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The aim of the article is to identify and analyse guarded centres for foreigners in Poland when considered as total institutions and the psycho-social consequences of such totalization on the officers and employees of the Border Guard who work in these centres. The above-mentioned consequences stem from their daily work in a total institution, primarily within the legal and socio-cultural conditions of the functioning of these centres and, secondly, in terms of the relationships between the staff employed in them, as well as between the staff and foreigners. In addition, they are also an effect of the simultaneous impact of the world outside the total institution on the officers and employees of the Border Guard.

In the years 1988-1993 the authors of this article participated in the research project “The Memory of Jewish Culture Among the Inhabitants of the Sub-Carpathian Region,” in result of which ca. 400 in-depth interviews with the inhabitants of southern Poland have been collected. This material for various reasons have not been elaborated at that time. In 2013, we have decided to return to it in the framework of a new project: “Strategies of Remembering the Jewish Culture in Galicia.” The new reading of the material collected 25 years ago offered us an exceptional opportunity to see how our perception has changed. We have noticed several hidden assumptions that we assumed when conducting interviews. The first of them was the location of the interviewees in the “allochronic discourse” in which they were perceived as the representatives of the past who did not belong to our commonly shared present and were not influenced by it. The second assumption was the commonsense concept of memory as mnéme, that is the present recollection of the image of events as encoded in the past. The third assumption was the acceptance as something self-evident that the interviewees must remember what they had experienced and that it is precisely the content of that experience that they share with us in the situation of the interview. While reading the interviews again, we have had to revise these assumptions. We have accepted that the visions of the past are constructed in the present, that they serve to build and to defend the constructs of identity of the respondents, and that what they delivered was in fact a result of a complicated process of interaction and overlapping of various discourses in terms of which they apprehended the past. We have also had to self-critically admit that reading the old material from the perspective of the debates that took place in Poland after the publications of Neighbors and following books by J. T. Gross revealed a certain naivety with which we had approached the Polish Jewish relations 25 years ago and a certain tendency to marginalize the Holocaust in favor of a nostalgic vision of Jewish culture. The revision of this naivety allowed us to see in the interviews the motifs, allusions, significant silences, contributing to what we describe in the final sections of the article as “non-memory” in which the past unveils more authentically than in its elaborated images. W latach 1988−1993 autorzy artykułu uczestniczyli w projekcie badawczym „Pamięć kultury żydowskiej wśród mieszkańców Podkarpacia”, w ramach którego zebrano około 400 pogłębionych wywiadów z mieszkańcami Polski południowej. Materiał ten, z różnych powodów, nie został wówczas opracowany. W 2013 roku postanowiliśmy do niego powrócić w ramach nowego projektu „Strategie pamiętania o kulturze żydowskiej w Galicji”. Odczytując na nowo materiał zebrany 25 lat temu, mieliśmy wyjątkową okazję zaobserwować, jak zmieniła się nasza percepcja wypowiedzi respondentów. Przede wszystkim dostrzegliśmy szereg ukrytych założeń, którymi posługiwaliśmy się, przeprowadzając wywiady. Pierwsze z nich to lokowanie naszych rozmówców w dyskursie, który Johannes Fabian określał jako „allochroniczny”, a więc traktowanie ich jako reprezentantów przeszłości, nienależących do naszej wspólnej teraźniejszości i nie podlegających jej wpływowi. Drugie to zdroworozsądkowa koncepcja pamięci jako mnéme, a więc jako przekazywania w teraźniejszości zakodowanego w przeszłości obrazu wydarzeń. Trzecie to przyjęcie za pewnik, że nasi rozmówcy muszą pamiętać to, co przeżyli i że właśnie treść tych przeżyć jest tym, co nam przekazują. Odczytując na nowo zebrane wywiady, poddaliśmy te założenia rewizji. Przyjęliśmy mianowicie, że wizje przeszłości są konstruowane w teraźniejszości, że służą budowie i obronie konstruktów tożsamościowych, i że to, co mówili nam respondenci, było w istocie rezultatem skomplikowanego nakładania się na siebie różnych dyskursów, w których ujmowali oni przeszłość. Samokrytycznie też musieliśmy przyznać, że odczytanie zebranego materiału z perspektywy debat, jakie przetoczyły się przez Polskę po opublikowaniu Sąsiadów i następnych książek J. T. Grossa ujawniło naiwność, z jaką 25 lat temu podchodziliśmy do stosunków polsko-żydowskich oraz pewną tendencję do marginalizacji problematyki Zagłady na rzecz nostalgicznej wizji żydowskiej kultury. Rewizja tej naiwności pozwoliła nam na dostrzeżenie w wywiadach wątków, aluzji, znaczących przemilczeń i tym podobnych, składających się na to, co określamy jako „niepamięć”, w której przeszłość ujawnia się bardziej autentycznie niż w wyartykułowanych jej obrazach. Tekst powstał w ramach projektu sfinansowanego ze środków Narodowego Centrum Nauki przyznanych na podstawie decyzji numer DEC-2012/07/B/HS3/03464. Publikacja współfinansowana w ramach programu Ministra Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego pod nazwą „Narodowy Program Rozwoju Humanistyki” – projekt nr 11H 12 0305 81 (umowa nr 0027/NPRH2/H11/81/2012) pt. „Archiwum Danych Jakościowych przy IFiS PAN”, realizowany w latach 2012–2018 w Instytucie Filozofii i Socjologii PAN.

