The transnational dynamics of local remembrance: The Jewish past in a former shtetl in Poland

Szydłowiec—revisiting the location of a former case study

The town of Szydłowiec, which I have chosen to hone in on in this study, is not exceptional. Rather, it is one example of the still underexplored memory culture of small Eastern European towns that prior to the Holocaust had large Jewish populations and were called “shtetls.” ² Before the Second World War, Szydłowiec had about 11,000 inhabitants, of whom 75% were Polish Jews. Almost all of them were killed in Treblinka, after which the town was repopulated by ethnic Poles. In the years 2002–2004, as part of a broader study of Holocaust remembrance in Europe, ³ I conducted field studies in the town, investigating how the local population dealt with the memory of the perished Others. My choice of precisely this former shtetl was motivated by the fact that I was born and grew up there. This facilitated collecting data of a sensitive nature and verifying it using my own previous knowledge of the place. To be brought up in a certain culture and environment can, with some reservations, be seen as a kind of extended participant observation. ⁴ At the same time, the risk of home blindness that can be associated with researchers doing fieldwork in their home environment has, in my case, been counteracted by the fact that I left the town at the age of 18 and have lived most of my life outside Poland. Thus, in relation to the people in Szydłowiec I am both an “insider” and “outsider.” ⁵

The research I conducted at that time (Törnquist-Plewa, 2006, 2007) showed that the Jewish past of Szydłowiec had, until the end of the 1990s, been to a large extent suppressed by its Polish inhabitants. Street names referring to Jewish life—Rabbi Street or Synagogue Street—had been changed. The ruins of the main synagogue, demolished by the Germans, had been cleared away without a trace, while the second, small, private synagogue had been turned into a pub, and nobody knew that it had once been a house of prayer. The only recognizable remnant of the Jewish past—a cemetery—was until the 1980s conspicuously absent from the official list of the town’s historical monuments. For a long time, the local authorities turned a blind eye to the disappearance of gravestones that were used for building materials.

The calendar of official commemorations in Szydłowiec never included the Jewish inhabitants who had perished in the Holocaust. A visitor could not find any information about the fact that the town had lost the majority of its residents in the Holocaust. The few existing publications on local history did mention the large number of Jews in pre-war Szydłowiec and laconically referred to their annihilation, but the marginal space given to this fact was striking. The killing of three-quarters of the town’s population was presented as if it did not impinge upon the life of the remaining inhabitants. My investigation demonstrated that the oldest residents in the town, especially those who lived in formerly Jewish houses, did not want to remember the Jewish past of Szydłowiec. They transmitted very little information to postwar generations about life in the town before the war and what had happened there during the Holocaust. However, the surveys and interviews I conducted showed that, at the same time, they had managed to transmit a considerable amount of prejudice and resentment toward Jews (Törnquist-Plewa, 2006: 211).

Nevertheless, my study revealed a few signs of budding changes in local memories. A first-ever collection of historical, scholarly essays dealing with Szydłowiec Jews was published and presented at a conference in the town in 1997. A few enthusiastic local schoolteachers, encouraged by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from Warsaw, started to involve schoolchildren in projects aimed at collecting both memories and memorabilia connected with the Szydłowiec Jews. Thus, while finishing my study in 2005, I already hoped to come back after a lengthy period of time and see whether this slowly growing awareness of the town’s Jewish past would result in any more radical changes. This opportunity came in 2016–2017.

In order to capture the changes, I started by scrutinizing recent historical writings about the locality, as well as new guides and local media, both printed and online. Using that material as well as information obtained through conversations with town inhabitants, I was able to identify the main memory actors in the town and conduct semi-structured interviews with them. In addition, I conducted focus group interviews as well as a survey with young people from one of the local secondary schools. Finally, I visited the town’s new places of commemoration. The scope of this article does not allow for a detailed analysis of all the sources gathered. I have limited myself to outlining the main observations and pinpointing the conclusions that may be drawn with a view to identifying the transnational dynamics of memory.

