POLIN Flashcards

Question

Gallery dedicated to the partitioning and end of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth- space dedicated to antisemitism

Answer 1

o As the Museum visitors continue, they enter a small, dark section of the gallery, dedicated to the development of political antisemitism in the closing decades of the 19th century. They learn about the pogrom in Chojnice in 1900, and can witness how the myth of ritual murder, which they had come across in the galleries dedicated to medieval and early modern history, continued to be present in a new form in modern times.

Answer 2

* The exhibition shows that, in many cases, the Jewish elites could still “return” to the masses by way of adopting a modern nationalist or revolutionary identity, or both, as exemplified by Ansky. The exhibition accommodates many different identities, including a folk identity, based on the Yiddish language. It is a great merit of this exhibition that it neither appropriates nor “Polonizes” the Jews who lived in Polish lands, but rather expresses their right to be “German,” “Russian” or some variety of“Jewish Jews.”

Answer 3

* The theme of industrialization and modernization conveyed in the rail- way station was closely linked to the rise of new professional and business strata and a generation of young Jewish men and women attracted to the Polish language and culture. In this way, the railway station opens out to spaces and visuals that convey the hope of Jewish integration into Polish culture and society

Answer 4

* Pogroms are mentioned in connection with the Revolution of 1905 and also in 1919. but the exhibit is dominated by a disturbing film about the Polish–Ukrainian fighting in Lwów. In the documentary-style film about these events, the Polish command in Lwów demands no anti-Polish expressions from Jews and “decent and loyal behavior.”- This is followed by a list of pogroms. The sequence implicitly links the pogroms to Jewish disloyalty.

Answer 5

* The story of anti-Semitism in the gallery is presented as part of a larger narrative, rather than as a distinct theme with its own space. Therefore, reasonable people might well object that the average visitor might easily miss the point.

Answer 6

eg The story of the December 1881 pogrom is not as sharp as it could be. To be sure, we show Aleksander Kraushar’s haunting poem of disappointment and even betrayal. But will the average visitor, especially the non-Polish visitor, under- stand what Kraushar meant when he saw his dreams of Polish Jewish integration collapsing in an outbreak of violence and hatred?

Answer 7

* Visitors must draw their own conclusions without being told what to think. Nevertheless, the story here is inescapable: the interwar years were a period when Jewish life and Jewish creativity blossomed on all fronts.

Answer 8

in the section to the right of the corridor - exhibition discusses the exceptionally diverse Jewish culture in interwar Poland o it features Julian Tuwim, the periodical Wiadomości Literackie and its circles, which were frequently excluded from the context of Jewish history by the Jewish historiographies leaning more to nationalism. o Alongside the Jewish press printed in Polish, visitors can see the abundance of Yiddish periodicals, as well as literature and movies in Yiddish

Answer 9

on the right, there is a room presenting the political history Jewish community in the Second Polish Republic o Due to its exceptionally strong plurality in terms of political parties and their manifestos, Jewish politics is shown through the 3 strongest movements: Zionism, the Orthodox movement and Bundism.

Answer 10

o The mezzanine located over the main part of “The Jewish Street” gallery accommodates further highly important and characteristic themes related to the history of Jews in Poland in the interwar years. They encompass, for instance, the very varied Jewish schooling system, the educational paths of Jewish youth and a mosaic of local Jewish communities

Answer 11

* Kijek - more perceptive visitors will realize what enormous impact the Great War had on such traditional forms of Jewish life as the shtetl, which began to disappear, what damage it brought to religious communities and, most importantly, the death toll it generated.

Answer 12

* Kijek - The exhibition designers did not overlook the fact that the First World War was also a key stage in the development of modern Jewish transnationalism. * the peak of modern Jewish transnationalism before the Holocaust is presented, the Gemilas Chesed lending associations (financed primarily from US resources), private Jewish schools, orphanages, health services and – in the non-material sphere – the attention given by the Polish Jewry to the fate of German Jews under Nazi rule, the situation of Jews in the Soviet Union and the Palestinian “Yishuv.”

Answer 13

* On the Jewish street- shows diversity of interwar Polish Jewry. It included Jews in big cities and small towns, Polish speakers and Yiddish speakers, yeshiva students and Bundists. Interwar Polish Jewry was also a work in progress, as Jews from the different partitions slowly overcame their cultural differences to find a common identity as “Polish Jews.” On the eve of the war, one in four Jews lived in one of the five largest cities, but half still lived in small towns. But at the same time, the most remote Jewish shtetl was linked to and influenced by the big cities eg Yiddish newspapers.

