Publication: Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory

Berlin, Germany. Rosenstrasse Protest Monument. Ingeborg Hunzinger, artist. Monument installed 1995. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber.

Women of Ravenbruck. Exhibit at Florida Holocaust Museum.

Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory

Readers of the blog may be interested in Janet Jacobs book, published last year, that explores how women's experience of the Holocaust is described and commemorated. It is a rare work that addresses issues of gender, collective memory and public commemoration, particularly in monuments and memorial museums. Dora Apel and Barbie Zelizer and others have done this, too, particularly in regard to the work of individual artists.

Having recently been a consultant for the archaeological excavation in Cologne, and visited Worms again, I am particularly interested in her views in chapter 5 (as reported by Boffey), that

For Jacobs, the effect of drawing attention to pre-genocide Jewry is to exoticize Jewish culture and tradition. As she sees it, the darkened, subterranean exhibition spaces at sites such as the Rashi House Jewish Museum in Worms lends a mix of nostalgic rural pastiche and hints of "Otherness" to depictions of pre-twentieth-century Jewish heritage. The suggestion that this "embed[s] the Jew in a medieval archaeology" (p. 125), facilitating a disidentification on the part of German audiences, is an interesting one. To be sure, this kind of distancing could conceivably smooth over the problematic fact that a great many Jewish Holocaust victims were also Germans--and assimilated Germans at that. But to argue, as Jacobs does, that this actually "re-stigmatizes" the Jews, who can then be "blamed for their own suffering and destruction" (p. 132), unfairly does away with the searching debates conducted within reunified Germany (not to mentionthose already taking place in the Federal Republic of Germany prior to 1989) that revolve around exactly this issue of German guilt and complicity in the Holocaust.[1] (Boffney, paragraph 6, below)

Worms, Germany. Rashi Lehrhaus. Judaica Exhibit on lower level. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber (2011)

More often, it has been argued that such exhibits - and excavations such as that in Cologne - provided discomfort to Germans in the past - and may still do so - precisely because they embed Jews deep in the German past, and re-establish their role as players in a long history. The antiquity of Jews in German continues to be much-debated and contentious issue. This point, however, seems to be only a small part of Jacobs thesis.

Another point she apparently raises (Boffney, below paragraph 5) - which parallels my own experience and perception - is her equating the exhibition of damaged Torah scrolls in memorial and especially historical exhibitions with medieval depictions of the vanquished synagoga figure. While ostensibly presented to inform and perhaps evoke pity or outrage, the damaged scroll often really serve as evidence of effective destruction - and the passing of "the old law." A Jew may be offended by these presentaiton. Non-Jews are fascinated by the exoticism and thus irrelevancy of the scroll. It could just as well be an old Sumerian cuneiform tablet, an excavated curio.

Berlin, Germany. Torah Scroll as Holocaust Monument, designed By Richard Hess and erected in 1987 outside the 'Judisches Gemendehaus' (Jewish Community Centre) on FasanenStrasse.  The quote next to the shape of the Torah scroll is: "A law is for the citizen and for the stranger that is among you." (Numbers 15:16). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber (1989)

Defeated sinagoga. Sculpture from Trier Cathedral.

I have not read Jacobs book yet, and won't get a chance to do so for awhile, so I re-post here Richard Boffey's detailed review from H-Net.

Richard Boffey review on H-Net of Janet Jacobs, "Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory"

Janet Liebman Jacobs. Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocideand Collective Memory. London I.B. Tauris, 2010. xxviii + 176 pp.$85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84885-103-0.
Reviewed by Richard Boffey (University of Leeds)
Published on H-Memory (November, 2011) Commissioned by Catherine Baker

In Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory, Janet Jacobs explores commemoration of the Holocaust in monuments, museums, and memorials through the lens of gender. Jacobs's book investigates how, at a range of sites in Germany and eastern Europe as well as the United States and Australia, gendered visual narratives contribute to traumatic collective memories of violence and genocide. Utilizing what she describes as a blend of cultural studies and visual sociological approaches and also drawing upon Marianne Hirsch and Barbie Zelizer's pioneering work on visual narratives of the Holocaust, Jacobs looks at the ways in which these memorial forms communicate Jewish victimhood. As it turns out, her conclusions paint a rather ambivalent picture of memorialization. [1]Chief amongst her concerns is that the presentation of Jewish men and women along highly stylized gendered lines in the sites she examines might unintentionally "denigrate" (p. 156) the memory of the victims.

