The (auto)biographical-traumatic pact with a child described in this article based on the illustrated series Wojny dorosłych – historie dzieci Wars of adults – stories of children is made on many levels. Firstly, the author of each work draws on their own (as in the autopsy narratives by Joanna Papuzińska, Irena Landau, and Marek Perepeczko) or someone else’s wartime childhood (as in the narratives from informants who survived World War II or other armed conflicts, sometimes still ongoing, in the prose of Beata Ostrowicka, Renata Piątkowska, Dorota Combrzyńska-Nogala, Katarzyna Ryrych, Paweł Beręsewicz, Michał Rusinek, and others), pacting with themselves or the other as a former (previous) child regarding the conditions of disclosure and concealment, the mechanisms of (self-)creation, and the stylistic processing of a difficult history. Trauma ‘dictates’ (or creates) separate conditions, as an (in)describable experience. Secondly, the (auto)biographical-traumatic pact is forged with the child – the contemporary young reader – by sharing the past and present experiences of others, and by familiarising them with the existential drama of individuals and families as a result of war and its immediate consequences (for example, migration, displacement, death), which annihilate childhood and unify the fates of adults and children. The series demands empathetic reading; it constitutes a multi-authored polylogue that enables a multidirectional, intergenerational, and multicultural transfer of experience and knowledge in the context of post-memory.
Katarzyna Wądolny-Tatar (Sun,) studied this question.