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The Figure of the Bloodsucker in Polish Religious, National and Left-Wing Discourse, 1945–1946: A Study in Historical Anthropology

The ‘bloodsucking Jew’ was a figure all Poles – Catholics, nationalists, and Communists – could understand and abhor. Following World War II, the image served to bind the Polish imagined community together, following Benedict Anderson's concept. Abhorrence of Jewish bloodsuckers was one of the few emotions that could, under the new conditions that prevailed after the war and given a diversely interpreted concept of patriotism, unite Catholics and nationalists associated with the National Armed Forces (NSZ), the hard-line Home Army, and the Communist People's Guard (GL) resistance militias. It was a novelty that this idea was embraced also by those Communists who combined nationalist rhetoric with a left-wing critique of the capitalism. This process was due to a rapid literalization of the bloodsucker metaphor in this period. This article is a study of the figure of the bloodsucker – a metaphoric condensation that appears in three types of anti-Jewish discourse (religious, national and left-wing) in the period of 1945–1946. Concentrating on the language used to formulate accusations against Jews who had survived the Holocaust, the author analyzes the evolution of such language and attempts to link symbolic violence it expresses to actual physical violence. As Hanna Segal's concept of symbolic equation shows, the literalization of comparisons or metaphors in propaganda or hate speech may indicate upcoming physical violence. Before the eruption of violence, its indications appear on a symbolic level – in language whose meaning is suddenly taken literally. Someone with a status of an exploiter is referred to with a seemingly dead metaphor of bloodsucker; when the situation escalates, however, the metaphor regains its living content, and this person is killed as someone who, e.g. as a kidnapper of children really consumes blood. When balance is restored, the memory of the crime regains the status of a dead metaphor.