Sebastian Łucek: Politics and Memory in Contemporary Poland

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Background

What are the effects of memorializing past violence on political attitudes and behavior in the present? When do memorials to past interethnic violence promote inclusive historical memory and attitudes or entrench historical falsehoods and out-group antagonism through backlash eects? My project seeks to answer these questions through analyzing the politics of historical memory of the Jewish past in contemporary Poland. In recent years, Poland has seen a surge of interest in memorializing Jewish history, with memorialization eorts frequently led by non-Jewish Poles.

Memorializing the Jewish past in contemporary Poland is fraught with controversy. In 2000, Jan Tomasz Gross, a Polish-Jewish professor of History and Sociology at Princeton, published a book titled Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. In it, he drew from new archival sources to document in gruesome detail a massacre of Jews by their Catholic neighbors during Nazi occupation in 1941. Neighbors quickly became a hot-button political issue, and the public response to the publication of Neighbors was sharply divided. The Polish Institute of National Remembrance launched an investigation that culminated in the creation of a monument at the site of the massacre and a formal collective apology by the President of Poland, a member of the center-left Civic Platform party. Conservative politicians responded dierently–upon achieving power in 2015, the right-leaning Law and Justice party opened a libel case against Gross and accused him of defaming the Polish nation, threatening to strip him of state honors he had received many years prior. These high-prole controversies are frequently reected at the local level of towns and villages as memory activists seek to introduce memorials to Jewish history and suering into local communities and at times face backlash by other members of their community.

Thanks to funding from The Europe Center, I was able to travel to Poland during the summer to conduct exploratory eldwork on the politics of historical memory in Poland. Over the course of a month, I visited Warsaw, Kraków, and smaller towns and rural areas in Małopolska to conduct interviews and eld site visits in order to generate hypotheses and explore possibilities for future large-scale data collection on local-level practices of memorialization. I interviewed academic historians, religious community leaders, local memory activists, and museum sta to better understand what contemporary memory politics looks like on the ground. In addition, I visited a variety of sites ranging from major national museums to local museums, cemeteries, commemorative squares, and synagogues to better understand the varieties of memorial practices employed in Poland and how memorials vary in their form and narrative content.

Construction of a new Holocaust memorial in Nowy Sacz

In particular, I was able to observe the construction and inauguration of a major new memorial in the town of Nowy Sacz. The memorial was placed prominently in the historic town square and listed the full names of of all of the town’s Holocaust victims collected through the work of local historians and activists. I visited the site both during its construction, interviewing the leader of the initiative to create it, and visited again for its inauguration ceremony that involved members of the local community, Jewish and Catholic religious leaders, political leaders, Holocaust survivors and descendents living abroad, and international embassy sta. Through observing the process by which a memorial is constructed and ritually inaugurated, I was able to better understand the kind of intervention that memorials eect in communities.

Insights from Fieldwork

Political opportunities

During my eldwork, I observed that left-leaning politicians frequently promote or at least tolerate the work of local activists to construct Jewish memorials. In addition, politicians on the right often seek to capitalize on memorials to generate resentment, tapping into populist narratives and attitudes to caste memorials as a waste of resources and generate fear about the possibility of Jewish return and eorts to re-seize property lost during the Holocaust. This conrmed my hunch - that while memory politics is often engaged in by activists to promote inclusive attitudes among the public, it also provides political opportunities for both the right and left and can at times feed into cycles of local political polarization. Activists must carefully manage their work and the kinds of narratives their memorials employ to avoid such polarization eects.

The variety of memorials

While I initially intended to focus solely on the revitalization of synagogues, my eldwork made it clear that there is no standard way in which memorials are constructed in communities. At times, the presence of a place of worship may serve as a site of education and community engagement around memory, as is the case in the town of Dąbrowa Tarnowska that I visited. In other cases, Synagogues may not become a crucial part of memorialization, such as in Nowy Sącz where the local synagogue is managed by a Jewish group that has not opened the synagogue to the public. Through my time in the eld, I was able to generate a better sense of the diversity of memorial approaches, and I also learned that each town’s memorial approach is unique.

The historic synagogue in Nowy Sacz

International involvement

A third insight from my eldwork was the importance and extent of international involvement in the creation of memorials. Since the fall of Communism, historical narratives in Poland have undergone major shifts from Soviet narratives that downplayed the unique suering of the Jewish people and promoted uniformly positive narratives of non-Jewish Poles’ behavior during the Second World War to contemporary Western European narratives that center Jewish suering and a nuanced assessment of local communities’ actions during the Holocaust. The narratives in the West dier substantially from those that were promoted by the communist regime, and much of the funding for memorial work comes from Western sources and international donors. This added a further dimension to my understanding of local Jewish memorials: they frequently make salient a narrative discontinuity between the communist and post-communist era and may feed into concerns over globalism in local politics.

Next-steps

Going forward, I hope to continue working on this project by beginning to assemble comprehensive data on memorial practices across Poland and linking this data to political outcomes data and survey attitudes data. To the best of my knowledge, such systematic country-wide data would be the rst of its kind, as eorts at memorialization are not entirely centralized. The conceptual work undertaken and relationships formed during the summer will be invaluable as I begin this process.

A wall created out of fragments of grave stones in Kraków

Sebastian Łucek: Politics and Memory in Contemporary Poland