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ABSTRACT
There are three important phenomena in the lyrics of popular Polish songs about the Holocaust. Firstly, there is local resistance to the conflation of the town of Oświęcim with the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Secondly, the memory of the Jedwabne pogrom is used as a yardstick for contemporary societal evils and to comment upon the chasm between conservative and liberal segments in Polish society. Thirdly, the Catholic pro-life movement juxtaposes abortion and the Holocaust. These songs were released after the publication of Jan T. Gross’s Neighbors (2000) but there is a disparity in how the genocidal past is treated.
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Notes
1 Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust.
2 Williams, ‘Feel the Knife’; Dyck, Reichsrock; Love, Trendy Fascism; Stratton, ‘Jews, Punk and the Holocaust’; Boswell, Holocaust Impiety.
3 Barańczak, Odbiorca ubezwłasnowolniony, 308.
4 Popular music is understood here very broadly and is not to be confused with pop as its subgenre. See Starr, Waterman, American Popular Music.
5 The symbolic sphere in Poland is overdetermined by Catholic symbols, founding and reinforcing Polish nationalism Waligórska, ‘On the Genealogy’.
6 Each of these songs have had their share of success. If a need arises to compare how they fared on YouTube, the number of views is given in the bibliography.
7 Žižek, Looking Awry.
8 Budryte, ‘Decolonization of Trauma’.
9 Mazierska, ‘Introduction: Popular Music’.
10 Wolski, ‘Akademicki kolonializm’.
11 Gross, Neighbors.
12 Hackmann, ‘Defending the “Good Name”’.
13 Ibid., 604.
14 Ibid.
15 Kotwas and Kubik, ‘Symbolic Thickening’.
16 Kończal, ‘The Invention of the “Cursed Soldiers”’. A premeditated strategy of downplaying or ignoring violence by these partisans against ethnic minorities, including Jewish Holocaust survivors, shows that its proponents value historical populism over historical truth (76).
17 Sławomir Kapralski, ‘The Holocaust: Commemorated’, 55-56.
18 Ibid., 56.
19 Ibid., 58.
20 Ibid., 59-60.
21 Michlic, ‘Remembering to Remember’.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Tokarska-Bakir, ‘Obsesja niewinności’.
27 Olick, The Politics of Regret.
28 This name was adopted in 2006 (during the first ‘Prawo i Sprawiedliwość’ government) and UNESCO was notified to reflect this change.
29 Dauksza, ‘Doświadczenie bez nazwy’, 234-235.
30 Ibid., 241-242.
31 Ibid., 243.
32 Ibid., 244.
33 Janusz A. Majcherek quoted by Duda, ‘Auschwitz kontra Oświęcim’, 19.
34 Ibid., 25.
35 Until recently, the ‘stop snitching’ slogan (forbidding co-operation with the police) had been a core principle of hip-hop culture. Smiley, ‘From Silence to Propagation’.
36 All translations are mine.
37 Wójciuk, ‘Ekspresywność języka’.
38 Ibid., 74.
39 Ibid., 77.
40 Riley, ‘The Rebirth of Tragedy’, 305-307.
41 Roman, ‘Popkultura jako medium pamięci’, 235.
42 Majewski, ‘African-American Music’.
43 Rawecki, ‘Niechciany Auschwitz’.
44 Ibid., 86.
45 Charlesworth et al., ‘“Out of Place” in Auschwitz?’, 169.
46 Kącki, Oświęcim.
47 Ibid., 235-236.
48 Ibid., 52-54.
49 Ibid., 314-319.
50 Forecki, Spór o Jedwabne; Dobrosielski, Spory o Grossa; Forecki, Po Jedwabnem.
51 Elliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 436.
52 Czesław Niemen held the mantle of an innovator and was one of the most popular artists in the Polish People's Republic. There has been a recent resurgence of interest in his music, elucidating a shift from his ‘self-colonization’ with Western pop to a decision to become a quintessentially Polish artist. Gradowski, ‘Success, Failure, Splendid Isolation’. On ambiguities in his career, see Mazierska, ‘Czesław Niemen’.
53 This connection had been made by commenters on YouTube only to be picked up by Holocaust scholars e.g. Kowalska-Leder, ‘Wstęp’, 7 and Dobrosielski, ‘Stodoła’, 365.
54 The average rating for this album on Empik.com – the largest Polish online music store and bookstore – is proof that Peszek's art riles many people. Out of 1147 ratings, 132 are five star ones while 987 people gave it the lowest, one star score. https://www.empik.com/karabin-peszek-maria,p1120108315,muzyka-p, accessed September 8, 2020.
55 ‘ZOMO’ refers here to the riot squads of ‘Milicja Obywatelska’ (Citizen Militia), remembered for their violent dispersion of peaceful strikes and other mass gatherings in the 1980s. Subsequently, ‘ZOMO’ became a symbol of state brutality.
56 Peszek prefers an adjective ‘oświęcimski’ to the proper noun ‘Auschwitz’.
57 Paweł Dobrosielski argues that ‘barns’ had not connoted the Holocaust until the publication of Neighbors. Subsequently, this noun attained a semantic ambivalence: its traditional meaning relating to the harvest, hiding illegal objects, giving shelter, providing intimacy, and making love, was expanded to encompass more sinister deeds. Jews seeking shelter in the countryside frequently found refuge in barns. Dobrosielski, ‘Stodoła’, 375-376.
58 The role of the intelligentsia in propagating anti-Semitism among the rural masses is assessed by Chmielewska, ‘The Intelligentsia’.