Access to knowledge about the Jewish past of Szydłowiec: the Yizker book

While in 2002–2004 not many sources could be found about the Jewish past in Szydłowiec, the situation changed in the years that followed. The Jewish history of Szydłowiec is now described in Polish encyclopedias (including Wikipedia) and since 2010 it is included in the portal, The Virtual Shtetl. ⁶ Most noteworthy, however, is the fact that the town’s Jewish past is highlighted in guides, leaflets, and books written by locals. This information is further disseminated on the town’s website and by the local media, both in print and electronically.

How did these changes occur? In tracing this development, I discovered that the main body of knowledge disseminated to the public about Szydłowiec’s Jewish past originates in the Szydłowiec Memorial Book (the so-called Yizker book in Yiddish), published in English translation in New York in 1989. The Yizker books, mostly written in Yiddish, were published by organizations of survivors originating from the same community (Landsmanshaftn) in Central and Eastern Europe. They appeared in limited editions of less than 1000 copies and were primarily addressed to the inner circle of survivors and their families. Each of them contains the survivors’ memories of the vanished communities before and during the Holocaust (Schwarz, 2015: 12).

The Szydłowiec Memorial Book first reached the town in 2004 when one non-Jewish emigrant from Szydłowiec interested in Judaica found it in a bookshop in New York. He bought several copies at once, and, knowing about my research interests, sent one copy to me and one to Sława Lorenc-Hanusz, a history teacher in Szydłowiec, one of the few enthusiasts for local Jewish memorabilia with whom I cooperated during my field study. Since she did not read English, I summarized much of the book’s contents for her and urged her to obtain a proper translation of at least some parts, so she could use the book in her activities. In 2007, she, together with Grzegorz Miernik, a professional historian, published the first popular publication about Szydłowiec Jews: [Preserving Memory of Those Days—A Guidebook to the Monuments of Jewish Culture in Szydłowiec](in Polish and English), using some material from the Memorial Book. Furthermore, she referenced the Memorial Book again when she wrote a chapter in a published volume about Szydłowiec residents’ memories of local events in the twentieth century (Lorenc-Hanusz, 2015: 133–148). The incorporation of Jewish voices into this book about the town, whose title is That Is Our Life (author’s emphasis), can be seen as a step toward the gradual inclusion of Jewish memories in public memory. Thanks to both publications, also accessible on the town’s webpage, Szydłowiec’s Jewish past has become clearly visible for the public.

A few excerpts from the Szydłowiec Memorial Book were also published in Polish translation in the local periodical Dom na Skale (see nos. 2/58 2008 and 3/59 2008), which further aroused interest in the town’s Jewish history. Some voices proposed that the whole Memorial Book should be translated into Polish as an important source for local history (Tygodnik Szydłowiecki, 10–17.10.2011). However, this has not yet been realized. The enthusiasm of local memory activists cooled (interviews with Lorenc-Hanusz and Plewa-Dziubek) when they realized that a professional translation of the whole book meant including sensitive passages that had hitherto been omitted in the translation. They reference instances of indecent behavior on the part of Poles toward their Jewish neighbors as well as the names of those in Szydłowiec who denounced Jews to the Germans. Almost none of these individuals are alive today, but their families live in the town. There is fear of how the local community may react to such disclosures and their consequences, both for the descendants of the perpetrators and for those who would be making their deeds widely known by translating the Yizker book. In the opinion of the local memory activists, Szydłowiec is not yet prepared to fully face the difficult parts of its past. The translation of the whole Szydłowiec Memorial Book has to wait.

