Monika Rice's “What! Still Alive?!”: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Israel Remember Homecoming is an extraordinary contribution to the field of postwar Polish Jewish history. The book focuses on adult Holocaust survivors’ memories of their first encounters with ethnic Poles in their hometowns after the war ended. It is a study in patterns of collective memory as situated in “the changing geopolitical realities” of Poland and Israel, where the memories were recorded (6). This original research is based on almost two hundred written testimonies selected from two collections, grossly underused in the historiography on the subject: the Central Jewish Historical Commission (CŻKH) testimonies collected in Poland immediately after the war, and the Yad Vashem testimonies collected in the 1950s and 1960s. Using grounded theory, the author draws patterns of collective memory, which are deeply contextualized, movingly interpreted, and beautifully written.
By skillfully comparing the two sets of the Polish Jewish survivors’ testimonies, Rice traces the relationship between “the recorded memories of their postwar encounters with Polish Gentiles and the place and time of their recalling of those memories” (195). She convincingly argues that, in the testimonies recorded in Poland immediately after the war, survivors were still unsure about their future and whether they would stay or leave. The sudden shock of continuous hostility and violence created “additional postwar trauma clearly … unabsorbed by the time testimony was given because it was typically manifested in the use of common, dry, and unemotional language and rhetoric” (196). The discourse of memory was not yet created, and collective memory was still in the making. However, Rice argues, when the Yad Vashem testimonies were collected in Israel in the 1950 and 1960s, the collective memory of postwar Polish-Jewish encounters was well established. It became a narrative with closure and coherence, aligned to “Israel's national agenda” (197). Survivors “were convinced of the continuity of antisemitism in Poland … ; they were more vocal about their postwar encounters with their Polish neighbors … ; and they employed explicitly Zionist vocabulary and imagery in their narratives, perhaps to prove that they belonged to the Israeli society” (196). In this context, Rice finds the high proportion (39 percent) of silences about Polish encounters or hostility in the Israeli testimonies particularly striking. In her view, these silences might suggest some Polish Jewish survivors’ “push back” against the dominant Zionist discourse at a time when they struggled to adapt to the social and political conditions of their new homeland.
In her analysis of testimonies, the author follows Barbara Engelking's approach to Jewish victims’ voices, “using as much as possible the survivors’ own words and resisting to the extent possible the imposition of [her] own interpretations on their expressions” (13). Rice thus purposefully takes “each testimony at face value, without attempting to verify its factuality. [She] then attempt[s] to reconstruct the world that ‘welcomed’ the survivors, who were reaching for their own experiences as expressed in their own words after the war” (15). The result is a sophisticated textual analysis of these expressions of memory, deftly contextualized in the detailed profiles of the institutions that collected them and in the broad national discourses within which these institutions operated. Intellectual biographies of the founding members, most prominently Rachel Auerbach, who first participated in the creation of the CŻKH and then headed the Department for the Collection of Testimonies at Yad Vashem, prove particularly useful for this analysis.
For the most part, Rice's selection of testimonies and quotations is well aligned with her research agenda. However, even Rice finds the inclusion of some stories awkward to justify, albeit for reasons different from this reviewer. The selections under question can be found in the otherwise brilliant chapter on “Comparative Analysis of the Data: Memory on a Curve,” which investigates “styles of recounting” of Polish and Israeli testimonies: from the dry language of police reports; through the genres of lament, novel, and manifesto; through stories of exodus and the Promised Land; to “memory-boxes” and “absent matsevot.” “A Tale of Two Doctors” examines a fictional narrative, “Dr. Michał Goldfein: Castaway” by Dr. Herzig, and a manuscript by Dr. Julian Aleksandrowicz, both archived in Yad Vashem. I do not find the inclusion of a fictionalized account problematic, especially since, as Rice shows, Dr. Michał Goldfein is a composite character of two real persons and can be considered yet another form of narrating the trauma. But a heavy focus on the wartime period sets this subchapter apart, considering that no other survivors’ wartime experiences are examined at any length in the book. As such it unsettles the logical development of the argument that works so well in the rest of the book.
The disturbing narrative of violence, hostility, and indifference toward the Jewish survivors in postwar Poland (and prewar Polish Lwów, Sokal, Naliboki, and Korelicze) that emerges from Rice's study is not new. It confirms what historians of postwar Poland have already established in recent decades. But Rice's book infuses this knowledge with the throbbing texture of the lived experience, especially in small communities. Most testimonies in Rice's book come from small Polish towns and villages: Grajewo, Ciechanowiec, Wesoła, Chełmno, Garwolin, Łowicz, Proszowice, Radomsko, Klementów, Jędrzejów, Pawłów, Koźle, Wisła, Międzyrzecz, Sandomierz, Sinowoda, Parczew, Wołomin, Sterdyń, Kosów Lacki, Wysokie Mazowieckie, Nowy Targ (many of these names are not included in the index), and numerous unnamed villages near Tarnów, Lublin, and Kraków. Since Rice leaves the local contexts of these places mostly untapped, there is an opportunity for social historians of postwar Polish-Jewish relations to take up the two collections where Rice left them and sketch a collective portrait of a small Polish town after the war.
Overall, “What! Still Alive?!” is a uniquely readable, remarkably affecting, and truly original text that is a must read for anyone interested in the history of Holocaust survivors, Polish-Jewish relations, and memory studies. It is certainly one of the best books on the subject in recent years.
