6.2. After 1945, After 1989: Reconstructing Lives and Memories

The memory of Soviet deportations of the Baltic States has received attention within the field of memory studies only recently. Scholars such as Tea Sindbæk Andersen, Barbara Törnquist Plewa (2016), Tomas Balkelis (2018) and many others have extensively contributed to discussing the socio cultural and political processes and movements that have shaped the remembering of the deportations. Yet, there is still a gap within popular culture that extends the same discussion and representation on the history and remembering of the Baltic deportations. Ruta Sepetys’s Between Shades of Gray contributes to anglophone popular memory culture by bringing this historical event to a mainstream young adult representation. She attempts to bring to the forefront representations of historical events that have been neglected or, in her words, ‘lost’. However, this paper seeks to unpack the novel’s homogenous and potentially nationalist memory-making. While Violeta Davoliūtė (2015, 2016) has pointed towards the heterogeneous, subjective experiences of deportees who were not ethnic Lithuanians, the novel lacks this heterogeneity. Instead, it restricts empathetic identification towards certain characters, who are not ethnic Lithuanians, by depicting them as unlikable, although they also experience dehumanisation and are often doubly marginalised under the Soviet regime. This paper then seeks to examine how the novel limits readerly empathy through its young adult narrator character, towards 1) Mr Stalas, an elderly Jewish Lithuanian deportee and 2) Ulyushka, who is described as an Altaian woman. By not recognising the trauma and extent of vulnerabilities experienced by Mr Stalas, and by adopting vocabularies towards Ulyushka that are both infantilising and dehumanising, the novel disregards their subjective experiences. Thus, even as it contributes to remembering Lithuanian deportations, its contribution is seeped with certain prejudices towards those who are not ethnic Lithuanians, thus either ‘forgetting’ their experiences or remembering them through a prejudiced lens.

On November, 1989, Berlin Wall collapsed and communist regimes in Europe began to democratize. In late 1991, finally, Soviet Union disappeared. The end of communism had a profound systemic impact elsewhere, including Italy, where the disappearance of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the largest communist party west of the Balkans, and the emergence of a new leftist formation took place. Italian scholarship has mainly focused on the public memory of the PCI’s demise as portrayed by leaders. However, for millions of militants, these events triggered a profound sense of loss given the dissolution of the “markers of certainty” that had anchored their identities and political lives. This paper explores how grassroots militants experienced the transformative transition from communism to post communism from an existential perspective. What did they feel as they lived through the crisis of their political home? How did they react to the loss of old ideals and culture? How was their identity reshaped? Is there, in their memories, any symptom of a search for the lost community? Building upon the concepts of liminality and social drama, introduced by Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner and brought into social sciences and history by Arpad Szakolczai, Harald Wydra, Bjørn Thomassen, and Rosario Forlenza, and using militants’ personal narratives, this paper argues that the transition toward a new political community was never accomplished and remained open. Working on letters and diaries, this paper shows how the end of Italian communism transmogrified into the symbolic closure of the horizons of expectation, exposing the party’s body politic to what Italian ethnographer Ernesto De Martino would conceptualize as “crisis of presence”. Stripped of their community and meaningful symbols, militants experienced a trauma of separation from previous forms of political life, which hindered their capacity to compete with emerging liberal progressive and populist ideologies.

