The Final Solution in Early Polish Testimonial Fiction: The Impact of the Holocaust on the Witnessing World

Abstract

While early Jewish literary testimonies of the Holocaust have received a remarkable amount of critical attention, very little has been said about the early literary responses of the Poles, the closest witnesses to the disaster. The location of the Holocaust, which took place mainly on the Polish territory, placed the Poles between the victims and the perpetrators. As the testimonial literature studied here shows, the borderline witnessing situation produced an emotional and ethical crisis, because the reality of the Final Solution put to test the humanistic fortitude of the writers. This paper examines the impact of the Jewish plight in literary testimonies in Józef Mackiewicz's ‘Ponary – “Baza”’ (1945), which records the liquidation of a transport of Jews in Ponary, Tadeusz Borowski's ‘This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen’ (1946), which describes a transport of Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and a narrative composed of three 1947 stories,‘The Landscape that Survived Death’, ‘Victory’, and ‘Returned Kindness’ of three stories by Kornel Filipowicz, which depict the Jewish search to survive. These first person testimonials focus on the narrators’ response of emotional numbness and moral compromise. The concreteness of the Final Solution dehumanized not only the perpetrators and the victims; the bestiality of the former and the degradation of the latter affected the humanity of the witnesses because their disengagement from the victims signified acquiescence with the genocidal scheme of the German executioners. The testimonial narratives attest to the narrators’ twofold objective to recount the reality that they witnessed and to examine its effect on their psyche. Whereas the testimonial component of the texts demonstrates the narrators’ sense of obligation to record the facts, the literary component of confession communicates the need to reckon with the effects of discontent, shame and guilt of the wartime experience. The humanistic aspect of the stories lies in their narrators’ recognition of their emotional detachment from the victims as emotional failure and ethical transgression.