Jacobs begins with a short introduction that maps out the efforts made by recent memory studies research to explain the role of the Holocaust in contemporary processes of identity construction. She sees a place for the "memorial scapes" (p. xx) she has studied in propping up an institutionalized, Holocaust-centered memory culture, but rather than look at their role in the politics of memory she focuses specifically on the category of gender at these sites. A theoretical chapter then reflects on her dual role as empathetic female spectator and distanced, critical researcher--a "role conflict" (p. 33) lying at the heart of her ethnographic approach.

In what is a fascinating meditation on this so-called double vision (p. 37), Jacobs considers the ethical implications of a feminist gaze, in particular with regard to its inherent selectivity and inadvertent voyeurism. Might focusing exclusively on representations of women's suffering, she asks, risk reproducing a fetishized gaze drawn to the female body whilst relegating the experiences of men and children to the ethnographic background? Likewise how can Jacobs, a Jewish woman, analyze and photograph these images of atrocity without subjecting herself to a kind of traumatic transference? In answer to the first question, Jacobs has decided also to look at accompanying representations of Jewish masculinity at her research sites in order to mitigate the objectification of her primary research subjects. In answer to the second, she proposes to use her camera and field notes to create an "intellectual space" (p. 38) for managing her emotions and maintaining critical distance.

Jacobs begins the remaining five chapters by discussing the representation of women at the Auschwitz memorial museum. In photos, memorial sculptures, and artifact installations displayed at the site, she discerns a prevalence of maternal imagery on the one hand and sexualized representations of the female body on the other. Whilst the former casts Jewish women as passive victims, the latter turns the act of spectating from remembrance into "sexual objectification" (p. 45). At the Ravensbruck concentration camp memorial, the subject of chapter 3, Jacobs sees a Christianizing frame of remembrance. This is apparent above all in prisoners' depictions of a "woman-made hell" (p. 63) that feature female guards as diabolical tormenters in black capes and in the motif of a martyred female victim that appears in a number of memorials to national prisoner groups.

Chapter 4 deals with German memorials to the 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms. In the memorials Jacobs has surveyed, both this incident and by extension the Holocaust in a broader sense are represented primarily as the destruction of a religion and culture, not as the destruction of a people. Indeed, visual symbols such as a desecrated Torah appear in these memorials with telling frequency. For Jacobs this equates to an "emasculation" of the Jewish sacred text that effectively severs its link to a powerful patriarchal God and reduces the scrolls to a "defeated and ruined female archetype" (p. 102). In this sense, she sees Kristallnacht memorials as unconsciously aping medieval anti-Semitic religious iconography, in which the Jewish synagogue for instance was represented as a defeated and vanquished female figure, Synagoga.

The focus is broadened in chapter 5 to investigate efforts at memorializing medieval and early modern Jewish life in Germany and eastern Europe, thereby situating representations of the Holocaust within a broader language of memorialization. For Jacobs, the effect of drawing attention to pre-genocide Jewry is to exoticize Jewish culture and tradition. As she sees it, the darkened, subterranean exhibition spaces at sites such as the Rashi House Jewish Museum in Worms lends a mix of nostalgic rural pastiche and hints of "Otherness" to depictions of pre-twentieth-century Jewish heritage. The suggestion that this "embed[s] the Jew in a medieval archaeology" (p. 125), facilitating a disidentification on the part of German audiences, is an interesting one. To be sure, this kind of distancing could conceivably smooth over the problematic fact that a great many Jewish Holocaust victims were also Germans--and assimilated Germans at that. But to argue, as Jacobs does, that this actually "re-stigmatizes" the Jews, who can then be "blamed for their own suffering and destruction" (p. 132), unfairly does away with the searching debates conducted within reunified Germany (not to mention those already taking place in the Federal Republic of Germany prior to 1989) that revolve around exactly this issue of German guilt and complicity in the Holocaust.[1]

