Poland: Monuments and Memory in Warsaw

Umschlagplatz Monument (top) and Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument (bottom)
Photos: Samuel D. Gruber 2008

Poland: Monuments and Memory in Warsaw
by Samuel D. Gruber

(ISJM) In my recent blogpost about President Obama’s visit to Buchenwald, I mentioned in comparison to Buchenwald's Little Camp (Kleine Lager)monument the older – and I think still exemplary – monument erected by the City of Warsaw at the place known as the Umschlagplatz (Ul. Stawki close to the intersection of ul. Dzika), the assembly and transfer point where Jews were herded from the Warsaw Ghetto and from whence they were placed on the trains that took them to their deaths at Treblinka.

I first saw the monument in 1990, shortly after it was constructed, and was struck then by the clarity of its design and the directness with which it spoke to the visitor. Unlike most Holocaust monuments I had seen up until that time, it was entirely devoid of the claptrap, bombast, false sentimentality and empty rhetoric common to memorials of all sorts. The Monument especially stood in start contrast to the granite and bronze Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument designed by L.M. Suzin and sculpted by Nathan Rapaport, which stands not far away and which, since its dedication in 1948, has been the iconic image of post-Holocaust Jewish Warsaw.

The dynamic tension between these monuments, which are now connected by the very subtle “Remembrance Walk,” is going to be changed with the construction of the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, to be built immediately opposite Rapoport’s monument, and where construction begins this summer (see my previous post). No doubt the new museum will re-focus some interest on the history of the Ghetto period, but it is also likely to steal the thunder (whatever thunder is left) from the earlier memorials.

I had the opportunity to revisit both monuments last fall, after the Umschlagplatz monument was fully cleaned and restored by the City of Warsaw, which owns and is responsible for the site.


The monument is even smaller than I remembered it. Every time I visit I recall how delicate a structure it is, which surprises me given its continued power to arouse in me a powerful response – a reaction that is essentially rational, but that teeters on the edge of a deep well of grief. Of course the quiet of the monument is in contrast to what must have been the loud, tense, dangerous and tragic situation on this spot in 1943 (reenacted in the film The Pianist).

Like the monument at Treblinka, the destination point of Jews from the Umschlagplatz (and to my mind, one of the greatest memorials ever made), the monument is essentially abstract, and through the use of a few simple forms, materials and distilled inscriptions to uses abstraction to allow the mind and heart to meld in deep contemplation.

This is very different from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument, which is a more in-your-face presentation of a heroic struggle and tragic lose. As James Young has carefully documented (Texture of Memory, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, Chapter 5, “The Biography of a Memorial Icon: Nathan Rapoport’s Warsaw Ghetto Monument,” 155-184), the monument to the Ghetto Uprising was designed by Nathan Rapoport and unveiled in 1948. The sufferings and deaths of hundreds of thousands on and near this site are diminished, and even neglected in the selective memory that underlies Rapaport’s celebration of the Ghetto fighters.

The distinction between the two monuments is due in large part to the times in which they were built. The area of the ghetto, though a place of acute grief to many, was even more a site of shame – for those who perpetuated the cruelty of the place, but also for those who witnessed it, and for those who failed to act to prevent it. Thus only those aspects of the Warsaw Ghetto site that were deemed heroic were, until recently, officially remembered.

Though grand when first unveiled atop the rubble of the Ghetto, the Rapoport monument seems smaller now. It still commands the plaza on which it sits, but the plaza now has the intimacy of a familiar room. When I was last there a few old people were sitting on benches near the shrubbery, and a few children were playing. While the monument was originally pitched to a stadium-sized audience, now it is quieter, more like chamber music, but richer and subtler than it was before. Sixty-five years has not dimmed its message, but it has broadened it. While the children played, one man came and placed flowers at the monument base.

We now want much more from the monument, and I wish that for a generation or so it could be turned around so that the little-viewed (and rarely-reproduced) low relief on the back of the monument that shows the Jewish victims processing (to their deaths) could a greater focus of memory. Viewing that moving relief – that recalls the procession of Roman soldiers carrying the spoils of the Temple on the Arch of Titus in Rome, and thus a history of Jewish tragedy – is the first step toward transition to the Umschlagplatz.

