Unsettled Heritage: Living next to Poland's Material Jewish Traces after the Holocaust 9781501761751

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• UNSETTLED HERITAGE

UNSETTLED HERITAGE

n

L I V I N G N E X T TO P O L A N D ’ S M AT E R I A L J E W I S H T R AC ES A F T E R T H E H O LO C AU S T

Yechiel Weizman

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Publication of this book was made possible, in part, by grants from the First Book Subvention Program of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies and the Alexander R. Dushkin Foundation at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Copyright © 2022 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2022 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Weizman, Yechiel, 1982– author. Title: Unsettled heritage : living next to Poland’s material Jewish traces after the Holocaust / Yechiel Weizman. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021015201 (print) | LCCN 2021015202 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501761744 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501761768 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501761751 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Jewish cemeteries—Social aspects— Poland. | Synagogues—Social aspects—Poland. | Judaism and culture—Poland. | Jewish cemeteries— Poland—History—20th century. | Synagogues— Poland—History—20th century. Classification: LCC DS134.55 .W46 2022 (print) | LCC DS134.55 (ebook) | DDC 363.7/50899240438—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015201 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015202 Cover image: The Jewish cemetery in Warta. 1987. Photo by Ireneusz Ślipek. Courtesy of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum archive, Israel.

• Conte nts

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix

List of Abbreviations xiii

Introduction

1

1. “Everything Was a Void”: New

Order and Social Chaos

17

2. “There Are No Jews Here”: The

Language of De-Judaization

50

3. To Whom Does It Belong? Ownership

and Doubts

69

4. Resentment and Compassion

84

5. The Antechamber of Mystery

100

6. Liberalization, Nationalism,

and Erasure

109

7. Profanation and Dirt

132

8. Residual Presence

149

9. Anxiety and Rediscovery

161

10. The Dialectics of Preservation Conclusions: Enduring Ambivalence Notes

227

References Index

283

265

183

203

• I l lustr atio ns

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

The Jewish cemetery in Kolbuszowa The surface of a square, Zator Cowshed, Starowola by Parysów The ruins of the Warta synagogue A memorial in the Jewish cemetery in Sandomierz The Dzierżoniów (Reichenbach) synagogue The Jewish cemetery in Dzierżoniów The new Jewish cemetery in Olkusz The Olkusz synagogue The Parczew synagogue The Jewish cemetery in Warta The Dąbrowa Tarnowska synagogue The Jewish cemetery in Krynki The Jewish cemetery in Sokółka A memorial for the Jewish victims, Szydłowiec The Rymanów synagogue The Jewish cemetery in Oświęcim Drawing of the Sandomierz synagogue Drawing of the Zamość synagogue Mass grave of Jews, Zhovkva, Ukraine Olkusz, the site of the former synagogue The ruins of the Great Synagogue in Krynki The old Jewish cemetery in Maków Mazowiecki The Sandomierz synagogue “Maintenance” works in the Jewish cemetery, Warta Recovered Matzevot in Kazimierz Dolny The “Wailing Wall” in Kazimierz Dolny Ireneusz Ślipek in the Jewish cemetery in Warta The renovated synagogue in Dąbrowa Tarnowska The Jewish cemetery in Ryki

3

28

29

30

38

46

47

55

56

58

96

99

103

106

126

128

128

129

129

137

150

151

154

157

192

195

195

197

221

226

vii

• Acknowledgments

This book would not have seen the light of day without the help of so many people who have seen me through this project. I am indebted to Marcos Silber and Amos Goldberg for their devoted and inspiring guidance. Their insightful comments and advice, and mostly their endless patience, helped me to f lesh out my ideas, sharpen my thoughts, and rethink my research. I was blessed to call the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa my supportive, academic home during my early career stages; it gave me with the optimal conditions for pursuing my research. I began this project in Jerusalem and Haifa and finished it in Leipzig, at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture—Simon Dubnow. I am grateful to Yfaat Weiss, Elisabeth Gallas, and all of my colleagues at the Dubnow Institute, who provided me with the perfect intellectual and social atmosphere to bring this book to fruition. Sitting for hours in archives and typing away in front of a computer screen can be a lonely and discouraging experience, but I was lucky to have acquired colleagues, teachers, and friends to accompany me over this long intellec­ tual, emotional, and very physical journey. Maria Ferenc-Piotrowska and Jan Piotrowski were my family in Warsaw, and their apartment was my home away from home. The long and inspiring walks with Elżbieta Janicka through her Festung Warschau challenged me to rethink what I talk about when I talk about Polish-Jewish relations. I am grateful to Lucyna Aleksandrowicz­ Pędich, for her support and advice and for our joint excursion into the heart of Podlasie back in 2014. Eleanor Shapiro became my chavruta in discovering the contemporary Polish-Jewish landscape, and a constant source of inspira­ tion. In Krynki and its environs, Joanna Czaban helped me tremendously in reaching places and people that I would never have discovered on my own. I am indebted to Ireneusz Cieślik, who generously invested his time and efforts in walking me through the traces of Olkusz’s Jewish past. I owe a great debt to Erica Lehrer for all her support and encouragement over these past few years, ever since we first met in 2012 during the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir substantially inf luenced ix

x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

the way I approach my research subjects. Her comments and thoughts on my work and this book helped me sharpen my arguments and approach to my research. Natalia Aleksiun read previous versions of this work, and I am grateful for her remarks and suggestions, which have assisted me tre­ mendously in revising and honing my ideas and writing. I am thankful for Jagoda Budizk, for all of her wise and sensitive ref lections and thoughts, and for pushing me to see this project through to the end. Adam Musiał was my home base in Kraków, and I am indebted to him for his valuable help with the extensive Polish translations. So many people have read sections of my work, commented on my papers, taken the time to meet me, answered my nagging emails, offered their own ideas, and shared their original material. I am particularly grateful to Anna Artwińska, Eleonora Bergman, Dorota Borodaj, Barbara Engelking, Konstanty Gebert, Agnieszka Ilwicka, Jan Jagielski z”l, Karolina Jarmusz­ kiewicz, Kobi Kabalek, Agnieszka Karczewska, Kamil Kijek, Krzysztof Kocjan, Julia Koszewska, Monika Krawczyk, Łukasz Krzyżanowski, Jacob Labendz, Magdalena Marszałek, David N. Mayers, Michael Meng, Alicja Mroczkowska, Annamaria Orla-Bukowska, Roma Sendyka, Yonatan ShilohDayan, Judith Siepmann, Stephan Stach, Albert Stankowski, Katrin Stoll, John Swanson, Gregor Thum, Magdalena Waligórska, Jonathan Webber, Agnieszka Wierzcholska, Marcin Wodziński, Tadeusz Woleński, and Emma Zohar. I am grateful to the two external readers of this manuscript for their close and meticulous reading and for their generous and helpful comments and suggestions for revision. I would also like to thank Eitan Gavson and Hannah Landes for their professional and committed language editing of several drafts of this book. Working with the editing team of Cornell Uni­ versity Press has been a great pleasure, and I want to specifically thank Emily Andrew, Karen Laun, and Allegra Martschenko for their patience and immense assistance. Finally, I want to thank my mother, Chaya, and my brother, Adi, for their love and support, and to my Frau Doktor, Orly Rabi, for everything. During these past few years, I have received generous grants and scholar­ ships from various institutions that have enabled me to focus primarily on this research. These include the Minerva Stiftung, the Gerda Henkel Stif­ tung, the Israeli Council for Higher Education, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Israeli Inter-University Academic Partnership in Russian and East European Studies, the Polish Institute in Tel Aviv, the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, and the International Institute for Holocaust Research of Yad Vashem. Chapter 3 in this book is a revised and extended version of my earlier article: “Unsettled Possession: The Question of Ownership of Jewish Sites in

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xi

Poland after the Holocaust from a Local Perspective,” Jewish Culture and His­ tory 18, no. 1 (2017): 34–53. It is used by permission of the publisher (Taylor &Francis Ltd., http://www.tandfonline.com). A note on language: I use the Polish version of place names, except when a recognized English version exists, which is phonetically different than the original name. For example, I use Warsaw rather than Warszawa, but I do use Kraków and Łódź instead of Krakow and Lodz. In the case of towns whose Yiddish name is substantially different from the Polish one, I mention the Yiddish version in brackets.

• Ab b r e vi atio ns

AAJDC AAN AIPN APB APKa APKr APL APLk APRa APRz APSd APW AŻIH CKŻP DDZ MAP MGK MO MSW PKWN PMRN

Archive of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archiwum Akt Nowych (Archive of Modern Records) Archiwum Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej (Archive of the Insti­ tute of National Remembrance) Archiwum Państwowe w Białymstoku (State Archive in Białystok) Archiwum Państwowe w Katowicach (State Archive in Katowice) Archiwum Państwowe w Krakowie (State Archive in Kraków) Archiwum Państwowe w Lublinie (State Arhcive in Lublin) Archiwum Państwowe w Lublinie Oddział w Kraśniku (State Archive in Lublin, Kraśnik Branch) Archiwum Państwowe w Radomiu (State Archive in Radom) Archiwum Państwowe w Rzeszowie (State Archive in Rzeszów) Archiwum Państwowe w Siedlcach (State Archive in Siedlce) Archiwum Państwowe we Wrocławiu (State Archive in Wrocław) Archiwum Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego (Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute) Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce (Central Committee of Pol­ ish Jews) Dział Dokumentacji Zabytków (Historical Monuments Docu­ mentation Center) Ministerstwo Administracji Publicznej (Ministry of Public Administration) Ministerstwo Gospodarki Komunalnej (Ministry of Public Services) Milicja Obywatelska (Citizens’ Militia) Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych (Ministry of Internal Affairs) Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego (Polish Committee of National Liberation) Prezydium Miejskiej Rady Narodowej (Presidium of the Municipal National Council) xiii

xiv

PPRN

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

Prezydium Powiatowej Rady Narodowej (Presidium of the Dis­ trict National Council) PRL Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa (Polish People’s Republic) PWRN Prezydium Wojewódzkiej Rady Narodowej (Presidium of the Voivodeship National Council) PZPR Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (Polish United Workers’ Party) TSKŻ Towarzystwo Społeczno Kulturalne Żydów (Social-Cultural Association of Polish Jews) UdW Urząd do Spraw Wyznań (Ministry of Religious Affairs) WKŻ Wojewódzki Komitet Żydowski (Voivodeship Jewish Committee) ZBOWiD Związek Bojowników o Wolność i Demokrację (Union of Fight­ ers for Freedom and Democracy) ŻKW Żydowska Kongregacja Wyznaniowa (Congregation of Jewish Faith) ZRWM Związek Religijny Wyznania Mojżeszowego (Religious Union of the Mosaic Faith)

• UNSETTLED HERITAGE

Introduction

On a sunny afternoon in June 2016, I found myself wandering through the streets of Kolbuszowa—a small, provincial town in southeastern Poland. Almost nothing in the town’s contemporary landscape revealed its contrasting past reality. Only the town’s historical coat of arms, which depicts a friendly handshake between a Christian and a Jew, testified to distant times when around half of the local inhabitants were Jews. In 1942, most of them were sent to their deaths by the Germans at the Bełżec extermination camp. Yet over three generations later, the simple act of querying random passersby in the streets—“Excuse me, do you know where the Jewish cemetery is?”—seemed a bit invasive; it touched on a toointimate and ambivalent chord within the townspeople. A few reacted with surprise, while others became visibly puzzled and emotionally affected. Oth­ ers still became a bit guarded and suspicious. Although no one knew exactly how to get there, every person I spoke to was able to point in the general direction of the cemetery, which was situ­ ated on the outskirts of town, in the middle of a wooded area. Having lost my way trying to find it, I entered a small grocery store close to the forest to ask for guidance. A customer, who was in the middle of paying for a bottle of beer, turned around and announced, “I know where it is. I will take you there.” He seemed to be in his late fifties, was missing some teeth, and wore shabby clothes. He was also drunk. It was clear to me that he has been like 1

2

INTRODUCTION

this for some time. Although hesitant at first, I decided to follow him out to the cemetery, a twenty-minute walk that took us out of town and into the woods. No signage nor clear trail markers existed, yet my guide seemed to know exactly where he was headed, confidently leading the way, until we arrived at the cemetery’s gate. I would not have found it alone. I thanked him for his generous escort, assuming he would then leave me to myself, but he insisted we enter the compound together. Inside the relatively preserved cemetery were the usual sights one can find in abandoned Jewish necropolises throughout Eastern Europe: wild and overgrown plant life, off-kilter matzevot (plural of matzevah, a Jewish headstone), old memorial candles, and empty liquor bottles. Surveying the desolated surroundings, my companion shook his head in sorrow, repeatedly murmuring, “no respect” (bez szacunku). He then bid me to follow him into the heart of the forested cemetery. He had something to show me. After few minutes of making our way through the overgrowth, we arrived at a secluded area, where a large memorial stone marked the place where more than a thousand Jews had been shot and buried by German forces between 1942 and 1943. Still gripping his beer bottle in his hand, the man told me, in detail, the story of these Jews’ execution. “I was born fifteen years after the massacre,” he said. This enigmatic, almost surreal, encounter was repeated, in only slightly different versions, more than once in my visits to Polish provincial towns, and left me wondering about the power of the material Jewish remnants to blur the usually stark boundaries between presence and absence, past and present, and remembrance and forgetfulness. Trying to decipher the unique ambiance surrounding the physical traces of Jewish culture in Poland and to understand how their social function, collective perception, and cultural meaning have been constructed and shaped since the Holocaust took me on a long and intensive journey that forked out in surprising and unpredicted avenues. The results of this journey are presented in this book. Since antiquity, the two most quintessential material coordinates in the life of every Jewish community are the gravesite and the house of prayer. These places, where one’s dead are buried and prayers made, are not simply “ritual sites.” Rather, they are the embodiments and spatial expression of a com­ munity. Historically and conceptually, a Jewish congregation without these two anchors is nearly inconceivable. The sanctity of cemeteries and syna­ gogues differ in Jewish law, yet they share a basic duality in their everyday practice and symbolic status. As a place of death, the cemetery marks the finality of human life and memorializes the dead, but it is also “the house of

INTRODUCTION

Figure 1.

3

The Jewish cemetery in Kolbuszowa. 2016. Photo by the author.

the living” (beit chayim)—standing as an everlasting emblem of the congrega­ tion’s continuity and cross-generational endurance.1 A synagogue, conversely, facilitates the sustainment of everyday Jewish life. Yet it is also a memorial to the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem, a “small sanctuary” (mikdash me’at), that harbors the collective trauma of the Jewish people’s loss of sovereignty and its hope for redemption.2 The strong symbolic status of these two sacral anchors was also acknowledged by the surrounding non-Jewish societies, constantly evoking curiosity and antagonism. Since the twelfth century, successive Sicut Judaeis (Papal bulls that governed the treatment of the Jews) determined that those who damage a Jewish cemetery or a synagogue will be fined, thus testi­ fying to the prevalence of such acts.3 Over the course of Jewish history, cemeteries and synagogues began to acquire a life of their own long after their communities had left the scene. When not destroyed or converted for other purposes, these spaces slowly decayed, turning into the pyramids and mausoleums of Jewish culture. It is often the ruins of these sites that have served as the sole material testi­ mony to a historical Jewish presence in manifold locations throughout the world. This mnemonic capacity of the material remnants of former Jewish communal sites is perhaps most saliently evident in Poland, the home of

4

INTRODUCTION

Europe’s largest Jewish population on the eve of World War II, in whose wake it was almost completely erased. Whether deserted, desecrated, razed, preserved, or renovated, Poland’s Jewish sites stand today as a met­ onym of the ambivalent place of Jews in Polish culture and imagination since 1945. In this country, where the void left in the wake of a near-total disappearance of its former Jewish population is most vivid—and where the Nazi “Final Solution” took its shape and form—the remaining Jewish material traces have come to embody both the absence of the Jews and their haunting presence. Unsettled Heritage presents a historical and anthropological account of the afterlives of the thousands of Jewish communal heritage sites scattered throughout Poland’s postwar landscape and traces the social, political, and cultural history of how Poles have interacted with their presence. Although the seeds of this project were planted with my initial discovery of contempo­ rary Poland’s Jewish spaces, this work is mainly concerned with the country’s communist period, between 1945 and 1989, as it was mostly over this span of time that the current tangible and symbolic status of the nation’s Jewish religious sites were developed and took on the form they have today. This book focuses primarily on small, provincial towns that had a substan­ tial Jewish presence up until World War II, and it attempts to answer one main question, namely: How were Jewish religious sites, namely synagogues and cemeteries, perceived, negotiated, treated, interacted with, and experienced by postwar Polish society? The main protagonists of this work are the Polish individuals and organizations who came into contact with the presence of the Jewish traces on a daily basis: local officials, municipal bureaucrats, smalltown activists, and regular citizens who lived next to the material remnants of their murdered neighbors. How did these people conceptualize and con­ ceive of the newly deserted properties absent the Jewish communities who once frequented them? What was the material and symbolic status of post­ war Jewish spaces in their eyes? What were the emotions and meanings that these inanimate traces aroused in the neighboring Poles, and how were they realized? How did the discussions on the fate of Jewish spaces actually take place, and what were the mechanisms, considerations, and justifications that determined the future of Jewish sites? The picture that emerges when trying to answer these questions is mul­ tifaceted. It shows the extent to which the presence of Jewish cemeteries and synagogues, and the pressing questions about their future, became an ongoing—sometimes obsessive—discussion between state officials, local leaders, and their communities. The question, “What do we do with this cem­ etery/synagogue?” was, on the one hand, a material and logistical concern,

INTRODUCTION

5

touching on local and national needs and desires in the postwar, communist reality. Yet scratching the surface reveals a deeper, implicit layer that discloses the most complicated and uncomfortable elements of the Poles’ dealing with the fate of their Jewish neighbors. By analyzing both the material and the implicit meanings of this question, this book illustrates how these two layers were interdependent and locked in an ambivalent interplay throughout the communist period and beyond. The perception and treatment of the sacral Jewish traces metamorphosed and took on different outward forms and expressions according to the changing political and cultural climates. The persistence of largely abandoned Jewish sites throughout the Polish interior became one of the most urgent municipal concerns of the communist era, and it was the main vehicle by which Polish society implicitly and explicitly interacted with its memory of the Jews and their annihilation. Living next door to f resh Jewish ruins evoked a broad array of human reactions. These ranged from contempt, fear, unease, and embarrassment to reverence and compassion. Such conf licting responses ref lect patterns of thought rooted in prewar Polish folklore and ideology that were later complicated by the ramifications of World War II and communism and also—perhaps mainly— by the unsettling aftermath of the extermination of the Jews. Although the wartime and postwar fate of Jewish sites in Poland has increas­ ingly received research attention, it remains largely unknown how local administrations, personages, and policies governing their existence—as well as how the urban and rural populace—perceived and interacted with these spaces in their daily lives and across generations. Several works, mainly by Polish scholars, provide important and detailed accounts of what has become of Poland’s mostly abandoned Jewish sites. These studies serve as useful sources of knowledge, detailing the sites’ physical states and their changing legal status from World War II to the present.4 The work of the historian Krzysztof Bielawski, for example, presents a meticulous overview of the gradual destruction of Poland’s Jewish cemeteries and supplies an up-to-date picture of their current state, drawing on an impressive array of archival sources and fieldwork.5 Yet this invaluable body of research does not construct a systematic and historicized analysis of the social function, cultural meaning, and symbolic transformation of Jewish sites; nor does it explore the local, inner dynamics and nuances of Polish discourse over their problematic inheritance. That is what this book endeavors to do. More than merely seeking to answer the question of “What happened to Jewish sites?,” I strive to uncover the social interests, beliefs, and attitudes that have contrib­ uted to their modern-day perception.6

6

INTRODUCTION

A significant contribution to the study of the afterlife of Jewish sites in postwar Poland is Michael Meng’s Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland, in which he thoroughly traces the transforma­ tion of Jewish spaces in five urban centers in Poland and the two Germanies, from the end of the war through the present.7 Surveying Poland, Meng focuses on the two large cities of Warsaw and Wrocław, where he shows how competing urban, national, and transnational considerations and dynamics inf luenced and shaped the future and status of urban Jewish spaces, and how the political and cultural climate that emerged in the wake of the Holocaust and postwar national rebuilding projects determined their fate. Meng’s comparative approach leads him to undermine the assumed dichotomy between Eastern and Western Europe’s internal negotiation with their wartime past and to challenge the centrality of the Cold War as the prime explanatory model for understanding how Europe remembered the Holocaust and how it dealt with its Jewish heritage. But while arriving at illuminating conclusions, the primary focus on Poland’s large urban centers and on the main political and cultural actors produces a partial picture that inevitably misses crucial nuances, counternarratives, and symbolic layers. These aspects become evident when one adjusts the spotlight from the cen­ ter to the periphery, concentrating on discussions and practices there at the microlevel and analyzing them critically, while taking into consideration the ethnographic dimension of the Poles’ encounter with the ruptured Jewish space. In so doing, Unsettled Heritage opens up new possibilities of under­ standing the complexities and ambivalences of Polish dispositions toward the material traces of the murdered Jews. This book’s primary focus is the urban topography of the country’s small and mid-sized towns. This methodological choice is not an arbitrary one; extant scholarship on Jewish space in postwar Poland has concerned itself mainly with large cities, leaving our knowledge of the fate of Jewish sites in small and provincial towns lacking.8 By shifting our attention away from Poland’s large metropolises, this book fills in a gap in current research by mining the rich postwar afterlife of a unique cultural, social, and geographi­ cal urban structure that existed in Eastern Europe for hundreds of years, commonly known as the shtetl. The origins of the shtetl, which is as much a cultural construct and a myth as it is a historical phenomenon, date back to the sixteenth and sev­ enteenth centuries when Polish magnets established small market towns in rural areas where Jews played a central role in the local economy and commerce.9 Over the course of the turbulent, succeeding centuries, in

INTRODUCTION

7

which Poland was partitioned between the empires, these shtetlach would become the prominent settlement pattern for Polish and Eastern European Jews, who would often form the majority of their local population.10 With the accelerated modernization that accompanied the turn of the nine­ teenth and twentieth centuries, and following the tides of Jewish emigra­ tion and the demographic and geographical effects of World War I, the prominence of the shtetl phenomenon diminished.11 Although the biggest interwar Jewish communities occupied Poland’s large cities, around half of the Polish Jewish population, numbering almost 3.5 million souls (around 10 percent of Polish society), remained in these small to mid-sized towns, many of them located in the geographical and social periphery of the coun­ try.12 On the eve of World War II, in a considerable number of these towns Jews still constituted half or more of the local population. The shtetl is sometimes portrayed as a hermetic and isolated Jewish universe; yet the demographic, geographic, and social conditions in these communities led to the development of a unique model of interethnic and interreligious interaction between Jews and their gentile neighbors.13 This distinct model, at the same time intimate and dissonant, was characterized as “symbiotic­ ambivalent” by the ethnographer Rosa Lehmann, who used this term to capture the nature of Jewish and non-Jewish neighborly ties in the shtetl.14 Lehmann’s model envisions “strict ethnic boundaries” between the two groups; however, it also conceives of a communal familiarity and shared space which, though often nurturing mutual animosity and anti-Jewish vio­ lence, led to daily economic and everyday exchanges while maintaining a social distance.15 The f lames of the Holocaust consumed and wiped out this particular socio-geographic and demographic reality. Though Jewish congregations (albeit in a significantly diminished capacity) still existed in the larger cities, most of Poland’s former shtetlach had become, or soon became, completely emptied of their Jews.16 This striking gap between prewar rooted Jewish pres­ ence and postwar near-total Jewish absence from the communal fabric was emphasized by the persistence of what, in many of these towns, had become the last remaining traces of Jewish life: abandoned cemeteries, empty syna­ gogues, and other communal sites, such as ritual bathhouses (mikvaot, singu­ lar: mikveh) or houses of study (batei midrash, singular: beit midrash). While in the large cities discussions on the future of Jewish sites often included city planners, architects, urban regeneration experts, and high-ranking state and Communist Party officials, the debates on the question of Jewish sites in the provinces were far less professional and formalized. The small-town mayors,

8

INTRODUCTION

town council members, local leaders, and average citizens who took part in these discussions—and who are central to this book—were immersed in an all-too-personal and emotionally charged engagement. They were negoti­ ating the presence and future of familiar properties, used by their former neighbors who had been an integral part of their own communal fabric, whose murder they had either personally witnessed or heard immediate tell of, and in whose houses many of them were now living.17 The locus of the (former) shtetl is thus a particularly interesting case study for examining how people treat, perceive, and experience material heritage traces of absent communities that were violently uprooted from the shared local landscapes. In addition, the relatively intimate nature of human con­ nections in a small town—as opposed to the urban estrangement, which is more characteristic of the big city—offers a unique prism for exploring the interconnections between language, memory, and spatial practices. Focus­ ing on small towns in the Polish geographic and social periphery and paying close attention to discussions and practices at the local level shed new light on the internal dynamics of the decision-making processes over the future of Jewish spaces and offers a re-examination of the deliberations, and tensions, between the central communist regime, town officials, and the local popula­ tion over these sites’ fate. Further, this bottom-up perspective demonstrates the limitations of hegemonic discourses to hermetically determine the status of material Jewish traces in the periphery. My choice to focus specifically on religious sites, mainly cemeteries and synagogues, derives primarily from the fact that these sites attracted the pre­ ponderance of postwar discussion and attention, involving both the Polish authorities and remaining Jewish organizations. Although nonsacral public Jewish property, such as community buildings, schools, and hospitals were also left behind after the war, they did not attract the same level of attention. The unique symbolic value of Jewish religious spaces, their special status in Jewish law, and the universal and Christian sensibilities regarding houses of worship and places of burial all charged the discussion over their future with an intense sense of urgency. As the most distinctively Jewish symbols, discussion over their future was particularly sensitive and problematic, for Jews and Poles alike. The towns appearing in this study are located in different regions of the country, within the country’s post-1945 borders, including localities in the former German territories that were annexed to Poland after the war. Towns in the country’s prewar eastern borderlands that were relinquished to Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania after the war do not fall under the scope

INTRODUCTION

9

of this book. My guiding principle in selecting the towns was to construct as broad, representative, and nuanced a picture as possible, with the aim of highlighting typical patterns while also including exceptions that would undermine monolithic conclusions. In most of the examined towns, an orga­ nized Jewish congregation no longer existed after the war. In some, only a handful of individuals remained, while in others no Jews resided after 1945. In a few towns, a small community continued to exist through the 1960s and even beyond. This wide array of selected towns represents the multiple fates that befell Jewish religious remnants during or after the war, and it showcases the variety of actors and circumstances that took part in determining their afterlife. The chosen localities also represent various patterns of German persecution and different local histories of Polish-Jewish relations. Taken as a whole, this mosaic of case studies ref lects the diverse and conf licting per­ ceptions, vocabularies, and attitudes that arose in response to the existential problems posed by the material Jewish remnants. Not all towns receive the same amount of attention in the book. Cer­ tain places are more dominant than others in specific periods, while others appear throughout the entire book in different chapters. In the course of the book, I zoom in and out in changing resolutions, moving between the local, regional, and national perspectives. In some cases, I devote a lengthy and in-depth discussion to specific towns to illuminate and analyze certain phenomena and mechanisms, while some towns are mentioned singularly as examples to demonstrate a general phenomenon. The main rationale behind this methodology is to be able to tell one story, built on a montage of microhistories. As such, this approach elucidates the nuances that compile the larger picture while also points to the boundaries and limitations of any grand narrative. The book proceeds chronologically, beginning with the first succeed­ ing moments after the liberation of Poland and ending in 1989, with the collapse of Poland’s communist regime. In these forty-five years, despite the ever-changing political and cultural climate, a coherent narrative may be woven, highlighting the processes and developments that inf luenced how the citizens of the Polish People’s Republic treated and perceived their former neighbors’ sacral sites. The division into chapters is not hermetic, as I occasionally move back and forth across these temporal borders. At various places on our march through time, the theme of historical narra­ tion is suspended in order to provide in-depth anthropological analyses on phenomena that rebuff periodization and endure today. Appended to this account is an epilogue, which addresses some significant developments in

10

INTRODUCTION

and transformations of Poland’s surviving Jewish spaces after 1989 and into the first two decades of the new millennium, revisiting some of the towns that appear throughout the work. Unsettled Heritage contributes to the growing body of research surveying the cultural, material, and demographic consequences of the war that radically shattered the existence of millions of people—who either lost their lives or everything that defined life for them through murder, displacement, dis­ possession, and relocation.18 It complements other studies that specifically deal with the aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland and the rest of East­ ern Europe which to date are mostly concerned with the homecoming of survivors, anti-Jewish violence, emigration, and property restitution.19 As it mainly draws on the actions and views of non-Jewish institutions and per­ sons, this book also contributes to the understanding of the war’s long-term impact on Christian-Polish society, exemplifying the cultural revolution, which the Poles underwent after 1945 and which has shaped their contem­ porary identity.20 Unsettled Heritage may also be approached as a retroverse perspective on the communist political and administrative regime, as well as the relationship between “the authorities” and “the people,” by diverting the attention to the periphery of the communist apparatus. Accordingly, I challenge the com­ mon monolithic perception of “the regime” that often conveniently removes agency from civic organizations and local bodies and points the finger at the wrongdoings and fallacies of the country’s central rule alone. A closer examination of this period’s struggles with its question of remnant Jewish space helps to undermine this common dichotomy between the regime and collective Polish society, showing the extent to which municipal and regional authorities, and local leaders and actors, had substantial political space to maneuver independently and significantly inf luence overall policy in com­ munist Poland. Though mainly attentive to non-Jewish Poles’ motives, views, and actions toward Jewish space, this book sheds new light on postwar Poland’s Jewish minority, joining a recent trend in similar studies to move past the common portrayal of Jews as passive subjects or, alternatively, as enthusiastic commu­ nists. Instead, this work emphasizes their agency and initiative to negotiate their own place and identity within the new system.21 Unsettled Heritage dem­ onstrates the unique role and importance Polish Jewish organizations and individuals had in shaping the attitudes and policies toward Jewish spaces at the local, national, and transnational levels. It also highlights the essentially unknown stories of minuscule Jewish congregations outside Poland’s urban

INTRODUCTION

11

centers, who chose not to leave their hometowns and saw themselves as the last guardians of the Jewish heritage sites in the provinces. The narrative presented in these pages weaves a historical and anthro­ pological account of the decisions that shaped the future state of deserted Jewish burial places and houses of prayer f rom the point of view of Polish authorities and individuals who were confronted with the question, What to do with the material leftovers of another’s culture? It is furthermore an investigation of Polish interaction with, and experience of places where—in the words of the philosopher of history Eelco Runia—“the past discharges into the present.”22 In so doing, this book joins and enriches the f low of scholarship dealing with the memory and perception of the Holocaust in Poland, which predominantly revolves around traditional mediums of mem­ ory such as official commemorative policy or various modes of discourse, whether in intellectual circles and high, popular culture, or any combina­ tion thereof.23 It paves its own path in its foci of memory, concentrating foremost on the tangible traces of Jewish life and using them as a prism for understanding Polish perception and cognizance of their murdered and exiled Jewish communities. Since their forced abandonment by their host communities, Jewish cem­ eteries and synagogues have had a refractive effect on their social environ­ ment. Beyond simply reminding their Polish milieu of the Jews’ violent consumption in the Holocaust, these neglected lands and forsworn struc­ tures stand as material metonyms for the lost Jews themselves. As Runia notes, a metonymy, as opposed to metaphor, does not represent something but presents it. “A metonymy is a ‘presence in absence,’ not just in the sense that it presents something that isn’t there, but also in the sense that . . . the thing that isn’t there is still present.” For Runia, fossils and relics are prime examples of material metonyms, as they are by definition pars pro toto; monuments, similarly, have a “metonymic strand” by way of their capac­ ity to “make past events present on the plane of the present.” The power of these physical metonyms lies precisely in their ability to bridge presence (what is here and now) and absence (for our purposes, past events and peo­ ple). “Metonymical monuments,” Runia notes, “function not by giving an account of an event, but by forcefully ‘presenting an absence’ in the here and now.”24 Drawing on Runia’s conception of metonymy, Unsettled Heritage demon­ strates how physical Jewish remnants in postwar Poland served not only as relics and fossils of the absent Jews but also as their monuments. Using this lens allows us to carve an alternative way to construct the perception of the Jews and the Holocaust from below by closely observing the ways in which

12

INTRODUCTION

municipal administrators, low-key officials, local leaders, and ordinary citi­ zens negotiated their collective past through their daily encounters with the physical traces of their neighbors. My research required access to a disparate body of sources and the employ­ ment of divergent methodologies and interpretive frameworks. To inves­ tigate how Poland’s Jewish religious sites were treated, discussed, and negotiated, I relied on bureaucratic protocols, official and unofficial cor­ respondence, reports, and citizens’ letters. Most of these materials were found in state and local archives across Poland. In addition, I relied on Jew­ ish and non-Jewish travelogues, press reports and local publications, Yizkor books (memorial books commemorating Jewish communities), and per­ sonal memoirs that contain valuable information on the attitudes toward the Jewish heritage in the provinces. These administrative, literary, and egodocuments helped me to reconstruct the physical and symbolic transforma­ tion of the Jewish spaces during the communist period and to grasp their changing meaning and perception over different times and places. These historical sources are complemented by drawing on various ethnographic studies done since the 1970s in Poland, and on my own field research, which included several ethnographic interviews and informal conversations con­ ducted in recent years in numerous towns, with people of varying social backgrounds and age groups. To detect the perceptions and attitudes expressed by my protagonists toward Jewish space, I paid careful attention to the explicit content of my source material, with an eye toward exposing their implicit notions, assump­ tions, strategies, and aims. As most of the documents surveyed were com­ posed under the censures of the communist era and in light of postwar Poland’s sensitivity toward Jewish issues, such an interpretive approach was crucial for unearthing the sources’ full meaning and significance. This mode of interpretation is known as critical discourse analysis, which treats texts as not merely expressing explicit content and providing factual information, but also as harboring and implicitly ref lecting certain emotions, sensibili­ ties, social structures, and cultural notions even while its speakers or writers are not necessarily aware of these layers.25 This work oscillates between the analysis of the explicit content of the sources and their hermeneutic poten­ tial. It “dig[s] beneath the events,”26 as proposed by the cultural historian Robert Darnton, to uncover not only what is formulated in the text but also wider cultural and symbolic “webs of significance” within which, according to the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, individual actors operate and take part in shaping them.27

INTRODUCTION

13

This book transcends its specific f ramework and sheds light on broader inquiries into the interdependencies of material culture, mass violence, nation-building, and interethnic relations. On account of its particular focus, the book highlights debates and dilemmas relevant to postconf lict societies struggling with their physical traces of absented groups. Mate­ rial remnants of missing communities—whether ruined, redundant, over­ grown, or cherished—have become inseparable elements of rural and urban landscapes worldwide, especially ubiquitous in the twentieth cen­ tury and onward. Over a diminutive span of time, one that has witnessed mass displacement, forced and voluntary emigration, population transfers and exchanges, ethnic cleansings, and genocides, these material leftovers are the surpluses and by-products of large-scale conf licts and ventures in social engineering. The 1947 transfer of millions of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs across the newly drawn borders of India and Pakistan, following the partition of the Indian subcontinent; the expulsion and f leeing of Palestinians from the state of Israel, succeeding its 1948 establishment; the 1974 Greek and Turkish Cypriot population exchange, after Turkey’s invasion of the island, and the decade-long uprooting of entire Muslim and Christian communi­ ties throughout the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s are only a few examples of mass population transfers that left behind uncountable numbers of chat­ tels, deserted homes, agricultural lands, historical monuments, cemeteries, houses of worship, and other religious communal real estate.28 This Polish Jewish case study offers a new approach for examining the function, status, and affectivity of such “disturbing remains” by closely analyzing the cultural, social, and political aspects of their treatment from a local perspective.29 Concentrating on ritual sites and tracing their physical transformation and symbolic trajectories helps determine how societies recall and live with their past, especially when it continues to bleed into and intrude on the present. Unsettled Heritage proposes its own answer to a question that remains relevant and pressing: What happens to a culture that has witnessed the uprooting of entire communities from the shared landscape when only their physical traces remain? Many of the issues and questions that are dealt with in the book touch on and are interconnected with previous periods and chapters in Polish his­ tory and Polish-Jewish relations.30 Since the prewar and wartime contexts are addressed in detail throughout this book, especially those relevant to questions of property and space, there is no need to recapitulate here a com­ prehensive review of the history of the Polish-Jewish interaction prior to

14

INTRODUCTION

1945. However, I would like to sketch out a few preliminary remarks on the interactions between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles during World War II.31 The analytical concept “bystanders,” coined in 1992 by the eminent Holo­ caust historian Raul Hilberg, has long since been challenged for not captur­ ing the full array of actions, attitudes, and responses of non-Jews who lived in Europe during World War II and witnessed the persecution and extermi­ nation of the Jews.32 In Nazi-occupied Poland, perhaps more than any other country, this term appears to lose all validity.33 The German decision to locate its death factories in Polish territory, the general state of terror inf licted on Polish citizens, and the close proximity of the country’s local population to the extensive sites of persecution, degradation, and murder of their Jewish landsmen, meant that simply “standing by” was not a real option. Firsthand knowledge of the genocide in Poland was so direct, writes the historian Dari­ usz Stola, that it “demanded a reaction, if only a mental one.”34 This is irre­ futably demonstrable in Poland’s middling and smaller towns, whose Jewish souls often made up half or more of the population. In such localities, writes the historian Omer Bartov, the murder of the Jews was all-too-intimate, and was experienced as a “communal genocide.”35 As opposed to large cities such as Warsaw, Kraków, and Łódź, the Nazi ghettos in provincial towns were usually not hermetically sealed or separated from the outside society by a wall or fence.36 Not only did Poles in these small towns knew what was hap­ pening inside these “open ghettos” and could interact with the Jews on a daily basis, they also watched as their fellow Jewish townsmen, women, and children were being deported to the extermination camps or shot and beaten to death in wild and brutal “actions” throughout their shared town squares and streets, leaving behind trails of blood.37 Another undermining of the applicability of the “bystander” category to the Polish case, emerges from new historical revelations on the involve­ ment of large parts of Polish society in the death and dispossession of the Jews.38 This research, done mainly by Polish scholars since the early 2000s, has increasingly shown that the level of complicity of “ordinary Poles” in the physical destruction of the Jews can no longer be described as negligible. The publication of Jan Tomasz Gross’s Neighbors in 2000 shattered the belief that only marginal and criminal elements in the society participated in the killing of Jews. On July 10, 1941, as the book revealed, the Polish residents of the small town of Jedwabne, in northeast Poland, murdered almost their entire Jewish community—hundreds of men, women, and children—many of whom were burned alive in a barn.39 The massacre in Jedwabne became the most famous and emblematic example of Polish participation in the Holocaust, but it was just but one case among a larger wave of pogroms

INTRODUCTION

15

that swept northeast Poland—as well as large parts of Ukraine, Lithuania, and Romania—following Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941. Dur­ ing a period of few chaotic and lawless weeks between the retreat of the Soviets and the full establishment of the German occupation in the areas under Soviet rule between 1939 and 1941, Jews were murdered by their Pol­ ish neighbors in around thirty towns.40 The German involvement in the kill­ ings varied from place to place, but in all cases Poles actively took part in the murder. As additional studies show, cases of active participation of Poles in the killing of Jews occurred also in other parts of Nazi-occupied Poland, and involved individuals, policing units under German command, and under­ ground fighters.41 A substantial part of the contemporary literature focuses on the Polish provinces, where many of the Jews sought shelter, showing that the chances of Jews surviving in the periphery were low, as many of them were either killed or hunted down and handed over to the Germans by their Polish neighbors.42 As of the end of 1942, an estimated number of 250,000 Polish Jews were wandering around the forests and villages look­ ing for a place to hide. No more than 40,000–50,000 remained alive by the end of the German occupation.43 The behavior of Poles toward the f leeing Jews should also be understood as part of the Nazi policy of involving the local population in the countryside in the genocide. As the historian Tomasz Frydel writes, German pressures, collective punishments, and threats from above “gave rise to existential dilemmas in village society that came to form the bottom-up push for denunciations and killing.”44 The thousands of documented cases of Poles risking their lives to save Jews by providing shelter, food, or false documents ran contrary to the prevailing norm and social standards.45 Poles, for the most part occupied with their own hardships, were indifferent or afraid to offer help to their neighbors—a fear that came not only from German death threats but mainly from the fear that their neighbors would betray them.46 “We will be hunted and pursued day and night,” wrote Adam Kamienny in 1944, “No one will let us under his roof or offer us a piece of bread. Even if someone wanted to do it, he refrained out of fear that a neighbor would notice and inform on him. We will have to hide in the woods like wild animals, exposed to murder by bandits, who seemed to be teeming everywhere.”47 The attempt to assess a society’s synoptic stance toward the Holocaust is not a simple task for the historian of this period.48 But in light of the vast body of research on the Polish-Jewish wartime encounter we can conclude that despite having a common enemy, Poles and Jews did not find themselves on the same side of the barricade.49 On the contrary, writes the historian

16

INTRODUCTION

Barbara Engelking, “In the situation of narrowing moral obligations, Jews were excluded from the community of citizenship, neighborhood, and fra­ ternity, and ultimately, from the human community.”50 Whether or not the collective members of Polish society acted as “participating observers,” as posited by the cultural studies scholar Elżbieta Janicka, calling them “passive witnesses,” as suggested by the historian Michael Steinlauf, is questionable.51 No matter how the Holocaust was and still is perceived by the Poles, the extermination of the Jews profoundly altered Polish society and resulted in an “unprecedented change of the cultural landscape.”52 Framing and nar­ rating the story of the Poles’ interaction with the material Jewish traces of their murdered neighbors in their new and fractured cultural landscape is the purpose of this book.

