Hide and seek with Nazis: Playing with child identity in Polish children's literature about the Shoah

Abstract

The paper analyses child character identity change presented in contemporary Polish children's novels about the Holocaust. Using the category of play described by scholars such as Erving Goffman, George Eisen, and Jerzy Cieślikowski, it is shown that the change of a protagonist's identity from Jewish to non-Jewish and vice versa is a sort of play containing a set of rules, practices, stakes, etc. As it is described, the child Jewish identity is something determined by the surrounding (mainly Nazi authority) and then something fluid, not solid (as the protagonists mostly come from integrated Polish-Jewish backgrounds). Playing-out as coming out of normal life seems to be the only way to survive the terror of war and the Shoah. Identity fluidity is presented as a mechanism to show the protagonist as a universal character facing terrible events, which makes these novels readable for contemporary readers.