Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders 103236050X, 9781032360508

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“Whereas perpetrators and victims of the Holocaust are well defined subjects, bystanders remain ambiguous and difficult to understand. Although often described as indifferent to the witnessed violence, in his brilliant study Per­ verse Memory and the Holocaust, Jan Borowicz assumes that the bystander position must also evoke extreme emotions, which he qualifies as ‘perverse’. In this context ‘perverse’ is a defense structure that prevents the examination of reality and that allows the bystander to freely live in contradiction and to avoid responsibility, guilt, and suffering. He has totally convinced me that only a psychoanalytic approach can do justice to and understand the ambi­ guity of the perverse emotions bystanders felt.” Ernst van Alphen, Professor Emeritus of Literary Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands “Bystanders are not uninvolved, Jan Borowicz shows this aspect in many facets. Courageously and uncompromisingly, Jan Borowicz shows us the dirty secret of Poland: confidants and bystanders not only saw the crimes of the Nazis, they also felt something about them. The aspect of excitement and satisfaction, the triumph over the murder of millions of people can no longer be hidden after reading the book, the perverse memory can no longer be glossed over or whitewashed by reinterpreting it. It continues to have an unconscious and preconscious effect in the following generations. The coura­ geous psychoanalytical study of Jan Borowicz can be understood as an inter­ pretation to uncovering the denial in the Polish memory.” Elisabeth Brainin and Samy Teicher, Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (IPA), Austria

Perverse Memory and the Holocaust

Perverse Memory and the Holocaust presents a new theoretical approach to the study of Polish memory bystanders of the Holocaust. Drawing on psy­ choanalytic theory, it examines representations of the Holocaust in order to explore the perverse mechanisms of memory at work, in which surface a series of phenomena difficult to remember: the pleasure derived from witnes­ sing scenes of violence, identification with the German perpetrators of vio­ lence, the powerful fear of revenge at the hands of Jewish victims, and the adoption of the position of genocide victims. Moving away from the focus of previous psychoanalytic studies of memory on questions of mourning, melancholy, repressed memory, and loss, this volume considers the transformation of the collective identity of those who remained in the space of past Holocaust events: bystanders, who partook in the events and benefited from the extermination of the Jews. A critique of ‘perverse memory’ that hampers attempts to work through what is remem­ bered, this book will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences working in the fields of Holocaust studies, memory studies, psychoanalytic studies, and cultural studies. Jan Borowicz is a member of the Holocaust Remembrance Research Team at the Institute of Polish Culture at the University of Warsaw, Poland. A cultural studies scholar, he has published two books in Polish on the Holocaust his­ tory and memory. He is also a certified psychotherapist, a member of the Polish Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, and a candidate of the Polish Psychoanalytical Society (IPA).

Memory Studies: Global Constellations Series Editor: Henri Lustiger-Thaler, Ramapo College of New Jersey, USA and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France

The ‘past in the present’ has returned in the early twenty-first century with a vengeance, and with it the expansion of categories of experience. These experi­ ences have largely been lost in the advance of rationalist and constructivist understandings of subjectivity and their collective representations. The cultural stakes around forgetting, ‘useful forgetting’ and remembering, locally, regionally, nationally and globally have risen exponentially. It is therefore not unusual that ‘migrant memories’; micro-histories; personal and individual memories in their interwoven relation to cultural, political and social narratives; the mnemonic past and present of emotions, embodiment and ritual; and finally, the mnemonic spatiality of geography and territories are receiving more pronounced hearings. This transpires as the social sciences themselves are consciously globalizing their knowledge bases. In addition to the above, the reconstructive logic of memory in the juggernaut of galloping informationalization is rendering it more and more publicly accessible, and therefore part of a new global public constellation around the coding of meaning and experience. Memory studies as an academic field of social and cultural inquiry emerges at a time when global public debate - but­ tressed by the fragmentation of national narratives - has accelerated. Societies today, in late globalized conditions, are pregnant with newly unmediated and unfrozen memories once sequestered in wide collective representations. We wel­ come manuscripts that examine and analyze these profound cultural traces. Titles in this series 25. Memory Fragmentation Below and Beyond the State Uses of the Past in Conflict and Post-Conflict Settings Anne Bazin, Emmanuelle Hébert, Valérie Rosoux and Eric Sangar 26. The Portuguese Colonial War and the African Liberation Struggles Memory, Politics and Uses of the Past Edited by Miguel Cardina 27. Perverse Memory and the Holocaust A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders Jan Borowicz https://www.routledge.com/sociology/series/ASHSER1411

Perverse Memory and the Holocaust A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders

Jan Borowicz Translated by Mikołaj Golubiewski

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Jan Borowicz The right of Jan Borowicz to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Borowicz, Jan, 1987- author. | Golubiewski, Mikołaj,

1985- translator

Title: Perverse memory and the holocaust : a psychoanalytic understanding

of Polish bystanders / Jan Borowicz ; translanted by Mikolaj Golubiewski.

Other titles: Pamię ć perwersyjna. English | Psychoanalytic understanding of

Polish bystanders

Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. |

Series: Memory studies : global constellations | Includes bibliographical

references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2023038854 (print) | LCCN 2023038855 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781032360508 (hbk) | ISBN 9781032360515 (pbk) |

ISBN 9781003330035 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)--Poland. |

Bystander effect--Poland. | Memory--Poland. |

Poland--History--1918–1945--Historiography.

Classification: LCC DS134.55 .B67 2024 (print) | LCC DS134.55 (ebook) |

DDC 940.53/1809438--dc23/eng/20231002

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023038854

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023038855

ISBN: 978-1-032-36050-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-36051-5 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-33003-5 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003330035

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of Abbreviations Acknowledgements

ix

x

Introduction: The Blurred and the Overlooked

1

1

Voyeurism: The Polish Bystander Looks with One Eye

23

2

Fetishism: The Nazi in a Uniform

60

3

Masochism: Competitive Victimization

93

4

Sadism: Drastic Returns of the Dead

136

5

Perverse (Post)Memory

171

Conclusion

198

Index

217

List of Abbreviations

KWO M MF . . NZZ P

PP PZ SZ WSZ

Zyta Rudzka, “Krótka wymiana ognia,” Dialog 4/2014. Szczepan Twardoch, Morfina (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2012). . Bozena Keff, On Mother and Fatherland, trans. B. Paloff, A. Valles (Asheville, North Carolina: MadHat Press, 2017). . . Igor Ostachowicz, Noc zywych Zydów (Warsaw: WAB, 2012). . Leo Lipski, Powrót, ed. A. Maciejowska (Paryz– Kraków: Instytut Literacki Kultura i Instytut . Ksia˛ zki, 2015). Tadeusz Hołuj, Puste pole (Krakow: Wydaw­ nictwo Literackie, 1979). . Leo Lipski, Paryz ze złota. Teksty rozproszone . (Izabelin: S´wiat Ksia˛ zki, 2002). Magdalena Tulli, Szum (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Nisza, 2014). Magdalena Tulli, Włoskie szpilki (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Nisza, 2012).

Quoting Freud, I usually use The Standard Edition (abbreviated as SE). SE

Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vols. 1–24. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey. In collaboration with Anna Freud. Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1964).

Acknowledgements

This book’s origin lies in my PhD dissertation, thus first thanks have to go to my supervisor, Professor Iwona Kurz, whose sensitivity and attentiveness continue to guide me in thinking about culture and cultural memory. I would also like to acknowledge Professor Roma Sendyka who helped me to work on my text and reconsider . many ideas: for the better, I hope. Many thanks go to Professor Tomasz Zukowski whose enthusiastic support has built my con­ fidence to express myself clearly and straightforwardly. Lastly, I wish to thank Professor Andrzej Leder whose ideas are a never-ending source of inspiration to continue to think. It is a privilege and an unequivocal pleasure to be in the presence of such brilliant minds. I would like to thank the Polish Psychoanalytical Society and the Polish Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for the generous funding needed to publish this book. Finally, I wish to thank Palgrave Macmillan and Universitätsverlag Winter for their kind permissions to use some previously published fragments of this book. They were re-written and changed (sometimes along with the main thesis), nevertheless I owe my gratitude to the publishers and editors who helped me to write my texts: Tanja Schult, Diana I. Popescu, Marius Henderson, and Julia Lange. The articles may be found here: Jan Borowicz, “Holocaust Zombies: Mourning and Memory in Polish Contemporary Culture”, in: Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era, eds. Diana I. Popescu, Tanja Schult (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Jan Borowicz, “Boredom and Violence: Returning to the Perverse Scene of Memory”, in: Entangled Memories. Remembering the Holocaust in a Global Age, eds. Marius Henderson and Julia Lange (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017).

Introduction The Blurred and the Overlooked

. Figure I.1 Photograph from the exhibition at the Bełzec Museum signed in Polish, English, and Hebrew, which reads: “Public humiliations of Jews, like this cutting of an elderly religious man’s beard by an SS officer in Lublin in the Zamos´c´ region in September 1939, was usually the first step in the imple­ mentation of German racial policies in Poland.”

Looking at the Onlookers Out of all the existing and possible photographs of the Holocaust—the digital archive of Yad Vashem has over 400,000 of them—I chose one from the per­ . manent exhibition at the Bełzec Museum. It shows a typical scene from the occupation period in Eastern Europe: Germans humiliating Jews in one of the villages in the Zamos´c´ region. It must be a sunny day because the sil­ houettes cast long shadows on the well-trodden road among wooden houses. DOI: 10.4324/9781003330035-1

2

Introduction: The Blurred and the Overlooked

In the foreground, there are six soldiers in SS uniforms and two elderly Jews with white beards wearing poor clothes and hats. As the faces show, the sol­ diers are rather pleased; some of them simply laugh, most likely because one of them cuts off a man’s beard with barely visible scissors. The man’s face expresses pain, and the face of his companion standing behind him is not visible. After a while, one may notice more figures: on the left stand high boots behind the soldier with a whip who smiles radiantly straight into the lens. On the right, behind the soldier who cuts the beard, one can notice a similar hat to those worn by the Jewish men in the foreground. Thus, hidden but also present, are probably another SS man and a Jew, one perpetrator and one victim of violence. In the back, there are two women and a girl in the space between the group of soldiers on the left and the soldiers who cut the beards. The women and the girl lean against the wall of a neighboring house and stand maybe ten steps away from this scene. They are dressed in country clothes and are probably Polish villagers. They look toward the scene of vio­ lence and the photographer. The photograph is blurred in the background, and the strong light falling on the women and the wall blurs the details. The most visible figure in the background is an elderly woman in a headscarf dressed in a dark blouse, which distinguishes her from the surroundings. If we look closer, we might notice a smile on her face. The woman in the background captures my attention, pulls me in, and does not let me look anywhere else. Does this—probably1—ethnically Polish villager smile to the camera as we are used to do when someone photographs us? Could she have seen a camera before? Maybe her look does not turn at all to the camera lens but to the scene unfolding right in front of her? Maybe she laughs because she is pleased with the violence—so close yet still at a distance. Or maybe it is just an overinterpretation and projection of a previously adapted thesis? Perpetrators and victims are relatively well-defined subjects.2 Only in the last few decades have scholars of Holocaust history begun paying more attention to the people who could remain passive, although present at the crime scene.3 The woman in the photograph may well symbolize this challenge to the Holo­ caust memory analysis: the description of bystanders who try to be a few steps away from history, barely fit into the frame, remain anonymous, and leave only a few traces. Other photographs do not help in the identification of this person. Two photographs located in Yad Vashem archives—clearly taken in quick suc­ cession—present the same scene.4 One of the photographs also captures a young man dressed in civilian clothes who stands behind the soldiers with a wide grin— perhaps a local, too. Another photograph presents a narrower frame with a close-up of the soldier who cuts the beard of the Jew who seems to be crying. The photograph is touching because although the soldier holding the scissors seems a little older than his colleagues, he could still be the son of the man he is now humiliating. However, the two photographs do not capture the woman in question. Moreover, the photographer and the men from the foreground moved. This woman appeared in the frame only for a brief moment but we may still try to tell her story only with this little piece of information. Of course, the choice of

Introduction: The Blurred and the Overlooked

3

this shot is arbitrary and might be unjust toward the anonymous protagonist. Nevertheless, this photograph and the hypothesis of a smile allows us to pose further questions about the position of the Polish bystanders of the Holocaust. How should we treat this photograph? What should we do with it? First, the picture may serve as an icon that provides an insight into the reality of this occupied Polish village. This is a perspective that Polish cultural historian Jacek Leociak considers when he compares the work of an historian to look­ ing through a window in his description of what the wartime Varsovians might have seen from the tram that passed through the Warsaw Ghetto5. Just like the passengers, historians look at a picture and observe the examined reality as if in a very sharp frame.6 In this case, the image we see appears in a photograph that captures reality right at this particular moment and place. The scene from the photograph presents the reverse of philosophical and historical Holocaust and Nazism concepts created by such thinkers as Zyg­ munt Bauman or Raul Hilberg, which in turn stems from the common— although conflicted—tradition of Martin Heidegger, Theodor W. Adorno, and Max Horkheimer.7 In this theoretical vein, the Holocaust and Nazism are the logical consequences of modernity, progressing modernization, and the capitalization of social and political spheres. It is the initial stage of the Holocaust, non-mechanized and based on physical, direct contact between perpetrators and victims; this stage shows no part of the later “calm” of the Holocaust. In his work Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Johan Gold­ hagen describes mass murders committed by the German army as a carnival of violence preceded by intense and thrilling gradual stripping of the Jews of their humanity. Goldhagen interprets the cutting of Orthodox Jews’ beards as a gesture that is to deprive the victims of masculinity.8 Goldhagen indicates that the humiliation of the Jews provoked an excessively great pleasure among the perpetrators, which culminated in the act of murder. It brings to mind a simple thesis posed by Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents which still seems difficult to accept: Neighbour is … not only a possible helper or sexual object, but also a temptation to them to gratify their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without recompense, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus.9 . Watching the photographs from the Bełzec Museum is challenging and bur­ densome, because it reveals what we would prefer not to know about our­ selves. In this sense, crime photographs are somewhat pornographic because—while being in safety—we watch someone’s extreme humiliation, suffering, or death. Austrian journalist Martin Pollack believes that “when we look [at such images], we feel disgust and revulsion, yet at the same time some excitement as if somebody caught us doing something forbidden.”10 The person looking at a photograph may find oneself reflected in that woman

4

Introduction: The Blurred and the Overlooked

who probably smiles at the pain of her Jewish neighbors. It is an uncomfortable position, because there is no certainty that this is not an overinterpretation; after all, the background is blurred, which may confuse the viewers. Second, the photograph may serve as an index linked to the museum . exhibition of which it is part.11 The Bełzec Museum chose this photograph to illustrate the early reality of occupied eastern Poland, and the exhibition resulted from cooperation with the United States Holocaust Memorial . Museum in 2004.12 The Bełzec Museum uses many exhibition solutions from Washington, Yad Vashem, and Berlin (especially in terms of the aes­ thetics of emptiness),13 and its memorial is undoubtedly one of the boldest and most daring artistic commemorations of an extermination camp. In this . respect, no other commemoration in Poland can compete with the Bełzec Museum and Memorial Site. The sites of Jewish extermination irrelevant to ethnically Polish martyrology have a different character than museums deemed to be of (inter)national importance like Auschwitz-Birkenau or Majdanek—consider Treblinka, Chełmno on Ner, or Sobibór (this changed recently: the new Sobibór and Chełmno museums were completed in 2020 and 2021)—and for a long time they received no official commemoration at . all. Moreover, the Bełzec Museum is on the outskirts of official tourist and remembrance routes as it requires much determination to reach the place. Obviously, the photograph as an illustration to the text explaining historical actuality is a conservative exhibition strategy that assumes the iconicity and transparency of the message. However, we should also note that the exhibi­ tion begins with enlarged prewar photographs of Jews—just like in the Tower of Faces in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington— which from the very beginning establishes the process of identification with the victims.14 Separated by the impassable distance of history, visitors observe the photographs from “then and there.” At the same time, when encountering the gaze of the woman in the photograph, they look at themselves as the onlookers. Leociak proposes this way of viewing damaged photographs from the Holocaust: treating mechanical and chemical tears and stains as stigmata, traces, and metonymies of the Holocaust.15 This perspective makes one . wonder why the Bełzec Museum used this particular photograph. Did the exhibition creators notice what appears in the background and—in this secret and unclear way—made the Polish position toward the Holocaust the topic of this part of the exhibition? Or is it maybe a visual error, a Freudian slip, and an accidental disclosure of the unconscious? Then the image would not be testifying to how things were, nor reflecting the perception process, but to exactly the opposite: to how it interferes with the process of looking. Third and finally, we may treat this photograph as a symbol of remembrance of the Polish bystander’s position that may be easily overlooked. However, when we see it, we cannot really know what to do next. It is a photograph that breaks the continuity of history because it provides more questions than solutions, multiplies doubts, and gives no clear answers. In his book Spectral Evidence,

Introduction: The Blurred and the Overlooked

5

Ulrich Baer discusses such a spectral presence that we can neither see nor understand well.16 The very “spectral evidence” in the Salem witch trials in the late seventeenth century consisted of testimonies of what the ghosts haunting the village told witnesses in visions and dreams. The Supreme Court of the United States banned such argumentation in courts, thus separating the judiciary from the influence of religious communities and churches.17 However, Baer writes that there remain examples that contradict this Enlightened decision: As roadblocks to an ideology that conceives of history as an unstoppable movement forward, the photographs compel viewers to think of lived experience, time, and history from a standpoint that is truly a standpoint: a place to think about occurrences that may fail, violently, to be fully experienced, and so integrated into larger patterns. These images … arrest the gaze and captivate the imagination because they guarantee no way out of the photographed instant.18 This is how the photographs of trauma operate that tear apart the continuity of time and identity or the photographs of events that could not be discerned by their participants. Cathy Caruth believes that “traumatic experience … suggests a certain paradox: that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it.”19 In this sense, finding oneself— even if only when fantasizing—in the smiling woman from the photograph is like waking from a dream one wants to continue. However, only then the nightmare begins, as the observers are confronted with the fact that they could be such voyeurs able to smile at the sight of people suffering. Never­ theless, only then, “the viewer is made to bear belated witness to experiences that expropriated and deconstituted those who suffered them.”20 This photograph forces a thirst for knowledge that must remain unquen­ ched. The picture violates our certainty about what happened, that every­ thing happened as we can see in the pictures, and that we can only discover more illustrations to support the already known and agreed-upon theses. We cannot determine for sure what is in this photograph. The blurred back­ ground creates a paradox that we cannot simplify and solve. In this sense, it resembles a dream in which the same images may assume opposite meanings. Freud explains this mechanism in his considerations of ancient languages and words with antithetical meanings.21 Later, Jacques Derrida addressed this topic and analyzed the Platonian concept of pharmakon as meaning both remedy and poison, only to conclude that it is a place of aporia, hence disabling the possibi­ lity of an unambiguous reading.22 However, only in such a situation can we approach a just and ethically responsible decision—namely in relation to what is really visible in the picture in question—only when there is a possibility of choice. However, we are never sure of what we choose: The difficulty of ethical responsibility is that the response cannot be for­ mulated as a “yes or no”; that would be too simple. It is necessary to give

6

Introduction: The Blurred and the Overlooked a singular response, within a given context, and to take the risk of a decision by enduring the undecidable.23

This is especially important when discussions about the past of ethnic Poles and Jews and the Holocaust and wartime memory provoke immediate answers and engaged gestures. Especially since the war history and memory have recently become weaponized for current ideological controversies, supporting ethno-nationalistic, illiberal turn.24 In contrast, Derrida teaches us to refrain from haste in seeking unambiguity, coherence, and decision: it is easy to agree with oneself25 but only a constant movement against oneself allows us to take a truly risky and ethical position.26 When we do not know for certain whether we take a remedy or a poison.

The Primal Scene The assumptions of my book rely on a simple thesis: indifference to violence is impossible. Visible violence and suffering never cause indifference, maybe except for Muselmann prisoners in camps, who were radically separated from the outside world. Indifference may result from complicated defense mechan­ isms, which is when it may even become such a mechanism itself: a defensive shield against any suggestions that the ethnic Poles’ feelings toward the Jews might have been hostile before, during, and after the war. It is indeed a dis­ course prevailing in Poland that creates a symmetrical picture: there are the righteous (still not enough), the collaborators (still too many), and the neu­ tral, inactive, and emotionless majority.27 However, in reality, violence must evoke different extreme emotions like horror, rage, sadness, excitement, and joy, and as such, it became a part of the Holocaust memory. Murders, mass plunder, rapes are all registered by the surrounding people everywhere the Holocaust took place: in the case of Poland, it was the almost entire east, south, and central parts of the prewar country.28 The stubborn insistence on the indifference of bystanders present in the Polish memory culture instead conceals the lack or refusal of empathy. In a famous fragment of “On Pho­ tography,” Susan Sontag writes about how she was changed by her encounter with photographs from the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau con­ centration camps.29 We know many Polish testimonies and works of culture that reveal the deep commitment, agitation, and shock inspired by the exter­ mination of Jews. However, what should we do with the memory about the fact that the Polish bystander may see suffering but not sympathize, instead feeling pleasure, excitement, and triumph? I want to treat this photograph as the primal scene of Polish memory of the Holocaust that establishes the triangle: the German perpetrators, the Jewish victims, and the ethnic Polish as onlooking others.30 Obviously, such a con­ struction is not unique for the Polish memory only. The Holocaust had its observers everywhere where there were deportations or executions.31 How­ ever, there is something unique about Central and Eastern Europe where Jews

Introduction: The Blurred and the Overlooked

7

may have constituted the dominant populations of many villages, towns, and cities. It is the exceptional brutalization and excess of violence, sometimes even massacres committed on the spot. Jews in these areas were killed with combinations of various, even improvised, extermination techniques, namely deportations to extermination camps and executions at the place of resi­ dence.32 The result is a hardly comprehendible scale of violence in whose face some may find only an illusory comfort in the thesis that the Holocaust was a clean, cold, and impersonal operation.33 Thus, the dominant symbol of the Holocaust for the Western imagination and historiography became the gas chamber, which removes to the background the brutal events that occurred in the spaces of everyday life.34 The excerpt often quoted in Polish historio­ graphy from Jan Tomasz Gross’s essay evokes these different images: The streets and squares of Polish cities and towns ran with blood, the manhunts lasted for weeks, up to the moment when the murder of innocent victims became a boring routine … Even in Warsaw, behind the walls, the last thousands of Jews were being murdered in the light of the greatest fire in the city’s history, and thus “in plain sight” of all its citizens.35 The very deportation of Jews in these areas shows the . scope of cruelty and violence that happened in broad daylight. Stanisław Zemis, a prewar teacher and social activist, wrote in his diary on November 8, 1942: The crowd was escorted to the train station at early twilight. The road led through our streets, right next to our house. I was digging in the garden when I heard intense shooting, screams, I went to the street, where there already was an enormous procession of two to three thousand people walking in a tight group, crammed together. A crowd of men, women, children of all ages, and babies on the hands of fathers and mothers. On both sides, a strong escort of Ukrainians with rifles ready to fire. Every Jew trying to escape was killed on the spot. . Zemis adds “a few images:” A hundred steps farther, about six corpses fell on one heap. Before the march reached the train station, a hundred or more people were killed. The shooting lasted all night. The train was not at the station. The whole crowd was driven into a huge barrack next to the station. This afternoon, I went with my sons to the train station to buy a newspaper. Near the barrack, whole puddles of blood testified to what was happening there at night.36 The shock that the extermination is a part of the everyday landscape—it happens when people are digging in the garden or when they go to buy a newspaper—disappears when one realizes that it happens right then and there. This is the fundamental reason why the Holocaust had to become a

8

Introduction: The Blurred and the Overlooked

part of everyday life in Eastern Europe, which witnessed most of the exter­ mination, which differently and on various terms connected all the local inhabitants and the foreign armies. The sights of deportation and violence . toward the Jews deeply moved and shocked Stanisław Zemis, who expressed his emotional breakdown in writing.37 Historians and sociologists distinguish different emotional reactions and attitudes to witnessing mass atrocities: dread, shock, paralysis, nervous breakdowns, as well as various evasive reac­ tions.38 However, we suspect—or even know—that other reactions were not necessarily the same. Józef Górski, a prewar landowner and supporter of the National Democracy, in Christian spirit feels sorry for the murdered people, but he also explicitly admits in his diaries: “I could not hide my satisfaction when I passed our Jew-free towns and when I saw that the shabby, atrocious ruins with their typical iron stoves had ceased to be an eyesore.”39 There are other testimonies to the feelings of pleasure. The author of a vast diary of the wartime, Zygmunt Klukowski wrote about what happened in 1942 in Szczebrzeszyn—which is a place where the photograph I discuss may come from—during and after the deportations: “Throughout the massacre, some even laughed. Some went sneaking into Jewish houses from the back, searching for what could be stolen.”40 Shraga Feivel Bielawski, hiding in a cellar, eavesdropped during an Aktion that happened on the streets of his hometown We˛ grów: the cries of Jews mixed with the shouts of the Germans and with the laughter of the Poles. Throughout the day the SSMänner, with the eager assistance of the Poles, loaded the Jews on open trucks, which left for Treblinka.41 This experience of engaging in the extermination, watching it with pleasure, and benefiting from it settled in the memory within the basic primal scene, which with its power shapes the identity. The primal scene in the strictly psychoanalytic sense comes from Freud’s description of the Wolf Man, in which Freud’s patient watches the sexual act of his parents as a child. The child is terrified and excited at the same time, it does not understand what is happening and simultaneously feels excluded: it is to be one of the first Oedipal moments during which the child notices that a parent is not its property. In later psychoanalytic theory, this traumatic event gained wider significance as a metaphor for all knowledge about human relationships, the difference between children and parents, between parents themselves, about own identity, and the differences among people.42 In this sense, a primal scene is a construct representing knowing something one does not know, not knowing what one knows, and not knowing what to do with what one knows. The primal scene is about participation in a scene of aggression or sex via projection and identification with either actor or victim.43

Introduction: The Blurred and the Overlooked 44

9

Therefore, it is not about the classic Hilberg’s triad, for in this case, the voyeur always participates in the trauma, and the trauma always marks the voyeur. In the work of Polish memory, I am interested in such Holocaust representations that are comedies rather than tragedies, as introduced by Polish theater historian Grzegorz Niziołek in his The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust. These comedies operate not with “the rhetoric of blame and denial, trauma, or the sublime” but rather with “indifference, stupidity, and the obscene.”45 In psychoanalytic categories, we may also describe such representations as perverse, because the extreme violence they involve becomes saturated with pleasure. Instead of pain, horror, sadness, and loss, there appears a fleeting yet barely noticeable smile. In everyday language, perversion means something excessive and deceitful, something that betrays a pathological transgression of social and ethical norms. However, I will use in this book the notion of perversion as separate from value judgment, which is an elementary approach in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic theories understand perversion differently: as the arresting development of sexuality in preoedipal stages (hence its saturation with sadomasochism); as a defense against psychosis and fear of annihilation (thanks to various sexual solutions one can at least feel alive); as sexualized hatred (transition of an old trauma into pleasure and old humiliation into a triumph over the oppressor).46 To distinguish the psychoanalytic meaning of perversion, which significantly differs from its colloquial understanding of moral classification, I will present the concepts most relevant to my con­ siderations in this book. Their short description will show what is the most interesting to me in the Holocaust representations under scrutiny, while I will present and elaborate theory “in action” in interpretations in each chapter. Psychoanalysis is not a uniform discipline, so the understanding of perversion that interests me mostly comes from different intellectual traditions, so one should keep in mind that they approach the issue differently: the French postFreudian theory (Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel); the post-Winnicottian theory (Joyce McDougall); the post-Kleinian theory (John Steiner).47 For the French psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, perverse sexuality is a state of omnipotence, namely the possibility of erotic pleasure of everyone with everyone, which leads to the disappearance of any differences, including sexual and generational. When analyzing The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade, Chasseguet-Smirgel concludes that the perverse essence of the novel lies in continuous transformations, deformations, and dissolutions of complex constellations of individuals who engage in sexual practices until all boundaries disappear: between “men and women, children and old people, virgins and whores, nuns and bawds, mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters, uncles and nephews, noblemen and rabble.”48 The ecstatic state of omnipotence has its unconscious purpose in hiding the feeling of helplessness, hurt, and unimportance. On the most basic level, these are the feelings of a child toward their parents. By creating the seductive and magical reality of perversion, the child may avoid painful developmental conflicts, including the

10

Introduction: The Blurred and the Overlooked

Oedipus complex. However, it happens only in the inner world. Thus, the per­ verse person will consider other people only as controllable objects and tools for the implementation of their own fantasies. On the other hand, Joyce McDougall stresses the role of perversion as a defense against psychic death and defragmentation, in other words, as the ultimate and only form of relationship in which one can maintain any con­ nection with other people, even if dominated by horror and sexual excitation. Therefore, perversion becomes an attempt at survival, especially after such trauma as the dramatic separation from a mother who does not believe in her child’s ability to live independently. Instead of paralyzing horror, the subject summons rigid sexual scenarios whose implementation is necessary for any erotic fulfillment. However, these scenarios always prove insufficient because they do not ease the fear of death, psychosis, complete disintegration of the subject and her consciousness, and the impossibility to establish any contact with another person. Thus, for McDougall, perversion is a desperate attempt of self-healing through specific sexual scenarios designed to mask the destroyed symbolic representation of oneself and that of other people.49 In turn, John Steiner provides another, less intuitive understanding of per­ version, as it separates perversion from sexuality.50 In Steiner’s theory, per­ version is a defense structure that prevents the examination of reality; first of all, of the Oedipal situation, namely the exclusion of the child from their parents’ relationship. It is better not to discover parents’ sexuality to avoid the unbearable feelings like jealousy and murderous or incestuous impulses. To deal with it, one is to employ the mechanism of denial, which means both the recognition of reality (the child sees the parents’ relationship from which it is excluded…) and its invalidation (…but it is irrelevant). This is how Steiner interprets Sophocles’s drama Oedipus the King, by following the critical assessment of the literary critics who notice that this work is not about dis­ covering the terrible truth like in Freud’s interpretation.51 For Steiner, the characters know everything from the beginning, but they choose to act as if they do not. Therefore, perversion becomes a trick that allows one to freely function in contradiction—“I know well, but all the same…”—thus avoiding responsibility, guilt, and suffering.52 Consequently, in the concluding chapter I will argue to utilize the concept of denied rather than repressed memories, thoughts, and phantasies, and in general denial (or disavowal, Freud used the term die Verleugnung)53 rather than repression in order to describe the perverse memory. Such under­ standings of perversion will enable the reconstruction of the founding primal scene between Germans, Jews, and ethnic Poles, namely the different positions of the event’s participants and their relationships with each other. If we assume that both the perpetrators and the victims of the Holocaust almost entirely disappeared several dozen years after the war, we should thus ask: who remained in the photograph? Moreover, how has the memory of violence marked those who remained at the crime scene?

Introduction: The Blurred and the Overlooked

11

Bystanders: Memory and Identifications The primal scene assumes relationality, projections, and identifications of the observer, and it shapes the identity of bystanders, who often are confused with the name of “witnesses,” especially in Polish public and academic discourse.54 In Polish, the translation of the term “bystanders” became problematic when their position toward the victims and the perpetrators came into question. I will outline this dilemma encompassing both the translation, trying to emphasize how the position of Polish witnesses (in this case: those who may testify) determines their identity. The problems with Polish translation illumi­ nates a few core aspects of the problematic situating of bystanders to geno­ cide, especially in regions where the distance between the bystanders and the victims is minimal.55 In this regard, Grzegorz Niziołek employs the word “gawkers,” thus highlighting the libidinal and group aspect of observation; . memory scholar Elzbieta Janicka postulates the concept of a “participant­ observer,” thus foregrounding coparticipation in crime;56 and the researchers from the Kraków-based Research Center for Memory Cultures propose the notion nearest to the concept of “bystander,” (postronni, which literarily means “on-the-siders”) as they argue: “because they stood ‘on the side’ of events, sometimes it was the side with the victims, and sometimes—that of the oppressors. We assume that no neutral position is possible in the face of genocide.”57 Michael Rothberg provides another terminology, as he intro­ duces the notion of “implicated subjects” who “occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm; they contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or control such regimes.”58 In other words, the “implicated subjects” are at a certain distance from the perpetrators, but they simulta­ neously can hurt others and benefit from such actions. Moreover, implication is a handy description that allows for the inclusion of this uncomfortable position into Hilberg’s triad. I will primarily use the most relevant for my considerations of the notions of bystanders and gawkers, while assuming that these positions—determined always by the event—never crystallize to become a stable, unchanging subject. In my considerations, I follow Mary Fulbrook’s observation that the notion of the bystander is processual, dynamic, and mutable depending on the con­ text rather than some essential identity. On the most concrete level, this means that the same person may be indirectly implicated at one moment and become a perpetrator or victim of violence at another.59 Bystandership is an analytical category that always cuts something out of reality, always is too narrow, and always leaves behind too many facts that someone else will claim. Each time, inaccuracies and doubts will arise. In the analyzed photograph, even if the woman is really a Pole from the Zamos´c´ region in the early period of the Second World War, the Germans soon may displace her to a temporary camp in Zwierzyniec and later to a concentration camp, or even deport her to Germany to work as a forced laborer. However, I am more interested in how

12

Introduction: The Blurred and the Overlooked

these historical experiences settle in memory, by taking “here and now” as their starting point and treating the Polish position not only as processual but also relational. What founds my analyses of perverse memory is the question about identity, namely who the subject is, what is her fantasy about herself, and what “others” appear in these fantasies. Perverse memory strategies about the Holocaust and Second World War constitute the identity and identification strategies of the Polish bystander of the Holocaust who observes the scenes of violence occurring between Ger­ mans and Jews.60 Such strategies serve to highlight what feelings and desires are inspired by the observation of violent scenes, and how the bystander later processes the experienced violence, loss, and benefits. In this sense, this book has two purposes: to describe perverse memory mechanisms and analyze the identity they create. This approach stems from my belief that psychoanalysis does not just consist in naming psychological mechanisms, but also in embedding them in the subject’s entire inner landscape. From this perspective, I wish to show how the Polish subject defines herself within the basic triangle of the post-Holocaust identity of perpetrators–victims–bystanders (Germans– Jews–Poles). The layout of the book’s chapters reflects this approach: 1

2

3

We are Poles because we are not Jews (voyeurism). The chapter reflects on the position assumed by the Polish bystanders of the Holocaust, in which they recognize that Jews’ suffering is different than their own, and they find excitement in the scene of violence. I will analyze two films: Kornblumen­ blau by Leszek Wosiewicz and the recording of Rafał Betlejewski’s perfor­ mance Płona˛ ca stodoła (The Barn Is Burning), in which I find the perverse situation of peeping at the Holocaust through the keyhole. We are Poles because we are Germans (fetishism). The chapter considers the Polish bystanders’ identification with the German perpetrators, with their strength, potency, and destructiveness captured in the image of the black SS uniform elevated to the rank of a fetish. I will examine here what is the purpose of “fascinating fascism” in the Polish memory by analyzing visual works such as Obsession by Maciej Toporowicz, The Nazis by Piotr Uklan´ski, Tomasz Kozak’s videos, and to a lesser extent, ´ literature such as the book Slicznotka doktora Josefa (Doctor Josef ’s Beauty) by Zyta Rudzka. We are Poles because we are Jews (masochism). The chapter concerns the identification strategies of the Polish bystander with the Jewish victim, in which sexualized pain serves to avoid suffering and compassion for others. By discussing the masochistic structure as a post-traumatic identity in the service of survival—in the works of Leo Lipski and in Artur Sandauer’s Notes from a Dead City—I will reveal its adoption for purposes of bystanders. In the latter context, I will focus on Szczepan Twardoch’s Morfina (Morphine), including other works by this author, along with Umschlagplatz and Kinderszenen by Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz.

Introduction: The Blurred and the Overlooked 4

13

We are Poles because we are not Germans (sadism). The chapter elaborates on anxiety fantasies about the return of vengeful Jews, who choose ethnic Poles instead of Germans as the object of their revenge for the Holocaust. The Polish bystanders become paralyzed, they know not what the specters want from them nor how to receive their forgiveness. Here, I will scrutinize what are the socioeconomic conditions in which. the Jews return as mon­ . sters in Igor Ostachowicz’s novel Noc zywych Zydów (The Night of the Living Jews), Marcin Wrona’s film Demon, and Ryszard Bugajski’s film Blindness.

The final chapter develops the possible idea of perverse memory and postmemory, along with how memories of violence transfer into the future. I dis­ cuss second-generation narratives on relationships between daughters and their mothers who survived the Holocaust in the books Włoskie szpilki (Italian High Heels) and Szum (Noise) by Magdalena Tulli and On Mother and Fatherland . by Bozena Keff. These texts support my speculation that the sadomasochistic transgenerational transmission of experiences and memories most often occurs when there is a lack of an empathetic and understanding environment. To reconstruct a perverse traumatic scene, I refer to two dramas about memory sites of former extermination camps, in which death and sexuality inextricably intersect: Puste pole (The Empty Field) by Tadeusz Hołuj and Krótka wymiana ognia (A Brief Exchange of Fire) by Zyta Rudzka. The selection of artistic texts and images with different status, popularity, and sphere of influence results from my belief that artistic sources constitute a seis­ mograph that allows us to study the social field and decipher historic experi­ ences. Cultural representations would function thus as social dreams, giving form to different experiences: that is why while writing on artistic sources I will also invoke historical testimonies. What can be uttered and represented sets the limits of cultural memory,61 whose analysis works best in fringe cases. It seems that the study of limits allows us to better determine what resides in the center of Polish Holocaust memory. When postulating perversion as a useful tool for describing the Polish identity, memory, and the relationships in which they enter with other collective entities at various moments of postwar and post-Holocaust life,62 I am interested in the synchronic rather than diachronic perspective. Noteworthy, most of the perverse representations I analyze emerged after 1989— after the abolition of official state censorship and Polish state transformation from communism to post-communist democracy—which became popular again after that date or were found after many years of oblivion. It is the result not only of the loosening of social and political control over what is permissible, along with the increasing time distance involved—also the generational change—when war survivors’ descendants become most active artistically. In such events, a Polish literary historian sees the process of desecration: Earlier art about the Holocaust did not depict the inexpressible but showed the impossibility of representation. For some time now, we are

14

Introduction: The Blurred and the Overlooked dealing with the expression of what can be represented while being incomprehensible.63

Then, profanation becomes the articulation of previously unacceptable emo­ tional experience.64 This means that only with the transformations in the Polish social field—just before the end of the twentieth century—did we become able to find symbolic forms for capturing past experiences. Besides the problem of transgenerational transmission (for obvious reasons requiring time distance), the following themes that I scrutinize in works of “late wit­ nessing” are nothing new: the direct observation of the Holocaust, the fasci­ nation with German oppressors, and the messianic model of Poland as the greatest war victim. However, they could not be fitted into the available modes of representation that irritated Polish writer Henryk Grynberg in the middle of the 1980s. Grynberg believed then that the communist Poland per­ mitted writing about the Holocaust only in the elegiac tone, which falsified the history of Polish-Jewish relations.65 Perverse representations of the Holocaust certainly do not fit the elegiac convention. Hence, in psychoanalytic terminology, they do not apply to the role of grief. Psychoanalytically oriented literature adopted the approach that art seeks a way to transform the experience of loss from melancholy into grief in response to historical and personal trauma. However, the structures, symptoms, and perverse processes described in this book may also be the results of the Polish bystanders’ trauma. I am describing this controversial notion in the concluding chapter. Most broadly speaking, I am primarily interested in the state of memory captured by Czesław Miłosz in his famous poem “Campo dei Fiori” (1944).66 The poet depicts the moment of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, when the Polish bystanders watched what was happening on the other side of the ghetto wall. In the poem apparent contradictions coexist: an image of a burning city, remains of things and bodies, “crowds … laughing,” and most of all, subtle and rarely noticed ero­ ticism. Yet this is how it looked: At times wind from the burning Would drift dark kites along And riders on the carousel Caught petals in midair. That same hot wind Blew open the skirts of the girls And the crowds were laughing On that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.67 However, I should let Mordechai Tsanin have the last word in this intro­ duction. Tsanin was a reporter travelling around Poland a few years later, right after the war, who sought to save and preserve what was left of the old

Introduction: The Blurred and the Overlooked

15

Jewish culture. Tsanin observed carefully and collected memories of bystan­ ders and found a similar image to the one from Miłosz’s poem: On Krasin´ski Square, just outside the ghetto walls, a circus was set up between the palaces of Polish justice. Polish youth had fun on the merry­ go-round and on the Ferris wheel exactly where ten meters away the last of the Jewish nation fought with their teeth and claws against the mighty army of murderers. Polish youth rose joyfully on the swings higher and higher, so as to be able to see how Jews convulsed and how their houses burned—on the other side of the wall. On Krasin´ski Square, between the carousel and the Ferris wheel, the crowd cheered: “Bedbugs are burning!”68

Notes 1 In the Lublin region, according to the Second General Census in Poland of December 9, 1931, 85.7% of those surveyed declared Polish as their mother tongue, 10%—Yiddish and Hebrew, and 2.5%—Ukrainian; in terms of religion, 76.9% declared Catholicism, 12.7%—Judaism, and 8.5%—Orthodoxy (this census did not include questions about nationality). Source: Drugi Powszechny Spis Lud­ nos´ci z dn. 9. XII 1931 r. Mieszkania i gospodarstwa domowe. Ludnos´c´. Stosunki zawodowe. Województwo lubelskie, Statistics Poland (Warsaw: 1938). In 1939 in Szczebrzeszyn, which is the likely location of the photograph, 43% of the inhabi­ tants were Jews (3200 out of 7496), Virtual Shtetl (April 1, 2020). I return to this issue at the end of this book. 2 The first large-scale and classic historical work on the Holocaust relies on materi­ als created by the perpetrators; cf. R. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 1961). In turn, the last equally synthetic study uses testimonies of different social groups, foremost Jewish victims. Cf. S. Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York; Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2008), pp. xxi–xxii. Hilberg’s work is from 1961, while Friedländer’s book is from 1998. The dynamics of the Holocaust’s historical interpretations in these four decades is described in: Y. Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, Connecticut; London: Yale University Press, 2002), esp. pp. 68–118. See also: S. Friedländer, “An Integrated History of the Holocaust: Some Methodological Challenges,” in: The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, ed. D. Stone (New York: Berghan Books, 2012). 3 “Introduction,” in: ‘Bystanders’ to the Holocaust: A Re-Evaluation, eds. D. Cesarani, P. A. Levine (Ann Arbor, Michigan; London: Routledge, 2002), p. 3. Many researchers noted this, and I refer to them below. The most notable publication among the most recent ones is Probing the Limits of Categorization: The Bystander in Holocaust History, eds. C. Morina, Krijn Thijs (New York: Berghan Books, 2019). I offer more literature in footnotes 55–60. 4 These photographs are in the album FA16/16. Interestingly, the photograph from . the Bełzec Museum is not in the archives of Yad Vashem. In turn, it is in the col­ lection of the Zamos´c´ Muzeum under the number MF-142-R. According to the information from the archive, the photo may be from Szczebrzeszyn. I want to . thank Ewa Koper from the Bełzec Museum, Emanuel Saunders from Yad Vashem Photo Collections, and Sebastian Oliwiak from the Zamos´c´ Museum Photo Department for their help in my query. 5 J. Leociak, Limit Experiences: A Study of Twentieth-Century Forms of Representation (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019), p. 119.

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6 “Passengers [of the Aryan tram going through the ghetto] move through a kind of aerial corridor. Space twists and turns. They find themselves in the ghetto, and yet they are separate from it. There are in some sort of space between, neither here nor there. … What connects us with the passengers of that Aryan tram, it would seem, is the experience of separation, of the existence of a kind of curtain – or rather a clear pane of glass – along which our gaze slides. We are apparently very close, but we are in fact terribly far away.” Leociak, Limit Experiences, p. 119. 7 Cf. Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust. 8 D. J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 245–246. 9 S. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989), p. 69. . 10 M. Pollack, Skazone krajobrazy, trans. K. Niedenthal (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2014), p. 78. Janina Struk at the beginning of her important book Photo­ graphing the Holocaust writes about analyzing a photo of atrocity: “I felt ashamed to be examining this barbaric scene, voyeuristic for witnessing their nakedness and vulnerability, and disturbed because the act of looking at this photograph put me in the position of the possible assassin.” Janina Struk, Photographing the Holo­ caust: Interpretations of the Evidence, (London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005), p. 3. 11 Cf. R. Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2” October 4/ 1977, pp. 65–66. 12 A. Zie˛ bin´ska-Witek, Historia w muzeach. Studium ekspozycji Holokaustu (Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS, 2011), p. 200. 13 Cf. A. Huyssen, “The Voids of Berlin,” Critical Inquiry 24.1/1997; D. Libeskind, “Trauma,” in Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust, eds. S. Hornstein, F. Jacobwitz (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2003); J. Pederson, “Trauma and Narrative,” in: Trauma and Literature, ed. J. R. Kurtz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 14 Cf. J. E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, Connecticut; London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 344. 15 Cf. Leociak, Limit Experiences, pp. 243–246. 16 U. Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: MIT Press, 2002), p. 13. 17 E. G. Breslaw, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies (New York: NYU Press, 1995), pp. 178–179. 18 Baer, Spectral Evidence, pp. 1–2. 19 C. Caruth, “Traumatic Awakenings (Freud, Lacan, and the Ethics of Memory),” in: Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), p. 94 20 Baer, Spectral Evidence, pp. 20–21. 21 S. Freud, “The Antithetical Meaning of Primary Words,” in: Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, ed. and trans. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Insti­ tute of Psycho-Analysis, 1968). 22 J. Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in: Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 23 J. Derrida, E. Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow: A Dialogue (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), p. 76. “Enduring the undecidable” bears resemblance to the Wilfred Bion’s psychoanalytic concept of “negative capability.” Bion understood it as the ability to tolerate states of not knowing and the frustration accompanying them. W. Bion, Attention and Interpretation (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970). 24 J. B. Michlic, “The Politics of Memorialization of the Holocaust in Poland: Reflections on the Current Misuses of the History of Rescuers,” Jewish Historical Studies 53.11/2021; “Rethinking ‘Democratic Backsliding’ in Central and Eastern Europe,” East European Politics 34.3/2018.

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26 27

28 29 30

31 32 33

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. Holocaust memory scholar Tomasz Zukowski calls such a type of thinking about the past a “great retouch” which aims to protect the narcissism violated with constant doubts: “Creating an idealized image of ourselves silences . the anxiety of a culture that nevertheless keeps coming back to the problem;” T. Zukowski, Wielki retusz. Jak . . zapomnielis´my, ze Polacy zabijali Zydów (Warsaw: Wielka Litera, 2018), p. 14. J. Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 4. It remains a widespread discourse, although currently it changed toward the con­ troversial issue of Polish . complicity in the Holocaust. Cf. an in-depth discussion of the essay by Tomasz Zukowski, “Wytwarzanie ‘winy oboje˛ tnos´ci’ oraz kategorii ‘oboje˛ tnego s´wiadka’ na przykładzie artykułu Jana Błon´skiego ‘Biedni Polacy patrza˛ na getto’,” Studia Litteraria et Historica 2/2013, https://ispan.waw.pl/journa ls/index.php/slh/article/view/slh.2013.018 (DOA: April 1, 2020). This remains a widespread model of emotional reactions of ethnic Poles to the Holocaust. Lately, social psychologists Michał Bilewicz and Maria Babin´ska presented the model “compassion–Schadenfreude–indifference” in their text. “Bystander, czyli kto? . Potoczne wyobrazenia Polaków na temat stosunku do Zydów w czasie okupacji hitlerowskiej,” Teksty Drugie 3/2018. A. Leder, “Konsekwencje dos´wiadczenia Zagłady dla polskiej s´wiadomos´ci (i . nies´wiadomos´ci) społecznej,” Zagłada Zydów. Studia i Materiały 14/2018. S. Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 17. I use the term “ethnically Polish” instead of the more common “Polish” as to identify “non-Jewish Poles.” I am referring to the civic concept of state in which Polish Jews are also Poles. Polish anthropologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir uses terms “Jewish” and “non-Jewish” Poles. Cf. J. Tokarska-Bakir, Pogrom Cries: Essays on Polish-Jewish History, 1939–1946 (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019). In this context, cf. R. Ensel, E. Gans, “The Dutch Bystander as Non-Jew and Implicated Subject,” in: Probing the Limits of Categorization: The Bystander in Holocaust History, eds. C. Morina, K. Thijs (New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2019). B. Engelking, J. Grabowski, “Preface,” in: Night without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2022), pp. 9–10. O. Bartov, “Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide,” The Journal of Modern His­ tory 80.3/2008, p. 571; J. Burzlaff, “Confronting the Communal Grave: A Reassess­ ment of Social Relations during the Holocaust in Eastern Europe,” The Historical Journal 63.4/2020. Fundamental documentary, testimonial, and field work: Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). About the consequences of forgetting about the brutal events of everyday life for art and the theory of testimony, cf. R. Sendyka, “Holocaust by Bullets: Expanding the Field of Holocaust Art,” European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, https:// ehri-project.eu/holocaust-bullets (DOA: June 6, 2019); see also S. Vice, “‘Beyond Words’: Representing the ‘Holocaust by bullets’,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 25.1–2/2019. J. T. Gross, “Ten jest z ojczyzny . mojej…,” ale go nie lubie˛,” in: Upiorna dekada. Eseje o stereotypach na temat Zydów, Polaków, Niemców, komunistów i kolaboracji 1939–1948 (Krakow: Austeria, 2007), p. 44. The American historian Omer Bartov, “Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide,” p. 570, agrees with Gross: “Even when the shootings were conducted at some distance from the towns—in forests, or cemeteries, or quarries—the brutal roundups (Aktionen or akcje), in which the old and the sick were dragged, humiliated, beaten, and shot, girls and women were raped, and babies were thrown out of balconies and windows or had their skulls smashed against walls, all took place in public view.” See also: A. Wylegała,

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37

38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Introduction: The Blurred and the Overlooked “Entangled Bystanders: Multidimensional Trauma of Ethnic Cleansing and Mass Violence in Eastern Galicia,” in: Trauma, Experience and Narrative in Europe after World . War II, eds. V. Kivimäki, P. Leese (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), p. 121. S. Z(Rz)emin Czubaszek, . ´ ski, “Łuków—Ghetto .and Surroundings,” in: Krzysztof . Stanisław Zemis—s´wiadek zagłady Zydów w Łukowie. Stanisław Zemis—Witness of the Holocaust in Łuków (Warsaw: EMKA Edukacja Media Kultura, 2019), p. 77. Original spelling of the author’s name; it is ambiguous because when the text was printed, it was not clear what the author’s real name was. However, Krzysztof Czubaszek determined (as a result of a typically archivist weave of meticulous . work and luck) that his name was . really Stanisław Zemis. Cf. .K. Czubaszek, . “Stanisław Zemis—s´wiadek zagłady Zydów w Łukowie,” Zagłada Zydów. Studia i Materiały 14/2018. . Justyna Kowalska-Leder thoroughly comments on Zemis’s testimony analyzing the postition of an observer and emotional entanglement of empathic witness: J. Kowalska-Leder, Nie . wiem, jak mam ich cenic´… Strefa ambiwalencji w s´wia­ dectwach Polaków i Zydów (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2019). Zygmunt Klukowski who witnessed massacres and subsequent carnavalesque mass robbery of Jewish property by ethnic Polish neighbors in his hometown wrote: “All of this paints an uncanny image, difficult to describe. Something as terrible, as dreadful, nobody has ever seen or heard of. I am writing down my impressions chaotically, clumsily, I am heavily off balance. I have a conviction, however, that even such notes may prove to be one day a sort of a document of this very moment.” Z. Klukowski, Zamojszczyzna 1918–1954 (Warszawa: Karta, 2017), p. 328. Quote comes from the Polish original, as the English translation is abbreviated. See: Z. Klukowski, Diary from the Years of Occupation 1939–1944 (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 222. A. Wylegała, “Entangled Bystanders: Multidimensional Trauma of Ethnic Cleansing and Mass Violence in Eastern Galicia”, p. 130. Moreover, Polish his­ torian Feliks Tych indicates that ethnically Polish bystanders rarely write about the ´ Holocaust and the Jews fate in their notes: F. Tych, “Swiadkowie Shoah. Zagłada . Zydów w polskich pamie . ˛ tnikach i wspomnieniach,” in: Długi cien´ Zagłady. Szkice historyczne (Warsaw: ZIH, 1999), p. 13. J. Górski, “At the Turn of History,” ed. J. Grabowski, Holocaust Studies and Materials 1/2008, p. 310. Z. Klukowski, “Record of May 9, 1942,” in: Klukowski, Diary from the Years of Occupation 1939–1944 (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 197. S. F. Bielawski, The Last Jew from Wegrow: The Memoirs of a Survivor of the Step-by-Step Genocide in Poland (Praeger: New York, 1991), p. 58 (my emphasis). J. McDougall, Plea for a Measure of Abnormality (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 56.

Cf. L. Aron, “The Internalized Primal Scene,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 5.2/1995.

N. C. Auerhahn, D. Laub, “The Primal Scene of Atrocity: The Dynamic Interplay

Between Knowledge and Fantasy of the Holocaust in Children of Survivors,”

Psychoanalytic Psychology 15.3/1998, p. 371.

Cf. R. Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945

(London: Secker & Warburg, 1995). Hilberg does not clearly define the latter

eponymous figure.

G. Niziołek, The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust (London; New York; Oxford;

New Delhi; Sydney: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2019), p. 242.

M. Parsons, “Sexuality and Perversion a Hundred Years On: Discovering What

Freud Discovered,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 81/2000, pp. 43–44.

Cf. F. de Masi, “Theories of Sadomasochistic Perversion,” in: The Sadomasochistic

Perversion: The Entity and the Theories, trans. P. Slotkin (London: Karnac, 2003).

On theories of perversion, see also J. Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: Studies in

Introduction: The Blurred and the Overlooked

48 49 50 51 52

53

54 55

56

57

58 59

19

Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 47–61. J. Chasseguet-Smirgel, “Perversion and the Universal Law,” in: Creativity and

Perversion (London: Free Association Books, 1998), pp. 2–3.

J. McDougall, “Neosexual Solutions,” in: The Many Faces of Eros: A Psychoanalytic

Exploration of Human Sexuality (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), p. 172.

J. Steiner, “Turning a Blind Eye: The Cover up for Oedipus,” International Review

of Psychoanalysis 12/1985.

Cf. H. Verhoeff, “Does Oedipus Have His Complex?,” Style 18.3/1984.

Here, I borrow an apt phrase by a Lacanian psychoanalyst, Octave Mannoni: “je

sais bien, mais quand même…” Cf. O. Mannoni, “I Know Well, but All the

Same…,” in: Perversion and the Social Relation, eds. M. A. Rothenberg, D. Foster,

S. Žižek (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2003). It is a typical

construction based on perverse denial allowing one to say, “I am not anti-Semite,

but…” What follows, usually proves what the interlocutor wants to deny.

I will prefer to use the term denial over disavowal out of its practicality and wider

use in other disciplines, primarily in history and memory studies. I am aware that

the most often translation of Freudian Verleugnung is the classical James Strachey

term “disavowal.” See: C. Hall, D. Pick, “Thinking About Denial,” History

Workshop Journal 84/2017. For different sociological notions of “denial”, various

examples and categorizations, see a brilliant study: S. Cohen, States of Denial:

Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).

For example, Hilberg’s book title Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders was transformed

into what could be translated back as Perpetrators, Victims, Witnesses.

Besides the researchers whose argumentation I briefly present further, the publication

of . Jan Tomasz Gross also deserves attention: “Sprawcy, ofiary i inni,” Zagłada

Zydów. Studia i Materiały 10/2014. Gross considers and proposes various terms for bystander understood as “a person standing next to someone else.” According to Gross, the most accurate ones are “helper,” “enabler” and “beneficiary.” Roma Sendyka presents the most exhaustive analysis of this notion in the Polish context in her text “Od s´wiadków do postronnych. Kategoria bystander i analiza podmiotów uwikłanych,” in: S´wiadek: jak sie˛ staje, czym jest? eds. A. Dauksza, K. Koprowska (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2019). E. . Janicka, “Pamie˛ c´ przyswojona. Koncepcja polskiego dos´wiadczenia zagłady Zydów jako traumy zbiorowej w s´wietle rewizji kategorii s´wiadka,” Studia Litteraria et Historica 3–4/2014–2015; E. Janicka, “Obserwatorzy uczestnicza˛ cy zamiast . s´wiadków i rama zamiast obrzezy. O nowe kategorie opisu polskiego kontekstu Zagłady,” Teksty Drugie 2/2018. A. Szczepan, “S´wiadek/postronny,” in: Nie-miejsca pamie˛ ci. Elementarz, ed. R. Sendyka (Krakow: Os´rodek Badan´ nad Kulturami Pamie˛ ci, 2017), p. 35. Cf. R. Sendyka, “Pos´wiadek, przeciw-postronny i (niczyja) trauma,” Widok. Teorie i prak­ tyki kultury wizualnej 18/2017; B. Karwowska, “Bystander czy (pasywny) s´wiadek? Kilka uwag nad konsekwencjami wyboru terminologii w badaniach nad Zagłada˛ lub Holocaustem,” Roczniki Humanistyczne 64/2017; R. Sendyka, “Od obserwa­ torów do gapiów. Kategoria bystanders i analiza wizualna,” Teksty Drugie 3/2018, pp. 129–130; K. Koprowska, Postronni? Zagłada w relacjach chłopskich s´wiadków (Krakow: TAiWPN Universitas, 2018), p. 120; Sendyka, “Od s´wiadków do post­ ronnych. Kategoria bystander i analiza podmiotów uwikłanych,” pp. 76–80. M. Rothberg, “From Victims and Perpetrators to Implicated Subjects,” in: Impli­ cated Subjects: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2019), p. 1. M. Fulbrook, “Bystanders: Catchall Concept, Alluring Alibi, or Crucial Clue?,” in: Probing the Limits of Categorization, p. 26.

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Introduction: The Blurred and the Overlooked

60 Jonathan Friedman encapsulates the link between identity and memory in an empathic way: “the past is always practiced in the present, not because the past imposes itself, but because subjects in the present fashion the past in the practice of their social identity… The past that affects the present is a past constructed and/or reproduced in the present” J. Friedman, Cultural Identity and Global Process (London: Sage, 1994). In psychoanalytic terms, an act of remembrance in the presence that affects the memory’s content would constitute the process of Nachträglichkeit, see Friedrich-Wilhelm Eickhoff, “On Nachträglichkeit: The Mod­ ernity of an Old Concept,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 87.6/2006. 61 Following Jan Assmann, I understand cultural memory on the most general level—consistent with the psychoanalytic connection of identity and memory—as a common practice of understanding the past that shapes group identity. Cf. J. Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 111. See also A. Assmann, “Transformations between History and Memory,” Social Research 75.1/2008, pp. 49–72. 62 The perspective of cultural studies follows the methodological postulate of Frederick Jameson—“always historicize!”—which usually distrusts analyses in which the notions are not subject to historical criticism, and the lack of understanding of their genealogy leads to false universalization. However, Slavoj Žižek indicates that there are also procedures of “over-rapid historicization” applied to avoid what is traumatic (and what also eludes symbolization). Therefore, the use of psychoanalytic concepts results from my faith that we may treat the dynamic, variable, and socially depen­ dent theory of psychoanalysis as a temporary certainty. With psychoanalysis, we may criticize the Polish Holocaust memory. Cf. S. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London; New York: Verso, 2008), pp. 50–51; F. Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. ix. On possible usages of psychoanalysis in cultural and critical theory, see: A. Allen, Critique on the Couch: Why Critical Theory Needs Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021). 63 P. Czaplin´ski, “Zagłada i profanacje,” Teksty Drugie 4/2009, pp. 205–206. 64 G. Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation,” in: Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007), p. 73, puts it emphatically in this manner: “‘to consecrate’ (sacrare) was the term that indicated the removal of things from the sphere of human law, ‘to profane’ meant, conversely, to return them to the free use of men.” 65 H. Grynberg, “Holocaust w literaturze polskiej,” in: Prawda nieartystyczna (Warsaw: PIW, 1994), p. 199. 66 The poem has a fascinating later story of reception when a dispute occurred within various memory operations—structurally similar, although on a smaller scale, to the debates and scandals around the books of Jan Tomasz Gross—about the his­ torical probability of the picture showing non-Jewish Varsovians playing on a car­ ousel next to a ghetto burning during the uprising. I agree with Katarzyna Chmielewska that the panicked concern for compliance with “historical facts” caused by the need to protect the Polish image aims to remove the need to under­ stand the essence of the matter; cf. K. Chmielewska, “Alternative Narratives of the 1940s Versus the Politics of Memory,” in: The Holocaust Bystander in Polish Cul­ . ture, 1942–2015: The Story of Innocence, eds. M. Hopfinger, T. .Zukowski (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 88–91. Cf. T. Zukowski, “Zbiorowa nies´wiadomos´c´. Czesław Miłosz,” Narracje o Zagładzie 5/2019. 67 C. Miłosz, “Campo dei Fiori,” in: New and Collected Poems 1931–2001 (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2001), pp. 33–35. . . 68 M. Canin, Przez ruiny i zgliszcza. Podróz po stu zgładzonych gminach zydowskich w Polsce, trans. M. Adamczyk-Garbowska (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Nisza, 2018), p. 44 (cf. M. Canin, Iber sztejn un sztok. A rajze iber hundert chorew-geworene

Introduction: The Blurred and the Overlooked

21

kehiles in Pojln [Tel Awiw: Lecte Najes, 1952]). Tsanin traveled around Poland between 1946 and 1947 and published his reports in Yiddish in the famous New York newspaper Forwerts (now The Forward). The whole series was published in 1952 in Tel Aviv. It is a collection of shocking and melancholic records, whose observations entered Polish memory only in the recent decades.

Bibliography Baer, U. Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 2002. Bartov, O. “Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide.” The Journal of Modern History 80. 3/2008. Błon´ski, J. “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto,” in: My Brother’s Keeper: Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust, ed. A. Polonsky. London: Routledge, 1990. . . Canin, M. Przez ruiny i zgliszcza. Podróz po stu zgładzonych gminach zydowskich w Polsce, trans. M. Adamczyk-Garbowska. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Nisza, 2018 (Canin, M. Iber sht.eyn un sht.ok. a rayze iber hundert. h.orev-gev.orene k.ehiles̀ in Poyln. Tel Aviv: Lecte Najes, 1952). Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. Creativity and Perversion. London: Free Association Books, 1998. Derrida, J., Roudinesco, E. For What Tomorrow: A Dialogue. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2014. Engelking, B., J. Grabowski, eds. “Preface,” in: Night without End: The Fate of Jews in

German-Occupied Poland. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2022.

Freud, S. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989.

Gross, J. T. “Ten jest z ojczyzny . mojej…, ale go nie lubie˛,” in: Upiorna dekada. Eseje

o stereotypach na temat Zydów, Polaków, Niemców, komunistów i kolaboracji 1939–1948. Kraków: Austeria, 2007. Klukowski, Z. Diary from the Years of Occupation 1939–1944. Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Leder, A. “Konsekwencje dos´wiadczenia Zagłady dla polskiej s´wiadomos´ci (i nies´wia­ . domos´ci) społecznej.” Zagłada Zydów. Studia i Materiały 14/2018. Leociak, J. Limit Experiences: A Study of Twentieth-Century Forms of Representation. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019. McDougall, J. The Many Faces of Eros: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Human Sexuality. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995. McDougall, J. Plea for a Measure of Abnormality. New York and London: Routledge, 2015. Probing the Limits of Categorization: The Bystander in Holocaust History, eds. C. Morina, K. Thijs. New York: Berghan Books, 2019. Snyder, T. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books, 2010. Steiner, J. “Turning a Blind Eye: The Cover up for Oedipus.” International Review of Psycho-Analysis 12/1985. Struk, J. Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005. The Holocaust Bystander in Polish Culture, 1942–2015: The Story of Innocence, eds. . M. Hopfinger, T. Zukowski. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Whitebook, J. Perversion and Utopia: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996.

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Wylegała, A. “Entangled Bystanders: Multidimensional Trauma of Ethnic Cleansing and Mass Violence in Eastern Galicia,” in: Trauma, Experience and Narrative in Europe after World War II, eds. V. Kivimäki, P. Leese. Cham: Springer, 2021. . ´ ski, S. “Łuków—Ghetto Z(Rz)emin and Surroundings,” in: K.. Czubaszek, Stanisław . . Zemis—s´wiadek zagłady Zydów w Łukowie. Stanisław Zemis—Witness of the Media Kultura, .2019. . Holocaust in Łuków. Warsaw: EMKA Edukacja . Zukowski, T. Wielki retusz. Jak zapomnieliśmy, ze Polacy zabijali Zydów. Warszawa: Wielka Litera, 2018.

1

Voyeurism The Polish Bystander Looks with One Eye

This chapter deals with the disturbing feelings of Polish gawkers—the pleasure of voyeurism and schadenfreude—which means pleasure derived from seeing the Other being harmed and enjoying it from a safe distance. In Erotism: Death and Sensuality, Georges Bataille states that such a forbidden pleasure of peeping at someone’s suffering transgressively connects sexuality and death, although it is much more “widespread and staggering”1 than we would want to admit. From the example of two different representations—the film Kornblumenblau by Leszek Wosiewicz and the recording of Rafał Betlejewski’s performance Płonie stodoła (The Barn is Burning)—I want to show what is usually masked or over­ looked in discussions about Holocaust memory, namely that the Jews’ suffering seen by bystanders does not provoke only empathy and fear but may also arouse pleasure. These two representations have different status, form, and range; one of them involves high culture whilst another influences popular culture. Finally, these representations concern different historical experiences, namely extermi­ nations performed in gas chambers and pogroms that happened in the Polish provinces. What they have in common is the description of the condition of Polish Holocaust gawkers (and beneficiaries); their impulsive and emotional entanglement in the Holocaust and the socioeconomic—or at least libidinal— benefits they derived from the event.

On the Border Leszek Wosiewicz’s full-length debut Kornblumenblau did not have an easy premiere in 1989. Even despite the awards it received—including the Golden Lions of the Gdynia Film Festival for directing—it seems that the film went unnoticed. It is hardly surprising, as the Polish society was focused on differ­ ent matters at the time of systemic transformation from communism to democracy. According to film historians, the most popular productions of that time were Western ones, and in the early 1990s, historical films referring in general to Polish-Jewish relations enjoyed moderate success.2 However, Kornblumenblau stands out all the more as a breakthrough film: produced in 1988, it was still submitted to the communist Film Approval Committee (Komisja Kolaudacyjna Filmów Fabularnych)3 and premiered on October 9, DOI: 10.4324/9781003330035-2

24

Voyeurism: The Polish Bystander

1989, less than two months after the formation of the first non-communist Polish government since 1946. Contrary to the enthusiasm of the freshly acquired political freedom, Kornblumenblau again wanted viewers to focus on imprisonment. Although the film screened in the 1990s, which is the era of the loosening of moral censorship and the relative opening of the public sphere, it was still the product of the 1980s. The discussions from the martial law period—a breakthrough for the Polish memory of the Holocaust— enabled a new approach toward camp experiences and the experience of being a Holocaust bystander. The Polish 1980s brought important debates on Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), Jan Błon´ski’s article “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto” (1987), and . Henryk Grynberg’s “Ludzie Zydom zgotowali ten los” (People Brought This Fate upon the Jews; 1984, discussed only in 1990 and 1994), which testify to the crisis of the Polish collective identity and the resurfacing of the previously unnoticed disaster in social consciousness. Fragments of Shoah presented in public television made people realize that ethnic Poles witnessed the Holo­ caust, while Błon´ski and Grynberg raised doubt regarding national inno­ cence.4 Scholars believe that the symbolic crisis stems from the reaction to martial law and romantic narratives created at that time to reconcile the ethnic community, from the erosion of the anticommunist ethos, and from the emergence of a new generation that did not remember the war.5 The con­ densation of narratives and images on the wartime stories of Polish Jews, the Holocaust, and Poles’ attitude toward the Holocaust allows us to consider the period a memory boom, which after all, is eagerly studied by historians of culture.6 However, historians tend to overlook Kornblumenblau in their ana­ lyses: it is not a niche film, but it never became the subject of any discussion nor a part of any debate on history, occupation, camp experience, and the Holocaust, even though it does deal with these issues. The film seems to resist by not fitting any interpretative framework. There are relatively few scientific analyses and studies concerning Kornblumenblau. 7 Moreover, it mostly went unnoticed by critics, although in existing reviews, the opinion about the film prevails that it is an interesting artwork.8 Polish critics in this regard interpret Kornblumenblau mostly con­ servatively, as a morality play about the artist’s role in totalitarian regimes. In the analyses, the film’s metaphorization usually accompanies the realistic treatment of the protagonist’s camp experience and the comparison to two earlier canonical films about Auschwitz: The Last Stage (1947) by Wanda Jakubowska and Passenger (1963) by Andrzej Munk. Wosiewicz clearly complicates in Kornblumenblau the formal and aesthetic construction of the camp’s depiction based on symmetry and harmony that we see in Jakubow­ ska’s film, while Munk’s film seems closer to Wosiewicz’s perspective because of the emotional fascination and bond between the female perpetrator and the female prisoner. After all, Wosiewicz himself prompts such interpretative approaches by highlighting the motif of the artist in a “totalitarian system” as it moves from Nazism to Communism, thus combining the Second World

Voyeurism: The Polish Bystander

25

9

War with the reality of the 1980s martial law period. Noteworthy, this was also how the film was advertised.10 However, such analyses completely exclude the unique part, namely the experience of the Polish Holocaust bystanders. Kornblumenblau boldly exceeded the discursive framework of decorum and acceptability. The screenplay is based on the memories of a former Auschwitz prisoner, Kazimierz Tymin´ski,11 but we may assume that the director and scriptwriters (Wosiewicz and Jarosław Sander) treated his testimony only as a pretext, because the film condenses, dislocates, and omits some threads.

Trauma Archives The film begins with a title sequence: before the credits appear, viewers watch edited archival photos, fragments of fictional films documenting important historical events, and stylized staged scenes from the childhood and adoles­ cence of the protagonist, Tadeusz Wyczyn´ski (starring Adam Kamien´), inter­ rupted by intertitles. In total, Kornblumenblau offers about a hundred dynamically changing, overlapping shots accompanied by cheerful, cabaret piano music. The archival materials mix with those recorded later, fiction merges with documentary, and tragedy blends with irony in the images of the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Polish–Soviet War. All of this sets the scene for a Charlie Chaplin film atmosphere, but it also shows the ambiguity of what is remembered. The title sequence aims to show Tadeusz’s story before he arrives at the concentration camp as a conspirator, so viewers watch chronologically ordered moments from his life constantly interrupted by other images. From the very beginning, the film ostentatiously reveals its form: black-and-white images are grainy, and their outlines are blurred. It is hard to distinguish authentic archival materials from artificial ones, and the historical time and theatrical frame constantly overlap. Quickly changing images remain in chronological order, but they are difficult to follow, reflected by the repeating circular movement sequences: a spinning carousel, rotating dancing couples, even a spinning floor in a dance club. It is a reference to the atmosphere of the interwar Polish cinema—melodramatic, burlesque, and remote from the social reality.12 The opening sequence combines two contra­ dictory principles: linear narrative development and spatial archivization.13 The archive of family history presents its opacity rather than representing the reality of old reality, which corresponds to the notion that prewar archives are retrospectively stigmatized by the catastrophe that followed them, which pre­ vents us from maintaining their coherent order.14 The narrative strives to progress linearly, continuously from the past into the future, yet something constantly interrupts it with an abrupt break. Trauma theory informs that what disallows the smooth narration to close is the traumatic experience15. But what would be traumatic about these images? Manipulation with archival materials indicates that the director does not really believe they could capture objective reality, even though viewers may

26

Voyeurism: The Polish Bystander

recognize many signs from prewar and interwar Polish history. However, as one critic emphasizes, cinematic archives simultaneously present an “ethni­ cally pure” Poland, whose history continues without the Jews.16 Not seeing the Jews in these images instantly brings the viewer’s attention to the issue of the gaze, which the film takes up from the very beginning, even before its “historical” part. The beginning is an homage to early cinematography, but it is also a declaration that the film deals with the ways and dynamics of seeing. After a brief shot of a flying plane, there appears a camera and its operator aimed toward the viewers. Next, a quick zoom-in happens, the camera expands, and it seems that the lens is about to fill the entire frame, but the shot smoothly turns into a sequence of colliding trains. It is a trick montage of attractions known from the early beginnings of cinematography, but it also is a shock, maybe even trauma, considering that Freud chose the train crash as one of his traumatic event models at the time to which these images refer.17 Therefore, we might assume that trauma concerns precisely the gaze: looking, viewing, seeing, but also averting or closing of the eyes, and blindness. The ending of the opening sequence suggests this as well. The dynamic montage decelerates, and the image gradually becomes colorful when an eye appears in the peephole of the prison door that is looking at the bloodied and bruised face of Tadeusz, captured during the resistance’s operation. It is the first scene when the viewer’s look assumes the position of the witness of suf­ fering. Although the film does not tell us whose eye is looking at the protago­ nist, the context suggests that the viewer should assume the perspective of the German supervisor. The peeping scene—in my view crucial to the proper reading of the film—repeats two more times: when the main character watches the execution of prisoners through a window and in the final sequence that shows Jews dying in the gas chamber. When the peephole suddenly closes, and Tadeusz realizes that somebody watches him, he looks toward the door, the scene is cut, the opening credits appear, and the actual film narrative begins.