Answer 14

* Critics- The Jewish Street” gallery and the history of Jews in interwar Poland is an excellent example. According to their criticisms, this period is presented as “the second golden age of Polish Jews” (Matyjaszek, 2015). I have said above that this is not quite the case, that the poverty of the majority of Polish Jews is illustrated, as are the social conflicts that divided them, and the antisemitism that threatened their existence. (Kijek)

Answer 15

* not a word about the National Democrats, the increasingly popular party that worked to provoke pogroms. Its founder and leader is not on the timeline (reference is made much earlier in core exhibit), but much is dedicated to Pisudski and his tolerance towards Jews

Answer 16

* the timeline section. It begins and ends with a quotation from the Jewish journalist Bernard Singer in 1934 referring to the Treaty of Versailles: “So beautiful was the sound of the words ‘All citizens of Poland, regardless of race, language or religion, will be equal before the law.’ What happened to this article of the treaty, how it was put into effect— The visitor, it seems, is expected to decide based on what is presented in the timeline.

Answer 17

* WW1 is not presented as a time when integral & xenophobic nationalism erupted, inexorably resulting in violence. Without realizing this it is impossible to understand the role & power of antisemitism in the next period, in the Second Polish Republic o What is crucial to understand in this context is that the increasing competition between Polish and Ukrainian nationalism in the kresy, and the rise of Jewish nationalism, or Zionism, in part in response to these earlier movements, substantially altered the position of Jews in Poland. Within the Polish and Ukrainian nationalist discourse and visions of the future, the Jews as a religious and ethnic or national group had no space. o This also explains why in 1944, while the few surviving Jews in Poland and western Ukraine saw the Red Army as their liberators, Poles in Poland and Ukrainians in western Ukraine largely saw them as occupiers.

Answer 18

* the emphasis has been placed on “life in the shadow of death”—in other words, on the totality of the Jewish experience in German-occupied Poland: from ghettoization to death. We were especially concerned to show the differences in Jewish attitudes toward persecution.

Answer 19

* Presents opening stages of war as similar for Jews and Poles - only during the early stages of the occupation when the Germans introduced segregation, discriminatory regulations, and then confined Jews in ghettos that these perspectives diverged.

Answer 20

* Natalia - Powerful emotions are generated by a re- construction of the footbridge between the so-called “large” and “small” ghettos, from which Jewish passers-by could see what from their perspective was “normal life” on the “Aryan side.” Further on, the so-called Grossaktion of the summer of 1942 is shown, and the mass extermination in the death camps, Jews hiding inside and outside the ghetto. o the Bridge over the “Aryan Side” is one of the key points in our narrative—in it, victims gaze at witnesses and witnesses gaze at victims, passing and exchanging glance.

Answer 21

* Next gallery – devoted to Aryan Side - learn about the reality of life in occupied Poland from Polish perspective. The Aryan Side, leads to the exhibit devoted to Jews in hiding and the complexity of relations between those in need of help and those who helped. By depicting many different stories of such Jews, we attempt to show the whole spectrum of attitudes, from help to betrayal and murder.

Answer 22

* In Aryan side gallery focus is on polish experience of occupation - - In three colour photographs of the burning Warsaw Ghetto taken during the uprising, we discover the perspective of Poles looking at the ghetto. The pictures were taken from the roof of a building on the “Aryan” side of Warsaw, some distance from the ghetto and from the fire raging there. This is a metaphor for the gulf between the situation of bystanders and victims.

Answer 23

* Looks at Einsatzgruppen – and examples of pogroms by local populace (Lwow & Jedwabne) - the first death camp—Kulmhof (Chełmno on Ner)—as well as the decisions taken at the 1942 Wannsee Conference- The next space, the Shoah Corridor, presents the history of two death camp.

Answer 24

* Victims perspectives dominate the exhibition- Ringelblum’s diaries exhibited (underground survival) + Czerniaków, who was the chairman of the Warsaw Jewish Council responsible to the Germans, represents the strategy of surviving by seeking a modus vivendi with the Germans. o use of voices from there and then not retrospectively They see events through the eyes of individuals who do not yet know what is going to happen. This approach allows the visitor to understand that “life in the shadow of death” had the appearance of normality as well as a number of other specific attributes.

Answer 25

* perpetrators are the authors of most of the photographs displayed in the galleries. Wishing to avoid suggesting to visitors that this German perspective is objective, we consistently emphasize the context in which a photograph was taken. * We have considered carefully every case where we used photographs. For instance, to support the narrative about religious life in the Warsaw Ghetto, we use an enlarged photograph of a corpse clothed in rags with the face covered with a newspaper- don’t want to risk making “thoughtlessly repeated icons of the holocaust

Answer 26

o When the 2,000-soldier strong German units, supported by tanks and armored vehicles, entered the ghetto on 19 April 1943—the eve of the Passover holiday—they were faced by 300-500 ŻOB members divided into 22 militant groups along with 250 militants of the Jewish Military Union. o On the German side, over one thousand Waffen-SS soldiers and policemen took part in the armed combat each day o It was precisely due to the attitude of the civilian population (who refused to obey the German orders for eviction and remained hidden in bunkers and other hiding places) that the German liquidation action lasted as long as four weeks.

Answer 27

* Polin museum website says - the Germans continued a painstaking search for Jews in hiding on the ‘Aryan side’, offering financial rewards for assistance in capturing them.

Answer 28

* Fits awkwardly into the narrative of the museum as a whole: o indeed, as any other genocide, cannot fit easily into its historical context, and should not be normalized or simplistically explained as an inevitable result of identifiable causes.- genocide is not routine historical event o yet, any genocide, including the Holocaust, does occur within a historical context and cannot be understood and explained outside of its specific circumstances.

Answer 29

* Bartov – gallery has not chosen which narrative to critique. Is it that Germans murdered Polish Jewry or Polish Jews and Christians suffered together? Or is it about Polish/ Jewish relations? o The gallery is generally inclined towards the mutual suffering idea- largely evades the question of the relationship between the two communities under the extreme conditions of war, genocide, and internal intercommunal violence. o Further, in this gallery the visitor does not learn the extent to which the implementation of Nazi policy relied on the poor state of interwar P-J relation

Answer 30

o The reason the Holocaust Gallery has difficulties in confronting this issue head-on is that doing so would make it necessary to modify the narrative presented in earlier galleries so as to reflect the growing anti-Jewish sentiment in prewar Polish society - because the museum wishes to avoid the sense of inevitability of genocide and the tunnel vision of Polish Jewish history as leading to Auschwitz, it ends up largely evading or marginalizing the issue of Polish anti-Semitism and violence prior to, as well as during, and, of course, also after the Holocaust

Answer 31

Visitors are standing exactly on the Himmelweg of the Warsaw Jews. This is how the Germans referred to a path between a changing room and a gas chamber in concentration camps * Driven to trains, all Jews from the Warsaw ghetto were compelled to go this way. Columns of people gathered from different part of the ghetto were streaming into this small square in front of the museum of today. They could go in one direction only: via Zamenhofa Street (the old track is below this gallery) to the loading platform and then to a train and later to gas chambers. – the museum does not show this – have to rely on guides for this information the museum does not show this – have to rely on guides for this information

Answer 32

* as regards the attitude of Polish society to the Holocaust, sympathetic & empathetic voices clearly prevail in the exhibition, accompanied by examples of active aid to Jews. In this context, the info about other sentiments fades away

Answer 33

* Natalia - Polish visitors often voice opinions rooted in stereotype: “There were more righteous people in Poland than anywhere else, despite the fact that there was the death penalty [for helping Jews] in Poland but nowhere else.”- clearly people go with preconceived notion

Answer 34

* the part of the exhibition devoted to the pogroms that took place in Jedwabne and some other neighbouring towns in the summer of 1941, arouses fewer emotions in the audience than might be expected.- Occasionally, guides hear opinions such as “But the Germans did it” or “The Jews collaborated with the Soviets.” participants of senior (U3A) groups are most prone to holding such opinions.

Answer 35

* Natalia - guides have noticed that viewers, Polish and foreign alike, are often interested in learning about other ghettos e.g. ones from their hometowns.- Julia Chimiak: “Groups coming from abroad or from outside of Warsaw often cite a lack of examples that could be helpful in explaining the history of ghettos in their own towns, or enable comparison of the situations in different ghettos

Answer 36

* During the first 18 months the contents of the core exhibition and the Holocaust gallery were tested intensely by the team of museum guides during their interactions with visitors. They concluded that knowledge of the holocaust was in fact quite low o Natalia has co-created two such walks for Polish and foreign visitors: ‘Shoah and its Commemoration’ and ‘Resistance Fighters’. These two-hour tours lead them through the final two galleries: Holocaust and Postwar Years – as well as a part of the interwar period gallery.

