Poland and the memory of the Holocaust

The author argues that in postwar Germany a small portion of the guilty could be punished and the crime could be symbolically expiated and society for better or worse move on. Yet Polish history had loaded the act of witnessing the Holocaust to spring psychological and moral traps from which there were no apparent exit. The unacceptable, unmasterable guilt could only be denied and repressed, thereafter to erupt into history in a particularly distorted form.