Polish Interpretations of the Holocaust after 1968

In 1968, the most virulent anti-Semitic campaign of postwar Europe unfolded in communist Poland. In what was effectively a linguistic pogrom, the state-controlled media showered the country with thousands of verbal attacks against Jews. One of the central lines of assault alleged that international Jewish organizations were carrying out a broad “anti-Polish” campaign by focusing on the breakdown of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust. As one press article put it, the “anti-Polish smear campaign of world Zionism” focuses on “the alleged ‘crazed’ antisemitism in our country and the cooperation of Poles in the extermination of Jews during World War II.”

This linguistic assault had a profound impact on the discussion of Polish-Jewish relations in Poland after 1968. The “anti-Zionist” campaign awakened among Poland’s intelligentsia the “Jewish problem” and stimulated an intense debate about the Holocaust in the 1980s. But it also created ideational, linguistic frames that structured the contours of this discussion. By attacking “collaboration” as “anti-Polish,” the 1968 campaign framed attempts to think about Polish participation in the Holocaust as subversive, dangerous, and un-patriotic.

This paper explores this conflicting, paradoxical effect of 1968 in Polish discussions about the Holocaust in the 1980s. After briefly discussing the linguistic violence of 1968, it will provide a close textual analysis of the writings of Jan Józef Lipski, Jerzy Turowicz, and Jan Błoński.  While Błoński was most able to resist and overcome the linguistic framing of 1968, Lipski and Turowicz were not able to break free of the dominant discourse; they remained acutely ambivalent about conceptualizing Polish participation in the Holocaust beyond the passive notion of “indifference.” Lipski and Turowicz identified the idea of active, Polish “collaboration” as a “western” import that was, at its core, anti-Polish.