Reading (in) the Holocaust. Malgorzata Wójcik-Dudek
witness and second generation. Secondly, literature which addresses painful themes of the cohabitation of Poles and Jews (Błoński and Grynberg) has been introduced to schools. Thirdly, and finally, what seems to be the most radical, or even revolutionary, intervention is that while the Holocaust may not have been removed from the centre of the school’s textual world, its peripheries – which have been neglected in Polish language education so far – have been considerably bolstered. Before the new core curriculum was introduced, the Holocaust had been the overriding “Jewish theme,” which commanded, if not entirely eclipsed, all other issues related to Jewish culture, among which anti-Semitism and the assimilation of Jews had been the most pronounced, if not the only points on the agenda. Such questions had mainly been tackled “on the margins” of discussions about Adam Mickiewicz’s Master Thaddeus, Positivist short stories, Bolesław Prus’s The Doll or Stanisław Wyspiański’s The Wedding, serving primarily as an introduction to the narrative about the Holocaust.
The major thrust towards dismantling the classic arrangement of “scholastic” texts about the Holocaust for Polish instruction came not so much from an attempt to adjust literature to the emotionality and knowledge of contemporary readers as from the demands of interdisciplinary humanistic discourse, into which the core curriculum incorporated Polish instruction. When discussing writings about the Holocaust, it is difficult to ignore the historical contexts and even more difficult to fail to discern and appreciate the methodological revolution initiated by Holokaust – zrozumieć dlaczego [The Holocaust: Understanding Why?], a textbook developed by Robert Szuchta and Piotr Trojański in 2003.
The authors sought to outline an inclusive political, sociological and cultural context of the Holocaust. Though they are both historians, the textbook quickly ←29 | 30→proved not only useful in their field, but also seamlessly aligned with the interdisciplinary investment expected of schools in the wake of the reform of the core curriculum. As a result of the ministerial policy document (which invited criticism from historians for shifting Holocaust-related issues from junior secondary school to the later stage of education), the textbook became helpful to teachers of other subjects than history as well and turned out to perfectly correspond to the needs of upper secondary education.
It seems therefore that the current concept of teaching about the Holocaust in Polish lessons is geared towards constructing a narrative in which “other Jewish themes,” which have been treated merely as a functional background so far, will no longer be accessory, if not entirely subordinated, to the central issue of the Holocaust. This of course does not mean that the Holocaust is divested of its unprecedented status.56 The Event has been embedded in a historical-cultural space and, most importantly, such emplacement does not herald the end of the Holocaust narrative, but marks an explicit change in the structure of this narrative as consciousness-raising about the irreversible loss of that world is accorded a special place in it.57
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The experience of the present should incorporate an awareness of the lack of something that could be, but will evermore not be.58 After all, the ethical goal of lessons about the Holocaust lies in breeding nostalgia rather than trauma through the texts read at school. Perhaps the didactic triumph, so difficult to imagine in this context, can be aptly encapsulated in the confession: I miss you, Jew.59 Perhaps the memory frameworks of the third and fourth generations should be demarcated by the vectors of nostalgia and loss.
To remodel students’ sensitivity, which, though individual, could integrate with the communal affective framework, is certainly a formidable challenge for Polish language education.60 One reason why it is so daunting is that navigating ←31 | 32→the textual world of the Holocaust at school requires discipline which is not simply extorted by an ideological “corset,” but is essentially an injunction of responsible reading in which students benefit from the teacher’s assistance. In the case of such texts, the freedom of reading should be abandoned for the sake of reading with the Other,61 which means that young readers’ reading is supported by an adult. For the same reasons, a Polish lesson marked by an encounter with a text about the Holocaust transfigures into an ethical event.62
If anything, an even greater sensitivity is required of a writer who decides to tell a young readership about the Holocaust. This is a difficult art involving utmost responsibility because it entails bearing witness to the past in a way that is attuned to the present. The Shoah Library63 meticulously catalogues narratives among which children’s literature is certainly pivotal in terms of educational import. Children’s literature, which offers readers their “first exposure to the meaning of history, is catalogued in D804.34 for nonfiction or in PZ for fiction.”64
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We could easily imagine a catalogue of Polish books about the Holocaust bearing the PZ library classification, that is, those addressed to a young readership. Such a catalogue would not be very extensive. The Polish tradition of post-Holocaust tales for children does not boast a long history, though admittedly it has developed rather vigorously over the first two decades of the 21st century. The robust interest of literature for children and young adults in the Holocaust, which has been observable in the 21st century, is certainly a very complex and multifaceted development. Whether or not the seismographic sensitivity of “the fourth literature”65 is its genetically inherent property (weighty inspirations from adult texts can easily inundate and fertilise it), as literature’s younger sibling it has taken upon itself the obligation to bear witness.
Where the readiness of the fourth literature to tackle the Holocaust-related themes comes from is hardly a puzzle. For one, the reasons can be found in transformations which, for lack of a better term, can be described as methodological and cultural. They include the engagement with what had previously been taboo issues, memory studies, postmemorial narratives, experiences with modern Whitean redefinitions of historical prose and/or postcolonial disenchantment with the single-discourse totality.66
At the same time, the growth of interest in the Holocaust observable in Polish literature results from the vernacular context that stirs a mental ferment, undoubtedly leading to a recasting of the awareness of the young generation. The events of the past fifteen years have undeniably had a considerable impact on the shaping of a new vision of Polish-Jewish relationships, a vision which is also – primarily perhaps – conveyed by texts for a young readership. It is sufficient to ←33 | 34→mention the debates around Tomasz Gross’s Neighbors and Golden Harvest or Anna Bikont’s My z Jedwabnego [We from Jedwabne]. The transformations in the generation’s consciousness are immensely affected by the studies carried out by the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, which are mirrored in the stipulations of the Core Curriculum and thus shape the school narrative about the Holocaust to a degree.67 Even a cursory look at the circumstances in which the fourth literature has found itself makes it obvious that sooner or later it could not but respond to the challenge of bearing witness to the past in the broad sense of the expression.68