Project will shed light on Polish Holocaust stories

The neglected voices of Polish Holocaust victims will be given a new platform by an Essex researcher who is studying how their eyewitness accounts were translated for western audiences.

Dr Joanna Rzepa will explore how translation, censorship and publishing decisions have influenced our understanding of the Holocaust and restricted what we know about Polish Jewish experiences.

Funded by the Leverhulme Trust, she hopes her work will help to expand and diversify known Holocaust stories, drawing attention to less recognised narratives that show the complexities of Jewish survival in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Dr Rzepa, from Essex’s Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, said: “We tend to rely on canonical accounts like those of Anne Frank and Primo Levi for our understanding of the Holocaust, but these only tell part of the story.

“Witness accounts from western Europe don’t speak about life in the ghettos because there were no ghettos in the west, or the mass shootings by Nazi killing units (Einsatzgruppen) which took place only in eastern Europe.”

By exploring the role translation and publishing played in whether or not Polish voices are remembered, Dr Rzepa hopes to shed new light on the neglected experiences from eastern Europe and inform a broader understanding of the Holocaust across the continent.

She will investigate Polish accounts published during the Second World War, from behind the Iron Curtain in the Cold War and in the years after the fall of Communism in 1989 when there was a wave of new publications.

She explained: “The Holocaust affected communities who spoke many different languages. The majority of the victims were from eastern Europe and English wasn’t their mother tongue.

“Translation and publishing allow us to hear their voices, but translation involves mediation. Cultural issues, language challenges, historical context and political circumstances all shaped the work of translators and publishers, who have significantly contributed to our present-day understanding of the Holocaust.”

At the heart of her research will be texts like Mary Berg’s teenage diaries from the Warsaw Ghetto which, although published in 1945, fell out of circulation for more than 60 years. Despite her story being as relatable and important as that of Anne Frank, her name remains largely unknown.

“The fate of Mary Berg’s diary shows us that it’s not just the quality of the writing or the importance of the narrative that makes a given text commercially successful, but it’s also about cultural and political contexts, and the involvement of editors and publishers and marketing professionals,” Dr Rzepa explained.

Her project will also explore the works of writers like Polish-Jewish activist Gusta Draenger, novelist and Auschwitz survivor Seweryna Szmaglewska and Calek Perechodnik, a diarist and member of the Jewish Police from the Otwock Ghetto.

Speaking about censorship during the Cold War, when many accounts were archived, Dr Rzepa explained: “Every publication in communist Poland had to be approved by the central censorship office and all publishing was nationalised, so editors and publishers had to think very carefully about what they would be able to publish.

“Things that were considered politically incorrect at specific moments under communist rule, like unfavourable mentions of Soviet soldiers or communal violence against Jewish neighbours, would be frequently censored.”

Dr Rzepa’s project, The Holocaust in Translation: Publishing Testimonies from East-Central Europe, builds on her two previous research papers which explored Polish-Jewish relations in Jan Karski's Story of a Secret State and the Polish government-in-exile’s translation and publishing campaign during the war.

Header picture courtesy of The Archive of the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oświęcim.