1,720,963 research outputs found
'The grave […] has been planted over with potatoes.' Exhumations and the creation of Holocaust monuments in pre-1968 Poland
No full textHow to create a bystander? The 1965 Polish scouts’ reconnaissance and vernacular memory of the Holocaust
No full textForgotten? Holocaust Monuments and Jewish Activism in 1960s Poland
No full textThe present paper focuses on the early 1960s and spotlights efforts to commemorate the Holocaust in south-eastern Poland. Members of the religious Congregation and the lay Social-Cultural Association of Polish Jews as well as transnational activists, created a network of memorials. Encompassing local sites of killings, those small-scale memorials challenged the Communist authorities’ programme of commemoration. They marked villages, towns and cities with reference to Jewish suffering. They highlighted victims’ identity and used Jewish symbols and bilingual inscriptions to narrate the genocide. In so doing, they have successfully prevented the memory of the Holocaust from disappearing
Generational succession, culture, and politics:The shaping of Euro-Atlantic sites of memory
Full text linkMemory studies have often looked to the Cold War and the fall of the Iron Curtain as the principal mediators of collective memory for the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Scholars have often assumed the primacy of political factors in memory work with Cold War politics understood as shaping collective memory both West and East of the Iron Curtain. The present article proposes to problematize these assumptions. While not negating the role of politics, it suggests that the changing cultural priorities of each successive generation were of greater importance than current memory analyses permit. Using the former KL Plaszow (Kraków, Poland) as a case study, this essay draws attention to the common features of memory work shared across the Euro-Atlantic world. Establishing how each of the postwar generations engaged with memory work to suit their particular needs this article analyses the impact that generational sensibilities had on memory sites
Creating Cosmopolitan Past:Local and Transitional Influences in Memory Work in Schindler’s Factory in Kraków, Poland
Full text linkThe present article tests the limits of cosmopolitan memory. It spotlights a unique case study, the permanent exhibition in Schindler’s Factory in Kraków, Poland, shaped by a group of local curators and politicians, as well as representatives of foreign memorial institutions and supranational NGOs. The thrust to create a cosmopolitan narrative came from Polish curators, but their vision was curbed by both a local politician and the head of a global NGO. The version of cosmopolitanism offered in Kraków engaged with contemporary Polish problems. However, it ignored Polish anti-Semitism and perpetration. The article reveals how in practice the cosmopolitan message is shaped, what propels it forward, what limits its horizons
Between the egalitarian project and anti-semitic rejection. Jewish civic organizations and socialism in 1960s Poland
No full textJews and Poles in the Holocaust Exhibitions of Kraków, 1980-2013:Between Urban Past and National Memory
No full textThis book offers a unique approach to memory studies by focusing on local memory work conducted across the divide of the fall of Communism, whereas other histories have consistently used 1989 as a watershed moment. By examining the ways in which the Holocaust has been exhibited in Kraków, it investigates the impact local memory work has had on Polish collective memory and problematizes the importance of the fall of Communism for memory work. Using the Polish case study, it contributes to international debates on the nature of urban memory. It brings to the fore the role of mid-ranking governmental and municipal activists for local remembrance, investigates the relationship between the form and the content of the exhibitions, and highlights the importance of authenticity and emotional evocations for Holocaust remembrance. In particular, it focuses on the emergence of cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust, a process with local, Kraków, sources.</p
Regional professionals, American activists, and the Iron Curtain:Transnational memory work during the Cold War in the Jewish neighbourhood of Kraków
Full text linkIn the search for the roots of the cosmopolitanization of Polish memory in the first decade of the twenty-first century, this article looks past the chronological boundaries of post-socialist Poland. It identifies regional memory professionals as the key “scale” in transnational memory work. It demonstrates that the present state of Jewish sites of Kraków is the outcome of transnational work conducted from as early as the 1970s, and it is the effect of competition and collaboration among Jews from the American diaspora, Polish Jews, and Polish regional memory professionals. In a field regulated by the Polish socialist state, diaspora Jews tried to impose on their Polish collaborators their vision of Jewish sites. Polish Jews fought to protect those same sites as a key component of their identity work. Prompted by local and transnational Jewish pressure, ethnically Polish professionals discovered the Jewish past for themselves. They began by protecting Jewish sites, later turning them into valuable parts of the heritage ofPoland and, eventually, into a constitutive element of Polish heritage. This articleclaims that it is precisely regional memory professionals who are the key to transnational memory work
Ragged Houses and Candlelight. The Romance of the Jewish Past and Memory Work in the Last Decade of the Communist Rule in Kraków, Poland
Full text linkIt has often been proposed that the Jewish past of Poland had been largely forgotten and that first popular commemorations of the destroyed minority took place after the fall of Communism in 1989. Challenging this chronology the present article examines the commemorations in Kraków, the cultural capital of Poland, in the 1980s. It analyses the work of local Jewish museum and preservation projects developed during the decade and establishes that the Jewish past had been remembered in the city since at least 1980. It demonstrates that local, mid-ranking officials, a group situated mid-way in the polar opposites of the government and the society, were responsible for this rediscovery of the Jewish past. In particular, this article points towards the heritage preservationists and comments on their importance for urban memory work
The Politics of Remembrance in Kraków. The Holocaust Memorials, Monuments, Plaques and Obelisks before 1989
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