ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a group of female political prisoners in post-war Communist Poland and their efforts to reestablish for themselves a space in the Polish historical narrative. Elzbieta Zawacka's narrative combines two closely entwined stories: a macrohistorical account of events of the last century of Polish history and her own personal narrative. The agency that the women of Nike nevertheless display is located in a tactical understanding of the burden and responsibilities of the Polish woman. The women of Nike make a more or less conscious decision not to talk about imprisonment in terms of the potential vulnerability of women or problems that the female body might have experienced in a cell. Following James Fentress and Chris Wickham's study of social memory, Nike can be viewed as representing the social memory of a particular group. Nike is the result of a specific dialogue between the women themselves, between their prison and post-prison past, and between their past and present.
