The Nuremberg Trials, the Warsaw Uprising and the prison and concentration camp literature of communist Poland
For a long time after 1945 there was no institution in Europe that would create a European forum for an ideological and intellectual exchange. There was no international tribunal to which one could appeal from unjust judgments and wrong political decisions. The Nuremberg Tribunal certainly did not play such a role. Therefore, the enormity of the crimes committed in Poland could not be submitted as a complaint or an appeal directly to an institution representing the international public opinion. As a result, Polish martyrdom — a gigantic sacrifice of the population of the capital city during the Warsaw Uprising — was ideologically managed more or less successfully by socialist humanism. Infatuationwith the Marxist ideology and fear for the inviolability of borders prevented people from noticing that Germany of the 1950s and 1960s was not only an imperialist peril and hotbed of revisionism, but also a European state seeking integration with other European countries, a state with a vision of common supranational European values. The prison and concentration camp literature in communist Poland was a very specific phenomenon. The sheer number of works by authors little known in the world of literature makes us think about the political context of using these texts.