However, young people from Szydłowiec, who, in contrast to the older generation, have a good knowledge of English, can access the whole book, since it is now available online both on the portal The Virtual Shtetl and the Yad Vashem Museum website. This enabled Patrycja Wlazło, a history student from Szydłowiec, to write an MA thesis called Szydłowiec Jews during the German Occupation 1939–1943 (in Polish) in 2010, using the Yizker book as one of her main sources. The thesis speaks openly about the anti-Semitism of Szydłowiec’s non-Jewish inhabitants, both during the Holocaust and immediately after the war. However, the thesis, of which only one copy is available at the local library, is known to just a few people in the town.

The case of the Szydłowiec Memorial Book demonstrates how the particular memory of a local community’s members can travel across cultures and create unexpected connections. The book was written to keep the memory of lost Jewish life in Szydłowiec alive for the survivors and their descendants. However, after its translation and discovery, almost by chance, by non-Jews originating from Szydłowiec, it transcended its initial internal Jewish context. It traveled across borders (also in the literal sense) back to the place it commemorated and triggered memory work there among non-Jews, helping to bring the long-suppressed past to life. It exemplifies “how the memory narratives central to the identity of one group can, in travelling, help model the narrative of another group […].” (De Cesari and Rigney, 2014a:10).

Commemorating together: Polish–Jewish encounters in Szydłowiec

The local media in Szydłowiec from the years 2005–2017 include several reports about Jewish visitors; while some are brief, others, for example, regarding prominent guests such as an American ambassador (Tygodnik Szydłowiecki 7–13.11.2011) or a renowned composer (Tygodnik Szydłowiecki 30.08–5.09.2010), are more extensive. These visits stimulated locals to reflect on the town’s Jewish heritage and start caring for it. Until 2005, the Jewish cemetery had been littered and overgrown with weeds most of the year. In 2006, as reported by the local media (Tygodnik Szydłowiecki 23–29.10.2006), a group of young people, “guests from Israel”, cleaned up the cemetery as part of an action organized by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland. The paper hinted at the fact that it was inappropriate behavior to let guests do the tidying-up. Soon afterward, the local authorities started a more regular upkeep of the cemetery, and the local school was assigned to keep an eye on its condition. In 2011, the authorities finally officially registered the still preserved Jewish house of prayer as a historical monument. However, it should be noted that none of these locations was included in the large-scale revitalization project of the town conducted in the years 2011–2014 and co-financed with European Union (EU) funds. The Jewish heritage is recognized but not prioritized in promoting the town as a tourist destination. Instead, the focus is on its aristocratic heritage (a castle) and historical Catholic monuments. The largely welcoming and relaxed attitude to Jewish visitors today is worth highlighting. This constitutes a marked change from the late 1990s, when I could clearly notice some anxiety that Jews were coming to reclaim their possessions among the owners of the former Jewish houses (Törnquist-Plewa, 2006). While still present, these worries are mostly rebutted and even scorned. ⁷

The local media also publishes recurrent reports about different projects regarding the memory of the Jewish past in Szydłowiec. Some examples are the “Day of Jewish Culture—Mazel Tov,” a festivity organized annually since 2006 by the local cultural center; the 2009 photography project “School Diary—A Story from Szydłowiec,” based on a school diary from the Jewish class in Szydłowiec from 1937–1938, conducted by the Association for the Development of Szydłowiec; and a number of other projects involving pupils in the local schools. Reading about these memory projects in the local press, I noticed that all of them had been given some financial support by Jewish or Polish-Jewish foundations and organizations, the “Mazel Tov” event being supported by the Nissenbaum Foundation, the “School Diary” project by the Taube Foundation, and several of the school projects by the Shalom Foundation. This suggests that Jewish memory actors contribute to the town’s new emerging commemorative practices.

