Materializations – after the Holocaust

The subterranean city that is the former Warsaw Ghetto will not permit itself to be forgotten. It relinquishes reminders of itself every time construction machines involved in urban development projects strip away the covering shell of concrete and asphalt, revealing the outlines of houses and the old cobblestone routes of that city – the city that existed before 1939 – 1945. Signs of the old life vexingly transpire among the bulldozers’ excavations.

That life was terminated abruptly, crushed, burned. What remains – aside from glimpses of memories – are fragments of things that the property development companies would like to swiftly eradicate, or at least cover up once again. But the relicts themselves cannot be compromised. They call on artists, writers, museums and other institutions of memory to bear witness to the destruction of that world in its entirety – so that we may witness it with our own eyes.

There are in fact two facets to this ruined urban landscape – the Polish one, and a space within it, designated as Jewish. From 1940 to 1943, the two were divided by a wall, built on German orders, whose purpose was to separate Jews from Poles. The former, as “Lebensunwertes Leben”, were doomed to slow agony and eventually a sudden, torturous death; the latter, whose selective extermination was depriving them of their elites and of the power to resist, were to be relegated to the categories of the subhuman and reduced to a labor force. Both facets are marked by death and a funereal substratum of urban memory, and yet are infused by these to varying degrees. Not least because the ghetto area became a total cemetery.

The large-scale map prepared after the war by the Capital Reconstruction Office, documenting the destruction of the urban fabric of Warsaw, shows nearly all buildings in the central part of the city as being burnt down or too damaged to rebuild. Only a single area is unmarked – the former Warsaw Ghetto – where there was simply nothing left to categorize. It was a sea of ruins – though even these were systematically exploited and recycled as the war neared its end. This work was done by concentration camp inmates; it was there that Max Mannheimer (who went on to become a famous resident of Munich) worked in the autumn of 1943 with his brother Edgar. As unbelievable as it sounds today, the bricks collected at the time were still being shipped off to the Reich.

Some of the rubble was used to rebuild Warsaw after the war. Before new housing projects went up on the mounds of remaining rubble, the latter made a haunting and poignant landscape. It inspired and became the subject matter of an early wave of art, evoking the horror of a time not long past, and symbolizing – sometimes without deliberate intent – the death of the people who had lived there barely a few years earlier.

Bohdan Lachert, the modernist architect who designed Muranów, the residential area built on top of the former Warsaw Ghetto, planned for the new buildings to be raised up on “terraces” fashioned out of the rubble– a peculiar monument to the martyrs.² The buildings’ fresh, red brick was even compared to the color of the blood spilled there. The official language of Polish politics and media during the communist period did much to erase the memory of the ghetto’s uniqueness, blurring differences and generalizing the real nature of the tragedy. Few people kept the memory of what had actually happened in the ghetto alive. Writer Jerzy Jurandot, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, wrote the following after the new housing development had been built:

Whatever intentions there were to memorialize the area of the ghetto, they were soon erased by politics, a rather general dislike of the dead residents, and ultimately the dynamics of the new life that flooded into Muranów.

Art in Poland had already made the Holocaust one of its subjects during the German occupation. Holocaust art was created by both Jewish artists in the ghettos of Warsaw (Roman Kramsztyk, Witold Lewinson, Halina Ołomucka, and Gela Seksztajn) and Łódź (Wincenty Brauner), as well as Polish ones, for instance Felicjan Szczęsny Kowarski, Bronisław Linke, Władysław Strzemiński, Mieczysław Wejman, and subsequently by prominent Jewish artists who had survived. The language of those early works was intended to trigger strong emotions; it was above all expressive, and at the same time steered clear of pathos. Creating these works of art was a form of self-therapy or, at the other extreme, a way of documenting a tragedy that the artists had witnessed directly, sometimes barely avoiding extermination themselves. Some even opted for the grotesque. Drawings and prints created in concentration camps in occupied Poland and the Reich followed similar lines. Their artistic language had evolved in the midst of a world torn to pieces by relentless destruction.

Works created after the war were different. Their aim was to preserve a record of the crimes, to sing the praise of heroic resistance fighters and victims, and to devise symbols and metaphors that could convey, however soberly, the catastrophe that had overturned people’s understanding of human nature and undermined the obviousness of moral, religious, and civilizational truths. In the shadow of huge questions about the point of writing poetry “after Auschwitz” and the injunction to silence, hundreds and probably thousands of representations attempting to come to terms with the Holocaust emerged. As time passed – I will venture the following generalization – the language of art expanded to treat the general nature of the human condition and internalized the discourse on whether it was at all possible to represent an event like the Shoah.

