POLIN

Question 1

location of nightmares

Answer 1

2007

• Hosted in a stadium which was the biggest open air market at the time. Made out of rubble from destroyed area. Was home to contraband – could buy anything there from beyond Soviet border + the market became a main site of immigrant Warsaw.

Question 2

nightmares - call for Jews

Answer 2

Jews! Fellow countrymen! People! Peeeeople! This is a call, not to the dead, but to the living. We want 3 million Jews to return to Poland, to live with us again. We need you! We’re asking you to return!”
* “Return to Poland. To your country!”

Question 3

nightmares- antisemitism

Answer 3

• “When you left we were secretly happy. We said ‘at last we’re home by ourselves’. The polish pole in Poland. From time to time we found a Jew and told him to leave Poland”

Question 4

nightmares- Jews and memory

Answer 4

Without you we cannot even remember. Without you will we remain locked in the past”
* “and both you and us will finally cease to be the chosen people, chosen for suffering, chosen for suffering wounds, chosen for inflicting wounds. And we shall finally become Europeans”.

Question 5

1968 crisis

Answer 5

o Response to student protests for greater democracy and reform.
o This campaign was characterized by propaganda campaigns, purges within the party and state institutions, and the expulsion of thousands of Jews from Poland.

Question 6

communism and holocaust memory

Answer 6

• During the Communist era, the memory of the Holocaust was subordinated to a far-reaching process of reworking and manipulation, which served the authorities’ political and ideological needs

o “one should not stress Jewish matters.” The questioning of Polish attitudes and behavior toward Jews during the war was no longer allowed.

commemorative rituals at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial site, where the word “Jew” was hardly mentioned and the Jewish victims were encompassed in the nationality of the countries from which they came

o The genocide of Polish Jews was usually presented as an integral part of the ethnic Polish tragedy, as in the statement that “six million Poles died during the war,” which also strengthened the popular belief that the Poles had suffered more than any other nation.

Question 7

View of jews during communism

Answer 7

o Partisans highlighted negative aspects of Jewish behaviour eg as anti-Polish or lacking ingratitude for Polish saviours.
o Nowicki asserted that pre 1939 Jews had a privileged position – dominated professions, controlled disproportionate wealth etc.- this meant things such as numerus clausus were justified

Question 8

unlocking of Jewish memory

Answer 8

• 1970s and 80s, there was a new willingness to look at thorny Polish-Jewish relations eg in 2000 promised to teach holocaust in schools.

Question 9

2000s reversal back to restricting memory

Answer 9

• But 2006 legislation to protect the good name of Poland – punishment for publicly slandering it.
• in 2018, 279 parliamentarians voted for the adoption of the Holocaust Law- can’t attribute holocaust to Poland.
• 2016 education minister called Polish responsibility for Jedwabne a matter of opinion.

Question 10

importance of term ‘Polish Jews’ in Polin

Answer 10

• By referring to Polish Jews, rather than Jews in Poland, the museum’s name points to the integral and transnational nature of the story— integral, because Jews were (and are) not only “in” Poland but also “of” Poland, and transnational because their story is not confined to the territory of Poland
  o To speak of Polish Jews rather than Polish Jewry is to keep open the diversity of Polish Jews, rather than to treat them as one body.

Question 11

ultimate purpose of polin

Answer 11

• POLIN Museum contributes to the mutual understanding and respect among Poles and Jews
• The opening of the Polin Museum and its core exhibition in October 2014 was, with- out doubt, the most prominent event signifying the revival of interest in Jewish issues in Poland after 1989, and one which resonated most widely among the public

Question 12

basic location of Polin

Answer 12

• The Polin Museum is situated in the very heart of Jewish Warsaw, where the Jewish district was formed in the middle of the 19th century. Built on the land of the Warsaw ghetto.

Question 13

Jewish identity in polin

Answer 13

• Jewish identities can range from complete to marginal, and we did not want to miss this variety in our exhibition.- the existence of degrees of Jewishness, the different depth of Jewish roots, diverging levels of Jewish identification, and the possible differences between self-perception and perception by others,

o Visitors assume each character is Jewish or not Jewish. Don’t assume shades. They do have interviews in the core exhibit which ask individuals about their Jewish identity to show shades.

Question 14

pre conceived public perceptions and Polin

Answer 14

• One point adopted by the museum team was: let us not begin with misperceptions. This means that we never tried to construct our story with the aim of answering the expectations of the public, whether to deny or confirm them. Beginning with them even only to dismantle them would be an indirect confirmation to many a visitor.

Question 15

main aims of polin

Answer 15

1. resisting teleology
2. No master narrative – chorus of voices
3. Museum of life

Question 16

Polin resisting teleology

Answer 16

• Barbara K-G – A challenge for this museum, as for virtually all Jewish museums in Europe, is to resist an overwhelming teleological narrative driving inexorably to the Holocaust as its inevitable endpoint for the preceding millennium of Jewish history.
• The core exhibition of this museum does not begin with hate and does not end with genocide—the Holocaust was a cataclysmic event, but the story does not end there
• Jewish life in Poland would vanish into the axis of genocide, and the history of Polish Jews would be reduced to a lesson in (in)tolerance.

