Paper short abstract:

The current government's project of radical rebuilding the image of socialism in Poland encounters sometimes the resistance from different social groups. Remembering the brutalities of the post-war civil conflicts, they contest the new historical policy and practice own memory of that time.

Paper long abstract:

The need to overcome the socialist past and define a new collecitve identity are the important results of political transformation in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc. This process had been relatively peaceful and multi-vocal in Poland until 2015, when it accelerated rapidly and took a more radical turn as a national conservative camp was chosen to be the governing body. Legitimizing its right to exercise power, the party implements intensive historical policy that focuses above all on the anti-communist partisans called "cursed soldiers", which are presented as genuine patriot-Poles and great national martyrs of communism in Poland. This strategy of rebuilding the social imagination, revolutionary in its character and based on a regime of national conservative memory, encounters often bottom-up resistance of historical witnesses, victims' families, local communities - rural, ethnic, combatant groups, etc. Remembering the brutalities of the post-war civil conflicts, they do not agree to accept the unconditional glorification of the mentioned partisans - instead, they produce their own alternative strategies of collective memory of that time.

In my paper I would like to analyse one case of these current conflicts surrounding the anti-communist partisan group acting on the Polish-Slovakian borderland in the Tatra Mountains,

whose activities still evoke intense emotions, provoke opposing opinions and generate new forms of memory practices.