J C ha p te r 1 “Everything Was a Void” New Order and Social Chaos

A few years after the end of World War II, Yakov Handshtok, who had survived the war in the Soviet Union, returned to Ryki, a small town between Warsaw and Lublin. Almost all of the town’s Jews, who until 1939 constituted most of its population, had been murdered in the extermination camps of Sobibór and Treblinka. In June 1945, four young Jews who returned to Ryki after being liberated f rom concentration camps were murdered by armed attackers.1 Entering town, Handshtok was struck by the total absence of Jewish life. Everything looked familiar, yet dead, to him. Looking through the windows of former Jewish homes, he was startled to see Christian icons standing on the windowsills. Horrified by this emptiness, he wondered to himself, “Perhaps this isn’t Ryki?” Arriving at Ryki’s synagogue—and realizing it had been transformed into a granary— he leaned against the wall and wept: “My heart felt chilled . . . my throat was suddenly constricted.”2 Not far f rom Ryki, Moshe Rapaport was making his way back to Biłgoraj, another town that used to be predominantly Jewish.3 Wandering by the old Jewish cemetery, the study house, the mikveh, and the place where the synagogue once stood, he was filled with despair: “Every­ thing was a void.” The streets were paved with headstones that had been uprooted from the cemetery, the chiseled Hebrew inscriptions legible and clear to the eye. Everything seemed to him like a “vast graveyard.”4

17

18

CHAPTER 1

For Polish Jews returning home directly after the war, the sight of a des­ ecrated cemetery or profaned synagogue often concretized their feelings of emptiness and loss. These first encounters with their remaining, though altered, traces of Jewish life in their former homeland thrust them into an existential shock, presenting the physical evidence that their basic notion of home had been shattered. But not only the vernacular Jewish landscape was ruptured beyond recognition. The country that Poland’s Jewish survi­ vors were returning to, that land where millions of Christian Poles were struggling to overcome the hardships of the war years, was a new entity, different geographically, politically, and socially f rom prewar Poland. In the aftermath of the great conf lict, almost nothing familiar remained in the now war-torn country—the nation had, in a very short period of time, suf­ fered unprecedented material and human losses.5 Apart f rom the extermi­ nation of around 3 million Polish Jews (over 90 percent of the country’s Jewish population), approximately 2 million ethnic Poles, mostly civilians, lost their lives in the war, whether by death at the hands of the German or Soviet occupation forces, or by perishing in the Nazi concentration camps and Soviet gulags.6 The reduction to rubble of entire Polish cities was an easily recogniz­ able, outward sign of the parallel destruction of basic industrial and eco­ nomic infrastructures and their attendant social networks.7 Displacement, emigration, and slaughter of entire populations had left an enormous amount of abandoned and deserted property for the taking. Furthermore, the geopolitical outcomes of the war greatly complicated the (re)formula­ tion of identity for the new Polish state. Allied decisions dictating the post­ war reshaping of Europe forced Poland to cede almost half of its eastern territories to the Soviet Union. As compensation, large areas in the west and the north, originally belonging to Germany, were annexed to the new Polish state.8 This redrawing of political boundaries resulted in massive demographic changes—millions of Germans in the so-called Recovered Territories (Ziemie Odzyskane) were either deported from their native soil or f led to a newly drawn Germany.9 The homes of the suddenly homeless Germans were quickly occupied by Polish settlers from the east ( Jewish and non-Jewish alike), whose own hometowns were now divided among the new Soviet republics: Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania.10 Nationally owned public and government property, agricultural lands, and factories now found themselves on the wrong side of the new eastern border. Among them, Wilno and Lwów—two of Poland’s most important cultural centers—were rechristened Vilnius and Lviv in Lithuania and Ukraine, respectively. His­ torical national minorities in the eastern Polish borderlands, particularly

“ E V E R Y T H I N G W A S A VO I D ”

19

Ukrainians, were relocated or expelled to the Soviet Union. Most of the Ukrainians remaining in their hometowns in southeastern Poland were deported from their homes by Polish government forces in 1947 and resettled mainly in the Western Territories, as part of Operation Vistula, whose declared goal was to crush the Ukrainian Insurgent Army guerrilla forces.11 The geopolitical and demographic postwar changes were so radical that “even the very concept of ‘Poland’ was in a state of f lux,” notes Dariusz Stola.12 The massive tectonic movements described above had substantial, farreaching repercussions for all levels of Polish society. The wholesale murder of the Jewish population, the displacement of large communities of ethnic minorities, and the emigration and transfer of entire provinces transformed thousands of villages, towns, and cities in Poland into “void communities,” an apt term created by the sociologist Anna Wylegała.13 These communities often benefited materially from the disappearance of their neighbors, yet they inherited a physical and cultural void, having lost integral elements of their social structure and cultural fabric. All of these developments were taking place in the wake of Eastern Europe’s gradual transformation into communism. The consolidation of communist rule in postwar Poland began immediately after the liberation of the eastern parts of the country in the summer of 1944 by the Red Army, with the establishment of a quasi-governing, Soviet-backed body led by Pol­ ish communists, known as the Polish Committee of National Liberation (Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego).14 This body immediately began to implement socioeconomic and political reforms in the spirit of the social­ ist vision. Soon after, in 1945, a provisional government was established.15 Initially the government was not controlled solely by the communists, but it became progressively dominated by them. The new Moscow-backed authorities encountered difficulties establish­ ing their hold, as they were considered illegitimate (being representatives of a foreign power) by many within the general public.16 Members of the main underground organizations who had fought against the Nazis regarded these unwelcome rulers as the new occupiers and opened a guerrilla war against them. At the same time, the new Polish security forces, bolstered by Soviet support, began hunting down the underground fighters and arresting all nationalist activists. As this violent atmosphere reigned in the country, additional actors joined the fray, taking part in what became a “limited civil war.”17 As the historian Marcin Zaremba shows, from 1944 to 1947 Poland was in a transitional state of social and political chaos with violence raging between a wide spectrum of political, ideological, and ethnic groups; this

20

CHAPTER 1

gave way to and was aggravated by bandits, deserters, displaced persons, and refugees wandering freely about the war-torn country.18 Inspired by the Soviet model of the economy, Poland’s new rulers were gradually transforming the economy, limiting the private sector while advancing the nationalization—and confiscation—of property and indus­ tries. Already at the beginning of 1945, the provisional government intro­ duced a policy for the nationalization of the private sector. Not only was Jewish property expropriated or confiscated, but the authorities initiated a comprehensive land reform that affected the ownership status of all agri­ cultural lands, factories, businesses, and public and religious properties.19 Although a strict collectivization policy was not implemented as in other countries in the Eastern Bloc, the introduction of socialist ideas dramatically changed the Polish economy. Basic branches of industry were nationalized, as were small- and medium-sized businesses and firms.20 Compensation for citizens who had lost land or property as a result of this nationalization was either determined arbitrarily or never fully awarded.21 One of the main legal and conceptual categories under which the trans­ formation of property laws was being facilitated was known as “abandoned property” (mienie opuszczone). Formally, under this conceptual framework could be grouped all assets belonging to Polish citizens and organizations that were confiscated during the war by the Germans or, as of September 1, 1939, were not in possession of their original owners.22 Although the fate of Jewish property was formally discussed as part of the general reformula­ tion of property relations, it is instructive that since its inception, the ques­ tion of Jewish property occupied a central place in the new official policy regarding property and ownership rights.23 Whereas the decrees regulating the status of abandoned property did not mention Jewish property as a dis­ tinct category, the specification of the new legislation left little room for doubt which group would be the most affected by it. Since all possessions and lands belonging to individual Jews, Jewish communities, and Jewish organi­ zations were automatically and retroactively confiscated by the Germans at the outbreak of the war, Jewish property as a whole was considered aban­ doned property according to the criteria of the postwar laws. While it is true that during the war, the Germans did confiscate non-Jewish Polish property, they did so selectively. Conversely, all Jewish—according to Germany’s racial definitions—assets were immediately seized on this date. Therefore, in prac­ tice, the legal construct of “abandoned property” was in many ways tanta­ mount to “Jewish property.”24 The postwar inheritance legislation only ratified this equation. In con­ trast to prewar law, which allowed second-degree relatives (e.g., cousins and

“ E V E R Y T H I N G W A S A VO I D ”

21

nephews) the right to claim private property, under the new regulations, only the original owners or first-degree relatives (spouses, descendants and ascendants, siblings) could petition for restitution. Although this change did not explicitly single out Jews, the unprecedented scope of the extermination of Polish Jewry meant that it was primarily Jews who were affected by it. Neither did the authors of this revision attempt to conceal the primary aim of the new inheritance laws, which they justified by pointing to the need to prevent the concentration of capital in the hands of “parasitic and non­ productive elements” and to prevent “distant relatives in Argentina who engage in despicable jobs from inheriting the property.”25 These limitations on the line of inheritance were not the only obstacles faced by Jewish survivors trying to regain private property. Proving the death of the original owners and their relation to the deceased became highly complicated in the wake of the war as local courts added manifold bureau­ cratic hurdles to the restitution process.26 In addition, many cases included a criminal component, as Jewish and non-Jewish Poles were often found to have falsified documents and unlawfully taken ownership of the real estate, thus robbing the legal heirs of their right to the property.27 As the deadly animosity toward Jews spread throughout the country, many of the return­ ing survivors were simply too apprehensive about reclaiming their family property, much of which was already occupied by their former neighbors, who refused to renounce their spoils.28 Despite these adverse obstacles, there were still some Jewish survivors who successfully reclaimed their individual property through the local courts, especially in the first immediately suc­ ceeding months after the war.29 These few cases, however, were more char­ acteristic of the main urban centers. In the provinces, the power of the legal authorities was weaker, paving the way for “wild takeovers, unchallenged by Jewish survivors.”30 While private restitution could still be made, Jewish communal prop­ erty (buildings, lands, and objects that belonged to the prewar Jewish com­ munities) was now legally uninheritable, as the communist authorities had passed a law preventing any postwar Jewish association f rom claiming rights to property of the prewar communities. An official circular dated February 6, 1945, declared that none of the prewar Jewish communities in Poland possessed any legal standing in the postwar era, and no Jewish asso­ ciation had the right to represent them or claim their property.31 The new congregations could obtain only a limited right to “use and manage” their former religious sites solely for religious and communal needs; they were not considered legal owners. Despite the strong protests of Jewish leaders in Poland and abroad, who believed that religious sites not currently in use

22

CHAPTER 1

should nevertheless be in Jewish hands, the authorities refused to change their stance on disinheritance.32 As a result, hundreds of Jewish sites— principally synagogues, cemeteries, ritual bathhouses, and other commu­ nal assets—became formally “heirless” and state property. This legal logic of categorically disinheriting the Jewish communities was implemented in most countries of the Soviet Bloc with the exception of Czechoslovakia, where the postwar Jewish communities were recognized as direct heirs of their prewar predecessors and could reclaim synagogues, cemeteries, and other properties.33 Following a series of provisional decrees, the final Act on Abandoned and Formerly German Property was adopted on March 8, 1946, by the Pol­ ish interim government.34 This law would remain the primary legal founda­ tion for the sequestration and use of Jewish sites until the 1980s. Similarly to the previous decrees, any reference to Jewish property in the law’s provi­ sions was disguised, but the way was now paved for governmental appro­ priation and use of all movable and immovable Jewish property—private and communal—and its repurposing for public and private needs.35 Accord­ ing to the law, the abandoned property was to be placed under the posses­ sion of the state treasury or the municipal authorities.36 Chattels would become fully nationalized after a period of five years, whereas real estate became state-owned after ten years. It meant that until then, Jewish com­ munal sites could be allocated, leased, or rented to public organizations and associations that were required by the same law to ref rain f rom conducting permanent changes in the property. In practice, many of these sites were immediately repurposed and converted for other needs, thus losing their original character. Throughout Europe, Jewish survivors faced substantial difficulties in reclaiming their property. Although the declared policy of many govern­ ments on the Continent—east and west of the Iron Curtain—favored the res­ titution of private and Jewish communal property, almost everywhere Jews were met with major legal and administrative hurdles, along with institu­ tionalized hostility in their attempt to reclaim stolen possessions and lands.37 Even in West Germany, as Michael Meng shows, where the restitution of Jewish property was allegedly a success story, there was strong opposition to Jewish restitution claims.38 In Poland, more than in any other place in Europe, the question of owner­ ship of Jewish property played a particularly crucial role in postwar nationbuilding, in popular imagination, and in public discourse. Moreover, the sheer quantity of private and Jewish communal assets dwarfed that of any other country. The nationalization and Polonization of Jewish property were

“ E V E R Y T H I N G W A S A VO I D ”

23

regarded as a golden opportunity for the economic recovery of the Polish state and for furthering the interests of the Polish people. This sentiment was echoed by large segments of Poland’s postwar society and its ruling elites. In divided postwar Poland, which was embroiled in a violent conf lict between nationalist circles and communist supporters, the aim of escheat­ ing Jewish realty, as well as that belonging to other ethnic minorities, unified even the most contradictory extremities of Polish society.39 The conviction that “non-Polish” property should be confiscated by the state and given to its citizens served the interests of both sides, even though they were completely at odds with each other concerning the identity of the new state. Pursuing a strict policy toward the nationalization of Jewish property by the commu­ nists should also be seen as one of several attempts by the new rulers to gain public legitimacy by appearing to promote national goals and ideals. While the communists and nationalists were fighting each other, and the Polish underground fighters were being targeted by government forces, the new regime employed nationalist policies and language in a calculated move to win the support of the masses, many of whom regarded the communists as foreign implants.40 The nationalization of Jewish and other minorities’ prop­ erty therefore not only served the political and ideological goals of the new regime, but it also echoed and fulfilled the nationalistic dreams of an ethnic and religious homogenization of society.

Property and Violence The postwar legal framework, which inverted the status of Jewish property, in many ways augmented and made licit its wartime fate. The robbing of Jewish real estate and objects was above all an ideological and economic German state-project that was supposed to enrich the German war economy and was an integral part of the Final Solution. In reality, however—as in other parts of the continent—many Jewish dwellings, businesses, and other material assets found their way into the hands of the non-Jewish population through various channels. Although most valuable confiscated belongings were usually designated for the benefit of Germans, Poles could buy some of the furniture and houseware expropriated from Jews in special auctions organized by the Nazi occupation authorities or to be appointed by the latter as “trustees” of empty Jewish real estate.41 In addition, Poles obtained Jew­ ish things directly from Jews, who at the early stages of the war entrusted their Christian friends with their properties for safekeeping. Most of the Jews never came back to reclaim their deposits, and those who did return often encountered hostile reactions when trying to retrieve them.42 Some

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purchased personal items from their Jewish neighbors, who, facing depor­ tations, realized that immovable and movable objects would no longer be of use to them and began hastily selling their worldly possessions to their neighbors, usually at a loss. The liquidation of the ghettos provided the neighboring citizens with new opportunities for easy enrichment and opened the way for spontane­ ous pillage of the material goods left behind.43 The actual mechanism of the plunder of Jewish property differed between the urban centers and the periphery. Whereas in the large cities German officials strictly handled the robbery and confiscation of Jewish belongings and estates, designating the plunder according to their needs, in provincial towns this process was much less supervised, and they tended to tolerate the spontaneous looting of prop­ erty by locals. The sight of peasants raiding the empty ghettos and filling their wooden wagons was common, especially in smaller provincial towns.44 This kind of behavior, although condemned by the exiled Polish government in London, appeared to be widespread. The famous Polish physician Dr. Zyg­ munt Klukowski, a contemporary witness to the liquidation of the ghetto in the town of Szczebrzeszyn, close to Lublin, reported in his diary: “In town a mob started assembling, waiting for the right moment to start removing everything from the Jewish homes. I have information that already some people are stealing whatever is possible to be carried from homes where the owners have been forced to move out.”45 Marcin Zaremba places the plundering of Jewish property by Poles as part of what he calls “Szaber (plunder) f renzy,” a phenomenon that became common during and after World War II in Poland and targeted all vacated property, Jewish or otherwise.46 Occasioned by social breakdown, the chaos of war, and a leadership vacuum, ordinary people—who, under normal circumstances would not act this way, writes Zaremba—engaged in f ran­ tic looting sprees, pillaging the abandoned homes of virtually everything, f rom jewelry and clothes to walls and doors. But the concrete and mental process by which the Jews’ property transferred into their neighbors’ hands was not only a matter of an unrestrained f renzy of plunder but also of a much more rational behavior and realistic self-justification that received formal legitimation in retrospect. According to the philosopher Andrzej Leder, occupying these “ownerless” properties was understood and expe­ rienced by Poles as a kind of “logical obviousness.” A collective conviction prevailed, he explains, that the objects left behind after the murder of the Jews “had to find new owners.”47 This social fact was accepted both by large segments of the Polish society and the postwar communist authorities. Officially, the latter considered the wartime appropriation of Jewish assets

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by Poles a crime; however, in practice, especially in the provinces, the new rulers tacitly accepted this state of affairs and ratified it. In fact, allocating the empty houses and stores of the Jews to the Polish population was the best available option to address the severe housing shortage and economic difficulties after the war. This collective transfer of ownership was, for Poles, one of the most tan­ gible and material gains, or compensations, as a result of the Jews’ disap­ pearance. As voiced by contemporary Polish observers during the war, it created a possibility for a large-scale economic upgrade for non-Jewish citi­ zens in peripheral towns, in which Jews sometimes formed around half, or even more, of the prewar local population.48 Historically, Jews had a dom­ inant presence in the trade, craft and local production in these localities, and owned the majority of shops and businesses around the market square (rynek). They also occupied most of the apartments and houses around the square, forming a quite binary residential pattern, in which Jews lived in the town’s center, and Christians resided in the outer circles. During the war, after the liquidation of the ghettos, these traditional spatial configurations and economic structures were radically transformed, as non-Jewish Poles moved into the empty houses of the Jews and occupied their place in the social space. It was obvious that this new reality is irreversible, as expressed in an official report of the exiled government in the summer of 1943: “NonJews have filled Jews’ places in towns and townships and this is, in a vast part of Poland, a fundamental change of a final nature. A massive return of Jews would be perceived by the population more in the light of an invasion to be thwarted—even physically—than of restitution.”49 This state of affairs became fait accompli following the war. The few Jews who returned to their hometowns could hardly interfere with this process and often encountered animosity when trying to get back their property. The new owners were not willing to easily give up on their recent spoils of war. “We knew in the country an entire social stratum—the newborn Polish bourgeoisie, which took the place of the murdered Jews,” wrote the Polish weekly Odrodzenie, “perhaps because it smelled blood on its own hands, it hated Jews more strongly than ever.”50 The threat of physical violence was the most acute concern accompanying the returning survivors, in a general atmosphere of raging violence and exis­ tential insecurity. It is difficult to determine how many Jews were murdered after the war, but widely accepted accounts estimate that between 1,000 to 1,500 people lost their lives in the wave of anti-Jewish violence between 1944 and 1947.51 Poland was not the only place where Jews were physically attacked after the war, but the number and scope of deadly incidents in Poland were

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much higher than in any other country.52 The most notable case took place on July 4, 1946, in Kielce. After a rumor was spread around town that a Chris­ tian boy was kidnapped by Jews, an inf lamed mob, including Polish soldiers and local police, began hunting down and massacring Jews in an outburst of bloodshed that left forty-two dead and many injured.53 Scholars differ on the question of motives in the postwar wave of extreme anti-Jewish hostility and on its contextualization. Jan Tomasz Gross argues that the return of Jewish survivors presented their Polish neighbors with the fear that they would have to give up the Jewish property they had taken. This fear, he claims, was accompanied by a haunting accusation, of which the very existence of these returnees personified: “Living Jews embodied the massive failure of character and reason on the part of their Polish neighbors and constituted by mere presence both a reminder and a threat that they might need to account for themselves.”54 Others choose to emphasize the centrality of anti-Jewish hatred that f lourished in prewar Poland and was exacerbated in light of the war, while another explanation suggests that the traumatic experience of the war and the demoralizing effects it had on Polish soci­ ety are key to understanding its rabid reception of Jewish survivors.55 Some historians point to the prevailing public belief in the myth of Żydokomuna ( Judeo-Communism) as one of the main reasons, or pretexts, for the postwar murder of Jews, who were widely perceived as advocates and representatives of the new regime.56 This equation was so rooted among nationalist circles, argues Krystyna Kersten, that more than the Jews were targeted as represen­ tatives of the enemy regime, the armed resistance against the communist was perceived by many as a fight against the Jews.57 It is probably accurate to suggest that multiple factors were responsible for the anti-Jewish violence in Poland after the Holocaust, or provided the immediate context that gave justification to the perpetrators. Both the wartime experiences and postwar political context, as well as the reluctance to give back property and existing patterns in Polish-Jewish relations, culminated into a conviction “that virtu­ ally any Jewish presence in Poland threatened the ability of the ethnic Polish community to reestablish its just prerogatives in its homeland.”58 Amid this violent reception, Jewish survivors were making their way back to their towns to discover that not only had their houses been occupied by others, but also their religious sites had been destroyed and profaned. Cem­ eteries, synagogues, and other communal properties had been confiscated by the Germans and were repurposed and abused during the early stages of the war. It is estimated that around 10,000 synagogues and 2,000–2,500 Jewish cemeteries existed in the territories of prewar Poland (approximately forty percent of them in present-day Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus).59

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Virtually all wooden synagogues, which had been part and parcel of the Pol­ ish landscape for centuries, were burned to the ground by the Nazi occupa­ tion forces.60 Brick and stone synagogues were also systematically destroyed or converted by Germans authorities to serve other purposes, including for use as warehouses, stables, offices, and even swimming pools. In numerous cases Torah scrolls and other sacred objects were deliberately and publicly desecrated, defaced, and destroyed as part of the systematized Nazi plan for humiliating and dehumanizing the Jewish population. Many of the poten­ tially lucrative and valuable religious articles fell victim to contrived looting and were sent back to Germany.61 Jewish cemeteries became bound with violence from the onset of the war. In numerous towns, Jews were regularly brought to the cemetery, shot, and buried there in mass graves. Those who had died in the ghettos from starvation and disease were carted in and buried alongside them. In nearly every Polish town throughout the country, the Jewish cemetery was used by the Germans as part of their policy of mass extermination. This fact became crucial in shaping the future perception and status of Jewish cemeteries in Poland. From the Jewish perspective, the role of the cemetery as a place of murder and mass graves turned it into a Holocaust memorial and a site of martyrdom and further emphasized the religious and moral problems of cemetery desecration and the importance of their preservation. As we shall see later in the book, for Poles, Germany’s wartime actions would strongly identify Jewish cemeteries with the fate of the Jews, in the symbolic and concrete sense, increasing the already macabre and ambivalently charged perceptions surrounding Jewish cemeteries. In addition to being used as killing fields, Jewish cemeteries were either destroyed and plundered by the Germans or devastated by battle and bombings. Only a handful of Jewish cemeteries in Poland and elsewhere in occupied Eastern Europe, remained relatively intact. Whereas deliber­ ate defilement of Jewish burial places was not a declared Nazi policy—most of the Jewish cemeteries in the Reich, for example, survived the Nazi years and were spared from massive destruction—as the German forces advanced eastward, the Jewish graveyard became a target in itself.62 Substantial damage was incurred in the removal of headstones and their exploitation for vari­ ous needs. Matzevot were used by the Germans for the paving of roads and sidewalks, the building of walls and houses, and for various other civilian and military uses, such as regulating river courses and delimiting gardens. In many cases, Jewish or Polish conscripted laborers were made to perform these acts. In Kazimierz Dolny (Yiddish: Kuzmir), a former Jewish shtetl on the Vistula River, Polish workers were forced to uproot tombstones from

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the nearby Jewish cemetery and use them to pave a road leading to the town’s Franciscan monastery, which had been converted into the Gestapo headquarters. According to the local story, the workers made sure to lay the inscribed side of the headstones face down to save the epitaphs from being erased by carts and foot traffic.63 Reports of the massive devastation of Poland’s Jewish cemeteries and synagogues quickly circulated and were recorded in the Warsaw Ghetto’s underground Ringelblum Archive (Oneg Shabbat). One of the archivists, Rabbi Shimon Huberband, compiled reports and testimonies recounting the destruction of Jewish heritage sites and religious items into an essay, “The Destruction of Synagogues, Houses of Study and Cemeteries.”64 The essay, later recovered in a trove of other buried archive materials, lists thirty towns where Jewish ritual sites, some centuries-old, had been demolished and defiled. Shortly after the Germans entered Radomsko in September 1939, writes Huberband, they turned the synagogue into a public lavatory and dug up graves in the Jewish cemetery in search of the valuables allegedly buried there. On September 9, we read in the notes, the Będzin synagogue was blown up using dynamite. Several Jews who tried to rescue the Torah scrolls from the burning synagogue were shot to death by the Germans.65 In Drobin, he writes, German forces uprooted tombstones f rom the Jewish ceme­ tery and turned the site into a sports field. Bones and skeletons remained

Figure 2. Surface of a square. Zator, Małopolska Province. 1939–45. Photo by Łukasz Baksik, Matzevot for Every Day Use, 2008. Courtesy of the photographer.

Figure 3. Cowshed. Starowola by Parysów, Mazovia Province. 1942. Photo by Łukasz Baksik, Matzevot for Every Day Use, 2009. Courtesy of the photographer.

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Figure 4. The ruins of the Warta synagogue after its demolition by the Germans in 1940. From the collection of Ireneusz Ślipek. Courtesy of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum archive, Israel.

scattered around the town until the community received permission to bury them in a mass grave. From the war’s inception, Jewish sites had been targeted and dismantled not only for practical needs but were also desecrated as an end in itself. After entering the town of Przasnysz, north of Warsaw, in September 1939, the Germans disinterred all the headstones from the town’s Jewish cemetery. For three consecutive days, according to Polish eyewitnesses, the Germans f looded the cemetery with sewage they pumped from the town’s cesspools.66 As the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, entire Jewish cemeteries in Ukraine were destroyed, with headstones being knocked over or smashed to pieces.67 Desecration, writes the anthropologist Véronique Nahoum-Grappe, is an attempt to achieve the symbolic extermination of a community and func­ tions as an act of cultural, ethnic cleansing that “represents an attempt to kill the identity of the community [and] annihilate .  .  . the historical and collective identity of the enemy in their own eyes.”68 Though not an original part of the Final Solution, the Nazi desecration of Jewish religious spaces was in line with their genocidal policy. Yet the Germans were not alone in their devastation of Jewish cemeteries. The atmosphere of eliminationist anti-Semitism, exacerbated by the war, seems to have encouraged state and local leaders in different parts of the Continent to fulfill their spatial visions

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regarding the material Jewish heritage. In Thessaloniki, three months after the Jewish deportations began in 1943, the city’s expansive Jewish necropo­ lis was almost entirely demolished. While the official order came from the German occupiers, it was the Greek authorities who initiated the plan and carried it out both efficiently and zealously.69 Between 1942 and 1944, state and local authorities in collaborationist Romania planned for and carried out the destruction of several Jewish cemeteries in their country, including the one in Iaşi, where, in the summer of 1941, Romanian perpetrators murdered more than 10,000 Jews—one-third of the city’s population.70 In Poland, the local population also participated in the plunder and ruin of Jewish spaces as soon as the first deportations of the Jews began. After the liquidation of the ghetto in Frampol (close to Lublin) in 1942, a local dairy farm owner dug out the headstones from the Jewish cemetery, dismantled parts of the surrounding wall, and sold his haul to the town’s inhabitants.71 Not far from there, in Izbica, the journalist Mordechai Tzanin heard from eyewitnesses how peasants had f locked from the nearby villages to uproot the Jewish cemetery’s gravestones.72 A Pole from Zamość, near the Ukrai­ nian border, told Tzanin how just after the German retreat, and before the arrival of the Red Army, the town’s inhabitants raided the synagogue with shovels and picks, hoping to find the valuables that, according to legend, the Jews had buried in tunnels under the synagogue.73 Jewish cemeteries, mass graves, and killing sites were also plundered and plowed by neighboring inhabitants in search of gold and other alleged “treasures.”74 In small towns and villages, the looters’ identities were an open secret, known by all; after the war, this knowledge was sometimes used to settle local scores. One telling example concerns two men from the southeastern village of Krzywcza, who approached a visiting head of the Jewish com­ mittee of the nearby city of Przemyśl to inform on a local peasant. Accord­ ing to the pair, this peasant had taken possession of Krzywcza’s synagogue after the deportation of the town’s Jews. Having dismantled the roof, he sold its shingles for one zloty a piece.75 The Jewish representative confronted the peasant, who at first denied his involvement in demolishing the syna­ gogue and tried to pin the blame on another man. Finally, after a third wit­ ness also accused the man, he confessed that he was indeed responsible for demolishing and selling parts of the synagogue, though he argued he only did so after receiving German approval. In some cases, those Jewish sites that had survived the wartime devastation were damaged by the liberating Soviet army advancing west into Germany. In Zamość, according to town authorities, Soviet soldiers used the old Jewish cemetery as an arable field for potatoes.76 In the Silesian town of Wodzisław Śląski, Soviet troops ordered

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Polish workers to exhume and remove bodies from the Jewish cemetery and to remove the headstones. The mortal remains were buried elsewhere in the town and entombed under an unmarked asphalt surface. In their place, some 15,000 Soviet soldiers were buried.77 The void created by this mass despoliation and depredation of Jewish heri­ tage sites and religious property was prominent among the first visions wit­ nessed by Jews returning home.78 “Now I realized that I was stepping on the graves of my people,” wrote Nissan Tikochinksi, after realizing that the main square in his hometown, Sokółka, near Białystok, was paved with matzevot from the local cemetery. Wandering through the ruined cemetery, he was unable to find any graves and realized that he must leave immediately: “The ground is burning beneath my feet. I cannot go on anymore. I must get out of here as soon as possible.”79 Upon returning to Bełchatów, in the vicinity of Łódź, Yossef Reich was struck at the sight of his former Polish neighbors, strolling along broken Jewish gravestones, embedded in the towns’ streets: “You live in our homes, you sleep in our beds, you use our bedding, and you wear our clothes—at least do not obliterate our holy places!”80

Regathering the Fragments Already before the end of the war, during the emergence and installation of the new, Soviet-backed Polish government, Jewish representatives showed support for the new authorities—although an active political involvement in the Communist Party was not high among the Jewish public.81 Whether out of ideological reasons or practical considerations, this act of taking the side of the new regime was perceived by many Jews as a defensive strategy against the widespread hostility and violence leveled against them by large segments of Polish society.82 In an atmosphere of social chaos and politi­ cal instability, aligning themselves with the new rulers was understood by Jewish leaders—from different ends of the ideological spectrum—to be the only way to try and regather the fragments of their congregations and to create the communal frameworks to address the basic needs of returning survivors. By the end of 1944, the first “Jewish Committees” were established in sev­ eral towns and were officially recognized by the temporary state authorities. The committees dealt mainly with the acute problems of housing, security, and welfare. They were affiliated with the Central Committee of Polish Jews (Centralny Komitet Żydów Polskich; CKŻP), which was manned by repre­ sentatives from the different political factions of the vestigial Jewish popula­ tion, approximated at 250,000 by the summer of 1946.83 Until its dissolution

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in 1950, the Central Committee was the official political and social repre­ sentative of the Jews in the country and was active in rehabilitating Jewish private and communal life after the Holocaust. While the local Jewish committees and the CKŻP oversaw social and political issues, the responsibility for the population’s religious needs was put in the hands of a different body, the Congregations of Jewish Faith (Żydowskie Kongregacje Wyznaniowe; ŻKW). This body, which would later be known as the Union of Mosaic Faith in Poland (Związek Religijny Wyzna­ nia Mojżeszowego w Polsce; ZRWM), functioned as an umbrella organiza­ tion for the several local Jewish religious congregations scattered around the country.84 Its mandate was limited to providing for the religious needs of its constituency, including the maintenance of in-use synagogues, cemeteries, and other ritual landed and movable property. As mentioned earlier, neither the local congregations nor the union in Warsaw could become legal own­ ers of any communal property, but they did receive a limited right to “use and manage” ritual sites solely for religious needs. Furthermore, unlike the prewar Jewish communities, the postwar congregations were not recognized as legal entities and could neither inherit nor own any real estate. In order to reinforce this legal discontinuity, the new regime made sure to distinguish between the prewar Jewish communities ( gminy) and postwar Jewish associa­ tions, defining the latter as congregations (kongregacje).85 Distinguishing between the secular and Jewish religious organizations was not always easy in the first postwar period. In some towns, the same individuals ran both the Jewish committees and the religious congrega­ tions simultaneously. Meanwhile, the CKŻP perpetually dealt with religious issues. This split may have been confusing to the Jewish leadership, but it was encouraged by the state authorities, who, under these conditions, found it easier to divide and conquer the Jewish population, further limiting their political power. In addition to the outside confusion produced by this state of affairs, the multiplicity of varying and vying Jewish bodies was beset by internal tensions that were cultivated by the Polish leadership.86 This schism between the religious and secular Jewish leadership was nothing less than revolutionary: it was the first time in the thousand-year history of Jews in Poland that the official Jewish establishment had been divided into two dis­ tinct arms, religious and secular. On the heels of the war’s end, one of the first centralized attempts of the newly founded Jewish organizations, both the religious and secular leader­ ship, was to reactivate damaged ritual sites for the use of the returning Jews or at least to try and save deserted sacral spaces from complete destruc­ tion. During 1945–46, following a request from the CKŻP, the local Jewish

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committees reported on the state of the Jewish cemeteries in their towns. The responses sent back by the Jewish committees all painted a general picture of devastation and profanation. Most of the correspondence con­ firmed the local population’s continued and simultaneous looting and use of the cemeteries as a public dump. The committee in Kraśnik, near Lublin, informed that not only did matzevot frequently disappear from the town’s two Jewish cemeteries but that the local peasants often pastured their cat­ tle there.87 Reports from throughout the country exposed a corresponding reality. The small Jewish committee of Miechów, a town north of Kraków, reported that the cemetery, completely destroyed by the Germans in the war, was now being plowed and used for agricultural purposes by the local Polish population, who were also known to graze their cattle there. The same com­ mittee chronicled similar reports in the nearby town, Słomniki’s, Jewish cem­ etery.88 Headstones were being sold in markets. In Siedlce, east of Warsaw, Mordechay Tzanin witnessed how an entire freight wagon, full of matzevot, arrived in town and was sold on the wholesale market.89 Although the state of Jewish cemeteries in the larger cities was slightly better than elsewhere, these grounds were also victim to acts of robbery and vandalism during and after the war. Even in Kraków, which had suffered less material damage than most other cities in Poland, the Jewish sites were deteriorating. In May 1945, Kraków’s Jewish congregation warned that its two cemeteries, the old and the new, were being constantly plundered of its valuable headstones. Only a few weeks earlier, they wrote, even a body had been stolen from one of the graves. In July of that same year, they reported that the new Jewish cemetery was being used as a dumping ground and public toilet.90 In Lublin, Tzanin met a Polish boy inside the old Jewish cemetery, carving toys from scattered bones he had harvested from the destroyed graves. In Lubartów, Tzanin sighted pigs foraging around the cemetery. In the nearby town of Izbica, he learned that the synagogue is being used as a public toi­ let.91 This was also the case in Zamość, where the ruins of the synagogues were being used as latrines.92 In June 1945, in Radom, a medium-sized city in central Poland, one of the town’s Jewish cemeteries was being used by local peasants as grassland for livestock.93 Radom’s Jewish committee had asked the mayor to erect a fence around the Jewish cemetery, but he refused, argu­ ing that if they were so concerned, they were welcome to build a fence using their own funds.94 The committee also reported to the CKŻP that their large synagogue was constantly being ransacked and damaged by local people who took valuables and removed their furniture.95 This picture of havoc was not limited to Poland. In numerous towns and cities in liberated Ukraine, for example, Jewish cemeteries were plundered by local citizens who dug up

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graves in the hunt for valuables, dismantled graves for construction materi­ als, or turned cemeteries into grazing lands.96 News of the raiding of Jewish sites arrived mainly from Jewish citizens, but in some cases such information was also reported by non-Jewish Poles. In September 1946, a physician from Chmielnik, south of Kielce, informed the CKŻP that local farmers were removing gravestones and monuments in the new Jewish cemetery and dismantling its fence, with no opposition from the town’s authorities. The physician further stated that Chmielnik’s other, older Jewish cemetery was being used as an open market and asked the Jewish organization to intervene, expressing his strong moral outrage: “I don’t know what the reaction would be if Jews did the same to a Catholic cemetery. After all, we live in a free and democratic country, where all faiths are respected.”97 The newly established local authorities in the Polish provinces, for the most part, did not try to stop the widespread profanation. In fact, many of them were unauthorizedly repurposing cemeteries’ lands for construction and other purposes. At the end of 1945, in Kraśnik, town officials began level­ ing one of its Jewish cemeteries to make way for a marketplace on the site.98 At the same time, on the grounds of Biała Podlaska’s Jewish cemetery, close to the Belarusian border, a municipal food market was already operating.99 A few months earlier, in the Silesian town of Będzin, it was reported that a local industrial firm was using the Jewish cemetery as a construction site and systematically destroying its headstones.100 In 1946, a municipal branch in Rzeszów, a city in southeast Poland, was using headstones from the Jewish cemetery to reinforce river embankments and selling the rest. In the same year, the town council of Pinczów built barracks for homeless people on the grounds of the Jewish cemetery.101 Following the many requests made by peasants from Szydłowiec—once a predominantly Jewish town close to Radom—asking to use the Jewish cemetery for grazing their animals, the town’s authorities decided to put the site up for auction. Several peasants received the right to lease parts of the site in return for a yearly rent of 15,000 zloty.102 When word of such cases reached Jewish organizations, they tried to approach officials in the provisional government, asking them to act on their behalf and stop the misuse of religious spaces. The main responsibility for supervising the fate of Jewish sites, and religious sites in general, was in the hands of the Department of Denominations in the Ministry of Public Administration (Ministerstwo Administracji Publicznej, MAP).103 The ini­ tial regulations concerning the protection of Jewish sites were not always consistent, but in some cases MAP officials did manage to prohibit towns

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f rom using Jewish cemeteries and synagogues for certain purposes, or at least urged them to secure those sites.104 In quite a few incidents, the officials intervened and demanded local authorities to put an end to the utilization of Jewish sites, often arguing that such “profanation” (profanacja) is “harm­ ing the dignity of the Polish people,” or disturbing the “religious feelings of the Jews.”105 In many cases, following protests of Jewish leaders, state offi­ cials forbade towns to convert abandoned synagogues for purposes such as cinemas or theaters, arguing that it “contradicts the original sacred nature of the building.”106 These examples demonstrate the rather confusing policy of the new state authorities toward the question of Jewish sites at the first period after the war. While implementing a strict policy of confiscation and nationalization of Jewish communal property, they tended to be relatively attentive to Jewish concerns regarding the misuse of abandoned religious sites. The attitudes of the Polish central authorities concerning the inviolability of Jewish sites in the first postwar years were rather cautious in comparison to other countries in the Eastern Bloc, particularly in the Soviet Union. In 1947, for instance, despite protests by the World Jewish Congress and the Anti-Fascist Committee, the Lithuanian state authorities upheld the Vilnius municipality plans to repurpose the Jewish cemetery where the Vilna Gaon (one of the most inf luential figures in the early modern rabbinic world) was buried and to transfer the Gaon’s grave to another cemetery.107 The rela­ tive attentiveness of MAP officials to Jewish concerns regarding the usage of sacral sites was in line with the general, calculated state policy concern­ ing the Jews in the early postwar years.108 Despite the attempts to limit the power and inf luence of Jewish bodies, the Communist authorities—until the end of the 1940s—treated their Jewish citizens with a sense of “regu­ lated pluralism.”109 The new regime enabled Jews some sense of equality and autonomy, as a national and religious minority. Although this policy usu­ ally did not protect Jews against physical violence, Jews were able to enjoy some rights and freedoms that were denied to other ethnic classes, such as Germans, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. This approach was the product of a few factors, namely a certain tradition common to Polish communists of combatting anti-Semitism, the psychological impact the Shoah had made on the Polish left, and the presence of Poles of Jewish origins in the regime. The ruling Communist Party was also motivated by a desire to hold up to worldwide political scrutiny—mainly, the focused attention by Western gov­ ernments and international organizations—the plight of Jewish survivors and refugees. As the historian Grzegorz Berendt argues, the government’s policy toward Jews in the first postwar years was “consistent with the new

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regime’s political interests” to show a good face. It was desirous of “promo­ tion of a favorable image of the new Polish government on the international arena and its perception as a democratic state and determined adversary of anti-Semitic ideology and its propagators.”110 While professing a declared policy of inviolability of sacral Jewish spaces, the ability of the central government to enforce its authority and supervise local governance, especially outside Poland’s major cities, was limited until the regime stabilized around 1947. Local bodies often took advantage of this unstable legal and political atmosphere and did not always comply with instructions from above. In Będzin, for example, despite the order from War­ saw to stop the construction on the cemetery grounds, works resumed as usual. In Miechów, after district authorities ordered the town to cease and desist from using the Jewish cemetery for agricultural and pasturing pur­ poses, this activity nevertheless continued. In Kolno, in the northeast of the country, not long after MAP prohibited further use of the synagogue for “inappropriate purposes,” it was converted into a commercial center. Even though at this time it was still less common for local authorities to take inde­ pendent action and remove a Jewish site altogether, some were still known to have taken advantage of the postbellum lack of order, performing demo­ litions of religious sites and clearing their vacated lands for construction. Soon after the war, for example, Radom’s synagogue was demolished by the municipality, probably without receiving any authorization from the state.111 Apart from petitioning state authorities to save Jewish sites f rom com­ plete oblivion, Jewish representatives were also attempting to reclaim headstones—in whole or part, embedded in pavements, roads, and walls— and return them to their original places, though in most instances it was enough (and all they could do) to restore them to any Jewish cemetery. This reclamation of matzevot was perceived by Jews as a symbolic gesture of laying to rest those who lacked a proper grave and burial.112 In 1946, in Ciechanów, north-central Poland, a small Jewish group organized a “funeral” with frag­ ments of headstones they had found in various places throughout the town and escorted them to the cemetery as a “final good deed” (letzter Chesed shel Emes).113 In Sandomierz, Myślenice, Łuków, and other towns, the reclaimed slabs, hunks, and shards were used to erect monuments resembling pyramids and obelisks. Locating and extracting these traces was not an easy endeavor. When portions of headstones were found in private houses or backyards, Jews usually had to pay the homeowners to recover the stolen property. By the same token, authorities were rarely eager to help Jews retrieve gravestones from sidewalks and public buildings, in many cases conditioning any such

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Figure 5. A memorial created out of matzevot in 1949, the Jewish cemetery in Sandomierz. 1963. Courtesy of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Poland.

agreement with the Jews’ commitment to substitute their matzevot for new pavement and cornerstones. The Jewish committee in Garwolin, southeast of the capital, was informed by the town that they already started tracking down headstones, but in order to continue this work they would need 10,000 zloty.114 In June 1946 in Biecz, southeastern Poland, the town council allowed the local Jewish committee to extract matzevot parts from the sidewalks and streets only after the committee presented new replacement stones and committed to carrying out the work as quickly as possible.115 A few months later, in the nearby town of Gorlice, the town authorities strongly resisted the request of the Jewish district committee to remove gravestones frag­ ments from sidewalks, stairs, squares, and other public areas. They argued that uprooting these stones would cause great damage to the town’s infra­ structure. Since the Germans were responsible for this act, they wrote to the voivodeship authorities; the town should not be forced to assume the costs of extracting the tombstones and repaving the streets, that according to them were “ordinary stones that had lost their religious value.”116 In a few cases, Poles expressed some unease regarding the existence of matzevot in public spaces; however, they maintained that it was the Jews’ responsibility to solve the problem. In Siedlce, a local Polish teacher and writer sent a letter to the Jewish committee in town, asking them to remove headstone fragments

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cobbled into the high school’s backyard, arguing that it was having a “devas­ tating, demoralizing effect on the students.”117 An even more urgent task for the returning Jews were the efforts to arrange for the proper burial of those who had been murdered and dumped in unmarked (mass) graves, in forests, by side roads, and in backyards.118 Sur­ vivors also buried ashes from death camps and from extermination sites in Jewish cemeteries.119 The exhumation of civilian and military mass graves was a common occurrence in postwar Poland and was usually sponsored by state authorities or the army.120 Jews, however, were left to this task alone and received no help from the establishment. In a few cases local authorities did help Jews disinter their dead. A rare case of such cooperation happened in Sandomierz, near Kielce, where at the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews had formed half of the local population. In the summer of 1946, the town’s Jewish committee began locating the bodies of Jews that were buried in roadsides and backyards and delivering them to the Jewish cemetery for burial. According to the town’s Yizkor book, many of these Jews were mur­ dered by Polish nationalists or by peasants who had initially hidden them but later killed them and robbed their property.121 The information pointing to the location of the corpses was provided to the Jews by the towns’ dio­ cese, who had gathered this knowledge through local parish churches. Such exhumation and reburial of Jewish dead were usually accompanied by the erection of a symbolic matzevah, which often served as the cemetery’s only remaining intact monument and functioned as a memorial for the entire community. In many towns, the symbolic memorials for the murdered Jews were destroyed by unknown perpetrators. In Kutno, between Warsaw and Łódź, the local Jews organized a symbolic funeral march carrying a coffin holding the ashes of the victims. The coffin passed through town, escorted by the Jewish representatives of Kutno and elsewhere. The pallbearers, including the Chief Rabbi of Polish Jewry, David Kahane, wore their Polish Army uni­ forms. The ashes were buried in the town’s Jewish cemetery. A few days later, the symbolic monument erected on the grave had been smashed to pieces and further vandalized. Shortly after, it was renovated, only to be demol­ ished again.122 Similar cases occurred throughout the country, though mainly in small towns. In Biała Podlaska, for example, shortly after the proper burial of 400 Jewish corpses rescued from a nearby mass grave and the construction of a collective matzevah, the monument was blown up with dynamite.123 In Mława, north of Warsaw, a few weeks after the placing of a commemora­ tive matzevah in memory of the community, it was pulverized, which led to a rare condemnation by the local Catholic priest.124 In demolishing the

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commemorative headstones, the perpetrators seemed to project onto them the violence and hostility that, at the same time, were targeted against the surviving Jews themselves. These memorials symbolized the unsettling return of the Jews and embodied the fears and anxieties such return threat­ ened to evoke among their fellow non-Jewish citizens.

