pen Academic Seminar. Justyna Koszarska-Szulc will deliver a lecture entitled will deliver a paper entitled You’ll swallow a bullet and go where the Jew goes. Postwar Trial Testimonies and the Discourse on the Holocaust
02.04.2026 16:40:21
Open Academic Seminar
Justyna Koszarska-Szulc
„“You’ll swallow a bullet and go where the Jew goes.” Postwar Trial Testimonies and the Discourse on the Holocaust

The meeting will take place on
Wednesday, April 15, in Room 161 at Staszic Palace (72 Nowy Świat Street) at 11:00 a.m.
Online participation via Zoom is available—registration is required:
🔹https://tinyurl.com/mvvyr3th
What emerges from an analysis of the language used by participants in trials held between 1947 and 1951, whose final proceedings took place before the Court of Appeal in Lublin? Although the testimonies were collected in an atmosphere of pressure, institutional entanglement, and social inequality, the language they record reveals deeply rooted, negative stereotypes about Jews. The activation of these stereotypes appears to create a kind of informal rapport between peasant witnesses and educated judges. As a result, it shapes assessments of the credibility of the testimonies themselves. I seek to answer the question of how these trials—through their specific linguistic practices, strong institutional framing, and manifestations of social prejudice—participated in shaping the postwar image of the Holocaust.
Justyna Koszarska-Szulc is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is involved in work on the Atlas of Holocaust Literature (at the IBL PAN Digital Humanities Centre). She collaborates with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the “Holocaust Justice” project. In 2024, she published the book Faithful to His Own Fracture: Identity in the Work of Artur Sandauer, which received, among other distinctions, the Józef Gierowski and Chone Shmeruk Award. She curated the exhibitions A Stranger at Home: Around March ’68 and (Post-)JEWISH: The Opatów Shtetl through the Eyes of Majer Kiszenblat (the latter jointly with Natalia Romik), and was a member of the curatorial team responsible for the core exhibition at the POLIN Museum.