We Are All Witnesses. In Lieu of an Introduction

1Maryla Hopfinger

2The Polish culture has not yet worked through the experience of the Shoah. In this volume, we ask about the narrative methods of constructing the witness in Polish texts of culture from the period between 1942 and 2015. The Polish witness, inscribed in the tales of the Shoah, is an intertextual category. yet it has real authors and concrete recipients, who live in the changing reality of social communication.

3The authors of this volume take a critical look at the constructions of the witness, which share a national-Catholic perspective and concern for the heroic self-image of the community. This dominant syndrome of the Polish identity still holds today. The author writes about the changing circumstances of communication between the times of the Holocaust and the contemporary times, and she asks what it means to have been a witness to the Shoah then and, through the passing decades, up until today.

CHAPTER 1. Constructing the Figure of the Polish Shoah Witness

4Katarzyna Chmielewska

5In this essay, the author draws new cognitive frameworks for the category of witness, critically approaching the most significant concepts and discussions around this category, or better said, around many categories that appear in the constellation of witness: bystander, witness, moral witness, participant. In ordering these categories, she turns toward the ‘40s of the 20th century, demonstrating that already then, almost simultaneously with the Shoah, the Polish memory politics concerning this event was already forming. Memory politics is defined as a meta-narration, formulating recurring motifs, common places, fabularizations and taboos. The figure of a Polish witness as the only admissible and canonical form of commenting on the Polish role in the Shoah emerged already in this period. The author analyzes press publications, proclamations, manifestos, early diaries and essays written concurrently with the events, pointing out the recurring motifs and ways of thinking about the Polish witness within this voluminous material.

CHAPTER 2. Alternative Narratives of the 1940s vs. the Politics of Memory

6Katarzyna Chmielewska

7The author attempts not only to provide a more in-depth commentary on the frameworks of the Polish memory politics, delimited by her in earlier texts, but she also focuses primarily on outlining testimonies alternative to the ones of the nascent politics. She paints a broad social and historical background of the aforementioned events, devoting considerable space to the Kielce pogrom and to reactions of leftist intellectuals to the shock of this event. Separate space is dedicated to considerations regarding Catholic voices, usually published in Tygodnik Powszechny weekly, which, while resisting anti-Semitism and active attacks against Jews, reproduced the models of exclusion and, at the same time, strengthened the dominant memory politics.

CHAPTER 3. A Tale at a Crossroads. Before and after October 1956

8Tomasz Żukowski

9October 1956 has functioned as a breakthrough moment in the Polish narrations about the Shoah. even though discussions after the Kielce pogrom were extinguished, the late ‘40s and the first half of the ‘50s brought particularly interesting and bold depictions of the Shoah and of Polish attitudes toward Jews. They were taken up after the year 1956. The author discusses two novels from the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, along with their screen adaptations: Kazimierz Brandys’ Samson (1948), whose film adaptation directed by Andrzej Wajda was released in 1961, Pokolenie (1951), also directed by Wajda, which entered cinemas in 1954. Both literary texts, although associated with socialist realism, depart from the figure of “witness”, placing an emphasis on the agency of the Polish surroundings, rooted in the anti-Semitic cultural patterns and the related collective guilt. They also limit the idealization of the Polish surroundings, including of the workers. This message rings through in the adaptations. The change takes place in 1956. Along with recovery of memory about the Home Army conspiracy, its image – and with it the image of Polish attitudes in general – becomes whitewashed. The model example of this is Roman Bratny’s novel Kolumbowie. Rocznik 20 (1957) and Janusz Morgenstern’s TV series (1970) based on the book.

CHAPTER 4. Hand in Hand. Calling on Witnesses to Polish-Jewish Brotherhood

10Anna Zawadzka

11The author proposes an analysis of texts (and their reception) that established the order of discourse on the Shoah in the last three decades of the PRL. They are Władysław Bartoszewski’s and Zofia Lewinówna’s Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej (1966), Kazimierz Moczarski’s Rozmowy z katem (1977), Hanna Krall’s Zdążyć przed Panem Bogiem (1977) and Andrzej Szczypiorski’s Początek (1986). Such a juxtaposition of literary works is dictated by the fact that they all summon witnesses to prove the Poles’ magnanimity toward Jews. In three cases of Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej, Zdążyć przez Panem Bogiem and Początek these witnesses are Jewish. In Rozmowy z katem Moczarski makes the SS commander Jürgen Stroop a witness to the Polish cause. The acclaim that these books enjoy to date speaks to the fact that they provided the type of narration about the Shoah that was desired in Poland. The main plexuses of this narration discussed in the text are: heroic help brought to Jews by Poles, the common fight of Poles and Jews against the German occupant, trying to pass Home Army off as the main ally of the Jewish conspiracy and the de-communisation of Polish aid to Jews and of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The aforementioned texts also share the fact that they purport symmetries between the Polish and Jewish experience. These are symmetries of fear, crime, traitors and victims, as well as the symmetry between Nazism and communism, which binds them into a coherent whole.

CHAPTER 5. Bearing Witness to Witnessing: Jewish Narratives about Polish “Witnesses” to the Holocaust

12Anna Zawadzka

13The same categories have been applied from the ‘40s on to the wartime experiences of Poles and Jews. As an effect, the key stakes in the texts by Polish Jews concerning World War II have been to address the specificity of the Jewish experience of war. This specificity was largely affected by the attitudes of Poles toward Jews. The author analyses the resistance that this truth encountered, based on the example of reception of the following texts: Wielki Stefan Konecki by Adolf Rudnicki (1948), Pusta woda by Krystyna Żywulska (1963), Zapiski z martwego miasta by Artur Sandauer (1963) and Żydowska wojna by Henryk Grynberg (1965). In order to outline the context in which Polish Jews who write about Shoah function, she also discusses the reception of Krystyna Żywulska’s Przeżyłam Oświęcim (1946) and Artur Sandauer’s O sytuacji pisarza polskiego żydowskiego pochodzenia w XX wieku (rzecz, którą nie ja powinienem był napisać…) (1982).

