Ewa Stańczyk examines how children’s experiences of World War II are present in commemorative practices in post-1989 Poland. Particular emphasis is placed on the period following the country's accession to the European Union in 2004, but the author also looks back to the Polish People’s Republic. The book is based on ethnographic fieldwork, archival sources and media analysis, interviews with various stakeholders involved in commemorative practices (artists, museum staff, educators, activists), and analyses of monuments, exhibitions, comic books, films, literature, and many more. The author’s aim is to “explore the intersection of childhood, war, national identity, and emotions and investigate how children are made into objects of commemoration” (p. VIII). She does so by focusing on emotional responses to contemporary representations of “war children”, including child victims, survivors, children who witnessed various forms of war violence, and those who were active agents of struggle.
Stańczyk’s work can be situated at the intersection of several fields, including memory studies and childhood studies. The author understands “childhood” as a cultural construct that shapes a unified perception of different experiences. Stańczyk attentively follows its manifestations in memory culture, but inspiringly, also shows how particular commemorative practices deprive children of their agency. Fixed ways of perceiving children meet with memory clichés of war experience and history. Thus, a canon of “proper” remembrance is formed, defining attitudes, images, words, and emotions that seem appropriate and reveal prevalent cultural patterns.
“Combative remembrance”, a concept announced in the sub-title of the book, is defined here primarily in terms of emotions. The term is not quite what Michael Rothberg calls “competitive memories”1 – rival versions of the past that cannot tolerate each other in the public sphere – although this perspective is necessarily present in Stańczyk’s argument. Her focus is rather on the inherent tendency of Polish memory culture to induce emotions that “antagonize, unsettle, sadden and upset” (p. 15), and the ways in which children are remembered seem an excellent field to observe this, because the feelings triggered here are particularly intense. Although an analytical approach examining affects and emotions has already been established in Polish memory studies2, the author’s focus on war children forms a new perspective.
The core of Stańczyk’s argument is based on distinguishing four different types of emotions that emerge from remembrance activities. Separate chapters are devoted to each and explore them with reference to illustrative case studies. This way of presentation makes the concept of the book transparent but may also hinder readers in recognizing relations between these emotions.
“Pensive sadness”, the first of the four types, can be seen as a default, traditional, “correct” emotional response to the tragic past, characterized as formal, solemn, “unconditional reverence” (p. 64), leaving little space for individual initiative. Commemoration of children’s war suffering in Łódź, which dates back to the Polish People’s Republic, serves as an example of this attitude. Its development since, however, reveals a certain flexibility of “pensive sadness”: it is the only one among the affects discussed that does not preclude pluralized memory forms and can show its “many faces” (p. 71).
“Moral panic” is illustrated by the example of child soldiers of the Warsaw Uprising (1944). The commemoration of these children provokes opposing opinions among Polish audiences: while some place them in the context of Polish heroism and national martyrdom, others perceive their experience solely through the lens of contemporary human (and child) rights discourse, thus positioning them exclusively as victims of adults’ decisions. The author focuses on the latter, who are analyzed in a slightly provocative way as those who “morally panic”. With the Warsaw Uprising as a dominant lieu de mémoire in contemporary Polish culture, which triggers a wide range of positive and negative emotions, Stańczyk’s argument seems selective here because she addresses its commemoration only through this lens. Those who want to understand better its dominant position in contemporary memory politics may be disappointed. Still, it supports her general aim to show her four identified emotions in action.
The third emotion, “morbid pleasure” in its “serious guise” (p. 105), is defined by “the sense of pride and self-righteousness that comes from learning about the past” (p. 105) when it induces “pleasure of being able to see oneself as part of an open-minded civilized society that has moved past atrocity” (p. 106). It can be a response to – or a side effect of – state-of-the-art education practices in former death camps (specifically, the exhibition of the Majdanek museum is painstakingly analyzed here). Following Stańczyk, satisfaction (and self-satisfaction) is a natural part of learning but can also move attention from the victims to one’s own empathy and moral superiority. This problematic response seems exceptionally difficult to avoid. It would have been interesting to know what particular aspect – if any – of the very structure or design of the Majdanek exhibition makes it prone to such reactions, but the author remains rather vague here.
The chapter about “jingoistic rage” focuses on a Kindertransport monument in Gdańsk, which was protested by a group of locals. The story shows how the commemoration of children is used to express antagonistic political views concerning the past and the present of the nation. Childhood is of secondary importance here. The monument is both defended and resisted due to the fact that it marks the plurality of memories, the multi-national past of the city, and the “Europeanization” of memory.3 Stańczyk uses this example to present her acute description of the functions Jewish remembrance fulfills in Poland. Giving a thought-provoking analysis of the dynamics of nationalistic affects, she goes much further here than the usual diagnosis of anti-Semitism, placing the latter in the context of social divisions and distinctive practices of liberal elites.
Surprisingly, one component of childhood war experience seems virtually absent in Stańczyk’s argument: sexual abuse. This fact is coherent with the general suppression of the topic in Polish memory culture concerning World War II, but still poignant testimonies of such situations appear and sometimes are available to the wider public4, and these experiences also mark children’s war trajectories, along with the “migration, imprisonment, loss, death, separation from families and armed struggle” (p. 22) aptly described by the author.
Ewa Stańczyk’s book can be read as a general introduction to present-day Polish culture, skillfully sketching recent trends and tensions. In this view, Polish remembrance becomes a touchstone of the contemporary cultural processes of the post-communist state, and the author’s informative accounts of contemporary Polish debates support this possible reading. At the same time, Stańczyk’s expert diagnosis of memory culture, rooted in observations of local projects, discussions, and activities, naturally provokes questions concerning memory activism. What should be postulated as an adequate emotional response to a tragic past? All four emotions discussed prove at least ambivalent, if not detrimental, for the “well-being” of memory cultures and remembering subjects. The emotions’ evaluation rests on support for pluralization of memories and anti-nationalism, which is a common view among memory scholars, but this general agreement, justified as it is, rarely provides tools to reach out to remembering communities and process radicalized emotions like these analyzed by Stańczyk. Her book offers many examples of good intentions backfiring, of backlashes to memory changes, and only a few instances of overcoming pensive sadness, moral panic, morbid pleasure, or jingoistic rage.
Notes:
1 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford 2009, pp. 1–21.
2 See for instance: Zofia Budrewicz / Ryszard Nycz / Roma Sendyka (eds.), Pamięć i afekty, Warszawa 2014.
3 Marek Kucia, The Europeanization of Holocaust Memory and Eastern Europe, in: East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures 30/1(2016), pp. 97–119.
4 For instance, Anna Bikont included painful stories of Jewish children continuously abused by their keepers in her biography of Irena Sendlerowa. Anna Bikont, Sendlerowa. W ukryciu, Wołowiec 2017.