Aesthetics of Anesthetics and Excitement Kornblumenblau tells the story of Tadeusz imprisoned in a concentration camp; the shooting of the film happened mainly in Auschwitz and Majdanek: Tadeusz’s slow rise in the prison hierarchy from the working Kommando through the kitchen Kommando and waiting in the officers’ canteen to the Lagermuseum, later exile to camp arrest as punishment for the escape of prisoners from the Kommando, and the liberation of the camps. It is difficult to reconstruct the plot, as the film’s structure is oneiric, and the montage juxtaposes images based on emotional associations rather than a coherent narrative. We also learn little about the protagonist who hardly talks and only acts.18 The protagonist’s flattened psychology leaves only moving bodies in the frame, stripped of any ideological conditioning. Tadeusz survives the camp not thanks to his faith, values, or politics but luck and relationships with other prisoners. Therefore, the film breaks the convention of camp

Voyeurism: The Polish Bystander

27

experience representation already at this stage—including Tymin´ski’s own testimony that offers many references to Polish patriotism—without placing the prisoner’s bodily and emotional experience in any broader frame. It is not common for narrations on camp experience, as usually the reality of the concentration camps is put in broader—political, patriotic, religious, sym­ bolic—frames, removing out of it the individual, material and corporeal experience.19 Wosiewicz follows here Tadeusz Borowski’s prose (known to any Polish viewer as his prose was a part of the school curriculum since the early post­ war years), even borrowing the double name of the author/narrator of Auschwitz stories: the protagonist of Kornblumenblau is Tadeusz and not Kazimierz, as Tymin´ski’s memoirs would suggest. As argued by the critics, Borowski’s works were anti-mythical and challenged the national and reli­ gious images of the occupation that emerged immediately after the war.20 As early as in 1948, one of the most apt literary critics, Kazimierz Wyka, noticed the “cruel sobriety” of his prose refusing to be put in any ideological frames.21 Usually deprived of authorial commentary or emotions, the ascetic style of Borowski’s Auschwitz stories is sometimes described as behaviorist and focused only on the surface that is difficult to include into any ideology. Moreover, the film breaks the taboo associated with showing homoerotic relations in the camp. Tadeusz receives his camp pseudonym “Kornblumen­ blau” when playing merry accordion tunes for his Block Leader (starring Krzysztof Kolberger). Kornblumenblau is the title of a pub song celebrating the joy of living by the Rhine, drinking wine, and the blue color of women’s eyes. The title literally means “cornflower,” and it combines nationalist rhetoric with male homoeroticism.22 Although the sexual relationship between Kornblumenblaum and the Block Leader is only suggested, their bond is visible in their tender communication. Moreover, the relationship involves violence in the very structure of the camp: the Block Leader replaces a young prisoner disguised as a woman (pipel in camp slang) with Tadeusz, but then beats Tadeusz upon discovering fleas on him. However, reducing their relationship to the perpetrator–subordinate scheme would lead to losing the perhaps much more difficult observation that they share a deep emotional bond. In the film, the same kind of tenderness connects Tadeusz and Włodek, a fellow prisoner from the bunk. In this world, women appear only for brief moments: Tadeusz’s wife appears only in the archival opening sequence in the wedding scene and in a photograph sent to the camp. A woman from the Jewish Kommando exchanges flirtatious glances with Tadeusz when they pass each other on their way to work; he believes that she belongs to the group intended for the raping Germans; the protagonist watches a dancing Jewish girl from a distance after the transport’s arrival to the camp; the terrifying female camp registrar rapes Tadeusz with another female prisoner func­ tionary; the commandant’s wife is looking for artists for a Christmas party and accidentally saves Tadeusz from death. In the world of Kornblumenblau, women constitute an idealized image when they remain inaccessible (outside

28

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of the camp world, passed without a word on the way, or on the other side of an open cattle wagon) and become monstrous when a man comes close. Tadeusz can look for rescue only among other men, who sometimes take care of him by pure accident. There are only a few similar images of love relationships between con­ centration camp prisoners in Polish culture: Wosiewicz largely transforms Tymin´ski’s testimony, in which camp homosexuals are called perverts with disgust and fear and likened to prisoners who receive sexual pleasure from murdering cats23. A significant exception is Marian Pankowski’s drama Tea­ trowanie nad s´wie˛ tym barszczem (Theatrics over the Holy Borscht) staged for the first time in 1985 in Belgium and published in Poland in 1995.24 In Pan­ kowski’s ironic drama, postwar Polish reality constantly intertwines with war memories. Former prisoners discuss which stories told by them could be staged during the official celebration of the victory over fascism. However, Polish memory—or the “holy borscht”—does not contain the most interest­ ing, constantly retold story about a tender and brutal relationship between a prisoner and his kapo. It is a male story in which women, in fact, do not participate, they are isolated from what happens in the camp. This story does not fit the officially formatted memory and must remain out of its frame.25 Thus, the higher the emotional temperature of Kornblumenblau. In interviews, Leszek Wosiewicz discusses the unique quality of the film obtained through montage (by Wanda Zeman and Jarosław Wodejko). The images were transposed into a sheet music, the scenes divided into bars, and the shots are a maximum of sixteen seconds long, which creates the film’s fast-paced dynamics.26 The prisoners trot around the camp, they never walk, and the camera’s sudden movements set a rapid rhythm. One critic compares the emotional atmosphere of Kornblumenblau to burlesque.27 Indeed, the film provides no moments of silence or melancholic elegy characteristic for the canonical documentary Night and Fog (1955) by Alain Resnais. Instead of sadness, the film evokes excitement. The film has two opposing color tones: for most of the time, gray and brown predominate in unsaturated images, which makes the shots cold and raw. In the night sequences, there is a red filter, which makes an unnatural impression: the film redirects its attention to own materiality but simulta­ neously intensifies emotions. Red refers to blood, a bodily fluid connected both to sexuality and aggression: in scenes saturated with red, Tadeusz con­ ducts tender conversations with Włodek, but also later ends up locked in a prison cell with an insane prisoner who paints catastrophic visions on walls. One critic writes that these are the moments when the film’s body reveals itself, conveyed in the suffering bodies captured in the shot, which becomes unbearable and disgusting.28 It seems that the sheer amount of arousal becomes difficult to bear; according to Freud’s first definition, a traumatic experience occurs when an excess of stimuli breaks the subject’s protective shield.29 Excitement turns into pain attacking the viewers confronted with the images of the camp. Thus, sometimes emotions exerted by a work of art may

Voyeurism: The Polish Bystander

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be so intense that they break the cognitive process and lead to the reader or viewer losing a stable position.30 Affects with sources that are difficult to locate cause pain and burst the work’s framework. However, interestingly, in Kornblumenblau, red appears in scenes that are not that significant for the plot, while scenes that are particularly memorable are presented in a greyblue, emotionless tone. This is another trope from Borowski’s prose and his photographic account of the camp reality, whose visual traces return in numb images.31

Regarding the Pain of Others—with Pleasure In these color tones, the cinematic reality of Auschwitz seems temporarily distant and deliberately dated, even the striped uniforms seem rather washed out.32 The protagonist is two-dimensional and lacks any deeper feelings.33 The board that appears right after the opening sequence to introduce the film’s motto announces exactly such an attitude: “Most of our occupations are low comedy … We must play our part duly, but of the mask and appearance we must not make a real essence …! Montaigne.” This is a quote from Essays by Michel de Montaigne, a sixteenth-century collection of philosophical notes created, which is crucial, during the cruel religious wars in France. The motto comes from the essay Of Managing the Will that begins with a concept typical of this author: Few things, in comparison of what commonly affect other men, move, or, to say better, possess me: for ‘tis but reason they should concern a man, provided they do not possess him. I am very solicitous, both by study and argument, to enlarge this privilege of insensibility, which is in me natu­ rally raised to a pretty degree, so that consequently I espouse and am very much moved with very few things. I have a clear sight enough, but I fix it upon very few objects; I have a sense delicate and tender enough; but an apprehension and application hard and negligent. I am very unwilling to engage myself; as much as in me lies, I employ myself wholly on myself, and even in that subject should rather choose to curb and restrain my affection from plunging itself over head and ears into it, it being a subject that I possess at the mercy of others, and over which for­ tune has more right than I.34 Montaigne develops an anti-dogmatic and anti-theoretical attitude founded on an appropriate distance to all possible actions and situations, both perso­ nal and social. David Carrol Simon indicates that Montaigne assumed this Democritean position35 primarily toward the surrounding war, from which he hid behind ironic nonchalance.36 However, Simon also writes that there is a darker side to this distance, namely the satisfaction that one is not a victim of danger and, moreover, that pleasure may come from the surrounding vio­ lence. Tracking down the theme of laughing at someone else’s misfortune and numerous graphic examples of wartime cruelty in Essays, Simon recognizes

30

Voyeurism: The Polish Bystander

the first modern example of schadenfreude in Montaigne’s work. Schadenfreude involves the awareness of the danger that threatens the subject, so there is a recognition of vulnerability that connects one with another subject. However, the observation that one is free from danger immediately follows this finding. The subject sees the danger as external and happening to someone else, which is pleasing. Therefore, the pleasure is double: the subject is not the one who suffers, and someone who is not the subject suffers.37 In a situation when violence is ubiquitous, safe distance is never innocent. Thus, the Kornblumenblau motto may refer to Tadeusz’s attempt to survive in Auschwitz as his adaptation strat­ egy.38 Such a thesis seems quite obvious, but also rather withdrawn. It is much more difficult to imagine extending the thesis on safe distance so that it includes the pleasure of keeping such a position and relating it to the position of the Polish Holocaust bystander in the film’s broader background. In The Polish Theater of the Holocaust, Niziołek writes about the numbness and remoteness of Polish bystanders in the representations of camps and the Holocaust. In the chapter analyzing Jerzy Grotowski’s Akropolis, Niziołek devotes a small paragraph to discuss the best “testimony of social perception”39 . of Auschwitz, namely Tadeusz Rózewicz’s short story “An Excursion to the Museum” (1959): “The site of the mass death and torment is transformed in . Rózewicz’s vision into a kind of national peepshow, as tour groups seek thrills walking through the camp grounds, asking around impatiently: “Where is the hair?” After all, the museum cannot teach anything to the visitors who are only capable of expressing conventional and smooth phrases. Niziołek indicates that the Polish witness remains unmoved and thoughtless in the face of a traumatic situation, similarly to Eichmann analyzed by Hannah Arendt: The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communica­ tion was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was sur­ rounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.40 However, Niziołek’s analysis involves another thesis about the national peep­ show and the active search for the pleasure of peeping—in this case—suffer­ ing. Abraham Bomba tells Lanzmann in Shoah: A funny thing happened, like maybe it’s not nice to say, but I will say it. Most of the people, not only the majority, but ninety-nine percent of the Polish people when they saw the train going through—we looked really like animals in that wagon, just our eyes looked outside—they were laughing, they had a joy, because they took the Jewish people away.41 This is how the victim of violence recalls the events. We may also see in the film a gesture of a peasant living near Treblinka, who says with an inscrutable

Voyeurism: The Polish Bystander

31

expression that when the Jews were transported to the extermination camp by trains, he and other locals approached the cars with curiosity. When the vic­ tims asked where they are heading, he made a throat-slitting gesture to inform them about their immediate future. The man shares this memory with non­ chalance and considerable satisfaction.42 Similar testimonies also concern the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In an interview concerning his wartime memories, historian Jerzy Jedlicki tells about the “Aryan side” inhabitants’ reactions to the suffering of the Jews: During the Ghetto Uprising, when there was a glow over the city and the smell of burning matter in the air, the number of jokes about Jews increased, brought to school from home by the girl scouts from our class.”43 In turn, just after. the war, poet Mieczysław Jastrun records a situation that happened in the Zoliborz district in Warsaw of 1943: Young female bureaucrats . who ran out onto the terrace of one of the largest blocks of flats in Zoliborz to look at the ghetto fire from there—it was during the first days of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—shouted cheerfully into the spring air shaken by detonations and saturated with smoke: “Come and see how Jew chops are frying!”44 Jastrun comments that the bureaucrats did not sound like they were possessed by a thirst for blood. However, they were clearly possessed by a voyeuristic thirst for spectacle. Kornblumenblau is exactly such a study of voyeurism. When Tadeusz, the protagonist, moved to the kitchen Kommando owing to his Block Leader’s support, his chances of survival significantly increased thanks to the access to food and the relative freedom of movement around the camp. While in the food warehouse, Tadeusz bites a raw onion and looks out of the window at the scene occurring in front of the barracks. The whole film emphasizes the prisoners’ corporeality, so here we also hear loud sounds of chewing and swallowing. The rapid movements of the camera imitate the rapid movements of Tadeusz’s head; he tries to see why the prisoners quickly run out of the square in front of the barrack. Elegantly dressed women appear, followed by SS men. The women sit on stylish armchairs, just cleaned by prisoners dres­ sed in striped uniforms, in front of the platform and the gallows, where the soldiers bring the convicts. The montage accelerates, the excitement grows thanks to the dynamically changing shots and reverse shots: the viewers see what the protagonist is looking at, and then they watch the protagonist looking at the scene. The camera becomes the eye of the peeper greedily devouring—the protagonist is still eating while peeping—the scene of the execution and its audience. Bodies fall apart in frames during close-ups: the rope wrapped around a prisoner’s neck, the face of a woman biting her lips in excitement, crossed legs, barely covered with a red skirt and a white chemise,

32

Voyeurism: The Polish Bystander

the peeper’s eye, leftover onion on slimy lips. The camera’s movement simu­ lates the peeper’s head movement, who out of excitement, does not know what to look at. The atmosphere gains further energy from marching music and the laughter of women who wait for the show to begin. Finally, the trapdoor slides down from under convicts’ feet, one of whom still stands on the tips of his toes and shouts to the audience: “I shit on you and your whores! Kiss my ass! We will win anyway! Fuckers.” The reverse shot shows Tadeusz’s eyes tightly closing and opening. However, sexually marked invec­ tives disgust the women, a close-up focuses on the gesture of neatening and lowering the skirt by the woman who gets up from the armchair, and the shot ends with a close-up of the SS-Mann’s hand seizing the woman’s buttock. On one side stand—the peeper, on the other—a cruel scene of violence mixed with sexuality, structurally similar to a sadomasochistic intercourse that is crucial for determining the Polish bystanders’ position. Niziołek orga­ nizes his work on the Polish attitude toward the Holocaust around the thesis of “libidinal engagement in the creation of attitudes of indifference and hos­ tility,” which translates into blindness and poor sight, the striving not to assume the position of an observer, and an aggressive severance of empathic relationship with the victims.45 This allows Niziołek to discuss the “obscene position of bystanders,”46 which indicates the deep ambiguity of this phrase: the indecency and being off-stage (“ob-scene”). In a widely discussed text from 1980s, “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto,” Jan Błon´ski postulates in metaphysical terms that Poles should take the blame for crimes committed against Jews. In Błon´ski’s project, the collective subject indeed takes respon­ sibility, but in the metaphysical scale of this ethical responsibility very con­ crete coordinates disappear: who was where, what did they see, and what did they do?47 In Błon´ski’s text, the gawkers disappear and smoothly separate themselves from the events they see. Situating themselves outside of the crime scene seems to function as a protective mechanism. The film Kornblumenblau restores memory about what is so hard to remember: the Polish gawkers sit­ ting in a (relatively) safe position and looking at the suffering of others. It seems particularly important that in the scene in question, the shot and the reverse shot are not symmetrical and not perfectly linked: the viewers assume the peeper’s position, but there is no directly reciprocated gaze. We see the face of Tadeusz focused on the execution either from the side or obliquely, so he himself is caught peeping. This may resemble Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological description of voyeurism, which allows him to present his theory of gaze and subjectivity in Being and Nothingness. When a voyeur looks through a keyhole, she loses selfawareness because she is completely absorbed by the spectacle on the other side of the door. However, as she hears someone’s footsteps in the corridor, she suddenly realizes that she has been found and seen, and that she became a spectacle for the Other. This makes the voyeur not only scared but also deeply ashamed.48 In Kornblumenblau, the Polish bystander Tadeusz is discovered and must realize that he himself is present in the field of vision of other. This

Voyeurism: The Polish Bystander

33

is exactly what Polish culture does not want to know about itself: it is afraid of being caught, like any other peeper. As film scholar Libby Saxton writes: “By denying us any innocent position from which we might view the death scene, the director forces us to confront the ethical consequences of look­ ing”49 It is the position of a voyeur because one sees without being seen, and it is also a position of a sadist because one notices someone’s pain without feeling it. Here resurfaces a famous phrase by an ethnic Pole interviewed by Lanzmann in Shoah, who says to the translator: “If you cut yourself, then it doesn’t hurt me.”50 The missing element of these two short definitions is the pleasure of watching someone else’s suffering. The pleasure is experienced not only by perpetrators—but by bystanders as well. Slavoj Žižek discusses the interpassivity, pleasure experienced by the other on someone’s behalf. With this category in mind, Polish philosopher Andrzej Leder writes that “the murder of Jews—mostly, but not only, by the Nazis—suddenly created a huge gap in the social and economic fabric of Polish society. A gap that was filling up quickly.”51 In this sense, ethnic Poles collaborated with Germans in Holocaust crimes, because it was profitable for them; but not only for this reason, as Žižek writes: “even if the actual gesture of compliance was very modest, we are dealing with ‘surplus-obedience’ the moment the gesture of compliance provides the subject with a jouissance of its own.”52 In The Victory (1969), Henryk Grynberg describes the mood of Polish witnesses after the Red Army entered the country in the following words: The people of Dobre weren’t monsters, and some of them sincerely sym­ pathized with the Jews. But at bottom they were pleased. Even those who sympathized. So many places had opened up in town. So many goods. They couldn’t help taking a quiet pleasure in this. Even the best of them, who found it hard to admit this to themselves. The Germans had known this and had certainly counted on it.53 There are many testimonies of this vindictive satisfaction, as in these excerpts from ethnic Poles’ diaries: The most common Poles’ opinion, however, is this: “it’s sad and cruel, but the Germans are doing us a big favour: they are solving the Jewish question;”54 or “I’ve seen tears in eyes of hard and rooted anti-Semites. But I’ve also heard phrases: the Germans could solve this difficult pro­ blem …. Some Poles are happy that Germans did the dirty work for them. They didn’t have to, even only to calm their nerves, to put cotton wool into their ears to drown out someone else’s screams.”55 In psychoanalytical terms, the violence experienced and even viewed from a distance does not cause indifference—as is often written about the attitude of ethnic Polish bystanders—but rather a mixture of fearful identification and

34

Voyeurism: The Polish Bystander

repressed sadistic pleasure of triumph. The figure of the (possible) perversity of the bystanders’ position may be the account cited by Lawrence L. Langer about an Hungarian Jesuit, Father S., who secretly observes through a hole in a wooden fence the scene at the station of Jews’ transportation to Auschwitz. When an SS-Mann torments a prisoner, the monk escapes. During his testi­ mony for the Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, the Jesuit spoke about that event for the first time. The psycho­ analyst present during the filming comments that it was not the event itself that was repressed but the voyeuristic pleasure of watching someone else’s suffering, namely the situation of being “sucked through that knothole” and being in the middle of the scene of violence.56 It seems that this is the essence of the repeated question about the visibility and invisibility of the Holocaust and whether the Polish and other eastern European societies could have known about it. The violent deportations—and later massacres, mass shoot­ ings, death camps—were at arm’s length, sometimes only slightly obscured by a fence. Žižek describes it in terms of a “dirty secret” by comparison to the dirty secret of Freudian hysterics who conceal the fact that their symptoms are of a sexual nature: “Nazis themselves treated the Holocaust as a kind of collective ‘dirty secret.’”57

Representability in Spite of All The culminating scene of Kornblumenblau combines a phantasmagoric image of a ballet and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with a sequence of the extermi­ nation of Jews in a gas chamber. There are few directors who decided to present killing in gas chambers in their films; except for Kornblumenblau, such scenes actually only appear in Uwe Boll’s bizarre Auschwitz (2011).58 By such a depiction, Kornblumenblau’s director Wosiewicz joins the discussion on the representability of the Holocaust experience, in which the gas chamber lies at the very center, often even as a metaphor, for the entire Holocaust.59 Wosie­ wicz conceptualizes and engages in a polemic with the famous ban on repre­ sentation by embodying and positioning the Polish Holocaust bystander.60 These are the last minutes of the film, just before the liberation of the camp through bombing.61 Tadeusz plays in the camp orchestra that accompanies singers and dancers. The orchestra plays Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 for the camp authorities. The performance is interrupted by archival footage of par­ ades and marches organized in the Third Reich, and later also with pictures of Jews being locked and killed in a gas chamber. The music plays all the time, the tenor sings, and the choir joins. With an artificial cut, I want to focus here on the extermination sequence, which begins again with a shot of voyeurism: naked Jews are driven to the gas chamber, which the camera records from the other side of the fence. Children, men, and women move to the left, while the camera moves to the right, which makes the image stutter when the frame moves behind pickets while blackness and colorful spots obscure vision. However, the tracking shot is so fast that the viewer almost

Voyeurism: The Polish Bystander

35

manages to assemble a complete picture of images and bodies from their defragmented parts. Moving naked bodies in a discontinuous sequence create a visual effect that is disturbingly similar to Eadweard Muybridge’s early mon­ tage, and as one critic argues, his movement analyses were voyeuristic and sexual in nature.62 When two Sonderkommando prisoners close the chamber’s door, a young soldier appears, unscrews the gas cylinder, and while eating, gazes with fascination through the barred window at the Jews’ death; this is a structural reflection of the scene in which Tadeusz watches the hanging of prisoners. The peeper’s face is visible obliquely again; only another witness, a Sonderkommando member, is looking directly at the viewers. The reverse shots show a trembling tangle of suffocating Jews’ bodies, fragments of arms, legs, and twisted faces. The frame is divided by a grid and saturated with a strange, unnatural green-blue light. The gas chamber interior that the viewers peep into resembles a flat cinema screen devoid of perspective and depth. The Sonder­ kommando prisoners open the chamber, blood and body fluids begin to leak through the doorstep, revealing a flat and frozen composition of bluish dead bodies framed by the door. The ostentatious artificiality—of gaze, image, frame—on which the previously analyzed scenes also relied63 does not diminish the shocking effect, especially when it involves the accompaniment of the last notes before the triumphant “Ode to Joy.” Such a literal—though not fully realistic—depiction of a gas chamber death could raise objections among the supporters of the thesis that the Holocaust should not be represented. The unrepresentability of the Holocaust is a difficult to grasp category used by many critics, and it is not easy to recreate its gen­ ealogy. It seems that only two significant artists strongly codified the idea: Elie Wiesel in the United States of America and Claude Lanzmann in France. The most influential writer and guardian of the Holocaust memory in the USA, Wiesel argues that “Auschwitz cannot be explained nor can it be visualized,” which is why he criticizes the NBC series Holocaust (1978) by writing that “the last moments of the forgotten victims belong to themselves.”64 On the other hand, Lanzmann claims that “the Holocaust is unique primarily because it is surrounded by a circle of fire, an impassable boundary line … I firmly believe that there are things that cannot and should not be presented.”65 In the same article that criticizes Schindler’s List, Lanzmann includes his famous statement that if there were a film showing death in a gas chamber, he would not only never publish it but even destroy it.66 In his autobiographical notes, he writes about the Holocaust victims: “They ended their days in darkness, enclosed by four walls of smooth stone, in a true ‘non-place’ of death.”67 Berel Lang expresses a similar position in philosophy and literary studies as he believes that only facts may be presented, and beyond that one should remain silent and do not create artistic and fictional narratives that change the Holocaust’s meaning.68 In these approaches, the Holocaust became a negative—dark and blind—moment of modernity, history, language, and image.69 The source of the concept of the Holocaust’s unrepresentability stems from early French post-structuralism.70 American literary theorist James Berger

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notes that in the 1960s and early 1970s, post-structuralists who emerged from the French May 68 avoided the subject of the Holocaust, which created a paradox, as their philosophy highly utilized apocalyptic language, “invoca­ tions of rupture, decentering, fragmentation, irretrievably lost identity, the shattering of origins and ends.”71 In the chapter devoted to the evolution of Jacques Derrida’s thought, Berger traces the fate of Derrida’s notions: différ­ ance, trace, shibboleth, ashes. Berger indicates that Derrida’s later ethical turn toward the Jews’ history allows for treating these metaphors as disguised fig­ ures of the Holocaust. Berger argues that May 68’s disappointment with postwar bourgeois prosperity and the philosophy of post-structuralism— characterized as a post-apocalyptic genre—stemmed from unvoiced war trauma related to the Jews’ disappearance from France.72 The constantly rethought absence, gap, void, or split in the center of post-structuralist thought (of Derrida, Lacan, and Lyotard) meets the void aesthetics in Wes­ tern memory of the Holocaust. However, this is closely linked to the historical actuality of differences between the West and the East in the Holocaust administration of countries occupied by the Third Reich. As postcolonial analyses of the Holocaust reveal, the Germans forced Jews to leave, and so they disappeared in an exotic land separated from the normal world, not only geographically but also temporally.73 Polish philosopher Andrzej Leder follows this reasoning in Rysa na tafli (A Scratch on the Surface) as he juxtaposes French post-structuralist thought with the Warsaw School of the history of ideas, which simultaneously developed in Poland. Leder remarks that the two stem from similar discussions in philoso­ phical Marxism and are a reaction to trauma: in the case of France related to the Holocaust, in the case of Poland—Stalinism; which agrees with Niziołek’s diagnosis about Polish blindness to the Holocaust.74 The French critique of the bourgeois institutions employed reflection in categories of antagonism and conflict that disallow concluding any anthropology. Antihumanism became a triumph of discontinuity and contradictory forces. Leder understands the Warsaw School of the history of ideas as a formation that introduced an opposite movement; a movement that rejected class antagonism yet agreed to the Marxist conception that the historical process conditions epistemology. Then, the social and historical reality became the reflection of the rationality’s logical structure, coherent and continuous as such. Trauma lies in the center of both formations, but they produced different answers to the underlying dis­ turbance. The French post-structuralism chose a melancholic solution, while Polish humanism obsessively sought to restore the previous state and repair what is broken.75 However, the latter approach leads to the suppression of the fact that there occurred any trauma at all. Historically, French May 68 tried to conceptualize the Jews’ absence, while the Polish March 1968 dealt with the Jews’ excessive presence. In 1968, Poland witnessed the last expulsion of the Jews, in the biggest postwar anti­ semitic campaign.76 Hence the ever-growing number of postwar lists of Jews that explained who of the survivors blended into the Polish society by

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77

adopting a false Polish identity. I do not seek to harmfully and absurdly equate the antisemitic pogrom-like atmosphere of the second half of the 1960s with the theoretical activities of the Warsaw School of historians of ideas. Instead, I wish to highlight the Warsaw School’s return to modern humanism and philosophy as if it was possible to escape the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust with no loss or injury. The rhetoric of silence and images of void may be alien to the Polish image of the Holocaust—and so also to the representation ban—because paradoxically, the Holocaust was always present in Poland, as its traces, images, and staging are everywhere, including the language itself.78 Henryk Grynberg writes about it in his short story “Ojczyzna” (Fatherland) (1990): [Grandpa] drove not far away. He ascended to heaven through the chim­ ney and returned with the air of the wind. From here, it was only a few dozen kilometers to Treblinka, and what is this distance for the wind? So, he came back and poured into the ground, fertilizing the soil of these fields, and now he is hovering over them—in the scent of lupine.79 We may assume that this is the difference between the French and Polish experiences of the Holocaust. Georges Didi-Huberman may argue against the concept of the Holocaust’s unrepresentability based on real historical experience. However, while he believes that “the camps were laboratories, experimental machines for a general obliteration”80 built on the easternmost fringes of Europe, Polish gawkers still inhabit these lands. They live in a paradoxical place that French historian Nadine Fresco calls “the definitive beyond.”81 However, constant contact with memories of violence inevitably changes the collective subject and memory left in this space. For the Polish memory, the representation ban and the aesthetics of void and absence are, by definition, wide of the mark. Therefore, Niziołek’s trans­ lation of Hilber’s “bystanders” category into “gawkers” in The Polish Theater of the Holocaust accurately reflects the visual identity of the Polish witness: “bystanders” are literally those who stand right beside; they may even stand with their backs turned, but they always see something and receive some sti­ muli. Thus, we must ask: how do they process what they saw? Wosiewicz’s decision to present the Jews’ death in a gas chamber may be natural but no less shocking: Kornblumenblau primarily .concerns ethnic Polish gawkers—not Jewish victims. The same goes for Artur Zmijewski’s critical video installation Berek (Game of Tag; 1999). If not removed from exhibitions (as in Berlin in 2011 and Tartu in 2015), Berek is often displayed in such a way that viewers can decide in advance if they want to see it after reading its description and learning that the work may shock them. The unbearable emotional confusion that Berek evokes relies on the duality of the exhibited naked body: it simul­ taneously suggests exciting erotic play and stripped Jewish victims running into a gas chamber or already crammed inside. The essence of Berek touches the viewer’s relationship with the moving image by placing the viewer in the

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position of a voyeur. Consequently, the video installation tells us more about ethnic Polish bystanders than the Jewish victims, which was emphasized already by the fact that, according to some sources,82 the game’s name refers to the famous nineteenth century Jewish-Polish war hero (Berek Joselewicz) which makes the quotidian children’s play into a “Jew-hunt.” In his Shoah, Lanzmann repeats many times that the film relates to the void around which witnesses—victims, perpetrators, and gawkers—build their nar­ ratives.83 Shoshana Felman closely follows Lanzmann’s understanding of the film and writes that, in Shoah, viewers can see how the Holocaust’s traces dis­ appear, even when the speakers visit the former camps, slowly overgrown with forest.84 However, it seems that only somebody not living in these places might say that these sites do not exist. In Shoah, we constantly observe places that exist to this day. Saying that there is nothing or that what was is disappearing means ignoring the entire visual aspect of what can be actually seen. Historian Enzo Traverso similarly links the difference between the Western and Eastern memory of the Holocaust with the historical reality of proximity: first of the Polish-Jewish neighborhood, then of the Holocaust for Polish inhabitants. This means the presence of the eyewitness who must be then incorporated into cultural memory: Representing themselves as “victims,” Eastern European nations leave little space for the Holocaust commemoration. Here, the memory of the Shoah does not play the same communal role as in the West. It is seen as a competitive memory, as a roadblock on the way of recognizing other national communities’ suffering during the Second World War. This con­ trast is paradoxical, as the Eastern Europe was the scene of the Jewish genocide: it was here where most of the Shoah victims lived, and it was here that the Nazism created ghettos, then began the massacres, with the beginning of the war with the USSR, and finally where it placed the extermination camps.85 Kornblumeblau reports on the Polish memory of the Holocaust and the Polish position of gawkers without following the martyrdom and national scheme. In the gas chamber scene, the camera follows Jewish victims through the fence, which only partially covers the scene; unlike the cultural figure of the “wall” that tightly separates Poles and Jews, whose mass reproduction in Polish memory is described by a cultural historian as “an obstacle that prevents contact with the Holocaust’s reality and a screen behind which happens the genocide, invisible to Poles.”86 The ghetto walls behind which Jews die becomes a handy excuse for Poles’ non-involvement in their fellow citizens’ suffering. Noteworthy, Kornblumenblau contains the story of Father S., which I mentioned above and which Langer describes in Holocaust Testimonies. In the story of Father S., the fence uncovers because one can look through it freely, but it also covers because it separates subjects with completely different experiences. The fence connects and separates, includes and excludes,

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especially since only a few ghettos were actually closely surrounded by walls; most often the Jewish quarter was separated only symbolically, and access to watching and participating in scenes of violence was simply at hand.87 Korn­ blumenbau further emphasizes the perverse Polish memory with the artifici­ ality of the scene of Jews’ death: the gassing scene in a cinematic frame reveals that the Holocaust is both visible and invisible. It may be informative to highlight the intentional introduction to this scene: Tadeusz joins the camp orchestra, in which a friend gives him sausage and vodka, saying that “as long as the transports continue, we will never run out this.” What comes to mind is Borowski’s sober observation from This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen: “The Canada men, weighed down under a loaf of bread, mar­ malade and sugar, and smelling of perfume and fresh linen, line up to go. For several days the entire camp will live off this transport.”88 Tadeusz gladly drinks from the bottle, falls to the ground, and loses consciousness. Only then the Holocaust can enter the frame: seeing is allowed only in a dream, in which thanks to the softening of defense mechanisms, the experience may receive a visual representation. One of the dream creation mechanisms is the “considerations of representability,” thanks to which the processes that elude understanding in verbal representations may find their outlet.89 Wosiewicz clearly wanted to include the Jewish perspective. In his testi­ mony, the author of memoirs on which Wosiewicz based his film, Kazimierz Tymin´ski, partly situates his experience in the framework of patriotism, and upon noticing the different and worse situation of Jews in the Auschwitz concentration camp, he does not problematize the Holocaust itself. Tymin´ski states that, “after all, the Auschwitz camp was known as a Vernichtungslager, an extermination camp,”90 but markedly, he only means the situation of its ethnic Polish prisoners. Wosiewicz’s similar gesture was the clear presentation of the waiter Moskwa as a Jewish prisoner, about which Tymin´ski makes no remark in his memoirs. As in most postwar Auschwitz memoirs, the Jewish perspective appears incidentally at best: only the introduction of the position of Vorarbeiter Tadek from Borowski’s short stories allows us to extract the issue of the nonreciprocal gaze between Poles and Jews. As Borowski writes, the gas Zyklon B was “an efficient killer of lice in clothing and of men in gas chambers,”91 which reveals the difference that separated Auschwitz victims.

The Eastern Frontier The gassing scene that breaks the iconoclastic taboo of the Holocaust’s unrepresentability makes a particularly shocking impression when juxtaposed and constantly intertwined with the phantasmagoric and unbelievable ballet performed by men in striped uniforms and women in SS parade uniforms (noteworthy, only men served in the historical Schutzstaffel military organi­ zation). The dance happens under a wooden statue of Valkyrie towering over those who dance and sing parts from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. Wosie­ wicz juxtaposes the horror of extermination with the harmony of noble

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music—physiology with sublimity—he confronts the viewer with naked life through a highly elaborate, fantastical image. On the one side, we see twisted naked bodies, and on the other, a studied choreographic sequence, in which the bodies are dressed, and the singers’ skin is covered with heavy makeup. The atrocity combines with captivating melody, which forces the viewer to simultaneously process the terrifying image and exciting music. Such montage creates an unbearable impression that could raise ethical objections. For example, similar to that when Lanzmann accused Schindler’s List of the greatest crime in his eyes: the creation of images that kill imagination along with the ability to feel and experience the Holocaust.92 According to Lanz­ mann, Spielberg’s film evokes fictional plots where there should not be any because nothing was left of that time. Lanzmann condemns Spielberg for creating “fake archives.” It is hard not to think that this argument may be particularly inaccurate in the case of Kornblumenblau: a film that does not aspire to be realistic at any moment. The “archival images” that appear during the opening sequence—which typically serve as a documentary ele­ ment basing on archival materials so as to legitimize the “truth” of images in other films about the Holocaust—are not only false from the beginning, but they also ostentatiously remind the viewer about this falsity. Most commentators of the film juxtapose the two approaches—of alleged naturalness and artificiality, cruelty and high culture—following Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust, which treats Beethoven as the Enlightenment’s spokesman and the gas chambers as an aberrant but logical consequence of this eighteenth-century project.93 It is hard to disagree with such a reading, but I would suggest instead observing these two scenes in the vein of Theodor W. Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlight­ enment—which precedes Bauman’s diagnosis—which does not omit the dia­ lectical opposition between civilization and barbarity.94 In the film The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012, by Sophie Fiennes), Slavoj Žižek indicates that Ode to Joy and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in general excellently exemplify a projection screen: every interpreter may find what they look for in this work. Žižek recalls that the piece appeared at Nazi ceremonies, during the Cultural Revolution in China, and then became the official anthem of the European Union, while its most famous performance happened in Berlin directed by Leonard Bernstein to celebrate the reunifica­ tion of Germany. It was also sung in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.95 The general quality of the slogan “All men will become brothers” can be filled with any content, such as in Kornblumenblau when—after the shot of an open gas chamber—the camera points to the inscription above the singing choir, which reads “Alle für Alle.” However, in the film, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 begins with a less obvious and less known movement, the Turkish March, which normally appears at the end of the piece. Musicologist Lawrence Kramer admits that so far the critics ignored this part of the symphony, because it is still unclear how it should be understood.96 The March opens with instruments producing very low “visceral” and “guttural” sounds that

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contain the “obscene, abjected piece of the male voice.” These are the sounds of the body’s interior made by the digestive and excretory systems, which is important for a film in which the physiology of eating plays such an important role. Schiller’s words about brotherhood refer to the noble Dorian Greece, an eighteenth-century fantasy about the cradle of what is European, juxtaposed with Turkey as the metaphor of the Orient that becomes the embodiment of bloody despotism and fascinating carnal and sensual pleasure. Military mascu­ linity equally embodies passion and eroticism as it does cruelty and violence. The Greek brothers can only win when they absorb into themselves that which embodies utter anti-Europeanness. In such a way, the Turkish March becomes a dialectical combination of Dorian and Oriental elements, and the slogan “All men will become brothers” finds its opposing Other. Following the musical layer and lyrics, Kramer remarks that Symphony No. 9 presents world history that dialectically realizes rationality, which is to be similar to contemporary works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Kramer claims that Symphony No. 9 gives an aesthetic form to the idea of emancipation, whose theorizing was the focus of Hegel’s work.98 The cultural elaboration of Hegel’s project—together with the master–slave dialectic—must consider the historical reality of the nineteenth century and the colonial context of Enlightenment uni­ versalism. For instance, Susan Buck-Morss offers such an analysis by indicating that it was not the French Revolution but the Haitian Revolution that could constitute the ideological matrix for Hegel’s analysis of history.99 Postcolonial analysis restores to the Enlightnment project’s interpretations its contemporary Others who juxtapose mythology and reason—but who originate neither from revolutionary France nor ancient Greece. Through the gesture of the mythical moment in the dialectic of the Enlightenment, Kornblumenblau indicates that its events happen in the Oriental East and speaks from the position of degraded, counterhistorical witnesses, who were present at the crime scene and—what is more—who still live there. According to Didi-Huberman, the camp served for the “universal dis­ appearance” of the Jews. In The Ground of the Image, Jean-Luc Nancy adds that the Holocaust’s goal was the removal of representation itself and the possibility of its creation: “The death camp constitutes the stage on which super-representation plays out the spectacle of the annihilation of what, in its eyes, is non-representation.”100 Nancy explains that showing this mechanism raises ethical doubt, because it provokes the suspicion of com­ plicity, of a repetition of the criminal gesture.101 The reason why Korn­ blumenblau induces anxiety in viewers is that it makes us realize the trauma of the Polish gawkers’ complicity, even if it only happened by looking. Nevertheless, Kornblumenblau represents a special kind of gaze and memory, namely the peeping of a crime and the unimaginable pleasure one derives from it. The observed scene always marks the beholder and the identification with victims, which entails bidding about who suffered more may become a defense against this experience. Otherwise, a dangerous identification with the oppressor opens as a viable reworking of the 97

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experience. I will describe both these positions later in this book. This is the peculiar experience of the nations who witnessed the Holocaust first-hand, for whom the atrocious events unveiled right behind a fence.

Discomfort Finally, I wish to link the fact that Kornblumenblau was overlooked with the issue of its Chaplinian accents. Both the opening sequence and the whole image of the camp experience appear in a burlesque character. Although the very thought seems inappropriate, indeed even the trotting around the camp— known from the literature—looks comical in the film as if it fulfilled Bergson’s classic definition according to which “we laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing.”102 It seems that Kornblumenblau explores this insufficiently recognized gray zone,103 in which the victims arouse not only sympathy but also laughter. The director does it in a purely cinematic language as in Charlie Chaplin’s physical comedies: the nervousness of the main char­ acter’s body—its stiffness, falls, trips, tangles, twists—creates a pathos that combines tragedy with comedy.104 It is hard to imagine that the protagonists of Jakubowska’s The Last Stage or Munk’s Passenger would end up in mud when a disagreeable friend tripped them, which happens to Tadeusz when he runs to a new Kommando. The Last Stage and Passenger side with tragedy, sophisti­ cated static shots, and a slow reflective pace, which also includes reference to what lies outside the camp; for Jakubowska it is Stalinism, and for Munk—the set of a contemporary film from which the camp’s history is recalled. In turn, the world of Kornblumenblau is one of immanence, seclusion, and futile rapid movement; as I mentioned above, Tadeusz is a passive protagonist subjected to accidental circumstances and encountered people, a protagonist who smiles blissfully after a meal and when lying in mud. What reflects this paradox is Žižek’s notion of “camp comedy” which he identifies after Agamben in the figure of the Muselmann, the amalgamate of tragedy and comedy, the very notion that defies quotidian distinctions: “If we try to present [Muselmanns] predicament as tragic, the result is comic; if we treat them as comic, tragedy emerges.”105 Kornblumenblau balances between these two poles: tragedy and comedy. The former offers the basic ontological and ethical model for discussing the human condition while the latter rup­ tures the symbolic field that defines social reality.106 However, the trium­ phant naked life that mocks political, religious, and ethical conditioning does not make the horror and cruelty of the camp disappear. I believe that this is the source of the cognitive and emotional discomfort felt when watching Kornblumeblau, which could have additionally contributed to the overlooking of the film; its comedic structure does not inspire an easy rejection or outrageous accusation of crossing the line of the Holocaust representation. By staging the voyeuristic position of the Polish witness of the Holocaust, Kornblumenblau exposes the bystander to this experience in its entirety and with all its consequences.

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Peeping at the Crime Scene Rafał Betlejewski had similar intentions in his performance Burning Barn (2010), which concerns the Polish memory of the pogrom in Jedwabne on the sixty-ninth anniversary of the event. Social discussions on the Jed­ wabne pogrom in 1941 and the degree of complicity of ethnic Polish neighbors in the mass killing of the Jews became a pivotal point in spreading historical knowledge and awareness in Poland.107 It is not only the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp that constitutes a nexus of Polish memory of the Holocaust but also Jedwabne, where various aspects of the Polish and Jewish memory of the war are condensed, such as the question of complicity in the massacre and the shifting identifications with perpe­ trators and victims. At this crime scene, memory mixes horror with exci­ tement, brutality with sexuality. Such representations indicate the sadomasochistic character of the Holocaust experience, the intertwinement of violence and sexuality, in which become entangled both the perpetrators and the victims. Thus, the Holocaust experience becomes exhausted in the experience of sexual violence inflicted on the Jewish victims by the Nazi tormentors—or the ethnic Poles allied with the latter—and very impor­ tantly, by the obscene observing bystander. Burning Barn documents the performance in which the artist is dressed as “a peasant,” who torches the barn he built, along with various antisemitic “sins” written on pieces of paper sent to the performer by people seeking “moral cleansing.” The patronizing gesture of a performance artist from Warsaw, who comes to the countryside with journalists and his film crew to perform cathartic rituals, assumed the participation of local inhabitants as onlookers and bystanders. The barn stood in the middle of a golden wheat field (through which the performance documentary guides viewers), next to the road on the one side and the inhabitants on the other, waiting in a long line of cars. On the one hand, the repetition of the burning of the barn con­ firms Marx’s claim that history repeats itself twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. On the other hand, the burning seems directly linked to the phenomenon that Freud describes as repetition compulsion, in which the repressed, unresolved psychological conflict returns in the present in an intrusive, unchanged form through symptoms, dreams, or acting-out. In other words, one unconsciously attempts to give a representation to what he cannot forget, but also cannot describe: “[h]e reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.”108 The repetition compulsion occurs in full identification with the vic­ tims, in an hysteric strategy based on mimicry, in a smooth transformation of a bystander into a victim. Betlejewski repeats several times that he enters the barn as a Jew—setting it on fire from the inside—but he simultaneously claims that his performance is addressed to ethnic Poles, “raised by the Polish school, Polish Catholicism, and in the Polish language,” who were the pogrom’s perpetrators. Betlejewski claims:

44

Voyeurism: The Polish Bystander A theatrical spectacle is supposed to let us to directly look at the tragedy of the Jews of Jedwabne, in real time, in direct closeness. Their extermi­ nation lasted, had a temperature, a sound, stretched over several minutes, quarters, hours. Someone stood outside the barn with rakes and watched, guarded. What did that person feel? Through my reenactment, I wanted to reveal their secret as well.109

What secret does Betlejewski mean? During the Second World War, Poland was the place of the German extermination of Jews. The proximity of the Holocaust meant for Polish citizens that they were eyewitnesses to the Holo­ caust and after the war, that experience had to be incorporated into cultural memory. The Polish subject positions himself in various ways, but always keeps his distance: “Holocaust watched from afar,” “lowering one’s eyes,” “turning a blind eye,” “voyeurism,” or “watching through a keyhole.” How­ ever, “reveal their secret” concerns the affective sphere of the Polish murderer, suspecting them of a forbidden yet appealing pleasure: the secret becomes the “obscene, dirty secret”110 that hides sexual excitement under extreme brutal­ ity. According to the division of bystanders of the Holocaust created by visual and memory scholars, onlookers would turn out to be gawkers, captivated by the event, absorbed by it, engaged in it emotionally.111 Art history may pro­ vide a similar analysis of ethnically Polish painters documenting the burning of the Warsaw Ghetto during the war, of their attempts and failures at finding an adequate visual language for this event, who sometimes completely neglect its significance. One of those who saw more than Polish postwar culture would allow was Mieczysław Wejman, who employed the commedia dell’arte convention to depict the images of a dancing, joyful street crowd, with the Ghetto liquidation unfolding in the background.112 However, Betlejewski constructs his performance as a working-through, a confrontation with the returning repressed, treating the burning fire as a cleans­ ing ritual. At the same time, what paradoxically enters the scene is excitation. It is so perhaps because fire as a medium of catharsis is not innocent in the context of the Holocaust, and it directly refers to primal meanings and images. Henry Bond examines crime scene pictures to analyze the relation between the scene and the gawkers. Bond distinguishes crime scenes according to a Lacanian key, namely into perverse, psychotic, and neurotic. In the introduc­ tion he describes his peculiar experience of watching police photographs. Covered in dust, locked in archives, they are treated as a taboo, subject to different restrictions, including the presence of uniformed guards of memory asking why Bond is interested in evidence materials concerning murders from half a century ago. Bond concludes that the photographs of events, surely forgotten over the years, are locked away because of crime’s potential con­ tagiousness; the impulsive drive to commit a crime that exists in every person must be subject to a quarantine.113 Revealing the obscenity of the photo­ graphs would cause a repeated outburst of repressed feelings and, conse­ quently, social unrest. Therefore, crime scenes are usually isolated by police

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an airtight tape and the symbolic “Please disperse! Nothing to see here,” separation of the examined spot as the authorities prevent both spoiling the scene by unauthorized presence and the onlookers by the crime. The repetition of the killing happens not only in the sphere of ethnic and historical identification but also within the dynamic of being the bystander and the perpetrator, when the delay of performance caused by two students from Warsaw protesting against the burning of the barn evokes the spectators’ anger and aggression. The atmosphere during Betlejewski’s performance quickly becomes pogrom-like115 when drunk villagers insult the students, shake the ladder, which they climbed to enter the barn, and finally yank the escaping students. The camera observes the violent scene through a hole in the wall, a crack between planks, separating us from the scene but also sti­ mulating interest and suspense, as we observe from the outside what happens inside the barn. The close-up follows the rules of the primal scene—the scene of intercourse between parents as observed by a child through a keyhole—the child who does not yet have a formed, mature idea of sexuality struggles with feelings of love and hate, excitement and horror, with the need for control and the feeling of being under attack.116 This is the voyeuristic position in which the viewers find themselves. According to Bond, the perverse scene of the crime is constructed theatrically, and the crime and its remains are exposed to the gaze of the cruel Other who demands a bloody show.117 The crime is performed in the very middle of the scene, in broad daylight, and the specta­ tors are situated on a natural platform, and they step in when little happens (“we want to see the fire and go home”). At the same time, the inhabitants of the village Zawada and the local villages are forced into this role by the very nature of Betlejewski’s performance. Do the inhabitants know the intentions of the performer dressed as a traditional peasant? It seems as if Betlejewski wants to play their role better than they do. Do they see the Jedwabne pogrom and other pogroms in the burning barn or do they come to watch a spectacle? Or perhaps these two perspectives are not mutually exclusive but overlap: the primal pleasure of watching fire and observing an artistic recon­ struction of a pogrom. One may recall one of many accounts of the theatri­ cality of the atrocities, characteristic for the Holocaust taking place in Central and Eastern Europe, as evidenced for example in Kaunas, Lithuania where: 114

the Jews were clubbed to death with crowbars, before cheering crowds, mothers holding up their children to see the fun, and German soldiers clus­ tered round like spectators at a football match. At the end, while the streets ran with blood, the chief murderer stood on the pile of corpses as a trium­ phant hero and played the Lithuanian national anthem on an accordion.118 Not only does the mass murder happen “in plain sight”, but it is accompanied by the festive atmosphere and is incorporated in kitschy ethno-nationalistic nar­ rative. The atrocities are carried out in the name of perversely understood justice but also provide extreme amounts of frantic excitement.119

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Finally, the performer sets fire to the building, which burns amid the screams of the crowd. In Betlejewski’s video, spectators see two takes: one is a hand-held shot, when the cameraman approaches the barn, perhaps sup­ posed to be identified with Jew being rushed to the inside (the barn symbo­ lizes also a gas chamber); the other one is shot from afar, widescreen, when he may identify himself with the Other craving destruction, with a mix of pleasure and horror felt during an act of violence. The image of fire is accompanied by a voiceover reading a letter from an activist from one of the Polish Jewish organizations: “My mother is Polish, my father Jewish. And all the three of us say: burn it! Burn it to the ground!” After her scream, there is a cut and the video ends. Like in horror and pornographic films, the end structurally represents an orgasm,120 serves to release tension, suspense, fulfills the promised image of destruction at the height of emotion. It is also a perverse reversion of meanings, when it is the victim who demands murder, forced into a masochistic scenario.121 This excitement with violence echoes what may be read in testimonies describing crowds of spectators surrounding Jews who are to be killed. Calel Perechodnik, who, during the war, described events in the Otwock ghetto just outside of Warsaw, wrote: And maybe you are looking at the Poles who are riding by in crowded electrical trams, looking at the Jews of Otwock for the last time. Some are probably very pleased and are joking, seeing how polite the Jews appear to be in the square, really like a flock of lambs; others lower their heads quietly or make a sign of the holy cross, whispering, “Requiescant in pace.” Indeed, they already see corpses in front of them.122 The same images may be found in representations created by the bystanders. Immediately after the war, ethnic Polish writer Ludwik Hering composed a forgotten novel Meta (Hideout) in which he described that when the Warsaw ghetto was burning during the uprising, people gathered to watch the fire. Ethnic Polish neighbours sat down as in the theatre boxes and commented among themselves: “Sometimes I forget that these are Jews and then it is scary. …” “Exactly that: ‘we for-get.’ We, the Poles, are sentimental. This is our biggest national flaw. …” “Among us, people soaked in Western culture, it is not the subversive intellect of talmudists that prevails but simple integrity. That is why I feel alien to them and that is why I have no sympathy. …” “This is all too complicated for me … all too complicated. I am a technology-minded person, so for me the case is simple ….” He looked at everybody with sincere, cheerful openness and exclaimed softly yet firmly: “Slaughter the Jews!”123

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The literal burning of the barn does not constitute the return of the repressed, because how can we speak of repression, when everything is out in the open? I believe that no meanings evade us, as looking at the burning barn from a skewed perspective would be of little use: everything happens—and is over­ looked—directly in front of the spectator. Betlejewski’ intentional act was supposed to cleanse and make a difference by reenacting the events in Jed­ wabne. However, what happened was only a repetition, with all the feelings accompanying such a performance. The perfect repetition compulsion oper­ ates here disguised in the opposite meaning: as dissolution and workingthrough. This is perhaps the source of the “terrible power” of concentration camps analyzed by Georges Didi-Huberman, of which there is nothing left, and where nothing changed at the same time.124 It may be extrapolated to other sites of genocide, as contrary to the Western imaginary in which the central position is occupied by symbols of Auschwitz and gas chambers, most Jews in the Eastern and Central Europe died in their hometowns and among their close neighbours.125 The British psychoanalyst John Steiner calls this phenomenon the mechanism of “turning a blind eye,” in which one has access to truth and reality but ignores it, because it is more convenient.126 The observed scene is so terrifying or destructive that the subject unconsciously (rarely consciously) refuses to acknowledge yet perceives it, which is more important. One eye remains open and can see, while the other one is closed, impervious. Steiner demonstrates this phenomenon, commenting on Freud’s interpretation of the tragedy of Oedipus, which reveals the mechanism of hiding the truth, and not the crime of the hero of the tragedy. All characters seem to know the past and the future from the very beginning, but they act as if they knew nothing: “all the evidence points to one conclusion, but it does not prove it.”127 All the elements fit but no coherent picture can be composed. Freud refers to the concept of denial in several of his late works. In “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” (1925), Freud notes that denial occurs when a little boy does everything not to see or know about the difference between the sexes. Remaining ignorant is an expression of his narcissistic desires to see only himself and his lookalikes.128 Women ruin this illusion and thus a boy stuck in this dilemma will grow up to be a man either terrified by women or one feeling triumphant disgust toward them. In Fetishism (1927), Freud discusses this mechanism most comprehen­ sively by theoretically developing the link between denial and sex difference, along with the reluctance of a young boy to see the lack of a penis in girls and women. This leads to the splitting of the self: the boy “saw” and came to terms with the fact but still tries to convince himself that he saw wrongly, that what he saw is not true, and that surely the penis—which will then turn into a compensation fetish—is actually there.129 In the triumph, there is no fear of being consumed by a traumatic scene; on the contrary, there is almost exclu­ sively excitement and pleasure. Thus, the splitting encompasses both the emotional sphere and subject’s knowledge: two antagonistic thoughts are held

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separate yet at the same time. Following this diagnosis, Eric L. Santner calls this kind of representation of the Holocaust “narrative fetishism,” in which visual pleasure blocks pain and horror, preventing their surfacing, constitut­ ing a substitute in the place of the traumatic absence.130 Instead of dealing with the loss and working through it, narrative fetishism restores—too quickly, too abruptly—the principle of pleasure. It follows the logic of Freud’s text in which he deeply connects the perverse mechanisms with difficulties in mourning and working-through the traumatic experiences. Freud compares denial accompanying fetishistic sexual rituals to the case of two men unable to cope with the death of their loved ones and incapable of grief.131 In order to dismiss insufferable pain, they conjure two different realities: one in which nobody died and another “which took full account of that fact. The attitude which fitted in with the wish and the attitude which fitted in with reality existed side by side.”132 To turn a blind eye means also to wink: I know the truth, but I play the game with others and with myself, as if I did not know. It is an approach close to the cynicism diagnosed by Peter Sloterdijk as the modern existential and social situation: living in two parallel realities, which sometimes leads to having two contradictory judgements.133 It is a different situation from the one assumed by the mechanism of repression. Repression is a very costly defense mechanism, and it never works, because sooner or later, the repressed returns in symptoms, dreams, or slips of the tongue. However, there are such areas of the Holocaust memory, in which there is a clear and precise cut that separates ethnic Poles and Polish Jews—and which prevent the “return of the repressed.” Sites of repressed memory are haunted by specters of dead Jews; these are the sites where guilt, shame, fear, and sometimes anger torture the person confronted with memories. There also are sites of denied memory, governed by the mechanism that so far removes unwanted contents from identity so that they do not pose a challenge, nor do they cause pain, namely Polish complicity in crimes against Jews or the requisition of their property (which I discuss in chapter four). The sites of denied memory follow the per­ verse logic of “yes, but” in which the empathetic bond with Jews is partly broken, restricted to pleasure caused by inflicting or observing pain. To avoid crushing guilt connected with violence or simply with the requisition of Jewish property, one must renounce any kind of human, emotional relation­ ship with the other, and reduce this person to an object with which one may do what they please. Burning Barn mostly directly demonstrates the Jedwabne pogrom, however it first concerns the confrontation with Polish guilt for complicity in the Holocaust; second, it attempts to work through antisemit­ ism; third, it expresses a longing.134 The logic of the return of the repressed and the working-through postulated by Betlejewski obscures what happens in the foreground: that everything is exactly the same. Marianne Hirsch claims that recurring images of the Holocaust prove the traumatic repetition compulsion, unable to prevent and calm their eternal return.135 The burning barn image returns with the image

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49

of Jewish victims trapped inside in different versions: sometimes in the mind’s eye, sometimes at an arm’s length. Only the perpetrator’s identity can sometimes be blurred. The image itself remains crystal clear, because there exists a stable position of the observing or fantasizing bystanders. According to psychoanalysis, nobody pursues the same action over and over again without a significant reason. It seems that if the same image keeps returning, it suggests one takes pleasure from imagining the action, even if it is a byproduct of that process. Polish memory incessantly evokes and silences the image of suffering, murdered Jews, whose death will never find closure.136 Betlejewski’s performance is not a meta-commentary that would help to realize this mechanism; it only reenacts the mechanism. Gazing (looking, gaping, peeping) is an active process. Irrespectively of the level of complicity in the atrocities, the bystanders were implicated in various types of onlooking: witnessing victims being taken away; deporta­ tions; mass killings; dead bodies; fresh graves.137 Even without actively taking part in the crime, implication varies: from seeing the violence only indirectly through seeing the atrocities themselves to being requisitioned by the perpetrators as, for example, the owners of tools necessary to commit atrocities and not in the possession of troops.138 However, Betlejewski staged the Jedwabne pogrom perpetrated by the ethnic Polish neighbours and recreated the festive atmosphere, in which looking at the atrocities became a captivating, exciting event. Picnics and fairs are not at all passive; they fit in the dialectics of pleasure and boredom, anticipation and ecstasy. The deconstruction of the paradigm of ethnic Poles’ passivity during the Holocaust should not stem from the opposition looking and acting but from a reflection on what type of gaze dominates. Historians have already deconstructed the wishful idea that only looking at the mass killings of the Jews was no action. On a mostly concrete level, it prevented the possibility of escape for the victims. On the more symbolic level, it created a theatrical situation, with the scene of atrocity and the involved spectators. In time of mass atrocities, there is little distance between “playful” torment and active violence.139 Faced with perverse places of the Holocaust memory, the bystanders situate themselves neither by closing their eyes (the psychotic solution, in which instead of reality, one observes the hallucinations arising in the mind) nor by averting their eyes (the neurotic solution, in which one sees even though they would prefer not to)140; instead, they simultaneously “observe” and “do not see.” Thanks to this phenomenon, knowledge and ignorance, revealing and concealing, the site of memory and the site of nonmemory can all co-exist. This is accompanied by an excitement141 of the bystanders observing the scene from different positions: the gas chamber and the Jedwabne barn; the city and the province. These positions belong to the perverse mechanisms of ethnic Poles’ complicity in murdering Jews, the perverse gaping. This is reflected in the gesture of peeping through a key­ hole. To see something, the peeper must close one eye.

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Voyeurism: The Polish Bystander

Notes 1 G. Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (New York: City Lights Publishers, 1986), p. 107. 2 M. Haltof, Polish Film and the Holocaust: Politics and Memory (New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012), p. 154. 3 Kornblumenblau. Stenogram z posiedzenia Komisji Kolaudacyjnej Filmów Fabularnych z 2 sierpnia 1988, Archiwum Filmoteki Narodowej, file No. A-344, item. 566. The film received positive evaluations from all members of the Commit­ tee. The Film Approval Committee, alongside the Script Assessment Commission, supervised the production in communist Poland, and approved films to be produced and distributed. Members of the committees were recruited from the representatives of the film industry and appointed communist party officials. Transcripts of their discussions prove to be a useful source for the analysis of norms shaping the Holo­ caust memory discourse. Cf. A. Misiak, “Polish Film Industry under Communist Control: Censorship Conceptions and Misconceptions,” Iluminance 24.4/2013. 4 P. Czaplin´ski, “Katastrofa wsteczna,” Poznan´skie Studia Polonistyczne. Seria Literacka 25.45/2015, p. 40. 5 P. Czaplin´ski, “Zagłada jako horror. Kilka uwag o literaturze polskiej 1985–2015,” . Zagłada Zydów. Studia i Materiały 12/2016, pp. 376–378. 6 Cf. A. Mach, S´wiadkowie s´wiadectw. Postpamie˛ c´ zagłady w polskiej literaturze najnowszej (Torun´: Wydawnictwo UMK, 2016). 7 Cf. N. Chojna, “Groteska i ironia w Kornblumenblau,” Pleograf. Kwartalnik Akademii Polskiego Filmu 3/2018; S. Jagielski, Maskarady me˛ skos´ci. Pragnienie homospołeczne w polskim kinie fabularnym (Krakow: TAiWPN Universitas, 2013), pp. 379–403; K. Ma˛ ka-Malatyn´ska, “Artysta w l’univers concentrationnaire. ‘Kornblumenblau’ Leszka Wosiewicza jako traktat o sztuce,” Images 7.13–14/ 2009–2010, pp. 151–167; L. Saxton, Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), pp. 68–91; V. G. Walden, “Transcultural Engagement with Polish Memory of the Holocaust while Watching Leszek Wosiewicz’s Kornblumenblau,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 22.2–3/2016, pp. 256–273; M. Wróbel, “Tadzikowe perypetie z totalitar­ yzmem. Metaforyzacja rzeczywistos´ci lagrowej w filmie Kornblumenblau Leszka Wosiewicza,” Kwartalnik Filmowy 29–30/2000, pp. 96–112. I only reached the above discussions on the film. Considering the film’s significance, the number seems small. 8 Cf. J. Wróblewski, “Karaluchy w złotych pancerzykach,” Kino 11/1989, pp. 12–15; T. Jopkiewicz, “Flirt z katem,” Kino 43/1989, p. 7; J. Niecikowski, “Je˛ zyk nowy,

tres´c´ stara,” Kino 47/ 1989, p. 5; M. Przylipiak, “Ne˛ dza sztuki,” Kino 3/1990,

pp. 13–16. In addition to these more extensive reviews to which I refer below,

there are also some short press notes from that time, such as by A. Werner

(Gazeta Wyborcza 97/1989, p. 8) or M. Pieczara (Tygodnik Solidarnos´ci 25/1989,

p. 18). I rely on my archival research and collections of Filmoteka Narodowa.

9 A. Mos´, “Widocznie tak musiało byc´. Rozmowa z Leszkiem Wosiewiczem,” in:

Debiuty polskiego kina, ed. M. Hendrykowski (Konin: Wydawnictwo “Przegla˛ d

Konin´ski” w Koninie, 1998), pp. 291–292.

10 Niecikowski, Je˛ zyk nowy, stara tres´c´, p. 5.

11 K. Tymin´ski, To Calm My Dreams: Surviving Auschwitz, trans. M.-B. Tyminski-

Marx (Chatswood, NSW, Australia: New Holland Publishers, 2011).

12 A. Madej, Mitologie i konwencje: o polskim kinie fabularnym dwudziestolecia mie˛ dzywojennego (Krakow: TAiWPN Universitas, 1994), p. 33. 13 E. van Alphen, Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), pp. 7, 9.

Voyeurism: The Polish Bystander

51

14 Van Alphen, Staging the Archive, p. 199. Cf. E. van Alphen, “List Mania in Holocaust Commemoration,” in: Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era, eds. D. I. Popescu, T. Schult (Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 15 Among others, see: C. Caruth, “Traumatic Awakenings (Freud, Lacan, and the Ethics of Memory),” Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). 16 Walden, “Transcultural Engagement with Polish Memory,” p. 261. 17 S. L. Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 125. 18 Critics already highlighted this fact. Cf. Wróblewski, “Karaluchy w złotych pancerzykach;” Przylipiak, “Ne˛ dza sztuki.” 19 B. Karwowska, Ciało. Seksualnos´c´. Obozy Zagłady (Krakow: TAiWPN Uni­ versitas, 2009), pp. 8–9. 20 S. Buryła, “Wste˛ p,” in: T. Borowski, Proza I (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2004), p. 7. Cf. A. Werner, Zwyczajna apokalipsa. Tadeusz Borowski i jego wizja s´wiata obozów (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1981), pp. 137–138. 21 K. Wyka, Pograniczne powies´ci. Proza polska w latach 1945–1948 (Krakow: Wydawnictwo M. Kot, 1948), p. 157. 22 Jagielski draws attention to the use of the flower figure as a hidden homo­ sexuality code. Cf. S. Jagielski, Maskarady me˛ skos´ci, pp. 392. 23 Cf. Tymin´ski, To Calm My Dreams, pp. 140–145. 24 Here, I omit the most known camp testimonies: fragments of Stanisław Grze­ siuk’s memoirs Pie˛ c´ lat kacetu (1958) and homophobic remarks about lesbian relationships in Ravensbrück in Wanda Półtawska’s And I Am Afraid of My Dreams (2013). 25 A. Chałupnik, Niech sie˛ pan tak nie wyteatrza! Auschwitz w twórczos´ci Mariana Pankowskiego (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2017), pp. 31–32. 26 Cf. for example an interview with the director in the program Jedna Scena (production: TVP, hosted by Michał Chacin´ski, November 9, 2015); Mos´, “Widocznie tak musiało byc´. Rozmowa z Leszkiem Wosiewiczem,” pp. 296–298. 27 K. Ma˛ ka-Malatyn´ska, “Artysta w l’univers concentrationnaire. Kornblumenblau Leszka Wosiewicza jako traktat o sztuce,” Images 7 13–14/2009, p. 165. 28 Walden, “Transcultural Engagement with Polish Memory,” pp. 265–266. 29 S. Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in: SE, Vol. 18, pp. 29–30. 30 E. van Alphen, “Affective Operations of Art and Literature,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53–54/2008. The psychoanalytic foundation of the thesis that meanings cannot arise without feelings comes from Wilfred Bion’s theory. Cf. I. Armstrong, “Thinking Affect,” in: The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). 31 Cf. Ernst van Alphen, “Caught by Images: On the Role of Visual Imprints in Holocaust Testimonies,” Journal of Visual Culture 1.2/2002, p. 208. 32 Michał Głowin´ski recalls the ghetto in a similar color scheme in The Black Sea­ sons suggesting that it may be a feature of traumatic memories: “The ghetto remains in my memory as a place without a shape, deprived of any ordering principle, a space enclosed by walls from which all sense has been taken, just as the sense of life was taken from those pressed within it. Yet I remember its color, unique and inimitable, the sort of color that might signify every collective mis­ fortune: a gray-brown-black, the only one of its kind, devoid of any brighter color or distinguishing accent. Before my eyes remains this monochromatism of the ghetto, perhaps best described by the word discoloredness.” M. Głowin´ski, The Black Seasons (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1999), p. 6.

52

Voyeurism: The Polish Bystander

33 As Mirosław Przylipiak aptly puts it in his review: “[Tadeusz] cries looking at his wife’s photos, screams when they beat him, and smiles blissfully when he can eat his fill. Saying that he wants to survive at all costs would not be true because it would introduce an element of will, desire, plan, or decision. There is no such thing in Kornblumenblau.” Przylipiak, “Ne˛ dza sztuki,” p. 14. 34 M. de Montaigne, Essays, trans. C. Cotton (Auckland: The Floating Press, 2009), p. 1761. 35 De Montaigne, Essays, pp. 409–410. 36 D. C. Simon, “The Anatomy of Schadenfreude; or, Montaigne’s Laughter,” Cri­ tical Inquiry 43/2017, p. 259. 37 Simon, “The Anatomy of Schadenfreude,” p. 252. 38 Przylipiak, “Ne˛ dza sztuki,” p. 14. 39 G. Niziołek, Polski teatr Zagłady (Warsaw: Instytut Teatralny im. Zbigniewa Raszewskiego i Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2013), p. 286. The subsequent quote comes from the same work. I quote from the Polish version of Niziołek’s book, as the English translation was abridged. 40 H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 49. Emphasis by Arendt. 41 C. Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 31. 42 Lanzmann, Shoah, p. 35. The director put this picture in the film: Lanzmann urged, persuaded, and pressured Czesław Borowy for a long time. Cf. A. Dauksza, “O pewnym chłopskim ges´cie. Od rabacji do Zagłady,” Teksty Drugie 6/2017, pp. 102–103. In the film fragments provided by the USHMM archive, the interview with Borowy has the . number RG-60.5032. 43 A. Bikont, “Ty to chyba Zydek jestes´? Rozmowa Anny Bikont i Jerzego Jedlickiego (2014),” Gazeta Wyborcza February 3–4, 2018, p. 11. 44 M. Jastrun, “Pote˛ ga ciemnoty,” in: Przeciw antysemityzmowi 1936–2009, Vol. 2, ed. A. Michnik (Krakow: TAiWPN Universitas, 2010), pp. 2–3. Original pub­ lication: M. Jastrun, “Pote˛ ga ciemnoty,” Odrodzenie 29, 1945. 45 G. Niziołek, The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust, trans. U. Phillips (London: Bloomsbury Publishing and Instytut Teatralny im. Zbigniewa Raszewskiego, 2021), pp. 23–25. 46 Niziołek, . The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust, p. 46. 47 Cf. T. Zukowski, “Co widzieli s´wiadkowie?” in: Pomniki pamie˛ ci. Miejsca niepamie˛ ci, eds. K. Chmielewska, A. Molisak (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2017), p. 57. 48 J. P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. H. E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), n.p. Kaja Silver­ man discusses this passage in relation to Lacan’s eleventh seminar in: Threshold of the Visible World (New York; London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 163–167. 49 Saxton, Haunted Images, p. 78. 50 Lanzmann, Shoah, p. 25. The English translation is based on highly trans­ formed—and deformed—Lanzmann’s translator’s version: “If I cut my finger, it doesn’t hurt him.” This obscures the actual sense of his words. On differences in translations and what is lost in-between the lines, cf. Cf. R. Sendyka, “Natur­ ellement: Speech Variants of Holocaust Bystanders in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” Przekładaniec 2019, special issue, “Translation and Memory.” 51 A. Leder, “Kto nam zabrał te˛ rewolucje˛ ?” Krytyka Polityczna 29/2011, p. 34. Leder’s important book was translated into German: A. Leder, Polen im Wach­ traum die Revolution 1939–1956 und ihre Folgen, trans. S. Ewers (Osnabrück: fibre, 2019). See also: J. T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz: An Essay in Historical Interpretation (New York: Random House, 2007). 52 S. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London; New York: Verso, 2008), pp. 68–69.

