Lost local traces: How national and local narratives overlap in a town’s space
Agnieszka Szurek, University of Warsaw
This presentation investigates how people in a small Masovian town in Poland, especially local authorities and amateur historians, interact with the traces of the past that are visible in the town’s space.
The two places in Grodzisk Mazowiecki which are the object of my analysis here are both connected with World War 2. The first is a memorial place near the town’s main square. In 1942, the Jewish house which stood there was destroyed. In 1943. twenty people brought from Warsaw prison were executed there. On the next day, local people put flowers and candles on the spot, so the place started to be consciously shaped as a ‘memorial’.
On 16 January 1945 another tragedy happened on the main square: about 300 people were killed in a Soviet air raid. The incident has never been explained (was it an accident? a mistake? a deliberate crime?) and during the communist era people were not allowed to talk about it. In 1966 a monument was erected on the spot, but the inscriptions on it mentioned only Polish and Soviet war victiories. It was national/global history that was to be remembered and ‘visible’, not the local one. In 1989, 1992 and 2015, subsequent tablets and inscriptions were added to the monument, but except for one tablet devoted to the victims of the air raid, they all again refer to ‘national’ narratives. The Jewish people, those executed there or other local heroes are not mentioned.
The second place is an old villa, which in 1945 was turned into a political police station and prison. Later, in the 1950s, it was turned into a kindergarten. The exact date when this change took place is unknown. There are no no documents or reports , and when people are asked about the house they claim they don’t remember anything. A very good and comprehensive study about this building has been written by a student from a local school, but it has never been published. Local history proved to be to ‘unsafe’.
These two examples show how difficult is the situation of local authorities and local historians, in this case in Poland: they have to build a coherent narrative from scattered memories and deal with discrepancies between local and national narrations. National narratives not always agree with local memories, but they do offer a ready-made pattern, a frame into which local ‘traces’ can be put. Local traces are therefore often reshaped to fit into national versions.
Last updated: 30 January 2017