Answer 37

* opens with a quotation from Władysław Szpilman: “Tomorrow I must begin a new life. How could I do it, with nothing but death behind me?” and a dramatic photograph depicting the rubble of Warsaw. It shows how empty and funereal Poland was at that time for the few Jewish survivors, and explains their consequent powerful migration sentiments. By the same token, it also explains the reasons why the Zionist movement became so popular.

Answer 38

It was important to us to show the relations of Jews to communism, especially in the years 1945–55, without apologetics and without lending credibility to the anti-Jewish stereotype of communism as a Jewish enterprise and of Jews as a ruling group + Jewish presence in anti-Communist activities post war. o At the very beginning of the postwar story, we show the gratitude of Jews in hiding to the Soviet army that liberated them. o Jews who were among the top leaders of Stalinist Poland. We wanted to avoid attaching such labels as Jew and non-Jew to individual figures - Our solution was to provide short biographies of all leaders. Those biographies clearly show that three of them were born Jews and abandoned Judaism, just as the three others were born Christian and abandoned Christianity. o Show mass Jewish migration from communist Poland

Answer 39

* References are made to the accusations of Jews for committing ritual murders and a whole array of accusations related to “Judeo-communism,” which blamed Jews for the worst aspects of the new political system.

Answer 40

* . The peak of Stalinism is then shown, and the resulting end of the plurality of Jewish life in Poland; followed by the 1956 “thaw” which, on the one hand, brought a certain political relaxation and welcomed a new generation to the Socio-Cultural Association of Jews in Poland and, on the other, saw another outbreak of antisemitic sentiments and another migration of many thousands of Jews from Poland

Answer 41

* POLIN Museum’s exhibit boldly representing the March 1968 antisemitic campaign that resulted in the exodus of 13,000 Polish Jews

Answer 42

* Polish gov. under the rule of the Justic (PiS) Party - The Amendment Act on the Institute of National Remembrance - signed into law Feb 6th 2018 - [new Holocaust ruling] - essentially forbids & potentially punishes scholars & journalists who claim “collective Polish support” of the Holocaust. Yet leading Polish scholars in Holocaust studies have simply persisted in their research, publishing, and planning of events and exhibitions, intent on uncovering evidence-based truth regardless of the consequences

Answer 43

* 2019 - POLIN, Museum of the History of Polish Jews, likewise braved a PiS media storm and successfully defended its important new exhibit, Commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the forced exile of thirteen thousand Polish Jews o several PiS senators in the Polish Sejm had protested to, the minister of culture, that this exhibit had posted some of their tweets—“taken completely out of con- text”—to demonstrate how the antisemitic hate speech generated during March 1968 was being recycled in the speeches and posts of PiS politicians today

Answer 44

* Post 1989- It is beyond doubt that this section of the core exhibition should take into account the enormous merits of this group of scholars, which it does not, thereby posing yet another threat in the context of the current political situation in Poland.

Answer 45

* This is a Polish museum, partly funded by the Polish gov. A degree of self-censorship on the part of some of the museum’s creators, perhaps unconscious, may have played a role here. - the visitor is given little but hints that are not enough to develop any sort of coherent narrative about Polish anti-Semitism. Jerzy Halbersztadt, who directed the project for fifteen years, fiercely defended the intellectual independence of the exhibition team. o the politicians who could have a real influence on the shape of the exhibition had the good sense to realize that only a truthful presentation could make a really positive impact on Poland’s image – admitting political presence seems unreliable to say that it was only reliable people

Answer 46

* Janicka refers to the space around the N. Rapoport’s Monument to the Fighters and Martyrs of the Ghetto and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews POLIN in Warsaw- an internationally recognisable icon. The museum is centrally located in front of the monument’s façade.

Answer 47

o Originally, this fissure was supposed to direct with its axis directly to Rapaport’s monument. But it is not. The monument somehow escapes the museum’s axis; it is standing a little bit to the side.

