If this indeed happens, Masłowska’s macabre “twist” on the canon – in her “over dead bodies, dead bodies, dead bodies” – will stand as a challenge that postmemory poses to literature and education. And then, poets will appeal in vain to open windows and air rooms88 because even nurseries will have already been infected with the virus of Auschwitz.89
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1 Dorota Masłowska’s Między nami dobrze jest (literally: Things are Good Between Us) has been translated into English by Artur Zapałowski as No Matter How Hard We Tried, or We Exist on the Best Terms we Can and published in (A)pollonia: Twenty-First Century Polish Drama and Texts for the Stage, eds. Krystyna Duniec, Joanna Klass and Joanna Krakowska (London: Seagull Books, 2014). The quotation here does not come from this translation.
2 Aleksandra Ubertowska, “Historia bez Ojca. Postmemorialne kobiece narracje o wojnie i Holokauście,” in Aleksandra Ubertowska, Holocaust: Auto(tanato)grafie (Warszawa: IBL, 2014), pp. 182–210, on p. 197. Throughout this book, quotations from non-English sources are provided in translation by the translator of this volume, if not indicated otherwise.
3 Written in 1938, “Locomotive” is an extremely popular children’s poem which set the standard of Polish poetry for children for many years. The rhythm, rhymes and onomatopoeic devices used in it perfectly capture the movement of a speeding train. The poem would later be referenced by Stanisław Wygodzki, a Polish poet of Jewish descent, who lost his wife and daughter in truly tragic circumstances (realising what was awaiting them at Auschwitz, all of them took luminal on the train from the Będzin ghetto to the camp; Wygodzki himself survived). His bitter poem “Locomotive,” which alludes to Tuwim’s popular pre-war text, is a heart-rending elegy for his lost child.
4 Masłowska (born in 1983) uses the topos of the train, one of the most popular images shaping Poland’s historical landscape. In Polish culture, the train is associated both with the Holocaust (as the Nazi “technology” of the Holocaust accorded a very special role to railways) and with the year 1968, when Polish citizens of Jewish origin were forced to leave the country. An estimated twenty thousand people emigrated from Poland then. The enforced exodus was symbolised by the Gdańsk Station in Warsaw, from which trains had been departing to the Treblinka extermination camp during the war. The train topos also features profusely in the tradition of Polish martyrdom linked to Soviet oppression. The train route to Siberia has been re-cast as a symbolic Calvary. Masłowska’s rhythmical reiteration of “dead bodies, dead bodies, dead bodies” insists that the history of Poland is founded on suffering and death.
5 See Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, IL, and London, UK: Chicago University Press, 1992).
6 Aleksandra Boroń, “Holocaust i jego reprezentacje w przestrzeni pamięci i tożsamości,” in Aleksandra Boroń, Pedagogika (p)o Holocauście. Pamięć. Tożsamość. Edukacja (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2013), p. 93.
7 Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London and New York: Verso, 2000), p. 150.
8 Finkelstein’s book provoked some quite sharp responses, for example from Alvin H. Rosenfeld. See Alvin H. Rosenfeld, “The End of the Holocaust,” in Alvin H. Rosenfeld, The End of the Holocaust (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011), pp. 238–270.
9 Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), p. 123.
10 Berel Lang, The Future of the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 175.
11 Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 37–53, on p. 37.
12 Linda Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History,” in Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, eds. Patrick O’Donnell and Robert C. Davis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 151–170.
13 Hayden White, “The Practical Past,” in The Practical Past (Flash Points), ed. Ed Dimendberg (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), pp. 3–24, on p. 19.
14 Hayden White, “Figural Realism in Witness Literature,” Parallax, Vol. 10, No. 1 (2004), pp. 113–124, on pp. 117–118. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals. DOI: 10.1080/1353464032000171145. Accessed 11 Apr. 2019.
15 Kellner, Hans, “Etyczny moment w teorii historii,” in Historia: O jeden świat za daleko, trans. and ed. Ewa Domańska (Poznań: IH UAM, 1997), pp. 71–100, on pp. 81−82.
16 See Dorota Wolska, “Doświadczenie,” in Modi memorandi. Leksykon kultury pamięci, eds. Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska and Robert Traba, in collaboration with Joanna Kalicka (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, 2014), pp. 94–99.
17 Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2008), pp. 103–128, on p. 106.
18 Małgorzata Pakier, “ ‘Postmemory’ jako figura refleksyjna w popularnym dyskursie o Zagładzie,” Kwartalnik Historii Żydów, No. 2 (2005), pp. 195–208, on p. 196.
19 See Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, “Jedwabne – historia jako fetysz.” Gazeta Wyborcza (16 Feb. 2003).
20 See James Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 3−4.
21 See Saryusz-Wolska and Traba, eds., Modi memorandi.