Evan Alberhasky, 2014 AJC Fellow
The old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” aptly conveys how I felt upon viewing the replica of the Gwoździec Synagogue, which now stands as a centerpiece of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
Wooden synagogue construction was common during the sixteenth to eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which today is part of Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine. European Jews were afforded peace and prosperity, a chance to continue their traditional ways of life. A flourishing trade economy and religious tolerance made the area a haven for Jews fleeing persecution from Western Europe. Due to the abundance, and therefore, inexpensive nature of wood in the area, it was a matter of course that the most significant building in the Jewish community—the synagogue—would be built of wood.
These synagogues—whether in Jedwabne, Gwoździec, or Jurbarkas, Lithuania—were typically constructed with fairly unadorned exteriors concealing the grandeur and religious iconography that lie within. Carvings and magnificent paintings adorned the domes and vaulted ceilings. The decorative manifestations simultaneously reflected both traditional Jewish folk art and the birth of a new unique style that reflected the freedom Jewish craftsmen were given in the area. In the Gwoździec Synagogue, zodiac signs and animal symbols were reflected in fantastic hues of blue and red, similar to those found in recently excavated Galilean temples from late antiquity. The bima stood as the centerpiece of every wooden synagogue: this highly crafted art piece would face the ark where the Torah, the elemental text of Judaism, was stored. Wooden synagogues of the Commonwealth period were a ubiquitous feature of the countryside, then a crossroad between east and west, where modernity was just starting to peek out of the traditional shtetl life.
The extraordinary phenomenon of wooden synagogues represented a high point in artistic Jewish creation, yet Nazis destroyed the vast majority of these impressive wooden structures during the Holocaust. In a sweeping blitz, Nazi forces obliterated architectural wonders. Fortunately, during the interwar period, a group from the Institute of Polish Architecture of the Polytechnic of Warsaw, cognizant of the historical importance and artistic value of wooden synagogue construction, had been commissioned with the task of documenting the then-extensive network of wooden synagogues in the region. While much of their documentation was destroyed during World War II, enough remained intact for Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka to finish the work. In 1957, Wooden Synagogues was published in Polish and two years later, in English. Their book became a testament to the splendor and loss of wooden synagogues.
Fast forward several decades into the new millennium. A renewed interest in wooden synagogue construction took flight thanks to the dedication and efforts of Rick and Laura Brown, founders of non-profit Handshouse Studio, which facilitates hands-on community service projects. In the summer of 2011 and 2012, a workshop was created with the explicit goal of replicating the seventeenth-century Gwoździec Synagogue roof and painted ceiling. Twelve workshops, eight Polish cities, 58 professionals and over 300 students later, the roof was reconstructed and moved into the central wing of POLIN, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Chief curator Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett led our group through the exhibition, explaining the museum development and the intricacies of the stunning synagogue.
As you walk into the museum, a façade of modern glass gives way to an undulating wavelike entryway. To the right, the apex of the pointed wooden roof peaks out through the floor, an engineering feat suspended by multiple steel cables, a mixture of metal and wood, past and present. Our tour took place in July 2014 while the exhibition was still under construction before the September 2014 opening, but the roof and bima had already been lowered into their final resting place.
Our journey around Poland had already shown us the various states of synagogues in the country. Preservation and renovation were concepts we often reflected on, examining how they could be uplifting or even detrimental to the surrounding community. Some structures, such as the 1852 Działoszyce synagogue, remain a skeletal shell of the past; the 16th century Remuh Synagogue in Kraków is one of many renovated and used for worship. What we saw in the Gwoździec Synagogue replica was something different: a unique piece of history that not only reflected the glorious past of the 1,000 year presence of Jews in Poland, but also an educational tool connecting the past, present, and future.
To be sure that this historic structure and its relationship to the past would be remembered, a documentary team recorded the entire process of reconstruction, from start to finish—one tree, one saw, one nail, and one paintbrush at a time. The group of students and professionals utilized only the techniques and methods that would have been available during the period in which the original synagogue was constructed. The international premier of Raise the Roof took place at the 2015 Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. I sat in the theater, watching the film slowly develop with snippets of the colorful roof shown here and there; I reflected on how it felt to see the structure as an AJC Fellow in Poland. I felt a small sense of electricity go up my spine each time a new colored piece would come into focus. I was transported back to my fellowship and the time I spent in Poland. I was carried away to a time of my ancestors.
The colors of the Gwoździec Synagogue roof may slowly fade from my mind as time progresses, but this memory will not. The roof and the museum represent a new age, one in which the idea of Poland as a Jewish cemetery no longer holds supremacy. The museum in Warsaw where the roof rests is one more layer on top of a presence that exists as much in the past as it does in the future. A roof has been raised once again—physically, emotionally, existentially. Let us hope that this time around, it will not ever come down.
Originally from southern Kentucky, Evan works for ORT America in Atlanta as the region’s Development Associate. He previously worked at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City for four years and has a working knowledge of Hebrew and Russian. Evan holds an M.A. in Jewish Studies from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a second M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Kean University, and a B.A. in History from Indiana University. Evan and his wife Marina are members of Temple Emanu-El in Dunwoody where they also teach Sunday school.
Showing posts with label Fellows Journal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fellows Journal. Show all posts
Thursday, August 6, 2015
Jewish Sites in Poland as Transnational Spaces
Nicole Freeman, 2014 AJC Fellow
While visiting Jewish cemeteries and memorials in Poland last summer, I reflected upon the sites I had previously seen in Germany. What are their differences and similarities? How have Germany and Poland comparatively come to terms with their difficult pasts? My own academic research on twentieth-century Germany and Poland has been greatly influenced by the most recent “transnational turn” within the history discipline. Transnational history focuses on the movements of peoples, ideas, goods, and technologies across nations. In fact, historians now look beyond national boundaries to study global themes and processes in a larger context. Transnational history allows for scholars to challenge the traditional framework of the nation state, expose its limitations, and problematize nationalist histories. Historians, like Michael Meng, have recently studied Jewish synagogues and cemeteries as transnational spaces in Germany and Poland.
Meng’s book, Shattered Spaces, focuses on the destruction and preservation of Jewish sites and property after the Holocaust in Germany and Poland. He uses the cities of Berlin, Warsaw, Potsdam, Essen, and Wrocław as case studies in order to show parallel histories and shared memoires across national boundaries. Both Germany and Poland’s approaches to Jewish ruins evolved greatly over a 60-year period. Meng argues that local officials in Germany and Poland “made deliberate choices about what to rebuild and preserve from the rubble of the war.” This conscious selection helped reshape postwar German and Polish national identities. With small or no remaining Jewish populations, Jewish sites represented a past that neither nation wanted to confront in the immediate postwar decades. Thus in the 1950s and 1960s, urban renewal allowed Germans and Poles to build new, modern capitals and “erase these reminders of the past rather than mourn the catastrophe behind their shattered condition.” However, there was a general shift from destruction to preservation in the 1970s and 1980s. National politicians, tourists, and international Jewish leaders brought attention to Jewish ruins and sought to reconstruct the Jewish past.
During the AJC fellowship, we visited many of these preserved and reconstructed spaces of Jewish history in Poland. The Jewish cemetery, Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, and the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw are just a few of the sites in Poland that represent Jewish memory, nostalgia, tension, melancholy, and mourning. Meng refers to these kinds of reconstructed and newly built Jewish sites as spaces of “redemptive cosmopolitanism.” The commemorative sites represented the missing multi-ethnic nature of German and Polish democratic societies.
By comparing these Jewish sites of memory and mourning, we are able to address larger questions regarding the legacy of the Holocaust in contemporary Germany and Poland. Today’s historians are using transnational methodologies in order to bring these two countries into dialogue with each other. Moving away from national narratives allows for historians to draw connections between multiple countries and bring new perspectives to old questions.
Nicole Freeman is a PhD student at the Ohio State University who specializes in twentieth-century German and gender history. In 2012, she graduated summa cum laude from Salem State University with a BA in History and received her Massachusetts Initial Educator License in History and the Social Sciences. Nicole’s honors thesis explored the experiences of Jewish children rescued by the Kindertransport who lived with English foster families during the Second World War. Prior to staring graduate school at Ohio State, she interned at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
While visiting Jewish cemeteries and memorials in Poland last summer, I reflected upon the sites I had previously seen in Germany. What are their differences and similarities? How have Germany and Poland comparatively come to terms with their difficult pasts? My own academic research on twentieth-century Germany and Poland has been greatly influenced by the most recent “transnational turn” within the history discipline. Transnational history focuses on the movements of peoples, ideas, goods, and technologies across nations. In fact, historians now look beyond national boundaries to study global themes and processes in a larger context. Transnational history allows for scholars to challenge the traditional framework of the nation state, expose its limitations, and problematize nationalist histories. Historians, like Michael Meng, have recently studied Jewish synagogues and cemeteries as transnational spaces in Germany and Poland.
Meng’s book, Shattered Spaces, focuses on the destruction and preservation of Jewish sites and property after the Holocaust in Germany and Poland. He uses the cities of Berlin, Warsaw, Potsdam, Essen, and Wrocław as case studies in order to show parallel histories and shared memoires across national boundaries. Both Germany and Poland’s approaches to Jewish ruins evolved greatly over a 60-year period. Meng argues that local officials in Germany and Poland “made deliberate choices about what to rebuild and preserve from the rubble of the war.” This conscious selection helped reshape postwar German and Polish national identities. With small or no remaining Jewish populations, Jewish sites represented a past that neither nation wanted to confront in the immediate postwar decades. Thus in the 1950s and 1960s, urban renewal allowed Germans and Poles to build new, modern capitals and “erase these reminders of the past rather than mourn the catastrophe behind their shattered condition.” However, there was a general shift from destruction to preservation in the 1970s and 1980s. National politicians, tourists, and international Jewish leaders brought attention to Jewish ruins and sought to reconstruct the Jewish past.
During the AJC fellowship, we visited many of these preserved and reconstructed spaces of Jewish history in Poland. The Jewish cemetery, Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, and the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw are just a few of the sites in Poland that represent Jewish memory, nostalgia, tension, melancholy, and mourning. Meng refers to these kinds of reconstructed and newly built Jewish sites as spaces of “redemptive cosmopolitanism.” The commemorative sites represented the missing multi-ethnic nature of German and Polish democratic societies.
By comparing these Jewish sites of memory and mourning, we are able to address larger questions regarding the legacy of the Holocaust in contemporary Germany and Poland. Today’s historians are using transnational methodologies in order to bring these two countries into dialogue with each other. Moving away from national narratives allows for historians to draw connections between multiple countries and bring new perspectives to old questions.
Nicole Freeman is a PhD student at the Ohio State University who specializes in twentieth-century German and gender history. In 2012, she graduated summa cum laude from Salem State University with a BA in History and received her Massachusetts Initial Educator License in History and the Social Sciences. Nicole’s honors thesis explored the experiences of Jewish children rescued by the Kindertransport who lived with English foster families during the Second World War. Prior to staring graduate school at Ohio State, she interned at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
In Search of Authenticity
Helen Rubinstein, 2014 AJC Jaffa and Larry Feldman Fellow
The first thing I do when I get to Auschwitz is put on sunscreen.
Then I take out my notebook and write, The first thing I do when I get to Auschwitz is put on sunscreen. Because being here makes us scrutinize ourselves; being here makes us worry. Are we mourning appropriately? Are we responding and reacting in the way that we should? Should I not wear the dress with horizontal stripes, should I avoid any dress with bright colors? Once thought, these questions are hard to un-think, and so I am here in my brownest most ordinary dress, a dress I will from now on think of as my Auschwitz dress even if, when I return to the memorial on other days—because, right, this is not Auschwitz but the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum—I will feel okay wearing brighter dresses.
In the past weeks, we AJC Fellows have been debating the ethics of selfies at Auschwitz and photos under the iconic Arbeit Macht Frei sign. That the sign is no longer the original but a replica erected after a 2009 robbery only makes visitors’ photos underneath its awning more specious and confusing. See, I needed to record that I was putting on sunscreen not only because sunscreen falls into the same sunny category as bright dresses, but because sunscreen is a summer thing, a vacation thing, and a tourist thing. And the reconstructed Arbeit Macht Frei sign—the way the replica stands in for the original, the simulation for the real—only magnifies my concern that the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum is, like sunscreen, a summer thing, a vacation thing, and a tourist thing. I’m afraid that, in its attempt to provide evidence of the horrors of its history, the memorial that is now a UNESCO World Heritage site may have shed some of what makes its past feel immediate, authentic, and true.
Our guide, Paweł, begins our tour by telling us that this is an authentic site—I write down his words. He says, “Every brick tells a story.” What he means, I know, is that everything here has been maintained, conserved, or reconstructed to as-near-perfectly-as-possible match the original. There’s an obvious reason for this: the site must stand as evidence to counter the ranks of Holocaust deniers. But the instant Paweł calls the site authentic, I feel myself grow doubtful, not only because I am mindful that authenticity is an impossible ideal, but because I don’t even know how the site can be authentic. It can’t replicate the moment the memorial is presuming to preserve: nothing that is happening onsite now was happening onsite between 1940 and 1945. And how can the site be authentic when its iconic gate, barbed wire, execution wall, and HALT! signs are all reconstructions?
Our AJC Fellows group has spent much of the trip discussing the ethos of museums: their design choices, their occasional contrivances, the narratives implied in the arrangement of artifacts and interpretive material, and the various ways in which museums attempt to authentically—that is, ethically, and with as little propaganda as possible—represent the past. Here, too, such questions are pertinent, even if Paweł will suggest that the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is not only a museum but also a kind of cemetery. Inside one former barracks, near photos of the 1944 transport of Hungarian Jews, a bronze sign reads baldly: “Jews are a race that must be totally exterminated.” It’s a quotation from Hans Frank, meant to provide context and educate, but its loud and prominent position on the wall gives me a chill. Elsewhere, a sign reading MATERIAL PROOF OF CRIMES makes me equally uncomfortable, for how it directs the reader’s attention not to these crimes’ victims—whose hair, shoes, and possessions constitute “proof”—but to the crimes’ unnamed perpetrators.
Authenticity is a word Paweł keeps returning to. New exhibits, he says, will be without multimedia, without fireworks, meant only to explain the authenticity of the site. He tells us about the three-year project of barracks preservation, the attempts to conserve historical damage, how replicas of straw mattresses, and even ceiling pipes, are marked by newness, so as to distinguish themselves from nearby originals—designed so that the viewer can see the old in the context of refurbished details meant only to fill in the blanks. He explains that, aside from an Auschwitz I gas chamber reconstructed after the war, the gas chambers alone have not been conserved, that to conserve them would be an ethical problem, and that the fingernail scratches we find inside were most likely left behind by tourists, not prisoners. Original fingernail scratches would have faded. But new fingernail scratches that pretend to be old—new fingernail scratches that are scars of disrespect—these can’t be painted over, either.
This is maybe the essence of the problem: that while Auschwitz attempts to maintain the traces of what it used to be, it is also something new. It is a place where people use selfie sticks, a place where we sit in auditorium seating for lectures in buildings that are former blocks. We understand the visitors’ fingernail scratches to violate some code of behavior, but we’re not sure exactly what that code might be, because we’re not sure exactly what this place is. This is a museum, and a memorial, a cemetery, and a site of former atrocity. This is the most visited museum in all of Poland precisely because it is an authentic site. Here, we walk paths that prisoners have walked—it’s an immersion exhibit, in a way. But we don’t want it to be like the drippy brick tunnels inside the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising or the gravelly mockghettos at the Schindler Factory Museum in Kraków. The problem with these exhibits lies in the word mock: in the act of imitation, and especially as they imitate places and events we remember with gravity, these reconstructions can come off as belittling and cheap. In its attempts at self-preservation, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, too, risks becoming what Robert Jan van Pelt calls “a reconstruction on an original site,” “a place that constantly needs to be rebuilt in order to remain a ruin.”
Because people visit Auschwitz with the assumption that the Arbeit Macht Frei sign, barbed wire, execution wall, and gas chamber wall in Auschwitz I are original, their newness is pointed out during regular tours, we’re told. But I’m most bothered by the HALT! signs we find along the fencing, with their skulls and crossbones. These are obviously reconstructions, but in a place where the smell of sunscreen wafts through the air, they can look like decorations in a theme park’s thrill ride. At other museums, we’ve discussed the difference between immersion and spectatorship, between standing on gravel meant to replicate the environment of a ghetto and looking at photos of the same ghetto through a peephole on a wall. The first method risks disrespect, the second too much distance. Here, though, we are standing in the site of atrocity at the same time that we’re seeing it from afar. We don’t want to imitate prisoners’ experience (as I might seem to be doing if I wore stripes: almost as rude as scratching my fingernails into a wall), but neither do we want to distance ourselves too much (as I might if I wore bright colors).
The problem reminds me of two towns we visited earlier on our trip. In Chmielnik, at the site of the shtetl’s former great synagogue, there now stands a synagogue re-creation complete with a modern glass bima and a multimedia exhibit about the area’s Jewish history. In nearby Działoszyce, at the site of the shtetl’s former great synagogue, stands the same great synagogue, fenced in but now roofless and subject to pigeons and rain. Neither site feels authentic to its history: in Chmielnik, the reconstructed synagogue feels too flashy, despite the obvious earnestness of the attempt to honor the past; and in Działoszyce, the empty hole at the great synagogue’s height is a reminder less of what was than what is. But at Auschwitz, the attempt is to strike a balance between these two modes of representation. And I’m not sure it’s possible to do both, to be at once original and redone.
The problem is that time prohibits authenticity: time makes it impossible to be faithful to any moment in the past. Months after my visit, a cousin from my parents’ generation will ask about my trip and tell me how, when she visited Auschwitz, she refused to pay an entrance fee because, she told the guard, “You killed my whole family here and now you expect me to pay to see it?” She’s conflating two very different yous—the you of the camp guards and the you of the memorial’s guardians—but I can see why. Here, past and present coexist, and the way they coexist is uncomfortable. The memorial’s attempt at authenticity is impossible for precisely this reason. There’s nothing wrong with preservation, conservation, or replication, except that it will never be exactly right.
Helen Rubinstein is the Provost's Postgraduate Visiting Writer in nonfiction at the University of Iowa, where she is at work on two books, one of which draws on research from her AJC trip. Her essays and stories have been published in The Paris Review Daily, Slice Magazine, Witness, The New York Times, and elsewhere, and her work has been honored in The Best Women’s Travel Writing and The Best American Nonrequired Reading series. She holds M.F.A. degrees from the University of Iowa and Brooklyn College, and a B.A. in literature from Yale.
The first thing I do when I get to Auschwitz is put on sunscreen.
