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Paper short abstract

This paper explores ethical challenges in researching difficult pasts, drawing on studies of smuggling on the Polish–Slovak border during and after Second World War. It reflects on the role of empathy in protecting interviewees’ agency while breaking silence around contested histories.

Paper long abstract

This paper reflects on the ethical challenges of researching difficult pasts, based on anthropological and historical work on smuggling on the Polish–Slovak border during the Second World War and the postwar years. At that time, smuggling was a significant element of the region’s social landscape, closely intertwined with the activities of the Polish underground and the cross-border escape of Jews. Yet, as an illegal and morally ambivalent practice, smuggling has remained largely absent from dominant wartime and postwar memory narratives.

Ethnographic research on the memory of smuggling therefore inevitably becomes an act of breaking historical silence. While this can open space for discussion about violence, illegality, and contested pasts, it also raises ethical questions. These concern how to work with witnesses and their families in ways that respect their agency, emotions, and right to remain silent, as well as how to approach archival materials responsibly.

The paper draws on ethnographic research conducted by the author within the project 'Faces of Smuggling in the Polish–Slovak Borderland between 1918 and 1949', supervised by Dr Karolina Panz. It explores how research empathy and practices of care help the research team engage with socially taboo topics and create conditions in which both researchers and interlocutors can navigate the process of breaking historical silence. The paper asks how ethnographic and archival sources can be brought into dialogue to shed light on various aspects of the contested pasts.