Forgetting Polish Violence Against the Jews: The Great Whitewash

During the Holocaust, Polish bystanders were witnesses not only to Nazi crimes but also to their own collective violence toward Jewish neighbors. This book shows how these memories continue to be distorted and silenced in the Polish culture.

Considering the ways in which Polish culture displays symptoms of a suppressed and violent memory while obstinately refusing to see the meaning of such symptoms, the author shows how the narrative of the Holocaust, in threatening the self-image of the community, causes a continuous anxiety and thus compulsive and neurotic reactions. Through analyses of a wide range of literary, journalistic, commemorative, and cinematic texts, Forgetting Polish Violence Against the Jews sheds light on a set of narrative and discursive models connected with social practices, which serve to discipline individuals - especially Polish Jews - while generating pressure to defend both habits of silence and also an idealized selfimage of the Polish Christian majority.

This book will appeal to scholars with interests in memory studies, cultural studies, Holocaust studies, and psychoanalytic studies.

Tomasz Żukowski is Associate Professor of Modern Polish Literature and Culture in the Department of Contemporary Literature and Social Communication at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is the co-author of Philo- Semitic Violence: Poland’s Jewish Past in New Polish Narratives (2021), and the co-editor of The Holocaust Bystander in Polish Culture, 1942-2015: The Story of Innocence (2021).