We fill preexisting forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.
-Frank Bidart
-Frank Bidart
(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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |