„Szerzą wrogą, antypolską propagandę”. Polityczne i pamięciologiczne wymiary reportaży Mordechaja Canina

Abstract

The author discusses the Jewish fate in post-war Poland. The writer and journalist Mordechai Canin (1906–2009) visited Poland several times in 1946 and 1947, as a reporter for the Yiddish American left-wing daily “Forwerts”. A collection of his reports was published in Israel in 1952 under the title Iber shteyn un shtok: a rayze iber hundert khorev gevorene kehiles in Poyln, translated into Polish by Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska and published in 2018 (Przez ruiny i zgliszcza. Podróż po stu zgładzonych gminach żydowskich w Polsce (Through ruins and rubble. A journey through one hundred exter-minated Jewish communities in Poland)). According to the author of the sketch: “Canin’s book is a unique record of the experience of emptiness following the Holocaust. It is a unique testimony to the post-Holocaust atmosphere and social landscape of Polish cities and towns: with its few survivors, with its beneficiaries and accomplices, and above all with its witnesses erasing and suppressing the memory of their murdered Jewish neighbours from Polish consciousness”.