Negative Witnessing and the Perplexities of Forgiveness: Polish Jewish Contexts After the Shoah

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

The transgressions of man toward God are forgiven him by the Day of Atonement;

The transgressions against other people are not forgiven him by the Day of Atonement if he has not first appeased the other person.

— Mishna Torah, quoted by Levinas in ‘Toward the Other’¹