Then I take out my notebook and write, The first thing I do when I get to Auschwitz is put on sunscreen. Because being here makes us scrutinize ourselves; being here makes us worry. Are we mourning appropriately? Are we responding and reacting in the way that we should? Should I not wear the dress with horizontal stripes, should I avoid any dress with bright colors? Once thought, these questions are hard to un-think, and so I am here in my brownest most ordinary dress, a dress I will from now on think of as my Auschwitz dress even if, when I return to the memorial on other days—because, right, this is not Auschwitz but the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum—I will feel okay wearing brighter dresses.
In the past weeks, we AJC Fellows have been debating the ethics of selfies at Auschwitz
Our guide, Paweł, begins our tour by telling us that this is an authentic site—I write down his words. He says, “Every brick tells a story.” What he means, I know, is that everything here has been maintained, conserved, or reconstructed to as-near-perfectly-as-possible match the original. There’s an obvious reason for this: the site must stand as evidence to counter the ranks of Holocaust deniers. But the instant Paweł calls the site authentic, I feel myself grow doubtful, not only because I am mindful that authenticity is an impossible ideal, but because I don’t even know how the site can be authentic. It can’t replicate the moment the memorial is presuming to preserve: nothing that is happening onsite now was happening onsite between 1940 and 1945. And how can the site be authentic when its iconic gate, barbed wire, execution wall, and HALT! signs are all reconstructions?
Our AJC Fellows group has spent much of the trip discussing the ethos of museums: their design choices, their occasional contrivances, the narratives implied in the arrangement of artifacts and interpretive material, and the various ways in which museums attempt to authentically—that is, ethically, and with as little propaganda as possible—represent the past. Here, too, such questions are pertinent, even if Paweł will suggest that the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is not only a museum but also a kind of cemetery. Inside one former barracks, near photos of the 1944 transport of Hungarian Jews, a bronze sign reads baldly: “Jews are a race that must be totally exterminated.” It’s a quotation from Hans Frank, meant to provide context and educate, but its loud and prominent position on the wall gives me a chill. Elsewhere, a sign reading MATERIAL PROOF OF CRIMES makes me equally uncomfortable, for how it directs the reader’s attention not to these crimes’ victims—whose hair, shoes, and possessions constitute “proof”—but to the crimes’ unnamed perpetrators.
Authenticity is a word Paweł keeps returning to. New exhibits, he says, will be without multimedia, without fireworks, meant only to explain the authenticity of the site. He tells us about the three-year project of barracks preservation, the attempts to conserve historical damage, how replicas of straw mattresses, and even ceiling pipes, are marked by newness, so as to distinguish themselves from nearby originals—designed so that the viewer can see the old in the context of refurbished details meant only to fill in the blanks. He explains that, aside from an Auschwitz I gas chamber reconstructed after the war, the gas chambers alone have not been conserved, that to conserve them would be an ethical problem, and that the fingernail scratches we find inside were most likely left behind by tourists, not prisoners. Original fingernail scratches would have faded. But new fingernail scratches that pretend to be old—new fingernail scratches that are scars of disrespect—these can’t be painted over, either.
This is maybe the essence of the problem: that while Auschwitz attempts to maintain the traces of what it used to be, it is also something new. It is a place where people use selfie sticks
Because people visit Auschwitz with the assumption that the Arbeit Macht Frei sign, barbed wire, execution wall, and gas chamber wall in Auschwitz I are original, their newness is pointed out during regular tours, we’re told. But I’m most bothered by the HALT! signs we find along the fencing, with their skulls and crossbones. These are obviously reconstructions, but in a place where the smell of sunscreen wafts through the air, they can look like decorations in a theme park’s thrill ride. At other museums, we’ve discussed the difference between immersion and spectatorship, between standing on gravel meant to replicate the environment of a ghetto and looking at photos of the same ghetto through a peephole on a wall. The first method risks disrespect, the second too much distance. Here, though, we are standing in the site of atrocity at the same time that we’re seeing it from afar. We don’t want to imitate prisoners’ experience (as I might seem to be doing if I wore stripes: almost as rude as scratching my fingernails into a wall), but neither do we want to distance ourselves too much (as I might if I wore bright colors).
The problem reminds me of two towns we visited earlier on our trip. In Chmielnik, at the site of the shtetl’s former great synagogue, there now stands a synagogue re-creation complete with a modern glass bima and a multimedia exhibit about the area’s Jewish history. In nearby Działoszyce, at the site of the shtetl’s former great synagogue, stands the same great synagogue, fenced in but now roofless and subject to pigeons and rain. Neither site feels authentic to its history: in Chmielnik, the reconstructed synagogue feels too flashy, despite the obvious earnestness of the attempt to honor the past; and in Działoszyce, the empty hole at the great synagogue’s height is a reminder less of what was than what is. But at Auschwitz, the attempt is to strike a balance between these two modes of representation. And I’m not sure it’s possible to do both, to be at once original and redone.
The problem is that time prohibits authenticity: time makes it impossible to be faithful to any moment in the past. Months after my visit, a cousin from my parents’ generation will ask about my trip and tell me how, when she visited Auschwitz, she refused to pay an entrance fee because, she told the guard, “You killed my whole family here and now you expect me to pay to see it?” She’s conflating two very different yous—the you of the camp guards and the you of the memorial’s guardians—but I can see why. Here, past and present coexist, and the way they coexist is uncomfortable. The memorial’s attempt at authenticity is impossible for precisely this reason. There’s nothing wrong with preservation, conservation, or replication, except that it will never be exactly right.
Helen Rubinstein is the Provost's Postgraduate Visiting Writer in nonfiction at the University of Iowa, where she is at work on two books, one of which draws on research from her AJC trip. Her essays and stories have been published in The Paris Review Daily, Slice Magazine, Witness, The New York Times, and elsewhere, and her work has been honored in The Best Women’s Travel Writing and The Best American Nonrequired Reading series. She holds M.F.A. degrees from the University of Iowa and Brooklyn College, and a B.A. in literature from Yale.
Friday, April 3, 2015
The Art at Auschwitz
Franziska A. Karpinski, 2014 AJC Fellow
On the third day of in-depth study visits to Auschwitz-Birkenau, it was not annihilation we learned about, but the opposite: courageous acts of resistance by prisoners of Auschwitz. The resistance we studied was not armed; it was not violent or public. Rather, but no less impressive and powerful, it was a silent resistance aimed at documenting the crimes committed and re-establishing the victims´ humanity and dignity. We visited the art gallery of the memorial, which exhibits works of art produced by inmates both during the operation of Auschwitz and after liberation.
Auschwitz-Birkenau represents the utter and complete destruction of human beings: more than 1.1 million men, women, and children from all over Europe were brutally murdered at Auschwitz. It is one of the most haunting symbols of the Holocaust and the deeply immoral ideology that created it. Today, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum is one of the largest memorial sites in the world. The vastness of the geographical space on which Auschwitz-Birkenau was built is staggering: an entire space the size of a small city built solely for the purpose mass murder. The crimes perpetrated there were so horrendous, the sense of destruction and despair so all encompassing, it is hard to cope when walking through the site. It is easy to forget that prisoners resisted in various ways.
The artwork produced by inmates during the camp’s existence was produced illegally, which means that those who painted and drew did so with materials that they were not allowed to possess. Pencils, watercolor, ink and feather, coal and other drawing materials used were possessed illegally, under the threat of torture and death. Some were smuggled from SS work stations, where artists created commissioned work for the SS. Other prisoners used whatever materials they could get their hands on to produce their art: small paper scraps, baking paper, the backs of old letters. It is an impressive accomplishment to have created art in such perilous circumstances and amidst everyday destruction.
Art historian Anna Sieradzka, whom we were introduced to that day, led us into one of the blocks on the former campgrounds. We walked down a long corridor and finally entered a large, rectangular room with red floor tiles and whitewashed walls. The air was crisp and cold, a stark contrast to the intense July summer heat that was prevalent outside. As if the difference in temperature signaled the entry into another world, we stepped into room that featured countless art works - paintings, drawings and artifacts. It was a place of creation and construction, not destruction. There, she asked us to describe the paintings and artifacts we saw, attaching as many adjectives and associations to them as we could. We were the only people there, which enabled us to fully concentrate on the art displayed without interruption and many possibilities for deep contemplation, thought, and exchange amongst us.
Auschwitz-Birkenau is not a place where one would have expected the creation of anything, let alone art, to have happened. But it did. Artwork was made by the inmates – illegally and under constant threat of immediate death when discovered. And there they were: portraits of inmates, many of them produced by Franciszek Jaźwiecki, a Polish artist and political prisoner at Auschwitz. He made portraits of fellow prisoners, drawings – mostly pencil – on thin, now yellowed, paper. Every now and then, some blue, red, or yellow colors appear in the otherwise grey- and brown-colored drawings. The general lack of bright colors mirrors the desperate situation of the inmates portrayed, at least at first glance. Yet, these portraits do so much more: they are a manifestation of the restoration of dignity, of taking back the humanity that the Nazis cruelly robbed. They are also a means of working against forgetting, against becoming a nameless face among hundreds of thousands, marked with exhaustion and terror, with fear and despair, worn down by the horrendous conditions in Auschwitz, always threatened by death.
Upon arriving in Auschwitz, the deported were systematically deprived of their identity by having their hair shorn off, by being given the same worn-down striped uniforms and wooden shoes or no shoes at all, by having confiscated their personal belongings such as pictures of their loved ones, jewelry, clothes. In the camp, they were forced to do hard slave labor for the SS, they were starved, many times starved to death, defeated by disease, haunted by the horrors of the reality of Auschwitz. Instead of their names, they were assigned numbers, sewn onto their prisoner uniforms, and oftentimes, tattooed on their arms.
Indeed, one can see this process of dehumanization and degradation best exemplified in the official erkennungsdienstliche Photographien (German: fingerprinting and photographs) that the SS took of all new arrivals of prisoners. The photographs show the inmates in their uniforms, without hair, and their camp number in the picture frame; as such, these photographs present a symbol for the complete degradation the Nazis subjected their victims to. By being photographed by the SS, the prisoners were negated the status of a human being, of a feeling and thinking subject with agency, but were made objects at the whim of the Nazis. Last, the Nazis’ de-humanization campaign found its terrible and genocidal culmination in the systemized mass murder through gas and mass shootings. The dead were then further denied a proper burial without a name or a place to commemorate them, but where burnt and buried in anonymous mass graves.
The portraits made illegally by the Auschwitz inmates achieve the opposite of anonymity: They give back human dignity; they restore individual prisoner identity. On the portraits, the prisoner numbers are shown as well, but this time, enabling historians today to attach a name to the portraits. Anna Sieradzka told us that the desire amongst inmates to have an image of themselves was very strong, precisely because it was a means of re-gaining one’s identity. The portraits also document the forced transformation the victims at Auschwitz underwent. Their faces are strained and full of exhaustion and fear. Sieradzka told us that she finds the eyes in the portraits most remarkable – they fully mirror the despair and helplessness of the inmates. They also show a profound sadness and sorrow, which had the deepest impact on me, personally.
The portraits, as Sieradzka explained to us, served three purposes: One was to reinstate human dignity and identity among the prisoners. Second, many considered the acts of both drawing and being drawn as a means of mentally escaping the reality of Auschwitz. Finally, the portraits were made to document the Nazis’ crimes and to document those fallen victim to them. Sieradzka believes that Jaźwiecki made these portraits because he knew they would eventually become important historical documents. In the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, there are more than a hundred of Jaźwiecki’s portraits. During his internment in Auschwitz, Franciszek Jaźwiecki miraculously managed to hide his illegal work in his bed and clothes. He survived Auschwitz, but died soon after liberation, in 1946.
For me, one of the most memorable portraits was that of Mala Zimetbaum, a Polish Jewish woman, who was deported to Auschwitz in 1942 and died in 1944. Shortly before her death, she had attempted to escape from Auschwitz with her lover, Edward Galinski. They made it outside of the camp, but were ultimately found by a German patrol and brought back into the camp. Galinski was hanged, and Zimetbaum tried to kill herself, but accounts vary as to whether the SS ultimately killed her. Her portrait is stunning; it is one of the few that do not portray an inmate in prisoner’s uniform, but in formal clothes. She wears a blazer and a bright blue scarf around her neck. Her hair is not shorn off, but long and wavy, of a full brown color and done in a beautiful hair-do; it is the portrait of a beautiful woman. The expression on her face is one of strength, one of resourcefulness, maybe even the faint trace of a smile.
In addition to portraits, the gallery houses many paintings and drawings – often produced post-war – that depict camp conditions such as roll call, forced labor, and the camp orchestra, among other scenes. The pictures, made with different materials, by different painters, at different times, are illustrative of the horrors of Auschwitz: These forceful depictions of everyday life in the camp leave a deep impression on the observer. I remember that at about halfway through our workshop, the entire group went silent, scattered across the room, deeply affected by what was shown.
Another set of pictures includes works that prisoners were forced to make. It is little known that the SS commissioned imprisoned artists to create beautiful art, such as large oil paintings and drawings, mostly of landscapes, animals, and postcards with colorful flowers. The bright colors of these art works are in complete contrast to those made illegally. They cruelly contrast the reality of Auschwitz, where colors and an abundance of nature and life were purposefully eliminated.
The pictures before us on the wall were not only evidence of what happened in Auschwitz, they were a means of remembrance and commemoration of the subjects and artists. What is depicted through everyday life in Auschwitz is evidence of the crimes perpetrated. Who is depicted is a landmark against being forgotten. Together, they present an invaluable expression of the prisoners’ views and voices. The art made by prisoners in Auschwitz is a potent means of upholding human dignity. It is also a testimony to admirable courage and fighting spirit in the face of tragedy.
Franziska A. Karpinski is a PhD student in Modern History at Loughborough University, UK. The title of her thesis is “In Defense of Honor and Masculinity–In-Group Pressure, Violence, and Self-Destruction in the Third Reich´s Elite, 1933-1945.” She has a BA in American Studies and Modern European History from the Free University Berlin (2011), and a Master’s degree in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from the University of Amsterdam (2012, cum laude). She has spoken at multiple conferences, attended seminars around the world, and co-authored an article titled “Sexual Violence in the Nazi Genocide: Gender, Law, and Ideology”.
On the third day of in-depth study visits to Auschwitz-Birkenau, it was not annihilation we learned about, but the opposite: courageous acts of resistance by prisoners of Auschwitz. The resistance we studied was not armed; it was not violent or public. Rather, but no less impressive and powerful, it was a silent resistance aimed at documenting the crimes committed and re-establishing the victims´ humanity and dignity. We visited the art gallery of the memorial, which exhibits works of art produced by inmates both during the operation of Auschwitz and after liberation.
Auschwitz-Birkenau represents the utter and complete destruction of human beings: more than 1.1 million men, women, and children from all over Europe were brutally murdered at Auschwitz. It is one of the most haunting symbols of the Holocaust and the deeply immoral ideology that created it. Today, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum is one of the largest memorial sites in the world. The vastness of the geographical space on which Auschwitz-Birkenau was built is staggering: an entire space the size of a small city built solely for the purpose mass murder. The crimes perpetrated there were so horrendous, the sense of destruction and despair so all encompassing, it is hard to cope when walking through the site. It is easy to forget that prisoners resisted in various ways.
The artwork produced by inmates during the camp’s existence was produced illegally, which means that those who painted and drew did so with materials that they were not allowed to possess. Pencils, watercolor, ink and feather, coal and other drawing materials used were possessed illegally, under the threat of torture and death. Some were smuggled from SS work stations, where artists created commissioned work for the SS. Other prisoners used whatever materials they could get their hands on to produce their art: small paper scraps, baking paper, the backs of old letters. It is an impressive accomplishment to have created art in such perilous circumstances and amidst everyday destruction.
Art historian Anna Sieradzka, whom we were introduced to that day, led us into one of the blocks on the former campgrounds. We walked down a long corridor and finally entered a large, rectangular room with red floor tiles and whitewashed walls. The air was crisp and cold, a stark contrast to the intense July summer heat that was prevalent outside. As if the difference in temperature signaled the entry into another world, we stepped into room that featured countless art works - paintings, drawings and artifacts. It was a place of creation and construction, not destruction. There, she asked us to describe the paintings and artifacts we saw, attaching as many adjectives and associations to them as we could. We were the only people there, which enabled us to fully concentrate on the art displayed without interruption and many possibilities for deep contemplation, thought, and exchange amongst us.
Auschwitz-Birkenau is not a place where one would have expected the creation of anything, let alone art, to have happened. But it did. Artwork was made by the inmates – illegally and under constant threat of immediate death when discovered. And there they were: portraits of inmates, many of them produced by Franciszek Jaźwiecki, a Polish artist and political prisoner at Auschwitz. He made portraits of fellow prisoners, drawings – mostly pencil – on thin, now yellowed, paper. Every now and then, some blue, red, or yellow colors appear in the otherwise grey- and brown-colored drawings. The general lack of bright colors mirrors the desperate situation of the inmates portrayed, at least at first glance. Yet, these portraits do so much more: they are a manifestation of the restoration of dignity, of taking back the humanity that the Nazis cruelly robbed. They are also a means of working against forgetting, against becoming a nameless face among hundreds of thousands, marked with exhaustion and terror, with fear and despair, worn down by the horrendous conditions in Auschwitz, always threatened by death.
Upon arriving in Auschwitz, the deported were systematically deprived of their identity by having their hair shorn off, by being given the same worn-down striped uniforms and wooden shoes or no shoes at all, by having confiscated their personal belongings such as pictures of their loved ones, jewelry, clothes. In the camp, they were forced to do hard slave labor for the SS, they were starved, many times starved to death, defeated by disease, haunted by the horrors of the reality of Auschwitz. Instead of their names, they were assigned numbers, sewn onto their prisoner uniforms, and oftentimes, tattooed on their arms.
Indeed, one can see this process of dehumanization and degradation best exemplified in the official erkennungsdienstliche Photographien (German: fingerprinting and photographs) that the SS took of all new arrivals of prisoners. The photographs show the inmates in their uniforms, without hair, and their camp number in the picture frame; as such, these photographs present a symbol for the complete degradation the Nazis subjected their victims to. By being photographed by the SS, the prisoners were negated the status of a human being, of a feeling and thinking subject with agency, but were made objects at the whim of the Nazis. Last, the Nazis’ de-humanization campaign found its terrible and genocidal culmination in the systemized mass murder through gas and mass shootings. The dead were then further denied a proper burial without a name or a place to commemorate them, but where burnt and buried in anonymous mass graves.
