Unburied Practices of Memory: The Holocaust and the Polish-Jewish Relations in Joanna Rudniańska’s Kotka Brygidy (2007) and XY (2012)

Abstract

In many Polish children’s books published in the last twenty years the relationship between Jews and Poles during the Holocaust is presented as an unburied theme which can be interpreted in the context of both collective and private/individual cultures of remembrance. Therefore, in this case, we deal with experiences confirmed in the cultural and written order rather than existentially faced. In contemporary Poland, a practically monoethnic and predominantly Catholic country, where the largest number of Jews killed by the Nazis lived before World War II, there is a syndrome of silence concerning the Holocaust. This paper focuses on analysing Joanna Rudniańska’s Kotka Brygidy [Brygida’s Cat] (2007) and XY (2012), two unique works in the genre of Polish Holocaust children’s fiction which combine parable, magic realism, and postmodern fairy tale. The authors argue that Rudniańska’s texts belong not only to the group of literary works known as children’s literature of atrocity or the literature of genocide for young people but also literature of testimony with its authenticity and referentiality as an element of figural realism. Analysing Rudniańska’s works, they show how she, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who did not want to talk about the traumatic war experience, not only writes about the unburied themes but also crosses genre boundaries by mixing realistic figures with stories firmly rooted in a poetic, metaphorical, and magic atmosphere with subjective and expressive narration.