In my paper I wish to examine a specific position of the Polish bystander of the Holocaust – the position of a voyeur. Recent literature focuses particularly on the concept of the bystanders, in Polish context especially, within the frame of the social and economic benefits derived from the Holocaust by the neighbors. I analyze the specific memory-work produced by regarding pain of others, whilst profiting out of their suffrage. My hypothesis is that such representations will become perverse in their nature – psychoanalytically speaking, radical violence will be saturated with sexuality. Such representations are located at the edge of memory due to the confusion they arouse: they tend to be rejected or overlooked. At the same time, however, since the discussion of the subsequent books of Jan Tomasz Gross, this kind of narrative about the past returns in literature, film, and art. The extermination in these representations becomes an exciting death story in which the bystanders participates only as a relatively safe observer of the scene of crime and violence.
I examine this theoretical model in the analysis of a curious Polish film, Kornblumenblau (1989, directed by Leszek Wosiewicz), which flashed through Polish cinemas, virtually unnoticed – and strangely absent from the Holocaust memory discourse. The staging of the Holocaust and the Polish bystander in this film follows the logic of perversion and voyeurism, in which the extermination of the Jews triggers a strong emotional reactions: disgust, fear, excitement and pleasure. Thus I will show that the perverse part of Polish memory, especially active after 1989, is governed by different principles than the theoretical framework of repression, mourning, melancholy and working-through adopted earlier in the Holocaust and memory research – which apply more to the Western-European memory. It shows a Polish bystander as an implicated subject (Michael Rothberg), in affective and deep relationship with scene of the Holocaust. I show the difference between Western and Eastern bystanders. The latter were directly present at the scene, witnessing the whole range of brutality towards the Jews during the war and later on had to incorporate these experiences within the frames of their memory.