59 It suffices to mention a pioneering archive of oral histories gathered in the 1970s and 1980s by Dionizjusz Czubala, showing patterns of Holocaust memory among peasants in the Kielce region (Grochowski, 2019), as well as a much needed interpretation of similar accounts (Koprowska, Citation2018).
60 For an assessment of Betlejewski's reparative agenda, see Łysak, ‘Artistic Interventions’, 177-181.
61 Gross, ‘Eastern Europe's Crisis’.
62 Criminal proceedings were eventually dropped in November 2019.
63 ‘Jan T. Gross: Obecny stosunek Polaków’.
64 Czajkowska, ‘O dopuszczalności przerywania ciąży’, 136.
65 Ibid., 154.
66 On October 22, 2020, the Constitutional Court ruled that the third reason was unconstitutional, practically making abortion illegal in Poland. This decision sparked wide-ranging protests, including locations heretofore associated with the ‘Prawo i Sprawiedliwość’ electoral landslide victories.
67 These disturbing images are to create ‘a visceral sense in the viewer that abortion raises serious moral issues’. Colb and Dorf, Beating Hearts, 150.
68 Borkowska-Kniołek, ‘Polska racja stanu’, 93.
69 Jan Paweł II, Pamięć i tożsamość, 20.
70 Stelmasiak, Twitter post. The late Pope provides a genealogy of abortion: the brutality of modern warfare including the attacks on civilians such as carpet bombing (and the atom bomb), concentration camps, mass deportations and culminating in genocidal crimes against Jews, Roma and Sinti. Kornecki, ‘Ochrona życia człowieka’, 76-77.
71 Maciąg, Społeczne znaczenia aborcji, 68.
72 Adamczyk-Garbowska and Duda, ‘Terminy Holokaust, Zagłada’, 243.
73 Trzaskowski and Wysocka, Narracje o narodowcach, 174.
74 Ibid., 176.
75 The Pope mentions this film in his sermon in Radom, however, neither the title nor the director's name are given.
76 Jurkowska, ‘Odczłowieczenie’.
77 In principle, the pro-life movement in Poland targets the official, very low number of legal terminations (ca. 1000 annually), without touching upon a much larger number of abortions performed clandestinely or in neighboring countries.
78 Domańska, Medialny obraz Czarnego protestu.
79 Kim, ‘Moral Extensionism’, 312.
80 Ibid., 326.
81 Moberg, Christian Metal, 48, 61.
82 Ibid., 131. Luhr, ‘Metal Missionaries’.
83 Inasmuch as Houk is not a Chrtistian metal band per se, it reiterates the gender tropes of this genre's discussion of abortion. Rademacher, ‘Men of iron will’, 642.
84 John Paul II coined this phrase to denounce the modern approach to life, lumping together abortion, euthanasia, murder, genocide, contraception and in vitro fertilization.
85 Luxtorpeda's spreading of the Catholic worldview is favorably reviewed by a Catholic priest, a then doctoral student of theology at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin. Kuciński, ‘Duchowość w “poezji krzyczanej”’.
86 Global Life Campaign estimates this number for the period 1921-2015. Maciąg, p. 60.
87 The capitalized word ‘Zagłada’ refers to the Holocaust.
88 Since there are a few different spellings, the word has not been properly assimilated: ‘shoah’, ‘Shoah’, ‘Szoa’ (correct transliteration from Hebrew), and ‘Szoah’ (as listed by Słownik Języka Polskiego, https://sjp.pl/Szoa accessed September 24, 2020).
89 Seeing the fetus as the victim is a well-known trope in the pro-life movement. Hughes, ‘Burning Birth Certificates’, 554.
90 This aesthetic was a trademark of the Los Angeles band Rage Against the Machine and was put to a leftist political use. Green, ‘Rage Against The Machine’. Luxtorpeda acknowledges RATM as their source of musical inspiration, making no reference to the disparity in their political views. Królikowski, ‘Po prostu spontanicznie’, 18. In fact, RATM have left no doubt that they stand on the pro-choice side of the barricade.
91 For the political angle of heavy metal, see Scott, ‘Heavy Metal’.
92 Showing ultrasounds to women contemplating abortion is expected to lead to ‘a change of heart’ or future remorse. Colb and Dorf, Beating Hearts, 156.
93 Stein, Shameless, 129.
94 Ibid., 130.
95 Leociak, Młyny boże, 184-185.
96 Szczuka, Milczenie owieczek, 248.
97 Leociak, Młyny boże, 188.
98 Napiórkowski, Turbopatriotyzm.
99 Ibid.
100 Pirker, Kramer, Lichtenwagner, ‘Transnational Memory Spaces’, 440.
101 Memory and rhetoric are deeply interrelated as memories are informed and ‘disseminated’ by rhetorical means but also ‘rhetorical gestures’ are rooted in ‘collective, cultural rememberence’. Phillips, Reyes, ‘Introduction’, 1.
102 Ibid., 11.
103 Ibid., 13.
104 Ibid., 15-16.
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Notes on contributors
Tomasz Łysak
Tomasz Łysak, Associate Professor at the University of Warsaw. His work focuses on representations of the Holocaust in relation to trauma studies and psychoanalysis. He has held fellowships at the University of Washington, Seattle, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Chicago. He has been awarded a research grant from the National Science Center: ‘From Newsreel to Post-Traumatic Film: Documentary and Artistic Films on the Holocaust’ (2013-2015). He has edited Antologia studiów nad traumą (Trauma studies anthology 2015) and is the author of Od kroniki do filmu posttraumatycznego – filmy dokumentalne o Zagładzie (2016) which was awarded as the best debut book in cinema and media studies by the Polish Association for Studies of Film and the Media.