A concluding chapter analyzes two Holocaust memorial museums outside Europe and also draws together the geographically wide-ranging case studies introduced in preceding chapters. The two sites examined here, one in Melbourne and the other in Indiana, both attest to "women's creativity and vision" (p. 141) insofar as female Holocaust survivors and their relatives had a large hand in founding them. Moreover, they both set the more canonical photographic representations of Jewish victims--groups of Jewish men moments before execution or liberated Jewish women survivors of the concentration camps, for example--against photos of survivors' families that predate the Holocaust. In this way, Jacobs argues, the trope of women's relationships and kinship bonds serves to yoke the memory of observers to the lives of individual Jewish victims. In this familial frame of remembrance, Jacobs sees an alternative approach to the memory of genocide that might avoid the pitfalls of alienation or voyeurism.

It is not until late in the chapter that Jacobs considers whether other visitors to the sites she has surveyed would share her concern at the "unintended consequences of memorialization" (p. 153). If she feels there are unresolved "issues of gender, anti-Semitism, and representations of victimization" (p. 153) at the center of today's collective memory of the Holocaust, then the question of exactly whose collective memory this is remains unanswered. Indeed, Jacobs herself remarks that "it is ... my interpretative framework through which these monuments and sites have been evaluated and understood"(p. xxii). It would have been valuable to hear more about how the (often problematic) tropes and motifs Jacobs has identified are perceived by others. Underdeveloped sections in chapter 3 on ritual patterns of remembrance at Ravensbruck and in chapter 4 concerning the conceptual and financial involvement of Jewish groups in bringing about memorials would suggest a complex landscape of memorial agents and observers. As it is, however, the sites emerge in the narrative as rather static and two-dimensional.

This could also have been avoided with a keener alertness to historical and present-day contexts at certain points, particularly in the chapter on Ravensbruck. Jacobs castigates the memorial site for not explicitly mentioning that the subject of a memorial stone at the crematorium was Jewish. "Because this memorial has been placed at the crematorium," she argues, "the absence of a Jewish narrative is all the more striking and highlights the as yet unresolved issues of Jewish invisibility in German memory" (p. 74). Yet the crematorium at Ravensbruck was not primarily a site of Jewish suffering in the way that the crematoria at extermination camps in occupied eastern Europe were--Jewish inmates made up around 15 percent of the total prisoner population at the former. Collapsing together Jewish suffering and the symbol of the crematorium in this way arguably reduces National Socialist racial policy to its anti-Semitic dimensions, resembling the thrust of Anglo-American "Holocaust Education" discourses that have emerged since the turn of the millennium.[3] Jacobs might have asked whether this context has worked its way into her own analysis.Similarly, she overlooks the ideological function of the "Burdened Woman" statue at Ravensbruck in the German Democratic Republic.Certainly, one can read it as a symbol of Christian maternity, as Jacobs does. But a closer look reveals that, unlike a traditional Pieta, the statue also appears to be striding forward, signifying anew beginning that resonated with the GDR's self-proclaimed antifascist genealogy. Political imperatives therefore also served to marginalize the Jewish Holocaust in this statue.[4]

These criticisms notwithstanding, Janet Jacobs has written a thoughtful and lucid study on Holocaust memorialization. Where the book is most successful is in its exploration of the relationship between memorial and observer, convincingly employing a feminist approach to interrogate the assumption that Holocaust memorials "honor" the memory of victims they purport to commemorate. Future studies in this field will be able to profit from Jacobs's ethical critique and couple it to a more differentiated understanding of collective memory.

Notes

[1]. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Barbie Zelizer, Visual Culture and the Holocaust (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000).

[2]. These were triggered not least by the publication of Daniel Goldhagen's highly controversial Hitler's Willing Executioners:Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996).

[3]. In particular since the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, January 26-28, 2000. Seehttp://www.holocausttaskforce.org/.

[4]. See Insa Eschebach, "Soil, Ashes, Commemoration: Processes of Sacralization at the Ravensbruck Former Concentration Camp,"History & Memory 23 (2011): 131-157; 141-142.

Citation: Richard Boffey. Review of Jacobs, Janet Liebman, Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory. H-Memory, H-Net Reviews. November, 2011.URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3D34573
This work is licensed under a Creative CommonsAttribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United StatesLicense.

