Polish Society’s Perception Of The Holocaust After World War Ⅱ (1945-1989)

On September 1,1939,when Nazi Germany invaded Poland,Poland was home to the largest and most concentrated Jewish population in the world outside the United States,and a major center of Jewish religious and cultural life.With the continuous progress of the war,Nazi Germany set up a number of concentration camps in Poland in order to implement its policy of genocide,the main concentration camps are: AuschwitzBirkenau,Belzec,Chelmno,Majdanek,Sobibor,Treblinka.Poland gradually became the core and center of the Nazi Holocaust during the war.About 3 million Jews were slaughtered in Poland,and the Auschwitz concentration camp became an important symbol of the Nazi Holocaust.After the war,polish embarked on its own national reconstruction,in the face of disaster land in Poland and devastation caused by the falling to reality,combined with the polish for a long time since the formation of the martyrs mentality,the present situation and the historical psychological fermentation constantly fusion,the resultant force make the society formed by the polish martyrdom explanation model as the main body of the massacre,in such a narrative mode,Poles were the largest group of holocaust victims,and other victims were lumped together into national groups.In terms of motivation,Poland suffered a devastating blow during World War Ⅱ and was the European country that resisted the Nazis for the earliest and longest time.In fact,Poland’s single explanation ignored other victim groups,especially Jews,whose deaths were hidden from the polish model,and whose discussions were briefly taboo.Polish society believes that under the theme of commemorating Poland’s wartime heroism,resistance and national martyrdom,the emphasis on Jews and other groups will lead to the diluting and obscuring of Poland’s wartime suffering experience,and will seriously weaken and threaten the image of Poland as a victim.The narrative centered on The Polish martyrdom satisfies the purpose of shaping the new image of Poland after the war,and can strengthen the national cohesiveness and consolidate the collective identity.This polish-centric mode of interpretation is reflected in many aspects.In the field of education,especially in textbooks.On the one hand,The Number of Jewish victims has been included in the total number of Polish victims,in order to increase the number of Polish victims and highlight the severity of Poland’s wartime losses.On the other hand,he will be regarded as the other in the category of citizens.The polonization of jewish victims and the otherization of Jewish identity exclusion seem to be contradictory,and most importantly reflect that this is an extremely distorted and strongly directed polish-centric interpretation model.In the film and television industry,the production and release of films are subject to strict official censorship.Among them,there were few depications of Jewish themes in films and television in the early postwar period.The purpose of film production was to show the heroic lens of Polish resistance to the Nazis for the audience.With the intervention of the Jewish world and the awakening of holocaust consciousness,polish society’s cognition of the Holocaust has been continuously impacted from the outside.Since the 1980 s,especially after the 1989 Upheaval in Eastern Europe,the original cognition of Polish society has been gradually disintegrating from the inside.The fragmentation of Poland’s political landscape has had a ripple effect on all levels.Poland began to discover and criticize Polish anti-Semitism and other anti-minority prejudices.The image of The Jews began to be recognized,the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust was viewed objectively,and the cognitive concept of the Holocaust in Poland changed greatly.The formation and transformation of polish society’s cognition of Nazi Holocaust fully reveals the political and social psychological situation of Poland after the war.At the beginning,the Polish central interpretative model played a role in shaping post-war national identity and meeting the political and social needs of post-war reconstruction.Finally,with the combined force of internal and external,the distorted model is deconstructed,and the polonization of the oneness gradually fades,and the hidden Jewish face is revealed.