Question 17

reason for chorus of voices

Answer 17

• museums in general (and the POLIN Museum in particular) can act as major agencies of social and intellectual transformation.- Webber - one of the key modes of the way in which museums can bring about the transformation of ideas derives from the opportunities that they offer to supply new narratives for recontextualising Jewish histories.
• The essence of Jewish existence is diversity - Jewish history must take the form of separate histories of numerous communities, each of which has constructed Jewishness differently—there cannot be one grand narrative that seamlessly integrates the sociocultural histories of all the Jewish communities that have existed in the Diaspora over the past two thousand years
• . Roskies, who wrote in his review of the core exhibition, that it is simply impossible to tell a single coherent story about the 1000 years of Jewish history to visitors from all over the world. It would be ahistorical, too.

Question 18

chorus of voices in Polin

Answer 18

• There is no master narrative available as an intellectual guide to find one’s way through the complexity of the subject; and so museum visitors are encouraged to become aware not only of different modes of behaviour but also the spectrum of interpretation

Question 19

conflicting opinions about chorus of voices

Answer 19

• Rosman - Competing voice may confuse the visitors
• Webber disagrees - in my experience ordinary museum visitors can often be deeply gratified when they are shown that the subject they have come to learn about can be approached in different ways’

Question 20

notion of museum of life

Answer 20

• 1000 years of Polish-Jewish coexistence, speaking of cooperation, rivalry and conflicts, autonomy, integration and assimilation. While seeking to confront thorny issues, we also bring attention to bright chapters in our common history.

Question 21

Gallery dedicated to the partitioning and end of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth- how it politicised jews

Answer 21

• includes the ambivalent reforms of the “Jewish people” launched by all three partitioning powers (Russia, Prussia, Austro-Hungary) The majority of the Jewish community interpreted these reforms & operations of the officials in terms of an attack against their tradition, life-style and autonomy – but these actions actually laid the foundations for the advancing process of emancipation and formation of the modern forms of individual and collective Jewish identity.

for instance, this part of the exhibition shows how the conservative yet modern religious movement of Hasidism that sprang up around this time could develop as a voluntary socio-religious movement thanks to the weakening of traditional Jewish communities

Question 22

Gallery dedicated to the partitioning and end of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth- modernisation of religious circles

Answer 22

• the “defensive modernisation” of religious circles, taking the form of modern yeshivas, gradually produced modern Jewish orthodox ideology. - Contrary to the present stereotype, in the 19th and 20th centuries, these orthodox circles did not live “as they did in the Middle Ages.” This alteration of the political history that the Polish visitors are familiar with and the deeper and less obvious socio-cultural history constitutes a highly important and positive aspect of the exhibition

Question 23

Gallery dedicated to the partitioning and end of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth - response of Jews to partitioning

Answer 23

• Kijek - the response of the representatives of the Jewish elite to the partitioning comes to the fore; the section dealing with the Kościuszko uprising shows the involvement of the Jewish poor in the defence of Praga.

Question 24

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

Answer 24

• The authors of the gallery showed the more aggressive side of the debate, and the origins of so-called progressive antisemitism. Not only ultra-conservative circles, but also those associated with the Enlightenment shared the conviction about the traditional Jewish mentality, which allegedly was always directed against Christianity, and the fears that Jews would use their own emancipation for evil purposes, thereby threatening all their neighbours

Question 25

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

Answer 25

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.

Question 26

Gallery dedicated to the partitioning and end of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth- diversity of Jewish identity

Answer 26

• 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.”

Question 27

Gallery dedicated to the partitioning and end of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth- urbanisation and assimilation

Answer 27

• 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

Question 28

critique of Gallery dedicated to the partitioning and end of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth- pogroms

Answer 28

• 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.

Question 29

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

Answer 29

• 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.

Question 30

critique of Gallery dedicated to the partitioning and end of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth- indirectness

Answer 30

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?

Question 31

overall narrative of interwar gallery

Answer 31

• 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.

Question 32

section 1 of interwar gallery

Answer 32

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

Question 33

section 2 of interwar gallery

Answer 33

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.

Question 34

section 3 of interwar gallery

Answer 34

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

Question 35

the disappearance of the shtetl in interwar gallery

Answer 35

• 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.

Question 36

interwar gallery- Jewish transnationalism

Answer 36

• 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.”

Question 37

interwar gallery- diversity of Jewish identity

Answer 37

• 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.

Question 38

interwar gallery- does portray Jewish suffering

Answer 38

• 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)

Question 39

critique of interwar gallery- national democrats

Answer 39

• 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

Question 40

critique of interwar gallery- the timeline

Answer 40

• 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.

Question 41

critique of interwar gallery - antisemitism

Answer 41

• 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.

Question 42

Holocaust gallery- diversity of responses

Answer 42

• 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.

