Remembering the Polish-Jewish Past a Decade after the Collapse of Communism

This thesis analyses the reconstruction of the remembering of Polish-Jewish relations from the Second World War after the fall of the Communist regime in Poland in 1989. Although the Jewish minority in Poland presently accounts for about 7,000 - 15,000 people, the perception of the common past still plays a decisive role in the shaping of Polish identity. Public assessment of Polish-Jewish relations is closely intertwined with public debates concerning national values and what constitutes Polish cultural traditions. Is it pluralism, openness and tolerance, or are xenophobia, parochialism and narrow-mindedness the salient traits of Polish national consciousness? How far does Catholic identity merge with Polish national identity? How important to Poles is their heroic and martyrological vision of the past? Answers to these questions are seen as indications of how a new post-Communist identity is being constructed. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the extent of the revision of the Polish-Jewish past, explore fully the complexity of the driving forces behind the process and to analyse the main characteristics of this remembering in the context of Poland's ambition to join the European Union and to strengthen the country's position in NATO. Finally, the thesis investigates the impact of this re-gained "memory" on the Poles' perception of the Second World War. In order to answer these questions the thesis compares and contrasts the two most significant debates generated on Polish-Jewish relations in postwar Poland. The first debate occurred in Communist Poland in 1985 and was provoked by Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah. The second debate occurred in 2001 in a free, democratic country and was generated by the book Neighbors by Jan Tomasz Gross. The overall findings of the thesis are that official remembering of Polish-Jewish relations has changed considerably since the fall of the Communist regime in Poland and that the country's intellectual and cultural elites have moved towards a more critical approach to Poland's past. At the same time the thesis establishes that the Polish-Jewish past is usually remembered in Poland as long as it has any use for the memory of the suffering experienced by Poles during the Second World War. However, the thesis exposes the existence of an authentic (not generated by or emanating from governing elites) local remembrance of Polish-Jewish relations, which occurs in small communities within Poland, when remembering their own particular collective past.