Reactions by émigré Polish leaders and intellectuals in the United States to the television series Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss (1978)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Matyjaszek’s article discusses a set of reactions by Polish émigré cultural and political activists in the United States to the screening of the NBC television series Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss on 16–19 April 1978. It offers an analysis of the emergence of Holocaust history as a source of collective identity and memory in western societies, and as a part of popular culture. The end of the 1970s witnessed a series of cultural and political events as well as the publication of scholarly texts that put images of the mass murder of the European Jews at the centre of North American and global debates on identity and history as well as their political uses. In his analysis of reactions by Polish intellectuals and community leaders, Matyjaszek examines the cultural position of members of the post-war Central-Eastern European intelligentsia in the United States, both in relation to their own reference group’s painful and violent history, and to their position within the North American society of the time. In a critical evaluation of contemporary uses of the concepts of ‘bystander’ and ‘survivor’ with regard to the Holocaust, he focuses on a set of documents stored in the private archive of Jan Nowak-Jeziorański (Ossoliński Institute, Wrocław, Poland), as well as on published documents and correspondence.