English
Polish
The unrecognized potential? Oral history in Polish Holocaust research
Anna Wylegała
anna.wylegala@ifispan.edu.pl BioAnna Wylegała - PhD in sociology, professor at IFiS PAN. Her work focuses on the social history of the Second World War and the post-war period. She is also interested in qualitative social research methodology, oral history and memory studies. Among other works, she is the author of There Was a Manor, There Is No Manor. Agrarian Reform in Poland (2021) and a critical edition of Klara Schwarz's diary (2017), and co-editor of the volumes The Burden of the Past History, Memory, and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine (2020) and No Neighbors' Lands: Vanishing Others in Postwar Europe (2023). Since 2022, he has been directing the Polish part of the research and documentation project “24.02.2022, 5 am: Testimonies of War,” which aims to document the Ukrainian experience of Russian aggression.
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5575-4123
Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences
Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, No. 20 (2024), pages: 499-509
Publication date: 2024-12-17
Abstract
This text presents the place of the Holocaust in oral history accounts recorded in Poland over the past twenty years. In order to do so, the author reaches back to the methodological roots of this trend, describes the methodological peculiarities and the most important themes present in Polish oral history, and reviews the main centers and communities that record and archive interviews. She then indicates how this resource can be useful to Holocaust researchers. In the final section, the author poses the question, why, despite its enormous potential, oral history resources, especially interviews with Polish witnesses, are not used as a historical source by Polish researchers.
Keywords
oral history, Holocaust, Polish witnesses, survivors' testimonies
References
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Other articles by the same auhtor(s)
- Anna Wylegała, Omer Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 15 (2019)
- Anna Wylegała, Ukrainian Discussions on the Holocaust: on Omer Bartov’s Book , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 7 (2011)
- Anna Wylegała, Remembrance (or Lack of It) on the Ruins. The Holocaust of the Żółkiew Jews in the Consciousness of New Residents of the Town , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 7 (2011)
- Anna Wylegała, Review: John-Paul Himka, Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA’s Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941–1944, seria „Ukrainian Voices”, t. 12, Stuttgart: ibidem, 2021, 540 s. , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 18 (2022)
