Review by Choice Review
When the Nazis decided to build their death camps in Poland, they correctly calculated that the Poles would sympathize with their intent to rid Europe of its Jews. In fact, the Poles themselves killed some of the few who managed to survive, most notoriously at Kielce in 1946. The subject of this book is how postwar Poland has dealt with that history. Its author is a young sociologist of Polish and partly Jewish background, whose own observations in contemporary Poland and undisguised opinions mingle here with conclusions drawn from the work of others. Irwin-Zarecka finds that initially, the Poles made every effort to cover up the special fate of Polish Jewry during the war. Then gradually they began to create a memory, first by making the Jews part of Polish history--but only as Poles--and very slowly by evoking the memory of a separate Jewish existence within Poland. This "memory work," as the author calls it, has been controversial and remains incomplete. She warns against the tendency to allow memory to be "neutralized," and hence made innocuous. Although the book might have been more tightly written and the author's advocacy more subdued, the work (which has no predecessor in English) is important not only for what it says about contemporary Poland, but also for its broader thinking about confronting divisive and morally charged historical memories. College, university, and public libraries. -M. A. Meyer, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (OH)
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
