We fill preexisting forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.
-Frank Bidart
-Frank Bidart
I returned to the site of the Plaszow concentration camp last week to find the archaeological dig in progress there. I was not disappointed, but unfortunately the weather kept from me spending too much time there, and has kept me from returning since. Because of that, this post will be shorter and sparer than I had hoped. Still, I think it will be clear how remarkable the finds at Plaszow really are. I was most struck by the stone-paved roads that archaeologists have uncovered. There's an iconic scene in Schindler's List where destroyed Jewish tombstones are used to pave a road through the concentration camp. The Nazis buried all of this in January 1945, but I was able to see one such road, newly visible for the first time in 72 years. Here are some photos of uncovered roads and of tombstone fragments, many with designs and Hebrew or Polish letters still visible: I wish I was able to spend more time here, and to see more of what the archaeologists have uncovered, but alas: the weather's been prohibitive, and their funding was for a limited period of time. Soon they'll have to rebury what they've found, if they didn't rebury it already this week. But I wrote in this series that Plaszow is inadequately memorialized. Perhaps the vivid history that these archaeologists have discovered--have recovered, really--will encourage local groups to reconsider and improve their approach to the Plaszow site. Speaking of vivid history, here's a house on the edge of Plaszow whose top floors were once used as Gestapo offices and whose basement was once used as a Gestapo torture chamber. Today it's a residential building, and the people who live there would be dismayed and angry if their home's brutal history was broadcasted to the public: Which should take priority, the present or the past? The memories of the people murdered in that building, or the wishes of the people living there today? Can you imagine living there at all? I certainly can't. How complicated is the legacy of the Holocaust here in Poland!
1 Comment
(Here's part 2/4 of my series on the site of the Plaszow Concentration Camp; if you're just tuning in, you can find part 1 here.) We Americans tend to think that memorials can and should be apolitical, non-partisan, and free from ideological biases. Imagine the outcry, for example, if the September 11th memorial in New York City only referred to 9/11's Christian victims, or described the perpetrators of that attack exclusively as "Saudi Arabian terrorists," or described them exclusively as "Muslims." Whether or not American memorials and monuments are always as ideology-free as we like to assume is beyond the scope of this post (spoiler alert: they're not), but Holocaust and WWII memorials in Poland often have no such apolitical pretense. Instead, memorials here often serve to reinforce or to undermine various ideological perspectives, and to evaluate various claims about who has a "legitimate" place in Polish national identity, or in the narrative of victimhood during World War II. What do I mean by this? Plaszow is a perfect example. There are no fewer than six separate memorials at this site, and each one tells a different story; they're in a kind of competition. Each memorial implicitly questions the legitimacy of the other memorials at the site, and argues for its own exclusive story of what Plaszow means and to whom it belongs. By way of explanation, I'll share my photos of some of the site's memorials, with a little commentary about each one. The first memorial built at the site is still the biggest; it's a striking, several story tall Soviet monument: The other side of the monument is inscribed in Polish with the rhetoric typical of Soviet Holocaust memorials: "In honor of the martyrs who were murdered by the Hitlerites, in the years 1943-1945." This might seem benign and straightforward, but there are two very deliberate omissions here. First, Jews are not mentioned as Plaszow's or as the Holocaust's victims; instead this site memorializes generic and anonymous "martyrs." And second, the murderers are not Germans or even Nazis but are "Hitlerites." How do these omissions reinforce Soviet ideology? To recognize Jews as a distinct people with a distinct narrative would have undermined their Marxist claim that the only real differences in human society are those of class, and that everything else, especially religion, is a bourgeois fabrication. And further, from the perspective of official Soviet history, the Holocaust was not an anti-Jewish genocide, but was a fascist crime against Europe's working class. This narrative allowed Russia to frame themselves, and the Red Army, as the liberators of all of Europe's proletariat. In a similar vein, the Soviet Union worked hard to "welcome" East Germany into its socialist federation. As part of this project, Russia worried that calling Germany or Germans the perpetrators of the Holocaust and the instigators of World War II would prevent East Germany's successful assimilation into the USSR, and further reinforce irrelevant national distinctions. Hence "Hitlerites," the anonymous followers of a particular fascist leader, are the murderers of Plaszow. A much smaller nearby memorial attempts to rewrite this Soviet perspective: I didn't have good lighting to photograph the text of this memorial, but note the first big word, about a third of the way down: Zydzi, Polish for Jews. The other side of this memorial is in Hebrew, and here we see a wholly different story about how Plaszow's victims were, and who their legacy belongs to. In direct opposition to the Soviet memorial for "martyrs," this small plaque identifies the Holocaust as a crime particularly committed against Jews. But another Jewish memorial is just a few steps away: This plaque commemorates a group of Jewish women from Hungary who were briefly kept at Plaszow on the way to being murdered at Auschwitz. But unlike the first Jewish memorial at the site, this one is written only in Polish, with no Hebrew; it doesn't seem intended for a Jewish audience. Who is it for, then? A clue comes from the sponsoring body named at the bottom of the plaque, the Hungarian consulate in Krakow. What was their agenda? Perhaps they simply wanted to memorialize this tragic part of Hungarian history. A more cynical response, though, and unfortunately I think that cynicism is warranted here, sees this plaque as a part of Hungary's