Graveyards and an Inquiry into the Dead

Why are there stands of hardwoods in the middle of cities, in the midst of Warsaw and Lodz? The Jewish cemeteries span out for many acres behind walls. In Warsaw the Okopowa Street Jewish Cemetery, established in 1806, is eighty-three acres and the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe. The walls are brick, much like the Jewish ghetto walls of that city. The cemeteries are, of course, in once Jewish neighborhoods. They were part of daily life, part of the compound of Jewish living. Children played on and near cemetery grounds. I imagine there were markets and houses at its edges. The dead were close to life, though not part of it. Life pulsated around them, as Heaney writes, “Everywhere plants/Flourish among graves.” Those plants then are like people who are always living atop and alongside the dead. Their dead? Our dead? The dead are tree roots pushing us, reminding us that we, too, will enter the earth and become nourishment for plants.

The dead are both present among and entirely absent the living. I have disliked the term “the dead,” which marks those who have passed as a group, uniform, and obliterated. In Poland it was hard to feel that the dead had moved on. They lingered in history, in the places we visited. We went to them; we sought them out. Rather, I have preferred the seemingly more human phrase, “those who have died.” Yet, in writing now I feel that “the dead” is a group that represents all those many millions, billions, who have passed on before us living. We are always, every moment, some of us, joining the dead. The dead live among us in memory, but most of them, at least individually, are forgotten. Those who would remember them are gone as well. The dead is an idea, an idea that erases individuality, which is, of course, lost in death. The dead is a thought of all that has come and gone and that remains, in pieces, among us.

Entering those Jewish cemeteries takes time. One travels from their outer edges on paths that lead deep into their interiors, paths that often become increasingly forested. I had forgotten our small group was in the middle of a city. Once in the cemetery we were inside a forest, under a canopy, gravestones askew and angled atop the tenacious rise and push of tree roots. In Warsaw, I felt I had entered a story, like a child’s fairytale, and was the protagonist lost in a wood. Around me dwelled the remnants of many spirits. They were like ribbons haunting my path, circling their energies about my feet and in the air around me. They induced reverence, caution, attentiveness. Everywhere there were secrets, small spaces and walks that I could not see. The graves and their occupants were in relationship to one another. They had developed their own connections and divergences over the years. They had watched events appear and disappear. They knew temporality, whereas for me it was only an idea, a wish of enlightenment and knowledge. Only the graves by the path were visible to me. So much existed beyond.

I walked quietly, light of foot and silent, among many who had died and whose markers now crowded and competed for space. Long rows of gray stones standing upright at all angles disappeared into trees with arrowlike trunks. There were small iron fences, both inviting and protective, with motif of curlicue, even filigree, brownish with rust, around family plots. Each fence merited a poem. The fences lived in relationship to the grass, plants, and trees. Sometimes the living things completely obscured the graves; the fence was home to an unruly and unabashedly lush band of plants. There were large, artistic, expressive gravestones heavy with sculpture and verbose epitaphs for famous and wealthy people. Two prominent graves were those of Adam Czerniakow, head of the Judenrat in the Warsaw Ghetto, who killed himself the day before the liquidation and deportation of the ghetto, and Esther Rachel Kaminska (1870–1925), known as the mother of Yiddish Theater; the theater is still operative in Warsaw. These gravestones asserted a command to remembrance, almost forcing it on the visitor. They reminded me how terrible and difficult it is to pass quietly when one has known attention and admiration in life. Others were humble—diminutive, broken, abandoned, their letters erased by time, snow, wind, and vandalism. A Jewish star carved into stone was more impactful and prominent than a name.

A Turn to Narrative: Contemplations on the Presentation of History at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Italian chemist, writer, and camp survivor Primo Levi wrote in his “Self-Interview” in 1976, "I returned to Auschwitz in 1965...I didn't feel anything much when I visited the central camp. The Polish government has transformed it into a kind of national monument.” What does it take to feel the past and to mourn at Auschwitz, I wonder as a visitor, a scholar, an Auschwitz Jewish Center fellow, and a human being horrified at the genocide that transpired here. What does it take to feel in this place and in response to this place and its history when Levi felt nothing upon his return to the camp twenty years after his imprisonment there? In asking this question, I have in a mind a turn to narrative, the definition of which I delineate here in a narrative of my visit to Auschwitz. My own entry into Auschwitz has been through narrative. 