The Polish Wild West Whereas the Jewish question was one of the most f raught and emotional issues that configured the social and cultural reality in Poland after the war, it was not the only wartime legacy that shaped the new postwar order. The formerly German lands in the west and north of the country, which came to constitute forty percent of the postwar country, presented Poles with a different set of tensions and challenges, and conf ronted them with the traces of foreign and “dissonant heritage.”125 The vast majority of German citizens who lived in the new Polish territories in the west and north of the country—over 7.5 million people—either f led or were deported to Ger­ many between 1945 and 1949.126 But the former German lands were not emptied of its original inhabitants’ property, which was mostly left behind, including houses, factories, stores, public buildings, personal objects, and also thousands of cultural and religious sites (mainly Protestant Evangeli­ cal churches and cemeteries). Even before the first laws regulating the new status of German properties were published, Polish groups and individuals stormed the new lands in a plundering rampage. Some of these looters were by now professionals, having pillaged Jewish property during the war.127 The legislation that had altered the status of Jewish property was also relevant in the newly annexed lands. It defined the status of property that belonged to German citizens, German organizations, and the German state, as well as the personal property of all Polish citizens who had declared loyalty to the German occupiers, to be “Formerly German Property” (mienie poniemieckie). But whereas, formally speaking, the possibility of restitution of Jewish and other “abandoned property” existed, no such channel was available in regard to formerly German property; these assets, public and individual, were auto­ matically and immediately nationalized, and the option of their restitution did not exist. A similar legal framework was applied regarding the property of another group of “absent others”—the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Ukrainians who were relocated, many of them forcibly, to Soviet Ukraine, as part of the population exchanges agreed between Warsaw and Moscow. According to the postwar decrees, the property of individuals and communities who

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resettled in the USSR became under the ownership of the state. Also nation­ alized were the possessions of the Ukrainians who were expelled from their hometowns to the west and north of Poland as part of Operation Vistula in 1947.128 The disappearance of the Ukrainians has left behind not only houses and personal belongings but also deserted religious sites, mainly Ukrainian Orthodox and Ukrainian Greek Catholic churches and cemeteries, many of which were turned into Roman Catholic shrines, designated to other needs, or destroyed by the authorities. Private German property was allocated to the new Polish settlers, whereas public property was sequestrated by the state and newly formed local authorities in the former German lands. Religious sites, such as Ger­ man Protestant churches and cemeteries, were often repurposed for secu­ lar needs, used by the Catholic Church, or demolished.129 In a few cases, German church property was handed over to the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Poland (Kościół Ewangelicko-Augsburski w Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej), an umbrella organization for Protestant denom­ inations in Poland that during communist rule was the only official rep­ resentative for all Protestant denominations in the country.130 Many other formerly German religious sites, sacral objects, and historical monuments fell prey to spontaneous plunder. The unauthorized plundering of German property may not have been official state policy, but it was invigorated f rom above. This stance was in line with the declared policy toward the new territories, which was intended to de-Germanize and Polonize them. This policy included the physical removal of all traces of German culture, such as monuments, historical sites, cemeteries, and even extended to the erasure of German inscriptions on monuments, signs, and headstones.131 The removal of traces of German culture was part of a larger political, social, and cultural postwar project of the communist regime. With the loss of the eastern borderlands, which were taken by the Soviet Union, the regime attempted to win populist support by f raming the annexation of former German lands not only as territorial compensation but as a return to ancient Polish lands, although the presence of Polish culture in these areas was negligible.132 By weaving a narrative f rom historical myth and nationalist ideology, and with sup­ port f rom Catholic and nationalist circles, the regime evoked the ethos of the Polish Piast dynasty that had first ruled these areas hundreds of years earlier and had been canonized as the forerunner of an ethno-Catholic monocultural vision. The memory of the Piast dynasty was favored over the legacy of the competing political and cultural-historical model—the Jagiellonian dynasty—that had ruled the multiethnic and multireligious

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Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth and came to be identified with the mul­ tinational prewar Second Polish Republic.133 The authorities also had to win the hearts of the millions of Polish set­ tlers, many of whom were displaced—having lost their homes in the Soviet annexation of Poland’s eastern region—and were now rebuilding their lives in a foreign and alien land and with no social networks.134 The notion of the alleged recovering of the Polish homeland was meant to serve as a social glue and as the creation of a nationalistic and unifying myth. Calculated attempts by state and local authorities were made to erase signs of historical German presence while simultaneously exposing alleged archaeological proofs for the historical Polish presence. German heritage sites and religious monuments were often Catholicized or preserved only to the extent that they could be presented as testimony to ancient Polish material culture.135 Those German remnants that could not be easily Polonized were destined for removal or at least the effacement of any German characteristics.136 This propagandic campaign coincided well with the public sentiment of seeking victor’s justice. In war-torn Poland, it was not difficult to convince someone of the legitimation of reprisal against the former German occupi­ ers; the communist regime channeled the existing hostility toward all things German in order to avoid discussing the damages and disasters the Soviets had inf licted on the Poles. This policy of cultural cleansing was not limited to the former German territories. German culture had had a central role in the ethnic and religious mosaic of Polish lands since the Middle Ages and until the eve of World War II. Many Polish citizens belonging to the prewar German minority were also included among the millions of deportees after the war, their property and religious objects receiving the same treatment as property belonging to German citizens.137 Traditionally German areas in the west of prewar Poland, such as Greater Poland and parts of Upper Silesia, also underwent a process of de-Germanization of space, with a focus on Protestant churches and cemeteries in particular.138 As opposed to the sense of relative tolerance and caution afforded to abandoned Jewish sites by some branches of the state and party appara­ tus in the early postwar years, the massive destruction, or Polonization, of German heritage sites faced no objection f rom above. While in many cases state officials intervened to protect Jewish sites f rom misuse and damage, albeit with limited success, they hardly showed any sensitivity to former German property. Whereas Jewish organizations could still find an atten­ tive ear to their protests in the immediate period after the war, the few and often persecuted German organizations in the country who tried to raise objections to the destruction of their sacral sites were usually ignored. The

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same state branches were in charge of both Jewish and other non-Catholic religious sites, but the f requent requirement in the 1940s to use places of worship for “appropriate” purposes was limited to Jewish prayer houses. For comparison, local authorities who received permission to use a syna­ gogue for other purposes were f requently ordered to preserve the Jewish characteristics of the building. Yet when it came to the allocation of Ger­ man churches, this condition was not stipulated; on the contrary, they were often instructed to expunge it of all German hallmarks.139 German cemeter­ ies were converted for local needs immediately after the war and in many cases were completely razed and erased. Requests by local authorities to remove and level them were generally approved by state officials. Since the end of the war through 1967, for example, in Wrocław and Gdańsk alone (formerly Breslau and Danzig), seventy-one non-Catholic German cemeter­ ies were cleared.140 Despite the orchestrated Polonization campaign, the project of the deGermanization of the Recovered Territories was not straightforward. It was fraught with difficulties and setbacks due to the lack of consistent policy and commitment among local authorities to invest their resources in the expen­ sive and often sisyphic task of removing German traces from the urban and rural landscape.141 At a certain point, the initial drive to eradicate and erase the material traces of German culture would slow down, mainly because of the realistic realization that it is simply not possible to erase all remnants of German heritage.142 Nevertheless, the policy of reengineering and culturalethnic cleansing enacted in the newly gained German territories resulted in a mass reshaping of the cultural landscape and led to the gradual disappear­ ance of the German cultural and sacral landscape.

The Other Jewish Heritage Among the millions of Polish citizens who settled in the formerly German lands were tens of thousands of Jews, many of whom had either been lib­ erated from the concentration camps in Lower Silesia or were repatriated from the USSR, where they survived the war years. At the initiative of Jewish activists, and with the encouragement of the communist authorities, Lower Silesia became a magnet for large numbers of Jews who were seeking to rebuild their lives in Poland in a part of the country that was considered relatively safe from violence. In 1945 and 1946, Jews thronged to these areas, built active congregations, and rehabilitated political, religious, cultural, and educational institutions. This was the only region in postwar Poland that saw a significant increase in Jewish habitation in comparison with prewar

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numbers; everywhere else, the opposite was true.143 During the first half of 1946 almost 100,000 Jews, around half of Poland’s Jewish population, arrived in Lower Silesia, settling in approximately thirty localities, where they sometimes became a majority of the local population.144 In the after­ math of the almost total elimination of Eastern European Jewry, towns such as Dzierżoniów (formerly Reichenbach im Eulengebirge) and Wałbrzych (formerly Waldenburg), which until 1945 had a minuscule Jewish presence, became thriving Jewish centers. This phenomenon drew worldwide attention and was unique in the postHolocaust landscape. It served both the interests of the regime and Jewish communists by showcasing a positive picture of productive socialist-Jewish life and further legitimized the annexation of the German lands. As the his­ torian Kamil Kijek shows, this convergence of interests, as well as the Jews’ dependence on the authorities, unavoidably led the Jewish settlers in the west to participate in the national project of Polonization of the Recovered Territories and to take an active part in propagating the nationalist narra­ tive of coming back to the native “Polish lands.”145 Jews also partook in the appropriation of the German economy and property in these areas. Like all other Polish residents in the new lands, Jews were given private German objects—such as homes, shops, tools, and clothing—as well as public build­ ings and infrastructures that were allocated to Jewish organizations in the region. The Polish Jewish settlers in the west also received into their possession a familiar yet foreign heritage; the traces of the German Jewish communi­ ties that had lived there until 1939 and were destroyed in the Holocaust. After the war, German Jews who survived became foreigners in their home­ towns that were now integrated into the new Polish state. Although Ger­ man Jewish survivors were recognized as victims of the Nazi persecution and were not forcibly expelled to Germany, they found themselves isolated in the new geopolitical reality and were treated with suspicion by the new Polish authorities, who saw them as representatives of German culture. Some of them suffered physical violence by Soviet soldiers who often did not differentiate between them and other German inhabitants. Although the newly formed Polish Jewish organizations in the west provided German Jews with certificates that were supposed to protect them against harassment, the encounter between the two groups was fraught with mutual estrangement and animosity.146 Rooted religious and cultural differences between the Pol­ ish Jews and their German-speaking brethren, as well as the former’s antago­ nism toward Germany, doomed this relationship to failure. The shared fate of German and Polish Jewries, argues the historian Katharina Friedla, was

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not enough to bridge their historical hostilities: “The experienced persecu­ tion did not contribute to solidarity, but rather strengthened deeply rooted clichés and structures of prejudice.”147 This experience of alienation made it clear to the German Jewish sur­ vivors that rebuilding their private and communal existence on Polish soil is too difficult and convinced almost all of them to start a new life in Ger­ many. During 1945–46, thousands of them were transported by buses across the border, leaving behind most of their possessions, as well as hundreds of religious sites. Since the prewar concentration of Germans Jews in these areas was not nearly as high as it had been in prewar Poland, the material heritage they left behind in these territories was, accordingly, relatively scarce. Nevertheless, there remained a few hundred German Jewish religious sites in the new Polish territories, most of them in an advanced state of destruction resulting from the war. The majority of synagogues had been partially or completely destroyed already in Kristallnacht, the November 1938 pogrom in Nazi Germany.148 The question regarding the legal status of German Jewish communal property aroused some particular difficulties, since according to the post­ war legislation in Poland, German property that was confiscated by the Nazis f rom persecuted groups should not be nationalized by the Polish state. Nevertheless, court rulings eliminated any legal option for the Polish Jewish congregations to be recognized as owners of the heritage sites of the extinct German Jewish communities.149 Polish authorities lacked a clear policy toward German Jewish religious traces. Cemeteries and synagogues that had belonged to the Germans Jews were usually discussed together with other Polish Jewish sites, but occasionally they were treated differ­ ently, perceived more as part of the material German Christian heritage rather than a solely Jewish one. Many German Jewish cemeteries resembled German ones in their artistic and architectural form; both in the style and form of the headstones and the German inscriptions, it was sometimes dif­ ficult to differentiate between them. Even in recent years, when visiting formerly German towns, local inhabitants sometimes guided me to the German Christian cemetery when I asked for directions to the Jewish cem­ etery. Many German Jewish cemeteries eventually suffered the same fate as German Christian ones, but the former had better chances of survival. In Wrocław, for example, the only German graveyards that survived the post­ war years were the city’s two Jewish cemeteries, while all Christian cemeter­ ies were destroyed.150 In many ways, the fate of German Jewish sites was bound with the his­ tory of the new Polish Jewish congregations that were formed in these

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areas. In the early weeks after being liberated from Nazi concentration camps in Lower Silesia, a group of former Jewish prisoners began using the nineteenth-century German Jewish cemetery in Reichenbach to bury their fellow Jewish inmates who died shortly after the liberation.151 As more Jews settled in town, which was renamed Rychbach and later Dzierżoniów, the cemetery was adopted by the new congregation, which continued to bury its dead there. Thanks to this, the Jewish cemetery in Dzierżoniów was spared from a similar fate as the German Evangelical cemetery in town, which was demolished soon after the war by the local authorities.152 The new Jewish settlers in Dzierżoniów, also took over the local synagogue, which belonged to the previous German Jewish community until 1938, and turned it into their new prayer house.153 Although the new Jewish settlers were not recognized as legal owners of the German Jewish heritage sites, the process of allocating communal prop­ erties to Jewish congregations in the west usually went more smoothly than was common in other parts of the country, where it was f requently met with the animosity of local authorities who were reluctant to allow Jews to reactivate their ritual sites. For instance, around the same time when local authorities in the town of Włodawa, on the Ukrainian border, adamantly refused to allow the small Jewish congregation to use one of the town’s

Figure 6. The Dzierżoniów (Reichenbach) synagogue. 1946. Archive of Tad Taube Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław.

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Figure 7. Graves of concentration camps’ prisoners who died after the liberation and were bur­ ied in the Jewish cemetery in Dzierżoniów (Reichenbach). 1946. Archive of Tad Taube Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław.

synagogues, the Jews in the Lower Silesian city of Jelenia Góra faced no opposition when they sought authorization to make use of a synagogue that had previously belonged to the city’s German Jewish community.154 Their request was roundly supported by the municipal authorities, dis­ trict authorities, and directors of the cooperative that had been using the building.155 The relatively peaceful relationship between the Jewish congregations in the new territories and the local authorities in the early years after the war ref lected a model of Polish-Jewish relations that differed from what Jews were experiencing in the rest of the country. Whereas in other parts of Poland Jews returning to their former towns often encountered physi­ cal violence and hostility, in the Jewish settlements in the west the atmo­ sphere was safer for Jewish life, although anti-Jewish violence was not at all absent.156 The marked tensions and antagonism in the rest of the country toward returning Jewish survivors was likely moderated by the fact that in the Recovered Territories, unlike in “old” Poland, Jews were not coming back to reclaim their sought-after possessions. The “ownerless” property that had

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remained behind in these areas belonged to the common German enemy, and both Jews and Poles took part in its appropriation. Notwithstanding this calmer atmosphere for Jews in the annexed lands, a permission to continue using German Jewish sites for the religious needs of the Polish Jewish inhabitants was not always granted and was mostly dependent on the decision of municipal or district officials. Some of the Jewish congregations did not receive authorization to pray in German Jewish synagogues and were given some other private space, usually an apartment, to be used as a synagogue or study house. Even when a Ger­ man Jewish cemetery did exist in town, a new congregation was not always allowed to use it for burial and was instead allocated quarters in a nonJewish public cemetery, problematic as far as Jewish religious law is con­ cerned. Such was the case in Szczecin (Stettin), a former German city in northeast Pomerania, which became another center of Jewish life in the west. A few thousand Polish Jews resettled in the city and, at a certain point in 1946, constituted more than 40 percent of the population. Despite the existence of a large German Jewish cemetery, city authorities refused to allow Jews to bury their dead there, as they were advancing their own plans for its total removal, along with the other German cemeteries in town. Jews were instead ordered to bury their dead in the city’s non-Jewish communal cemetery, although many of them defied this order and continued to hold funerals in the existing Jewish cemetery, which led the authorities to restate their prohibition.157 The Jewish presence in the former German territories contributed to the preservation of those German Jewish heritage sites that were continued to be used by the new congregations, but usually neither the Jewish settlers nor the Jewish leadership in Warsaw showed special interest in preserving abandoned German Jewish sites in localities where a Jewish concentration did not exist after the war. The traces of Jewish culture in the former Ger­ man lands—around 200 cemeteries and 23 synagogues—received attention mostly to the extent that they could be used again for ritual purposes.158 Whereas those Jews returning to their original hometowns treated the rehabilitation of their religious sites as a moral and sacred duty, for the Jew­ ish settlers in the new and foreign lands in the west, the question of Jewish sites in their vicinity was perceived more as a functional rather than emo­ tional issue. Inspection of protocols f rom the sessions of the Jewish com­ mittees in Lower Silesian towns during 1945–47 shows that taking care of deserted Jewish sites in their area was not an issue that f requently came up, unlike their counterparts in other parts of the country who invested many

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efforts in trying to protect deserted cemeteries and synagogues in the prov­ inces.159 The religious sites that had an emotional meaning for the Jewish settlers in the new Polish west were those left behind in their hometowns, many of them now within the new Soviet borders. The Jewish spaces they encountered in their new surroundings were indeed familiar but not quite theirs. They were foreign and unconnected with their personal and family memories and bore the physical hallmarks of a country that tried to destroy their existence.

J C ha p te r 2 “There Are No Jews Here”

The Language of De-Judaization

Directly after the war, it was generally true that as long as Jews had a considerable presence in the Polish provinces, they were in a better position to monitor the situation of religious sites and to take some part in their preservation. This changed in the summer of 1946, with the acceleration of anti-Jewish violence against Jews nationwide, culminat­ ing in the Kielce pogrom, which only reinforced the feelings of insecurity among Polish Jews and encouraged them to f lee the country. Already by February 1947, around 100,000 of these Jews had left Poland.1 Most of those who had opted to remain f led the perilous provinces and moved to the rela­ tively safer large cities or to Lower Silesia. This mass emigration led to the abandonment of hundreds of Jewish heritage sites, now at the disposal of local authorities. In many ways, these developments made it much easier for local authorities to institutionalize the seizure of Jewish religious properties and employ them for public pur­ poses. But the growing ability of local bodies to determine the fate of Jewish spaces was met by a contradictory tendency, inf luenced by developments at the state level. At the same time that the absence of Jews was becom­ ing a permanent fact in Polish towns, the central governance was gradually increasing its control over the state. Since the end of 1946, the Communist Party was tightening its grip over the country through a combination of legal

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51

maneuvers and orchestrated political violence.2 Both the June 1946 referen­ dum and the parliamentary elections in January 1947 were staged as free and democratic but were in practice manipulated by the communists. The results of the elections were falsified to further eliminate and delegitimize all oppo­ sitional and independent parties and institutions.3 As the communists were monopolizing their legislative and executive power, they were also winning in their war against the underground organizations. By the end of 1947, the atmosphere of chaos was substantially decreasing.4 Although it was not until the end of 1948 that the government’s control was hermetically achieved, the dramatically increased political stabilization allowed the regime to more effectively and efficiently centralize power and supervise the activity of pro­ vincial authorities. The growing success of the center in Warsaw to supervise and oversee the conduct of the local administration made it harder for the latter to con­ tinue their unauthorized use of Jewish spaces. While local authorities were constantly trying to extend their reach over deserted cemeteries and empty prayer houses, the government introduced new measures limiting the free­ dom of municipalities to determine on their own these properties’ ultimate fate. Earlier attempts by the regime to protect Jewish sites lacked consistency and an enforcement mechanism. By 1947 the government was more unified, circulating general orders and instructions for the use of Jewish religious sites, and better equipped to bring local officials into line. During March 1947, different branches in the temporary government were working on the first draft of a binding circular that regulated the maintenance and use of Jewish cemeteries, emphasizing the importance of respecting their inviolability. Although deep divisions regarding the high costs of guarding and maintaining the cemeteries led to the initiative’s shelv­ ing after more than two years of intensive debate and revisions, this attempt ref lected the level of sensitivity and contentiousness surrounding the prob­ lem of abandoned Jewish cemeteries.5 By May 1948, the Ministry of Public Administration (MAP) had issued another circular distributed nationwide, following the refusal of local authorities to remove stolen headstones from pavements and buildings. The circular clarified that in instances where the inscription was visible, the local authority would bear fiscal responsibility for stone removal and replacement. When the writing was not manifest, the responsibility fell to whoever wished to remove the gravestone to cover the costs.6 During 1947–48, in light of ongoing reports of the devastation of Jewish cemeteries across the country, Warsaw guided all voivodeships to launch

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reconnaissance initiatives on the state of Jewish burial grounds in their ter­ ritory and to secure them against further harm. Following the government’s instructions, the Kraków voivodeship began to circulate letters throughout its districts. The letters stated that its abandoned Jewish cemeteries were “in a regrettable state and have become objects of profanation, as head­ stones and monuments are being plundered.”7 It ordered district authori­ ties to gather up-to-date information on all cemeteries in their jurisdiction and demanded them to compel mayors to take concrete measures to avert further “profanation” by hiring around-the-clock guards or by fencing the site. Failure to comply with these demands, the circulars stated, would result in sanctions against the recalcitrant municipalities. In addition, the circular asked town authorities to publish an open declaration, admonish­ ing the population to respect its Jewish cemeteries and those of all other faiths. Denuding or ruining these sites would be considered a felony, with malefactors subject to punishment. In f leet compliance, the districts hur­ ried to issue letters to their mayors, repeating these instructions and warn­ ings. Mayors were ordered to present an accurate report on their Jewish cemeteries and were given a strict timef rame for taking the required steps to protect them.8 Most mayors reported their cemeteries in neglect and severely damaged, attributing this to the war and to German or Soviet acts, though many did confirm that the local population shared responsibility. In the town of Trze­ binia, in the Chrzanów district, one mayor confirmed that goats regularly graze within its Jewish cemetery.9 Town authorities in Zakopane, near the Slovakian border, also reported that during the summer the town’s Jewish cemetery was used by local peasants to pasture their livestock.10 About forty kilometers north, the authorities in Rabka-Zdrój apprised their superiors of a fence—surrounding a mass grave of Jews—that had been dismantled by “unknown perpetrators.”11 Although these top-down initiatives usually did not lead to a long-term improvement in the situation of Jewish cemeteries, some authorities did call on their citizens to respect the resting place of their former neighbors. In the southern village of Krościenko nad Dunajcem, the authorities published an emotional call that emphasized the need to safeguard national dignity: “We must always keep our national honor and maintain a level of decent civilization that would respect our nation. We shall not take example from the German occupier, and we shall not be responsible for his profane acts.”12 Some authorities attested that representatives of the former Jewish commu­ nity had hired a local guard to oversee the cemetery; most places, however,

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had no protection. Many mayors maintained that the current situation was problematic, but most were quite reluctant to allocate resources for securing these sites, asseverating that their town lacked sufficient funding for fences or guards. Some mayors blamed the Jews for their lack of action, saying that it was the Jews’ responsibility to take care of their own cemeteries. The town board of Muszyna submitted that although the Jewish community was “loaded [with money]” (zasobna w gotówkę), the latter did not take care of the cemetery, a fact that led to its current poor state.13 In Olkusz, a middling town between Kraków and Katowice, the munici­ pality also tried to def lect responsibility, ignoring the state officials’ demands to protect abandoned Jewish cemeteries. Before the war, around one-third of the town’s 10,000 residents were Jewish. Nearly all were murdered at Auschwitz and most of those who returned soon left after encountering a hostile welcome f rom their former neighbors. By 1947, a handful of Jews remained. Following district orders, the town did publish an open call to respect the Jewish cemeteries, all the while refusing to take active steps to ensure their protection. On July 1, 1948, Olkusz’s mayor addressed his town’s diminutive Jewish populace, demanding they cover the expenses for protecting the new Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of town. In his letter, he urged them to take care of the cemetery that, as he described, “was abandoned by the Jews during the war,” neglecting to mention the circum­ stances of its abandonment. “The remains of your relatives are buried in the cemetery—therefore it is the Jewish congregation who should make sure to keep the cemetery in a good state,” he wrote.14 Only after district authori­ ties made it clear to him that the town—and not the Jews—was obligated to look after the cemetery, the municipality erected a temporary fence around the cemetery. Three months after the district had brought the mayor into line, the town council once again resisted following their superiors’ instructions, this time concerning the town’s other Jewish site, the sixteenth-century old Jewish cemetery in the town center, which had not been in use for new burials since the end of the nineteenth century. Protesting again that the town lacked sufficient means to appoint a guard or build a fence, they suggested it was preferable to simply extirpate the cemetery: “No burial has taken place in the cemetery for almost fifty years. . . . The cemetery has no monuments of historical or artistic value, and we therefore ask for permission to use the cemetery for . . . building [in] town, for example, a square or a park.”15 Men­ tioning the time span during which the cemetery was not active was a crucial argument. According to the 1932 burial law, a period of at least fifty years

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since the last burial must pass before a cemetery could be used for another purpose.16 Although in the case of Olkusz’ cemetery this condition would have been met soon, state authorities prohibited the town from doing so. Having consulted with the CKŻP, they maintained it should be preserved, being one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in Poland.17 While discussing the future of their Jewish cemeteries, Olkusz officials were also attempting to push forward their plan for repurposing the town’s sixteenth-century synagogue. The building had been partially destroyed by German soldiers, who had used it as a warehouse during the war. After the liberation, it stood dilapidated in the heart of town, while several local orga­ nizations competed for its rights. In May 1947, Olkusz firefighters addressed the provisional government in Warsaw, requesting use of the synagogue and its adjoining house of study (beit midrash) for their new station: “We kindly request to transfer into our possession the properties that belonged to the former Jewish community, that is: the building of the former synagogue and the Jewish school. . . . These buildings do not have any historical value, they are completely ruined, and stand without proper care . . . [and] our current station is located in a small and old building that does not fit our needs. . . . The requested buildings, after proper and needed renovations, could serve as a modern fire station.” The firefighters added to their appeal a letter of consent from the mayor, who wrote: “The municipal board in Olkusz fully agrees with the above request, and it confirms that the former Jewish object in its current state is a ruin. . . . This object was built only forty years ago, without any architectural principles, and therefore it does not have any his­ torical value.”18 The authorities in Warsaw consulted with Jewish representatives from Olkusz and Kraków, who expressed their strong opposition to the firefight­ ers’ request. They claimed the building was in good repair and did not require a substantial expense to preserve it. Refuting the mayor’s erroneous claim that the synagogue was only forty years old, the Kraków Jews insisted that it was a historical monument, questioning the underlying motives of the firefighters: The synagogue in Olkusz is a historical monument and it is the only sacral trace of our forefathers in Olkusz. It is in good condition, it requires only plastering of its walls and windows, which should not cost too much. The firefighters are not competent to decide whether the synagogue is a historical monument. If the firefighters have a need for a station, then there are plenty of other abandoned buildings. . . . The attempt to take over the synagogue and beit hamidrash is only a

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pretext by some . . . of the firefighters—who are determined to not leave any Jewish trace in Olkusz.19 The Jewish objection was apparently inf luential since the plan to transform the synagogue into a fire station was not realized. Although state officials clarified that the Jewish congregation had no right of successorship to the synagogue, the question of usage was regarded differently and required cau­ tion. MAP informed town authorities that any future use of a synagogue “should not stand in contradiction to its original nature.”20 What happened in Olkusz is representative of the dynamics involved in negotiating Poland’s abandoned Jewish spaces in the second half of the 1940s and the dichotomy between the state and the local authorities’ views on the issue. Although the Jewish population had dramatically declined, the main Jewish organizations still had inf luence among higher-ranking offi­ cials who were showing some measure of concern for Jewish sensibilities. Conversely, local governing bodies were guided by practical concerns. In the war’s wake, given the material damages and the poor socioeconomic condi­ tions, emptied Jewish sites were regarded by local leaders and their citizens as the most natural resource for supplying public needs. By the same token, allocating town resources for the preservation of unused cemeteries was not

Figure 8. The new Jewish cemetery in Olkusz. 1984. Photo by Monika Krajewska. Courtesy of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum archive, Israel.

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Figure 9. The Olkusz synagogue after World War II. Courtesy of the Antoni Minkiewicz Regional Museum of Polish Tourism and Sightseeing Society in Olkusz.

seen to be urgently required. With little to no Jews around, it was obvious to local leaders that just as Jewish private property had been used to benefit the non-Jewish Polish citizens, so too should Jewish communal property contribute to their towns’ welfare and postwar recovering.

The Performativity of Bureaucratic Discourse Obtaining approval from the Ministry of Religious Affairs to use Jewish reli­ gious spaces for purposes alien to their original intent, such as those seen with Olkusz, was formally mandated in communist Poland. Although this measure was not always observed, it demonstrates the extent to which the question of Jewish sites was understood to be a sensitive issue and necessitated the observation of official protocol. From the early months after the war, thousands of letters were mailed to the government by mayors, town coun­ cils, and local organizations, petitioning for authorization to convert aban­ doned Jewish religious sites for public needs. The majority of requests made in the latter half of the 1940s concerned synagogues, houses of study, and ritual bathhouses. Fewer applications were made for cemeteries at this time, as the option of using burial grounds for other purposes was still considered to be relatively problematic. Adapting synagogues for public use, however,

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was much simpler, religiously, morally, and politically. Moreover, an empty synagogue, usually a large and solid building in the heart of town, was a valuable piece of real estate and was regarded as perfectly suitable for various public needs, whether as a cultural center, a warehouse, a factory, a school, a police station, or a cinema. Examined together, the corpus of letters offers a glimpse into the inter­ nal and local dynamics of Poland’s material rebuilding project after the war. These written requests constructed a clean case by which provincial towns could self-justify the inheritance of the property of their extinct or greatly diminished Jewish communities. The letters present historical, demographic, and material “facts” and observations that were intended to convince the authorities of the soundness of their requests. But this is not the full story. A careful analysis of the following examples shows how local officials were not merely trying to lobby the government to grant them permission to use Jewish spaces, but also laying the conceptual grounds for shaping the new postwar demographic and cultural order, and legitimatizing it as the war’s logical and moral outcome. Through a set of rhetorical and linguistic prac­ tices, local leaders bolstered the collective effort and desire to appropriate and de-Judaize Jewish spaces, physically and symbolically, and underpinned the overwhelming conviction according to which the Jewish chapter in their local history is over and done with.21 On February 27, 1946, the commanders of a garrison in the western town of Ostrów Wielkopolski, supported by the local authority, applied to MAP, asking for the use of the town’s synagogue as a cinema and a theater hall: “Within a radius of few hundred kilometers there is not even one theater hall or any artistic institution whatsoever, and therefore neither the soldiers nor the citizens of the town have an opportunity to cater to their artistic needs. . . . However, there is an appropriate building—that once housed a synagogue. This building is being used as a junkyard and due to lack of pro­ tection is getting destroyed gradually. . . . In Ostrów there are absolutely no people of Mosaic faith.”22 In Parczew, not far from Lublin, a similar request was made by the town board to its district authorities. Nearly all of Parc­ zew’s Jews—previously the majority of the town’s inhabitants—had been murdered by the Germans. On February 5, 1946, Polish partisans from the anticommunist, nationalist underground Organization for Freedom and Independence (Zrzeszenie Wolność i Niezawisłość) committed a planned attack on Parczew.23 The attackers plundered shops and apartments of Jews, and the looted property was loaded onto trucks. According to one of the per­ petrators, local citizens were directly involved in tracking down the Jews and

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robbing their property. Three Jews, who were claimed to serve in the local communist militia, were murdered in the raid.24 Shortly after the pogrom, all of the town’s remaining Jews left. Several months later, in October 1946, the town board dispatched a formal letter to the district, asking for permission to use the synagogue as a cinema: “The town of Parczew does not have an appropriate building to operate as a cinema. . . . The best space for a cinema could be the building of the synagogue, after a necessary renovation.  .  .  . None of the Jews [nikt z Żydów] are living in Parczew, the building of the former temple is deserted and not taken care of, and it is being used by passers-by as a place to relieve their urgent needs—which profanes the place much more than a cinema. Therefore, the town board asks for permission to turn the . . . synagogue into a cinema.”25

Figure 10. The Parczew synagogue. 2007. Used after the war as a textile factory and a clothing shop. Currently houses a restaurant. Photo by Wojciech Wilczyk. Courtesy of the photographer.

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The format and style of these letters became a kind of linguistic tem­ plate in the ensuing years. In 1950, the municipal board of Bełchatów (south of Łódź), where before the war some 40 percent of the town’s citizenry were Jews, petitioned the government for the use of the synagogue as a cinema hall. We would like to request consent to create a cinema in the building of the former synagogue located in the town of Bełchatów . . . [which] is being destroyed by time and nature, as there are no conservation works being performed. . . . As for a Jewish congregation or a commit­ tee that could protect and secure the building, there is none in the city nor even within 40 kilometers. . . . A cinema in the town of Bełchatów is really necessary and unquestionably indispensable.  .  .  . The build­ ing of the former synagogue . . . would be perfect for a cinema after a complete renovation.26 As may be evident from the examples given above, a substantial number of requests asked for the town synagogue to be rezoned and used as a cinema. Bearing in mind the central location of most small-town houses of prayer, their expansive spatial layout, and their visual and acoustic attributes, one can understand why these requests were among the most common. Although these specific petitions did not receive governmental approval, a close read­ ing of the texts is revealing. The letters share many similarities in content and style. They are written in a formal and ingratiating manner, typical of early communist correspondence. They also share the same stated goal—to convince the decision makers of the justness of their appeal. In the realiza­ tion that gaining such approval is no easy task, the writers employ various rhetorical tactics, explicit and implicit, to solidify their case and to stress the reasonableness and fairness of their proposal. Every letter emphasizes the urgency of its request by highlighting the town’s lack of an adequate venue for some important and necessary public institution, pointing to the nega­ tive consequences that will arise should the status quo continue. Further, by alluding to the country’s postwar challenges and hardships and insisting that the synagogue stands empty, the applicants could present their request as not only reasonable but also as morally fitting and indisputably right. It is telling that many petitioning towns and cities, mainly during the first postwar years, found it important to note the “appropriateness” of converting synagogues into cinemas or cultural centers. Many of the letters implied, or explicitly claimed, that by earmarking the abandoned site for cultural purposes, the state would be acting in a much more “appropriate” manner than by leaving it ruined. Such argument was raised in the letter from the municipal body

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of Parczew, which argued that turning the synagogue into a cinema will help to prevent its further profanation. Whether out of a politically calculated attempt to address the regime’s strict regulations concerning the appropri­ ate use of Jewish sites, or the local authorities’ religious-moral sensitivities, it seemed crucial for them to stress that it is more than merely an entertain­ ment place, but an indispensable institution for the town, and meant for the welfare and well-being of the people.27 Another frequent statement used by Polish towns seeking to repurpose Jewish property was the “evidence” of the absence of Jews in their towns. The refrain, “There are no Jews here,” became a key tactic in the Polish local authorities’ strategy to justify their plans to lay claims to abandoned Jewish property. In Ostrów, town officials declared, “There are absolutely no people of Mosaic faith” in town. The letter from Parczew was similarly worded, insisting that “none of the Jews live here.” This lingual motif persisted into later years. In 1957, trying once again to repurpose the Parczew synagogue, this time for a textile factory, the town stressed that “there are no Jews at all in the area of Parczew and even if you happen to meet one, he is not practic­ ing the Jewish faith.”28 In Bełchatów, municipal bureaucrats insisted that Jews no longer lived in town, “nor within a radius of 40 kilometers” from it. In the town of Praszka, central-western Poland, officials asked for permission to convert their synagogue into a “people house” (i.e., a cultural and social cen­ ter), writing, “Not even one citizen of Jewish nationality lives in Praszka.”29 A letter from Opoczno stated that “no one in town belongs to the Mosaic faith.” Another letter, petitioning for rights to the town’s synagogue, stated, “There have been no Jews in Opoczno since 1945.”30 Why was it so important for the lobbying towns and cities to stress that no Jews were living among them? This clause, appearing in almost every application letter for the allocation of Jewish sites, has multiple layers of meaning. First, it reinforces the case for the town’s use of the site, creating a rational, legal, economic, and moral ground for its conversion to fulfill local needs. Second, the insistence on a complete absence of local Jewish presence excludes the possibility that a requested site will be used for its originally intended religious purposes. Phrased more explicitly, the statement conveys the following contention: there are no Jews in town now nor will there be in the future; therefore, the site in question can and should be used for nonJewish public needs. Third, the clause seeks to show that the total absence of Jews in town proved that no Jewish body would want to or be able to take care of the requested property. Therefore, the only way to “save” it from complete destruction is to adopt and adapt it for other purposes, as the

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letter from Bełchatów argues: “As for a Jewish congregation or a commit­ tee that could protect and secure the building—there is none in the town.” The emphatic repetition of this claim can be understood as an attempt to block possible future restitution claims by Jews, implicitly positing that the absence of Jews demonstrates abandonment and renunciation of all rights of reclamation. By invoking the lack of Jews and stressing the indispensable value of the site for the remaining (non-Jewish) inhabitants, each town urged the evident conclusion that the site in question should pass into the hands of and serve the welfare of its local inhabitants—no longer being Jewish, by their definition—permanently. But did these “facts” actually correspond to a demographic reality? While official Jewish congregations were largely no longer active in the provinces, the repetitive insistence on the total absence of Jews suggests that the peti­ tioners were not attempting to present an accurate account of the state of affairs. In adamantly stating, “there are no more Jews here,” each town was perhaps expressing a wish rather than giving testimony. By approaching these statements with an eye beyond their face value, we can interpret them as a creative discourse that cannot be simply understood as true or false. Rather, each letter should be seen as a sort of speech act—a performative utterance that aims at dictating reality rather than giving a factual report.31 In this sense, the proclamation of Jewish absence by town officials not only functioned as part of a calculated economy attempting to wrest away rights and ownership of Jewish property but also actively shaped and legitimized the demographic order in postwar Poland. By determining that “there are no more Jews here,” local officials were entrenching this postulation into the postwar social vocabulary. This local discourse was not a top-down ref lec­ tion of objective reality but rather an evocative lexical construction, coined by local officials in provincial towns throughout Poland. If we agree that lan­ guage helps shape our ordering of reality and consciousness, we can under­ stand how this eidetic phrase contributed to the symbolic clearing of the Polish landscape of any Jewish presence and to the legitimation of Jewish absence as the desired outcome. Employing this interpretive framework on other statements and argu­ ments appearing in the local petitions, we can begin to understand the extent to which local officials were reinforcing and constructing specific cultural codes, perceptions, and attitudes, over and above the explicit content and declared intent of the texts. Another idea, often repeated in the letters, is the claim that Jewish sites “have no artistic or historical value.” The prima facie meaning and intent of this clause appear to be obvious, namely, ruling out

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the idea that such a site should be preserved. After the war, it was rare for the local authority to decide that a synagogue or some other Jewish space should be considered a site of historical or artistic importance. Those few cases in which Jewish spaces were officially recognized as historical monuments and were accordingly preserved, came about when they were adopted by and petitioned on behalf of officials from the Ministry of Art and Culture, state conservators, art historians, and architects, but not by municipal representa­ tives; the latter usually tried to refute the notion that these sites were worthy of preservation.32 Although several dozen Jewish communal sites were registered as histor­ ical monuments after the war—by 1964, seventy-two synagogues and eight cemeteries had been recognized as such—the preservation policy for Jew­ ish heritage sites was neither clear nor consistent.33 The formal regulations f rom the 1950s, according to which structures constructed before the nine­ teenth century were deemed to have historical value, were in many cases not observed by the local authorities when it came to ancient Jewish sites.34 Local authorities often used the language of historical preservation when discussing the future of Jewish sites, yet they provided false dates of origin. When asking for permission to turn his local synagogue into a fire station, for example, the mayor of Olkusz maintained that the synagogue could not be considered a historical monument since “it had been built only forty years ago.” In actuality, it was originally built in the sixteenth century and renovated in later periods, making it one of the oldest buildings in town. More than a decade later, the mayor of the southern town of Dąbrowa Tarnowska argued—in seeking authorization to designate his town’s dilapi­ dated nineteenth-century synagogue for nonreligious purposes—that the building was not a historical monument, but rather “simply a regular build­ ing, built between the two world wars.”35 It is unlikely that these two may­ ors were unaware of the actual ages of their town synagogues. Yet these historical “errors” were not simply lies but rather determinations of the desired reality as the norm. By providing false dating to Jewish sites, each mayor took part in normalizing the common perception that a synagogue simply cannot be a site with historical value. As such, they sought to estab­ lish the preconditions to the notion that Jewish sites, in general, are unwor­ thy of preservation. This dictum, along with other recurring statements in the petitionary let­ ters, had a prescriptive dimension. It established the conceptual preconditions legitimizing the process of appropriating and Polonizing traces of Jewish culture in Poland. These various linguistic determinations, formed early on in the postwar years, molded the patterns and narrative of the local Polish

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language around surviving material Jewish remnants, and more generally— as we shall see later—played a key role in shaping the postwar Polish syntax and grammar concerning the disappeared and disappearing Jews. According to the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who integrated the notion of speech act into his critical discussion on language, performative utter­ ance “contributes practically to the reality of what it announces by the fact of uttering it, of predicting it and making it predicted, of making it conceiv­ able and above all credible and thus creating the collective representation which will contribute to its production.” For Bourdieu, performative utter­ ances do not merely seek to determine concrete reality but also shape and ref lect the symbolic horizons and boundaries of a society. According to his theory, agents who engage in and disseminate this performative symbolic language are not necessarily acting consciously, but they do take an active part in creating a common discourse and worldview, solidifying power rela­ tions and social norms.36 Trying to detect the performative dimension of local bureaucratic lan­ guage allows us to examine not only statements and arguments but also implicit notions expressed through time descriptions and tenses. Over­ whelmingly, in almost every missive requesting the use of a Jewish site, all references to the property appear in the past tense, such as “the former syna­ gogue/cemetery.” This may not strike us as significant, given that most of these sites were indeed no longer used by a Jewish population. The new legal status of the abandoned Jewish properties also rendered them “a thing of the past,” allowing them to be confiscated from the Jews permanently. However, if we take the interpretive framework of performative discourse a step further, then this allegedly neutral past tense can be further understood as a kind of speech act in itself. In this sense, the repetitive referencing to a Jewish space as “former” did not merely ref lect objective existence but contributed to the general framing of all Jewish sites as “things of the past,” thus neutralizing their “Jewishness” and ethnic-religious origins and further justifying their appropriation. This practice of using past tense terminology to discuss Jewish property, private and communal, evolved from the bottom-up, as a local and unofficial discourse, only later becoming the norm in formal discourse and correspon­ dence. Already in the first months after the liberation, and even before the introduction of legal changes affecting the status of Jewish land and build­ ings, local officials were referring to Jewish sites in the preterite form. In June 1945, bureaucrats from the southeastern town of Łańcut asked the district authorities to repurpose the town’s mikveh as a public bathhouse—relating to it as “a formerly Jewish public bathhouse” (łażnia publiczna, pożydowska).37

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A few months later, in September 1945, a local cooperative in town asked the district authorities for rights to the “formerly Jewish bakery” (piekarnia pożydowska).38 The past tense was also employed early on after the war by local bodies and citizens who wished to receive Jewish private property. On April 17, 1945, for example, the new town board of Sławków, close to Olkusz, approached the district authorities with a request to regulate their current use of a “formerly Jewish house [dom pożydowski] . . . that belonged to the Jew Berek Lajtenberg and his wife Zysel until the outbreak of the war.”39 On May 4 of the same year, a woman from a nearby village asked the authori­ ties to lease her a “formerly Jewish house that used to be in possession of Jochym Kramat.”40 As demonstrated in the examples above, local officials and citizens were quick to employ various linguistic means that ref lected the conviction, or rather determined, that Jewish sites and properties are no longer Jewish or in Jewish hands. Letters asking for permission to use cemeteries or synagogues, from the early postwar years onwards, referred to them interchangeably as cmentarz pożydowski, była synagoga, były cmentarz or dawna synagoga, all of which can be translated as “a formerly Jewish cemetery/synagogue.” Simi­ lar expressions, for example, referred to “the area of the former cemetery” (teren po byłym cmentarzu), “the building of the former synagogue” (budynek po synagodze), or “the building of the former temple” (budynek dawnej świątyni).41 Other, more convoluted language was also used, for example, “a building that once housed a synagogue” (budynek, w którym ongiś mieściła się synagoga).42 This grammar stood in direct confrontation with the language of Polish Jewish representatives, who always made sure to refer to their cultural sites in the present tense. For them, their religious sites had an eternal sanctity, and therefore could not be used for mundane purposes, nor could they be described as existing Jewishly only in the past. A cemetery, in particular, pos­ sesses an immanent and infinite sanctity according to Jewish law, regardless of its current use or physical state. Thus, the mere expression “a former cem­ etery” is a contradictory term in Jewish religious thinking.43 Also, according to normal logic, this phrase is self-refuting: a cemetery, as a place for the dead, continues to fulfill its function regardless of its current state of repair and can never truly be a “thing of the past” as long as the deceased remain buried there.44 The Polish employment of past tense terminology in this context func­ tioned as a sort of pre-emptive counterargument, aimed at neutralizing the requested object and legitimizing the use and appropriation of Jewish sites and property. A closer linguistic analysis of the unique term po-żydowski

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clarifies this point. While literally signifying “formerly Jewish,” this transla­ tion fails to capture the significance of the term. Polish words beginning with the prefix po refer to “a kind of legacy involving something that is no longer present in a certain place.”45 In the Polish postwar context, terms such as formerly Jewish house, or the more common “formerly Jewish property” (mienie pożydowskie), were overwhelmingly employed by citizens and institu­ tions. They did not merely state that a certain object is no longer in Jewish hands. Rather, they encapsulated a deeper layer of meaning that encoded an implicit moral economy. Mienie pożydowskie, writes the political scientist Piotr Forecki, became a figure of speech in the Polish language and estab­ lished the self-perception of the Poles as heirs of the Jewish possessions—“as if the murdered Jews left their property to the Poles.”46 Such categories became the most common reference to Jewish property, communal and private, and functioned as an essential component in the gen­ eral postwar Polish discourse. Similar lingual constructs encoded the postwar status and perception of other absent groups’ possessions, most notably the property left behind by the German deportees, which was referred to as “for­ merly German property” (mienie poniemieckie). It should be noted that mienie poniemieckie was coined as a legal term, whereas mienie pożydowskie sprouted from below and was not created as a formal category.47 It first appeared in local correspondence, statements, and conversations on the future of Jewish property, underpinning the Polish self-perception as its legitimized heirs.48 Only later, these terms evolved to become a pattern in the national vocabu­ lary. Both in official correspondence and in colloquial language, this phrase served as a linguistic signifier for the wide-scale appropriation of Jewish property, rapidly becoming the preferred doublespeak for “Jewish property” in subsequent decades.