campaign to join the European Union. The memorial was created in 2000, two years after negotiations on Hungary EU membership began and 2 years before Hungary was invited to join. During this period Hungary sought to claim their rightful place in the story of modern Europe, and asserted a Hungarian narrative on this Holocaust site in order to show the rest of Europe that the Hungarian and the European fates were intertwined. A few meters away stands another memorial, presenting its own distinct story: This monument, which is again only in Polish, commemorates about 40 Christian-Polish policemen, members of the Polish anti-Nazi underground, who were murdered at Plaszow. The anchor-like symbol in the top right corner was the emblem of the Polish underground during World War II, but it's significant that this memorial was not built until 2012. Though Nazi Germany was the enemy of both the Soviet Union and of the Polish Underground, in this case the two were not friends: the Soviets saw the Home Army as expendable pawns in the war against fascist Germany, and after that as nothing more than potential anti-Soviet insurgents. A monument to the Polish underground would never have been allowed in Soviet Poland, as the Home Army was seen by the ruling powers as an illegitimate nationalist movement. Only in the past decade or two, as this memorial shows, have Poles begun to publicly celebrate the history of their anti-Nazi underground. Just like the first Jewish monument here at Plaszow, this small statue is an attempt to rewrite Soviet erasure. So who has the "right" to claim Plaszow? As these memorials show it can alternately be seen as a Jewish, a Comunist, or a Polish place of victimization. The starkness of these distinctions becomes even more clear at one of Plaszow's major mass execution sites. This hill, which once held a narrow ravine until it was filled in and turned into a plateau by tons of human ashes mixed with dirt, is marked with an exclusively Christian memorial: Despite the fact that the vast majority of the people buried below this cross were Jews, there is nothing here to indicate any Jewish narrative. Instead this mass execution site has been claimed as a place of Polish-Catholic martyrdom. To me this photo symbolizes the competition between victimhood-narratives that takes place at Plaszow, and across much of Poland. Why is this identified exclusively through Christian symbolism? There seems to be a concerted attempt on the part of the local government to reframe Plaszow as a Polish-Christian, and not as a Jewish, site. But must we choose between Jewish and Christian narratives as we remember Plaszow's horrible past? If not, how should these differing stories be framed together, instead of in opposition? If Plaszow is a site of Jewish tragedy, does that mean it's not a site of Polish-Catholic tragedy?
Every time I think about Plaszow, I'm overwhelmed with these questions, which are complicated by the project of post-Soviet Polish identity building, which often excludes Judaism from the narrative of Polish history, and by the overwhelming absence of living Jewish communities in this region who could articulate a Jewish heritage or enter into dialogue with their Polish neighbors. And of course, these are the few memorials at the site, most of which is woefully uncommemorated. There is no memorial, and not even a historical sign, at Plaszow's ruined Jewish graveyards, or at the rubble of the old pre-burial hall, and the house whose basement was once an SS torture chamber is unacknowledged as anything but a mundane residential building. Clearly there is more work to do in adequately memorializing Plaszow; what is less clear is whether that work will get done. I'm optimistic, however, because of the remarkable findings that recent archaeological digs at the site have uncovered. Perhaps this will encourage the local government to improve their commemorative and historical infrastructure. I went yesterday to see the excavations, and my next blog post will discuss what I found. On Monday morning I visited the site of the Plaszow concentration camp, a wasteland that sprawls across nearly 200 acres in the heart of suburban Krakow. It's a strange and difficult place, because in 1944 the Nazis systematically destroyed all evidence of the concentration camp they built there, exhuming and burning tens of thousands of Jewish corpses and destroying the camp's buildings, which they covered with dirt. In 1942, the camp was a small and terrible city: But in January 1945, when the Red Army swept into Krakow, Plaszow looked just as it does in this photo I took Monday morning of what was once the camp's main square: Layers of absence and presence converge at Plaszow as they do nowhere else I've been in Poland, and I'd like to explore these layers through a series of four blog posts. In this one, I'll talk about the site as it exists today and as it was from 1942 to 1944: its ruins and its desolations, its past and present uses and misuses. In the next post, I'll discuss the competing and often inadequate attempts at memorialization on the grounds of Plaszow. In the 3rd post, I'll discuss the small archaeological dig that is working right now to excavate a small portion of Plaszow, and I'll share photos of some of their remarkable discoveries. Finally, in the 4th post, I'll look at the remnants of the fake Plaszow camp which Steven Spielberg created to be a set for Schindler's List, and which still exist as a strange kind of postmodern presence outside the quarry where Plaszow's Jews were forced into slave labor. But first, to give credit where credit is due: I am grateful to have gone to Plaszow with a small group of historians and writers, led by the wonderful Jason Francisco. Without his expert knowledge of the site, and his generosity in sharing it, I'd know very little of what I'm writing here. His knowledge, of course, comes from many sources, including the guidance of Plaszow survivor Bernard Offen. Among the most glaring absences at Plaszow is that of the two old Jewish cemeteries the Nazis destroyed to create their concentration camp. From the hundreds of graves that once stood here, only one is intact today: Why this particular grave? There's no answer: it's a random, arbitrary, almost absurd Jewish presence on a field of absence. But looking at the the area around it, it's clear that an extensive cemetery was destroyed here: A beautiful and ornate pre-burial hall, part of the cemetery complex, once stood nearby. In 