Ghetto Uprising Monument (top), Arch of Titus, Rome (bottom)
Photos: Samuel D. Gruber

That relief is also rooted in the Jewish social art of the turn of the 20th century - works like Maurycy Minkowski'sJews Leaving the Town (ca 1910) and Jacob Weinles' Jews Fleeing a Pogrom (ca. 1914); both works lost or destoryed in the Holocaust; and Samuel Hirszenberg's Exile (1904)and The Black Banner (1905). Dr. Eleanora Bergman, Director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw tells me that she, at least, always begins her tours of the Ghetto from the rear side of the monument.

Maurycy Minkowski, Jews Leaving the Town (ca 1910)

It is well known that Post-war selective rebuilding in Warsaw led to highly selective memory, not just of the Holocaust, but also of the entire pre-War and Jewish history of the city. It took a half-century for some of the elements of the earlier topography to reemerge - in the form of the unobtrusive Remembrance Walk, consisting of nineteen stone blocks sited on a route from the Ghetto Uprising Monument, culminating at the Umschlagplatz. The route and monument were designed by Hanna Szmalenberg and Wladyslaw Klamerus and dedicated in 1988 on the 45th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The simple blocks are dedicated to notable figures that died in the Ghetto and who are surrogates for thousands of unnamed others (but since the texts are only in Polish they are there for the local audience, not tourists - unlike the new series of monuments erected to remember the Ghetto wall, which are in Polish and English).

The subtle but still more visible Umshlagplatz monument, however, combines literal and symbolic elements in a formal memorial language. The enclosed space next to the former Jewish hospital provides a refuge for contemplation, but the enclosure also conveys the feeling of separation. The black band in the white wall recalls the tallit, Jewish shawl in which a man prayers, and in which a pious Jews is buried. Over the entrance is a matzevah (tombstone)- shaped lintel showing a broken tree, within a forest of broken trees symbolizing untimely death of an individual and of a community.

Inside, glimpsed through a cut in the wall, one sees a living tree, symbol of hope, renewal, revival. Is it the Tree of Knowledge? Or the Etz Hayyim, the Tree of Life? In a place like Warsaw, were the two the same? If people had known, would they have died? Or did they know, but did not act?

The artists chose four hundred first names, typical of Warsaw Ghetto Jews and engraved on the walls - to allow the viewer a glimpse of the individuality of the dead, and to associate with them. It’s as if we went to a Warsaw city directory of the period and picked out people, who became names, and then numbers, and then victims. Anyone and everyone is included. Whenever I visit I see my own name – Samuel – and know that I would have been a victim, too.


Inside the striped walls of the memorial, with its benches around the perimeter like an old prayer hall, one can almost hear an old Jew – or all the Ghetto Jews – chanting El Maleh Rachamim (the memorial prayer).

Four plaques in Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish and English explain, “Along this path of suffering a death over 300,000 Jews were driven in 1942-43 from the Warsaw Ghetto to the gas chambers of the Nazi extermination camps.” Like the monument itself, the text is simple, direct and true.

Germany: Obama Visit Draws Attention to History of Buchenwald Camp

Buchenwald, Germany. Little Camp Memorial, designed by Stephen Jacobs, dedicated 2002.
Photos courtesy of the US Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad

Germany: Obama Visit Draws Attention to History of Buchenwald Camp
by Samuel D. Gruber

President Barack Obama’s visit today to the concentration camp at Buchenwald, Germany brings new attention to the extensive site in site in Eastern Germany. Despite it being liberated by U.S. forces in April 1945, Buchenwald remained for many years – at least for Americans, Western European and Israeli, the unknown and almost forgotten Holocaust Camp. Located outside Dresden Buchenwald was part of former East Germany (Democratic Republic of Germany), and thus was off-limits to most non-Soviet bloc visitors until 1989. Since then, the site has been undergoing a major and continuing process of reinterpretation and new presentation. Focus has shifted away from the monumental and heroic Soviet-era monument designed by Fritz Cremer and dedicated on September 14, 1958. Instead, interest and visitors have shifted to newer monuments including the 1997 memorial to Roma and Sinti victims and the 2002 monument to Jewish victims erected on the site of the infamous Little Camp.