The reason I had come to Auschwitz, even to Poland, was because of a passion for reading and teaching Levi’s two-part memoir, Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening, of his ten months in the camp, in particular Buna-Monowitz, a labor subcamp known also as Auschwitz III. His memories channeled into narrative motivated my desire to apply to the Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellows Program and to visit the sites about which he wrote, sites that had drastically influenced his life course, his thoughts, and his writing career. He had even admitted, bravely, I thought, that if he had not lived his Auschwitz experience, he probably would have never have written anything. So, it was Levi’s words and his need to write that emerged of his camp experience that I carried with me into Auschwitz, even as I visited a place that I understood has become a tourist site, a memorial drastically changed from the killing and labor camp it was from 1940-1945.          

Given my own narrative pull to Poland, I want to explore here how a turn to narrative offers a way to navigate the camp space, both mental and physical. Over my three days at Auschwitz I experienced that the possibility that knowing, hearing, seeing, and imagining individual and community stories of those deported to the camp opens to the visitor space for grieving, feeling, and acknowledging the horror and loss implicit in a visit to these charnel grounds. Levi’s humanity as it emerged in his language and his writing over the years influenced me as a writer, thinker, and scholar to seek out other such narratives during my several day-visits to Auschwitz. In speaking of survival, Levi wrote that he felt his steadfast interest in the human spirit and his determination to “recognize in my companions and myself, men, not things.” So, too, narrative matters because it grounds the visitor in the experience of individual human beings whose memories as reflected in a written account, a sketch, or a photo—convey relationship with others, emotions of hope and fear, and the courage that documentation and reflection requires. Such narratives help visitors to connect to the tenacious continuity of human experience within the camp. Finally, the attuned visitor may discover several small stories, or the possibilities of such stories, in the documentation and artifacts (Levi called these artifacts “relics”) in the exhibits at Auschwitz.

 Auschwitz-Birkenau is a state museum, funded by the Polish government. It was established in 1946 by several former prisoners who wanted to create a memorial at the site. Gradually, the memorial developed into a museum. Under Communism the emphasis on memorialization was on those “martyred” in the Second World War, with less emphasis on the genocide of specifically Jewish prisoners. Since the early 1990s with Poland’s transition to democratic government, there has been exponential growth in the preservation of artifacts, including buildings, as well as in the scope of educational programs and global digital presence of the museum. At peak periods—from April to October—up to 15,000 people visit Auschwitz in a single day. Individuals must visit the camp in tours, between 10-3, with a specially trained guide so that they stay together, learn the history and see particular areas of the camp. Our guide was Pawel Sawicki, a journalist and writer with the Press Office for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum. Pawel noted that in visiting the camp “it is individuals who are a problem; people must take tours.” What this means is that individuals sometimes venture into areas not open to the public or under renovation. The emphasis on groups helps to deter individual exploration of Auschwitz. If individuals experience the camp only in groups, they have little space for their own experience of the place. This loss of individual experience constitutes the very reason that stories should constitute a core element shaping the contemporary visitor’s time there. However, due to sheer numbers of visitors, people must move quickly through exhibits housed in the former cellblocks of the Auschwitz I compound. Keeping a steady pace through narrow hallways that open into crowded exhibit rooms, a summer crowd ahead and behind, the visitor may try to comprehend the enormity of atrocity and the total loss for individuals, particularly for Jewish people, as they arrived to the camp from transport trains. The effect of such absorption is stupefying. Cases of hair, shoes, glasses, prosthetics—extensions of one’s very self and one’s ability to function in the world—form decaying mountains of intimate things that never should have become relics of genocide.

Inherent to the museum’s visitation policy is the notion that how one conducts oneself is important to the maintenance of the place as memorial and one’s experience of it. This is a museum after all. Yet, some fellow visitors’ faces betray horror and disgust. A restless silence periodically befalls us. In the long narrow room with suitcases, hair, and children’s shoes there is a tangible atmosphere of disbelief—in confronting the space and its remains. We visitors must confront the evidence that systematic cruelties happened right here and how, if at all, we respond. Sighs puncture the space, small words between intimates, people who have known one another over time and who can, perhaps without misunderstanding, confess their horror to one another. The sighs seem to surge into one sustained out-breath of injury and mark a particular heaviness of repressed emotion in response to these artifacts.