The Unspeakableness of the Holocaust In considering the process by which local discourse facilitated the appropria­ tion of Jewish spaces and shaped its perception, attention should be paid not only to what is expressed and articulated in the request letters but also to what is missing from the text. While some key dictums appeared in almost all letters of this genre, others were equally lacking. Perhaps the most strik­ ing omission in the letters is the near absolute avoidance of any reference to or mention of the historical circumstances behind the Jews’ absence. Their disappearance is virtually always presented without context and as a fait accompli, as if to merely note a neutral, given, and permanent situation. The main reason for the Jews’ sudden exiguity—namely, their extermination—is

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markedly lacking in the town appeals, their disappearance presented simply as an uncontextualized and natural state of affairs. The silence regarding the circumstance of the Jews’ death ref lected a central conceptual pattern in the postwar Polish consciousness that rein­ forced the unspeakableness over the Jewish fate. Although not a completely mute issue in communist Poland, avoiding discussions on the Holocaust was both a political and psychological procedure of censure.49 But this pat­ tern of silence served a specific and crucial goal for local officials in their collective effort to acquire and use Jewish communal property. In their let­ ters to the government, the inexistence of Jews that led to the vacancy of a requested Jewish site was explained in aloof terms, decontextualized and devoid of any historical explanation. In the rare cases where some historical account of the Jews’ disappearance is alluded to in their letters, it is often stated that the Jews simply left town, as the mayor of Olkusz wrote in 1948: “The cemetery was abandoned by the Jews during the war.”50 In most cases, neither the Jewish fate nor even the war is mentioned directly. In Mielec, for example, town officials who wished to receive ratification for the use of the Jewish cemetery for industrial purposes wrote in 1947 that “since 1943, the cemetery is used for local industrial purposes.”51 In 1949, education activists f rom Jarocin, close to Poznań, asked for the use of the town’s synagogue, stressing that “it hasn’t been taken care of since 1939.”52 The same year the mayor of Kępno, in central-western Poland, in a letter asking for authori­ zation to use the synagogue as a kindergarten, pointed out that the Jews had “not lived here since 1945.”53 This pattern had become normalized in all similar request letters during the early postwar years and persisted up until the end of the 1980s. A letter sent f rom Opoczno in 1952, asking for permission to use the town synagogue, emphasized that there had been “no Jews in Opoczno since 1945.”54 A year before, the town council in Chełm had tried to obtain official approval to build on the site of their Jewish cem­ etery, noting that “since 1945 the place has not been used for burial.”55 In another attempt to commandeer the Jewish cemetery of Chełm, a 1968 let­ ter f rom the town council pointed out that “since 1943, the cemetery has not been used for burial.”56 During the 1970s, the town council of Warka, close to Warsaw, requested use of the Jewish cemetery that “since 1939, has no longer been in use.”57 In Ryki, the town announced that the Jewish cemetery had been “active until 1944.”58 Even as late as 1983, the mayor of Józefów Biłgorajski, near Lublin, petitioned government authorities for per­ mission to turn the cemetery into an agricultural space, stressing that “since 1942, nobody has shown any interest in this object.”59 This syntactic pat­ tern, which omits any direct reference to the murder of the Jews, is another

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example of the bottom-up groundswell of constructed discourse relating to Jewish property that began with local officials and grew to become a perma­ nent pattern in Polish society and imagination.60 This formula, “since 19XX/until 19XX,” consisted of a mere mention of some formal date, without any clear context; however, it was not an empty signifier. Anyone with some knowledge of the war’s timeline would imme­ diately recognize these specific years as code, aimed at, but at the same time concealing, the concrete events of the war and the Final Solution. The years 1939 and 1945 respectively mark the formal beginning and end of World War II, and in the letters function as symbolic dates marking the end of the exis­ tence of Poland’s Jewish population. The years 1942, 1943, and 1944 evoke an even more direct reference to the extermination, pointing to the years of the final deportation of the Jewish communities and the emptying out of the towns from Jewish presence. Although implicitly indicating the events of the Holocaust, a direct reference to the fate of the Jews was rarely acknowledged in the hundreds of letters sent. This failure to explicitly recognize any historical context or reason for the disappearance of the Jews while citing a concrete year for the point at which the Jews ceased to exist reveals an inherent tension capturing the place of the Shoah in the postwar Polish discussion about Jewish property. On the one hand, it was the near-total extermination of the Jews that led to the construction of an inner logic sanctioning Polish appropriation of Jew­ ish property. This reasoning can be summarized as follows: Since the Jews have disappeared and no longer need their property, it is only reasonable that we should use it. On the other hand, the admission of any details con­ cerning how three million Polish Jews have disappeared was almost always left out. This comingling of insinuation and concealment can be detected in a letter from Jaraczewo, close to Poznań. As late as 1960, local officials were petitioning for the use of an abandoned synagogue in their town. “The synagogue,” they argued, would “not fulfill its destiny in the future since, as of 1939, not a single Jewish descendant remained in town” nor within “a radius of several kilometers.”61 The letter’s silence on the con­ crete circumstances that led to Jaraczewo’s lack of Jews is telling. Just as it was important to emphasize that the Jews had disappeared and would not return, it was equally important to conceal any historical context account­ ing for their absence. Decontextualizing the circumstances behind the Jews’ fate was therefore crucial for the local self-justification of using Jewish com­ munal property. To draw parallels between the murder of the Jews and the now-vacated properties threatened to undermine the legitimacy of using these sites for other means. By specifically addressing the circumstances of

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Poland’s missing Jews, there was a risk of impugning the newly vacated properties with the reminder of their bloody provenance.62 The discourse analysis of local petitions conducted thus far shows how, by employing the rhetorical means discussed above, Polish officials constructed a clean case by which they could inherit the property of their destroyed and absent Jewish communities. But the fact that municipal officials invested so many resources in their bids for Jewish holdings suggests that they were not only trying to convince the state authorities of their right­ ness, but also themselves. The prevalent and persistent use of implicit and explicit arguments of justification, and the adoption of certain silencing mechanisms, raise the possibility that perhaps this issue was neither simple nor resolved for the petitioners. As we shall now see, the collective effort to lay claim to abandoned Jewish sites aroused doubts and insecurities among the local administrations that even the painstakingly crafted convictions of entitlement could not always ease.

J Ch a p ter 3 To Whom Does It Belong?

Ownership and Doubts

As was discussed in the previous chapter, by the second half of the 1940s, local officials had launched an all-out petitionary campaign seeking authorization for the use and appropriation of their Jew­ ish spaces. While the central government did show some sensitivity toward using Jewish sites for “inappropriate purposes,” they maintained that the sur­ viving Jewish population had lost legal ownership of communal property. The postwar congregations could use cemeteries and synagogues, but their own ritual sites were no longer theirs. Yet, at the local level, the question of ownership was not at all clear. Despite the constant efforts of local officials to justify their right to acquire Jewish spaces, many of them were unable to resolve their uncertainties pertaining to the essential meaning of the ques­ tion, to whom does this property belong?1 Although questions of owner­ ship of Jewish property were formally settled soon after the war, the sources I review in this chapter suggest that the understanding of Jewish ownership as a thing of the past did not always reach the periphery. Local governing bodies expended great effort to de-Judaize and Polonize their abandoned Jewish sites, but many could not bring themselves to regard these sites as no longer Jewish, in the legal and conceptual sense. In November 1946, the mayor of Łuków, in eastern Poland, deliberated over the legal status of his town’s Jewish communal property. Prior to the war, Jews had comprised approximately half of the local population, whereas 69

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by the end of the war, the town’s Jewish community had vanished altogether. Seeking advice on the matter, the mayor consulted with the district authori­ ties in the nearby town of Biłgoraj. Contrary to the official laws, the district officials informed him that Jewish property was not considered abandoned and that the municipality could only use it on a temporary basis.2 Another misunderstanding regarding the status of Jewish communal property occurred in 1947, in the town of Dąbrowa Tarnowska, where a local court granted the petition of its small, reestablished Jewish community to reclaim their synagogue. In this case, the judges not only granted them the limited right of “use and administration,” as per the new law but also restored their full ownership of the building. As opposed to the regime’s proclamation that Jewish communal property is not inheritable, the local judges’ ruling recog­ nized the new congregation as heirs to the prewar community.3 Throughout the country, lower judicial courts and local authorities had not fully internal­ ized the decision of the temporary government, made on February 6, 1945, to sever the continuity of ownership between the pre- and postwar Jewish communities. They seemed to misinterpret the formal directive to allocate Jews with adequate ritual sites for “use and management” and instead rec­ ognized them as owners. In October 1948, in the southern town of Nowy Sącz (Yiddish: Tsanz), the local court mistakenly ruled that the town’s post­ war Jewish congregation was representative of its former, obliterated Jewish community, returning ownership of one of the latter’s properties to the cur­ rent congregation—which rented it to a local tailors cooperative.4 The fact that the new legal reality was not immediately recognized, understood, or implemented by local authorities and courts should not be surprising, considering the political, social, and legal turmoil and chaos that prevailed until 1947–48, and the difficulties of the communists to consolidate power.5 The concept of property rights had suffered a radical jolt in the six lawless years of war and in its chaotic aftermath. In the first postwar period a general atmosphere of uncertainty reigned over the ownership of all unceded holdings, a feeling whose provenance originated in the mass displacement of entire communities.6 The basic notion of “ownership” was shattered as mil­ lions of people were no longer in possession of their personal belongings and as empty houses and deserted objects were being occupied and appropriated overnight. The mass appropriation of German residences and native lands in the west, for example, was fraught with difficulties among the Polish new­ comers, who were troubled to find themselves suddenly living in someone else’s home.7 Despite the official propaganda that painted the western reset­ tlement as a glorious return to ancient Polish homelands, many settlers who were relocated from the eastern borderlands struggled to acclimate to these

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foreign surroundings and to treat them as a suitable replacement to their former homes, now enclosed within the Soviet border. A pervasive feeling of “sitting on [one’s] suitcase” impeded the new Polish residents’ efforts to put down roots and firmly and comfortably settle into their new surroundings.8 Such matters were further complicated by a thoughtless policy that too often allocated to Polish newcomers apartments that were still occupied by their original German owners. Such intrusion into another family’s private sphere was emotionally and morally trying, and it aroused intense qualms over the forced appropriation of German belongings.9 A Polish woman, ref lecting on her arrival at her new—though formerly German—home, wrote: “With every step I take, I stumble across other people’s things, evidence of a life I know nothing about, of the people who built this house and lived here and who may well be dead. How does one start a new life here? Impossible. I can’t imagine that I’ll ever be able to say that this is my house.”10 While the atmosphere of unease and discomfort concerning the appro­ priation of unceded German properties in the new territories in the west subsided after the immediate postwar period, the ownership status of com­ munal Jewish assets—namely, empty synagogues and deserted cemeteries— remained unsettled and unregulated in the deepest senses of the words.11 These misunderstandings concerning the ownership status of sacral Jewish spaces continued well after the standardization of the property laws, the further emigration of Jews, the consolidation of communist rule, and the stabilization of social turmoil around 1947–48. Even as the government repeatedly clarified that Jewish communal property is uninheritable, many local officials continued to contravene the new formal regulations and treated Jews as owners of communal properties—even abandoned and inactive. Therefore, the misconceptions regarding the true ownership of Jewish sites probably ref lect more than a general atmosphere of uncertainty regarding property rights or some legal and procedural misinterpretations. The fol­ lowing examples suggest that the core of this confusion derived from the inability of many local officials to fully assimilate the notion that abandoned Jewish sites no longer belonged to their Jewish neighbors, who were often referred to as their conceptual, legal, and even moral owners. In December 1947, a letter was sent by the firefighters of Lelów to the central Jewish committee in Warsaw. Before the outbreak of World War II, more than half of the inhabitants of the southern village of Lelów (close to Częstochowa) were Jews. Over a few days in 1942, around 700 men, women, and children were deported to the death camp of Treblinka, bringing the 400-year-old Jewish community of Lelów to an end. Five years later, in December 1947, the local firefighters sent a letter to the CKŻP, requesting

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permission to use the empty synagogue in place of their destroyed station: “We would like to request that the committee allocate to us the ‘synagogue’ building owned by the former Jewish community in Lelów. If the fire depart­ ment were granted the requested building, it would show all due respect to it, intending to use it as an educational and cultural house. . . . Part of it would be used as a common room, library, and theatre, the other part for storing firefighting equipment indispensable for emergency actions.”12 An order of Carmelite nuns from Wolbrom, in Silesia, whose prewar population had also been predominantly Jewish, wrote a similar—albeit slightly more resolute—letter in January 1948. Almost all of Wolbrom’s Jews had been sent to the Bełżec extermination camp in 1942. The remainder, around 600, had been shot to death by the Germans in the nearby forests and buried in mass graves. Although by 1948 there were no longer any Jews living in town, the Carmelite order addressed the letter to the Jewish Coun­ cil of Wolbrom—a small group of survivors who lived in the nearby city of Sosnowiec—to ask their permission for the use of several former Jew­ ish properties, including two synagogues and the Jewish school: “We hereby request that the Jewish Council grant us the house that belongs to the Jewish Community. . . . It is currently intended for poor children, postwar orphans, cripples, and the elderly. . . . We trust that the Jewish Council will take the above request into consideration and not only give the said school for the above purposes, but also donate other neighboring buildings to us—both synagogues, destroyed and falling apart, for the purpose of our religious, social, and monastic order.”13 These letters, and hundreds more, addressed by local bodies to different Jewish associations, were sent frequently from almost every part of the country. Since Jewish organizations could no lon­ ger claim formal property rights over abandoned communal property, the formal and practical significance of these letters was unclear. In some cases, the Jewish recipients were unsure how they should react to these letters and often deferred to the state authorities. It is not entirely obvious what exactly the officials from Wolbrom and Lelów were looking to gain by writing these letters. Were they presenting a formal request for a legal transfer of ownership from the Jews, whom they believed to be the current owners, or asking for a form of moral consent for regulating the acquisition? Many similar requests were sent to the Jew­ ish leadership by provincial authorities. Not all letters were formulated in a respectful manner, but they all shared the underlying belief that Jewish bod­ ies were the ultimate address for conferring a blessing on those petitioners seeking the titles to and/or redesignation of former Jewish land and build­ ings. The mere act of reaching out to the Jewish representatives suggests

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that the authors of these letters believed the Jews still had some measure of say over the future of these sites. This practice begs the question of whether Polish officials were simply ignorant of the new property and inheritance laws or whether they were suffering deeper, more profound doubts over their claims to former Jewish spaces. At least in some cases, it is clear that local Polish officials were acquainted with the new legal rulings but were nevertheless unassuaged of their uncer­ tainty and concerns over the final status of Jewish religious sites. Such was the case in Kępno. On February 19, 1949, Kępno’s mayor asked the Jewish congregation in Warsaw to convey the local synagogue to the town for use as a kindergarten. Only five years earlier, Kępno’s Jews had been shipped to the Łódź Ghetto, and then sent to their deaths in the nearby killing factory of Chełmno. Complaining that he had made this request to the regional Jewish committee in nearby Poznań on several occasions and received no response, the mayor urged the Varsovian congregations to give their consent. Drawing attention to the synagogue’s poor state of repair, owing to the war, he argued that turning it into a kindergarten would be the only way to save it from col­ lapse.14 Although the synagogue had been practically empty for more than five years, and no Jewish restitution claim had been submitted (or could be formally submitted), Kępno’s mayor took great pains to obtain Jewish agree­ ment to transfer the site to the town, pledging to use it only for cultural and educational purposes that would correspond to “the restrictions of the Jew­ ish religion.” The mayor seemed fully aware of the new legal status of the site. But while referring to the synagogue as an “abandoned property under the administration of the town,” using the same language of the law from March 8, 1946, he reveals a sense of uncertainty regarding the issue of its future ownership: “We can assume that the Jewish community of Kępno will not receive any restitution,” adding the caveat that if they did, it would be “only in the distant future.”15 His lurking fear of a possible future restitution appears to lie behind the approach he takes with the Central Committee of Polish Jews, whose approval he believes will decisively settle the question of ownership. In their response, the CKŻP agreed to his request, having been swayed in particular by the assertion that it would be used to help educate children.16 This tension between the Polish awareness of the new laws and their per­ sistent doubts over the law’s ethical ramifications is further ref lected in a letter from the town council of Leżajsk (Yiddish: Lizhensk), a former Hasidic center in southeastern Poland, now devoid of any Jewish presence. In March 1949, the municipality appealed to the CKŻP for the “transfer to the own­ ership of the municipal board” of the mikveh, either permanently or in the

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form of a ninety-nine-year lease. The language of the letter points to an awareness of the mikveh’s new legal status, noting that it could be “regarded as an abandoned property” and attesting that the former Jewish commu­ nity had “ceased to exist as a legal entity.” These descriptions, in accordance with the 1946 law on abandoned property, do not seem to have allayed their concerns over the ownership status of the site. In the letter, the town coun­ cil puts many efforts to convince the CKŻP to relinquish ownership of the building, even though the law stipulated otherwise.17 Such examples are indicative of the widespread local Polish reticence to be satisfied with government confirmation that abandoned Jewish sites were no longer Jewishly owned. This phenomenon was unique. For their part, local Polish authorities expressed no such doubts about the true proprietorship of abandoned German and Ukrainian churches and cemeteries, and they made no effort to reach any kind of custodial or possessory agreement with these groups’ representatives before laying claim to them.18 A Jewish confirmation to appropriate a religious property, on the other hand, appears to have been significant for non-Jewish Poles, serving as a type of performative process by which true ownership of a given site was understood to have been formally and symbolically transferred. Whether they were seeking official, legal con­ sent to the relinquishment and transfer of ownership of former Jewish sites, or rather a more symbolic authorization, their concerns were intertwined, interdependent, and fueled one another.

Barter Transactions As opposed to the former petitionary letters to Jewish organizations— which can be read as seeking performative letters of consent—the follow­ ing examples bear a stronger resemblance to contractual writing, as Polish officials sought to anchor Jewish organizations to consensual transference via legally binding agreements. Many of them even went as far as to propose financial transactions with the Jewish organizations to buy or lease their property, long after the new legal status of Jewish sites was introduced. A careful reading of the following sources attests to the existence of prelegal sensibilities shared by local authorities that may have prevented them f rom fully internalizing the new legal reality that the central government sought to institutionalize. Local, regional, and national Jewish committees and organizations were being continually approached by local Polish governmental organs propos­ ing a formal agreement by which the Jewish body would relinquish its right to a given communal property in return for a stipulated sum. On February

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2, 1947, for example, town officials from Włoszczowa, fifty kilometers west of Kielce, met with the local Jewish committee, the remnant of survivors which had, before the war, formed half of the town’s population. As the minutes of the meeting indicate, its purpose was to discuss the “handing over of ownership of the property left by the former Jewish community to the town of Włoszczowa.” According to their detailed arrangement, formulated as a standard purchase-and-sale agreement, the Jewish committee, which in reality had no ownership rights to any communal property, transferred three buildings into the possession of the town: the synagogue, the mikveh, and a study house. In return, the town pledged to take care of the Jewish cemetery by erecting a fence around it and appointing a caretaker, and they agreed to use the synagogue solely for cultural purposes.19 On April 24, 1948, a similar deal was reached in Kutno, central Poland, when the local firefighters signed an agreement with the remaining local Jewish committee, whose original size had once constituted the majority of the town’s residents and was all but eliminated between 1942 and 1943 at the Chełmno extermination camp. In return for deeding the local synagogue to the firefighters, which they intended to use as their new station, the fire­ fighters pledged to rebuild the wall of the Jewish cemetery that had been heavily destroyed by the German occupation forces and to conduct further preservation works in the cemetery, at an estimated cost of 750,000 zloty.20 In this sale, the local Jewish representatives had presented themselves as the owners of what was, by law, abandoned and heirless property. On occasion, the difficulty in internalizing the idea that Jewish bodies could no longer be owners of communal sites sometimes led to clashes between local Polish bodies. In Łańcut, which had lost almost all of its Jews in the war, more than 40 percent of the local population, the local Jewish committee had leased a synagogue to a town commercial cooperative immediately following the war. In October 1948, the mayor of the town wrote to the CKŻP in Warsaw, asking that they cancel the original agreement and instead lease the build­ ing to the municipality, which hoped to transform it into a library, claiming that this usage was more in keeping with and respectful of its original pur­ pose.21 Such transactions between local Polish authorities and Jewish repre­ sentatives became common, mostly consisting of long-term leases, but also included the rental and occasional outright purchase of communal property. Although these deals lacked legal validity, they were negotiated and seen as legal agreements. Town representatives expended great efforts to finalize such deals, insisting on official stamps that indicated their lawful acquisition of the site as insurance against future claims. Often, they would specifically ask for “the transfer of ownership title” of the requested site.

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The leaders of the national Jewish organizations were well aware of the laws dispossessing them of their prewar communal property. In 1947, the CKŻP unambiguously clarified to Radom’s Jewish committee that they can­ not lay claim to belongings of the prewar community, explaining to them that “The lack of legal basis stems from the fact that the Polish state, and not the Jewish committee [of Radom], is the successor of formerly Jewish property.”22 At the same time, while showing a level of caution, the central Jewish bodies occasionally assumed the status that many Poles attributed to them, approving the transfer of ownership of properties that did not for­ mally belong to them. Aware of the law and desirous of avoiding confronta­ tion with the new regime, the central Jewish organizations in Poland (the CKŻP or the leadership of congregations) had to maneuver delicately. As a rule, they did not initiate deals, though they did often approve agreements proposed by local Jewish representatives and respond to direct appeals by Polish authorities. They usually refrained from accepting money, preferring a binding commitment from the Polish party in the deal to reconstruct a Jewish cemetery instead. Such commitment from the Polish side became the most common currency in such barters. In several cases, Jewish individuals in the provinces took the initiative in these transactions, approaching local authorities and representing themselves as the owners of certain communal properties, proposing to sell their real estate in return for hard currency. Whereas such independent initiatives were disapproved by the regional and central Jewish leaders, and even though they were careful to steer clear of confrontation with the government, they were tacitly or actively contravening the new legislation. In doing so, they may have been consciously reaffirming and demonstrating their moral right to Poland’s material traces of Jewish heritage; perhaps they were also seeking to quietly defy the regime’s policy of mass confiscation. They might have been motivated by practical considerations, using their little inf luence and imagined status to save some Jewish sites from desecration and destruction. In June 1949, officials in charge of the prison in Grodzisk-Mazowiecki, about thirty kilometers from Warsaw, wrote a letter to the Jewish congrega­ tion in the capital. Though the town had been predominantly Jewish before the war, no Jews lived there now, most having been murdered during the war in Treblinka. The prison officials wanted to lease part of the partially destroyed Jewish cemetery that abutted the prison. Acknowledging that it “belongs to the former Jewish community,” they informed the congregation that they hoped to use it as a garden and recreation area for the prisoners, adding that this would serve “our joint interests.” In return for the use of the land, they suggested paying a “symbolic leasing fee” by looking after the

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cemetery, which was currently “without proper care.”23 The congregation in Warsaw brought the matter to the CKŻP, which gave its consent on condi­ tion that the administration of the prison erect a fence around the cemetery, and only use the section that was free from graves.24 Another acute challenge facing the Jewish committees was the pressing need to take care of the hundreds of unmarked mass graves littered through­ out the country. In Łuków, where thousands of Jews had been murdered during the war and buried in the forest on the outskirts of town, human remains were often found (and left) scattered about the area. During 1947– 49, Łuków’s officials consulted with the town’s Jewish representatives, now residing in Dzierżoniów. They estimated that the cost of securing and pre­ serving the site (1.5 million zloty) was beyond the town’s means. In response, the Jewish representatives suggested trading the town synagogue for the offi­ cials’ pledge to erect a fence around the mass grave and see to its maintenance. The town agreed on condition that the deal was approved by the CKŻP in Warsaw, which ultimately ratified it.25 Recognizing that the repair and preservation of thousands of abandoned cemeteries and burial sites would be an impossible task, the attempt to secure commitments by local authorities to take this responsibility, in exchange for empty and unused synagogues, may have been the only rational course of action for the Jewish leaders. They were aware of the mistreatment of Jewish cemeteries by the local population and might have had doubted whether the local authorities would indeed keep their commitment. However, given their weak bargaining position, it seems that securing these promises in writing was the best they could do. Such realistic logic also guided Jewish leaders in the Czech lands after the war, who, unlike their Polish counterparts, were recognized as owners of communal property. As Jacob Labendz showed, the Czech-Jewish congregations made a strategic decision to sell, or to give away for free, unused synagogues to the authorities in return for a commitment— eventually unfulfilled in many cases—of the new owners to take care of the Jewish cemetery.26 Assuring the protection of cemeteries as a form of payment was also favorable in Jewish law. Profiting from the sale of ritual sites to non-Jews was regarded by religious representatives as a problem, while applying proceeds to a religious cause, such as cemetery renovation or exhumation of Jews buried in unmarked graves was considered more legitimate, as Rabbi David Kahane made clear to the CKŻP in a 1949 letter.27 Trying to save a cemetery by giving up a synagogue served as a practical solution that simultaneously addressed religious sensibilities. The inviolability of the cemetery, according to Jewish law, is eternal and everlasting. However, under certain conditions,

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it is permissible to use former synagogues for other purposes.28 “Scarifying” synagogues to try and save cemeteries was considered to be the most san­ guine arrangement. Similarly for the Polish side, promising to reconstruct or preserve a Jewish cemetery in place of monetary payment was the desired solution. Many officials proposed it to Jewish bodies on their own initia­ tive. This form of payment was preferred, especially in a time of economic shortage, and may have been viewed as a more convenient solution, as it was harder to supervise its implementation in the long run. Indeed, in most cases the Polish commitment to look after the preservation of the cemetery was not kept. The barter transactions between local bodies and Jewish representatives involving Jewish communal property were made unbeknown to Polish gov­ ernmental authorities in Warsaw who, when informed about such cases, frequently annulled them, as they violated the law stipulating that Jewish communal properties were noninheritable. Whereas during the turbulent postwar years, many local authorities could still operate autonomously, with the growing consolidation of the communist government between 1947 and 1948, the center increasingly monitored and controlled local governance.29 It was around then that the central authorities began to put an end to the Jewish properties market. From 1948 on, Warsaw commenced circulating memoranda elucidating the legal status of former Jewish properties and admonishing local officials against involving Jews in real estate issues. Gov­ ernment officials did not hesitate to retroactively cancel these transactions, even when the payment, in whatever form, had already occurred. Such intervention from above happened in the aforementioned case of the Kutno synagogue. When word of the agreement between the firefighters and the local Jewish committee reached the communist authorities in War­ saw, MAP officials immediately annulled it on the grounds that the Jewish committee had no rights to prewar Jewish communal property.30 Both sides appealed the decision, with the Jewish regional committee of Łódź argu­ ing that while they understood the agreement lacked legal status, this was the only recourse they had to protect the cemetery. The firefighters main­ tained that they had already expended a great amount of money and were thus deserving of the synagogue: “Everyone in town says that our request is justified . . . Someone had to take care of the cemetery, it only being rea­ sonable to expect the money to come from the property of the community that had once used it.”31 Despite these protestations, the authorities stood by their decision, reiterating that no Jewish body had any right to prewar Jewish belongings.32 In April 1948, the handful of surviving Jews from Wolbrom, then living in Sosnowiec, proposed to sell various properties to the town of

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Wolbrom, including the synagogue and the mikveh, in return for the town’s pledge to locate and exhume the bones of its murdered Jews, discarded in the nearby forest, and to rebury them inside the Jewish cemetery. When news of this proposal reached MAP officials, they immediately prohibited the arrangement: “Neither the Jewish Association of Wolbrom nor any Jew­ ish congregation is entitled to represent the former religious community. Hence, the said possessions do not lie at their disposal.”33

The End of Jewish Autonomy In the meantime, by the end of the 1940s, the status and strength of the Jewish minority in Poland deteriorated. National and international developments—among them the establishment of the state of Israel, the Cold War, and changes within the communist regimes of Eastern Europe— have marked the end of the relative autonomous Jewish existence in Poland. In December 1948, the Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, PZPR) was created as a result of a forced merger between the Communist Party (formally, the Polish Workers’ Party [Polska Partia Robotnicza]) and the Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna). This merger signified the homogenization of communist rule and the abolition of the remnants of independent political formations.34 These political changes marked the beginning of the Stalinist period in Eastern Europe and, with it, the imposition of a more centralized and repressive style of rule. Along with many other political and administrative changes, which will be analyzed in the next chapter, the regime was reform­ ing the constitutions of city and town governments. Between 1949 and 1950, the status and authority of local governance were diminished, limiting its autonomy and increasing its dependence on the government and the PZPR. The makeup of many local authorities was altered during these years, with many local officials being replaced by loyal communists.35 This period was also characterized by increasingly anti-Jewish tendencies, inspired by Mos­ cow, which at the start of the new decade led Poland to back away from its earlier support of the f ledgling Jewish state of Israel. In step with the increasingly hostile Soviet anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist policies being enacted at the time throughout the Soviet Bloc, the Polish regime began adopting this hostile line and merging it with traditional Polish anti-Jewish sentiments and language.36 These developments dramatically affected the Jewish environment in Poland, weakening the status, power, and presence of Jewish organizations, as the Polish regime removed many of its policies protecting the Jewish

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minority and severely limited the political and cultural autonomy of its Jews. By 1950, practically all noncommunist parties were abolished, Zionist organi­ zations ceased to exist and the activity of international Jewish organizations within Poland, such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, was put to a halt.37 The most substantial blow to the national-cultural Jewish autonomy was the closure of the CKŻP, the most important and inf luential Jewish organization in postwar Poland. The closing of the CKŻP in 1950 marked the end of the existence of all local Jewish committees. These devel­ opments combined with the Soviet anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish campaigns, and the activity of the state of Israel opened the way for a massive wave of Polish Jewish emigration. From a population of around 100,000 Jews after the war, some 30,000 left Poland between 1949 and 1951.38 These new winds from Warsaw have also marked the end of the short-lived success story of the Jewish settlement in Lower Silesia. By 1950, only 30,000 Jews remained in the area, as many of the region’s congregations and Jewish organizations had dissolved in previous years, their members having emigrated elsewhere. From then on, the Jewish population of Poland would be represented by a pale successor to the CKŻP, known as the Social-Cultural Association of Polish Jews (Towarzystwo Społeczno Kulturalne Żydów, TSKŻ), a loyal communist body whose mandate was limited to secular cultural and social fields. The religious aspects of Jewish life still fell under the responsibil­ ity of the few dozen remaining congregations throughout the country and the ZRWM. From this point forward, the schism between the secular and the religious Jewish representatives would become increasingly polarized, the TSKŻ often accusing the ZRWM of being reactionary bourgeois while the latter blaming the former in betraying and violating the Jewish tradition and religion.39

Doubts Persist The diminishment of the power, status, and presence of Polish Jewry, coupled with the regime’s standardization of the economy and local administration, led to tighter supervision of abandoned Jewish sites and a concomitant reduc­ tion in their trade. Although this business had been slowed down, it was far from eradicated. State authorities were still unable to completely prevent unauthorized transactions between local and Jewish bodies. In the large cit­ ies, officials seemed to assimilate the postwar status of Jewish communal property by the beginning of the 1950s, but in the provinces the authorities continued to harbor doubts of ownership. Officials and bureaucrats in pro­ vincial towns still found it difficult to see empty Jewish sites as conceptually

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and formally abandoned. Even after the CKŻP had disbanded, local officials approached other Jewish addressees or were approached by Jews who pre­ sented themselves as owners of communal property. In 1950, a member of the small Jewish congregation in Nowy Sącz finalized a deal with a local firm that transferred ownership of the synagogue to the firm so that it could be used as storage for fertilizer. In 1953, the head of the Jewish congregation in Przemyśl, “sold” a synagogue in the nearby town Kańczuga to the town authorities, having led them to believe that his congregation possessed the rights to the property.40 In December 1954, cognizant of the prevailing misperceptions concerning the status of Jewish communal property and their inability to fully eradicate unauthorized real estate deals, the Ministry of Religious Affairs circulated an urgent nationwide memorandum to all voivodeships. “It has been brought to our attention that in many cases the congregation of Mosaic faith was treated by local authorities as the legal successor of the former Jewish religious communities. As a result, . . . certain Jewish congregations unjustly used the properties to gain profits.”41 Later on, the memorandum again asserts that Jewish congregations can “use and manage” former communal properties for the sole purpose of their current religious needs, though they are not owners in any way. Transactions in which formerly Jewish property was sold or leased by Jews, the memo maintains, must be canceled immedi­ ately because they are illegal. The authorities in Warsaw appear to have been bothered primarily by the violation of their own fabricated principle of dis­ continuity between prewar Jews and the current congregations, rather than by the fact that some Jewish congregations had profited from these deals. Even those cases in which the local authorities merely asked for Jewish “per­ mission” to use their properties angered central governance since it indicated that Jews were still perceived as having some connection to these properties. One such case occurred in Sandomierz, whose last remaining Jews had left town by 1949. Five years later, a vocational school that had recently been built adjacent to the town’s partially destroyed new Jewish cemetery wanted to erect dormitories on an empty plot of land within the cemetery. The school administrators asked the Sandomierz town council to “transfer . . . ownership of the cemetery to the school,” arguing that its poor state was negatively affecting “the school’s aesthetic appearance” and expressing their intentions to “develop the site and give it an aesthetic look,” employing “a humane approach toward the deceased.”42As “abandoned property,” the cemetery lay under the responsibility of the local town council, which had the authority to transfer the requested land to the vocational school after they received relevant authorization from the state. The town council chose

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instead to consult with the Jewish congregation in Warsaw, asking them to write “a letter of consent” agreeing to the transfer of the cemetery to the school, which they did.43 This annoyed the governmental authorities in War­ saw, who demanded the council explain its actions. Voivodeship authorities confirmed that the Jewish congregation in Warsaw “may have exceeded its powers in saying: We agree to the transfer of ownership of the Jewish cem­ etery in Sandomierz to the school.” They thus informed their superiors that the town’s appeal had been based on “ignorance of the appropriate legal reg­ ulations concerning the case of abandoned, formerly Jewish properties.”44 The incident in Sandomierz was one of the last known cases of such administrative peculiarities. In the second half of the 1950s, the number of “unauthorized transactions”—in which Jews were perceived as property owners by Polish officials—gradually decreased. The notion of unsettled Jewish ownership was losing its power and only sporadic cases remained in which local authorities were involved in real estate transactions with Jewish representatives.45 Nevertheless, the vast scope of this unique phenomenon and its persistence in the first decade after the war, despite the political cen­ ter’s attempts to stamp it out, demand explanation. The inability of many local officials to fully internalize the new legal ownership status of Jewish heritage sites may indicate an atmosphere of geopolitical confusion and economic-legal uncertainty in the early postwar years. It may also demon­ strate the discrepancy between the formal policy of the regime and its inter­ pretation by the public, as well as the difficulties in adjusting to the new and socialist conceptions of nationalization and state ownership. But local officials’ nagging and unsettled questions of ownership of Jew­ ish sites point to something deeper: a persistent and strong sense of unease accompanying municipalities’ collective attempts to own and employ Jewish spaces for their means. The commingling of these two seemingly contradic­ tory tendencies tells us something about the moral, social, and psychological aftermath of the war and the extermination of the country’s 3 million Jews on their non-Jewish neighbors.46 The absence of the Jews from the fabric of everyday life was experienced in the most material sense; Jewish individual and communal property left behind were largely considered by the Polish society to be legitimate spoils of war. This “sudden inheritance,” argues Michael Steinlauf, left an indelible mark on those confronted by it. “Nei­ ther for the Polish shopkeeper occupying his competitor’s premises . . . nor for the millions of Poles moving into what had been Jewish homes, offices, synagogues and communal institutions . . . would it be simple, morally or psychologically, to accept this new order of things.”47 Discussing what to do with empty Jewish sites, while wartime memories were still fresh and

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while Jews still had some presence in the country, was not a simple task for provincial officials, particularly when dealing with religious objects of such pronounced symbolic value as cemeteries and synagogues. Whatever the moral stance of local officials toward their neighbors’ demise may have been, the bloody and violent circumstances whereby Jewish communal objects became vacant complicated the formal, conceptual, and ethical question of their ownership. Whereas state officials in Warsaw could formulate an unambiguous pol­ icy for the nationalization of Jewish communal properties, local officials and individuals appear to have found it more difficult to relate to their Jewish sites in such a detached manner. Rather than dealing with the formal abstract question of the status of former Jewish properties in Poland, they were faced with all-too-familiar icons—synagogues and cemeteries in their towns that had been used by their neighbors, whose murder they perhaps have wit­ nessed, and whose private belongings many of them were now occupying. It is quite plausible that, when confronted with the question of ownership of concrete and intimately familiar spaces from this perspective, a local official and former neighbor struggled on a different and more complex plane than that inhabited by central government officials participating in formal discus­ sions in the cold halls of the capital. While local leaders and bureaucrats eagerly sought possession of formerly Jewish or “leftover Jewish” property, their desire came at a price, often imbuing them with a disturbing sense of embarrassment, unease, and uncertainty over the legal and conceptual ques­ tion, to whom does this property belong?

JC

HAPTER

4

Resentment and Compassion

In January 1951, an official in the Łódź voivode­ ship wrote to the Ministry of Religious Affairs in Warsaw about the Łask town synagogue. During the war, almost all of Łask’s Jews, who until then had constituted about one-half of the town’s population, were deported to the extermination camp of Chełmno, where they were murdered. For the town, the most vivid reminder of their Jewish past was the suddenly vacant synagogue, occupying a prominent place in the center of town. After previ­ ous attempts to repurpose the synagogue had failed, the official was now petitioning the government for its demolition: “At this moment, when our country is rising up from the ruins, and erasing the traces of the war, sooner or later the synagogue will have to be rebuilt, or demolished.”1 Written on the cusp of a new decade, this letter chronologically and the­ matically marks the beginning of the second postwar period in Poland that was characterized by an increasing tendency to physically remove the Jewish sites from the national and local landscape. Whereas in the first half-decade of Poland’s postwar years the municipal authorities’ treatment of Jewish spaces was fraught with doubts and uncertainties, from the 1950s on they gradually adopted a more resolute and consistent stance. Although occa­ sional cases of misinterpretation regarding the ownership status of Jewish communal buildings still took place, city governments found it easier—on a practical and conceptual level—to treat Jewish spaces as their own. The 84

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compulsion to physically remove all hints of the country’s Jewish past increasingly embedded itself as the first option among equals in the minds of local and state officials. With the conceptual, lingual, and legal precondi­ tions for the de-Judaization of Poland’s townscapes having been fulfilled in the first postwar period, the road was paved to move on to the next phase, which would result in a massive erasure of the Jewish traces. Changing attitudes around the status of Jewish spaces were brought about by several new developments in the political realm. Late 1940s and early 1950s Poland, along with the entire Soviet Bloc, witnessed the peak of totalitarian rule and state terror connected with the Communist era.2 Political persecutions, arrests, and censures during the Stalinist period plagued large segments of Polish society, affecting Jews and Christians alike. The regime aimed at restricting the freedoms of all religious associations, including the powerful Catholic Church, and enhanced the supervision of all nongovernmental, autonomous associations.3 With the beginning of the Stalinist years in Poland, the central government’s new economic measures directly impacted official policy relating to the country’s spatial vision. By 1948, the regime had dramatically tightened its control over the financial sec­ tor, with the abolishment of a market economy in favor of the Soviet model of a centrally planned command economy and the collectivization of lands and agriculture. Working according to the Six-Year Plan, the government’s aim was to increase production while cultivating industrialization.4 Among the regime’s central goals was the encouragement of urban regen­ eration and addressing the severe housing shortage caused by the war. New Soviet-style residential buildings were erected to house the masses, and the reconstruction of urban centers and public infrastructure was accelerated. The doctrine of Socialist Realism was most visible in the realms of the arts, design, and architecture, with the official ideological line promoted through the construction of massive monuments and functional public structures.5 The tone set by this new period was one of modernization. The rebuild­ ing, renovation, and reshaping of Poland’s landscape and its urban spaces— including the clearing away of the ubiquitous physical scars of war—became prominent in the government’s overall postwar vision. A series of laws and decisions made between 1948 and 1950 paved the way for the confiscation and nationalization of all lands and properties for “necessary national and economic needs,” which made it easier, in turn, to designate Jewish and other—mainly non-Roman Catholic—religious and historic sites for public purposes.6 In the southeast of the country, for example, hundreds of deserted Ukrainian Greek-Catholic churches, including those recognized as historical monuments, were destroyed or converted for local needs between 1949 and

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1956.7 By the early 1950s, the Polish regime was paying decreasing attention to Jewish concerns, and the relatively pluralist policy toward Poland’s Jewish minority was gradually abandoned. The political and cultural autonomy of Jews was finally severed in the wake of the emerging Cold War, with Stalin­ ist satellite regimes giving less consideration to the concerns of Western governments and international organizations.8 Despite what has already been stated, in many ways Jews fared better in Poland than they did in other Eastern Bloc countries.9 Hungary and Czecho­ slovakia, for example, were staging show trials against prominent Jewish fig­ ures, whereas Poland’s official party line explicitly rejected anti-Semitism, presenting itself as protecting the security of all citizens, regardless of their ethnicity.10 While it is true that a de jure public anti-Jewish campaign was at this early stage nonexistent, Poles of Jewish origins in the ranks of the PZPR and state apparatus were harassed and targeted for their ethnicity under the false banner of fighting against the perceived evils of Cosmopolitanism and Zionism. According to the historian Audrey Kichelewski, the accumulation of these aspersions “gave impetus to an existing anti-Jewish trend inside the Communist Party, where existing prejudices were combined with exagger­ ated internal competition and envy.”11 Aware of the widespread belief among the Polish public in the myth of the Żydokomuna, and attentive to the Soviet anti-Jewish sentiments spreading throughout the Communist Bloc, a grow­ ing circle within the Polish party leadership began to exploit this zeitgeist to increase and consolidate their own authority. Although anti-Semitism was officially regarded as a dangerous deviation from the communist ideology, members of the ruling elite were gradually seeking to appear more ethni­ cally Polish by condoning and espousing more traditionally Polish notions of anti-Jewish behavior and thought, thereby attempting to legitimize them­ selves in the public forum.12 At the turn of the decade, the former caution and sensitivity the govern­ ment had displayed in its policies toward the future of the material Jewish heritage in the initial postwar period gave way to a more practically minded and economically based approach. State authorities became demonstrably less committed to their former policy of protection of Jewish sites. Many of the government officials who had presided over the relatively tolerant policy of the 1940s were replaced in the early 1950s.13 This shift in politi­ cal discourse was manifested in tangible changes in the treatment of Jewish spaces in the postwar Polish landscape, as the case of the Muranów neigh­ borhood in Warsaw illustrates. A formerly Jewish quarter in prewar Warsaw, and the site of the largest ghetto in Europe, Muranów stands today as one of the most grandiose urban regeneration projects completed in postwar

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Poland. In 1948, a massive monument honoring the Jewish ghetto fighters, known as the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, was designed by the sculptor Nathan Rapoport and inaugurated to great fanfare. Yet by the beginning of the 1950s, a different future was envisioned for the area. Whereas previous plans of Polish architects had aimed to preserve and recreate some of the historical characteristics of the heavily damaged prewar Jewish neighbor­ hood, including the allocation of commemorative gestures to the former Jewish inhabitants and their fate, these schemes were eventually rejected. Instead, a mass-scale housing project was built on the ruins of the destroyed ghetto, burying the neighborhood’s Jewish past altogether.14 The plans to turn Muranów into a workers’ residential complex were designed under the framework of Socialist Realism, which favored functionalism and sought to glorify the communist vision. But the new communist architectural vision was not the only reason for this sudden shift in the plans for and execution of Muranów’s reconstruction. As Michel Meng demonstrates, the decision to remove all traces of Jewish Muranów ref lected the national and political priorities of the time. As the new residential quarters were going up in Muranów, concealing the neigh­ borhood’s historical Jewish past, the government was reconstructing the old city of Warsaw, carefully restoring centuries-old national and religious sym­ bols of the Polish Catholic past, while at the same time marginalizing the ghetto space.15 The government’s decreasing commitment to commemorat­ ing Jewish spaces was also on display in the discussions concerning the future of the massive Jewish cemetery in Warsaw’s Praga district. In June 1951, the cultural branch of the Central Committee of the party addressed the committee’s secretary, Edward Ochab, expressing its objection to a symbolic reconstruction at the site: “It is absolutely pointless to erect any mausoleum or memorial at the cemetery.”16 At the same time, governing town and city councils were radicalizing their visions regarding the future of Jewish sites, devising daring solutions and toughening their treatment and views of the Jewish spaces. The local petitions from the first half of the 1950s attest to a significant intensification in the local authorities’ determination to solve the “problem” posed by extant Jewish sites. Previous requests had focused on the proposed future of the site, asking to designate it to other purposes; from the 1950s on, these appeals increasingly obsessed over the site’s persistence, often asking to remove it now that it had long ceased to serve its dead and exiled community. In 1953, a few years after the 1946 plans to transform their synagogue into a cinema had failed to take shape because of MAP officials’ objection, Parczew’s town officials reached the conclusion that it would be simpler to

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tear down the building, which by that point, as they argued, had fallen into complete disrepair. In their formal request, they wrote that the building was a danger to the public, threatening to collapse at any moment. After its demolition, they proposed, the remaining bricks could be used for the construction of a new structure.17 A year earlier, in Annopol, 140 kilometers southwest of Parczew, the authorities had also sought approval to demolish their empty synagogue to make room for the construction of public hous­ ing. The town had similarly warned of the building’s imminent collapse, accusing the government of not helping them find a solution.18 This rising sense of impatience with the procrastination in solving the problem of the continued existence of abandoned Jewish sites was becoming widespread at the local level. In 1953, an anonymous letter was sent to the daily newspaper Sztandar Ludu by a resident of the town of Tarnogród, south of Lublin.19 The author expressed his dissatisfaction that nothing had been done with his town’s synagogue, which stands empty and crumbling at the town’s center, while it could be used as a culture center and to cater to the needs of the town’s youth. These voices from Parczew, Annopol, and Tarnogród ref lect the material and cultural shortages that were prevailing in the periphery at the outset of the 1950s and provide a glimpse into the populace’s grow­ ing frustration with the government’s failure to address their needs. In this atmosphere of infrastructural and social privation, the presence of unused and unavailable Jewish sites only emphasized resentment in the provinces. With the start of a new decade, state officials no longer wholly rejected requests to appropriate synagogues for mundane purposes. Warsaw’s chang­ ing attitudes can be illustrated in the case of the Bełchatów synagogue. Since 1948, the town’s authorities had been soliciting the government for leave to convert their empty synagogue into a cinema. The state had refrained from sanctioning this request, responding that former synagogues could not be used for entertainment purposes. However, in March 1950, the Department of Denominations no longer expressed an absolute objection to the town’s desire to turn their synagogue into a movie house. Instead, the department “believed” that this proposed use was “not appropriate.” In September of that year, the new department’s head reversed the former rejections and authorized that the Bełchatów synagogue be transformed into a cinema.20 Whereas until the 1950s, most petitions for the use of Jewish sites con­ cerned synagogues, in the second postwar period local officials increasingly pled for custody of Jewish cemeteries—a request hitherto seen as more prob­ lematic. In Chełm, a famous town in Jewish folklore where every second citizen was Jewish before the war, the local authority asked permission in 1951 to erect a service station for a local bus company on the grounds of the Jewish cemetery.21 In their petition to Warsaw, the town pointed out that

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no funerals had been held there since 1945, deducing that the land should therefore benefit the greater public. Similar reasoning was employed by the Kraśnik town council, where around 40 percent of the prewar population was Jewish. The council’s first attempt to turn their old Jewish cemetery into a market in 1945 was halted by Jewish leaders’ appeals to the central government. In 1952, Kraśnik made a second bid to appropriate the burial ground, proposing it be used as a storage site for construction materials. In their letter, the town deputation described its cemetery as an urban blight, contaminated by waste and filth: “It is a negative inf luence on the town’s aesthetic appearance and [its] sanitary state.”22 That same year, representatives of Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, a southcentral Polish town whose Jews had made up some 40 percent of the prewar population, expressed their wish to transform their Jewish cemetery into a park. Like many Jewish cemeteries, it was a site of former tragedy; hun­ dreds of Jews had been shot to death there and buried in unmarked graves. District and voivodeship authorities supported the town’s request. The lat­ ter cited the location of the cemetery as problematic, being too close to a couple of neighborhood schools that had been erected after the war. It was on account of these aesthetic and hygienic reasons, they contended, that it was more judicious to convert the site into a park.23 As a conciliatory gesture, the town officials proposed to create a symbolic memorial in the center of the new park, which would be constructed from the remaining matzevot. True, the use of headstones in constructing a memorial was a practice that had been adopted by postwar Jewish survivors. Yet while the survivors used displaced and fragmented gravestones to erect their monuments as an act of commemoration, local officials sought to erect memorials from intact gravestones standing in their original place as “compensation” for the acqui­ sition and repurposing of these cemeteries. After this request was made, the Ministry of Religious Affairs asked Jewish leaders for their opinion of Ostrowiec’s proposal. The religious Jewish association ZRWM was the usual address for such issues, but this time the matter was referred to the secular Jewish organization TSKŻ, which, in opposition to the traditional stance of their counterparts at ZRWM, accepted the town’s plans.24 Despite TSKŻ’s approval, the Ministry of Religious Affairs hesitated to grant Ostrowiec’s request, inquiring whether the town sincerely intended to erect a memorial in the planned park.25 Although carte blanche approval from above to clear out cemeteries had not been given during the early 1950s, facing the growing pressures from the local administration, state officials were beginning to reconsider their policy. During the first half of the 1950s, voivodeships were regularly asking their superiors in Warsaw to clarify their policy on inactive Jewish cemeteries, citing

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a growing number of local authorities who had expressed their wish to utilize abandoned Jewish cemeteries for other purposes.26 Responding to these inqui­ ries, in 1954, the Ministry of Religious Affairs maintained that Jewish cem­ eteries should not be used for any other needs; however, in cases where the cemetery had already been repurposed, it was possible to take actions to offi­ cially liquidate it.27 This position gave retrospective justification to the ongoing plunder and misuse of Jewish burial grounds. It enabled town and city councils to invoke circular argumentation to affirm their actions; since the cemetery was already being used for other purposes, there was no obstacle to clear it.28 In several cases in the early 1950s, local authorities did not even try to secure approval from Warsaw and determined the fate of Jewish cemeteries on their own initiative. The most notable case took place in Białystok. During 1952–54 municipal workers buried the traces of the large Rabbinical Cemetery under heaps of sand and gravel, completely covering the remaining monuments and turning the site into the city’s Central Park.29 Amid these developments, widespread plunder and abuse of Jewish cem­ eteries continued unabated. In May 1952, Jewish representatives in Łódź chronicled the gradual degradation of Jewish cemeteries in the vicinity. In at least eight distinct locations, they reported, matzevot were being removed and graveyard walls were being dismantled; animals were pasturing inside burial grounds; and local firms were progressively annexing swaths of cem­ etery land.30 In a 1953 report, Lublin’s voivodeship authorities confirmed the Lublin congregation’s protestations that the heavily destroyed Jewish cemetery in Parczew was being profaned. Public toilets had been installed on the site, cattle and horses had been seen wandering among the smashed tombstones, and the area was perpetually being damaged by the treading of passersby using it as a shortcut. A year later, an open market had commenced operations on the Parczew cemetery grounds.31 Following the Jews’ com­ plaints the state intervened, ordering the town to remove the toilets and take actions to prevent animals from grazing there. The toilets were removed, but the place was still used by the townspeople in subsequent years for pasture. The situation in Parczew is illustrative of a larger trend throughout Poland, where such abuses were usually tolerated by local administrations. In this way, Poland’s remaining Jewish cemeteries were diminished and destroyed, paving the way for later evidence to be summoned in the justification of their ultimate removal.

