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The article attempts to analyse Hannah Arendt’s short essay “We Refugees” published in 1943 in a Jewish magazine The Menorah Journal in the context of the current humanitarian crisis (a crisis of reception policies) and peace studies. It also reconstructs refugee themes in the life trajectory of the author of Eichmann in Jerusalem. The author is confident that the essay “We Refugees” from seventy-seven years ago allows one to speak up repeating the questions concerning one of the key problems of contemporary world – the condition of the outcasts.

The article Black Seasons. Black Kites. About the Children’s Reading in Ghettos is devoted to the Holocaust seen and lived from the perspective of children. The author is interested in book collections of those who survived the war and later became writers (U. Orlev, A. Frankel, and M. Glowinski), and those stories that thematise children’s reading in ghettos (D. Combrzynska-Nogala, M. Szczygielski). Joanna Roszak shows which books became for the children readers a matrix imposed on reality, which met the needs of a library therapy, helped children to cope with the emotional challenges of ghetto existence, and which enabled integration and identification processes. Moreover, the authoress presents which books triggered the escapist interpretation and finally which found an extension in the stories and essays created after the war. The title of the paper refers to The Black Seasons [Czarne sezony] by Michal Glowinski, and to a line from Czeslaw Milosz’s Campo di Fiori.

Autorka artykułu akcentuje potrzebę konfrontowania młodzieży z tematem Innych (etnicznych, narodowościowych, religijnych), co wiąże się ze stosunkowo nową sytuacją społeczną i polityczną, z nasilającymi się ruchami migracyjnymi. Polska szkoła powinna zobaczyć dla siebie istotne zadanie w kontekście światowego nomadyzmu i eskalującego kryzysu humanitarnego. Podczas etapu zbierania materiałów przeprowadzono wywiady skategoryzowane z nauczycielami, bibliotekarzami i uczniami dziesięciu poznańskich szkół. W artykule dokonano analizy i interpretacji zawartości podręczników do nauczania języka polskiego oraz zaproponowano realizację tematów powiązanych z wątkiem uchodźczym. Płynie z niego wniosek, że najważniejszym zadaniem, stojącym przed polską edukacją na wszystkich szczeblach, wydaje się wprowadzenie, nieobecnej dotąd w programie, edukacji na rzecz pokoju.

In June 1942 Emanuel Ringelblum asked: “What kind of books do people read? This topic has always been interesting for each Jew and after the war it also became interesting to the world”. This topic hasn’t received a comprehensive study yet. The author of the paper The Remains of the Letters. Three Reading Paradigms in the Ghettos examined this aspect of history of the ghettos. The literature allows us to shed light on the topic of the life and deaths of their inhabitants. But, taking up this topic enables us also to activate new ways of interpreting the books. The volumes they spent time on in the ghetto allow to capture the way the residents of the ghettos built or broke the bond with the reality, how they taught their own children to read or found solace in someone else’s pain. The author considers, however, whether the studies of ordinary life in extraordinary times of the Holocaust can be considered micro-historical.

The theme of the article is translation as a mode of internal immigration. Paul Celan, who chose German as the language of his work, (it was the language of his mother and of murderers), found a sanctuary also as translator. In translator’s profession, he found ways of distilling the German language, which never ceased to be his “internal landscape” in spite of the wound inflicted to the language by Nazism. Most of the discussion focuses on Celan’s motivations when he translated Osip Mandelstam’s poetry.

The article is a reflection on the wall being built since 2002 between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The paper presents this structure, its history and how it is reflected in poetry (Yehuda Amichai and Mahmud Darwish), reportage (Raja Shehadeh) and film. Artists’ initiatives once focussed on the Berlin Wall and more recently on the initiatives related to the Palestinian wall prompt the question how the media report on the present situation of the excluded. It is worth bearing in mind that memory or post-memory of our European wall and ghettos does not shape the discourse about the Middle-East. The preferred method of talking about walls has become geocritics (based more broadly on cultural and postcolonial studies; it is significant that the foundations of the theory of postcolonialism were put forward by a Palestinian – Edward Said).

The title “I have called you by your number” is paraphrased from the book of Isaiah. In Torah the change of name of the main character suggests the turning point of his/her fate. In the article I concentrate on the gesture of assuming pseudonym-anagrams by a few poets – it is viable to read it as an attempt at self-determination, and as a painful dividing line, and as a form of a mask, and an analogue of a perturbed fate. My reflection concentrates on texts by Sachs, Domin, Celan, Amichai, Améry with a motif of numbers (the turned over analogues of the names) – I find a context in the poem by Wisława Szymborska Still; and in the performance by Raimund Hoghe, staged only once, just in Poland, entitled site specific; the project 80064 by Artur Żmijewski or works by Roman Opałka. The promise written in the Book of Isaiah of liberating Israel, which was supposed to be a work of God’s omnipotence, God talking to Jacob – who is an allegory of Israel: “Don’t be afraid, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by your name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you: when you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle on you. For I am Yahweh your God”, in Auschwitz turned into the antithesis, and hence a threat that has a completely different sender than a good father: Be afraid, or else nobody will redeem you. I am calling you by the number, you are no one’s. You will go to the fire and a flame will consume you. You are alone.

In her essay, the author recalls literary contexts (including John Donne, Michel Houellebecq and Ernest Hemingway) and philosophical and anthropological contexts (including Aristotle, Thomas Merton, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Paul Sartre and Gilles Deleuze) presenting the poetic “I’s” various ways of approaching friendship. The quotation from a German translation of John Donne’s poem used in the title of the article is in itself a meaningful phonetic wordplay: “Kein Mensch ist ein Ich-Land” (no man is an “I” land, no man is an island). The main part of the essay includes an interpretation of the television series Lost — Joanna Roszak investigates philosophical references in the series and indicates biblical contexts (“Am I my brother’s keeper?”). A very apt comment to many episodes in the series is, according to the author, the formula told by Z. Herbert’s Fortinbras: Ani nam witac sie ani zegnac zyjemy na archipelagach/ A ta woda te slowa coz mogą coz mogą ” [It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos/ and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince]. It is a similar defencelessness in which the main characters of Lost try to struggle the reality, even if they live together, and die all alone. Collective memory has become a safeguard for the community in the world, which is to be destined for homelessness and forlornness. The other person though becomes a reference point — it is him or her that makes it possible to find the way home.