These were the parents of the third generation, the generation that is now comprised of forty-year-olds, who learned about the Holocaust partly at school, but most probably outside it and who are today getting actively engaged in reclaiming that lost memory. Nonetheless, a hiatus in the intergenerational dialogue still remains, while the category of the trace has been made hardly tenable as a result of the gigantic destruction of Jewish culture effected by the Nazis on the occupied territories and by the policies that the USSR-dependent Polish state adopted towards Jews, which culminated in 1968.
The fourth literature attempts to emplot the Holocaust narrative and, consequently, to “sort out” and organise memory,74 though what the reader navigates is rather the space of the imaginarium of the Holocaust. It is understandable, considering that only two of the books which I discuss below were written by witnesses, whereas the remaining ones belong in the narrative of the “second” and even the “third generation.”75 Sławomir Buryła suggests that Polish researchers ←37 | 38→of Holocaust literature should first attend to the topoi of the Holocaust, which he meticulously enumerates in his article “Topika Holokaustu.”76 Although I was deeply inspired by this article, I did not build on it extensively. One reason for this was that, as I was working with only a handful of texts, the frequency of motifs turned out to be limited. Another reason was that I was exploring literature for children, which expectedly did not contain some of the topoi listed by Buryła. Last, but not least, had I closely followed his guidelines while examining the fourth literature, the outcome would probably have been an unbearable composition more akin to a dictionary than to a coherent narrative.
That is why in my study of the imaginarium of the Holocaust, I chiefly paid attention to explicit repetitions and reiterations of motifs, images and metaphors. This study yielded an account of the literary representations of Janusz Korczak, observations about the oft-employed narrative patterns, a depiction of space and the topoi of mother and child. By demarcating these areas, I was able to discern other phenomena relevant to postmemory. I can only hope that I have managed to capture and adequately articulate them all. Straying from the title, I commence my narrative of the Holocaust by discussing Jan Brzechwa’s Akademia pana Kleksa [The Academy of Mr Inkblot], which was published directly after the war. This was the only choice I could possibly make because, in my view, Akademia actually incorporates the foundational myth of the Holocaust narrative addressed to young readers. I only hope that my readers will share my fascination with the trilogy by Brzechwa and condone this narrative inaccuracy of mine. This book does not offer a complete survey of texts about the Holocaust written between the Academy and the beginning of the 21st century, because the Holocaust, if mentioned in them, is usually relegated to the peripheries of their main thematic concern, that is the Second World War.77
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With a few exceptions, most pre-2000 books for a young readership dwell first and foremost on Polish history and martyrdom, whereby they either entirely pass over or, at best, marginalise Holocaust-related issues. In fact, earlier texts for young readers only rarely featured a Jewish protagonist. In an acutely insightful essay written in 1966, Joanna Papuzińska recounts the process of stereotyping the Jew in pre-war works for children and young adults. She demonstrates that young-adult readers were afforded no opportunity for a neutral literary encounter with Jewish culture because before the war they were encouraged to read anti-Semitic texts (with Eugenia Kobylińska’s novel Rysiek z Belmontu [Dickie from Belmont] standing out as an infamous example thereof), which ultimately were not included in the canon, and after the war everyday Jewish themes were overshadowed by the Holocaust. Even though the war was an important turning point in the reception of Jewish motifs, it indisputably fixed the stereotype of “the Jew as one who is beaten.”78
To get a closer idea of typical Holocaust motifs, I propose taking a short glimpse at the texts produced in the immediate aftermath of the war and throughout the 20th century which I will not explore below, instead focusing on literature written over the last fifteen years. The post-war novels Wojtek Warszawiak [Wojtek the Varsovian] by Andrzej Perepeczko and Wrócimy razem [We’ll Return Together] by Maria Niklewiczowa clearly imply that the Holocaust was never the plot axis in literature for a young readership, and Holocaust victims (who are often treated with compassion or offered help in defiance of lethal risk) and/or witnesses79 were consigned to the margins of the narrative world. It is precisely ←39 | 40→because the Jewish theme is absent from the national pantheon of heroic twins or valiant teddy bears80 that special attention is due to Anna Kamieńska’s novel Żołnierze i żołnierzyki [Soldiers and Toy Soldiers], which is as brilliant as it is ignored by schools.81 Woven into the texture of the novel is a “Jewish thread” which accompanies the protagonist and irregularly surfaces in the narrative. Although it appears intermittently, its intensity is invariably harrowing, so that the passages concerning the Holocaust will stick for ever in the reader’s memory. The murder of Mr Seidel, a Jewish artist who has forged papers and hides “on the Aryan side,” is the climax of the novel. Mr Seidel is shot dead in his own study next to an easel on which there is an unfinished portrait of his mother, who has ←40 | 41→remained in the ghetto. At the moment of his death, the artist is playing the Dąbrowski Mazurka (the national anthem of Poland), which attests to his “Polish Jewishness,” a well-established device known from Master Thaddeus.82 Stach, the novel’s protagonist, who witnesses the crime by chance, vows that he will forever remember the victim.
The list of mandatory Holocaust readings should not omit books which shift the Holocaust to the foreground. One such text is Maria Zarębińska’s unfinished novel Dzieci Warszawy [The Children of Warsaw], which tells a story of Polish kids who feel responsible for Szymek, a fugitive from the ghetto, and help him survive on the Aryan side. Maria Kann approaches the Jewish motif in an equally engaging way. Notably, Kann wrote Na oczach świata [Before the Eyes of the World], a brochure which informed Polish society of the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw ghetto and appealed to Poles to help Jews, which she herself did by hiding fugitives from the Jewish Quarter.83 Kann’s books produce an extraordinary effect which could be called the communality of space. As one of few authors, she portrays the community of suffering of Jews and non-Jews, abolishing all divisions between them. The depiction of space in Niebo nieznane [Unknown Sky] is particularly evocative in this respect. Undergoing historical transformations, Długa Street in Warsaw turns into a dramatic and simultaneously democratic palimpsest whose narrative is spun by the residents of Krakowskie Przedmieście and Nalewki alike.84
The space of Długa Street brims with Polish-Jewish history, whose discourse is not built around the our-vs.-foreign opposition, but is founded on the similarity of the fates of people on either side of the wall. Kann resorted to the same device in her brilliant novel Sprawa honoru [A Matter of Honour], which offers a synthesis of problems that persistently recur in Polish-Jewish narratives. The book is written with remarkable honesty, starting from the inclusive presentation ←41 | 42→of the entire spectrum of attitudes of Polish society to Jews and ending with the structuring of the texts underpinned by the concept of a mirror reflection, which results in the portrayal of similarities and differences between the Polish and Jewish characters of the novel. The ghetto wall85 can be construed as the axis of symmetry of the world the novel depicts, a world which is divided into the Aryan and Semitic parts by the oppressive system, but which