Although Jewish memory actors remain mostly in the background in the projects mentioned above, some mnemonic activities in Szydłowiec actively involve both Poles and Jews. One of the most interesting involves the participation of Szydłowiec youth in meetings between school classes from Poland and Israel. These take place within the framework of the nationwide action “Preserving Memory. History and Culture of the Two Nations,” organized as part of a special 2002 agreement between the Polish and Israeli governments. The idea is to give young Israelis who take school trips to the former death camps an opportunity to meet their Polish peers and together commemorate the lost Jewish world in Poland. The meetings are carefully prepared by twinning ⁸ schools from Poland and Israel on a voluntary basis, and training teachers who participate in the project. Education about the Holocaust is at its center. In 2010, one of the two secondary schools in Szydłowiec joined the project and for several years hosted school classes from Hof HaSharon. In addition to mutual presentations and conversations, each visit included a walk together to the Jewish sites in Szydłowiec and a joint Holocaust commemoration ceremony at the Jewish cemetery. It is important to emphasize that the ceremony had a culturally hybrid character. The Israeli youngsters laid down stones, the Poles laid down flowers. They read aloud a piece from the Book of Isaiah both in Hebrew and Polish and participated in the Kaddish prayer. ⁹

In the focus group interviews conducted with a number of pupils in Szydłowiec who participated in the school class meetings, I learned that these were considerably appreciated. The pupils described the encounters as “exciting” and as an opportunity to learn more about Israel and also about the past of their own town. ¹⁰ They wished that this type of event would continue. They also told me that the first time they walked together through the town, a big group of around 90 people, people in Szydłowiec were astonished and some perturbed. However, in the following years, nobody seemed uneasy. Local authorities as well as some private businesses co-sponsored the event each year by buying food and small presents for the visitors. The attitude of the visitors also changed. During the first visit, some of the Israeli teachers and especially the Israeli security guards seemed to be quite nervous, while at the following encounters, the atmosphere was much more relaxed. ¹¹

The encounters between Polish and Israeli students in the town can be described as transnational rituals of commemoration with a transcultural (i.e. transformative) potential, since meeting in a concrete physical place with the real “Others” created bodily experiences and emotional involvement. Considering the existing mutual stereotypes that burden relations between Poles and Jews, these encounters enabled the traversing of cultural borders and the dismantling of culturally ingrained prejudices. On the Polish side, it subdued the image of the Jew as an “alien” in a country with practically no Jewish inhabitants. On the Israeli side, it curbed the image of the Pole as a staunch anti-Semite. The ritual trips made by young Israelis to Poland to visit the former death camps have been criticized as serving nationalistic sentiments (Macdonald, 2013: 201–203) and even having an anti-Polish “tenor” (Feldman, 2008: 260). I would like to argue that the joint Polish Israeli commemoration in Szydłowiec, crafted as a transcultural ritual, was imbued with affective elements, cracked “national containers,” and activated the potential for transcultural ways of remembering.

A new Polish-Jewish site of memory in Szydłowiec

In my publications from 2006 and 2007, I pointed out that Polish and Jewish memories about Szydłowiec never came into dialogue with each other. However, during my field studies in 2016–2017, I could observe that, in the 10 years that had passed, Jewish institutions and organizations, and survivors and their descendants had become involved in negotiations concerning commemorations of the town’s Jewish past. The best example is the 2014 unveiling of a commemorative plaque to honor the memory of Szydłowiec’s Holocaust victims.

For decades, the only clearly visible site reminiscent of the town’s Jewish past was a neglected cemetery. In 1967, on its grounds, the district’s Communist party had commissioned and erected a monument dedicated to “Polish citizens of Jewish origins from Szydłowiec and its surroundings” killed during the Second World War. However, this monument never became a site of memory for the inhabitants of the town. Placed in the middle of the neglected cemetery, it was forgotten and left to decay. My investigation in 2005 showed that few people even knew about its existence (Törnquist-Plewa, 2007: 121–123). Upon my return in 2017, it was still there, derelict and abandoned. Not surprisingly, representatives of Jewish organizations visiting the town started to approach the local authorities regarding the necessity of building a new memorial in another, more visible place. In 2013, an official letter arrived with a request from The Friendship Society Israel–Poland in Tel-Aviv. It proposed placing a commemorative plaque on the wall of the secondary school built on the grounds of the destroyed, main synagogue.

