Reading (in) the Holocaust. Malgorzata Wójcik-Dudek
the different intensities with which the Holocaust is experienced by Jews and non-Jews, it is understandable that the Polish fourth literature does not boast an author comparable to Israeli author Bat-Sheva Dagan, who is a prolific writer of versatile Shoah-related texts. A survivor of extermination camps (first Auschwitz-Birkenau and then KL Ravensbrück) and, in Israel, a psychologist and the founder of a method of Holocaust teaching to children, she has earned a special right to mould the young generation’s postmemory. Three of her books for children have been published in Poland: Czika, piesek w getcie (Chika the Dog in the Gehetto), Gdyby gwiazdy mogły mówić (If the Stars Could Only Speak) and Co wydarzyło się w czasie Zagłady. Opowieść rymowana dla dzieci, które chcą wiedzieć (What Happened during the Holocaust: A Rhymed Tale for Children who Want to Know). The former two are conspicuous in that they are the only publications for younger readers released by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. While perceived as testimonies “bound up” with a particular place of memory and thus never widely popular with readers, they have certainly ←34 | 35→influenced the modes of Holocaust narrative in the writings of Polish authors. The third book was in fact Dagan’s debut on the children’s literature market. It appeared in Israel in 1991, and in Poland it was published by the Podlasie Opera and Philharmonics – European Art Centre in Białystok twenty years later. The rhymed story with eye-catching illustrations by Ola Cieślak reads like the credo of the author, who has resolved to engage in dialogue about the Holocaust with a child.69
Hana’s Suitcase by Karen Levine is a book which is extremely popular in the West and which certainly works beyond the educational setting of the museum. It seems to offer methodological guidelines for arranging a young person’s encounter with the Holocaust narrative.70 The book tells the story of Fumiko Ishioke, who organises an exhibition at the Tokyo Holocaust Museum and applies to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum to lend out a few items for the show. Among the exhibits she receives there is a suitcase with Hana’s address scribbled on it. Fumiko starts a private investigation aimed at restoring the memory about the owner of the suitcase. As history is being retrieved, an educational project focused on the scrutiny and personalisation of the trace comes into being. The micro-history which is generated as a result of reading the trace produces a friendly climate for the child’s encounter with the Holocaust narrative.
When this volume was being submitted to the publisher, a book entitled Mój pies Lala (My Dog Lala) had just made its way into bookshops. Similarly to Dagan’s works, it is a specimen of Holocaust non-fiction, an entirely new phenomenon in writings for a young readership. It was authored by Roman Kent, who was born in Lodz in 1925. He spent his childhood in the Lodz ghetto, where he lost his father. After the war, he left for the US, where he has lived ever since. His book tells the story of an extraordinary friendship between a boy and a ←35 | 36→dog which sneaks into the ghetto to visit its Jewish owners. The publication is embellished with illustrations designed by students from Mińsk Mazowiecki.71 Clearly, the publication, as with many books of this type, presupposes an active involvement of young people who contribute to the narrative (as in books by Kent and Levine) or take part in lesson projects (Dagan’s works).
In reflecting on the Polish fourth literature about the Holocaust, we should focus on two essential questions: “What are its purposes?” and “What should it be like?” Of course, such questions enmesh texts for children in ideological and aesthetic suspicions. Yet “Project Postmemory” should abide by a set of principles, and in this particular case the writer’s creative freedom can be subjected to a certain restraint in order to make sure that broadly conceived propriety is observed, a criterion which anyhow turns out to be very flexible in fact.
Admittedly, Holocaust literature for young readers has attracted considerable scholarly attention; however, as a relatively novel development represented by a limited number of contemporary literary texts, it has not yet been comprehensively examined in one, methodical monograph. Still, several researchers have displayed a considerable commitment to such investigations, producing a range of shorter but compelling studies in which multiple Holocaust-related issues are addressed. Obviously, a real memory boom is observable in publications for a young readership which depict the Warsaw Uprising or the Second World War in general72; they add up to an opulent, diversified and, most importantly, continuous body of texts which make it possible to construct a coherent narrative.
Post-Holocaust literature for children makes an impression of serving as a preparatory stage for the encounter with school readings about the Holocaust. Of course, the ascription of such an utilitarian function to “that” literature and literature in general is hardly a novel or surprising discovery. Nevertheless, texts ←36 | 37→for children seem to have a slightly different and more important role as well. They contribute to evoking the sense of lack, comprehended as nostalgia for what is irretrievably lost, which in and of itself may be viewed as a blueprint of remembering. In this framework, the trace should be the paramount category of postmemory, as the trace proves that what is not there now was there once. The work of the trace is never done because the trace requires constant movement, transmission and continuous narrative which enable it to bear witness to the past.
The problem is that, in the history of Polish memory about the Holocaust, there have been moments when interest in the Holocaust subsided nearly to the point of non-existence. These faultlines of memory, demarcated by the timeframes of 1948−1968 and 1968−1970,73 entrapped the post-war generation of readers, who were not provided with any Holocaust education. These were the parents of the third generation, the generation that is now comprised of forty-year-olds, who learned about the Holocaust partly at school, but most probably outside it and who are today getting actively engaged in reclaiming that lost memory. Nonetheless, a hiatus in the intergenerational dialogue still remains, while the category of the trace has been made hardly tenable as a result of the gigantic destruction of Jewish culture effected by the Nazis on the occupied territories and by the policies that the USSR-dependent Polish state adopted towards Jews, which culminated in 1968.
The fourth literature attempts to emplot the Holocaust narrative and, consequently, to “sort out” and organise memory,74 though what the reader navigates is rather the space of the imaginarium of the Holocaust. It is understandable, considering that only two of the books which I discuss below were written by witnesses, whereas the remaining ones belong in the narrative of the “second” and even the “third generation.”75 Sławomir Buryła suggests that Polish researchers ←37 | 38→of Holocaust literature should first attend to the topoi of the Holocaust, which he meticulously enumerates in his article “Topika Holokaustu.”76 Although I was deeply inspired by this article, I did not build on it extensively. One reason for this was that, as I was working with only a handful of texts, the frequency of motifs turned out to be limited. Another reason was that I was exploring literature for children, which expectedly did not contain some of the topoi listed by Buryła. Last, but not least, had I closely followed his guidelines while examining the fourth literature, the outcome would probably have been an unbearable composition more akin to a dictionary than to a coherent narrative.
That is why in my study of the imaginarium of the Holocaust, I chiefly paid attention to explicit repetitions and reiterations of motifs, images and metaphors. This study yielded an account of the literary representations of Janusz Korczak, observations about the oft-employed narrative patterns, a depiction of space and the topoi of mother and child. By demarcating these areas, I was able to discern other phenomena