The Ethics of Witnessing: The Holocaust in Polish Writers' Diaries from Warsaw, 1939-1945

Chapter 6. Stanisław Rembek: The Christian Witness of the Holocaust and the End of Polish Messianic Destiny

133 The altering perceptions of the Jews in the oeuvre of Stanisław Rembek (1901–1985) are puzzling. As Aleksander Kaczorowski has remarked, Is it inconceivable that the same man who wrote the profoundly moving descriptions of the Jews in his fiction was capable of such a degree of indifference in his Diary of the Occupation toward people that he saw as “only” Jews? How can we explain this contradiction?1 The references to the Jewish genocide in Rembek’s wartime diary not only demonstrate obtuseness toward the victims, they also draw upon past anti-Semitic stereotypes in order to diminish the unfolding Jewish tragedy. Yet Rembek’s literary work is populated with insightful and positive depictions of Jewish characters, all loyal and ardent Polish patriots. Rembek’s changing views of the Jews in his diaries and literary works reflects the complex trajectory of his evolving nationalistic-religious Weltanschauung and a progression from the triumphalist assertion of the Polish people’s Christian mission to a realization of the Poles’ moral failure at the time of the Occupation and the Holocaust. Rembek’s formative self-identification as a patriotic Pole was shaped by the romantic tradition of the 1831 and the 1863 insurrections that conceptualized the suffering of the Polish nation in terms of Christ’s Passion , and attributed a messianic destiny to the Polish people. The independence of Poland in 1918 and the victory of the new state in the 1920 Stanisław Rembek: The Christian Witness of the Holocaust and the End of Polish Messianic Destiny chapter 6 134 stanisław rembek Polish-Bolshevik war, in which Rembek fought as an officer, fortified his faith in Poland’s military invincibility and moral superiority. In his autobiographical writing of the interwar period, Rembek displayed considerable anti-Semitic prejudices. In his fiction, however, he portrayed the Jews as patriotic officers fighting for Poland. Their selfless love for the motherland qualified them as comrades-in-arms. Such characterizations of the Jews highlighted Poland’s democratic open-mindedness toward its Jewish citizens. Nonetheless, the Jewish faith of these soldiers prevented their full integration into Polish society, because as Jews they were excluded from the nation’s Christian destiny. From a theological perspective, however, a Jewish presence was indispensable to Poland’s redemptive destiny; the Jew sanctioned the Polish claim to a messianic calling as an affirming witness. The 1939 defeat shattered the myth of Poland’s invincibility. Rembek was deeply distressed over the incompetence of the military authorities , the indignities of the Occupation, and the loss of his identity as a proud reservist officer. Rembek’s Dziennik okupacyjny (Diary of the Occupation) empathically recorded the physical and mental suffering of the Poles, while its observations of the evolving mass murder of the Jews showed deliberate indifference and indubitable anti-Semitic animosity . This reductive and insensitive treatment of the Jewish genocide reflected Rembek’s need to reaffirm the Poles’ honorable national character which would assure their special destiny among the Christian nations . Recognition of the unprecedented horror of the extermination of the Jews would have the contrary effect, diminishing the singularity of Polish heroism and martyrdom. Rembek’s treatment of the Polish attitude toward the Jews during the war in his postwar fiction, The Sentence of Franciszek Kłos (Wyrok na Franciszka Kłosa) and “A Letter to Churchill” (“List do Churchilla”), represents an astonishing ideological and theological turnabout of Rembek ’s diaristic perspective. Rembek’s literary representation of the Occupation represents a far-reaching shift from his diary’s silence about the moral dissolution of Polish society at that time. Rembek the writer reconstructed the Polish people’s unethical wartime acquiescence in the extermination of the Jews which Rembek the diarist had evaded. This new perspective led Rembek to the realization that the immoral conduct of the Polish people violated Christian ethics and thus forfeited stanisław rembek 135 the Poles’ singular destiny. The Polish contribution to the extermination of the Jewish witness of the Polish mission of redemption signified the loss of this mission and the victory of the forces of evil. Rembek started his literary career in 1922–23 with A Punitive Expedition (Expedycja karna), a novel for adolescents,2 but soon engaged in fiction for adults. In 1922, he published a novella, Ripe Spikes (Dojrzałe kłosy), which featured a Jewish Polish officer in the Polish army heroically waging a lost battle against the Bolsheviks in the...