The correspondence that followed between the Jewish representatives and the mayor’s office, as well as between different bodies of the local government, discloses the divisions in the local community regarding the Jewish past. The mayor supported the initiative, but, since the school was situated on grounds belonging to the county and not the town, the county had to be involved and issue the necessary permission. However, the county executive obstructed this by enumerating several administrative conditions and stating clearly that they would not finance the project in any way. Nor did they like the idea of placing the plaque on the school wall. There was a risk of stalemate, and the Jewish organizations, both the Friendship Society Israel–Poland and the “Association of Friends of Szydłowiec” (a Franco-Belgian organization of Jews originating in Szydłowiec and their families), had to appeal to the Polish Foreign Office. Finally, a compromise was found. The mayor’s office and the Jewish organizations funded the project together, and the mayor persuaded the county executive to allow a separate commemorative plaque, placed outside the school playground. ¹²

The inscription on the plaque gives information about Jewish Holocaust victims from Szydłowiec and its neighborhoods, and also explains that a synagogue once stood on this site. On 29 October 2014, the plaque was unveiled at a solemn ceremony, with participation of the mayor and representatives of the city council, the Jewish organizations mentioned above, as well as religious representatives from the local Catholic church and from a rabbi office in Warsaw. The event was also attended by a few school classes and some local memory activists (interview with Lorenc-Hanusz, 24 January 2017).

Some local media gave the event positive coverage, others were more neutral. Few reactions were otherwise noticed from the broader public. However, some comments I found in a local electronic news portal are evidence of the community’s continuing division on this point. The following exchange of opinions may serve as an example:

The people I asked about the commemorative plaque (pupils, teachers, local politicians) were very positive. “Finally, we have a place to which we can take Jewish visitors, without being ashamed”—I heard in one of the focus group interviews with students. The reference to the feeling of shame is evidence of a rising awareness that, until recently, in relation to the town’s Jewish past, the local society had not lived up to otherwise widely recognized standards on how to commemorate local victims of the Second World War.

It is worth pointing out that the memorial plaque has not only become a new site of memory for Jews coming to Szydłowiec but also a place where Jews and local Poles can meet and engage in some kind of transnational interaction. The plaque seems to be integrated into the town’s memory- scape in a way the old monument at the Jewish cemetery never was. Placed near the school, it is an integral part of the city and can be perceived as a site that belongs to all. In contrast to the old monument, the new one has never been vandalized. The plaque is currently not included in the local authorities’ calendar of official annual commemorations such as national holidays and anniversaries. However, as I learnt from interviews with two local teachers (Wiśniewska and Plewa-Dziubek) who documented their information with photographs, the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, celebrated in Poland on 19 April (the day of the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising), is the day when they go with schoolchildren to lay down flowers at the commemorative plaque. This demonstrates that the new memorial place matters at least to some parts of the local community.

Researchers such as Young (1993: 5) and Stewart (2005: 336) have observed that monuments sometimes contribute more to forgetting than remembering, and that they are often built to give closure to a difficult past. This does not seem to be the case with the new memorial in Szydłowiec. The inscription on the plaque, written in Polish, English, and Hebrew, informs us that 21,000 Jews were “imprisoned in the local ghetto and murdered by German perpetrators of genocide.” ¹³ Given recurrent Polish national debates about anti-Semitism among the Poles, before, during, and after the Holocaust, the plaque could lead potentially to questions about the local non-Jewish population’s actions or behavior in those times.

This question has still not been broached. Yet as if to foreclose discussion, voices have been raised in the past by the local press, proposing that Szydłowiec honor those inhabitants of the town who assisted Jews during the German occupation and rescued them (Dom na Skale, no. 4/60 2008; Tygodnik Szydłowiecki, 16–22.06.2008). So far nothing regarding this has happened in Szydłowiec, although such initiatives would fit well into the general Polish trend of the last years to celebrate the Polish “Righteous” (Suszkiewicz, 2016: 213–240), a defensive gesture in the face of criticism of how Gentile Poles behaved toward their Jewish compatriots during the Second World War.

