Holocauststudies 2017 08 Studies Janicka.Indd
Elżbieta Janicka Instead of negationism. The symbolic topography of the former Warsaw ghetto vis-à-vis Holocaust narratives Polish Holocaust narratives after 1945, by and large, blurred the identity of the victims. The following methods were employed: humanist universalisation, anti-fascist universalisation, ‘Polonisation’, and inally ‘Christianisation’. In the sequence of narratives, the following were the victims: People, victims of fascism, Poles, members of European nations of various religious denominations, with special emphasis placed on Christians.1 After the decade-long symbolic battle for the Carmelite cloister and the Auschwitz gravel pit, even if the so-called ‘papal cross’ was not removed from the area adjacent to the camp, and even if the cross that towers over Birkenau remained, the Holocaust was ‘returned’ to the Jews.2 Does a narrative about the Holocaust as a crime perpetrated on the Jews threaten the dominant narration about the past of the Polish majority? Yes and no. It does, as long as one deines the Holocaust as a crime of the German state perpetrated in occupied Europe. On the other hand, it begins to be a fundamental threat, as Jan Tomasz Gross postulates, if one considers that the Holocaust was also (or perhaps primarily?) “a mosaic of distinct episodes, improvised by local decision-makers, and hinging on unforced behaviour, rooted in motivations that can only be guessed, of all of those who were near the murder scene at 1 Cf. for example: Lucy Dawidowicz, “Appropriating the Holocaust: Polish Historical Re- visionism,” in The Holocaust and the Historians (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp.
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