Witnesses to Their Own Cause: The Dominant Polish Narrative About the Holocaust During the Holocaust
Authors: Janicka Elżbieta 
Published: February 2019

After Dariusz Libionka’s pioneering treatise entitled Berkom Joselewiczom już dziękujemy… [Bereks Joselewiczs, goodbye and good luck...] (2009), this is the second analysis of Maria Kann’s canonical and paradigmatic pamphlet. This time the research question is: why did the Holocaust not delegitimize antisemitism in Poland, and did not lead to a revision of the dominant culture and the majority’s collective identity? The pamphlet Na oczach świata (1943) – ordered, published, and distributed by the Polish Underground State – condemns the extermination of Jews, while voicing the need of their elimination from the society. It maintains the belief in the existence of the “Jewish question” (without quotation marks in the original) and heralds that after the war Poles will “solve” it for the sake of the Polish “national interest” – without “foreign assistance” and, supposedly, without violence. The presented discourse analysis deconstructs this and other mechanisms of hate speech, which declaratively delegitimize violence, but in fact incite to it, and are acts of violence in themselves. In the situation of the Holocaust, a surgical separation of the praised elimination from the condemned extermination was but wishful thinking. This wishful thinking, presented as a description of reality, removed from the view the responsibility of the non-Jewish majority for co-creating the realities of extermination, and thus this majority’s influence on the number of Jewish victims on the “Aryan side.” An important tool of falsifying the state of affairs was the figure of the Polish witness to the Holocaust. In the analyzed perspective, at no time was the fate of Jews of any importance. The declared purpose of Na oczach świata was to stop Poles from participating in the Holocaust for the sake of Christian love of enemies, which in fact masked collective narcissism. After all, the more worthy of hatred an enemy is, the more glory it brings to one to refrain from aggression towards them. The presented analysis focuses on the techniques of constructing the enemy figure as, simultaneously, an irreducible abject, and an irreducible threat. This construction consisted in the reproduction of hateful and oppressive phantasms and argumentative schemes – like the myth of Judeo-communism or orientalization – none of which were original. However, Na oczach świata was novel (or restorative) and precedential in that it updated the antisemitic narrative to make it fully efficient in relation to and in the face of the Holocaust: “before the shooting in the ruins of the ghetto fell silent”. Maria Kann’s pamphlet was also a normative text in the sense that, with the full sanction of the Polish Underground State and its authority, it organized the Polish experience of the Holocaust. It established its legitimate variant. It shaped individual and collective emotional and mental dispositions. The analysis covers strategies and tools for pacifying empathy and cognitive dissonance. Na oczach świata contains peculiar guidelines for how to profess antisemitic pre-sumptions without confronting their consequences. What is secured in such a way, apart from the Polish (self-)image interest, is the Polish identity interest in its preclusive, chauvinist understanding. The dominant culture loses contact with reality and gains immunity to the imperative of reckoning and rejection of disgraced virtues, values and patterns.