Who was the victim and who was the saviour?

Omer Bartov rightly noticed that ‘self-perception as a victim often immunises individuals and nations from seeing themselves as perpetrators. Accordingly, in history textbooks students are presented with Hungarians as either victims of the German occupying force or as those awarded the title of Righteous among the Nations, while Miklos Horthy comes to be perceived as a saviour of the Jews of Budapest. Until the fall of communism, the fate of Polish Jews did not constitute a discursive topic outside of the research community. In January 2000, at the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, Poland was among forty-six countries that signed the Stockholm Declaration – a document defining commitments of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. In Poland, Holocaust education is shaped by state institutions and teachers, and by museums/memorial sites, together with Non-Governmental Organisations. Similar relationships between the two misconceptions about Polish–Jewish history can also be found among older generations of Poles.