Book Project

Sexual Violence · World War II · "Active National Forgetting"

My second project builds off of many of the themes from my first book to investigate sexual violence in Poland during World War II. This research looks at the violence itself, and, more importantly, at the strategic silencing of that violence that ensued in the aftermath of the war. While most studies of wartime sexual violence focus on either camp life or upon the Red Army’s atrocities, my project yokes together these phenomena and locates them within a Poland notorious not only for its ethnic crimes, but also for its routinely-overlooked sexual brutality. Using Nazi medical records, security reports, personal papers, court documents, and charity memoranda, this project first establishes the pervasiveness of sexual violence. Then, it explicates the phenomena's strategic “national forgetting.” By placing women at the center of my inquiry and by acknowledging Polish men as perpetrators, my book challenges prevalent nationalist discourses that reinforce notions of Polish masculine heroism, martyrdom, and self-sacrifice.