Przemoc antyżydowska w powojennej Polsce w świetle ksiąg pamięci
Anti-Jewish Violence in Postwar Poland in the Light of Memorial Books

Summary/Abstract: This article undertakes to critically analyze the descriptions of anti-Jewish violence in postwar Poland included in memorial books. Its objective is to familiarize the reader with the form, structure, and main threads of the narration about this subject matter. The author discusses, among others, the placement of the texts devoted to the postwar violence against Jews in memorial books, their composition, genre diversification, and also the issues connected with the multitude of points of view and the authors’ status (including testimonies given by direct victims of the violence, repatriates from the USSR, Jewish ‘travelers’ visiting postwar Poland, and Christian witnesses). Aside analyzing the descriptions of the acts of violence, the author focuses on several selected issues: the physical and mental condition of the survivors returning to their hometowns, the reaction to their returns on the part of the Christian population, and the reasons for the postwar violence (traditions of prewar Antisemitism, Polish complicity in the Holocaust crimes, and the demoralizing influence of the Nazi occupation). But the most important research problem is answering the question about the overall vision of Polish-Jewish relations immediately after the war present in the memorial books, as well as indicating this vision’s most characteristic denominators.

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