The portraits made illegally by the Auschwitz inmates achieve the opposite of anonymity: They give back human dignity; they restore individual prisoner identity. On the portraits, the prisoner numbers are shown as well, but this time, enabling historians today to attach a name to the portraits. Anna Sieradzka told us that the desire amongst inmates to have an image of themselves was very strong, precisely because it was a means of re-gaining one’s identity. The portraits also document the forced transformation the victims at Auschwitz underwent. Their faces are strained and full of exhaustion and fear. Sieradzka told us that she finds the eyes in the portraits most remarkable – they fully mirror the despair and helplessness of the inmates. They also show a profound sadness and sorrow, which had the deepest impact on me, personally.
The portraits, as Sieradzka explained to us, served three purposes: One was to reinstate human dignity and identity among the prisoners. Second, many considered the acts of both drawing and being drawn as a means of mentally escaping the reality of Auschwitz. Finally, the portraits were made to document the Nazis’ crimes and to document those fallen victim to them. Sieradzka believes that Jaźwiecki made these portraits because he knew they would eventually become important historical documents. In the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, there are more than a hundred of Jaźwiecki’s portraits. During his internment in Auschwitz, Franciszek Jaźwiecki miraculously managed to hide his illegal work in his bed and clothes. He survived Auschwitz, but died soon after liberation, in 1946.
For me, one of the most memorable portraits was that of Mala Zimetbaum, a Polish Jewish woman, who was deported to Auschwitz in 1942 and died in 1944. Shortly before her death, she had attempted to escape from Auschwitz with her lover, Edward Galinski. They made it outside of the camp, but were ultimately found by a German patrol and brought back into the camp. Galinski was hanged, and Zimetbaum tried to kill herself, but accounts vary as to whether the SS ultimately killed her. Her portrait is stunning; it is one of the few that do not portray an inmate in prisoner’s uniform, but in formal clothes. She wears a blazer and a bright blue scarf around her neck. Her hair is not shorn off, but long and wavy, of a full brown color and done in a beautiful hair-do; it is the portrait of a beautiful woman. The expression on her face is one of strength, one of resourcefulness, maybe even the faint trace of a smile.
In addition to portraits, the gallery houses many paintings and drawings – often produced post-war – that depict camp conditions such as roll call, forced labor, and the camp orchestra, among other scenes. The pictures, made with different materials, by different painters, at different times, are illustrative of the horrors of Auschwitz: These forceful depictions of everyday life in the camp leave a deep impression on the observer. I remember that at about halfway through our workshop, the entire group went silent, scattered across the room, deeply affected by what was shown.
Another set of pictures includes works that prisoners were forced to make. It is little known that the SS commissioned imprisoned artists to create beautiful art, such as large oil paintings and drawings, mostly of landscapes, animals, and postcards with colorful flowers. The bright colors of these art works are in complete contrast to those made illegally. They cruelly contrast the reality of Auschwitz, where colors and an abundance of nature and life were purposefully eliminated.
The pictures before us on the wall were not only evidence of what happened in Auschwitz, they were a means of remembrance and commemoration of the subjects and artists. What is depicted through everyday life in Auschwitz is evidence of the crimes perpetrated. Who is depicted is a landmark against being forgotten. Together, they present an invaluable expression of the prisoners’ views and voices. The art made by prisoners in Auschwitz is a potent means of upholding human dignity. It is also a testimony to admirable courage and fighting spirit in the face of tragedy.
Franziska A. Karpinski is a PhD student in Modern History at Loughborough University, UK. The title of her thesis is “In Defense of Honor and Masculinity–In-Group Pressure, Violence, and Self-Destruction in the Third Reich´s Elite, 1933-1945.” She has a BA in American Studies and Modern European History from the Free University Berlin (2011), and a Master’s degree in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from the University of Amsterdam (2012, cum laude). She has spoken at multiple conferences, attended seminars around the world, and co-authored an article titled “Sexual Violence in the Nazi Genocide: Gender, Law, and Ideology”.
A Turn to Narrative
Cheryl Chaffin, 2014 AJC Fellow
Italian chemist, writer, and camp survivor Primo Levi wrote in his “Self-Interview” in 1976, “I returned to Auschwitz in 1965...I didn’t feel anything much when I visited the central camp. The Polish government has transformed it into a kind of national monument.” What does it take to feel the past and to mourn at Auschwitz, I wonder as a visitor, a scholar, an Auschwitz Jewish Center fellow, and a human being horrified at the genocide that transpired here. What does it take to feel in this place and in response to this place and its history when Levi felt nothing upon his return to the camp twenty years after his imprisonment there? In asking this question, I have in a mind a turn to narrative, the definition of which I delineate here in a narrative of my visit to Auschwitz. My own entry into Auschwitz has been through narrative. The reason I had come to Auschwitz, even to Poland, was because of a passion for reading and teaching Levi’s two-part memoir, Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening, of his ten months in the camp, in particular Buna-Monowitz, a labor sub-camp known also as Auschwitz III. His memories channeled into narrative motivated my desire to apply to the Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellows Program and to visit the sites about which he wrote, sites that had drastically influenced his life course, his thoughts, and his writing career. He had even admitted, bravely, I thought, that if he had not lived his Auschwitz experience, he probably would have never have written anything. So, it was Levi’s words and his need to write that emerged of his camp experience that I carried with me into Auschwitz, even as I visited a place that I understood has become a tourist site, a memorial drastically changed from the killing and labor camp it was from 1940-1945.
Given my own narrative pull to Poland, I want to explore here how a turn to narrative offers a way to navigate the camp space, both mental and physical. Over my three days at Auschwitz I experienced that the possibility that knowing, hearing, seeing, and imagining individual and community stories of those deported to the camp opens to the visitor space for grieving, feeling, and acknowledging the horror and loss implicit in a visit to these charnel grounds. Levi’s humanity as it emerged in his language and his writing over the years influenced me as a writer, thinker, and scholar to seek out other such narratives during my several day-visits to Auschwitz. In speaking of survival, Levi wrote that he felt his steadfast interest in the human spirit and his determination to “recognize in my companions and myself, men, not things.” So, too, narrative matters because it grounds the visitor in the experience of individual human beings whose memories as reflected in a written account, a sketch, or a photo—convey relationship with others, emotions of hope and fear, and the courage that documentation and reflection requires. Such narratives help visitors to connect to the tenacious continuity of human experience within the camp. Finally, the attuned visitor may discover several small stories, or the possibilities of such stories, in the documentation and artifacts (Levi called these artifacts “relics”) in the exhibits at Auschwitz.
Auschwitz-Birkenau is a state museum, funded predominantly by the Polish government. It was established in 1946 by former prisoners who wanted to create a memorial at the site. Gradually, the memorial developed into a museum. Under Communism the emphasis on memorialization was on those “martyred” in the Second World War, with less emphasis on the genocide of specifically Jewish prisoners. Since the early 1990s with Poland’s transition to democratic government, there has been exponential growth in the preservation of artifacts, including buildings, as well as in the scope of educational programs and global digital presence of the museum. At peak periods—from April to October—up to 15,000 people visit Auschwitz in a single day. Individuals must visit the camp in tours, between 10-3, with a specially trained guide so that they stay together, learn the history and see particular areas of the camp. Our guide was Paweł Sawicki, a journalist and writer with the Press Office for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum. Paweł noted that in visiting the camp “it is individuals who are a problem; people must take tours.” What this means is that individuals sometimes venture into areas not open to the public or under renovation. The emphasis on groups helps to deter individual exploration of Auschwitz. If individuals experience the camp only in groups, they have little space for their own experience of the place. This loss of individual experience constitutes the very reason that stories should constitute a core element shaping the contemporary visitor’s time there. However, due to sheer numbers of visitors, people must move quickly through exhibits housed in the former cellblocks of the Auschwitz I compound.
Keeping a steady pace through narrow hallways that open into crowded exhibit rooms, a summer crowd ahead and behind, the visitor may try to comprehend the enormity of atrocity and the total loss for individuals, particularly for Jewish people, as they arrived to the camp from transport trains. The effect of such absorption is stupefying. Cases of hair, shoes, glasses, prosthetics—extensions of one’s very self and one’s ability to function in the world—form decaying mountains of intimate things that never should have become relics of genocide.
Inherent to the museum’s visitation policy is the notion that how one conducts oneself is important to the maintenance of the place as memorial and one’s experience of it. This is a museum after all. Yet, some fellow visitors’ faces betray horror and disgust. A restless silence periodically befalls us. In the long narrow room with suitcases, hair, and children’s shoes there is a tangible atmosphere of disbelief—in confronting the space and its remains. Right here and now we visitors must confront the evidence that systematic cruelties happened and, how, if at all, we are to respond. Sighs puncture the space, small words between intimates, people who have known one another over time and who can, perhaps without misunderstanding, confess their horror to one another. The sighs seem to surge into one sustained out-breath of injury and mark a particular heaviness of repressed emotion in response to these artifacts.
In the exhibits of Auschwitz I there are placards, dates, numbers, statistics, reports of transports, and historical photos, particularly of a particular Hungarian transport in1944. But the visitor must glimpse these artifacts, rather than linger and invite a potentially emotional response to them. In this space, I sometimes stop to hear Paweł’s voice explain photos, documents, and artifacts. I search for relationships within photographs of transports. These isolated images move me. I gravitate toward particular moments, names, a face, toward evidence of life. A photo of a man, in prison clothes, seemingly well fed, and woman, newly arrived, talking, saying something urgently, some last words, some counsel for survival, an almost passionate moment on the train ramp. What could their relationship be? I may continue to read, imagine, and translate that photo for the remainder of my life.
A boy holding a woman’s hand—his mother?—surrounded by children and women hurrying along, apprehension, exhausted. Those photos will catalyze poems. I will return to them in search of vaporous specificities of personal histories never available to me, never narrated and remembered to anyone, but somehow shared with all of us. Facing those photos from 1944, what stood out to me were instances, vitally important, between people on the ramps as they were driven from trains and corralled and ordered into lines that led towards the gas chambers. I knew that I would later attempt to express those subtle yet vital interactions between people: moments of shared humanity, of fear and love, of existing together in myriad ways, clinging to one another in the face of grave uncertainty, subsumed with hope and desperation and aching need.
“We must be disciplined now,” Paweł tells our group, “in order to get through this tour and see certain things.” We are slow, dragging, lingering over documents and relics. He may lose us in the hallways. We will not have time to finish the tour. Disciplined, orderly. Is this how we visitors are to behave here in Auschwitz? Yes, there are lines, streams of people channeling through halls and stairways. Yet, even as we hurry and attend to our guide, we see so little of the camp. Past the shooting wall, through Block 11, in a line past cells—one of starvation, another of standing, into which four men bent and crawled and stood for days. I rub the Buddha charm at my neck. “How do you do this?” I ask Paweł who is just in front of me. He grimaces. “Do you get used to it? It’s your job.” He hardens himself. “Yes,” he says, always focused on moving us through. We enter the innards of a gas chamber for a minute. We move through. Perhaps moving through is a glimpse, a memory with intention to return to full life, an entry into and surfacing from the historicized grounds of genocide and murder.
Paweł later shares that at Auschwitz “the tour suppresses a need for internal narrative and also prevents emergence of such a narrative.” The museum’s aim, he explains, is not to encourage an emotional experience of the place but to impart historical knowledge of the camps. I resist the idea that one can or should suppress an internal narrative, but upon further reflection imagine the problems germane to a museum space of sobbing and shaking, overtly horrified, grief-stricken, enraged, or overwhelmed people. The priority is to recognize the place and the things within it that point to an historical understanding over and above an all-consuming emotional response to its energies.
At home with books and solitude, a quiet afternoon, a garden at the window, I listen. I turn to songs and voices, writing towards poetry, pleas for forgiveness, for life, full of grief and understanding. In these crucial texts of Auschwitz I return to, to grapple with what Father Manfred Deselaers at the Center for Dialogue and Prayer called the lifelong wound of Auschwitz. In dialogue with the fellow, Fr. Dr. Deselaers said, “The task is to try to understand and to take this wound seriously. It touches us and we think it has to do with us, but what?” Such a lifetime inquiry brings one into an ethical engagement with the place of Auschwitz and the words that remain among humans because of that place. Auschwitz began with the killing of relationship, says the Father. My turn then to narrative, both in visiting the camp and once home, reflects a deep desire to mend relationships across time, place, and event. One such text that nourishes that longing is Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After, written twenty years after her repatriation to France. She describes this no-place where she has landed from her native France, transported into some dislocated deep winterscape, “We arrived on a morning in January 1943. The doors of the cattle cars were pushed open, revealing the edge of an icy plain. It was a place from before geography. Where were we? We were to find out—later, at least two months hence; we, that is those of us who were still alive two months later—that this place was called Auschwitz. We couldn’t have given it a name.”
Seventy years later, its name has burned in our consciousness. Of our contemporary relationship with the camp, Paweł says, “We have only the place and words,” neither of which Delbo and her compatriots had upon their arrival. It is words that persist and flourish against the violence and against the forgetting of history. The modest, even minimal, remains of buildings, monuments, exhibits, and words structure humanity’s current relationship with the camp. For example, just 3-5% of all original documents and records in the camp remain. Most were destroyed, some were confiscated by camp liberators, the Russians. The loss of objects through war makes potent the gradual shift to narrative as a means of processing and feeling one’s visit to the camp. Such a shift indicates that this memorial-museum space has begun to relinquish a focus on historical facts and a lingering political ideological narrative (of Communist Poland) that speaks of martyrdom over the uniqueness of individual lives for more personal, narrative-driven guidance through the camp. Such a turn manifests in an exhibit at Birkenau of 2,400 photos found in suitcases and discovered after camp liberation in 1945. It is reflected, too, when in Birkenau on the second day of the tour, Paweł reads to fellows from testimonies he has carefully chosen to allow a feeling for camp conditions and how those who lived and survived here experienced the place. At the edge of a stand of birches, near the crumbling bricks of former gas chamber five he reads to us from Henryk Mandelbaum recounting of his experience as a Sonderkommando. Mandelbaum describes the process of killing within the gas chambers, the extraction of hundreds of bodies and the subsequent cremation of bodies. We are in Birkenau, the death camp, built to house more prisoners and to accommodate a growing number of gas chambers to kill them. Ironically, the vastness of Birkenau (“birch” in German), the spaces between structures and the paths through woods and along marshy waterways, allows more time to think and feel. In the former barracks, many of these buildings currently undergoing restoration, Paweł reads a woman prisoner’s careful logging of the disease, filth, and dying that developed in the female camp quarters.
These readings are somewhat new for our guide. He holds in his hands white sheets of paper of laser jet words. He wants us to hear firsthand accounts of the places we stand. He wants us to hear firsthand accounts of the places we stand. Paweł wonders if narrative accounts of the camp help us to understand events from both historical and personal perspectives. Does it add to our sense of the place and what transpired here? He seems tentative, alert to our responses. As I leave the camp, I contemplate what a turn to narrative implies for historians, curators, educators, and press officers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum—those who preserve, present, and offer the memorial-museum and its space to those of us who visit. This turn constitutes a sort of risk. First it signifies that they make narratives essential to the visitor’s tour of the camps, so that narratives hold the rich potential to figure prominently in one’s post-visit recollections of the camps since they constitute a vital element in feeling and knowing the camps as they once were, not simply as historical markers of criminality and genocide, but as terrible and unforgettable spaces wherein people lived, loved, struggled, and died. It is life that must be honored, not en masse but as a unique and idiosyncratic expression of each individual. It matters that the guide feels the same way. That he believes reading a narrative memory is a way of remembering and feeling. It makes the guide, perhaps, as emotionally vulnerable, as human, as are his visitors. His turn to story validates all our stories in this place. This is not just an office, an everyday routine for him; it is a place of words and through him we listen.
Narratives mean that visitors need time and space to listen, to hear, and to respond quietly, as an interior process, to the experiences of others. The importance of visiting the camp resides in feeling the texture of life from the perspective of another human who experienced the camp. The connection to narrative facilitates a particular, yet enlarged, perspective of the camp as once inhabited by individuals. Delbo wrote in her memoir, Auschwitz and After, “Listening to their stories, I took the measure of the incommunicable.” It is the incommunicable that one may hear in Auschwitz. That listening happens in a space that fosters the ability to attend and feel narratives, both documented and silent, of former prisoners. Levi confessed he could feel nothing there, but because he gave me his story I felt something large and moving there, something with which to grapple for my entire life. So it is that narratives affirm our humanness in the exact place that sought to annihilate that humanity.
Cheryl Chaffin teaches English composition, literature, and rhetoric at Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz, California. She is director of the college’s Writing Center. She has an MFA in Writing from Goddard College where she focused on feminist literature of exile and immigration. Cheryl has published poetry as well as personal and academic essays. She recently received her PhD in Humanities from Union Institute and University. Her dissertation project, “Speaking from Memory: Writing and Reading Women’s Political Memoirs,” concerns the role of memoir in directing public attention to injustice and towards activism for change. Specifically, she examines works written by women who have suffered severe limitations to freedom due to social, economic, political, and cultural situations. In 2014 she traveled to Poland as one of ten scholars with the Auschwitz Jewish Fellows Program. Her blog is Speaking from Memory.
Italian chemist, writer, and camp survivor Primo Levi wrote in his “Self-Interview” in 1976, “I returned to Auschwitz in 1965...I didn’t feel anything much when I visited the central camp. The Polish government has transformed it into a kind of national monument.” What does it take to feel the past and to mourn at Auschwitz, I wonder as a visitor, a scholar, an Auschwitz Jewish Center fellow, and a human being horrified at the genocide that transpired here. What does it take to feel in this place and in response to this place and its history when Levi felt nothing upon his return to the camp twenty years after his imprisonment there? In asking this question, I have in a mind a turn to narrative, the definition of which I delineate here in a narrative of my visit to Auschwitz. My own entry into Auschwitz has been through narrative. The reason I had come to Auschwitz, even to Poland, was because of a passion for reading and teaching Levi’s two-part memoir, Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening, of his ten months in the camp, in particular Buna-Monowitz, a labor sub-camp known also as Auschwitz III. His memories channeled into narrative motivated my desire to apply to the Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellows Program and to visit the sites about which he wrote, sites that had drastically influenced his life course, his thoughts, and his writing career. He had even admitted, bravely, I thought, that if he had not lived his Auschwitz experience, he probably would have never have written anything. So, it was Levi’s words and his need to write that emerged of his camp experience that I carried with me into Auschwitz, even as I visited a place that I understood has become a tourist site, a memorial drastically changed from the killing and labor camp it was from 1940-1945.
