude of didactic ideas, there is also an approach in which the narrative about the Holocaust serves as an excuse for addressing other instances of genocide. See Arkadiusz Morawiec, “Zagłady,” Polonistyka. Czasopismo dla Nauczycieli, No. 11 (2014), pp. 9−12.
57 Unfortunately, most textbooks do not live up to the ambitious provisions of the core curriculum. Apparently, a diversified, if not always coherent, approach can rather be found in textbooks from before the education reform. Some of their ways of handling “Jewish themes” certainly deserve attention. In Przeszłość to dziś [The Past is Now], a textbook by Jacek Kopciński, the Holocaust is represented by Bronisław Linke’s painting Egzekucja w murach getta [An Execution within the Ghetto Walls] and Józef Szajna’s installation Ściana butów [The Wall of Shoes]. The former is accompanied by the assignment: “Explain the symbolism of this work,” while the latter comes with information about the artist’s camp experiences and an interpretation which simply states that “Perishable things remained while life perished.” The authors of the textbook Między tekstami [Among texts] explicitly refer to Theodor Adorno’s famous words by devoting two pages to “Art after Auschwitz.” Their brief survey of works of art proves the thesis about diverse approaches to representing the Holocaust. Students have an opportunity to see Władysław Strzemiński’s Moim przyjaciołom Żydom [To My Jewish Friends], Józef Szajna’s Ściana butów, a drawing by Marian Kołodziej and, finally, on the following page, Art Spiegelman’s comic book Maus and Zbigniew Libera’s LEGO Concentration Camp Set. Such an original compilation of cultural representations produces a specific tension between the narrative of the Holocaust generation (of victims and witnesses) and the narrative of the post-Holocaust generation, which attempts to fashion a new language for telling about the Holocaust, one accommodated to popular culture. The idea of confronting various narratives about the Holocaust was not picked up in other textbooks.Post-reform textbooks are slightly disappointing as most of them just tend to replicate the cultural representations which have been referenced in Polish instruction for years. The selection of works offered in the Świat do przeczytania [A World to Read] seems interesting. The textbook includes works which help incorporate the narrative of the Holocaust in a rich context of Jewish culture and history, such as Singer’s The Magician of Lublin, Amiel’s “Kartka z pamiętnika” (“Leaf from a Diary”), Krall’s To Outwit God, Głowiński’s “Przeżycie Zagłady” [“Experiencing the Holocaust”], Wiesław Kot’s “Pomnik z popiołu” [“The Monument of Ash”], Aleksander Gierymski’s Święto trąbek [Yom Teruah], Bronisław Linke’s El mole achmim, Libera’s LEGO Concentration Camp Set, Spiegelman’s Maus and “the reading of films,” encouraging the students to see Bob Fosse’s Cabaret, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler List and Roman Polański’s The Pianist.
58 Anna Ziębińska-Witek, Holocaust. Problemy przedstawiania (Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS, 2005), pp. 9‒10.
59 I refer at this point to a social campaign initiated by performance artist Rafał Betlejewski. Betlejewski took pictures of passers-by whom he chanced upon in former Jewish neighbourhoods and wrote Tęsknię za Tobą, Żydzie (I miss you, Jew) on walls as a gesture reversing anti-Semitic graffiti.
60 One of art education textbooks is also an interesting case. Spotkania z kulturą [Encounters with Culture], a textbook which is frequently selected by teachers, features two contemporary references to the Holocaust. They are Joanna Rajkowska’s Pozdrowienia z Alej Jerozolimskich (Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue) and Zbigniew Libera’s LEGO Concentration Camp Set. The authors of the textbook stripped Rajkowska’s work of the Holocaust allusions: the photo of the palm tree is described as “This installation in the form of an artificial palm tree is located in the centre of Warsaw” and is followed by the assignment: “Have a close look at the picture and read its description. Then discuss how, in your view, such art affects the appearance of the city.” Everything implies that the Charles de Gaulle Roundabout (where the installation is placed) will not enter the students’ consciousness as a space that opens up to the no-longer-existing Jewish world of Warsaw, and the plastic palm tree will be remembered just as a (possibly) kitschy embellishment in a European capital. The description of Libera’s work similarly trivialises its meanings, stating simply that it suggests a possibility of constructing a concentration camp of toy blocks, while the Pozytywy (Positives) series are photos which refer – with a twist – to the most recognisable photos representing contemporary history.
61 The expression is borrowed from Krystyna Koziołek’s book Czytanie z innym: etyka, lektura, dydaktyka [Reading with the other: Ethics, Reading, Teaching] (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2006).
62 It is difficult to predict what the reformed Polish lessons on Jewish themes will look like. As yet, the reform has only been implemented in elementary schools, and it will start applying to post-elementary schooling on 1st September, 2019. The core curriculum has been devised, but new textbooks have not yet been written. While the list of compulsory reading has been expanded, the number of books regarding Jewish themes has been reduced, as not only modern narratives, by authors such as Amiel and Fink, but also canonical texts (e.g. Błoński’s essay mentioned above) have been removed.
63 See Przemysław Czapliński, “Zagłada jako wyzwanie dla refleksji o literaturze,” Teksty Drugie, No. 5 (2004), pp. 9–22, on p. 22.
64 David G. Roskies, “What is Holocaust literature,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Vol. 21 (2005), pp. 157–212, on p. 159. Roskies refers to the classification system used by the Library of Congress in Washington.
65 In Poland, literature for a young readership is often referred to as the fourth literature (Polish: literatura czwarta). The term was coined by literature researcher Czesław Hernas, who classified literature into high, folk and entertainment. The fourth type which he distinguished was comprised of children’s literature. To avoid the deprecating overtones of the fourth literature, Jerzy Cieślikowski proposed that children’s literature should be referred to as “separate literature” (Polish: literatura osobna) in order to showcase its specific aims and storytelling practices. In this book, I use the two terms interchangeably.
66 It can be assumed that “new” themes in literature for a young readership and the interdisciplinary approach to old and contemporary texts for children were precipitated by the increasing popularity of children’s studies. While the term itself was only coined in 1991 by Gertrud Lenzer, the founder of Children’s Studies at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, Polish research into childhood, whose tenets dovetail with children studies, was launched as early as in the 1960s by Jerzy Cieślikowski and his books Literatura osobna [Separate Literature] and Wielka zabawa [Great play].
67 Representations of the Holocaust in art, pop-culture and media deserve a separate study of their own. Particularly the latter two communication channels enormously affect the development of young people’s awareness of the Holocaust. See Marek Kaźmierczak, Auschwitz w Internecie: Przedstawienia Holokaustu w kulturze popularnej
