View 2010: Holocaust Studies and Materials

2010: Holocaust Studies and Materials

ISSN:
1895-247X
eISSN:
2657-3571

Publication date:
2010-12-01

Section: Materials

Censorship Keeping Guard over the Church. Krystyna Modrzewska’s Censored Memoir

Jacek Leociak

jleociak@gmail.com

lecturer in the Institute of Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, head of the Holocaust Literature Studies Department of the Institute, member of the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Recent works: (co-author with Barbara Engelking), The Warsaw Getto. A Guide to the Perished City (2009, Polish edition 2001), Doświadczenia graniczne. Studia o dwudziestowiecznych formach reprezentacji (2009), Ratowanie. Opowieści Polaków i Żydów, (2010)

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1471-6926

Institite of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, 2010: Holocaust Studies and Materials, pages: 289-311

Publication date: 2010-11-30

https://doi.org/10.32927/ZZSiM.133

Abstract

In the three subsequent issues of The Bulletin of the Jewish Historical Institute of 1959 and 1960, the diary of Krystyna Modrzewska (Mendalbaum), submitted to the Central Jewish Historical Commission in 1947, was published. The first part, which opens with the outbreak of the war and ends with mass executions of the Jews in a forest near Krępiec, outside Lublin in spring 1942, was massacred by the censorship. The author writes, among other things, about hiding in the nunnery of the Congregation of Sisters of the Bethany Family outside Lublin, and she harshly judges the relations there. It turns out that the communist censor eliminated the record concerning critical views on the nuns’ mentality, their intellectual and moral standards. The censor did not approve of the comments about nunnery’s everyday life and church religious rituals, the clergy’s hypocrisy and the increasingly materialistic views of this group. The censor’s interference in the field of the author’s religious experience is even more acute as Modrzewska’s diary rates among a small group of testimonies describing adult Jews hiding in monasteries and convents. All those fragments has been restored in the current edition and placed in the context of the whole. Reading the integrated fragments of Modrzewska’s diary about hiding in the convent, it is worth pondering why a person (who had been baptized as a student of the university of Bologna, treating this ceremony very seriously, not opportunistically) experiences such a sheer disappointment in the convent near Lublin

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Leociak, J. (2010). Censorship Keeping Guard over the Church. Krystyna Modrzewska’s Censored Memoir. Zagłada Żydów. Studia I Materiały, (Holocaust Studies and Materials), 289-311. https://doi.org/10.32927/ZZSiM.133

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                            View 2010: Holocaust Studies and Materials

2010: Holocaust Studies and Materials

ISSN:
1895-247X
eISSN:
2657-3571

Data publikacji:
2010-12-01

Dział: Materials