The memory researcher as transnational memory actor

When I came to Szydłowiec in 2002 for my first field study, Poland was in the midst of the postcommunist transformation and preparing its EU accession, which took place in 2004. At that moment, the town’s Jewish past was almost non-existent in public memory. However, changes were on their way. On the national level, Polish democratic governments initiated a new politics of memory that gave Holocaust remembrance a prominent place, not least under the influence of the EU for whom the Second World War and the Holocaust had become “founding myths” (Sierp, 2014: 121–132).

A conference and the first Polish publication on the history of Szydłowiec Jews in 1997 were signals from above to the local authorities in Szydłowiec that it was about time they started to care for the town’s Jewish legacy. The authorities remained largely passive, but they were receptive to initiatives from below. Thus, the very few individuals in Szydłowiec who were keen to discover the Jewish past could now get some support, both locally and from organizations on the national and international level. In the years 2002–2005, I was able to observe the beginning of negotiations about what should be remembered and how. While finishing my field work at that time, I understood that my own investigation had become a part of this process. By doing interviews and conversing with many local people, I influenced the ongoing memory work. I encouraged people to think about matters that had not previously concerned them. Moreover, as a person and scholar from abroad, I brought new perspectives on the local past. Thinking back, I realize that I had become a transnational memory actor in the formation of local memories.

Which of the changes realized can be related to my work? The most direct effect can be traced to the influence of the Szydłowiec Memorial Book. As mentioned earlier, I made Sława Lorenc-Hanusz, one of the town’s main memory actors at the time, aware of the book’s importance, and she used it effectively by disseminating parts of its content in publications directed at the local public. Furthermore, my work on Szydłowiec’s Jewish past strengthened Sława’s motivation to involve herself in the commemoration of Szydłowiec Jews. When I met her in 2002, she was almost alone with her interest in the local Jewish past and carried out one of her first “memory projects” with schoolchildren who interviewed their grandparents. She received support for this endeavor from the Polish Jewish foundation Shalom, but on the local level, she was largely treated as a “weirdo.” Our cooperation in carrying out interviews with the town’s oldest inhabitants reinforced her conviction that what she was doing was important. In addition, in her eagerness to introduce me to representatives of the local authorities as well as to her superiors at the school and local cultural center, I saw that I was able to empower her by my authority as a foreign scholar. Today she is a person to whom the local authorities frequently refer and rely on when it comes to questions regarding the Jewish past in the town (interviews with the mayors 20–21 January 2017).

I certainly stimulated curiosity about the Jewish past of Szydłowiec among many people I spoke with, since many, especially those whose families had come to Szydłowiec after the war, expressed astonishment that this past was hidden for them and wanted to know more. I was invited to local schools to hold lectures for pupils and teachers about the Holocaust, Szydłowiec and the postwar oblivion, which I did a few times. One of my lectures was later reported in the local press (Dom na Skale, no. 3/37 2006). Some of the schoolteachers I conversed with on these occasions later engaged in the commemoration projects described above. The fact that they sometimes sent me pictures from these events gives me reason to think that I in some way encouraged their activities.