Answer 48

* attempts made by some representatives of Jewish circles in Poland (to the protests of others), and eagerly supported by a variety of political circles, to build a Monument to the Righteous which is to be located next to the Polin Museum and the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes and Martyrs- this is an attempt to make large of the role of Polish saviours. The Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland initiated this idea o This suggests that the Jewish voice only achieves legitimacy in the public space on condition that the narrative it recounts conforms to that presented by the dominant group

Answer 49

Leociak - ‘one cannot pretend that there is continuity in the Polish Jewish history and that nothing happened. The Polish Jews, the European Jews were, in reality, put to death. There is only a void left. This gap is an indispensable element of thinking about the Holocaust and the Polish Jewish history. The whole story about the thousand-year Jewish history in this land is fake and artificial. The phenomenon of reviving the Jewish life here and now cannot be understood without this real void.

Answer 50

* example of ‘forgetting’ about the Holocaust or ‘leaving it aside’ because it did not match vision of POLIN Museum as a MUSEUM OF LIFE is a promotional video entitled ‘A Museum of Life’, not a single scene/second/word any way relates to the extermination of Jews - the subject of one of Core Exhibition galleries. The Holocaust is not presented in the video. The place where the museum is located has been completely disregarded. It is only an ordinary place where the museum was built, nothing more.

Answer 51

* The key aim of Museum on Wheels was to teach about ‘the centuries of coexistence of Jewish and Polish culture’. The traveling museum was also used by POLIN to promote its discourse and agenda, which emphasize the continuity of Jewish life in Poland throughout centuries. This includes the Holocaust as a topical element but not the central one

Answer 52

* In 2015 and 2016, the standard exhibition consisted of: a three-dimensional model of a shtetl which showed some of the key buildings in a town inhabited by Jews and Christians in the early twentieth century; a panel about the three languages used by Jews in Poland (Polish, Yiddish and Hebrew), with photos and related quotes from diaries written by young Jews in 1920s * Finally, two short films about the POLIN Museum and its core exhibition were played on a large TV screen in a loop, and in some towns in 2015, there was another screen showing video-recorded interviews with Jewish Holocaust survivors from Poland. * In some places in 2015 and the years that followed there was a panel – “They risked their lives. Poles who saved Jews during the Holocaust”. explained

Answer 53

* Similarly, in the core message of Museum on Wheels the Holocaust and absence of Jews in today’s Poland are not presented as the most crucial elements.

Answer 54

* Most small towns and villages visited by MoW are excluded from this narrative of ongoing presence. They do not fit into the story. They are sites of Jewish absence in the present and will most likely remain so in the future.

Answer 55

* Disconnect between aim of MoW and reality -Another interview: learning about Jews is vital because Jewish history is connected to Poland particularly because of the Holocaust and the war. Germans and WW2 are for him inextricably connected to discourses about Jews and, because of that, also to the museum- focus is on violence against and tragic fate of Jews – no acknowledgement of Jewish contribution. * Another interview: In her account, the key manner in which Jews are connected to the place where she lives, is that Jews suffered during WW2 and non-Jewish Poles helped them. Highlights the story of the Ulma family from Markowa, a nearby town. The Ulma family had given shelter to two Jewish families- the Ulma family were shot alongside the Jews they helped.

Answer 56

* Demonstrate MoW, triggered engagement with the painful past, the Holocaust & Jewish absence - Although it was not its central aim, the three days visit of MoW has created opportunities for local communities to address the void left after the Holocaust- MoW provides an opportunity for visitors to articulate the discourse of Jewish absence

Answer 57

* SOCIALIST REALISM = It stressed the building of beautiful and decorative facades by typically turning to classical architecture to construct aesthetically pleasing and politically meaningful buildings.

Answer 58

* This transformation of Muranow into a socialist-realist housing complex was invested with significant political meaning in early postwar Poland. Muranow’s rebuilding metonymically represented the emergence of a new socialist Warsaw, a moment in the city’s history marked by the Communist victory over the bourgeois capitalist past & by Poland’s revitalization from the destruction of Nazism - Muranow as a space of rebirth & Communist triumph displaced the area’s wartime history

Answer 59

* Bohdan Lachert - quite the opposite - his design carried the intention to expose as much of the destroyed materiality of the ghetto as possible. Lachert’s Muranow was to become a “memorial district”. - construct his apartments on top of the ruins and to use the ghetto rubble mixed with concrete for their foundations- built from red rubble as if from the blood of Warsaw.

