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The article analyzes the causative, emancipatory potential of the journalistic essay of testimony, which goes beyond its reporting function to become a new form of liberating the voices of the victims of communist regimes and "remémoration" of the past. Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets and Małgorzata Rejmer's Mud Sweeter than Honey. Voices from Communist Albania generate a space for reckoning with the undemocratic past which makes it possible: to (re)interpret history and regain the experience of its participants, to face up to historical trauma, as well as to restore the identity of the subdued. The discussed essays question the objectivity of history, a homogeneous vision of the past, and thus open historical events up to constant reinterpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is a review of Arkadiusz Morawiec's book Literatura polska wobec ludobójstwa [Polish Literature and Genocide], the first Polish literary study to address the acts of genocide that occurred before the Holocaust and the ethnic cleansing after World War II. The reviewer recognises the researcher's scholarship and the ethical sensitivity with which he revises his previous theses about the uniqueness of the Holocaust. The book has been composed in a cross-sectional manner, the articles on Holocaust and Genocide Studies are accompanied by analyses informed by poetics and sociology of literature. Thus, the reader becomes acquainted not only with the historical realities of the described conflicts but also with the mechanisms of collective memory, which is shaped by both institutional activities (museums) and the reception of survivors' testimonies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is a review of Agnieszka Gajewska's book Zagłada i gwiazdy. Przeszłość w prozie Stanisława Lema [Holocaust and the stars. The past in the prose of Stanisław Lem]. The author discusses Lem's autobiographical prose, realistic fiction and science fiction as a memory text in disguise, in terms of such categories as trauma and testimony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses the problem of postmemory and secondary testimony, including their visual and textual manifestations in Tadeusz Różewicz's late poem nożyk profesora (2001). The essay deals with theoretical background of the concept of postmemory (according to Marianne Hirsch and Dori Laub) in its psychoanalytical and aesthetical aspects. It focuses on the experimental style and composition of Różewicz's poem which combines visual (3 photographs) and textual (or, more precise, intertextual) means of expression to articulate a multilayered and polyphonic secondary Holocaust testimony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]