Precarious Muse: Holocaust Studies and Polish Jewish Studies

“What we need is a history of the Jewish people during the period of Nazi rule, in which the central role is to be played by the Jewish People, not only as the victim of a tragedy, but also as the bearer of a communal existence with all the manifold and numerous aspects involved,” argued in 1959 historian and Holocaust survivor Philip Friedman.¹ With his background as a scholar interested in the social and economic history of the Jews in Polish lands, emancipation, and local history, he now advocated for a “Judeo-centric” study of the Holocaust.² His approach echoed the practices of scholars and community activists who, already during the Holocaust, had struggled to document the individual, familial, and communal responses to the German genocidal project as part of the modern Jewish experience.³ After the war, this mission was reinstated and carried forward by survivor-scholars such as Friedman, Szymon Datner, Rachela Auerbach, Michał Borwicz, and others. Although the Jewish experience was at the center of their attention, they sought to contextualize it with questions about the role of the local population, the attitudes of neighbors, and the scope of collaboration and assistance.⁴ Polish Jewish Holocaust scholars continued these efforts under the umbrella of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and on the pages of its journals, in Polish and in Yiddish. This was a vision that—for a limited audience in Poland and abroad—integrated the Holocaust into its complex Polish local and regional settings.

Over the last three decades, however, the contribution of Holocaust scholars in Poland not only shaped the conversation about the period of the persecution and destruction, but also inspired the study of Polish Jewish history and culture. While the question of the place of the Holocaust in the field of Jewish history has not been resolved, the case of Polish Jewish studies offers us insight into the importance of drawing on Holocaust research.⁵ Indeed, Holocaust studies have contributed to revitalizing Polish Jewish studies and by extension Eastern European Jewish studies. Holocaust scholars have posed innovative questions, introduced new sources and methodologies, and questioned categories, continuities, and ruptures that Polish Jewish studies had taken for granted.

Notably, scholars studying the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland have argued for studying the Jewish victims’ experience in its own right, drawing on available personal testimonies and seeking to reconstruct victims’ voices.⁶ These scholars compellingly rejected the temptation of treating it as a pretext for discussing the deeds of the “Righteous among the Nations.”⁷ Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak offered a richly researched scholarly “guide” to the Warsaw ghetto.⁸ Other scholars, such as Dagmara Swałtek and Karolina Panz, employed a biographical method, bringing to the surface intimate lives of individual Jewish families.⁹ Thus, Polish Jews moved beyond supporting roles, taking center stage in a myriad of local studies addressing their daily lives and their communal and familial networks.¹⁰ By placing Jews in their local communities, drawing portraits of neighborly violence, such studies implicitly and explicitly called for recognizing the Holocaust as an event of critical importance in modern Polish history as well. In a recent interview, Jan T. Gross asked, “Three million citizens of the Second Polish Republic were murdered in the Holocaust. Isn’t this an unprecedented catastrophe experienced by the Polish society?”¹¹

While attentive to Jewish agency, however limited, Holocaust scholars began challenging hitherto applied categories. Anthropologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir has questioned the polar categories “Poles” and “Jews.”¹² Instead, she advocates using the categories of “Jewish” and “non-Jewish Poles” to underscore the civic identity even if the term was largely anachronistic in ethnocentric Eastern Europe.¹³ Her work on the Kielce pogrom underscored the continuity of Polish and Polish Jewish histories before, during, and after the Holocaust.¹⁴ Lukasz Krzyzanowski underlined the belonging of the survivors as a point of departure in understanding their subsequent unwelcoming in their hometowns, referring to them as “ghost citizens.”¹⁵ Most recently, sociologist Izabela Wagner made a similar argument in her biography of Zygmunt Bauman, whose life was...