Answer 60

* The gallery here itself, by cleansing the street of the real rubble from the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto which surrounds it, makes it what Matyjaszek calls a ‘laboratory of nostalgia’- This is rooted in the fact that that what stands between access to the uninterrupted dreams of pre-war Polish modernity is precisely this rubble. o This particularly falls short of what museology sees as the purpose of museums - to provoke public debate, especially on new areas, or those in which a false narrative is perpetuated. The absence of a critical reflection on these visions, allows today for a revival of nostalgia rooted in idealized imageries of pre-Holocaust Polish history which, coupled with the urgency of creating post-Communist Polish national identities, leaves the modern ruin, “the cipher for nostalgia”, in an ambivalent and highly problematic position

Answer 61

o The rubble embodies the destruction of Warsaw’s Jewish community & the Holocaust, and thus provokes images of the darkside of Polish modernity. – the discussion of which current historical debate does not allow, thus, the Museum fails to address this gap.

Answer 62

o Shortly after the Museum’s opening, Waldemar Dąbrowski, a former Minister of Culture and the government’s ministerial plenipotentiary for the Museum, explained that he saw its construction as “a part of the decades-long project of rebuilding Warsaw to its pre- -1939 state

Answer 63

* The entrance lobby - With the principle of the “museum of life, not the Holocaust” becoming a main narrative thread, the design of the lobby interior came to be interpreted accordingly: Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett saw the lobby as “a bridge across the chasm of the Holocaust”, an interior “filled with radiant light” that communicates “a message of hope on a site of genocide”.

Answer 64

o In compositional terms, the lobby is an optical mechanism, intended to focus the visitor’s gaze by means of a set of visual frames and apertures, From top of the stairs, window allows a full perspective onto a green square with one large linden tree in front and a cluster of trees in the background, with pathways & benches, & outlines of residential buildings in the far background.- museum director calls this a beautiful symbol of life o In the visual absence of the materiality of the Jewish city, covered by the surface of Muranow park, “we” continues to signify the collective subject of modern nostalgia: the Polish majority. o allows the “sanitized” district to enter the building’s interior.

Answer 65

* documents (announcements) issued by the Judenrat, bottles of different shapes and colours (it is incredible that they have survived intact), cutlery, dishes and other objects of this type were found. These artifacts were not included in the exhibition at all.

Answer 66

* spectacular example of this disruption of the heritage of place, or ‘forgetting’ about it, is artificial rubble in the gallery devoted to the post-war years. It looks as if it is made of papier-mâché, whereas the authentic rubble of the Muranów district that was unearthed during the archaeological excavations conducted when the museum’s building was under construction could have been used. * OR While walking through the exhibition, one has this rubble under one’ feet – one could even hear it crunching. But these bricks extracted from the Muranów sanctuary were simply thrown away.

Answer 67

* Leociak - The museum is not a neutral container for artefacts/objects, but a way of communicating- For these reasons - museums that are built today are so spectacular that they change the nearest surroundings & often become new symbols of the cities in which they are located. * Undoubtedly the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw has become one of the most dominant architectural features in the capital.

Answer 68

* Resisting teleology o Nuance – paradoxically a weakness – fails to address antisemitism properly * Chorus of voices- o Nuance – chaotic. * Has addressed serious public debates eg March 1968 exhibition and post 1989 section.

Answer 69

* The fundamental problem of the Polin core exhibition narrative is that it does not present antisemitism as a permanent element of the life and experience of Polish Jews.it is true that museum visitors learn about the fears related to the emancipation and integration of Jews in the Enlightenment; but without prior knowledge, they will not understand how this issue will recur in every decade to come, or how it will influence the fact that Jews would be refused the right to live in Polish lands on the same conditions as Poles.

Answer 70

* Another thing we will not learn from the exhibition concerns the extent to which German policy in the General Government relied on the disastrous Polish-Jewish relations formed in the prewar period and the importance that the discrimination of non- Poles on the eastern frontier

Answer 71

o Jewish soldiers at Jabłonna is shown in such a manner that if I had not known that I should be looking for it, I probably would not have found it. The assassination of President Gabriel Narutowicz, as the one “elected by the Jews,” was not ignored, but, again, the connection to all the other manifestations of antisemitism in interwar Poland is not made explicit. o The authors of the “Postwar Years” gallery have indeed shown determination and demonstrated the intention to show the scale and importance of antisemitism in Poland in 1945 and 1946. Yet in order to find this part of the exhibition, once again visitors have to change direction, turn around and walk around the whole room, which many of them, tired by then, will probably fail to do.

