163 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Hopfnger, T. Z ̇ ukowski (eds.), The Holocaust Bystander in Polish Culture, 1942–2015, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Confict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66408-4_5 CHAPTER 5 Bearing Witness to Witnessing: Jewish Narratives About Polish “Witnesses” to the Holocaust Anna Zawadzka KatarzynaMatschi To begin with, the individual and collective wartime experiences of Poles have been falsely universalized. Since the 1940s, those who found them- selves in Poland during the war have been portrayed in the same terms, without drawing a distinction between Poles and Jews. Second, this expe- rience has been Holocaustized, that is, the narrative of the Polish experi- ence was made to resemble descriptions of the Holocaust as experienced by the Jews. 1 As a result, Polish Jews writing on their World War II experi- ence have come to focus their efforts on foregrounding that difference, and ensuring that the disparity between the war accounts of Jews and Poles—whether individual or collective—would not pass unnoticed. Because the difference was largely marked by Polish attitudes toward Jews, any “mere” act had become elevated in the Polish context to an “excep- tional” one. A. Zawadzka (*) Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland e-mail: anna.zawadzka@ispan.waw.pl