1942 the Nazis began to use this building as a stable for Amon Goth's horses, and in June of 1944 the building was ceremonially destroyed. Today nothing marks the former grandeur of this pre-burial hall--there is no memorial, no sign, no photograph--except a pile of rubble, now overgrown by weeds and surrounded by apartment blocks: What is this mound of rubble, an absence or a presence? Would we answer this question differently if a halfway-adequate memorial existed at the site instead of just an anonymous pile of ruins? For many locals today Plaszow is a pleasant park, a place to jog and have barbecues or to spend a pleasant Saturday morning. While I was there I saw a young couple, for example, walking their dog up the hill that rises over the rest of the landscape, a few hundred yards from the ruined cemetery. It looks like a nice walk up a placid, forested trail, past a meadow ringed with wildflowers, and in some sense that's exactly what it is: But the hill pictured above was also one of two major mass execution sites at Plaszow. And when slave laborers walked up and down that trail, SS guards often shot at them for sport. What kind of mindset should these awful facts demand of today's visitors to Plaszow? In this photograph three layers of absence intersect: the absence of Jews and their culture, because of the Nazi destruction; the absence of any evidence of that destruction, because the Nazis razed the camp and burned its bodies; and the absence of signs or monuments pointing to any part of the hill's or the entire site's history.
Is it an ignorance, willful or otherwise, that allows couples to walk their dogs casually up the hill towards a major Nazi mass grave, within the historic borders of a concentration camp? Is it a response to the absences that Plaszow is filled with? Or is it a different kind of presence, a new and self-consciously ahistorical way of life, in this haunted and haunting place? In the next part of this short series on Plaszow, I'll continue to present some of the complexities that this site raises, with a discussion of the few memorials in this former concentration camp. Why are there different memorials nearly side by side, in a kind of competition? What are their underlying ideologies, and why are they so inadequate? Why is almost the whole site bereft of memorials, monuments, or historical signage at all? These are some of the questions this next post will explore. I was fortunate enough to take part this afternoon in a brief action organized by a group of local and international Jewish activists, artists, and scholars. Together we reclaimed the historic yeshiva and synagogue Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim, here in the heart of old Jewish Kazimierz, and hopefully prompted a challenging and necessary conversation about Jewish heritage in today's Poland. Some context: In 1896, a Jewish prayer and study space named Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim opened at the intersection of Meisels street, named after the influential Polish rabbi Dov Ber Meisels, and Bozego Ciala street, Polish for "the body of Christ." This space, in other words, exists at the symbolic convergence of Krakow's Jewish and Catholic heritages. Between its founding and the 1930's, the Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim was painted with a series of ornate and beautiful wall frescoes. Though heavily degraded today, these frescoes still stand as one of Poland's best surviving examples of original synagogue art. You can get the idea from this small detail of a Jerusalem frescoe, but the walls of the synagogue are filled with such decaying and glorious art: Check out Sam Gruber's Jewish Monuments blog for a more in-depth look at Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim's art and symbolism. The name Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim is Hebrew for House of Study Society of Psalms, and this namesake was connected with the community's particular distinction: every day, as part of their morning prayer and study, the members of Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim recited the book of Psalms in its entirety. But this tradition died out with its practitioners not long after the Nazis moved Krakow's Jews across the Vistula river, into a ghetto in the Podgorze neighborhood. By the end of World War II, most of the members of Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim had been murdered, and their beautiful building entered a second life as a dance studio. In 1997, however, a Polish law passed allowing, and in some cases requiring, the restitution of Jewish property. Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim was returned to Krakow's official Jewish community, and sat in disuse until a bar and dance club called Mezcal leased the building in 2013. Today the site has changed hands again, and is the home of a newly-opened and decidedly cool bar called, of all things, Hevre. Why has the Jewish community leased this space for secular businesses? The story is complicated, and involves political and economic machinations both too convoluted and too cynical to attempt recounting. But it's worth noting that Krakow's progressive Jewish community recently submitted a proposal to take over the building's lease, and raised a considerable amount of money to do so. This proposal was rejected, and the lease was given instead to the operators of one of Krakow's trendiest bar and restaurant groups. They wasted little time renovating the building, and in the process the historic and beautiful decorations around the aron kodesh, the place on the synagogue's eastern wall which once held Torah scrolls, was irrevocably damaged. So all of this, as it must, brings us to today. Hevre opened a few weeks ago to great fanfare, and here is the space as it looks now, with glass doors on the photograph's left side where the aron kodesh once stood: Along with over 2 dozen people, I showed up at the Hevre bar/coffeeshop, née Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim, at 2:30 this afternoon. We filled the whole space as we listened to chanting from the book of Psalms, and then we milled through the bar reading Psalms out loud. For the first time since the Holocaust, Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim was alive with the sound of Biblical Hebrew poetry. Hevre's patrons looked on with bemusement and respect, and the staff actually turned their sound system off for the duration of our psalm recitation.
