Starting from 2005, Prof. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir (Polish Academy of Sciences) organised multiple field expeditions for her students focused on collecting qualitative data and materials related to blood libel legends and specifically concerning Holocaust memory in the Sandomierz region in central Poland. Their research, known as Ethnographical Archive, revealed the undisturbed persistence of the myth of the so-called "Jewish ritual murder", which was the seedbed for the postwar pogroms, among them the bloodiest pogrom in Kielce on 4 July 1946. In 2007, the critical artist Artur Żmijewski made a film about their project in Sandomierz, entitled "Polak w szafie" ("A Pole in a Closet"). Taking this film as a point of departure, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir will talk about her work on postwar pogroms described in her monographs entitled "Pod klątwą", "Społeczny portret pogromu kieleckiego" (2018) [Engl. translation: "Cursed. A Social Portrait of the Kielce Pogrom", 2023] and "Kocia muzyka. Chóralna historia pogromu krakowskiego" (2024).

»A Pole in a Closet« – 20 years later
Prof. Dr. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir (Polish Academy of Sciences)

Donnerstag, 26. Juni 2025, 18:00 Uhr
SR 385, Carl-Zeiss-Straße 3, 07743 Jena

Ein Vortrag in der Reihe 80 Jahre danach. Polnische Perspektiven auf den Zweiten Weltkrieg. Mehr Informationen dazu gibt es hier.