Isolated Congregations The diminishing protections that state and local officials were granting Jew­ ish sites coincided with their growing hostility toward the Jewish inhabitants

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still living in the provinces, even as overall Jewish settlement was becoming scarcer in the second postwar period. While larger Jewish congregations in the major cities were allowed to manage their religious sites, the shrink­ ing Jewish communities in the rest of the country were facing pressure and harassment by town officials who sought to expropriate active Jewish spaces, notably synagogues and cemeteries, for non-Jewish local use. Despite their diminutive numbers, the presence of any Jewish gatherings in the periphery was met with disdain and seen by local officials as an obstacle preventing them from assuming possession of what they believed should serve munici­ pal needs. One such confrontation occurred in the town of Łask. By 1950, only a handful of Jews were left in town, and they still worshipped at the local syna­ gogue. That summer, however, the town board transferred possession of the synagogue to the local firefighters on the grounds that it was “abandoned property” and therefore belonged to the town.32 The Łask Jews insisted on continuing to pray there, even though they no longer had a minyan (a quo­ rum of ten men for public prayer). In their 1951 letter to the Ministry of Reli­ gious Affairs, they argued that the town’s designation of their synagogue as abandoned was erroneous, as they were still using it for religious purposes. They further stressed that their synagogue should not be exploited for any other purpose because of its great religious significance: “It is our Western Wall.” Moreover, they complained, the building had been heavily vandalized by “dark elements” among the towns’ citizens. In addition, they wrote, the Jewish cemetery was regularly desecrated and despoiled by individuals and local firms, who removed bodies from their graves. The reason for this mal­ treatment, their impassioned letter concluded, was that the town was united in its efforts to expel the remaining Jews from Łask and destroy all remaining signs of Jewish culture. The firefighters, the Jews argued, had had a consider­ able selection of deserted buildings to choose from. “The only reason they want to use the synagogue,” the letter accused, was “in order to humili­ ate us and hurt our dignity.” Finally, the missive recounted a recent incident that had occurred when a local Jewish woman came on her father’s yahrzeit (death anniversary) to light a candle and pray for his soul. Upon entering the synagogue, she encountered a firefighter and a municipal official who forbade her from praying and drove her from the building, yelling: “The synagogue doesn’t belong to you anymore—get out of here!”33 The Poles’ version of events differed. In response to the incident of the woman seeking to pray for her deceased father, voivodeship officials claimed that she had burst into the synagogue while a town council meeting was being held to discuss the site’s future. According to their report, the woman erupted into their conclave, ranting about the synagogue not belonging to

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them and demanding they leave. In their depiction of events, the council members informed the woman that she was disturbing their congress and “asked her, politely, to leave the place.” As the officials argued, they had every right to be there as the synagogue—and all other formerly Jewish properties in town—had been legally conferred to the town. The town was in desper­ ate need of a firefighting station, they wrote, and from the town’s original population of Jewish inhabitants, nearly all of whom were “deported and never returned,” only six Jews remained—whom they described as “capital­ ists and greedy.”34 Although they did not deny that the wood beams from the synagogue had been taken by the local population after the war, they insisted these acts had not been motivated by “nationalist feelings” but were rather the result of an acute shortage of coal for heating. A similar occurrence demonstrating how the continued existence and use of Jewish sites in the periphery had given rise to escalating tensions in the 1950s took place in the city of Przemyśl, on the southeastern border. Until the war, the Jewish community had numbered around 20,000 individuals, yet only a few dozen remained in 1952. This minority faced increasing pressure and alienation from the city’s governing body, which was trying to seize a prayer house and communal center still in use by the remaining Jews. Municipal rep­ resentatives claimed that, according to the law concerning abandoned prop­ erty, the city’s Jews had no right to remain there, as the building belonged to the state.35 Moreover, they claimed, not only did the congregation have other locations where they could perform their religious activities, but the building was better suited for other, more important purposes. According to Przemyśl’s Jews, town officials had forcibly entered their prayer room in the middle of services during the Jewish holiday of Shavuot (Pentecost) and began removing prayer books from the shelves.36 After the worshipping Jews complained, the town officials put the books down and left, only to return a few days later, whereupon they commenced ejecting books, religious items, and furniture from the building and into the street. News of this soon reached the leadership of the Jewish organizations in War­ saw. A TSKŻ delegate visited Przemyśl in August 1953, surveyed the scene, and accused the local authorities of persecuting the Jewish minority. She did not hesitate to label their behavior as anti-Semitic, an accusation considered taboo during the communist period. Despite attempts by state officials to find a compromise between the local authority and the Przemyśl Jews, the city was ultimately successful in acquiring rights to the building, as the final members of the community gradually emigrated. These local quarrels may seem insignificant, but when taken as a whole they demonstrate how the status of Poland’s remaining Jewish structural presence was interconnected

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with the increasingly antagonistic national mood toward living Jews in post­ war Poland. The insistence of provincial Jewish communities to cling to their crumbling heritage sites in the face of growing attempts by local authorities to evict them and possess their property appears to have only emphasized the dissonant public sentiments toward Jewish spaces. A different case concerns the conf lict over the synagogue of Dąbrowa Tarnowska. On the eve of World War II, the town’s Jewish community num­ bered some 2,400 souls, who made up about 40 percent of the local popula­ tion. Most of them were murdered at the Bełżec extermination camp in 1942, after being shipped there from the local ghetto. Others were shot to death in the Jewish cemetery adjacent to the synagogue or were hunted down in the town’s streets. Many of those who had escaped deportation and hid in the purlieus were later handed over to the Nazis or murdered by Poles.37 After the war, the surviving Jewish congregation regrouped and, in a rare deci­ sion by the local court, won back full ownership of the Dąbrowa Tarnowska synagogue in 1947. Despite the heavy damage sustained during the war, the Jewish congregation persisted in using their synagogue for religious services, even after their numbers no longer constituted a minyan. The endurance of this huge and crumbling synagogue at the heart of their town disturbed Dąbrowa Tarnowska’s officials, as it stood at odds with their surrounding postwar rebuilding and regeneration. Since the beginning of the 1950s, the town and voivodeship had intensified their efforts to resolve this problem by conceiving plans to convert the synagogue into a cultural center, arguing that “the size of the synagogue and its central location” were “perfect for this purpose.”38 Local authorities throughout Poland had begun to realize that demolishing dilapidated buildings and constructing new ones in their place was simpler and cheaper than repairing old ones; but such an option was not viable in Dąbrowa, owing to the synagogue’s unique legal status. In 1954, town and district officials petitioned the Ministry of Religious Affairs to order the congregation to evacuate the building, expressing their growing frustration at their inability to find a solution to their problem. Asserting that the physical state of the building was only getting worse, they accused the Jews of deliberately stalling all attempts to resolve the issue, predicating in their letter that “a group of fourteen people” could not “even be regarded as an independent organization.”39 They suggested instead that the congregation be permitted to pray on Saturdays and Jewish holidays at the Tarnów city synagogue—twenty kilometers south of Dąbrowa Tarnowska—where a larger congregation existed at that time.40 Even though the Jews of Dąbrowa Tarnowska were no longer considered an official congregation, following the ZRWM’s decision to annex small

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congregations to larger ones, they continued to resist efforts to evacuate them from the synagogue, explaining that it was a holy site and the only place where they could pray. They also confuted the description of their synagogue employed by local officials, who had referred to it as “the for­ mer synagogue” (była synagoga), pointing out that it was “still an active syna­ gogue, not as they [town officials] wrote—a former synagogue.”41 In their response to the town’s request, state officials did not rule out the plan to turn Dąbrowa Tarnowska’s synagogue into a cultural center, but they condi­ tioned their approval on the council’s commitment to allocate an alternative space in town for the congregation’s religious activities. They also demanded that the original artistic elements of the building be preserved in any future renovation.42 Unable to locate an appropriate alternative site for the con­ gregation, and due to the high costs of preserving the ornaments, the local authority announced in 1956 that they were “resigning their initial plan to turn the synagogue into a cultural center, as [the conditions for doing so had] became invalid.”43 With the town unable to intervene to demolish or repair the building for its own use, and with the congregation lacking the resources to fix it, the synagogue continued to gradually deteriorate, even as the Jews, whose number further diminished, insisted on using the place for services. From the 1950s on, Jewish settlement in the Polish provinces became a rare phenomenon, one that would nearly dwindle to nil after subsequent waves of mass emigration. Despite their insignificant numbers and weaken­ ing power, the last remaining Jews in the provinces desperately and deter­ minately clung on to their worship places as a sacred duty. Their insistence on continuing to use communal property was becoming an anathema in the eyes of the municipal authorities, as it complicated their attempts to wholly accomplish the appropriation of the Jewish space and the de-Judaization of the local landscape.

Compassion and Protests As the 1950s wore on, Jewish sites were increasingly seen as a public nui­ sance, evoked impatience and animosity among local officials, and were con­ sistently damaged through lack of care, plunder, and unauthorized use. This generated agitated reactions mainly from Jewish representatives but also from non-Jewish Poles, who were sending letters of protest to Polish author­ ities, Jewish organizations, or the media. One such letter, written in 1951 by a group of citizens hailing from the village of Iwaniska and addressed to the Jewish congregation in Łódź, concerned the dire state of the village’s Jewish cemetery. Only a few years earlier, Iwaniska’s entire Jewish community—

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amounting to over 50 percent of the village population—had been murdered by the Germans. The village citizens’ letter to the Jews of Łódź sought to inform them that local residents had been plundering the cemetery. “The cemetery has existed for hundreds of years and was in use until the deporta­ tion (wysiedlenie) of the Jews. But now, there are some people here, gravedig­ gers, that are plundering the cemetery, stealing headstones and bricks from the wall.” In their letter, the citizens included the full names and addresses of two citizens whom they claimed were most responsible, asking the Łódź Jews to take the matter to the courts. “We call upon the Jewish congregation to take legal action in order to punish these people. . . . We cannot tolerate such damage to the cult of the dead.”44 Aside from echoing a moral outcry, this letter is noteworthy for its reference to the village Jews’ ultimate fate by use of the term wysiedlenie (deportation).45 Such word choice stood in con­ trast to the official local language, which strove to avoid referring directly to the Jews’ fate when proposing new uses for abandoned Jewish sites. While this term does not fully encapsulate the violent nature of the Jews’ depar­ ture, its invocation triggers the horrors of the extermination, adding another layer to the moral indictment voiced in the letter. A more overt reference to the local Jewish fate appeared in a letter written in 1954 by a body of citizens from the small town of Warta, where until the war every second citizen was Jewish. Addressing their complaint to the popu­ lar national radio program Fala 49, they expressed their grave concern about the “disrespect toward the Jewish cemetery” and explicitly mentioned what happened to the Jews: “The fence [of the cemetery has been] demolished almost totally by some citizens who should be brought to justice for doing that. And even worse: cows, horses, goats and pigs are brought to pasture in there. Such profanation is unacceptable. . . . In this cemetery lie Jews who were hanged during Hitler’s occupation and who were mass-murdered by the Nazis. And those citizens have no compassion to let them rest in peace.”46 The identification of a local Jewish cemetery as a site where crimes con­ nected to the Holocaust were committed also appears in a letter addressed to the same radio program one year later by a peasant from Parczew who wished to protest the recent construction of a marketplace on the Jew­ ish cemetery grounds. Unlike the previous example, which was elegantly crafted, this letter was phrased in a simple language: “I would like to bring to your attention, that here in Parczew they built a marketplace on the Jew­ ish cemetery in a very shameful way. . . . There, in the cemetery, many Jews were killed by the Germans, maybe even thousands, and today people place wagons there. Everybody is saying that they shouldn’t do it. It doesn’t matter if someone is Jewish or not, he is still a human being. . . . I apologize for my

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spelling mistakes. I’m only a simple peasant.”47 The disapprobation expressed in the letters is aimed not only at the breaching of the universal and religious laws proscribing the desecration of graves. The writers of these texts have been stirred by the scandalous memory of the execution and burial of their neighbors. The desecration of the resting place of Jewish victims appears to bind the cemetery with the memory of their extermination and reinforces the moral protest and call for action against the breaching of the universal taboo of disturbing the dead. The profanation of the place is thus perceived, in many ways, first and foremost as an obliteration of the memory of the murdered Jews. The significance of openly recalling the slaughter of local Jews is note­ worthy, given the atmosphere of dissimulation around the events of the Holocaust in communist Poland. Although the Shoah was not completely absent from the cultural and political discussions, public engagement with the Jewish fate had become increasingly rare. Governmental restrictions on and censorship of historical research since the early 1950s limited public dis­ cussion pertaining to the Shoah, which had been possible to some degree until then.48 The growing silence over the murder of the Jews in the war, was especially dominant in those small provincial towns where Jews sometimes formed half, or more, of the local population. Yet, in this vacuum of discus­ sion, letters like these provided a unique platform to deal with the muff led wartime past, demonstrating the potential of Jewish sites to incarnate the

Figure 11. The Jewish cemetery in Warta. 1986. Photo by Ireneusz Ślipek. Courtesy of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum archive, Israel.

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fate of the local Jewish communities. The imprinting of a cemetery with the concrete events of the Shoah strengthened the moral imperative felt by the Poles against its desecration. Citizen letters protesting the misuse of Jewish cemeteries were addressed to Polish authorities, media organs, and Jewish organizations and came from every region, social class, and age group. Some letters were penned anony­ mously, though most writers were unafraid to identify themselves by name. Those who turned to the media were likely trying to raise public awareness over a certain cemetery’s plight, but their letters usually went unpublished and instead were handed over to the authorities for inspection. What began in the 1950s as a thin stream of protest letters grew into a wider phenomenon since the 1980s. During most of the communist decades, however, these texts cannot be statistically regarded as a representative example of any significant social trend. They are the rare exception that proves the rule since they truth­ fully testify to the overall poor state of deserted Jewish sites and their gradual destruction at the hands of the local population. Nevertheless, these individual counter-voices function as “indictors of meaning which can potentially assume general dimensions,” according to the historian Edoardo Grendi.49 Carlo Ginzburg, one of the founders of the microhistory school, argues that “even a limited case can be representative.” In Ginzburg’s words, limited and unrep­ resentative cases “permit us to define the latent possibilities” of a larger phe­ nomenon and explore the potential of something which is otherwise censured and concealed.50 Accordingly, the protest letters, as rare moral outcries, may disclose the latent affectivity common to all abandoned Jewish sites—physical markers that spur the memory of the mass murder of the country’s Jews. Maria Kozaczkowa, born in 1910, provides a salient example of the mnemonic capacity of dilapidated Jewish sites in her unique poem, writ­ ten in 1952. During the war, Kozaczkowa—a journalist and poet—moved to Dąbrowa Tarnowska, where she was active in the underground press. Fol­ lowing the war, Kozaczkowa served on the local town council and became a central public figure. Her poem “The Old Synagogue” (Stara Bożnica) betrays its power not in its poetic qualities but rather in its portrayal of the synagogue as a concrete canvas, permanently imprinted with the horrors of the Jews’ murder and a pronounced metonym of their fate.51 In a small town across from the cemetery An old synagogue stands desolate: The mere sight of it strikes one with grief and dismay, For it has watched, for so many years, Over the sleep of its children, lest they should be awoken,

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Though they will not be brought back to the world of the living! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Jews were on their knees, and even the crying had ceased, Awaiting a salvo—or Jehovah’s miracle . . . —But the empty synagogue kept silent, So they just bowed their heads ever lower; Ahead of them, every road led to death And the synagogue—most probably Godless by now! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Then on the squad’s commander’s order The platoon ran their guns over the people, —They fell so slowly like corn stalks, Like ears of grain cut with a bayonet . . . The Germans threw them into a mass pit And trampled the ground with their boots. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The old synagogue . . . It still remembers the insane cry of mothers Who carried their children to their death, And the scream that returned in a multi-mouthed echo From the empty houses of the ruined ghetto, And it cries now with its blind windows Gazing at the cemetery of those murdered.52 Published in 1980, nearly thirty years after it was written, “The Old Synagogue” personifies the house of prayer as an intimate, inert, yet feeling witness to the suffering of its Jewish congregation—it cries, gazes, and remembers. It is also depicted as a victim, its body wounded and scarred, its windows blind. The state of the ruined building emphasizes the somber and tragic ambiance, buttressing its capacity to recollect the murder of its Jews. The synagogue, as depicted by the poet, functions as an “unintentional monument” (a term coined in 1903 by the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl), a memorial origi­ nally constructed with no purposive intention to memorialize or commemo­ rate.53 Unlike planned, intentional monuments, Kozaczkowa’s synagogue becomes an accidental witness to the past by means of its mere presence. This landmark functions not only as a symbolic representation of the past but also concretely registers it by recording—through Kozaczkowa’s emotional projection—the executions of dozens of the town’s Jews in the abutting Jewish cemetery during the liquidation of the ghetto.54 Polish local Stanisław Dorosz witnessed the execution of the remaining Dąbrowa ghetto Jews in December 1942. “They [the gendarmes] marched them out of the house

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Figure 12. The Dąbrowa Tarnowska synagogue. 1972. Photo by Adam Bartosz. Courtesy of the photographer.

four by four, and led them to the Jewish cemetery. There, they told them to strip, and to jump into the pits which had been dug earlier. A Gestapo agent from Tarnów did the shooting. He shot all the Jews the same way.”55 There are different ways to read this poem. The figure of the synagogue as an inanimate witness can be seen as representational of the alleged Polish forced passivity of the town’s non-Jewish residents, thus fostering a widely accepted belief that the Polish citizenry was barred from helping its Jewish neighbors, having been coerced by the Germans into becoming powerless observers, unable to prevent their death.56 Considering these varying inter­ pretations, “The Old Synagogue” undoubtedly demonstrates the extent to which a mutilated synagogue can incorporate the visual and aural memories of the Jews’ deportation and murder. Kozaczkowa’s synagogue is equally a vernacular fact and an element rooted in the local landscape as well as a Frem­ dkörper (foreign body) which, according to Eelco Runia, “make[s] past events present on the plane of the present, fistulae that connect and juxtapose those events to the here and now.”57 The derelict presence of the synagogue, as depicted in Kozaczkowa’s poem, thus testifies not only to the historical events but also to their lingering affect.

JC

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5

The Antechamber of Mystery

As the dust and confusion of World War II and the early postwar years settled, deserted and dilapidated Jewish burial grounds and houses of prayer began to acquire a unique presence amid the physical and mental townscapes of formerly “Jewish towns.” Desired prop­ erty, victims of exploitation, and vectors of past violence, these sites gradu­ ally entered the local folklore, as is often recalled by members of the postwar generations, who inherited a changed reality devoid of Jewish presence. Growing up in postwar, provincial Biłgoraj, Piotr T. Kwiatkowski (b. 1957) was exposed to almost no physical evidence of his town’s centuries-old Jewish community, which in 1939 had constituted the majority. One of the remaining traces of the Jews’ historical presence was the new Jewish cem­ etery. Hundreds of Jews were executed there by the Germans and buried in mass graves. After the war, a concrete factory was built on parts of its grounds. Located at the outskirts of town, the cemetery was “nobody’s,” as Kwiatkowski remembers, yet it radiated a special attraction. The remains of the old wall, erected years ago f rom large, uneven chunks of stones, formed the boundary between a place where time had stopped, and ground that bore the weight of everyday human affairs. As children, we rode there several times a year on our bicycles to experience an unusual, slightly thrilling feeling. We left our bicycles

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against what was left of the wall and climbed the slight elevation. From there, we could see the cemetery spread out below us. There was a small square overgrown with thistles and wormwood, where ordinary grass did not want to grow. An uneven square, where a dozen or more headstones leaned this way or that, and several lay f lat on the ground. We stood at the border of the cemetery looking down into that melancholic, rubble-strewn ground. Each of us felt the tension: the antechamber of a mystery stood open before us. From that place, everything led to the unknown. . . . The Jewish cemetery was like an open door to the abyss. . . . We entered it solemnly, with gravity and with something like fear.1 Kwiatkowski’s sensitive description of the cemetery, as he recalled in an essay written in 1984, is tinged with a thrilling intimidating ambiance. Its ramshackle state, surrounded by wild vegetation, emphasized its complete strangeness and otherworldly presence. The cemetery is described in the text as different from any of the familiar spaces known from everyday reality. It reverberates the universal in-betweenness of the cemetery, which marks the threshold between life and death, presence and absence, and past and present. As the place “where the absent is made present,” concretely and symbolically, the cemetery “confuses what is and is not.”2 In his discussion on “Heterotopia,” Michel Foucault defines the cemetery as “a place unlike ordi­ nary cultural spaces.”3 He argues that while the cemetery remains “outside of all places,” its presence nevertheless possesses a special status, as it is “con­ nected with all the sites of the city, state or society or village.”4 According to his formulation, the unique position of the cemetery derives not from its ordinary integration in the city’s structure but rather the opposite, function­ ing as “the other city,” a mirror ref lection that complicates the distinction between the living and the dead.5 Although it could be argued that every cem­ etery possesses these ambiguous qualities, the image of the post-Holocaust deserted Jewish cemetery problematizes and confuses the dialectical rela­ tionship between presence and absence more than usual and presents a paradigmatic case of a heterotopic space, being the ultimate “other” place. The account in the above quote demonstrates the capacity of the grave­ yard to occupy the position of a threshold and to function as a “liminal space,” which is defined by the anthropologist Victor Turner as being “betwixt and between.”6 The children stand behind the wall that separates the world of “everyday human affairs” from the “unknown” and “abyss.” The terms “bor­ der,” “boundary,” and “antechamber,” which appear in the text, highlight the cemetery’s liminal position as just outside the known landscape and magnify

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its powerful presence and threatening attraction. These strange encounters with the Jewish cemetery in his hometown led Kwiatkowski and his friends to seek out scarce and fragmentary memories from their families about their former Jewish neighbors and their extermination, but this knowledge failed to become integrated into a familiar pattern. The Jewish wartime fate appeared to them as “some unfamiliar catastrophe” and as a “hasty death that passed into total oblivion.” The memory of the Jewish tragedy was ref lected in the peculiar position of the Jewish cemetery in the local landscape, becom­ ing “a phenomenon located somewhere in the middle, between our ordinary human world and the world of matter and nature.”7 Many Poles who were born after the war in provincial towns remembered the Jewish traces in their surroundings as a source of ambivalent attraction, evoking a wide range of sensations. In these childhood memories, the aban­ doned Jewish spaces were in many ways experienced as totally dissimilar to other spaces in town and possessing a unique status—“different from all the sites” in Foucauldian terms.8 Embodying the undiscussed local Jewish past, these sites, mainly cemeteries, were often regarded by postwar generations as “forbidden places,” located outside of the normative boundaries, but also as places that radiated an intriguing ambiance. Their forbidden character endowed them with an attractive aura. The nature of these childhood interactions with Jewish burial grounds ranges from solemn fear and thrilling eeriness to more macabre experiences such as playing with human remains. Next to the grounds of one of the two other Jewish cemeteries in Biłgoraj, which was destroyed and razed by the Germans, a school was built after the war. During construction works in its backyard, bones and skulls were exposed and were used by pupils as a morbid amusement. Although there were several hypotheses as to the origins of the body parts, the accepted version among the school children was that these are the remains of Jews killed by the Germans.9 In other memories, Jewish cemeteries were not necessarily associated with such ghastly impres­ sions and held a thrilling yet nonthreatening playful attraction. A woman from Krynki, a small town close to Białystok that was predominantly Jewish until the war, remembered the Jewish cemetery as the “other” place of her childhood, yet it lacked any frightening connotations. “We went there [to the Jewish cemetery] because it was a mysterious place. A secret place, very differ­ ent, exotic. . . . It wasn’t scary, not at all.”10 Another interviewee from Krynki, who was born in the late 1950s, recounted how she and her friends used to play hide-and-seek in the cemetery, hiding behind the matzevot.11 Another point of exotic interest for Krynki’s children was the town’s crumbling Great Synagogue. Its ruined yet grandeur-filled presence was experienced as an

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Figure 13.

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The Jewish cemetery in Krynki. 2014. Photo by the author.

ancient artifact from a lost world and enchanted the imagination of the local children. One of them, a woman who was born at the beginning of the 1960s, used to name the synagogue “my mysterious castle” (mój tajemniczy zamek).12

Fear and Fascination Polish society’s postwar experiences of, and thoughts about, Jewish sites largely aligned with traditional notions and beliefs about the Jews and Jew­ ish spaces in the prewar Eastern Europe folk culture and lore. Local, nonJewish populations, especially in villages and small towns, conceived of the Jewish religious landscape with a combination of fear and respect, fascination and loathing. Despite the centuries of Jewish and non-Jewish cohabitation, interreligious borders had mostly been maintained between these disparate communities; this separation fueled the persistence and embellishment of stereotypes and superstitions about the other’s religious practices.13 Com­ munal Jewish death rituals and burial practices spawned, in particular, folk fantasy.14 Some prevailing notions among Gentiles were that Jews were buried sitting down and that encountering a Jewish funeral procession was

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considered a bad omen.15 Archetypal symbols on matzevot contributed to these creative stories. The image of blessing hands, for example, which marks the grave of Kohanim (members of the hereditary Jewish priestly caste), was believed to symbolize the Jews’ calling for Jesus’s crucifixion.16 Synagogues, too, were objects of creative curiosity. In the remote eastern town of Orla, which until 1939 was predominantly Jewish, non-Jews who grew up there before the war were able to speak about their memories of the town’s synagogue, which they did not dare to enter.17 One of the inhabit­ ants, who had the “courage” to peek through the windows of the synagogue, remembered the “satanic paintings” on the wall. Another person recalled an episode when the rabbi tried to tempt him to enter the synagogue using “poi­ soned tobacco.”18 In its liminal exotic alterity, the Jewish cemetery, in particu­ lar, was regarded as a “forbidden place,” a site with “supernatural” qualities, both demonic and healing.19 Myths about the ambivalently magical power of the Jewish cemetery were common in the local folklore.20 The ethnogra­ pher Alina Cała has documented the obscure practice of integrating parts of headstones and even corpses from the Jewish cemetery in the walls of cow sheds and stables in order to heal animals.21 According to a popular legend in the Ukrainian provinces, grit scraped from an inscription on a matzevah can be used to curse blacksmiths.22 The perception of the Jewish cemetery in prewar folk culture, involving a religiously charged attraction on the one hand and a fearful repulsion on the other, is perhaps not disconnected from the intrinsic tension in the Jew­ ish tradition concerning the site of burial. A place of everlasting sacredness, it is also the prototype of impurity. Visiting the Jewish cemetery is consid­ ered a religious obligation and in certain streams of Judaism is connected to magical-salvational qualities; yet the cemetery is also regarded as “a place where one does not go,” and which under certain circumstances should be avoided.23 Evidence of Gentiles adopting esoteric Jewish traditions con­ nected to burial places has been found in ethnographic research. The famous writer and folklorist S. Ansky, for example, visited a village where newly mar­ ried Jewish couples would go to the grave of a Jew who was believed to have been murdered by the Cossacks and perform a dance for good luck and protection around the grave.24 Ansky noticed that the non-Jews in the village had adopted this practice as well.25 The famous Hasidic tradition of placing kvitlach (notes with personal prayers or requests) on the grave of the local tzaddik (the spiritual leader of a Hasidic community) was also adopted by local Poles in the provinces, who often regarded him a “holy man” with special powers.26 This mythical approach to Jewish religious sites was, in many ways, embodiment and incarnation of the general perception of the

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Jews themselves in the eyes of their neighbors in Polish folklore.27 Accord­ ing to Cała, the strangeness of the Jews “has always given rise to ambivalent feelings similar to those felt in the presence of holiness: fear, awe, and at the same time fascination and admiration.”28 The Jew in rural Polish society, argues Olga Goldberg-Mulkiewicz, was often “a liminal figure with a special supernatural unique force.”29

Illegible Stain on the Map The aftermath of the war did not diminish the liminal status of the Jews and their spaces in the eyes of their (now former) neighbors. In the almost total absence of living Jews in small towns and villages, their inanimate, empty traces—namely cemeteries and synagogues—retained their already ambiv­ alent position and were charged with an even more peculiar macabre air. They became subjected to a physical and conceptual process of forgetfulness and repression, often cut off from their surroundings by visible or invisible boundaries. In many towns, the neglect of the Jewish cemetery has led to a creation of natural borders, like thick clumps of bushes and vegetation that engulf and conceal the place as an urban enclave. Some of these urban enclaves are still visible today. In 2015, I went with an acquaintance from Sokółka to visit the local Jewish cemetery. As we were making our way to the cemetery, he told me that as a school kid, he used to play soccer there with his classmates. He also remembered that they referred to the cemetery simply as Żydki (Yids/Kikes—a derogatory term for Jews), without really understanding what exactly this place is. Entering the site was not an easy task since the cemetery was entangled in what looked like a wild forest, located right next to a residential neighborhood. After managing to clear our way into the heart of the cemetery, we encountered a group of young boys who were standing next to the hardly visible graves and playing pikuty (mumblety-peg)—an old, and quite dangerous, outdoor game involv­ ing throwing pocketknives to the ground. It appeared they had their own little campsite in the heart of the forest. When I asked them why they are coming to hang out in the cemetery, of all places, they answered, halfembarrassed: “Because no one comes here.” Until its clean-up in the 1980s, the Jewish cemetery in Tarnów was “some sort of a thicket of trees and bushes, surrounded by a crumbling wall,” as described by Adam Bartosz.30 Growing up after the war in Tarnów, a mediumsized town in which Jews comprised around half of the prewar population, Bartosz remembers that almost nobody entered the perimeters of the cem­ etery. But while out of bounds for most people, he recalls, it had a special

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Figure 14.

The Jewish cemetery in Sokółka. 2015. Photo by the author.

attraction for some heterodox characters. “In the consciousness of Tarnów’s residents, the presence of Jews in the past seemed an empty concept, not one which would arouse ref lections or questions. Just as the area of the Tarnów Jewish cemetery was a sort of hole, an illegible stain on the city map. It was located nearly in the center of the city, but no one ever went in there. . . . I made my first attempt to enter the Jewish cemetery, which proved an impass­ able jungle, a thirty-year-old forest. . . . Its depths were a campground for groups of tramps, drunks, and similar types.”31 During the communist years, and to a lesser extent even today, one of the hallmarks of Jewish cemeteries, apart from physical neglect and ruin­ ation, were empty alcohol bottles and groups of drunks, nomads, and other non-normative types. The Jewish cemetery of Krynki, for example, was used during the 1980s by local youth to grow cannabis and to have drinking par­ ties. As one of them told me, it was the perfect location since “nobody ever came there.” Reports and complaints about disturbing and unusual activi­ ties in Jewish cemeteries were common during the communist decades. In 1959, alerting the Polish Jewish paper Folks-Sztyme about the ongoing van­ dalism and destruction in the Jewish cemetery in Olsztyn, a former German city in the north of the country, a worried Polish citizen described how the place was turning into a despicable and odd playground, as “drunks and all

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sorts of hooligans” go there regularly and “have [drinking] orgies.”32 He also warned that children who played outside witnessed those sights and heard “the strange noises.” In an official report by district officials from 1968, the destroyed Jewish cemetery in Wągrowiec, close to Poznań in central Poland, was described as a dismal place, which in the summertime was frequently visited by “hoo­ ligan elements who are engaged in drinking feasts.”33 At the beginning of the 1980s, a Polish citizen who informed the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw about the poor state of the Jewish cemetery in Chrzanów depicted the site as “a meeting place for all kinds of dark elements.”34 In the same year, voivodeship officials in Kraków reported that in several towns in the area, youth gangs would go to Jewish cemeteries and get drunk.35 Visiting Kraków at the beginning of the 1980s, the Israeli poet Haim Gouri met a gathering of underground types, drunks, and prostitutes, sitting at the entrance to the old Jewish cemetery. One of the prostitutes even helped him find the key to the gate.36 Dilapidated synagogues were also used by outcast figures. The only surviving synagogue in Warsaw, Nożyk, for example, was described in the 1970s as a place where drunks and prostitutes would stay.37 It should be mentioned that these anomalous underground practices are not limited to Jewish places and ruins. Deserted German cemeteries in post­ war Poland, for example, have similarly been described as meeting places for certain “shady” characters.38 It is a nearly universal phenomenon that in many rural communities and at the outskirts of urban centers, youth groups, tramps, nomads, and gangs often consume alcohol in marginal sites such as cemeteries.39 These drinking sprees often involve the destruction and van­ dalization of such sites, not to mention other violent and antinomian behav­ iors.40 Deserted cemeteries and other marginal, unfrequented locations tend to harbor even more illegal activities, and in rural societies they are recog­ nized as prime meeting places for addicts and other “dangerous” groups.41 The special appeal that cemeteries and deserted areas hold for children is also a universal and well-reported phenomenon.42 Playing games inside graveyards is a common and worldwide cultural occurrence. Moreover, for­ eign and abandoned cemeteries hold an extra dimension of mystery, thrill, and allure for the young. Postwar Poland’s landscape was fertile ground for this type of play, boasting no small share of deserted and neglected domains. In the west and north of the country, the heritage sites belonging to the former German inhabitants became the “other space” of new Polish settlers’ childhoods. Old and deserted Protestant cemeteries were popular hideaways for local youth.43 “The site of the old cemetery has stirred up many emotions in me since childhood. It was a very mysterious place,” writes the

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Polish professor of the arts, Mariusz Białecki, reminiscing on his hometown’s deserted Evangelical cemetery. “To me the cemetery means enormous old trees . . . stone tombstones, slowly and gradually absorbed by the ground and twined around by vegetation, as well as the wind, somewhat colder and stronger there. It also means attempts at deciphering the unknown language, written in an archaic typeface.”44 Understanding the universal appeal of graveyards and abandoned spaces (at least for children and heterodox groups) and the enhanced attraction foreign cemeteries seem to hold for them allows us to locate the social perception of deserted Jewish sites as part of a global cultural landscape, characteristic of urban outskirts, which is often associated with postconf lict and disputed spaces. For the postwar generations who grew up in towns emptied of their Jewish population, deserted Jewish sites became the embodiment of such extraterritorial enclaves. But the social perception of specifically Jewish space carried an additional, idiosyncratic charge that not only ref lected the universal pattern of “other space” but also incarnated the unique place of the Jews in local folklore and the unsettling memories of their violent, though undiscussed, mass disappearance. The fact that nearly all provincial Jewish cemeteries were transformed into sites of execution and mass burial during the war has contributed to their postwar existence and conception as barren and degraded spaces, remote from normal human affairs, while simultane­ ously exerting a peculiar, macabre attraction. Forsaken, intimidating, thrill­ ing, and located at the physical and symbolic outskirts of the townscape, the Jewish cemetery became a resonant no man’s land, emblematic of the place of the dead Jews in the local consciousness.

JC

HAPTER

6

Liberalization, Nationalism, and Erasure

As a wide array of everyday practices, cultural attitudes, and collective emotional reactions toward Jewish space grew to become permanent fixtures in postwar Polish folklore and imagination, the status of the country’s gradually disintegrating Jewish cemeteries and syna­ gogues was being shaped by political developments at home and abroad. The dramatic changes in Poland’s political system, starting in the mid-1950s, had a significant effect on the fate and future of Jewish sites in the succeed­ ing years. The first signs of an easing of the strict and centralized Stalinist policies came about in 1954, a year after Stalin’s death, when open criticism by Polish intellectuals was raised against the evils and repressions of Stalinism.1 Following the first steps of de-Stalinization undertaken by Moscow, anti-Zionists texts began to appear less in the Polish press, and restrictions on Jewish organizations and other autonomous associations, such as the Catho­ lic Church, were to some extent eased.2 Crucial events in the course of 1956 led to what is known as “the Polish Thaw.”3 Public disclosure and dissemina­ tion of Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” denouncing Stalin; the March 1956 death of Bolesław Bierut, leader of the Polish state; and massive public protests and demonstrations in Poland later that summer all culminated in October 1956 with the election of Władysław Gomułka as first secretary of the PZPR and the leader of the state. Gomułka, who had led the country until

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his ousting in 1948 for being a “right-wing reactionist,” was put now back on the front stage in an attempt to calm the social unrest. In the revolutionary aftermath of 1956, Poles and Jews alike experienced substantial cultural change. The iron fist of previous years had begun to loosen, with some liberal measures finding their way into the political, cul­ tural, social, and economic spheres. Responding to growing social unrest and dissatisfaction, some of the censures on the freedom of speech and restric­ tions on civil liberties were eased. The opening up of the public sphere led to a certain cultural renaissance. Writers, painters, dramatists, and playwrights were now given some more liberty to wrestle with elements of the Polish heritage and history in ways that would have previously provoked the ire of the Stalinist regime.4 In addition, the public expressions of Catholic and national sentiments, which until then had been restricted and controlled, were given freer reign.5 As opposed to other Eastern Bloc countries, such as Hungary, where social unrest and demonstrations were met with a Soviet military invasion, Moscow and Warsaw had reached an understanding, giv­ ing Poles a greater level of autonomy in their internal affairs and allowing for the adoption of a “Polish Road to Socialism” as pledged by Gomułka, trying to address national sentiments within the society.6 After 1956, the new reality in Poland led to an apparent recovery of cul­ tural and political Jewish life concomitant with the liberalization of the public sphere.7 The previously tight supervision of the country’s Jewish organiza­ tions was relaxed, cultural autonomy was more permitted, and international organizations, such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, could now resume their activity in the country. In addition, following agree­ ments between Warsaw and Moscow, over 250,000 Polish citizens were allowed to return home after having been forced into exile in the USSR by the Soviets during the war. Among these repatriates were some 18,000 Jews, initially seen by the leaders of Polish Jewry as “new blood,” capable of reviv­ ing the country’s Jewish population.8 As was true in almost every political crisis in communist Poland, Jews again found themselves in the eye of the storm. Large segments within the political elites understood that one quick and easy way to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the increasingly disillusioned Polish public was through the ousting and expulsion of Poles of Jewish origins from the Communist Party and state leadership, pinning the blame for all Stalinist crimes on the Jews. This purge targeted some of the most prominent figures in the state and party apparatus, such as Hilary Minc, minister of industry and commerce and deputy prime minister, as well as Jakub Berman, the powerful head of the Ministry of Public Security. The problem of “over-representation” of

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Jews in the government was raised in internal party discussions, and there were a growing number of voices within the Communist Party demanding an “ethnically-oriented manpower policy,” who overtly espoused anti-Jewish stereotypes, accusing Jews of disloyalty and betrayal.9 Although the official party line until the late 1960s still condemned and rejected anti-Semitic manifestations, anti-Jewish views spread throughout Polish society.10 The climate surrounding the events of 1956, along with bur­ geoning social and economic unrest, led to an increase in anti-Jewish acts and attitudes across the country. The political transformation had indeed liberalized the public sphere, allowing for the creation of new platforms for open engagement with various, hitherto repressed cultural and historical topics but, at the same time, it also diminished the taboo of openly express­ ing anti-Jewish beliefs. The reintroduction of Catholic education, as some scholars have posited, also contributed to increasing anti-Jewish attitudes.11 Freed from their earlier constraints, some Poles took advantage of their newfound social liberation by settling scores with the alleged “enemies of the people”—namely national minorities, particularly Jews—through verbal harassment and physical attacks.12 While officially adopting a more pluralist stance toward national and religious minorities, party officials were adept at kindling nationalist and chauvinist feelings for their own political benefit. They did not have to work hard to convince the people that it was the Jews who should be blamed for Stalinism and for their poor economic situation.13 Reports came pouring to the country’s Jewish organizations and the security services: Jews were being targeted in the streets, at their workplaces, and at school. Jewish workers were dismissed from their jobs, and Jewish school­ children were harassed by their Polish peers and teachers.14 Monitoring pub­ lic opinion, the Ministry of Internal Affairs officials informed in May 1956 on a “growing tendency to express negative opinions about Jews publicly and remove them from their positions.”15 Despite these reports, the authorities took no tangible actions to address the rising wave of popular anti-Jewish hostility, denying the reality recorded even by their own intelligence services. Hostile attitudes toward the Jewish minority were also felt in the Recov­ ered Territories—one of the main centers of Jewish life in the country in the mid-1950s. The political and social upheavals of 1956 further cracked the sense of relative security that Jewish inhabitants had enjoyed in the new Polish lands. In Żary, about thirty kilometers east of the German border, the town’s 350 Jews began to sense their Polish neighbors’ growing hostil­ ity toward them, which was most-tellingly expressed in the spatial contact zones, such as cemeteries. In the summer of 1957, district officials suggested building a wall around the Jewish quarter, separating it from the general

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Catholic cemetery, inside which the Jewish quarter was located. The aim of this project was to limit or prevent further verbal attacks on Jewish mourn­ ers by Catholic Poles, which had recently spiked in Jewish reports and been confirmed by town officials. According to the officials, Jewish visitors had been increasingly harassed by Christian Poles, who would mock them and also insult their dead during funerals and prayers.16 By the end of the 1950s, the last remaining Jews in the small, Lower Sile­ sian town of Ziębice were faced with substantial pressures by local officials who had been trying to expropriate the town’s synagogue. Although it had been deeded to the congregation after the war, and the Jews were still using it for religious and communal purposes, the town and voivodeship main­ tained, in correspondence with state officials, that the synagogue should be consigned to the town to use as a warehouse for food products. According to the Ziębice municipality’s position, which was presented to Warsaw by the voivodeship representative, there were only thirty Jews left, and there­ fore they no longer constituted a congregation, but rather “a self-proclaimed group.”17 The town’s leaders further claimed that only eleven of the Jews were religious, and since “Jews must have at least ten people to pray,” there was no sense in letting them keep the synagogue.18 They also argued that Ziębice’s Jews were not capable of performing necessary maintenance on their synagogue. Despite the protests of the Jews, officials in Warsaw chose to side with the town’s claims and ruled in their favor. They instructed the town authorities to confiscate all official stamps bearing the title of the Jew­ ish congregation, having deemed that they do not appear in the register of the ZRWM as an official congregation.19 The post-1956 wave of anti-Jewish sentiments that had engulfed the coun­ try was openly criticized by a few Polish intellectuals and activists, and led to first public discussions in Catholic circles, which addressed the problem of anti-Semitism.20 But the populist and nationalist expressions drowned out these critical voices.21 The momentum produced by the general anti-Jewish atmosphere that had accompanied the events of 1956 contributed to the most substantial consequence of the political change on the Jewish population. Between 1956 and 1959, around 50,000 Polish Jews emigrated from Poland, most of them settling in Israel.22 Jews were not forced to leave the country, but there was also nothing preventing them from doing so. On the contrary, the ban on emigration had been lifted mainly for Jewish citizens. Many Jews, among them the majority of the repatriates from the Soviet Union, seized upon this opportunity to leave Poland and the Communist Bloc. By the start of the 1960s, around 35,000 Jews remained in the country, mostly in the large cities.23 Many of the smaller communities in the periphery were dissolved

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after their last members left the country. With substantially fewer Jews in the provinces, the protection and maintenance of abandoned religious sites became an impossible task for the country’s Jewish leadership. Although international Jewish aid organizations had been permitted to resume their activities in the country after 1956, they regularly preferred investing in active places of worship over abandoned cemeteries and synagogues that had fallen into disuse. Looking after the thousands of deserted Jewish sites, Joint offi­ cials argued, would be an “impossible financial burden.”24

Solving the Problem With the new sociopolitical reality so transformed, the latter half of the 1950s and the following decade witnessed the biggest wave of physical demolition of Jewish sites since the war. Local officials were more effective in convincing the state to remove protections from abandoned Jewish cemeteries through­ out the country, preparing the literal and figurative ground for their future erasure and local exploitation. Formally all decisions that touched on the fate of Jewish sites had to be made by governmental ministries, but local officials now felt freer to push the limits of the law, broadening their interpretation of the formal guidelines. This growing self-confidence on the part of Poland’s local governing bodies and their increasing urgency to “solve the problem” of extant, structural Jewish presence was reinforced by a further loosening of the state’s commitment to protect Jewish religious sites and appeared to be inf luenced by the rising anti-Jewish tendencies. These developments coincided with the ongoing impetus toward mod­ ernization and renovation that had been in motion since the beginning of the 1950s, spurred on by the drive to overcome a troubled past by removing and erasing remaining tangible signs of war that had marred the Polish vista and were manifested in official decisions adopted in the mid-1950s. In August 1955, the government adopted a resolution for the “Removal of the Traces of War Damages” from the Polish landscape, regulating and advancing the demolition and clearing of ruined buildings and monuments.25 Although this resolution was general in its construction and did not single out Jewish sites, it was seized upon by local authorities to promote the removal of non-Polish sites, particularly Jewish and German. In August 1956, for example, the Pajęczno district authorities, close to Łódź, relayed on this resolution when voting to pull down the town’s syn­ agogue, proclaiming that it was threatening to collapse, thus endangering public safety.26 Not satisfied with the erasure of the synagogue, the town board further maintained that its bricks be used as pavement. A few days

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later, the decision was forwarded to the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which did not oppose the demolition of the synagogue, but also did not approve the use of the bricks for subsequent construction.27 State, voivodeship, and local authorities continued to discuss the matter during the next months, when political turmoil in the country reached a peak, culminating in massive demonstrations and protests in October 1956 and the subsequent reshuff ling of the government and administration. In November 1956, as part of the political changes, Jerzy Sztachelski was appointed director of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which from now on showed less commitment to the pro­ tection of Jewish religious sites.28 Shortly after his appointment, the ministry approved the use of the Pajęczno synagogue’s bricks for paving the town’s roads or for any other purposes.29 The sequence of events in Pajęczno demonstrates how the central author­ ities after 1956 became increasingly receptive to local authorities’ interests, leading to another substantial deterioration in the status of Jewish cemeter­ ies and synagogues. This change in the government’s stance also affected other non-Catholic heritage sites. Although following the political changes there appeared to be an easing of the restrictions on religious minorities in the country, state officials overwhelmingly approved the demolition of abandoned German cemeteries and churches, which well into the 1960s dis­ appeared from the Polish landscape at a dizzying pace.30 Although a blanket approval to liquidate heritage sites was still not given in the case of Jewish sites, the aftermath of the mini-revolution of 1956 moved the state’s overall visions for Poland closer to those held by its local organs. The undermin­ ing of the protection of Jewish traces was a two-way process that ref lected the interdependence of the governments in the center and the periphery. Warsaw’s hardening position toward the status of Jewish sites inf luenced dynamics on the ground, and the concerns and demands at the local level helped shape official policy toward the Jewish space. An overview of local governmental documentation from 1956 on demonstrates a sharp increase in the initiatives taken by municipalities to clear away abandoned Jewish and German cemeteries. The f lood of requests from the periphery emphasized the urgency these towns felt to regulate the use of abandoned cemeteries through permanent legalization that would address the growing demands of the local administration. After a series of ad hoc decisions by state officials, the 1932 “Burial and Cemeteries Law” was amended in 1959.31 The amended law shortened the timespan that needed to pass between the last burial in a cemetery and the ability to repurpose the cemetery for another use, from fifty years in the

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original law to a period of forty years. An even more substantial change dealt with unique cases in which the area of the cemetery was deemed “indispens­ able for public use,” even before the expiry of the inviolability period. The prewar law had maintained that such a determination could be decided by state authorities only after consultation with the representative of the com­ munity to which the cemetery belonged; however, this crucial restriction was missing in the 1959 version of the law.32 The reasons behind this legal change, which did not single out Jewish cemeteries as a distinct category, were probably part of a larger attempt by the government to limit the power of religious associations. In practice, this amendment eased the conditions for expunging inactive Jewish cem­ eteries and marked a further step in the convergence of the state and local authorities’ views on their future.33 Local authorities took advantage of the new legal possibilities for their benefit, often giving the laws a broad inter­ pretation. For instance, when trying to advance plans to utilize the Jewish cemetery for the construction of a vehicle inspection point, the authorities in Płońsk, the birthplace of Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion, relied on the updated burial law, arguing that the proposed building plan con­ stituted an exceptional and indispensable public need.34 Other “public needs” invoked by municipalities to justify the use of a Jewish cemetery for other purposes included the building of recreational areas, constructing housing estates and workshops, the discovery of “gravel resources” in the area of the cemetery, or a general wish to improve the aesthetic appearance of the town.35 Such legal amendments, which gave local authorities more tools to remove Jewish cemeteries, were published around the same time in other countries as well. In 1958, state legislators in Soviet Ukraine adopted new regulations that allowed to use cemeteries for other purposes without hav­ ing to wait any minimal period of time from the last burial, thus amending the previous Soviet law that required a waiting period of twenty years. The amendment was aimed at all cemeteries, but it was employed immediately by local authorities to erase Jewish cemeteries.36 These developments in Poland led to a situation in which local authorities did not necessarily wait for official approval before taking concrete actions on the ground.37 In the late 1950s, some provincial municipalities felt confi­ dent enough to start construction works inside Jewish cemeteries without informing state authorities, often receiving a post-factum approval from gov­ ernment ministries, which were less bothered with these independent local initiatives. In many cases, local authorities retroactively justified their acts by arguing that removing the traces of the cemetery had become inevitable

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since “it has lost all characteristics and value of a cemetery.” They failed to mention that the cemetery had reached this condition, to a large extent, because of the actions of the townspeople and authorities.38 While clearing cemeteries entailed some legal sophistry from the side of the local authorities, pulling down a synagogue was simpler. Officially, the government’s approval was mandatory to perform such an act, but local authorities showed lesser commitment to following this regulation.39 The second half of the 1950s witnessed a widespread tide of demolitions of syna­ gogues, initiated and promoted by the local authorities, arguing that their advanced state of destruction left no other choice but to level them com­ pletely, as their current state jeopardized the public’s safety. Local officials made sure to highlight the urgency and necessity of removing synagogue buildings, often carrying out preparatory steps for the demolition before receiving authorization from the state. In many of these cases, the work was done by the local authorities, without the state’s formal agreement or even disregarding previous contradicting orders. In 1954, for instance, the Ministry of Art and Culture rejected the town of Płońsk’s suggestion to demolish its seventeenth-century synagogue, stating that it should be instead preserved and treated as a historical monument. Nevertheless, by 1956 the synagogue was dismantled at the municipality’s initiative.40 In Olkusz, town officials increased their efforts to solve the problem of the synagogue. In 1955, a year after another proposal to repurpose the increas­ ingly dilapidated building was rejected by the state, the town pushed forward a plan to tear down the building altogether. At the request of the local coun­ cil, the provincial authorities adopted a resolution to raze the synagogue, acting under the government’s decision from 1955 that regulated the demoli­ tion of war-damaged structures. According to a post-factum report submit­ ted by the voivodeship official, the Olkusz synagogue was “three-quarters destroyed” and was “regularly being disassembled by unknown perpetra­ tors.”41 Though the plan did not receive formal approval from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, the town proceeded with the demolition plans. Because of administrative and bureaucratic red tape by the Kraków voivodeship authorities, the project was stalled again. Eager to remove the ruins, in the summer of 1957, the town’s leaders took matters into their own hands and decided to carry out the demolition works by themselves. Since the appro­ priate mechanical equipment was not available to them, the demolition was conducted by local residents, who tore down the walls with shovels and ham­ mers and used the bricks for their own needs. According to the above report, “The town council had found volunteers among the locals who pulled down the building in exchange for the remaining building materials, which they then used for their private purposes.”

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Only a few months later, word of the events in Olkusz reached the ZRWM, which demanded explanations from Olkusz officials and informed the Ministry of Religious Affairs of what had happened.42 The latter was sur­ prised to learn of the local authorities’ independent initiative and asked for clarifications. Town officials explained that they had decided to act indepen­ dently after all previous attempts to repurpose the building of the synagogue had failed. They insisted that tearing down the synagogue was necessary in order to safeguard the public: “The demolition needed to be performed as quickly as possible because of sanitary and aesthetic reasons.”43 Despite the clear deviation from protocol, state officials did not seem to be particularly concerned with the issue and did not take any actions against the Olkusz’s authorities, thus signaling their decreasing commitment and will to protect abandoned Jewish sites from destruction. Even after the complete demoli­ tion of the Olkusz’s synagogue, the process of its erasure from the townscape continued. Two years after the demolition, the local council decided to change the name of the street on which the synagogue had stood.44 As the minutes of the council’s meeting on June 6, 1959, indicate, its original name, “The Synagogue Street” (ulica Bóżnicza), was changed to “Corporal Kamienka,” (Korporal Kamienka) in honor of a local Polish policeman who was murdered after the war.45 In the 1960s, local authorities felt more secure in ordering the complete razing and leveling of Jewish cemeteries; this often included uprooting head­ stones and damaging bodily remains. Such “public works” had precedent, but the special sensitivity surrounding desecration of Jewish cemeteries had hitherto checked the complete erasure of Jewish cemeteries on a mass scale. In this decade, the last measures of state protection for Jewish cemeteries were being further undermined. A circular published in 1964 by the Ministry of Public Services, whose aim was to limit the power of all religious bod­ ies in the country (mainly non-Catholic), gave local organs more incentives to solve the “problem” of abandoned Jewish cemeteries by means of their elimination.46 The circular stipulated that the financial obligation for these sites’ maintenance, heretofore held by the state, would be given to the local authorities of each municipality. As a special caveat, the circular noted that cemeteries converted to other uses, according to the new guidelines, would lose their requirement of care by the local municipality, which had been for­ merly responsible for them. Faced with the choice of assuming the financial burden of custodial care, or alternatively, repurposing or removing a Jewish cemetery, local authorities usually opted for the second option.47 In 1965, the head of the Union of Jewish Congregations in Poland com­ plained to the Ministry of Religious Affairs about several cases where local authorities were demolishing cemeteries, using bulldozers to dig out the

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bones and “throwing them to landfills like carcasses” without any autho­ rization from the government.48 One such incident occurred in Mielec, in southeastern Poland. Already in 1947 town authorities had used parts of the cemetery, which was severely ruined during the war, for the construction of industrial structures. In 1965, plans were put forward for a post office on another part of the cemetery. The head of the Jewish congregation in Kraków, Maciej Jakubowicz, who had visited Mielec after the last events, met with the local undertaker who told him what was happening in the Jewish cemetery. According to the undertaker, horse-drawn car dumpers razed the cemetery and simply dug out piles of earth that were mixed with human remains. Some of the bones, he recalled, were put in boxes and buried in the Catholic cemetery.49 A similar fate befell many other Jewish cemeteries dur­ ing the 1960s and early 1970s.50 Local inhabitants in Olsztyn recalled how, in a few days in 1969, tractors and trucks completely demolished the Jewish cem­ etery, uprooting and clearing away both monuments and human remains and leveling the area. They also remembered how local groups raided the destroyed cemetery, continuing to dig in the ground on burial sites in search of valuables and gold.51 Although the Ministry of Religious Affairs was still trying to maintain some monitoring over the handling of Jewish cemeteries by local authorities, officials in local administrations enjoyed a relatively high amount of auton­ omy. To a large degree, municipal authorities could advance their plans for the removal of Jewish cemeteries and often made irreversible changes before Jewish leaders had the chance to intervene. Although according to the law, when conducting work to convert a cemetery to other purposes the request­ ing body is responsible for carefully exhuming the human remains and trans­ ferring them to another place of burial, usually this clause was not observed. In the mid-1960s, town authorities in Bielsko-Biała, a mid-sized city in Silesia, advanced their plans to erase one of the inactive Jewish cemeteries in town, using its space for the construction of a sports center, despite the relatively good condition of the site, which contained around 1,700 standing grave­ stones.52 Despite the strong objections of the local Jews, around 250 people at that time, state ministries accepted the argument that building the sports center was an “indispensable public need”; thus, according to their interpre­ tation of the law, the cemetery could be utilized even before the expiration of the forty-year period since the last burial. The local congregation had no option but to agree to the suggestion of removing and transferring the matzevot and human remains to the second Jewish cemetery in town, which the local officials considered to be large enough to cater to the needs of the local Jewish population.

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While the matter was still being discussed, on April 22, 1966, town author­ ities published an open call, announcing that the construction was beginning and declared that people who were interested in exhuming the bones of their relatives and transferring them to the second cemetery could file a written request within fourteen days.53 Despite the Jewish complaints on the short and unrealistic time frame to prepare for the exhumation, the works started shortly afterward by the construction company, who “recruited local people” to help in exhuming the bodies.54 According to eyewitnesses, the works were done in a hasty and amateur manner.55 Out of the 1,700 headstones, 170 sur­ vived and were transferred to the second cemetery. Only a small part of the human remains was eventually exhumed and reburied. Many of the matzevot were used as revetments in a nearby river or were thrown in the backyard of the sports center. This wave of destruction aroused an increased stream of criticism by Pol­ ish Jews; the most outspoken among them was Rabbi Wawa Morejno from Łódź. Starting in 1965, he sent numerous long and angry letters to differ­ ent government branches, protesting the destruction of Jewish cemeteries all over the country. State and party officials were usually not impressed by these appeals, treating Rabbi Morejno as an eccentric and controversial fig­ ure.56 As anti-Jewish attitudes reached a peak in the second half of the 1960s among the central and local administration, Jewish leaders were becoming deprived of real power to stop the rapid obliteration of their remaining heri­ tage sites.

Polonization of the Holocaust The harshening of state and local policies and attitudes toward the question of Jewish sites during the 1960s coincided with the rise of emerging forces that were now gaining power in the PZPR and state cadres and were inte­ grating nationalistic-xenophobic ideas and contempt for liberal-intellectual groups into the heart of the communist system. The most prominent figure in these circles was Mieczysław Moczar, who in 1964 was appointed as the head of the inf luential Ministry of Internal Affairs. Moczar and his so-called partisans (partyzanci) gradually took hold of key positions in the state admin­ istration and political and cultural circles. In a few years they managed to shape the political discourse and to exert their inf luence on the official party policy, to the extent that in the mid-1960s “an atmosphere of moral approval towards anti-Semitic views and attitudes and extreme nationalism, prevailed among the elites of the party.”57 These tendencies coincided with and were interconnected to a changing policy and perception regarding the narrative

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of World War II. During the Stalinist years, the national Polish narrative of the war, especially the mention of noncommunist underground fight­ ers, was heavily censored and restricted. The aftermath of 1956 resulted in the emergence of an official and popular national narrative that increasingly emphasized the heroism and victimhood of the Polish nation.58 The opening up of the public sphere after 1956 led to academic and public engagement also with Jewish wartime experiences, but it was mainly the non-Jewish Polish fate that received attention. The most notable trend in remembering the war was the formation of a “bombastic phraseology of national consciousness” that signaled a new Polish national approach to the public memory of the war.59 Groups of war veterans and former prisoners of war became key players in the consolidation of the national narrative of the war and the myth of Polish suffering and sacrifice. The regime increas­ ingly adopted the notion of “national communism” and realized the need to create a new legitimizing narrative that would emphasize the national unity of the resistance movement. Addressing a growing demand from within the PZPR and state cadres and by grassroots “memory groups,” the party policy makers, for the first time, allowed for the official commemoration of noncommunist underground fighters and even pardoned anti-Soviet fighters who were imprisoned during the Stalinist years. A leading player in outlining the growingly nationalistic-commemorative policy was the Union of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy (Związek Bojowników o Wolność i Demokrację [ZBoWiD]), an organization of Polish war veterans and underground fighters that became highly inf luential in the 1960s under the patronage of Moczar, who became head of the organiza­ tion in the mid-1960s. The ZBoWiD initiated a wave of memorialization and commemoration that glorified the suffering and sacrifice of the Pol­ ish nation through building monuments, arranging ceremonies, and taking care of sites of national martyrdom and concentration camps. In the years before, both the Jewish fate and the victimization of the Polish nation were embedded into the commemorative pattern of the communist “anti-fascist” struggle. Now, the heroic-tragic story of the Polish nation was increasingly emphasized while the specificity of Jewish fate in the war was diminished and absorbed into the Polish narrative of victimhood and patriotic sacrifice. Posters and memorial plaques in the 1960s commemorated the “Six Million Poles” who were murdered by the Nazis, without any mention of the fact that around half of them were murdered for being Jews.60 With the growing power of the war veterans, who were able to inf luence official state policy, sites such as Auschwitz-Birkenau were treated as places of Polish national martyrdom, praising the plight and resistance of the Poles,

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while diminishing the Jewish identification of the camp, even though most of the deportees and victims had been Jews. The emerging nationalization of the war memory was developed and perceived as an alternative and subver­ sive counter-memorialization against the early official communist commem­ oration. While the Polish fate was cultivated from below in opposition to the universal “anti-fascist” trope, the Jewish memory was usually not included in the national counter-memorialization of the war and came to be perceived as competing with the Polish memory. In this growingly nationalist atmosphere, the expression of the specificity of Jewish suffering was systematically blurred. Discussing the Jewish trag­ edy threatened to undermine the supremacy of Polish martyrdom.61 Reduc­ ing the Jewish fate and highlighting the heroism and suffering of the Polish nation was in many ways an attempt to circumscribe the increasing demand for public memorialization of the wartime past in post-1956 Poland by off­ setting the Jewish fate with the Polish national story. This counterbalancing attempt was also a reaction to the growing inclusion of the Holocaust in the world since the Eichmann trial and other legal procedures against Nazis and collaborators in the 1960s.62 Although the international wave of com­ memoration of the Holocaust did not skip Poland, as can be seen in the erection of the monuments at the extermination camps in Bełżec (1963), Treblinka (1964), and Sobibór (1965), it was framed by the authorities under the narrative of the Polish martyrdom.63 While the design of the monument at Treblinka was undeniably Jewish, comprised of thousands of stones com­ memorating the destroyed Jewish communities, the state-sponsored inaugu­ ral events did not dedicate a distinctive place to the fate of the Jews. At the unveiling of the memorial in Treblinka, the prime minister spoke of “the 800,000 citizens of European nations” that perished in the camp, without mentioning the Jews.64 In a similar fashion, a book titled A Guide to Commemorated Sites of Battle and Martyrdom of the War Years, 1939–1945 that was widely distributed across the country in 1964 stated: “During the Second World War, it was Poland which, of all of the states involved in the fighting, suffered the greatest num­ ber of losses. . . . Six million victims—men, women and children—were tor­ tured and murdered by Hitlerism, gassed in the chambers and burned in the crematoria at Auschwitz, Birkenau, Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec, Chełmno . . . and dozen other death camps. . . . This is the price paid by the nation for its love of the country and of freedom.” The views demonstrated in this passage ref lected the irreconcilability of the Shoah in the Polish national story and the fears that the Jews would “win” the suffering competi­ tion and “taint” the Poles’ self-image as “innocent victims.” These attitudes

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were propagated in a direct attempt to contest not only the threat of the hegemony of Jewish fate but also in response to cultural productions inside the country, that according to ZBoWiD sympathizers, falsified the legacy of the war by depicting “cheap and tearful humanitarianism” and “pacifism and superficial anti-militarism.”65 It is not easy to determine to what extent these nationalistic-patriotic sen­ sibilities affected local policies regarding the presence of Jewish sites. Gener­ ally speaking, these attitudes consolidated a Polonized exclusive interpretive framework of Polish history and specifically the events of the war. “Patri­ otic” sympathies were performed, to a large degree, as a material project of shaping the space. As part of the accelerated memorialization of the war landscape, execution sites and mass graves of victims of the Nazi brutality were commemorated as spaces of national martyrdom. This trend coincided with a growing tendency of rediscovering and preserving historical national heritage sites, while excluding from the definition of “national heritage” sites of non-ethnically Polish groups. In this growing patriotic redesigning of the landscape, Jewish heritage sites, which often functioned during the war as killing and persecution locations, problematized this coherent narrative. In this atmosphere, the Jewish fate, incarnated in the presence of desolated cemeteries and synagogues, undermined the supremacy of Polish suffering in its nationalistic meaning. Whereas Jews saw in the preservation of Jewish religious sites a symbolic commemoration of their families and communi­ ties, the mainstream Polish war memory appeared to regard the mnemonic charge of the Jewish sites as a problem. In a growing number of cases since the late 1950s, the Polish negotiation on the fate and status of Jewish cem­ eteries was shaped by the commemorative language of Polish national martyrdom. The main proponents of this line were activists of veteran orga­ nizations, such as the ZBoWiD, that during the 1960s increasingly took part in local discussions on the future of Jewish sites. In 1959, for example, inside one of the Jewish cemeteries in Nowy Sącz, a small memorial was erected bearing the inscription: “To the victims of the Hitlerites and to the memory of the fighters for freedom of the Polish nation. 1939–1945.” Until the near-total extermination of the Jewish com­ munity, the town was one of the strongest and well-known Hasidic centers in the country. Following the German occupation, hundreds of Jews were shot inside the Jewish cemetery. It was not accidental that any allusion to the Jew­ ish tragedy was omitted, reframing the Jewish cemetery as a site of Polish martyrdom. This attempt continued when in 1963, town officials discussed the development/zoning (zagospodarowanie) of the cemetery, which was a euphemism for its demolition, that is the removal of all matzevot and turning

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the place into a recreation area.66 In a meeting of the local representatives, including a member of the minuscule Jewish congregation still in town, the latter was pressured to agree to the plans. The discussion was also attended by a member of the local branch of ZBoWiD, who insisted that while his organization respects all rituals, they wished to turn the memorial inside the cemetery into a “mausoleum,” building a comfortable entry point for the visitors and including chairs and benches, which would provide the visitors with a “spiritual rest” (wypoczynek duchowy).67 The cemetery was eventually spared from destruction, but the local negotiations on its future during the 1960s demonstrate the ways in which the question of the presence of Jew­ ish traces intersected with growing nationalistic-commemorative threads, amplifying their irreconcilability. Another example of the conjecture between nationalistic discourse and the question of the future of Jewish sites was demonstrated in Łęczyca, a town close to Łódź, of which more than 80 percent of its population was Jewish at the beginning of the twentieth century. During the war a ghetto was built in town, from which almost all of the Jews were sent to their death in Chełmno. In 1960–61, a multilayered monumental complex was built at the center of the town on the territory of the former ghetto, loaded with national symbols and phraseology, praising the “heroes of the struggle for national and social liberation” and commemorating the national Pol­ ish struggles and martyrdoms from the fifteenth century to World War II. Jewish victimhood is only insinuated. Referring to the last war, one of the memorial plaques commemorated the “heroism of the murdered during the Hitlerite occupation in the concentration camps and ghettos, and the victims of the massive execution from Łęczyca and the surrounding areas.” The monument also mentions the sacrifice of the Red Army and the Polish fighting units but lacks any reference to the Jews. In 1963, a descendant of Łęczyca, Rabbi Yitzchak Yedidya Frenkel, one of the leading rabbinical figures in Israel and the future Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, was part of the Israeli delegation to the twentieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1963 and took the opportunity to visit his hometown. Frenkel was struck by the sight of the desolate Jewish cemetery, where he saw bones scattered around and carts driving uninterruptedly over the graves and wrote an emotional letter to the town’s board in which he pled with them to take care of the place and protect it f rom further destruc­ tion. He demanded that the town leaders protect the place as a historical site, a sacred place for Jews, and as “a reminder of the wildness of the bar­ baric occupants, who also destroyed the cemetery and desecrated the bones of the dead.”68

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In response, the town’s board replied that they did not intend to take any action to protect the cemetery, as it was included in the urban plans for building new roads and developing green areas. They did oblige to bury the scattered bones and raised the possibility that after the “development” (zagospodarowanie) of the site, a memorial plaque would be installed in the area. However, as they stressed in their response letter, “the memory of the martyrs who died while defending the homeland and murdered in concen­ tration camps and ghettos” is already commemorated in the memorial at the town’s center.69 Frenkel sent another letter, this time directly to the Polish prime minister, in which he accused the town’s leaders of “proceeding with the Nazi crimes” by “desecrating” the Jewish remains.70 He urged the gov­ ernment to intervene and threatened that if the matter were not resolved he would turn to the international press. Nevertheless, the town implemented its plans and razed the cemetery, clearing the space for construction. The attempts at erasing Jewish cemeteries coincided with national and local efforts of fostering a Polonized narrative of the local past, a narrative in which any material reminders of the fate of the Jews were perceived as inter­ fering factors. Another example from Przeworsk, in the southeastern cor­ ner of the country, demonstrates even more clearly the connection between the Polonized reframing of the local war period and the attempt to clear the traces of the Jewish community and the memory of its extermination. During the war, thousands of Jews, who constituted around one-third of the local population between the world wars, were shot to death inside the cemetery and buried there in unmarked mass graves. The cemetery was sub­ stantially destroyed by the Germans, and during the 1950s parts of the site were expropriated for paving the Kraków-Przemyśl highway. In 1969, town authorities, local politicians, and veteran associations were planning to build a monument for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of the town, titled “The Fight and Martyrdom Memorial” (Pomnik Walki i Męczeństwa), on another part of the cemetery, further eliminating its remaining Jewish traces.71 The monument is comprised of both communist symbols and Polish national emblems and glorifies both the fighters for national liberation and also the socialist revolutionaries who fought against the right-wing reaction­ ary forces. As the sociologist Sławomir Kapralski explains, the building of the monument was an attempt to present the communist version of history, but at the same time was meant to legitimize communist rule by address­ ing national sensibilities and praising the legacy of the Piast dynasty, which represented a historical vision of monoethnic and monocultural society. By this, argues Kapralski, “Polish Communists and Polish nationalists thus

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shared a vision of Poland that was ethnically homogeneous, with no place for Jews.”72 The erection of the monument, during the height of the antiJewish wave of the late 1960s, demonstrated the spatial mechanisms through which the Jewish fate was being blurred and manipulated under the increas­ ing centrality of the commemorative language of the national communist “Polish martyrdom,” both at the state and local level. But this pervasive tendency was not hermetic. The post-1956 popular impetus for dealing with the nation’s historical and cultural heritage, com­ bined with the loosening of censorship and relative liberalization of public life, created channels for engaging with the wartime past in a way that did not necessarily adhere to the omission of the Jewish suffering. In 1958 in Kolbuszowa, for example, a monument was erected inside the Jewish cem­ etery, on the site where, between 1942 and 1943, the Germans had shot to death more than a thousand Jews and buried them in mass graves. Unlike the prevailing style, the Kolbuszowa monument clearly specifies the fate of the Jewish dead, while integrating them into Polish martyrology. The inscription on the monument honors the “Polish citizens of Jewish nationality, victims of the fascist terror of 1943. 1958, the people of Kolbuszowa.” Even as late as 1967, at the peak of nationalist and anti-Jewish atmo­ sphere in Poland, a large monument, inscribed with a Star of David, was inaugurated in the middle of the Jewish cemetery in Szydłowiec, over the mass grave of hundreds of Jews murdered by the Germans. The Szydłowiec monument inscription reads: “On the forty-second anniversary of the mass murder of 150 Jews, the townspeople of Szydłowiec and the county, pay trib­ ute to around 16,000 Polish citizens of Jewish origin from Szydłowiec and its area, executed in the extermination camps and murdered by the Nazi crimi­ nals, between the years 1939–1943. Szydłowiec, March 21, 1967.” This monu­ ment evoked local tension. A year after its establishment, it was smashed to pieces by unknown perpetrators and rebuilt two years later.73 The same year, a memorial was placed inside the Jewish cemetery of Bielsk-Podlaski, a town close to Białystok near the eastern border. During the war, Jews had been taken from the town ghetto and shot to death inside the cemetery. The remainder of the town’s Jews—numbering around 5,000—were shipped to die in Treblinka. Their monument, erected by Bielsk-Podlaski’s local citizens, went as follows: “The place of execution of Polish citizens of Jewish nation­ ality shot by the police and Gestapo of Nazi Germany during 1941–44. More than 200 people rest here in the common grave. Honor to their memory, the inhabitants of Bielsk-Podlaski, September 1967.” The identities of these monuments’ sponsors, along with the circum­ stances behind their construction, remain unclear. Although the caption on

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Figure 15. A memorial for the Jewish victims, erected in 1967 inside the Jewish cemetery in Szydłowiec. 2016. Photo by the author.

the memorials did not undermine the common nomenclature of that time— referring to the Jews as “Polish citizens of Jewish nationality/origin”—it did challenge the prevailing commemorative framework by not eliding the dis­ tinctiveness of the Jewish fate or assimilating it under the framework of the national martyrdom. In so doing, these acts stood in stark contrast to

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the tendencies of reframing the Holocaust under the worldview of nation­ alist monoethnic memory, demonstrating the limitations of any official commemorative discourse to hermetically dictate to its citizens how to memorialize their dead neighbors.74

“Silent Cry of Remorse” These local commemorative initiatives ref lected the dual legacy of the thaw in Poland. The same liberating momentum that unleashed a nationalist wave and resulted in massive devastation of Jewish sites opened a narrow window for addressing forgotten chapters in the nation’s heritage and history and raised awareness to the material traces of Jewish culture. In 1956, for exam­ ple, city conservators undertook first steps to renovate the Old Synagogue in Kraków. After several years of rigid preservation, it officially became a Jewish museum—the only one of its kind in communist Poland.75 From the mid­ 1950s on, a few Polish scholars and artists began dealing with the material traces of Jewish culture in their works, inspired by a motivation to document what remained and reconstruct what was lost. In 1957, the architects Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka published a pioneering and monumental body of research on Poland’s wooden synagogues, containing photographs, draw­ ings, and descriptions of what had once been a common and iconic fixture of the Polish landscape, spanning hundreds of towns and villages, and which had vanished without a trace during the war.76 The attempt to bring to light the concrete or symbolic material vestiges of Polish Jewry stood at the center of several artistic endeavors, which focused mostly on what was left in the country’s small towns. In 1958, two young Polish artists, Lucyna Krakowska and Jacek Zieliński, both born in the mid-1930s, discovered the Jewish cem­ etery of Szydłowiec by chance, when traveling in the area. Surprised and curious by this “lost world,” they decided to document the engraving and ornaments on the matzevot and created dozen paper drawings, using a sketch­ ing technique of stone rubbing.77 In the introduction to their exhibition, they explained that “these traces of Jewish cemeteries, scattered throughout the lands of Poland, evoke in us feelings of amazement and awe. . . . These relics of a lost world, were, until recently, a testament of a living world and a liv­ ing culture.”78 Krakowska and Zieliński described their project as an attempt to document “not only the beauty of the ornaments, but also their tragic destruction, and to express a silent cry of remorse.”79 The feeling of discovery of a lost world and the moral imperative to docu­ ment it stand also at the center of a joint Polish-Jewish exercise, commis­ sioned by the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and conducted by the

Figure 16. The Rymanów synagogue. 1964. Photo by Adam Bujak. Courtesy of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Poland.

Figure 17. The Jewish cemetery in Oświęcim. 1965. Photo by Adam Bujak. Courtesy of the Eman­ uel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Poland.

Figure 18. The Sandomierz synagogue. A drawing made by Józef Cempla. Reprinted by permis­ sion from Davidovitch 1959.

Figure 19. The Zamość synagogue. A drawing made by Józef Cempla. Reprinted by permission from Davidovitch 1959.

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Jewish journalist Zalman Gostyński (b. 1917) and the Polish photographer Adam Bujak (b. 1942).80 In his youth, after the war and when he was still an amateur photographer, Bujak spent a few years studying at a clergy semi­ nary in Oświęcim, where he documented the remains of the largest Nazi death camp. During the early 1960s, the two traveled together to dozens of towns in southeastern Poland, which had once, before the Shoah, pos­ sessed a substantial Jewish presence. In each town, Bujak and Gostyński doc­ umented the material remains of disappeared Jewish communities, snapping photos of desolate synagogues and deserted cemeteries. Bujak, a devoted Catholic, regarded this project as his “sacred duty” and made sure to wear a head-covering whenever he entered a Jewish cemetery. Trying to locate the Jewish traces in the provinces, they were often guided to the exact location of Jewish cemeteries by the last Jews of the town or by local elderly Poles who “knew everything,” as Gostyński recalled. In the village of Korczyna, Gostyński recalled meeting an old Christian woman who voluntarily took care of the Jewish cemetery: “Although she didn’t know a word of Hebrew, she led me from matzevah to matzevah, each time mentioning the names of the deceased.”81 These series of photographs appeared in few exhibitions in Poland during the 1960s, including in the Old Synagogue in Kraków. In 1971, at the initia­ tive of the art historian David Davidovitcz, they were also presented in an exhibition in Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv. In one photograph, we can see the disintegrating Rymanów synagogue, looming in a pastoral, rural back­ ground; it appears to have already become part of the surrounding nature, as trees and bushes grow wild amid its ruins. Another photograph documents the Jewish cemetery in Oświęcim and shows, as Davidovitcz wrote: “a col­ umn of matzevot uprooted from the land, broken, leaning on top of each other, packed—resembling those living people who were uprooted from their houses and brought here, pressed together on their way to the ovens of death.”82 The artist and professor of the arts, Józef Cempla (b. 1918), similarly contributed to the artistic memorialization of Poland’s Jewish past. Cempla, who grew up in the Jewish neighborhood of Bielsko-Biała, was a student at the State Institute of Fine Arts in Kraków when the war broke out. Cempla kept close contact with his Jewish classmates during the war years and dedi­ cated some of his later works to their memory.83 In 1959, accompanied by the Vilna-born Israeli journalist Eliyahu Golomb, he traveled throughout south­ ern Poland, making pencil drawings of a few dozen synagogues—mostly in provincial towns that had once boasted large Jewish communities. Cempla’s delicate pencil drawings capture both the grandeur and the fragileness of

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the buildings and manage to convey a sense of intimacy as well as mournful empathy. The blurred and faceless human figures in the drawings—random passersby or perhaps phantoms of the missing Jews—function as a scale that underlines the monumentality of the structures. The positioning of the syn­ agogues on the fuzzy background of almost lifeless towns highlights their dominant presence in the local landscape, transmitting a strong ambiance of emptiness and a palpable feeling of void.

• C h a p te r 7 Profanation and Dirt

Despite the scattered new media and initiatives for documenting and commemorating Poland’s remaining and lost Jew­ ish spaces, the fate of the country’s surviving Jewish communal sites was becoming dire in the aftermath of the 1956 events in the country. As local municipalities became more successful in gaining state backing to repur­ pose or remove these sites, the ongoing practice of misuse and plundering of Jewish property was strengthened by an added factor. Since the mid-1950s, a rather new phenomenon of deliberate vandalization and devastation of religious spaces, for the sake of destruction alone, became a considerable threat. Throughout the country, a sharp rise in the deliberate attacks on Jew­ ish cemeteries, synagogues, and other communal buildings was observed. Jewish leaders reported an increase in vandalism of Jewish sites everywhere.1 According to these reports, usually unidentified malefactors demolished graves and smashed and uprooted headstones and other monuments in cemeteries all over the country, including the two biggest and active Jew­ ish cemeteries in Poland—Warsaw and Łódź. Active synagogues and prayer houses were also occasionally attacked, with incidents of stoning and win­ dow breaking.2 This wave of vandalism touched other religious minorities as well; Ger­ man sites, in particular, were singled out for attack. In November 1957, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which was in charge of all internal security and 132

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criminal matters, issued an urgent circular to all regional headquarters of the Citizens’ Militia (Milicja Obywatelska [MO], the national police in commu­ nist Poland): “We have recently observed worrying signs of devastation and plundering [in your district’s] abandoned cemeteries, perpetrated by crimi­ nal elements.” According to the circular, these “everyday acts” included the smashing and stealing of gravestones and other monuments and the “profa­ nation” of human remains.3 The letter did not state which denominations these cemeteries belonged to; however, it stressed that a “particular increase” in these crimes had been observed in the voivodeships of Koszalin, Wrocław, Gdańsk, Zielona Góra, Opole, Szczecin, Olsztyn (all of which are located in areas that belonged to Germany until 1945), and Poznań.4 This important geographical clue, and the fact that all the cemeteries in question were listed as abandoned, leads us to the conclusion that most of them—if not all— were German (or German Jewish). The central authorities tried to portray this wave of vandalism as the work of young criminals, “hooligans” on the fringes of society, minimizing the greater problem and denying any correlation between the crimes and a certain nationalistic or ideological messaging. They took further pains to refute any anti-Semitic context behind the mounting tide of attacks on Jew­ ish burial grounds, reiterating the official stance that anti-Semitism was a nonentity in communist Poland. Although some of the perpetrators were young hoodlums, and some Polish Catholic cemeteries were also vandalized, the xenophobic and ideological character of these acts was undeniable. Most of the cemeteries targeted were “foreign,” mainly Jewish and German, repre­ senting Poland’s greatest two archenemies in the popular postwar imagina­ tion. From the 1960s on, the ways in which Jewish cemeteries were ravaged bore distinct characteristics. In addition to the usual plundering acts, graves were being smashed, and anti-Semitic graffiti and swastikas began to accom­ pany such attacks, as the Ministry of Internal Affairs reported.5 During Janu­ ary 1960 alone, over a hundred incidents involving graffiti and the dispersal of neo-Nazi leaf lets were reported at Jewish cemeteries.6 The deliberate profanation of Jewish cemeteries as an end in itself—a marked shift from the already-routine practice of plundering and exploiting Jewish cemeteries for their material benefit—is a clear indication that these sites were targeted simply because they existed. The ritual studies scholar Ronald Grimes opines that there is a conceptual distinction between desecra­ tion and profanation. “Desecration,” Grimes argues, “is an inter-religious violation in which one discounts or ignores the sacredness of what is vio­ lated.” With desecration, internalization of the sacral status of the site is not required. While the motives for a sacred site’s violation may be understood

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as material and practical, such an act is a desecration in the sense that it violates universal taboos surrounding the disturbance of the dead and their resting places. Under Grimes’s explanatory framework, we can define acts of despoliation for personal and industrial gain or the use of the burial grounds as construction sites as desecration. Dissimilarly, cases of pure vandalism, bespeaking no immediate material gain, should be regarded as acts of profa­ nation. According to Grimes, profanation “implies a charged relation to the sacred. When we profane, we take the sacred seriously, but we invert or violate it. . . . The one who profanes is not necessarily an insider or believer, but by definition the profaner is not indifferent to the power implicit in the violated object.”7 Damage done to a religiously significant site for the sole purpose of violating it on the victim culture’s terms is therefore an act of profanation. As Grimes makes exquisitely clear, profaners do not see their victims and their sites in neutral terms. The profaner’s destructive act is a recognition of the religious charge of the place and an attempt to violate the taboos the victim culture holds dear. This distinction might help us to characterize the practice of deliberate vandalization of Jewish burial grounds—which was not limited to Poland; it was, and is, a long-standing pan-European, and even universal, phenom­ enon.8 In Germany alone, between 1945 and 1999, there were around a thousand registered cases of such incidents.9 The anthropologist Gertrud Koch sees post-Holocaust profanation of Jewish cemeteries as more than a simple attempt to breach the universal and powerful taboo against disturb­ ing the dead, which she frames as an “Oedipal desire to break with previ­ ous generations.” Rather, Koch argues, this type of profanation is “a politics of (non)remembrance, which consists not only in disturbing the rest of the dead-as-enemies, but also in destroying their names and the iconic repre­ sentation system of their gravestones and graveyards.”10 Koch posits that, however paradoxically, the symbolic attempt to eradicate the Jewish resting place cannot achieve its goal since such an act already implies an ambivalent relationship between the profaners and their targets, which function both as objects of contempt and fetishes of obscure reverence. Accordingly, while the act of profanation attempts to obliterate the religious site, it negatively reaffirms the site’s powerful presence. The intended damnatio memoriae becomes “a negative memorial practice” and reaffirms the object’s power over its assaulter.11 The notion of “negative memorial practice” might help us analyze another phenomenon that became associated with the Jewish space: lead­ ing animals to graze in deserted Jewish cemeteries and using these places as dumps and waste sites. Starting immediately after the war, by the end of

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the 1950s these acts became a common practice in Poland.12 In May 1958, Jewish leaders alerted the Ministry of Religious Affairs that local citizens in numerous towns were using their cemetery grounds for dumping garbage and pasturing their cattle. In one village, they wrote, the local dogcatcher was known to bury the corpses of stray dogs in the local Jewish cemetery.13 Several Jewish cemeteries and synagogues were used as public toilets.14 The synagogue in Dukla, for example, was turned into a pigsty.15 In 1957, the Białystok voivodeship recommended fencing all abandoned cemeteries in the district, particularly the Jewish ones, since they were in constant use by peasants as pastureland for their animals.16 On other parts of the European continent, abandoned Jewish cemeteries similarly became synonymous with trash heaps and degradation. In the village of Sirotino, Belarus, the authori­ ties built a pigpen in the Jewish cemetery. Inside the Jewish cemetery of Uman, Ukraine, a chicken coop was opened inside the building for the ritual washing of the dead (beit tahara).17 These practices were not limited to Jewish graveyards. German burial grounds, and to a lesser extent old and neglected Christian Orthodox and Catholic cemeteries, received similar treatment.18 Nor was this a uniquely Polish pastime. Abandoned cemeteries around the world, particularly in conf lict zones, have often been earmarked for littering and degradation.19 These deserted no man’s lands, already outside the normative borders of the community and “belonging to no one,” seem to advertise a free-for-all, valueless status. As regards the burial space of an “other,” often antagonistic, denomination or ethnic group, such practices often carry no social sanction in the majority culture, rarely encountering moral condemnation. Accord­ ingly, these practices might be regarded as desecration, since they “discount or ignore the sacredness of what is violated” and do not appear to “to take the sacred seriously.”20 Conversely, a closer look at Jewish abandoned cemeteries may lead us to see these practices in a more ritualistic light, namely, as a form of profana­ tion.21 The specific nature of these acts and the choice to perform them pre­ cisely within a burial ground imply that those involved in their littering are in fact “not indifferent to the power implicit in the violated object.”22 Beyond merely showing disregard or disdain for the land, these actions are active and concentrated attempts of defilement that indicate a kind of gravity radi­ ated by the place. The overwhelming prevalence of this phenomenon, cut­ ting across different periods and regions, suggests that the election of Jewish cemeteries for such treatment is neither random nor neutral. The sight of grazing animals and piles of garbage in the Jewish cemetery was so ubiq­ uitous that the sites themselves came to be identified with these practices.

