Authors

Janek Gryta¹;  ¹ University of Southampton, UK

Discussion

Poles tend to believe that when it comes down to the Holocaust, they were a country of bystanders only. For decades, scholarship supported such notions. In a similar vein, there is a tacit assumption in research that the Polish bystanders did not pass on any knowledge about the Holocaust, certainly not under State Socialism. The present article addresses both of those ideas. It reveals that detailed knowledge about the Holocaust not only existed but was passed on from the generation of the implicated on-lookers to the first postwar generation. Moreover, I demonstrate how in the process of this transmission of knowledge the position of a bystander was developed.
This paper spotlights the Alert of Victory, a 1965 reconnaissance organised by the Polish Scouting and Guiding Association. During the Alert, young people identified sites of fight and suffering, and interviewed local witnesses about the Nazi crimes.
Focusing on reports from the reconnaissance from South-Eastern Poland this paper comments on the shape of the vernacular memory of the Holocaust as it existed in the mid-1960s. It establishes that details of the mass killings by Einsatzgruppen in the Spring and Sumer of 1942 were widely known and communicated as was some information about the camp system. It suggests that some knowledge about the Polish co-participation in the killings, denunciation of Jewish Poles and loot of their propriety existed amongst the on-lookers. Finally, this paper establishes how the explosive potential of such knowledge was dismantled in the space of the testimony. It was through the maintaining of Jews in the position of the national other, and strategic use of passive voice and omission that a palatable version of the war past was devised and a figure of the passive, blameless bystander was called to life.