Examining local memory in the context of the state policy of remembrance in Poland. Deportations into the heart of Russia to Siberia in unofficial memory

Researchers in social memory are bound in their work to include the relations occurring between the memory of local communities and the official historical policy of the state. When events retained and exposed in the local memory are persistently passed over in silence, distorted, falsified or removed from the public sphere by means of decisions taken by the censorship, the remembrance of these events takes on the character of concealed memory, which integrates the given social group tightly (e.g., the Siberians, the Silesians). The transformations which followed in Poland after 1989 (liquidation of the Censorship) formally introduced „commonwealths of memory” into the public debate; however, they affected the stereotypes and prejudices held by Poles only to an insigni' cant degree. The ideologization of the state policy of remembrance, which has been gaining strength for some time (among others, the amended act on the Institute of National Remembrance) practically makes it impossible for a free dialogue to function in the public space. If the official (state) remembrance imposes the way of understanding, interpreting and remembering past events and this under the threat of legal repressions, then there again we come to deal with its clash with unofficial (local) memory, in consequence of which the „bearers” of the latter may develop a sense of being excluded from the official historical narration. Such a situation not only hampers conducting studies among the stigmatized or excluded groups, but primarily requires from the researchers to be particularly responsible while interpreting the images of memory which are lived through by these communities