ABSTRACT
In 1989, Polish history textbooks were freed from the official control of the communist state. This was also the time when diverse but often difficult memories and narratives of the past were released into the public sphere. This chapter compares and analyses representations of controversial events of the war: the Jedwabne massacre and the expulsions of Germans. It demonstrates how ‘black and white visions’ of that history in the textbooks of the early 1990s were transformed into today’s complex narratives about heroes, victims, perpetrators, bystanders and witnesses. This does not mean that there is a single new version of the past, but rather a multiplicity of various textbook narratives about the war. The question is posed of how textbooks conformed to a wider European trend of remembrance and teaching about the Holocaust as fostered by international organizations. Textbook narratives, like any other narratives, are anchored in the present, and in coming to terms with the past. Precisely because they are used in schools, they have enormous potential to reconstruct reality.
