Research on the commemoration of the Holocaust in Poland and in the United States as exemplified by the two largest memorials. Discourses, archives and politics
Research on the commemoration of the Holocaust in Poland and in the United States as exemplified by the two largest memorials. Discourses, archives and politics

Summary/Abstract: Aim. This article aims to answer the question: How can we discover why there are differences between the discourses on the Holocaust at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the Holocaust Museum in Washington? Concept. The article is based on an outline of the results of the author’s research on comparing the policies of remembering the Holocaust in two countries - Poland and the United States. An analysis of the literature on the subject has shown that the official discourse on the Holocaust in these countries is conducted within the framework of state institutions (although in the case of the United States. it is more appropriate to speak of “federal institutions”) which are also memorials to the Holocaust: i.e. the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim and the Holocaust Museum in Washington. The contents of the museums’ archives play an indispensable role in discovering the differences between these discourses. The archives provide material on how these discourses have been shaped, under what circumstances and during what struggles, and how they are organized within the framework of internal and external methods of exercising power. These institutional data repositories facilitate the identification of all initiators of the discourses - starting from individuals, through expert bodies and opinion leaders, and ending up with political leaders. Thanks to the archives, it is possible to reconstruct policies of remembrance and to identify the goals of these policies, as well as discourse organization in these centers. Results and conclusions. As shown in the article, research in the archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim and the Holocaust Museum in Washington can significantly contribute to answering the question about the development of the discourse on the Holocaust in Poland and the United States, and to understanding the differences between the discourses, and through this, in the policies of memory in the context of the Holocaust in the two countries, both in previous years and nowadays.

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