A Tale of a Former Shtetl. The Memory of Jews and the Holocaust in Poland

Abstract

Michael Steinlauf has convincingly argued that the Poles had ‘Polonised’ the Holocaust during the post-war years by emphasising their own suffering during the war.1 Auschwitz became a symbol of Polish martyrdom and until recently the majority of Poles believed that Auschwitz was first and foremost a place where Poles had been killed. Yet another researcher, Jan Gross, even claimed that the victims of the Holocaust had never been mourned in Poland.2 Was he right? Unfortunately, we know comparatively little about how the Jews and the Holocaust have been remembered in the multitude of Polish small towns — called ‘shtetl’ by the Jews — which had lost their Jewish population during the war.3 This chapter attempts to illuminate this issue by analysing the memory of Jews and the Holocaust in Szydlowiec, a former Jewish small town in central Poland. This choice is largely motivated by the fact that I grew up there. This has enabled me to collect and verify considerable material.4