Negative witnessing and the perplexities of forgiveness

Polish Jewish contexts after the shoah

Dorota Glowacka

pp. 180-199

in: Desmond Manderson (ed), Essays on Levinas and law, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

After the war, the surviving remnants of Polish Jewry were coming "home," often in the hope that they might find family members still alive. Returning from the death camps, from places of hiding and from exile in the Soviet Union, they were, in the words of a witness, a sad, incredible spectacle: "gloomy, quiet, like after the funeral."²