Holocaust as horror. A few remarkson Polish literature 1985–2015

Abstract

The author suggests that the depictions of the Holocaust in Polish literature of 1989–2015 shouldbe categorized as horror. From the chronological perspective, Czapliński divides those thirty yearsinto three shorter periods: 1) the initial period (from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Jan Błoński’sessay “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto” to the end of 20th century) was dominated by white horror,which presented Jews as ghosts demanding a place in the Polish memory; 2) during the secondperiod (from Marek Bieńczyk’s Tworki and Jan Tomasz Gross’ Neighbors until the end of the 2010s)the horror poetics was used to reveal those principles of pre-war and occupation-period normalitywhich helped the Germans conduct the Holocaust and which conditioned the exclusion of Jewsfrom the Polish circle of ‘normal humanity’; 3) during the third period (from Gross’s Golden Harvestuntil the end of the second decade) Jews return as the undead, violating the rules of distanceand obliging Poles to physically touch the disgusting matter of the Holocaust. The contact with theHolocaust as something abhorring becomes a condition for collective self-knowledge, purging,and establishment of a new imaginary community.