In the exhibits of Auschwitz I there are placards, dates, numbers, statistics, reports of transports, and historical photos, particularly of a particular Hungarian transport in1944. But the visitor must glimpse these artifacts, rather than linger and invite a potentially emotional response to them. In this space, I sometimes stop to hear Pawel’s voice explain photos, documents, and artifacts. I search for relationships within photographs of transports. These isolated images move me. I gravitate toward particular moments, names, a face, toward evidence of life. A photo of a man, in prison clothes, seemingly well fed, and woman, newly arrived, talking, saying something urgently, some last words, some counsel for survival, an almost passionate moment on the train ramp. What could their relationship be? I may continue to read, imagine, and translate that photo for the remainder of my life. A boy holding a woman’s hand—his mother?—surrounded by children and women hurrying along, apprehension, exhausted. Those photos will catalyze poems. I will return to them in search of vaporous specificities of personal histories never available to me, never narrated and remembered to anyone, but somehow shared with all of us.

Facing those photos from 1944, what stood out to me were instances, vitally important, between people on the ramps as they were driven from trains and corralled and ordered into lines that led towards the gas chambers. I knew that I would later attempt to express those subtle yet vital interactions between people: moments of shared humanity, of fear and love, of existing together in myriad ways, clinging to one another in the face of grave uncertainty, subsumed with hope and desperation and aching need.

“We must be disciplined now,” Pawel tells our group, “in order to get through this tour and see certain things.” We are slow, dragging, lingering over documents and relics. He may lose us in the hallways. We will not have time to finish the tour. Disciplined, orderly. Is this how we visitors are to behave here in Auschwitz? Yes, there are lines, streams of people channeling through halls and stairways. Yet, even as we hurry and attend to our guide, we see so little of the camp. Past the shooting wall, through Block 11, in a line past cells—one of starvation, another of standing, into which four men bent and crawled and stood for days. I rub the Buddha charm at my neck. “How do you do this?” I ask Pawel who is just in front of me. He grimaces. “Do you get used to it? It’s your job.” He hardens himself. “Yes,” he says, always focused on moving us through. We enter the innards of a gas chamber for a minute. We move through. Perhaps moving through is a glimpse, a memory with intention to return to full life, an entry into and surfacing from the historicized grounds of genocide and murder.

Pawel later shares that at Auschwitz “the tour suppresses a need for internal narrative and also prevents emergence of such a narrative.” The museum’s aim, he explains, is not to encourage an emotional experience of the place but to impart historical knowledge of the camps. I resist the idea that one can or should suppress an internal narrative, but upon further reflection imagine the problems germane to a museum space of sobbing and shaking, overtly horrified, grief-stricken, enraged, or overwhelmed people. The priority is to recognize the place and the things within it that point to an historical understanding over and above an all-consuming emotional response to its energies.

At home with books and solitude, a quiet afternoon, a garden at the window, I listen. I turn to songs and voices, writing towards poetry, pleas for forgiveness, for life, full of grief and understanding. In these crucial texts of Auschwitz I return to to grapple with what Father Manfred Deselaers at the Center for Dialogue and Prayer called the lifelong wound of Auschwitz. In dialogue with the fellow, Fr. Dr. Deselaers said, “The task is to try to understand and to take this wound seriously. It touches us and we think it has to do with us, but what?” Such a lifetime inquiry brings one into an ethical engagement with the place of Auschwitz and the words that remain among humans because of that place. Auschwitz began with the killing of relationship, says the Father. My turn then to narrative, both in visiting the camp and once home, reflects a deep desire to mend relationships across time, place, and event. One such text that nourishes that longing is Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After, written twenty years after her repatriation to France. She describes this no-place where she has landed from her native France, transported into some dislocated deep winterscape, “We arrived on a morning in January 1943. The doors of the cattle cars were pushed open, revealing the edge of an icy plain. It was a place from before geography. Where were we? We were to find out—later, at least two months hence; we, that is those of us who were still alive two months later—that this place was called Auschwitz. We couldn’t have given it a name.”

Seventy years later, its name has burned in our consciousness. Of our contemporary relationship with the camp, Pawel says, “We have only the place and words,” neither of which Delbo and her compatriots had upon their arrival. It is words that persist and flourish against the violence and against the forgetting of history. The modest, even minimal, remains of buildings, monuments, exhibits, and words structure humanity’s current relationship with the camp. For example, just 3-5% of all original documents and records in the camp remain. Most were destroyed, some were confiscated by camp liberators, the Russians. The loss of objects through war makes potent the gradual shift to narrative as a means of processing and feeling one’s visit to the camp. Such a shift indicates that this memorial-museum space has begun to relinquish a focus on historical facts and a lingering political ideological narrative (of Communist Poland) that speaks of martyrdom over the uniqueness of individual lives for more personal, narrative-driven guidance through the camp. 