While the impact of my work was more or less indirect and can be traced to local memory actors on the grassroots level, I did make one direct intervention at the local authorities’ level. In January 2017, during my later field work in Szydłowiec, I was shown a newly created permanent exhibition presenting the history of Szydłowiec. It was set up in three small rooms as an annex to the already existing local Museum of Folk Instruments. Not many objects could be found on display there: some items of everyday use from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some old tools, and some weapons from the First and Second World Wars. It was noteworthy that the exhibition contained relatively many Jewish objects (such as prayer books, menorahs, books in Yiddish and Hebrew), courtesy of Sława Lorenc-Hanusz, who had collected them in the town with the help of schoolchildren. However, the texts on the walls designed to tell the history of the town contained very little information about the Jews of Szydłowiec. I found this disturbing, considering the amount of memory work on this topic that had already been done. This prompted me to write an official letter to the director of the municipal cultural center, responsible for the exhibition, as well to the mayor of Szydłowiec, with an appeal to modify the exhibition. I used my authority as a foreign scholar as well as the whole arsenal of arguments: the moral obligation to remember Holocaust victims, the educational need to tell schoolchildren in Szydłowiec the historical truth, and the political imperative that both EU and United Nations (UN) be active regarding Holocaust remembrance and education. I also employed “shaming” as a strategy, warning the local authorities that, by hiding the Jewish past, they risked tarnishing both the image of the town and of themselves as modern, democratic leaders, as well as inviting accusations of anti-Semitism.

Did I receive an answer? I did not. Yet, when I revisited the exhibition 2 months later, I was surprised to find a new addition to the historical narrative on the walls. The added text (both in Polish and English) states clearly that the majority of pre-war Szydłowiec inhabitants were Jews, and that in the years 1939–1943, the Germans turned the town into a large ghetto whose inhabitants perished in the gas chambers of Treblinka. The addition did not radically change the exhibition’s general, fact-oriented narrative that focused on the town’s aristocratic and patriotic traditions from early medieval times until today. However, it injected certain memories into a public sphere from which they had been absent or marginalized. The addition at least has the potential to stimulate new conversations. It also sends a signal to Jewish visitors that the locals have recognized the town’s Jewish history, which in turn can create grounds for dialogue.

Reflecting on my “participant intervention,” ¹⁴ I realize that what happened can serve as an example of transnational memory work. My intervention enabled the town locals to look at the exhibition through other, non-local, transnational lenses and confronted them with ideas produced elsewhere, including the European politics of memory. I led them to rethink their memory narrative “through the sense of being judged by others” (Macdonald, 2009: 4). This experience made me reflect not only on my actions within the contexts of “autoethnography” (see, for example, Tedlock, 1991) and “action anthropology” (see, for example, Reason and Bradbury, 2006) but also and more importantly on the role of a memory scholar in the processes of memory making in general. Drawing conclusions from the dynamic model of cultural memory as proposed by De Cesari and Rigney (2014a: 8), who see it both in processual terms (an outcome of cultural practices) and in generative terms (an activity that is productive of new stories), I would like to claim that a memory investigator is potentially always a memory actor. Her or his research constitutes either direct or indirect intervention in memory work, either during data collection by personal intercession (as in my case), or through the sheer communication of research results that puts the memories further on the move (Rigney, 2012). More theoretical and methodological reflection on the position of the memory scholar should be developed in future studies.

Concluding remarks

The case of Szydłowiec exemplifies how transnational dynamics of memory production can operate on the level of a locality. My analysis demonstrates that imported mnemonic material, transnational practices and first and foremost transnational actors played a significant role in the rediscovery of the town’s forgotten Jewish past. The changes involved interaction between transnational memory actors on different societal levels, pointing to the multiscalarity of memory formation. The process was influenced by a complex interplay involving many institutions, groups, and individuals: European politics of memory and Polish governmental bodies on all levels during the period preceding Poland’s accession to the EU, joint Polish Israeli governmental actions, Polish NGOs cooperating with a number of Jewish Foundations, Jewish organizations of survivors and their families, and, last but not least, both Jewish and non-Jewish individuals communicating across national borders: visitors and local memory activists. The relationship between these different levels and scales cannot be described as just “the bottom-up or top-down” process but moves in “multiple directions” (cf. Rothberg, 2014: 135).