Given my own narrative pull to Poland, I want to explore here how a turn to narrative offers a way to navigate the camp space, both mental and physical. Over my three days at Auschwitz I experienced that the possibility that knowing, hearing, seeing, and imagining individual and community stories of those deported to the camp opens to the visitor space for grieving, feeling, and acknowledging the horror and loss implicit in a visit to these charnel grounds. Levi’s humanity as it emerged in his language and his writing over the years influenced me as a writer, thinker, and scholar to seek out other such narratives during my several day-visits to Auschwitz. In speaking of survival, Levi wrote that he felt his steadfast interest in the human spirit and his determination to “recognize in my companions and myself, men, not things.” So, too, narrative matters because it grounds the visitor in the experience of individual human beings whose memories as reflected in a written account, a sketch, or a photo—convey relationship with others, emotions of hope and fear, and the courage that documentation and reflection requires. Such narratives help visitors to connect to the tenacious continuity of human experience within the camp. Finally, the attuned visitor may discover several small stories, or the possibilities of such stories, in the documentation and artifacts (Levi called these artifacts “relics”) in the exhibits at Auschwitz.
Auschwitz-Birkenau is a state museum, funded predominantly by the Polish government. It was established in 1946 by former prisoners who wanted to create a memorial at the site. Gradually, the memorial developed into a museum. Under Communism the emphasis on memorialization was on those “martyred” in the Second World War, with less emphasis on the genocide of specifically Jewish prisoners. Since the early 1990s with Poland’s transition to democratic government, there has been exponential growth in the preservation of artifacts, including buildings, as well as in the scope of educational programs and global digital presence of the museum. At peak periods—from April to October—up to 15,000 people visit Auschwitz in a single day. Individuals must visit the camp in tours, between 10-3, with a specially trained guide so that they stay together, learn the history and see particular areas of the camp. Our guide was Paweł Sawicki, a journalist and writer with the Press Office for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum. Paweł noted that in visiting the camp “it is individuals who are a problem; people must take tours.” What this means is that individuals sometimes venture into areas not open to the public or under renovation. The emphasis on groups helps to deter individual exploration of Auschwitz. If individuals experience the camp only in groups, they have little space for their own experience of the place. This loss of individual experience constitutes the very reason that stories should constitute a core element shaping the contemporary visitor’s time there. However, due to sheer numbers of visitors, people must move quickly through exhibits housed in the former cellblocks of the Auschwitz I compound.
Keeping a steady pace through narrow hallways that open into crowded exhibit rooms, a summer crowd ahead and behind, the visitor may try to comprehend the enormity of atrocity and the total loss for individuals, particularly for Jewish people, as they arrived to the camp from transport trains. The effect of such absorption is stupefying. Cases of hair, shoes, glasses, prosthetics—extensions of one’s very self and one’s ability to function in the world—form decaying mountains of intimate things that never should have become relics of genocide.
Inherent to the museum’s visitation policy is the notion that how one conducts oneself is important to the maintenance of the place as memorial and one’s experience of it. This is a museum after all. Yet, some fellow visitors’ faces betray horror and disgust. A restless silence periodically befalls us. In the long narrow room with suitcases, hair, and children’s shoes there is a tangible atmosphere of disbelief—in confronting the space and its remains. Right here and now we visitors must confront the evidence that systematic cruelties happened and, how, if at all, we are to respond. Sighs puncture the space, small words between intimates, people who have known one another over time and who can, perhaps without misunderstanding, confess their horror to one another. The sighs seem to surge into one sustained out-breath of injury and mark a particular heaviness of repressed emotion in response to these artifacts.
In the exhibits of Auschwitz I there are placards, dates, numbers, statistics, reports of transports, and historical photos, particularly of a particular Hungarian transport in1944. But the visitor must glimpse these artifacts, rather than linger and invite a potentially emotional response to them. In this space, I sometimes stop to hear Paweł’s voice explain photos, documents, and artifacts. I search for relationships within photographs of transports. These isolated images move me. I gravitate toward particular moments, names, a face, toward evidence of life. A photo of a man, in prison clothes, seemingly well fed, and woman, newly arrived, talking, saying something urgently, some last words, some counsel for survival, an almost passionate moment on the train ramp. What could their relationship be? I may continue to read, imagine, and translate that photo for the remainder of my life.
A boy holding a woman’s hand—his mother?—surrounded by children and women hurrying along, apprehension, exhausted. Those photos will catalyze poems. I will return to them in search of vaporous specificities of personal histories never available to me, never narrated and remembered to anyone, but somehow shared with all of us. Facing those photos from 1944, what stood out to me were instances, vitally important, between people on the ramps as they were driven from trains and corralled and ordered into lines that led towards the gas chambers. I knew that I would later attempt to express those subtle yet vital interactions between people: moments of shared humanity, of fear and love, of existing together in myriad ways, clinging to one another in the face of grave uncertainty, subsumed with hope and desperation and aching need.
“We must be disciplined now,” Paweł tells our group, “in order to get through this tour and see certain things.” We are slow, dragging, lingering over documents and relics. He may lose us in the hallways. We will not have time to finish the tour. Disciplined, orderly. Is this how we visitors are to behave here in Auschwitz? Yes, there are lines, streams of people channeling through halls and stairways. Yet, even as we hurry and attend to our guide, we see so little of the camp. Past the shooting wall, through Block 11, in a line past cells—one of starvation, another of standing, into which four men bent and crawled and stood for days. I rub the Buddha charm at my neck. “How do you do this?” I ask Paweł who is just in front of me. He grimaces. “Do you get used to it? It’s your job.” He hardens himself. “Yes,” he says, always focused on moving us through. We enter the innards of a gas chamber for a minute. We move through. Perhaps moving through is a glimpse, a memory with intention to return to full life, an entry into and surfacing from the historicized grounds of genocide and murder.
Paweł later shares that at Auschwitz “the tour suppresses a need for internal narrative and also prevents emergence of such a narrative.” The museum’s aim, he explains, is not to encourage an emotional experience of the place but to impart historical knowledge of the camps. I resist the idea that one can or should suppress an internal narrative, but upon further reflection imagine the problems germane to a museum space of sobbing and shaking, overtly horrified, grief-stricken, enraged, or overwhelmed people. The priority is to recognize the place and the things within it that point to an historical understanding over and above an all-consuming emotional response to its energies.
At home with books and solitude, a quiet afternoon, a garden at the window, I listen. I turn to songs and voices, writing towards poetry, pleas for forgiveness, for life, full of grief and understanding. In these crucial texts of Auschwitz I return to, to grapple with what Father Manfred Deselaers at the Center for Dialogue and Prayer called the lifelong wound of Auschwitz. In dialogue with the fellow, Fr. Dr. Deselaers said, “The task is to try to understand and to take this wound seriously. It touches us and we think it has to do with us, but what?” Such a lifetime inquiry brings one into an ethical engagement with the place of Auschwitz and the words that remain among humans because of that place. Auschwitz began with the killing of relationship, says the Father. My turn then to narrative, both in visiting the camp and once home, reflects a deep desire to mend relationships across time, place, and event. One such text that nourishes that longing is Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After, written twenty years after her repatriation to France. She describes this no-place where she has landed from her native France, transported into some dislocated deep winterscape, “We arrived on a morning in January 1943. The doors of the cattle cars were pushed open, revealing the edge of an icy plain. It was a place from before geography. Where were we? We were to find out—later, at least two months hence; we, that is those of us who were still alive two months later—that this place was called Auschwitz. We couldn’t have given it a name.”
Seventy years later, its name has burned in our consciousness. Of our contemporary relationship with the camp, Paweł says, “We have only the place and words,” neither of which Delbo and her compatriots had upon their arrival. It is words that persist and flourish against the violence and against the forgetting of history. The modest, even minimal, remains of buildings, monuments, exhibits, and words structure humanity’s current relationship with the camp. For example, just 3-5% of all original documents and records in the camp remain. Most were destroyed, some were confiscated by camp liberators, the Russians. The loss of objects through war makes potent the gradual shift to narrative as a means of processing and feeling one’s visit to the camp. Such a shift indicates that this memorial-museum space has begun to relinquish a focus on historical facts and a lingering political ideological narrative (of Communist Poland) that speaks of martyrdom over the uniqueness of individual lives for more personal, narrative-driven guidance through the camp. Such a turn manifests in an exhibit at Birkenau of 2,400 photos found in suitcases and discovered after camp liberation in 1945. It is reflected, too, when in Birkenau on the second day of the tour, Paweł reads to fellows from testimonies he has carefully chosen to allow a feeling for camp conditions and how those who lived and survived here experienced the place. At the edge of a stand of birches, near the crumbling bricks of former gas chamber five he reads to us from Henryk Mandelbaum recounting of his experience as a Sonderkommando. Mandelbaum describes the process of killing within the gas chambers, the extraction of hundreds of bodies and the subsequent cremation of bodies. We are in Birkenau, the death camp, built to house more prisoners and to accommodate a growing number of gas chambers to kill them. Ironically, the vastness of Birkenau (“birch” in German), the spaces between structures and the paths through woods and along marshy waterways, allows more time to think and feel. In the former barracks, many of these buildings currently undergoing restoration, Paweł reads a woman prisoner’s careful logging of the disease, filth, and dying that developed in the female camp quarters.
These readings are somewhat new for our guide. He holds in his hands white sheets of paper of laser jet words. He wants us to hear firsthand accounts of the places we stand. He wants us to hear firsthand accounts of the places we stand. Paweł wonders if narrative accounts of the camp help us to understand events from both historical and personal perspectives. Does it add to our sense of the place and what transpired here? He seems tentative, alert to our responses. As I leave the camp, I contemplate what a turn to narrative implies for historians, curators, educators, and press officers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum—those who preserve, present, and offer the memorial-museum and its space to those of us who visit. This turn constitutes a sort of risk. First it signifies that they make narratives essential to the visitor’s tour of the camps, so that narratives hold the rich potential to figure prominently in one’s post-visit recollections of the camps since they constitute a vital element in feeling and knowing the camps as they once were, not simply as historical markers of criminality and genocide, but as terrible and unforgettable spaces wherein people lived, loved, struggled, and died. It is life that must be honored, not en masse but as a unique and idiosyncratic expression of each individual. It matters that the guide feels the same way. That he believes reading a narrative memory is a way of remembering and feeling. It makes the guide, perhaps, as emotionally vulnerable, as human, as are his visitors. His turn to story validates all our stories in this place. This is not just an office, an everyday routine for him; it is a place of words and through him we listen.
Narratives mean that visitors need time and space to listen, to hear, and to respond quietly, as an interior process, to the experiences of others. The importance of visiting the camp resides in feeling the texture of life from the perspective of another human who experienced the camp. The connection to narrative facilitates a particular, yet enlarged, perspective of the camp as once inhabited by individuals. Delbo wrote in her memoir, Auschwitz and After, “Listening to their stories, I took the measure of the incommunicable.” It is the incommunicable that one may hear in Auschwitz. That listening happens in a space that fosters the ability to attend and feel narratives, both documented and silent, of former prisoners. Levi confessed he could feel nothing there, but because he gave me his story I felt something large and moving there, something with which to grapple for my entire life. So it is that narratives affirm our humanness in the exact place that sought to annihilate that humanity.
Cheryl Chaffin teaches English composition, literature, and rhetoric at Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz, California. She is director of the college’s Writing Center. She has an MFA in Writing from Goddard College where she focused on feminist literature of exile and immigration. Cheryl has published poetry as well as personal and academic essays. She recently received her PhD in Humanities from Union Institute and University. Her dissertation project, “Speaking from Memory: Writing and Reading Women’s Political Memoirs,” concerns the role of memoir in directing public attention to injustice and towards activism for change. Specifically, she examines works written by women who have suffered severe limitations to freedom due to social, economic, political, and cultural situations. In 2014 she traveled to Poland as one of ten scholars with the Auschwitz Jewish Fellows Program. Her blog is Speaking from Memory.
Saturday, December 13, 2014
Reflections of a Polish historian
Jared Warren, 2013 AJC Fellow
As a language student at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, I traveled to Poland to study Polish language and culture, but I encountered much more: the remnants of the diverse ethnic, linguistic, and religious heritage of the Polish-Lithuanian lands.
One summer evening, in 2012, I sat on the ruins of a cathedral in the center of Lublin chatting with Polish acquaintances. They were delighted to introduce to me to a regional delicacy: an onion-covered flatbread, a culinary marker of the city’s Jewish heritage. Just to the west, while an Israeli band began to play, the setting sun illuminated several flags draped on the eastern edge of the square: the national colors of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Norway advertised the course-offerings of one of the city’s many language schools. On other days, after my language classes, long city strolls brought constant reminders of Poland's diverse ethnic and religious heritage: historical markers in Polish, Hebrew, and English marked a Jewish heritage “trail”; and a monument in the Plac Litewski commemorated the 1569 Union of Lublin which joined the Kingdom of Poland to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
Piqued by these encounters with Poland’s Jewish heritage, I returned to Poland as an AJC Fellow hoping to understand better the interactions and interrelations between Polish culture and Jewish culture in the historic Polish lands. I hoped to learn how I—as an historian primarily of linguistic and ethnic Poles—could integrate Jewish narratives into my understanding of Polish history. I sought to discover the relationship between Polish and Jewish experiences in pre- (and post-) war Poland, the differences between Polish and Jewish narratives, and what we can learn from those differences.
On the one hand, it seemed it ought to be an easy task, since Jewish history is already so present—it seemed—in Polish history and culture. After all, the Jews are prominent in much of the history of Poland: interwar Poland was one of most ethnically diverse states in Europe: Poles comprised 69% of the general population; Ukrainians were 14%, Jews 9%, Byelorussians 3%, and Germans 2%, according to historian Tomasz Pudłocki. Furthermore, Jewish life mirrored Poland's diversity: some Jews were religiously observant, others secular and assimilated into the majority culture. During the interwar period, one third of the Jewish population lived in big cities, and much of the rest in shtetls.
However, I found relating Jewish narratives to my studies of Polish culture to be a difficult challenge. During our travels, we often discovered that (even prior to the creation of the WWII ghettoes) Jewish society was often segregated from Polish society. Although Jews were permitted to live in Poland, had been invited to settle in Poland by Polish kings, and although they often portrayed Poland as a refuge, in some cases they still were forced to settle in isolated communities. In Krakow, for instance, Jews were required to settle outside the main city limits in Kazimierz, a district specifically designated for the Jewish community. Referring to these spatial distinctions between Polish and Jewish life around 1900, Samuel Kassow called Poland's seven million Jews “familiar strangers”.
This segregation was evident even today, even in our academic discussions: I was struck by how poorly I, as a Polish historian, understood Jewish studies and Jewish cultural and religious traditions. Conversely, I was surprised that my colleagues—who have collectively spent decades in Holocaust studies—often had not been assigned much Polish history—the backdrop to so much of Polish Jewish life. Although the stories of Jews and Poles in Poland are interrelated, it seems we often do a poor job of integrating these two narratives. In a place with such a long tradition of diversity, why is the historiography often segregated? How does one write and tell coherent histories, which embrace Polish experience in full ethnic and religious diversity?
In his book Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz, Jan Gross tackles this problem of Jewish and Polish relations, and identifies the relationship between Polish and Jewish inhabitants of Poland as fundamentally unhealthy. He concludes that members of Polish society did not have the proper means to grieve the murder of its Jewish population during WWII. He suggests that Poles reacted to this loss by pushing the Jews further away, avoiding confronting their lack of effort to save Jews. Instead, Gross points out that many Poles profited from the Holocaust, by taking over property previously owned by Jews.
Despite the importance of WWII and the Holocaust in Polish history, we cannot appreciate the richness of Jewish life in Poland without a broader historical context. If we restrict our view of Polish Jewish life to the years around the War, we understand Jewish history primarily in the context of a graveyard. Even more importantly, we may often be guilty of simplifying the Holocaust by making it overly Jewish—guilty of understanding and perceiving the Auschwitz survivor, for example, only as a Jewish survivor. And we must avoid seeing the Holocaust as the summation, or even the end of Jewish history in Poland. It is only part of the story—albeit a significant part. In order to relate the narratives of Polish and Jewish life in Poland, we much reach chronologically much further back than the twentieth century.
The problem of relating Jewish and Polish history becomes yet more complex: the boundary between the two groups is not always clear. After all, not all individuals who were identified and killed as Jews during WWII self-identified as Jewish. The issue of identity is crucial here. The study of identity holds an important role in East and Central European historiography, and some historians have recently emphasized the difference between frequently ambiguous personal identities, and the more clear-cut identities foisted upon these characters from outside actors, such as proponents of nationalist programs. Perhaps even the act of writing these stories as “Jewish history” or “Polish history” is, in and of itself, part of the problem rather than part of the solution; as we attempt to relate the two, we must first realize we do not know what distinguishes the two fields.
While Jews were often scapegoated and negatively stereotyped by Poles, the difference between “Polish Poland” and “Jewish Poland” is confusing or even non-existent. By the turn-of-the-century, there were synagogues where sermons were preached in Polish—not Yiddish or Hebrew. Many of Marci Shore's characters, in Caviar and Ashes, were neither stereotypically Jewish nor quintessentially Polish: a notable example is that of Alexander Wat, a Polish-Jewish poet from an ethnically Jewish family. He was a declared atheist, who became Catholic while in exile in Kazakhstan, during WWII. The issue of nationalism, another issue which plagues East European historiography, relates to this question of identity; to make headway on the relationship between “Polish” and “Jewish” histories, we need to go beyond (late) nineteenth century conceptions of nation and ethnicity. According to Brian Porter in When Nationalism Began to Hate, early nineteenth century Polish nationalism was comparatively universal; it only became more xenophobic and exclusive later in the century. “The ideal of multiculturalism is not an American invention of the late twentieth century,” Porter writes, “but a quintessentially East European dream of the early nineteenth.” Perhaps stressing multiculturalism provides a gateway for beginning to apprehend and represent pre-twentieth century Poland’s ethnic and religious diversity.
In The Reconstruction of Nations, Timothy Snyder makes an important point regarding national identity. He asks “how...four modern national ideas arise from a single early modern one?” He answers by pointing to changing conceptions of state and citizenship. The Early Modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth counted its citizens as gentry populations, while modern states more often reflect the geographical territory inhabited by a specific ethnic group. Snyder demonstrates, in a sense, the arbitrariness of modern “Poland.” Thus, in discussing the nation of Poland, we need to be mindful of historically contingent definitions of national geographies and citizenship.
Chad Bryant’s work on conceptualizing East European urban history is particularly valuable here. He notes that preferencing different geographic units (other than nation-states) can aid the historian to create new narratives. Thus urban history’s “shared interest in a type of geographical space, rather than a particular methodology or research question...invites comparisons of events, peoples, and cultures among cities in a way that can transcend regional specializations ... it has the potential... to examine large forces and big structures within a context that provides for detail and complexity. Urban history, in other words, can reduce the scope of our inquiries—whether they be about nationalism, modernization, or something else—to a manageable size”.
