Conclusion

In the Polish People’s Republic (1944–1989) open discussion of the Holocaust was discouraged, and often impossible. The subjects nevertheless appeared in artworks for a variety of reasons and under various circumstances. We found works of many different media: sculpture, textiles, ceramics, painting, paper-cutting, printmaking.

The works collected here offer a material context to consider how Holocaust memory in Poland has changed. It lets us see how personal experience and trauma is mixed with ideology, religion, popular media images, local tales, and traditional ways of depicting suffering, as well as the guilty feelings of German Christian Leftists, and the nostalgia of Polish Jews forced to emigrate.

Is this “the Holocaust for sale”? Or rather a belated conversation between perpetrators and witnesses? And where do the victims fit in?

What do these visual documents say about the Holocaust and the people who witnessed it? About its lingering social and cultural effects?

What does it mean to inherit a bystander’s gaze on the Holocaust? Who are we – and who do we become – when confronted with these uncanny documents today?

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