Forgotten? Holocaust Monuments and Jewish Activism in 1960s Poland

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ABSTRACT The present paper focuses on the early 1960s and spotlights efforts to commemorate the Holocaust in south-eastern Poland. Members of the religious Congregation and the lay Social-Cultural Association of Polish Jews as well as transnational activists, created a network of memorials. Encompassing local sites of killings, those small-scale memorials challenged the Communist authorities’ programme of commemoration. They marked villages, towns and cities with reference to Jewish suffering. They highlighted victims’ identity and used Jewish symbols and bilingual inscriptions to narrate the genocide. In so doing, they have successfully prevented the memory of the Holocaust from disappearing.