Such a turn manifests in an exhibit at Birkenau of 2,400 photos found in suitcases and discovered after camp liberation in 1945. It is reflected, too, when in Birkenau on the second day of the tour, Pawel reads to fellows from testimonies he has carefully chosen to allow a feeling for camp conditions and how those who lived and survived here experienced the place. At the edge of a stand of birches, near the crumbling bricks of former gas chamber five he reads to us from Henryk Mandelbaum recounting of his experience as a Sonderkommando. Mandelbaum describes the process of killing within the gas chambers, the extraction of hundreds of bodies and the subsequent cremation of bodies. We are in Birkenau, the death camp, built to house more prisoners and to accommodate a growing number of gas chambers to kill them. Ironically, the vastness of Birkenau (“birch” in German), the spaces between structures and the paths through woods and along marshy waterways, allows more time to think and feel. In the former barracks, many of these buildings currently undergoing restoration, Pawel reads a woman prisoner’s careful logging of the disease, filth, and dying that developed in the female camp quarters.

These readings are somewhat new for our guide. He holds in his hands white sheets of paper of laser jet words. He wants us to hear firsthand accounts of the places we stand. How do we like it? Does it add to our sense of the place and what transpired here? He seems tentative, alert to our responses. As I leave the camp and consider prisoner memories given over to others, such as we visitors, I contemplate what a turn to narrative implies for historians, curators, educators, and press officers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum—those who preserve, present, and offer the memorial-museum and its space to those who visit. This turn constitutes a sort of risk. First it signifies that they make narratives essential to the visitor’s tour of the camps, so that narratives hold the rich potential to figure prominently in one’s post-visit recollections of the camps since they constitute a vital element in feeling and knowing the camps as they once were, not simply as historical markers of criminality and genocide, but as terrible and unforgettable spaces wherein people lived, loved, struggled, and died. It is life that must be honored, not en masse but as a unique and idiosyncratic expression of each individual. It matters that the guide feels the same way. That he believes reading a narrative memory is a way of remembering and feeling. It makes the guide, perhaps, as emotionally vulnerable, as human, as are his visitors. His turn to story validates all our stories in this place. This is not just an office, an everyday routine for him; it is a place of words and through him we listen.

Narratives mean that visitors need time and space to listen, to hear, and to respond quietly, as an interior process, to the experiences of others. The importance of visiting the camp resides in feeling the texture of life from the perspective of another human who experienced the camp. The connection to narrative facilitates a particular, yet enlarged, perspective of the camp as once inhabited by individuals. Delbo wrote in her memoir, Auschwitz and After, “Listening to their stories, I took the measure of the incommunicable.” It is the incommunicable that one may hear in Auschwitz. That listening happens in a space that fosters the ability to attend and feel narratives, both documented and silent, of former prisoners. Levi confessed he could feel nothing there, but because he gave me his story I felt something large and moving there, something with which to grapple for my entire life. So it is that narratives affirm our humanness in the exact place that sought to annihilate that humanity. 

Enjoying New York City

I've just returned from three weeks in Poland and am in NYC with my dear friend and fellow poet, Mary Ann Mayer. We have walked from Midtown to Lower Manhattan over the past two days--despite my jet lag from Krakow to Munich to New York. The summer city is hot, vibrant, alive with energy and people, a beautiful and gritty melange of humanity's relationships and creation. We visited Aperture Photography Gallery today and cruised around Manhattan on a boat. Cool and fun on the water!

I am working on a post on my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, but am letting that experience stew and ripen a bit before I share it.

My dreams upon return to the United States are filled with images and the traumas of history as I experienced them vicariously in Poland. Probably it will be a lifetime of integration and thinking about the travels there and those travels will influence and direct my critical and creative writing in many ways.

I return home as a post-doctoral student of life. A new phase after graduate school begins and I anticipate new poems, new essays, and continued conversations with others that enrich and deepen life and thinking. I hope you will all follow my blog as I continue to post short essays, poems, and ideas and photos here.

On the boat around Manhattan.

Brooklyn Bridge and Freedom Tower in the background.

Lower Manhattan. Trade Towers gone, the new Freedom Tower in their place.

Walking the High Line--an old railroad that delivered milk, meat, and other  goods in Manhattan.
Now a beautiful park and elevated garden over the city from 30th Street to 14th Street.

Synagogues in Poland

There are many synagogues in Poland, their states ranging from beautiful restoration to symbolic and literal states of disrepair, a reminder of the destruction of Jewish culture and community between 1939-1945. Our fellows group has visited synagogues in bigger cities like Krakow, Warsaw, and Lodz, and in small towns such as Szydlow, Dzialosycze, Chmielnik, and Oswiecim. At the time of the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 there were 3.5 million Jewish people in Poland. By war's end there were approximately 350,000. Ninety percent of Poland's Jewish population had been murdered. Synagogues in contemporary Poland, both post-war and post-Communist era, remind visitors of both the gradual resurgence and resilience of Jewish culture and of the destruction that virtually erased Jewish communities, towns, and urban centers that had, for the most part, thrived prior to the war.

