the most interesting thing about the Core Curriculum is that it strives to place the texts about the Holocaust in a broader discourse on Jewish culture and the position of Jews in Poland. Consequently, at the basic level, the reading list has been expanded to include mandatory short stories by Bruno Schulz and optional readings, such as Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Magician of Lublin and Julian Stryjkowski’ Austeria [At a Roadside Inn]; at the advanced level, two recommended, but non-compulsory readings – a reportage by Henryk Grynberg and a selected essay by Jan Błoński – have been added to the list. In practice, authors of textbooks indeed make use of selected passages from these texts, which improves their chances of actually being discussed in classroom. In this context, Błoński’s “Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto” (“The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto”)55 seems to enjoy the greatest popularity.
With such recommended readings, there is a considerable chance of generating a basic, tolerably coherent structure of school narrative not so much about the Holocaust alone as about Jewish tradition per se. The optional choice of these ←28 | 29→texts is certainly a downside of the curricular decisions, but at the same time, the learning outcomes defined for the advanced level of Polish instruction include the capacity to recognise literary allusions and cultural symbols (e.g. biblical, Romantic, etc.) as well as their ideological and compositional function, together with signs of traditions, including antiquity, Judaism, Christianity, Early Modern Poland, etc. This entails the expediency of selecting texts which promote meeting the requirements stipulated in the core curriculum.
Given this, it seems that the Minister’s regulation which came into effect in 2009, while altering the reading list, first and foremost modifies the ways of talking about the Holocaust. As far as the transformations of the reading canon are concerned, I can see three areas in which truly relevant changes can happen.
Firstly, texts by authors as yet not discussed in schools, such as Fink and Amiel, have been included in Jewish discourse. Such readings may foster reflection on the generation of the Scorched, i.e. on the categories of witness and second generation. Secondly, literature which addresses painful themes of the cohabitation of Poles and Jews (Błoński and Grynberg) has been introduced to schools. Thirdly, and finally, what seems to be the most radical, or even revolutionary, intervention is that while the Holocaust may not have been removed from the centre of the school’s textual world, its peripheries – which have been neglected in Polish language education so far – have been considerably bolstered. Before the new core curriculum was introduced, the Holocaust had been the overriding “Jewish theme,” which commanded, if not entirely eclipsed, all other issues related to Jewish culture, among which anti-Semitism and the assimilation of Jews had been the most pronounced, if not the only points on the agenda. Such questions had mainly been tackled “on the margins” of discussions about Adam Mickiewicz’s Master Thaddeus, Positivist short stories, Bolesław Prus’s The Doll or Stanisław Wyspiański’s The Wedding, serving primarily as an introduction to the narrative about the Holocaust.
The major thrust towards dismantling the classic arrangement of “scholastic” texts about the Holocaust for Polish instruction came not so much from an attempt to adjust literature to the emotionality and knowledge of contemporary readers as from the demands of interdisciplinary humanistic discourse, into which the core curriculum incorporated Polish instruction. When discussing writings about the Holocaust, it is difficult to ignore the historical contexts and even more difficult to fail to discern and appreciate the methodological revolution initiated by Holokaust – zrozumieć dlaczego [The Holocaust: Understanding Why?], a textbook developed by Robert Szuchta and Piotr Trojański in 2003.
The authors sought to outline an inclusive political, sociological and cultural context of the Holocaust. Though they are both historians, the textbook quickly ←29 | 30→proved not only useful in their field, but also seamlessly aligned with the interdisciplinary investment expected of schools in the wake of the reform of the core curriculum. As a result of the ministerial policy document (which invited criticism from historians for shifting Holocaust-related issues from junior secondary school to the later stage of education), the textbook became helpful to teachers of other subjects than history as well and turned out to perfectly correspond to the needs of upper secondary education.
It seems therefore that the current concept of teaching about the Holocaust in Polish lessons is geared towards constructing a narrative in which “other Jewish themes,” which have been treated merely as a functional background so far, will no longer be accessory, if not entirely subordinated, to the central issue of the Holocaust. This of course does not mean that the Holocaust is divested of its unprecedented status.56 The Event has been embedded in a historical-cultural space and, most importantly, such emplacement does not herald the end of the Holocaust narrative, but marks an explicit change in the structure of this narrative as consciousness-raising about the irreversible loss of that world is accorded a special place in it.57
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The experience of the present should incorporate an awareness of the lack of something that could be, but will evermore not be.58 After all, the ethical goal of lessons about the Holocaust lies in breeding nostalgia rather than trauma through the texts read at school. Perhaps the didactic triumph, so difficult to imagine in this context, can be aptly encapsulated in the confession: I miss you, Jew.59 Perhaps the memory frameworks of the third and fourth generations should be demarcated by the vectors of nostalgia and loss.
To remodel students’ sensitivity, which, though individual, could integrate with the communal affective framework, is certainly a formidable challenge for Polish language education.60 One reason why it is so daunting is that navigating ←31 | 32→the textual world of the Holocaust at school requires discipline which is not simply extorted by an ideological “corset,” but is essentially an injunction of responsible reading in which students benefit from the teacher’s assistance. In the case of such texts, the freedom of reading should be abandoned for the sake of reading with the Other,61 which means that young readers’ reading is supported by an adult. For the same reasons, a Polish lesson marked by an encounter with a text about the Holocaust transfigures into an ethical event.62
If anything, an even greater sensitivity is required of a writer who decides to tell a young readership about the Holocaust. This is a difficult art involving utmost responsibility because it entails bearing witness to the past in a way that is attuned to the present. The Shoah Library63 meticulously catalogues narratives among which children’s literature is certainly pivotal in terms of educational import. Children’s literature, which offers readers their “first exposure to the meaning of history, is catalogued in D804.34 for nonfiction or in PZ for fiction.”64
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We could easily imagine a catalogue of Polish books about the Holocaust bearing the PZ library classification, that is, those addressed to a young readership. Such a catalogue would not be very extensive. The Polish tradition of post-Holocaust tales for children does not boast a long history, though admittedly it has developed rather vigorously over the first two decades of the 21st century.
