This
morning I look at the picture of Julia Pirotte (1907-2000), her self-portrait taken in
1942. It moves me. I return often to her sad reflectiveness, the camera there
as her eye, an eye that both protects her from and opens her to the world. She is already vulnerable, quietly
internal, and, simultaneously, so entirely immersed in and made of and by the
world. This is during the war. She has seen so much, maybe too much, more than
a human should see. Should we be forced to look? Charlotte Delbo’s words haunt me: look,
just try to see. It’s impossible. Truly impossible to look. Yet, Julia trains
her camera. She trains it on herself. She cannot look directly into the mirror.
The camera is her eye. It becomes her way of seeing, meditated through technology,
imprinted like a tattoo, the image, the moment of life on her eye. She chose
photography, or it chose her.
She wrote in an essay, “I like sadness: it’s more photogenic
than joy.” She knows sadness more than joy; it’s strangely familiar to her. She
lost her brother to typhus in a Gulag camp, her sister was guillotined by
Gestapo in Breslau (1944), her father and stepmother were murdered in death
camps, and her first husband, mobilized in the war, she never again saw. Her
mother had died when Julia was nine. She came from small town in Poland, between Lublin and Warsaw, called Końskowola.
In post-war Poland she
formed the WAF, the Military Photographic Agency. She was sent by the agency to
document the Kielce pogrom in July 1946. Many of her photos of that event the police confiscated and destroyed. There are some remaining and I have a
collection of those photos in Julia Pirotte: Faces and
Hands, as well as in Jan Gross’s book, Fear,
where I first discovered Pirotte’s work and felt compelled by this
Polish-Jewish woman’s war photos.
She called the camera a potential weapon—as
she learned when used in the wrong circumstances and others, also in the
midst of war, felt threatened and exposed by the camera’s eye. After that, she
turned it into an “instrument of struggle.” In 1934 she had left Poland for
Brussels. She was a Communist, involved in worker issues, photographing
strikes, working for small news agencies, an active member of the Resistance in
Brussels and France. Three decades after the war when
she visited her former Polish village, she saw her house but did not knock. She
recognized the climate that had developed through and after the war towards
Jews, their families mostly dead, their properties confiscated and moved into
by Polish families. She had remembered the violence to her camera. What was
once was no longer. Julia lived with that loss, cloaked in grief.
Many museum artifacts of Second World War and Jewish history in Poland come from those people who donated items and collections. So much was destroyed
in Poland in the wars and through communism, disappeared, taken. What remains, the
collections of historical documents, maps, photos at historical institutes, the
camps, the various small museums in former synagogues, has been assembled and
opened to the public painstakingly and after much work of collection, personal donation,
and time passed where history comes to meet the present and when some will come
to see and partake of its remnants. Poland is now beginning to claim and create
a history disallowed, silenced under the regimes it endured through communism. The work
of historical institutes is often retrospective in character. Whereas the work
of museums such as the Warsaw Uprising Museum, opened in 2004, is
technologically interactive and experiential in character. For Pirotte, there
was a box: press clippings, photos, folk songs in Yiddish, poems by Jewish
poets in Polish translations (all of them about the Holocaust)—“carefully
selected and something about you you’d rather not disclose. . . .Besides her
photographs, this folder with poems is the most personal testimony [she] left
behind," as poet Krystyna Dabrowska writes in Julia
Pirotte: Faces and Hands.
Why are you interested in Pirotte?, Maciek, our guide through
Poland, asks me at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw where I purchase a book of some her photos. I hear myself saying, “She is a woman and a photographer. I
feel compelled by her work.” Still, I’m unsure how I’m drawn to her during my
time in Poland, just that I am, and that she has stories to tell through her
work and hidden behind her photos and I want to know. I’m hungry, I’ve always
been hungry and my diet in childhood of these things, these histories was lean.
I’m seeking now, looking, listening, attentive and attuned. I’m quiet in the
hallways of museums. I want introspection, space, and solitude. I find myself
alone again and again, as often as possible, in Poland. The late afternoons
stretch toward evenings. In small spaces I enter into other times and places
that exist here, now, that return quietly, in pieces, never whole, with
attention and stillness. These moments, lives, histories, tracings are all
around us. We must look for them and stay with them for a while, let them
linger, penetrate and change us, when and where they find us.
