The Memory of Totalitarian Reality

A Child’s Perspective of the Experience of Displacement From the Administrative Region of Łódź During the Second World War

Abstract

The article presents the experience of children faced with the traumaof displacement from the so-called Łódź administrative region (knownas the Kalisz administrative region in the years 1939–1941) duringthe Second World War. It is extremely important in this context to analyzethe process of formation, recreation and obliteration of the memoryof totalitarian reality in adulthood. From the beginning of the war, children were observers of German totalitarianism, which manifesteditself in the utter subjugation of Polish society to the German Reich,and in the implementation of total warfare. Crucially, those who foundthemselves in the Polish territories incorporated into the Third Reich veryquickly became not only witnesses to the war, but also its participants.The young people clearly saw that individuals who did not want to submitto a state foreign to them, were swiftly expelled therefrom. Particularlytraumatized were the children who had to part with their existingworld – their favorite toys, bed, home, garden, pets – and accompanytheir parents on a journey into the unknown, according to the dictatesof Nazi policy, which they did not de facto understand. Their first tasteof the “unknown” were the resettlement camps, followed by the townshipslying along the railroad line connecting Łódź with the cities of the GeneralGovernment in the south.