This paper develops a comparative framework for tracing how Polish theatre navigates history, memory, trauma, and performativity across different political, aesthetic, and affective contexts. Building on Marvin Carlson's "memory machine" concept and Grzegorz Niziołek's critique, it explores how Tadeusz Kantor, Tadeusz Słobodzianek, and Krzysztof Warlikowski develop distinct models for performing memory regarding the Holocaust and its aftermath, with distinct affective goals in mind. Kantor's Theatre of Death represents a post-avant-garde synthesis of art, memory, and mourning. Its initial production, The Dead Class (1977), dramatizes "cultural haunting," merging personal, cultural, and national memory within a myth of eternal return, and evoking the Polish tradition of the "theatre of the dead". This approach transforms memory into an autonomous artistic subject, foregrounding the aesthetic distance and formality of the somnambulic resurrections over immediate empathy, while having a profound emotional impact on the audience. Słobodzianek transforms the theatrical encounter into an emotionally charged ethical confrontation. His play, Our Class (2008), takes a stance in the debates about the Jedwabne massacre, dramatizing the tensions between individual and collective morality, remembrance, and denial. Using the classroom setting as an allegory for Poland's postcommunist historical revisionism and reckoning with its past, he performs a moralistic interrogation. He shocks the audience into confronting individual and collective responsibility for the past. Warlikowski shifts the focus toward postdramatic recontextualization and transnational memory. His (A)pollonia (2009) remixes Western cultural mythologies and Polish traumatic biographies to interrogate the ambiguities of gendered sacrificial gestures, reluctant guilt, and unpredictable empathy. Staged on Europe's "festival circuits," his performances articulate Polish memory within a shared continental anxiety over the recurring ghosts of history. The three evolving models transform memory into a dynamic, performative process comprised of poetics, context, and affect, mediating between the living and the dead, the national and the global, and

This paper presents and conceptualizes the findings on Polish-Jewish cultural memory derived from over 80 original, in-depth interviews conducted mostly in Poland in 2023. The interviewees comprised Jewish and non-Jewish Poles across three generations. I will first present a general map of my findings, structured around established theoretical notions (e.g., implication, absence/loss, intersectionality, trauma) alongside original conceptual frameworks developed for this research (e.g., disorientation, weak memory, conflation). The general picture that emerges is one of intense affect, profound complexity, and enduring historical legacies. One of these legacies stems from the Communist period’s politics of state-imposed erasure/obfuscation of Jewish presence in Poland’s public sphere, particularly following the 1968 anti-Semitic campaign. Middle-aged and young interviewees admitted to their lack of knowledge regarding what happened during the Communist period with “things Polish-Jewish,” doing so with a sense of shame. While they had no tool to approach these events, they possessed the vocabulary of the Holocaust, which—in addition to their understanding of it as a singular historical event—also became a placeholder for the un-worked-through cultural and political phenomena of the Communist era. This projection of the Holocaust onto the anti-Semitic politics of the Communist government is prevalent in Poland. Serving as my example will be the 50th anniversary of the 1968 anti-Semitic campaign; I will contend that even these rich commemorations lacked appropriate tools to unpack the convoluted mechanisms of Communist anti-Semitism. I will conclude my analysis with a short overview of theatrical plays explicitly written for the commemorations. This will show how the anti-Semitism of the campaign is persistently read through the established lenses of the Holocaust rather than the much-needed framework to assess Communist ideological and political practices.

In my research on Polish children born of the war, which I have been conducting for several years, I have encountered both individual stories and the stories of entire families. These are often narratives that have been hidden for decades—family secrets: children born out of wedlock, unknown fathers, abandonments, adoptions, and other difficult experiences. Recently, I have been approached by people born to Polish female forced laborers and displaced persons (DPs) between 1940 and 1947, whose fathers were either employers (e.g., farmers), camp guards, Wehrmacht soldiers, or, later, foreign Allied soldiers. Some of these children came to post-war Poland with their biological mothers, while others were abandoned by them in Germany or Austria, later brought to Poland by the communist authorities, or adopted in Germany, Austria, or even internationally, including in the United States. Today, they see this as their last chance to learn about their roots and are determined to tell their stories. I learn about the fates of others through dispersed archives. For researchers, these are often challenging encounters that demand sensitivity, empathy, and patience, as well as careful judgment about what can and cannot be said so as not to harm the suffering interviewees. Finally, there is the important question of how to disseminate the knowledge gained in this way – how to share it with others. How can we critically analyze the stories we hear and the documents we find in a way that does not cause harm? The position of the researcher appears particularly fragile here, and there are no clear guidelines, at least for historians, on how to proceed in such difficult situations, including how to manage one’s own emotions. This paper outlines several ideas that could be incorporated into the training of historians working with silenced and/or contested histories.