Spectres of the Holocaust

In the era of post-memory, the Holocaust as an event belongs more to the dead than the living. In Polish literature, we find evidence of its haunting: this is not merely the return of socially repressed issues concerning the Holocaust. The dead themselves are also returning, after having been forced beyond the bounds of memory during the postwar years. They will not allow the next generation to forget. Their relationship with the annihilation of the Jewish world, with the dead, has been emphasized by writers who survived the war as children. Today those who were born after the war are writing about their persistent contact with spirits and ghosts of the past.