The Holocaust in Postwar Polish Testimonial Literature

The Polish literary scholars of the early literary responses to the Holocaust perceive the testimonial literature as a representation of the total collapse of humanism; hence the Jewish plight becomes part of the affliction of the civilian population. Thus they disregard the distinctions between Polish Jewish writers-survivors of the Final Solution and Polish Gentile writers-witnesses of the Jewish destruction. This presentation proposes that the literary representations of the Holocaust by the Polish writers offer a distinct insight into the experience of witnessing. I focus on four early literary works, all based on the authors’ personal experiences. Kornel Filipowicz’s “Repaid Kindness” (1947) depicts the impact of an encounter with a surviving Jew in the lager. His depiction which juxtaposes the unyielding humanistic position of the Jewish protagonist with a most critical analysis of the Polish acquiescence with the German perpetrator reveals a sense of guilt and shame about the Polish response to the Holocaust. Leopold Buczkowski’s Black Torrent (1946) describes the underground activities of Poles and Jews after the liquidation of the Jewish village Szabasowa. This literary response represents a treatment of the Holocaust which aims at coming to terms with the trauma of a Polish witness the Jewish genocide. Whereas the factual component of the texts demonstrates the narrators’ sense of obligation to record the facts, the fictional component communicates the need for a perspectival distance to come evaluate the psychological and ethical predicaments of witnessing the Holocaust.