He concludes his article noting that “as we look for ways to become more European and global, the study of the local, ironically, might prove to be one of our most promising alternatives”. Thus perhaps to understand Jewish and Polish (and other ethnic) experiences in Poland, we need to pay special attention to the geographic spaces and limits of our historical inquiries; perhaps we should begin with small stories, small narratives, and small geographic areas. We need to acknowledge the ambiguity, the many layers of identity in even one small place. As we learned during the fellowship, the town that Americans know as Auschwitz was also referred as Oświęcim and Oshpitzin depending on the language of the town's inhabitant. Thus, although no Yiddish-speaking national state was established on the Polish-Lithuanian lands, the story of Yiddish-speakers is still integral to the story of Oświęcim, to the story of Poland.
Rather than speak only of ethnic groups, of national movements which succeeded, we need to discuss nationalisms that did not succeed, or perhaps which never were. We need to recognize the diversity of Poland's inhabitants, and that each is important in the story of Poland. For a balanced perspective of Polish history, we cannot talk only of “Polish” history, or even of Jewish and Polish history in Poland. To do so ignores the Belorussians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans, and many other groups who lived in Polish lands.
We have perhaps succeeded in integrating the Jewish narrative into Polish history when we cease to define each and every inhabitant of the Polish lands as Jewish or Polish—as belonging to an ethnic group—or even several. We have perhaps succeeded when the issue at stake is not a question of how to identify our characters, but when we as historians have let our subjects speak them themselves, as themselves.
Perhaps the question, to begin with, ought not be a question of how I as a “Polish” historian can relate two narratives (or two fields of study); but rather, perhaps the better endeavor is to attempt to avoid defining and identifying as either a scholar of “Jewish history” or of “Polish history”—but rather of the inhabitants of a region, or of a community. That will necessitate rigorous research and demanding language regimens, but hopefully we end with richer, deeper, and more human scholarship. In Polish and Jewish history, we cannot have one without the other: Jewish history is Polish history, and vice versa.
Jared Warren is a PhD student in Modern European history at New York University, where he specializes in Central and Eastern European cultural and intellectual history. He holds a M.A. from the Center for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies at the University of Kansas; and a B.A. in French and history from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
As a language student at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, I traveled to Poland to study Polish language and culture, but I encountered much more: the remnants of the diverse ethnic, linguistic, and religious heritage of the Polish-Lithuanian lands.
One summer evening, in 2012, I sat on the ruins of a cathedral in the center of Lublin chatting with Polish acquaintances. They were delighted to introduce to me to a regional delicacy: an onion-covered flatbread, a culinary marker of the city’s Jewish heritage. Just to the west, while an Israeli band began to play, the setting sun illuminated several flags draped on the eastern edge of the square: the national colors of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Norway advertised the course-offerings of one of the city’s many language schools. On other days, after my language classes, long city strolls brought constant reminders of Poland's diverse ethnic and religious heritage: historical markers in Polish, Hebrew, and English marked a Jewish heritage “trail”; and a monument in the Plac Litewski commemorated the 1569 Union of Lublin which joined the Kingdom of Poland to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
Piqued by these encounters with Poland’s Jewish heritage, I returned to Poland as an AJC Fellow hoping to understand better the interactions and interrelations between Polish culture and Jewish culture in the historic Polish lands. I hoped to learn how I—as an historian primarily of linguistic and ethnic Poles—could integrate Jewish narratives into my understanding of Polish history. I sought to discover the relationship between Polish and Jewish experiences in pre- (and post-) war Poland, the differences between Polish and Jewish narratives, and what we can learn from those differences.
On the one hand, it seemed it ought to be an easy task, since Jewish history is already so present—it seemed—in Polish history and culture. After all, the Jews are prominent in much of the history of Poland: interwar Poland was one of most ethnically diverse states in Europe: Poles comprised 69% of the general population; Ukrainians were 14%, Jews 9%, Byelorussians 3%, and Germans 2%, according to historian Tomasz Pudłocki. Furthermore, Jewish life mirrored Poland's diversity: some Jews were religiously observant, others secular and assimilated into the majority culture. During the interwar period, one third of the Jewish population lived in big cities, and much of the rest in shtetls.
However, I found relating Jewish narratives to my studies of Polish culture to be a difficult challenge. During our travels, we often discovered that (even prior to the creation of the WWII ghettoes) Jewish society was often segregated from Polish society. Although Jews were permitted to live in Poland, had been invited to settle in Poland by Polish kings, and although they often portrayed Poland as a refuge, in some cases they still were forced to settle in isolated communities. In Krakow, for instance, Jews were required to settle outside the main city limits in Kazimierz, a district specifically designated for the Jewish community. Referring to these spatial distinctions between Polish and Jewish life around 1900, Samuel Kassow called Poland's seven million Jews “familiar strangers”.
This segregation was evident even today, even in our academic discussions: I was struck by how poorly I, as a Polish historian, understood Jewish studies and Jewish cultural and religious traditions. Conversely, I was surprised that my colleagues—who have collectively spent decades in Holocaust studies—often had not been assigned much Polish history—the backdrop to so much of Polish Jewish life. Although the stories of Jews and Poles in Poland are interrelated, it seems we often do a poor job of integrating these two narratives. In a place with such a long tradition of diversity, why is the historiography often segregated? How does one write and tell coherent histories, which embrace Polish experience in full ethnic and religious diversity?
In his book Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz, Jan Gross tackles this problem of Jewish and Polish relations, and identifies the relationship between Polish and Jewish inhabitants of Poland as fundamentally unhealthy. He concludes that members of Polish society did not have the proper means to grieve the murder of its Jewish population during WWII. He suggests that Poles reacted to this loss by pushing the Jews further away, avoiding confronting their lack of effort to save Jews. Instead, Gross points out that many Poles profited from the Holocaust, by taking over property previously owned by Jews.
Despite the importance of WWII and the Holocaust in Polish history, we cannot appreciate the richness of Jewish life in Poland without a broader historical context. If we restrict our view of Polish Jewish life to the years around the War, we understand Jewish history primarily in the context of a graveyard. Even more importantly, we may often be guilty of simplifying the Holocaust by making it overly Jewish—guilty of understanding and perceiving the Auschwitz survivor, for example, only as a Jewish survivor. And we must avoid seeing the Holocaust as the summation, or even the end of Jewish history in Poland. It is only part of the story—albeit a significant part. In order to relate the narratives of Polish and Jewish life in Poland, we much reach chronologically much further back than the twentieth century.
The problem of relating Jewish and Polish history becomes yet more complex: the boundary between the two groups is not always clear. After all, not all individuals who were identified and killed as Jews during WWII self-identified as Jewish. The issue of identity is crucial here. The study of identity holds an important role in East and Central European historiography, and some historians have recently emphasized the difference between frequently ambiguous personal identities, and the more clear-cut identities foisted upon these characters from outside actors, such as proponents of nationalist programs. Perhaps even the act of writing these stories as “Jewish history” or “Polish history” is, in and of itself, part of the problem rather than part of the solution; as we attempt to relate the two, we must first realize we do not know what distinguishes the two fields.
While Jews were often scapegoated and negatively stereotyped by Poles, the difference between “Polish Poland” and “Jewish Poland” is confusing or even non-existent. By the turn-of-the-century, there were synagogues where sermons were preached in Polish—not Yiddish or Hebrew. Many of Marci Shore's characters, in Caviar and Ashes, were neither stereotypically Jewish nor quintessentially Polish: a notable example is that of Alexander Wat, a Polish-Jewish poet from an ethnically Jewish family. He was a declared atheist, who became Catholic while in exile in Kazakhstan, during WWII. The issue of nationalism, another issue which plagues East European historiography, relates to this question of identity; to make headway on the relationship between “Polish” and “Jewish” histories, we need to go beyond (late) nineteenth century conceptions of nation and ethnicity. According to Brian Porter in When Nationalism Began to Hate, early nineteenth century Polish nationalism was comparatively universal; it only became more xenophobic and exclusive later in the century. “The ideal of multiculturalism is not an American invention of the late twentieth century,” Porter writes, “but a quintessentially East European dream of the early nineteenth.” Perhaps stressing multiculturalism provides a gateway for beginning to apprehend and represent pre-twentieth century Poland’s ethnic and religious diversity.
In The Reconstruction of Nations, Timothy Snyder makes an important point regarding national identity. He asks “how...four modern national ideas arise from a single early modern one?” He answers by pointing to changing conceptions of state and citizenship. The Early Modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth counted its citizens as gentry populations, while modern states more often reflect the geographical territory inhabited by a specific ethnic group. Snyder demonstrates, in a sense, the arbitrariness of modern “Poland.” Thus, in discussing the nation of Poland, we need to be mindful of historically contingent definitions of national geographies and citizenship.
Chad Bryant’s work on conceptualizing East European urban history is particularly valuable here. He notes that preferencing different geographic units (other than nation-states) can aid the historian to create new narratives. Thus urban history’s “shared interest in a type of geographical space, rather than a particular methodology or research question...invites comparisons of events, peoples, and cultures among cities in a way that can transcend regional specializations ... it has the potential... to examine large forces and big structures within a context that provides for detail and complexity. Urban history, in other words, can reduce the scope of our inquiries—whether they be about nationalism, modernization, or something else—to a manageable size”.
He concludes his article noting that “as we look for ways to become more European and global, the study of the local, ironically, might prove to be one of our most promising alternatives”. Thus perhaps to understand Jewish and Polish (and other ethnic) experiences in Poland, we need to pay special attention to the geographic spaces and limits of our historical inquiries; perhaps we should begin with small stories, small narratives, and small geographic areas. We need to acknowledge the ambiguity, the many layers of identity in even one small place. As we learned during the fellowship, the town that Americans know as Auschwitz was also referred as Oświęcim and Oshpitzin depending on the language of the town's inhabitant. Thus, although no Yiddish-speaking national state was established on the Polish-Lithuanian lands, the story of Yiddish-speakers is still integral to the story of Oświęcim, to the story of Poland.
Rather than speak only of ethnic groups, of national movements which succeeded, we need to discuss nationalisms that did not succeed, or perhaps which never were. We need to recognize the diversity of Poland's inhabitants, and that each is important in the story of Poland. For a balanced perspective of Polish history, we cannot talk only of “Polish” history, or even of Jewish and Polish history in Poland. To do so ignores the Belorussians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans, and many other groups who lived in Polish lands.
We have perhaps succeeded in integrating the Jewish narrative into Polish history when we cease to define each and every inhabitant of the Polish lands as Jewish or Polish—as belonging to an ethnic group—or even several. We have perhaps succeeded when the issue at stake is not a question of how to identify our characters, but when we as historians have let our subjects speak them themselves, as themselves.
Perhaps the question, to begin with, ought not be a question of how I as a “Polish” historian can relate two narratives (or two fields of study); but rather, perhaps the better endeavor is to attempt to avoid defining and identifying as either a scholar of “Jewish history” or of “Polish history”—but rather of the inhabitants of a region, or of a community. That will necessitate rigorous research and demanding language regimens, but hopefully we end with richer, deeper, and more human scholarship. In Polish and Jewish history, we cannot have one without the other: Jewish history is Polish history, and vice versa.
Jared Warren is a PhD student in Modern European history at New York University, where he specializes in Central and Eastern European cultural and intellectual history. He holds a M.A. from the Center for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies at the University of Kansas; and a B.A. in French and history from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Monday, August 18, 2014
Reflections on Poland: Memory and its Place
Ximena Goecke, 2013 AJC Fellow
From the moment I arrived in Kraków, I enjoyed exploring Polish cities, food, nature, history, and culture. Yet the country’s vast greenness was the most striking thing to me. Before that, Poland for me was gray pavement, stones, railways, snow, and dangerous woods. This green Poland was charming and generous. It was difficult to imagine shadows while I felt the sun in my eyes.
We visited many small synagogues in towns and villages, some still supported by families and institutions as spaces for encounter and prayer. It became much easier to comprehend the deeply rooted Jewish history in Poland seeing its traces up close. Walking around the formerly Jewish spaces in today’s Polish cities, I recognized their features and felt surrounded by history, fragments of a lost culture and rich history. I struggled to reconcile the simultaneous connection and emptiness I felt.
The windowless, roofless synagogue in Działoszyce was once home to a thriving community. The lonely bimah in Tarnów, surrounded by chains in a commemorative square, was once was a beautiful synagogue. I couldn’t forget the words of survivor David Feuerstein, who said that when he visited his hometown Chęciny in 2001, everything looked familiar, the same as it was in the 1930s. He felt transported back to his childhood and could almost picture his father walking to the synagogue on those streets.
Authors who have explored memory issues have emphasized the role of framing memories, anchoring them to territorial and social contexts. I witnessed the importance of this during my time as an AJC Fellow, as we encountered institutions and individuals who use these spaces to connect to that shared memory today. My hope is that through these institutions of memory, we can work to ensure that younger generations will utilize these lessons for good.
Ximena Goecke is a historian and professor at UDLA in Santiago, Chile. She has just finished her Magister in Gender and Culture Studies at Universidad de Chile, and is currently developing an educational project related to the Holocaust. She is currently a fellow of Women Mobilizing Memory (2013-2015), and works with the Citizenship, Justice and Rights research group at Universidad de Valparaíso and in the Body and Emotions research nucleus at Universidad de Chile.
From the moment I arrived in Kraków, I enjoyed exploring Polish cities, food, nature, history, and culture. Yet the country’s vast greenness was the most striking thing to me. Before that, Poland for me was gray pavement, stones, railways, snow, and dangerous woods. This green Poland was charming and generous. It was difficult to imagine shadows while I felt the sun in my eyes.
Polin, known in Jewish legend as a country in which to rest and flourish, was easy to embrace.This warm feeling, a mixture of curiosity and fraternity, was challenged by historical memories in almost every corner. Nowhere else as in Poland can one be constantly confronted by a constant presence of the absent. Jewish people lived in these places and built a robust culture, then were destroyed so swiftly during Nazi rule. We visited so many visible traces of the past during the fellowship. From time to time I paused, seeing behind the contemporary scenes to historical images passing through my mind. As I walked through town after town, I saw scenes from the history of those streets. I imagined towns that were once places for living, not meant to be sites of mourning or tourism in for these purposes.
We visited many small synagogues in towns and villages, some still supported by families and institutions as spaces for encounter and prayer. It became much easier to comprehend the deeply rooted Jewish history in Poland seeing its traces up close. Walking around the formerly Jewish spaces in today’s Polish cities, I recognized their features and felt surrounded by history, fragments of a lost culture and rich history. I struggled to reconcile the simultaneous connection and emptiness I felt.
The windowless, roofless synagogue in Działoszyce was once home to a thriving community. The lonely bimah in Tarnów, surrounded by chains in a commemorative square, was once was a beautiful synagogue. I couldn’t forget the words of survivor David Feuerstein, who said that when he visited his hometown Chęciny in 2001, everything looked familiar, the same as it was in the 1930s. He felt transported back to his childhood and could almost picture his father walking to the synagogue on those streets.
Authors who have explored memory issues have emphasized the role of framing memories, anchoring them to territorial and social contexts. I witnessed the importance of this during my time as an AJC Fellow, as we encountered institutions and individuals who use these spaces to connect to that shared memory today. My hope is that through these institutions of memory, we can work to ensure that younger generations will utilize these lessons for good.
Ximena Goecke is a historian and professor at UDLA in Santiago, Chile. She has just finished her Magister in Gender and Culture Studies at Universidad de Chile, and is currently developing an educational project related to the Holocaust. She is currently a fellow of Women Mobilizing Memory (2013-2015), and works with the Citizenship, Justice and Rights research group at Universidad de Valparaíso and in the Body and Emotions research nucleus at Universidad de Chile.
The Personal Side of Genocide
Kirril Shields, 2013 AJC Fellow
There came a moment during our fellowship when open displays of emotion swept through the group. I expected this emotion in places such as the camps, and while sites like Treblinka caused open sadness, the occasion that made the strongest impression on me took place in Kraków.
Forming a circle at the Jewish Community Centre, the group sat with Uwe von Seltmann and his wife, Gabi. Uwe and Gabi spoke for about an hour about their personal and familial histories. In particular, they discussed their relationship and its ties to the past: Uwe’s grandfather was a former SS officer, and Gabi’s Jewish family members were murdered at Auschwitz. Up until this moment in the trip the group had heard much about the victims of the Holocaust, and we had been privileged with first-hand survivor accounts. Yet Uwe’s tale was different, for here was his grandfather’s story of perpetration, and with it we were to witness the effects it had had on his family.
I sympathized with Uwe, who lives with this dire past, a man who loves his Jewish wife and respects the Jewish community into which he has been adopted. Uwe was visibly upset when revealing his family history; he had made it his quest to educate others about the dangers of anti-Semitism. In snippets throughout Uwe’s speech, though, there appeared to be statements that defended his grandfather, subtle yet quite potent sentences that I found as interesting as his narrative of woe. In one instance Uwe painted his grandfather as a relatable and likeable individual, much like Uwe himself, thereby suggesting the grandfather was a victim of his own time and place.
At the conclusion of our session in Krakow, I asked Uwe if he noticed aspects of his grandfather in himself. Though the two had never met, over the years Uwe had grown aware of links tying him to his paternal forbear: both trained as journalists, both were highly educated, and both men preferred to work in cafés rather than in the confines of an office. Without directly saying so, Uwe inferred that the man who sat talking to us could have, given differing circumstances, worn the SS uniform, only in this instance we were witnessing a man affected by this past rather than a man who aided in the creation of a particular history.
From there our group explored how our traditional ideas of the perpetrator slowly unravelled. We stopped assuming the individuals were diabolic. It was too easy and one-dimensional to depict them that way. Instead, we started wondering if the perpetrators could have been people with whom we could have built rapport and friendship, in another time and in different circumstances. This was a complex conundrum, and one that mimicked in its complexity many of the situations and readings of history encountered during the fellowship.
Uwe's comment, suggesting some similarities and connections between him and his grandfather, became a topic of debate among the group at a later reflection. We had to wonder if Uwe was asking us to empathize with a former SS man, and moreover, if we could.
This display of empathy would have been remarkably easy, for relating to a man who may have spoken, smiled, winked, and chuckled as did Uwe, was for all of us an easy and understandable reaction. Of course we felt for the man. And yet the problem with this situation was that it was all too easy to feel empathy. In contrast, when trying to conceive of the killings committed by the SS-Obersturmfürer, or the killings for which he was responsible, that remains impossible.
