No. 3 (2017): Narrations of the Shoah 2017, no. 3: Animals/Shoah
Holocaust studies and animal studies pose a foundational relationship for this issue of Narrations of the Shoah; in this respect, it includes the articles by Barbara Czarnecka, Katarzyna Ebigg, Magdalena Kokoszka, Bartłomiej Krupa, Mirosław Loba, Daria Nowicka, Kinga Piotrowiak-Junkiert, Beata Przymuszała, Lucyna Sadzikowska, Patryk Szaja, Marta Tomczok, and Monika Żółkoś. Adopting various methodologies, these authors analyse the potential of non-anthropocentric position for the humanities, tackle the controversial juxtaposition of the extermination camps and the industrialised intensive farms, and, consequently, loosen the grips of this lexical analogy. Moreover, they broadly analyse the pejorative animalisations, typical of anthroponormative language of violence and widely discussed and read in literary texts; eventually, the contributors to this issue reconstruct various strategies of presenting animal protagonists in literature and culture; they either are involved in the narratives on Jews during the times of the Shoah or experience their own war stories.
Written during his imprisonment in Dachau concentration camp, Edgar Kupfer Koberwitz’s cutting-edge publication, Bracia zwierzęta. Rozważania o etycznym życiu [Animal Brethren. On Ethical Life.] (introduced and translated into Polish by Katarzyna Kończal) provides us with a significant context to the aforementioned reflections. Moreover, we proudly present Primo Levi’s “Mnemagogia” (1946) (translated by Paweł Wolski), a short story that until now has remained unknown in Poland, and Kitty Millet’s “Caesura, Continuity, and Myth: The Stakes of Tethering the Holocaust to German Colonial Theory” (translated by Monika Żółkoś). In addition, this issue of Narrations of the Shoah includes Andrzej Juchniewicz’s detailed reading of the genre of lullaby, its variants and implementations, in poetry written during the times of the Shoah, Karolina Koprowska’s text on conceptualising violence in Jicchok Kaceneleson’s “Wej dir,” and Anita Jasińska’s contribution on Rutka Laskier’s diary, whose reading includes a take on the materiality of Laskier’s text. Judging from the documentary value of our contributions, two texts deserve utmost attention: Hanna Gosk’s proceedings of her research in Leo Lipski’s archive, resulting in the edition of Paryż ze złota… [The Golden Paris…], and Michał Wachula’s text on the minor labour camp located next to Cable Factory in Cracow.
