Zimzum Issue 1

7
NORMALISATION
FROM THE
PERSPECTIVE
OF THE THIRD
POST-WAR
GENERATION
The case of Poland
Jagoda Budzik
G
eneration - a term that
inherently refers to elapsed
time: seems to also provide an
opportunity to look inside the internal
dynamics of the normalisation
processes and the attempts to disrupt
them. However, before we use the
phrase “third generation” more
generally, to refer not only to Israel or
Germany, but also to other countries,
particularly to Poland, it seems essential
to pose the question about the very
possibility of speaking about “Polish
third generation” and the reasons why
such a term hardly exists in Polish
memory discourse, contrary to Israel
and Germany.
This intriguing fact may serve as a good
starting point for a reflection on how
Polish society in the post-war decades
was dealing, or rather was avoiding
having to deal with its past, and how
- with time - the repressed facts started
to come to the surface, breaking
society’s efforts to maintain the state of
normalisation. The latter process can be
traced in various works created by a
younger generation of artists. Moreover,
it is worth emphasising the fact that
they very often pick the genres and use
motifs formerly not connected to the
topic of the memory of the Second
World War, the Holocaust, and
Polish-Jewish relations. The examples I
am going to present here are only a
small part of the huge post-war
memory boom that began to occur in
Polish contemporary art and culture as
early as the 1990s, but - for reasons I
will discuss later on - became
particularly noticeable in the 2000s.
Polish spaces, from which traces of war
history have been erased, in
contemporary works are often shown to
be haunted by the past. Having thus far
been treated as inviolate, they began to
reveal what Martin Pollack calls their
actual “contamination”, arguing that
landscapes of such countries as Austria,
Slovenia, Romania, Ukraine, Czech
Republic, and - above all - Poland will
forever remain marked by the events of
the Second World War. The motif of
contamination of Polish soil with war
crimes in general, and the Shoah in
particular, has become discernible in the
works of artists belonging to the third
generation. It is entangled, however, with
some significant issues that demand to be
mentioned here.
First of them is the fact of Poland’s
exclusion from the contemporary
reconciliation process, which has been
described by Karolina Przewrocka in her
widely commented-on essay published in
the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz. I am
not going to analyse the whole article,
where the author discusses extensively
both the reasons and the consequences of
this lack of Polish voice in Israeli-German
memory discourse. Instead, I would like
to focus on just one fragment where
Przewrocka defines in precise terms one
of the main problems of Polish memory:
The Jewish cemeteries scattered
throughout Poland, together with the
remains of the death camps, ghettos and
synagogues, are with us every day. We
wake up to them in the morning, pass
them on our way to work and go to sleep
at night in cities whose names evoke fear
in Israelis, including Oswiecim, Lodz and
Kielce.
She adds:
When Israeli Jews visit Poland’s Holocaust
sites, they return to Israel with a sense of
relief. We, in contrast, must find a way to
continue to live alongside these places,
unable to exorcise this dybbuk.
The situation of struggle with the past
Przewrocka describes
is, however, quite a
new phenomenon. In
the first post-war
decades, what prevailed
in Poland was the
atmosphere of silence
and repression of the
traumatic event’s
memory. The rising
consciousness of this
situation started to
appear more frequently
in art and in literature
only at the end of the
twentieth century.
Nevertheless, the most
meaningful turning
point in that process of
breaking the
normalisation of the
spaces came in 2000,
together with
publication of Sąsiedzi
(“The Neighbours”), a
book written by the
Polish sociologist and
historian Jan Tomasz
Gross, in which he
describes the history of
one of the pogroms on
Jewish inhabitants of
the town Jedwabne,
planned and carried
out by their Polish
neighbours. Although
the crime has been
already depicted in a
magnificent
documentary movie …
Where My Elder Son Kain (1999),
directed by Agnieszka Arnold
(who in 2001 also released a second
documentary on the pogrom, entitled
Sąsiedzi, from which the book in fact
borrowed its title), the film did not get
much attention, and it was the Gross
essay that dramatically changed the
shape of the discourse on Polish-Jewish
relations in Poland.
The debate launched by this
publication constituted a precedent in
the history of Polish afterwar narrative
of Polish-Jewish relations, and cracked
the façade of silence which had been
kept up for decades with regard to
Polish attitudes towards the Jews
before, during, and after the Second
World War. The book not only
revealed the truth about what has been
the most strongly repressed thread of
this story, namely, Polish complicity in
murders committed on the Jews, but
also allowed to highlight the question
of Jewish absence, its reasons and
consequences - both in the public
debate and in art or literature,
particularly in works of young artists
belonging mostly to the third postwar
generation.
The persistent lack of former Jewish
citizens of Poland and the places they
used to live in seems to be one the
central motifs in works that have been
created in recent years and might be
perceived as connected to the third
generation’s experience. The first work I
would like to discuss is Yael Bartana’s
project And Europe will be stunned
from 2009. The work consists of three
parts and presents a vision of a Jewish
Renaissance Movement in Poland that
calls three milions Jews to come back.
Although the motif of the void left
after the murder of over three milions
of Polish Jews is present in all parts, it is
the first section, entitled “Mary
koszmary” (“Nightmares”), that
presents it in the most apparent way.
In the first part of the trilogy, Sławomir
Sierakowski, leader of “Krytyka
Polityczna”, stands in the empty
Decennial Stadium in Warsaw and calls
the Jews to come back to their country.