Dominick LaCapra refers to the Holocaust and actions that culminated in the Holocaust as “limit events.” I interpret “limit” to mean the limit of human intellect and/or the limits of imagination in attempting to understand and/or relate to these experiences. For example, it is impossible for me to even come close to picturing, let alone feeling, what it must have been like to be a part of, or have been responsible for, the events of the Holocaust. These huge “limit-events” are beyond the scope of my experience, as are the depravities that occurred in Auschwitz. I had hoped that the shock of seeing the sites in which the crimes were committed would bring forth enlightenment, as if I would be able, in that instance, to understand. While my historical knowledge increased, attempts at such an understanding only marginally grew.
Uwe's grandfather died in 1945, yet Uwe is the one who bears the guilt for the grievances committed. That is why, I believe, Uwe’s words evoked such visible emotion, for it is Uwe’s generation who carry the burden of these perpetrations. It is Uwe, now living in a society that wishes to expose such crimes and acknowledge the wrongdoings of the past, who feels a moral obligation to stress the likeness of the perpetrators to the everyday individual. To do so, he needs to openly expose the crimes, while also ensuring that his audience understands that these were not the makings of an individual possessed. And by doing so, as shown in the response to Uwe’s talk, we come to acknowledge that the average individual of very normal societal stature has in them the ability to cause suffering that continues to haunt throughout the decades.
Kirril Shields recently completed his PhD at the University of Queensland, Australia. His thesis examined the shifting and changing attitudes towards the period of the Third Reich as noted over many generations in Australian society. This year Kirril was awarded a Fellowship to the Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization, and he is currently the 2014 Alfred Midgley Scholar at the University of Queensland.
There came a moment during our fellowship when open displays of emotion swept through the group. I expected this emotion in places such as the camps, and while sites like Treblinka caused open sadness, the occasion that made the strongest impression on me took place in Kraków.
Forming a circle at the Jewish Community Centre, the group sat with Uwe von Seltmann and his wife, Gabi. Uwe and Gabi spoke for about an hour about their personal and familial histories. In particular, they discussed their relationship and its ties to the past: Uwe’s grandfather was a former SS officer, and Gabi’s Jewish family members were murdered at Auschwitz. Up until this moment in the trip the group had heard much about the victims of the Holocaust, and we had been privileged with first-hand survivor accounts. Yet Uwe’s tale was different, for here was his grandfather’s story of perpetration, and with it we were to witness the effects it had had on his family.
I sympathized with Uwe, who lives with this dire past, a man who loves his Jewish wife and respects the Jewish community into which he has been adopted. Uwe was visibly upset when revealing his family history; he had made it his quest to educate others about the dangers of anti-Semitism. In snippets throughout Uwe’s speech, though, there appeared to be statements that defended his grandfather, subtle yet quite potent sentences that I found as interesting as his narrative of woe. In one instance Uwe painted his grandfather as a relatable and likeable individual, much like Uwe himself, thereby suggesting the grandfather was a victim of his own time and place.
At the conclusion of our session in Krakow, I asked Uwe if he noticed aspects of his grandfather in himself. Though the two had never met, over the years Uwe had grown aware of links tying him to his paternal forbear: both trained as journalists, both were highly educated, and both men preferred to work in cafés rather than in the confines of an office. Without directly saying so, Uwe inferred that the man who sat talking to us could have, given differing circumstances, worn the SS uniform, only in this instance we were witnessing a man affected by this past rather than a man who aided in the creation of a particular history.
From there our group explored how our traditional ideas of the perpetrator slowly unravelled. We stopped assuming the individuals were diabolic. It was too easy and one-dimensional to depict them that way. Instead, we started wondering if the perpetrators could have been people with whom we could have built rapport and friendship, in another time and in different circumstances. This was a complex conundrum, and one that mimicked in its complexity many of the situations and readings of history encountered during the fellowship.
Uwe's comment, suggesting some similarities and connections between him and his grandfather, became a topic of debate among the group at a later reflection. We had to wonder if Uwe was asking us to empathize with a former SS man, and moreover, if we could.
This display of empathy would have been remarkably easy, for relating to a man who may have spoken, smiled, winked, and chuckled as did Uwe, was for all of us an easy and understandable reaction. Of course we felt for the man. And yet the problem with this situation was that it was all too easy to feel empathy. In contrast, when trying to conceive of the killings committed by the SS-Obersturmfürer, or the killings for which he was responsible, that remains impossible.
Dominick LaCapra refers to the Holocaust and actions that culminated in the Holocaust as “limit events.” I interpret “limit” to mean the limit of human intellect and/or the limits of imagination in attempting to understand and/or relate to these experiences. For example, it is impossible for me to even come close to picturing, let alone feeling, what it must have been like to be a part of, or have been responsible for, the events of the Holocaust. These huge “limit-events” are beyond the scope of my experience, as are the depravities that occurred in Auschwitz. I had hoped that the shock of seeing the sites in which the crimes were committed would bring forth enlightenment, as if I would be able, in that instance, to understand. While my historical knowledge increased, attempts at such an understanding only marginally grew.
Uwe's grandfather died in 1945, yet Uwe is the one who bears the guilt for the grievances committed. That is why, I believe, Uwe’s words evoked such visible emotion, for it is Uwe’s generation who carry the burden of these perpetrations. It is Uwe, now living in a society that wishes to expose such crimes and acknowledge the wrongdoings of the past, who feels a moral obligation to stress the likeness of the perpetrators to the everyday individual. To do so, he needs to openly expose the crimes, while also ensuring that his audience understands that these were not the makings of an individual possessed. And by doing so, as shown in the response to Uwe’s talk, we come to acknowledge that the average individual of very normal societal stature has in them the ability to cause suffering that continues to haunt throughout the decades.
Kirril Shields recently completed his PhD at the University of Queensland, Australia. His thesis examined the shifting and changing attitudes towards the period of the Third Reich as noted over many generations in Australian society. This year Kirril was awarded a Fellowship to the Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization, and he is currently the 2014 Alfred Midgley Scholar at the University of Queensland.
The Complexity of Commemoration
Laura Pearce, 2013 AJC Fellow
In thinking about the memorialization of Holocaust memory I encountered during the Fellows Program, I was reminded once again of the use of memorials to shape memory and of commemorating to forget. This idea is not specific to Poland or even Europe at large; I would apply this same idea of commemoration through forgetting and shaping memory to examples of Holocaust memorialization in the United States as well. But as I toured Poland as an AJC Fellow, I noticed this same pattern: commemoration projects were admirable, yet certain sites glorified or commemorated some aspects of these years while ignoring or obscuring others.
Commemoration and memorialization produced under Communist rule immediately appears to seek to shape memory. These monuments vilify the “Hitlerites” and mourn the victims. On the site of the Płaszów concentration camp in Kraków, the original memorial erected in the 1960s merely states: “In tribute to martyrs murdered by the Hitlerite genociders, 1943-1945.” Similarly, in the tiny town of Szydłów, the Communist-era memorial reads: “In tribute to those who fought, died, and were murdered, 1939-1945.” There is no mention of who these “martyrs” were or the reason for their victimization. These Communist-era memorialization examples commemorate the dead, but obscure their identities as Poles, Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Based on these Communist-era portrayals, these individuals were simply opponents of Fascism.
Another example of this is the immense Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Memorial, built in 1948, which reads simply: “The Nation of Israel to the Martyrs and Saints.” The monument image is striking: strong, male resistance fighters, and a token woman with child in the background. Sculpted so that they leap out of the monument, these figures are clearly meant to inspire awe and reverence with their determination to resist even in the face of certain death. This image is juxtaposed with the image on the reverse of the monument: an image of victims headed to their death. These individuals, rather than being glorified and carved out of the stone itself, are diminished in importance by being carved into it. They are not the fighters and they do not resist but instead walk mournfully to their deaths.
In stark contrast to the Communist-era memorials, and I think often in response to them, many memorials constructed since the fall of Communism do indicate why victims were murdered: because they were Jews. In attempting to highlight the fact that Jews were systematically victimized, these memorials hide the existence—whether intentionally or unintentionally—of other victim groups. They consistently ignore or trivialize the fact that while the Jews were the primary target of the Nazis, there were also millions of non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust. We visited a few sites memorializing non-Jewish victims, like the deportation square and cemetery in Łódz. Yet for the most part, many contemporary memorials are not so different from their Communist-era counterparts: they tell part, but not all of the story.
The nature of memorialization is limiting: monuments and plaques can only ever tell part of the story. Complexities and controversies are not easily illustrated through monument iconography and minimal text. As an aspiring museum professional I am in favor of museums to fill this gap. Yet not all museums achieve this; even the notable United States Holocaust Memorial Museum glorifies American liberation and downplays American policies that left victims of Nazism with no refuge. In a number of museums we visited in Poland, the memory of the Holocaust and the pre-war contribution of Polish Jews is commemorated, while conveniently omitting less savory aspects of the history of Jews in Poland.
Dąbrowa Tarnowska, for instance, has a museum within a former synagogue, which is impressive even when compared to former synagogues in Kraków that likely have many more visitors. While it highlighted the interconnected lives of Polish Jews and gentiles in the city and surrounding area throughout its history, the exhibition neglects to discuss the two pogroms against the area’s Jews that took place around the time of the First World War.
While not all museums are capable of incorporating all of the complexity of a given event, they do serve an important purpose in the field of memorialization. While engaging with these spaces as an Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellow, I examined how institutions can tell the same story differently.
“It’s not ‘lest we forget,’ it’s ‘lest we remember.’ That’s what all this is about—the memorials, the Cenotaph, the two minutes’ silence. Because there is no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.” -Tom Irwin, The History BoysThe film adaptation of the Broadway play The History Boys, about a group of unconventional teachers and their students, forces the audience to question the purpose of commemoration and memorialization within contemporary society. The above quote is from a scene in which the class is discussing a British World War I memorial during which the teacher, Mr. Irwin, tells his class that without monuments to the dead, the British might remember that collectively their country was as eager for World War I as anyone else. Instead, he suggests they can use their memorials and monuments as a way to focus their memory on the death and destruction of the war, and ignore their complicity in allowing it to happen. The event itself is remembered and memorialized so that the details and potentially difficult truths surround it can be forgotten.
In thinking about the memorialization of Holocaust memory I encountered during the Fellows Program, I was reminded once again of the use of memorials to shape memory and of commemorating to forget. This idea is not specific to Poland or even Europe at large; I would apply this same idea of commemoration through forgetting and shaping memory to examples of Holocaust memorialization in the United States as well. But as I toured Poland as an AJC Fellow, I noticed this same pattern: commemoration projects were admirable, yet certain sites glorified or commemorated some aspects of these years while ignoring or obscuring others.
Commemoration and memorialization produced under Communist rule immediately appears to seek to shape memory. These monuments vilify the “Hitlerites” and mourn the victims. On the site of the Płaszów concentration camp in Kraków, the original memorial erected in the 1960s merely states: “In tribute to martyrs murdered by the Hitlerite genociders, 1943-1945.” Similarly, in the tiny town of Szydłów, the Communist-era memorial reads: “In tribute to those who fought, died, and were murdered, 1939-1945.” There is no mention of who these “martyrs” were or the reason for their victimization. These Communist-era memorialization examples commemorate the dead, but obscure their identities as Poles, Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Based on these Communist-era portrayals, these individuals were simply opponents of Fascism.
Another example of this is the immense Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Memorial, built in 1948, which reads simply: “The Nation of Israel to the Martyrs and Saints.” The monument image is striking: strong, male resistance fighters, and a token woman with child in the background. Sculpted so that they leap out of the monument, these figures are clearly meant to inspire awe and reverence with their determination to resist even in the face of certain death. This image is juxtaposed with the image on the reverse of the monument: an image of victims headed to their death. These individuals, rather than being glorified and carved out of the stone itself, are diminished in importance by being carved into it. They are not the fighters and they do not resist but instead walk mournfully to their deaths.
In stark contrast to the Communist-era memorials, and I think often in response to them, many memorials constructed since the fall of Communism do indicate why victims were murdered: because they were Jews. In attempting to highlight the fact that Jews were systematically victimized, these memorials hide the existence—whether intentionally or unintentionally—of other victim groups. They consistently ignore or trivialize the fact that while the Jews were the primary target of the Nazis, there were also millions of non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust. We visited a few sites memorializing non-Jewish victims, like the deportation square and cemetery in Łódz. Yet for the most part, many contemporary memorials are not so different from their Communist-era counterparts: they tell part, but not all of the story.
The nature of memorialization is limiting: monuments and plaques can only ever tell part of the story. Complexities and controversies are not easily illustrated through monument iconography and minimal text. As an aspiring museum professional I am in favor of museums to fill this gap. Yet not all museums achieve this; even the notable United States Holocaust Memorial Museum glorifies American liberation and downplays American policies that left victims of Nazism with no refuge. In a number of museums we visited in Poland, the memory of the Holocaust and the pre-war contribution of Polish Jews is commemorated, while conveniently omitting less savory aspects of the history of Jews in Poland.
Dąbrowa Tarnowska, for instance, has a museum within a former synagogue, which is impressive even when compared to former synagogues in Kraków that likely have many more visitors. While it highlighted the interconnected lives of Polish Jews and gentiles in the city and surrounding area throughout its history, the exhibition neglects to discuss the two pogroms against the area’s Jews that took place around the time of the First World War.
While not all museums are capable of incorporating all of the complexity of a given event, they do serve an important purpose in the field of memorialization. While engaging with these spaces as an Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellow, I examined how institutions can tell the same story differently.
To me, successful examples of commemoration do not obscure or forget details and unpleasant truths, but instead present a whole story, including its complexities.Laura Pearce is an aspiring museum professional who recently completed a Master’s Degree in Public History at Loyola University Chicago. After receiving her undergraduate degree in history from DePauw University in 2010, Laura taught with Teach for America in the Mississippi Delta. She has interned at the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute, Indiana, and the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. In graduate school, she participated in oral history interviews with Holocaust survivors and conducted interviews with the children of survivors. Currently, Laura is working with the Chicago Cultural Alliance to create a digital archive and with the Legion of Young Polish Women to create an online exhibit to commemorate their 75th Anniversary.
The Survivor and the Photograph: Surrealism and Humanity in Poland
Beth Healey, 2013 Jaffa & Larry Feldman Fellow
As a graduate student who studies Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, I have spent the better part of the past decade as a student, studying the Holocaust through books and other documents, in American cities and classrooms. As I embark upon my dissertation, one of my greatest fears is that amongst all the reading and research, I will lose sight of the fact that the history I study was real life for other people. Other people personally experienced the events that I only read about from afar, both geographically and temporally. Visiting Poland with the Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellows Program was so important to me because it was an opportunity to ensure that I do not risk reducing the Holocaust to an academic abstraction and that I remain mindful of the Holocaust as a real-life experience for its victims.
Two particular experiences in Poland – the conversation with Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmysz and an encounter with a photograph from the Emanuel Ringelblum Oneg Shabbat archive – brought me closer to my goal while simultaneously challenging my conception of what life was like under the Nazis.
During the course of the Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellows Program, we had the privilege of meeting Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor Zofia Posmysz. Rather than telling us her life story or giving us a narrative of her wartime experiences, Zofia simply wanted to answer whatever questions we had for her. Towards the end of our conversation, Zofia told us she understood we would be visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau in the upcoming days, and said,
Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau was an entirely surreal experience, in ways both somewhat expected and utterly unexpected. Walking through the grounds, Zofia’s words, echoing through my head, were the one aspect of this otherwise entirely surreal experience that remained real for me and provided something to hold on to. Visiting Auschwitz I, in particular, was a very strange experience for me in ways I did not anticipate. Auschwitz seemed almost fake, for lack of a better word, despite the fact that the campgrounds were laid out before me to see with my own eyes. Somehow, the history seemed less tangible at Auschwitz than it does when I read, study, and teach about the Holocaust, half a world and decades away from the events in questions.
In many ways, visiting Auschwitz was like watching a movie based on a book – the character and the stories are familiar, but it is just different from the world you imagined while reading. Over the two days we toured Auschwitz I and Birkenau, Zofia’s request kept coming back to me, reverberating – “When you go to Birkenau, remember that I was there, too.” Remember that Zofia was there, along with so many others like her. It was through Zofia that Auschwitz the place became accessible for me, and I was able to connect with the victim experience of the Holocaust, in some small way.
Although I did not expect Auschwitz to seem so fake, my experience with Zofia and at Auschwitz was the sort of experience I hoped to find in Poland, one that emphasized the individual humanity of the victims. However, my ideas about humanity, victimization, and life under the Nazis were challenged by an encounter with a photograph from the Emanuel Ringelblum Oneg Shabbat archive at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. I was reminded that the humanity of the victims encompassed not only suffering and death, but happiness and life as well.
The photo that caught my eye was an outdoor shot of a street scene in the Warsaw Ghetto, showing a large crowd of people, presumably going about their daily lives. There is a young woman in the middle of the crowd, looking directly towards the camera, with a big smile on her face. She looks happy, excited, and even joyful. I do not know who this woman was, or what was going on that day, but this photo reminded me that even in the ghettoes, life continued. There were occasions for happiness. From an intellectual standpoint, this was not much of a revelation. I knew that Jewish life went on in the ghettoes, I have discussed this with my students, and I have seen photos of concerts, weddings, and other such events in the ghettoes. Yet, none of those photos made the same impression on me as the beaming young woman in this one – maybe because this was a candid moment rather than a posed photograph.
Moreover, when studying the young woman in the center of this photo, I did not see the same sense of fateful foreboding that sometimes – often – accompanies such pictures. I know nothing about this woman or what happened to her, but it is likely that the Nazis murdered her. Yet, looking at the photograph, I saw an evidently happy young woman as she was at that moment in time. She reminded me that Holocaust victims were also individuals with complex lives and rich histories. Despite the circumstances of their deaths, their lives were more than the Holocaust, and death should not eclipse life. Yes, the victims endured horrors that I can only imagine, hurting in ways I have never experienced, but humanity extends beyond just the experience of pain.
Often, Holocaust scholarship and teaching includes pre-war Jewish life in order to underscore the scale of the loss and enormity of Nazi crimes, giving Jewish history a sense of predetermined pathos, rather than considering Jewish history as its own story and worthy of studying in its own right. While understandable, I wonder if this use of Jewish history might also obscure the humanity and dignity of Holocaust victims in the same way as focusing exclusively on the manner of their deaths at the expense of their lives. Particularly as much of my own work as a historian involves reading witness statements and testimonies of horrifying events, it is critical that I retain a sense of these individuals as real people, with the full spectrum of human emotion. Like Zofia, the men and women I focus on in my dissertation “were there, too,” and like the young woman in the photograph, their lives were far more than what the Nazis sought to make of them.