The involvement of Jewish memory actors deserves attention, since the number of Jews living in Poland today is miniscule. Some researchers (Gruber, 2002; Tyszka, 2015) even claim that the revival of Jewish culture in Poland is “a renaissance without Jews.” The case of Szydłowiec, however, bolsters the arguments of scholars such as Lehrer (2015) or Murzyn-Kupisz (2015) who argue for the opposite view, pointing to the contribution of Jews from around the world. These include Jewish institutions and organizations, Israeli students making civil pilgrimages to Holocaust sites, and former Jewish residents and their families commemorating the Holocaust and visiting places where their ancestors lived. The case of Szydłowiec shows that, by coming to Poland and interacting with the local population, these Jewish memory actors become transnational memory carriers exerting influence on local memories, their “forms, contents, media and practices” (Erll, 2011: 10). The examples discussed of the Memorial Book, the memorial plaque, and the Israeli Polish youth meetings in Szydłowiec indicate the important role played in this process by mnemonic imports, flows of money, as well as “embodied practices such as touch and mobility” (Rothberg, 2014: 127). This last factor cannot be overestimated. The locals, by acting as hosts in face-to-face interaction with Jewish visitors, start to see their hometown through the eyes of their guests. Diverse memories can be brought into contact with each other. This case also demonstrates the significance of the mobility of people, not only the impact of Jewish travels to Poland but also the mobility of Poles themselves. Polish emigrants from the town, such as the one who found the Szydłowiec Memorial Book in New York, or the author of this text, have introduced new materials and new transnational perspectives into local memories.

So, how can we summarize and define the changes observed in this study to the local memory culture in Szydłowiec? The main result of the transnational memory work there, in my view, is that significant steps have been taken to dismantle the Otherness of the Jews and to reduce the anxiety connected with their heritage and with memories of the Jewish past. My study gives evidence of the fact that transnational memory work has facilitated the production and transmission of new memories, and has at least to some extent promoted openness, inclusivity, and tolerance in the local community, demonstrating that the Other is not so different. However, it has not given rise to a self-critical reading of the town’s own past, a feature characteristic of a reflexive cosmopolitan memory (Meng, 2011: 250). While there are individuals who critically evaluate Polish attitudes to Jews during and after the Holocaust, there is no support on the public level for discussing such matters in the town. In Szydłowiec, as in many other places, Poles emphasize memories of peaceful coexistence between Poles and Jews, and of how Poles helped their Jewish neighbors during the Holocaust, while the Jewish visitors most often carry memories of anti-Semitism and of being abandoned at the moment of trial (cf. Murzyn-Kupisz, 2015: 140). Thus, a real dialogue on the contentious issues is missing.

Nonetheless, it can be clearly stated that the process of rediscovering the town’s Jewish past has taken root in the local community. Material remnants of Jewish life are now officially declared part of Szydłowiec’s historical heritage. The Jewish past and Jewish heritage are recognized and included in the town’s memoryscape, although not foregrounded in its promotion. Furthermore, since 2014, a centrally placed memorial plaque commemorates Holocaust victims from the town. The site is not the focus of any regular, official commemorative rituals, but small groups of local pupils do gather there annually on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

All these observations suggest that local memory regarding the Jewish past has been transformed, although, on the Polish side, the change has the nature of a compromise, with the national memory framework remaining most powerful and still dictating what is made public and what is kept silent. This raises the question as to whether the transnational memories in Szydłowiec are at the same time “transcultural,” as defined in the introduction to this article, that is, hybrid memories occurring in the transversal of cultural boundaries with a transformative power to create new or modified identities and solidarities. My conclusion is that instances of transcultural memories can be traced in Szydłowiec, but almost exclusively on the individual level, articulated by a few local memory activists or at specific moments (such as the Polish Israeli commemorations described above). In general, however, it seems that transnational memory work in the town has not yet resulted in any wider production of transcultural public memories. This points to the limited effects of transnational memory making. However, it can also be claimed that the transformation of local memory achieved through transnational memory work has at least created the potential for the development of future transcultural memories.