Remembering Jews in Poland: the encounter between Warsaw’s POLIN Museum and rural memories of Jewish absence – divergent aims and needs

ABSTRACT

The POLIN Museum runs a traveling exhibition (Museum on Wheels) which has visited places in rural Poland since 2014. The exhibition’s aim is to teach about ‘the centuries of coexistence of Jewish and Polish culture.’ The Holocaust is one of the elements presented but is not central. Our content and lexicometric analysis of interviews with visitors from five towns visited by MoW in 2015 and 2016 indicates that the needs articulated by visitors differed from POLIN’s agenda. We show that the Holocaust and Jewish absence in the rural Poland of the present were the most prominent topics appearing, not the continuity of Jewish life and culture. Although it was not its central aim, the three days visit of MoW has created opportunities for local communities to address the void left after the Holocaust. For our analysis, we traced the museum’s discourse on the one hand and the ‘discourse of absence’ of the visitors on the other hand on the basis of keywords. From these two sets of keywords, we quantitatively mapped the prominence of both discourse and combined it with a more qualitative content analysis of specific segments of the interviews of which our corpus is composed.

KEYWORDS:

• Collective memory
• Holocaust
• lexicometric analysis
• new museology
• Poland

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Aleksandra Kubica is a London Arts and Humanities Partnership (AHRC) funded PhD Student at King's College London. Her research explores difficult memory in Poland on a case study of POLIN Museum's Museum on Wheels.

Thomas Van de Putte is a London Arts and Humanities Partnership (AHRC) funded PhD Student at King's College London. His research explores the interactional aspects of collective memory. His case study focuses on the inhabitants of the contemporary town of Oswiecim (Auschwitz).

Notes

1. Grabowski, “The Holocaust and Poland’s”.

2. Macdonald, A Companion to Museum Studies; Simon, The Participatory Museum.

3. Anna Lindh Foundation, Museum on the History of Polish Jews, Paragraph: Museum on Wheels.

4. Biber, Conrad and Reppen, Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language; Kennedy, An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics.

5. POLIN The Building, paragraph 1.

6. The EEA and Norway Grants stand for the contribution of Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway to ‘reducing economic and social disparities and to strengthening bilateral relations with 16 EU countries in Central and Southern Europe and the Baltics’ (EEA Grants-Norway Grants, “Who We Are – EEA Grants”).

7. POLIN Museum for most of the duration of the Jewish Cultural Heritage Project employed three members of staff in the education department to work primarily on the Museum on Wheels.

8. In 2015 and 2016 the educators’ team in each town composed of two people and most often one of them was part of the permanent staff of the museum’s education department and the other person was employed from outside of the museum on project-basis.

9. Crane, The Conundrum of Ephemerality, 243.

10. Arnold-de-Simine, “Mediating Memory in the Museum”; Macdonald, ed., A Companion to Museum Studies; Simon, The Participatory Museum.

11. Crooke, “Museums and Community,” 410.

12. The map was added to the exhibition in 2016.

13. The videos from the USC Shoah Foundation archive were made available during the tour in 2015.

14. This exhibition was initially created in English in 2013 on the basis of materials gathered in an oral history project run by the POLIN Museum: ‘Righteous Poles – Recalling Forgotten History’ (POLIN, “They Risked Their Lives … ” 2014). It was founded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland and its original aim was ‘to present to the viewers from abroad the Polish Righteous Among the Nations as a unique group in the context of other European nations’ (POLIN, “They Risked Their Lives … ” 2013).

15. See: Grabowski, “The Holocaust and Poland’s”.

16. Janicka and Żukowski, Przemoc filosemicka.

17. Blobaum, Antisemitism and Its opponents; Hauman, A History of East.

18. Blobaum, Antisemitism and Its opponents, 2.

19. Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other.

20. Heller, On the Edge of Destruction.

21. Zubrzycki, “Nationalism, ‘Philosemitism’ and Symbolic,” 67.

22. Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead, 28.

23. Grabowski, Judenjagd. Polowanie na Żydów; Engelking, Jest taki piękny słoneczny.

24. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community.

25. For comprehensive discussions of Jedwabne debate see: Głowacka and Żylińska (eds), Imaginary neighbours, 2010; Polonsky and Michlic (eds), The Neighbors Respond.

26. Tokarska-Bakir, PL: tożsamość wyobrażona; Zubrzycki, “The Politics of Jewish”.

27. Gruber, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish.

28. Waligórska, Klezmer’s Afterlife. An Ethnography.

29. Kugelmass and Orla-Bukowska, “If You Build It”; Lehrer, Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage.

30. POLIN, Mission and Vision, Mission.

31. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “The Museum of the History,” 273.

32. Ibid.

33. Rosman, “Categorically Jewish, Dinstinctly Polish,” 373.

34. POLIN, Museum on Wheels, paragraphs 2 and 4.

35. Szpakowska, “O Muzeum Historii Żydow,” 574.

36. Leociak, “Zagłada w ‘Muzeum Życia’”.

37. Ibid., 585.

38. Andersson, The Grammar of Names, 3–5.

39. Rayson, Wmatrix: A Web-based Corpus.

40. Polska Agencja Prasowa, W Markowej uczczono 71., paragraphs 5 and 6.

41. Grabowski, “The Holocaust and Poland’s”.

42. Ibid., 484.

43. Falk, Identity and the Museum.

44. Falk and Dierking, The Museum Experience Revisited.

Additional information

Funding

The completion of the research for this article was supported by London Arts and Humanities Partnership (AHRC).