Exhibition: Photos of Death Camp Drawings on View at Auschwitz

Exhibition: Photos of Death Camp Drawings on View at Auschwitz

Forbidden Art is the title of a new exhibition at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum Memorial on view until November 20, 2011 on the grounds of the former Auschwitz I camp in the camp laundry building.
The exhibition features photographic reproductions of twenty works of art made illegally and under the threat of death by prisoners in German Nazi concentration camps. The photographs are accompanied by commentary and excerpts from archival accounts.

Artists represented in the exhibit include: Peter Edel, Maria Hiszpańska, Franciszek Jaźwiecki, Mieczysław Kościelniak, Halina Ołomucka, Stanisława Panasowa-Stelmaszewska, Marian Ruzamski, Josef Sapcaru, Włodzimierz Siwierski, Zofia Stępień, Józef Szajna, Stanisław Trałka, The anonymous artist with the initials MM, other Aanonymous artists.

On the Auschwitz memorial webpage you can also view a gallery of over 90 artworks from the camp and post-liberation period.

The exhibit is scheduled to travel.

Read more about the exhibtion here.

Poland: Auschwitz’s future secure, preservationists worry about ‘forgotten’ Nazi camps

Auschwitz’s future secure, preservationists worry about ‘forgotten’ Nazi camps

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · October 12, 2011

ROME (JTA) -- Auschwitz, the most notorious camp in the Nazi killing machine, may soon claim success in its campaign to preserve the legacy of the Holocaust.

The foundation supporting the site in southern Poland has attracted tens of millions of dollars from donor countries, and the camp’s barracks and other buildings seem set to be preserved for decades to come. The museum memorial at the former Nazi death camp attracts more than 1 million visitors per year.

Some fear, however, that the concentration of resources and attention on Auschwitz could overshadow other preservation efforts and threaten the integrity or even the existence of the memorials and museums at lesser-known camps and Holocaust sites in Poland.

"Because Auschwitz is treated as the symbol of the Holocaust and the whole world is supporting only this museum, everybody in Poland, including the government, seems to think that this is enough," said historian Robert Kuwalek, a curator at the state-run Museum at Majdanek, the Nazi concentration camp and killing center near Lublin in eastern Poland. "The problem is deeper because it is the lack of basic knowledge that the Holocaust happened in forgotten sites like Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Chelmno.”

Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were the three killing centers of the so-called Operation Reinhard plan to murder 2 million Polish Jews in 1942 and 1943. During that operation, Kuwalek said, "more people were killed in a shorter time than in Auschwitz-Birkenau during the whole period that that camp functioned."

Despite their importance in the history of the Holocaust, these and other sites -- such as the forced labor camps at Stuffhof and Gross-Rosen -- are overlooked by the vast majority of visitors who want to learn about the Holocaust or pay homage to its victims firsthand. All are marked by memorials or even museums. But some are located in remote parts of the country, and most are in serious need of upkeep and preservation.

Read the entire article here.

Exhibition: Architecture of Murder: The Auschwitz-Birkenau Blueprints

Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate Avner Shalev studies one of the plans in the exhibition together with Prime Minister Netanyahu. Photo: Courtesy of Yad Vashem

Exhibition: Architecture of Murder: The Auschwitz-Birkenau Blueprints at Yad Vashem

January 27th is International Holocaust Remembrance Day - a Commemoration recently established by the United Nations to be celebrated on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops in 1945. In fact, when the Red Army arrived there was little to liberate. The German had moved west forcing a deadly evacuation of Jewish prisoners by forced march. Only the very sick and the dead remained to greet the advancing Russians (see the final entries in Primo Levi's famed memoir Se Questo e un Uomo (Survival in Auschwitz).

On Monday, January 25th, as part of a symposium for the diplomatic corps in Israel, a new exhibition, Architecture of Murder: The Auschwitz-Birkenau Blueprints will open at Yad Vashem. On display will be original architectural blueprints of Auschwitz-Birkenau, given to Yad Vashem for safekeeping last summer by the German newspaper Bild, For more on today's event click here.

For a video presentation about the architectural and engineering plans and drawings click here.

