Narratives of Return: Preserving Lost Knowledge in Postwar Polish Jewish Memorial Books

Abstract This article explores how Holocaust survivors and refugees described the experience of homecoming after the war in the postwar memorial books dedicated to their destroyed communities in Poland. The narratives of return that they wrote, from their places of migration, describe the ambivalent emptiness they felt in encountering their hometowns after the genocide, their embodied surveys through the towns, and their efforts to gather information about the local Holocaust. These itineraries and their composition into essays of return can be understood as part of an imperative to collect and preserve layers of knowledge about their towns of origin before, during, and after the war, and to prevent its loss.