Abstract
As part of a relatively new notion — “queering Holocaust studies” — the article deals with the issue of nonheteronormative forms of sexuality among Polish male former concentration camp prisoners. The analysis of selected excerpts from Mieczysław Karwacki’s book Życie wśród śmierci [lit. Life among death] (1999) is conducted with the use of the queer category as well as scholarly reflection on the topic of wartime sexuality. This strategy shows how crucial transgressive themes (concerning the homo- and heterosexual experiences of the author, touching upon his physicality and masculinity) are for the book, and how the author challenges the constraining, binary division into “female” and “male” topics of concentration camp literature. A queer reading of the book by Karwacki — someone hitherto anonymous, unknown to both readers and researchers — reveals the need to split open the martyrological, heteronormative model of war memoirs and to incorporate this kind of content into concentration-camp discourse in Poland.
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