It was at the Little Camp that Elie Wiesel was imprisoned, and there that the famous photograph of the emaciated sixteen-year--old Wiesel was taken. The famous photo is now on view at the camp and was shown to Barack Obama. The Little Camp site and the history of its Jewish victims was largely ignored by East Germany’s Communist regime and their history-arbiters who maintained the camp. Indeed, the camp commemorated victims from thirteen countries of origin, but did not specifically commemorate Jewish victims.

The creation of a modest and sensitive monument; and space for contemplation and commemoration on the Little Camp site was a project of a U.S. government agency, the United States Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. The project took many years, and was finally completed and dedicated in 2002. Warren Miller, first as a Commission member and then as Commission Chairman stayed with this project through the arduous planning, design, review, funding and implementation process, a story which he related in his speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in a ceremony prior to the monument’s dedication.

To me, the importance of this monument is considerable, but three aspects stand out and deserve attention. First, the monument was designed by American architect Stephen Jacobs, himself a child survivor, like Wiesel, of the Little Camp.

Second, the monument avoids any semblance of sentimentality, bombast or empty architectural rhetoric. It is simple, austere and elegant and instead of proving a monumental backdrop for official ceremonies (as Cremer monument did) it provides a quiet space for contemplation. The same distinction exists in Warsaw between Nathan Rapoport’s heroic Warsaw Uprising Monument and more sober and nuanced Umschlagplatz Memorial.

Lastly and most important, the monument at the Little Camp has a lengthy and detailed narrative of the history, events and horrors of the Little Camp – literally spelled out in six languages. This was Warren Miller’s most important contribution. He insisted there be no ambiguity about what had happened. Abstract monuments open to different interpretations would not do, nor vague inspirational language, like “Never Again.” Communist-era monuments were already heavy on symbols and rhetoric, but light on specifics. Unlike many previously memorials that function on the assumption that the viewer already knows what happened, the Buchenwald monument assumes the viewer knows nothing. In this sense, the Buchenwald design is the first truly made for a post-Holocaust generation, and surely one that confronts the venom of Holocaust deniers head-on.

Click here to view pictures of the memorial.

The text on the monument reads:

“On this site was the infamous "Little Camp." Separated by only a barbed wire fence from the Main Camp, its inmates were subjected to the greatest suffering of all those at Buchenwald. Begun in late 1942, its first inmates were Polish, Russian, French and Dutch prisoners. By January 1945, the Little Camp became known as the Jewish Camp because most of its prisoners were Jews, including children whose parents had been murdered by the Nazis. Most of the Jews were transferred here from Auschwitz and other concentration camps in Eastern Europe. In 1945 a large percentage of the deaths at Buchenwald occurred in the Little Camp, which imprisoned as many as 20,000 inmates at a time. Conditions were barbaric. Windowless stables with dirt floors intended to house 50 horses at times contained nearly 2000 people. There was no running water, no sanitation, and virtually no heat in the stables. Some inmates lived in tents. Thick mud was everywhere. Rations were only a percentage of those given inmates in the Main Camp. Drinking water was often not provided. With only one latrine, many inmates were forced to use their food bowls as night latrines. By 1945, an ever present stench of human excrement pervaded the site. Corpses lay about in the open as the death toll increased daily. The Little Camp was a place of deepest despair for those left there to be forgotten and to die from cold, starvation, dehydration, debilitating labor, torture and rampant epidemics of diseases that went untreated. In the last days before liberation, more than half of those selected for the death marches and railway transports that resulted in tens of thousands of deaths were inmates from the Little Camp. After liberation, although the main camp was preserved and various memorials established, the Little Camp was totally obliterated and allowed to be overgrown with trees and brush. The site was neglected by the East German authorities until 1990. Some of the survivors eventually settled in the United States; they and their descendants supported the creation of this memorial.”

You can read more about the Commission’s Little Camp Memorial project here, with links to various speeches.

For more information about the entire Buchenwald camp and museum and extensive photo-documentation see:

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/EasternGermany/Buchenwald/index.html

http://www.chgs.umn.edu/museum/memorials/buchenwald/