Encounters with antisemitism

Abstract

The Holocaust destroyed Jewish communities across Europe and in Poland. Subsequently, in the Soviet bloc, most Jewish survivors were expelled from or coerced into leaving their countries, while the memory of the millennium-long presence of Jews in Poland was thoroughly suppressed. Through the lens of a scholar’s personal biography, this article reflects on how snippets of the Jewish past tend to linger on in the form of absent presences, despite the national and systemic norm of erasing any remembrance of Poles of the Jewish religion. This norm used to be the dominant type of antisemitism in communist Poland after 1968, and has largely continued unabated after the fall of communism.