Question 43

Holocaust gallery- divergence between poles and Jews

Answer 43

• 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.

Question 44

Holocaust gallery- the footbridge

Answer 44

• 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.

Question 45

Holocaust gallery- aryan side

Answer 45

• 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.

Question 46

Holocaust gallery- nuanced view of the polish perspective of aryan gallery

Answer 46

• 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.

Question 47

Holocaust gallery- death

Answer 47

• 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.

Question 48

Holocaust gallery- victims perspectives

Answer 48

• 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.

Question 49

Holocaust gallery- photography

Answer 49

• 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

Question 50

Holocaust gallery- Warsaw uprising

Answer 50

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.

Question 51

Holocaust gallery- hunt for Jews

Answer 51

• 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.

Question 52

Holocaust gallery- fits into the museum - nuanced view

Answer 52

• 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.

Question 53

critique of holocaust gallery- dominant narrative

Answer 53

• 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

Question 54

critique of holocaust gallery- why the mutual suffering of Poles and Jews is dominant motif

Answer 54

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

Question 55

critique of holocaust gallery- its location

Answer 55

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

Question 56

critique of holocaust gallery- role of Poles

Answer 56

• 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

Question 57

critique of holocaust gallery- pre conceived stereotypes

Answer 57

• 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

Question 58

critique of holocaust gallery- antisemitism needs to be put forward because of views of visitors

Answer 58

• 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.

Question 59

critique of holocaust gallery- lack of personal connection

Answer 59

• 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

Question 60

critique of holocaust gallery- knowledge prior is low

Answer 60

• 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.

Question 61

postwar gallery - emotional opening

Answer 61

• 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.

Question 62

postwar gallery - Jews as communists

Answer 62

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

Question 63

postwar gallery - stereotype of Jews as communists

Answer 63

• 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.

Question 64

poswar gallery - portrayal of Stalin

Answer 64

• . 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

Question 65

Gallery addressing present Polish issues: Jewish migration

Answer 65

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

Question 66

Gallery addressing present Polish issues: ignores political rule

Answer 66

• 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

Question 67

Gallery addressing present Polish issues: media storm

Answer 67

• 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

Question 68

Gallery addressing present Polish issues: leaves scholars out

Answer 68

• 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.

Question 69

critique of Gallery addressing present Polish issues: national museum

Answer 69

• 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

Question 70

square of innocence

Answer 70

• 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.

Question 71

critique of square of innocence

Answer 71

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.

Question 72

square of innocence - competing interests

Answer 72

• 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

Question 73

museum of life - issues with not presenting death

Answer 73

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.

Question 74

museum of life - issue with promotional video

Answer 74

• 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.

Question 75

aim of museum on wheels

Answer 75

• 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

Question 76

standard museum on wheels exhibition

Answer 76

• 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

Question 77

museum on wheels - omits the holocaust

Answer 77

• 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.

Question 78

museum on wheels - mismatch between towns it visits and narrative

Answer 78

• 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.

Question 79

museum on wheels - reality is focus on the holocaust

Answer 79

• 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.

Question 80

MoW - public’s focus on the holocaust isn’t necessarily a bad thing

Answer 80

• 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

Question 81

socialist realism

Answer 81

• 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.

Question 82

Muranow as socialist realism

Answer 82

• 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

Question 83

Bodan Lachert’s proposal for Muranow

Answer 83

• 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.

Question 84

the removal of the rubble

Answer 84

• 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

Question 85

the relevance of the rubble

Answer 85

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.

Question 86

signs of social realism of museum- political comment

Answer 86

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

Question 87

how positive views see the lobby

Answer 87

• 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”.

Question 88

issue with the lobby

Answer 88

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.

Question 89

use of objects in the museum

Answer 89

• 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.

Question 90

the artificial rubble

Answer 90

• 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.

Question 91

museum building as itself a symbol

Answer 91

• 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.

Question 92

strengths of the museum

Answer 92

• 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.

Question 93

criticisms in general - permanence of antisemitism

Answer 93

• 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.

Question 94

criticisms in general - antisemitism of Poland and German policy

Answer 94

• 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

Question 95

criticisms in general - layout

Answer 95

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.

Question 96

criticisms in general - chorus of voices

Answer 96

• 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.”

Question 97

criticisms of museum in general - time and intellect required

Answer 97

• 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”.

Question 98

criticisms in general - polonisation

Answer 98

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.

Question 99

criticisms in general - citations

Answer 99

• 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.

Question 100

criticisms in general - reinforces political leaning

Answer 100

• 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.

Question 101

criticisms in general- exclusion of polish jews

Answer 101

• 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.

Question 102

against the criticism of Polin - antisemitism debate

Answer 102

• 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.

Question 103

against the criticisms- citations

Answer 103

• 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.

Question 104

against the criticism - chorus of voices

Answer 104

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.

Question 105

educative potential of museum

Answer 105

(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.

Question 106

Jewish historical agency in Polin

Answer 106

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”