This article is built on the premise that the topos has become a potent unit of cultural memory, an image that stores a wealth of often vague, buried or forgotten ideas. Its contents, like those of literature, tend to become extraordinarily condensed and confl ated; in consequence, some topoi (in particular the Holocaust topos) defy conventional tools of understanding and analysis. A solution to this problem can be found in an approach which broadens the scope of the sources of the Holocaust to include pop culture; gives up the rigid classifi cation of topoi, based on ‘hard’, documentary evidence; and, draws on a conceptual frame that connects the topos with the mechanisms of remembrance. A practical application of this approach is offered here in a series of readings of selected passages from Marcin Pilis’s novel The Meadow of the Dead (Łąka umarłych), Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s crime story A Grain of Truth (Ziarno prawdy), Marcin Wolski’s alternate history novel Wallenrod, Justyna Wydra’s war romance The SS-man and a Jewess (Esesman i Żydówka), Krzysztof Zajas’s thriller Oszpicyn [local Yiddish: Auschwitz] as well as some poems by Jacek Podsiadło from his volume The Breguet Overcoil (Włos Bregueta).

The article aims at focusing attention at selected aspects of pop culture which may, from the point of view of evolutionary psychologists, be deemed approximate to animal proto-cultures and social systems observed among the three-year-olds, i.e. — people who have not yet developed a psychological skill called “theory of mind”. The Author tries to point out that elements of proto-culture in the time of pop -industry development gain on dominance, as a result of which the quality of culture creating processes as well as culture transmission processes may be different than, let’s say, fifty years ago. It is not only about the mass media, but it is most of all about deep psychological processes which are the basis for understanding the essence of culture and participation in culture. In other words, the author tries to argue that norms, ideas and values, i.e. what culture is made of in general — are understood and disseminated in ways which are different in quality from the ones prevailing in the past.