According to the website of Yad Vashem:

“The original plans detailing the construction of Auschwitz, constitute graphic illustration of the Germans’ systematic effort to carry out the ‘Final Solution.’,” said Avner Shalev, Chairman of Yad Vashem. “We have chosen to display them to the public to illustrate how seemingly conventional activities of ordinary people brought about the construction of the largest murder site of European Jewry.”

Marking the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, the opening will take place as part of a special symposium in the presence of dozens of members of the diplomatic corps - representing some 80 countries - and Auschwitz survivors, and with the participation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Prime Minister, Minister of Education Gideon Saar, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, Holocaust survivor Ruth Bondy, Prof. Shlomo Avineri, Prof. Moshe Halbertal, Bild Editor Kai Diekmann, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Director Dr. Piotr Cywinski, Historical Advisor to the exhibition Dr. Daniel Uziel, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council Rabbi Israel Meir Lau and Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate Avner Shalev will address the participants.

The exhibition was curated by Director the Museums Division Yehudit Inbar. Along with the blueprints, the photo album of the construction of Auschwitz will be exhibited for the first time. In addition, an aerial photo of Auschwitz from the RAF, the Vrba-Wetzler Report (written by two Jewish escapees from Auschwitz in 1944), and quotes from SS men and Jewish prisoners describing the site and its murderous purposes. A copy of the poem “Death Fugue” by Paul Celan will also be displayed.

The exhibition is funded thanks to the generous support of the Greg Rosshandler and Harry Perelberg families, Australia.

A traveling version of the exhibition will open at the United Nations in New York in advance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The exhibition will open in the presence of Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Public Diplomacy Yuli-Yoel Edelstein, US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gabriela Shalev, Chairman of the American Society for Yad Vashem Eli Zbrowoski, and curator of the exhibition and Director of the Yad Vashem Museums Division Yehudit Inbar.

Poland: Still Urgency in Preservation of Jewish Sites

Poland: Still Urgency in Preservation of Jewish Sites

by Samuel D. Gruber

A recent article in the Jerusalem Post emphasizes the continuing need for resources (money!) and action to protect and preserve the Jewish heritage sites of Poland. Much has been done in the past 20 years...but the task has always been enormous and the support slow and small.

I've written frequently about the work of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland (FODZ) and its important role of stewardship of abandoned and neglected Jewish historic properties- especially cemeteries and former synagogues - throughout Poland. These are the place the no active Jewish communities - or anyone else - choose to use or care for. The costs in money, labor, materials and education to protect, maintain, preserve and properly present this sites is tremendous, and the real cash resources of the Foundation are extremely limited. General funds are needed for the upkeep of hundreds of cemeteries, and targeted donations can also be used for specific repair, restoration and education projects underway or in the planning stage.

The need for this work is not new. I recently came across this passage from 1947 from artist Louis Lozowick:

"A short time ago I heard a traveller, recently returned from Poland, tell the now familiar tale of Nazi depredation, violence and inhumanity. One thing caught my ear especially. 'From time to time,' he said, 'climbing over the rubble piled high where a house of worship used to be, you discover a piece of wood carving, from the Aron perhaps, a twisted metal candlestick, a painted slab. I read of so many millions and tens of millions of dollars spent on charity here and abroad - couldn't some pennies be spared to salvage the few remaining relics of a rich cultural heritage , while there is still time?"

[Louis Lozowick, "Synagogue Art: Review of Jewish Art in European Synagogues by George Loukomski' Menorah Journal (Autumn 1948), pp. 380-384. cited in Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 2007), p 94].

Many of appeals I wrote in the early 1990s while Director of the Jewish Heritage Council of the World Monuments Fund have similar urgency.

Even before the Holocaust many historic Jewish sites were rundown. Forgotten by many is the fact that some Jewish sites received government support for repairs since they were recognized as national historic monuments. But after the general destruction of war and the targeted destruction as part of the genocide of the Holocaust, came decades of neglect under Communism. As I have written elsewhere, only in the 1980s did this begin to change - for a very few sites (such as the former synagogue in Tykocin, Staary Synagogue in Krakow, and the Nosyk Synagogue in Warsaw). Gradually through the 1990s the pace of care for Jewish sites accelerated due to private and public initiatives. Still, the amount of work to do is immense, and the total resources applied are minuscule compared to other national and international initiatives for cultural projects (and I won't even try to compare the costs against the price of single tomahawk or cruise missile, or a fighter plane or an unmanned drone).

