Wardens of fate – forgotten, repressed. On literaryrepresentations of the Holocaust. Selected texts published in Polandin the nineteen forties and fifties

The text examines whether we can fi nd in literary works published shortly after the Second WorldWar any attempts to diagnose Polish entanglement in Shoa. The analysis tries to take into accountnumerous works of contemporary critical humanities and arts. So called ”Polish witness” of Shoawas traditionally considered in common discourse “helpless”, because of the Nazi terror, becausethey were not seen as representative for their culture but as individual cases. Today we can seethem – in the light of exactly the same texts – as co-perpetrators, because our social, cultural andhistorical knowledge is today much deeper and broader.