SLAVIC 171 – The Holocaust in Polish Memory and Culture

SLAVIC 171 – The Holocaust in Polish Memory and Culture

Semester: Spring
Offered: 2024
Instructor: Aleksandra Kremer
Meeting Time: W 3:00pm – 5:00pm

Hitler’s plan to destroy European Jewry was carried out by the Nazis mostly on the territory of occupied Poland, where three million Jews had lived before World War II. The Poles’ position has often been described as that of bystanders; nevertheless, Polish behavior also encompassed more direct involvement—whether complicity and murder, or attempts at rescuing Jews. How is this time remembered in Poland? How is it represented in Polish and Polish-Jewish literary texts? What is the relation between the Holocaust memory and Polish wartime history? What do we know about German and Soviet occupations of the country? How was the memory of the Holocaust and World War II shaped and used by communist Poland? What happens to this memory today? We will look for answers in different short stories, novels, poems, memoirs, and films created between the 1940s and the present day, and confront them with recent scholarship.

Course Notes: All readings in English. Students who wish to read Polish texts in the original may arrange a special section with the instructor.

For more details please visit the Harvard Course Catalog.