The authors present their experience of revisiting the in-depth interviews collected in 1988–1993 in the context of new research on Poland’s memories of Jews and the Holocaust conducted by them in 2013–2017. The revisit, carried out in a radically different intellectual and socio-political context, helped the authors: (1) to change their focus from the past to the present in which the interviews were conducted and in which the respondents constructed their remembrance; (2) to understand memory as a contingent and contextual image of the past, functional in relation to the identity-management of the remembering subjects; (3) to discover the previously neglected importance of the non-discursive attitudes to the past, located between amnesia and remembrance, which the authors have called non-memory.

This paper focuses on the reconstruction of social identity in which Polish pendulum migrants to Belgium engage, and pays specific attention to the civic components of this process. Social identity is here understood as an interactional, changing, and contextual phenomenon. Migration means being in a world in which neighbouring families and surrounding actors represent completely different cultures with different customs, traditions and lifestyles. The reconstruction of identity is an essential condition for adaptation and assimilation in the new place of settlement. This process of identity reconstruction, based on changes in stereotypes, is linked with the acceptance of pluralism as an important feature of the socio-cultural reality. The acceptance of a pluralist world brings migrants to a wider tolerance of diversity. This paper examines different circumstances of the processes mentioned in concrete empirical reality.

Monomolecular layers of pure chlorophyll a (Chl a), violaxanthin in the conformation all-trans, 9-cis, 13-cis and two-component monomolecular layers formed with Chl a and all isomers of violaxanthin, at a stoichiometric ratio 1:1, were formed and compressed at the argon–water interface. The specific molecular areas of Chl a and the isomers of violaxanthin in monomolecular layers were determined on the basis of the isotherms of compression. The isotherms of compression of the Chl a–violaxanthin-all trans monolayers correspond well to the theoretical ones, calculated on the basis of the additivity rule. The theoretical isotherms of compression of monolayers formed with Chl a and violaxanthin in conformations 9-cis and 13-cis are shifted towards higher molecular areas with respect to the experimental ones, indicating molecular interaction between components of the system. Monolayers were also deposited to a solid support by means of the Langmuir–Blodgett technique and subjected to spectroscopic studies: to quartz lamella in the case of electronic absorption and fluorescence spectroscopy and to ZnSe crystal in the case of Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR). The comparison of the absorption and Chl a fluorescence excitation spectra enabled to make a calculation of the rate of excitation energy transfer from violaxanthin to Chl a. Efficiency of energy transfer from a carotenoid to Chl a was 32% in the case of violaxanthin all-trans, 21% in the case of violaxanthin 9-cis and 15% for violaxanthin 13-cis. Such findings suggest a structural role of violaxanthin in conformation 9-cis and 13-cis and an accessory role of violaxanthin all-trans in the photosynthetic apparatus. The analysis of FTIR spectra reveals molecular interaction between Chl a and violaxanthin in conformations cis via the hydroxyl groups of xanthophylls located in the C3 and C3′ positions.