In recent years with the slow, often erratic but continuing process of communal property restitution - responsibility for a great many sites has shifted to the Jewish Communities in Poland and to the FODZ, but financial support remains elusive. Some have pointed out restitution of many properties has allowed Polish authorities to unburden themselves of near-useless properties - and the responsibility (mostly avoided) - for their care. Some Jewish administrators while recognizing a moral need to protect these sites have hesitated to receive them, knowing the resources for their care are lacking- which can (and has) allowed in some cases a shift of blame for neglect from Poles to Jews. In truth, care for these properties is a collective problem and a collective responsibility of Poles and Jews, and of the international community.

Last month it was announced that Germany has contributed €60 million to the Perpetual Fund of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation - about half the amount said to be needed to implement the entire master conservation plan for the extensive concentration and death camp site. No total of funds spent to conserve and restore other Jewish sites in Poland exists, but I would estimate that the total spent in 20 years on care for some 1500 cemeteries and former synagogues probably does not exceed half the amount of the recent Auschwitz contribution, and perhaps much less. This includes the major restoration projects of the synagogues of Wroclaw, Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow, as well as ongoing work at Zamosc, Lancut and elsewhere. Most modest Polish cemetery interventions still run between 10,000 and 50,000 euro. Building complete walls around cemeteries can cost much more - and therefore is rarely done. No similar fund for Jewish cemeteries has even been created - despite many efforts over the years. The current work of FODZ is the closest that has been achieved.

I do support continued international support for the preservation of Auschwitz and other death camp and Holocaust-related sites – and I praise the conservation initiative – one begun twenty years ago. I continue to believe, however, that similar efforts must be made to protect and find new and appropriate use for the remaining physical traces of the Jewish cultural and religious life and achievement that was destroyed. Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Belzec and other camps are cemeteries and memorials. Their protection honors the dead, and continues to remind us of their suffering as victims of Nazi culture of intolerance, cruelty, destruction and death. But the care and preservation of older cemeteries, synagogues and other Jewish sites remembers the culture of Jews – not Nazism. Preservation (and explanation) honors the dead, but also recognizes generations of Jewish culture and community of faith, leaning, creativity and community.

For more information about how to help fund Jewish heritage projects in Poland, please contact me directly at samuelgruber@gmail.com

Poland: Ruth Ellen Gruber on "Dark Tourism" & Auschwitz

Dachau, Germany. Crematorium on Display. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber

Poland: Ruth Ellen Gruber on "Dark Tourism" & Auschwitz

I recommend an essay by Ruth Ellen Gruber posted today on her blog. Her topic deal with the term and phenomenon now known as "Dark Tourism," and how visits to Jewish sites deserve this rubric. In this context, she describes her most recent visit to Auschwitz earlier this month.

Poland -- Dark Tourism at Auschwitz

Several years ago I gave a paper entitled "Sites of Shame: How We Remember Places We'd Rather Forget" at a conference called Framing Public Memory. My paper was not specifically about Jewish sites, but certainly they were part of the discussion. I never published that paper, but in reponse to Ruth's post, I will look it again, and think of new ways to address this question.

France: Holocaust Monument at Drancy (Paris) Vandalized

France: Holocaust Monument at Drancy (Paris) Vandalized

by Samuel D. Gruber

(ISJM) Various news reports describe the vandalism of the Holocaust Monument at Drancy (now a northern suburb of Paris, midway between the city center and Charles De Gaulle airport), France, on April 11, 2009. A video surveillance camera filmed the act and the perpetrators.

Drancy was the primary point of collection and deportation of over 67,000 (some estimates cite 77,000) French Jews (and some others) to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor, from where few returned. Approximately 3,000 prisoners died at Drancy from malnutrition and mistreatment.

Today, a memorial consisting a large sculpture by Shlomo Selinger and a small exhibition located in a former transport boxcar was established in 1976.

