ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I analyze how my participants attribute agency to different (mostly ethnic) groups when they talk about the Holocaust in their town. The ever-changing meaning of the categories ‘Poles’, ‘Jews’, ‘Catholics’ and ‘Germans’ and their roles as agents in the Second World War and the Holocaust is the main focus of this part of the book. I outline an apolitical working consensus in the Bunkrowcy group to not explicitly address contentious topics in the Polish struggle over Holocaust memory. But when this apolitical working consensus is disturbed on some occasions by individual group members, this is sanctioned by social avoidance, or even open conflict may emerge. In this chapter, I also analyze two topics and narratives which are explicitly political but are uncontentiously narrated across interactional contexts: the veneration of those who perished during the Warsaw Uprising, and the life and legacy of Witold Pilecki.