A key event when it comes to commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto’s place in the urban landscape was the publication of Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak’s monumental historical guide Getto warszawskie. Przewodnik po nieistniejącym mieście in 2001 (“Warsaw Ghetto. A Guide to the Non-Existent City”).⁵ Both authors are scholars at the Polish Center for Holocaust Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Thanks to this incredibly detailed publication we were finally able to begin exploring the material substance of the erstwhile city. The ghetto began to make itself present, no longer just symbolically, but increasingly in material terms. In the words of Jacek Leociak:

This city pounds on the doors of the living in Piotr Paziński’s excellent collection of short stories Ptasie ulice (2013) (“Bird Streets”).⁷ The narrator meets – indeed follows – ephemeral figures who exist in the other city but somehow find their way into our world. In reality, the other city cannot be accessed.

It is in the mnemonic scenery thus described that we want to set the exhibition Materializing. Contemporary Art and the Shoah in Poland at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism. The works of art employ various techniques and styles. What they have in common is how the artists went about creating them – in every case shaping the structure and giving the work its final form was preceded by thorough research into the subject matter. We might say that the artist entered the province of the historian or archaeologist, but used a completely different apparatus, characterized by a high degree of agency, to “publish” the findings. Most of the works actualize the materialization function referred to in the title. Instead of symbolizing or relying on metaphors, they speak to various types of concretization. They are all accompanied by brief comments in the following pages.

We are placing the works of Polish artists within the Munich Documentation Center’s permanent exhibition dedicated to the history of Nazism and the aftermath of that criminal totalitarian regime. All of them relate to the Shoah on Polish land. Sometimes the artists go as far as to physically probe the earth for memories.

To conclude these remarks, however, it is worth addressing other references which are emerging as we speak – essentially in the same territories, historically speaking. On March 1, 2022 the world was rocked by news of a Russian missile attack on Babyn Yar in Kyiv – a place where the Germans launched the murder of European Jews on a mass scale; over the course of just a few days in September 1941 more than 33000 Jews were shot there. Their remains, along with those of tens of thousands of other victims, were buried at the site. A project, even if a controversial one to commemorate them, which had been running for the past few years, was interrupted by the Russian rocket attack. As Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky wrote at the time:

When words fall short, we resort to materialization. So the memory doesn’t completely disappear.

Translated from Polish by Dominika Gajewska

¹ Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały 10 (2011), S. 513.

² Bohdan Lachert, “Muranów – Dzielnica mieszkaniowa,” Architektura (1949) no. 5, pp. 129-132: “[…] the construction of a new housing development […] on the rubble heap, will be a testimony of new life on the ruins of the old social relations, in an area memorializing the unprecedented barbarity of Hitlerism and the heroism of the Ghetto insurgents. The Museum of the Fight against Fascism […] at the Gęsiówka prison, the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, Warsaw’s martyrdom area […] will remain at the same level as before the cataclysm, but the new buildings will rise on a terrace created out of the rubble heap.” Other accounts cited after: Piotr Matywiecki, Kamień graniczny, Warszawa 1994, pp. 489-494. I am grateful to Adam Przywara for bringing these sources to my attention.

³ Jerzy Jurandot, Stefania Grodzieńska, City of the Damned: Two Years in the Warsaw Ghetto. Ghetto Children, transl. Jolanta Sicińska, Warsaw 2015, p. 411.

⁴ The Jedwabne Massacre was a pogrom in Jedwabne and the surrounding area against Jewish residents of the small town in northeastern Poland on July 10, 1941, in which at least 340 people were murdered.

⁵ Barbara Engelking, Jacek Leociak, Getto warszawskie. Przewodnik po nieistniejącym mieście, Warszawa 2001. English edition: The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, transl. Emma Harris, New Haven 2009. www.warsaw1943.pl

⁶ J. Leociak, “Boże, gdzie jest Gęsia?” www.dwutygodnik.com (accessed 10.07.2023).

⁷ Piotr Paziński, Ptasie ulice, Warsaw 2013.

⁸ Piotr Paziński, “Izaak Feldwurm’s Manuscript,” in: Bird Streets, translated by Ursula Phillips, forthcoming from Vine Editions, Detroit. I am grateful to Piotr Paziński for making the text available.

⁹ Jeffrey Veidlinger, “A brief history of Babi Yar, where Nazis massacred Jews, Soviets kept silence and now Ukraine says Russia fired a missile,” The Conversation, March 8, 2022, theconversation.com (accessed 10.07.2023); see also: Masha Gessen, “The Holocaust Memorial Undone by Another War,” (accessed 10.07.2023).