In his charismatic speech, which on the
one hand may be likened to
propaganda films from the Third Reich
(particularly Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph
of the Will), but on the other hand, is
set in a space that is highly charged
with symbolic meaning, Sierakowski
urges:
Jews! Fellow Countrymen! People!
Peeeople! You think the old woman
who still sleeps under Ryfke’s quilt
doesn’t want to see you? That she forgot
about you? You are wrong! She dreams
about you every night. Dreams and
POLISH SOCIETY IN THE
POST-WAR DECADES WAS
DEALING, OR RATHER WAS
AVOIDING HAVING TO DEAL
WITH ITS PAST, AND HOW -
WITH TIME - THE REPRESSED
FACTS STARTED TO COME
TO THE SURFACE, BREAKING
THE SOCIETY’S EFFORTS TO
TO MAINTAIN THE STATE OF
NORMALISATION.
trembles with fear. Since the night you
were gone and her mother reached your
quilt, she has had nightmares. Bad
dreams. Only you can chase them away.
Let the three million Jews that Poland
has missed stand by her bed and finally
chase away the demons. Return to
Poland, to your country! (...).
This potential situation of Jews
returning to Poland has in fact more
than just one possible interpretation.
The mechanism whereby the repressed
return leads in two directions. On the
one hand, it illustrates how deeply
rooted the normative Polish silence
about the former Jewish neighbours is;
on the other hand, it refers to the issue
of Jewish settlement in former
Palestine, which has often been
described in terms of “coming back to
the historical homeland”. Seen from
the Polish perspective, hovewer,
Bartana’s work not only refers to the
fact that memory of three and a half
million Jews who lived in Poland before
the war has been repressed from
collective consciousness, but also points
towards the dread the Poles are filled
with owing to the recollection of
property grabbed from their Jewish
neighbours, or the remembrance of
many Polish crimes committed during
the Shoah. Therefore, the void left after
the genocide of Jewish inhabitants
gains more specific
form.
A significant shift
occurred, therefore, at
the time when the
representatives of the
third postwar
generation took the
floor: the motif of
Jewish absence and a
thread of an active role
played by Poles in the
process of forgetting
have entered the
cultural mainstream.
The consequences of
these phenomena have
also gradually started
to be more visible in
Polish texts from the
field of popular
culture, whose authors
try to deal with the
issue of Polish history.
The subject of
forgotten Jewish
victims of the Second
World War appears,
for example, in two
Polish movies that
reached the wider
public: Pokłosie
(“Aftermath”) by
Władysław Pasikowski
and Demon by Marcin
Wrona. Both of them
- although in different
ways - present the
outcome of post-war
silence concealing the
traces left after the Holocaust victims.
Both films, similar because they adopt
the form of popular thrillers, show that
what preserves the memory repressed
by the Polish people is precisely the
space. In each case, the protagonist
familiarises himself with the
surroundings and suddenly discovers
the truth about what happened before
and during the war, only to learn that
the inhabitants are still very eager to
keep their dark secrets. In both cases,
the attempt at normalisation fails at
some point, for the long-hidden facts
come to light. However, it offers
neither a sense of catharsis, nor an
opportunity to settle with the past, for
it remains unreachable owing to Polish
reluctance to do so as well as still-vivid
anti-Semitism, which is underlined in
both movies in a very critical way.
Another, and probably one of the most
literal and radical uses of the motif of
such a comeback of the past, comes
from the field of literature. In Noc
żywych Żydów (“The Night of the
Living Jews”), Igor Ostachowicz tells
the story of Jewish zombies rising from
the basements of Warsaw. In his rather
lowbrow novel, the zombies become an
obvious pop-cultural symbol of
unwanted memory. Although it follows
the pattern of a popular novel, Noc
żywych Żydów in fact reflects the
Polish struggle for normalisation and
eagerness to repress the memory of
what happened in spaces of
contemporary everyday life (one of the
novel’s most important locales is
“Arkadia”, an enormously large
shopping centre built on the premises
of the former Warsaw ghetto), at the
same time becoming a testament of
their failure. However, Ostachowicz’s
novel is also unable to offer a sense of
catharsis. It is rather a report on Polish
unreadiness for a confrontation with
the memory of the Jews who used to
inhabit the same well-known places we
live in today.
From this perspective, the general
experience of the Polish third
generation is strongly connected to
space, which on the one hand remains
a place where the European Jewry was
exterminated, and on the other hand is
the space of today’s Polish life. At the
same time, after many years of silence,
members of the third generation are
those who experience - probably most
strongly - the return of the repressed,
return of the forgotten Jewish history.
The central role in this process is played
by places which over the decades have
been strenuously adjusted to avoid any
kind of suffering as a result of a guilty
conscience or traumatic memories. For
some time, however, the ghosts of the
past have haunted them, showing that
Polish society - even though it is still
reluctant - will eventually be forced to
face its fears and confront the past.
Jagoda Budzik is a doctoral student at the
Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology
at Adam Mickiewicz University in
Poznań. She has degrees in Hebrew
Studies and Theatre Studies from the same
university. Her research interests focus on
issues of collective memory, Israeli
literature, theatre and visual arts in the
light of the Holocaust discourse. Her work
combines elements drawn from three
major disciplines: literature, memory
studies and cultural studies.