Abstract
This thesis examines the dominant approaches taken by historians to the subject of Polish rescue activities related to Jews during the Second World War. I ask how the “negative” spectrum of behavior toward Jews during the war (blackmail, denunciation, and murder) was displaced by the “positive” spectrum of successful rescue activities driven by noble intentions. This study is an in-depth examination of various themes, motifs, stylizations, and omissions of the Polish historiography from 1945-2011. I examine popular historical writing and contrast it with contradictory information found in personal documents of the wartime period (testimonies, memoirs, studies). As part of the continuum of these patterns, I also discuss artistic representations found in feature films. I conclude that these approaches functioned to deflect negative phenomena in order to sustain a narrative of Polish behavior that reflected positively on Polish-Jewish relations during and after the war. Thus, the historiography was part of a larger pattern to rehabilitate “the good name of Poland” in relation to the Holocaust.