Beth Healey is a PhD candidate in the History department at Northwestern University. She earned a BA in History from Providence College, an MA in History from Boston College, and worked for non-profit educational organization Facing History and Ourselves in Brookline, MA. Under the supervision of Professor Peter Hayes, Beth is currently working on her dissertation about the Royal Warrant trials of Nazi war criminals in British-occupied Germany. She was named the 2013 Jaffa and Larry Feldman Fellow by the Auschwitz Jewish Center, and has presented her work in Chicago, Los Angeles, Rome, Munich, and London.
As a graduate student who studies Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, I have spent the better part of the past decade as a student, studying the Holocaust through books and other documents, in American cities and classrooms. As I embark upon my dissertation, one of my greatest fears is that amongst all the reading and research, I will lose sight of the fact that the history I study was real life for other people. Other people personally experienced the events that I only read about from afar, both geographically and temporally. Visiting Poland with the Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellows Program was so important to me because it was an opportunity to ensure that I do not risk reducing the Holocaust to an academic abstraction and that I remain mindful of the Holocaust as a real-life experience for its victims.
Two particular experiences in Poland – the conversation with Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmysz and an encounter with a photograph from the Emanuel Ringelblum Oneg Shabbat archive – brought me closer to my goal while simultaneously challenging my conception of what life was like under the Nazis.
During the course of the Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellows Program, we had the privilege of meeting Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor Zofia Posmysz. Rather than telling us her life story or giving us a narrative of her wartime experiences, Zofia simply wanted to answer whatever questions we had for her. Towards the end of our conversation, Zofia told us she understood we would be visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau in the upcoming days, and said,
“When you go to Birkenau, remember that I was there, too.”She spoke this in a quiet way, not insistently, but almost wistfully, softly asking us to remember her. I have heard many survivors tell their stories, but it is this comment of Zofia’s that has resonated with me in a way unlike any other Holocaust survival story I have heard.
Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau was an entirely surreal experience, in ways both somewhat expected and utterly unexpected. Walking through the grounds, Zofia’s words, echoing through my head, were the one aspect of this otherwise entirely surreal experience that remained real for me and provided something to hold on to. Visiting Auschwitz I, in particular, was a very strange experience for me in ways I did not anticipate. Auschwitz seemed almost fake, for lack of a better word, despite the fact that the campgrounds were laid out before me to see with my own eyes. Somehow, the history seemed less tangible at Auschwitz than it does when I read, study, and teach about the Holocaust, half a world and decades away from the events in questions.
In many ways, visiting Auschwitz was like watching a movie based on a book – the character and the stories are familiar, but it is just different from the world you imagined while reading. Over the two days we toured Auschwitz I and Birkenau, Zofia’s request kept coming back to me, reverberating – “When you go to Birkenau, remember that I was there, too.” Remember that Zofia was there, along with so many others like her. It was through Zofia that Auschwitz the place became accessible for me, and I was able to connect with the victim experience of the Holocaust, in some small way.
Although I did not expect Auschwitz to seem so fake, my experience with Zofia and at Auschwitz was the sort of experience I hoped to find in Poland, one that emphasized the individual humanity of the victims. However, my ideas about humanity, victimization, and life under the Nazis were challenged by an encounter with a photograph from the Emanuel Ringelblum Oneg Shabbat archive at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. I was reminded that the humanity of the victims encompassed not only suffering and death, but happiness and life as well.
The photo that caught my eye was an outdoor shot of a street scene in the Warsaw Ghetto, showing a large crowd of people, presumably going about their daily lives. There is a young woman in the middle of the crowd, looking directly towards the camera, with a big smile on her face. She looks happy, excited, and even joyful. I do not know who this woman was, or what was going on that day, but this photo reminded me that even in the ghettoes, life continued. There were occasions for happiness. From an intellectual standpoint, this was not much of a revelation. I knew that Jewish life went on in the ghettoes, I have discussed this with my students, and I have seen photos of concerts, weddings, and other such events in the ghettoes. Yet, none of those photos made the same impression on me as the beaming young woman in this one – maybe because this was a candid moment rather than a posed photograph.
Moreover, when studying the young woman in the center of this photo, I did not see the same sense of fateful foreboding that sometimes – often – accompanies such pictures. I know nothing about this woman or what happened to her, but it is likely that the Nazis murdered her. Yet, looking at the photograph, I saw an evidently happy young woman as she was at that moment in time. She reminded me that Holocaust victims were also individuals with complex lives and rich histories. Despite the circumstances of their deaths, their lives were more than the Holocaust, and death should not eclipse life. Yes, the victims endured horrors that I can only imagine, hurting in ways I have never experienced, but humanity extends beyond just the experience of pain.
Often, Holocaust scholarship and teaching includes pre-war Jewish life in order to underscore the scale of the loss and enormity of Nazi crimes, giving Jewish history a sense of predetermined pathos, rather than considering Jewish history as its own story and worthy of studying in its own right. While understandable, I wonder if this use of Jewish history might also obscure the humanity and dignity of Holocaust victims in the same way as focusing exclusively on the manner of their deaths at the expense of their lives. Particularly as much of my own work as a historian involves reading witness statements and testimonies of horrifying events, it is critical that I retain a sense of these individuals as real people, with the full spectrum of human emotion. Like Zofia, the men and women I focus on in my dissertation “were there, too,” and like the young woman in the photograph, their lives were far more than what the Nazis sought to make of them.
Beth Healey is a PhD candidate in the History department at Northwestern University. She earned a BA in History from Providence College, an MA in History from Boston College, and worked for non-profit educational organization Facing History and Ourselves in Brookline, MA. Under the supervision of Professor Peter Hayes, Beth is currently working on her dissertation about the Royal Warrant trials of Nazi war criminals in British-occupied Germany. She was named the 2013 Jaffa and Larry Feldman Fellow by the Auschwitz Jewish Center, and has presented her work in Chicago, Los Angeles, Rome, Munich, and London.
Monday, May 19, 2014
Selfie Control
Jenna Brager, 2013 AJC Fellow
This excerpt is from Jenna Brager’s article Selfie Control published by The New Inquiry in March 2014. Please click the link to read the full article.
The exhibit [“Before They Perished” at Birkenau] compiles photos found after liberation in a suitcase in the vicinity of Kanada, believed to have been brought to the camp by families traveling together from the ghetto in the area of Będzin and Sosnowiec and either forgotten amid the piles of stolen goods or stashed as a souvenir by a member of the SS.
In [one] photograph, a girl, in her late teens or early 20s, kneels in front of a white-painted metal bed and behind a small wooden table. She holds a box camera steady atop a book on the table. She is looking down at the camera, intent on the act of creating the image. Both from the positioning of the camera and a glare of light in the top left corner of the photograph, it’s clear that the picture was taken by the subject herself, in a mirror. Like Roland Barthes scrutinizing the photograph of Lewis Payne, the handsome assassin, I am “lacerated” by the knowledge that she is going to die, by the ‘“defeat of Time’” in the historical photograph. And yet I am relieved of the burden of the Nazi gaze. I look at the photographer as subject rather than the victim, interpolated differently by this looped encounter in which I yearn for our eyes to meet and am frustrated by her lowered gaze, by the historical accident of a too-slow look. The woman looks into a mirror, back at herself, but also (not) at me. The open lens of her camera is pointed at her own image and (not) at me. There is no perpetrator, there is no spectacle. This is the devastating part; our eyes (do not) meet.
I wonder, would the inevitability of the death of this unknown woman be more terrible if I knew for certain that she was a Holocaust victim? Would I be less moved by this photograph if I found it in an antique shop in ¬Bielsko-Biala, or in New York City, instead of in this exhibit of photographs of perished Jews? It is easy to create a romantic fiction for the selfie of the unknown woman at Auschwitz—separated lovers, a cherished photograph in the dismal ghetto—as easy as it is to “like” an Instagram selfie and then keep scrolling.
Is what inspired the unknown woman to turn her camera toward the mirror similar or the same as what prompts smartphone users to rotate their cameras toward themselves? What limited circulation did her ephemeral snapshot find before it became an artifact? How do we compare this to the reach of the approximately 35 million selfies on Instagram? How do we parse through this transient superabundance, to locate what “should” be archived, what images will become history? Should we even try?
Jenna Brager is a doctoral student and artist in Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in American Studies and a certificate in LGBT Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research looks at processes of veridiction and the establishment of truth after atrocity through narrative testimony, photographic evidence, and transgenerational memory practice. Her writing and comics have been published in the Black Warrior Review, The New Inquiry, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Shareable Magazine, among others.
This excerpt is from Jenna Brager’s article Selfie Control published by The New Inquiry in March 2014. Please click the link to read the full article.
In [one] photograph, a girl, in her late teens or early 20s, kneels in front of a white-painted metal bed and behind a small wooden table. She holds a box camera steady atop a book on the table. She is looking down at the camera, intent on the act of creating the image. Both from the positioning of the camera and a glare of light in the top left corner of the photograph, it’s clear that the picture was taken by the subject herself, in a mirror. Like Roland Barthes scrutinizing the photograph of Lewis Payne, the handsome assassin, I am “lacerated” by the knowledge that she is going to die, by the ‘“defeat of Time’” in the historical photograph. And yet I am relieved of the burden of the Nazi gaze. I look at the photographer as subject rather than the victim, interpolated differently by this looped encounter in which I yearn for our eyes to meet and am frustrated by her lowered gaze, by the historical accident of a too-slow look. The woman looks into a mirror, back at herself, but also (not) at me. The open lens of her camera is pointed at her own image and (not) at me. There is no perpetrator, there is no spectacle. This is the devastating part; our eyes (do not) meet.
I wonder, would the inevitability of the death of this unknown woman be more terrible if I knew for certain that she was a Holocaust victim? Would I be less moved by this photograph if I found it in an antique shop in ¬Bielsko-Biala, or in New York City, instead of in this exhibit of photographs of perished Jews? It is easy to create a romantic fiction for the selfie of the unknown woman at Auschwitz—separated lovers, a cherished photograph in the dismal ghetto—as easy as it is to “like” an Instagram selfie and then keep scrolling.
Is what inspired the unknown woman to turn her camera toward the mirror similar or the same as what prompts smartphone users to rotate their cameras toward themselves? What limited circulation did her ephemeral snapshot find before it became an artifact? How do we compare this to the reach of the approximately 35 million selfies on Instagram? How do we parse through this transient superabundance, to locate what “should” be archived, what images will become history? Should we even try?
Jenna Brager is a doctoral student and artist in Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in American Studies and a certificate in LGBT Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research looks at processes of veridiction and the establishment of truth after atrocity through narrative testimony, photographic evidence, and transgenerational memory practice. Her writing and comics have been published in the Black Warrior Review, The New Inquiry, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Shareable Magazine, among others.
Integrating Narratives
Yael Friedman, 2013 AJC Fellow
One of my aims as a Holocaust educator is to teach the complexity of Holocaust history by focusing on individual countries’ narratives. The Fellows program raised many of these complexities and offered the opportunity for our group, as scholars, to discuss and debate the intersection of difficult histories. Throughout the program I returned to the question of how to integrate various narratives about the Holocaust and the broader history of the time period. I believe the Holocaust should be taught within the Jewish narrative as well as the general context of the time period rather than as a separate historical event. Salo Baron, a prominent 20th century Jewish history scholar, studied the Holocaust as separate from the Jewish historical narrative. I worry that if we remove such a tragedy from the cohesive story of Jewish history, then we risk losing an accurate understanding of the history from a holistic perspective and the impact of such a catastrophe. Additionally, by divorcing the Holocaust from the Jewish narrative, it makes the Holocaust more incomprehensible and further detached from attempts to understand how such an event could have occurred.
Throughout the program, we were confronted with the challenges of how to present a cohesive, accurate history. Certain questions in particular sparked lively discussion: From the Jewish narrative perspective, to what extent do we include others? How exclusive can the Jewish narrative remain? At what point does the narrative begin? Is there a division between general Holocaust education and Holocaust education for Jewish students? Why can it not be the same? When focusing on Holocaust education, these are the questions, informed by the Fellows program, that I ask.
Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands emphasizes the challenge of creating an inclusive narrative of this time period. As a Jewish Studies scholar, I recognize that the Holocaust carries an additional dimension for Jews. The collective memory that exists for the Jewish people about the loss and the threat of extermination has shaped the way the majority of Jews understand the importance of the Holocaust and Jewish identity in general. For several decades, Jewish and Israeli educators have used the Holocaust as a tool for developing Jewish identity. Snyder’s book highlights the intersection of difficult histories, namely the dual occupation of Poland by two totalitarian regimes. He examines the role of Poles during the Holocaust and what Poland’s narrative can teach us about memory. Additionally, he complicates our understanding and categorization of victim and perpetrator in this particular context.
Adding another layer to this complex history, our meeting with Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw highlighted the challenges of representing a Jewish narrative in particular. A challenge exists between presenting the lives of Polish Jews within a separate history compared to a contextual analysis of the development of the Jews of Poland. Professor Kirshenblatt-Gimblett described this difference as an integral history versus a contextual approach, respectively. The Museum, set to open this fall, takes the approach of the former, focusing primarily on the Jewish lived experience without deviating too much into the experiences of other groups at the same time. The exhibition will show the integration of Jews into their surrounding environment, but does not focus on other groups. This discussion helped me create a framework in which to understand the different approaches to teaching about and representing Jewish history.
In the exhibit People of Kraków in Times of Terror 1939-1945-1956, I appreciated that the exhibition designers included biographies of individuals with a variety of perspectives: victims, informers, and Polish police. The inclusion of all types of people offers a more nuanced picture of life during this time period. It doesn’t make it easier for us to swallow the reality, but it allows us to examine the circumstances more humanely.
On the other hand, there are cases of including multiple perspectives that are jarring and verge on inappropriate, in my opinion. A relatively new addition to the Treblinka memorial now stands on the periphery of the cemetery of stones ranging in size, shape, and color. There are four photographs of Nazi guards, Nazi accommodations, and the process of creating large pits in which to burn the bodies. The images provide a stark contrast between the memorial to the victims and the Nazi role in such inhumane actions. This was an extremely unsettling addition to the site and calls into question the nature of the site. Is it a memorial? To whom? For what? Is there an educational element to including these images? As a memorial site to nameless victims, this doesn’t appear to be the appropriate location for these historical photographs. It is unclear what the purpose of these photographs is and what it contributes to the experience of visiting Treblinka. Instead, there should be a dedicated place to learn about the Nazi mentality and the relationship between the Nazis and their victims, though this does not seem to be the right place or an appropriate means to bring these considerations into the discussion. This juxtaposition underscores the challenge of bridging together multiple narratives in one location. Perhaps a more extensive museum would be able to more adequately address the integration of narratives without marring the experience of the memorial site.
I am still exploring the answers to many of my questions, yet I feel comfortable with that. I feel most inspired when I constantly question why I am interested in the Holocaust and how much I can learn. It is evident that I still have contradictory perspectives on how and when to include different difficult histories, but I firmly believe that the intersection of narratives will help us improve education today. We must continue to question how to present multiple histories and integrate them. I am extremely appreciative for the many tools, examples, and resources I acquired during my Fellowship in order to delve into these issues more deeply throughout my career.
Yael Friedman is currently the Gallery Education Coordinator at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. She graduated with a Dual Master’s in Education and Jewish Studies and Hebrew and Judaic Studies from New York University as a Jim Joseph Fellow, with a concentration in Holocaust Education. She holds a B.A. in Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Studies from Washington University in St. Louis where she received the Steven S. Schwarzschild Prize for Overall Excellence in Jewish Studies. Yael has worked in various capacities at several Holocaust museums and educational non-profit organizations as well as at the U.S. Department of State for the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. She focuses on curriculum and professional development for Holocaust Studies.
One of my aims as a Holocaust educator is to teach the complexity of Holocaust history by focusing on individual countries’ narratives. The Fellows program raised many of these complexities and offered the opportunity for our group, as scholars, to discuss and debate the intersection of difficult histories. Throughout the program I returned to the question of how to integrate various narratives about the Holocaust and the broader history of the time period. I believe the Holocaust should be taught within the Jewish narrative as well as the general context of the time period rather than as a separate historical event. Salo Baron, a prominent 20th century Jewish history scholar, studied the Holocaust as separate from the Jewish historical narrative. I worry that if we remove such a tragedy from the cohesive story of Jewish history, then we risk losing an accurate understanding of the history from a holistic perspective and the impact of such a catastrophe. Additionally, by divorcing the Holocaust from the Jewish narrative, it makes the Holocaust more incomprehensible and further detached from attempts to understand how such an event could have occurred.
Throughout the program, we were confronted with the challenges of how to present a cohesive, accurate history. Certain questions in particular sparked lively discussion: From the Jewish narrative perspective, to what extent do we include others? How exclusive can the Jewish narrative remain? At what point does the narrative begin? Is there a division between general Holocaust education and Holocaust education for Jewish students? Why can it not be the same? When focusing on Holocaust education, these are the questions, informed by the Fellows program, that I ask.
Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands emphasizes the challenge of creating an inclusive narrative of this time period. As a Jewish Studies scholar, I recognize that the Holocaust carries an additional dimension for Jews. The collective memory that exists for the Jewish people about the loss and the threat of extermination has shaped the way the majority of Jews understand the importance of the Holocaust and Jewish identity in general. For several decades, Jewish and Israeli educators have used the Holocaust as a tool for developing Jewish identity. Snyder’s book highlights the intersection of difficult histories, namely the dual occupation of Poland by two totalitarian regimes. He examines the role of Poles during the Holocaust and what Poland’s narrative can teach us about memory. Additionally, he complicates our understanding and categorization of victim and perpetrator in this particular context.
In education, arguably in Jewish education especially, it is essential to teach the complexity of Polish history in order to avoid associating the actions that took place on Polish territory primarily with the Polish people.Some Jews today will not visit Poland because of their beliefs about the role of Poles in the atrocities of the Holocaust. This approach illustrates a lack of depth in understanding the nuances of Holocaust history. It is necessary to have a complete picture of the reality that existed in order to better understand how such an event could have occurred. Our group discussion of Snyder’s book provided a helpful framework in which to place and explore our own experiences in Poland.
Adding another layer to this complex history, our meeting with Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw highlighted the challenges of representing a Jewish narrative in particular. A challenge exists between presenting the lives of Polish Jews within a separate history compared to a contextual analysis of the development of the Jews of Poland. Professor Kirshenblatt-Gimblett described this difference as an integral history versus a contextual approach, respectively. The Museum, set to open this fall, takes the approach of the former, focusing primarily on the Jewish lived experience without deviating too much into the experiences of other groups at the same time. The exhibition will show the integration of Jews into their surrounding environment, but does not focus on other groups. This discussion helped me create a framework in which to understand the different approaches to teaching about and representing Jewish history.
