ABSTRACT
Regarding the lethal connection between modernity and the Holocaust, the author of this chapter has polemicised with Zygmunt Bauman on the previous occasions, on the basis of nineteenth-century ethnographic materials. The current state of research permits the reinforcement of that stance with archival and new empirical evidence. One contribution to this progress is the microhistorical research into the Holocaust that I have been pursuing for a decade and a half. This became possible with the opening of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance archives, which house the documentation connected with the August Trials, a series of court cases conducted immediately after the war in which many Polish citizens were found guilty of non-political collaboration with the German occupying forces. The chapter is therefore a revisiting of the Modernity and the Holocaust debate and a development of new polemics in the argument. The chapter addresses two issues: the idealisation of premodern condition in the writings of Zygmunt Bauman, and the phenomenon of “the ant-like Holocaust” (in relation to Patrick Desbois’s term “the Holocaust by bullets”), in which the Jews were killed not by the bureaucratic machine, but by the ordinary members of the communities in which they lived.