CHAPTER 6. The Guilt of Indifference

14Aránzazu Calderón Puerta, Tomasz Żukowski

15In 1986 and in early 1987 two important texts regarding Polish attitudes toward Jews under occupation were published. The first one – Jan Błoński’s Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto – gained great publicity and it determined the frameworks for discussing Polish guilt for many years. The second one – „Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej…”, ale go nie lubię by Jan Tomasz Gross – was passed over in silence. A choice of narration about the war had taken place in culture. The authors shed light on its consequences. In the narration proposed by Błoński, which introduced the figure of Poles as “indifferent witnesses to the Shoah” that holds to this day, they indicate areas that eschew problematization and describe discursive strategies protecting against taking up unwelcome topics. Gross’s approach, which departs from acknowledgement and analysis of the censorship present in the Polish tale of Shoah, is a successful attempt at looking from the outside at mechanisms of silencing and disowning knowledge about Polish attitudes. An attempt that had never been made.

CHAPTER 7. Nostalgic Archeology and Critical Archeology

16Tomasz Żukowski

17The ‘80s were marked by an intensified interest in the Shoah and in the Jewish culture in Poland. This interest was accompanied by an emergence of texts that took up the effort of finding and interpreting the traces left after the murdered Polish Jewish. The figure of an eyewitness was supplemented with the figure of a second and third-generation witness, who experiences history through its remnants. This phenomenon has taken on two forms: nostalgic and critical. In the nostalgic perspective, what is left after Jews turns out to be a testimony to a catastrophe, with which neither the archaeologist nor his group have anything to do. Nostalgia brings the beholders closer to the victims and turns them into guardians of memory, at the same time ripping the Shoah out of its social context (e.g. Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz’s 1988 Umschlagplatz or Tadeusz Rolke’s photography project Tu byliśmy from 2008). In a critical approach, traces such as buildings of former synagogues or Jewish cemeteries – as well as their current state – point to a social concrete, including patterns of Polish culture or behaviours that consolidate exclusion and erasure from memory (e.g. photography projects: Miejsce nieparzyste by elżbieta Janicka carried out in 2003-2004, Wojciech Wilczyk’s 2009 Niewinne oko nie istnieje or Łukasz Baksik’s 2002 Macewy codziennego użytku, or Marcin Kącki’s 2015 reportage Biała siła, czarna pamięć).

CHAPTER 8. A New Narrative Contract. Pokłosie [Aftermath] (2012)

18Elżbieta Janicka

19This text presents Władysław Pasikowki’s movie Pokłosie (2012) as a recapitulation and working through the existing resources of documentary cinema concerning the Polish context of the Shoah. The analysis – similarly to the film itself – is founded upon knowledge that accumulated after the Jedwabne debate (2000) and on the rejection of existing majority narrations about the Shoah: marked by the Righteous (the paradigm of innocence) and by the figure of Polish witness to the Shoah (the paradigm of the collective Polish trauma of the Holocaust).

20Pokłosie has been shown as a treaty on anti-Semitism, which problematizes and narrativizes phantasms and mechanisms of key importance for this socio-cultural pathology. The cinematographic visualization entails the mechanism of constructing the phantasm of Jew and of applying it to real subjects. It does not omit the Christian roots and the identity-related dimension of anti-Semitism with its central figure of Crucifixion. By highlighting the plexus of discourses and practices, attitudes and behaviours, it in turn defends the great quantifier as a justified category of description of the Polish context of the Shoah.

21The texts discusses the essential conflict between Pokłosie and the system of Polish culture. The combination of two different genres (thriller, western) and of a plebeian main character with a domain that passes as intelligentsia’s monopoly resulted mainly in shock and rejection. The study of Pokłosie’s reception is a study of class distinction in action. The charges – of kitschiness, exaggeration, unlikelihood, colonial perspective – largely made it possible to omit, if not invalidate, the director’s diagnoses. They include: showing anti-Semitism as a problem of an anti-Semitic culture and of anti-Semitic society, as well as baring the falseness of constructs such as “dialogue” and “reconciliation”.

22Taking up a reflection over what the knowledge about anti-Semitism and about the Polish context of the Shoah bring for the culture and the society, the film’s analysis indicates a systemic challenge in the form of the imperative to review culture and reject its toxic patterns. In a new light a new narration becomes possible – as a critique of narration.

CHAPTER 9. Documents and Fictions

23Wojciech Wilczyk

24The Jewish Holocaust perpetrated by the Germans in occupied Poland had many onlookers on the “Aryan” side of the wall. Despite this, there are not many visual records of these events created by Polish witnesses. In his text entitled Dokumenty i fikcje the author attempts to trace how the visual documents produced during the war (mainly by the German occupants) are used to create the figure of an empathetic observer of the Holocaust, whose figure and the set of views ascribed to it is always subject to social negotiations. The figure of the Polish witness to the Shoah, created unceasingly since 1945, evolved, acquiring features of likelihood, even though it is almost always placed within a reality mimicking what has been recorded by the German photojournalists, filmmakers and “trophy hunters”.