Voyeurism: The Polish Bystander

53

53 H. Grynberg, The Jewish War and The Victory (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University .Press, 2001), pp. 100–101. 54 Stanisław Z(Rz)emin´ski, “Pamie˛ tniki. Łuków i okolice – getto,” p. 637. . Wylezyn´ska, in: Jan Grabowski, “Biedni Polacy patrza˛ na wars­ 55 Diary of Aurelia . . zawskich Zydów i na getto warszawskie,” Zagłada Zydów. Studia i Materiały 10/ 2014, pp. 542, 545. 56 L. L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, Con­ necticut; London: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 32. The testimony of Father John S. is available in Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies under the number T216. A fragment of the testimony’s transcription is also available in: O. B. Stier, Committed to Memory: Cultural Meditations of the Holocaust (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), pp. 72–73. 57 Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 71. On the mass atrocities happening in broad daylight, see S. Neitzel, H. Welzer, Soldaten on Fighting, Killing and Dying: The Secret World of Transcripts of German POWs, trans. J. S. Chase (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), p. 163. 58 In Shindler’s List (1993), Steven Spielberg plays with the audience’s expectations, when by editing and mood he suggests that the female prisoners in the camp are in the gas chamber, but in the climax, it turns out to be a shower room. In Robert Enrico’s For Those I Loved (1983) and Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone (2002), viewers watch as Sonderkommando prisoners empty the gas chamber. In Claude Lelouch’s Boléro (1981), Robert Young’s Triumph of the Spirit (1989), and Mark Herman’s Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008), the camera captures the victims huddled in the gas chamber, but they die behind closed doors. In the TV series Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss (1978) and Constantin Costa-Gavras’ film Amen (2002), there are no directly shown gas chambers, but there are guards watching what happens inside. In Wanda Jaku­ bowska’s The Last Stage (1947), the Holocaust appears in the metaphor of a smoking chimney and in Andrzej Munk’s Passenger (1963) the main character watches the Jews entering the crematorium building from a distance. In László Nemes’s Son of Saul (2015), the interior of the gas chamber is blurred on the periphery of the main character’s vision. Cf. Saxton, Haunted Images, pp. 76–84. Further reading on Uwe Boll’s film Auschwitz (2011): E. M. Ward, “Questions of Re(Presentation) in Uwe Boll’s Auschwitz (2011),” in: Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era. More on Son of Saul (2015) in this context: B. Nedoh, “When the Tiger Leaps into the Past,” Angelaki 24.5/2019. 59 G. Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holo­ caust (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 176. 60 The ban on representation and the Western-museum discourse did not yet func­ tion in the late 1980s. However, Kornblumenblau was the last full-length drama to be made in the Auschwitz camp. The director tells in interviews that the gas­ sing scenes were filmed inside the original chambers (in Majdanek; with a crowd of extras, stunt performers, and camera operators), he mentions that there was a tense but cheerful atmosphere and admits that all the footage was accidentally damaged, and the scenes were later recorded in the studio. Cf. “Alles für alle,” an interview with Leszek Wosiewicz conducted by Natalia Chojna, Pleograf. Kwartalnik Akademii Polskiego Filmu 3/2018. The director’s story resembles fragments of Tadeusz Hołuj’s drama The Empty Field (1963), which I discuss in the last chapter. Suffice it to say that if Lanzmann saw Wosiewicz’s film, the director of Kornblumenblau would probably receive a separate chapter in The Patagonian Hare. 61 Wosiewicz shows here that he is less interested in historical reality than he is in fiction, thanks to which he can reach the real; he repeats this plot point from The Last Stage by Wanda Jakubowska, who in this way staged the messianic role of

54

62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69

70

71

72 73 74

Voyeurism: The Polish Bystander Stalin in the war with the Germans. Moreover, with this phantasmagoric scene, Wosiewicz breaks another principle of decorum in the representation of the Holocaust, which Terrence de Pres, “Holocaust Laughter?” in: Writing and the Holocaust, ed. B. Lang (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), p. 217, defines as an imperative to describe the Holocaust “as accurate and faithful as possible to the facts and conditions of the event, without change or manipulation for any reason—artistic reasons included.” L. Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Ber­ keley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 38–48. Przylipiak believes that a Jewish girl who dances upon arrival at the camp is the only truly free character in Kornblumenblau. However, the main character also looks at her as if she was a fantasy picture: she dances within the frames of the train car’s open door. Cf. Przylipiak, “Ne˛ dza sztuki,” p. 16. E. Wiesel, “Trivializing the Holocaust: Semi-Fact and Semi-Fiction,” New York Times April 16/1978, p. 29. C. Lanzmann, “Holocauste, la représentation impossible,” Le Monde March 3/ 1994, p. 7. Cf. C. Lanzmann, R. Larson, D. Rodowick, “Seminar with Claude Lanzmann, 11 April 1990,” Yale French Studies 79/1991, p. 99. C. Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir, trans. F. Wynne (London: Atlantic Books, 2012), ch. 12, n. p. Cf. Lanzmann, “Seminar with Claude Lanzmann,” p. 99. B. Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 160–161. For further reading on the prohibition of representation in Wiesel’s works, see Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing, pp. 28–88. On the prohibition of representation in Lanzmann’s works, see D. LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, New Jersey; London: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 95–138; M. Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Min­ neapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 221–262. Within the theory of history: H. White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in: Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. S. Friedlander (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 44–52. Another, theological explanation of the Holocaust’s sacralization through its uplifting resemblance to the hidden Judeo-Christian God is provided by Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), pp. 28–33. This is closer to what David Freedberg, an art historian, described as “the myth of aniconism,” namely the conviction internalized in monotheistic cultures about the superiority of word over image: D. Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 59–60. J. Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: Uni­ versity of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 107. Cf. L. Ferry, A. Renaut, French Phi­ losophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, trans. M. H. S. Cattani (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990). Cf. A. Milchman, A. Rosenberg, “Postmodernism and the Holocaust,” in: Postmodernism and the Holocaust, eds. A. Milchman, A. Rosenberg (Amster­ dam: Rodopi, 1998). Niziołek, The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust, pp. 154–155. Cf. M. Olin, “Lanz­ mann’s Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film,” Representation 57/1997. A. Leder, Rysa na tafli. Teoria w polu psychoanalitycznym (Warsaw: Wydaw­ nictwo Naukowe PWN, 2016), pp. 287–288. In the context of France, other

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75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82

83 84 85

86 87

88 89

90 91

55

reference points are the heritage of the Vichy state, complicity of the French in the Holocaust, and the heritage of colonialism. Cf. M. Rothberg, Multi­ directional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009), esp. ch. “The Counterpublic Witness: Charlotte Delbo’s Les belles lettres.” Leder, Rysa na tafli, p. 301. Cf. D. Stola, “Anti-Zionism as a Multipurpose Policy Instrument: The AntiZionist Campaign in Poland, 1967–1968,” Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture 25.1/2006. J. Tokarska-Bakir, Legendy o krwi. Antropologia przesa˛ du (Warsaw: WAB, 2008), ´ pp. 632–633. Cf. A. Paja˛ czkowska, J. Borowicz, “Papiery,” in: Slady Holokaustu w imaginarium kultury polskiej, eds. P. Dobrosielski, J. Kowalska-Leder, I. Kurz, M. Szpakowska (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2017). ´ J. Kowalska-Leder, “Wste˛ p,” in: Slady Holokaustu, pp. 13f. Also see N. Blu­ . mental, Słowa niewinne (Kraków: Centralna Zydowska Komisja Historyczna w Polsce, 1947). H. Grynberg, “Ojczyzna,” in: Szkice rodzinne (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1990), p. 128. G. Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 20. N. Fresco, “Remembering the Unknown,” International Review of Psycho-Ana­ lysis 4/1984, p. 424. “Dyskusja nad miejscem sztuki w muzeach martyrologicznych (fragmenty), Muzeum Stutthof w Sztutowie, 11 maja 2012 r.—z udziałem Marka Zaja˛ ca, Mał­ gorzaty Omilanowskiej, Piotra M. A. Cywin´skiego, Piotra Tarnowskiego, Grze­ gorza Plewika,” in: Obóz-muzeum. Trauma we współczesnym wystawiennictwie, eds. M. Fabiszak, M. Owsin´ski (Krakow: TAiWPN Universitas, 2013), p. 134. Saxton, Haunted Images, pp. 30–31. S. Felman, “The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” in: S. Felman, D. Laub, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York; London: Routledge, 1992), p. 253. E. Traverso, “L’Europe et ses mémoires. Trois perspectives croisées,” Raisons politiques 4.36/2009, p. 162. Further reading on the museums of the Second World War in postcommunist countries, the hierarchy of victims, and the adap­ tation (museums in the Czech Republic and Slovakia) or rejection (the Baltic states, Hungary) of the Holocaust narratives from Western Europe, the USA, and Israel, see L. Radonic´, “Europeanization of the Holocaust and Victim Hierarchies in Post-Communist Memorial Museums,” in: Entangled Memories: Remembering the Holocaust in a Global Age, eds. M. Henderson, J. Lange (Hei­ delberg: Winter Verlag, 2017). ´ J. Kowalska-Leder, “Mur,” in: Slady Holokaustu, p. 256. Tych, “S´wiadkowie Shoah,” p. 24. In the photo essay at the beginning of Nizio­ łek, The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust, p. 13, there is a picture of three uni­ formed men beating a lying man in a labor camp for Jews in Cieszanów (Podkarpackie Voivodeship). At the bottom we see the blurred outline of a fence from behind which the picture was taken. Source: Miejska Biblioteka Publiczna w Cieszanowie CATL 5 J / 2.9.1. T. Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 49. S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 358. Contemporary psychoanalysis calls it the “figurability,” cf. C. Botella, S. Botella, The Work of Psychic Figurability: Mental States Without Representation (Hove, East Sussex: Brunner-Routledge, 2005). Tymin´ski, To Calm My Dreams, p. 89. Borowski, This Way for the Gas, p. 29.

56 Voyeurism: The Polish Bystander 92 Cf. Przylipiak, “Ne˛ dza kultury;” Wróbel, “Tadzikowe perypetie z totalitaryzmem.” 93 Saxton, Haunted Images, p. 27. Bauman’s classical sociological text reads: “In the face of an unscrupulous team saddling the powerful machine of the modern state with its monopoly of physical violence and coercion, the most vaunted accomplishments of modern civilization failed as safeguards against barbarism. Civilization proved incapable of guaranteeing moral use of the awesome powers it brought into being.” Z. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), p. 112. 94 Frankfurt School used psychoanalysis to consider how on the political and social level “the rational” slides into “the irrational”, fueling each other, or in the case of Dialectic of Enlightenment language, “the Enlighted” into “the barbaric or mythical:” “But this dialectic remains powerless as long as it emerges from the cry of terror, which is the doubling, the mere tautology of terror itself The gods cannot take away fear from human beings, the petrified cries of whom they bear as their names. Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown. This has determined the path of demythologization, of enlightenment, which equates the living with the nonliving as myth had equated the nonliving with the living. Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is nothing other than a form of universal taboo.” T. W. Adorno, M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford, California: Stanford Uni­ versity Press, 2002), p. 11. Apart from classical texts by Martin Jay, see A. Allen, Critique on the Couch: Why Critical Theory Needs Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021). 95 As evidenced by historian and Holocaust survivor Otto Dov Kulka, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination, trans. R. Mandel (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 26–29. 96 L. Kramer, “The Harem Threshold: Turkish Music and Greek Love in Beethoven’s Ode to Joy,” 19th-Century Music 22.1/1998, p. 78. 97 Kramer, “The Harem Threshold,” p. 89. 98 Kramer, “The Harem Threshold,” p. 79. 99 S. Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). 100 J.-L. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. J. Fort (New York: Fordham Uni­ versity Press, 2005), p. 40. 101 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, pp. 46–48. 102 H. Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. C. Brer­ eton, F. Rothwell (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1913), p. 58. 103 According to P. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 38, it is the space of ethical non-distinction between prisoners and camp torturers. 104 P. Mos´cicki, “Playful Pain. Chaplin and Phatos,” trans. K. Bartoszyn´ska, Widok. Teorie i Praktyki Kultury Wizualnej 6/2014, p. 9, www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/ 2014/6-pathos-image/playful-pain.-chaplin-and-pathos (DOA: April 1, 2020). 105 S. Žižek, “Camp Comedy,” Sight and Sound 10.4/2000. Cf. L. Banki, “Komedia o . Holokaus´cie—gatunek niemozliwy,” trans. A. Ubertowska, Teksty Drugie 4/2009. ˇ ˇ 106 Cf. A. Zupancic, The Odd One In (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 217–218. 107 The controversy was initiated by the publication of Jan Tomasz Gross’s book, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, New Jersey; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), published just after the overlooked documentary films Neighbors and …Where is My Older Brother Cain by Agnieszka Arnold. The debate has been—and continues to be— very heated. On the controversies, among others: The Neighbors Respond: The

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108 109 110 111

112 113 114 115

116 117 118 119

120 121

122 123

124

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Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland, eds. A. Polonsky, J. B. Michlic (Princeton, New Jersey; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003); J. Tokarska-Bakir, “Jedwabne: History as Fetish,” in: Imaginary Neighbors: Med­ iating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust, eds. D. Głowacka, J. Zylinska (Lincoln, Nebraska; London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). S. Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,” in: Further Recom­ mendations on the Use of Psycho-Analysis II, trans. Joan Riviere, pp. 145–156. “Płonie stodoła. Z Rafałem Betlejewskim, artysta˛ performerem, rozmawia P. . Pacewicz,” Gazeta Wyborcza, Duzy Format, May 20, 2010, http://wyborcza.pl/ duzyformat/1,127290,7899683,Plonie_stodola.html (DOA October 20, 2016). S. Žižek, The Plague of Phantasies (London: Verso, 2008), p. 71. R. Sendyka, “Od obserwatorów do gapiów: Kategoria bystanders i analiza wizualna,” Teksty Drugie 3/2018, pp. 129–130; R. Sendyka, “Bystanders as Visual Subjects,” in: Probing the Limits of Categorization: The Bystander in Holocaust History, eds. C.Morina, K. Thijs (New York; London: Berghahn Books, 2018), pp. 66–67. L. Nader, “Polscy obserwatorzy Zagłady: . Studium przypadków z zakresu sztuk wizualnych—uwagi wste˛ pne,” Zagłada Zydów. Studia i Materiały 14/2019, p. 200. H. Bond, Lacan at the Scene (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2009), p. 24. J. Rancière calls it the “the police version of history” in his On the Shores of Politics, . trans. L. Heron (London: Verso, 1995), p. 29. . See T. Zukowski, “Przedmiot i podmiot nostalgii: ‘Te˛ sknie˛ za Toba˛ Zydzie’ i ‘Płonie stodoła’ Rafała Betlejewskiego (2010),” in: Przemoc . filosemicka? Nowe . polskie narracje o Zydach po roku 2000, eds. E. Janicka, T. Zukowski (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2016), pp. 156–157. See Freud, S. “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” trans. A. and J. Strachey, in: SE, Vol. 17. H. Bond, Lacan at the Scene, p. 42. H. Trevor-Roper, “Foreword,” in: The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by its Perpetrators and Bystanders, eds. E, Klee, W. Dressen, V. Ries (New York: The Free Press, 1991). Dominick LaCapra comments on the kitsch and “Rausch” qualities of this experience in: LaCapra, History and Memory After Auschwitz, pp. 30–35. A very similar historical account is available in J. Tokarska-Bakir, Jewish Fugitives in the Polish Countryside, 1939–1945 (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2022), chapter: “When Dawn Breaks: Adamów and Malenie, Machory Borough, Opoczno District, June 1944”. See L. Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989). . See B. Keff, “Pomóz mi, zabij mnie: wokół Przy torze kolejowym Zofii Nałk­ owskiej, Andrzeja Brzozowskiego i Michała Nekandy-Trepki,” in: Zagłada w . “Medalionach” Zofii Nałkowskiej: tekst i konteksty, ed. T. Zukowski (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2016). C. Perechodnik, Am I a Murderer? Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman, ed. and trans. Frank Fox (London; New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 40–41. ´ L. Hering, “Meta,” in: Slady (Warszawa: Czarna Owca, 2011), pp. 82–83. Same images appear as well in Adolf Rudnicki’s novel The Easter in which the burning ghetto is directly compared to a theatrical performance gathering many specta­ tors from the Aryan side of the ghetto wall. See: A. Rudnicki, “Easter,” trans. J. Zwolska, in: Contemporary Polish Short Stories, ed. A. Kijowski (Warsaw: Polonia Publishing, 1960). G. Didi-Huberman, “The Site, Despite Everything,” in: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays, ed. S. Liebman (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 121.

58 Voyeurism: The Polish Bystander 125 See M. Fulbrook, “Complicity and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe,” Jewish Historical Studies 53.3/2021. 126 J. Steiner, “Turning a Blind Eye: The Cover up for Oedipus,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis 12/1985, p. 161. 127 Steiner, “Turning a Blind Eye,” p. 161. 128 S. Freud, “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,” in: SE, Vol. 19. 129 S. Freud, “Fetishism,” in: SE, Vol. 21. Another curious example of Freud’s usage of denial (disavowal) may be found in: S. Freud, “Introductory Lectures to Psy­ choanalysis,” in: SE, Vol. 15, p. 209. 130 E. L. Santner, “History beyond the Pleasure Principle: Some Thoughts About the Representation of Trauma,” in: Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. S. Friedländer, (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London 1992), pp. 146–147. 131 S. Freud, “Fetishism,” p. 155. 132 S. Freud, “Fetishism,” p. 156. 133 For example, “To act against better knowledge is today the global situation in the superstructure; it knows itself to be without illusions and yet to have been dragged down by the ‘power of things’.” P. Sloterdijk, The Critique of Cynic Reason, trans. M. Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2001), p. 6. 134 “Płonie stodoła. Z Rafałem Betlejewskim, artysta˛ performerem, rozmawia P. Pacewicz.” 135 M. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust . (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), p. 122. ´ci: rekonstrukcja likwidacji getta w 136 See T. Zukowski, “Korekta rzeczywistos . Be˛ dzinie (2010),” in: E. Janicka, T. Zukowski, Przemoc filosemicka? 137 A. Wylegała, “Entangled Bystanders: Multidimensional Trauma of Ethnic Cleansing and Mass Violence in Eastern Galicia”, in: Trauma, Experience and Narrative in Europe after World War II, eds. V. Kivimäki, P. Leese (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). 138 This distinction comes from Patrick Desbois research on “the Holocaust by Bullets” in Ukraine: Patrick Desbois, “The Witness of Ukraine or Evidence from the Ground: The Research of Yahad-In Unum,” in: The Holocaust in Ukraine: New Sources and Perspectives, Conference Presentations (Washington: Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, 2013). pp. 95–96. 139 Erich Fromm describes it precisely: “Yet there is only a short step from passive enjoyment of violence and cruelty to the many ways of actively producing exci­ tement by sadistic or destructive behavior; the difference between the ‘innocent’ pleasure of embarrassing or ‘teasing’ someone and participating in a lynch mob is only quantitative.” E. Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1973), p. 248. 140 Freud distinguishes very clearly neurotic repression and psychotic disavowal: “neurosis does not disavow the reality, it only ignores it; psychosis disavows it and tries to replace it”. S. Freud, “Neurosis and Psychosis,” in: SE, Vol. 19, p. 185. 141 Saul Friedländer calls this excitement Rausch when referring to German perpe­ trators, a Dionysian frenzy accompanying a massacre. See S. Friedländer, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 111.

Bibliography Berger, J. After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

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Didi-Huberman, G. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Freud, S. “Fetishism,” in: SE, Vol. 21. London: The Hogarth Press. . Grabowski, .J. “Biedni Polacy patrza˛ na warszawskich Zydów i na getto warszawskie,” Zagłada Zydów. Studia . i Materiały 10/2014. Grynberg, H. “Ludzie Zydom zgotowali ten los,” in: Prawda nieartystyczna. Berlin: Archipelag, 1984. ´ Hering, L. “Meta,” in: Slady. Warszawa: Czarna Owca, 2011. . . Janicka, E., Zukowski, T. Przemoc filosemicka? Nowe polskie narracje o Zydach po roku 2000. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2016. Kornblumenblau, 1989, dir. Leszek Wosiewicz. Kramer, L. “The Harem Threshold: Turkish Music and Greek Love in Beethoven’s Ode to Joy,” 19th-Century Music 22. 1/1998. Lanzmann, C. Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. Leder, A. Rysa na tafli. Teoria w polu psychoanalitycznym. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2016. Niziołek, G. The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust, trans. U. Phillips. London: Bloomsbury Publishing and Instytut Teatralny im. Zbigniewa Raszewskiego, 2021. Perechodnik, C. Am I a Murderer? Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman, ed. and trans. Frank Fox. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Płonie stodoła, 2010, Rafał Betlejewski. Santner, E. L. “History beyond the Pleasure Principle: Some Thoughts About the Representation of Trauma,” in: Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”, ed. S. Friedländer. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1992. Saxton, L. Haunted Images. Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust. London: Wallflower Press, 2008. Simon, D. C. “The Anatomy of Schadenfreude; or, Montaigne‘s Laughter,” Critical Inquiry 43/2017. Steiner, J. “Turning a Blind Eye: The Cover up for Oedipus,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis 12/1985. Tymin´ski, K. To Calm My Dreams: Surviving Auschwitz, trans. M.-B. Tyminski-Marx. Chatswood, NSW: New Holland Publishers, 2011. Walden, V. G. “Transcultural Engagement with Polish Memory of the Holocaust while Watching Leszek Wosiewicz’s Kornblumenblau,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 22. 2–3/2016. Žižek, S. The Plague of Fantasies. London and New York: Verso, 2008. Zupancˇ icˇ , A. The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008.

2

Fetishism The Nazi in a Uniform

This chapter focuses on the Polish version of what Susan Sontag calls “fasci­ nating fascism” and on the further consequences of this phenomenon for identity and memory. By scrutinizing the postwar career of Nazi director, Leni Riefenstahl, Sontag describes the return of the fascist aesthetic in the culture of the 1970s while pointing to the basic determinants of what connects Riefenstahl’s oeuvre, photograph albums with SS uniforms, and sadoma­ sochistic pornography. According to Sontag, fascism fascinates with “situa­ tions of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain.”1 The German perpetrators remain both in the collective American and Polish imaginations, in which they play a special role due to the experiences of the Second World War and the occupation. By analyzing works of (mostly) visual culture, I reconstruct the figure of fascinating fascism in Polish memory as a process of identification with the perpetrator. I focus on artistic works by Maciej Toporowicz, Piotr Uklan´ski, and Tomasz Kozak. The best proof of the transgressiveness of Toporowicz’s and Uklan´ski’s art concerning the memory of war and the Holocaust is their participation in the famous and controversial exhibition Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art (2002) in the New York Jewish Museum.2 Identification with the perpetrators allows for a reversal of the traumatic situation, over which one thusly regains con­ trol: one is no longer a victim but an active, integral, and agential subject.

Intruders and Persecutors . First published in 1979, Tadeusz Rózewicz’s drama The Trap describes the stuffy bourgeois family world of young Franz Kafka. In the claustrophobic apartment slowly appear increasingly dramatic symptoms of the future Holocaust as timelines mix ahistorically, along with realism and fatalism. The inside of an open mouth is associated with rotting meat, it turns out that in the closet there is a crowd of poor Jews swarming like kitchen mice (which in itself repeats the antisemitic images of Jewish poverty in the interwar Poland),3 and then a liminal character—who does not interact with other characters on stage, and stands by the black wall—directly refers to the Holocaust by telling the audience about the extraction of gas chamber DOI: 10.4324/9781003330035-3

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victims’ golden teeth by Sonderkommando soldiers. This liminal space is also where mute SS officers come from and who are described in the stage direc­ tions to one of the scenes: EXECUTIONER-GUARDS appear against the black wall at the back of the stage. They wear black uniforms and are handling a police dog on a leash. … They may return on the stage at any given moment with or without their dogs. … They may enter in silence and may stop in front of the selected people. THE EXECUTIONERS’ activities are unpredictable. Sometimes the characters notice them, sometimes only one character does while the others behave as though they weren’t there.4 The SS officers cannot speak, nor can they enter the narrative and the nar­ ration, they can only interrupt it with their actions, create confusion, and separate interlocutors. The situation is similar in Andrzej Wajda’s Holy Week (1995), a film adaptation of Jerzy Andrzejewski’s eponymous novel, in which SS officers from time to time appear on motorcycles, a self-reflective symbol of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In a simple way, they structure the film as they chase the protagonist who helps his Jewish friend in hiding; but they also remain outside of the frame of action, as they do not speak, do not participate in action, do not influence the story or the represented world. The same thing happens in Tadeusz Konwicki’s film Salto (1965): the protagonist constantly feels hunted, and whenever he falls asleep or loses consciousness, he is haunted by specters of soldiers executing him; in Konwicki’s multi­ faceted and multidirectional narration, the soldiers are not only German but also come from the Polish Home Army and the People’s Army. Polish memory holds no complex Nazi characters,5 as they are usually portrayed schematically and indeed mute. However, this does not mean that Nazi characters are completely absent from Polish literature. Polish writer Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz formulates an accurate diagnosis in one of his novels: I wonder, how many more Poles … dream of the Germans today? How many more Poles do they chase in their sleep, shoot, torture? … There is not so many of us, the Poles born before or at the beginning of the war. But there are probably several, maybe a dozen million of us. And these several millions still dream about the same. These several million still dream the same dream: they dream of murderers in German uniforms. But perhaps these murderers visit also the dreams of the Poles who no longer remember them, cannot remember them, because they were born in the 1950s and 1960s?6 Rymkiewicz captures the persecutory figures of Polish social unconsciousness. Furthermore, he suspects that this nightmare that haunts the community may never be worked through, that it may never cease to be dreamed. A Nazi in a

62

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uniform as one of the main national persecuting objects was constituted as a fetish: an image always present, even too present, but which can never be fully incorporated into the symbolic space. The Nazi becomes a sudden surplus interrupting the story, a nightmarish image that means little, but does a lot. Obviously, in the field of memory operation, the Nazi belongs to the category of acting out rather than working-through. According to Jacques Lacan, the sexual fetish shares with its religious equivalent divine status: “It is this which befalls the executor in sadistic experience when, at its most extreme, his pre­ sence is reduced to being no more than its instrument.”7 In other words, if the Nazis enter the scene as nameless, demonic, or mechanical creatures func­ tioning solely as an emblem of evil, desire for destruction, pleasure derived from inflicting harm, they become a fetish. However, it is then that fear van­ ishes, and fascination appears. Especially when the Nazi is dressed in a pom­ pous black SS uniform, which the SS officers in reality used only on rare occasions, whose image nevertheless left the strongest imprint in common imagination.

Affect and Smell Maciej Toporowicz’s Obsession from 1993 is a found footage, a quick mon­ tage of images juxtaposing stills from Calvin Klein’s perfume advertising campaign from 1985 with the scenes from Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938), photographs of public buildings designed by Albert Speer, Nazi sculptures of Baeck; and the scenes from postwar films: Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969) and especially Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974).8 At the same time, Obsession is a montage of affects: the video begins with an image of a sexual female body from Calvin Klein’s advertising campaign, and ends with the last scene from The Night Porter, in which after the war, a former perpe­ trator and a former victim are lovers who reconstruct their own concentration camp—homely, intimate, and sadomasochistic. Toporowicz’s work does not reconstruct Nazis’ beautiful bodies, as some suggest, but the beautiful sexual intercourse of Nazis and their victims as watched by the witnesses in images known from popular culture. This may also be the Freudian meaning of obsession: a constant, persistent return to the brutal primal scene and the arousal and terror linked to peeping.9 In his work “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” Freud describes the famous case of the Wolf Man, who in recurring neurotic symptoms began to unconsciously repeat the scene of sexual intercourse between his parents that he saw as a child. Freud analyzes and relives the dream with the patient, namely the image processing this memory, in which white wolves sitting in a tree observe the terrified drea­ mer.10 Freud explains that the dream contains both the patient’s arousal and terror, which are strong primal feelings that do not allow for free psychosex­ ual development, condemning him to constant repetition of the primal scene. According to Toporowicz, the primal scene for Polish culture is the experi­ ence of Nazism.11 Juxtaposing a perfume advertisement with images of Nazis,

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Toporowicz seems to ask what affects are aroused by the unintentional clichés from the Nazi aesthetic, the aesthetic of strong masculine bodies of Nazis in uniforms that appear in popular culture? In other words: what could Nazis smell like? The 1985 Obsession is a fragrance that gained incredible popularity in the United States of America, mainly because of the bold and straightforward advertising campaign linking the perfume with sexual attraction. The base notes are moss and ambergris, the middle—marigold, sagebrush, and cor­ iander, and the head note—tangerine, bergamot, jasmine, rose, and orange blossom. Experts describe the perfume as “warm, spicy, profoundly and deli­ cately sweet, stronger with time, losing the sweetness, but amplified with body warmth”12 and belong to “oriental perfumes,” which suggests a postcolonial fantasy of a forbidden polymorphic sexuality of the Orient that would entail the infinite potency of the male body, the compliance of the female body, and the power of man over women. In many aspects, smell resembles the functioning of the affect: smell is physical, uncontrollable (unless one pinches their nose), and pre-intellectual, yet it influences the entire organism. Smell works not on distance, it is instant and close. Smell engages, absorbs into the very middle of the scene; as Sarah Ahmed writes about affect, it “involves subjects and objects, but without residing positively within them.”13 Like the affect, smell remains barely tangi­ ble and fleeting: it either dissolves into air or the smeller grows accustomed to it. Freud links smell and smelling with infantile sexuality, with the basic bodily sensations of babies and children connected with discovering their own bodies. He foregrounds the dual nature of bodily smells leading to different sexual solutions: genital and anal.14 This trope is followed by the psycho­ analytic theorist of perversion, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, for whom perver­ sion is mainly linked to anality, thus to sadism, to a mix of violence and horror, to a brutal desire of control hidden under hyperaesthetic surface: what is idealized is often bright, sparkling, glittering (for example, theo­ phanies). It is well known that such characteristics are often part of the fetish (shiny boots, the oilcloth raincoat, satin underwear, etc.). … The per­ vert’s inclination for beauty, his aesthetic tendencies, his idealization of that which surrounds him, and the idealization of the fetish by the fetishist are linked to an absolute constraint aimed at masking the unbearable truth.15 For Chasseguet-Smirgel, the fetish constitutes an exciting triumph over the paralyzing fear for one’s own life, rescue from the complete breakdown of reality, hence its form of a beautiful artwork that hides the underlying abomination. Excessive attention to personal hygiene, beauty, and nice smell mask the violent phantasy of dirt profaning the body and of its basic contamination.16 Extermination camps were to be excluded from the field of visuality so that nobody from the outside had the right to see and know what happened inside

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them. As I reconstructed in the previous chapter, this establishes a perverse situation of voyeurism, a game of hiding and speculation, of knowledge and ignorance. Even though what happened in the camps could not be seen, numerous prisoners’ accounts and those by local inhabitants, the smell of smoke from the crematories could be felt everywhere, the “evil-smelling, sickly sweet”17 smell of burned human flesh. Thus, the impenetrability of the camps interior for the local neighbors seems to be more a theoretical concept than historical reality.18 In Lanzmann’s Shoah, the engineer of the train to Treblinka said that they would get vodka from the Germans, so that they would not feel the smell and so that they could separate themselves from the consciousness of what they were doing.19 Describing the initial methods of . discarding the bodies in Bełzec, the first extermination camp created in the General Government, journalist Martin Pollack recalls: Local villagers say … the entire area was shrouded with dense, yellowish, stinking smoke, plastering all windows with a greasy layer. This memory kept resurfacing in their stories: women stuck rags in window cracks, as they did in winter, and washed the windows almost every day, but they could not clean them. The wind spread burned hair of the dead for many miles away.20 Toporowicz’s Nazis surely smell of crematory, but they also smell of the Calvin Klein perfume, of brutal sexuality: as in the accounts concerning doctor Mengele, who excessively cared for his personal hygiene and even wore a characteristic perfume, as the witnesses recall.21

Doctor Mengele: Cleanliness and Cruelty The handsome doctor Mengele is a figure that quickly started to haunt both Polish and global collective imaginations.22 He has appeared in multiple accounts and become the synonym of terror and heartless cruelty. “The Angel of Death” became an excessively affective figure: he sometimes appears in the memories of Auschwitz survivors, even when we know he was not the one conducting the specific selections; moreover, many ascribe to him an aura of monstrous splendor. This is the subject of Zyta Rudzka’s novel S´licznotka doktora Josefa (Doctor Josef ’s Beauty; 2006). Now a celebrated author, her book initially enjoyed little interest in Poland, although critics appreciated the description of old age from the biological and material perspective, rare in Polish literature. However, some claim that Rudzka exploited the subject of the Holocaust, describing it with such words as “provocation,” “shock value,” and “inappropriateness,” even formulating the bewildering opinion that the “provocation” is proof that “the history is now controlled by hysteria.”23 The novel is comprised of little stories the residents of a retirement home tell each other—stereotypical, repetitive, and boring—and the description of slow death, deprived of pathos, in the terrible conditions of the place, in which

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indifferent children and grandchildren place their loved ones. Most residents are Holocaust survivors. The novel focuses on the camp experiences of Mrs. Czechna, which disrupt the narration, constituting only jagged fragments of fading memories. Mrs. Czechna still proudly calls herself “Miss Auschwitz,”24 a nickname she received as the prettiest little girl in the camp; at the same time, she was Doctor Mengele’s favorite, who constantly conducted medical experiments on her, while protecting her and expressing sexual interest in her. The unpleasant smell of old body triggers a memory of her past tormentor in Mrs. Czechna: Doctor Josef. Such a nice man. Clean. Smelled beautiful. Strong. She wanted to be closer to him, because then, she did not feel the stink of burnt human flesh that stuck to her. Mrs. Czechna meditated. He always had a perfectly tailored uniform. Taylor-fitted. Accentuating his silhou­ ette. Clean boots. Polished. Spotless. So buoyant. Trig. He looked like a magician. In white gloves, with an elegant riding crop, with which he whipped the upper.25 The memory of Doctor Mengele slips into an obsessive enumeration of his attributes, singular images describing the beautiful, closed-off body of a Nazi capable of inflicting the greatest pain, who gives her the greatest pleasure: He approaches her again. Doctor Josef. Swarthy. Equalling the heavens. Absent. Disobedient. Deaf. He whistles when walking through the camp. He stops. The starched apron rustles. He does not touch anything. He points with his gloved hand. Tells her to sit on the dissecting table. … He stands over her. He laughs. His body remains upright. Tense as an unsprung trap. Hard. Strong. As a trunk. He waits. He does not shrink with the rhythm of laughter. He does make a move. He does not follow joy. He remains separated from the face. The uniform does not wrinkle. Even if the memory itself may seem terrifying, Mrs. Czechna treats it with tenderness, and the narration shows irony and distance, which is puzzling in confrontation with the brutality of sexual violence. At the same time, it does not prove the memory to be alive as it dissolves into another series of images of a uniformed phantasm, whose sexual power is expressed through complete control of his desire. The description embodies the perverse core of the Polish view on Nazism that reconciles separated contradictions: glamor and death, sexuality and fear, “bad” and “high” art. The Nazi uniform opens the bystander to a possibility of perverse identification with the perpetrator, which has at least two aspects: the first one entails abandoning the naturalized position of the victim, going beyond even the “grey zone” described by Primo Levi. The second one releases repressed affects: excitement and terror of the pleasure the Nazi per­ petrators derived from inflicting pain on helpless victims. Jean-Luc Nancy

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recalls a camp instruction, according to which an SS-Mann is to be “a shin­ ing example for the prisoners.”26 We may find a description of this shining example, intoxicating the victim, also in Jerzy Kosin´ski’s The Painted Bird (1965/1989), when the protagonist—a child like in Rudzka’s novel—looks up at the SS-Mann, simultaneously feeling admiration and jealousy, the feelings he never expressed toward Polish peasants with whom he wanders: His entire person seemed to have something utterly superhuman about it. Against the background of bland colors he projected an unfadable blackness. In a world of men with harrowed faces, with smashed eyes, bloody, bruised, and disfigured limbs, among the fetid, broken human bodies, he seemed an example of neat perfection that could not be sullied: the smooth, polished skin of his face, the bright golden hair showing under his peaked cap, his pure metal eyes. Every movement of his body seemed propelled by some tremendous internal force. The granite sound of his language was ideally suited to order the death of inferior, forlorn creatures. I was stung by a twinge of envy I had never experienced before, and I admired the glittering death’s-head and crossbones that embellished his tall cap. I thought how good it would be to have such a gleaming and hairless skull instead of my Gypsy face which was feared and disliked by decent people.27 It seems that the possible accusation of hysteria—a typical sexist argument also widely applied to Kosin´ski—derives from the sexual character of the relationship that links the victim with the perpetrator. However, there is a second side to this process of the sexualization of violence. The danger of annihilation and the memory of utter humiliation are turned into triumph and the feeling of control,28 crucial to both Rudzka’s and Kosin´ski’s novels.29 We encounter a similar reversal in Ignacy Karpowicz’s novel Son´ka (2014), in which the eponymous protagonist from the Podlasie region falls in love with an SS officer stationed in the area: I noticed Joachim right away: in my eyes, which were more and more often blinded by the light of day, a striking dark outline appeared. Two steel lightning bolts shone on his uniform. It seemed to me that these lightning bolts—so close to each other, inflamed for a moment in a blinding flare—were us.30 However, the image of such entanglement of victims and perpetrators does not meet social, aesthetic, and moral expectations about the Holocaust and wartime memory, whose normativity would push such representations into the area of pathology. Obviously, Polish memory is not an isolated case; American pop culture is just as dense when it comes to the fetish of uni­ form.31 However, what differentiates these two images from one another is the fact that, for the winners of the war, Nazis are endowed with great,

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fascinating power, but they are perceived as equal opponents. The Polish position is different: the Polish victim and the Polish bystander must look up to face the Nazi. In the final part of Andrzej Wajda’s film Kanał (1957), when the exhausted dirty insurgent, nearing ultimate defeat, leaves the sewers, in the frame first appear boots and then the whole of a uniformed SS officer towering over the Polish soldier, whom he will soon shoot.32 Even if as an exception, the German soldier may reveal his human side, as in Roman Polan´ski’s The Pianist (2002), so initially—when we do not know yet who the Wehrmacht captain will be for the hiding protagonist Szpilman—the camera shows him in the same frame, from the bottom to the top: first the polished boots, then the uniform, and at the very end, the face. Hence the attacks on such a representation of the Nazis that return in the sphere of Polish memory.

Flat Images and an Attack Piotr Uklan´ski’s work The Nazis already received diverse commentaries, as did the famous scandal resulting from Daniel Olbrychski’s intervention and the eventual closing of the exhibition at the Warsaw Zache˛ ta Gallery in 2000 by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage. Despite acknowledging the fascinating quality of the film stills portraying the actors playing uniformed Germans, most commentators omitted the exhibition’s sexual character.33 One critic recalls that the atmosphere surrounding the exhibition caused the thenMinister to “demand that it be accompanied by an appropriate description, protecting naive spectators from the naive interpretation of what they were to see and the naive faith in the truth and objectivity of images.”34 The attack and shutting down the exhibition had also a sexual dimension, and the concern for the “naive spectators”—most often children—resembles a prudish ban to shock spectators with pornography.35 Apart from the image itself, The Nazis provides few stimuli: stills in modest frames were placed in a row on the backdrop of white gallery walls, and there were no captions identifying the actors or films in which they starred. At the same time, the spectator’s gaze cannot wander or linger randomly—lest they recognize an actor’s face—the photographs are placed at eye level and encircle the entire room. Freedom is restricted for the sake of repetition, a mechanical repetition of an almost identical image: a male face, a hat, a uniform fragment. The essence of The Nazis is their obsessive seriality, giving the impression of a fatal inevitability; there is and can be nothing beyond another Nazi. Every still shows the same fetish: “what is absent … makes itself present constantly within a series—in every new fetish, the repressed scene, with which the arousing charm began, is evoked.”36 The fetishistic gaze chooses one signifier—like when a fetishist chooses the boot, the bra, the whip—and sticks to it; everything else must be eliminated: there appears a necessity, which eliminates all movement. This might elicit different reactions, from boredom and indifference (as one critic asked: “What does Piotr Uklan´ski’s work show? Nothing in particular”)37 to engagement and a stimulating show of strength by replacing one fetish with another, namely

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Kmicic’s phallic saber introduced by Daniel Olbrychski. In 2000 Olbrychski, one of the most celebrated Polish actors, had entered the exhibition with a saber—a movie prop from his famous movie—and with it destroyed his photo and those of several other actors who had agreed to this action. His stunt and ultimately artistic performance became a widely discussed scandal.38 The Nazis portray men in Nazi uniforms functioning as fetishes that have a phallic role and display the uniformed male body for the spectator to behold. The fetishism of the gaze constructed by Uklan´ski is double, as it encom­ passes both the seriality of the image and of the presented uniform: it also conveys terror, considering how the SS-Mann uniform is associated with vio­ lent phantasies of the strong male body concealed underneath, capable of doing the greatest harm, and the excitement for male sexuality subjected to total control. The serial representations in Uklan´ski’s The Nazis evokes the multiplied portraits in Leni Riefenstahl’s films, which play a particularly important role in Triumph of the Will. The Third Reich’s power emerges in the film mostly from the masses of uniformed men, organized in formations, parading in front of the Führer arm in arm, rifle in rifle, boot in boot. As Klaus Theweleit writes, analyzing the sexuality of fascism, [t]he soldier’s limbs are described as if severed from their bodies; they are fused together to form new totalities. The leg of the individual has a closer functional connection to the leg of his neighbor than to his own torso. In the machine, then, new body-totalities are formed: bodies no longer identical with the bodies of individual human beings.39 Just like Uklan´ski, Leni Riefenstahl is interested mostly in partial objects, the parts replacing wholes thanks to which the object can never be fully present: the Nazi uniform either terrifies (when the spectator identifies with the victim) or excites (when the spectator identifies with the perpetrator). This entangle­ ment of anxiety and excitement is crucial for the cultural representations dis­ cussed in this chapter. Joyce McDougall regarded perverse solutions as one of the most desperate defenses against fundamental fears of death, fragmenta­ tion, and psychosis.40 She theorizes perversion as the struggle to regain con­ trol of oneself through sexual excitement when flooded with the feelings of unsafety, helplessness, and vulnerability. This perspective allows one to per­ ceive perverse phenomena as rooted in trauma, rather characteristic for pre­ carious subjectivities, even when they seem strong and omnipotent. In this context, it is incredibly interesting to observe Uklan´ski’s return to The Nazis in the work No Title (Poland Über Alles) displayed again in the Zache˛ ta Gallery, after over a decade (2011–2013). As one of the critics described: The Nazis appeared in a smaller, more mundane form; as a wallpaper, permeating the wall, blending in with the surroundings, creating an unin­ terrupted circulation of representations with no beginning and no end, preventing the spectacular gesture of destruction of the image in advance.41

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At the same time, as the film stills surrounded the spectator from every side, they were spreading, creating colorful walls, and the excitement was addi­ tionally strengthened by the colorful dancefloor, disco music, and the white eagle towering over the entire installation. It seemed that the images “were not to be defeated, never ceased to exist, but only multiplied, extended the ‘army’”—as if in reaction to Olbrychski’s gesture, who tried to push them into oblivion, they returned in a more monstrous form. In psychoanalytical categories, we could understand it as the repression process, in which the content “exuberantly … proliferates in the dark,” and then returns “and finds extreme forms of expression.”42 It returns as a flat picture to which and with which nothing can be done, and which has great power over the spectator. Flat pictures of Nazis acquire a delightful distance, which the spectator can never close; an ungraspable quality, charm, or glamor. In Mythologies, Roland Barthes describes Greta Garbo’s face in similar terms: Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced.43 Such a film star was Stanisław Mikulski who played the role of Hans Kloss in . . the classic Polish television series Stawka wie˛ ksza niz zycie (Stakes Larger than Life; 1967–1969), in which the protagonist and the actor are fused with the spy alter ego of a German officer. He was the subject of a spicy anecdote, according to which the magazine Stern put him on the cover, dressed in a German uniform, with the caption “Polish women are in love with him.” A Nazi’s restrained body promises an ungraspable pleasure; there is some­ thing so delicate about it as an illusionary object subjected to the gaze of the spectator, but at the same time, it has to be captured in the strict frames of a flat, closed, and serial picture. According to Theweleit, the fascist must fulfill the ideal of a man-machine, closely controlled, disciplined, and capable of opposing wartime reality with the power of his closed body: the most urgent task of the man of steel is to pursue, to dam in and to subdue any force that threatens to transform him back into the horribly disorganized jumble of flesh, hair, skin, bones, intestines, and feelings that calls itself human—the human being of old.44 This is what the Nazi faces with his masculine, cruel strength capable of doing anything it wants with the enemy. Sadistic submission and potency are a perverse dream of gaining total control over someone, and over one’s body— both in the sense of power and of sexuality. The spectators find themselves in the position of envious and excluded voyeurs, hooked on the intoxicating intensities of affects.

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In No Title (Poland Über Alles), Uklan´ski multiplies the obsessive realism of his previous work in terms of both form and content, including characters from new film stills. However, if The Nazis required a deliberate mode of reception, the new work makes it difficult to concentrate, which initially allows for a pleasant daze that after a while—depending on one’s individual capacity for stimuli— transforms into irritation. The ostentatious reproduction evokes pop art experi­ ments, replicating images indefinitely in a joyful aura of consumption, even independently of the subject matter. Hal Foster indicates two possible directions of interpretation: metonimical—when we focus on the passive self-reflexivity and self-sufficiency of artworks’ shining surfaces, and metaphorical, when we seek critical reference, be it cultural, economical, social, or sexual.45 Analyzing Andy Warhol’s series Death in America (1962–1964), in which the artist replicates media photographs of brutal accidents, Foster offers a dialectical connection of the two possible perspectives in what he calls traumatic realism, and what is “referential and simulacral, connected and disconnected, affective and affectless, critical and complacent.”46 The repetitiveness of images aims to conceal their profound traumatic character, which nevertheless breaks through the hyperreal, shining surface and prevents the spectator from lingering in the state of pleasant arousal for too long. It works as a screen memory: presenting in an unimportant image a complex and dense reality of the unconsciousness from which the subject wants to keep as far away as possible.47 The return of feelings and desires con­ nected to the figure of the Nazi may incite anger and a need to erase them again, which happened when Olbrychski barged into the 2000 exhibition and, using a saber that was a film prop from a Polish classic film The Deluge based on Henryk Sienkewicz’s famous novel—in which Olbrychski played the protagonist— destroyed the photographs of himself and the actors who had given him their permission: Stanisław Mikulski, Jan Englert, and Jean-Paul Belmondo.

Fascinating Violence Olbrychski’s gesture references the canonical narration of Polishness, the matrix for discussing Poland, Polish attitude toward the other, and PolishGerman relations, especially in the position of the weaker facing the stronger. Kazimierz Wyka predicted such a cultural response to the defeat in the Second World War already during the war: Since the nation is suffering, come forth the poky and overused lyrical martyrdom, come forth the poetry of patriotic cliché. All the old specters, all the overused props and patterns are ready to continue down this path. This is why the situation should be defined and the intruders chased off in advance. Let nobody imagine that—since the tradition is troublesome— then right after the war we should dwell on the literary fruit of that time, saying “sure, Mister, but the nation yearns for a new Sienkiewicz.” The nation needs consolation and demands Kmicic and Zagłoba in Tobruk, Narvik, and Warsaw.48

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Henryk Sienkiewicz’s widely read The Trilogy codified in the nineteenth cen­ tury the traditional Polish ethnic identity. Its antimodernist tradition, antic­ olonial toward the center and imperial toward the periphery, raised the individual—hurt in the conditions of early capitalism of post-communist Poland and the political lack of autonomy—by giving the illusion of indivi­ dual influence of great gestures on the development of history.49 The antimodernist tradition was particularly valuable in the situation of Poland’s defeats and crises, because it allowed reconnecting the fractured national identity. In post-communist Poland of the 1990s and at the turn of the mil­ lennia, there appeared a revindication of Sarmatism in the conservative milieu of the magazines Fronda and Arcana, which assumed a non-critical approach—or an anticritical one, considering the then-new theses in histor­ iography—by adapting the mass sarmatism of the 1960s and the 1970s and recognizing the Sarmatian as the figure of an “average Pole.”50 Formulated in conservative articles, this formation opposes everything that was then con­ sidered modern, European, and laicized, like the installation displayed in the Zache˛ ta Gallery in the same year as The Nazis La Nona Ora (2000) by Maurizio Cattelan, which portrayed the Pope John Paul II crushed by a meteorite. A member of parliament from the Christian National Union, Witold Tomczak, attempted to remove the meteorite, damaging the sculp­ ture’s leg, which he sought to protect by separating it from the object. The attack on otherness and the protection of one’s own self-image happens through the splitting of the image—the ethnic Pole and the other, the Catholic and the atheist—which gather in the Sarmatism complex. Contemporary artist Tomasz Kozak deconstructed this complex by creating a coherent and consistent artistic project while drawing the farthest possible consequences from the fascination with the figure of a fascist. The found footage Kozak created—Klasztor Inversus (The Inverse Cloister; 2006)—is a subversive montage of allegories, which following Walter Benjamin, juxta­ poses images that do not fit together in the currently used symbolic field.51 In this work, Kozak cuts and edits fragments of The Deluge (1974, dir. Jerzy Hoffman) and Pan Michael (1969, dir. Jakub Goldberg), creating a figure of reversed Sarmatism that disgraces main figures of Polish identity: Kmicic and the Jasna Góra Monastery. The twelve-minute-long film opens with a closeup of the Black Madonna painting and then of Kmicic’s face (played by Daniel Olbrychski), who thanks to sound manipulation shouts about an attack on the Monastery and God. After a fragment of the attack and a close-up of the crucified Christ accompanied by a voice saying “Yes, suck my breast and touch me,” the stunned Kmicic falls to the ground. A close-up shows his face: he stares off into the distance and smiles, seemingly at an hallucination appearing in front of his eyes. The montage accelerates when viewers can see a dream fantasy: an exotic seaside landscape through a yellow-and-green filter, among palm trees, a man pulls out another man, unconscious and naked, from the sea. The scene is interrupted with the one from The Deluge, in which Kmicic is prepared for torture, which the editing

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changes into self-torture by hanging on a barn’s balk and burning his own body with fire. Right before the moment of pain, there is a cut to a close-up of anal sex presented again through a yellow-and-green filter, with violent music and screams of pain from the background. It turns out Kmicic’s fan­ tasy is that of a violent gay pornographic film. Images of pain, bodies, and fire, dark colors of blood, mud, and dirt, and the psychedelic yellow and green quickly mix, and the scene ends with a cut, an animation of the cross (mostly inverted), only to change into the scene from Pan Michael of the impaling of Azja Tuhajbejowicz (also played in the movie by Olbrychski), interspersed with close-ups of Kmicic laughing when tortured. The video ends with a prayer to a holy image of the Black Madonna of Cze˛ stochowa that looks like an ironic, desperate, and hysterical attempt at restoring balance, especially since the frame is soon engulfed in flames and an edited voice says “There is no God! I am the only Lord!” while the scream of pain mixes with the shout, “I feel well now,” joining torture and pleasure. The last frame shows Azja Tuhajbejowicz wearing a helmet and a metal armour, triumphant in battle like a soldier figure taken from protofascist imaginery of Ernst Jünger, with flames in the background. Using the categories of the Frankfurt School, Kozak describes his work as an examination of the blasphemous, reverse side of Sarmatism. The figure of Kmicic’s dark doppelgänger attacking the Jasna Góra monastery,52 the tor­ turing and tortured body of Daniel Olbrychski changes from the symbol of Polishness into the symbol of otherness, repeating in an unconscious return the discussion from the 1970s, when Hoffman announced casting Olbrychski in the main role in The Deluge (1974). The protest letters readers sent to the editorial offices of main newspapers asked about Olbrychski’s personality, appearance, and especially, the ambiguous interpretative conclusions resulting from Olbrychski’s performance as both Kmicic in The Deluge (1974) and Azja Tuhajbejowicz in Pan Michael (1969).53 Janusz Głowacki maliciously remarks on the essence of the conflict whether Olbrychski can play Kmicic in his op-ed in Kultura: He should not [play the part], because he played Azja and now we all remember that he is little, dark, and slouches, that he is shorter than the small knight [Pan Michał Wołodyjowski] even when standing on his toes, and that he has no degree in art.54 Głowacki mocks prospective audience’s fear of equating “our Kmicic” with someone foreign ethnically, racially, and class-wise, of creating a possible link between Poland and Asia, Poland and Ukraine, light and darkness, beauty and ugliness. Especially since it was Olbrychski that constantly deconstructed the traditional model of Polishness and masculinity in Andrzej Wajda’s films. The year The Deluge premiered was also the year of the premiere of Wajda’s The Promised Land (1974), in which Olbrychski’s character Karol Borowiecki symbolizes the erosion of the landowner ethos in the process of capitalist

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social changes. The saber, formerly the sign of imagined Sarmatian masculine power of the gentry, hangs in Borowiecki’s fiancée’s mansion only as a useless decoration.55 For Kozak, the figure of the saber still holds a lot of power linked to vio­ lence and brutality, understood as an ambivalent metaphor: on the one hand, of anachronistic conservative historical policy,56 while on the other hand, of the capacity to allegorize, cut, and connect images that do not fit in a Benja­ minian montage manner. In One Way Street, Benjamin self-references that “quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out, armed, and relieve the idle stroller of his conviction.”57 The doubling of Kmicic—the figure of Polishness—with his dark equivalent not only worries but also allows recognition of the “terrible pleasure” behind this act. In this case, it is sexuality. As one critic has indicated, all Sienkiewicz’s villains (Bohun, Bogusław, Azja) are violent men that come from outside of Poland who demand access to Polish women, kidnap them, and rape them.58 This sexu­ ality is not just dangerous but also one that seeks and finds pleasure in pain. This is a trope Kozak seems to follow in his difficult-to-watch juxtaposition of Azja’s impaling from Pan Michael and the violent pornographic film. How­ ever, Kozak accurately finds a quotation from Sienkiewicz’s work, in which the unusual cruelty of description and its suggestive imaging appear especially striking by the mix of pain and pleasure: The horses moved; the straightened ropes pulled Azya’s legs. In a twinkle his body was drawn along the earth and met the point of the stake. Then the point commenced to sink in him, and something dreadful began,—some­ thing repugnant to nature and the feelings of man. The bones of the unfor­ tunate moved apart from one another; his body gave way in two directions; pain indescribable, so awful that it almost bounds on some monstrous delight, penetrated his being. The stake sank more and more deeply.59 This resembles the description of the famous Rat Man, a case documented by Freud, and his story of the horrible torture of rodents entering the insides through the anus, which made a lasting impression on him. However, Freud notices that: “his face took on a very strange, composite expression. I could only interpret it as one of horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself was unaware.”60 As Kmicic in the Zache˛ ta Gallery and in Klasztor Inversus, Olbrychski appears exactly at the cultural intersection described by the sociologists, namely between the Poland economically colonized by the richer countries of Western Europe and the Poland that colonized eastern terri­ tories with latifundia that subordinated Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Belorussians.61 Kozak sexualizes these economic-political relations in sadomasochistic categories as a persecutor–victim relationship. In a mural that preceded Klasztor Inversus entitled Poles! One More Struggle! (2004), first displayed at the exhibition Za czerwonym horyzontem (Behind the Red Horizon) in the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in

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Warsaw, Kozak links Polishness with sadism by connecting figures from draw­ ings by Artur Grottger, a Romanticist artist, with the beginning of Marquis de Sade’s famous pamphlet. In the center of the infernal, black-and-red composi­ tion, Kozak places a woman with two children, the personification of Polonia surrounded by symmetrical mirror reflections of insurrectionists with pitchforks and scythes—visual images from Grottger’s paintings—and on the left and right side, Kozak positions figures disrupting the symmetry: an insurrectionist with a flamethrower and a stereotypical Jew with a baby that he holds by the feet, which is a reference to the legend of ritual murder. One art scholar remarks that Kozak notices a small, almost negligible element in Grottger’s paintings, namely the subtle antisemitism, seen for example in the painting in which Polish insur­ rectionists throw themselves to protect the mansion from invaders, and the Jew cowardly escapes.62 In Grottger’s processed works, Kozak designs a Polish— patriotic and romantic—community that rejects what is different and alien, situated on its sidelines. Meanwhile, these figures attract the eye and fascinate as sources of horrible destruction: the woman holds the child in her arms, the Jew seems to shake the child demonically, and the insurrectionist with the flame­ thrower is a source of the flames engulfing the entire composition. They become the embodiment of sadistic strength, which according to Lacan, is contained in the imperative: “I have the right of enjoyment over … your body, anyone can say to me, and I will exercise this right, without any limit stopping me in the capri­ ciousness of the exactions that I might have the taste to satiate.”63 I notice something familiar in the dark figure of the Jew, on which Poles are to project their sadistic fantasies about inhumane cruelty that would allow the brutal murder of helpless children for magical purposes; however, the figure anachro­ nically armed with a flamethrower seems less obvious. We can learn who this might be from Kozak’s most famous and controversial cycle of video works entitled Negroisation (2006).

Polish and German Doppelgängers Let us focus on the first work of the cycle, namely Negroisation 1: Brief His­ tory of a Certain Metaphor. What distinguishes this work from Klasztor Inversus is its orientation toward narration and discurse. Kozak generally prefers word to image, which he admits himself.64 In Negroisation, he plays the role of a narrator commenting on the racist figure of the “Negro” in texts by Ernst Jünger and Tadeusz Borowski. In his books and articles, Kozak meticulously fashions himself as an author and artist who describes his vision and, especially, his position as a dialectician. This is also how the film begins. We see a fragment in which a traveler enters a forgotten crypt and opens graves. The narrator describes himself by asking rhetorical questions. Is he an archeologist, a tomb raider, “an exorcist succumbing to the whispers of demons,” or “a librarian lost in the maze of esoteric discourse”? He continues to blur his identity and position by opening his story with the words “let’s listen to this story,” thanks to which we do not know whether Kozak who

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later himself appears in front of the camera is the narrator, the author, or the protagonist. Especially since this introduction is concluded with a later fre­ quently repeated scene, an ironic scene from Planet of the Apes (1968, dir. Franklin J. Schaffner), in which one of the apes shouts: “Smile!” while taking a photo, and a frame from Landscape After Battle (1970, dir. Andrzej Wajda), portraying a laughing Tadeusz (played, obviously, by Daniel Olbrychski). Later, Kozak focuses on the German fascism’s historical dream about the rebirth of the world after a cultural disaster thanks to the revival of ancient Greece—especially Sparta and the Dorian world (according to the famous Gottfried Benn’s definition)—only to move to the main theme: the racist figures of the “Negro” and the “negroisation,” which links very differ­ ent writers in terms of style, biography, and political views: a Wehrmacht captain and one of the creators of the German conservative revolution of the 1930s, Ernst Jünger, and the communism-inclined writer and poet Tadeusz Borowski. For both, the black man embodies a crisis of culture, which Kozak will visualize multiple times in this work. For example, when after the film sequence of the burning Rome, there appears an image from another film, showing a black American soldier with a flamethrower, a repetition of the figure from the mural Poles! One More Struggle!. “Negroisation” was the term Jünger used to describe immersion in cruelty and murdering fellow sol­ diers, while after the war, the “Negro” became for him a metaphor of foreign and sexual threats, conveyed in the act of rape committed by a black soldier on a German girl. Kozak explains everything dressed in a suit and standing against a neutral backdrop. The discursive part is concluded by a fragment of a film: a small white girl plays with a giant black snake, which entwines her with a hiss. The extremely racist figures of a violent, eroticized black man and a “Jew performing ritual murder” portrayed in the mural Poles! One More Struggle! turn out to be mirror reflections. Kozak finds similar metaphors in Borowski’s postwar poems and short stories written in a Munich transitional camp managed by the American army. Kozak quotes verses abundant in racist imagery, and when he speaks of the degradation of Germans after the capitulation, there appears an image of a black American soldier laughing who says: “that’s funny.” When stereo­ typical and brutal figures in poetry become saturated with sexual content, the story begins to be accompanied by images, with an intercut from a porno­ graphic film, in which a black man kisses and licks a white woman’s neck. The pornographic scenes are mixed with images of ancient female sculptures, and everything ends with the image of the same laughing soldier, who says: “He said something important.” The perversion of this moment of the mon­ tage lies in its ambiguity, as it remains unclear what is the subject of the sol­ dier’s comment. Is this a victim agreeing to a racist stereotype, into which he is incorporated? Does this concern Kozak himself and his distanced position of a researcher? This suspension of simple answers and a blurring of the position, from which the artist speaks (and shows), introduces confusion, responsible for viewers’ inability to decide what sort of film they are

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watching.65 It seems that the racism of this figure is acknowledged and at the same time omitted; as it is in the concept of denial, reconstructed in the chapter on voyeurism in comments on Freud’s essay Fetishism. Freud gives another example of the mechanism of denial (disavowal) in his Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis: some people punish their children for their plays and jokes that are sexual in nature and then write heated polemics on the innocence of the children who know nothing of sexuality.66 Thus, through this trick, the knowledge of child sexuality is both “in plain sight” and providently denied. At the very end of the video, the narrator cautiously wonders whether this metaphor can be saved (it is unclear why he would want to in the first place), finding the answer in alchemic discourse. In alchemy, “nigredo” was to mean the first degree of metamorphosis, the greatest disaster equated to the death of Christ, thanks to which there can come a rebirth.67 The alchemic process is an initiation, in which after the nigredo—a symbolic death resulting from tortures—there comes a return to the primal chaos, the mother’s womb, and then rebirth.68 Kozak considers not why such a figure appears in alchemic theory, as if nobody had ever attempted to explain it. He hides behind a dis­ course dense with meanings, which in itself is colonial and racist. However, Kozak is interested mostly in the double portrait of the Pole and the German, who constitute one figure. In turn, Kozak employs Borowski’s postwar works not included in the latter’s classic Auschwitz stories, theoretically known to every person who attended Polish school since 1972.69 The neglect of Borowski’s poetry70 that predated his prose may stem from the fact noticed by Kozak: the obscenity and scanda­ lousness of Borowski’s poems, even greater than that of the controversial documents of camp life, accused of breaking all moral, ideological, and patriotic rules as in the poem “Muzułman” (Muselmann), which provides a colorful list of people, elevated ideas, and historical events cursed by a con­ centration camp prisoner on the verge of death from hunger.71 It is difficult to find in the literature created “then and there” an equivalent of the poem “Koniec wojny” (The End of War), the first poem written after the liberation of the camp Dachau-Allach, in which Borowski stayed. This is especially true in terms of its Part Seven, entitled “Sodomiczny wieczór” (A Sodomic Evening): In tents, in waschraums, in luftraums, in krankenbaums, in playrooms and at the barber’s, in cholera rooms and camera rooms, in the block, in grass, and by the corner a Frenchman fucks, a Hungarian fucks, a Pole fucks a Polish woman in a hole, a black soldier fucks a German woman, a priest fucks a bunch of hookers, a lawyer fucks in a corner, a Jew fucks and, of course,

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an artist fucks himself, he’s a tenor-onanist both sexes and all nations. “Liberation!” They are right. The image of an orgy resulting from the explosion of sexuality restrained during wartime years and camp oppressions returns throughout Borowski’s oeuvre, especially in poetry, in which we may feel his lack of restraint in describing even the most intimate physical experiences. This is especially remarkable, because the time when Borowski worked on his texts was also when the most highly valued accounts of the camp experiences in universal and objective categories were written, such . as Seweryna Szmaglewska’s Smoke over Birkenau (1945) and Krystyna Zywulska’s I Survived Auschwitz (1946). Liberation by the American army and then the stay in the camp for displaced persons were very difficult experiences for Borowski, who con­ sidered this period another enslavement, which he expressed in his most famous—also thanks to Andrzej Wajda’s film adaptation—story entitled “Bitwa pod Grunwaldem” (The Battle of Grunwald). Kozak’s attentive observations confirm that black American soldiers are a particular object of fear, hatred, and contempt for Borowski, which we can already expect from one of the verses in “Koniec wojny.”72 Indeed, this image recurs in Borowski’s poetry and prose from the period.73 It is not too frequent but always appears in the familiar Fanonian configuration as a figure of sexual predator.74 Racist images portray the black soldier also as an avenger, who either rapes or seduces and defiles German women, which likens him to an ethnic Polish (white) former prisoner of the camp, the speaking subject from Borowski’s poems and stories. In Borowski’s work, the appetites of the frustrated former prisoners—both concerning food and sex—demand instant satisfaction, which is usually abrupt and does not have much to do with joy or gratitude that the society demands from the survivors. Sexuality mixes with violence, especially when Borowski projects a reversal of the roles of perpetrator and victim. In the poem “Spacer po Monachium” (A Stroll Through Munich), a man fantasizes about bashing the heads of German babies he sees in strollers on the pave­ ment, while in the story “Encounter with a Child” from the series The World of Stone contains a promise of violence, perhaps sexual, toward a German woman who is observing former prisoners walking the street. Both black American soldiers and former prisoners serve as the embodiment of sex­ ualized brutality, of revenge and hatred, of the reversal of the roles of tor­ mentor and victim.75 Kozak restores the memory about this part of Borowski’s œuvre, which is perhaps even less accessible than the Auschwitz stories themselves. The liberation did not open to Borowski any way to post­ war reality. It only provided him with the occasion to process his camp experiences and—as Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi notices—to write in the post­ traumatic present tense.76 DeKoven Ezrahi compares Borowski’s works to the

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oeuvre of Primo Levi, who “retains a continuous vision of the human order and of the relationship between history and art.”77 Kozak points to the affinity of Borowski with another survivor writer, namely Jean Améry, who explains in Resentments that honesty does not allow him to tactfully retreat to a serene silence: We victims of persecution … ought to internalize our past suffering and bear it in emotional asceticism, as our torturers should do with their guilt. But I must confess: I lack the desire, the talent, and the conviction for something like that. It is impossible for me to accept a parallelism that would have my path run beside that of the fellows who flogged me with a horsewhip.78 Améry considers the lack of forgiveness and reconciliation with former oppressors as the highest moral order. Jewish-Polish writer Henryk Grynberg writes in a similar vein at the end of Dziedzictwo (Heritage; 1993), which is a report of his conversations with people from his homeland, where during the war, one of the local ethnic Poles murdered his father and the knowledge of this event became an open secret in the local community. After a moving description of his father’s exhumation, Grynberg writes: I am unable to forgive, I do not want to, I do not feel entitled to do it. I am a weak person, you cannot demand that much of me. I do not think God requires it and he is justice. I think to condemn is to do justice. Eternally condemn. Without a statute of the expiration date.79 Carolyn J. Dean writes about conventionalizing the Holocaust testimony and the gradual establishment of the canonical testimony of Primo Levi, for whom calm comprehension deprived of excessive emotion is most important. She juxtaposes Levi’s approach to Améry’s furious and vengeful writings, which are inaccessible, because: victims are told not to hate in the name of being reintegrated into the community: “May your suffering be discreet,” the victim is counseled; “May your memory be calm and your desire for revenge muted, for it is a matter of assuring the goodwill of humanity.80 The thought that survivors are not passive victims anymore and that they can express feelings of hatred, especially when society demands reconciliation, forgiveness, and forgetfulness, may indeed seem unbearable.81 This incites a fear that frequently returns in the above works, namely that the victim will turn into the perpetrator. Of course, rejecting the possibility to articulate these feelings will not make them disappear. This is where the power of Borowski’s oeuvre comes from, especially the Auschwitz works, whose poetics assumes modest form and sharp language in

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the description of camp reality. Most notable works are as close to doc­ umentaries as possible, lacking commentary but abundant with emotions underneath the simple registration of camp experience.82 Until Borowski’s works become contaminated with explicit communist propaganda,83 they strip the camp experience of any pathos and honestly describe especially the omnipresent camp violence. Moreover, critics repeatedly remark (and some of them still see it as a fault) that in the Auschwitz stories, the German camp guards play a secondary role, and the camp images of violence show mostly the relationships between the prisoners themselves.84 In Borowski’s work, the emotions under the cold and sometimes heartless descriptions explode mostly in hatred and desire for vengeance. As in the words of Tadek, from “The People Who Walked On:” “I think that for those who have suffered unjustly, justice alone is not enough. They want the guilty to suffer unjustly too. Only through this will they understand justice.”85 This is the introduction to a short story “Silence,” in which due to a rumor about the kidnapping of an SS officer by former prisoners, an American officer gives a speech on the triumph of law over lawlessness and the necessity to seek justice in the court. Former prisoners politely listen to the speech, after which they bring out the SS officer they had earlier hidden in their block and “grunting and growling with hatred,” kill him.86 In the story “This Way for the Gas, Ladies, and Gentlemen,” the narrator Tadek feels worse and worse during the unloading of Jews from the train in Birkenau. He feels like vomiting and begins to hallucinate due to exhaustion, growing hatred, and anger: “Listen, Henri, are we good people?” “That’s stupid. Why do you ask?” “You see, my friend, you see, I don’t know why, but I am furious, simply furious with these people—furious because I must be here because of them. I feel no pity. I am not sorry they’re going to the gas chamber. Damn them all! I could throw myself at them, beat them with my fists. It must be pathological, I just can’t understand … ” “Ah, on the contrary, it is natural, predictable, calculated. The ramp exhausts you, you rebel—and the easiest way to relieve your hate is to turn against someone weaker. Why, I’d even call it healthy. It’s simple logic, compris?”87 Later, there comes one of the most striking scenes, in which a woman tries to save her life during the selection and disavows her child. Andrej, a sailor from Sevastopol, approaches the woman and shouts: “Ah, you bloody Jewess! So you’re running from your own child! I’ll show you, you whore!” His huge hand chokes her, he lifts her in the air and heaves her on to the truck like a heavy sack of grain. “Here! And take this with you, bitch!” and he throws the child at her feet.

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This is probably the most antisemitic exclamation recorded in Polish litera­ ture; only the pogrom shouts cataloged by Joanna Tokarska-Bakir in her text about the Kielce pogrom88 are similar in structure and emotional-sexual quality. Borowski himself must have known the exclamation’s power, as he decided to put it in the mouth of a non-Polish prisoner, and hide it partially by writing it in Russian rather than Polish (in the original, Andrej exclaims: “jebit twoju mat’, blad’ jewrejskaja!”). However, this shift is also indicative of the fact that the scene concerns the transportation of Jews,89 who despite objectively being in the worst conditions, can be the subjects of pure hatred. The scenes of horizontal relationships between prisoners portray their pre­ dicament, which does not end with their liberation or the end of the war. Analyzing the literature dedicated to concentration camps, trauma research­ ers underline the automatic and regressive character of the prisoners’ psy­ chological processes, including identification with the persecutors.90 When prisoners cannot express their aggressive impulses toward their oppressors, they begin to hate each other, trying to feel at least for a moment that they dominate over someone else.91 Seeing others in the same role, the victim recognizes in oneself hatred and the will to get rid of it, not compassion. Borowski’s works contain a conviction—difficult to accept during the times of peace and by people unaffected by trauma—that the victims may feel relieved when they become the aggressors.92 Kozak retrieves the overlooked racist figure of the black soldier from Borowski’s oeuvre, and from that perspective, this figure seems to be comprised of two parts: it is a medium of sexual ven­ geance on the German oppressors and it is an object of utter contempt. In this sense, the black soldier becomes an uncanny doppelgänger, created by the racist mechanism of splitting and the projection of the subject’s unwanted desires;93 the tormentor and the victim glued together, a sadomasochistic phantasy that transforms the humiliation of a person reduced to an object into a triumph of vengeance.94 The mirror reflection of Borowski in Kozak’s work is Ernst Jünger, one of the propagators of the conservative revolution in the 1920s and the 1930s, who spent the wartime on the German side, as a Wehrmacht officer in Paris. We can sense a fascination with Jünger and his metaphysical concept of vio­ lence in Kozak’s texts. In a 1934 essay, Jünger writes: “pain has a sure and ineluctable hold. Nothing is more certain and unavoidable than pain.”95 In the part of Negroisation dedicated to Jünger, Kozak uses mostly films frag­ ments depicting pleasure of inflicting pain, killing, shooting, military drills, and explosions. This orgy of destruction leaves behind an empty inhuman landscape and ruins examined by archeologists or robbers. This may be a reference to Jünger’s most famous novel, On the Marble Cliffs, 96 in which the old world collapses because of the invaders’ insanity, and the calm and har­ monious civilization burns. Kozak knows this pleasure of massacre himself, as his oeuvre obsessively and repeatedly refers to images of flames engulfing the world. However, it is the following step that seems crucial. The next frame shows a naturalistic image of natural childbirth, promising a rebirth of the

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world. This is a figure parallel to Kozak’s reflection on the figure of the “Negro” as nigredo, a stage in alchemic transmutation. It seems that this is the key moment of Kozak’s project: the idealization of a catastrophe, which becomes a regeneration and another step toward life. We may consider this another movement in Benjamin’s style. In the conclusion of his dissertation on German tragic drama, Benjamin writes that the multiple baroque alle­ gories of death and breakdown are actually indicative of a Messianic idea: And this is the essence of melancholy immersion: that its ultimate objects, in which it believes it can most fully secure for itself that which is vile, turn into allegories, and that these allegories fill out and deny the void in which they are represented, just as, ultimately, the intention does not faithfully rest in the contemplation of bones, but faithlessly leaps forward to the idea of resurrection.97 However, there remains huge disparity between the results of contemplation on disaster images; the Benjaminian allegorist who observes past harm feels loss and grief that lead to redemptive melancholy, whereas Kozak’s narrator experiences maniac excitement and triumph instead.98 Kozak intends this Polish “expedition on the fascist territory” as a thought experiment, in which the dialectician from a safe space dives into the charm of primal violence, careful not to plunge into it completely: “Do not colonize darkness if you do not want for darkness to colonize you.”99 Indeed, this is a phallic and sexual metaphor, in which the male subject must contain himself in order not to dissolve into pleasure when Polishness recognizes in itself the dark doppel­ gänger and the victim—their own persecutor. In libidinal economy, this sti­ mulates a perverse mechanism, one unrelated to guilt or grief. Borowski diagnoses it as a direct witness, reconstructing the camp perspective in his works, whereas Kozak does it on a meta-level, as a post-witness, gradually moving his diagnosis toward a sociopolitical postulate.

