A Tale of a Former Shtetl. The Memory of Jews and the Holocaust in Poland

Michael Steinlauf has convincingly argued that the Poles had ‘Polonised’ the Holocaust during the post-war years by emphasising their own suffering during the war. 1 Auschwitz became a symbol of Polish martyrdom and until recently the majority of Poles believed that Auschwitz was first and foremost a place where Poles had been killed. Yet another researcher, Jan Gross, even claimed that the victims of the Holocaust had never been mourned in Poland. 2 Was he right? Unfortunately, we know comparatively little about how the Jews and the Holocaust have been remembered in the multitude of Polish small towns — called ‘shtetl’ by the Jews — which had lost their Jewish population during the war. 3 This chapter attempts to illuminate this issue by analysing the memory of Jews and the Holocaust in Szydlowiec, a former Jewish small town in central Poland. This choice is largely motivated by the fact that I grew up there. This has enabled me to collect and verify considerable material. 4