Żydzi i zagłada w polskich kulturach pamięci: między antagonizmem i agonem
The Jews and the Holocaust in Polish Cultural Memory: Between Antagonism and Agon

Summary/Abstract: 25 years ago, Polish gentiles were interviewed on the disappearance of their Jewish neighbours. Kapralski re-examines those interviews in order to revise current attitudes to this kind of memory. He presents memory as a product of current constellations of the remembering subject’s interests, whereby the subject is embroiled in existential efforts to construct mnemonic safety, which in turn is the basis for processes of reconstructing collective memory. These processes were particularly vital in the context of the uncertainty that marked the transformation in the 1990s – a transformation that Kapralski frames in terms of a structural trauma that shapes memories about historical trauma. Such a framing of memories of the Jews means that they have been publicly commemorated in Poland, but they are not remembered within the structures of communicative memory.

• Details
• Contents