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187 Chapter 10 On the Ruins of Memory in Miron Białoszewski’s A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising Jeannine M. Pitas Memory is a form of fiction. Very often, it is a projection of present-day desires and beliefs about the past. At times, this type of fiction is created deliberately: perhaps recollecting the past in its full intensity would be too painful for the one remembering, or perhaps too many of the details have been forgotten. Even those who consciously strive to resist this fictionalizing process most often find, however, that they cannot do so. Looking at twentieth-century Polish writer Miron Białoszewski’s A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, we see an attempt, or perhaps a compulsion, to remember the event as accurately as possible: to capture every detail, every feeling, and to immerse the reader fully into the experience as the author lived it. And yet Białoszewski himself admits that this kind of perfect, “authentic” remembrance is not possible. As Madeline Levine, who translated the Polish poet’s memoir into English, comments in her introduction to the text, The Tolstoyan rejection of the overview in favour of the distancing achieved through individual observation assumes the integrity of the individual observer . Białoszewski undermines even this premise by questioning the validity of his own perceptions and recollections. Memory is not a simple process, and he is careful to insist repeatedly on the shakiness of his recollections. Indeed, Białoszewski is obsessed with the problems of remembering: the difficulty of fixing an event in time, the inevitable fusing of distinct memories into a single image; or, conversely, the fragmenting of a single image into several disjointed images; the near impossibility of freeing one’s personal recollections from accepted interpretations and the numerous literary and cinematic depictions of a celebrated event. (1991, 16) Chapter 10 188 My intention in this essay is to examine some of the ways memory functions in Białoszewski’s memoir and to speculate on their significance. After giving a brief historical introduction to the Warsaw Uprising, I seek to show the ways it was later adopted into Poland’s collective memory as a sort of grand narrative of the national myth. I then suggest that Białoszewski’s narrative, which was very controversial when originally published in Poland , poses a challenge to that myth. Instead of deifying (and reifying) the historical event, it seeks to reveal it as exhaustively and accurately as possible . The situation still is not this simple, however, for we soon see that this attempt at honest remembrance becomes quite difficult for Białoszewski. Time, space, and even personal identity become shapeless and fused in a constantly changing realm of destruction and creation. Some memories inevitably get buried under the rubble. Under these traumatic circumstances, the attempt to remember becomes as much an uncontrollable, even compulsive , process driven by the need for healing as it is a conscious strategy of resistance against totalizing, reifying metanarratives that would seek to use the past instrumentally in pursuit of current political aims. I suggest that Białoszewski’s narrative is both of these at once, ultimately standing as both a war memorial and a ruin. It is a memorial because on the one hand, it has been purposefully created in the aftermath of a tragic event with the intention of preserving the memory of lives lost. On the other hand, it is a ruin, the fragmented remains of an experience scooped up from the rubble. Białoszewski has written about his memories of the event in the most honest way he can. Paradoxically, by recognizing the elusive nature of memory and the impossibility of telling the full, veritable story of the Warsaw Uprising as he lived it, Białoszewski manages to produce a deeply authentic account of this event. Making a Myth: The Commemoration of the Warsaw Uprising The Warsaw Uprising began on August 1, 1944, at a crucial stage of the Second World War. By this time the Nazis were significantly weakened; the Allies had gained air supremacy, and Soviet forces, who were marching toward Germany from the East, had almost reached Warsaw. At this point, the Polish underground “Armja Krajowa” (Home Army) decided to start a rebellion in Warsaw against the occupying Nazi forces. Their primary goal was to secure Poland’s independence and to try to prevent it from being subjected to a Communist regime after the war (Ensink 2003b, 12). Having already witnessed the failed uprising in the...

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