So what now? After several minutes, our group left, the pop music returned, and Beit Midrash Hevre Tehillim was once again a bar called Hevre, wearing its past on the walls like an incongruous costume. As one participant said, it felt like we were simultaneously invading a space that did not belong to us, and reclaiming a space that had been unjustly taken. I'm optimistic, however, that actions and interventions like this can change the conversation about Jewish heritage and historical Jewish spaces in today's Poland. Instead of allowing the whims of the market to dictate the legacy of Polish Judaism, we claimed a place as that legacy's inheritors and as such insisted on our right to interpret Krakow's Jewish past, and to shape Krakow's Jewish future. What will this change? Maybe nothing, or maybe it's the glimmer of a new conversation about the use and misuse of Jewish heritage. But either way, for even a few minutes, a historical Jewish space was reclaimed by the psalms that enlivened it before the Holocaust, and by the people committed to the preservation of Krakow's Jewish culture. Beneath that degraded fresco of Jerusalem, and in a place that has seen so much Jewish death and destruction, I couldn't help but think of the book of Jeremiah: "It will again be heard in this place, about which you say that it is a wasteland... and in the streets of Jerusalem, that are desolate without inhabitant... the sound of joy and the sound of happiness." In ecology an "ecotone" is that region at the intersection of different biomes, where a grassland and a forest meet, for example. The etymology of ecotone is telling: from the English eco, as in ecology, and the Greek τόνος, tonos, meaning tension. But ecologists know ecotones to be places, along with their tensions, of tremendous diversity and vitality. What do those ecotones look like at the borders of Judaism? Through words and stray photographs, that's the question I hope to use this space to explore.
I've been thinking for a while of making an online home for some of my writings and photographs. I'm interested, above all, in those liminal spaces where worlds collide: the trace of a mezuzah on a doorpost in a little Polish village, or Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe kidnapped by Comanche warriors on American's southern great plains. Those unexpected moments, in other words, where distant times and places converge. Comment on posts or send an email with thoughts, questions, reflections, etc: I'd love to start a conversation. The old Jewish cemetery in Warsaw was first used in 1806, and today holds a quarter million marked tombs on over 80 acres of land. Across much of Eastern Europe, Jewish graves were designed as sculptures with a complex, symbolic language in order to memorialize their dead. A philanthropist's tombstone, for example, was often engraved with the image of a hand dropping coins into a pushke: Those graves with a kind of proto-Vulcan salute are the burial places of kohanim, Jewish men descended from the Israelite priestly class. Leonard Nimoy was inspired to create this salute by memories of the birkat hakohanim, the traditional priestly blessing, he had seen in synagogues as a child. The shape of the fingers in this gesture represents the Hebrew letter shin, the first letter in one of the names of God, and according to certain mystical folk traditions the light of the Divine Presence shines through the kohen's fingers when he raises them in this gesture and recites the appropriate blessings. Of course, among the most prestigious roles a man could have in Jewish culture was, and still is, that of a scholar. The graves of rabbis, and of particularly learned laymen, were often inscribed with bookshelves as symbols of study. The graves of the descendants of Levites feature a water pitcher, a reference to the Levite responsibility of washing the hands of priests before sacrificial service. If you can't read Hebrew, any guesses what communal role the following gravestone symbolizes? Hint: that's supposed to be a hand holding a knife. Of course, these are just some examples of the very diverse and very complex Jewish gravestone design across Eastern Europe. I'll update with more photos, and hopefully highlight in particular the beautiful regional art of Galician Jewish cemeteries, many of which were traditionally painted with vibrant colors.
|