ABSTRACT

A Polish Christian eyewitness is usually perfectly capable of recalling which individual Poles cooperated with the Nazis and which resisted them but never would the eyewitness argue that the entire Polish national group was collaborating with either the Third Reich or the Soviet Union. The case of Koniuchy is controversial because it challenges Stalinist propaganda, ethnic stereotypes about victimhood and victimization, and Western scholarship, which overwhelmingly tends to view the Intermarium through the singular prism of the Holocaust. To stereotype, members of the majority group tend to feel that they suffered the most not only at the hands of the Nazis and Communists but also at the hands of the minorities, who were, allegedly, at best uniformly indifferent and at worst hostile to the plight of the majority. Predictably many, if not most, individuals identifying with a national group seem incapable of particularizing outside of their own ethnicity.