Answer 72

* What seems to be the problem is not cowardice but rather the different outlooks of the authors and their critics. Apart from the exhibition reviewers who were not involved in designing the exhibition, Helena Datner, the author of the “Postwar Years” gallery, also expressed regret about the exhibition’s ultimate form. In her opinion, the visitors to the Polin Museum cannot see a single “coherent story.”

Answer 73

* The core exhibition demands from visitors considerable cultural & intellectual competence, many hours of intense attention & – in many cases – also the assistance of the guides. Matyjaszek is right in saying that the narrative of the core exhibition, told by means of source texts, is not easy to comprehend, & it may indeed fail to provide the tools sufficient to “interpret history on one’s own”.

Answer 74

Moshe Rosman. He was accused of “Polinizng” the history of Jews in Poland by promoting a false and ideologized version of it with the myth of Poland as a “paradise of tolerance.”- The criticism pertaining to the somewhat unfortunate name of the gallery dedicated to the history of Jews in the 16th and 17th centuries, “Paradisus Judeorum,” is justified. Visitors to the Museum do not have an opportunity to learn from the exhibition that its title is taken from an anti-Jewish text, which claims that the good living conditions Jews enjoyed in Poland were something that should change.

Answer 75

* Kijek- Most important messages are conveyed by citations rather than original commentary of the experts who designed the exhibition [curating team intention - that citations would be so accurately selective & so suggestive that reading them while look at visual exhibits would suffice every visitor to understand key elements of museums narrative - failed- visitors may frequently leave the Museum with an impression of chaos and a sense of having failed to understand what they have seen.

Answer 76

* Kijek - Right-wing reviewers went to the Museum with hearts in their mouths, consciously or subconsciously expecting to encounter primarily the presentation of antisemitism. Some of them found less of that than they had expected and left the Museum relieved and with a bizarre conviction that the claim that “Jews have disappeared from Poland because they were clearly not welcome there” is only a false stereo type – should actively address preconceived conceptions + focus the narrative a bit more.

Answer 77

* Post war- We describe Jews who lived in Poland. This excludes many Polish Jews, from prewar emigrants to those who remained in the Soviet Union (where the majority of Jews who had lived in Poland in 1939 survived) to the postwar emigrants, who became important only after having left Poland, in Israel or in other countries. If we wanted to include them and their children, the story would be different. It would be very interesting but fragmented, located mostly far away from Poland.

Answer 78

* Kijek believes that virtually all the most important narrative themes of the exhibition have disappeared from the discussion, which has failed to present this narrative adequately. Additionally, the debate is narrowed down to a single problem of whether there is “too much” or “too little” antisemitism, which ironically makes this debate ethnocentric, objectifying the Jews & their history. o Against critique of Poland as paradise for the Jews - It is not appropriate to present an exhaustive history of antisemitism in Poland in a museum of the history of Jews. - antisemitism should be present, but as an element that had an impact on their situation & living conditions. Above all, antisemitism is a stereotype.

Answer 79

* Most important messages are conveyed by citations rather than original commentary of the experts who designed the exhibition. It is, however, not true that the Museum is “hiding behind citations” [K. Szaniawska], that it is marked by the “cowardice of citing” [J. Krakowska], and that by this token the authors of the core exhibition tried to avoid taking a stand when speaking about the controversies of the history of Jews in Poland o The very selection of citations is an interpretation in itself; it does entail taking a stand and manifesting the outlooks of the exhibition’s authors on specific events and processes. The issue is not cowardice but different outlooks – Datner author of post war years gallery regrets that at POLIN there is no single coherent story.

Answer 80

Roskies: it is simply impossible to tell a single coherent story about the one thousand of years of Jewish history to visitors from all over the world. It would be ahistorical, too.

Answer 81

(public reception as a means to determine the effectivity of POLIN’S discourse and museum design)- This is because one of the founding aims of any museum is to educate its audience on the historical period in question.

Answer 82

o Barbara K-G (2015)– “The exhibition presents a broad spectrum of relations, which visitors will experience as a story of coexistence and competition, conflict and cooperation, separation and integration—without reducing the history of Polish Jews to a history of Polish-Jewish relations (all too often treated as a history of antisemitism)… above all, Jews are agents of history, and not only objects on which others projected their fantasies and fears”

POLIN Flashcards

(106 cards)