Rozstrzeliwane miasteczka i palone wioski.
Annihilated Towns and Burned Villages

A Collective Memory Narrative of the Polesie Region and the Folklorization of Second World War Memories

Summary/Abstract: The collective memory narrative of wartime and the Holocaust – recorded in theBelarusian and Ukrainian parts of the Polesie region – presents from an emic perspective alesser-known representation of the Second World War: a vernacular, autonomous variant,independent from the (post-)Soviet discourse of (non-)remembrance. Methodologically,this contribution aims to foster discussion on the intersections between folklore studies,oral history, and memory studies. A distinctive feature of this narrative is its parallelism:accounts of mass murders of Jews and peasants share a common structure andconceptual-axiological framework. An analysis of similarities and differences betweenthe narrative variants, conducted using Vladimir Propp’s method, reveals the affiliationof Jews and peasants within a shared category of innocent people, contrasted with “nonhumans:”Germans and their accomplices from “their own” group.

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