Professor Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explained: The Holocaust is typically situated in a history of hate, which ends with a discussion of genocide. When the Holocaust is situated within a history of Jewish life, it doesn’t end with genocide.Her comment summarizes the difficult task that exists in educating for different audiences and for different purposes. Our discussion with Professor Kirshenblatt-Gimblett challenged my impressions from our discussion in Snyder’s book about integrating difficult histories in order to get a full picture of the history. I found it extremely helpful to learn about the process of presenting a specifically Jewish narrative and how that compares to portraying a narrative that includes multiple historical perspectives; this includes humanizing perpetrators in order to address the importance of making moral and ethical choices.
In the exhibit People of Kraków in Times of Terror 1939-1945-1956, I appreciated that the exhibition designers included biographies of individuals with a variety of perspectives: victims, informers, and Polish police. The inclusion of all types of people offers a more nuanced picture of life during this time period. It doesn’t make it easier for us to swallow the reality, but it allows us to examine the circumstances more humanely.
On the other hand, there are cases of including multiple perspectives that are jarring and verge on inappropriate, in my opinion. A relatively new addition to the Treblinka memorial now stands on the periphery of the cemetery of stones ranging in size, shape, and color. There are four photographs of Nazi guards, Nazi accommodations, and the process of creating large pits in which to burn the bodies. The images provide a stark contrast between the memorial to the victims and the Nazi role in such inhumane actions. This was an extremely unsettling addition to the site and calls into question the nature of the site. Is it a memorial? To whom? For what? Is there an educational element to including these images? As a memorial site to nameless victims, this doesn’t appear to be the appropriate location for these historical photographs. It is unclear what the purpose of these photographs is and what it contributes to the experience of visiting Treblinka. Instead, there should be a dedicated place to learn about the Nazi mentality and the relationship between the Nazis and their victims, though this does not seem to be the right place or an appropriate means to bring these considerations into the discussion. This juxtaposition underscores the challenge of bridging together multiple narratives in one location. Perhaps a more extensive museum would be able to more adequately address the integration of narratives without marring the experience of the memorial site.
I am still exploring the answers to many of my questions, yet I feel comfortable with that. I feel most inspired when I constantly question why I am interested in the Holocaust and how much I can learn. It is evident that I still have contradictory perspectives on how and when to include different difficult histories, but I firmly believe that the intersection of narratives will help us improve education today. We must continue to question how to present multiple histories and integrate them. I am extremely appreciative for the many tools, examples, and resources I acquired during my Fellowship in order to delve into these issues more deeply throughout my career.
Yael Friedman is currently the Gallery Education Coordinator at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. She graduated with a Dual Master’s in Education and Jewish Studies and Hebrew and Judaic Studies from New York University as a Jim Joseph Fellow, with a concentration in Holocaust Education. She holds a B.A. in Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Studies from Washington University in St. Louis where she received the Steven S. Schwarzschild Prize for Overall Excellence in Jewish Studies. Yael has worked in various capacities at several Holocaust museums and educational non-profit organizations as well as at the U.S. Department of State for the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. She focuses on curriculum and professional development for Holocaust Studies.
Eastern European Memory and Reflections on Romania
Grant Harward, 2013 AJC Fellow
When I was applying for the Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellows Program, I was interested in better understanding the complexities of the Holocaust in Poland. I knew it would be an invaluable opportunity to learn about the German government and Nazi regime and gain a comparative perspective for my own research into the Romanian army and government and their involvement in the Holocaust under the regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu.
During the Fellowship, I found myself drawn to the issue of Polish post-war memory of pre-war Jewish life and the Holocaust. This topic captured my attention and was probably the issue that I learned most about and changed my perspective most profoundly. I dealt with memory in my research usually in the form of sources: journals, memoirs, and oral interviews. In carrying out oral interviews with veterans from the war, memory was a key issue. Books such as Maria Bucur’s Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania and Gavin Bowd’s Memoria razboiului (The Memory of the War), 1941-1945, introduced me to some of the ideas of memory in the context of the Second World War in Romania.
As I was confronted with different examples of memory in Poland, I began contrasting them with my previous experiences when I was conducting my research in Romania, where the actions of the Antonescu Regime, independent of German pressure or direction, resulted in the murder of at least 300,000 Romanian and Soviet Jews. This is not taking into account the Jews of Northern Transylvania, which was under Hungarian occupation during the war. Still, none of my experiences in Romania prepared me for some of the things that I learned in Poland.
One of the first exhibits we saw during the Jewish Culture Festival was Souvenir, Talisman, Toy, an exhibit on contemporary Jewish figurines and images sold in the main square of Krakow, and elsewhere in Poland. I had read about these figurines tangentially in The Pages In Between before starting the program, but had not really thought much more about these examples of post-war memory. The exhibit on the figurines was well done and engaging, but overall I had an increasingly unsettled feeling as I made my way through the different parts of the exhibit, particularly as I watched the interviews with Poles about the figurines. Average people were asked why they had bought or sold the figurines and what was the significance that they held in their view. I was extremely disturbed when I heard some comments from shop owners selling the figurines that one person who saw the figurines said they looked like they were “lined up for the gas chambers”. I had a strong reaction to these figurines, as did many in the group who went to see the exhibition. However, these objects forced me to reflect on memory of Jewish life in Poland compared to what I had experienced, or, rather had not experienced in Romania when visiting cities, which once had large and thriving Jewish populations.
During our reflection session on the figurines, we talked about their appropriateness and the continued strength of particular stereotypes today. Throughout the Fellowship, the diversity of the fellows’ backgrounds served to help me understand more about this complicated aspect of historiography through engaging discussions. We explored the reality that many Jewish visitors feel their own stereotypes about the Polish people are confirmed when they see stereotypical representations of Jews in Poland. Poles are often stereotyped as being anti-Semitic because of bitter memories of interwar Polish nationalism, events during wartime Nazi occupation, and Communist era politics. Therefore, many believe that anti-Semitism is somehow an innate part of the Polish character and see the figurines as proof positive. However, as I was mulling over these things in our reflection session, I thought of my visits to cities in Romania, the Republic of Moldova, and Ukraine, which had formerly been major centers of Jewish life and culture; cities such as Bucharest, Iaşi, Cernowitz, Chisinev, and Odessa. When I visited them, these cities lacked any provoking visuals representation of their former Jewish populations, such as the ones we saw intermittently in Poland. In those cities, there is a marked absence of memory of the Jewish culture that once had flourished in them and played a major role in their respective histories. Yet the physical absence of images that can be labeled offensive does not mean that stereotypes or anti-Semitic feelings do not exist in those countries. In fact, I know from personal experience that such sentiments are still prevalent. This led me to wonder:
In Romania, the situation is similar, in Iaşi, only one synagogue of nearly one hundred survived the war. In Bucharest, the four remaining major synagogues are hidden behind huge Communist blocs, literally out of sight and out of mind. While it is clear that Romania had a much smaller Jewish pre-war population, around 800,000, in comparison to over three million in Poland, it still seems strange and disturbing that very few remnants of the Romanian-Jewish culture remain, particularly because Romanian Jews were notably visible minorities in urban settings. All major Romanian cities in the interwar period had large Jewish populations whether in the southern region of Wallachia or the western region of Transylvania with their largely assimilated, Reform Jewish populations or in the eastern regions of Moldavia and Bessarabia with its more Orthodox and Yiddish speaking Jewish population. In fact, Iaşi was the birthplace of modern Yiddish theatre. The Jewish past of Romania was vibrant and influential, but during the war much of the population of the eastern provinces was decimated by the Antonescu regime, yet the Jewish population of Wallachia and southern Transylvania survived deportation and death; numbering around 350,000 in 1945. Therefore, in Romania, unlike Poland, the Jewish population survived the war much more intact and Jewish life actually continued until the late 1970s, when most Jews were allowed to immigrate to Israel by the Communist regime. Nevertheless, despite the survival and continuity of the Jewish community in Romania, today, unlike in Poland, there is basically no memory of that past, flawed or otherwise.
There are certain public examples of that memory in Romania, such as the Romanian Holocaust Memorial, which was only inaugurated in 2009. There are a few memorials in Iaşi and other towns created after the war by the Jewish community. The Jewish Yiddish Theatre still exists in Bucharest. There are synagogues in almost all the Romanian cities I have ever visited, usually dilapidated and vacant, but there nonetheless. More distressing to me is the absence of a public discussion or debate about the complicity and role that Romanians played in the Holocaust. This is in stark contrast to the situation that I experienced while in Poland during the fellowship program. It became evident to me as I read the required readings, listened to lectures, and talked with our Polish guides, that there has been an extensive, ongoing discussion about Polish collaboration and responsibility in the Holocaust. In Romania, in contrast, this debate is nearly nonexistent, even though Romania remained unoccupied by Nazi Germany and independently partook in deportation and murder of the Jewish communities of the eastern provinces of Bukovina, Bessarabia, and Transnistria.
Despite the varied opinions on representations of Jews and post-war memory, it seems to me that no memory may be worse than bad memory. Despite the issues Poland still faces, its open space for dialogue should be a model for many countries. In Romania, without public debate or organizations addressing post-war memory, there is no forum to inform the public, help people learn from the past, and, hopefully, begin healing wounds. Instead Romanian academics working in the United States try to confront the issue of the Holocaust in Romania, but the debate is limited to Romanian academics in Romania writing in response justifying the actions of Antonescu and his regime against Romanian Jews. The government is officially supporting Holocaust studies and funded the Holocaust Memorial in Bucharest, but it seems largely lacking motivation other than to placate the European Union in order to receive funds and support. The government has done the official minimum required of it to remember the Holocaust. The more important goal, and the much more difficult one, will be to expand the debate to include more than a narrow strata of government officials and academics to include the general public.
My experience with the many forms of commemoration and memory in Poland during the fellowship affected me greatly. It offered me a new perspective of my own research and motivates me to make sure that I properly address the Holocaust and its issues in my own work. I returned from Poland with a largely optimistic outlook on developments. The debate over the Holocaust continues to raise awareness of tolerance and understanding. The Jewish past in Poland seems to be steadily more recognized and important, as evidenced by the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews that we visited in Warsaw. I hope that I can contribute in the future to the ongoing debate and scholarship on the Holocaust in a meaningful way, which will help our understanding of the events as well as change the attitudes of people in contemporary problems of intolerance and prejudice.
Grant Harward grew up in Orange County, California and earned his B.A. from Brigham Young University, where he researched the Communist takeover in Romania. He lived in Romania for two years, studying Romanian history during the Second World War and becoming fluent in the language. He earned his M.A. in History of the Second World War in Europe from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He is currently a Ph.D. student in Modern European History at Texas A&M University. His research focuses on the motivation of Romanian soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front against the Red Army and in perpetrating atrocities against the Jewish population under Romanian administration.
When I was applying for the Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellows Program, I was interested in better understanding the complexities of the Holocaust in Poland. I knew it would be an invaluable opportunity to learn about the German government and Nazi regime and gain a comparative perspective for my own research into the Romanian army and government and their involvement in the Holocaust under the regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu.
During the Fellowship, I found myself drawn to the issue of Polish post-war memory of pre-war Jewish life and the Holocaust. This topic captured my attention and was probably the issue that I learned most about and changed my perspective most profoundly. I dealt with memory in my research usually in the form of sources: journals, memoirs, and oral interviews. In carrying out oral interviews with veterans from the war, memory was a key issue. Books such as Maria Bucur’s Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania and Gavin Bowd’s Memoria razboiului (The Memory of the War), 1941-1945, introduced me to some of the ideas of memory in the context of the Second World War in Romania.
As I was confronted with different examples of memory in Poland, I began contrasting them with my previous experiences when I was conducting my research in Romania, where the actions of the Antonescu Regime, independent of German pressure or direction, resulted in the murder of at least 300,000 Romanian and Soviet Jews. This is not taking into account the Jews of Northern Transylvania, which was under Hungarian occupation during the war. Still, none of my experiences in Romania prepared me for some of the things that I learned in Poland.
One of the first exhibits we saw during the Jewish Culture Festival was Souvenir, Talisman, Toy, an exhibit on contemporary Jewish figurines and images sold in the main square of Krakow, and elsewhere in Poland. I had read about these figurines tangentially in The Pages In Between before starting the program, but had not really thought much more about these examples of post-war memory. The exhibit on the figurines was well done and engaging, but overall I had an increasingly unsettled feeling as I made my way through the different parts of the exhibit, particularly as I watched the interviews with Poles about the figurines. Average people were asked why they had bought or sold the figurines and what was the significance that they held in their view. I was extremely disturbed when I heard some comments from shop owners selling the figurines that one person who saw the figurines said they looked like they were “lined up for the gas chambers”. I had a strong reaction to these figurines, as did many in the group who went to see the exhibition. However, these objects forced me to reflect on memory of Jewish life in Poland compared to what I had experienced, or, rather had not experienced in Romania when visiting cities, which once had large and thriving Jewish populations.
During our reflection session on the figurines, we talked about their appropriateness and the continued strength of particular stereotypes today. Throughout the Fellowship, the diversity of the fellows’ backgrounds served to help me understand more about this complicated aspect of historiography through engaging discussions. We explored the reality that many Jewish visitors feel their own stereotypes about the Polish people are confirmed when they see stereotypical representations of Jews in Poland. Poles are often stereotyped as being anti-Semitic because of bitter memories of interwar Polish nationalism, events during wartime Nazi occupation, and Communist era politics. Therefore, many believe that anti-Semitism is somehow an innate part of the Polish character and see the figurines as proof positive. However, as I was mulling over these things in our reflection session, I thought of my visits to cities in Romania, the Republic of Moldova, and Ukraine, which had formerly been major centers of Jewish life and culture; cities such as Bucharest, Iaşi, Cernowitz, Chisinev, and Odessa. When I visited them, these cities lacked any provoking visuals representation of their former Jewish populations, such as the ones we saw intermittently in Poland. In those cities, there is a marked absence of memory of the Jewish culture that once had flourished in them and played a major role in their respective histories. Yet the physical absence of images that can be labeled offensive does not mean that stereotypes or anti-Semitic feelings do not exist in those countries. In fact, I know from personal experience that such sentiments are still prevalent. This led me to wonder:
Is it better to have a skewed public memory of the past rather than a general amnesia?The informal dichotomy that I considered was that of bad memory versus no memory. One of my colleagues suggested that the actual physical remnants (synagogues, cemeteries, memorials) should comprise the public memory of Jewish communities and not misrepresented stereotypes. She had a good point, except that we know that usually only a handful of these physical remnants survived the Second World War. It was made clear during visits to various cities how much was destroyed, so that even what physical remains of former Jewish life are left are often remote, hidden, re-appropriated or ignored – leaving only memory behind.
In Romania, the situation is similar, in Iaşi, only one synagogue of nearly one hundred survived the war. In Bucharest, the four remaining major synagogues are hidden behind huge Communist blocs, literally out of sight and out of mind. While it is clear that Romania had a much smaller Jewish pre-war population, around 800,000, in comparison to over three million in Poland, it still seems strange and disturbing that very few remnants of the Romanian-Jewish culture remain, particularly because Romanian Jews were notably visible minorities in urban settings. All major Romanian cities in the interwar period had large Jewish populations whether in the southern region of Wallachia or the western region of Transylvania with their largely assimilated, Reform Jewish populations or in the eastern regions of Moldavia and Bessarabia with its more Orthodox and Yiddish speaking Jewish population. In fact, Iaşi was the birthplace of modern Yiddish theatre. The Jewish past of Romania was vibrant and influential, but during the war much of the population of the eastern provinces was decimated by the Antonescu regime, yet the Jewish population of Wallachia and southern Transylvania survived deportation and death; numbering around 350,000 in 1945. Therefore, in Romania, unlike Poland, the Jewish population survived the war much more intact and Jewish life actually continued until the late 1970s, when most Jews were allowed to immigrate to Israel by the Communist regime. Nevertheless, despite the survival and continuity of the Jewish community in Romania, today, unlike in Poland, there is basically no memory of that past, flawed or otherwise.
There are certain public examples of that memory in Romania, such as the Romanian Holocaust Memorial, which was only inaugurated in 2009. There are a few memorials in Iaşi and other towns created after the war by the Jewish community. The Jewish Yiddish Theatre still exists in Bucharest. There are synagogues in almost all the Romanian cities I have ever visited, usually dilapidated and vacant, but there nonetheless. More distressing to me is the absence of a public discussion or debate about the complicity and role that Romanians played in the Holocaust. This is in stark contrast to the situation that I experienced while in Poland during the fellowship program. It became evident to me as I read the required readings, listened to lectures, and talked with our Polish guides, that there has been an extensive, ongoing discussion about Polish collaboration and responsibility in the Holocaust. In Romania, in contrast, this debate is nearly nonexistent, even though Romania remained unoccupied by Nazi Germany and independently partook in deportation and murder of the Jewish communities of the eastern provinces of Bukovina, Bessarabia, and Transnistria.
Despite the varied opinions on representations of Jews and post-war memory, it seems to me that no memory may be worse than bad memory. Despite the issues Poland still faces, its open space for dialogue should be a model for many countries. In Romania, without public debate or organizations addressing post-war memory, there is no forum to inform the public, help people learn from the past, and, hopefully, begin healing wounds. Instead Romanian academics working in the United States try to confront the issue of the Holocaust in Romania, but the debate is limited to Romanian academics in Romania writing in response justifying the actions of Antonescu and his regime against Romanian Jews. The government is officially supporting Holocaust studies and funded the Holocaust Memorial in Bucharest, but it seems largely lacking motivation other than to placate the European Union in order to receive funds and support. The government has done the official minimum required of it to remember the Holocaust. The more important goal, and the much more difficult one, will be to expand the debate to include more than a narrow strata of government officials and academics to include the general public.
My experience with the many forms of commemoration and memory in Poland during the fellowship affected me greatly. It offered me a new perspective of my own research and motivates me to make sure that I properly address the Holocaust and its issues in my own work. I returned from Poland with a largely optimistic outlook on developments. The debate over the Holocaust continues to raise awareness of tolerance and understanding. The Jewish past in Poland seems to be steadily more recognized and important, as evidenced by the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews that we visited in Warsaw. I hope that I can contribute in the future to the ongoing debate and scholarship on the Holocaust in a meaningful way, which will help our understanding of the events as well as change the attitudes of people in contemporary problems of intolerance and prejudice.
Grant Harward grew up in Orange County, California and earned his B.A. from Brigham Young University, where he researched the Communist takeover in Romania. He lived in Romania for two years, studying Romanian history during the Second World War and becoming fluent in the language. He earned his M.A. in History of the Second World War in Europe from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He is currently a Ph.D. student in Modern European History at Texas A&M University. His research focuses on the motivation of Romanian soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front against the Red Army and in perpetrating atrocities against the Jewish population under Romanian administration.
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