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.It tookPolish directors much longer to represent and comment on memoryand postmemory of Jewish suffering in Poland, not least because it tookPolish society at large much longer to admit that Jews, rather than eth-nic Poles, were the main victims of the Second World War (Mazierska2005).As Iwona Irwin-Zarecka puts it, For the majority of Poles, it istheir own victimisation during the Nazi occupation that represented aformative trauma (Irwin-Zarecka 1994: 49).Yet, Marczewski does notsimply replace the suffering Pole with a suffering Jew, but addressestheir intertwined histories and pain.The Polish suffering is epitomisedby the trauma of children who witness Weiser s perishing, without fullygrasping what happened to him, and then stand accused of killing Weiser,although they did not do so.Such accusations can be construed as seek-ing scapegoats for the true culprits of Jewish genocide, both in Polandand elsewhere.There are many signs of Jews previous presence and current absencein WrocÅ‚aw and, by extension, in Poland as a whole.For example, theantique dealer whom PaweÅ‚ visits in relation to the old record whichwas played by Weiser wants to sell PaweÅ‚ a set of cutlery, which mostlikely belonged to some Jews taken to the death camp, and a leatherarmchair, on which Hermann Göring apparently once sat.The char-acter of these antiques , namely the fact that the cutlery is an objectof merchandise and enriches those who are not their real owners andthat the connection with the man who, together with Hitler, played themost important role in the annihilation of Jews, adding value to the oldarmchair, testifies to the lack of respect for Polish Jewish heritage andeven, possibly, of anti-Semitism flourishing in contemporary Poland.From Weiser s talk with his Jewish grandfather or religious mentor,as recollected or imagined by PaweÅ‚, we learn that he is an orphan.Although, being a 12- or 13-year-old boy he cannot be a child of theHolocaust victims, their conversation suggests that Weiser s parents diedbecause they were not fit to survive in adverse circumstances.Weiser smentor does not want Dawid to repeat his parents mistakes and the boypromises to follow his request.In the light of this conversation, Weiser s Dealing with Historic Trauma 53probable death in the blown-up tunnel can be interpreted as a kind ofrepetition of his parents death, thus a sign of him being overwhelmedby postmemory, not unlike the Jewish and Armenian characters in thefilms previously discussed.Conversely, it can be seen as proof that Weiserlearnt from their mistakes and avoided their fate by masterminding hisown death, rather than allowing others to kill him.The second inter-pretation is supported by scenes of Weiser constantly working on hisphysical and even more mental powers.He learns to endure pain,levitate and, ultimately, disappear.We see Weiser for the first time when he is harassed by a group ofPolish children.They attack him as he mends his bike and call him aJew.The assault takes place after the last lesson of Catechism beforethe summer holiday.The fact that Weiser does not attend religiouseducation is perceived by Polish children as sufficient reason to punishhim.Symbolically, this can be viewed as an indictment of the CatholicChurch in the history of Polish anti-Semitism, as argued by Gross (Gross2006).Weiser is rescued by Elka, who forces the children to leave theboy alone.This incident is observed by PaweÅ‚, who neither takes part inthe harassment, nor defends the boy.His silence is repeated later in theantique shop, where he refuses to comment on the antiquarian s taste-less advertising of his Jewish souvenirs.This passivity can be regardedas emblematic of the position taken by the majority of Poles in responseto the killing of Jews by Germans and fellow Poles.It also can be inter-preted, as some reviewers observed, as signifying PaweÅ‚ s attitude as afuture artist, who prefers to look rather than act (Lubelski 2001).11In becoming the rescuer of a Jew, Elka cuts an unusual figure in theHolocaust narratives and especially the Holocaust films.Typically it is astrong, Gentile male who rescues Jews, both male and female, the mostfamous example being Oskar Schindler in Schindler s List (Cole 1999: 82).Yet Elka concurs with the representation of women in Polish war narra-tives, for example in the Polish School films, who often had to take careof weak or sick men (Ostrowska 2006) and in Polish Holocaust films,where it is usually a woman who shows solidarity with a Jew, as can beseen in the films by Wanda Jakubowska and Jan Jakub Kolski (Mazierska2000, 2001).In my opinion, by choosing a woman as the rescuer of aJew, Marczewski links Polish anti-Semitism with patriarchy, suggestingthat overcoming one of these ideologies might help to overcome theother.After Elka s rescuing of Weiser, PaweÅ‚ and his two classmates befriendhim, most likely regarding it as the acceptable price for being close tothe charismatic and pretty girl.Yet, Elka remains the only person in 54 European Cinema and Intertextualitythe neighbourhood who is emotionally close to Weiser.For her, Weiseris not inferior to the Polish boys but superior, as demonstrated by herobserving with awe his levitating.She also participates in his dangerousexperiments, lying next to Weiser on the airport runway, at the veryplace where the plane is about to land.It should be mentioned thatWeiser is not the only Polish film from the postcommunist era in whichJews are represented as possessing supernatural powers.This motif isalso prominent in the films by Jan Jakub Kolski, a descendant of a JewishHolocaust survivor, who in his films also takes issue with Polish Jewishrelations during and beyond the Second World War (Mazierska 2000).Both in Kolski s films, for example Cudowne miejsce (Miraculous Place,1994), and in Weiser, the miracles which occur in the presence of theJewish characters are a measure of the almost impossible task the Jewshad to undertake to survive in adverse circumstances.From this per-spective, Weiser can be compared to the magic realism of such LatinAmerican authors as Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso andGabriel García Márquez.The fact that magic realism flourished in the lit-erature of the Third World is often explained by the fact that the post-colonial experience involves sharp discrepancies between the cultures oftechnology and superstition, as well as grave economic and social ine-qualities (Slemon 1988).Accordingly, magic in these works is frequentlyrepresented as a tool of imaginary overcoming of these inequalities, ofbringing justice and prosperity to those who are harmed and margin-alised
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