Polish BDSM Empire Kozak’s artistic activity increases pace over time only to gain more scope. His 2017 800-pages-long visionary political tractate Poroseidy (Poroseids) juxta­ poses fictionalized parables with their erudite exegesis, which forms a hardly graspable collage of German idealism, Nietzsche’s concepts, modern gnosis, and Deleuze’s anti-structuralism that is difficult to comprehend. The structure of these fantastical and philosophical parables is the following. First, Kozak sketches an image of (post)modernity petrified by the lack of revolutionary projects of utopia capable of breaking the neoliberal end of history, then there appears a clever way of escaping this world, there appears a small crack in its hard shell through which one can escape. Poroseidy becomes a compilation of stories about Porus, the personification of abundance from Plato’s Sympo­ sium, whom classicists link with Hermes and thus considered a trickster, an

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anthropological figure of a god embodying the force of life unbridled by any rules.100 Paul Radin, the author of a classical anthropological dissertation dedicated to this subject writes: Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself. He wills nothing consciously. At all times he is constrained to behave as he does from impulses over which he has no control. He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being.101 The trickster is a liminal deity—Porus’ name could be translated as “road” (which links him with Hermes, the god of roads, travelers, and thieves)—a creature in perpetual movement, appearing in many forms, elusive. One reviewer of Poroseidy juxtaposes the tragic element governed by dissatisfac­ tion, Eros, with Porus—the embodiment of comedy, excess, and abun­ dance.102 Porus is the force that drives Kozak’s artistic strategy as he wanders among his concepts, covering his tracks so that he may never be caught in the position from which he speaks. Following Kozak’s suggestion to read his book regardless of its linearity, chronology, and order, we should move to Chapter 8 that conveys of a “parable” and the accompanying “parallel.” The chapter discusses the dia­ lectician—a very important figure for Kozak, to whom he dedicated many previous texts—and sexuality with its projected political, emancipating char­ acter. Like the other parts, the chapter reflects the whole treatise by freely mixing ethics, aesthetics, politics, economics, and eroticism. The dialectician is the protagonist of the parable named Szudaj. He is a high church state official, which is consumed by a mysterious heresy that destroys the social system’s restrictive structures. Like Kurtz from Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, who tried to explore the nature of insanity,103 Szudaj plunges into heresy to betray his country in the end, transforming into his own contra­ diction: Judas. Szudaj-Judas (in Polish: Judasz) clearly is the intertwined figure of Kmicic and anti-Kmicic, of Borowski and Jünger. The heresy Szudaj discovers is a mix of gnostic knowledge and deeply carnal, sexual pleasure, which tempts and finally overwhelms him. Searching for the heresy, Szudaj travels through spaces of fantasy to finally find himself at the entrance: In a narrow, granite frame, an ashen membrane trembles with tension; half-transparent, like a screen, for some unclear, convoluted, and simul­ taneously alluring, arousing shapes, shadows, silhouettes swirl on it, as if screened by a projector hidden in the interior of the alcove. Across this membrane—from the bottom right corner to the top left one—there goes a done zipper, shining with a hundred silver teeth.104

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To enter, the protagonist takes out a pen endowed with magical phallic power and writes on the figure’s body guarding the entrance: “I wish to penetrate.” In this reformulation of Franz Kafka’s novella “Before the Law”—repeatedly interpreted, also psychoanalytically, along with the Oedipal prohibition—we find ourselves inside an infant fantasy of a return to the mother’s womb, in which absorption mixes with sexual arousal. Referring to the Freudian concept of oceanic feeling, the psychoanalyst Mervin Glasser calls this fantasy the core complex, in which the child melds with the primal object in a delightful fusion overcoming all destructive feelings but disallowing the child to ever leave and mature.105 In the interior of the womb-alcove happens Szudaj’s gnostic-sexual transformation, but I find it hard to consider the protagonist a mature man, even despite the accumulation of sexual terms balancing on the verge of kitsch: the heresy flows in Szudaj’s body (in this version of sexuality there is basically no need for other bodies); from the anus (“Porostate”) and from the penis described in utter stupefaction and admiration: “[the cock] shines in full glory,” “the eager cock is itching to penetrate sofia’s interior,” “Judas scans Sofia’s welcoming interior with his clear mind, vigilant eye, and alert cock (which is still attentive),” “following the pulsating cock that rushes ahead… Where?— Deep inside…”106. Sexual arousal flows from his entire body, but the role of the phallus is clearly exaggerated, as if it was endowed with great power; as in the case of Little Hans described by Freud, who before experiencing fear of cas­ tration, saw a penis in every place where he expected triumph and male power.107 Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel writes that for such boys (and men), “all interest is focused on the penis, with doubts of its size and quality and with exaggerated narcissistic compensations,”108 which results in their withdrawal from the world of relationships and focus on themselves. In the end, it also completely excludes women reduced to the role of “nature,” “womb,” “spell,” “jungle,” or as in the case of Poles! One More Struggle!, to the traditional mythical figure for Polish imagination: Polonia. Thus, the fantasy of merging with the womb-recess also incites terror as Szudaj is then literally penetrated by the heresy—both sexually and violently—in the form of “sofia” and “Scripture.” The scene sketched by Kozak resembles the writings of judge Schreber, especially the fragments that impressed Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, namely when Schreber had a vision of being pene­ trated with rays of sunshine by one of the gods. It is a transformation that later allows Szudaj to participate in a sexual orgy, connecting bodies in the inflows and outflows of different substances seeping through all bodily holes. We may see it as the flow of life that is Deleuzian in spirit, delectable and joyful, an unrest­ ricted flow of desire. However, it is important that the entire activity is captured in the structure of a sadomasochistic spectacle. The description is full of neolo­ gisms, which are indirect but refer to a recognizable meaning: The first one raises a thick mixock on a two-meter-long handle only to stuff it all the way up to the hilt into the graphicunt …. The third one starts the vibronator and pushes it into the “nudity’s” narrow paradisiacanal.109

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The fascination with violence idealized as a form of regeneration, self-trans­ formation, and rebirth was a recurring motif in Negroisation, this time it presents itself as a form of political and sexual emancipation. Just as the main thesis is already included in the commentary to the parable and ends with a question mark: “Perhaps the late-modern fetishistic practices express the desire to deconstruct the cults of Ruling?” Next, Kozak describes a joyful vision of fetishistic pornography and per­ verse sexuality that hold neither fear nor violence. Kozak does not explain why such strongly conventionalized and established sexual activities are to be emancipatory or why the space of the greatest oppression is to become—using the terminology from Theses on the Philosophy of History by Benjamin whom Kozak so appreciates—the gate through which the Messiah is to arrive. It is still the same moment in which radical destruction through idealization assumes the opposite meaning: rebirth. This is the projected fetishistic sexu­ ality thanks to which one can escape the crystal palace of modernity: the differences between the partial objects that Kozak lists and examines—all the clitorises, glandes, vaginas, anuses, bellies, nipples, breasts, heels, toes, lips— “which are of little significance to a random viewer (so such a viewer often claims that porn is monotonous) assume an absolutely epic significance in the eyes of connoisseurs.” Perverse sexuality turns out to be fantastical and luminous as opposed to neurotic sexuality, which is to always stay unsatisfied, monotonous, and inef­ fective. In this world, violence loses its destructive nature and becomes an exit leading to absolute inner freedom. At this point, Kozak refers to Erich Kah­ ler’s text about Jünger’s works, in which Kahler describes the mechanism of splitting. According to Kahler, Jünger’s characters oppose the Nazi attempts to tear apart their personalities by deliberately creating a split within them­ selves, namely a split in their own consciousness, detaching from their ordin­ ary consciousness a certain kind of unconscious “self,” faithful to it in the most dangerous situations, making it a point of observation resistant to this nightmare that consumed the weakest victims.110 This debatable or even doubtful equating of the sadomasochistic with the (conscious or not) strategy of survival in the camp enhances its traumatic origins: the utter terrifying humiliation of war. The perversion of fascism may be absorbed and used to defend against breakdown and nothingness from which rebirth cannot save. Kozak’s works diagnose the dangers of what we may call the Polish romantic paradigm: the unquestionable figure of a victim (which I will scrutinize in the next chapter). The dark doppelgänger of the Polish victim is the German perpetrator, whom the victim closely observes. Identification with the perpetrator provides relief and a sense of agency but also enthralls in eternal torture. The return to the sadistic imperative, thus remaining in the position of the victim, is based on the dialectic rule: it arouses the establishment of the perpetrator. It is a position that both is completely masculine and locked in masculinity; it projects everything that is weak and vulnerable onto the despised victim, finally embodied by the

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woman. It follows the logic outlined by Klaus Theweleit’s in his psycho­ analytic study of German fascism, Male Fantasies. Theweleit argues that for the fascists, the “Germanness” became their fragile structure of masculinity, which serves as an armor against dangerous feelings, empathy, drives, and sexuality. These threaten to dissolve male psyches which constantly need to discipline themselves in order to never experience loss or their own pre­ cariousness.111 This concurs with Joyce McDougall’s observation that the perverse solutions are invoked primarily to soothe oneself and to convince that no loss has taken place.112 Therefore, the sexual excitement that is so apparently evident in the case of these phantasies has much more to do with dealing with overwhelming anxiety than with desire. The Polish version of the “fascinating fascism” of the black uniform is the kind of identification with the perpetrator that erases from memory the war, poverty, famine, and disaster. Saving oneself from humiliation, weakness, and vulnerability that result from victimhood, the Polish subject identifies with the perpetrator. The fascination with fascism then becomes a fascination with violence, sometimes hidden, which refers to its source in the Holocaust. It can be sometimes seen right on the surface as with the Polish soccer stadiums symbolism. Polish anthropologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir observes how the identification with the aggressor guides the conflicts between different groups of hooligans113. Hooligan chants and insults most often utilize Nazi termi­ nology, or simple German phrasings, known to every Polish citizen after the war, such as “Jude Raus”. This phenomenon may be observed also in inci­ dents of the desecration of Jewish cemeteries: most often matzevots would be defaced with swastikas.114 In other times, the identification with Nazism is more hidden, as if the Jews as the Holocaust’s victims ought to disappear from the image, because the subject then would approach too closely the other side of fascism. Nancy argues that in the emblem of the skull, SSManns were to see “the steeliness of their own gaze:” the death camp’s decor and the corpses.115

Notes 1 S. Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in: S. Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: First Vintage Books Edition, 1981), p. 91. 2 The exhibition catalog with essays from J. E. Young, N. L. Kleeblatt, S. DeKo­ ven Ezrahi, E. Handler Spitz, L. Saltzman, E. van Alphen, R. Greenberg: Mir­ roring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art, ed. N. L. Kleeblatt (New York: The Jewish Museum and Rutgers University Press, 2002). 3 Examples of . antisemitic images of filth and disgusting human mass can be found in Stefan Zeromski’s prose: “The apartment buildings built by the Jews and belonging to them were marked by big-city shoddiness, brazen vulgarity, and disgraceful hideousness. The war had stripped them of their whitewash or oil paint. The paint on these buildings had curled into rolls and looked like slovenly side-locks on a slovenly Israelite. The inner parts of the buildings around the courtyards were not only stripped of oil paint or whitewash, but deprived of their plaster, which had crumbled off in flakes and lumps. The walls showed bare

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9 10 11

12 13 14

Fetishism: The Nazi in a Uniform brickwork, though it too was slimy with filth and covered with cracks, stains, blotches, damp patches, and hideous dirt-marks that did not bother any of the inhabitants. How ghastly were the latrines, the trash heaps, the drains, sinks, . gutters, and the very flagstones!” S. Zeromski, The Coming Spring, trans. B. Johnston (Budapest; New York: Central European University Press, 2007), p. 340. “There were lots of people in the garden. Judym hardly noticed the passing afternoon. In the evening, Jewish hordes began to arrive. The main avenue, the side avenues, and all the roads were flooded with people. There was nowhere to stroll so the whole groups stood in the streets or moved a few steps to the right . and left.” S. Zeromski, Ludzie bezdomni, ed. I. Maciejewska (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolin´skich, 1987), p. 51. These are common images, both on the right and left side of the political scene; they appear in Roman Dmowski’s texts, as well as in the reportages of Wanda Melcer and Zbigniew Uniłowski (Wiadomos´ci Literackie). . T. Rózewicz, The Trap, trans. A Czerniawski (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic

Publishers, 1997), p. 48.

An exhaustive list of works and their descriptions are delivered by Sławomir

Buryła in Tematy (nie)opisane (Kraków: TAiWPN Universitas, 2013). It seems

to me that among them, the most ambitious and consistent analysis of the Nazi

psyche is Stanisław Grochowiak’s novel Trismus (1958), in which the author

gives voice to the perpetrator himself and leads the narration from his perspec­ tive. However, in my opinion, this perspective lacks depth, because the sources of

Nazism of the protagonist are understood traditionally as an intellectual blind­ ness by political ideology, without any links to the affective and social sphere.

Robert Eaglestone claims that in general the portrayals of the Nazi perpetrators

in literature are simple and although they wish to examine the question of evil,

they fail to deliver any answers. See: R. Eaglestone, The Broken Voice: Reading

Post-Holocaust Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

J. M. Rymkiewicz, Rozmowy polskie latem roku 1983 (Warszawa: Bellona i Ofi­ cyna Wydawnicza Volumen, 2009), pp. 65–66. The author also mentions these

nightmares in J. M. Rymkiewicz, Kinderszenen (Warszawa: Sic!, 2008), p. 216.

J. Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” trans. J. B. Swenson, Jr., October 51/1989, pp. 55–75.

Although Maciej Toporowicz has lived and worked in the USA since finishing

studies, I consider him as a participant of Polish culture, the one in which he was

raised; I underline this to justify the analysis of his work here. This also shows

the links connecting Polish and global memory of the Holocaust. Obsession was

one of the works presented in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw at the

exhibition Sztuka polska wobec Holokaustu (Polish Art and The Holocaust) (04/

17–11/30 2013, curator: Teresa S´miechowska). It was presented at the ground-

breaking exhibition curated by Norman I. Kleeblatt Mirroring Evil: Nazi Ima­ gery/Recent Art in the New York Jewish Museum in 2002.

See S. Freud, “Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis,” in: SE, Vol. 10,

pp. 151–318.

S. Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” trans. A. and J. Strachey,

in: SE, Vol. 17, pp. 29–47 and 61–71.

Considering the popularity of Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage, Niziołek

deems “the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp” to be the primal scene of

collective imagination, the place of multidirectional memory of different social

groups. Cf. G. Niziołek, Polski teatr Zagłady (Warszawa: Instytut Teatralny im.

Zbigniewa Raszewskiego and Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2013), p. 265.

L. Turin, T. Sanchez, Perfumes: The A–Z Guide (New York: Penguin Books,

2008), p. 257.

S. Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Texts 22.2/2004, p. 119.

See S. Freud, “Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis,” p. 247–248.

Fetishism: The Nazi in a Uniform

87

15 J. Chasseguet-Smirgel, “Loss of Reality in Perversions—With Special Reference to Fetishism,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 29/1981, pp. 526–528. 16 See S. Freud, “Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis,” p. 229f. 17 W. Kielar, Anus Mundi: 1,500 Days in Auschwitz/Birkenau, trans. S. Flatauer (New York: New York Times Books, 1980), p. 260. 18 See for example: A. Skibin´ska, “Interviews with Chełmno inhabitants carried out by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,” in: The Extermination Center for Jews in Chełmno-on-Ner in Light of the Latest Research: Symposium Proceedings, ed. Ł. Pawlicka-Nowak (Konin: Muzeum Okre˛ gowe, 2004). 19 C. Lanzmann, Shoah (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 32. . 20 M. Pollack, Skazone krajobrazy, trans. Karolina Niedenthal (Wołowiec: Wydaw­ ´ nictwo Czarne, 2014), p. 81. See A. Chałupnik, “Komin,” in: Slady Holokaustu w imaginarium kultury polskiej, eds. P. Dobrosielski, J. Kowalska-Leder, I. Kurz, M. Szpakowska (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2017). 21 Wiesław Kielar described him as “an exceedingly elegant and good-looking SS officer who, thanks to his attractive appearance and his good manners, conveyed the impression of a gentle and cultured man who had nothing whatever to do with selections, phenol and Cyclon B.” Kielar, Anus Mundi: 1,500 Days in Auschwitz/Birkenau, p. 180. 22 There is a book on the surprisingly interesting story of the search of the remains and the aesthetic of court photography of Mengele: Th. Keenan, E. Weizman, Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics (Frankfurt am Main: Sternberg Press/Portikus, 2012). 23 A. Morawiec, Literatura w lagrze, lager w literaturze: fakt, temat, metafora (Łódz´: Wydawnictwo Akademii Humanistyczno-Ekonomicznej, 2009), p. 300. 24 See a Polish documentary on a beauty pageant for the Holocaust survivors in Israel: Miss Holocaust, 2017, dir. Michalina Musielak. ´ 25 Z. Rudzka, Slicznotka doktora Josefa (Warszawa: Jacek Santorski & Co: “Inanna,” 2006), p. 90. Further quotes from pp. 204–205. 26 J.-L. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 42. 27 J. Kosin´ski, The Painted Bird (New York: Grove Press, 1995), pp. 248–249. 28 See D. Campbell, “Perversion: Sadism and Survival,” in: Introducing Psycho­ analysis: Essential Themes and Topics, eds. S. Budd, R. Rusbridger (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 235–236. 29 See J. Rawski, “Seksowny faszyzm jako egzemplifikacja relacji płci i władzy,” Teksty Drugie 2/2015. 30 I. Karpowicz, Son´ka (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2014), p. 54. 31 Apart from Susan Sontag’s well-known essay “Fascinating Fascism,” the most profound perspective on the perverse fascination with fascism and Nazism was provided by K. Ravetto, The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (Minneapolis: Uni­ versity of Minnesota Press, 2001). 32 The boots as a part of this structure of imaginations is discussed by Iwona Kurz, ´ “Buty,” in: Slady Holokaustu w imaginarium kultury polskiej, pp. 63–70. . 33 See I. Kowalczyk, Podróz do przeszłos´ci. Interpretacje najnowszej historii w polskiej sztuce krytycznej (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo SWPS Academica, 2010), pp. 138–158. 34 Ł. Zaremba, “Ikonoklas´ci i ikonofile,” Konteksty 3/2013, p. 11. 35 See N. L. Kleeblatt, “The Conflation of Good and Evil,” in: Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery / Recent Art, ed. N. L. Kleeblatt (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2001), pp. 108–109; Ł. Zaremba, Obrazy wychodza˛ na ulice. Spory w polskiej kulturze wizualnej (Warszawa: Be˛ c Zmiana, 2018), pp. 132–133. 36 H. Böhme, Fetishism and Culture: A Different Theory of Modernity (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), p. 311.

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37 P. Piotrowski, “Szabla Sarmaty i pamie˛ c´ historyczna,” in: Piotr Piotrowski, Sztuka według polityki. Od Melancholii do Pasji (Kraków: TAiWPN Universitas, 2007), p. 212. 38 Zaremba, Obrazy wychodza˛ na ulice. 39 K. Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans. S. Conway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 154. 40 J. McDougall, “The Primal Scene and the Perverse Scenario,” in: Plea for a Measure of Abnormality (New York; London: Routledge, 2015), p. 69; J. McDougall, “Neosexual Solutions,” in: The Many Faces of Eros: A Psycho­ analytic Exploration of Human Sexuality (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995); see J. Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996), p. 52. 41 Ł. Zaremba, “Ikonoklas´ci i ikonofile,” p. 13. The next quote comes from the same publication. 42 S. Freud, “Repression,” in: SE, Vol. 14. 43 R. Barthes, Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press, 1991), p. 56. 44 Theweleit, Male Fantasies, p. 160. 45 H. Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: The MIT Press, 1996), pp. 127–130. 46 Foster, The Return of the Real, p. 130. 47 S. Freud, “Screen Memories,” in: SE, Vol. 14, pp. 299–332. 48 K. Wyka, “Tradycja a przyszłos´c´,” in: Konspiracyjna publicystyka literacka, ed. Zdzisław Jastrze˛ bski (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1973), pp. 67–68; Ori­ ginally in Kazimierz Wyka, “Tradycja a przyszłos´c´,” Miesie˛ cznik Literacki, November 1942. 49 R. Koziołek, Dobrze sie˛ mys´li literatura˛ (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2016), pp. 245–246. 50 See P. Czaplin´ski, Poruszona mapa. Wyobraz´nia geograficzno-kulturowa polskiej lit­ eratury przełomu XX i XXI wieku (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2016), p. 133. 51 T. Kozak, Wyte˛ pic´ te wszystkie bestie? Rozmowy i eseje (Warszawa: Stow­ arzyszenie 40000 Malarzy, 2010), p. 425. 52 Kozak reminds that The Deluge begins with an iconoclastic attack on the por­ traits of ancestors, only to be followed by an orgy. Kozak, Wyte˛ pic´ te wszystkie bestie?, p. 438. 53 The stances on this conflict are described in the book by M. Oleksiewicz, 535 dni Potopu (Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1975). 54 J. Głowacki, “Od tyłu,” in: J. Głowacki, Jak byc´ kochanym (Warszawa: S´ wiat . Ksia˛ zki, 2005), p. 22. The fragment originally appeared in Kultura, June 13, 1971. 55 S. Jagielski, Maskarady me˛ skos´ci. Pragnienie homospołeczne w polskim kinie fabularnym (Kraków: TAiWPN Universitas, 2013), p. 286. 56 T. Kozak, “Ku polskos´ci trawersuja˛ cej,” in: Grzegorz Klaman, Polonia (Sopot: Pan´stwowa Galeria Sztuki w Sopocie, 2016), p. 93. 57 W. Benjamin, One Way Street, ed. Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, . 2016), p. 84. . 58 T. Zukowski, “I pokocha, i polegnie—czyli zycie seksualne polskich patriotów,” Bez Dogmatu 84/2010, p. 21. 59 H. Sienkiewicz, Pan Michael, trans. J. Curtis (Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown, and Company 1983), p. 426. 60 S. Freud, “Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis,” pp. 151–318. 61 J. Sowa, Fantomowe ciało króla. Peryferyjne zmagania z nowoczesna˛ forma˛ (Kraków: TAiWPN Universitas, 2014), pp. 222–223.

Fetishism: The Nazi in a Uniform 62 63 64

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66 67 68 69 70 71

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73 74 75

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77 78 79

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E. Toniak, S´mierc´ bohatera. Motyw s´mierci heroicznej w polskiej sztuce i litera­ turze od powstania kos´ciuszkowskiego do manifestacji 1861 (Gdan´sk: słowo/obraz terytoria, 2015), p. 218. Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” p. 58. . T. Kozak, “Jestem jadowitym molem ksia˛ zkowym,” interviewed by S. Sza­ błowski, Obieg, http://archiwum-obieg.u-jazdowski.pl/rozmowy/1447; DOA: August 29, 2017. See also T. Kozak, “Za literackos´c´!,” interviewed by Jakub Majmurek, in: Kino–sztuka. Zwrot kinematograficzny w polskiej sztuce współc­ zesnej, eds. J. Majmurek, Ł. Ronduda (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Poli­ tycznej i Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej, 2015), p. 324. It is in confusion and not in Kozak’s blurry categories of “times of political correctness” and “liberal-democratic discourse” that I see the reasons for reject­ ing this work by some of the curators and critics. See T. Kozak, “Zmurzynienie. Ekshumacja pewnej metafory,” interviewed by S. Szabłowski, Obieg (DOA: August 14, 2017). S. Freud, “Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis,” in: SE, Vol. 15, p. 209. See C. G. Jung, “Psychology and Alchemy,” in: Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1968). M. Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structures of Alchemy, trans. S. Corrin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 161. S. Karolak, Dos´wiadczenie Zagłady w literaturze polskiej 1947–1991. Kanon, który nie powstał (Poznan´ Wydawnictwo Nauka i Innowacje, 2014), pp. 233–263. J. Szcze˛ sna, “Wste˛ p,” in: T. Borowski, Poezja, eds. T. Drewnowski, J. Szcze˛ sna (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2003), p. 33. . T. Borowski, “Koniec wojny. Noc w czternastu cze˛ s´ciach. Reportaz poetycki” (fragments), in: T. Borowski, Poezja, pp. 227–228. The controversies surrounding Borowski’s work are discussed by S. Buryła in: Prawda mitu i literatury. O pisarstwie Tadeusza Borowskiego i Leopolda Buczkowskiego (Kraków: TAiWPN Universitas, 2003). In his stories, Borowski notices the distinctness of the Jewish prisoners’ fate and the Holocaust, he sees that their pain is different, exclusively caused by Nazi racism. The situation is different in the case of the racial context in the descrip­ tion of American liberators who become the new oppressors. For example, in the poems “Koniec wojny” and “Wieczór w Monachium,” in the story “Bitwa pod Grunwaldem,” which contains particularly offensive and racist word choices, and in the stories “Koniec wojny” from Kamienny s´wiat and Ojczyzna. See F. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C. Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), esp. ch. 6 “The Negro and Psychopathology.” A sadomasochistic relationship between a prisoner and a female SS officer— between a Pole and a German—is described by Pankowski in a short story . “Moja SS Rottenfuhrer Johanna,” in: M. Pankowski, Złoto załobne (Koszalin: Millenium, 2002) and in the novel Rudolf (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1984). S. DeKoven Ezrahi, “Representing Auschwitz,” History and Memory 7.2/1995, p. 123. Borowski is often compared to Levi; see P. Wolski, Tadeusz Borowski— Primo Levi. Przepisywanie literatury Holocaustu (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN), 2013. DeKoven Ezrahi, “Representing Auschwitz,” p. 124. J. Améry, “Resentments,” in: J. Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana Uni­ versity Press, 1980, p. 69. H. Grynberg, Dziedzictwo (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2018), p. 109. However, in the last paragraph, Grynberg mentions also the warmth that he felt from some of his interlocutors. Jacek Leociak remarks different personal docu­ ments of survivors who write about the desire for vengeance on their oppressors

90

80 81

82

83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

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92 93 94

Fetishism: The Nazi in a Uniform (e.g. Calel Perechodnik expresses hope that his writings will lead to a “ruthless extermination of all Germans”). J. Leociak, Tekst wobec Zagłady (Torun´: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UMK, 2016), pp. 118–120. C. J. Dean, Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 151. In Polish memory, the figure of the Jewish victim taking revenge on German oppressors is included in Ida Kamin´ska’s . drama Zasypac´ bunkry (Bury the Bunkers), Archiwum Pan´stwowego Teatru Zydowskiego im. E. R. Kamin´skiej, . no. 710; reprint in: Rodzaju zen´skiego. Antologia dramatów, eds. A. Chałupnik, A. Łuksza (Warszawa: Instytut Teatralny im. Zbigniewa Raszewskiego, 2018). The experience of spending a few years in hiding makes Rachela unable to get over the war and return to normal life after the liberation; it is only an off-scene murder of imprisoned German soldiers that shakes her out of her stupor. This incredibly moving drama, staged in the Jewish Theatre in Warsaw (directed by Kamin´ska, who also played the role of Rachela) announced the events of the Polish political crisis in March 1968. . S. Buryła, D. Krawczyn´ska, “Problemy (nie)wyrazalnos´ci Zagłady,” in: Literatura polska wobec Zagłady (1939–1968) eds. S. Buryła, D. Krawczyn´ska, J. Leociak (Warszawa: Fundacja Akademia Humanistyczna i Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2012), p. 427. The contrast between the behavioralism of the narration and the shock incited in the reader is noted by Andrzej Werner, Zwyczajna apokalipsa, p. 154, albeit not in emotional but ethical terms. The similarity of style between Borowski and Nałkowska is also noticed by Tadeusz Drewnowski in his Ucieczka z kamiennego s´wiata. O Tadeuszu Borowskim (Warszawa: PIW, 1992), p. 198. Notably, the Muselmann from his early poem despises all ideologies. T. Bor­ owski, “Muzułman,” in: T. Borowski, Poezja, p. 228. See A. Werner, Zwyczajna apokalipsa, p. 100. See also B. Krupa, “‘Zakrzycza˛ . nas poeci, adwokaci, filozofowie, ksie˛ za’. Najnowsza odsłona ‘sporu o Bor­ owskiego’,” Poznan´skie Studia Polonistyczne 26/2015. Borowski, This Way for the Gas, p. 90. Wajda put this scene at the beginning of Landscape After Battle, we can see it also in Kozak’s found footage. Borowski, This Way for the Gas, p. 163. T. Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, p. 40. The next quote, p. 43. J. Tokarska-Bakir, “Pogrom Cries,” in: J. Tokarska-Bakir, Pogrom Cries: Essays on Polish-Jewish History, 1939–1946 (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019). See S. Buryła, “Opisywac´ nie nazywaja˛ c,” in: Stosownos´c´ i formuła. Jak opowiadac´ o Zagładzie?, ed. M. Głowin´ski et al. (Kraków: TAiWPN Universitas, 2005); S. Buryła, “Proza Tadeusza Borowskiego wobec Holocaustu,” Ruch Literacki 3/2004. R. Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton; Oxford: Prince­ ton University Press, 2007), p. 32. The violence between the victims is discussed in the chapters The Gray Zone and Shame by Primo Levi in his book The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Summit Books, 1988). For example, in one of Zofia Posmysz’s less known stories from the volume Ten sam doktor M (The Very Doctor M), the narrator recounts the prisoners’ hatred of the Sonderkommando in the Auschwitz sub-camp Budy toward one of them, who for a moment placed higher in the hierarchy because she sang for the sub-camp’s service. See Z. Posmysz, “Zengerin,” in Z. Posmysz: Ten sam doktor M (Warszawa: Iskry, 1981). J. Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done to: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 224. See C. Seulin, C. Bronstein, “Introduction,” in: On Freud’s “The Uncanny”, ed. C. Bronstein, C. Seulin (London: Routledge, 2020). M. Janion, “Legenda i antylegenda wojny,” in: M. Janion, Płacz generała. Eseje o wojnie (Warszawa: Sic!, 1998), p. 148. See also A. Werner, Zwyczajna apokalipsa, pp. 92–93.

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95 E. Jünger, On Pain (Candor, New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2008), p. 28. 96 See E. Jünger, On the Marble Cliffs, trans. T. Lewis (New York: New York Review Book, 2023). 97 W. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne (London; New York: Verso, 1998), pp. 233–234. 98 For Saul Friedländer, such a mythologization of death is an expression of kitsch linked to the fascist aesthetic. See S. Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). 99 See Kozak, Wyte˛ pic´ te wszystkie bestie?, p. 290. 100 K. Kerényi, Hermes: Guide of Souls, trans. M. Stein (Putnam, Connecticut: Spring Publications, 1976), p. 105. 101 P. Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1988), p. ix. 102 J, Majmurek, “‘Poroseidy.’ Tomasz Kozak o tym jak wyjs´c´ z bezwładu i nie wpas´c´ w faszyzm,” Gazeta Wyborcza March 31, 2017. See also A. Bielik-Robson, “Instytut Pamie˛ ci Negatywnej, czyli mythopoiesis Tomasza Kozaka,” in: T. Kozak, Poroseidy. Fenomenologia kultury trawersuja˛ cej (Warszawa i Łódz´: Cen­ trum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski i Muzeum Sztuki, 2017), p. 14. 103 See Kozak, Wyte˛ pic´ te wszystkie bestie?, p. 286. 104 Kozak, Poroseidy, p. 686. 105 M. Glasser, “Identification and its Vicissitudes as Observed in the Perversions,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 67/1986. 106 Kozak, Poroseidy, pp. 683, 691, 692, and 695. 107 S. Freud, “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy,” in: SE, Vol. 10, p. 9. 108 J. Chasseguet-Smirgel, Female Sexuality: New Psychoanalytic Views (London: Karnac Books, 1992), p. 39. See also D. Birksted-Breen, “Phallus, Penis and Mental Space,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 77/1996. 109 Kozak, Poroseidy, p. 704. Further quotes from pp. 719, 754. 110 E. Kahler, “Druga s´wiadomos´c´ i wszechs´wiat zatomizowany,” trans. J. Proko­ piuk, Literatura na S´ wiecie 9/1986, pp. 231–232. 111 K. Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, trans. E. Carter, Ch. Turner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 183. 112 McDougall, “The Primal Scene and the Perverse Scenario,” p. 82. 113 J. Tokarska-Bakir, “Prospero i Kurz w lustrze pamie˛ ci,” Politeja 3.35/2015, p. 11f. 114 Wojciech Wilczyk made a photography album documenting hooligan wars ´ ˛ ta wojna (2009–2014) waged with the help of Nazi symbolism: W. Wilczyk, Swie (Łódz´-Kraków: Atlas Sztuki and Karakter, 2014). See also: A. Zawadzka, “Polska walcza˛ ca,” an introduction to this album. 115 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 42.

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This chapter focuses on what constitutes the Polish Romantic martyrological complex and its presence in the Polish memory of the Holocaust. Considering that many researchers already pointed to the Romantic paradigm,1 I want to reveal the perverse core of the victim position, which simultaneously deepens the trauma and desensitizes to the pain of others. By presenting three literary cases—the works of Leo Lipski, Artur Sandauer, and Szczepan Twardoch—I point to the continuity of cultural approaches and to how the ethnically Polish bystander assumed the position of the greatest war victim. Several critics have already claimed the Western postwar world witnessed the birth of victim ideology, which rids those in the position of victims of responsibility and agency, while at the time of real violence serves to withdraw from viable political action for the sake of superficial debate on trauma.2 Powered by Romantic cultural codes, the Polish memory of the Holocaust can skillfully appropriate such a narration by transforming the ethnic Polish bystander into a helpless victim, concentrated on their own suffering, perceived as mis­ understood and ignored by everyone else. Eventually, these operations create a representation of a masochistic solution, thus a post-traumatic identity, which dangerously deprives one of the ability to feel the pain of others. In Polish culture, the representation has been most profoundly expressed by Leo Lipski, whose fascinating work surely transcends its cultural readings. In this perspective, Szczepan Twardoch’s works portray a hijacking of this iden­ tity strategy, albeit we may still find numerous examples of such operations performed in ethnically Polish memory, which then separates itself from the Polish-Jewish memory. The novella by Artur Sandauer—whose modest fic­ tional work demands new interpretations—is supposed to bridge the two separated memories, as it describes a specific Polish-Jewish identity. In Lipski, Twardoch, and Sandauer’s texts, I observe the common figure of immature masculinity—humiliated and furious—for which the masochistic position seems attractive because of the accompanying feeling of moral superiority and triumph. This influences not only the shape of the memory itself but also the model of social relations, including those between men and women. The perverse core of the Romantic martyrological complex in the Polish memory of the Holocaust impoverishes the Polish bystander’s empathy, who DOI: 10.4324/9781003330035-4

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concentrates on their own suffering. Thus, emerge two competing narratives on war: “Jewish” and “Polish”, which result in splitting and exclusion.

Disgust and Fascination Leo Lipski was a writer who constantly struggled with a catastrophe: the internal one—linked with the progressive deterioration of his body—and the external one, which meant the end of his world caused by the war and the Holocaust. In place of the catastrophe, he created perverse, sexual, and hate­ ful stories of memory, scatology, and gender relations. Lipski was a separate author, very different from his literary colleagues, and he remains underrated and non-canonical—but also extremely Polish. He expressed a certain for­ mula of Polishness (which I will elaborate below) as weak, hateful masculinity that repeatedly projects exciting sacrificial rituals of masochism. Nevertheless, Lipski is also a modern writer; book editions of his short stories and novels were published in Poland only after 1990. Why was it only then that the works could be published? The simpler answer is that Poland’s political and economical opening of the 1990s allowed for the recognition of poetry and prose that borders on pornography, vulgarity, and scatology. I propose a more complex answer indicating the formula of Polish identity and historical memory constituted after Poland’s transition from communism and based on the particular nexus of sexuality and violence; thus, the return to Lipski’s work would simultaneously be this nexus’ symptom and diagnosis. Lipski’s work is modest in volume, but it has already been subject to con­ siderable scholarly scrutiny, especially in recent years.3 My interpretation results from a disagreement with the available perspectives on his work, which coupled his vulgarity, repulsion, and passion for scatology with more reas­ suring and humanistic concepts of the circle of life, vitalism, or even simple messianism. Many authors begin their reflections on Lipski by justifying his work and situating it in a humanistic and sentimental framework, as if there was an obligation to conceal the powerful element of his prose that appears shameful and obscene. For example, one critic writes: Indeed, Lipski’s prose initially seems to be an expression of the anti-aes­ thetic cult of the trivial, the mundane, the sickly, and sometimes, the repulsive. However, it appears that the texts provide more than just a mannerism of style, an unhealthy fascination, or an unjustified whim of an obsessive writer.4 However, we may provokingly ask: What if it is not just an initial impression? Or, what is it about Lipski’s prose that makes it difficult to recognize one’s unhealthy fascination with the prose in oneself ? The fascination of both Lipski and the readers turns out to be so difficult that one seeks distance. Karyn Ball grapples with a similar problem in the conclusive chapter of her book Disciplining the Holocaust: “What would it mean to view this

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[Holocaust] testimony not only as a focus of feminist scholarship, but also as a voyeuristic venue of fantasy and repressed desire?”5 Karyn Ball writes about her identification with the painful story of a Holocaust survivor, but she simultaneously discovers the underlying, uncomfortable feeling of fascination in herself. This situation is not so different from that of the narrator of Zofia Posmysz’s novel Wakacje nad Adriatykiem (The Adriatic Holiday; 1980), when during an examination, the doctor finds out that the woman was in a concentration camp and begins to flirt with her, wanting to hear as many details as possible, especially those concerning sexual life in the camp.6 The easiest choice would be to reject this feeling of “unhealthy fascination” and accept that what may unnerve or repulse is a symptom of something else that has not been discovered yet, while adopting the position of moral embar­ rassment and perceiving it as an overt identification with the “sick obses­ sions” of the writer.7 However, Lipski forces us to reconsider the category of trauma, our fasci­ nation with it, and why his work sparks the interest of critics and readers only now. We may indicate three sources of trauma in his oeuvre: the Holocaust, the Soviet labor camp, and the progressive paralysis of the body. Lipski con­ structs his particular poetics around these experiences, connecting fear with fascination, repulsion with pleasure, and pain with hatred. Because of the work of American and French theorists, we became used to thinking of trauma as something that impoverishes and melancholizes the subject, and to the accompanying poetics of the inhibition of affects and representations for the sake of what pierces through the ego’s defensive shield. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s canonical Testimony tracks the influence of trauma in the silence that opens between survivors’ words when they formulate their testi­ monies: it is in the pauses and silences that the catastrophe leaves its traces.8 Such an understanding of trauma influenced the canonical artistic com­ memorations of the Holocaust, which employ the aesthetics of void and silence. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the survivors’ violence and cruelty often disappears from analyses of the Holocaust memory and postmemory, which is partly understandable when done to save the survivors from renewed victimization. At the same time, we should remember that trauma not only leaves the subject in the state of a halved life but also summons an internal world of war of all against all, a world of hatred, resentment, and desire for vengeance.9 Lipski’s work transcends the poetics of despair and silent suffering: in his lively prose, full of excitement, he fragments his char­ acters who constantly seek to piece themselves back together.

Melancholy, Humiliation, and the Survivor’s Guilt: “Roe Deer’s Brother” Lipski’s last published short story “Sarni braciszek” (Roe Deer’s Brother, 1976)10 begins with a particular confession: “Dzien´ i noc [Day and Night] is the title of my Soviet sketches; with this text, I try to diminish the guilt of not

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being on the other side as well.”11 The only few-pages-long story recounts the guilt of a Jew who survived the Holocaust by being imprisoned in a Soviet labor camp. The eponymous “roe deer’s brother” is a boy that the narrator knew before the war, who studied at a cheder, repeating prayers and blessings; he would have learned more of them had his education not been interrupted by the Holocaust. It is basically the only one of Lipski’s characters that is so attached to Jewish tradition and religion, and at the same time, the only one about whom the narrator reminisces after the catastrophe as someone who belonged to a lost world. The narrator does not remember him well: “When I try to recall him, I cannot. He is too undefined, as if he was subject to the Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle; he has flickering contours, transparent, with a thin hand, grey like a hand of a two-year-old” (P 272). It seems as if the roe deer’s brother simultaneously did and did not exist, like a forgotten memory or the dead appearing in dreams. In his note on the story, Lipski writes that he wanted to name “a thing so fragile that it seems I could destroy it with a memory. It emerges from distant recollections, blurred, destroyed, in shreds” (PZ 93). Freud describes the dreams of mourners in the following manner: in a dream, the deceased is kept alive, unaware of his passing, and only after waking up does the dreamer painfully realize the illusion, yet again confronted with the loss.12 By describing the fragmented memory, the narra­ tor revives the roe deer’s brother and then kills him again, because this memory is also the memory of his death and the Holocaust. Waking up from a dream that revived the old world, the narrator despairs: “Why, why must I write about this … for the love of God, why?” (PZ 93). Lipski is afraid of giving a form to that memory, because it evokes too much pain: it is a conflict that accompanies Lipski throughout his entire work, constantly balancing between fragmentation and temporary integration. Pain accompanies him also in writing, and he finds no comfort that some readers of his poetry and prose would like to find in his texts, which nevertheless do not fit in the reductionist concept of art as self-therapy.13 Sometimes the creative act can be an aggressive and self-aggressive one,14 which is concisely worded by theorist James Berger, who writes that: language, like the body or the psyche, can be wounded and can wound. A text can be traumatized and can also transmit trauma. A text can disrupt the symbolic order in which it appears, and can force readers to restruc­ ture that order in light of the traumatic disruption.15 The contours of the roe deer’s brother flicker, because the memory of him haunts the narrator like a specter. Dominic LaCapra writes about specters of the past, who “roam the post-traumatic world and are not entirely ‘owned’ as ‘one’s own’ by any individual or group. If they haunt a house, … they come to disturb all who live—perhaps even pass through—that house.”16 The specter of the roe-deer’s brother appears in front of the narrator’s eyes, because it found no place for the deceased to rest. One critic claims that it is this short

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story that is supposed to function as a tomb, in which the deceased could finally rest, along with the guilt, suffering, and shame;17 however, it may seem that the words “He leaves me, covered in fog” (P 272) are not a farewell to the dead boy but a farewell to the dream, in which the dead boy appears, when . the narrator cannot part with the boy. In his memoir Paryz ze złota (Paris of Gold), Lipski reveals the profound pain with which he survived the Holo­ caust, mentioning the words of a friend about belonging to a generation that is “doomed from the start, burned, contorted” (PZ 22–23). Those who died during the war and the Holocaust—among whom were Lipski’s friends—are both “eternally dead” and “still dying” (PZ 19), suspended between real death and death in memory. Lipski’s characters will suffer in their name, like the protagonist of Lipski’s most famous short story “Piotrus´” (Little Peter): “And where don’t you feel pain? Oh, great Piotrus´. Could it be you suffer for the entire generation?” (P 247). The narrator’s further thought is a proof of his failure in parting with the roe-deer’s brother covered in fog: “if something happens to him, neither I nor you will have the right to live” (P 272). The conditional phrase removes the awareness of his death as it does to the narrator’s fantasy of following the boy, knowing well he is already dead. The narrator’s fantasy of his own death in light of the unjust death of a friend reveals what was described in the postwar times as the survivor syndrome, a profound guilt resulting from crimes that the survivor did not commit but of which they were the victim. In one of the psychoanalytic theories, the survivor’s guilt results from violent wishes aimed at one’s family and friends killed during the Holocaust, wishes that return as reproaches and accusations: of not having done enough to prevent their death, of not deserving to live when they died.18 The guilt is sometimes so great that it assumes the form of identification with the dead, the desire to accompany the dead, as Freud aphoristically describes it in Mourning and Melancholia: “the shadow of the object fell upon the ego.”19 The melancholic subject feels that the loss does not concern the dead but a part of their self, thus feeling impoverished. It is a common experience: after the war, the sur­ vivor often becomes lonely, as they lost family and friends. The boy remem­ bered from before the war returns to remind him about himself in a tender memory that also causes pain because of the underlying accusation. Unin­ tegrated psychological content, including loss, assume the form of a specter, as Freud writes: “a thing which has not been understood inevitably reappears; like an unlaid ghost, it cannot rest until the mystery has been solved and the spell broken.”20 The narrator is tormented not only by guilt but also by shame. In his notes on “Sarni braciszek,” Lipski reminisces: “I identify neither names nor events, because I am ashamed of not remembering them, and I regret not remem­ bering them, and I am ashamed of remembering them, and I regret it, and I am proud of it” (PZ 93). The guilt is linked with what he has done or what he has fantasized about doing, and the shame with who he is.21 As for many survivors, these two feelings mix: the narrator feels guilty about not

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remembering the past for the sake of the dead, and he is ashamed of his memory’s weakness. Shame and shamelessness, exhibitionism and withdrawal into silence, covering and uncovering are the dynamic, overlapping sides of the conflict characteristic of Lipski’s work. “Sarni braciszek” concludes the part of his oeuvre accused of “pornography,”22 revealing that Lipski’s exhi­ bitionism is rooted in melancholy, which according to Freud, is characterized by a particular lack of shame in endless intrusive self-accusations.23 Jacque­ line Rose comments on the phenomenon in the following manner: “Faced with a death too painful to contemplate, there are no limits to which some people will go to torment and degrade themselves.”24 Lipski’s work is full of such images. In this short story, the obligation of memory encounters not only shameful resistance but also an unusual tenderness of the memory about the roe-deer’s brother. The boy is delicate and fragile, and his innocence is unprecedented in Lipski’s work. We may even think that what remained “on the other side” was also the lost sensitivity that the reader never encountered before in Lipski’s previous prose, along with the tenderness, with which the narrator addresses the boy.

War Feces and Excitement: “Day and Night” and “Waadi” The short stories that work through Lipski’s camp and larger wartime experience evade categorization. Some critics call them testimonies,25 while others are not convinced, indicating how are they directed towards the inner life of the narrator, reducing the description of the outside world.26 As in Lipski’s other works, we find no realistic representation of war, but they create an image of war that is rarely available and conscious in Polish cul­ ture: they describe the extreme wartime and camp degeneration, which becomes either a cold dispassionate numbness or a fantasy about feces flooding the world. Refraining from calling Lipski’s short stories testi­ monies, we must nevertheless notice that “Day and Night” (1953) begins in this convention with a direct address to the readers (listeners): “Leave me alone” (P 165). Memory resists the narrator but his own reluctance to return to the past is also evident; especially as he bitterly mentions that: “you already know all of this, and it will soon make you all vomit” (P 165). The memories incite anger and humiliation, as one is no one special—and they nauseate as well. Lipski’s characters constantly vomit: they rid themselves of their memories and experiences, but in this undigested, unmetabolized form, as it is the readers who are supposed to process them instead of the char­ acters. This is how I understand the “clamminess” and “stickiness” of Lipski’s prose noticed by one critic, who argues that his reception is emo­ tional rather than intellectual.27 Moreover, “you already know all of this” suggests a particular context: one might assume that the author addresses his story to a particular community, perhaps to Polish readers, familiar with wartime and camp images that repeatedly haunt them as long as the repeti­ tion compulsion works.

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Indeed, Lipski states that “Day and Night”—a record of his camp experi­ ence—is not supposed to be an easy read: I remember that before the war, police officers once led a man and kept punching him in the face. I could not look away. And behind them there walked a group of people. And I, too, had to watch. Maybe you will also find something that you will have to watch. (P 165) The representation of this experience enters the area of compulsion; the nar­ rator who first watched a scene of violence, now exposes himself as a victim and concludes that such a scene will be an engaging image. Grzegorz Niziołek writes in this way about the condition of the gawker bound by the compulsion to watch.28 Moreover, there returns the image known from Freud’s analysis of the Rat Man, who with both terror and excitement, recounted the overheard description of sexual torture.29 The narrator of “Day and Night” reveals the excitement he felt when watching and spying on a scene of violence. However, the short story does not abound in scenes of violence, and the camp world seems frozen and dry, when the narrator—the doctor’s assistant—walks through the camp automatically fulfilling his duties: “‘Now, even the …’ I did not even know how to say in Russian ‘feces.’ … ‘are frozen, and you must chop it off’” (P 172). The thought seems crucial that “a new protective layer appeared: numbness” (P 177). The impersonal form of this claim suggests the narrator’s depersonalization, who thinks and acts automatically and concretely. On the one hand, afraid of forgetting his own name and surname, he notes them down on birch bark, while on the other hand, he paradoxically claims that since: in the camp, people encounter each other like meteors. People are mixed like sand. It is. It will not be tomorrow …. the camp provides more freedom than when you are free. A bit more free. You do not need to be so careful. (P 176). The social sphere is reduced, leaving only a body of unclear identity. This process is evident in the language of the story, already noticed by some critics: short, fragmented sentences, organized rhythmically rather than in longer chains of meaning; the plot, difficult to reconstruct, yields to visuality.30 Instead of a consistent retelling of what happened—which we expect from a testimony—there are only juxtaposed, fragmented images that make no whole and toward which the narrator does not assume a singular, stable identity. When subjectivity decomposes, it seems as if language fails, replaced by images, which resembles the regressive, psychotic character of functioning in a camp, thanks to which many prisoners could survive.31 What is particularly striking is the examination of the prisoners in the dark cell, whose description disintegrates into the ordinal numbers of particular prisoners, shreds of thoughts, sick body parts:

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Masochism: Competitive Victimization Seventeenth, convincing, bare butt, a clotted trickle of blood, a known haemorrhoider [sic!]; eighteenth, nineteenth; twentieth, leave it, a white boy, pulse 130; step forward; suddenly seventeenth, turn around, let me see your mouth, there’s no need to show the rest, let me see your throat, haemorrhage, tbc [tuberculosis], stomach, I do not know why you showed me your butt … , because … , because … , a phone call to the hospital, lay down; twenty-first, twenty-second; twenty-third: the leg open in a very unusual spot, he must have rubbed it the whole night, step forward. (P 167).

Slipping into factual information, the narrator seems to lack internal space, a mental life; he is reduced only to the simplest, most primal instincts; we read of no adjusting strategies, no internal monologues, nor conflicts of interests known from camp literature; there is only the humiliating reduction, which does not transform into a feeling of power or agency. Even though the short story concludes with a powerful image, the narrator instantly distances him­ self from it. He thinks about one of his fellow prisoners, of whom there is no news, but he shrugs with indifference, even despite suspecting that he might have died, because “he barely lived in the first place” (P 187). The speaker then withdraws to leave space for the image from the beginning of the story: the powerful, inhumane machine that arouses respect and fear like the factory from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: The power plant incandesces. It has all the qualities of a deity. It even drowned 50,000 people when the levee broke. Pray for us! Forgive us our trespasses as we do not forgive those who trespass against us! Right next to it is the hour of our death. Haaa! (P 187) The image of the power plant as a dangerous and sacred object seems to dismiss all the attempts of the narrator at describing his experience, as he shrinks in the face of such power, overwhelmed, deprived of any significance. The power plant appearing at the beginning of the story like a godlike “Pharaoh” and a recurring deus ex machina finally becomes a foreign, inhu­ mane body, which the narrator cannot contact in any way. In many aspects, “Waadi” (1953) is the reverse of “Day and Night.”32 Ice turns into heat torturing the sick and the dying in a hospital in Uzbekistan. As the heat condenses, so does death, like in the beginning of the short story: The density of death in the country in which I live is unbelievable. Even the living radiate with their dead. People, the carriers of death, like stones thrown into the water, draw circles that ripple and overlap … I am also like that. It is evident that my story is deadly. (P 191)

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It is not only humans that carry the burden of death but also the earth. As Timothy Snyder tries to comprehend the terrain stretched from central Poland to western Russia, on which fourteen million people died during the Second World War, he chooses the term “bloodlands” to describe the collective experience connecting the people of different cultures who inhabit this region.33 When Lipski writes his story, the biweekly Współczesnos´c´ (Con­ temporaneity) publishes Henryk Grynberg’s debut story “Ekipa ‘Antygona’” (The “Antigone” Pack, 1959) dedicated to the group exhuming the murdered Jews in the woods. The diggers feel as if the bodies they seek are everywhere, and even that as a result of the ground moving, they were coming to the surface on their own.34 Roma Sendyka concludes: “We should not be step­ ping on tombs but—here, in the ‘bloodlands’—is it even possible?”35 The dying mix with the living, in a tight, tangled mass running with blood, dysentery, and worms: “everyone had diarrhea” (P 191) “their sweat was steaming. Their bubbling, moaning, spluttering, and snoring. Their hands mixed. Their breaths too … and they shat them­ selves, and the feces dried fast: flies ate it” (P 192) “flies covered the people lying down—like a velvet carpet, … unbelievably thin, suffering from dysentery, on grim afternoons they dreamed of umbrageous latrines, of peace that would allow them to lie and sleep in lavatories … of big, beautiful scarabs and black-and-green doors walking around them, rolling balls of feces, like lions in the circus” (P 194) “constantly defecating, twelve people were dying, meowing like cats; their voices were no longer human voices” (P 196). The world of death is equated with the world of decomposition, feces, and decay, which consumes people and turns them into a disgusting, clumped cluster. This is also a violent fantasy of the protagonist who can no longer stand the stuffed, claustrophobic space of the hospital: “Let them shit, let them drown in shit, let them die, let it all collapse” (P 192). In “Day and Night,” the feces had to be chipped away, here we read about the risk that feces will drown the whole world; it is possible to understand it also as an expression of the narrator’s hatred, as he is weak and helpless, so he would rather have his misery and the entire world cease to exist. In the Polish memory of the Holocaust and the camps, there appears the topos of “anus mundi,” which is a term used in a camp diary of one of the

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Auschwitz doctors36—a notion popularized by the famous Polish psychiatrist Antoni Ke˛ pin´ski37—later serving as the title of ex-prisoner Wiesław Kielar’s memoir. Notably, it was the publishing house that chose the title.38 In Ke˛ pin´ski’s interpretation, the term refers to the Nazi project of cleansing the world.39 However, Ke˛ pin´ski—along with others—clearly feels uneasy about this metaphor, as he instantly juxtaposes it with memories of “heroism, sacrifice, and love.”40 It seems that the memory of the humiliating hygiene conditions in the camps could not remain on the surface after the war. In Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage, the omnipresent mud in which the inmates get stuck during assemblies, serves to elevate the fighters’ heroism as opposed to its primary meaning. At the same time, the works that did not achieve such a strong symbolic position or were overlooked on purpose, per­ haps because of tackling the repulsive camp conditions, like Andrzej Wajda’s Landscape After the Battle (1970) and his fantasy of the adaptation of Dos­ toevsky’s Demons, in which actors would act in actual mud,41 or Leszek Wosiewicz’s Kornblumenblau (1989).42 Apart from Lipski, the only authors considering similiar themes would later be accused of tainting national memory: Miron Białoszewski, who describes the unheroic activities of civi­ lians during the Warsaw Uprising, and Marian Pankowski, who can write about a Muselmann that “he farts golden bubbles out of his ass.”43 One . might also mention Tadeusz Rózewicz’s iconoclastic drama Do piachu (To the Ground; 1979), staged in the atmosphere of a scandal that mobilized all political options (then and in postcommunist Poland as well), in which the central character Walus´, also known as S´ mierdziel (Stinker), soiled himself out of fear before being shot in the woods by the guerilla, and after death, he drowns in a latrine. One of the critics writes about this drama’s profane deconstruction of the myth of Christ’s sacrifice; Walus´’s body will never res­ urrect, his death will never be redeemed, it will always be simply an end, deprived of any sense, as was his life, of which we do not find out much, apart from the fact that he was insane.44 Although the omission of such themes is also caused by class and gender conditions,45 what seems crucial in this context is the profound humiliation and shame of not only utter helplessness but also the reduction of prisoners to the slime of the mud that filled the camps. The French psychoanalyst Béla Grunberger logically derives the metaphor of Auschwitz as “anus mundi” from the functioning of the digestive system turning food into feces; the apparatus of Nazi violence does the same with people, as it attempts to transform individuals into a homogenous mass.46 In Lipski’s categories, the experience of the war and the labor camp is one that not only transforms a human being into a numb automaton—or a weak and fragile baby—but also one that reduces people to feces, as expressed in the camp names for the Muselmann: “stinker,” “fleabag,” “Müde Scheiss,” “pest,” “stinky tom,” or “carrion.”47 This post-traumatic identity is assumed by every one of Lipski’s characters, “feeling like a squelchy sack, filled with guts, soft and wet” (P 237). In this sense, the naked life and the naked body—

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shattered, beaten, and almost crushed—gains an historical status, becomes the image of a fragment, a shred of history. The extreme humiliation cannot be transformed into a feeling of power, as is often the case of other Second World War victims in Polish memory. Lipski’s protagonist always remains a petrified victim. “Waadi” demonstrates that what existed in “Dzien´ i noc” only potentially, inaccessible due to defensive apathy—the overflow of humiliation, degrada­ tion, and death—was inhibited by numbness. Giorgio Agamben’s famous concept of Muselmanization presented in Remnants of Auschwitz 48 finds its carnal, post-traumatic supplement in Lipski’s characters; the void that opens when the very structure of language crumbles and fills with perverse con­ structs of the world of feces. In this sense, Lipski’s images are related to the modernist avant-garde and Georges Bataille, who in The History of Eroticism, praises bodily fluids that perversely link life with death: “It is clear, in any event, that the nature of excrement is analogous to that of corpses and that the places of its emission are close to the sexual parts; … life is a product of putrefaction, and it depends on both death and the dungheap.”49 In the world of Waadi, feces and death mix with sexuality: when women identified with naked, biological libido (“they distanced themselves by copulating. And they were revived;” P 194) have sex with men, they do it surrounded by flies that cover everything, and which themselves copulate on the excrements. As in other Lipski’s texts, women manage the reality of the camp better, because they can disconnect from it thanks to their sexuality, so they will most fre­ quently use men and, as a consequence, humiliate them. At the same time, equating women and flies, sexuality and anality creates a situation in which only the perspective of the male subject counts, as he is excited and terrified by the surrounding reality. Humiliated men find a second type of woman, whose image seems strongly removed from the first one, as it is an image of women-mothers, capable of comforting the suffering. Ewa, upon seeing that her lover is dying, decided that he would die by her side, so that he was not afraid, snuggled into her. She would tell him stories. Not those about how he was going to recover and how it was going to be. The ones you tell to little children. … She told him the story of “The Ray of the Moon,” “The Good Sower,” “In His Heart Sang a Lark.” He could not speak, when she asked him “Want to hear more?” He waved his hand, which meant “Yes.” And more, and more. (P 196) The division into a sexual woman and a caring woman soon connects in the image of death and sex: “with one hand, he squeezed Ewa’s hand, with the other, he scraped the pillow, the way she did when she orgasmed” (P 196), at four in the morning, his breath got stuck on something … his jaw dropped. She saw a hearing toothy grin in the moonlight—a lustful

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Masochism: Competitive Victimization grimace—and soon he was lying there, on the other side, snuggled into her, almost touching her lips with his.” (P 197)

The tender lyricism and its interruption by sudden sexuality prove the feeling of absolute superiority of women over men. In Lipski’s work, men will always depend on women, who surpass them with their physical and biological power. In the short story “Powrót” (Return), which describes a postwar attempt at escaping the nightmare of imprisonment, the protagonist is a sur­ vivor who starved and jellylike, warms himself thanks to a huge, hot woman; it is difficult to say whether he is her lover or her child. In Lipski’s prose, the survivor is a weak, fragile man subservient to monstrous, terrifying women, and the mix of impulsive sexuality with the Romantic topos of the Polish woman dressing the wounds of an insurrectionist is not only a recurring motif in his works but a model of relationships between men and women. The gender relations create a model determining a broader construct of corpor­ ality and agency, exceeding Lipski’s literary idiolect.

Body Fragmentation and Extreme Submission: Niespokojni and “Piotrus´” Niespokojni (The Restless, 1948)—the novel Lipski wrote right after the war—and his most famous short story “Piotrus´” touch on sexuality and cor­ porality in the most direct manner, making them their main themes. Niespo­ kojni is a meandering novel, comprised of many loosely connected images; it is digressional and splitting into many plots and characters; Lipski clearly feels uncomfortable in the longer form and prefers short, fragmented texts like his perception of the subject and the body to be fragmented. The volume opens with a short chapter entitled “Saint Paul,” which instantly introduces an apocalyptic atmosphere: “A black storm circles over the town like a hawk; it hits the houses and the sky with its wings. Let it destroy it all; including me” (P 27). It may be an image of destruction and the Holocaust, but it also may be an image of a relationship between a man and a woman, which is the focus of initial descriptions. Between the narrator and Marta is no and can be no connection, as he does not care about the woman and does not react to her attempts at initiat­ ing sex; in Lipski’s prose, it is the women who initiate contact while the men desperately seek to defend themselves against it. The man runs away from the woman, feeling lonely and terrified, suspecting that he and his body are separate entities. Marta screams to him: “You’re a doll with a crushed head!” and then he affirms: “I’m slowly rotting. I’m slowly seeping out of myself, leaving a soft shell, a deformed shape” (P 28). Gnarled, “resembling a wet rag” (P 30), the protagonist’s body does not have clear boundaries, as they dissolve during contact with a woman, as his feelings uncontrollably pour in and out of him, with no skin capable of holding the insides of his body and

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separating it from the outside world. Absorbed by the question of boundaries, including the corporal boundaries, the French psychoanalyst Dider Anzieu writes that, the first function of the skin is to be the sac that contains and retains inside itself all the good, full material that has accumulated through breastfeeding, everyday care, and the experience of being bathed in words. Its second function is to be the interface that marks the border with the external world, which it keeps on the outside. … The third function of the skin … is to be a site and primary mode of communica­ tion with other people, to establish meaningful relations.50 It seems that the protagonist of Niespokojni—and of Lipski’s other works—is a character deprived of skin that would allow him to safely store feelings, thoughts, and memories: “they casually smear her with feelings that seep from me like mucus, sticky, trying to woo her, like an old cocotte; I dress them in nonchalance and squeeze them out of myself. I must” (P 27). There is no skin that would protect him from sudden external stimuli, namely when he feels like “an animal who has an arrow stuck in his back; it rolls, runs, howls, spits, blood floods its eyes; the arrow is still there. There is no one around and no one will pull out the arrow” (P 28). There is no skin that would allow him to have real relationships with other people: “Everyone is closed in their own night, alone” (P 28). Lipski’s post-traumatic protagonist with cut and pierced skin is suspended between the threat of complete dissolution and decomposi­ tion—when he feels and suffers—and complete hardening when he cuts him­ self off from reality. When the body hardens, it can separate itself from the external world—before that, the skin waves—but there remains the inability to feel anything, as in the case of the protagonist of “Day and Night.” The author suspects that this is what would happen to him when he writes that his paralysis developing since 1944 would soon cause him to “turn to stone” and become entombed in his own body.51 This image creeps throughout Lipski’s entire oeuvre, as this is how the protagonist of “Little Peter” will end up in his fantasies. Thus, there are two solutions: either emotional disconnection— being dead in life—or the path of immense emotional suffering. The protagonist of “Saint Paul” rots from the inside, because he feels full of disgusting, repulsive memories: “I eat my past as if I was eating my own feces, I chew it again and again. It is like swallowing your own saliva when you are thirsty” (P 28–29). The constant chewing and defecating with one’s own secretions and memories is a fantasy of a closed circuit, in which there is no need to communicate with anyone, even if the process itself poisons and destroys the body. As in the short stories about the time of war, the fecality touches on violence and fear of death. The protagonist feels that inside, it is “as quiet as in a morgue,” that he carries poisonous, dead images, “dry like the breasts of an old woman” (P 29), and that he can only vomit his memory of history and the war, when he feels poisoned by it. To excrete the corpses,

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death, and terrifying memories through writing that becomes his salvation becomes the only remedy for his pain and psychological suffering. “Piotrus´” repeats this perspective on the particular function of memory and compares it with the constant cleansing oneself of dirt, when memories are like “fleas” (P 211), like “dust settling on the face” (P 212), and ridding oneself of the excess of memories is like “picking [one’s] nose” (P 204), an act in which all the people who “remember too much” happily indulge in postwar Tel-Aviv. Even though he has no need to write, the protagonist proceeds to write when the war and decay continuously return. Writing means here not only excreting but also expressing a powerful wish of creating something alive from the ejected matter. In the fantasy that concludes the chapter, the protagonist compares himself to God creating a human from mud: “Will I be a half-god, halfwizard, mixing, forming, and conceiving people?” (P 30). If we consider Lipski’s other works, we may assume that the narrator wants to represent the memories that haunt almost all his characters: I am waiting for the images to rise in front of me, as in front of a snake whisperer, images of the lice-ridden and the living, forcing their lips into the mouths of corpses, straddling them with their thighs, until they all mix in a big blend of sweat, dung, fear, numbness, and reveal what came before. (P 30) Later, Niespokojni focuses on the impotence of the protagonist Emil, incap­ able of engaging in satisfactory relationships with women, which remain strange and alien to him. The novel is filled with gentle homosexual desire: the only tender relationship is the one between two men, serving as an oasis of peace from all the wild and violent exchanges with Emil’s female lover. Men are not as terrifying, because it is women who embody pure, poly­ morphic sexual drive: “Ewa was made of dark, volcanic mass, which was a vital force, a fluid life, a grace, spouting unnamed ideas” (P 95). However, the interest in sexuality is only superficial, because according to the narrator, beneath lies only “one word: shit” (P 88). Sexual intercourse becomes an act of recognition of man’s complete submission when Emil licks Ewa’s feet in an expression of sexual allegiance (P 115), while after the intercourse—initiated by the woman—he feels consumed by her, excreted by her, and dead: As if lightning had struck in him and faded. She sat next to him and tilted him. … At that moment, he was doubly absorbed by her, doubly sucked in, consumed, and digested. And for the first time, it seemed that he was dying. (P 141) It seems again that the weak and limp man seemingly deprived of sexual pleasures may only be a child to the woman, or even a toy; the pair is inter­ twined in a sadomasochistic relation, in which the man can say: “I’m nothing,

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52

you can do anything you want with me.” This is not a fear of castration, as Lipski’s heroes are not afraid of murderous competition nor of losing crea­ tivity. Their fears are more primal, as they are afraid of death, fragmentation, and being devoured. There is no difference between lovers and mothers, and the protagonists’ fears remain the same, as in the terrifying scene that Emil sees (fantasizes about) after the funeral of his mother: A young mother was eating into the cheeks of her one-year-old child. Then, she started to hit the child on the butt, and she hit him long. And then she was kissing the butt, and eating it. The brat was screaming. The mother kept eating the butt … and she did so ad infinitum. (P 117) Women usually give men a cold and dehumanizing gaze. We encounter it in Ewa’s gaze during Emil’s orgasm and in the look of the girl that wants to pretend to be a corpse as sexual foreplay. This is also how the only significant women to Piotrus´ treat him in “Little Peter” (1959). The rescued but hurt Piotrus´ lies covered in feces in a marketplace in Tel Aviv, where Mrs. Cin buys him and then proceeds to lock him for many days in the toilet used by all the tenement building inhabitants. This is another image that obsessively recurs in Lipski’s work: Emil from Niespokojni locked himself in toilets, trying to detach himself from the world. Finally, Mrs. Cin begins to treat Piotrus´ like a dog, keeping him on a leash, as he tries to walk on injured hands and legs, which drives her to an orgasm. He is also disdained by the prostitute Batia—a profession of many Lipski’s female characters—who releases Piotrus´ from his toilet prison and smiles when she sees Piotrus´, “but not … at me; it was an impersonal smile. With this look, anyone who wanted could have her. She looked at me as if at a dead object” (P 221).53 Hence the humiliating thought that only women truly exist, and men are just waste destined solely for suffering. Mrs. Cin explains this essence of sexuality: sex organs are dead, they do not invigorate the body; it is only under the skin that real life occurs, in the form of feces, on which anything can grow (P 214). We may assume this a circle of life, given that it is the life of asexual, non-human reproduction, life deriving from ashes and corpses.54 In Lipski’s represented world, anality supersedes genitality because thanks to anality, the anyway unachievable sexual fulfill­ ment is possible without another person; whether by using someone as a prop in a sadomasochistic theater or in the creative act of the sorcerous art of rid­ ding oneself of suffering. After staging his “toilet Golgotha,” Piotrus´ even­ tually returns to it, unable to find a place in the world to “suffer for the whole generation” (P 247). In painful hallucinatory half-sleep, he slowly dies, finding solace only in death and in the fantasy that, “in the end, you will return deep into yourself, leaving a speaking, laughing facade. Then animals will enter your room and calmly sit on you, like on a stone or on the ground” (P 256). The lack of disgust in Lipski’s characters may be surprising, as they are not

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repulsed by the stickiness of feces or the space of the toilet; on the contrary, they are soothed when the toilet constitutes an asylum protecting them from reality, and excited when it is connected with sexuality. Psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel writes that in perversion, one worships feces and partial drives like deities, which according to the Freudian scheme, never trans­ formed into demons expelled from the mature world.55 Feces and other objects granted fetish status do not disgust, taint, or humiliate. Instead, they become precious treasures, which one may tenderly observe, thus bathing in the glow of this gaze. Piotrus´ assumes the position of the abject—never fully a subject or an object—and seems to strive to make others treat him as such. In his essay “In the Waiting Room of Death: Reflections on the Warsaw Ghetto,” Jean Améry writes about the Jewish victims’ internalization of the position enforced by the German perpetrators: the Jew “had become the louse of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.”56 The soothing image of animals sitting on Piotrus´’s stone cold dead body—perhaps originating from the messianic image of the lamb next to a lion—appear when the death drive triumphs, which seeks to reduce living matter to simple and stable inanimate state. The final stage of masochistic submission—the feeling of one’s own weakness and self-humiliation—is the apotheosis, the idealization of death, the last lofty task of the man who survived the war and the Holocaust.

Masochistic Post-Traumatic Identity In light of the above, we may better understand the opening motto of “Pio­ trus´” from one of the Polish novels (Maria Da˛browska’s Noce i dnie): “Whoever fully devotes oneself to a single cause, be it great or little, but also a hopeless one—must in the end die for or through it” (P 199). Lipski’s pro­ tagonist sees the purpose of his life in delightful self-sacrifice, in laying his frail and fragile body at the feet of a woman, and then in his own death. This masochism constitutes the minimal organization of libido to create any—even if unstable—construct of identity surrounding his own body.57 The pain one feels proves that one is still alive as blows leave visible marks, and if one can die, then it is at least certain that one has lived.58 The man fawns on the woman desiring appreciation, yet she looks at him coldly and dispassionately, demanding ever greater sacrifices. In Lipski’s entire prose, the characters do not really meet and learn each other, they are lonely and similar to one another in the loneliness, like siblings or identical twins, with many of them being orphans, when on the one hand, there are no strong father figures, and on the other hand, there are hardly any mothers, as these are barely men­ tioned. This is not strange in the case of Holocaust survivors, as many of them survived alone. Nearing death in the toilet, Piotrus´ experiences an hal­ lucination, in which he sees a Polish village, where he finally feels at home. He experiences bliss, dreaming of a good, uncomplicated life, and suffers when the images fade and he must leave the toilet. It seems that in this sense, Lipski’s characters are constantly seeking their mothers—to comfort them,

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hold them, and sooth them—in the need to return to safely clinging to her body that should heal and mend them. However, this rescue fantasy never comes to fruition. Women forced into the role of mothers provide no tenderness, and one cannot enter into any subjective relationship with them; one can only experience their ruthlessness. This corresponds to the concept of courtly love developed by Jacques Lacan, who argues the ladies celebrated by the troubadours in Occitan literature have nothing in common with affectionate women: The Lady is never characterized for any of her real, concrete virtues, for her wisdom, her prudence, or even her competence. If she is described as wise, it is not because she embodies an immaterial wisdom or because she represents its functions more than she exercises them.59 The trials appointed by the lady to her admirers never end—as they are sup­ posed to restrict access to her—and they aim to humiliate the bold, which is often connected with scatology. Idealization reveals here its opposite: utter degradation by demanding the highest sacrifice by humiliation. The mon­ strous woman demands and gives orders; this is the only relationship in which a man can engage. Although she promises gratification and pleasure, it turns out that the Lady—or Lacan’s das Ding that represents the connection with the mother—is a blessing so great that it is unbearable for the subject.60 In reality, surrendering oneself to the woman representing the mother finally brings the hero’s death, which Lipski’s prose reiterates. The connection with the mother is usually restricted by the Oedipal fatherly law—irrelevant to Lipski’s world deprived of strong men—which makes the mother an eternally unfulfilled object of desire. Lacan claims that it is the law that creates desire, previously unknown to the child from his relationship with his mother, because the child did not lack the pleasure of a sensual, physical relationship with the mother. Lacan quotes the Epistle to the Romans, according to which it is only Order that creates sin.61 Emil from Niespokojni finds the same fragment of the Bible and feels “a reversed and underground relation” (P 30) with the text. However, slipping into the pleasure of the state Freud calls primary narcissism—and Chasseguet-Smirgel the archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex—involves complete rejection of the world and reality, which ultimately equates the illusionary return to the womb with death. Like Lipski’s other protagonists, Emil remains in a state of utter dependency on the consuming mother, totally at her mercy, incapable of real birth and start­ ing a life, stuck in the hurt state of trauma, from which he tries to escape. Lipski’s characters seek a perfect, soothing mother, but they post-traumati­ cally find a monster who devours them. The paradox is that in this scheme, the mother and the woman are equally loved and despised. Idealization con­ ceals passionate hatred and contempt: women are reduced to an all-consum­ ing destructive drive, which they cannot sublimate:

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Masochism: Competitive Victimization They cannot break away from the biosoil. Menstruation is a constant memento vivere. They are rarely scholars or great artists. They have no organizing abilities, and this is why they cannot organize massacres. They live naturally and—perhaps—better than men. (P 95–96)

The loop closes when masochism reveals its hidden other side: sadism. In Freud’s dynamic interpretation, these contradictory positions are two sides of the same coin: A person who feels pleasure in producing pain in someone else in a sexual relationship is also capable of enjoying as pleasure any pain which he may himself derive from sexual relations. A sadist is always at the same time a masochist,62 and vice versa, it might be added. Emil, Piotrus´, the narrators of “Waadi,” “Day and Night,” and “Deer’s Little Brother” seem to be different versions of the same man, deeply woun­ ded by the Holocaust, the war, and the disease progressively destroying his body, from which he wants to rescue himself with the help of masochism, idealization of suffering, degeneration, and finally, self-sacrifice. By observing his protagonists from another angle, Lipski diagnoses the Romantic type of Polishness, in which Poland as a concept becomes the prohibited object of desire, an archaic matrix that constantly promises ultimate satisfaction and simultaneously demands sacrifices, usually in blood. We see here a perverse reversal of meanings of subsequent humiliating demands, which become a lofty triumph. At the same time, Lipski’s work seems to accurately indicate the moment of trauma, namely the extreme humiliation of the Second World War, with whose experience the Polish subject had to cope after the war ended. It is difficult to speak of repression when the perpetual returns to the war and the Holocaust, death and corpses are governed by images of pure moralism and justified suffering: the deep trauma and humiliation remain in this experience, albeit transformed into an elevated object, like the dry chan­ nel in Aleksander Ford’s movie Border Street (1948) or, more currently, like the main exhibition in the Warsaw Rising Museum in Warsaw. Lipski seduces readers with his literary integrity and regardless persuades us to interpret him as an optimistic writer, as in the following fragment: “Interesting and lush things grow only on shit, on fertilizer. The smell of dung is the smell of life. Only the eras of state, moral decay produced high culture. Only slightly rotten personalities can create art” (P 76). According to Lipski, art and culture ori­ ginate from the aggression of a continuing war, and they teach that trauma can create an identity, in which triumph sadomasochism, humiliation, and identities shifting between the perpetrator and the victim. The appearance of any change in the symbolic field—such as the Second World War in Polish memory—not only reorganizes social relations but also wreaks havoc and

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terror in the very structures of memory. A direct return to trauma is difficult not only because of the lack of courage—often mentioned by critics—but also because the subject returns not only to the state of fragmentation and barely alive but also to hatred and desire for vengeance. Living in the “wound culture,” in which trauma establishes one’s identity, according to Mark Seltzer is linked with “the public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock,”64 which provokes a confrontation not only with sadness and despair but also with anger and hatred.

The Cesspool of the World and Sewers In some of his stories, another Jewish-Polish writer Artur Sandauer describes interwar Poland as such a wound culture, treating as a source of creativity his home region of Galicia, a melting pot of cultures. At the same time, he is not deluded about peaceful cohabitation. He presents his hometown Sambor currently located in Ukraine in Zapiski z martwego miasta (Notes from a Dead City; 1963) as deeply separated neighborhoods: the Town Square inhabited by rich Poles and assimilated Jews from upper classes and the Blich district, inhabited by the Jewish poor. The acceptable borderland was the Targowica district, where “Polish was heard as frequently as Yiddish,”65 and on market days, Ukrainian joined these voices. The structure of Sambor is clearly vertical by class, nationality, and geographical stratification.66 The Polish neighborhood is located on the hill, with bureaus, schools, and chur­ ches, and the Jewish ghetto spreads at the very bottom, full of run-down shanties, surrounded by “synagogs, cemeteries, and morgues.”67 Born on the borderland, in the Targowica district, the narrator tries to climb the heights of the Town Square, of Polishness, Europeanness, classical education, and a higher economic status, even though in the eyes of Polish non-Jews, he belongs to the Blich district, to which he is repetitively driven back—a recurring motif in Sandauer’s work. The Blich district lies at the bottom both literally and metaphorically, because it is where all the town sewers spill: In the center of the ghetto, they opened their one-and-a-half-meter wide jaws, dripping with yellow effusion. It was the main anus of the whole town, which up on the hill, discreetly masked its underground connection with Blich with the help of sewer plates, but here, everyone did their business openly and without embarrassment. The local ghetto becomes an anus, and the declassed Jews become doubly excluded as they are associated with excrements. This situation co-exists with cultural images of Jews in Poland, characterized by the inversion of tradi­ tional structures; for example, there were legends of Jews being born through the anus—a famous European figure of foetor judaicus, the fecal-sexual stink allegedly exuded by the Jews.68 The antisemitic divisions described by San­ dauer will only radicalize with the war—although they will not substantially

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change—and the Jewish inhabitants of Sambor will be literally treated as waste. Moreover, even under the Soviet rule, “despite the friendship bonding the Soviet nations,”69 the divisions between ethnic Poles, Jews, and Ukrai­ nians will remain in force. As Sandauer bitterly writes, he will never feel like a real inhabitant of the Town Square. The structure of the Polish-Jewish town— similar to Buczacz70 meticulously reconstructed by the historian Omer Bartov—is identical to that of a colonial town described by Frantz Fanon, one deeply divided between the French and the subservient Algerians: The settlers’ town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown, and hardly thought about. … The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire.71 In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon demonstrates how these spatial divisions reproduce in the psyche of the colonized.72 It is similar in Sandauer’s texts. Scholars notice in his texts an identity split into Polishness and Jewishness, both in the external tissue of the town—when one treats these stories as an image of the pre-war intercultural relations—and inside the Polish-Jewish identity,73 considering that in “Kanały” (Sewers) from Notes from a Dead City, the narrator says: Identify myself? The thing is that I still was an unidentified and borderland phenomenon, like the neighborhood where I was born twenty-five years ago. The place of my birth, Targowica, bordered with the ghetto by Mły­ nówka on one side and the Town Square, by the stairs, on the other.74 Maintaining the original metaphor of the town space divided into Heaven (Polishness), Purgatory, and Hell (Jewishness), we move in the area of the Freudian structural model of the psyche: the narrator finds himself between the dreamed fulfillment of expectations (superego and ego ideal) and the constant slipping into the force driving and destabilizing for the entire order (id). In the essay On the Situation of the Polish Writer of Jewish Descent in the Twentieth Century, Sandauer even criticizes the subtle violence inflicted by the Polish cultural code in the very identification of Jewishness as otherness, which is either eradicated (the antisemitic solution), or which tempts with its nearly erotic attraction (the philosemitic solution).75 However, there exists a second possible order in these stories, the Freudian topographical model

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governed by the dialectic between consciousness and unconsciousness: the dialectic between the surface town and the sewers connecting all the neigh­ borhoods underground. This opposition receives stronger meaning during the German occupation. Because of his conspiratorial activity, the narrator knows his routes around the sewers, through which he escapes during the ghetto liquidation. He runs and then wades in the water and sludge with a crowd of people; guided by instinct, people sought hiding places that seemed the safest. It was from those that they were lured out by sewer hunters. San­ dauer writes that it was great fun for the Polish workers who were helping the Germans: laughing, they promised that the liquidation is done and people may safely come out, which quickly turned out to be untrue. However, the narrator does not leave his hiding place and does not come out. One critic considers the scenes in the sewers an initiation in the sense of “unification with the Blich district and the subconscious,”76 foregrounding the narrator’s feeling of community with other Jews. Once safe and in search of better hideouts, the protagonist leaves the sewers and—as the critic argues—sym­ bolically revives as a Jew.77 I suggest we follow the other direction, of not yet coming out to the surface, to examine what the narrator finds in the sewers, which he describes as “a safe haven:” It was warm and pleasant like in the mother’s womb. As if to confirm this analogy, something curvy blocked my way: a woman’s body. It wedged in before me or maybe it came from somewhere else? What was important was that it was there: still, firm, in a dress. To make space for those crawling behind me, I slid onto the body as much as I could, so high that I felt a crusted mask on her face with my hands; only the eyeballs were alive. I touched her nameless face, her hairs glued together: it was like a substitute of tenderness, which I skimped on someone else just a moment ago. Was I, anonymous, not on the very bottom, in the cesspool of the world, where all embarrassments and inhibitions disappear, where one can do anything? As an external human, I was hereby returning to an enormous black community, a bottomless creature; I was blending with the bottom and the background. I was falling asleep.78 The description’s realism about the terrifying situation of hiding, being chased, and turned in by Polish sewer hunters mixes with fantasy. Desperately clinging onto life, the narrator finds a moment of soothing in the arms of a dead woman, like a child held in their mother’s arms.79 He can fall asleep, because he feels safe in the motherly womb equated with “the cesspool of the world.” The hiding places that allowed Jews to avoid death are often such liminal spaces: attics, basements, wardrobes, dug-outs, tombs.80 Out of necessity, they are the places typically avoided by others, these places are usually untidy, run-down, and abandoned. Sandauer writes about the “psy­ chological way through the sewers,”81 also considering the fact that the experience of hiding marks the hiding person for the entire lifetime—again in

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a double meaning. The sewers mark the situation of being “in-between,” a merging of the split Polish-Jewish identity, and a situation of being “under,” as in living a life reduced to a repulsive scrap. Tenderly holding the dead woman’s body, the narrator clearly identifies with it, in a fantasy described by the psy­ choanalyst Hanna Segal: “being a corpse himself was used as a defence against pain, anxiety, madness, disintegration, and the threat of dying, since corpses are immune from death.”82 At the same time, the narrator is separated from the woman by his triumph over her: he lives and can continue living. The narrator leaves “smudged with the turd of the sewers;” he survived, but he is marked by the condition of a victim. Therefore, I believe it is problematic to compare his situation to a revival; even non-metaphorically, leaving the hiding place does not have a cathartic character. It more strongly reveals the dialectics of vic­ timhood: surviving but also being stifled by the memory of living on the verge of death. The borderline area indicated by Sandauer demonstrates the mechanisms constituting the Jewish identity in the domineering and hostile Polish environment—which solidified the norms of prewar Poland after the war—and the post-traumatic mark of the victim’s role.

The Second World War: The War of Sexes Identifying the Polish bystander of the Holocaust with the position of a victim was incorporated into the postwar cultural code. We may trace its modern examples in the works of a modern mainstream writer Szczepan Twardoch, because what constitutes the very basis of his literary canvass are extreme states and identity problems or split identification in terms of nation, gender, and personality. They all result from an external conflict, usually a war, causing analogical harm to his protagonists’ minds. However, the starting point is the very specific experience of Polishness and the strategy of con­ structing this experience, strongly present in Polish culture, as it focuses around masochistic clinging to suffering and humiliation. What are the ben­ efits of the fact that the Polish bystander who identifies with the Jewish victim—having constructed their image beforehand—transforms into the main protagonist of an irreverent short story “Moniza Clavier” by Sławomir . Mrozek, torturing his company at a party by demanding recognition, accep­ tance, and soothing for his patriotic suffering? He shows gaps in his teeth saying: “Here, they took it out, just for the freedom!”83 Even though Twar­ doch’s works have little to do with simple martyrdom and neither the novel’s protagonists nor its narrators believe in national and religious ideas, we must note the common Romantic matrix arranging the sociopolitical, emotional, sexual, and drive-related realms, which keep on recurring in his work. The literary scholar Maria Janion labels this matrix “the mythical imperative,” the general necessity of fighting even if the cause is already lost and a compulsive self-sacrificing ritual.84 Twardoch discloses the sexual structure that accom­ panies this imperative imposing bonds of a sadomasochistic contract on the national identity. I will focus on Twardoch’s later novels: his breakthrough

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2010 work Wieczny Grunwald (Eternal Grunwald) and particularly on his most ambitious and the most profound Morphine published in 2012. I will present the common framework of Twardoch’s novels.85 The novels show a reality based on an all-out, overwhelming, eternal war. This is the original world of Thomas Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes, in which interpersonal relations are based mostly and above all on violence. In that sense, the war and the whole world become a nightmare that force humanity to regress into its very primal state. Twardoch’s main protago­ nists—the men who constantly try to give new meaning to themselves and their existence in this nightmarish world—seek to become heroes in the sense that Freud defined in his bitter “Thoughts for the Time of War and Death:” to regress to the original state of disbelief in one’s own mortality and the possible death of others.86 Therefore, a war hero can kill feeling no fear and guilt whatsoever. On the other hand, he is constantly falling apart as a result of the pressure of his internal emptiness that cannot be controlled even by closing oneself inside of a uniform. In Twardoch’s novels, the war has just ended, is about to break out, or is raging. The phantasmagoric Wieczny Grunwald, published on the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Grunwald, tells a story of a medieval knight tra­ veling in time and landing in one conflict site after another against his will. The main protagonist Paszko is an orphan, son of a deceased German pros­ titute and fourteenth-century Polish king Kazimierz the Great, who would not acknowledge him, a bastard who knows no home and has no parents. The narration undergoes constant shuffling, yet the protagonist always draws the same card, finding himself in the middle of a battle, which seems to have neither a beginning nor an end. Much like all Twardoch’s protagonists, Paszko has no clear identity. He is both a knight and a city pauper, a German and a Pole, a Christian and a pagan, a man and a woman. When he fights in the Battle of Grunwald that infinitely repeats in an eternal loop, he fights against everyone, simply partaking in a massacre rather than taking sides. The Battle of Grunwald becomes a symbol of eternal slaughter, but nobody knows who is killing whom and for what reasons. Everything becomes a mixture of homogenous matter, much like in Paszko’s later memory, a transhumanist science fiction costume from Twardoch’s former novels written for an hermetic circle of Polish fantasy readers: Or that time, when I lived in Warsaw, and I locked everyone in camps. Everyone. Every prisoner was a guard and every guard was a prisoner, executioners were victims, and victims were executioners. Every person on both sides of the border erased by me was putting gigantic effort for the cause of the ultimate physical extermination of everybody, to give place to more ideal and beautiful trans-people, a-anthropic in a different sense than in Primeval Grunwald, so homogenous and identical and not a­ anthropic individually like the inhumane Poles and Germans with Ewiger Tannenberg.87

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The war holds an existential meaning and the willingness to sacrifice your own life becomes the noblest possible ethical gesture. The plot of the novel is fragmented, difficult to follow, and practically impossible to be told or inte­ grated in pretty much the same manner. This intention brings Twardoch closer to the writing method declared by Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz in his Kinderszenen (2008) dedicated to the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 and presented by the author himself in the following words: “My tale (much like all of them) is rudimentary. It consists of pieces, fragments, shards spread by the explo­ sion.”88 Both Rymkiewicz and Twardoch consider it natural, because to them Poland as a whole was also a result of war. As Rymkiewicz claims, whoever wants to live in Warsaw, “must accept that they will inhabit, walk around, ride through, and sleep at a cemetery. This should not be considered a meta­ phor.” But what non-metaphorical meaning could it have? The writer is iro­ nically distrustful of his own creative tools—language—so he proposes piercing through its curtain to reveal the harsh reality of the death devaluing all the words capable of grasping the experience. This Heideggerian moment acquires a particularly Polish tone when Rymkiewicz shifts focus to the cen­ tral point of his book, namely Kilin´skiego street during the Warsaw Uprising, which was “covered in blood up to the third floor” after the explosion of the so-called “trap-tank.” The bare bones come to life due to this particular act of memory: a cemetery hidden under the surface of the present gushing with an underground stream of blood, a source of vitality for both Poland and the Poles in the story of Kinderszenen. It is impossible and forbidden to forget about the crimes, much less forgive them. In that sense, the war continues.89 The glorification of the massacre of the Warsaw Uprising, the explosion and dismembering of human bodies defines the basic existential meaning of the Polish identity.90 This affinity resembles the works of political theorist Carl Schmitt for whom the war is a necessary political reality, which stems from the fact that the basic distinction between people is the radical division between a friend and a foe, like the ethical distinction between good and evil or the aesthetic distinction between beauty and ugliness.91 The enemy is extremely and essentially different, which makes any mediation or communication impossible: War, the readiness of combatants to die, the physical killing of human beings who belong on the side of the enemy-all this has no normative meaning, but an existential meaning only, particularly in a real combat situation with a real enemy.92 In psychoanalytical terms, we may understand this phenomenon as a dom­ ination of the splitting between the good self and the bad object, drifting away from each other in the state of permanent conflict. At the same time, when Schmitt wrote his Political Theology, British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein analyzed this phenomenon in the context of a phantasy of an infant struggling for food against its mother. To eat one’s fill means to devour the

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mother. This constitutes a struggle for life and death. If one of them is to live, the other must die—analogically to the struggle of nations viewed through Schmitt’s perspective—which leaves no room for compromise or a “disinterested and therefore neutral third party” like a mediator or the universal ideals of human rights; after all, the land and the resources are limited.94 Psychoanalysis understands such cases as a situation when a dyad between the mother and the child cannot be influenced by the father (a third party), who will include the child into the society with the Oedipal law. Twardoch’s protagonists never take this step toward maturity, never separate themselves from their mothers, even though the mortal struggle against them proves so devastating that it prevents the protago­ nists from constructing their own identity. This defines the core of the condition of Polish men after the Second World War, whose constant failures in self-estab­ lishment become a series of delightful torment. In other words, the protagonist’s suffering becomes sexualized as it transforms into the delight of the biggest victim of war, which in turn, deprives him of the ability of any empathic reaction to himself or anyone else. This explains why Twardoch’s novels include few moments of authentic sadness but a lot of those of boyish fascination with violence. In Wieczny Grunwald appears a gradually emerging structure that brings order to violence, which in the beginning seems like a “war of everyone fighting against everyone,” a conflict between Germany and Poland, with both countries tangled in a brutal sexual intercourse. There is no platform for possible communication apart from violence inflicted by both sides by enlarged national bodies with clearly specified gender. Germany is a phallic, mechanical, intellectual, and harsh organism, while Poland is an absorbing, primal, corporal, and fluid matrix: As Germans were the common blood of Blutfabric and the waters of Rhine. They were the holy, eternal flame of the Indo-Germans on castle tops, they were Schubert’s lieder, the Black Sons, the sunny black circle of factories at the gates of Nuremberg. They were the night and the fog, the overwhelming rule, the all-moving idea, the only possible content and the meaning of life, the God of our world, and yet they were still not alive. … Thus, Germany remained an idea setting in motion all the material enti­ ties: Blut, Rhine, us, the a-anthrops, drones, panzers, and zerstörers. Yet Mother Poland was alive. Her blood was the blood of Polish women who had lived hundreds of generations before, before the anthropic transfor­ mation. And so, Mother Poland lived with her large, beautiful body fill­ ing the country so close to the surface that the ground was slightly rippling like a young woman’s breast when you court her too firmly. It rippled with its breath and its pulse and you could kiss the ground, so we kissed Mother Poland and we walked over Mother Poland and lied on Mother Poland. And she opened in every one of noble manor houses with a million of its wombs and vapor came from under a thin layer of black soil from billions of its glands. It smelled of its sweetest, inebriating sweat.95

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This fantasy refers mostly to constant attacks of the male body on the female body; the mother attacked both by the father and the son. There are no daughters here. The world described by Twardoch is definitely a man’s world, the story is told through a man’s perspective and women do not appear in it as outright, independent subjects.96 This statement is true even for syntax: short, rhythmic phrases used to describe Germany and long, complex sen­ tences about Mother Poland. Those are the conflicting elements in Klaus Theweleit’s analysis of fascism, Male Fantasies, in which dry fascistic mascu­ linity—deprived of its emotions, drives, and desires—resists the pressure of invasion identified with femininity.97 The fundamental asymmetry and lethal danger related to sexual differences leads to a conflict. Twardoch’s protago­ nists find themselves in the very midst of conflict in every single one of his novels. Its source lies in the trauma of the Second World War, which shows in the constant referencing to it in Wieczny Grunwald, written in a language stylized on early modern Polish. Moreover, the juxtaposition of those two distant yet probably the most memorable dates in Poland—1410 and 1939– 1945—appears right after the war, in posters and in early state propaganda.98 The 1960s saw a rise in anti-German rhetoric due to West Germany refusing to acknowledge the borders on rivers Odra and Nysa, which we may see in Polska Kronika Filmowa (Polish Cinematographic Chronicles) from 1960, full of nationalistic attacks on “modern Teutonic Knights” dedicated to the subject of “Grunwald from 1410 until 1960.”99 At that time, the narrative of the alleged Polish origins of the regions of Warmia and Mazury—and of labelling the Germans the eternal enemies of the Polish state—included the popular film Knights of the Teutonic Order (1960) by Aleksander Ford who a bit later was banished from Poland due to the antisemitic witch-hunt.100 Therefore it may be argued the plot of Wieczny Grunwald is set in a tradition of Polish anti-German resentment, transformed into psychosexual categories of an incomplete, castrated male identity confronted with the German hyper­ masculinity.101 However, the foundation of the weak, tormented masculinity of Twardoch’s protagonists lies also in hostility toward the other, especially those in the position of victims: women and Jews.

A Pole without a Uniform Konstanty Willemann, the main protagonist of Morfina, wakes up from a drug-induced dream—or at least this is how it seems from the reader’s per­ spective—in Warsaw in October, 1939, two weeks after the city surrendered. The German army conquered the Polish capital. Initially, driven rather by accidents happening to him than of his own volition, Willemann wanders between his ethnic Polish wife and his Jewish mistress, trying to figure out what is he exactly supposed to do at this point, occasionally using morphine. His description suggests that in terms of prewar profession, the thirty-year­ old was unconvincingly pretending to be an artist and, once the war broke out, he also happened to serve in the army. Due to a rather accidental chain

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of events, he gets involved in a conspiracy plot as a valuable asset; after all, he is the child of a Polish aristocrat and a German officer—a veteran of the First World War—which makes Willemann a perfect candidate to convincingly play the role of a Volksdeutsch. His long-lost father gives him a German uniform, so Willemann travels to Budapest with another conspirator on a secret mission. Later, he returns to Warsaw to die from the hand of his friend who suspects that Willemann has been sleeping with his beloved. This fun­ damentally absurd story depicts the distance that Willemann constantly feels toward who he is and what is happening to him. As critics indicate, his life is a “series of failed attempts at attaching himself to various identities, that of a man, of a Pole, and of a spy,”102 while his structure as a character relies on “probability, openness, and non-specificity.” As the plot unfolds, this structure evolves in a very limited manner, gradually melting and falling apart.103 In that respect, Willemann is a reflection of Paszko from Wieczny Grunwald and also partly of Jakub Szapiro from the later The King of Warsaw, as he feels empty on the inside as if drained. When losing his consciousness from mor­ phine and sex, he emerges from nothingness by saying: “Not-me. / Not-me opens his eyes. I open my eyes. I opened them.”104 The events, ideas, and relations of the outside world barely attach to him, but they can neither remain with him forever nor define his identity. Therefore, only sometimes and only temporarily can Konstanty be someone: a husband, a father, a lover, an artist, or a conspirator. He lacks boundaries not only in the psychological sense but sometimes also in literal and physical understanding, as he is described as literally “leaking out” of himself. The novel is riddled with descriptions of overflowing bodily fluids, diarrhea, and vomit. The protago­ nist’s structure reflects the reality of occupation: “the society is spoiled. There are no Jews, no Greeks, no ladies, no whores, no professors or thieves” (M 13). The war world of the novel itself seems to be in a shapeless, liquid state. Maybe it is not as fragmented as when the protagonist struggles to put his traumatic war memories in order, but it is definitely not governed by any clearly defined rules which would help him function. Eventually, the nonspecificity itself becomes a pose of sorts. Upon being asked by Dzidzia—a woman he meets in conspiracy—about who he really is and unable to draw any conclusions, he answers that “there is no ‘really.’ I really don’t exist. Nobody really exists,” to which she answers: “such conceit” (M 434). Even­ tually, to become “someone,” he must see his own reflection in the eyes of others. Only this mediation provides him with an identity. It constitutes a very comfortable position to mock these elements of the Polish identity, but at the same time, it results in a very particular construction of sexuality. Konstanty’s internal emptiness hides behind every possible intensive action intended to conceal it, which is not only the morphine—which the narrator quits at some point—but also sexuality. He uses drugs to calm himself into thinking that everything looks fine, even though the reality around him lies in ruins. The novel shows this either in the repetitive, soothing rhythm of lulla­ bies based on melodic declamations and repetitions or in exponentially

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increasing narcotic and sexual experiences. From the very beginning, the reader learns that even though the protagonist loves his wife with an ostentatiously Polish name Hela and his son Jurek, he also constantly fantasizes about other women and a different life. One of those women is Salome, a Jewish prostitute who in bed shows to him the plenitude of her body’s sexuality, “the non-shame, and in her non-shame she was beautiful, as if she knew no shame at all” (M 31). This reminds Willemann of paintings by Egon Schiele, an author of many nudes, and also self-por­ traits, which in this context is far from coincidental. Art historian Lynda Nead observes that a female nude is in fact a strategy to form and frame female sexuality, set its stable and impenetrable borders and avoid spilling the excess matter coming from a body transformed into an object of intellectual analysis.105 Indeed, Salome personifies monstrous femininity able to consume men who succumb to her: And I fall deeper and deeper into fluff, drowning in molasses, my beau­ tiful, fair Salome, my filthy, befouled Salome. How many men found a little bit of death inside your body? And I die a considerable death, I die a hundred times in her mouth and she is laughing for she knows that I belong to her, not to Hela, not to Poland. I belong to her because she holds me between her teeth and she could crush me if only she wanted to (M 101). Salome’s counterpoint is Hela, the personification of a prude, naive Polish identity, along with patriotic exultation taken from her father’s ideals of the far-right National Democratic party. Hela agrees to sexual intimacy only after her husband joins the conspiracy and joins the fight for Poland’s inde­ pendency. The strict splitting between the dangerous yet hypnotizing sexuality of Salome and the unattractive yet safe protectiveness of Hela deprives Will­ emann of agency and objectivity, a theme characteristic of Twardoch’s novels. In the same fashion, in his analysis of abundant memories, letters, and diaries of members of the Fascist movement Freikorps, Klaus Theweleit observes that although all the writing soldiers were married, they almost never mention women in their personal documents.106 If they do write about them, for example about mothers or sisters, it is almost always because they were in danger of death or rape. Their complete opposites were to be the female Bolshevik soldiers, completely distinct in terms of their ethnic and cultural background, “women with guns” committing unimaginable acts of brutal murders, supposedly much worse than those accounted to men. In those fun­ damentally cruel images of women, Theweleit identifies two archetypes, namely that of a white nurse and a red whore, the victim and the perpetrator of terrifying violence. The “white nurse” is a desexualized woman whose virtue and innocence should be protected. However, the “red whore” desires to pulverize men with her dangerous sexuality through her transgression of gender borders.107

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These objectifying constructions of femininity conceal deep fear and the need to frame femininity. In Morfina, women pose the greatest threat to the conspiring Willemann, although the war is wreaking havoc all around him. At the same time, the theme of sexualization of male violence from Wieczny Grunwald returns, because Warsaw as the symbol of Poland is constantly raped (M 109, 325, 383, 412, 543), just like Polish soldiers (“The Germans fucked up your asses and the Russians will finish the job;” M 383), and men in general (Konstanty’s father drinks his vodka through his “war-raped lips” M 406). A similar image appears in Miasto 44 (2014), a film about the Warsaw Uprising by Jan Komasa, somehow related to Twardoch’s style. In one of the final scenes, right after the complete defeat of the Warsaw Upris­ ing, one of the female insurgents hides in a hospital where she is later found by a squad of Germans. A German soldier sits right in front of her and the viewer can see their faces, first the one of the terrified girl, and then the sol­ dier who in turn gazes right at the camera’s lens, and thus, at the viewer. He twitches his face in a mysterious smirk and there is a cut, which suggest sexual violence that the viewer is to imagine for herself.108 The entire plot of Morfina is based upon strong, resilient women—with whom one cannot establish an equal relationship—and weak men. Apart from Willemann, the examples include melancholic Jacek, the Engineer with his ridiculous patriotic ecstasy and illusions, the Captain, always confusing the reality of war with his own hallucinations, and the father who was maimed in the First World War.

The Tomb-Womb This particular image of gender relations stems from involvement in a pecu­ liar family drama—another recurring motif in Twardoch’s work—the rela­ tionship between a powerful mother (ethnic Polish) and a maimed, weak father (German). The latter explains sexuality to Konstanty in the following words: “beware of your mother, son, for she is like a wild, dreadful beast. She is a personification of sin which roams the streets in its silk stockings.” The mother somehow confirms that by saying: Remember, son. As you enter (women’s) pussy, you’re not only satisfying your animal, but you also commit the act of unification with the essence of Poland. Do not think about those women for they are only flesh. Think only of Poland. I am Poland. (M 86) The mother is all-encompassing and absorbing, wooing and imprisoning the scores of men submissive to her. First goes the husband, ensnared at the age of sixteen. Then comes the son who is unable to defy her: “Your mother is pure willingness, your mother can touch divinity. If she wanted to, she could use her will to stop Hitler, she could stop the sun from rising over the hor­ izon.” (M 222) This evokes images from Lipski’s Niespokojni, in which the

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main character in a guesthouse styled after Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain is picked up by a dandy prince and a much older bather (P 32);109 and from a famous novel of Polish modernist literature Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy)’s Insatiability, in which Zypcio experiences his sexual initiation with an older duchess, who reminds him of his mother, which both scares and attracts him greatly.110 Generally, this is a tradition dating back to the dark side of Romanticism, according to which a mother figure becomes saturated with incestuous eroticism.111 In this situation, Willemann as the symbolic Pole will never have to mature, as his mother already provides everything he needs, including sexual satisfaction, and there is nothing to look for beyond her. Thus, the child can evade Oedipalization, as the father as such becomes ridiculed and degraded, and the mother anoints her son as the dream part­ ner.112 Hence comes the lack of identity that can be acquired only through his mother and a relationship with her. Philosopher Agata Bielik-Robson also observes this phenomenon: The sons of Poland can neither be born nor exist as a whole nor acquire any kind of identity; until the very end, Willemann remains nothing, nei­ ther a Pole nor a German, neither a guy nor a gal, neither me nor non-me. They are eternally stuck inside a womb-tomb of this part-real, part-fantasy matrix called Polishness, which forbids becoming-a-subject.113 Polish sons live in their mothers’ wombs, which does not lead to tranquility but rather to an explosion of rampant aggression and violence pouring out of Twardoch’s represented world. Notably, this aggression is pointless and gra­ tuitous, as it changes virtually nothing both in the outside and the inside world of the protagonist. The King of Warsaw shows this in the image of a whale floating over Warsaw, a prefiguration of doom (“What does the Litani floating over Warsaw feed on? Black milk”),114 seemingly consuming all pro­ tagonists. At the beginning of his The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt references a biblical image of a Leviathan as a sea monster of incredible power, which according to some legends, could even consume the whole universe.115 In Twardoch’s Drach, the eponymous ancient, chthonic deity brings the whole animate and inanimate matter to the same pantheistic level of an oft-repeated statement: “a tree, a human, a deer, or a rock—the same thing.”116 Slavoj Žižek describes the interventions of nature in Hitchcock’s Birds (1963) in similar words: “the birds are not ‘symbols’ at all, they play a direct part in the story as something inexplicable, as some­ thing outside the rational chain of events, as a lawless impossible real.”117 In a society devoid of fathers—thus lacking a stable symbolic field—anarchy and violence are on the loose and aggression pours out, culminating in explosions, just like in the reference to Rymkiewicz’s Kinderszenen: “I come out, my white tires on bloody pavement, bloody tires in puddles of blood, blood pouring out of philharmonics windows, livid garlands of gigantic bowels hanging out of the windows, their blood pouring out the windows” (M 275).

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The not-entirely-born Willemann can achieve completeness of sorts only through dedicating himself to the conspiracy, which happens in the very center of the novel, separating its first half from the second, when Willemann dons his father’s German uniform.118 It becomes his second skin, an armor capable of holding Willemann’s insides in and defining his outline. By flexing in front of a mirror, he actualizes the Romantic phantasm of transformation from a lover into a soldier. The transformation in Polish culture finds its fullest expression in the progression from the fourth to the third part of Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady and, after the Second World War, in Ashes and Diamonds by Jerzy Andrze­ jewski, adapted to film by Andrzej Wajda.119 The metamorphosis relies on Willemann’s identification with a German thanks to the fetish of a uniform, which paints the whole picture of the dynamics and reversibility of positions of Polish bystanders: from a victim to a perpetrator and vice versa. In any case, Willemann requires no more morphine, as he can fully sacrifice himself to the cause, even though he is not entirely convinced about it.120 At the same time, the reason for his inability to achieve completeness and consistency—shattering the illusion of being in control of himself, his body, and his surroundings—is a mysterious voice saying: “Little Konstanty, a silly cluster of flesh and skin, my poor little toy, a toy of a dark substance pulsat­ ing under the world’s surface, my dear, beloved Konstanty” (M 204). This obscure entity that identifies itself as a woman is, on the one hand, an omni­ potent narrator telling tales about the encountered people, which usually end tragically in gruesome deaths, while on the other hand, she calls herself a dark goddess, an obscure substance penetrating reality, destroying everything that managed to emerge out of nothingness. This is a more general formula for a novel, in which there is no everyday, quotidian life, but only extreme states during which the protagonist confronts himself, the terror of existence, and the overwhelming death. Within the bounds of this particular ontology, the narrator appears to be the affected heir to the wisdom of Dionysus from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, recalling the legend of Midas chasing Sile­ nus. Upon catching Silenus, Midas asks what is the best and the most important thing to a man. Silenus cattily replies: Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second-best thing for you is: to die soon.121 Nietzsche describes two kinds of attitude: the Apollonian one is based on creating consoling images about the meaning of life, the illusion of individu­ alism, and empowerment; the Dionysian one mixes everything together in the state of intoxication only to realize the pointlessness and futility of existence. Nietzsche proves that—along with Socrates—the Greek culture became the culture of exhaustion as it lost its former heroic aspect. Eventually, it is

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Dionysus who confronts the truth, which is the terror of death. Agata BielikRobson demonstrates how this is the origin of tanathophiliac philosophy of the twentieth century: authors whose works were the closest to that approach would be the theoreticians of fascism like Heidegger, Jünger, Schmitt, and Céline.122 In that sense, the mysterious voice resembles the Freudian definition of the drive of death as “the silent drive.”123 The French psychoanalyst André Green characterizes its results as “the work of the negative.” Green under­ stands it as destroying the value of an object by withdrawing the drive, which does not apply only to other people, relations, and ideas. This work can be directed at oneself, at one’s internal world and identity. Withdrawing the drive becomes a defense mechanism against the overflow of emotions uncontain­ able in one mind, which in turn, leads to draining the mind of any kind of representations and leaves it empty.124 Willemann and other Twardoch’s pro­ tagonists can achieve completeness only through a constant search for exhi­ larating pain, which sometimes can transform into something else, but usually leads them to inflicting pain on themselves. Freud explains that this refers to: the suffering itself is what matters; whether it is decreed by someone who is loved or by someone who is indifferent is of no importance. It may even be caused by impersonal powers or by circumstances; the true masochist always turns his cheek whenever he has a chance of receiving a blow.125 In the novels, the masochistic turning of the cheek is accompanied by the conviction that the protagonist—a man constantly preoccupied with thoughts on his body, strength, and sexuality—will never succeed anyway. In his ana­ lysis of Rymkiewicz’s Wieszanie (Lynching), Twardoch describes the historical process of feminizing the ethnic Polish male who is becoming a masochistic victim. He also states that should what Rymkiewicz had predicted in his counterfactual historical fantasy actually happen, then maybe the Polish society would all be different: Men would stop dying at war for the cause, and they would start winning for the cause, and so women would lose their function of transferring Polishness to future generations to men. It was passed on through many generations for two hundred years, losing its previous republican, noble, and military virtues so greatly that there is nothing left. From a nation of cavalry, the Poles became a nation of the castrated, as now their national character relies only on the feminine values of sacrifice, false grandeur of defeat, sadness, and passive resistance, instead of victory, enthusiasm and active attack.126 Twardoch inherits this half-irony from Rymkiewicz. However, this historio­ graphy practiced in sexual terms surfaces in the construction of Twardoch’s

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novels. Nevertheless, the staging of one’s own impotence also serves other purposes. As Chasseguet-Smirgel describes, the fetish “is like a magic wand. Its presence modifies reality. The theatre where the human drama is per­ formed—with its mourning, deprivations, injuries, renunciations—thus becomes a fairyland where feelings of inferiority, loss, and death exist no more.”127 Masochism thoroughly conceals the sentiment of triumph and nul­ lifies or gives opposite meaning to destruction. Near the end of Rymkiewicz’s Kinderszenen, the narrator poignantly describes the death of his turtle, as he confronts his loss and the lack of knowledge to explain this event. The loss is personal, emotional, and trivial from a historical perspective, and it contrasts with Rymkiewicz’s claim that: the Warsaw Uprising was the greatest chapter of the history of Poland. In the country’s entire existence, there was no (and there will probably never be) nothing more important than that … [as] the white light of explosion represents the manifestation of fate.128 However, what particular emotions does this male-centered fascination with violence prevents from feeling?

Masochist as a (Non-)Witness Although Jews appear not only in the middle of Morfina but also in the beginning and the ending of the novel, they always seem to reside in Kon­ stanty’s peripheral vision. At the very beginning, Willemann is walking down Krochmalna street—at the time, a Jewish marketplace—thinking: “The Heebs are doing their best to sell me everything exclusively for ‘dullars’ and gold. They are in a hurry and they are very scared, yet I keep walking and I don’t look at them” (M 14). He uses that language throughout the entire novel, disdainfully calling Jews “Heebs,” “Heebie-Jeebies,” or “Heeblets” while also adding a little bit of classist disgust to the mix (“shitty little Jewish towns”) and class distinction, when he adores famous Jewish poets writing in Polish: Tuwim, and Les´mian. Then begins the Holocaust with the persecution of Jews, but it seems to elude the protagonist’s perception and his field of vision until the very ending, when Willemann uses his power as someone mistaken for a German, and screams at Jews who are excavating dead bodies without any particular reason, as if he was dissociatively observing himself from a distance. Because of such structure, the reader, unaware of the novel’s context, might not notice this part of the occupied Poland’s reality. It seems that the function of masochism becomes this particular indifference and insentience. Although the Jews are somehow represented in the novel—after all, Willemann never closes his eyes when walking down a Jewish street—they do not evoke any emotions. He can see their pain and living conditions, yet he remains indifferent. Thus, Polish bystanders may perceive the suffering of the other, but they scream only about their own pain, unable to tell one from

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another. They can escape the pain of suffering a traumatic experience, as seemingly nothing of importance is happening. The illusion of being a witness occurs only when one is going through the same experience. Freud describes such a cannibalistic identification “in which the object that we long for and prize is assimilated by eating and is in that way annihilated as such.”129 Therefore, people acquire lost object’s attributes without ever actually losing it. Kaja Silverman, the theoretician referring to psychoanalysis, similarly describes the idiopathic identification leading to the appropriation of the other, abolishing of differences, and destruction of every threat to cohesion.130 Thus, the protagonist can only stage a masochistic spectacle, in which his body undergoes sexualization. The reader can peek at Willemann’s suffering but witness no real change in his subjective position. The King of Warsaw inverts this scheme, as the readers witness the rise of fascism in Poland in the 1930s through the eyes of a Jewish boxer. His gaze might have even crossed with that of Willemann strolling during the war, if it was not for the fact that the boxer himself realized the dream of Morfina’s protagonist, namely he managed to escape the bounds of Polish reality. However, as I have already proven in the digression about the analogical construction of female characters in both novels, even though the overall scheme becomes inverted, it generally remains intact. The same applies to Rymkiewicz’s Kinderszenen. Many literary critics indicate the central position of the explosion and the fragmentation of Polish corpses during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. One critic aptly labels it as a fascination with massacre, recognizing the theme of the Holocaust as the dangerous and sacred carnage committed by the Germans, but this time with Poles as the victims of the “dark object of desire” hidden in the novel.131 An identical image recurs in Rymkiewicz’s Umschlagplatz focused on the Holo­ caust memory and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. A long passage describes the narrator’s walk “cwiszn łebn un tojt”132 around the Muranów district while contemplating the void left by the former inhabitants of the Jewish district and the ghetto. The walk introduces the following description: To the right we have Krasin´ski Garden, to the left a wall abutting on the territory of the brush makers. It was, I think, somewhere in this vicinity, at the level of that embassy, that the Germans who were about to enter the workshop precincts in April 1943 were blown up by a mine. I wonder what being blown up by a mine actually looks like. Hunks of flesh, scraps of uniforms spiral up in the air, somersaulting and dripping with blood? At what altitude? If one has never seen anything like it, it is difficult to imagine. Even though I was before the war, I find it impossible to visua­ lize the speed of the ascent and somersaulting, the pious levitation of hunks of flesh, scraps of body and blood.133 Rymkiewicz tries to recall this image twenty years later, when writing about the Warsaw Uprising in Kinderszenen. The law of the massacre and the death

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drive in fact level the field for all actors of this historical drama: the victims, the perpetrators, and the bystanders. At the same time, the reader sees com­ plete identification that allows for a connection between Jewishness and Polishness, permanently linking the latter with the condition of the victim, framed by a typical for Eastern Europe national narration of innocence and heroism.134 It falls into what philosopher Chantal Mouffe famously called an antagonistic model of political relation in which conflict between two groups creates a social crisis as they become enemies.135 Furthermore, it generates different rivalry memories in which various groups—in this context Jews and ethnic Poles—claim their positions of victimhood as it gives certain political (and, as I tried to describe, libidinal) benefits.136 It deforms the condition of victimhood which becomes the source of masochistic pleasure, moral triumph and legitimacy for violence. It is one of the vehicles of contemporary Polish ethno-nationalistic narratives on war in which ethnic Polish victims screen the suffering of other groups, primarily the Jews. That is why, as it resurfaces often in Eastern Europe, national Nazi and fascist heroes can be celebrated as anti-communist, regardless of their war crimes and complicity in the Holo­ caust.137 It has, however, a long history, since the beginning of the postwar period. As one of the most apt observers of the Polish social life, historian Witold Kula wrote bluntly and harshly in his secret diary in the 1970s: In the face of the Jewish martyrdom, the Polish (and Russian) propa­ ganda sets itself on the noble task of proving that we, as well, were slaughtered, even no less than Jews. Two communities are bidding on which has been slaughtered more than the other. In the past, Jews were envied for their money, qualifications, positions, international liaisons— today they are envied for the ovens … 138 This rivalry in suffering may only diminish acknowledging the pain of others, as one lives in constant fear that recognition of the other’s victimhood means that their situation will become omitted. Expanding the Mela­ nie Klein’s notion of the splitting and paranoid-schizoid position, psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin claims that this evokes the world of “only one can live” where the wellbeing of the other means reducing the chances of the subject’s survival.139 Thus, it creates two antagonistic, split memories of (Polish) Jews and ethnic Poles, competing in the eyes of the world for recognition of their pain. Masochism from Lipski’s and Sandauer’s images allows direct victims to live, because it prevents them from sinking into utter despair defined by the narrator of “Deer’s Little Brother” in the following manner: “if something happens to him, neither I nor you will have the right to live” (P 272). Through mimesis of the victims’ experiences, Twardoch’s novels apply the same condition to an ethnic Polish (late) bystander, as he focuses on his staged suffering and demands acknowledgement. Masochism allows one to evade trauma and suffering for the price of reinstating the world of eternal war, anger, and hate. However, masochism does not

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establish any other world, because nothing else can ever be equally interest­ ing and exciting as violence. In the same vein, by identifying with the vic­ tims who annex their alleged ecstasy, the bystanders cannot know anything about real pain. The reality of constant violence has its own further impli­ cations, namely the lack of empathy. In place of empathy, the masochistic position puts the theme of a suffering man. Exclusion becomes the price for confirming social identity in the constant need for a repeating martyrdom: social narrations of victimhood, heroism, and innocence. The Polish Romantic ethos of bravery and messianic salvation in the moment of the greatest suffering conceals the core of perversion: no acceptance for life without sudden raptures and constant pain.

Notes 1 This paradigm has been re- and de-constructed in the Polish memory of the . Holocaust mainly by M. Janion, Bohater, spisek, s´mierc´. Wykłady zydowskie (Warszawa: W.A.B., 2009); G. Niziołek, Polski teatr Zagłady (Warszawa: Instytut Teatralny im. Zbigniewa Raszewskiego i Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2013). 2 S. Žižek, “Victims, Victims Everywhere,” in S. Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For (London: Verso, 2001); D. Fassin, R. Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, trans. R. Gomme (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009). 3 M. Cuber, Trofea wyobraz´ni. O prozie Leo Lipskiego (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu S´la˛ skiego, 2011); A. Dauksza, “Ekonomia afektu Leo Lipskiego,” in: Pamie˛ c´ i afekty, eds. Z. Budrewicz, R. Sendyka, R. Nycz (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2014); A. Dauksza, “Nosiciel pamie˛ ci. O pamie˛ taniu, kalectwie i pisaniu w twórczos´ci Leo Lipskiego,” Pamie˛ tnik Literacki 4/2013; A. Fra˛ czysty, “Jak działa pisarz mniejszy? Przypadek Leo Lipskiego,” Mały Format 5/2018; H. Gosk, Jestes´ sam w swojej drodze (Izabelin: S´wiat Literacki, 1998); P. Krupin´ski, Ciało, historia, kultura. Pisarstwo Mariana Pankowskiego i Leo Lipskiego wobec tabu (Szczecin: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szcze­ cin´skiego, 2011); A. Lipszyc, “Cze˛ s´c´ s´mierci: bierny frankizm i czarna gnoza w Piotrusiu Leo Lipskiego,” Teksty Drugie 2/2017; R. K. Przybylski, “Wobec mitu i historii,” Teksty Drugie 1.2/1991; P. Sadzik, “Zdrobniałe ja˛ kanie. Teologia afatyczna w Piotrusiu Leo Lipskiego,” Wielogłos 2/2019; K. Telejko, “Motyw wstydu w prozie Leo Lipskiego,” Midrasz 9/2009; J. Wierzejska, Retoryczna interpretacja autobiograficzna. Na przykładzie Andrzeja Bobkowskiego, Zyg­ munta Haupta i Leo Lipskiego (Warszawa: Dom Wydawniczy Elipsa, 2012); A. . Zaja˛ c, “‘Zycie półmałpie, spros´ne, s´wie˛ te’. Wokół Mojego ludu Leo Lipskiego,” Mały Format 5/2018; A. Zaja˛ c, “‘Poniedziałek—Ireny’. Fantomowe Kresy Leo Lipskiego,” Narracje o Zagładzie 5/2019; B. Zielin´ska, “W kloace s´wiata. O Piotrusiu Leo Lipskiego,” Teksty Drugie 1.2/1998. 4 Dauksza, “Nosiciel pamie˛ ci,” p. 73. 5 K. Ball, Disciplining the Holocaust (Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2008), p. 195. M. Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York; London: Routledge, 1998), p. 254: “The wound and its strange attractions have become one way, that is, of locating the violence and the erotics, the erotic violence, at the crossing point of private fantasy and collective space.” . 6 Z. Posmysz, “Wakacje nad Adriatykiem,” in Z. Posmysz, Pasazerka. Wakacje nad Adriatykiem (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1980), p. 339.

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7 See the criticism of the phantasy of assuming the position of a Holocaust witness by artists and scholars in G. Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2004). 8 D. Laub, “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in S. Felman, D. Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York; London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 58–59. 9 L. Flem, The Final Reminder: How I Emptied My Parents’ House (London: Souvenir Press, 2005), p. 117: “[Grief] is not only pain and regret. Aggression, anger, rage are present too. It is difficult to admit: the dead and their offspring only supposed that they would awaken tender, respectful, agreeable feelings.” 10 Translated into English by Christopher Garbowski stories “Roe’s Little Brother” and “Waadi” are contained in: Contemporary Jewish Writing in Poland: An Anthology, eds. Anthony Polonsky, Monika Adamczyk-Grabowska (Lincoln, Nebraska; London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001). . 11 L. Lipski, Powrót, ed. A. Maciejowska (Paryz–Kraków: Instytut Literacki Kul­ . . tura i Instytut Ksia˛ zki, 2015), p. 269; later abbreviated as P. L. Lipski, Paryz ze . ´ złota. Teksty rozproszone (Izabelin: Swiat Ksia˛ zki, 2002); later abbreviated as PZ. 12 S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 439. S. Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” in: SE, Vol. 12, p. 225. 13 See I. Armstrong, “Thinking Affect,” in: The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Black­ well Publishers, 2000). 14 See J. McDougall, “Violence and Creativity,” The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review 22.2/1999, p. 211. 15 J. Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: Uni­ versity of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 80. 16 D. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ versity Press, 2014), p. 215. 17 M. Cuber, Trofea wyobraz´ni. O prozie Leo Lipskiego, p. 206. 18 R. Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton, New Jersey; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 41. 19 S. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in: SE, Vol. 14, pp. 249. 20 S. Freud, “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy,” in: SE, Vol. 10. 21 Leys, From Guilt to Shame, pp. 130–132. See E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, North Carolina; London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 37. 22 This element of Lipski’s work impressed Marian Pankowski, who writes that it will be recognized neither in Poland nor in the emigrant community. M. Pankowski, “Wolny od łzy,” Kultura 7–8/1957, p. 213. On pornography in the representations of the Holocaust, see C. J. Dean, The Fragility of Empathy: After the Holocaust (Ithaca, New York; London: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 31. 23 See Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” p. 247. 24 J. Rose, “Introduction: ‘Shame’,” in: J. Rose, On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psy­ choanalysis and the Modern World (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003), p. 8. 25 Wierzejska, “Retoryczna interpretacja autobiograficzna,” p. 415. 26 Cuber, Trofea wyobraz´ni, pp. 122–123. 27 See Dauksza, “Ekonomia afektu Leo Lipskiego,” p. 73. 28 Niziołek, Polski teatr Zagłady, p. 75. 29 Freud, “Uwagi na temat pewnego przypadku nerwicy natre˛ ctw,” p. 32. 30 Cuber, Trofea wyobraz´ni, p. 139; Dauksza, “Ekonomia afektu Leo Lipskiego.” 31 Leys, From Guilt to Shame, pp. 32–33. 32 Marta Cuber indicates it in Trofea wyobraz´ni, p. 146. 33 T. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 34 H. Grynberg, “Ekipa ‘Antygona’,” Współczesnos´c´ 22/1959.

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35 R. Sendyka, “Robinson w nie-miejscach pamie˛ ci,” Konteksty 2/2013, p. 100. 36 J. Sehn, “Sprawa os´wie˛ cimskiego lekarza SS J. P. Kremera,” Przegla˛ d Lekarski 1a/1962, pp. 49–61. 37 A. Ke˛ pin´ski, “Anus mundi,” Przegla˛ d Lekarski 1/1965, pp. 150–152. The article . later became a part of Ke˛ pin´ski’s book Rytm zycia (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1973). 38 W. Kielar, Anus Mundi, trans. S. Flatauer (New York: New York Times Books, 1980). The information on the title is included in Mieczysław Kieta’s introduction. 39 Ke˛ pin´ski, “Anus mundi,” p. 150. 40 Ke˛ pin´ski, “Anus mundi,” p. 152. 41 See G. Niziołek, “Krajobraz po wstre˛ cie. Los metafory,” Didaskalia 126/2015, pp. 17–18. 42 It would be interesting to add the “sphere of smell” to the analysis of Korn­ blumenblau from the first chapter; in certain moments, the accumulation of images and sounds of the latrines together with dirty bodies filling the frame may incite a synesthetic smell sensation. 43 M. Pankowski, Z Auschwitzu do Belzen. Przygody (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 2000), p. 21. . . 44 T. Zukowski, “Skatologiczny Chrystus. Wokół Rózewiczowskiej epifanii,” Pamie˛ tnik Literacki 90.1/1999. 45 B. Karwowska, Ciało. Seksualnos´c´. Obozy Zagłady (Kraków: TAiWPN Uni­ versitas, 2009), mostly the chapter on Grzesiuk and his Pie˛ c´ lat kacetu (Five Years of the Camp). See O. Orzeł Wargskog, “Granice godnos´ci. Granice litera­ tury,” in: Porzucic´ etyczna˛ arogancje˛ . Ku reinterpretacji podstawowych poje˛ c´ humanistyki w s´wietle wydarzenia Szoa, eds. B. A. Polak, T. Polak (Poznan´: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Wydziału Nauk Społecznych UAM, 2011). 46 B. Grunberger, “Study of Anal Object Relations,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis 4/1977, p. 106. . 47 Name choice was based on the article by Z. Ryn, S. Kłodzin´ski, “Na granicy zycia i s´mierci. Studium obozowego ‘muzułman´stwa’,” Przegla˛ d Lekarski 1/1983. 48 G. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), pp. 41–87. 49 G. Bataille, “The History of Eroticism,” in: G. Bataille, The Accursed Share, Vols. 2–3, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 79–80. 50 D. Anzieu, The Skin-Ego, trans. N. Segal (London: Karnac, 2016), p. 44. 51 See A. Maciejowska, “Słowo wste˛ pne,” in Lipski, Powrót, p. 11. See also the poems from the selection of “egotics:” “Moje stanowisko…” and “Ja” (PZ 47, 63). Hanna Gosk defines this aspect of Lipski’s work as Foucauldian self-writing: . H. Gosk, “Posłowie,” in: Lipski, Paryz ze złota, p. 194. 52 See Grunberger, “Study of Anal Object Relations,” p. 102. 53 Perhaps Piotrus´ and Batia’s relationship is the closest to mutual love in Lipski’s work, as Piotrus´ longs for Batia when he is locked in the toilet, and then leaves with her to wander around a foreign town. However, Batia still terrifies Piotrus´, and he is afraid that he will stop existing because of her, that he is at risk of being consumed by nothingness, “without a trace” (P 239). At the very begin­ ning, the narrator realizes that: “You cannot conquer her. She always slipped away by some childish stubbornness, just when you thought you had her. She was where no one searched for her. She had a talent for disappearing. She was the one who owned me, because she said grrrr, gritted her teeth, lied down helplessly, and you could do nothing to her” (P 226). Their relationship ends when their bond that choked and devastated Piotrus´ breaks, and he wants to go back to the toilet. Another perspective, with a bigger messianic (and not at all

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54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75

76

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simple) hope is provided by Adam Lipszyc in “Cze˛ s´c´ s´mierci. Bierny frankizm i czarna gnoza w Piotrusiu Leo Lipskiego,” pp. 349–351. We do not know whether the action of the story takes place during the war, or right after it: “It was in Palestine, in the Holy Land, in spring of 194…” (P 201). J. Chasseguet-Smirgel, “Aestheticism, Creation and Perversion,” in: J. Chasse­ guet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion (London: Free Association Books, 1998), pp. 92–93. J. Améry, “In the Waiting Room of Death,” in: Radical Humanism: Selected Essays, eds. and trans. S. Rosenfeld and S. P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 24 In the Polish translation of Kafka’s “Metamor­ phosis” Gregor Samsa turns into a cockroach, but entomologically, his status remains unclear: he could be a louse, which then became known from the Nazi posters: “Jews—louses—spotted typhus.” See Anzieu, The Skin-Ego, p. 45. C. Beebe Tarantelli, “Life within Death: Towards a Metapsychology of Cata­ strophic Psychic Trauma,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 84/2003, p. 924. J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Porter (New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), p. 150. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, p. 73. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, p. 83. S. Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” in: SE, Vol. 7, p. 159. J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: Psychoses, trans. R. Grigg (New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993), pp. 201. Seltzer, Serial Killers, p. 12. A. Sandauer, “Zapiski z martwego miasta,” in: A. Sandauer, Proza (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1983), p. 180. As Joanna Tokarska-Bakir indicates: “Regardless of their wealth, education, and culture (real hierarchy), the place that Jews occupied in Polish symbolic hierarchy was at the very bottom.” J. Tokarska-Bakir, Legendy o krwi. Antropologia prze­ sa˛ du (Warszawa: WAB, 2008), p. 589. Sandauer, “Zapiski z martwego miasta,” p. 180. Further quotes from p. 164. Tokarska-Bakir, Legendy o krwi, p. 592. See also S. L. Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, p. 155. Sandauer, “Zapiski z martwego miasta,” p. 164. O. Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buc­ zacz (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019). F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington (New York: Zone Books, 1963), p. 39. F. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C. Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967). That the Polish culture’s self-description contains no memory of colo­ nization, see J. Sowa, Fantomowe ciało króla (Kraków: Universitas, 2011), p. 443. . H. Gosk, “Sambor i okolica. Dwie opowies´ci geo(poli/poe)tyczne o tym, ze w . Galicji zyło sie˛ razem, ale osobno (przypadek Andrzeja Kus´niewicza i Artura Sandauera),” Teksty Drugie 6/2014; J. Wierzejska, “Wa˛ tki galicyjskie w twórc­ zos´ci Artura Sandauera (S´ mierc´ liberała, Zapiski z martwego miasta, Byłem…),” in: A. Sandauer. Pisarz, krytyk, historyk literatury, eds. K. Hryniewicz, A. S. Kowalczyk (Warszawa: Wydział Polonistyki UW, 2014). Sandauer, “Zapiski z martwego miasta,” pp. 179–180. . A. Sandauer, O sytuacji pisarza polskiego pochodzenia zydowskiego w XX wieku (Rzecz, która˛ nie ja powinienem był napisac´…) (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1982), pp. . 71–72. See E. Janicka, T. Zukowski, Przemoc filosemicka? Nowe polskie narracje . o Zydach po roku 2000 (Warszawa: Instytut Badan´ Literackich PAN, 2016). See M. Wołk, Głosy labiryntu: od S´ mierci w Wenecji do Monizy Clavier (Torun´: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2009), pp. 90–91.

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77 Wołk, Głosy labiryntu: od S´ mierci w Wenecji do Monizy Clavier, p. 93.

78 Sandauer, “Zapiski z martwego miasta,” pp. 204–205.

79 In a story Sandauer wrote right after the war, “Pamie˛ tnik bez sensu,” in: San­ dauer, Proza, the protagonist does not manage to escape the sewers. It seems that this abjectional non-place haunts the writer’s work. . 80 See M. Cobel-Tokarska, Bezludna wyspa, nora, grób. Wojenne kryjówki Zydów w okupowanej Polsce (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IPN, 2012). 81 Sandauer, “Zapiski z martwego miasta,” p. 186. 82 H. Segal, “A Necrophilic Phantasy,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34/ 1953, p. 100. . 83 S. Mrozek, “Moniza Clavier,” in: Polska nowela współczesna, eds. T. Bujnicki, J. Kajtoch (Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1987, Vol. 2), p. 336. 84 M. Janion, Płacz generała. Eseje o wojnie (Warszawa: Sic!, 1998), pp. 283–284. 85 Drach is a different story, mainly focusing on Silesian identity. Nevertheless, it shares many of the structural constructions with the other books as Silesian identity appears both in Wieczny Grunwald and in Morfina. 86 S. Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” in: SE, Vol. 14, p. 296. 87 Sz. Twardoch, Wieczny Grunwald. Powies´c´ zza kon´ca czasów (Kraków: Wydaw­ nictwo Literackie, 2013), pp. 106–107. 88 J. M. Rymkiewicz, Kinderszenen (Warsaw: Sic!, 2008), p. 6. Further quotes from pp. 15, 16. 89 Rymkiewicz, Kinderszenen, p. 156. There is little written in English about this influential conservative Polish writer. For more, see U. Blacker, “The Return of the Jew in Polish Culture,” in: Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond: Disturbing Pasts, eds. S. Bird, M. Fulbrook, J. Wagner, C. Wienand (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). . 90 E. Janicka, “Mroczny przedmiot poza˛ dania. O ‘Kinderszenen’ raz jeszcze— inaczej,” Pamie˛ tnik Literacki 4/2010, p. 79. 91 C. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 26. Twardoch cites Schmitt explicitly in Król, p. 285 92 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, pp. 48–49. 93 Later on, Melanie Klein writes about a paranoid-schizoid position dominated by the splitting of bad and good aspects of a mother and primal fears of death. “The psychological principles of infant analysis,” International Journal of Psy­ choanalysis 8/1927, pp. 25–37. This is an early article by Klein, a full description of what she calls the paranoid-schizoid position appears in an article she wrote after the Second World War, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” Interna­ tional Journal of Psychoanalysis 27/1927, pp. 99–110. 94 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 27.

95 Twardoch, Wieczny Grunwald, p. 108.

96 See M. Janion, Niesamowita słowian´szczyzna. Fantazmaty literatury (Kraków:

Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2006), p. 267. 97 K. Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans. S. Conway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 183. Jonathan Littell makes the same argument in his inspired by Theweleit essay on the Bel­ gian fascist Léon Degrelle, J. Littell, Le Sec et l’Humide (Paris: Gallimard, 2008). . 98 See T. Zukowski, “Ustanowienie nacjonalistycznego pola dyskursu społecznego. Spór mie˛ dzy partia˛ a Kos´ciołem w roku. 1966,” in: Rok 1966. PRL na zakre˛ cie, eds. K. Chmielewska, G. Wołowiec, T. Zukowski (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2014). 99 Polska Kronika Filmowa, July 20, 1960 (PKF 30B/60). 100 See M. Haltof, Polish Film and the Holocaust (New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012).

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109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118

119 120 121 122 123 124 125

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W. S´ mieja, Hegemonia i trauma. Literatura wobec dominuja˛ cych fikcji me˛ skos´ci (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2016), p. 224. J. Tabaszewska, “Zepsuty afekt,” in: Ciała zdruzgotane, ciała oporne. Afektywne lektury XX wieku, eds. A. Lipszyc and M. Zaleski (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2015), p. 289. M. Koza, “‘Nieja oczy otwieram’. Etyczne czytanie i Morfina Szczepana Twar­ docha,” Teksty Drugie, 4/2016, p. 350. Sz. Twardoch, Morfina (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2012), p. 37. Later abbreviated as M. L. Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London; New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 22ff. Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. 1, pp. 17–18. Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. 1, pp. 63–100. An analogical construction of female characters appears in Twardoch’s The King of Warsaw. Salome-Ryfka and Helena-Emilia, including the women who belon­ ged to another man which the protagonist must fight against in an Oedipus struggle: Iga-Anna Ziembin´ska. M. Cuber, Trofea wyobraz´ni, pp. 76–80. S. I. Witkiewicz, Nienasycenie (Warszawa: PIW, 1992), p. 50. M. Bien´czyk, “Czy romantyzm jest odpowiedzialny za brak psychoanalizy w kulturze polskiej?,” in: Nasze pojedynki o romantyzm, eds. M. Bien´czyk, D. Siwicka (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 1995), p. 33. J. Chasseguet-Smirgel, “Reflections on Fetishism,” in: Creativity and Perversion (London: Free Association Books, 1998), p. 82. See also J. McDougall, Plea for a Measure of Abnormality (London; New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 34. A. Bielik-Robson, “‘Morfina’ albo psychoanaliza polskos´ci,” Dziennik Opinii, January 6, 2013, Web journal: https://krytykapolityczna.pl/felietony/agata-bie lik-robson/morfina-albo-psychoanaliza-polskosci/. Twardoch, Król, p. 264; a clear allusion to Paul Celan’s poem “Todesfuge.” C. Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. G. Schwab, E. Hilfstein (Westport, Con­ necticut; London: Greenwood Press, 1996). Sz. Twardoch, Drach (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2014). S. Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: MIT Press, 1992), p. 105. K. Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 2: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, trans. E. Carter; Ch. Turner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 211– 212; see also K. Theweleit, Object-Choice (All you need is love…: On Mating Strategies & a Fragment of a Freud Biography) (London: Verso Books, 1994), pp. 13–14. See E. Ostrowska, “Matki Polki i ich synowie. Kilka uwag o genezie obrazów kobiecos´ci i me˛ skos´ci w kulturze polskiej,” in: Gender. Konteksty, ed. M. Rad­ kiewicz (Krakow: Rabid 2004). Tabaszewska, “Zepsuty afekt,” p. 280. F. Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” trans. Ronald Speirs, in: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, eds. R. Geuss, R. Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 23. See A. Bielik-Robson, Another Finitude: Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). S. Freud, “An Autobiographical Study,” in: SE, Vol. 20, p. 57. A. Green, Key Ideas for a Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Misrecognition and Recognition of the Unconscious, trans. A. Weller (London; New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 215–216. S. Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” in: SE, Vol. 19, p. 57.

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126 Sz. Twardoch, “Pusty stryczek. O ‘Wieszaniu’ Rymkiewicza,” in: Spór o Rym­ kiewicza, ed. Tomasz Rowin´ski (Warszawa: Fronda, 2012), p. 30. 127 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Reflections on Fetishism, p. 87. 128 Rymkiewicz, Kinderszenen, p. 140, 228. 129 Freud writes further on: “The cannibal, as we know, has remained at this standpoint; he has a devouring affection for his enemies and only devours people of whom he is fond.” S. Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” in: SE, Vol. 18, p. 105. 130 K. Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York; London: Routle­ dge, 1996), p. 23. See also M. Bal, “Looking at Love: An Ethics of Vision,” Diacritics 27.1/1997. . 131 Janicka, “Mroczny przedmiot poza˛ dania. O ‘Kinderszenen’ raz jeszcze—inaczej,” pp. 79–80. 132 This is an important allusion to the title of a poignant essay by Leyb Goldin found in Ringelblum’s Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto. The essay concerns the experience of hunger. It was first written in Yiddish, then translated into Polish as “Kronika jednej doby” (One Day Chronicle). The literal translation from Yiddish reads “Between Life and Death.” See L. Goldin, “Chronicle of a Single Day,” trans. Elinor Robinson, in: Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto: Writing Our History, ed. David G Roskies (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2019). 133 J. M. Rymkiewicz, The Final Station: Umschlagplatz, trans. N. Taylor (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1994), p. 200–201. 134 See M. Fulbrook, “Complicity and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe,” Jewish ´ Historical Studies 53/3.2021; A. Mach, Swiadkowie s´wiadectw. Postpamie˛ c´ zag­ łady w polskiej literaturze najnowszej (Torun´: Wydawnictwo UMK, 2016), p.176. 135 C. Mouffe, “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?,” Social Research 66.3/1999. 136 J. Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done to: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 217; D. Fassin, R. Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma, p. 284. See also: A. C. Bull, H. L. Hansen, “On agonistic memory,” Memory Studies 9.4/2015. 137 See: The Holocaust/Genocide Template in Eastern Europe, ed. L. Radonic´ (London: Routledge, 2020); Andrea Peto˝, “The Illiberal Memory Politics in Hungary,” Journal of Genocide Research 24.2/2022. 138 W. Kula, Rozdziałki (Warszawa: University of Warsaw Press, 1996), p. 213. This entry comes from the late 1970s. 139 Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done to, p. 229.

Bibliography Anzieu, D. The Skin-Ego, trans. N. Segal. London: Karnac, 2016.

Ball, K. Disciplining the Holocaust. Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2008.

Benjamin, J. Beyond Doer and Done to: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the

Third. London: Routledge, 2018. Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. Creativity and Perversion. London: Free Association Books, 1998. Cuber, M. Trofea wyobraz´ni. O prozie Leo Lipskiego. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uni­ wersytetu S´ la˛ skiego, 2011. Da˛ browska, M. Noce i dnie (Nights and Days) Warsaw: Jakub Mortkowicz, 1931. Dauksza, A. “Ekonomia afektu Leo Lipskiego,” in: Pamie˛ c´ i afekty, eds. Z. Budre­ wicz, R. Sendyka, R. Nycz. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2014.

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Freud, S. “Mourning and Melancholia,” in: S. Freud, On the History of the PsychoAnalytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, trans. J. Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1964. Grunberger, B. “Study of Anal Object Relations,” International Review of PsychoAnalysis 4/1977. Janion, M. Płacz generała. Eseje o wojnie. Warszawa: Sic!, 1998. Klein, M. “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” International Journal of Psycho­ analysis 27/1927. Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Porter. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. Leys, R. From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After. Princeton, New Jersey and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. . Lipski, L. Paryz ze złota. Teksty rozproszone, ed. H. Gosk. Izabelin: S´ wiat Literacki, 2002. . Lipski, L. Powrót, ed. A. Maciejowska. Paryz and Kraków: Instytut Literacki Kultura . i Instytut Ksia˛ zki, 2015. Rymkiewicz, J. M. The Final Station: Umschlagplatz, trans. N. Taylor. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1994. Rymkiewicz, J. M. Kinderszenen. Warsaw: Sic!, 2008. Sandauer, A. “Zapiski z martwego miasta,” in: Proza. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1983. Schmitt, C. The Concept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Theweleit, K. Male Fantasies, vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans. S. Conway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Tokarska-Bakir, J. Legendy o krwi. Antropologia przesa˛ du. Warszawa: WAB, 2008. Twardoch, Sz. Morfina. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2012. Twardoch, Sz. Wieczny Grunwald. Powies´c´ zza kon´ca czasów. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2013. Twardoch, Sz. Drach. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2014. Twardoch, Sz. King of Warsaw: A Novel. Seattle, Washington: Amazon Crossing, 2020.

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This chapter describes a particular post-traumatic phenomenon: the hatred that perpetrators ascribe to their victims while retaining the conviction of own innocence. Cruelty and vengefulness shift and roles reverse: the perpetrator becomes the victim, and the victim becomes the perpetrator. The more harm is done, the more despicable become the harmed. In Precarious Life, Judith Butler reminds us that in some cases “recognition of another person’s frailty causes a rise of violence, noticing a vulnerability to physical harm in a certain group of others evokes in us a desire to destroy it.”1 In the framework of the perverse Polish memory of the Holocaust, the violence that Jews suffered from ethnic Poles transforms into the opposite: there appear images of Jews coming back from the dead to haunt the innocent Poles. The perverse nature of those phantasies stems from a clear splitting into ethnic Poles and Polish Jews, the good and the bad, innocence and cruelty. Moreover, the perverse nature stems from the fact that any discussion about the mass character of the crime committed against Jews during and after the Holocaust encounters no understanding or sense of responsibility, only anger. For example, one of the conservative historians contests the thesis that Polish antisemitism was the reason for murdering Jews returning to their homes and leaving their current hideouts. He astonishingly argues—and he is not alone in this explanation— that the true underlying reasons were following: the actions of Jewish Communists, who fought to establish a revolu­ tionary Marxist-Leninist regime in Poland; the deeds of Jewish avengers, who sought to exact extrajudicial justice on Poles who supposedly harmed Jews during the German occupation; and the efforts of the bulk of Jewish community members, who attempted to reclaim their property confiscated by the Germans and subsequently taken over by the Poles.2 We may consider the whole excerpt as an example of how the perverse Polish memory works; it establishes the “correct positions” in Polish-Jewish rela­ tions: Polish Jews are the perpetrators and the ethnic Poles are their victims.3 This chapter traces all of the mentioned “justifications” for the anti-Jewish violence. I inquire into the reasons for the fantastic creations of Jews-specters DOI: 10.4324/9781003330035-5

Sadism: Drastic Returns of the Dead 137 . . that appear to reclaim stolen property in Noc Zywych Zydów by Igor Osta­ chowicz, take revenge on perpetrators in Demon by Marcin Wrona, and to establish a communist regime in Zac´ma by Ryszard Bugajski.

We Will Not Forgive You for What We Did to You4 In the short story “The Cemetery Lady,” a part of the famous book Medal­ lions (1946) by Zofia Nałkowska, the narrator gives voice to an accidentally encountered woman, who describes the situation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in the following way: “We all live right by the wall, you see, so we can hear what goes on there. Now we all know. They shoot people in the streets. Burn them in their homes. And at night, such shrieks and cries. No one can eat or sleep. We can’t stand it. You think it’s pleasant listening to all that?” She glanced around warily as if the graves of the empty cemetery were listening. “They’re human beings after all, so you have to feel sorry for them,” she explained. “But they despise us more than they do the Germans.”5 Nałkowska created a character that embodies the attitude of a Polish bystander who tries to accommodate two opposing thoughts, two mutually exclusive feelings; in her short statement, we find both (trace amounts of) compassion and vengeful satisfaction.6 The conviction that Jews who die from the hands of Germans despise ethnic Poles neatly conceals one’s proper feel­ ings of hatred and joy from the fact that the Jews are disappearing. This procedure makes extermination more justifiable and the guilt caused by one’s own passivity vanishes. Moreover, this attitude is in no way fictional, as the above fragment refers to a leaflet distributed on the streets of Warsaw on August 11, 1942, in which Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, a writer, catholic activist, and co-founder of the . Council to Aid Jews with the Government Delegation for Poland, called Zegota, protested against German violence directed at Jews. In the text that later came to be known as “Protest,” we find the fol­ lowing fragment, which is often omitted due to its controversial nature: Therefore, we, the Polish Catholics, speak up. Our feelings toward Jews have not changed. We do not stop thinking of them as political, economic, and ideological enemies of Poland. What is more, we are aware that they despise us more than they do the Germans, that they make us responsible for their misery. Why, on what basis—this shall remain the secret of the Jewish soul but is a fact continually corroborated. Nonetheless, the awareness of those feelings does not relieve us of the duty to condemn the crime.7 The text of “Protest” and other ambiguous activities of Kossak-Szczucka as a writer have already been discussed at length.8 I will focus on such a

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positioning of the Poles–Jews–Germans triad, in which although Jewish hatred should focus on Germans, it is aimed at ethnic Poles, who are sup­ posedly innocent and even noble, as they are tormented by compassion and remorse. This phenomenon will be finally codified in “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto” (1987), in which Jan Błon´ski claims that God stopped Poles from partaking in the Holocaust.9 Thus, the “obsession with innocence”, diagnosed by Polish anthropologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, focuses on pro­ jecting their own hatred on the Jews. The obsession manifests in how ethnic Poles listen to people talk about their wrongdoings toward their Jewish neighbors first with amazement, then with outrage.10 Jews are to mistakenly seek vengeance on ethnic Poles for the German crimes. The structure of the conservative Polish memory is based on a splitting (guilt–innocence) and projection of hatred. Therefore, any representation of the Holocaust in which the Jewish victims rise from the dead to seek violent revenge under­ mine the conservative Polish identity.

The Holocaust Zombies . . In 2013, Igor Ostachowicz’s novel Noc zywych Zydów (Night of the Living Jews) was nominated for the Nike Literary Award. Even though the book raised much controversy, its success stemmed from the fact that it was published on the “bloodlands,” about which Ostachowicz writes: “this entire damned latitude in its width and length is thoroughly soaked with pain and fear …. All those moans and screams, those tears and blood, some are gone, others wander, every particle here is tainted with evil.”11 However, what could the “living dead” that emerge from this ground mean for the Polish memory of the Holocaust? Night of the Living Jews can probably be most accurately described as a controlled scandal. Tabloids described the book with outrage, which one could expect, for Ostachowicz was the Prime Minister’s counselor at the time: How can a work that “describes probably all the possible types of necrophi­ lia” win a literary award?12 Other reviewers received the book positively, praising the style and accepting the presence of Jewish zombies, albeit emphasizing the book is about “something else,” like a new, solidarity-based model of Polish-Jewish relations. The novel describes an invasion of the Jewish dead who leave the basements of Warsaw’s Muranów district, where they were buried. The nameless protagonist, “a floor tile layer with a uni­ versity degree,” had no previous associations with the Jewish culture besides having an antisemite for a father. One day, he walks down to the basement of his block of flats in Muranów, Warsaw’s district literally built on top of the Warsaw Ghetto’s ruins, where he encounters the Jewish zombies. The prota­ gonist initially tries to escape, convinced the zombies intend to kill him. However, he soon finds that the zombies need him and decides to help them find rest. He constantly hesitates between compassion for the innocent victims and the desire to lead a peaceful life. The zombies try to adapt to the Polish society, they try to mimic contemporary Poles by going to shopping malls,

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buying clothes and consumer electronics. The protagonist seeks to help them “find salvation” but it remains unclear what he must do to achieve this goal. Eventually, the Jewish zombies’ presence on Warsaw streets results in a social crisis when Polish neofascists unite and revolt against them and begin to destroy everything Jewish and dead in the Polish social body. The novel con­ cludes with a great battle in which the protagonist commands the Jewish zombie forces—and dies. Ultimately, we do not learn who wins the struggle and whether the dead Jews are saved. The story is a variation on canonical motifs from Hollywood horror films about zombies, which the author seems to know very well. Ostachowicz plays with a whole set of clichés, motifs, and figures borrowed from popular American horror pictures. Irony clearly is the novel’s most important literary device, manifested for example when characters talk about Michael Jackson’s music video Thriller or through humorous allusions to current Polish politics. Nonetheless, the zombies are not horrifying, or at least, not all the time. They can speak and even have their own needs and feelings, albeit automated and rigid. It is also a rather surprising twist on the original zombie narratives as readers actually sympathize with the zombies, who can be perceived as the victims. It is as if the zombies were almost-like-us, while the horror through­ out the novel is carefully kept in check. Why would the Holocaust zombies appear in modern Poland? The explicit justification for their appearance given by Night of the Living Jews is simple: the Jewish victims of the Holocaust have been forgotten. Ethnic Polish war victims are “stuffed with candles, flowers, prayers, and remembered,” while the Jews are not so lucky, argues the narrator: Only those who are forgotten crawl out of their basements, those who have no families, nobody will contemplate their grave. People need a little warmth or interest after death, especially after a violent one. And when the whole family—mom and distant cousins included—is six feet under, all your friends likewise, well, you cannot just lie like that … You get up, brush yourself, and look around .. (NZZ, 203). This certainly recalls the dilemma of Holocaust survivors: how to make sense of one’s survival after the loss of close ones and their entire personal universe? It also tells us more about a very specific social construction, in which not only do some people not count as living, but they also do not count as dead.13 Thus, they require nothing, not even remembrance.

Living on the Cemetery . In her photographic work Miejsce nieparzyste (The Odd Place), Elzbieta Janicka examines the problem of absent graves for the Jewish victims from another perspective. The Odd Place is a series of large square photographs—

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over one meter high and wide—exhibited in 2003–2004 in Atlas Sztuki Gal­ lery in Łódz´. At first, the photographs surprise with minimalism; they present blank white spaces and black frames that separate them from the gallery walls. After a closer examination, viewers notice the inscription “AGFA” in the frame, which suggests that these are in fact photographs, and title plaques . make one realize that the photographs show the air over Majdanek, Bełzec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Chełmno on Ner, and Os´wie˛ cim. Moreover, the plaques provide information on how many people were killed in the gas chambers at each camp. Explaining this form of commemoration, the artist said that during her visits to memorial sites and museums, she could not decide at what she should direct her camera lens to in order to avoid slipping into con­ ventionalized and cliché forms of the Holocaust representation.14 The frames of the large photographs were made from pieces of film inscri­ bed with the name of the manufacturer “AGFA,” which was one of the companies of the IG Farben conglomerate that owned the factory in which worked the Auschwitz-Monowitz sub-camp prisoners. The caption and frames (parergon) position the empty space of the photograph in the realm of death. In this perspective, The Odd Place concerns the disappearance of the Holocaust victims and the vanishing traces of that past. The crematoriums were meant to conceal the evidence of the Nazi atrocities, as Didi-Huberman says in Images in Spite of All: “To murder was not nearly enough, because the dead were never sufficiently “obliterated” in the eyes of the “Final Solu­ tion.”15 The empty skies in Janicka’s work evoke thoughts of incinerated bodies and the ashes that floated in the air to eventually vanish. The Odd Place highlights that the Jewish dead disappeared and are no longer here, even the smoke rising above the crematoriums is no longer there, albeit they remain omnipresent, like the air. In this way, the exhibition reproduced an image recurring in Tadeusz Konwicki’s 1971 film How Far Away, How Near: a traditionally dressed Jew—a figure of a world lost yet still weighing over Polish memory—flies over the Polish landscape. When we look up, we can also see the same thing that Paul Celan notices in “Death Fugue” (1947), his most famous poem about the Holocaust, namely “a grave in the clouds:” Black milk of morning we drink you at night we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at dusktime we drink and drink then scoop out a grave in the clouds where it’s roomy to lie.16 The title of Janicka’s work—which shows an aberrant grave into which the victims are shoved—alludes to the laws introduced at the University of Warsaw by antisemitic student organizations of the interwar period. The laws were meant not only to reduce the number of Jews among the students but also to humiliate them by assigning them specific places in lecture halls (“the odd places”). The ghetto benches were supposed to irreversibly separate Polish and Jewish students, following the “Doctrine of the Polish Majority”17

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that pushed Jews to their own, excluded areas. The Jews return as suffocating, omnipresent air that chokes Poles during social crises. We may find such a testimony in the first stanza of the poem “Post Mortem” (1969) written by Jan Darowski, after the events of the 1968 Polish political crisis and the last large expulsion of Jews from Poland: With David’s star, they went under our ground poisoned the air with the dioxide of deathly Psalms we must suffocate, we, witnesses to murder, holding the executioner’s hand we must walk half-bent through history.18 We may regard Odd Place and the “graves in the clouds” as a photographic negative of the Muranów-district basements from which zombies crawl out in Night of the Living Jews. By the principles of opposition and com­ plementarity, high above and deep under the ground, through the lack and excess of presence, the dead frame the Polish memory of the Holocaust vic­ tims, suffocating and overwhelming the witnesses with their brutal death. Jewish graves in Poland seem invisible. However, according to photo­ grapher Łukasz Baksik, they are everywhere—if we only know how to look for them. His photography project Matzevot for Everyday Use is a collection of photographs of Jewish tombstones reused as materials for barns, side­ walks, walls, even playground sandboxes. Baksik shows that the people living in Poland that stayed at the scene of the crime are often unaware they are surrounded by Jewish graves, even if these were “recycled.” Baksik reveals how often the everyday gaze slides across the surface of city walls, failing to notice the embedded matzevot. When asked about his method of discovering the tombstones, Baksik states: “after all this experience, when­ ever I see sandstone slabs of a certain size I can state with high certainty whether they are matzevot or not. Indeed, it is a kind of detective work.”19 Baksik demonstrates the mechanism of denial: the images of Jewish history exist on the surface but not necessarily at first glance. Ostachowicz’s novel Night of the Living Jews reveals a similar process: the Jewish zombies remained in a state of potential invisibility for a long time, suppressed and hidden in the basements of the Muranów district, until suddenly they become visible and flood the streets of Warsaw. Withdrawal from funeral rites results in a social crisis that creates phan­ tasmagorical images of an invasion of the living dead. However, in Night of the Living Jews, it is solely a Polish crisis that stems from postwar Jewish graves and death sites, for which no one cared. Like in Baksik’s photography project, the Germans stay out of the picture or serve as a frame, like in Janicka’s project, which in general links the ethnic Poles to the Germans in antisemitic violence (“holding the executioner’s hand” in Jan Darowski’s poem). Living on murder sites creates a crisis related to the suspension of the life–death cycle: the living cannot live normally and the dead cannot leave their world of the past.

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Slavoj Žižek speaks about the importance of the figure of the living dead for the social memory in Looking Awry, in which he suggests its captivating prefiguration in Sophocles’s Antigone. Žižek follows the famous analysis of the tragedy formulated by Jacques Lacan in his The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, in which the latter situates Antigone in a peculiar state between two deaths: she is both non-existing socially because of Creon’s law, and then she is buried alive. Lacan continues to argue that Antigone represents “a life that is about to turn into certain death, a death lived by anticipation, a death that crosses over into the sphere of life, a life that moves into the realm of death”20. Thus, Antigone formally dead, although she acts on stage as if she did not know it; her punishment is to be “suspended in the zone between life and death”21. In this sense, Žižek predicts Ostachowicz’s novel when he states that: the two great traumatic events of the Holocaust and the gulag are, of course, exemplary cases of the return of the dead in the twentieth century. The shadows of their victims will continue to chase us as “living dead” until we give them a decent burial until we integrate the trauma of their death into our historical memory.22

Memory Invasions There is no exaggeration in Žižek’s claim that the zombie is a figure essential for mass culture. As Colin Davis empathically states: “ghosts, dead, and undead walk among us now as much as ever.”23 The figure of a zombie may indeed share what Lacan characterizes in Antigone as “unbearable splendor,” a “quality that both attracts us and startles us.”24 A zombie is an odd entity, caught between a subject and an object: on the one hand, they are endowed with some agency, on the other merely as an animated cadaver.25 Zombies exist in-between, in the odd void between life and death: after the first death—social and symbolic—and before the potential second one that will put a stop to the automatic movements of an animated corpse. Thus, zombies are ambivalent, liminal figures that appear due to “a traumatic incident or injury—typically a confrontation with massive rupture or collapse of the social order.”26 The first stories about these creatures come from Haiti, where they may mean both slaves used by magicians to work in the field and the slave revolution during the anti-colonial revolts. However, their presence in popular culture had truly begun with George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead; other directors quickly jumped on the wagon of the film’s suc­ cess, and later Romero returned to the motif with new films: Land of the Dead (2005) and Diary of the Dead (2008).27 Night of the Living Dead actually established a new genre, in which zombie invasions work as an aftermath of historical traumas.28 The sphere of the dead of Muranów basements intertwines with the world of the living at the very beginning of Ostachowicz’s novel with the protago­ nist’s descent. At that moment, the protagonist becomes contaminated and is

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no longer entirely a member of the living world. The protagonist excludes himself from society, when against common sense and self-interest, he gives in to the urge to help the zombies.29 The protagonist is contaminated with death and moves to the side of the dead, which is also a typical motive for horror stories, even though it refers to historical experiences as well. Kornel Filipo­ . wicz’s short 1947 story “Krajobraz, który przezył s´mierc´” (The Landscape That Survived Death)—based on the experiences of the painter Jonasz Stern—juxtaposes occupation-time stories of a Jewish couple: the man that by chance survived a mass execution escapes from the pit filled with the dead while the woman hides on the Aryan side to gradually lose all hope for sal­ vation, eventually condemning herself to death by returning to the ghetto.30 In the short story, Filipowicz depicts bitterly possible dynamics of survival and juxtaposes two directions: from death to life and from life to death. Cul­ tural historian Jacek Leociak phenomenologically describes the experience of escaping from mass murder sites, explaining how surrounding corpses shield the survivors from the perpetrators’ gaze at first, later to become an obstacle: Survivors escaped the grave with great difficulty and great effort. Not only did they have to avoid being seen by their watchful executioners and fight their own exhaustion (after all, they were injured and in shock), they also had to overcome the resistance of the grave itself, along with the bodies filling it. It seems that in order to get out, they had to wage a kind of battle with the corpses. Roles were unexpectedly reversed; the corpses that had saved them, by providing cover, were now in the way, blocking their path, as if they wanted no living person to escape.31 Leociak mentions that the would-be victims of the execution, seeking help from the local peasants, were often treated like demons and chased away with crucifixes and curses: One could not cross the border between life and death with impunity. One had to pay for it with bitterness that comes with useless knowledge, with alienation, and with the stigma of madness. Folk imagination clas­ sified these survivors as specters and lunatics—as dangerous beings, since they had dwelled at the border of two worlds, in between.32 Zombies share with other supernatural creatures, ghosts, and demons the situation of a victim, but they differ in their corporeality and materiality: they are bodies brought back to life by old desires, which attack the living.33 In one fragment of Night of the Living Jews, the meticulously controlled irony collapses under the burden of horror. The main enemy of the Jews’ rescuer, Devil, shares with the protagonist an image of Auschwitz that explicitly resembles a sadomasochist spectacle. In the concentration camp, the Jewish prisoners joined by the protagonist are forced to perform mass orgies: men dripping with every bodily fluid stand in line to caged women, while everyone

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Sadism: Drastic Returns of the Dead .. is being beaten in a frenzy (NZZ 141). In this image, Jews are suspended in a constant, self-driven entanglement of sexuality and death. It resembles the Israeli stalag, a genre of erotic novels whose creation is dated at the time of the Eichmann process: the first confrontation of the newly created nation with the Holocaust. In the stalag genre, the main element of the plot is the sexual violence of prison guards against the prisoners.34 The forbidden violent sexual relations are simultaneously an exception and an ideal model of Nazism and the Holocaust experience.35 In Night of the Living Jews, the transformed camp scene constitutes the central element of the novel, all the more so because the protagonist is soon dragged into another fantasy by Devil. Tor­ tured by an SS officer, he looks through a drain in the room that is probably a gas chamber: I looked, heard, and felt with all my senses and thought with every gyrus and grey cell—nothing. … Dull fear spread across everything I am, I was unable to understand, name, or in a way known to me consume this nothing, which with unusual intensity triggered in me feelings of nos­ talgia, the will to live, and the opposite of “nothing” .. (NZZ 144). The “absolute nothing” that absorbs the protagonist seems to be the secret of the Holocaust, as if eternally entangled in torture and sexual violence. This void erases the temporal and identity separation, the Jewish victims never free themselves from this trap, even after their death. The physical pain is gone but not the torture: Only those with a flaw stayed below Warsaw, while the shocked appeared in large numbers. Unable to get a grip; some—angry at God—do not want to move anymore, for different reasons; some are afraid of under­ standing everything—a terrible thing; or even worse—of being forced to forgive. There are also those that worked in the police or the Sonder­ kommando, they have different reasons, either way: all are trapped. .here (NZZ 87). Helping the Jewish zombies, the protagonist forgets that fulfilling the wishes of the undead is rarely simple and idyllic, but it is certainly always bloody. The most interesting character among the zombies is the only non-Jew of the group: an ethnic Polish surgeon who lost his Jewish fiancée during the war. Envious of his position, another physician reported the fiancée in hiding to the Gestapo, who killed her after months of torture. Following her death, the surgeon made a vow to take revenge on the Nazis and ethnic Poles who cooperated with them. His activity was not interrupted even by his death in the Warsaw Uprising: he remained alive because of the hatred and sadistic desire for revenge. In a similar—perhaps even more literal—gesture as the Jewish avengers from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), the

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doctor physically scars his victims by circumcising men, symbolically equat­ ing them with their Jewish victims. The doctor is a liminal character that appears at the beginning and near the end of the novel, forever insatiable in mechanically torturing, bleeding out, and killing his victims. Like the figure of Antigone in Lacan’s analysis, the doctor exemplifies the rigidity and mechanical repetitiveness of the death drive that clings to the status quo without any possibility of change.36 By means of the violence inflicted through symbolic castration, the doctor reverses his condition as a victim and becomes a hero, transforming passivity into activity and humiliation into bloody revenge.37 The Polish war victims in the novel do not rise from the dead as zombies. Ostachowicz explains this situation by stating that although the Second World War was equally brutal to them: Poles are fattened with candles, flowers, prayers, memories. Even if someone still lacks something, because something bothers them, they still want to run away from the cemetery as far as possible from all those assemblies for the dead, ceremonial masses, speeches, commemoration, and cannon salutes. . . (NZZ 203) Ethnic Poles live in uninterrupted contact with their dead, to whom they devote an overabundance of funeral rites, so the dead do not feel the need to flood the city with their presence to remind of their existence. However, when Žižek postulates the burial of the “living dead,” he omits the fact that in popular culture zombies cannot be buried, they resist resting in grave. Hence the lack of a definite ending to the novel. The protagonist dies in the final battle between good (the Jewish zombies and their allies) and bad (Polish fascists), and the reader learns not what happens later. A similar situation may be encountered in Sylwia Chutnik’s short story “Muranooo” (2014),38 in which in a Muranów district basement a group of children meet a ghost of a Jewish boy who seeks his long-lost toy car. The boy begs his new friends for help, and when they find the toy, he asks them to “live his life a little,”39 which was suddenly interrupted when “mum was buried, dad was buried, the world disappeared five times, and they just ground it and assembled over again.”40 Sylwia Chutnik’s ironical short story concludes with a seemingly optimistic and warm element but the boy’s ghost does not disappear when the adventure is over; he is not gone after his request is fulfilled: “He plays happily with the nonexistent car. He rides it in all directions, all over the basement that they buried again.”41 Because of memory and that he was noticed, the ghost is definitely more peaceful, but it does not imply he will no longer haunt the Muranów district. In Ostachowicz’s novel, the zombies reveal an excess of life: a metaphor for such a perverse memory. The more of them that are killed, the more emerge to the surface. It is a horrifying scene as if from a nightmare that we may

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recall from Lady Macbeth’s gesture: the longer she washes her hands, the more blood appears on them. This phenomenon happens, because obsessive and compulsive rites—even funerals—cannot erase the source of guilt and fear of bloody vengeance. It would be easy to dismiss Ostachowicz’s novel as juvenile and belonging to pulp fiction. However, the usage of the “living dead” metaphor for the Jews sentenced to death during the Holocaust stems from the wartime itself. In his book Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War written in the Warsaw Ghetto, Emanuel Ringelblum describes Jews as “the deceased on leave,” whose property can therefore be freely appropriated.42 In his war diary, Calel Perechodnik described bluntly his experiences while hiding among ethnic Poles, often not holding back on his feelings of resentment and hatred: he precisely captured the idea that he is referred to by his neighbours as a “living corpse”. If he is treated as dead, then there is no problem in “inheriting” his belongings.43 Both Ringelblum and Perechodnik did not survive the Holocaust, so they could not experience how dangerous it was after the war for the fraction of the surviving commu­ nity to return to their homes and to attempt to retrieve their property. They knew, however, how risky it was even during the war and how lack of the supplies diminished the chances for survival.44 Perechodnik was aware as well that treating Jews as the “living corpses” not only made possible doing whatever one pleases with them but also evoked a strong fear of revenge on their ethnic Polish neighbors: Apparently, the human soul reacts differently in the presence of a live person to when dealing with “live corpses.” Then it seems he [the man that kept Perechodnik’s belongings in safekeeping and now refuses to give them back] recites a prayer that the live corpse should change into a real one and stop bothering “decent people.”45

Bloody Vengeance Published one year after the publication of Jan Gross and Irena Grudzin´ska­ Gross’s highly debated Golden Harvest dealing with the pervasive phenom­ enon in Poland of plundering the camp grounds in the postwar period by local populations, Ostachowicz’s novel begins with the following sequence: I was born and live in the city of gold diggers. They came here once from all over the scorched plain. Diggers of golden teeth and silver spoons. They were drawn here by the smoke of the ruins and the smell of rich bourgeois’ bodies who had lost their minds and had forgotten how nice it is to survive. We do not dwell on our misfortune, so we need not remember about them when we put sugar in our children’s tea. Warsaw is not a pretty city, but people here love life in its purest form. . . (NZZ 7)

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The very beginning of the novel establishes the interpretative key: the unburied bodies of Jews remain in the ground that was cleared of any prop­ erty that belonged to them. The sudden return from the dead is caused not only by the previously diagnosed need to escape from oblivion but also by the urge to take revenge for the plundered and usurped property.46 In the novel, teenage zombies spend their days in the shopping mall where they buy clothes and consumer electronics—again an allusion to classic films, albeit stripped of innocence. A decade after The Night of the Living Dead, George Romero directed the equally iconic Dawn of the Living Dead (1978), in which the protagonists shelter from a zombie invasion in a shopping mall. When the undead find their way inside, the remaining survivors struggle to distinguish them from shop mannequins; we hear comments that the zombies returned there guided by memories. Romero’s film was interpreted as a critique of capitalism and American consumerism, untamed by the counterculture of the 1960s. In Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri claim that the invasion of the living dead is such a popular figure because of the twentiethcentury capitalism’s structure: “The only modern myth is the myth of zom­ bies—mortified schizos, good for work, brought back to reason.”47 Therefore, the zombie is both a monster of memory and a product of capitalism, which easily intertwines in popular culture and the Polish memory: in anxious fan­ tasies about the imminent “claims” of the Jews that demand the return of their property.48 Philosopher Andrzej Leder follows the genealogy of Polish capitalism, indicating that only the appropriations of assets, industry, possessions, and properties of the Jewish bourgeoisie “paved the way for the formation of a new middle class that was Polish in the ethnic sense.”49According to Leder, the consequence of the leap to modernity “over the Jew’s dead body” is thoughtlessness understood after Hannah Arendt as the inability to remem­ ber, to connect the present to the past, which leads to the lacking sense of responsibility. This enables the looting that breaks connections between people, leaving in the field of consciousness only the acquired objects—not their former owners.50 However, understood psychoanalytically, thoughtless­ ness entails attacks by sudden irrepressible emotions. We may find such dia­ lectics in the Hannah Arendt’s descriptions of Eichmann’s interrogation: everyone who listens to the trial cries, panics, loses consciousness, or vomits, except for the main defendant himself.51 It follows the logic of massive pro­ jection of unwanted feelings into the environment. The zombies that emerge from the basements, ghosts unwilling to leave, and corpses buried in graves too shallow choke others with guilt and fear—multiplied and monstrous— with no escaping them. There is a pressing dilemma: how can we approach the state of mind of those that appropriate the Jewish property. Historical research tends to focus on the economic and social consequences, only a few researchers approach the topic from an emotional or personal experience perspective.52 One way is to describe the phenomenon indirectly, considering for example literary works

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and inscribed in them emotional reactions.53 Historian Marcin Zaremba positions the phenomenon of postwar, “disabled economy” looting in the framework of the common fear of hunger and poverty. Zaremba notices that “getting rich by looting brought the joy of a life-changing miracle—but also fear.”54 Ostachowicz’s mention of “life in its purest form” seeks to erase the memory of former owners from the objects acquired in a joyful rapture. This effort is partly successful as one may even live in denial for a long time, but everything can return. As Agata Tuszyn´ska writes in a post-memory bio­ graphy of her family: Many inhabitants of these old Jewish settlements in my country react this way; they are afraid of visits by people from the outside. They are afraid because those people were once the owners of their homes, their orchards, their farms, their furniture, and their plates and cups. Those outsiders also are incarnations of their guilt, but only among those who have good reason to feel it. It appears that they are more numerous than I had thought.55 Justyna Kowalska-Leder comments that after the war, the appropriated property—mostly Jewish and not the German property from the Recovered Territories—evokes feelings of guilt and fear of the necessity to return them.56 However, I believe that in such cases, we are more likely dealing with anxiety. Guilt involves the awareness of one’s deeds and encourages responsibility. In the afterword to Golden Harvest, which suggests the possibility of working through these difficult feelings, Gross and Grudzin´ska-Gross recount the story . of a man from Bełzec, who owns a ring inherited from his grandmother that originally belonged to a Jewish girl. The man lived through a severe car accident, after which he had a dream: he saw a Jewish girl who ordered him to return her property. The man obeyed her demand and sent the ring to the Majdanek Museum, and in doing so, repaid the debt made by his pre­ decessors.57 This story presents a feeling of guilt and an act of retribution: to symbolically repair what in phantasy one has done wrong.58 We deal with a different situation when one denies own responsibility (in the sphere of actions) and guilt (in the sphere of emotions). In such cases, the fear of bloody vengeance can be accompanied even by astonishment. After all, many believed they were completely innocent: since the Jews were dying anyway, it was better for the ethnic Poles to appropriate their things instead of the Germans.59 It became a pervasive explanation during the war, found in countless testimonies and is sometimes even expressed today, as it is appar­ ently very simple: however, in order to maintain it and not to be overwhelmed with persecutory guilt and fear, the Jews have to be dead or to be counted as dead in phantasy. Perechodnik describes it with cold accuracy in his diary: The [Otwock] ghetto is still surrounded by Polish rabble. The Poles jump over the fence, break down doors with axes, and rob whatever they can. At times the looters come across murdered Jews, but what does it matter?

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They argue and fight among the not-yet-cold bodies; one tears out of the hands of the other a pillow or a suit of clothes. And the Jewish corpse? Like a corpse, it lies quietly, does not speak, does not bother anyone; it will not even appear to anyone in their sleep. After all, the Poles have a clear conscience. Surely they justify themselves in their own minds: “We didn’t kill them, and in any case, if we don’t take it, the Germans will.”60 One can wonder, how much denial of fear and guilt people have to use in order to be able to perform such actions: to go through belongings whose owners lay dead just next to them. Yet, as evidenced in Perechodnik’s testi­ mony, it was a mass phenomenon, approved or tolerated by the whole com­ munity.61 Thus, it is not accidental that Ostachowicz chooses to use the horror convention: Evil cannot be covered by debris and soil, suffering must be respected and accounted for, while blood—if not washed away in time and allowed to indifferently soak into the earth and mix with clay—will one day crawl out as an army of golems, slow as tanks, and the broken bones and mangled corpses will put on whatever rags were not stolen from them, rig themselves up with sub-biological power to form bipedal nightmares that know only pain and will share this pain with others, running hunched from door to door of our peaceful homes .. (NZZ 14). Although the living dead are meant to make a friendly impression, Ostacho­ wicz’s novel convinces us that the living and the dead cannot exist in the same world. Reluctant to accept the return of the dead, Polish fascists appear early in the story and try to crack down on the dead as soon as possible. Besides, as is once again known from hundreds of historical testimonies, even if the former proprietor is found, the property is already Polish. When writer Henryk Grynberg seeks detailed information about his father’s wartime murder, one of the antagonistic interlocutors ends the conversation with the following statement: “And if you should try to take anything back, I have a hatchet.”62 In March 1968, Polish Jews will be once again excluded from the national and economic community, understood as the right to own property. Therefore, we should not be surprised by the rumors and legends about places haunted by Jewish ghosts, in modern thriller fiction combined with gruesome murders, like in Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s 2011 A Grain of Truth (adapted for the screen by Borys Lankosz in 2015) or in Marek S´ wierczek’s 2012 The Dybbuk, which still live in public memory, connected with the knowledge about the murder sites, passed down through generations.63 The Muranów district was the only place in Warsaw where the bodies were not exhumed but became an element of the landscape and the building material.64 As a result, local legends were and still are created: in Stacja Muranów (Muranów Station)—a documentation of Beata Choma˛ towska’s journalistic

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research—the residents of Muranów often mention supernatural occurrences that happen in the district, even if they do it with a grain of salt or in the form of a joke, when they say that it is the “Jewish ghosts” that are respon­ sible for construction errors.65 In 2010, the television channel TVN broad­ casted the fourth episode of the late night show Przekle˛ te rewiry (Haunted Areas), supposedly presenting stories of paranormal occurrences. In the introduction, the speaker explains: “today, we will visit Muranów. In the very heart of Warsaw, for over half a century, there happen things so terrifying and unexplainable that sometimes they even force the residents to flee to other parts of the city.” The following scenes—in gothic black-and-white or sepia— consist mostly of interviews with the residents and experts about stories of Jewish ghosts haunting Muranów houses, who usually have no identity but for a particularly intrusive rabbi. A spiritualist advises talking to the dead and asking them about their requests, in order to stop them from bothering the living residents. Should this method fail, the inhabitants were to resort to more ritualized forms of “cleansing their living space” and explain in a polite but firm manner that “someone else lives here now.” The probably unwitting antisemitism of those statements—in different context, the term “living space” must not necessarily refer to the Nazi fantasy of Lebensraum—reflects not only the far-right National Democracy’s prewar dreams of removing Jews from the Polish public spaces but also the postwar fear connected with the Jews returning to reclaim their property. As shown by historians, it is one of the principal fears in the landscape of postwar Poland.66 The emblematic response of the ethnically Polish environment to the reappearance of the Jewish survivors in their homeland was the question: “So you are still alive?”. The question contained both surprise and hostility: confrontation with indif­ ference, coldness, and anger was a central emotional experience of survi­ vors67. As one of the survivors from Bran´sk, eastern Poland, noted in the Book of Commemoration: It became known that in the nearby neighboring towns, within one day, there would be organized attacks upon Jews … It now becomes impos­ sible to remain in Bran´sk and therefore, we decide to leave. Passover, 1945, all Bran´sk Jews must leave, barely escaping with their lives. We will no longer derive anything good from Bran´sk. As we left Bran´sk, the Christians stood by, smiling, laughing at us and enjoying their new homes, beautiful clothing, new furniture and everything that had been Jewish. Now no one will come to claim their inheritance.68 An important element for the fantasy about the Jewish undead is connected with Jan Tomasz Gross’s breakthrough book Neighbors (2000). Its publica­ tion marks the beginning of what may be called a “twenty-first-century memory boom:” the study of the peripheries of the Holocaust that moves attention away from the “main trend”—the massive murders committed by the Germans—to the peripheral areas where the Jews were murdered by the

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local inhabitants. It seems that, earlier, the ghosts of Muranów and other similar places scared few people, perhaps mostly Germans. However, Gross introduced a revolution in the Polish symbolic field: he raised awareness about those who inhabited the outskirts of the Holocaust and—more importantly— who continue to inhabit these sites. Although Gross’s writings seem to con­ tinuously evoke strong emotions, the matter of the Polish people’s participation in the Holocaust can also be petrified and made into cliché. This is what hap­ pened to Wilhelm and Anna Sasnal’s arthouse film It Looks Pretty from a Distance (2011), which transforms the theme of Jewish property appropriation into a universal parable about the life of the residents of a former State Agri­ cultural Farm. Not much happens in the film, even less is said, which allows for the insertion of diverse content. The reviews mostly claim that the images refer to the reality of the occupation.70 The narration is simultaneously deprived of psychological depth and social background, taken out of specific historical context, which causes the image to effectively transform itself into a cliché, completely understandable for those who can fill in the missing context on their own.71 The film only seemingly operates with the shocking process of revealing what is already known. Therefore, I will not discuss it further, because in my opinion, the perverse representations bring no self-satisfaction or feeling of completeness and continuity. This is the significant difference between per­ version and kitsch: kitsch evokes emotions to later cool them down, perversion stimulates emotions and provides no resolution. Phantasies of bloody Jewish vengeance are interlocked with the Polish Romantic complex of innocence and the incomprehensible feeling we are wrongly attributed guilt for deeds not our own. In “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto,” literary historian Jan Błon´ski wishfully recalls the highest moral instance that supposedly kept the Polish hand from contributing to the Holocaust, and the Jewish victims nonetheless return from the dead to reclaim their property and threaten with flooding the living people’s realm. However, the memory of Polish cooperation in the crime—the murders and the appropriation of property—resurface with a significant shift: the projec­ tion of aggression and sadism onto the Jewish victims who do not take their vengeance on the Germans, as expected, but on ethnic Poles instead. This phenomenon is the reason why the last words in Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Holy Week (1945) resonate so strongly. Hidden by her Polish friend, a Jewish woman continuously embarrasses him with her bitterness, and when denounced by a neighbor, she explodes: “May you all die like dogs!… May you all be murdered and incinerated, just like us!”72 The Pole struggles with his (and society’s) expectation that the rescued victim should feel and express gratitude for the help and detach oneself from the suffered harm.73

What Do Jews Want From Us? In 2015, Marcin Wrona’s Demon premiered in cinemas, but despite its formal refinement, it went unnoticed, stirring no public debate. It may come as a

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surprise, since the similarly themed Aftermath (2012) by Władysław Pasi­ kowski caused so much controversy a few years prior. Perhaps the weak reaction to Demon resulted from the shock caused by the director’s suicide after the film’s premiere at the Gdynia Film Festival, or perhaps, the reci­ pients found it difficult to grasp its meaning due to the lack of plot resolution, breaking genre rules, and frequent consternation. The film shows the wedding . and reception . of Piotr (Itay Tiran), who comes from England, and Zaneta (Agnieszka Zulewska), from Poland, in the bride’s hometown somewhere in the Polish province. Piotr spends the night before the wedding alone in the house once inhabited by the bride’s grandparents and accidentally discovers a secret: a body is buried in the garden. Heavy rain falls and the muddy earth opens, for a short moment sucking the groom inside. The following day begins with everything happening according to plan. Somewhat dazed by the . previous night’s events, Piotr marries Zaneta, and during the reception held in a barn adjacent to the house, he asks his father-in-law (Andrzej Grabowski) about the history of the house and the family. The father-in-law laughs at him, pretending not to understand, and dismisses him while the groom starts to feel worse and worse. Finally, during the dance at the wedding reception, he collapses onto the floor in convulsions. It turns out that the ghost of a Jewish woman entered his body: the former owner of the house and a lover of the bride’s grandfather. The house was . acquired by the grandfather in unclear but certainly bloody circumstances. Zaneta discovers the unknown history of her family, and the desire to learn the truth overcomes her, even against her family’s wishes. A doctor, a priest, and an old teacher—the only Jew left in the community—debate on how to deal with the situation when suddenly the groom disappears. The wedding is over, the old house is razed to the ground and the family disposes even of Peter’s car; all trails disappear. The film starts and finishes with a parallel scene: in the beginning, the groom arrives in the closed community on a ferry, and at the end, the bride leaves in the same manner. The father-in-law recounts that during the war, the Germans destroyed the bridges that connected the town to the rest of the world. He hopes that thanks to the marriage and entering the family business, Piotr will rebuild the bridges, but this cannot work. The Polish community remains closed in its memory, abandoned and separated from the world with a secret that first violently comes to light only to soon be concealed again. The script openly alludes to the stories about dybbukim, which on the one hand, connects it to a symbol integrated in the Polish memory as “Jewish dziady”74—the most famous mourning drama, originated in the folklore and Slavic religion and then popularized in Romanticism by Adam Mickiewicz’s drama, read in Polish schools—which points to the coexistence of the living and the dead. On the other hand, dybbukim reveal traces of Eastern Eur­ opean Jews’ folklore in the dominating culture. Demon refers both to Szymon An-Ski’s drama Dybbuk (1920) and the film (1937) directed by Mosze Waks (Michał Waszyn´ski). In these texts of culture, the ghost of the opposite gender also enters the body of the living person, and the wedding dance mixes the

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living and the dead. On the most general level, Demon differs from its prewar archetypes by the fact that An-Ski’s drama and Waks’s film keep the structure of a classical tragedy, in which the community must deal with one of its members, recognize symbolic debt, take responsibility, and restore order.75 Meanwhile, Demon consistently mixes genres and even though the horror convention dominates, it remains underutilized and constantly disrupted by scenes from completely different genres. While genre cinema leads viewers from the beginning to the end, Demon constantly throws them out of different emotional states, mixing them. Finally, there is no obvious ending in Demon, not even an ambiguous punchline; the story ends simply because the main protagonist disappears. Therefore, there is no question of paying off the sym­ bolic debt, as the object of the debt remains unclear: Is it the house? Is it the lover? Equally unclear are the parties to the debt: Are the new generations responsible for the debt? Who do you return the old property to when nobody is alive? Finally, we also have very little clarity regarding the method: how can a ghost reclaim its property? Perhaps, this is the confusion that Peter’s father-in-law words in his farewell to the guests, when he advises them to treat the wedding events as an alcohol-induced hallucination. It seems best to dissociate from the history, because the Jewish demon’s return nearly destroys the Polish community. Speaking with the voice of the dead—like when the Jewish girl, Hana, speaks through the bridegroom Piotr—runs dangerously close to madness, which first excludes one from the community and then becomes a threat to the mad person. In Demon, the grave literally sucks Piotr inside. Through contact with death, the protagonist changes forever: when others have fun, he is lured by a secret and sees more than the people around him. The priest advises others not to dig in the ground to avoid the discovery of other bodies, and his opinion is supported by the bride’s brother: .“If there will be more [of them], everyone will go fucking crazy.” The bride, Zaneta wants to dig to complete the funeral rite, but whe­ ther there actually are any skeletons in the garden remains unclear. Moreover, when the groom disappears, completion of the funeral rite becomes impos­ sible: the missing cannot be buried. As opposed to Dybbuk, in the secularized world of Demon one cannot perform exorcisms. It is not the late nineteenth century. Markedly, the subtitle of An-Ski’s drama reads Between Two Worlds, which may be literally interpreted as the in-between of the spiritual and material worlds, but also as the in-between of times: the late nineteenth cen­ tury and the First World War, which inaugurated the twentieth century. What the viewers see in Demon is what surrounds them: the Poland after the Holocaust, which includes the Jedwabne pogrom. “You insisted on the barn,” the family says to the newlywed, meaning the place of the wedding, but later the barn gains another meaning: the persistent tracking of the Holocaust traces and clinging to the Jewish victims. For the Polish viewers mentioning “the barn” in a story of Jewish ghosts, is an all-too-clear allusion to the burning of the Jews in the barn in Jedwabne pogrom in 1941 (I wrote on perverse phantasies of Jedwabne in chapter one).

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The Jewish ghosts cling to modern inhabitants of Poland even despite the phlegmatic teacher’s recounting to the dybbuk that the old world is gone, that the Jewish town became a Polish one, and even the former synagogue was transformed into a butchery, which through profanation additionally empha­ sizes the aggressive gesture of the appropriation of Jewish property. When the bride drives through the empty town in search of the missing groom, the teacher describes prewar life. It creates the uncanny effect—the Freudian premonition of the unknown in the known and the familiar in the completely alien—because even though only mostly ordinary houses appear in the frame, . when Zaneta realizes their origin and previous owners, the surroundings seem to look back at her. Wojciech Wilczyk’s photographic album No Such Thing as an Innocent Eye (2009) makes a similar impression on the viewer. As part of his project, Wilczyk takes and archives photographs of former synagogs that currently serve different purposes: residential buildings, furniture stores, public toilets, scrapyards, or swimming pools.76 For those able to notice it, the trauma exists also in different spaces. In his novel Dziedzictwo (Heritage, 1993), Henryk Grynberg writes about the phenomenon best described as “traumatic space-time:” I had nowhere to run. At first, when I was moving farther away, time seemed to alleviate it, but time is a circular line, and when I made my circle—I had to return. To this hell that nobody relieved me from. The road that I drove along with my father was plowed, but I could see it through the furrows. I recognized the familiar thatched roofs, whitened boards, and the lime between them along the road to Nowa Wies´. New ones rise, differently built, but the shacks that remember my father, grandfather, and I are still standing. Time did not stop, but having com­ pleted its circle, the old time met with the new one. A new time came, but the old one did not pass.77 Describing the landscapes in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), Georges DidiHuberman notices a dialectical opposition between the fact that everything was destroyed and nothing has changed. 78 This dialectic also operates in Demon, in which the Polish wedding in a Jewish barn keeps slipping from denial to bloody truth. The host, father of the bride, knows exactly whose body lies buried in the garden but prefers to say that it is just a rumor and that there is no need to exaggerate the find. Just like in Grynberg’s home village, where he asks for the names of his father’s murderers, or in Jedwabne, where journalist Anna Bikont asks about the murderers that forced the Jews into the barn,79 these are open secrets, because everybody knows the truth. After the interrupted wedding reception, the host announces to the other guests: We should sleep it off. We need to forget about what we actually did not even see here. We witnessed here a collective hallucination, and it seems to us that we partook in it, but it just seems to be this way. I am

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dreaming you. You are dreaming me. A collective dream. A dream in a dream. There was no wedding. You were not here. There is and was no groom. Adeen, dva, tri … After this call, the guests half-conscious from the alcohol and emotions leave the wedding. We do not really know whether the closing countdown means releasing people from a hypnotic state or introducing the hypnosis one more time. In other words, Peter’s father-in-law proposes waking up from the nightmare and returning to reality, which is nightmarish in itself. This reminds one of a dream cited by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams: a father dreams that his dead son—whose body really rests in the nearby room, surrounded by candles—says to him: “Father, don’t you see I’m burning?”80 The man wakes up and hurries to see that his son’s body caught fire from one of the burning candles. Among many interpretations, Jacques Lacan indicates that the father’s waking up can be treated as a reluctance to confront the trauma that exists in the dream and escape from it to reality, which is equally catastrophic. After all, the father is concerned with his own carelessness, for we can learn from Freud’s description that the father blames himself for his son’s death.81 The host in Demon proposes recognizing the entire situation as a hallucination, but in such case, where is the truth? Did the Jewish dead really come back as a dybbuk? There is no answer to this question, but the fact of the Polish neighbors appropriating the Jewish property remains a truth valid in all versions of reality. Like Freud’s dream vision of a burning child, the fire is burning in the dream and in reality alike.82 What the film alludes to, is that the dispossession of Jewish property was not a calm and sterile process, as in defensive cultural images of abandoned objects waiting for their new owners.83 Perechodnik recalls that he cannot stand both “the sight of mur­ dered Jews, nor … the swarming Poles, who surrounded the ghetto like vul­ tures”84 waiting for the opportunity to come in and loot what was left. The plundering usually followed the deportations or mass murders carried out by the Germans and could itself turn into a frantic carnival, as evidenced by a gentile citizen of Klimontów: After the Jews left, a group of people, known as “miners” formed. They went with pickaxes [and] iron bars … at night around the post-Jewish houses and smashed walls, stoves, dug in cellars, and unearthed concealed Jewish treasures: money, textiles, leather, etc. Klimontów now started to drink and get drunk—since they could afford to—a plague of drunken­ ness beset the young people, who now became brazen and vulgar …85 It is the memories of this violence that still haunt the Polish landscape. Contact between the spiritual and material realms—the world of the living and the world of spirits—is a recurring motif in the Polish post-Romantic culture. Demon enters dialogs with this heritage not only by visual means—by likening its frames to Romantic paintings—but also with the ceremony of

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marriage itself, which alludes to the Polish national drama. As noticed by one literary critic, the director shows from the famous Stanisław Wyspian´ki’s drama, The Wedding (1901) farmhouse and barn are perceived differently after Gross’s books, in particular The Neighbours on the Jedwabne pogrom.86 Since Wyspian´ski’s time, a wedding is a good environment for depicting Polish social conflicts, as confirmed by cinematographic The Wedding (2004) by Wojciech Smarzowski, which is chronologically closest to Demon and whose director shares with Wrona a penchant for the celebration’s frenetic character. The motif of the hypnotic chochoł (straw-wrap) dance to the point of vertigo appears in Tadeusz Konwicki’s 1965 Salto and, of course, in Andrzej Wajda’s 1972 film adaptation of Wyspian´ski’s drama The Wedding, which first intro­ duced the motif. In Salto, the dance is initiated by a mysterious man who arrives in the closed community of a small town. This scene is typically interpreted as an image of social apathy in times of the Polish sixties, coined as communist “little stabilization.”87 However, there is no communal dance in Demon, because there is a person who cannot participate in the dance and who is a nuisance to the entire community. Possessed by the dybbuk, the bridegroom arches his back, stiffens, and shakes; he suffers separately, exposed to the gazes of others and humi­ liated. He is a reminiscence of the scenes in Konwicki’s Salto and Wajda’s The Wedding, which alluded to the contemporary situation of Jews in Poland. In Salto, after introducing the new dance, the mysterious man is ultimately chased out of the town by the entire community jointly throwing rocks at him, which foreshadows the exodus of Polish Jews three years later, in March of 1968. On the other hand, The Wedding was filmed after these events, so Wajda stages a conversation between Rachel and the Poet during a communal dance. However, everyone moves away from the couple, creating at the same time a circle of unfriendly gawkers staring at the Jew who dared come to the ethnic Polish neighbours’ wedding. As Grzegorz Niziołek notices, the critics’ focus on the chochoł dance motif and the social apathy it supposedly expres­ ses, omitting the violent force of disgust present in the scene.88 In the case of Demon, like in horror films, it is the uncanny that surfaces: the separate dance of the twisting body of the living man/dybbuk resembles an hysterical woman’s spectacle that the end of the twentieth century found so difficult to understand. Moreover, what the ghost really wants in Demon is not explicit; the dybbuk appears but stays silent when asked: “What do you want from us?” For Lacan, it is a question of the subject’s construction: every subject must answer for themselves what the Other wants from them; albeit we know that in the end there is no definite answer to the question “Che vuoi?”89 Žižek comments that such a question has an antisemitic background—that in reality it asks “What do Jews want from us?”—because it focuses on the radical construction of Jews as an absolute, unexplorable, unrecognizable, and foreign Other; in other words, something strongly detached from the subject that forms this construction.90 Nevertheless, the hastily created paranoid sce­ narios of Jewish conspiracies, plots, and intrigues appear more bearable than

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the terrifying truth that in reality we know not what the Other wants from us. Nothing can be done with the dybbuk in Demon, and when the body is gone, even restoring the funeral rite becomes impossible. The only request voiced by the dybbuk is delivered in Yiddish—“Get out of my house!”—which imme­ diately happens, as if by magic: the barn door opens wide, wind blows inside, and the atmosphere becomes menacing. Except for the old Jewish teacher, everybody escapes, but where can they escape? From the once-Jewish barn, they run to the once-Jewish house, where the celebrations continue. Various authors indicate that there may be an unconscious knowledge in Eastern and Central Europe on the “Jewishness” of various objects, even in later genera­ tions who show often surprisingly clear knowledge of the previous owners.91 “Jewish” or “post-Jewish” (as they are defensively called in Polish discourse) objects still possess emotional power and pose problems of what to do with them. Demon clearly states this deadlock. Any restitution—justice, debt repayment, or working through the guilt—turn out to be impossible; there can only be the replayed denial and the occasionally exploding violence. In a way, the situation is similar to what Mordechai Tsanin poignantly expressed in the late 1940s: Now there is a thick wall between Jews and Poles. When in a town a Pole talks to a Jew, he does not look him in the eye, he falls silent … Because in order to talk easily with a rescued Jew and look him in the eye, hun­ dreds of thousands of Poles would have to take the Jewish things out of their homes.92

Zombies of Judeo–Communism In this perverse scenario, ethnic Polish bystanders know not what the Jews want from them. However, they do surmise that the Jews return from the dead from far away places like the USA or Israel—as in cases of so-called “property restitution claims”—to hurt and prevent them from leading normal lives. This presupposition is accompanied by the premodern belief that Jews are characteristically prone to virulence and vindictiveness. Literary critic Michał Głowin´ski notes the rise of such rhetoric in his record of the March 1968 events: in the press, in public statements, and in other places. For example, he captures the astonishment of one elderly woman who shares a train compartment with him: she is amazed that the Jews sent by Germans to the extermination camps cursed their perpetrators, which for her manifests their vindictiveness.93 This “March chatter” reinforces and repeats the cliché of the “good and merciful” Pole and the “ungrateful Jew” who attacks inno­ cent Poland together with the reactionist German, which was to form the “Bonn-Tel-Aviv axis.” Głowin´ski reconstructs the basic scheme of the con­ temporary story about the Ghetto uprising repeated in the public media: (1) a short overview of the rebellion’s heroism; (2) an extensive part about the Jewish collaboration with Germans; (3) a reminder of the heroism of the

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“Poles who rescued the Jews;” (4) a closing commentary on the current poli­ tics with remarks about the danger of Zionism and the anti-Polishness of foreign and Polish Jewry.94 These plots finally solidify as a myth of the Judeo–communism, whose element is the story of Jews joining the postwar Public Security apparatus in search of vengeance on innocent ethnic Poles. Of course, the Judeo–commu­ nist figure was created earlier, at the beginning of the twentieth century, since the 1905–1907 Revolution in the Kingdom of Poland (part of Russian Empire at the time), when the far-right National Democracy party used it against their political opponents. However, the strongest intensification of this pro­ paganda appeared during the Polish–Soviet War.95 After the war, the myth of Judeo–Communism became saturated with the Holocaust’s history, which encouraged psychological and historical simplifications. Ryszard Bugajski’s film Zac´ma (The Cataract; 2016) fits this scheme. Bugajski was also the director of the legendary film The Interrogation (1982/1989), which depicts the Stalinist terror apparatus resisted by the wrongly accused Antonina Dzi­ wisz (Krystyna Janda). The director returns to the topic of Poland in the 1950s in The Cataract, in which he attempts to document the internal trans­ formation of Julia Brystiger (Maria Mamona) from a communist Public Security officer into a devoted catholic. This film from the “new patriotic cinema” genre96 premiered at a time of intensified conservative historical politics and was supposed to deal with the critical points of this narration: the heroic resistance of the Catholic Church and the Jewish entanglement with communist institutions, the Public Security apparatus in particular. None­ theless, nearly all reviewers and commentators from the whole gamut of political options judged The Cataract as a failed attempt.97 What is never­ theless found to be captivating is how The Cataract dialogs with legendary The Interrogation, which at the time of its premiere was immediately censored by authorities, was able to circulate only outside of official channels, on copied tapes; it was considered to artistically express the criticism of Polish socialism in its most bloody form. At that time, Bugajski was both praised and reproached for an ambiguous image of the Stalinist perpetrators.98 In The Cataract, Bugajski revisits this theme to sketch an image of a representative of the perpetrators. On the one hand, he tries to redeem Brystiger by depict­ ing her repentance and conversion, while on the other hand, he clearly indi­ cates her ethnic identity, which reiterates the antisemitic aspect of the Polish October 1956 propaganda. The Cataract tells the story of Brystiger’s visit in the Institute for the Blind in Laski, where the famous cardinal, Stefan Wyszyn´ski, resides. The prota­ gonist wants to talk to him about faith. Her initially unsuccessful attempts for an audience with Wyszyn´ski are interrupted by flashbacks of tortures inflicted on young men from the anti-communist resistance. One critic highlights many clichés of the Judeo–communist figure in the film, presenting how many of them appear in popular biographies of Julia Brystiger (a.k.a. “Bloody Luna”) and how strongly is her ominous legend founded on unreliable evidence.

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Particularly regarding the sadistic pleasure she supposedly took from inflict­ ing pain on the tortured men—especially their genitals—and her promiscuity. Indeed, there is no evidence that Brystiger ever combated and tortured members of the resistance.99 The Cataract foregrounds Brystiger’s Jewish identity on several occasions: when the priest who prevents her from meeting Wyszyn´ski demands to see her papers to establish her actual identity,100 she invents aliases and conceals her last name; during a formal confession, she first declares as sin her Jewish ethnicity—as if this the main burden in the eyes of the Catholic Church. It seemingly reveals no antisemitic norm, because the Church was to be Brystiger’s former victim, here represented by cardinal Wyszyn´ski (Marek Kalita) and priest Cieciorek, played by Janusz Gajos in a significant reversal from The Interrogation, in which Gajos acts as the main torturer. There appears a perfect symmetry of mutual harm and fault, along with the rationalization of antisemitic violence, supposedly directed at the communists, not Jews, thusly authorized in the patriotic discourse.101 The Catholic Church is portrayed as perfectly innocent (the nuns hid Jewish women during the war) and Luna is consequently presented as an Antichrist: in flashbacks, the patriot she tortures transforms into Christ. She presents at that time a surprising knowledge of the New Testament, reciting by heart passages about the death of Christ. The latter links the Judeo–communist figure to the premodern antisemitic myth of Jews killing the Christian God. Like in the images of Mel Gibson’s The Passion (2004), the memories of tortures inflicted on Polish patriots in Stalinist torture houses that penetrate Julia Brystiger’s consciousness resemble a sadomasochist show. In his essay “The Uncanny,” Freud links the fear of blindness and losing one’s eyes to the fear of castration, and while many authors criticize this connection,102 in The Cataract the two mix incessantly. Brystiger burns out men’s eyes before she whips their genitals dressed in black, buttoned up to the very top, like a sadistic dominatrix, impenetrable and unapproachable. The cuts to sexual scenes recreate the structure of the stalag genre, in which male prisoners are abused by female perpetrators, but the victims always prevail in the end, and the violence is reversed.103 In The Cataract, Brystiger imagines how the son she abandoned burns her with a cigarette, stigmata almost appear on her body, the police search her brutally, particularly near the genitals—which repeats the image of sexual violence against women known from The Inter­ rogation—and a bloodied cilice from cardinal Wyszyn´ski’s apartment appears on her thigh. Her past sadomasochist cruelty receives equal punishment: instead of the promised Christian penance, exciting violence comes constantly back in the unbreakable cycle. At the end of the film, priest Cieciorka—who lost his eyesight presumably as a result of torture—resumes conversation with Brystiger, trying to under­ stand her actions. However, he concludes that he cannot understand the actions, much like the viewers, who after seeing the entire film, still fail to understand the fictional Brystiger. It is an impenetrable barrier of otherness, seemingly psychological but actually ethnic and social; it is another variant of

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what Rymkiewicz considers in Umschlagplatz when reflecting on Judeo– communism, which he describes as the fundamental otherness of commun­ ism: the communists are to be neither Poles nor Jews but “mutants.”104 Nonetheless, we can see that in the Polish memory, this inhuman, awry, bloody, vindictive otherness is symbolized by the Jews. Film scholar Linda Williams indicates the intersecting looks of women and monsters in horror films: women are to avert their looks from terrifying scenes also because in classical cinema they have no one to identify with, and the female protago­ nists of silent cinema are often literally or metaphorically blind.105 In The Cataract, the viewers do not meet the female protagonist’s gaze— they observe but may remain unseen—so there is no identification. Like the monster in classic horror films and Rymkiewicz’s mutants, Brystiger’s character consists of incongruent elements: she simultaneously suffers from an excess of aggression and sexual appetite and a dearth of identity—constantly lost and uncertain—which is to make her metaphorically blind. She is like a living corpse: she acts but for no deeper reason, only mechanically and automatically. A zombie is an object that wants something from us and frantically seeks a solution, but ultimately, we do not know what to do with it. In this sense, Brystiger becomes a doppelgänger of the uniformed Nazi, who as a fetish is only an instrument of sadism—the pleasure derived from inflicting pain. The Cataract is in many aspects a negative of The Interrogation: the victims swap places with the perpetrators, the genders and ethnic identities have shifted. Brystiger’s uncanny doppelgänger in The Interrogation is Antonina Dziwisz, the brave victim of an unjust accusation, whose resistance against the system is not part of any ideology but consists solely in her personal desire to keep her friendships and romances to herself. Brystiger is the opposite: she submits her entire life to communist ideas, leaving her child to attend a social gathering with her lover and party comrade. Both women share an interest in drugs, promiscuity, and the punishment they receive in each film for their inclinations. However, at the same time, the two women could never meet: the castrating perpetrator Brystiger has no interest in women as she only tortures men who impersonate the patriotic ethos, although viewers learn very little about her motives. The perpetrator from The Interrogation at least reveals sparsely a suggestion that he survived a concentration camp. The main thing we know about Brystiger is that she is Jewish and that she firmly believes in communism; apparently, those identifications alone should suffice. Like monsters in horror films, in this variant of the Holocaust memory, Polish Jews are taking ven­ geance on ethnic Poles for the sole reason that it is their nature. In one of the wartime diaries giving much insight to the social and material reality of occu­ pation, ethnic Polish author writes—in keeping with the excerpts from Nałk­ owska’s novel from the beginning of this chapter—as follows: It is well known that the jews express all the time their hatred towards the poles, even greater than towards the germans! The jews have respect for brute force and they always themselves use such brute force wherever

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they can, for example under the Bolsheviks, where they horribly persecuted the Poles; so they have respect for the germans and they bow before them, and they hate us, which is seemingly completely incomprehensible.106 In this social phantasy the Jews are filled with hatred toward ethnic Poles and cannot wait to execute their revenge on them: communism, or to be precise, Judeo–communism, becomes the perfect vehicle to displace the violence onto the victims. When Brystiger castrates her victims—meaning when a Jew tor­ tures Poles—as if following a principle of a bookkeeping balance, it erases the fault of ethnic Poles toward Jews, establishing the equality of both groups, although redemption is to be available only with the adoption of the dom­ inating religion. Thus, the only possible perverse exorcism emerges: for the Jews to cease being monsters that haunt the Poles convinced of their inno­ cence, they must cleanse themselves of their Jewishness and simply become ethnic Poles. Only then will the Poles be able to start living normally. As uncanny doppelgängers, the Jewish undead are thought to be full of hatred and killing intent, but those are the sentiments assigned to the Jews by the ethnic Polish majority, who despite benefiting from the Holocaust, would prefer to forget all about the disastrous event. Connected with participation in or benefiting from the Holocaust, guilt stems from recognizing one’s own aggression and taking responsibility for it: repaying the debt. That is the sce­ nario of the story described in The Golden Harvest, when the man who inherited the ring with a ruby wants to symbolically settle with the past and return what once belonged to the Holocaust victims.107 However, the above scenarios show not guilt but the fear of bloody retaliation, the feelings of persecution and helplessness in the face of an omnipresent hostility, which indeed reverses the position of the victim. Freud describes this mechanism in his work Totem and Taboo: the dead return under the guise of specters to haunt those who rejoice in their death.108 The absence of Germans in this scenario is another source of the Poles’ sense of injustice: after all, it is the Germans that the Jewish ghosts should disturb. From this perspective, Gunter Deming’s famous all over Europe archiveinstallation Stolpersteine (Stumbling Blocks) becomes very ambiguous in Poland. Stolpersteine appeared in Germany at the beginning of the 1990s, and from there, it spread across Europe. The installation commemorates the vic­ tims of the Nazi regime by inserting into pavements small stones with brass plates informing that the murdered in the Holocaust lived nearby. Mounted into the pavements, usually next to the houses that remain—now inhabited by other people—the Stolpersteine connect the present to the past, reminding one of the individual victims, and by slightly interfering with urban space, they unseal it to give space to the spectral presence of the dead.109 In German, stolpern means “to stumble upon,” to feel how the space resists the pedestrian. In Poland, the Stolpersteine appeared so far only in a few cities.110 Out of necessity, the reception of the installation forms part of the perverse phantasy—supported by the prewar antisemitic political slogan “Your streets,

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our houses”111—which connects to the frantic fear of reprivatization and restitution intensified by the Fall of Communism. Every now and then, the fear explodes in tabloids and speeches from right-wing politicians. A memory scholar finds this culturally maintained fear in a dialog from Paweł Pawli­ kowski’s film Ida (2013): “Judge Wanda Gruz, one of the two protagonists of Ida, at one point questions a peasant. To the question: “Do you know, who lived here before the war?”, she receives the answer: “No Jew ever lived here!” Even though—as she soon points out herself—she never mentioned Jews.”112 It is hard to cope with the devastating guilt that manifests itself in the fantasy of “Jewish persecutors” when the ownership situation remains unclear. As an exception among European countries, Poland never introduced laws that would return or restitute wartime losses of its Jewish citizens.113 The recurring fear of “Jewish claims” to the Polish property was addition­ ally fueled by the suggestion of “antipolonism” among Jews—a propagandist construct from March 1968—and the anger provoked by the alleged blaming of Poles for German deeds. Hence the regularly repeated informational cam­ paigns addressed to Western Europe and the USA that distribute the guilt (Germans) and the heroic help (Poles), like the English translation of Wła­ dysław Bartoszewski and Zofia Lewinówna’s collection114 Righteous Among Nations: How Poles Helped the Jews 1939–1945, which was published imme­ diately after the events of March 1968. The fear of Jewish vindictiveness frantically drives the sense of injustice and confidence in one’s own innocence. In Postwar, Tony Judt writes that the joined European identity is defined by attitude toward the Holocaust and the nation’s complicity: “Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket.”115 However, in the case of Polish phantasies of vindictive Jews taking revenge for their stolen property, the dead turn us back from this road.

Notes 1 J. Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” in: Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London; New York: Verso, 2004), pp. 33–34. 2 M. J. Chodakiewicz, After the Holocaust: Polish-Jewish Conflict in the Wake of

World War II (Boulder, Colorado: East European Monographs, 2003), p. 1.

3 See D. Engel, “[A review of] Marek Jan ‘After the . Holocaust: Polish-Jewish

Conflict in the Wake of World War II’,” Zagłada Zydów. Studia i Materiały 1/ 2005; B. Szaynok, D. Libionka, “Głupia sprawa,” Tygodnik Powszechny 5/2008. 4 I thank Paweł Dobrosielski for reminding me of this expression from Jan Tomasz Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz. An Essay in Historical Interpretation (New York: Random House, 2006), p. 254. In his explanations of the Kielce Pogrom, Gross cites an incisive thought of Tacitus from The Life of Cnaeus Julius Agricola: “It is, indeed, human nature to hate the man whom you have injured.” See Tacitus, The Complete Works of Tacitus, ed. M. Hadas (New York: The Modern Library, 1942), p. 703. 5 Z. Nałkowska, Medallions (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1972), p. 32. 6 See H. Grynberg, “Holokaust w literaturze polskiej,” in: Prawda nieartystyczna . (Warsaw: PIW, 1994), p. 153; T. Zukowski, “Obraz polskich zachowan´ wobec . Zydów i figura s´wiadka. Przykład Medalionów Zofii Nałkowskiej,” in: Zagłada

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. w “Medalionach” Zofii Nałkowskiej. Tekst i konteksty, ed. T. Zukowski (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2016), p. 31. . Z. Kossak-Szczucka, “Protest,” in: Polacy—Zydzi 1939–1945, ed. A. K. Kunert (Warsaw: Rada Ochrony Pamie˛ ci Walk i Me˛ czen´stwa, 2001), p. 213. My emphasis. See J. Błons´ki, “Polak-katolik i katolik-Polak. Nakaz ewangeliczny, interes nar­ odowy i solidarność obywatelska wobec zagłady getta warszawskiego,” in: Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2008); C. Tonini, Czas nienawiści i czas troski. Zofia Kossak-Szczucka antysemitka, która ratowała . . Zydów, trans. T. and W. Jekiel (Warsaw: ZIH, 2007); K. Chmielewska, “Kon­ struowanie figury polskiego świadka podczas Zagłady,” in: Opowieści o nie­ . winności, pp. 88–96; T. Zukowski, “Troska o autowizerunek,” in: Wielki retusz, pp. 119–132. J. Błon´ski, “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto,” in: J. Błon´ski, My Brother’s Keeper: Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust, ed. A. Polonsky (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 47. J. Tokarska-Bakir, “Obsessed with Innocence,” in: The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland, eds. A. Polonsky, J. B. Michlic (Princeton, New Jersey; . Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003). . I. Ostachowicz, . . Noc zywych Zydów (Warsaw: WAB, 2012), p. 205. Later abbre­ viated as NZZ. In the analysis of the novel, I use the following reviews and articles: P. Czaplin´ski, .“Zagłada jako horror. Kilka uwag o literaturze polskiej 1985–2015,” Zagłada Zydów. Studia i Materiały 12/2016; P. Dunin-Wąsowicz, . . “Noc zywych Zydów Igora Ostachowicza w finale Nike,” Gazeta Wyborcza (06.10.2013); J. Kowalska-Leder, “Literatura polska ostatniego. dziesięciolecia wobec Zagłady. Próby odpowiedzi na nowe wzywania,” . Zagłada Zydów. Studia i . Materiały 10/2014; B. Przymuszała, “Noc zywych Zydów Igora Ostachowicza. Konwencje i emocje,” in: Smugi Zagłady. Emocjonalne i konwencjonalne aspekty tekstów ofiar i ich dzieci (Poznan´: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2016); R. Sendyka, “Miejsca, które straszą (afekty i nie-miejsca pamięci),” Teksty Drugie 1/2014; J. Sobolewska, “Mściciel z Muranowa,” Polityka 15/2012; K. Szczuka, “Dwa horrory,” . Tygodnik Powszechny 20/2012; J. Tokarska-Bakir, “Pół strony: . Noc zywych Zydów; ulica szmalcowników,” Dwutygodnik (DOA: July 31, 2017); M. Waligórska, “Healing by Haunting: Jewish Ghosts in Contemporary Polish Literature,” Prooftexts 34/2014. . “Igor Ostachowicz za ksiązkę o trupach nominowany do NIKE,” Fakt July 26, 2013. Cf. R. Schneider, “It Seems As If…I Am Dead: Zombie Capitalism and Thea­ trical Labour,” TDR: The Drama Review 56.4/2012, p. 151. E. Janicka, “Portrety powietrza,” interview by K. Cichon´, ARTeon 6/2006, pp. 10–12. G. Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. S. B. Lillis (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2008) p. 21. P. Celan, “Death Fugue,” trans. Jerome Rothenberg, in: P. Celan, Selections (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2005) p. 60. In this way, Paweł Brykczyn´ski describes the belief of the interwar far-right National Democracy party, later accepted by other political formations as the norm, that only ethnic Poles can rule in multinational Poland. See P. Brykczyn´ski, Primed for Violence: Murder, Antisemitism, and Democratic Politics in Interwar Poland (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), pp. 90f. J. Darowski, Drzewo sprzeczki (London: Oficyna Poetów i Malarzy,1969). Czes­ ław Miłosz mentions this little known poet and translator in “Gorzki wiersz,” Tygodnik Powszechny 37.3/ 2008. . Ł. Baksik, Macewy codziennego uzytku/Matzevot for Everyday Use (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2012), p. 18.

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20 J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Porter (New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), p. 248. 21 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 280. 22 S. Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: MIT Press, 1992), p. 23. 23 C. Davis, Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead (Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 1. 24 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 247. 25 Cf. S. J. Lauro, K. Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism,” Boundary 2/2008. 26 N. Muntean, “Nuclear Death and Radical Hope in Dawn of the Dead and On the Beach,” in: Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, eds. D. Christie, S. J. Lauro (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), p. 82. 27 See W. Graebner, “The Living Dead of George Romero and Steven Spielberg: America, the Holocaust and the Figure of the Zombie,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, 31.1/2017. 28 A. Lowenstein, “Living Dead: Fearful Attractions of Film,” Representations 110.1/2010. 29 See P. Czaplin´ski, “Metanoja albo postoświeceniowe filmy o Zagładzie,” Pom­ niki pamięci. Miejsca niepamięci, eds. K. Chmielewska, A. Molisak (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2017). . 30 K. Filipowicz, “Krajobraz, który przezył śmier” in: Krajobraz niewzruszony (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1947). 31 J. Leociak, Limit Experiences: A Study of Twentieth-Century Forms of Repre­ sentation (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019), p. 317. . 32 Leociak, Limit Experiences, p. 321. In “Krajobraz, który przezył śmierć,” the protagonist receives help from a peasant woman who bids farewell with the sign of the cross. 33 Roma Sendyka writes about the shocking series of reportages titled Iber sztejn un sztok. A rajze iber hundert chorew-geworene kehiles in Pojln (1952/2018), whose author just after the war explored former Jewish municipalities, villages, shte­ tlach, districts, and towns. R. Sendyka, “To, co było,” Dwutygodnik 5/2019, writes the following: “[Mordecai] Canin forces the reader to understand that what is left after Jews in Poland is mostly cadavers, not ghosts. Reading Iber sztejn un sztok. A rajze iber hundert chorew-geworene kehiles in Pojln makes us realize that as long as the material presence of the murdered in the Holocaust is not framed by a funeral rite, talking about the murdered Jewish life using the figures of ghouls and ghosts is a premature and escapist gesture, a romanticiza­ tion of a terrible physical reality that is still shared by us.” This is characteristic for all of the “bloodlands” or “Holocaust by bullets” region. 34 A popular yet rare information source about stalags is the documentary Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel from 2008, directed by Ari Libsker. The novels were quickly censored by the state; however, it was no obstacle to their mass reading, as is usually the case. In Israel, reading those novels became a common experience for the second generation after the Holocaust. 35 A. Pinchevski, R. Brand, “Holocaust Perversions: The Stalags Pulp Fiction and the Eichmann Trial,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24/2007, p. 394. 36 See J. Lacan, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” in: Écrits, trans. B. Fink (New York; London: W. W. Norton, 2007), p. 90. 37 See A. Pinchevski, R. Brand, Holocaust Perversions, pp. 401–402. 38 Initially, the text served as a script for a play directed by Lilach Dekel-Avneri (pre­ miered on May 12, 2012, in Teatr Dramatyczny in Warsaw) and was later included in S. Chutnik, “Muranooo,” in: W krainie czarów (Krakow: Znak, 2014). 39 Chutnik, W krainie czarów, p. 210.

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40 Chutnik, W krainie czarów, p. 206. 41 Chutnik, W krainie czarów, p. 211. 42 E. Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations during the Second World War, trans. D. Allon, D. Dabrowska, D. Keren (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1992), p. 77. 43 C. Perechodnik, Am I a Murderer? Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman, ed. and trans. F. Fox (London; New York: Routledge, 2018), p. 21. 44 See: M. Waligórska, I. Sorkina, “The Second Life of Jewish Belongings–Jewish Personal Objects and their Afterlives in the Polish and Belarusian Post-Holocaust Shtetls”, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, DOI: 10.1080/ 17504902.2022.2047292, p. 2. 45 Perechodnik, Am I a Murderer?, p. 144. 46 See Waligórska, “Healing by Haunting.” 47 G. Deleuze, F. Guatarri, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hutley, M. Seem, H. R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 335. 48 See P. Dobrosielski, “Pierzyna,” in: ślady Holokaustu w imaginarium kultury polskiej, eds. P. Dobrosielski, J. Kowalska-Leder, I. Kurz, M. Szpakowska (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2017), pp. 346–347. 49 A. Leder, Prześniona rewolucja. Ćwiczenie z logiki historycznej (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2014), p. 67. . 50 A. Zborowska, Zycie rzeczy w powojennej Polsce (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uni­ wersytetu Warszawskiego, 2019), p. 185. 51 See C. Covington, “Hannah Arendt: Evil and the Eradication of Thought,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 93.5/2012. 52 These exceptions include Anna Wylegała’s texts: A. Wylegała “About ‘Jewish Things’: Jewish Property in Eastern Galicia During World War II,” Yad Vashem Studies 44.2016; A. Wylegała, “Entangled Bystanders: Multidimensional Trauma of Ethnic Cleansing and Mass Violence in Eastern Galicia,” in: Trauma, Experience and Narrative in Europe after World War II, eds. V. Kivimäki, P. Leese (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Vast historical research on the subject: . Klucze i kasa: o mieniu zydowskim w Polsce pod okupacja˛ niemiecka˛ i we wczes­ nych latach powojennych 1939–1950, eds. J. Grabowski, D. Libionka (Warsaw: . Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badan´ nad Zagłada˛ Zydów, 2014); M. Dean, C. Goschler, P. Ther, Robbery and Restitution: The Conflict over Jewish Property in Europe, (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007); Jewish Property After 1945: Cul­ tures and Economies of Loss, Recovery, and Transfer, ed. J. A. Labendz (London: . Routledge, 2018); Ł. Krzyzanowski, Ghost Citizens: Jewish Return to a Postwar City (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2020); M. Dean, Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933– 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Dispossession: Plundering German Jewry 1933–1953, eds. C. Kreutzmüller, J. R. Zatlin (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2020). 53 S. Buryła, “Nowe Eldorado,” in: Tematy (nie)opisane (Krakow: TAiWPN Uni­ versitas, 2013), p. 202. 54 M. Zaremba, Wielka trwoga. Polska 1944–1947. Ludowa reakcja na kryzys (Krakow: . Znak i ISP PAN, 2012), p. 283. On the joy of looting, see also Zbor­ owska, Zycie rzeczy w powojennej Polsce, p. 88. 55 A. Tuszyn´ska, Family History of Fear: A Memoir, trans. C. Ruas (New York: Anchor Books, 2016) p. 172. 56 J. Kowalska-Leder, “Szaber,” in: Obyczaje polskie. Wiek XX w krótkich hasłach, ed. M. Szpakowska (Warsaw: WAB, 2008), p. 337. See P. Dobrosielski, “Pier­ zyna,” in: ślady Holokaustu w imaginarium kultury polskiej.

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57 J. T. Gross, I. Grudzin´ska-Gross, Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 123–124. 58 M. Klein, “Love, Guilt, and Reparation,” in: M. Klein, Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works, 1921–1945 (London: Vintage, 1998). Cf. J. Butler, “To Preserve the Life of Other,” in: J. Butler, The Force of Nonviolence (New York: Penguin Random House, 2020), p. 95. . 59 See S. Buryła, Nowe Eldorado, p. 159. See D. Libionka, “Kwestia zydowska i problemy własnościowe w ujęciu wydawnictw konspiracyjnych ugrupowanacjo­ . nalistycznych,” in: Klucze i kasa. O mieniu zydowskim w Polsce pod okupacją niemiecką i we wczesnych latach powojennych 1939–1950, eds. J. Grabowski, D. . Libionka (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Zydów, 2014). 60 Perechodnik, Am I a Murderer?, p. 59. 61 As was famously claimed by Hanna Segal, groups may act much more psycho­ tically than what is allowed to an individual. See: H. Segal, “Silence is the real crime,” in: Psychoanalysis, Literature and War: Papers 1972–1995 (London; New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 120–121. 62 H. Grynberg, Dziedzictwo (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2018), p. 62. 63 See R. Sendyka, “Prism: Understanding Non-Sites of Memory,” Teksty Drugie 2/2015. 64 See I. Grudzin´ska-Gross, “Muranów, czyli karczowanie,” Studia Litteraria et Historica 1/2012. 65 B. Chomątowska, Stacja Muranów (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2012), p. 248. See also “Sylwia Chutnik o duchach Muranowa,” an interview with Chut­ nik by I. Szymans´ka, Gazeta Wyborcza May 10, 2012. 66 Zaremba, Wielka trwoga, . pp. 619f. . 67 J. Kwiek, Nie chcemy Zydów u siebie. Przejawy wrogos´ci wobec Zydów w latach 1944–1947 (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Nieoczywiste, . 2021), p. 19.. Cf. A. Ski­ bin´ska, “Powroty ocalałych,” in: Prowincja Noc. Zycie i zagłada Zydów w dys­ trykcie warszawskim, eds. B. .Engelking, J. Leociak, D. Libionka (Warsaw: Centrum Badan´ nad Zagłada˛ Zydów IFiS PAN, 2007), pp. 536–537; Ł. Krzy­ . zanowski, Ghost Citizens. 68 Bran´sk: Book of Memories, eds. J. Cohen, A. Trus (New York: JewishGen, 2017), p. 385. The original comes from 1948. See: J. Tokarska-Bakir, Jewish Fugitives in the Polish Countryside, 1939–1945 (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2022), p.. 363. 69 P. Dobrosielski, Spory o Grossa. Polskie problemy z pamięcią o Zydach (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2017), pp. 12–13. 70 For example J. Majmurek, “Realizm intensywności,” in: Kino-sztuka. Zwrot kinematograficzny w polskiej sztuce współczesnej, eds. J. Majmurek, Ł. Ronduda (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej i MSN, 2015), p. 123. 71 I. Kurz, “Ani z bliska ani z daleka. Klisze i powidoki,” Dwutygodnik 76/2012. 72 J. Andrzejewski, Holy Week, trans. Oscar E. Swan (Athens, Ohio: Ohio Uni­ . versity Press, 2007), p. 138. Tomasz Zukowski believes that in Andrzejewski’s novel the counterpoint to Irena is a kindhearted catholic, Anna Malecka, the . protagonist’s wife. See T. Zukowski, “Autowizerunek po katastrofie. Zofia Kossak-Szczucka i Jerzy Andrzejewski: dwa polskie świadectwa Zagłady z lat 40.,” Poznans´kie Studia Polonistyczne. Seria Literacka 25/2015. . 73 See J. Kowalska-Leder, “Coraz to nowe ządania, ‘coraz . to nowe grymasy’: Relacja władzy i podporządkowania między Polakami a Zydami w kryjówkach . po aryjskiej stronie,” Zagłada Zydów. Studia i Materiały 12/2016. 74 J. Krakowska, “Cmentarz,” in: ślady Holokaustu w imaginarium kultury polskiej, p. 105. 75 A. Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (London; New York: Verso Books, 2000), p. 183.

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76 W. Wilczyk, Niewinne oko nie istnieje / No Such Thing as an Innocent Eye (Łódz´ and Krakow: Atlas Sztuki i Korporacja Ha!art, 2009). 77 Grynberg, Dziedzictwo, p. 108. 78 G. Didi-Huberman, “The Site, Despite Everything,” in: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays, ed. S. Liebman (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 12. 79 See A. Bikont, The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne, trans. Alissa Valles (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). 80 S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 513. 81 J. Lacan, “Tuché and automaton,” in: J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan (New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1981). See C. Caruth, “Trau­ matic Awakenings (Freud, Lacan and the Ethics of Memory),” in: Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ versity Press, 2016); S. Žižek, How to Read Lacan, trans. J. Kutyła (New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), p. 58f. 82 S. Felman, Writing and Madness, trans. M. Noel Evans, S. Felman (Palo Alto, California: Stanford . University Press, 2003), p. 139. 83 See: Zborowska, Zycie rzeczy w powojennej Polsce.

84 Perechodnik, Am I a Murderer?, p. 95.

85 Noted in the Parish Chronicle by Fr. Tomasz Zade˛ cki, in Tokarska-Bakir,

Pogrom. Cries – Essays on Polish-Jewish History, 1939–1946, pp. 160–161. Sta­ nisław Zemis writes in his diaries: “They are still shooting, and our hyenas are on the lookout for what they can steal from the Jews. The corpses of the Jews have not yet cooled down, and applications are already pouring in for Jewish houses, . ´ ski, “Pamie˛ tniki. shops, workshops or a piece of land left over.” S. Z(Rz)emin . Łuków i okolice – getto,” ed. A. Skibin´ska, Zagłada Zydów. Studia i Materiały 13.2017, p. 632. 86 M. Tomczok, “Co stoi za stodołą? Przemiany toposu pojedwabiens´kiego a topika Zagłady,” Narracje o Zagładzie 2/2016, p. 83. See J. Nowakowski, “Fil­ . mowe dybuki. Od zydowskiej legendy do polskiego koszmaru sennego,” Poz­ nans´kie Studia Polonistyczne. Seria Literacka 28/2016. 87 Demon and Salto share the same framing narrative, where at the beginning someone arrives in the community, to leave it at the end. The motive of dizziness can also be found in the frantic scene on the merry-go-round in Everything for Sale (1968), although we cannot rule out that this figure was for the director a more general symbol of the Polish condition; after all, a communal dance is also the closing scene in the decade younger Ashes and Diamonds (1958). 88 See G. Niziołek, “Krajobraz po wstręcie. Los metafory,” in: 1968/PRL/Teatr, p. 75. We may find historic arguments that question and introduce nuance to the . post-Rózewicz metaphor of the little stabilization in M. Zaremba, “Spo­ łeczens´two polskie lat sześćdziesiątych—między ‘małą stabilizacją’ a ‘małą destabilizacją’,” in: Oblicza Marca 1968, eds. K. Rokicki, S. Stępień (Warsaw: IPN, 2004). 89 J. Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” in: Écrits, trans. B. Fink (New York; London: W. W. Norton, 2007), p. 693. 90 S. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London; New York: Verso), p. 128. 91 Waligórska, Sorkina, “The Second Life of Jewish Belongings,” pp. 11–16. . . 92 M. Canin, Przez ruiny i zgliszcza. Podróz po stu zgładzonych gminach zydows­ kich w Polsce, trans. M. Adamczyk-Garbowska (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Nisza, 2018), p. 487. (Mordechai Tsanin is the English version of M. Canin.)

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93 M. Głowin´ski, Marcowe gadanie. Komentarze do słów 1966–1971 (Warsaw: PoMOST, 1991), p. 99. . 94 M. Głowin´ski, “Marcowe fabuły,” in: Pismak 1863 i inne szkice o róznych brzydkich rzeczach (Warsaw: Open,1995), pp. 77–78. See the entry “niemiecko­ . zydowska reakcyjna fraternizacja,” in Głowin´ski, Marcowe gadanie. . 95 P. S´piewak, Zydokomuna. Interpretacje historyczne (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Czerwone i Czarne, 2012), pp. 30–43. See Brykczyn´ski, Gotowi na przemoc, p. 24. Cf. J. Schatz, The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1991). 96 J. Majmurek, “Antyszkoła polska,” Dwutygodnik 265/2019. 97 M. Fijołek, “Zaćma to film kulawy pod wieloma względami. Brystygierowa została przedstawiona płytko i ryzykownie,” Polityka, November 26, 2016; P. . Forecki, “Krwawa Luna i zydokomuna,” Krytyka Polityczna February 5, 2017; P. Forecki, “Fantazmat Julii Brystiger,” środkowoeuropejskie Studia Polityczne 1/ 2017; A. Grupin´ska, “Uwagi o skłamywaniu historii,” Krytyka Polityczna December 29, 2016; D. Karpiuk, “Zaćma Bugajskiego? Kinowa czytanka na zajęcia z nowej polityki historycznej,” Newsweek November 28, 2016; J. Maj­ murek, “Zaćma, czyli niekończąca się pokuta,” Krytyka Polityczna September 25, 2016. 98 See K. Jabłon´ska, A. Luter, “Nawrócona zbrodniarka?,” Więź 665/2016.

99 Forecki, Fantazmat Julii Brystiger, p. 51.

´

100 See A. Pajączkowska, J. Borowicz, “Papiery,” in: Slady Holokaustu w imaginar­ ium kultury polskiej. . 101 See A. Zawadzka “ ‘Zydokomuna’. Szkic do socjologicznej analizy z´ródeł historycznych,” Societas/Communitas 2(8)/2009. See also A. Zawadzka. “Recepcja . piętna ‘zydokomuny’ w ujęciu pokoleniowym. Szkic do badań,” Teksty Drugie 1/ 2016; A. Zawadzka, “The Recent History of a Certain Paralysis: A Case Study of the ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ Stereotype in Poland,” in: Breaking the Frame: New School of Polish-Jewish Studies, eds. I. Grudzin´ska-Gross, K. Matyjaszek (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2022). 102 S. Freud, “Uncanny,” in: Freud, SE, Vol. 17, p. 231. Critics argue instead that eyesight and the possibility to observe are autonomous objects and libidinal impulses; see S. Rahimi, “The Ego, the Ocular, and the Uncanny: Why Are Metaphors of Vision Central in Accounts of the Uncanny?,” International Jour­ nal of Psychoanalysis 94/2013. 103 See A. Pinchevski, R. Brand, Holocaust Perversions: The Stalags Pulp Fiction and the Eichmann Trial, pp. 401–402. 104 J. M. Rymkiewicz, Umschlagplatz, p. 80. 105 L. Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” in: The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. B. K. Grant (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2015), pp. 17–18: “Blindness in this context signifies a perfect absence of desire, allowing the look of the male protagonist to regard the woman at the requisite safe distance necessary to the voyeur’s pleasure, with no danger that she will return that look and in so doing express desires of her own.” 106 Franciszek Wyszyn Polacy patrza˛ na . ´ ski’s diary, qtd. in J. Grabowski, “Biedni . warszawskich Zydów i na getto warszawskie,” Zagłada Zydów. Studia i Mate­ riały 10/2014, p. 543. See F. Wyszyn´ski, Dzienniki z lat 1941–1944, eds. J. Gra­ bowski, Z. R. Grabowski (Warszawa: “Mówia˛ Wieki”, 2007). 107 See J. T. Gross, I. Grudzin´ska-Gross, Golden Harvest, pp. 123–124. 108 S. Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. A. A. Brill (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Limited 1940), p. 92: “The survivor will deny that he has ever entertained hostile impulses toward the beloved dead; but now the soul of the deceased entertains them and will try to give vent to them during the entire period of mourning. In spite of the successful defense through projection, the

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punitive and remorseful character of this emotional reaction manifests itself in being afraid, in self-imposed renunciations and in subjection to restrictions which are partly disguised as protective measures against the hostile demon.” Michael Steinlauf hints on this phenomenon in his study of the Polish Holocaust memory: “To dislike one’s neighbor, to wish him gone; then to observe his unprecedented total annihilation; finally to inherit what had once been his: such a sequence of events can only add immeasurably to the guilt occasioned by the trauma itself.” M. C. Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1997), p. 60. The artist keeps a record of his interventions on http://www.gunterdemnig.de (DOA: August 18, 2019). See K. Harjes, “Stumbling Stones: Holocaust Mem­ orials, National Identity, and Democratic Inclusion in Berlin,” German Politics and Society 23.1/2005; D. Osborne, “Mal d’archive: On the Growth of Gunter Demnig’s Stolperstein-Project,” Paragraph 37.3/2014. Their current list can be found on Wikipedia: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_ Stolpersteine_in_Polen (DOA: 14 August, 2019). In October 2019, the local branch of the Institute of National Remembrance refused to agree to insert them into the streets of Krakow, stating as a justification: “Each time we must take into account the scale of the phenomenon and the diversity of the suffering of different groups of people.” Source: http://www.tokfm.pl/Tokfm/7,103085,25351820,kamieni-pamieci-o-ofiara ch-holocaustu-jest-na-swiecie-70-tys.html (DOA: 28 October, 2019). It is a popular prewar antisemitic slogan, with a much longer history, that con­ centrates the National Democracy’s narration on the economical conflict between ethnic Poles and Polish Jews. It is very practical, as it is perfectly sym­ metrical and reversible. Depending on the context, it can serve different pur­ poses, which we may see in many different instances of its usage in the semiofficial and vernacular circulation: the poor/townspeople can be both Jews and ethnic Poles; it can serve both as an ethnically Polish call to deprive Jews of property (“Our streets, your houses”) and a cynical triumphalism projected at Jews (“Your streets, our houses”). Joanna Tokarska-Bakir considers that this saying “sets the symbolic framework of the Polish-Jewish discourse for cen­ turies,” and she quotes the perhaps first trace of this phantasm in Sebastian Miczyn´ski’s work from 1618. See J. Tokarska-Bakir, Legendy o krwi, p. 590. I thank Justyna Kowalska-Leder for her help in finding this information. See P. Dobrosielski, “Pierzyna,” in: ślady Holokaustu w imaginarium kultury polskiej, pp. 348–349. O. Bartov, “Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide,” The Journal of Modern History 80.3/2008, p. 575. Righteous Among Nations: How Poles Helped the Jews 1939–1945, eds. W. Bar­ toszewski; Z. Lewin (London: Earlscourt Publications, 1969). T. Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Pimlico, 2007), p. 803.

Bibliography . Baksik, Ł. Macewy codziennego uzytku/Matzevot for Everyday Use. Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2012. Błon´ski, J. “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto,” in: J. Błon´ski, My Brother’s Keeper: Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust, ed. A. Polonsky. London: Routledge, 1990. Demon. 2015. dir. Marcin Wrona. Gross, J. T. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001.

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Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Porter, New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. Leder, A. Prześniona rewolucja. Ćwiczenie z logiki historycznej. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2014. . . Ostachowicz, I. Noc zywych Zydów. Warsaw: WAB, 2012. Perechodnik, C. Am I a Murderer? Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman, ed. and trans. F. Fox. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Pinchevski, A., Brand, R. “Holocaust Perversions: The Stalags Pulp Fiction and the Eichmann Trial,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24/2007. Miłoszewski, Z. 2011 A Grain of Truth. London: Bitter Lemon Press, 2012. Nałkowska, Z. Medallions. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1972. S´wierczek, M. The Dybbuk. Bielsko-Biała: Ammit, 2012. Wilczyk, W. Niewinne oko nie istnieje (No Such Thing as an Innocent Eye). Łódz´ and . Krakow: Atlas Sztuki i Korporacja Ha!art, 2009. ´ ski, S. “Pamie˛ tniki. Łuków i okolice – getto,” ed. A. Skibin´ska, Zagłada Z(Rz)emin . Zydów. Studia i Materiały 13/2017. Zac´ma. 2016. dir. Ryszard Bugajski. Žižek, S. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 1992.

5

Perverse (Post)Memory

This chapter supplements the examination of perverse phantasies. I will reflect on how perverse mechanisms that form bystander memory affect the Holocaust victims’ memory, and also in the following generations. I posit that in the per­ verse Polish memory, the victims could not articulate their trauma so that it became a burden transferred to the next generations. Children of the victims must contain their parents’ experiences, which became unbearable to the latter, making them recipients of the perverse intergenerational transfer of trauma. When the victims lack a sympathetic and present witness of their suffering, they are left alone with their trauma, overwhelmed and stifled with their experiences; the victims feel that their hope is futile in this world that does not follow definitive, predictable rules.1 When I read post-memory literature to reconstruct the perverse intergenerational transfer of trauma—like Włoskie . szpilki and Szum by Magdalena Tulli or On Mother and Fatherland by Bozena Keff—what draws my attention is the rejection and exclusion of the Polish environment in which Jewish families function. In her work, Tulli portrays the situation during the events of March 1968, while Keff shows it as a choir of antisemites. In this chapter, I will outline an image of the “environment of trauma:” indifferent, unwilling bystanders to which the victims cannot turn with their pain and suffering in search of understanding or at least a recogni­ tion of harm. I find such images of the environment of trauma in two plays, Krótka wymiana ognia by Zyta Rudzka and Puste pole by Tadeusz Hołuj, which present the environment of extermination camps. Their analysis will show how devastating the environment of hostile bystanders was to the Holo­ caust victims and their families, and also how much the victims’ memory can repeat the perverse mechanisms. The linking of the victims’ and bystanders’ memories, their entanglement, and the repeated violence reveal also an ethical aspect: they show that those memories cannot be separated from one another.

Trauma Witnesses Psychoanalyst Dori Laub, one of the co-founders of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, discusses the necessity of the Holocaust survivors to recount their memories in his co-written book DOI: 10.4324/9781003330035-6

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Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing. To continue living, we must talk, even if it takes our whole life to find the words that describe what we as victims had to do to survive.2 Silence slowly destroys and disfigures memory, so a person ceases to perceive the realness of past experience, and with that, their own realness, the continuity of identity and life. According to Laub, the Holocaust is an event without a witness, because during the war most of the victims could not assume the separated, safe position of the witness. Only by talking to someone who listens selflessly and openly—a model situation for giving testimony—can they become the narrators of their own stories. Laub addres­ ses the distrust that during the war accompanied the information about what was happening to the Jews living under the German occupation, and the documented postwar silence when societies focused on restoration and not on listening to the victims. Laub recounts the story of Menachem S., an Israeli army officer who as a boy was smuggled from the Płaszów concentration camp with an address of a hideout on the Aryan side. The boy took with him a photograph of his mother and a vow to meet his parents after the war. In difficult moments, like when he wandered the streets of Krakow in search of a place to hide from his perpetrators—if only for a moment—he talked to his mother in the photo­ graph. Thanks to that, he stayed in contact with a caring parent, although in reality, he had no information about his family’s whereabouts. Laub believes that “this story exemplifies the process whereby survival takes place through the creative act of establishing and maintaining an internal witness who sub­ stitutes for the lack of witnessing in real life.”3 The breakdown came when the boy met his parents after the war—something thousands of utterly orphaned survivors could only envy him—only to find that he fails to recognize them, that they do match neither his memories nor the photograph (as we know from testimonies and literary biographies, it is not an exception).4 According to Laub, remaining silent about the war experiences and a desperate desire to reverse them mark the further life story of Menachem S., when from a help­ less boy, he transforms into a soldier who heroically fights in Israeli wars. However, it does not stop the recurring nightmares. The nightmares cease only after giving testimony, after telling the story, and reinstating the inner witness; someone who will listen, try to understand, and accept all the emo­ tions and experiences. Although the presence of the witness does not elim­ inate the trauma, it allows one to think about the trauma, because a dialog appears—both inside and outside oneself.5 By the figurative expression “an event without a witness,” Laub does not mean the possibility of talking about the experience of the Holocaust only through negations, but rather the importance of having an engaged recipient to one’s testimony. Particularly, few can empathetically listen to cases of traumatic events, an eruption of violence, and limitless suffering.6 Although Laub posits a general anthropological thesis about experiencing trauma, it is different from what his critics typically assume. For example, Gary Weisman undermines Laub’s idea that the Holocaust victims cannot epistemologically

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7

perceive the war and occupation events they experienced. However, it appears that Laub refers to what happens with the traumatic experience after the war; he returns to the psychoanalytical thesis that madness and suffering stem from loneliness and the conviction that there is nobody who would listen to what we have to say. Trauma makes the world fragment into one’s inside and outside, the subject and the place of the trauma while breaking the link between the two.8 How­ ever, from the victim’s viewpoint, it is not a situation of separation and indifference, but through confinement in solitude—that of hostility. When the victim cannot meet the gaze of another person who would recognize their suffering—not the perpetrator, a bystander at least—the victim feels sur­ rounded only by persecutors. We can find an illustration of this process in Kornel Filipowicz’s short story (mentioned in chapter four) written immedi­ . ately after the war “Krajobraz, który przezył s´mierc´” (The Landscape That Survived Death; 1948), which describes the thoughts of a Jew led to the execution site: How unmoved was the landscape when they walked, stripped naked, divided into columns of two hundred, down a steep road, hearing as the wind brings muffled rustle of shots—as if there was a rabbit hunt. He tried to pierce the landscape with his eyes to discover some ultimate truth beyond what he could see; but there was nothing more than more land­ scape that wrapped around the globe, with a sky propped up like a wall on columns of air. There was nothing except free space, where a free person can touch every path with their material foot, grab every twig with own hands, and with own eyes choose a tree for sole property.9 The landscape—the forest, the sky—becomes an impassable wall closing on the convicts, although earlier it was a “free space” allowing for life. In the borderline situation of being sentenced to death, nature reveals a completely different face, terrifying and alienating, when all ties connecting humans with their surroundings disappear. Albert Camus wrote about such an existential experience in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus: A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is “dense,” sensing to what a degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia.10 The inhuman landscape in its cold beauty is not only indifferent, but also hostile: the wind blows in the faces of the convicts, bringing them the sounds of gunshots, announcing their future, not-so-distant fate. The landscape has

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no intentionality, which the character tries in vain to grasp, to discover the “ultimate truth” concealed to him in the execution. The forest, however, simply is, regardless of what happens within it. The forest becomes a witness, but unmoved, in a double sense: unchanged and emotionless.11 In Filipowicz’s description, the “unmoved landscape”—also the title of the short story collection from 1948—is a landscape hostile and responsible for all the indifference to suffering. The landscape becomes a wall, an impene­ trable barrier, and loses all depth: while others can walk, touch trees, and venture into woods, the victims sentenced to death can only look. The land­ scape looks back at them. When the bystanders insistently avoid becoming witnesses, their blatant indifference to the violence means plain hostility. When the victims’ suffering does not matter, they cease to be perceived as other people. Jews during the war experienced this indifference and hostility as a symbolic yet very concrete barrier surrounding them. As an anonymous author expressed collecting her experiences in the Warsaw ghetto: Behind the red wall, which forms a demarcation line separating us—the convicts from those who are allowed to live as normal humans, there is another wall that is much more difficult to cross. It is a thick wall of indiffer­ ence and lack of understanding with which Poles have surrounded themselves, mostly completely insensitive to the shocking tragedy we are suffering.12 After such an experience of indifference lined with hostility, the victims lose the faith that they can share their experiences of aggression, fear, and misery with anyone, which leaves them alone with all those feelings, along with all their loved ones, including their children.

Dreaming the Dreams of Others Polish writer Agata Tuszyn´ska gives perhaps the most accurate definition of intergenerational transmission of trauma in Family History of Fear (2005). The narrator notes her mother’s memories of escaping with her grandmother from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Aryan side: they are caught by szmalcownicy who lurk in the street; here presumably Biała street, situated on a frequent escape route, hence popular among those wishing to blackmail the Jews. A coach driver with an exuberant mustache chases the szmalcownicy away. The man proposes to take the women to a safe place, but it soon turns out he wants to denounce them himself. The driver stops the coach in front of the Gestapo headquarters on Szucha alley and states with a smirk: “What did . you think, Zydówo, dirty, fucking Jew? That I wouldn’t take you back where you belong?” The narrator’s grandmother and mother barely save themselves by bribing Polish police officers.13 In this memory, the Germans appear only in the background—we read about their voices in the Gestapo headquarters and sounds of footsteps—the dangerous game happens only between the Jews and the ethnic Poles, who can do whatever they wish with the Jews.

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The narrator adds that her mother’s story lives in her like a foreign body; it comes back at night as different versions of a dream, practically identical, raw and unprocessed despite the passage of time and the fact that, after all, it is not her own memory. In the dream, the narrator is the protagonist of the story, meaning the author’s mother; friends also appear, and even the narrator’s grandfather as the coach driver, and finally, a surprising bucket with sand. A quick association leads the narrator to compare the bucket to an hourglass, perhaps as a symbol of vanitas or simply the passing time: despite the years that passed, the experience of being hounded, the fear for one’s life, and the memory of escaping from perpetrators remains virtually unchanged. The major difference between the memory and the dream is the ending: the dream stops right before salvation. In reality, an ethnic Polish member of the family bribed the extortionists to release the narrator’s mother and grandmother. The dream’s conclusion does not erase the memory of the kindness of the relative or the fact that the women survived, but it indirectly shows how striking and mentally unbearable was the experience of escaping the Ghetto. Especially since, as we learn from the book, the grandmother who took the daughter to the Aryan side did not survive the Holocaust. The narrator inherits this story and lives it as if it was her own, even though she simultaneously feels detached. The dream and the inherited memory trap and suffocate the narrator, especially since there no sympathetic witness appears in the dream. The dream appears to be worse, because there is no witness to the suffering or anyone who would believe the narrator—only different tormentors. The feeling of being persecuted is not only the victims’ experience but also their families’—as the dream demonstrates—especially the experience of their children born after the Holocaust but still connected to it through their par­ ents. Polish culture waited until the beginning of the twenty-first century to hear the children’s voice, when the second generation began to struggle with their recent and distant past marked by the Holocaust. We can find a record of those struggles in Ewa Kuryluk’s novels Goldi (2004), Frascati (2009), and . Feluni (2019), Agata Tuszyn´ska’s A Family History of Fear (2005), Bozena Keff’s On Mother and Fatherland (2008), Magdalena Tulli’s Włoskie szpilki (Italian High Heels; 2011) and Szum (Noise; 2014), Monika Sznajderman’s Fałszerze pieprzu (Forgers of Pepper; 2016), Marcin Zaremba-Bielawski’s . Dom z dwiema wiezami (A House With Two Towers; 2018), or Jarosław Kurski’s Dziady i dybuki (Dziady and Dybbukim; 2022).15 The listed books were written more than sixty years after the war for two reasons. First, the fact that a generation that struggles with their parents’ memories can reveal a new dimension of the Holocaust memory was acknowledged relatively late. Helen Epstein’s 1979 Children of the Holocaust published in the USA is con­ sidered a turning point in how we perceive the survivors’ families.16 Second, it is hard to imagine such publications in the communist Polish People’s Republic, because in many cases, they contradicted the official narration about Polish–Jewish relations.17 Even now, after the state censorship was abolished, the books are difficult to integrate into the conservative narration

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of the past. This contradiction appears also in the documentary films created since the 1990s dedicated to the antisemitic campaign of March 1968, usually produced thanks to private financing, which include accounts of the wide­ spread antisemitism that the emigrants faced.18 Therefore, the stories that enter the field of postmemory19 become also anti-historical: they shatter the existing version of history and fill in the gaps. The stories become anti-his­ torical not only because they reveal the antisemitism meticulously effaced in the official and popular circulation but also because they concern everyday life—family relations—that show historical events only as a background. It is not by accident that most of the authors are women. Feminist critique paved the way for history to study everyday life—family and personal rela­ tions—beyond political and social history. Taking personal literature and mem­ oirs into account when studying the past remains a relatively new approach. Practically all the perverse representations of the Holocaust from the previous chapters were male representations. It is so not only because the exalted subject matter of history requires certain “discourse guardians” but also because the patriarchal images of women situate them outside the perverse through simulta­ neous idealization and degradation. This allows male authors to cultivate the phantasy of the lost land of sublime motherhood and a relationship with mother that is devoid of frustration. Although it is difficult to locate this phantasy, it acts as an unattainable model. As the British psychoanalyst Estela V. Welldon argues: the inability to connect women with perversion is based on the “refusal to admit that motherhood could have any negative aspects.”20 Therefore, the postmemory narrations most frequently break a double taboo not only because they refuse to depict the survivors solely as innocent victims of violence but also because they present the relationship between mother and child as far from the glorified model. The perverse memory will consist in the transmission and repetition through generations of the scenes of violence that continue despite the changing roles of their characters, which will be accompanied by the silent and hostile consent of the observers.

Post-Traumatic Boredom Magdalena Tulli describes a pessimistic vision of a vicious circle of repetition and transfer of the experience of the Holocaust in her novel Włoskie szpilki (Italian High Heels, 2011), whose last part ends with the words: “This is how it is with us, foxes. For generations, we will leap from one dream to another, and from that one—to the yet another one.”21 Composed of loosely related short stories, the novel describes a secret that constitutes the axis of the mother–daughter relationship. The secret is revealed only when the elderly mother can produce nothing more than pieces of stories and scraps of mem­ ories; that is when she reveals all her life and her concealed identity. Although the book deals with the matter of Jewish identity, it never uses the word “Jew,” it names nothing directly, even the “star” becomes “a symbol sewn onto clothing” (WSZ 71).

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The daughter unconsciously feels her mother’s past, her concentration camp traumas, and she feels alienated and estranged among her Polish peers in school, although she cannot grasp what separates her and other children. She grows up in silence, as the experience of the Holocaust made her mother feel empty, deprived of any memories, feelings, and pain. The mother “would rather believe that no blood flows in her veins, that you can live without blood. That would be even cleaner. If she could do that, she would deny that there was a war in her life” (WSZ 30). The unnamed daughter confronts an empty space in her relationship with the unnamed mother—and the empty space in herself. She feels that during her mother’s life, she experienced something that prevents her from establishing bonds and which makes them strangers to each other. The girl imagines the situation as a closed casket concealed in the back of her head, with images and feelings, in place of which there is only “eternal despair, cold breath on the neck, and instead of solid ground under the feet—emptiness” (WSZ 65). It reminds one of how Nadine Fresco, who conducted interviews with the second generation, wrote about the deadly emptiness that sometimes haunts children of Holocaust survivors, noting that “in place of the forbidden death, the child invents madness. The mother’s silence, the madness of the mother, locked up in her own silence.”22 The girl’s and later—the woman’s—pain becomes unbearable, as she can only identify with the internally dead mother and can only follow her to death. She goes through photographs of Auschwitz prisoners and feels that she is one of them, that she had also died in the camp. Abandoned by her mother, she lives surrounded by empty silence. In 1968, she feels the hatred of Poles who recognize her unknown identity despite her blue eyes: This bread is not yours, eat yours—I heard these words in the corner grocery store in the morning, just before the bell alarm clock, when I put two-forty on the counter. No mercy, I thought, waking up for a moment, as I choke with it anyway. (WSZ 134) She confronts the results of the infamous March 1968 with its political and social antisemitic campaigns in Poland, when once again, the Polish society denied Jews the right to be part of the community. The novel shows this by the refusal of bread, probably as a form of punishment for the so-called “Jewish ingratitude” for Polish help during the Second World War. The world in which the survivor mother must live forces her to remain silent, which does not block the non-verbal message she directs at her daughter. In Tulli’s novel, Polish society seems steeped in the Holocaust memory and the memory of Jews that live in Poland, but the memory returns only as virulent antisemit­ ism. Children in kindergarten shout “to burn, to burn, to burn!” (WSZ 16), which makes everyone suspect the girl’s mother’s origins and incorporate the girl’s Italian father in the circle of suspicion. It is obvious that since he looks “southern” and often leaves the country, he must be Jewish; although in the

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novel he is not. Polish writer Marek Nowakowski confirms the existence of this physiognomic-antisemitic norm in Poland in his notes on the March 1968 events published as Syjonis´ci do Syjamu (Zionists to Siam!; 2009), in which he writes about his school friend hounded by neighbors and the police: Sparks of sudden life ignited in the gamekeeper’s eyes. “This Henryk,” he said as if in passing, “they say he’s Italian … Italian or not … Somehow he seems Jewish … .” “Of course not! It’s a hundred percent sure thing! Father—Italian, mother—Polish.” “But a Zionist,” said the gamekeeper with undisturbed calm. And for a long time he whispered this to the secretary’s ear over a bottle of vodka. The secretary first shook his head in rejection; but later he froze and blinked his eyes. The bait worked. So my friend Henryk was in a net tighter and tighter. Stories about him were strange, various … .23 In postwar Poland every sign of visual or racial difference gave rise to suspi­ cion of Jewish identity. “Italian look,” probably referring to darker skin color and black hair, could be seen as a masquerade, especially during the anti­ semitic rise of 1968. In Włoskie szpilki, the girl in a similarly unfamiliar, hostile reality is doomed to her mother and the mother’s legacy, with which she cannot cope. In Tulli’s work, March 1968 is not only a symbol but also an image of a community in which the Polish Jews live. For many of them, the antisemitic campaign activates the trauma of the Holocaust, which reappears as piercing fear and the feeling of being hounded.24 The feelings of confine­ ment and claustrophobia rise, because outside the circles of family and friends, they only encounter a hostile environment. Therefore, the girl from Włoskie szpilki can only escape—which she always does in her dreams—not only from people but ultimately also from the terrifying reality inside of her: Her defect lies precisely in the fact that without any notice, she sinks into another time, as if the floor beneath her collapsed, as if she fell a few floors below. She believes herself fearless. And yet she always fears something. Always the same, and nothing more. But that fear has grown so deep inside her heart that she does not feel it day by day, only some­ times something starts to choke her, as if a foreign body was stuck in her throat, and nobody knows how it got there. (WSZ 142) The Holocaust memory enters her body like an intruder. She can neither spit out nor swallow her mother’s memory; the inherited Holocaust freezes her and makes her unable to function. It would be misleading to claim that the girl is depressed or that her nar­ ration is part of the mourning process (sadness or grief). The readers probably experience no similar affect. The novel is essentially boring with practically

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no plot whatsoever: the protagonist is barely alive, and so is the story. The boredom is not coincidental, as it follows the logic of exploring the empty space in the mother’s and daughter’s minds. French psychoanalyst André Green calls this construction a dead mother’s complex, which is to be characterized by “white depression,” a depression without sadness and the feeling of loss.25 The “dead mother” is not mentally dead, she is rather completely devoid of emotion, always focused on her own problems. The child cannot experience sorrow, because based on its experience, it perceives that this emotion does not influence the mother’s behavior and her relationship with the daughter; an empty space appears in place of the mother and the relationship with the girl. Identity revolves around numbness, dead tissue at its core. Boredom is then an affect and effect of the trauma, resulting from the feeling of utter abandonment. Boredom is rarely recognized as an effect of literature on Holocaust—supposedly out of the anxiety to break the ethical rules of analyzing testimonies and their fictional transformations. At the same time, it is exactly boredom and lack of life that demonstrate to the largest extent the harm the Holocaust inflicted on the mother, as well as the lack of dialog throughout the book: there is no one who speaks, and there is no one who listens. Tulli’s other novel Szum (Noise 2014) (later abbreviated as SZ) also seems to evoke affective boredom, as it further elaborates the story from Włoskie szpilki. Szum focuses on the girl’s childhood and her attempts to deal with her mother’s past. The girl feels alienated among her peers, has difficulty con­ centrating at school, and teachers assume that she is either mean or lazy, or unintelligent. However, she is absorbed by her inner world, withdrawn to her psychic retreat, where she can reside without any unnecessary movement. She is constantly preoccupied in her mind with vivid fantasies: predominantly of a fox living in a forest, which calms her down when she feels too anxious. In the author’s idiom, foxes stand for Jews, while the forest is a place of retreat from the school and from street persecutors, which perhaps represents her mother’s hiding during the war, as was the case for many ghetto and camp escapees. Fantasies—about the forest, the fox, the SS-Manns in their black uniforms— prove that the girl unconsciously holds her mother’s secret, that she is close to revealing and understanding the secret. Yet at the same time, it is constantly beyond her reach. Because of her classmate’s suspicion, she asks her mother who Jehovah is, and the mother indifferently replies that it is God in the “Jewish religion”—which makes it the only appearance of the word “Jewish” in the book—but that her family was never religious. This brief exchange does not broaden the girl’s knowledge, as she calms herself down immediately with fantasy that attacks her own intelligence, when the fox convinces her to “stick to the stupidity, it is our biggest protection” (Sz, 84). The girl is too absorbed in her fantasies to return to reality, to pay attention at school, and to have normal interactions with other children. She is constantly forced to process her mother’s “deaf, dead despair,” which can never be named directly. Ironi­ cally, the closest bond she can establish is with a girl whose parents also hid their identity and kept a secret; in this case, it was their German ancestors

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and the fact that “Wehrmacht soldiers lived in her family albums. Or, rather, they would have lived if they had not been torn away from those pictures” (SZ 89). Only after the death of her mother does she learn from the latter’s old friend when the silence began. After the liberation of the concentration camp, her mother occupied a small room in an apartment taken from a German family, shared by other displaced people who had nowhere else to go. As her flatmates were playing cards, she screamed in her sleep: She cried feverishly, with her eyes closed, breaking off with words, about events that others wanted to forget. At times she fell silent with a lump in her throat, one sentence was suddenly interrupted by her violent sobs, and in the next she fell asleep. … Her despair did not do a good impres­ sion, they had more than enough of their own, which they could barely contain, but they did not see a place for it on the outside. (SZ 187–188) Desperate, fragmented memories poured out of the mother uncontrollably; when they evoked only cold indifference in others, she withdrew into silence, vowing that she would never allow herself to display such a lack of self-control.26 From an excess of memories, she switched to the opposite state of emptiness and sup­ pression. This resembles the process described by Eva Hoffman, daughter of survivors from Kraków, who in the book After Such Knowledge deals with the memory of the next generation after the Holocaust. Hoffman notes: [It was not exactly] memories that were expressed at first by the survivors themselves. Rather, it was something both more potent and less lucid; something closer to enactment of experience, to emanations or sometimes nearly embodiments of psychic matter—of material too awful to be pro­ cessed and assimilated into the stream of consciousness, or memory, or intelligible feeling.27 Although unconsciously, the mother destroyed her daughter’s ability to think, feel, and grow up as a separate person. The “noise” becomes the metaphor for this experience in Tulli’s Szum: “I could not hit that narrow band of the right volume, squeezed between the forbidden noise ranges and the deaf silence” (SZ 13). In her fantasies, the girl hopelessly tries to process the cruel, sadistic scenes with their changing dynamics between perpetrators and vic­ tims. The girl follows the fox through the forest and encounters an SS-Mann who—contrary to the fox—tells her to confront her cruel classmates and to be brave, active, and strong. After deciding not to listen to him, they tie up the SS-man, leaving him to their mercy. Due to my problems, I constantly forgot to feed him. It just so happened that I never had a spoon nor sugar with me. But this time it was different.

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I pulled out of my pocket a tin spoon from the school canteen and some sugar in a creased paper bag. The SS-Mann licked the sugar out of the spoon hungrily. (SZ 100) Now it was the little Jewish girl’s turn to be in control and withhold food from the German perpetrator. However, it was the girl who was the actual victim—the victim of her mother who starved her and withheld all informa­ tion about herself and her past. Psychologists and memory scholars mention the control over their children’s food and eating exercised by many Holocaust survivors.28 The protagonist’s hunger and numbness turn into sadistic fanta­ sies that have their source in the mother’s experiences, and although they imprison the girl—they at least contain life. The contents of an inter­ generationally transmitted closed casket are released to the world, and the author of Włoskie szpilki writes about them: “The energy of violence trans­ formed into an aimless wandering energy of suffering, sorrow, and hatred. In this form, it came into the possession of the following generations—whether they wanted it or not” (WSZ 65). That is when the perverse becomes a form of defense against the emptiness and disintegration of post-traumatic bore­ dom; it becomes a desperate device that a child employs to find any kind of life, even in a fantasy—contrary to the state that engulfs their dead mother.29

The Terror of Memory . Unlike Tulli’s novels, there is hardly any silence in Bozena Keff’s On Mother and Fatherland (2008) (later abbreviated as MF). An historian of Polish–Jewish rela­ tions and Polish antisemitism, Keff constructs her drama as a lyrical grievance, a hateful and vengeful indictment of a daughter against her mother. Stories of the Holocaust told by her mother are flooding the daughter and suffocating her. The daughter cannot live a separate life; the mother hates the fact that her daughter is a different person and threatens to kill herself when the daughter comes home from the cinema or goes out on a date. The mother cannot eat anything, she starves herself as if she was living in a concentration camp, complaining: I have to chew this dry roll barely sipping the thin vegetable soup I eat nothing a morsel of boiled chicken perhaps a year ago every day I’m blocked up I lose my strength I have none left. (MF 11) The mother lives only from devouring her child, draining her life like a vampire sucking her blood. To the mother, her daughter appears as a bloody piece of meat. The daughter defends herself by not listening: I’m sitting with her chewing something not listening, but she’s broad­ casting anyway

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Perverse (Post)Memory This eternal broadcast annihilates me, I as I have no existence here, I’m an acoustic chamber … I’m already half-dead and hollow, but my mother isn’t done yet. (MF 13).

The mother vomits with her experience of the Holocaust, “tears her history by the skin, by the guts, she sinks her hand in the belly of a carcass, you never know what she’ll pull out” (MF 26). In response, the daughter feels that her memories and feelings resemble poisoned food, which can destroy her from the inside, so she must vomit her mother’s story. Using her daughter as an “acoustic booth” reveals a desperate and doomed attempt to find a listener. In reversal of their roles, it is the daughter that mothers her parent who con­ stantly demands her attention.30 The mother refuses to give her access, she conceals herself with stereotypically repeated stories—although she feels she gives everything away. There can be no agreement between them, because the mother is still living in the world engulfed by the primal hateful war, in which she feels like flesh to be devoured, like a wild animal hunted by the Nazis: No matter how much the Arymans capture and slaughter, they want more, spit bones, hair, shoes, erect a gallows, burn people out, singing merrily, weeping with laughter, so sincerely glad they are of this animal helplessness, corpse-like squalor, they sing, before snow, metal and hunger blows into their mouths. (MF 27) Now, the roles are once again reversed, and it is the mother who transforms from a defenseless victim into a sadist mistreating her daughter, devouring her existence as a separate, autonomous person. During the war, it was the mother who was treated like a piece of meat, destined for slaughter. The experience of war erased her entire former identity, and she struggles to recover from these ruins with the terror of memory and testimony forced down her daughter’s throat, who in return, can only vomit with her stories. In On Mother and Fatherland, Keff mixes many forms, myths, popular culture heroes, oral tradition, and Christian poems. Profanities constantly interrupt the sublime style, rhythm breaks with sudden interjections. The cruel dialog between the mother and the daughter assumes a musical form; as if in opposition to what Julia Kristeva calls the semiotic order, the female melody of lullabies and rhythm associated with the good connection between the child and their mother.31 In the drama, the daughter is fatherless; even more so, as the mother seizes her body claiming that she will be her father. Fatherland represents the Catholic, conservative Polish society full of antisemitic, sexist, and homophobic resentment: “Jewish fags! And Jewish dykes, and those hook-nosed feminazis! (MF 59)” Kristeva’s theory denounces the patriarchic

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order of overestimating the symbolic, the figure of the father, and manliness. However, the father plays an important role: he saves the child, and especially the girl, from being overwhelmed, absorbed by the mother.32 Understood symbolically as someone or something outside the claustrophobic mother– child dyad, the father provides opportunity for the child to become a separate person, protecting the daughter from the annihilation anxiety and murderous hatred governed by the primitive rule: “either her or me.” The mother’s hatred suffocates the daughter. Perhaps she would even want to kill her mother, but she feels too weak to follow through. She believes that she has no “legitimacy to exist,” as underneath the hatred and pain she feels empty: she dreams of standing at a train station holding a baby, “a screaming mass. (MF 24)” The traumatic reality of the mother is also the reality that she cannot cope with: “the trains depart, and the people pass by, / and I stand waiting for I don’t know what. (MF 24).” The only world beyond their relationship is the eponymous fatherland—a substitute for the absent father. The father does not appear in Keff’s play, equally barely present in Tulli’s novels.33 One critic notices that the closer we get to the mothers, the closer we get to the Jewish culture and the Holocaust, and farther away from Polish culture.34 In this place, narrowness also increases. However, only if the protagonists turn to a third party—the father, the fatherland—is it possible to reach any kind of agreement, because there appears room for something from outside of the sadomasochistic play. In On Mother and Fatherland, such an opportunity surfaces when the daughter and the mother can join a temporary alliance against the anti­ semitism that reigns in Poland (MF 43), they can jointly stand up against the phenomenon that the choir of patients waiting in line to a physician sings in the epilog: It’s common knowledge that Hitler’s grandmother was a Jew! Jews—Kikes! And the Germans are Jews! And the Russkies are yids! … Jewish fags! And Jewish dykes, and those hook-nosed feminazis! … Widzew-Kikes! Legia-Jews! Polonia-Yids! (MF 58–60)35 Fatherland—the metaphorical “third” to the scene—will not change the vio­ lent relationship between the daughter and the mother, because Polish gaw­ kers remain in the same spot they occupied during the war. The antisemites choir allows the protagonists to understand each other for a moment, although the understanding stems solely from joint rejection in pain. In fact, there is no other space in which the mother–daughter relationship could be different. Psychoanalyst Samuel Gerson emphasizes that the victims hope, there is an engaged witness—an other that stands beside the event and the self and who cares to listen; an other who is able to contain that which is heard and is capable of imagining the unbearable; an other who

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Perverse (Post)Memory is in a position to confirm both our external and our psychic realities and, thereby, to help us integrate and live in all realms of our experience.36

However, the witness who looks with indifference is the “dead third” to whom the victim cannot turn in search of recognition of the misery suffered from the perpetrator. One Holocaust scholar calls the experience of the futile search for a hideout by some Ghetto escapees a “human desert:” both in literal mean­ ing, the repeated refusal of help from the neighbours and the following wan­ dering in the search for a safe haven, and in the metaphorical sense, the emotional experience of despair, helplessness, and mistrust.37 Later, the lack of a sympathetic look from the Polish witness prevents breaking the violence that repeats in following generations, because the vic­ tims have nowhere to escape. The bystanders’ hostile gaze conveys the plea­ sure from seeing the misery of others. Therefore, there are some examples of transmitting the pain through generations which do not produce perverse structure. For example, Polish artist and writer Ewa Kuryluk’s auto­ biographical postmemorial novels Goldi, Frascati, and Feluni remain outside the perverse memory, albeit they focused on the pain transferred through generations. However, the empathetic and engaged “third” does appear in Kuryluk’s novels in the person of Łapa, the narrator’s father.38 As a result, we encounter a much less drastic dichotomy between the family and its sur­ roundings, between the Polish Jews and the ethnic Poles.

Vomiting Trauma The survivors do not remember in a vacuum, so it is not enough to study their memory, it is also necessary to study the trauma environment in which the transmission of memories and experiences happen. Perverse memory exists in a paradoxical space: a combination of life and death, of being steeped in tragedy and the violent gestures that negate it, of destruction and manic repairs. Poet Czesław Miłosz sharply depicts such a picture in one of his letters dated September 20, 1947: I am saddened with Polish customs. … You open [the album Warsaw in Tadeusz Kulisiewicz Drawings’] and your hair stand on end: ruins. Ugh! But ruins are embarassing, and they make them into relics. I ask, who cares about it in America? The cult of ruins is something incomprehen­ sible for me. Then you open [the monthly] Przekrój and what do we see? Jokes that no publication in the USA would dare printing, because they clearly enter the sphere of pornography. Ruins, Green Goose Theater (utterly unintelligible here, maybe for readers of New Yorker, this maga­ zine for intellectualists), raunchy jokes, vodka, sleeping around, and dis­ cussing Marxism—altogether a satanic aura of an end of the world, a true farewell to autumn.39

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Romantic sensitivity perceives ruins are a space of melancholy and grief that direct thoughts toward the past and loss. However, Miłosz seems to say that it is not the case in postwar Poland. Zyta Rudzka’s drama Krótka wymiana ognia (A Short Exchange of Fire; 2014) discusses this issue in an epicedium form, a lament over a deceased that brings no consolation, nor is it exces­ sively depressing.40 Written in one breath, it does not pause for any deeper reflexion, the characters talk by spitting out words, not really talking to one another but rather screaming about their own misery. In his letter written right after the war, Miłosz argues that the Polish cult of ruins may appear incomprehensible to Americans and that the focus on death and suffering should actually be hidden, not celebrated. Rudzka’s drama takes the exactly opposite direction: cemeteries are just what Amer­ icans seek in Poland. The protagonists of A Short Exchange of Fire are an American Jew—Jack London—and his Polish guide Maryna. Jack’s parents escaped Poland, and now their son goes to Auschwitz to scatter his family’s ashes. To him, Poland is simply a cemetery ground. Moreover, Maryna wants to sell exactly as such to the tourist. Auschwitz, where they meet, is primarily a tourist attraction, a destination for “Polish and foreign” trips; a gloomy, poor, and in fact, laughable place. Jack London stays in a hotel named “Auschwitz for You,” which welcomes travelers from around the world in search of morbid experiences. The camp that Rudzka describes is in fact a haunted house, a space supposedly tamed but scary, strange, and familiar at the same time.41 A trip to the museum becomes an element of “dark tourism,” namely collecting experiences from travels to sites of crime, murders, and genocides, spaces that hold an affectual “bad aura.”42 Hence the pressure to abolish the time distance, to update the old tragedy in a way that will make the past clear to the visitor for different reasons. In A Short Exchange of Fire, Auschwitz becomes another point of tourist colonization, Jack London says that in his collection: he has many poor treasures. A photo of the clotted blood of a baby thrown against a wall. A photo of the genitals of an impaled black-haired woman from Darfur. A Tasmanian aborigine, hair hastily removed from the head. A foot of an Armenian woman shod with a horseshoe. (KWO 37) For Rudzka, “Auschwitz for You” is also kitsch and tacky. Maryna lists the hotel equipment: Yay! An oilcloth with a “non omnis moriar” logo, I think I will steal it. And this painting. You won’t guess. And I know what it is—Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. European culture at your service. A saltshaker with the salt of this earth—you will steal it. (KWO 28)

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The kitsch of worthless objects peculiarly mixes with the death and suffering that the protagonists incessantly evoke. It resembles Agata Siwek’s installation The Auschwitz Shop (2003) presenting a stall with imagined souvenirs from the camp: canvas bags, baseball caps, and keychains with striped uniform patterns, with inscriptions “Arbeit macht frei” and “Halt.” Through her . controversial work, Siwek only radicalizes and reveals the things that Róze­ wicz already describes in “A Trip to the Museum” (1966) as the necessary result of the commodification of memorial sites: a tourist infrastructure essential for seeing sights. Some consider it a reason for not visiting the Auschwitz Museum altogether.43 However, Siwek and Rudzka do not look down on the situation, nor do they condemn the indifference or dissociation from the terrifying experience, but they make us realize what accompanies commercialization: a small, barely perceptible pleasure from seeing tiny objects in a shop display and the joyful possibility of buying them. Rudzka shows that Holocaust tourism has another meaning: the dark pleasure derived from pain. It is not coincidental that the tourist Jack London collects his objects of desire: “Skulls from Srebrenica. A mummy from Saber. A stockbook of tattoos from a Polish camp” (KWO 37). The Auschwitz camp has another meaning also for the colonized Polish locals. Maryna lists their afflictions: Subliminal blockage on riding trains, on touching soap, burning in the oven with legs and what-have-you, on buying boots, on touching lampshades, because some skinny hands might pop out. Foreign Poland in Poland is spooky, Polish Poland is supposedly less spooky, but it is instead two-headed. (KWO 28) Every seemingly mundane situation and every normal object can hold a hidden Holocaust meaning; the Holocaust resides deep in the Polish lan­ guage, as if in accord with the postulate formulated by the theorists that the Holocaust memory ought to be an everlasting disturbance in the social life.44 For Rudzka, the unhealed pain is both bodily and sexual. Before the sexual intercourse with Jack London, Maryna asks him: “How can you fuck and live prospectively in these circumstances?” (KWO 28). How then, could Jack London (a male American Jew) and Maryna (an ethnic Polish woman) meet in Auschwitz? As a museum tour guide, Maryna’s primary focus is to sell a product, a brand, desired by millions of tourists who thirst for the experience every year. The official reason for the arrival of Jack London to the former concentration and death camp is his need to mourn the dead. However, in this case, the transaction is sexual in nature: “Look, even the Bible for the old, for the young—a sex-boy-and-girl-in-one; and for all—a Jew on paper block for good luck” (KWO 28). Along with Auschwitz as the house of horror, Maryna offers him her body; Jack London describes his experience as follows:

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In this forest of the dead, why do I kneel in front of a healthy, rich tree, instead of kissing the fallen ones? I lick its leaves. They taste like maple syrup from my childhood. Oh, my shame … Oh, how I feel good! But why? It feels so good that I’m getting sick. Truly this delight becomes traumatic … Oh, yes, my goodness, oh my, oh my. (KWO 29–30) Maryna appears to represent bountiful nature, a simple sexuality. It is difficult for her to understand Jack London, who is fearful and focused on death, like the neurotic characters from Woody Allen’s films: “So that’s what our love is to be? No sex and always about the Jews” (KWO 31). Maryna definitively represents the (Polish, not American) connection to nature and earth, but also with their dark pendant: appropriation and killing. The couple evokes Andrzej Wajda’s The Birch Wood (1970), based on Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s short story from 1932. The peasant woman Malina is an object of sexual desire for different characters, including Stanisław—dying of tuberculosis— who comes to the Polish province from the “big world” of Western Europe. Ultimately, Malina accelerates the man’s death, which Wajda foreshadows through a symbol-image referring to modernist Jacek Malczewski’s paintings, in which a peasant woman in a white dress freezes in the middle of a field holding a scythe. In A Short Exchange of Fire, Maryna relentlessly reproaches Jack London for his Texan origins: “in America, where the lands are fertile, where there is no underground sewage, and where stubbles are always full of ears” (KWO 32). She fails to understand why instead of staying where mother nature is nurturing and caring, London visits Poland, where death reigns omnipotent. Polish mother’s nourishment can only induce vomit, which constantly hap­ pens in Rudzka’s drama: Jack, Maryna, and the students on school trips that visit Auschwitz all vomit. Melanie Klein theorizes about a “good” and a “bad” breast, which repre­ sent a mother to an infant. A child surrounded by care and affection from the mother builds trust toward the parents and experiences pleasure from being nourished, in both direct and metaphorical meaning. As a result, the child can tolerate frustration and dissatisfaction from what it perceives as the mother’s bad aspects. On the other hand, the child of an impaired guardian or one exposed to a traumatic experience pulls away from the “bad” breast; in this child’s phantasy, the mother becomes dangerous and her nourishment— poisonous.45 The vomiting in A Short Exchange of Fire allows for freeing oneself from an excess of emotions and desires and—as in On Mother and Fatherland—for avoiding the position of the witness. An impassable barrier appears between the ethnic Polish bystander and the Jewish victim: connection is impossible. The attempt to assimilate the Other or to share history with them can only end in violent rejection. Defiled history becomes only a scrap that evokes disgust. Analyzing the motif of eating Jewish corpses in Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class and Igor Ostachowicz’s

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Night of the Living Jews, one critic calls it an “invasion of abomination.” The bodies are “rotting, with visible signs of decay, smelling musty.”46 Dominic LaCapra believes that we can easily discard such macabre as an expression of deviant imagination “overwhelmed by hallucinations, flashbacks, and other traumatic residues that resist the potentially healing role of memory-work.”47 As already demonstrated by Freud—who was the first one to honestly listen to what his patients say—hallucinations are never random. Anna Bikont records a conversation in Radziłów near Jedwabne, where laughter, fascina­ tion, and disgust accompany the phantasy of reusing and consuming former neighbors: “When people started rebuilding, they took gravel in wheelbarrows and plastered their walls with Jews,” Marysia’s brother-in-law Józef K. chor­ tles. “And the new authorities used whatever the country folk hadn’t stolen in the night to build some road. Sorrel grew wild on the graves, it stood tall, and you always earned those few extra zlotys.” “What are you going on about?” his wife interrupts. “Sorrel like that would be foamy, there was a lot of fat in that ground. Who would eat sorrel like that from a cemetery?” “But it fetched a good price.”48 A Short Exchange of Fire also evokes disgust. Maryna and Jack create a complicated system in which being lovers means that the man returns to his mother-Poland, thus imbuing the relationship not only an incestuous but also a necrophilic dimension. According to Jack, in Poland: there are no other shoes than those piling up like mountains, no other lampshades than those made of human necks, no other soaps than those baby-ghetto ones, no other bodies than those unburied, no other lives than those left behind. (KWO 31) Jack surrenders to the corpse, but he simultaneously is a corpse; he thinks

that he is alive, but Maryna reminds him:

JACK LONDON: Luckily I only pass MARYNA: You have never left.

by this shit-covered stable.

I am Jack London from Austin, Texas. … I am the American

tourist. MARYNA: Never! JACK LONDON: I was born in the cradle of America. MARYNA: Never! JACK LONDON: I fulfill my filial obligation. MARYNA: Never ever! (KWO 35–36) JACK LONDON:

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Jack lives in the “eternal present” of trauma inherited from his parents, who survived the Holocaust; on the other hand, Maryna lives where the trauma happened. Life in the ruins turns out to be very exciting. Death inextricably mixes with sexual pleasure: this is the treasure of Auschwitz-Poland, accord­ ing to Rudzka. In the play, Poland is a cemetery where the bystanders try to continue on living, but all activities—especially the sexual ones—mix with trauma. Similar to Henryk Grynberg’s debut short story “Ekipa ‘Antygona’” (The “Antigone” Pack), which describes the work of workers who travel around the country in an effort to clean mass graves. They feel as if they “have already turned the entire fatherland inside out with their shovels,”49 but they still see no end to their work of separating the space of the living from that of the dead. They are exhausted, and the next “excavation site” nauseates the foreman. Finally, one of the workers says in resignation: “this whole operation is major shit, huge and stinking. We gather it in a pile as if we needed space for newcomers.”50 Nausea and vomit give a chance for nonwitnessing while proving there are too many feelings, but also too much ero­ ticized fear and disgust. In this reading, A Short Exchange of Fire is an obscene play, because it reveals what the procedures of Polish memory try to conceal, and it covers that which could be uncovered.

Empty Fields of Trauma A similar space is the environment for Tadeusz Hołuj’s nearly forgotten drama Puste pole (The Empty Field; 1963).51 Although the drama repeatedly surfaces in literary studies as a trace of the issue of plundering Holocaust sites for victims’ gold and valuables,52 what is often overlooked, which only few reviewers notice, is the play’s grotesque character. In one of the analyses, a famous staging of the drama by Józef Szajna in 1965 is described as a phan­ tasmagoria. By juxtaposing shocking images, the drama reveals the inade­ quacy of normal memory processes for traumatic events, distinguishing between “premature forms of cultural commemoration and decades late acts of revealing individual memory.”53 It appears as if trauma shatters the bor­ ders between the present and the past, consciousness and unconsciousness, leading to the outpour of raw content: naked images of violence and unpro­ cessed sexual scenes. A preview of what is described as the parody, inadequacy, grotesque, and ugliness of Szajna’s play54 appears also in the text of the drama itself. Hołuj touches a sensitive theme: what to do with the space left after the camp? The context suggests the Treblinka camp, which is important as it is concerned with the Holocaust memory. The characters who represent different genera­ tions, interests, and attitudes become the spokespeople for certain memory processes. The museum director wants to make it a scientific and archival facility, the crew makes a film about executions in gas chambers, local inha­ bitants scour the grounds for treasures and seek to reclaim farmland lost due to the camp construction, while former prisoners return to dig out the jewelry

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they once hid from the Germans. The text states only indirectly that the vic­ tims are the Jews, which is indicated by their camp experience—different to the ethnic Polish one. This way of writing agrees with the universalist narra­ tion about the wartime occupation, according to which it was the “nations that were murdered” in the camps, with no distinction between ethnic Poles and Jews. This is in accordance with the communist narrative on the war victims: as evidenced in the case of the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial con­ struction in the late 1960s or the infamous erasure of the Jewish identity of the death camps victims in a new edition of encyclopedia in the same years.55 On the other hand, it appears that Hołuj did not attach much importance to his own Jewish descent, albeit it made him seek hideouts during the occupa­ tion.56 In Puste pole, the Polish bystanders are supposed to manage the space of the camp where Jews died: they must assign meaning to the space, situate themselves against it, and decide what it will convey. According to the rule Zyta Rudzka formulates in Krótka wymiana ognia— that in Poland “there are no other shoes than those piling up like mountains” (KWO 31)—the language of Hołuj’s drama keeps slipping into the past. It is difficult to even treat this process as speech errors, crevices in the layer of language through which peeks the unconsciously working trauma, because the drama makes it a rule for its dialogs. The museum director is called the commandant, the staff meetings are called appeals, and if someone is angry at someone else, they shout in German, in the occupation dialect known to all Poles—if not from their own experience, then from later repetitions in family transmission or in mass culture—“Los! Hände hoch, du Arschloch, blöder Hund, du” (PP 111). Film shootings become equally tragicomical. In an effort to finish shooting as quickly as possible, the film crew talks about “quick gassing and quick burning” (PP 124), and an extra is described in the stage directions simply as “SS-Mann,” who seems to be a character from a slapstick comedy: he enters the stage for a moment, delivers a couple of lines and leaves, for example: “Excuse me, where is the toilet around here? [he is pointed in the right direction] Danke schön” (PP 117). The grotesque men­ tioned by some critics seems even to be a relatively safe category to describe The Empty Field. Grotesque is freely used in analyses of the Holocaust wri­ ters’ works,57 even if it comes with the caveat of balancing on the verge of “decorum.” What seems the most problematic when describing the drama is its prevalent erotic vibe. Everyone is aroused here: not only by the perspective of becoming rich through finding objects that belonged to camp victims. The extras playing gassed Jewish women evoke much interest in surround­ ing men, the women are extremely excited themselves when they are rushed naked in front of the cameras. They wonder whether others find them attrac­ tive, they worry that their heads are about to be shaved, they discuss whether they should look frightened. They compare their situation to the historic reality, they giggle, that they were unafraid during filming “even when they were whipped, not at all” (PP 92). Only one of them acts differently; she says that she could not sleep at night when the others were partying, but they

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mock her: “Girl V: It is terrifying, all this is terrifying. / Girl I: Terrifying? But it is delicious” (PP 94).58 Other girls tell Girl V that she should be calm, as there are no ghosts here. It resembles the scenes from the film Wycieczka w nieznane (A Trip into the Unknown; 1967) by Jerzy Ziarnik, based on the novel by Andrzej Brycht, in which the protagonist undergoes transformation by his trip to Auschwitz: similarly, at first he is only interested in the naked female extras from the film filmed there. In Ziarnik’s work, there appear similar linguistic slips to those from Hołuj’s play. In Wycieczka w nieznane when the protagonist arranges another date with a local girl, she asks him: “Will you come to the camp?” The film set and the post-camp museum become a space of flirting, and in one of the protagonist’s fantasies—sex­ ualized and terrifying—he becomes an SS-Mann and his girlfriend from Warsaw—a prisoner.59 However, as he becomes familiar with the tragic his­ tory of the camp, which barges into the film in the form of retrospects, he changes from a lighthearted bon vivant of the Polish 1960s into a man who respects history and is determined to commemorate it properly. The film cri­ ticizes the trivialization of the museum experience in a persistently didactic and prudish manner, which in the second half of the 1960s is when Auschwitz . was already a cliché, which is best proven by Rózewicz’s “Wycieczka do 60 Nevertheless, Ziarnik’s film also demonstrates the muzeum” (1966). immense affective force of the trivialization. It appears that nobody achieves a moral victory in Puste pole. Authorities catch but later release the locals who scour the ground for Jewish treasures. Former prisoners, who initially appear to be the “guardians of memory,” the most entitled to engage in commemorative actions, turn out to be equally unethical as they want to dig hidden jewelry, and one of the “museum staff” has a definitely perverse idea of commemorating the camp, which he shares with a film extra: … No stone slabs, just flowers, the types that grow in the countries where those who stayed here came from, and in the middle—a large figure of a girl, a young, beautiful girl, carved in a Plexiglas slab. GIRL II: Interesting. Naked of course. MARIAN: Of course. Against the sky as background. (PP 133–14) MARIAN:

The museum director is unsuccessful, because he fails to organize an international ceremony to commemorate the camp’s history, which would allow him to complete the plan of turning the provincial museum into one of international importance. He is possessed with the “museum madness.” Leon, the main caretaker and former inmate says about him: “son of a bitch, archives, files, documents, but this is a cemetery” (PP 99). The director lusts for the film extra Janka—Leon believes that if she seduces the director, he will lose his job—who sinks deeper and deeper into the camp history:

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Perverse (Post)Memory JANKA [to the director]: You saw a naked chick in this desert, and it’s a human thing. Today you like me but tomorrow—it’s over. You will see me with a naked head, shaved to the scalp, and I will no longer be a woman or even a person. I will stand right by the door, on the right side of the chamber, and you will think: disgusting. And that’s how I will remain in memory. (PP 103)

Janka has no former experience with this place and history, but she feels sorry for the director, with whom she starts an affair, and for her uncle Leon, whose story and secret she has just discovered. She can barely endure it: I am sick of all this, I am sick as if I was pregnant. I would cry there from the fear and disgust with myself. It is horrible, even more horrible when I think that—despite everything—it is still a tiny bit exciting. (PP 135) She wants to escape from the empty field (the eponymous puste pole), but the field keeps her captive; different characters also keep saying that the field stinks. Janka is no exception—everybody advises everybody else to leave, but ultimately everybody remains. Janka’s fiancée—who represents a cynical and utterly rational attitude—tells the director about his escapist phantasy: “The fields will once again be covered in grass, the bushes that you ordered removed will burst the plates prepared for the monument, and the govern­ ment will probably give the land back to the farmers as a pasture. By the way, there is damn too little feed in the country. And people still prefer milk over great mourning” (PP 147). It is not a total phantasmagoria. In Chełmno by the Ner river, on the grounds of the first extermination camp, where— importantly—it was not ethnic Poles who were killed, the state established an agricultural cooperative a few years before the publication of Puste pole. This made the local people very happy, because it provided them with easier access to food. Before 1957, elementary school students played soccer on the camp grounds.61 The ironic statement about “great mourning” indicates its oppo­ site: no need for mourning and the social norm that determines whose life and death are worthy of public recognition and tears.62 The post-camp space scatters into three demarcated yet intertwining areas: the empty field (an image that haunts Lanzmann in Shoah), that which is underground (treasures awaiting their hunters), the barracks, and the film set where happens most of the exciting action. The dead, whose property lies somewhere in the ground, invade the empty field from one side, and the living—who try to continue living—from the other. There are different groups among the living: farmers, former prisoners, the director with visitors who stay forever, and finally the actresses who reenact, recreate life, in an attempt to answer how is life even possible in such a place? The groups negotiate among themselves the appropriate form of memory, but the negotiations fail,

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because the surroundings seem to annihilate all the possible solutions. The metaphor of the “empty field” conveys Hołuj’s intuition that trauma leaves an empty space—only later can one learn what will fill the space. There is no unified poetics of trauma, there is no fixed reaction to a catastrophe the sub­ ject experiences.63 The empty field can be filled with perverse images reigned by violence and excitement, humiliation and triumph, terror and joy derived from someone’s pain, hatred and self-admiration. Under the influence of those pressing images and emotions, the social space disintegrates. All this results from trauma, and one requires a lot of work to feel the pain embedded underneath. An equal amount of work is required to recognize the unnamed characters of the play, namely the Jews murdered in the camp, about whom the prota­ gonists forget, or more, they deny that the Jews meant anything to the history of this space. Without the work of witnesses, who look with empathy and recognize the pain of others—a difficult and exhausting process—it is impos­ sible to work through the crime, and so nobody heals from their wounds. This mostly applies to the victims, but also to bystanders. The experience of wit­ nessing somebody’s suffering and deriving pleasure from it transfers through generations—just like the victims’ trauma—and then it lingers, sometimes dormant, to explode anew.

Notes 1 J. Benjamin, “Acknowledgment of Collective Trauma in Light of Dissociation and Dehumanization,” Psychoanalytic Perspectives 8/2011, p. 211. 2 D. Laub, “An Event Without a Witness,” in: Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York; London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 79–92. 3 Laub, “An Event Without a Witness,” p. 87. 4 We encounter the touching stories of children who fail to recognize their parents after the war also in the autobiographical The Black Seasons by Michał Głowin´ski and Jerzy Kosin´ski’s The Painted Bird. 5 D. Laub, “An Event Without a Witness”, p. 91. 6 D. Laub, S. Lee, “Thanatos and Massive Psychic Trauma: The Impact of the Death Instinct on Knowing, Remembering, and Forgetting,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 51.2/2003, p. 443. 7 G. Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 136. 8 D. Laub, “Traumatic Shutdown of Narrative and Symbolization: A Death Instinct Derivative?,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 41.2/2005, p. 311. See also: N. C. Auerhahn, D. Laub, H. Peskin, “Psychotherapy with Holocaust Survivors,” Psy­ chotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training 30.1993. . 9 K. Filipowicz, “Krajobraz, który przezył śmierć,” in: Krajobraz niewzruszony (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1948), p. 74. 10 A. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, in: The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays, trans. J. O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1991), p. 14. 11 The Dutch painter and photographer Armando called his series of paintings devoted to the nature surrounding the transit camp for Jews known to him from his childhood, The Guilty Landscape. The landscape becomes “guilty” by its

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12 13 14 15

16 17 18

19

20

21

22 23

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indifference to the suffering of the victims, as well as by the subsequent obliteration of the traces of the Holocaust. See E. van Alphen, Caught by History. Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford, California: Stan­ ford University Press, 1997), pp. 123–145. Patrzyłam na usta… Dziennik z warszawskiego getta, ed. P. Weiser (KrakówLublin: Homini, 2008), p. 61. A. Tuszynska, Family History of Fear, trans. Charles Ruas (New York: Anchor Books, 2017), p. 24. Cf. H. Faimberg, “The telescoping of generations: A genealogy of alienated iden­ tifications,” in: H. Faimberg, The Telescoping of Generations Listening to the Narcissistic Links between Generations (London; New York: Routledge, 2005). In my analyses of these works—described by their authors as partly auto­ biographical—I refer exclusively to the literary elements, constructions, and struc­ tures, tending much less to the nearly documentary novels of Tuszyn´ska, ZarembaBielawski, Sznajderman, and Kurski. This list does not also include Jewish-Polish authors that published their memoirs outside of Poland, as for example Eva Hoffman with her Lost in Translation (1989). See H. Epstein, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (New York: Putnam, 1979). A. Szczepan, “Rozrachunki z postpamięcią,” in: Od pamięci biodziedzicznej do postpamięci, eds. T. Szostek, R. Sendyka, R. Nycz (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2013), . p. 320. . Siedmiu Zydów z mojej klasy (1991), dir. Marcel Łozins´ki; Dokument podrózy . (1998), dir. Gołda Tencer; Pozegnanie z krajem (2002), dir. Andrzej Krakowski; . Rachela na Dworcu Gdans´kim (2006), dir. Ewa Szprynger; Przystanek Dłuzek (2008), dir. Irit Shamgar; Dworzec Gdans´ki (2009), dir. Maria Zmarz-Koczano­ wicz; Perecowicze (2009), dir. Sławomir Grünberg. I use the notion of “post-memory” following Marianne Hirsch, in its simplest and most general meaning, as the memory of the following generation, connected to a tragedy experienced by their parents. See M. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), p. 5. E. V. Welldon, Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood (London: Karnac Books, 2004), p. 10. See J. Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in: The Kristeva Reader, ed. T. Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). M. Tulli, Włoskie szpilki (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Nisza, 2012), p. 143. Later abbreviated as WSZ. I use the following interpretations of Magdalena Tulli’s prose: J. Borowczyk, K. Skibski, “Brak wiary w istnienie świata? Opowieść Magdaleny Tulli o pewnej matce i córce z Peerelem w tle,” Roczniki Humanistyczne 1/2017; M. Cuber, “Metonimia jako struktura wyobraźni. O prozie Magdaleny Tulli,” in: Metonimie Zagłady. O polskiej prozie lat 1987–2012 (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu śląskiego, 2013); S. Karolak, “Utwory o matkach i córkach. Kobiece narracje postmemorialne,” Politeja 4/2015; B. Przymuszała, “Między Włoskimi szpilkami a Szumem Magdaleny Tulli. Wokół problemu ofiary. Re-lektura emocji,” in: Smugi Zagłady. Emocjonalne i konwencjonalne aspekty tekstów ofiar i ich dzieci; A. Tippner, “Sensing the meaning, working towards the facts: drugie pokolenie a . pamięć o Zagładzie w tekstach Bozeny Keff, Magdaleny Tulli i Agaty Tuszyns´­ kiej,” trans. K. Adamczak, Teksty Drugie 1/2016; M. Zaleski, “Niczym mydło w grze w scrabble,” Teksty Drugie 6/2013. Nadine Fresco, “Remembering the Unknown,” International Review of Psycho­ analysis 11/1984, p. 421. M. Nowakowski, Syjoniści do Syjamu. Zapiski z lat 1967–1968 (Warsaw: świat . Ksiązki, 2009), pp. 74–75.

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24 For example, Michał Głowin´ski describes it as follows: “Around the middle of this horrible month, I asked Roman Zimand what he thinks, whether there will be concentration camps for Jews in the Polish People’s Republic; I asked expecting to hear in return: do not be hysterical, do not succumb to the panic, do not ask stupid questions. However, I was faced with a completely different answer: this cannot be ruled out. When I heard it my knees got soft. All hope is gone not only when you enter hell. Or maybe it was hell already?” M. Głowins´ki, Kręgi obcości. Opowieść autobiograficzna (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2010), p. 332. 25 A. Green, “The Dead Mother,” in: A. Green, On Private Madness (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1986). 26 Hannah Arendt poignantly describes this process in her essay “We Refugees:” “Besides, how often have we been told that nobody likes to listen to all that; hell is no longer a religious belief or a fantasy, but something as real as houses and stones and trees. Apparently, nobody wants to know that contemporary history has cre­ ated a new kind of human beings—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and internment camps by their friends.” H. Arendt, “We Refugees,” in: The Jewish Writings, trans. J. Kohn, R. H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2009), p. 265. 27 E. Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), pp. 6–7. 28 Cf. N. C. Auerhahn, “Evolution of Traumatic Narratives. Impact of the Holocaust on Children of Survivors,” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 67/2013. 29 See T. H. Ogden, “The Perverse Subject of Analysis,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association 44/1996. 30 T. Berry Brazelton, B. G. Cramer, “The Infant as Ghost,” in: The Earliest Rela­ tionship: Parents, Infants, and the Drama of Early Attachment (Reading, Massa­ chusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1990), p. 147. 31 J. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. M. Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 27. 32 J. Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 33 As Karolak, Utwory o matkach i córkach, p. 183, indicates: “The father is either a figure from outside of this experience [of the mother-daughter relation], outside of the Jewishness and the Holocaust, or he is absent from the daughter’s life for other reasons.” 34 Tippner, Sensing the meaning, p. 79. 35 Widzew (Łódz´), Legia and Polonia (Warszawa) are famous Polish soccer teams. Antisemitic insults have been common in fights between rivalry hooligans. Woj­ ciech Wilczyk documented in his photo album Holy War (2009–2014) antisemitic murals in Polish urban landscapes (see also accompanying essays by Joanna Tokarska-Bakir and Anna Zawadzka): W. Wilczyk, S´wie˛ ta wojna (2009–2014) (Łódz´, Kraków: Atlas Sztuki – Karakter, 2014). 36 S. Gerson, “When the Third is Dead: Memory, Mourning, and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 90.6/2009, p. 1342. 37 B. Engelking, Such a Beautiful Sunny Day…: Jews Seeking Refuge in the Polish Countryside, 1942–1943, trans. J. Michałowicz (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2016). 38 I write about the role of the “third” in the intergenerational transmission of trauma in Kuryluk’s prose in J. Borowicz, “Współczuja˛ cy s´wiadek – ocalaja˛ cy . Trzeci. Przekaz traumy w polsko-zydowskiej rodzinie w trylogii postpamie˛ ciowej Ewy Kuryluk,” Narracje o Zagładzie 7/2021. 39 C. Miłosz, Zaraz po wojnie. Korespondencja z pisarzami 1945–1950 (Krakow: Znak, 2007), p. 72.

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40 Z. Rudzka, “Krótka wymiana ognia,” Dialog 4/2014. Later abbreviated as KWO. Three years later, Rudzka published a novel under the same title yet without a noticeable connection to the discussed play: Z. Rudzka, Krótka wymiana ognia (Warsaw: WAB, 2018). 41 See T. Cole, “Holocaust Tourism: The Strange yet Familiar/the Familiar yet Strange,” in: Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era, p. 99. 42 See L. White, E. Frew, Dark Tourism and Place Identity: Managing and Inter­ preting Dark Places (London: Routledge, 2013). 43 For example, G. Pollock, “Holocaust Tourism: Being There, Looking Back and the Ethics of Spatial Memory,” in: Visual Culture and Tourism, eds. D. Crouch, N. Lübbern (Oxford: Berg, 2003). 44 Frank Ankersmit, “Remembering the Holocaust: Mourning and Melancholia,” in: Reclaiming Memory. American Representations of the Holocaust, eds. P. Ahokas, M. Chard-Hutchinson (Turku: University of Turku. School of Art Studies. Series A, 35/1997), p. 62. 45 M. Klein, “Weaning,” in: Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945, Vol. I (London: Vintage, 1998). 46 P. Czaplin´.ski, “Zagłada jako horror. Kilka uwag o literaturze polskiej 1985–2015,” Zagłada Zydów. Studia i Materiały 12/2016, p. 392. 47 D. LaCapra, “Psychoanalysis, Memory and the Ethical Turn,” in: History and Memory After Auschwitz (Ithaca, New Jersey and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 181. 48 A. Bikont, The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in War­ time Jedwabne, trans. Alissa Valles (London: William Heinemann, 2015), p. 124. 49 H. Grynberg, “Ekipa ‘Antygona’,” in: Ekipa “Antygona” (Warsaw: PIW, 1963), p. 43. 50 Grynberg, “Ekipa ‘Antygona’,” p. 60. 51 T. Hołuj, Puste pole, Dialog 4/1963. I use the reprint: T. Hołuj, Dom pod Oświęci­ miem. Puste pole (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1979). Later abbreviated as PP. 52 E.g. S. Buryła, “Nowe Eldorado,” in: Tematy (nie)opisane (Krakow: TAiWPN Uni­ . versitas, 2013); J. Leociak, “Efekt wrazliwości. Rabunek i ludobójstwo,” Znak 670/2011. 53 G. Niziołek, Polski teatr Zagłady (Warsaw: Instytut Teatralny im. Zbigniewa Raszewskiego i Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2013), pp. 274–276. 54 Niziołek, Polski teatr Zagłady, p. 277. 55 See J. Krakowska, “Obóz,” in: ślady Holokaustu w imaginarium kultury polskiej, p. 299; Niziołek, Polski teatr Zagłady, p. 277; M. C. Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse Uni­ versity Press, 1997). 56 M. Stępień, “‘Sprawa’ Tadeusza Hołuja,” in: Kontury w mroku (Katowice: WW Oficyna Wydawnicza, 2007), p. 189. 57 For example, J. Leociak uses the category of grotesque in his analysis of the auto­ biographical literature from the Warsaw Ghetto. See J. Leociak, Tekst wobec Zagłady (Torun´: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UMK, 2016), pp. 343–344. 58 This fragment is reminiscent of the way in which Kornblumenblau director Leszek Wosiewicz spoke about shooting the movie in the gas chambers. See: chapter one. 59 The first short story “Kobiety na ła˛ ce i ja” (Women in a Meadow and Me) from the popular book Wie˛ cej gazu, Kameraden! (More Gas, Kameraden!) by Krystian Piwowarski provides a similar image, where an SS-Mann fantasizes about the Jewish women he executes. I analyze the process of identifying with an SS-man in the chapter on fetishism. 60 I. Kurz, “Pozdrowienia z Oświęcimia,” Widok. Teorie i Praktyki Kultury Wizualnej 3/2013. 61 See P. Montague, Chełmno and the Holocaust. The History of Hitler’s First Death Camp (London: I.B. Tauris), p. 179; A. P. Zawadka, “Historia i upamiętnienie

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byłego niemieckiego obozu zagłady w Chełmnie nad Nerem,” Przeszłość i Pamięć. Biuletyn Rady Ochrony Pamięci Walk i Męczens´twa 41/2013. 62 J. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London; New York: Verso, 2006), p. 34. 63 See S. Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

Bibliography Benjamin, J. “Acknowledgment of Collective Trauma in Light of Dissociation and Dehumanization,” Psychoanalytic Perspectives 8/2011. Faimberg, H. The Telescoping of Generations Listening to the Narcissistic Links between Generations. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Felman, S., Laub, D. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. . Filipowicz, K. “Krajobraz, który przezył śmierć,” in: Krajobraz niewzruszony. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1948. Gerson, S. “When the Third is Dead: Memory, Mourning and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 90. 6/2009. Green, A. On Private Madness. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psy­ choanalysis, 1986. Hołuj, T. Dom pod Os´wie˛ cimiem. Puste pole. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1979. Keff, B. On Mother and Fatherland, trans. B. Paloff, A. Valles. Asheville, North Car­ olina: MadHat Press, 2017. Kurski, J. Dziady i dybuki (Dziady and Dybbukim). Warsaw: Agora Publishing, 2022. Kuryluk, E. Goldi. Warsaw: Twój Styl, 2004. Kuryluk, E. Frascati, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2009. Kuryluk, E. Feluni. Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2019. Rudzka, Z. “Krótka wymiana ognia,” Dialog 4/2014. Sznajderman, M. Fałszerze pieprzu (Pepper Forgers). Wołowiec: Czarne, 2016. Tulli, M. Włoskie szpilki. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Nisza, 2012. Tulli, M. Szum. Kraków: Znak, 2014. Tuszynska, A. Family History of Fear, trans. Ch. Ruas. New York: Anchor Books, 2017. . Zaremba-Bielawski, M. Dom z dwiema wiezami (A House With Two Towers). Kraków: Wydawnictwo Karakter, 2018.

Conclusion

Bystanders’ Trauma In his book Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominic LaCapra adapts psychoanalytic notions like trauma, mourning, melancholy, workingthrough, acting-out, transference, and projective identification to the study of the Holocaust memory. LaCapra emphasizes the ethical and epistemic need to process trauma by following the Freudian scheme: “where id was, there ego shall be.”1 In other words, for a traumatic experience not to cause breakdown, the experience must be worked-through, or to paraphrase Freud: to transform a mental illness into common human unhappiness.2 However, psychoanalysis distinguishes also a third solution besides the neu­ rotic mis-remembering and psychotic non-remembering3, namely the per­ verse remembering, which for various reasons is least present in the mainstream studies on the Holocaust. It also rarely appears in the repre­ sentations of the Holocaust themselves. However, as I have shown in numerous cases throughout the book, the perversion emerges when a horri­ fying scene of violence changes into an exciting spectacle at which peeps the separated, fascinated bystander.4 It is thus necessary to take into account the warning of the literary scholar Stef Craps, who notices the normative expectation for trauma to be recognized in “a modernistic aesthetic of frag­ mentation and aporia.”5 My overriding goal was to examine—with as much open-mindedness as possible—those representations of the Holocaust that for certain reasons can make people uncomfortable. Much has been written on the inadequacy of some representations, on the kitsch or bad taste characteristic of “reactionary and unimportant” traumatic narrations. However, it seems to me that some­ times this aesthetic value judgment allows us to avoid answering the question of what really worries us so much, thus avoiding the sudden affect connected with the extreme brutalization or sexualization of the Holocaust experience.6 Therefore, artwork dedicated to the Holocaust is bound by a number of rules. Philosopher Berel Lang suggests that the purest form of the Holocaust representation should be the chronicle, and the literary and artistic modes can only contaminate it with “individualization and subjectivization”.7 DOI: 10.4324/9781003330035-7

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Aestheticism, style, and metaphors remove us from the historical reality that they supposedly describe. Lang’s normative perspective sets boundaries of representation precisely where ends that which can be historically proven. Historian Hayden White disagrees with such an approach, arguing instead that every representation of the past draws on figurativeness, which he proves by, for example, tracking the literary borrowings in Primo Levi’s memoirs.8 For Lang, fidelity to norms and boundaries of representation has primarily an ethical aspect as a “moral connection to the writing of history”9 and an objection against falsifying the past. Meanwhile, aware that representations are by necessity artistic and social constructs, historian Saul Friedländer claims that there are some that are “grossly inadequate,” so he carefully postulates “limits to representation which should not be but can easily be transgressed.”10 Friedländer later spe­ cifies that carefully formulated principles and rules would serve to sustain and communicate the truth about the Holocaust. He believes that certain fictional representations of the Holocaust and Nazism are always incomplete and inadequate, as they obscure the image of the past rather than revealing the mechanisms that lead up to the crime: “The endless stream of words and images becomes an ever more effective screen hiding the past, when the only open avenue may well be that of quietness, simplicity, of the constant presence of the unsaid, of the constant temptation of silence.”11 The representations described in this book oppose Friedländer’s suggestions: they are marked with an excess of evoked feelings and excitement. How are these representations symptomatic of the historical trauma? First of all, it is crucial to indicate that “trauma”—like “perversion” as I argued in the introduction—is a descriptive, not moral or legal notion. Trauma entitles to nothing and legitimizes no one. Recent criticism of what is now known as trauma theory has signaled that claiming trauma has become identical with claiming moral ground. At worse, it could confuse the victims and the per­ petrators, obfuscating the complicity in crimes and weaponising suffering for political gains.12 However, as I tried to demonstrate, the notion of trauma can still be helpful in understanding suffering—both victims and bystanders of the genocide13—while not obscuring differences between these positions. In fact, the position of the bystander, of the third position aside of the victim and perpetrator, is intrinsic to the contemporary notion of trauma. Psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin claims: Being the failed witness or abandoning bystander can, as I said, be col­ lapsed into appearing to be the abuser or injurer—both being forms of betrayal and resulting in mystification, which involves deep injury to the sense of self … denial or refusal to witness can have a retraumatizing effect … When acknowledgment is refused the victim may lose her sense of self and what she knows to be real, become unable to save herself, despite her outrage, from feeling lost and “crazy.”14

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The “abandoning bystander” (or “the dead Third”, as emphatically called by Samuel Gerson15) is not only someone who seems distant and simply indif­ ferent, as an element of landscape. Being in the presence of somebody pre­ occupied with other affairs when the victim is experiencing radical injustice actually crushes the sufferer. Calel Perechodnik—whose testimony often accompanied my analysis in this book—poignantly describes his emotions of seeing ethnic Poles carrying on with their lives as usual: It’s difficult for me to describe what I experienced driving in daylight through the main streets of Warsaw. The traffic, shop windows, the smil­ ing faces of the elegant passersby, women, children, everything made on me, a condemned man, a depressing impact. I knew that this beautiful world was not created for me. It would have been enough for me to leave the car, and the first policeman had the right to kill me like a mad dog.16 It does not come as a surprise that later on he writes down that he is not certain whether anybody would believe such macabre stories.17 As I have argued throughout the book, what Perechodnik recollects, is no simple passive indiffer­ ence; it is, in fact, an active process of denial: of other people’s pain, fear, vul­ nerability. It may be a very subtle action, as it is usually unconscious—a very good example comes from a short novel by Artur Sandauer, who wrote a few forgotten yet illuminating pieces just shortly after the war, largely documenting his own survival as a Jew living in a small town in Galicia (his other novel, Notes from a Dead City, was analyzed in chapter three). In the ironically titled novel, Noc praworza˛ dnos´ci (The Night of the Rule of Law, 1949), to one of the ethnic Polish characters comes his Jewish friend asking him to keep him, to hide from the coming deportation. The ethnic Pole has a very curious answer for him: It would be best if you went to the attic to the closet. But well, our washerwoman lives there, and she will hear everything. Or maybe … I have a great idea. You will go to our attic, in our house. But well, my mom always carries the keys with her. Ideally, you would just go into the closet, and I would lock you up. But well, my mom opens the closet ten times a day. Let’s think, let’s think. Wait a minute. You know what? Why don’t you just walk out of here slightly so that no one notices where you’re coming from. You have so many friends. No one walks this way now.18 Unnoticed, perhaps even for the man himself, the desire to help turns into rejection and condemnation to further wandering and death. When the speaker is carried by the language, the space of rescue gradually shrinks from the attic to the closet, and he moves further and further away from the rela­ tionship with his former friend. At the end, he may not even register what happened and why exactly the fleeing man bounced off his door—this trick prevents him from feeling any guilt at all. His words help him disconnect himself from the reality and from another human being. He uses his words to

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keep his friend at a distance and to let his emotional denial get lost in a maze of words masquerading as a desire to help. With that process, however, he stu­ pefies himself as he cannot access what he has really done and what he really feels. From one perspective, it is obviously a lie19; yet it is also un unconscious mechanism of perverse splitting in order to deal with overwhelming awareness of what he has actually done.20 Treating it as a metaphor for the ethnic Polish bystanders’ memory, it could be argued that the traces of these experiences have to live on unconsciously and eventually will come back. These returns in perverse representations of the Holocaust indicate their traumatic origin. To claim that along with the Holocaust survivors, the bystanders may have been traumatized as well may seem a risky and controversial notion. I hope, however, that I demonstrated throughout the book that the traumatic memory of ethnic Polish bystanders does not assert moral superiority nor relieves them of the responsibility. On the contrary, it blocks the ethical response to the Holocaust victims, prevents them from empathizing with the Jews, and demobilizies from the solidarity. Being overwhelmed by the mem­ ories of violence, dispossession of goods, and murders actually imprisons the next generations of bystanders in a traumatic world of repeating destructive­ ness. The stubborn denial not only of being implicated in the Holocaust but sometimes even of witnessing it by right-wing and ethno-nationalistic parties, governments, and institutions in Poland and other countries in Eastern Europe, pushes the societies only further in traumatic mechanisms distorting and deforming the memory of the war. Benjamin claims that the bystanders “have to continually rediscover not only the remorse of failing to witness, but the fact that denial is based on the unwillingness to know these terrible things about ourselves: we monstrous humans.”21 In contemporary psychoanalysis, the traumatic experience is understood as encompassing also the third party that stood by idly, while the violence was happening. Benjamin argues that in order to repair the trauma, we need the instance of a compassionate, engaged, and present witness—it can be another person, a relationship with an idea, and even an institution, provided that it gives a sense of existence and continuity, gives an identity.22 This “third” in clinical psychoanalysis can also be quite concrete—when it is the father entering the space shared between mother and child.23 In this case, it func­ tions as someone outside of the couple: subject and experience, subject and memory, subject and trauma. The third instance is a moral instance, it intro­ duces the principle that every human suffering is important and requires recognition. When trauma victims are denied acknowledgment of their suf­ fering, they feel that there is no place in the world where they can count on anything that works according to specific and predictable rules.24 Unrecog­ nized suffering dehumanizes and leads to a sense of greater fragility, and finally to the recognition of life as unimportant. As Judith Butler indicates in many essays, some trauma victims do not count as either alive or dead, they are not recognized as a grievable life.25 They live then like ghosts in an empty world—incomprehensible to them and unwilling to understand them—so

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they have to deal with their experiences themselves, burying them within themselves. Unrecognized, dissociated memories and experiences, however, will keep returning, looking for an addressee able to listen and contain what after experiencing indigestible trauma may find a representation in a sado­ masochistic phantasy. As I demonstrated in my analysis of different perverse strategies—voyeur­ istic, fetishist, masochist, and sadist—the sphere of feelings strictly connects with the sphere of knowledge: with what and how can be remembered. Critics remark that in Polish public opinion since the early postwar period the themes of antisemitism, participation, and profiting from the Holocaust, common denunciations, and rare help during the war still evoke shock.26 We can acknowledge the repetitiveness of arguments, positions, and structures in the public debate: in 1968, then after Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, then after Błon´ski’s “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto, then after Michał Cichy’s article on killing Jews in the Warsaw Uprising, then after Gross’s Neighbors. 27 If we encounter so much repetition or even coercion—when the methods reoccur, are well-known, yet never change—we should ask: What phantasies are responsible for this immobilization?

Denial, Not Repression This repetitiveness reflects the memory’s perverse structure based on denial, not repression.28 Revealed in the linguistic construction “yes, but,” denial stems from the coexisting of knowledge and ignorance, memories and their masking, which results in the constantly reappearing shock with the infor­ mation that was already internalized. This structure is also the source of its reverse, the phrase full of impatience: “How much longer will we deal with the Holocaust?” At its core lies the assumption that everything has already been said on the matter, and as a collective subject, we have already coped with the loss.29 However, this has little in common with actual mourning and more with avoidance and denial of the need for mourning; particularly when the Polish bystanders move to positions in which they feel excited, aroused, and full of life. The most direct narcissist benefits for the Polish subject include: protecting the self-image, fragile fundaments of self-satis­ faction, and the feeling of moral superiority.30 Memory scholars indicate a conservative backlash to the growing historical knowledge and an attempt to restore the state of Polish culture from the time before Gross’s books on Polish antisemitic violence;31 to make it possible to stay convinced of one’s own innocence, but also continue to secretly produce bloody phantasies, and in imagination based on memories, identify with various actors of the primal scene. Thus, denial allows the holding at the same time, though separate, oppositional thoughts and feelings; it concerns both knowing, perceiving, and remembering, as well as not seeing, forgetting, disconnect­ ing, and unmaking. Denial is a dangerous mechanism, as evidenced by psychoanalyst Melanie Klein:

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Denial is a potent defense against the persecutory anxiety and guilt which result from destructive impulses never being completely con­ trolled. Denial, which is always bound up with persecutory anxiety, may stifle feelings of love and guilt, undermine sympathy and con­ sideration both with the internal and external objects, and disturb the capacity for judgement and the sense of reality. It serves also as the “justification of destructiveness”32, she adds. I believe Klein puts forward three important and relevant theses. Firstly, the mechanism of denial is supposed to cope with the persecutory sense of guilt, which is accompanied by the sense of terror. Not to find ourselves in a nightmarish world surrounded by vengeful ghosts (or zombies, as I descri­ bed in the chapter on sadism), we cling onto the feeling of innocence and the idea of being treated with a hurtful injustice. Secondly, constant denial results in the loss of good feelings toward the objects, arming against empathy with them, and impoverished perception of the whole outer and inner reality. In this sense, one breaks any emotional relationship, shared communities, interconnected histories, and a chance of an integrated iden­ tity: the other is not me, we do not live in the same world, and therefore I do not care what happens with them. Lastly, denial enables usage of violence and destruction, in the light of the law and with the feeling of moral justice. Aggression towards others is treated in most cases as a necessary defense from the outer attack. Then, everything is permitted, no means seem to be too radical, as it is the life-or-death conflict. It involves the refusal of taking any responsibility. This happens when looking on the Jewish suffrage bringing pleasure; by establishing the German perpetrator as a fetish, the Polish bystanders identify with the supposed German potency and power; when they masochistically stick to the victim figure by assuming that it is the ethnic Poles, and not the Jews, that suffered the most; when they project sadism with its hatred and fear on the Jewish victims, themselves feeling innocent. All those mechanisms coexist, overlap, and only in combination create the complex about the per­ verse memory of the Holocaust. They describe the Polish bystander’s memory: the perverse representations concern the phantasies created in the Polish unconsciousness, in which Jews and Germans appear only as objects. The focus of my description are mostly works whose authors do not identify as Jews; however, regardless of the authors’ ethnicity, the described perverse memory remains part of the Polish memory. The difference between different modes of memory—neurotic and perverse, operating with repression and denial, mourning and exciting repetition—can sometimes all be tracked in one work, for example in Ida Fink’s drama The Table (1988), in which a prosecutor interrogates people of a small Polish town in the second half of the 1960s, asking what happened in the main square during the war, when Jews were murdered. I pick two fragments of the play, in which two different persons are questioned:

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The square was black with people. Earlier you said that the people assembled in the marketplace were standing at the rear of the square, facing the town hall, and that there was an empty space between the people and the town hall. FIRST MAN: That’s right. PROSECUTOR: In other words, to say, “The square was black with people,” is not completely accurate. That empty space was, shall we say, white—espe­ cially since, as you’ve mentioned, fresh snow had fallen during the night. FIRST MAN: Yes, that’s right. FIRST MAN:

PROSECUTOR:

… … Oh, you want proof, don’t you? The snow on the town’s streets was red. Red! Does that satisfy you? PROSECUTOR: Unfortunately, Mr. Zachwacki, snow doesn’t constitute proof for judges, especially snow that melted twenty-five years ago.33 SECOND MAN:

These are two different after-images with distinct color palettes and two different visual operations. In the first fragment, there appear black and white: there are Jews, and suddenly, they are gone, presence turns into absence, there is a crowded square and an empty space after those who disappeared. The white snow emphasizes the emptiness; snow covers and dominates the entire space; in another Ida Fink’s short story, “S´lad” (Trace) from 1990, snow is the main metaphor of absence: it captures the footsteps of people led to an execution.34 The first excerpt from The Table may be interpreted as a description of unrepresentability and inexpressibility of the Holocaust experi­ ence.35 The second fragment is in red: the black of bodies seen from afar shifts into the color of blood. The color convinces readers that the testimonies omit the story of vanishing into thin air, presence in memory, and current absence: it is a story of a bloody massacre that paints the landscape red. Both images are blurred memories, but it is the second one that forms the Polish bystanders’ memory, as they saw what happened to the Jews crowded in the center of the town. It is the image that Jan Tomasz Gross has in mind when he concisely and accurately writes: “The streets and squares of Polish cities and towns were flooded with blood.”36 Contrary to the common interpreta­ tions of unrepresentability, one critic emphasizes the one-sided reception of Ida Fink’s texts, noting that the critics who reconstruct the aesthetic of emp­ tiness and silence in her work fail to acknowledge the Polish bystanders’ vio­ lence and exclusion she describes.37 There are more similar shifts in Polish culture. Let us recall the blank board in Andrzej Wajda’s Korczak (1990), which appears for a few seconds after the sequence of rushing the children to the train going to a camp. In a similar manner, we may interpret this as a rupture in the film in the spirit of JeanFrançois Lyotard’s The Differend, as a sign for “Zakhor” (“Remember!”), which is supposed to shock the viewers through its nothingness and

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simultaneously show what cannot be showed and conceal what is the most visible.38 This device would seek to switch Polish memory into a “neurotic” mode of action: remaining in the area of mourning and melancholy, reflecting on the empty space left after the Jews. However, if we consider the French criticism of the film—led by Claude Lanzmann—which among other things, accuses Wajda of erasing ethnic Poles from the plot, we may assume that the aesthetics of emptiness taken from the French theoretical thought is false, because it disagrees with historical experience (as I reconstructed in the first chapter).39 The ethnic Poles saw not only the empty square, streets, houses, shops, but also the rushed, the dragged, the humiliated, and finally, the exe­ cuted, whose bodies and blood remained on sites. It may be risky then to thoughtlessly acquire notions connected to the Western and Anglo-Saxon culture of trauma: both psychoanalytic categories of mourning and workingthrough and connected with them aesthetic choices may be used to screen the actual historical experience.40 Although sometimes caused by good intentions, such representations include only those parts of the experience of the Holo­ caust that are already-bearable, because they are conveyed in the acquired aesthetic-emotional-ethical model. I do not want to say that mourning is impossible in Poland and other Eastern and Central European countries. Quite the opposite, I am attached to the psychoanalytic notion that the trauma needs to be worked-through, otherwise we are destined to lead a limited, impoverished life, constantly in loop with destructive repetitions. However, access to working-through and mourning is all the more difficult due to the Polish bystander’s position and historical experience. No circumventing or avoiding what lurks in the perverse phantasies will bring us closer to experiencing and acknowledging the loss. Working through loss touches on the essence of the dispute about the basic distinction, which I seek to describe in this book as the distinction between neurosis—meaning the possibility of mourning and the threat of melancholy focused on experiencing loss—and perversion, namely the overload and burden of terrifying and exciting memories and phantasies of violence, the appropria­ tion of property, and murdering. This juxtaposition touches also on the difference between the Holocaust memory created in the West and East of Europe. While at one point in the West the recognition of the Holocaust as a central, fundamental event for Europe and its vision of democracy and pluralism41 became essential, in Eastern European countries after the fall of the USSR a memory incompa­ tible with this Western imperative became possible to articulate: the memory of people’s own nations that became victims to various powers during the Second World War.42 In Poland, the official state memory policy omitted the Jews as different victims of the war. Neither the authorities nor the ethnically Polish society were interested in such matters. Many times, more or less every decade, the national and nationalist discourse openly excluded the memory of Jewish suffering. As opposed to the Western European countries, Polish Jews did not restore their status from before the Second World War

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demographically or culturally, mainly as a result of emigrations socially pres­ sured and politically inspired in 1946, after the Kielce Pogrom, in 1956 after Polish October, and in 1968 after the March events.43 Therefore, when we discuss different models of remembering the Holocaust in Europe, we should include the influence of different historical experiences of the countries tou­ ched by the Second World War. This is the subject of Lanzmann’s Shoah, among other things. Postcolonial critics notice the geographical and linguistic conditioning of the film: Lanz­ mann’s fatherland is absent from the film while the French language is central and privileged; we may see it, for example, in the fact that the subtitles for the film were prepared from professional translations, and not the witnesses’ native languages.44 One critic deconstructs Lanzmann’s assumption that France and the French language mark the position of an uninvolved witness, distant from the space of the Holocaust, thus providing a neutral ground, separation from the experiences of the victims, the perpetrators, and the bystanders. France is utterly absent from the film, which reflects Lanzmann’s conviction that his fatherland would never allow for the establishment of camps on its territory. On the other hand, the Polish landscape, where the extermination camps were created, remains contaminated, and the only road to salvation leads to the land of Israel.45 The juxtaposition of the excluded area of origin (France) and the scene of the crime (Poland) is clearly a doubtful construct that reflects rather the director’s colonialist phantasies than the reality of the Holocaust; albeit the juxtaposition does capture the fundamental difference between Western and Eastern Europe: between the landscape from which the Jews “disappeared” and the landscape that served as the scene of pressing, intense experiences connected with the robbing and murdering of Jews. This is not only Poland’s situation, but the situation of all the Eastern European countries where the Holocaust happened “on site.” Let me briefly return to the picture discussed in the introduction, which portrays a scene of violence between a German soldier and an orthodox Jew observed by a woman in a headscarf. I identified the woman as a figure of the Polish bystander. According to archival data, the picture comes from the Zamos´c´ region, which means the woman could just as well be Ukrainian.46 In this sense, the historical experiences that fuel the perverse memory and perverse phantasies I described in this book are shared by the entire Eastern Europe, where antisemitism remains strong and has not been worked through. Below, I will give two recent examples—from Lithuania and Belarus—that are structurally similar to the events described in my book.47 In 2016, Marius Ivaškevicˇ ius, a novelist and playwright, published the article “Jews: Lithuania’s Misfortune” in Lithuanian and English on a cen­ trist portal Delfi. He describes the attitude of officials and citizens of his hometown toward the wartime massacre of Jews.48 The site of the local slaughter—just as in numerous Polish towns and cities—turned into an unmanaged wasteland, a spot for unofficial meetings and libations for the

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locals. Ivaškevicˇ ius interprets this as a mechanism of denial, of simultaneous remembering and non-remembering: Imagine: that day about 40 Jews will go to their grave while about 6,000 Lithuanians will peek out their curtains at them. But wait, this already happened, on August 29, 1941. When they were marching the Jews along this street several white armbanders ran ahead and shouted at the win­ dows: “Don’t look!” Whoever looks will be grabbed from their home and will go with the Jews.49 In the conclusion, Ivaškevicˇ ius invites everyone to the first commemoration of this event, a march down the city’s streets, which turned out to repeat the exact historical dynamic of the “there and then.” As said by a participant of the commemoration—a Lithuanian psychoanalyst Tomas V. Kajokas—he noticed the ongoing exchanges of gazes between the participants and the locals, who mostly did not join the march.50 I believe that commemorations organized in disregard of local conditions usually encounter understandable resistance, but I find we should also notice the strong coercion: the past obli­ gation to look at the Jewish victims being murdered and the current symbolic repetition of secretively watching the commemoration. Magdalena Waligórska provides an even more vivid example. She partook in the creation of the first Belarusian commemoration of the Maly Trostenets camp, the site of one of the biggest massacres of Jews during the Second World War, little known and hardly present in memory.51 Waligórska analyzes the Belarusian narration about the camp’s victims, which failed to acknowledge that they were mostly Jews; instead, the narration incorporated their martyrdom into the vic­ torious and heroic story of the patriotic war on fascism. An encounter with the Western narration occurred when thanks to financial aid from Germany, a small monument is erected, and a delegation from the West was invited to the celebra­ tion of its unveiling. The commemoration followed codes known to Eastern Europeans, namely Christian rhetoric and Soviet kitsch; for example, children dressed in traditional folk costumes released white doves into the sky. After pre­ sident Lukashenko’s speech, an honor guard gave a gun salute to add splendor to the ceremony. Waligórska demonstrates the deep shock that the gun salute caused for the Western delegates and considers it a symptom “of a thoughtless transfer of memorial practices surrounding (victor-based) World War II commemoration in Belarus to the context of remembering the victims.”52 External observers—who were taught different symbolic codes—were outraged with the literal reproduc­ tion of violence in the commemoration. After all, the victims were executed in Maly Trostenets by a firing squad, as there were no gas chambers on site.53 Waligórska emphasizes the tragicomic scene by recalling another such com­ memoration, during which a Belarusian orchestra played klezmer wedding music, probably due to the lack of knowledge of any other repertoire.54 Undoubtedly, we should recognize the fact that the camp was commemo­ rated for the first time. After the war, Maly Trostenets was incorporated into

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the capital city of Minsk, and a landfill operated nearby even in the 1990s.55 However, the accompanying events—similarly to slips of the tongue—empha­ size how Belarusian memory of the Holocaust can be dominated by other phantasies, so shocking to external observers, like the murderous wishes expressed symbolically by a gun salute.56 Western European countries also struggle with antisemitism, but their historical situation and the Holocaust memory must be different to those in Eastern Europe. Struggles with images and memories of violence that marked every bystander—regardless whether they actively partook in, benefitted from, or counteracted the violence—creates particularly burdened societies. Following a psychoanalytic intuition: without recognizing and working through this situation, the traumatic experiences will resurface—in the form of perverse images of violence, in which the victims’ death and suffering connect to arousal and excitation. Freud argues this in his reflections about the First World War: reaction to the death of even the closest person is also a triumph, because in every loved one we may find a bit of otherness.57 The ambivalent feelings—sadness and fear, joy and want of revenge—are even stronger when one perceives the dead as unbearable rivals.58 This is also the purpose of decolonizing trauma studies: to include a dif­ ferent historical situation and different positions of bystanders in relation to the victims and the perpetrators.59 According to Stef Craps, “trauma theory can and should be reshaped, resituated, and redirected so as to foster attune­ ment to previously unheard suffering.”60 Again, this does not mean that the perverse memory is solely a Polish or Eastern European matter; the cultures of the USA, Europe, or Israel provide numerous examples. However, their analysis exceeds the scope of this book. Researchers have attempted to understand this phenomenon,61 but there is still much left to be done, and synthesis is hardly achievable, for I believe, each work should ask questions similar to those in this book: Whose memory is it? With whom does the subject identify? Whom does the subject exclude? To what historical events does the subject refer? Even the seemingly similar representations of the Holocaust can have completely different meanings in different memory com­ munities, different historical moments, and different subjective positions. In my analysis, I have tried to avoid examples that easily outrage with kitsch and could be easily tackled by theoretical constructions. Perversion is a notion difficult to utilize, because it may be concealed by irony, allusion, or understatement, which makes us never know whether we misuse or overinterpret something. However, perverse memory is also a mode of Polish memory of the Holocaust that immobilizes and prevents us from going for­ ward: this perverse memory deforms the obligation to remember and makes the scene of violence—in which partake the victim, the perpetrator, and the observers—reproduce itself without end. What is at stake here is serious approach to the statement that Polish cul­ ture can be called post-traumatic.62 Although I have analyzed the perverse memory as a mechanism operating in the Polish memory in different histor­ ical moments, a clear tendency emerged during the research. The perverse

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representations of the Holocaust as a reaction to trauma—or the perverse element in the Polish memory of the Holocaust—have begun to gain momentum in the late 1980s. This has happened not only due to socio­ political changes, abolition of state censorship, and the easing of moral cen­ sorship but also due to the crisis in Polish identity. In this regard, Przemysław Czaplin´ski shows that national identity becomes leaky thanks to the growing awareness that someone observed the Holocaust (as shown by Lanzmann’s Shoah), that the Polish bystander was not innocent (Błon´ski), and that. Poles were guilty even as a community (Henryk Grynberg’s essay “Ludzie Zydom zgotowali ten los”63 noticed only in the 1990s).64 Jan Tomasz Gross’s Neigh­ bors sealed this process, proving that the guilty were not just Christianity or European culture but also ordinary Poles. This growing awareness has begun to both reveal the scale of ethnic Poles’ complicity in the Holocaust and its concretization, meaning from moral principles to individual acts of violence. I write “growing awareness” to differentiate it from psychoanalytically under­ stood transition of content from the unconsciousness to consciousness that would suggest a return of the repressed. Psychoanalysis assumes the following possibility: memories and feelings can return under favorable conditions, for example, after successfully working through grief, we may feel sad about the loss. In the case of perverse memory, what operates is not repression but denial. I deny because I cannot forget. In the case of denial, we perfectly remember what happened, but we simultaneously act as if we know nothing. The other side of “complete denial” is thus “complete surprise.” The Polish perverse representations that first appeared in the late 1980s—the film Kornblumenblau from 1989 is the oldest work I have closely analyzed in the book—intertwine with the outbreaks of the most important debates on Polish– Jewish relations: Jedwabne, the Auschwitz Cross, the Kielce pogrom.65 Images hidden with more or less success—of the joy derived from the Holocaust, of the feeling of own power in native variants of fascism, of own martyrology that moves to the fore, or of the fight for property and real estate—surfaced along with the processes described by Czaplin´ski, and they will remain in the Polish memory, multiplying and growing until they are worked through. The perverse representations of the Holocaust I have described in this book allow us to capture the experience of benefiting from the death of the Jews—if not materially, then at least libidinally, through excitement, joy, or vengeful satisfaction—in the framework of the Polish memory. Understandably, remembering these experiences is difficult, so they assume forms in which the Polish bystander’s feelings and status unfit for the conventional forms of memory are camouflaged, shifted, concentrated, and finally, overlooked as in the case of Kornblumenblau. The power of psychoanalysis as hermeneutics of suspicion derives from its ability to bring to light what must be named, albeit simultaneously evoking fear or shame, in this way counteracting the process of reducing difficult experiences to tamed, familiar forms of representation. One cannot remain indifferent in the face of violence. Indifference usually conceals hostility, which in the violence realizes a phantasy that evokes

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various feelings: fear and guilt, but also joy and excitement. These experiences have been researched only recently,66 yet according to psychoanalysis, mem­ ories and feelings accumulate in memory, nevertheless guarded by numerous unconscious mechanisms like repression, denial, dissociation. However, through meticulous reconstruction of the phantasies that appear later, we can access the underlying memories and feelings. Although perverse memory and perverse phantasies are by no means exhaustive of all possible modes of remembering, I firmly believe that the study of this element of Polish memory and the Polish symbolic field is crucial in order to fully recognize one’s own identity—and prevent the symbolic and literal antisemitic violence that sys­ tematically erupts in Eastern European countries.

Notes 1 D. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); S. Freud, “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,” in: SE Vol. 22, p. 80. 2 See S. Freud, “The Psychotherapy of Hysteria from Studies on Hysteria,” in: SE Vol. 2, p. 305. 3 Michael Franz Basch claims that in the Freudian notion of fetishism it is not the perception that is obliterated, only the meaning. Psychosis, on the other hand, annuls the whole perceived reality. M. F. Basch, “The Perception of Reality and the Disavowal of Meaning,” The Annual of Psychoanalysis 11/1983. 4 I presented a theoretical reconstruction of this meaning of perversion, included in Freud’s essay “Fetishism,” in the chapter on voyeurism. 5 See S. Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 38–43, especially the chapter “Beyond Trauma Aesthetics:” “I do think it is important to check the rush to dismiss whatever deviates from the prescribed aesthetic as regressive or irrelevant. Rather than positing a necessary relation between aesthetic form and political or ethical effectiveness, trauma theory should take account of the specific social and histor­ ical contexts in which trauma narratives are produced and received, and be open and attentive to the diverse strategies of representation and resistance which these contexts invite or necessitate.” 6 The story of the reaction to the Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art (2002) exhibition in the Jewish Museum in New York, which I mentioned in the introduc­ tion to the chapter on fetishism, is puzzling. Since the exhibition presented no nar­ ration about the victims of the Holocaust or mourning, it outraged commentators from all over the political stage. For example, a New Yorker reviewer describes it as “trivial shock,” “dilettantish sadomasochism,” “solemn smut,” and “toxic narcis­ sism.” See R. Greenberg, “Mirroring Evil, Evil Mirrored: Timing, Trauma, and Temporary Exhibitions,” in: Museums After Modernism: Strategies of Engagement, eds. G. Pollock, J. Zemans (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2007). 7 B. Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 154–155. See E. van Alphen, “History’s Other: Oppositional Thought and Its Discontents,” in: Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Con­ temporary Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 8 H. White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in: Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”, ed. S. Friedländer (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: Harvard University Press, 1992).

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9 B. Lang, Holocaust Representation: Art in the Limits of History and Ethics (Balti­ more, Maryland; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 20. On the other hand, the ethical approach to the literature of the Holocaust carries a threat of what Walter Benn Michaels convincingly describes as “ethical kitsch,” in which we know from the beginning what is the artwork’s message (the order: Never again!) and what the audience may experience (mourning). See W. Benn Michaels, The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 163. 10 S. Friedländer, “Introduction,” in: Probing the Limits of Representation, ed. S. Friedländer (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 3. Emphasis in the original. 11 S. Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 97–98. Emphasis in the original. 12 D. Fassin, R. Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, trans. R. Gomme (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 284; R. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago . Press, 2000), p. 24–25. In the Polish context: Elzbieta Janicka, “Pamięć przyswo­ . jona’ Koncepcja polskiego doświadczenia zagłady Zydów jako traumy zbiorowej w świetle rewizji kategorii świadka,” Studia Litteraria et Historica 3–4/2014–2015; E. Janicka, “Obserwatorzy uczestniczący i inne kategorie. O nowy paradygmat opisu ´ polskiego kontekstu Zagłady,” in: Swiadek: jak się staje, czym jest, eds. A. Dauksza, K. Koprowska (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2019). 13 I am leaving the topic of perpetrator’s trauma aside, as it is not the direct object of my consideration. I share the opinion that the perpetrators can also be traumatized by their own actions. It does not relieve them from moral and legal responsibility and furthermore, poses other difficult issues: as they can be traumatized, then it means that they too are human. See: Fassin, Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma, p. 94. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir strikingly illustrates this problem in her book on ethnic Polish murderers of the Jews during and immediately after the war, as she indicates that we should ask not how normal citizens become killers but why do they remain them, living later in their communities relatively unbothered, often among their victims. J. Tokarska-Bakir, Jewish Fugitives in the Polish Countryside, 1939–1945 (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2022). See also: D. LaCapra, “‘Traumatropisms’: From Trauma via Witnessing to the Sublime?,” in: History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (Ithaca, New York; London: Cornell University Press 2009). 14 J. Benjamin, “Non-violence as Respect for all Suffering: Thoughts Inspired by Eyad El Sarraj,”. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 21/2016, p. 14. 15 S. Gerson, “When the Third is Dead: Memory, Mourning and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 90.6/2009. 16 C. Perechodnik, Am I a Murderer? Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman, ed. and trans. F. Fox (London; New York: Routledge, 2018), p. 130. 17 Perechodnik, Am I a Murderer?, p. 145. See: J. Chasseguet-Smirgel, “Trauma et croyance,” Revue française de psychanalyse 64/2000. In her article on the topic of acknowledging the trauma, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel quotes Primo Levi’s famous dream that nobody believes what he experienced in Auschwitz-Birkenau: his family looks at him indifferently, talks about other matters, finally his sister leaves without uttering a word. P. Levi, If This Is a Man, trans. S. Woolf (New York: The Onion Press, 1959), p. 64. . ´ ´ liberała (Warszawa: Ksia˛zka i 18 A. Sandauer, “Noc praworza˛ dnos´ci,” in: Smierc Wiedza, 1949), p. 70. 19 Etymologically, Freudian notion of die Verleugung, denial (disavowal), is con­ nected to lügen, to lie. 20 Hannah Arendt posited a similar process in Adolf Eichmann’s thinking: “No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was

212

21 22 23 24

25

26

27 28

29 30

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surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the pre­ sence of others, and hence against reality as such.” H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jer­ usalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 49. She argues that Eichmann did not lie intentionally, he had a very basic incapacity to “think his thoughts” (to borrow an expression from Wilfred Bion), to engage himself in an internal monologue. Her thesis was obviously contested; Abram de Swaan argues that her description of Eichmann is false, yet her argument may be applied to “the countless minor middlemen of the Holocaust.” A. de Swann, The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder (New Haven, Connecticut; London: Yale University Press, 2015), pp. 21–22. J. Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done to: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and

the Third (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 244.

Gerson, When the Third is Dead, p. 1343.

Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done To, pp. 26–27; R. Britton, “The Missing Link:

Parental Sexuality in the Oedipus Complex,” in: The Oedipus Complex Today, eds.

R. Britton, J. Steiner, M. Feldman, E. O’Shaughnessy (London: Routledge, 1989).

J. Benjamin, “Acknowledgment of Collective Trauma in Light of Dissociation and

Dehumanization,” Psychoanalytic Perspectives 8/2011, p. 211. See also: S. Frosh,

Those Who Come After. Postmemory, Acknowledgement and Forgiveness (Cham:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), especially the third chapter: Beyond Recognition: The

Politics of Encounter.

J. Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” in Precarious Life: The Powers of

Mourning and Violence (London; New York: Verso, 2004), pp. 33–34. See also: J.

Butler, Frames of war: when is life grievable? (London; New York: Verso, 2016),

esp. Introduction; J. Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind

(London; New York: Verso, 2020), esp. ch. “To Preserve the Life of Other.”

Jan Tomasz Gross writes on the intelligentsia’s reaction to the Kielce pogrom in

1946: “What strikes me as a puzzle is how an entire milieu—precisely a milieu of

brilliant intellectuals—could have been so totally unprepared for what had hap­ pened. Why did the intensity of Polish anti-Semitism surprise those insightful,

sharp, and well-informed observers of Polish society?”. J. T. Gross, Fear: Anti-

Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz. An Essay in Historical Interpretation (New

York: Random House, 2006), p. 167. See: E. Janicka, “Mord rytualny z aryjskiego

. . paragrafu. O ksiązce Jana Tomasza Grossa Strach. Antysemityzm w Polsce . tuz po wojnie. Historia moralnej zapaści,” Kultura i Społeczens´two 52.2/2008; Zukowski,

“Wytwarzanie ‘winy obojętności’ oraz kategorii ‘obojętnego świadka’ na przyk­ ładzie artykułu Jana Błons´kiego ‘Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto’,” Studia Litteraria

et Historica 2/2013 https://ispan.waw.pl/journals/index.php/slh/article/view/slh.

2013.018 (DOA: April 1, 2020).

.

Zukowski, “Wytwarzanie ‘winy obojętnos´ci’ oraz kategorii ‘obojętnego świadka’

na przykładzie artykułu Jana Błons´kiego ‘Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto’,” p. 441.

Ruth Leys believes that the psychoanalytical concept of trauma is difficult to con­ nect with the theories of neurosis and repression. She mentions that since the

1920s, Freud was interested in other defense mechanisms, more primitive than

repression, including denial. See R. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: Uni­ versity of Chicago Press, 2000); H. B. Levine, “Psychoanalysis and Trauma,” A

Topical Journal for Mental Health Professionals 34.4/2014.

See Gerson, When the Third is Dead, p. 1352.

For other studies of this area, see The Holocaust Bystander in Polish Culture,

. 1942–2015: The Story of Innocence, eds. M. Hopfinger, T. Zukowski (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); A. Zawadzka, J. Tokarska-Bakir, K. Matyjaszek, “Totalne zaskoczenie inteligencji polskiej,” Studia Litteraria et Historica 7/2018. P. Forecki, Po Jedwabnem. Anatomia pamięci funkcjonalnej (Warsaw: Wydaw­ nictwo IBL PAN, 2018), p. 66.

Conclusion

213

32 M. Klein, “Some Reflections on ‘The Oresteia’,” in: Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963, ed. M. M. R. Khan (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1975), p. 293. 33 I. Fink, The Table, in: A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, trans. M. Levine, F. Prose (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1995), pp. 141, 156. 34 I. Fink, “S´lad,” in: Wiosna 1941 (Warsaw: WAB, 2012). The story fits into Mar­ ianne Hirsch’s dialectics of mourning and melancholy, which I described above. See Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, pp. 109–113. 35 See D. Głowacka, “Wsłuchując się w ciszę. Estetyka pamięci o Zagładzie według Jean François Lyotarda,” Teksty Drugie 1–2/2007, pp. 51–52. 36 Gross, “Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej…,” ale go nie lubię, p. 44. 37 A. Calderón Puerta, “The Experience of Exclusion Seen from the Inside. Ida Fink’s A Scrap of Time and Its Reception in Poland,” in: Breaking the Frame: New School of Polish-Jewish Studies, eds. I. Grudzin´ska-Gross, K. Matyjaszek (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2022). 38 Głowacka, “Wsłuchując się w ciszę,” pp. 53–54. 39 See J. Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); I elaborate on the subject in the chapter on voyeurism. 40 Niziołek, The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust, p. 102. Niziołek finds those simu­ lative strategies, falsely fast “working through,” and excessively earnest admitting one’s own fault in Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class from 2008 (pp. 553–555). However, this artificial construct has a distinctive splitter, noticed by Niziołek—a perverse fantasy of Poles raping a Jewish woman who enjoys the violence. This phantasy of the masochist victim who desires to suffer resembles the last scenes of Rafał Betlejewski’s performance Płonie stodoła and the constructs analyzed by me in the chapter on masochism. See A. Calderón Puerta, “Motyw gwałtu w opo­ wiadaniu Aryjskie papiery Idy Fink i w dramacie Nasza klasa Tadeusza Sło­ bodzianka,” Teksty Drugie 2/2015. 41 T. Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Pimlico, 2007), p. 803. 42 O. Bartov, “Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide,” The Journal of Modern History 80.3/2008, p. 566. 43 The first synthesis and chronology of the relations of Polish social history and the Holocaust memory can be found in M. C. Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997). See also M. Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm. Nacjonalistyczna legitymizacja władzy komunistycznej w Polsce (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Trio and ISP PAN, 2001). On forced emigrations see: Patterns of Migration in Central Europe, eds. C. Wallace, D. Stola (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). 44 M. Olin, “Lanzmann’s Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film,” Representations 57/1997, p. 7. See D. Głowacka, “Współ-pamięć, pamięć ‘nega­ tywna’ i dylematy przekładu w ‘wycinkach’ z Shoah Claude’a Lanzmanna,” Teksty Drugie 6/2016. 45 Olin, “Lanzmann’s Shoah,” p. 13. 46 I would like to thank Roma Sendyka for bringing this fact to my attention. 47 It does not mean that the mechanism of denial applies only to the East and Cen­ tral European societies; I argue, however, that it operates on different social experiences and memories. A striking example—coming from United States—of perverse simultaneous knowledge and lack of awareness comes from The New York Times from June 27, 1942: the article under the blunt title “More Executed in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Poland—Jews’ Toil 700,000” was confusingly put in the middle of the paper, even though it was reported as “the greatest mass slaughter in history”. The facts are not really obscured—certainly not repressed— yet their significance is blurred. If they were really to be acknowledged, certainly

214

48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59

60 61

Conclusion

the article would be on the front page. This is exactly the operation of perverse logic. The statements: “this happened” and “this could not happen” can be iter­ ated at the same time. Thus, hiding an article on “the greatest mass slaughter in history” in-between the pages of the paper seems like a compromise. See: S. Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), p. 161. M. Ivaškevičius, “Žydai. Lietuvos prakeiksmas / Jews: Lithuania’ s Misfortune” (DOA: April 1, 2020), https://www.delfi.lt/news/ringas/lit/m-ivaskevicius-zydai-lie tuvos-prakeiksmas.d?id=71273626; English version: https://www.lzb.lt/en/2016/05/ 19/jews-lithuanias-misfortune/. Ivaškevičius, “Jews: Lithuania’s Misfortune.” The “white armbanders” (baltar­ aišcˇ iai) were the locals collaborating with the German forces, recruited from among anti-communist nationalists, which as in Polish context hunted Jews. T. V. Kajokas, “śladami Hannah Arendt: O banalnoś ci strachu. O umys´le post­ ronnego na Litwie,” in: Czy powrót wypartego? Psychoanaliza i dziedzictwo totali­ taryzmów, ed. E. Kobylin´ska-Dehe (Kraków: Universitas, 2021), p. 139 M. Waligórska, “Remembering the Holocaust on the Fault Lines of East and West-European Memorial Cultures: The New Memorial Complex in Trastsianets, Belarus,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 24.3/2017. Waligórska, “Remembering the Holocaust,” p. 7. See A. Walke, “Split Memory: The Geography of Holocaust Memory and Amne­ sia in Belarus,” Slavic Review 77/2018. Waligórska, “Remembering the Holocaust,” p. 18. On using the sites of Jew’s torture as places to store waste, see R. Sendyka, “Nie­ miejsca pamięci i ich nie-ludzkie pomniki,” Teksty Drugie 2/2017, pp. 98–100. Waligórska, “Remembering the Holocaust,” p. 7, notes that Maly Trostenets is also a memory palimpsest: in the Stalinist times, it became the site of NKVD massacres, whose victims were perhaps even more excluded from the collective identity. S. Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” in: SE, Vol. 14, p. 293. The examples of perverse Eastern European commemorations of the Holocaust are numerous. Omer Bartov mentions illustrations from present day Ukraine, e.g. in Kossiv, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, a local historical museum located in the house of the town’s last rabbi presents a photograph of smiling UPA soldiers in German uniforms, who during the war hunted down Jews in hiding. See O. Bartov, “White Spaces and Black Holes: Eastern Galicia’s Past and Present,” in: The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, eds. R. Brandon, W. Lower (Bloo­ mington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 330–331. See also O. Bartov, “Aftermath,” in: Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019). Michael Rothberg means the Eurocentrism of trauma studies, while here, I mean the difference between Western and Eastern Europe. In Multidirectional Memory, Rothberg appeals for an ethical and epistemic objection to the Eurocentrism of the studies on trauma in the shape given to it in the 1990s by Cathy Caruth, Geoffrey Hartman, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, and Dominick LaCapra; M. Rothberg, Multi­ directional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stan­ ford: Stanford University Press, 2009), especially the chapter “The Counterpublic Witness: Charlotte Delbo’s Les belles lettres.” See M. Rothberg, “Decolonizing Trauma Studies: A Response,” Studies in the Novel 40.1–2/2008; M. Rothberg, Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, eds. G. Buelens, S. Durrant, R. Eaglestone (New York: Routledge, 2014), esp. “Introduction.” Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing, p. 37. The most popular text that initiated this vein would probably be Susan Sontag’s Fascinating Fascism (1975). There is already a significant bibliography of texts about Uwe Boll’s Nazisploitation film Auschwitz (2011), the films Night Porter

Conclusion

62 63 64 65

66

215

(1974) by Liliana Cavani, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) by Pier Paolo Pasolini, or Ka-Tsetnik’s novels. In “Anti-Retro,” Michel Foucault interviewed by Pascal Bonitzer and Serge Toubian, trans. A. Williams, in: Cahiers du Cinéma, Vol. 4, “1973–1978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle,” ed. D. Wilson (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 165, accurately summarizes the postulate of considering the relations of the government and the subjects in an interview for Cahiers du Cinéma dedicated mainly to Cavani’s Night Porter: “Power has an erotic charge. And this brings us to a historical problem: how is it that Nazism, whose representatives were pitiful, pathetic, puritanical figures, Victorian spinsters with (at best) secret vices, how is it that it can have become, nowadays and everywhere, in France, in Germany, in the United States, in all pornographic literature the world over, the absolute reference of eroticism? A whole sleazy erotic imaginary is now placed under the sign of Nazism.” Frequently quoted definition by M. Orwid, Trauma (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Lit­ erackie, 2009), p. 129. . H. Grynberg, “Ludzie Zydom zgotowali ten los,” in: Prawda nieartystyczna (Berlin: Archipelag, 1984). Later editions in 1990 by Almapress, in 1994 by PIW, and in 2002 by Wydawnictwo Czarne. P. Czaplin´ski, “Katastrofa wsteczna,” Poznan´skie Studia Polonistyczne. Seria Lit­ eracka 45.25/2015, pp. 40f. . See P. Forecki, Od Shoah do Strachu. Spory o polsko-zydowską przeszłoś ći pamię ć w debatach publicznych (Poznan: Wydawnictwo Poznans´kie, 2010); G. Zubrzycki, . . Krzyze w Auschwitz. Tozsamoś ć narodowa, nacjonalizm i religia w post­ komunistycznej Polsce, trans. P. Tomanek (Krakow: Nomos, 2014). What deserves particular attention is the analysis of complex relations between the Jews in hiding and the Poles who hid them in selected testimonies of Karol Rotberg, Calek Perechodnik, and Jerzy Feliks Urman, by Justyna Kowalska-Leder. Although Jews were sheltered from danger and denunciation, their guardians derived—more or less—joy from “being in control of another human being.” See J. KowalskaLeder, Nie wiem, jak ich mam cenić… Strefa ambiwalencji w świadectwach Polaków i . . Zydów, p. 237, especially chapter. “Zrozumiała, ze jest górą…” Justyna Kowalska­ Leder’s entire book is dedicated to the mutually exclusive feelings in relations between Polish Jews and Poles during the Second World War, and in the memories of those relations. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir writes about excitement—this time asso­ ciated with the experience of being the perpetrator—as an effect and a catalyst of the Kielce pogrom in “Communitas of Violence. The Kielce Pogrom as a Social Drama,” in: J. Tokarska-Bakir, Pogrom Cries: Essays on Polish-Jewish History, 1939–1946 (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019), pp. 294–296; also Pod klątwą. Społeczny portret pogromu kieleckiego, Vol. 1 (Warsaw: Czarna Owca, 2018), pp. 247–248.

Bibliography Bartov, O. “Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide,” The Journal of Modern History 80. 3/2008. Benjamin, J. “Non-violence as Respect for all Suffering: Thoughts Inspired by Eyad El Sarraj”. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 21. 2016. Benjamin, J. Beyond Doer and Done to: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third. London: Routledge, 2018. Craps, S. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Fink, I. A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, trans. M. Levine and F. Prose. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1995.

216

Conclusion

Gerson, S. “When the Third is Dead: Memory, Mourning and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 90. 6/2009. Klein, M. “Some Reflections on ‘The Oresteia’,” in: Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963, ed. M. M. R. Khan. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1975. Leys, R. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Perechodnik, C. Am I a Murderer? Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman, ed. and trans. F. Fox. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Waligórska, M. “Remembering the Holocaust on the Fault Lines of East and WestEuropean Memorial Cultures: The New Memorial Complex in Trastsianets, Belarus,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 24. 3/2017.

Index

Adorno, T.W. 3, 40, 56 Agamben, G. 20, 42, 54, 103, 130 Alphen, E. van 50, 51, 85, 194, 210 Améry, J. 78, 89, 108, 131 Andrzejewski, J. 61, 123, 151, 166, Anzieu, D. 105, 130, 131, 134 Arendt, H. 30, 52, 147, 165, 195, 211–212, 214 Auschwitz-Birkenau, camp and museum 4, 24–27, 29–30, 34–35, 39, 40, 45, 47, 53, 64–65, 76, 90, 102, 140, 143, 177, 185–189, 190, 191, 209, 211 Baer, U. 4–5, 16, 21 Baksik, Ł. 141, 163, 169 Ball, K. 94–95, 128, 134 Bartov, O. 17, 21, 112, 131, 169, 213, 214, 215 Bataille, G. 23, 50, 103, 130 Bauman, Z. 3, 40, 56 Beethoven, L. van 34, 39–40 Bełżec, camp and museum 1, 3–4, 15, 64, 140, 148 Benjamin, J. 90, 127, 134, 193, 197, 199, 201, 211, 212, 215 Benjamin, W. 71, 73, 81, 84, 88, 91 Berger, J. 35–36, 54, 58, 96, 129, 213 Betlejewski, R. 12, 23, 43–49, 57, 59, 213 Bielawski, Sh. F. 8, 18 Bielik-Robson, A. 91, 122, 124, 133 Bikont, A. 52, 154, 167, 188, 196 Błoński, J. 21, 24, 32, 138, 151, 163, 169, 202, 209 Bond, H. 44–45, 57 Borowski, T. 27, 29, 39, 51, 55, 74–81, 82, 89, 90, 91 Buck-Morss, S. 41, 56 Bugajski, R. 13, 137, 158–161, 170 Buryła S. 51, 86, 89–90, 165–166, 196

Butler, J. 136, 162, 166, 197, 201, 212 bystanders 2–6, 11–15, 23–25, 30, 32–34, 37–38, 42, 43–46, 49, 65, 67, 93, 114, 123–128, 137, 157, 171, 173, 174, 184, 187, 190, 193, 198–210 Camus, A. 173, 193 Caruth, C. 5, 16, 51, 167, 214 Celan, P. 133, 140, 163 Chaplin, Ch. 25, 42, 56 Chełmno by the Ner, camp and museum 4, 140, 192 Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. 9–10, 19, 21, 63, 83, 87, 91, 108, 109, 125, 131, 133, 134, 211 Chodakiewicz, M. J. 162 Chomątowska, B. 149, 166 Chutnik, S. 145, 164, 165 Cichy, M. 202 Craps, S. 197, 198, 208, 210, 214, 215 Czapliński, P. 20, 50, 88, 163, 164, 196, 209, 215 Davis, C. 142, 164 Darowski, J. 141, 163 Dean, C. J. 78, 90, 129 denial (disavowal) 9, 10, 19, 47–48, 58, 76, 141, 148, 149, 154, 157, 199–210 DeKoven Ezrahi, S. 77–78, 85, 89 Deleuze, G. 81, 83, 147, 165 Derrida, J. 5–6, 16, 17, 21, 36 Didi-Huberman, G. 37, 41, 47, 55, 57, 59, 140, 154, 163, 167 Eichmann, A. 30, 144, 147, 211–212 Fanon, F. 77, 89, 112, 131 Felman, Sh. 38, 55, 95, 129, 167, 197, 214

218

Index

fetishism, fetish 12, 47–48, 58, 59, 61–92, 108, 123, 125, 133–134, 160, 203, 210 Fiennes, S. 40 Filipowicz, K. 143, 164, 173–174, 193, 197 Fink, I. 203–204, 213, 215 Ford, A. 110, 118 Foster, H. 70, 88 Freud, S. 3–5, 8–10, 16, 21, 26, 28, 43, 47–48, 51, 55, 57–59, 62–63, 73, 76, 83, 86–92, 96–98, 99, 109, 110, 112–113, 124, 126, 129, 131–134, 154, 155, 159, 161, 167–168, 188, 198, 208, 210–212, 214 Friedländer, S. 15, 54, 58, 91, 199, 211 Fulbrook, M. 11, 19, 58, 132, 134 gawkers 11, 23, 32, 37–38, 41, 44, 49, 99, 156, 183 Gerson, S. 183–184, 195, 197, 200, 211–212, 216 ghosts, dybbuk, zombies 5, 97, 138–157, 161, 164, 191, 201–202, 203 Glasser, M. 83, 91 Głowiński, M. 51, 90, 157, 168, 193, 195 Goldhagen, D. J. 3, 16 Górski, J. 8, 18 Green, A. 124, 133, 179, 195, 197 Gross, J. T. 7, 17, 19, 20, 21, 52, 56–57, 146, 148, 150–151, 156, 162, 166, 168, 169, 202, 204, 209, 212–213 Grottger, A. 74 Grotowski, J. 30 Grudzińska-Gross, I. 146, 148, 166, 168, 213 Grunberger, B. 102, 130, 135 Grynberg, H. 14, 20, 24, 33, 37, 53, 55, 59, 78, 89–90, 101, 129, 149, 154, 162, 166–167, 189, 196, 209, 215 Guattari, F. 83 Hegel, G. W. F. 41 Heidegger, M. 3, 116, 124 Hering, L. 46, 57, 59 Hilberg, R. 3, 9, 11, 15, 18, 19 Hirsch, M. 48, 58, 194, 213 Hobbes, T. 115, 122, 133 Hoffman, E. 180, 194–195 Hołuj, T. 13, 53, 171, 189–193, 196, 197 Horkheimer, M. 3, 40, 56 Ivaškevičius, M. 214 Jakubowska, W. 24, 42, 53–54, 86, 102, Janicka, E. 11, 19, 57–59, 131, 132, 134, 139–141, 163, 211, 212

Janion, M. 90, 114, 128, 132, 135 Jedlicki, J. 31, 52 Jedwabne pogrom 43–49, 153, 154, 156, 188, 209 Judt, T. 162, 169, 213 Jünger, E. 72, 74, 75, 80, 82, 84, 91, 124 Kajokas, T. V. 207, 214 Karpowicz, I. 66, 87 Kafka, F. 60, 83, 108, 131 Keff, B. 13, 57, 171, 175, 181–184, 197 Klein, M. 9, 116–117, 127, 132, 135, 166, 187, 196, 202–203, 213, 216 Klukowski, Z. 8, 18, 21 Konwicki, T. 61, 140, 156 Kosiński, J. 66, 87, 193 Kossak-Szczucka, Z. 137–138, 163 Kowalska-Leder, J. 18, 55, 87, 148, 163, 165, 166, 169, 215 Kozak, T. 12, 60, 71–85, 88–92 Kramer, L. 40–41, 56, 59 Kuryluk, E. 175, 184, 195, 197 Lacan, J. 36, 44, 52, 62, 74, 86, 89, 92, 109, 131, 135, 142, 145, 155, 156, 164, 167, 170 LaCapra, D. 54, 57, 96, 129, 188, 196, 198, 210, 211, 214 Lang, B. 35, 54, 198–199, 210–211 Langer, L. L. 34, 38, 53 Lanzmann, C. 24, 30, 33, 35, 38, 40, 52–55, 59, 64, 87, 154, 192, 202, 205, 206, 209 Laub, D. 18, 55, 95, 129, 171–173, 193, 197, 214 Leder, A. 17, 21, 33, 36, 52, 54–55, 59, 147, 165, 170 Leociak, J. 3–4, 15–16, 21, 89–90, 143, 164, 166, 196 Levi, P. 56, 65, 77–78, 89, 90, 199, 211 Lipski, L. 12, 93–111, 121–122, 127, 128–135 Lyotard, J.-F. 36, 204 Majdanek, camp and museum 4, 26, 53, 140, 148, Maly Trostenets, camp 207–208, 214 March 1968 36–37, 90, 141, 149, 156, 157, 162, 171, 176–178, 202, 206 masochism 9, 12, 13, 32, 43, 46, 60, 73, 80, 83, 84, 89, 93–128, 143, 159, 183, 202, 203, 213 McDougall, J. 9–10, 18–19, 21, 68, 85, 88, 91–92, 129, 133

Index Mengele, J. 64–65, 87 Miłosz, Cz. 14–15, 20, 184–185, 195 de Montaigne, M. 29–30, 52, 59 Mouffe, Ch. 127, 134 mourning 48, 96, 97, 125, 129, 152, 168–169, 178, 186, 192, 198, 202–203, 205, 210, 211, 213 Munk, A. 24, 42, 53 Muranów, Warsaw district 126, 138, 141–142, 145, 149–151 Nałkowska, Z. 90, 137, 160, 162, 170 Nancy, J.-L. 41, 56, 65–66, 85, 87, 91 Nietzsche, F. 81, 123–124, 133 Niziołek, G. 9, 11, 18, 30, 32, 36, 52, 54–55, 59, 86, 99, 128–130, 159, 167, 196, 213 Olbrychski, D. 67–73, 75 Ostachowicz, I. 13, 137–149, 163, 170, 187–188 Pankowski, M. 28, 89, 102, 129, 130 Pawlikowski, P. 162 Perechodnik, C. 46, 57, 59, 90, 146, 148–149, 155, 165–167, 170, 200, 211, 215, 216 perpetrators 2–3, 6, 10, 11–12, 15, 24, 27, 33, 38, 43, 45, 49, 58, 60, 65–66, 68, 77, 78, 82, 84–85, 86, 108, 110, 120, 123, 127, 136–137, 143, 157–160, 172, 173, 175, 180–181, 184, 199, 203, 206, 208, 211 Polański, R. 67 Pollack, M. 3, 16, 64, 87 Posmysz, Z. 90, 95, 128 Radin, P. 82, 91 Resnais, A. 28 Riefenstahl, L. 60, 62, 68 Ringelblum, E. 134, 146, 165 Romanticism 24, 74, 84, 93–94, 104, 110, 114, 122–123, 128, 151, 152, 155–156, 184–185 Romero, G. 142, 147 Rose, J. 98, 129 Różewicz, T. 30, 60–61, 86, 102, 167, 186, 191, Rudzka, Z. 12, 13, 64–66, 87, 92, 171, 184–189, 190, 196, 197 Rymkiewicz, J. M. 12, 61, 86, 116, 122, 124–127, 132–135, 159–160, 168

219

sadism 13, 32, 43, 60, 143, 159, 183, 202 de Sade 9, 74 Sandauer, A. 12, 93, 111–114, 127, 131–132, 135, 200, 211 Santner, E. L. 48, 58, 59 Sartre, J.-P. 32, 52 Schmitt, C. 116–117, 122, 124, 132–133, 135 Segal, H. 114, 132, 166 Seltzer, M. 111, 128, 131 Sendyka, R. 17, 19, 52, 57, 101, 128, 130, 163, 164, 166, 213, 214 Sienkiewicz, H. 70–73, 88 Simon, D. V. 29–30, 52, 59 Sloterdijk, P. 48, 58 Słobodzianek, T. 187, 213 Snyder, T. 21, 101, 129 Sontag, S. 6, 17, 60, 85, 87, 92, 214 Spielberg, S. 40, 53, 164 Steiner, J. 9–10, 19, 21, 47, 58, 59, 212 Stern, J. 143 Tarantino, Q. 144–145 Theweleit, K. 68–69, 85, 88, 91, 92, 118, 120, 132–133, 135 Tokarska-Bakir, J. 17, 55, 57, 80, 85, 90–91, 131, 135, 138, 163, 166, 167, 169, 195, 211, 212, 215 Toporowicz, M. 12, 60, 62–64, 86, 92 trauma 5, 8–10, 12, 13, 14, 20, 25–26, 28, 30, 36, 41, 47–48, 51, 60, 68, 70, 80, 84, 93, 95–96, 102–103, 105, 108–111, 114, 118–119, 126–127, 136, 142, 154, 155, 171–175, 176–179, 181, 183, 184, 187–193, 198–202, 205, 208–210 Traverso, E. 38, 55 Treblinka, camp and museum 4, 8, 30–31, 37, 64, 140, 189 Tsanin, M. 14–15, 20–21, 157, 167 Tulli, M. 13, 171, 175, 176–181, 183, 194, 197 Tuszyńska, A. 148, 165, 174–175, 194, 197 Twardoch, Sz. 12, 93, 114–128, 132–133, 135 Tymiński, K. 25, 27, 28, 39, 50–51, 55, 59 Uklański, P. 12, 60, 67–70, 92 unrepresentability 34–37, 39, 53, 204 victims, victimhood 2–4, 6, 11, 12, 14, 31, 32, 35, 38–39, 41, 43, 46, 49, 55, 65–66, 77–78, 80, 84–85, 93, 114, 126–128, 136–137, 139, 145, 151,

220

Index

161, 171–184, 193, 199–200, 201, 203, 207, 208 visibility of the Holocaust 6–8, 34–39, 44, 45, 47, 49, 206, 208 voyeurism 5, 9, 12, 23–49, 69, 94–95, 202 Wajda, A. 61, 67, 72–73, 75, 77, 90, 102, 123, 156, 187, 204–205 Walden, V. G. 50–51, 59 Waligórska, M. 163, 165, 167, 207–208, 214, 216 Warsaw Ghetto 3, 14–15, 20, 31, 44, 46, 51, 57, 108, 126, 134, 137, 138, 146, 157–158, 174–175, 196 Weissman, G. 53, 54, 129, 193 Wejman, M. 44 Welldon, E. V. 176, 194 White, H. 54, 199, 210 Wiesel, E. 35, 54

Wilczyk, W. 91, 154, 167, 170, 195 Williams, L. 54, 57, 160, 168 Winnicott, D. W. 9 Wosiewicz, L. 12, 23–42, 50–51, 53–54, 59, 102, 196 Wrona, M. 13, 137, 151–157, 169 Wyka, K. 27, 51, 70, 88, Wyspiański, S. 156 Zaremba, Ł. 87–88, 92 Zaremba, M. 148, 165–167, 213 Zborowska, A. 165, 167 Ziarnik, J. 191 Żemis, S. 7–8, 18, 22, 167 Żmijewski, A. 37–38 Žižek, S. 19, 20, 33–34, 40, 42, 52–53, 56–57, 59, 122, 128, 133, 142, 145, 156, 164, 167, 170