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Making Sense of the Holocaust in Contemporary Poland: The Real and the Imagined, the Contradictions and the Paradoxes

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Webber J.

Jednak Książki. Gdańskie Czasopismo Humanistyczne

2016

issue 6 "The Holocaust and the Contemporary World"

7-28

This article, written from an anthropological perspective and based on extended personal fieldwork by the author, consists of a detailed discussion of two places of Holocaust memory in present-day Poland: the memorial museum at Auschwitz and selected Jewish sites in the city of Kraków. The principal argument is that both the Auschwitz museum and Jewish Kraków have meanings which are multi-layered and multi-dimensional. For example, Auschwitz means different things to different people; some of those meanings are particularist (relating to the histories of different victim groups), some are universal. Similarly, the character of Jewish Kraków is understood not only in relation to the physical presence of a former Jewish quarter (now substantially restored), but also in relation to the overpowering awareness of ruin and the absence of Jews. The investigation and analysis of common interpretations of these two places reveal that they rest on numerous contradictions and paradoxes; the real and the imagined, usually understood as polar opposites, may in fact coexist in people’s minds. In a sense it can be described as a ‘chorus of voices’, all of which need to be heard and acknowledged. But these voices are not always in harmony; on the contrary, what often comes across is dissonance or cacophony. In other words, there is no fixed interpretative scheme, no unified or stable approach. Nor, perhaps, should there be, in approaching something so totally subversive as genocide. The job of the scholar, in representing and problematizing how people make sense of the Holocaust in such contexts, thus requires the recognition of ethnographic inconsistencies and uncertainties, and in consequence to challenge preconceptions, mystifications, stereotypes, and simplifications.

Exhibiting Galicia: Problems of Interpretation and Other Reflections on the Permanent Exhibition at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków

100%

Webber J.

Scripta Judaica Cracoviensia

2020

vol. 18

105-124

The exhibition “Traces of Memory” presents about 150 present-day large-format colour photographs of the Jewish heritage still to be seen in many different towns in that part of Galicia which is today in Poland. The exhibition is innovative in museological terms. It does not present the Jewish history of Galicia using conventional chronology; nor is it comprehensive. Rather it is divided into a simple five-part set of ideas intended to help visitors make sense of the complex, conflicting realities relating to Jewish heritage 75 years after the Holocaust: that Polish Galicia is full of the abandoned ruins of the Jewish past; it is also full of surviving fragments of pre-Holocaust times; full of places where the mass atrocities of the Holocaust took place; it is also full of post-war attempts to restore (or to abandon) sites of Jewish significance; and full of individuals, from all walks of life, contributing to a new visibility of Jewish culture in the Polish landscape. But piecing together the present-day evidence into a coherent five-part exhibition, by assigning such socio-cultural meanings to what the photos are deemed to represent, is not a straightforward matter. How “typical” are they as illustrations of one of those five ideas? How far can one generalize on the basis of decontextualised visual evidence - architecturally typical, historically typical, socio-culturally typical? The problem is that a photograph can simultaneously have multiple meanings; and this paper includes numerous examples. Part of that is because of the cultural displacement caused by the Holocaust and its after-effects. Just as a “synagogue” marked on a tourist map may in fact no longer really be a synagogue, so too one strategy of memorialising a devastated Jewish cemetery has often been to turn it into a lapidarium - a collection of surviving tombstones. In other words, when re-presented as heritage, such places may no longer “mean” what they were originally intended to mean. So often the Jewish heritage as presented through photographs is treated as self-evident. But in fact the same place, or the same photo, may mean different things to different people: meaning may thus be a matter of emphasis and interpretation, an ambiguity which is not always made fully explicit.

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1 Jednak Książki. Gdańskie Czasopismo Humanistyczne

1 Scripta Judaica Cracoviensia

2 Webber J.

1 2020

1 2016

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Making Sense of the Holocaust in Contemporary Poland: The Real and the Imagined, the Contradictions and the Paradoxes

Exhibiting Galicia: Problems of Interpretation and Other Reflections on the Permanent Exhibition at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków