Generational identity search. Remembrence of the Holocaust in the literary work of Polish Jews

Abstract

During the Holocaust nearly the entire population of Polish Jews was exterminated. Those who survived became the likely keepers of their people’s memories and the stories of the suffering they had endured.

At the end of World War II, there was a long period of silence about the Holocaust. Only as time passed did the survivors start facing the trauma of their past, through creating literary works and writing down their memoirs; also, on behalf of victims who were no longer able to do that.

The Polish Jews who survived Holocaust also, while creating literary stories, were becoming writers, chroniclers and documentarists. By writing down their own stories as well as stories of their loved ones, they gave testimony to the crimes that were committed while rescuing the pieces of their nation’s destroyed past from fading into the oblivion. The imperative to write has become the repository of their memories and their identity being preserved for future generations.