Wyrodny świadek
A Degenerate Witness

Summary/Abstract: Starting from the perpetrators–victims–bystanders triad postulated by Raul Hilberg to describe the actors of the Holocaust, I propose employing its judicial aspect (perpetrators – defendants; victims – plaintiffs; bystanders – witnesses) to interpret the emergence of the collective identities of postwar societies, especially those who in various ways witnessed the annihilation of Jews. In this interpretation, a metaphor and symptom of these collective attempts at facing the past would be the great postwar trials connected to the Holocaust. In these proceedings against the defendants, it was typically the neighbors and family that testified for them. Hence, if a model Polish witness to the Holocaust is someone closely related to the defendant, often a false witness, the figure of a degenerate witness who testifies for the truth against his or her own community becomes a key element to the processes of collectively facing a difficult past. In the second part of the article, the author searches Polish visual culture for such witnesses fouling their own nest. Next, she confronts this figure with her own experiences working on the project of an oral history connected to the Polish remembrance of the Holocaust.

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