In Andrzej Wajda's film Samson (1961), fear drives the Jewish protagonist out of his cellar hiding place and into the bright Warsaw street where he may be seized momentarily by the Germans. Grzegorz Niziołek begins his essay by focusing on the Polish passersby. “The most important thing is to realize that everything was visible, that it really did take place and that everyone saw at least a fraction of what was going on” (1). These passersby are not witnesses, he explains, but “gapers,” reacting to the “spectacle” of the dirty, emaciated figure who appears suddenly before them. They see but refuse to know, to admit, what they are seeing. Their reaction is not indifference, which requires some decision, some shrug of the shoulders, but what Hannah Arendt, after Immanuel Kant, termed “stupidity” (39). This is the counterpart to Arendt's more widely known term “banality” for the actions of the German perpetrator. In the decades since the Holocaust, the memory—and the forgetting—of Polish “gaping” have deformed Polish culture and consciousness. Indeed, a sort of madness, endlessly recurring, has persisted down to the present time.

How to approach this madness? Theater, Niziołek proposes, is the key. On one hand, Polish theater historically “became the space of powerful declarations relating to collective memory. At one extreme…the declaration of complete and absolute memory [and therefore…] a society always ready to mourn. At the other extreme…the accusation of amnesia: we remember nothing…because it is more comfortable not to remember” (103). This polarity, powerfully relevant to the Polish memory of the Holocaust, repeats through all the decades since the Holocaust, that “spectacle” which from beginning to end took place before Polish eyes. “[T]he foundation of theatre,” Niziołek reminds us, “is after all repetition” (228).

His book is divided into two parts. In the first, “The Holocaust and the theatre,” by way of excursions into Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Francois Lyotard and others, Niziołek tracks the specificity of the Polish experience of the Holocaust. Rooted in Poland, “in the very space where the Holocaust was carried out,” (55) Niziołek criticizes the work of westerners such as Alvin Rosenfeld and Cynthia Ozick that insists that metaphor about the Holocaust is taboo for ethical reasons. Niziołek responds with a version of “you weren't there.” Just the opposite, he points out: from the heart of the horror, metaphor may be inescapable. “Today we know that metaphor was not excluded from discourses about the Holocaust, but subject to strategies of repression.” And Niziołek cites Hayden White's “brilliant” exposition of literary tropes in the work of Primo Levi (68).

The second part of Niziołek's study, “The theatre and the Holocaust,” is a history of how postwar Polish theater staged and restaged what Poles had gaped at during the war. In Stalinist Poland the legendary director Jerzy Grotowski took his actors deep into the countryside where they shaped horrific sado-masochistic versions of the classics of Polish and western theater. In his version of Stanislaw Wyspiański's Akropolis (1968), concentration camp prisoners built a crematorium around the audience while staging stories from biblical and Greek mythology. Grotowski spoke of seeking out in his performances “the things that can hurt us the most deeply” (154). Tadeusz Kantor's Annihilation Machine organized a beach party on the Baltic coast in which “scenes of agony, despair, hunger and terror” were parodied (166). In another production, folding chairs were tied together and dragged across the stage to devastate any possibility of extracting meaning from the spectacle.

In 2000, with his book Neighbors on Poles’ massacre of Jews in the town of Jedwabne in 1941, Jan Gross ignited a controversy that divided Poland no less than the Dreyfus Affair divided France a century earlier. Here Polish involvement in the Holocaust transcended gaping. The Romantic paradigm of Poles as fighters and martyrs was travestied; Niziołek cites the anthropologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir on the resulting Polish “obsession with innocence” (285). Summoned to the fray was the notion of trauma, of “a community of witnesses forced to watch the suffering of others and interpreting this experience as their own trauma. The supposed [Polish] trauma…becomes in fact a defensive mechanism. Polish culture strove to elaborate this deceit even in relation to memory of Jedwabne” (56). Thereby the nagging issue of Polish guilt could be erased. Nevertheless, the Jedwabne Affair was seen by many as part of a necessary historical “working through.” And indeed Aleksander Kwaśniewski, the then-president of Poland, in a powerfully theatrical gesture, stood at a newly erected monument to the massacre and apologized in the name of the Polish people for what had been done there to their Jewish neighbors.

The original Polish version of Niziołek's book appeared in 2013 under a neo-liberal government. Two years later, the nationalist PiS (Law and Justice) party came to power and has ruled Poland ever since. Its ideological pillar, reinforced in schools and churches and throughout Polish institutions, is the narrative of Polish heroism, martyrdom, and eternal innocence.