Abstract
Drawing on a wide range of commemoration practices (politicians’ and bishops’ speeches, museum exhibition, monuments, press articles, memorial ceremonies), the article examines the memorialization of rescue in Poland as a nationalist narrative of heroic victimhood, most fully realized in the state-sponsored cult of the Ulma Family. Considered for sainthood in the Catholic Church and portrayed as typical and representative, the Ulmas are appropriated for the ultraconservative, right-wing model of Polishness. The narrative of rescue framed as Christian martyrdom imbues Polish death with symbolic significance denied to Jews, and establishes Poles as victims of the highest order. This, the article argues, constitutes a return to a decades-old competition of suffering, a memory mode capable exclusively of mourning its own, ethnically defined victims.
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