A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust describes the monument as follows (with extensive photos):

Sculpture: The two blocks to the side of the central sculpture symbolize the doors of death. Drancy was considered to be the anteroom of death. The central sculpture is composed of 10 people, representing the number of people necessary for collective prayer (Minyan). On the front of the central sculpture a man and a woman embody suffering and dignity. In the center, the head of a man wearing the ritual cube (Tefilin) symbolizes prayer. Below, two inverted heads symbolize death. The Hebrew letters "LAMED" and "VAV" are formed by the hair, arms and beard of the two people at the top of the sculpture. These two letters have the value of 36, which is the number of righteous men in the world according to Jewish tradition

The interior of the boxcar is used as a museum about the camp. It includes a display of photographs, documents, and texts depicting the horrible living conditions and events that took place at Drancy.

The existence of the camp, established by the French Vichy government in 1941 as an internment camp was not officially acknowledged by the French government until 1995. According to the website of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Until July 1, 1943, French police staffed the camp under the overall control of the German Security Police. In July 1943 the Germans took direct control of the Drancy camp and SS officer Alois Brunner became camp commandant."

The camp was a multistory U-shaped building that had served as a police barracks before the war. Barbed wire surrounded the building and its courtyard. The capacity of the camp was 5,000 prisoners. Five subcamps, used primarily as warehouses for personal property confiscated from Jews, were located throughout Paris: at the Austerlitz train station, the Hotel Cahen d'Anvers, the Levitan furniture warehouse, the wharf in Bercy, and the Rue de Faubourg. Approximately 70,000 prisoners passed through Drancy between August 1941 and August 1944. Except for a small number of prisoners (mostly members of the French resistance), the overwhelming majority were Jews. A few thousand prisoners managed to obtain release during the first year of the camp's existence.

According to reports, Raphael Chemouni, responsible for maintaining the memorial, said it was the first time that it had been a target. "Until now there has been a very great respect for this monument," he said. There was some previous vandalism reported in 2005.

According to the JTA the train car" and a stone pillar, were daubed with swastikas. Shopfronts in the towns of Drancy and Bobigny were also attacked, according to the police." Lucien Tismander, from the Auschwitz Memorial Association, said this weekend's vandalism was particularly hurtful because of Drancy's symbolic importance in the history of France. "This monument is in a sense the tomb of the 76,000 French deportees and it has been sullied," he said.

Poland: Auschwitz Museum Seeks 100M Euro Fund to Maintain Camp

Poland: Auschwitz Museum seeks 100M Euro Fund to maintain camp

(ISJM) Agence-France Presse (February 04, 2009)reports that the Auschwitz-Birkanau Museum at the former Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland has obtained 4.2 million euros (US$5.4-million dollars)in EU funding to help preserve the site.

Conservation needs are considerable at both main sites. The smaller Auschwitz I site has more buildings of more substantial materials, and more exhibitions. Auschwitz-Birkenau, which functioned as a death camp occupies a larger area, and many of the features(some of which are actually post-War reconstructions), include wooden barracks, watchtowers, barbed wire and the remains of the crematoria, require regular conservation work.

In the 1990s an major international efforts was undertaken to get commitments of large donations from European countries to conserve the site, which because of the original temporary nature of much of its infrastructure, and because of the delicate state of preservation of much of the organic matter of the site (i.e. wood) and of the exhibitions (including human hair)is extremely difficult and costly to maintain. The effort was only partially successful. Maintenance of the site, to which over one million people a year visit, is an on-going and perpetual process. The extreme shifts in weather, including harsh winters, also make long-term preservation difficult.

The newly obtained funds will help conserve two brick barrack blocks and another six similar wooden buildings. The Museum hopes to create a 100-million euro (US$129-million-dollar) fund to better maintain the two camp sites. The Polish state-run museum now has an annual budget of around 5.5 million euros, half of which is covered by the Polish government and most of the rest from visitors' fees.

According to the AFP article:

Between three to five percent of the annual budget is also covered by the Lauder Foundation and Germany's regional governments.

Last year it recorded 1.13 million visitors, including 410,000 Poles, 110,000 British citizens, 75,000 Americans, 58,000 Germans and 44,000 Israelis.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau museum covers an area of 191-hectares (472-acres), including 155 buildings and 300 ruins.