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In numerous reports and official correspondence, the cemeteries are men­ tioned not simply as sites where animals are occasionally grazing or where trash exists, but they have rather become “a dump” and “a pasture site.”23 Such identification extended, in some cases, even to cemeteries lacking any original above-ground markings indicating their existence. What often “demarcated” these particular graveyards and distinguished them from their surroundings were the heaps of trash and the sight of grazing animals on the land. In 1987, district officials described the completely leveled Jewish cem­ etery in Kałuszyn—a town located sixty kilometers east of Warsaw that had boasted a predominantly Jewish population until the war—as lacking “any architectural traces of a cemetery (monuments or headstones).”24 According to their reports, the only “matter” that did exist in the site (where hundreds of Jews had been executed and buried in unmarked graves) were piles of garbage.25 Yet the excessive littering of the place did not entail its total oblivi­ ousness. When trying to determine exactly which parts of the cemetery had been used for burial, the officials talked with “the oldest people in town,” including the daughter of the former undertaker, and managed to map the precise boundaries of the graves.26 The anthropologist Roma Sendyka defines places such as these as “non­ sites of memory.”27 Unlike Pierre Nora’s classic definition of “sites of mem­ ory” (lieux de mémoire), these sites are not commemorated or remembered in any collective or institutional sense.28 The memory connected to these spaces is not materialized in the local topography. On the contrary, the community desires to un-commemorate and forget them because of the violent past that has so negatively charged them.29 The absence of any com­ memoration does not testify to the inexistence of these unmarked spaces in the collective memory but rather complicates the understanding of their presence. “These places are actively present in the lives of nearby commu­ nities in the ways that they are being avoided, unnamed, unmarked, and uncultivated—as places of taboo.”30 Drawing on extensive ethnographic research of unmarked burial grounds and Holocaust sites in Poland, Sen­ dyka shows how what the naked eye may see as empty and forgotten is in fact engaged in affective interaction with the locale and experienced as possessing a powerful, uncanny nature. These “abandoned, neglected locations,” Sen­ dyka concludes, “generate a particular kind of affective aura.”31 The “affective aura” of such “non-sites of memory” is detectable in a set of seemingly contradictory practices that take part in one ambivalent con­ stellation and imply a charged relation to the space. While killing sites, mass graves, and other post-genocidal spaces are often purposely left undeveloped and unattended, at the same time they are being littered, devastated, and

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contaminated.32 Sendyka maintains that the nature of these acts should be framed as a response to the melancholic status and imbued presence of such sites. “Their memory is not revealed in the order of material culture .  .  . but through denial, turning away, closing one’s eyes, and finally, through radical gestures, such as digging up, littering, or devastating: these activities seem to be related to ritualistic and magical acts surrounding cursed spaces and taboo places, which since the Roman times are connected to death and catastrophe.”33 Abasing a Jewish burial ground through physical contamina­ tion, making it dirty, testifies to its dual function as a place of oblivion and a source of antagonism. Signifying more than simple lack of respect or out­ right contempt, these behaviors indicate a negative marking and recognition of their unique nature, complemented by concomitant efforts to invert it. The defilement of these spaces is a ritualistic act of forcing forgetfulness, which conversely perpetuates a pathological remembrance. Despite major clean-up projects in the decades since 1989, these non-sites of memory remain a persistent eyesore throughout the peripheries of East­ ern Europe. In 2018, on a trip to the town of Zhovkva (Żółkiew) in presentday Ukraine, the photographer Jason Francisco visited the site of the Jewish cemetery that the Germans had destroyed in the war and that the Soviet authorities then razed in the 1950s to build a market. In 1942, on a plot abut­ ting the cemetery grounds, hundreds of Jews were shot to death by Ger­ mans and Ukrainian and buried in an unmarked mass grave. Yet, as Francisco found, the grave is marked, delineated by piles of waste that clearly separate it from the surrounding green meadow.34

Figure 20. Mass grave of Jews murdered in 1942, Zhovkva, Ukraine. 2018. Photo by Jason Fran­ cisco. Courtesy of the photographer.

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The analysis of everyday communal practices, and the attendant determi­ nation that they possess symbolic and ritualistic elements, does not necessar­ ily rule out a more prosaic behavioral account. People throw their garbage where a dump already exists, and they bring their cattle to graze in what is already a known pasture site. Yet the detection of an additional symbolic layer of these acts discloses a deeper cultural context that normalizes the actions of individuals who are not necessarily attuned to their underlying theme. Such analysis also helps us understand precisely how Jewish sites have acquired such a unique position, and how their defiled/attractive status came to be.

Cleansing the Dirt To fully comprehend the material and cultural mechanisms that facilitated the transformation of Jewish sites into paradigmatically degraded and neglected, one must understand not only the tangible processes that con­ structed them as such, but also the discursive patterns that allowed for this metamorphosis. As previous chapters showed, the administrative language of provincial officials played a key role in determining the status and fate of the Jewish space. Specific vocabulary and terms were employed in the first postwar years to legitimize the appropriation of Jewish sites, whereas the drive toward their erasure in subsequent decades involved different linguistic practices and conceptual patterns. Attempting to bring about the clearing of Jewish heritage sites from their townscapes, local authorities were increas­ ingly resorting to the discourse of aesthetics and hygiene. In Dąbrowa Tarnowska, for example, town officials were unable to find a solution to the problem of the synagogue, which continued to stand, dilapi­ dated and crumbling, in the center of town. After the attempts to transform it into a culture center had failed, town and district officials seriously consid­ ered the option of demolishing it. By the beginning of the 1960s, less than ten Jews lived in town and only occasionally prayed inside the building. It was now frequently referred to as a nuisance and as an aesthetic and sanitary haz­ ard that had a negative inf luence on the town’s appearance and well-being. Town officials constantly requested from state authorities to solve the prob­ lem and were becoming more and more impatient. An article in a regional newspaper from 1961 ref lected the growing discontent in the face of the state authorities’ procrastination in determining the fate of the synagogue: “This object, unused and unpreserved, increasingly disintegrating, disfigures [szpeci] through its very appearance this elegant part of town. The question of whether it has historical value or not is starting to be irritating. It is about

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time that after seventeen years someone will already decide how to solve this problem—what to do with the building.”35 A year later, voivodeship officials wrote to the Ministry of Religious Affairs, expressing their frustration with the lack of action regarding the synagogue, arguing that “the synagogue is an ugly ruin in the middle of town that disfigures its general aesthetic appearance.”36 In internal discussions within the ministry, the option of demolishing the synagogue was repeat­ edly raised but was ruled out due to the legal difficulties of overturning the 1947 decision of the local court that returned the site to Jewish control.37 In the meantime, the synagogue was perceived not only as interfering with the aesthetics and development of the town but also as a grave safety threat. In 1964, the commander of the local police unit in Dąbrowa issued an urgent letter to the district authorities, in which he reported that local children were constantly playing inside the main hall, which could collapse at any moment. He warned that the ceiling and walls were gradually crumbling and that beams were falling to the ground and might injure the children and even cause their death. He pled with the authorities to find a way to secure the threat and to make sure that no one would get hurt in the future.38 The Jewish congregation of Kraków, which was the formal possessor of the synagogue, was constantly pressured by state and local authorities to take care of the building or alternatively to willingly give up its rights to the place and transfer it to the town.39 The Jews argued that they did not have the sufficient sums necessary to renovate the synagogue but that they were willing to transfer the property to the town under the conditions that the Dąbrowian Jews would be allocated with an alternative prayer room and that the town would commit to using the synagogue only for culturaleducational purposes.40 Although the town eventually announced in 1965 that another prayer room had been located, the issue was not resolved due to further legal and bureaucratic setbacks. The matter revolved endlessly, in correspondences between the local and state authorities and the Jewish orga­ nizations, as well as in the local and regional press. The scope and intensity of the discussions on the fate of the synagogue are overwhelming. It ref lects the increasing urgency and impatience of the town to find a solution to the prob­ lematic presence of the synagogue, which in the late 1960s was perceived as a central and crucial obstacle to the town’s well-being and safety. In 1969 a member of the local municipal council wrote a long letter of complaint to the editors of the daily Trybuna Ludu, under the title “Casus Synagoga”: Our town is becoming more and more pretty and aesthetic.  .  .  . In recent years we are experiencing a renaissance. New and modern

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houses, stores and buildings were built and improved the aesthetic situ­ ation of the town’s center. But at the same time, the ruins of the Jew­ ish synagogue stand right next to the new and modern town hall and make a complete mockery out of it. . . . The situation of this building is deteriorating, and the increasing destruction disturbs the dynamic development of our town. Its appearance disfigures the entire own. . . . This is not an object with historical value. This is just an ordinary syna­ gogue that was built between the wars, and even to the few believers its existence is not necessary. . . . I am not an expert in the Talmud, and I do not know if they can pray somewhere else, but the fact is that these ruins continue to frighten, to ridicule and to pollute our town and even worse—it is the object of stupid and hostile rumors spread by local big­ ots [jest przedmiotem głupich i wrogich plotek miejscowych kołtunów]. . . . I am not an anti-Semite or intolerant . . . My only concern is for the aesthetics and order [porządek] of our town.41 One year later, another letter was sent by the same official, who had now become the head of the local council, to a different paper, Chłopska Droga. This time, he explicitly expressed his wish to see the building removed. “As the head of the local National Council, there is one issue which I cannot solve—the problem of the synagogue that stands in the middle of our town. The problem is constantly being brought up by the citizens. . . . The building was completely devastated during the war, and its appearance does not add to the town’s charm. . . . We would like to demolish this building and to build another one that would be more needed and necessary.”42 These harsh and resolute letters, and their urgent and obsessive tone, demonstrate the ways in which the presence of the synagogue was becoming simply unbearable and irreconcilable with maintaining the town’s propriety and appearance. The synagogue is depicted as a scar at the heart of the town that provokes constant unrest and resentment. The defensive insistence of the official, “I’m not an anti-Semite,” seems only to emphasize the hostile and impatient undertones interwoven in the appeals. His letter may also ref lect prevailing anti-Jewish tendencies in the administration and society, that had reached a new and violent peak in 1967–68, when the government launched the “anti-Zionist” campaign, an orchestrated crusade against the Jewish minority, labeling them as a “fifth column” and leading to the emigration of tens of thousands of Polish Jews.43 In this regard, the synagogue symbolized a “foreign” and hostile element that was concurrently being expelled from the country. The letters construct a clear dichotomy between the alleged dirty and obso­ lete Jewish space and the clean and progressive Polish space. The “polluting”

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and “disfiguring,” old synagogue is presented as the antithesis to the “new and modern town hall” and the “dynamic development of the town.” The old building stands as a direct contrast to the socialist-functional town topography, as if “mocking” its “dynamic development” and moderniza­ tion attempts. It is not clear what are these “stupid and hostile rumors” that trouble the official, but they appear to only emphasize the extent to which the building is perceived by him as undermining the rational social order. In the postwar years, a bureaucratic and regenerative discourse of aesthet­ ics and hygiene was expansively applied in the description of Jewish sites. The removal of a Jewish site or the neutralization of its cultural characteris­ tics was often euphemistically justified by local officials as “cleaning up” or “tidying up” (uporządkowanie). During the 1950s and 1960s, those years that marked the Polish phase and craze of the complete erasure of its vestigial Jewish remains, reliance on the aesthetic argument reached its apex, form­ ing the foundation to the collective attempt to rid itself of the remnants of Jewish presence. Aided by the conceptual lens developed by the anthropolo­ gist Mary Douglas, the obsession with Jewish “dirt” may be seen as a selfpreserving cultural construct.44 According to Douglas, social references to “dirt” and “pollution” need not necessarily be connected to a visible reality; instead, they act as useful mechanisms that may be employed to exclude ele­ ments considered dangerous and harmful to the self-definition, order, and integrity of the community. Accordingly, abandoned Jewish sites were not only becoming objectively dirty, but they were also framed and construed as such, for they embodied inappropriate and dissonant elements that threatened to undermine the boundaries and integrity of the postwar Polish society. Reliance on Douglas’s analytical framework should not detract from the actual, observable state of Jewish spaces. But the observable uncleanness is not what spurred local authorities to demand their uprooting. Notwithstand­ ing these sites’ material conditions, the focal point of the examined letters is located in how these places are f ramed as aesthetic aberrations and health risks that threaten to disfigure and corrupt their immediate surround­ ings, thereby justifying their urgent need for removal. A close analysis of the quoted texts reveals the performative use of repetitive terms and notions taken from the aesthetic-sanitary field, testifying not simply to an externally expressed reality but more profoundly to the existence of a distinct cultural pattern in the Polish postwar imagination. This “cleansing discourse” should also be placed within a particular thread in the modern architectural language of urban regeneration which, concomitant with postconf lict nation-building projects, entailed the fram­ ing of certain heritage spaces as an obstacle that hinders the consolidating

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of a hegemonic spatial narrative. This worldview found fertile ground in post-1945 communist Poland.45 In the wake of the vast material destruction caused by the war, and under a socialist and monoethnic architectural vision, historical spaces that exceeded the boundaries of the Polish Catholic canon were often cast aside as unaesthetic and backward elements in favor of shap­ ing a new and “cleaner” urban landscape. Alternatively, sites of nationalpatriotic significance often underwent conservation or were reconstructed anew.46 The vocabulary of pollution, dirt, and contamination appears to have found its most salient expression precisely in the discussions about the future of Jewish sites. Although other minorities’ heritage spaces, namely German sites, were physically cleared away regularly, the discourse employed by Pol­ ish officials to describe them usually did not resort to excessive dirt/cleanli­ ness terminology as in the Jewish case.47 The lexical expressions of hygienic and abomination were employed mostly regarding the Jewish space, becom­ ing a recurring motif in the postwar Polish municipal language.48 The connection between the sanitary conditions of the space and the necessity to remove it appeared already in the first years after the war, in letters written by local officials who asked permission from state authori­ ties to repurpose Jewish sites. In 1946 in Dąbrowa Tarnowska, different local bodies advanced plans to clear and level the Jewish cemetery in town that had been partially damaged during the war, arguing that it constitutes a hygienic hazard. The municipal board argued that “Due to hygienic and sanitary reasons the Jewish cemetery must be liquidated,” and mentioned that it is located too close to groundwater.49 Both the district architect and the health authorities recommended turning the cemetery into a green area and pointed at the grave danger that the cemetery poses to the local popu­ lation’s drinking water, concluding that the site “has a damaging effect on the environment.”50 The portrayal of Jewish sites as dangerously unhygienic soon spread among the local administration, constructing a normative and aesthetic order in which the presence of abandoned Jewish sites was an acute problem that had to be resolved or “put in order” as it jeopardized not only the town’s aesthetics but also public health. Jewish sacral traces, many of them lying in ruins after the war, were sometimes depicted in biological-viral terms as radiating destructive and repulsive ambiance. In Zamość, where around half of the population was Jewish previously, the municipality tried in 1947 to remove the synagogue, which had been heavily destroyed during and after the war in favor of public facilities. An official protocol composed by the municipal board concluded that the synagogue jeopardizes the health and safety of the townspeople: “The interior of the building is one big latrine, which serves the local inhabitants and passersby as public toilets. . . . It is full

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of excrement and spreads stench [fetor] and diseases in its surrounding. These ruins disfigure [szpecą] the environment and create a negative and depressing atmosphere. . . . We would like to remove this ulcer [wrzód] from the town’s body. . . . We ask to demolish the ruins, to use the bricks for construction . . . and to use the space for building a kindergarten and a culture house.”51 These corporeal and sensory impressions, combined with images of ulti­ mate havoc, convey something of the atmosphere of material ruinations and pandemonium that prevailed in many of Poland’s towns and cities in the years after the war, but they were also part of an excessive discourse of pollution and danger that remained associated particularly with the Jewish ruins in later years.52 In 1954, three years before the Olkusz synagogue was demolished on the town’s initiative, representatives of a union of disabled workers cooperatives tried to advance plans to convert it into a factory, ask­ ing government officials for their agreement. The harsh and radical language of this letter and its hygienic medical terminology seem both to predict the demolition and to lay the conceptual foundations necessary for its erasure: “The ruined building of the former synagogue is a hotbed of all possible filth [siedliskiem wszelkich nieczystości]. . . . Local residents and passersby use the place as public toilets and as a dump. . . . Rats, mice and f lies swarm there and turn this place into a breeding ground for infectious diseases [Rozsadniki zakaźnych chorób]. . . . The building of the former synagogue is suitable for our needs . . . [and] the town board fully supports our request as it is the only rational solution to the problem.”53 The dramatic language of the examples from Olkusz and Zamość ref lects the extent to which the presence of Jewish sites became physically and emo­ tionally unbearable and the pressing need in the town to erase them. The graphic and olfactive impression of the synagogue that emerges from these descriptions is one that arouses the bodily reaction of what Julia Kristeva defined as “abjection,” which is “the repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck.”54 The biological-viral terms used in the texts serve to stress the absolute neces­ sity of removing these “sanitary hazards” to aestheticize and “cure” the sur­ roundings. It is important to emphasize once again that the “contamination” of these sites was not only a discursive process but also an actual one. The physi­ cal appearance of deserted synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in the post­ war decades was indeed poor and dilapidated, and they were systemati­ cally defaced and littered by the local population. However, the actual state of the place and its conceptual construction as a polluted and despicable space are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the discursive and material

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components are two aspects of the same process, constructing the site as a concrete and imagined “abject” space. The physical act of defiling and the conceptual framing of a place as filthy, therefore, took part in a performative project, in which space eventually becomes contaminated through actions and words. Both the ontological and epistemological “contamination” of the Jewish space were thus interdependent and created the material and mental conditions for its exclusion and marking as an acute threat. In 1969, the town’s board in Chełm intensified its efforts to promote the idea of erasing and leveling the deserted Jewish cemetery in town. They peti­ tioned the government to give them the green light to clear the place. “The Jewish cemetery is awfully neglected, weedy and dirty, its sight deteriorates the town’s appearance. Attempts in recent years to take over the place by the town encountered objection by the Jews. . . . As you surely know, the district ‘cleanliness competition’ [konkurs czystości] is taking place now, and our town wishes to occupy one of the first places also this year. In light of this, we ask your help in solving the issue.”55 This example shows how the procrastina­ tion in finding a solution to the “issue” of the cemetery’s existence elevates its aesthetic threat and increases the urgency to cleanse it. The reference to the “cleanliness competition” is telling. The concern that the continued existence of the Jewish cemetery would hurt the town’s chances to win the competition sharpens the dichotomic perception of the “dirty” Jewish site as opposed to the desired “clean” Polish town. The cemetery is presented as the ultimate obstacle preventing the progression of the town and threatens to jeopardize their attempts to achieve purity in the most concrete sense.56 In her seminal work from 1966, Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas shows that what is perceived as dirt is not something totally external to a specific culture but is rather a familiar element that poses a danger to the integrity of the society and is constantly thrust outside of the boundaries. “In chas­ ing dirt, in tidying,” she argues, “we are not only governed by anxiety to escape disease, but are positively re-ordering our environment, making it conform to an idea.”57 Douglas does not argue that dirt and filth are nothing but cultural constructs, but when we notice a collective effort to reject and exclude certain elements as “dirty,” she tells us, we should ask ourselves why this “dirt” has become so dirty. This conceptual turn has allowed scholars to apply this analysis to multiple societies and cultures and also to the realm of the subjective self.58 They have shown how regimes of order, cleanliness, and purity were imposed to exclude or reject ideas, pasts, narratives, and even entire groups, whose existence was considered inappropriate or taboo and threatened to undermine the norms, boundaries, and integrity of the hegemonic society.59

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The long tradition of describing Jews and Jewish spaces as dirty, pollut­ ing (and polluted), and unclean could also be viewed under this interpretive framework. Descriptions of the Jews in hygienic and aesthetic terms were long used as part of the constant attempt to present them as a danger to the Christian societies in which they lived and to exclude them, physically and conceptually, from the normative boundaries.60 As we can detect in the examples above, many of the categories of hygiene and pollution in the peti­ tions reproduce long-rooted anti-Jewish stereotypes. The description of the Jewish space as a “breeding ground for infectious illness,” and the powerful image of rats and other pests spreading diseases from within the synagogue ruins seems to be taken directly from the biological vocabulary of the antiSemitic arsenal.61 With the emergence of progressive views on public health and hygiene and of social-Darwinist, pseudoscientific, and biopolitical racial theories, the dichotomy between “Jewish dirt” and “Gentile purity” became more solidified and distinct. In this trajectory, the notion of “Jewish filth” was an emblematic concept in the formation of scientific anti-Semitic dis­ course. In many ways, the Jewish space is described in the above texts not only as spreading diseases but as the disease itself—an “ulcer on the town’s body”— as one of the letters states. The hygienic danger that the existence of the Jewish sites poses is sometimes life-threatening. The metaphor of “ulcer” perhaps alludes to the racial discourse of the body politic, as demonstrated in language familiar from the Nazi vocabulary, that viewed Jews as a deadly wound or illness which must be removed in order to save the body of the nation.62 As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman notes, the Nazi wish to “get rid” of the Jews was understood as part of a “linguistic universe of ‘self­ cleansing’ and ‘political hygiene.’”63 The emphasis of the stench (fetor) that the Jewish site allegedly spreads, and other olfactive connotations, brings to mind another rooted notion in the anti-Jewish imagery—Foetor Judaicus—the belief in the innate stench of the Jew, which goes back to antiquity and was reinforced with the development of modern anti-Semitism since the midnineteenth century.64 The notion of “Jewish dirt” received its expression also in the evolution of modern Polish anti-Semitism. Ascribing filth and pollution to the Jewish body and environment became a central component in modern Polish cul­ tural and popular imagery as well and functioned as part of a symbolic puri­ fication of the Polish nation and excluding of the Jews outside of the national boundaries. The introduction of Enlightenment ideas of cleanliness into the Polish literature from the eighteenth century coincided with existing ste­ reotypes and was manifested in the perception of Jews as abject beings who

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threaten to breach the boundaries of the Polish nation and contaminate it.65 By “abjecting” Jews and other minority groups, argue Tomasz Kitliński and Joe Lockard, “A basic domestic polarity begins to emerge between clean­ liness and filth, one that parallels domination and subordination. Muck and human rodents haunt the background of a sanitized national cause and its lit­ erature.”66 This discourse was not foreign to the founding father of modern Polish anti-Semitic discourse, Roman Dmowski (1864–1939), who routinely regarded Jews as “an undeniable parasite on the body of the society” and “a mould on a healthy body.”67 From the beginning of the twentieth century, the image of the unaes­ thetic Jew and his polluted and filthy urban haunts infiltrated the Polish press, popular publications, and periodicals. As anti-Semitic discourse and practices became radicalized in the 1920s and 1930s, the hygienic danger posed by “Jewish filth” was increasingly accentuated. In the Poznań-based periodical Pod Pręgierz, an article titled “The Wandering Rats” described how rats and mice move about freely inside Jewish stores while their owners, cloaked in dirty kaftans, pay no mind: “Rats and mice are spreading diseases such as typhus, but the Jews don’t care! Will our police and sanitary authorities do something about it?”68 The portrayal of Jews and Jewish environments as aesthetic and hygienic hazards, thus facilitated Jewish exclusion from the surrounding culture, in the hope of ultimately achieving a symbolic purity. Although cognizance of this wider cultural background is crucial, it cannot fully account for the specificity of the Polish postwar aesthetic and sanitary obsession with Jewish sites. The conception of Jewish localities as abject and objectionable was not merely a projection and extension of traditional anti-Jewish ideas. Instead, this perseveration on purity and its Jewish threat was part and parcel of a more complex array of discursive and physical interaction with these spaces, whose presence was seen as simply incompatible with the postwar land­ scape. What then was particularly disturbing and threatening in the mere existence of empty synagogues and deserted cemeteries, to the extent that they were constructed, in practice and in theory, as polluted, dirty, and filthy spaces that ultimately must be removed? One 1954 letter, sent to the Polish government by Brzeziny authorities, points to a possible answer. Situated twenty-five kilometers east of Łódź, Brzeziny had a population that was nearly half-Jewish until the mass murder of the community in Chełmno. Following the war, one of the few remain­ ing material traces of the Jews’ presence was the ruined nineteenth-century Moorish-style synagogue that stood in Brzeziny’s town center. As Shimon Huberband recorded in his underground notes from the Warsaw Ghetto,

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shortly after the outbreak of the war, in 1939, the Germans set fire to the synagogue along with the Torah scrolls and then forced the community’s rabbi to sign a confession that he and other Jews were responsible for the arson.69 In their formal request to tear down the synagogue ruins fifteen years later, the Brzeziny municipality noted that only one Jew remained in their town and explained that “The huge pile of rubble is located at the cen­ ter and its sight disfigures the town. . . . Creating a green area in the empty plot will consequently enable the town to look aesthetically pleasing and will drown out the unpleasant memories of the savage Nazi thugs [zagłuszy przykre wspomnienia dziczy hitlerowskich zbirów].”70 The Brzeziny letter makes an explicit connection between the need to clear the Jewish “rubble” and the desire to erase all traces of the Jewish wartime fate. Urban regeneration and aestheticization intertwined with the town’s compulsion to eliminate concrete reminders of their neighbors’ destruction. The synagogue “disfigures” its environs not simply on account of its physi­ cal state; its nagging presence, an embodiment of the Jewish fate, could no longer cohere with the non-Jewish townscape and was perceived as hinder­ ing urban renewal. Like fungus in a greenhouse, mutilated Jewish remnants interfered with architectural and social progress because they threatened to crack the postwar status quo narrative, which required a collective forgetting of the Jewish fate. The social construct of Jewish space as innately dirty and polluted was an active attempt to achieve symbolic purity by expunging all reminders of the Holocaust, thus maintaining the normative boundaries of the Polish community. In his article “The Holocaust as Impurity,” the literary scholar Przemysław Czapliński claims that postwar Polish culture cannot allow for the unam­ biguous classification of the Holocaust and hence it “rejects it, making it a dirty matter.” Drawing on Mary Douglas, Czapliński argues that the idea of the Holocaust in Polish imagination is perceived as “dirt”; it cannot be reconciled with national propriety and with the symbolic system of purity. “The Holocaust and the existence of Jews in Poland are the dirty matter of our history—always out of place.” This hygienic discourse, however, reveals an inherent tension in the Polish dealing with the memory of the Jewish victims that correlates with the basic tension in Douglas’s notion of dirt as constitutive of society. As a “dirty element,” the Holocaust undermines the postwar Polish story, but at the same time it defines it. “The more the Holocaust is externalized as an abomination,” Czapliński maintains, “the more it undergoes individual internalization as a condition of purity.”71 Embodying the “dirt of the Holocaust,” crumbling and decaying cemeter­ ies and synagogues occupied a dual function. They threatened to shatter

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Polish postwar self-identity while providing the danger against which a local and national story could be built and consolidated. Symbolic national purity was maintained precisely vis-à-vis a self-perpetuating movement of defining what was dirty and abject, followed by strident efforts to expel the created danger. The twin collective projects of physically dirtying remaining Jewish heritage sites and conceptually f raming them as toxic and menacing aimed to blur the past metonymized by Jewish space. Paradoxically, these acts reaf­ firmed the insistent reality of an unforgettable past and compounded its residual presence.

• C h a p te r 8 Residual Presence

An empty, grass-covered rectangle: this is what can be seen today after heading northeast from Olkusz’s main square, up Florianska street, and turning right on Bóżnicza (synagogue) street. The symmetrical emptiness is striking. The plot breaks the line of buildings and leaves an unexpected void, clearly delineating the existence, or rather absence, of something. Only the street name and a commemorative plastic plaque installed on a nearby wall disclose that here stood the town’s syna­ gogue until 1957. Shortly before its demolition by Olkusz authorities and local volunteers, the synagogue had been described as a polluted space, swarming with pests and spreading infectious diseases.1 Today it is clean, inasmuch as nothingness can be so construed. Remarkably, although the cleared site has been at the town’s disposal since 1957, nothing permanent has been built there, despite the lack of legal and material impediments to construction. Why has this site, in the center of town, remained empty, despite several urgent petitions, on behalf of local officials and organizations, to convert the synagogue—when it was still standing—for other public needs? In 2015, I met ninety-five-year-old Mieczysław Karwiński in Olkusz. Karwiński was a well-known public activist and a veteran of the Home Army (Armia Kra­ jowa), who remembered well the demolition of the synagogue.2 When I asked him about the vacant lot, he looked at me, puzzled, and answered, 149

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Figure 21.

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Olkusz, the site of the former synagogue. 2016. Photo by the author.

“You have to understand, the town couldn’t build anything there—it simply didn’t belong to them.”3 This enigmatic answer re-evokes the juridical, con­ ceptual, or moral doubts over the question of Jewish ownership and implies that the town did not have an ultimate right to use this empty Jewish square. The fact that nothing was built on this piece of land and Karwiński’s expla­ nation for this mystery might also testify to a sense of unease, a fear of building on a land of a religious space, or perhaps to some level of remorse about demolishing it.4 True, in most cases, after local Polish authorities were able to successfully clear away abandoned synagogues and cemeteries, the vacated lots were built on and used.5 In Olkusz, however, and in other towns, there appeared to be some restraint from using the cleared Jewish space for mundane purposes. The story of the great synagogue of Krynki is another example of appre­ hension from building on a space of a demolished sacral site. The massive stone building was heavily damaged during the war, but until the early 1970s it still existed, gradually crumbling. Council protocols from 1971 record town officials’ warning that the synagogue’s rickety walls could collapse at any time, posing a danger to the children who played there.6 After renova­ tion attempts that had aimed at converting it into a cultural center failed, the local council called for its demolition, rezoning it for private housing

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development.7 In 1973, the voivodeship authorities gave final authorization to pull down the synagogue, and it was leveled with explosives. Yet there was no subsequent construction performed, and it grew into an overgrown heap of bricks. To this day, it is referred to as “the Ruins of the Great Synagogue” (Ruiny Wielkiej Synagogi). Krynki locals, who remember the synagogue’s demolition from their childhood, have their own explanations for why the empty enclosure was never used. “Perhaps it was considered to be inappro­ priate to build something there?” wondered a woman from Krynki.8 “They knew that it wasn’t right to use it,” another informant told me. “It’s just not moral and people understood it.”9 “Maybe,” a third woman wondered, the town never used the site for construction “because it is a holy place.”10 Whether razed by the Germans, demolished or leveled by postwar Pol­ ish authorities, or gradually disintegrating from lack of care, plunder, or vandalism, vacant squares, bare plots of land, and forest clearings dot the current Polish landscape. Although it seems in these cases that there are no visible remains, local inhabitants often treat these empty zones as if they were superimposed with another presence, emphasizing the elusiveness of their apparently absent form. On my journeys through several small pro­ vincial towns, my query of passersby, “Where is the Jewish cemetery?,”

Figure 22.

The ruins of the Great Synagogue in Krynki. 2014. Photo by the author.

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would sometimes be met with quite detailed instructions, leading me to an unmarked, empty plot of land, either at the side of the road or within a for­ est, and usually lacking any particularly distinguishing characteristics, aside from the surroundings. Despite the absence of even a single matzevah or any other physical marker, these sites were referred to by the locals as simply “the Jewish cemetery.” The anthropologist Jonathan Webber had similar experi­ ences. Searching for Jewish cemeteries in small Polish towns throughout the 1990s, he often found local residents could provide the exact delineations of a Jewish cemetery, despite the total lack of visible borders in grass-covered or barren squares. “The local people knew precisely where the Jewish cem­ etery was, even if it was invisible to an outsider.  .  .  . Yet for local people, the cemetery was still there. The categories of nothingness and emptiness,” Webber realized, “could be rich with content—even if nothing could actually be seen.”11 One such place was the Jewish cemetery in Brzostek, a village in southern Poland, where until the war Jews numbered one-third of the population. During the Nazi occupation, German soldiers transformed the Jewish ceme­ tery into an execution site and a burial place for hundreds of Brzostek Jews, and then they destroyed it. After 1945, an agricultural cooperative—along with a string of successive farmers—employed some of the cemetery’s acreage for arable land; a utility pole construction firm operated in another section.12 Over the years, all evidence of the existence of the Brzostek cemetery disap­ peared, along with the businesses that had operated there, and it ultimately became an empty, unfenced field. As Webber found, local narratives kept the memory of its original purpose and location alive. One elderly woman, who lived on a nearby property, showed him how the grass on the cemetery land grew a distinct shade of green, different in hue from the grasses in the adjoining fields. It was clear to her that, “Although the adjacent farmland was in use for agricultural purposes, the site of the cemetery had been left fallow, as the farmer had no right to that piece of land.”13 A similar restraint f rom farming former Jewish burial grounds was observed by the anthropologist Aimée Joyce in the village of Kodeń, near Biała Podlaska, on the Belarusian border. Joyce noticed that in this fertile, apple tree-lined village, one thin plot of acreage remained unharvested; there, the f ruit was left to drop and rot into the soil throughout the sum­ mer. Joyce later learned that this particular grove had been situated on the village’s former Jewish cemetery, now invisible to the naked eye. According to local tradition, the location of the trees proscribed consumption of their apples.14 Whether out of respect, fear, compassion, or remorse over the fate of the site and their Jewish neighbors, these examples provide another

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example of the power generated by these spaces and their affective relation­ ship with the local population.

“The Town Is Dead” What happens when, as was often the case, Jewish spaces did not remain empty and unused for long and were instead built over or repurposed? To what extent can we detect, in their desacralized transformation, a trace of their former life and original character? To answer these questions, we must turn our attention to the rich local folklore that developed around Jewish spaces that had been acquired and put to mundane uses. In 1958, when visiting his hometown Kazimierz Dolny, the Polish-born American Jewish writer and journalist Samuel Shneiderman met a certain Jan Pisula, a Polish man who became his companion. Pisula was enraged by what he saw as the desecration of the town’s synagogue, which had been turned into a cinema. Shneiderman recalls the local legend Pisula told him “as fact”: on every Yom Kippur night, the synagogue would light up, and lamenting prayers could be heard emanating from within. As the legend goes, those who gathered there were the Jewish souls that perished under unusual circumstances, such as those who drowned in the river or who were murdered in various pogroms. After revisiting the town in the early 1970s, Shneiderman learned of Pisula’s death at the age of eighty-eight. He was amazed to hear from the townspeople that, while walking home one night and passing by the old synagogue, Pisula suddenly saw it go up in f lames and heard his name called from inside the fire: “Pisula, Pisula.” A few days later, Pisula died, “as if heeding the call of the dead.”15 This eerie and intriguing story borrows from archetypical Polish Jewish folk legends and adds an unex­ pected, tragic turn, demonstrating how the synagogue had become fused with the memory of the Jews’ deadly fate.16 The local account of Jan Pisula’s death frames him as a modern-day martyr who, though personally outraged by the synagogue’s misuse, “takes upon himself ” the town’s “sin” of des­ ecrating it by converting it into a local movie house. After the war, localized rumors and myths sprang up, which connected the desecration of Jewish sites with mysterious, inexplicable deaths. A woman from Przemyśl told Alina Cała that “Where the Jewish cemetery used to be, there is now a movie theater in which there are ghosts. The door opened, the lights went on by themselves, something rattled on the stage, cats ran around the auditorium. When the noise began, he [one of the watchmen] went in, lit a match, fell down and broke his legs, and finally died.” Cała heard a similar story in the village of Warpechy, in eastern Poland. The local legend was of

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frequent, deadly car accidents that happen on a road that was built on the site of the Jewish cemetery. In the northeastern village of Nowy Dwór, the postwar Polish authorities demolished one of the synagogues. According to a local woman, they should not have done so, “for while they were doing it, a man was killed.”17 In the town of Ryki, sand from the site of the Jewish cemetery was used to level roads. As a result, according to a local legend, many car crashes occurred in the area.18 In Przeworsk, after a highway and a giant monument were built on the devastated Jewish cemetery, a bus station was established on the rest of the site. Also there, deadly car accidents that occurred on the highway were explained as a punishment for the desecra­ tion of the cemetery.19 The causal connection between the misuse of Jewish sites and the collective punishment “imposed” on the whole town is also part of these local myths. Visiting the town of Maków Mazowiecki, north of Warsaw, I came across the main bus station, which was built directly on the former Jewish cemetery. Talking to a lady who operates a small kiosk in the station, she linked between the location of the bus station and the poor situation (according to her) of the town: “And now you see, nobody wants to live here anymore. The town is dead.”

Figure 23. A bus station built on top of the old Jewish cemetery in Maków Mazowiecki. 2014. Photo by the author.

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Similar stories, of divine punishment for misusing Jewish religious sites, appeared in local folk culture already in previous periods, but after the Holocaust they became a literary topos.20 Expressing a sense of moral and religious unease as a consequence of profaning religious sites, the ancient stereotype of the vengeful and demonic Jew, or the macabre-mysterious perception of the Jewish space, these local legends might have also ref lected a deeper, tormenting fear that pertained directly to the Poles’ experience of witnessing the Shoah f rom a close range and to their own behavior toward the Jews. Beliefs in a divine curse for mistreating the Jews or not offering them assistance emerged immediately after the war.21 Coming back to his hometown Ryki, Yakov Handshtok met his Polish neighbor, who told him that people are terrified of God’s punishment for not saving the Jews. “Everyone knew that the Jews were being taken to their death and we did nothing to rescue them, we watched as if they were dogs. . . . More than one Christian has said to me that he’s terrified of the punish­ ment which may be coming.” Another man told him that everybody was living in constant fear of a curse for not providing enough help to the Jews during the war. “Ah, God will punish us severely for our failure to rescue them.” He also heard stories of mysterious deaths and injuries that befell the townspeople of Ryki as revenge for being indifferent to the Jews’ fate. “Who knows how many more disasters still await us,” an elderly woman told him, “The horseshoes we placed on the doorf rames didn’t help. There are evil spirits in town, and they want to take revenge.”22 This harrowing atmosphere was recorded by other Jewish visitors to Polish towns that had been heavily populated by Jews until the war. When arriving at Mszczonów in 1955, Samuel Shneiderman met a local elderly man who confessed, “We Poles .  .  . sure committed sins against our Yids [Żydki], and our present lot is God’s punishment upon us.  .  .  . When the name of our town was Amshinov, the Jewish name for it, things were hopping here. But now, you can see for yourself what our Mszczonów looks like—it’s a town that’s half dead.”23 These accounts might ref lect once again the stereotypical perception of the vengeful Jews or could be read as an attempt to adopt a traumatized narrative of victimization. But they clearly demonstrate a strong feeling of moral culpability, or guilt, among Poles who saw and heard the deportation or murder of their neighbors, profited from their disappearance, or—in some cases—were implicated in their death.24 These emotions may have elevated the sense of discomfort regarding the use of Jewish religious sites for mun­ dane purposes into pathological proportions, projecting the psychosocial

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imprints of the wartime period, together with the “sin of profanation” onto the evocative presence of the desacralized Jewish sites.

“There Are Demons Here” The aforementioned narrative records, which betray the culture’s moral qualms, religious feelings, traditional stereotypes, and historical memories, all convey evidence of a restless, haunted past that continues to intrude on the present. Such perturbing local beliefs are not as prevalent and as unyield­ ingly powerful for the present-day generation as they were for the genera­ tion who witnessed the Holocaust; yet Jewish specters and demons have not vanished from the Polish landscape and imagery. Present-day residents of the Muranów neighborhood, which was built on the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, have testified to hauntings—hearing strange noises, suffering unexplained panic attacks, feeling the presence of an invisible person in the room, and encountering “real” ghosts. Some inhabit­ ants have even claimed they were nearly strangled to death by a spectral figure. They have directly related their harrowing experiences to the tragic fate of the ghetto’s former Jewish prisoners, on whose ruins the new hous­ ing complex was built.25 Jewish specters were “spotted” also in Jewish cem­ eteries. While playing hide-and-seek in the abandoned Jewish cemetery in his hometown, recalled one participant in an online discussion, one of his friends fell into an open grave; when helping him climb out, they discovered a skull and started playing with it. Suddenly, he writes, an “old man wearing black” emerged out of nowhere and scolded them: “Why are you disturbing the dead?” Immediately afterward, the story goes, he dissipated into the air.26 In the 1990s, when visiting the Jewish cemetery in Częstochowa, which had a factory built on part of its grounds, the Israeli writer Benjamin Yaari met two Polish youngsters. “From a distance, I saw two young boys approach­ ing and moving away from me on and off. After a while they came closer to me and one of them asked in excitement: ‘Sir, aren’t you afraid to be here?,’ ‘Why should I be afraid,’ I asked, and he answered: ‘Why, there are demons here!’”27 Other stories center around synagogues, mainly repurposed for other needs. Local publications in the town of Sandomierz tell a version of the popular story about the ghosts in the synagogue. The building functions today as the town’s archive, but in the 1950s it was used as a warehouse for a local food product company. The reported events took place at that time. According to the story, while the night guard was seated inside the building’s basement, playing chess with his friends, they suddenly felt a creeping chill,

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and the lights started blinking. They saw then a group of rabbis, wearing ritual outfits, walking slowly and quietly down the stairs. The rabbis circled around the terrified Poles and then went up the stairs, disappearing.28 The figure of the “ghost rabbi” is a popular one. According to a famous legend, when on the ruins of the Great Synagogue at Tłomackie street in Warsaw attempts were made after the war to build a skyscraper, the con­ structors faced many setbacks and difficulties. The prevailing explanation was that the ghost of the last rabbi of the synagogue is responsible for the setbacks.29 In the town of Żarki, close to Katowice, some people are still con­ vinced that the former synagogue, which is now a cultural center, is haunted by the ghost of the last rabbi. In a 2008 article published in a local newspaper, workers at the cultural center testified to hearing unusual noises and creaks inside the empty building in the evenings and seeing strange shadows wan­ dering by. According to one of the interviewees, the rabbi is angry about the fact that the synagogue has become a place where dances take place: “He probably wants to scare away those who profane the holy place.”30 The spirits in postwar Polish ghost stories are not exclusively Jewish. The violent experience of the war years led to the development of numerous other macabre urban legends; some focused on former Nazi-related sites. In

Figure 24.

The Sandomierz synagogue, currently the town’s archive. 2015. Photo by the author.

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Legnica, about seventy kilometers west of Wrocław, a building complex that had served as a German hospital in World War II is believed to be haunted by the ghosts of Nazi soldiers, who have also been spotted wandering the town.31 Even so, legends of Jewish specters and belief in a “Jewish curse” are the most common of this genre, functioning as a narrative structure that weaves together repressed memories, guilt and responsibility, exoticization and sensationalism, references to looted property, and the profanation of religious spaces. While a rationalist perspective might scoff at the idea of taking these stories seriously, the figure of the specter has become an object of rigor­ ous study in the humanities and social sciences and a widely used ana­ lytical tool in different political and historical contexts.32 According to the sociologist Avery Gordon, when we “encounter” phantoms, we are often being reminded of a repressed past and the continued existence of those we believed—or hoped—were gone. We are haunted, Gordon explains, when “that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence.”33 Describ­ ing haunting as a sociological phenomenon, Gordon argues that the experi­ ence of being haunted testifies to past wrongdoing that has not yet received proper recognition or acknowledgment. Modern ghost stories in postcon­ f lict and postcolonial societies are often linked to the violent disappearance of entire ethnic groups, and they are focused on spaces that once belonged to the vanished group and which are now occupied by the descendants of the “wrongdoers.” In popular North American ghost stories, for example, this motif is echoed in tales of indigenous phantasms who haunt the spaces they once lived in and roamed.34 The liminal ontological state of the visiting spirit, between life and death and past and present, seems to serve as an appropriate representational fig­ ure for discussing the absent Jews and deciphering the macabre ambiance surrounding Jewish sites.35 Beyond merely indicating a troubled and agoniz­ ing past and pointing at historical injustices, they manifest a call for action, demanding a recognition that “there is something to be done” to resolve past and present misdeeds and indicate the existence of “unfinished business that needs to be addressed.”36 Being “haunted” by the ghosts of the Jewish space ref lects the recognition, whether conscious or not, that these places’ past “demands” to be acknowledged and taken care of in the present. The lingering presence of the Jewish ghosts inside ruined or repurposed sacral sites is all the more emphasized by the feeling of moral injustice—the desa­ cralization of these sites—that prevents the ghosts of the dead from “resting in peace” and keeps the wounds of the past open.