Remuh Synagogue. Orthodox. Krakow, Poland. First built in 16th century,
destroyed in WWII and restored.

Issac Synagogue. Krakow, Poland, 1664.

Reform synagogue with neo-Moorish deisgn elements.
Krakow, Poland. 

Szydlow, Poland. A restored synagogue. Now also a museum and art center.

 Nożyk Synagogue, Warsaw. 1898.

Beautiful molding.

Women's section.

Lodz, Poland. Synagogue at Jewish cemetery.

Restored synagogue at Auschwitz Jewish Center, Oswiecim, Poland.

Flowers blossom and butterflies pollinate in the garden at Auschwitz Jewish Center.
Flowers thrive in Poland's humid weather and afternoon thundershowers nourish.

Partial Liberation: Thoughts and Lives of Meaning

Emanuel Ringelblum, organizer Oyneg Shabes, a secret documentation and archival project of the Warsaw Ghetto. Ringelblum was caught by the Germans in April 1943 and sent to the Trawniki labor camp. Escaping in August 1943, he hid in an underground bunker in Warsaw with his wife Yehudis, son Uri, and 34 others. Ringelblum worked nonstop in the bunker, writing a history of Polish–Jewish relations during World War II and essays on key members of the Jewish intelligentsia. These writings survived. On 7 March 1944, the Germans discovered the bunker and a few days later murdered all its inhabitants. Searchers found one cache of the Oyneg Shabes archive in 1946; a second was discovered in 1950. A third cache is still missing. Three members of the Oyneg Shabes survived the war: Hersh and Bluma Wasser and Rokhl Oyerbakh (Rachel Auerbach). YIVO

Janusz Korczak(1879-1942); born Henryk Goldszmit

Writer of critical essays and children's books, pediatrician, educator, philosopher, activist, director of orphanages and schools. He has been a controversial and beloved figure in history. His educational philosophy--that children are small adults, that they want to learn how to function in the world, that they have incredible wisdom--reminds me of Maria Montessori's educational philosophy. Korczak wrote that life never gives more than partial liberation and achievement can never be more than fragmentary. He would have understood the difficulties and joys of liberation and achievement given the tumultuous period during which he lived and died.

Julia (Diament) Pirotte, self portrait, 1942

Julia (Diament) Pirotte. Documentary photographer, born in Końskowola, Poland 1907 or 1908, Jewish, died in Warsaw in 2000. Emigrated to Belgium in 1934. Later lived in France and became involved in the French Resistance, using her camera as a kind of documentary weapon for truth. 

Photographed the aftermath of the Kielce pogrom, July 4, 1946, which resulted in the death of 42 Jewish refugees, returning to Poland from the Soviet Union, and who were planning to emigrate to Palestine and the United States. 

Her work is not widely known, at least in the United States. I first discovered her photos in Fear, an interpretative essay by Jan Gross on the Kielce events. I felt moved by a woman photographer during the war and wanted to know more about her. Her self portrait reveals her seriousness, introspection, and grief all at once.

In the years 1949–1950, the Jewish Historical Institute Archives accepted records of the dissolved post-war Jewish organizations, especially of the Central Committee of the Jews in Poland, but also of the Organization for the Development of Creativity, the Society for the Protection of Health, various parties and Zionist organizations (Ichud, Hanoar Ha-tziyoni, Poalei Zion, Hitachdut, Keren Ha-Yesod) and of the Bund. Documentation also reached the Archives from foreign organizations that had branches in post-war Poland: the American Joint Distribution Committee and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

The archival units are very large in volume and show in detail post-war Jewish life in Poland, together with the problems of emigration. Unique on a worldwide scale is the card catalogue — numbering nearly 300,000 records — of the Jews registered in Poland after the war. (JHI)

Dr. Elonora Bergman, Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw.

Dr. Bergman met with our AJC fellows group and explained her work with all matters related to editing and publishing of the materials of Ringelblum Archive. She grew up in Poland to Jewish parents who were active in the Communist Party and had survived imprisonment in Soviet Union. Prior to joining the Institute she conducted case studies related to the following fields: history — urban planning, history-architecture and history-conservation. She also conducted inventories of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries. Her training is as an architect-urban planner.