We fill preexisting forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.
-Frank Bidart
-Frank Bidart
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.
6 Comments
Tuck Bowerfind A '84
7/6/2017 02:03:04 pm
Thanks for sharing this, Danny. I am looking forward to reading your next post. It certainly disturbs me to learn how this site has been left. I would guess that part of the reason is the post war status of Poland as a satellite state under the Soviet Union. And the fact that basically all of Poland's Jews were killed or exiled during the Nazi occupation. Of course that does not excuse the absence of an appropriate memorial being produced since 1989. What does?
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Danny
7/6/2017 11:27:03 pm
Thanks for commenting here. You're exactly right that Soviet policies and the legacy of communism are a major factor, as is the overwhelming absence of living Jewish communities to advocate for proper memorialization. I'll write more about this in my next post, but there are a few small monuments at this site, and one large one created by the Soviets, but I think they're all inadequate and very ideological. Unfortunately it's hard to separate politics from memorialization in a lot of places here.
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Lani Makholm
7/6/2017 10:54:57 pm
Thank you. A St John's tutor suggested I write my reflections up on my Krakow journey with the Schindler Factory retournes...am encoraged to see yr reflections. At my last supper .with them..although I was not Jewish nor a part of this tragic history...they said I was now a witness.
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Danny
7/9/2017 01:58:57 am
Hi Lani, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about the Schindler Factory's opening, and about your relationship to this history.
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Brittany
7/7/2017 10:52:26 am
While it is certainly disturbing that this site has been left overgrown and without proper memorialization, I'm also wondering: so much of Poland was affected by Nazi atrocities, is it even possible to create meaningful memorials for all of the sites without turning the entire country into a reminder of that time? I don't know what the right answer is here, but perhaps there is also a benefit to reclaiming the site in ways like this.
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Danny
7/9/2017 12:37:22 am
This is a great point, and something you hear often here. It's true that we can't memorialize everything, and there's probably no place on earth unconnected to some crime or atrocity.
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