Commemorating the Children of World War II in Poland: Combative Remembrance by Stańczyk Ewa (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 393 Stańczyk, Ewa. Commemorating the Children of World War II in Poland: Combative Remembrance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019, xxi + 175 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €69.54. The majority of scholarly studies focusing on children during World War Two have examined Jewish children, their agency during and after the war and the impact of Nazi policies, of the new post-war local political power holders as well as of rescue agencies, institutions and individuals on their lives. Ewa Stańczyk’s new book, Commemorating the Children of World War II in Poland: Combative Remembrance, proposes another approach that contextualizes the investigation of wartime children within contemporary public discourse regarding the commemoration of World War Two in East/ Central Europe. This is an extremely timely and significant cultural studies project for which, as expected, Stańczyk understands children as a social construct and a discursive category, focusing on how they have been made into ‘objects of commemoration’ in post-Communist Poland by both national public institutions and local grass-roots initiatives of committed individuals, especially after the country’s accession to the European Union in 2004. The starting point for her book is a monument dedicated to war children from her city of birth, Łódź, the so-called ‘Broken Heart Memorial’ erected in 1971 in the memory of ‘Christian children’ who were interned in a Nazi camp at the edge of the Łódź ghetto. This monument prompted Stańczyk to debunk the meanings of such acts of commemoration, especially the shift from the absence of Jewish children in this memorial to the post-2001 Polish policy that made ample reference to Jewish children as a valuable but controversially-used commodity. This move was a calculated gesture towards sustaining Poland’s multicultural heritage in order to promote its smooth integration into the EU; meanwhile, representations of Roma and Sinti children remained absent from such commemorative practices. For the discussion of public forms of war children commemoration, Stańczyk could no longer turn to survivors’ personal testimonies as her main source. Instead she has thoroughly scrutinized the reception and construction of war children by people who had no personal experience of World War Two, from archival and media documents, by interviewing museum staff, and from analysing the design and techniques behind memorials and murals. The book is judiciously divided into six chapters that decode the meaning of Poland’s wartime children for commemorative projects and perfectly balance a generic macro-spatial overview of Poland’s commemoration practices (in chapters one and two) with a micro-spatial analysis featured in chapters three to six, with their specific focus on Łódź, Warsaw, Majdanek and Gdańsk. There are three main arguments that make up the ‘combative remembrance’ of Poland’s wartime children which Stańczyk superbly tackles in this book. SEER, 98, 2, APRIL 2020 394 First, she demonstrates how public emotions represent important agents of change. Second, she proves that Poland’s remembrance of children is located at ‘the interplay between cultural ideas of childhood and the public/ private binary’ (p. 16). Third, what Poland’s memory-makers consider to be ethical and appropriate as to their memory of war children involves four affective stances that Stańczyk defines and explains in the last four chapters of the book. In chapter three, she discusses ‘pensive sadness’ — the default commemorative response in Poland constructed around traditional forms of solemn remembrance and thankfulness at the site of important national memorials in which the prevailing view is that of Poles as heroes and martyrs during World War Two. In chapter four, she addresses Poland’s ‘moral panic’ at the possibility of remembering war children as deprived of innocence and purity, especially in the case of child soldiers. This is also sustained by liberal humanitarian agencies that foreground the protection of children by which they are largely constructed as merely passive and dependent. In chapter five, she focuses on ‘morbid pleasure’, involving the use of dark tourism to sites of genocide perpetration for educational purposes that promote reflective stances to the Holocaust, but also show limitations following recent responses to the refugee crisis that involve a ‘compassion deficit, particularly where persons in need are concerned’ (p...