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Yet Jewish ghosts, in the post-Shoah Polish imagination, are more than mere figures of memory; they have a role beyond phantasmagoric retro­ spection. In the decades since the end of Poland’s version of communism, Jewish specters and dybbuks have become prosopopoeia in Polish literature, public discourse, and academic cultures.37 They are actively “summoned” to express feelings of loss, elicit mystical thrill, or present demands for “retribu­ tive” or “restorative” justice, offering therapeutic channels for Polish soci­ ety to “heal” itself.38 Possession by Jewish “demons” may also be a willful, hegemonic act, functioning within an array of power relations, where the “haunted” summon the living dead Jews for the purpose of exorcising them, thereby occluding their piercing moral indictments. The trend of inviting Jewish ghosts into the cultural realm may thus be interpreted as an attempt to reduce and dilute their chill, when they are presented as sanitized, ahis­ torical, and apolitical figments of an overwrought imagination that indulges in producing mesmerizing sensations, as opposed to dealing with the real, problematic aspects of Polish-Jewish relations.39 There remains another possible understanding of ghosts, which con­ ceives of them neither as illusions, metaphors, nor figures of memory. According to this perspective, the specter is neither a “real” nor a projected entity but rather a realm of experience, a way of being affected by the material presence of things. For Yael Navaro-Yashin, following her ethno­ graphic research in Northern Cyprus, a ghost “exists in and through non­ human objects, if not as an apparition in human form or shape.” In her observations of Cypriot Turks living in former Greek houses after the 1974 population exchange in Cyprus, Navaro-Yashin conceptualizes the specter as “what is retained in material objects and the physical environment in the aftermath of the disappearance of the humans linked or associated with that thing or space. In other words, rather than being a representation of something or someone else, the ghost is a thing, the material object, in itself.”40 The affective experience of a spectrality, retained in an abandoned material environment, is also detectable in Kozaczkowa’s poem, “The Old Synagogue”: And at the cemetery, where only hawthorn and heather Commemorate those trampled into the ground, A strange sound rustles in the pine needles at night, As if to summon the nameless to a roll-call . . . Watching over the haunted Jewish cemetery, the Dąbrowa Tarnowska synagogue is itself described as a living dead entity.

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And its naked stump still stands Half-torn apart by an explosion— And no one dares to pull it down For the tragedy of lifeless things fills one with horror [Bo budzi grozę tragizm rzeczy martwych].41 At night, the “strange sound,” whispered in the cemetery trees, is heard and recorded by the presence of the slowly crumbling, ruined synagogue. This “lifeless thing” is no longer alive, though it is not dead either. Whereas its zombielike status inspired local attempts to dismantle the Dąbrowa Tar­ nowska synagogue, the poet tells us that something imbued within fills its antagonists with horror, impeding their destructive efforts and ultimately protecting the building from total demolition. It is this “tragedy of lifeless things” that charged these remaining material traces, after the Jews’ depar­ ture, with a ghastly yet tangible presence. There is an evocative urge to remove these traces, though, at the same time, the profound difficulties of accomplishing this mission are revealed. This intriguing ambivalence, as we shall soon see, became particularly evident following the events of the late 1960s and on through the last two decades of the Polish People’s Republic.

• C h a p te r 9 Anxiety and Rediscovery

On March 22, 1973, at around one o’clock in the afternoon, a car stopped next to the old Jewish cemetery in Łańcut, in southeastern Poland. A group of “American citizens of Jewish nationality” emerged from the car and entered the site. After several minutes of commu­ nal prayer, one of the Jews approached a woman whose house abutted the cemetery and asked her for a glass of water, which she gave him. The man, the only one of the group who spoke Polish, asked the woman whether she knew of any plans by the authorities to build a marketplace over the cem­ etery. She replied in the negative. She had not heard of any such plans. The American Jew then gave the woman 150 zloty “in return for the water” she had given him and rejoined his fellow travelers in the waiting car and left. This is the chain of events described by the officer in charge of the local policing unit in Łańcut, in a report titled “secret,” following his conversation with the same woman, who had come to inform him what occurred in the cemetery.1 This peculiar incident, which on first hearing sounds like a provin­ cial anecdote, captures in many ways the tense atmosphere felt around Jew­ ish spaces by the beginning of the 1970s. For the next two decades, until the end of the communist project in Poland in 1989, Jewish sites were increas­ ingly perceived through a lens tinted with paranoia, suspicion, and caution, ref lecting the aftermath of the political upheavals of 1968.

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During the second half of the 1960s, anti-Jewish sentiments were strength­ ened among state and local authorities in Poland. These tendencies reached a boiling point in the aftermath of Israel’s Six-Day War, buttressed by Soviet support of the Arab nations. Following Moscow’s decision to cut diplomatic ties with Israel, the public sphere became f looded with an inf lux of aggres­ sive and brutal anti-Israel slogans and publications led by the nationalist factions in the Communist Party. In the Polish press, Israeli leaders were compared to Nazis, and Israel and West Germany were accused of cooperat­ ing to absolve the latter from responsibility for the Holocaust and put the blame on the Poles instead.2 On June 19, 1967, Władysław Gomułka, the state’s leader, delivered a public speech, decrying “Zionist circles of Jews—Polish citizens” for sup­ porting the state of Israel and referring to them as a “fifth column.” The speech, which was criticized by some members of the politburo for its anti-Jewish tones, marked the beginning of the “anti-Zionist” campaign, which was an orchestrated plan to persecute and oust citizens of Jewish origins.3 “These few sentences by the first secretary,” argues Dariusz Stola, “introduced the word ‘Zionism,’ that had augured ill for Jews since the 1950s.” Gomułka’s words were seen as a green light for activists within the security services and the party to begin “settling scores” with the Jews.4 A quiet campaign of removing Polish Jews f rom the ranks of the administra­ tion and the army had begun, inspired by a notion of unmasking “hidden Zionists.”5 In March 1968, the “anti-Zionist” campaign became an open anti-Jewish witch hunt following student demonstrations at Warsaw University against the regime’s censures on the freedom of speech, which in turn quickly spread throughout the country.6 Trying to calm the growing unrest, the Pol­ ish leadership employed the old tactic of scapegoating the Jews, blaming them for the political system’s wrongdoings. Ideological zealousness and crude political considerations merged into a brutal hate campaign, which targeted mainly Jews but also spread to Polish intellectuals and liberal activ­ ists. The campaign was clearly manipulated by the regime, intent on legiti­ mizing its power, and was nurtured by the anti-Jewish aspirations of party hardliners. It also ignited anti-Jewish sentiments and actions within Polish society.7 Polish Jews, for many of whom Jewishness was a marginal issue, felt a new hostility in their workplaces, in public staircases, in factories, and in published letters to the newspapers.8 Jewish citizens who had regarded them­ selves as loyal communists were exposed as Zionists at work rallies, publicly humiliated, and fired from their jobs. Exploitatively, the regime was able to merge deep-seated anti-Jewish sentiments with social unrest and feelings

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of dissatisfaction, providing platforms to disgruntled Poles eager to express their criticism of the system through the simulacrum of the Jewish enemy.9 As a direct result of the violent wave, many of the Polish Jews felt that they had no choice but to leave the country. With the encouragement of the government, another mass Jewish exodus began. By the end of 1968, around 15,000 Jews emigrated to Israel, Western Europe, and the United States, forced by the country’s authorities to relinquish their Polish citizenship and leave their homes forever.10 The Jewish public in Poland lost many of its leaders and elites, and organized Jewish life suffered a fatal blow.11 “Abroad,” writes Michael Steinlauf, “it was believed that the history of the Jews in Poland had come to an ultimate conclusion.”12 The substantial shrinking of the Jewish population led to a further diminishing of the status of the offi­ cial Jewish institutions, with only the secular TSKŻ and the religious body ZRWM remaining active in the country.13 In the years leading up to the events of 1968, amid an already increasingly anti-Jewish atmosphere, state authorities addressed abandoned Jewish sites with heightened suspicion and hostility, characteristic of their treatment of the Jewish minority. News of the demolition of Jewish cemeteries in the second half of the 1960s evoked protests by international Jewish organiza­ tions. This triggered counteraccusations that “international Jewish circles” had launched a campaign to tarnish Poland’s reputation. In 1966, during official discussions on the possible use of parts of a Jewish cemetery in the former Hasidic bastion Góra Kalwaria (Yiddish: Ger or Gur) for industrial purposes, Polish state officials expressed their reservations, warning that such move could “expose our country to attacks by Jewish circles in Poland and abroad.”14 That same year, the Ministry of Religious Affairs advised against the demolition of the Głogów Jewish cemetery in Lower Silesia. The ministry stressed that its position was not on account of “religious reasons” but was rather a preemptive measure aimed at preventing “international circles” from using this to further “hostile propaganda against the politics of religion in the Polish People’s Republic.”15 Such emergent political sensitivity and the fear of international criticism probably led the Ministry of Public Services to draft a nationwide circular in 1966, titled “On the further tidying up of Jewish cemeteries.” This outline ratified the procedures for overseeing Jewish cemeteries and stressed that all invasive action should proceed with caution. The circular also declared that Jewish burial grounds could be used for other purposes in unique and excep­ tional cases, and it ordered all relevant governmental branches to respond within two weeks to any international inquiries into the status of their Jewish cemeteries.16 Yet that same year, a parallel secret memorandum was penned

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by high-ranking party members and Interior Ministry officials, recommend­ ing the liquidation of all old Jewish cemeteries throughout the country and declaring that any attempts to secure financial resources abroad for their upkeep were undesired.17 Around the time of the 1968 anti-Jewish campaign, ambivalent political and ideological frameworks, characteristic of late 1960s Poland, governed the status of Jewish sites. On the one hand, hostile treatment and negative perceptions of Jewish communal sites continued and even appeared to have intensified in the antecedent and aftermath of 1968. A series of vandalis­ tic attacks on cemeteries and Holocaust memorials accompanied the ver­ bal anti-Semitic manifestations.18 Active prayer houses and other communal buildings were also sabotaged. Already before 1968 and increasingly after­ ward, the synagogue in Dzierżoniów was constantly targeted by “young hooligans,” who threw stones and smashed its windows. However, town authorities claimed that these acts were not committed on political or reli­ gious grounds.19 At the same time, the stereotypical fear of an alleged “Jew­ ish conspiracy” increased the politically calculated sensitivity regarding the issue of material Jewish traces. In October 1968, for example, only a short period after the peak of the “anti-Zionist” campaign, while thousands of Polish Jews had begun to f lee the country, the status of the abandoned Jew­ ish cemetery in Gliwice, a medium-sized town in the former German part of Silesia, was negotiated between Jewish organizations, local officials, and state authorities. Though the town council wished to use part of the burial grounds for construction, government representatives maintained that although the law sides with the town, “due to the political situation . . . such action is not advisable.”20 While the nationalist and antiliberal sentiments in post-1968 Poland had not yet subsided, it was not long after the “anti-Zionist” campaign had been introduced that the country’s leaders began to understand the harmful effects it was having on Poland’s image abroad. Although the regime may have sought to “solve” the “Jewish problem” by pushing tens of thousands of Jews to leave the country, the consequences of the brutal, state-sponsored anti-Semitic attack only further complicated the Jewish issue from the Polish point of view. These events raised worldwide condemnation and criticism and turned worldwide attention and scrutiny on Poland.21 Such strong international criticism after the anti-Jewish outburst only nur­ tured and reaffirmed the paranoid and stereotypical frame of mind among state authorities, who treated these external voices as dangerous “anti-Polish propaganda.”22 The threat posed by “the Jewish circles” and their believed inf luence on Western governments in the aftermath of 1968’s upheavals was

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elevated to a level of obsessive anxiety that was increasingly ref lected in dis­ cussions on the question of the country’s Jewish sites. By the new decade, this issue was discussed at the highest levels of the PZPR and the govern­ ment, including the Foreign Ministry. It appeared as if, in the new political climate, the question of Jewish spaces had become the focal point for Poles’ anxious preoccupations with international Jewish interests in Poland. Inter­ nal discussions in Warsaw interpreted the growing attention to the state of Jewish sites as an attempt to spread accusations about anti-Semitism in Pol­ ish society and to “stain our nation with [the] guilt and co-responsibility” for the Nazi regime’s crimes.23 The rationale behind this conviction was simple: “Due to the huge inf luence of Jewish circles on the political and economic spheres, and on the governments in the west . . . the anti-Polish propaganda campaign is harming our political and economic interests and creating a hos­ tile atmosphere in the international realm.”24 Such stereotypical beliefs reproduced and ratified long-held notions com­ mon to modern anti-Semitism and the Polish imagination, while combining them with communist Cold War politics. In the last two decades of the Pol­ ish People’s Republic, the authorities dealing with the question of Jewish sites demonstrated how these anxieties were fueled and nurtured by grow­ ing pressures and the lobbying of Jewish leaders from Poland and abroad.25 The following sequence of events concerning the Jewish cemetery in Łańcut shows how these anxieties were translated and generated at the local level. It also shows the real and imagined inf luence of Jews on the shaping of the question of the future of Jewish sites in the last epoch of the country’s com­ munist era and the increasing combination of local, national, and interna­ tional concerns in the discussion on the fate of Jewish spaces in the remote provinces.

“Our Rebbe Returning from Poland” During the latter half of the 1960s, the town council of Łańcut promoted a plan to eliminate the last traces of their old Jewish cemetery, clearing it for public purposes. The cemetery was severely destroyed by German forces with few fragmented headstones remaining. Word of these plans reached the leaders of Polish Jewry, who then informed Jewish organizations in the United States. In 1966, a group of American Hasidic rabbis attempted to thwart the cemetery’s impending destruction by turning to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee ( JDC) and the Polish government for help.26 The rabbis were particularly concerned with the fate of the remains of Rabbi Naftali Zvi Horowitz of Ropshitz (1760–1827), one of the original

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leaders of the Hasidic movement, whose grave was located within the Łańcut cemetery. State authorities were willing to consider the Jews’ request to preserve and secure the rabbi’s grave but stressed that the costs of such a project would have to be borne by those making the appeal. After the JDC refused to support this initiative, arguing that its limited resources should be used for preserving active Jewish cemeteries, the American rabbis began collecting money for the project.27 In the meantime, in November 1967, the voivodeship had accepted the town’s plan and adopted a resolution to level the site completely. Since no burials had been held there for the past forty years, there was no apparent legal reason for state authorities to intervene and prevent the cemetery’s erasure.28 Jewish leaders from Poland and abroad continued to try to halt the plans. On March 21, 1968, only a few days after the Warsaw University demonstra­ tions, and in the midst of the “anti-Zionist” campaign, two men, who intro­ duced themselves as representatives of the “Chief Rabbinate of Poland” (a body which ceased to exist by then), paid a visit to the head of the district authority in Łańcut.29 According to the latter’s hostile and anxious report, the two men, who refused to identify themselves further, had appeared unexpectedly at his private apartment, demanding to talk about the plans to demolish the cemetery.30 As an official protocol states, one of them was dressed in civilian clothes while the other, “the alleged rabbi,” was described as “Having a brown beard and wearing a liturgical outfit.” After the official insisted that he would not discuss the issue in his house, the three went to his office, where they had a “very tense discussion.” As the official’s protocol states, the two acted “arrogantly and aggressively,” ignoring his argument that the decision to remove the cemetery had already been determined in accordance with all legal procedures. His report goes on to state that the two emphasized that Judaism does not allow for cemeteries to be overturned and put to other uses, and that they warned him of the consequences of harming the tzaddik’s grave, threatening to turn the matter over to “Western governments.”31 It is not clear whether this dissonant encounter led to any concrete devel­ opments, but a little more than a month later, in May 1968, the “Chief Rab­ binate of Poland” sent a letter to the Łańcut town council asking them “to inform us which steps have been taken in order to secure the old Jewish cemetery.” In a resolute and assertive fashion, the letter claimed that the current, neglected state of the cemetery, and particularly the rabbi’s grave, had created a bad impression on many foreign visitors and had already been reported “in the overseas press.” Writing in the midst of an open, anti-Semitic campaign, the writers were not at all afraid of using such language. On the

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contrary, they blatantly warned that if the town dared to use the cemetery for other purposes, then this action would be considered an affront to the Polish constitution and human dignity, and it would “resemble the most bar­ baric acts of the Hitlerite criminals.”32 Considering the concurrent brutal attacks on Polish Jews, the daring and unequivocal tone of this letter should be seen as remarkably courageous, though admittedly dangerous. The writers of this text were well aware of the perilous climate. They appear to have recognized, at this early stage, the problematic and delicate situation the Polish leadership found itself in, and they seized upon it as leverage. The preservation of the Łańcut cemetery, they argued, could contribute substantially “to the retrieving of the good name of Poland—especially in the current period—by showing that, even now, our country’s authorities are genuinely rescuing and protecting the Jewish sacred traces from barbaric devastation . . . [and] bringing back their human dignity and honor which was robbed during the occupation.”33 This elegantly crafted argument reached the crux of the Polish paradox in the aftermath of the “anti-Zionist” campaign by manipulatively triggering Pol­ ish fears of international scrutiny of the country’s treatment of its remaining Jewish population. In doing so, the authors not only “offered” the regime a way of dealing with the strengthening worldwide condemnations, but they also implicitly threatened them with public accusations, comparing their actions to crimes perpetrated by the Nazis. The town council immediately forwarded the “Chief Rabbinate’s” letter to the state authorities, who appeared to treat it seriously. A few weeks later, on June 1, 1968, the director of the Ministry of Religious Affairs intervened, asking the Łańcut municipality to refrain from taking any further steps to clear away the cemetery until the matter could be further clarified.34 While the issue was being discussed in the higher echelons of government, the growing Jewish interest in the cemetery may have provoked other concerns and suspicions in town. In an interesting coincidence, in the middle of June 1968, the local police officer in the Łańcut district sent classified reports to his superiors in which he informed them that dozens of foreign Jews had recently begun to inquire about the status of their former private properties that remained in town.35 In another report, he also drew attention to the fact that there were several properties in town still registered as belonging to Jews, whose ownership had not yet been transferred to the state treasury.36 Although the proximity of these two occurrences could be merely acciden­ tal, the growing interest of Jews from abroad in the material Polish Jewish heritage following 1968 may have triggered strong suspicions among Polish officials that Jews were trying to reclaim their former assets.

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Meanwhile, American Jews had begun to take a more active role in attempts to save the cemetery. In 1970, a delegation of some thirty rabbis f rom the United States traveled to Poland to gather firsthand information about the state of Jewish religious traces in the country. One of their main interests was the grave of Rabbi Naftali Horowitz, in Łańcut. They met with several local and state officials, urging them to preserve the cemetery and to fence off the rabbi’s grave. The rabbinic deputation aroused a great deal of interest—and suspicion—at the highest levels of Polish leadership, who regarded the matter seriously and assured the group warm and welcom­ ing hospitality, while simultaneously tightly supervising their activities.37 Upon their return to the States, the American rabbis continued lobbying. The most outspoken among them was Rabbi Shmuel (Shmelke) Rubin, also known as “The Sulitzer Rebbe,” a leader of a small, Hasidic community in Far Rockaway, New York. Rabbi Rubin, a descendant of Rabbi Horowitz, continued f rom abroad his attempts to rescue the grave. In May 1970, he wrote a f lattering, yet assertive, letter to the head of the Ministry of Reli­ gious Affairs, trying to pressure him to work toward preserving the cem­ etery in Łańcut. He expressed his “heartfelt appreciation” for enabling the rabbinic group to visit Poland’s holy sites and stressed that “our visiting [of ] those historical Jewish places . . . and the [preservation] of these sites’ . . . sacred status will invite many other tourists f rom throughout the world.” The letter goes on to mention the importance of protecting the grave of Rabbi Horovitz, stating that he “would appreciate” the ministry head’s “interest in this matter.”38 After learning that no decision had been taken to preserve the grave, his assertive tone became much more explicit. In another letter to the ministry, he complains that nothing has been done to secure the grave, and he urges the authorities to treat the matter seriously as “it is receiving attention in the American press.”39 To prove his last point, Rubin attached to the letter a copy of his community’s monthly bulletin from June, marking an article titled, “Our Rebbe Returning from Poland.” The article mentions that the rabbis’ delegation received a warm welcome and was well-treated by the Pol­ ish government, but it also states that “it was, nevertheless, heartbreaking to see . . . Jewish cemeteries . . . still in ruins as a result of the Nazi occupation.” Referring to the grave of Horovitz, the article continued, “The main purpose of this trip [was to visit] our Rebbe,” and that “an application” had been filed “with the Polish government . . . wherein they promised to do their utmost in reestablishing his historic site.”40 This short article, published in a local New York synagogue bulletin, with a readership of some few hundred members, was taken seriously by high-ranking Polish officials. It was translated into

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Polish and was referred to as proof of the growing interest of Jewish circles working in Poland and abroad.41 Over the ensuing years, the issue of the old Jewish cemetery in Łańcut would be continuously and obsessively dealt with in the higher echelons of government, ref lecting the growing Polish anxiety over these “Jewish circles” and the re-emergence of the stereotypical belief in an omnipresent Jewish inf luence. While the regime was rethinking its policy toward the treatment of Jewish sites, growing worldwide interest in the situation of Jewish spaces appears to have charged the townspeople and local officials of Łańcut with yet another level of dissonance and anxiety. In March 1973, a few days after the police officer in Łańcut was informed by a local woman of the visit by an American Jewish group, the officer was once again approached by the same woman, who informed him of other visits by Jews to the cemetery.42 Accord­ ing to her, on March 25, two Jews arrived at the cemetery at one o’clock in the afternoon. After praying for twenty minutes, they left in a hurry. Later that day, around five thirty, she saw a different group of Jews visiting the graveyard and engaging in a conversation with a neighbor in German. The neighbor later told her that the Jews said that they had reached an agree­ ment with the director of a local museum about erecting a monument on the cemetery grounds.43 The concerned inspector expanded his investigation into the current events taking place in the cemetery and began talking to citizens who lived nearby. He learned of other visits by Jews from abroad. One of his infor­ mants, a woman whose house was adjacent to the cemetery, told him that she had herself approached a group of Jews that had come to pray in the cemetery on March 31.44 As she told the inspector, she had been planning to erect a fence around her house, but she was concerned that the Jews would accuse her of breaching the cemetery’s borders. Upon seeing the visiting Jews, she took the opportunity to discuss the matter with them. The Jews told her that they had “no problem” with her plans and that she could build the fence as she wished. They told her that they were only interested in erect­ ing a monument for their rabbi, who was buried in the cemetery, saying that they had already received authorization to do so.45 The dedicated inspector seems to have been bothered by the visitors’ fre­ quent and uncontrolled engagement with Łańcut’s locals. On April 29, the inspector personally surveilled the cemetery. As he later recalled, on this day three different cars, whose registration number he recorded, arrived at the cemetery, carrying groups of Jews “who didn’t speak Polish.”46 According to his report, each group spent a few minutes praying at the cemetery and then left by the car they came in. The inspector observed that one of the

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groups, after visiting the cemetery, wandered around town and took pictures of some private houses. After all the Jewish visitors had departed, he entered the cemetery and collected some of the little “paper notes” (probably kvit­ lach) that the Jews had left in the cemetery for further investigation.47 This strange and even comic episode demonstrates the local dimensions of the increasing anxiety surrounding Jewish spaces after 1968. Frequent visits to the Łańcut cemetery by foreign Jews, and the growing interest in its future strengthened the suspicious and dubious atmosphere surrounding the Jewish cemetery, evoking old concerns and insecurities among the local population. These unexpected, anonymous Jewish visits, the esoteric prac­ tices witnessed by the locals, and their intriguing interactions with the town’s inhabitants, on the background of the political climate, added another layer of dissonance to its already charged perception.48

“Mr. Polan Was Struck with Pain” The phenomenon of Jews, mainly Americans, visiting and exploring aban­ doned Jewish sites in their ancestral Polish hometowns had been gaining momentum since the outset of the 1970s, the period that the Holocaust first became central to the formation of American Jewish identity and key for American culture in general.49 For many American Jews, both first- and second-generation Holocaust survivors, the appearance of decayed and dis­ integrating Jewish heritage sites in Poland incarnated the almost total dev­ astation of the thousand-year-old historic Jewish community. Polish Jewish descendants were traveling to Poland on emotional journeys of remem­ brance and were attempting to salvage the desolate and obliterated sites of their forefathers. In 1971, Martin Polan, an American Jew, visited the small town of Złoczew, near Łódź, where his grandparents had been born. Struck by the state of the Jewish cemetery there, he went to the offices of the ZRWM in Warsaw, ask­ ing them to alert the authorities of this terrible situation. They obliged. “Mr. Polan was struck with the pain of seeing the bones of the dead scattered around the cemetery,” the union representatives wrote in their letter to the Złoczew town board, also addressing the Ministry of Religious Affairs as recipients. “This is all the more severe,” they added, “since . . . on September 4, 1939, 160 people were murdered inside the cemetery by the barbaric Hit­ lerites.”50 In 1972, a group of American Jews traveled to the Polish provinces, searching for the graves of their families. Going from town to town, as they later reported to the Joint, they were horrified to discover what had become of their ancestors’ resting places.51 In Łańcut, they wrote, “There is nothing

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but a concave depression in the ground.” In Przeworsk, they were told that “the road on which our bus was parked was the former cemetery and rest­ ing place of the Jewish dead.” Arriving at Aleksandrów, they saw matzevot smashed and “animal refuse covering the ground.” Concluding their report, they wrote, “Our feelings are that the responsible authorities should protect the cemeteries in Poland, where thousands of Jewish citizens are buried.”52 These kinds of individual petitions were met by the increasingly cautious, defensive attitude of state officials, who were becoming convinced that dem­ onstrating a willingness to protect Jewish sites corresponded to Polish inter­ ests. Although a few years earlier, similar appeals had been rejected out of hand, by the start of the new decade these accumulating voices, in the wake of the new political climate were able to concretely change the official policy regarding the status of Jewish spaces. In 1973, for example, the Ministry of Religious Affairs expressed its objection to the clearing of the Jewish cem­ etery in Sędziszów Małopolski, a small town in the country’s southeast, in favor of creating a municipal park.53 During the 1960s, such requests were often approved, but this time the ministry argued that the purpose of creat­ ing a park did not constitute “an exceptional public need,” which could be invoked in order to remove a cemetery before the expiry of the forty-year period succeeding the last burial. These special restrictions were particular to the Jewish case. In comparison, requests for clearing away German cemeter­ ies at the beginning of the 1970s were approved overwhelmingly and even encouraged without reservation.54 In 1972, following a legal investigation in Oleśnica, in Lower Silesia, it became clear that the local Polish citizens were regularly removing headstones from German cemeteries in the area and selling them off. The authorities not only tolerated these cases but also suggested conducting an official valuation of the monuments inside these cemeteries to regulate the gravestone trade.55 Despite the emerging cautious policy toward Jewish spaces at the begin­ ning of the 1970s, incidents of erasing Jewish sites did not disappear overnight. With most of Poland’s Jewish leaders having emigrated and perhaps fueled by the outburst of violence unleashed in 1968, some local politicians in the provinces succeeded to finally fulfill their spatial vision and demolish syna­ gogues and cemeteries in their localities. The most notable case took place in Białystok, when city officials and PZPR functionaries were able to imple­ ment a plan from the 1950s to remove the “Ghetto Cemetery,” located at the center of town, in which thousands of Jews who were murdered by the Nazis were buried. After the war, several monuments were built inside the site by the surviving Jews, honoring the victims. In the course of a few days in 1971, probably without authorization from the government, all the headstones

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and monuments were uprooted by municipal workers, and the bodies were exhumed from their original resting place and thrown together to a mass grave. The place was converted into a square, and a symbolic memorial was erected at its center.56 Three years later, the city authorities in Łódź planned to seize part of the Jewish cemetery, one of the largest in Europe. Although they could not implement their plans to clear the area, they were able to remove thousands of gravestones and exhume human remains, which were then buried in forty caskets in mass graves.57 Incidents such as these continued into the 1970s, but their frequency decreased. Jewish spaces were still being damaged, repurposed, and vandal­ ized throughout the country on a regular basis, but independent actions to remove Jewish cemeteries were no longer tolerated by the state. After a num­ ber of ad hoc interventions by state officials, a series of preliminary, national, and binding steps were taken in the mid-1970s toward the protection of Jew­ ish cemeteries, signaling the regime’s recognition of the need to prevent their destruction. In 1974, following talks with American Jewish organizations, the government initiated the first national survey since the early 1950s of Jewish cemeteries in an attempt to construct a comprehensive inventory of their number, state, and status. The information was gathered based on question­ naires distributed to and answered by the local authorities. The completed report concluded that there were 522 Jewish cemeteries in Poland;58 among them, twenty-seven were active and in a “relatively good state.” Among the 495 inactive cemeteries, the report determined, only twenty-five (5%) were being maintained, were fully fenced, and were preserved in a good state. In sixty-one cemeteries (12%), the site’s fence was 50 percent destroyed, and the headstones were partially destroyed. In 217 (43% of the) cemeteries, the fence was 50–90 percent destroyed, and only a small number of matezvot remained intact; most had been overturned and broken. The remaining 176 cemeteries (36%) were regarded as “geographical locations of former cem­ eteries,” in which no trace of former headstones or fences remained.59 Although the data collected in this survey and the conclusions reached were limited and inaccurate, ultimately placing the blame for the cemeteries’ sad state solely on the Germans or natural causes, it did provide a general pic­ ture of the immense destruction and poor situation of the Jewish cemeteries in the country. Apart from questionable statistical data, the 1974 report was significant in the sense that it forced the local authorities to deal with the issue of Jewish cemeteries, which was the first time they were obligated to do so since the war. It was made clear to them that the presence of these sites would be, from now on, also a political problem that demanded national and international consideration and attention.

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The motivation behind this report was clear. Its writers argued that “some letters f rom the West, mostly [f rom] Americans, are spreading alle­ gations .  .  . about alleged liquidations of Jewish cemeteries.” The report denied these allegations, insisting that the Polish authorities were putting great efforts into protecting their Jewish heritage sites, and that they were treated exactly as the ritual sites of all other denominations.60 Two years later, the newly appointed minister of religious affairs, Kazimierz Kąkol, one of the main orchestrators of the 1968 “anti-Zionist” campaign, distributed a nationwide circular, stating that the policy of the state authorities is “to preserve all existing Jewish cemeteries in Poland.”61 It contained a specific clause expressing a substantial change in the official state’s stance toward the question of Jewish cemeteries: “In practice, it [the circular] means the prohibition of violation, liquidation, or converting to other purpose exist­ ing cemeteries of this faith, as well as a commitment to take care [of ] and secure their external appearance.”62 This short paragraph marked a dramatic shift in the regime’s policy and ref lected its weakening international status; they were particularly vulnera­ ble to and afraid of criticism from abroad about the situation of Jewish cem­ eteries. The new regulations were circulated to the local governing bodies through the voivodeships and became the new normative principle invoked by state officials who dealt with local requests to use Jewish cemeteries. In 1979, for example, when a local agriculture cooperative from the village of Widawa, close to Łódź, wanted to expand its perimeters into the adjacent Jewish cemetery, they received an answer that, “according to the new regula­ tion from 1976, Jewish cemeteries cannot be used for other purposes.”63 Although government officials tended to refrain from approving requests for the clearing away of cemeteries, this memorandum did not lead to a sub­ stantial improvement in the situation of the Jewish sites. For the time being, no special resources had been allocated by government ministries or local authorities for their upkeep. The government’s declared change in policy did not appease Jewish concerns regarding the catastrophic state of Jewish sites, mainly cemeteries. The f lood of Jewish tourists visiting abandoned and neglected Jewish sites in all corners of the country, which increased substan­ tially toward the end of the 1970s, kept the issue at the center of worldwide and intensifying attention. This made it clear to the Polish authorities that it was not enough to just refrain from clearing and erasing Jewish sites, but that they also were required to take proactive steps to preserve them through physical renovation and reconstruction. The understanding that something must be done to actively preserve the traces of Jewish culture in Poland became all the more urgent in the latter

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half of the 1970s following the direct involvement of foreign political and diplomatic factors in the discussion of Jewish sites. This new phenomenon confirmed the Polish regime’s fears of international criticism. In a sense, the “danger” of Western governments’ involvement in Polish affairs was no longer a threat but a reality. Jewish leaders now addressed their complaints directly to senators, members of parliament, and diplomats—from North America and Europe—who did not hesitate to approach their Polish coun­ terparts with resolute inquiries regarding the physical state of abandoned Jewish sites. The deteriorating economic situation of Poland since 1976, its massive foreign debts, and the further weakening of the regime’s interna­ tional status and popular legitimacy made the latter more receptive and f lex­ ible than ever to such petitions. One might be surprised when reading urgent correspondence between Western ambassadors and lawmakers and high-ranking Polish officials and party members regarding the reconstruction of a fence in a deserted Jew­ ish cemetery in a remote provincial town, but this was the dynamic that characterized the negotiation of Jewish sites in the last decade and a half of communist rule. In 1975, for example, Moritz Kranz, an American Jewish citizen, visited Pysznica, a village at the southeastern corner of the country, where his family used to live. He was shocked to see the neglected Jewish cemetery and decided to erect a memorial inside it. Kranz then approached US senator Jacob K. Javitz, who wrote to the US ambassador in Poland, ask­ ing him to deal personally with the matter, which the latter did, involving local, district, and state Polish officials.64 In 1977, Rabbi Chaim Wolhendler, a descendant of Wolbromian Jews f rom New York, visited the Jewish cem­ etery of Wolbrom. He then made efforts to secure the desolate place and put a wall around it, which led to a seven-year-long series of urgent cor­ respondences, telegrams, and telephone calls between Jewish leaders, US diplomats, local officials, and Polish government ministers. Eventually, the cemetery was fenced off.65 Local authorities in the periphery were increasingly pressured by Jewish leaders and Western politicians who saw them as responsible for the mainte­ nance and status of neglected heritage sites, and increased their direct pres­ sures on mayors and town councils to act in the interest of preservation. In 1983, the World Jewish Congress addressed the mayor of Sanok, a town in the southeast corner of the country, trying to gain his support in erect­ ing a fence around his town’s Jewish cemetery: “Your cooperation in this matter would be highly appreciated as a gesture of good will, in allowing us to protect this holy site.”66 Toward the end of the communist era, inter­ national actors were frequently using “carrot and stick” tactics, convincing

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the Poles that renovating a cemetery or a synagogue could benefit them. In February 1989, following approaches by Jews, the US congressman Ste­ phen Solarz, himself Jewish, wrote a personal letter to the mayor of Słupsk, in northern Poland, asking for his assistance in preserving the city’s Jewish cemetery: “You might be interested to learn that several Jewish cemeteries have recently been preserved in Poland and throughout Eastern Europe. It has been my experience that the preservation of these holy sites is not only a positive step in relations between our two countries but also serves as a mechanism to attract tourism to the local communities.”67 These kinds of interventions daunted the Polish authorities and jolted them into action. They demonstrated, once again, the power (real or imag­ ined) of Jews inf luencing the Poles’ policies on Jewish spaces. These internal and external pressures put the local authorities in a complicated position, in which they had to maneuver between conf licting interests and consider­ ations regarding the future of the material Jewish remnants in their town­ scapes.

Salvaging the Lost Landscape While the regime’s sensitivity to the situation of Jewish sites was mainly stra­ tegic and motivated by political concerns, another more profound change had been taking place since the beginning of the 1970s at the grassroots level. Following the political violence and restrictions surrounding the 1968 events, the military repression of the workers’ strikes in 1970, and the slowing econ­ omy, an increasing number of Polish intellectuals and social activists were finally becoming disillusioned with communist rule.68 A growing number of dissident movements were losing faith in the system and the party, laying the cultural and social foundations for the future massive demonstrations of the Solidarity (Solidarność) movement in 1981. As the weakening regime was losing its grip on civil society, the public sphere was f looded with under­ ground publications and oppositional cultural initiatives. In the wake of the crude anti-Jewish wave, and as part of the resistance to the censorship and manipulations in the fields of history and culture, engagement with the Jew­ ish issue became a central element for circles of the Polish intelligentsia and liberal Catholic groups.69 The aftershocks of 1968 and the atmosphere of the underground renaissance also led to a cultural awakening within the Jewish public in the country. Although the number of Jews had shrunk to an unprec­ edentedly low point, a small group of young Poles of Jewish origins, many of them involved in the March 1968 demonstrations, were rediscovering their Jewishness, opening clandestine study groups and social forums that soon

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expanded.70 Dealing with Jewish culture was thus perceived by some parts of the society, Poles and Jews alike, as a political act, a search for a collective and personal identity, and as part of a reimagination of an alternate vision to the communist one.71 In this context, trying to save deserted Jewish sites concretized the sym­ bolic rediscovery of Jewish culture and the multiethnic Polish past while also commemorating the tragic fate of the Jews. At the beginning of the 1970s, activists from the Club of the Catholic Intelligentsia initiated attempts to restore the huge Jewish cemetery in Warsaw’s Okopowa. Entering the ceme­ tery for the first time, wrote one of the group’s leaders, Krzysztof Śliwiński, in a short article titled “Our Jewish Cemetery” (Nasz cmentarz żydowski), he felt as if he was on “another continent.” Working for an entire day in the cemetery, cleaning the matzevot and weeding out wild bushes, wrote Śliwiński, allowed him and his group to be exposed to the almost unknown story of the extermination of Poland’s Jews. After working on clean-up dur­ ing the day, in the evening they would meet for joint studies, discussions, and lectures about various Jewish subjects. One of the main subjects in those meetings was the Holocaust, the Polish attitude toward Jewish suffering, and the moral and religious meaning of the absence of the Jews for Polish society. “We wanted to make sure that the events of the Holocaust (Zagłada) would not be diminished,” he later recalled.72 The public’s growing attention to the situation of Jewish sites since the early 1970s was not limited to the famous heritage sites in the main urban centers but was also focused on the country’s remote provinces, where, after years of neglect, plunder, and devastation many of them were on the verge of total obliteration. The physical situation of Jewish cemeteries in the periphery was so catastrophic that it had become a synonym for utter destruction and profanation. In 1972, for example, a Polish citizen from a vil­ lage near Lublin wrote an angry anonymous letter to the editors of Sztandar Ludu, complaining against the local priest for not taking care of and neglect­ ing the Catholic cemetery. “The cemetery,” he wrote, “currently looks like a Jewish one.”73 Not until the 1980s, would independent clean-up initiatives of Jewish cemeteries accumulate into a wider social movement, but already at this stage, more and more letters were being sent by individual Poles to Jew­ ish organizations or state institutions, pointing to the condition and future of Jewish cemeteries in the provinces. In 1973, a citizen from the town of Dębica, in southeastern Poland, addressed the TSKŻ, in Kraków, about the Jewish cemetery in the nearby town of Ropczyce. “Respecting the memory of your ancestors who are buried in the cemetery in Ropczyce. . . . I would like to inform you that the authorities have begun preparatory works to build

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a highway that would go through the cemetery. . . . I kindly ask you to inter­ vene with the state authorities. . . . The deceased deserve to rest in peace.”74 This genre of protest letters was not a new phenomenon, but in the 1970s their frequency steadily rose, taking on a more confrontational manner. Many of these voices of protest had a clear, proactive, and political nature. The post-1968 atmosphere of cultural resistance to the regime’s censures and repressions had led increasing numbers of Poles to embrace the lost traces of Jewish culture as part of their social and educational project of creating a civil society. In November 1974, on All Saints’ Day (Dzień Wszyst­ kich Świętych), Barbara Nawrocka-Dońska, a writer and a journalist from Warsaw who was an underground fighter in the Home Army during the war, visited Łańcut. In the Polish Catholic culture, the practice of lighting candles on the graves of family and friends is one of the hallmarks of All Saints’ Day. The sight of devastation and neglect in the two Jewish cemeter­ ies overwhelmed her, and she wrote a long letter addressed to the voivode­ ship authorities. What shocked her the most was the state of a mass grave of Jews, who had been shot to death, inside one of the Jewish cemeteries. “In All Saints’ Day, when Poland glows with candlelight, when we connect with the deceased—is this is the way to pay homage to the place of mass murder of Polish Jews in Łańcut—with a void, abandonment, and oblivion?”75 She urged the authorities to renovate the cemeteries and, in particular, to clean the surrounding area of the mass graves, which had become overgrown with bushes. Taking care of the place, she argued, would not only pay respect to the dead but also had a moral and educational value, as it would incorporate the memory of the Jews in the town’s history and would give the youth “a painful example of the dangers of nationalism.”76 She suggested assigning high school students the task of looking after the mass graves, as was com­ mon with other war graves around the country. This, she claims, might help to ease tensions and deal with anti-Semitism in town, as she herself wit­ nessed when talking to the townspeople. Alongside the moral protests about the neglect of the cemetery and its perception as a Holocaust memorial, which was also present in previous letters, this text is anchored within a political-didactic program of national reconstruction, establishing the category of “Polishness” in a civil and inclusive sense.77 By referring to the Catholic tradition, Nawrocka-Dońska suggested that Jewishness had a special place also in the Polish Catholic selfidentity. Making these connections, she signaled a tendency—that would become common later in the 1980s—of re-integrating the Jewish story and the Holocaust into the nation’s canon and of the new Catholic sensibilities that showed affinity for Judaism. This latter trend was largely inspired by the

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teachings of the Polish pope John Paul II, who was chosen by the College of Cardinals in 1978.78 The popular rediscovery of Jewish heritage in the 1970s and 1980s was part of a larger cultural project whose goal was to unsettle the monoethnic frame­ work that had remodeled postwar life. Writers, poets, and public activists began turning their gaze toward the east and the west in their attempts to symboli­ cally retrieve their country’s multinational and multireligious past, which, as a result of the war and its aftermath, had become the most homogenous society in Europe.79 As a result of this effort to reimagine a pluralistic Polishness, the heritage of Poland’s historic minorities—including those representing former enemies such as Germany and Ukraine—became the center of local interest and activism.80 The “Jewish memory project” appears to have been the focus of this multicultural imagining project and functioned as a paradigmatic test case for unearthing elements of the “lost” Polish culture.81 In 1978, Władysław Niemierowski, an art historian from Zabrze, wrote an impassioned letter to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. A town in Silesia, which until 1945 was part of Germany (after the name Hindenburg), Zabrze saw its small Jewish community murdered during the war. After the war, most of its original German inhabitants were deported or f led to Ger­ many, leaving their properties to the new Polish settlers. In his letter, the agi­ tated Niemierowski wished to share with the Jewish institute a “discovery” he had made earlier that day. “I feel that it is my indisputable duty to inform you of a very unusual and valuable discovery . . . the old Jewish cemetery in Zabrze. . . . Please forgive me if my words are not a coherent report but I’m still under the direct impression of what I saw today.”82 His text reads like the words of an adventurous explorer who has discovered a terra incognita. He describes how he was clearing his way through the thick forest, trying to find a path to the cemetery, when he met two children who showed him the way in and told him that “almost nobody comes here.” Entering the site, he was amazed and intrigued by the foreign and ancient headstones, inscribed in Hebrew and German script, which he carefully copied. Niemierowski also noticed the poor, neglected state of the cemetery and expressed his opinion that it should be cherished as an artistic monument and as a valuable histori­ cal document. Despite the cemetery’s being part of German Jewish heritage and culture, the writer treats it as part of the town’s local history, in a sense reclaiming the site as a Polish Jewish space. “The people who lie here . . . are part of the history of Zabrze. . . . We are obligated to reconstruct, at all costs, their memory.”83 The sense of “discovery” of material Jewish traces as an encounter with a “lost world” was a recurring trope among Polish activists, many of whom

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were born after the war and later became engaged in documenting aban­ doned Jewish cemeteries. At the outset of the 1980s, Tomasz Wiśniewski, a young, amateur photographer from Białystok, began to wander alone around the towns and villages in his area, sleeping in a tent and photograph­ ing deserted Jewish cemeteries. The photos were published under the title “Postcards from Atlantis.” Later, Wiśniewski also began to search various archives for prewar photos of the cemeteries that, he nostalgically described, “all of a sudden disappeared, vanished into thin air like the mythical Atlan­ tis.”84 The exotic, sentimental attraction to the material remnants of the lost Jewish world, the moral impetus to commemorate the Jews, and the engage­ ment with Jewish culture as an oppositional political act were fused together into a wide social phenomenon, particularly after the crucial events follow­ ing the mass demonstrations of the Solidarity movement. The social dissatisfaction and disapproval of the Communist Party reached its peak at the end of the 1970s. Growing circles of workers, dissident intel­ lectuals, and churches were becoming disillusioned with the hope that the system’s impairments could be corrected as the economic situation further deteriorated, causing price increases and wage stagnation. The immediate trigger for the formation of the Solidarity movement was an occupation strike led by workers at the shipyards in Gdańsk declared in August 1980, and led by Lech Wałęsa. Workers’ strikes and demonstrations soon expanded into other parts of the country, sweeping along different groups and classes and creating the first anticommunist mass movement in Eastern Europe.85 The regime in Warsaw was startled by the overwhelming popularity of the movement in Polish society and agreed to some of the demands of the oppo­ sition, including, for the first time, the undermining of the absolute monop­ oly of power of the PZPR and social and economic reforms. One of the outcomes of these dramatic developments was the lifting of some of the censorship rules, which led to a proliferation of publications of books, journals, and magazines, dealing with various, hitherto restricted subjects. The Solidarity movement, which at its height included half of the country’s adult population, was home to different and competing groups and views, including many Jews. In the liberating atmosphere of breaching the censorship and discovery of repressed aspects of Polish culture, dealing with Jewish history and heritage had become more popular than ever, result­ ing in the creation of many more grassroots initiatives aimed at protecting Jewish sites. In 1981, Jewish and non-Jewish activists in Warsaw founded the indepen­ dent organization known as the Citizens’ Committee for the Care of Jewish Cemeteries and Cultural Monuments in Poland (Społeczny Komitet Opieki

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nad Cmentarzami i Zabytkami Kultury Żydowskiej w Polsce). One of their first projects was publishing a public appeal in the Tygodnik Solidarność, the weekly magazine of the Solidarity movement, calling on its readers to pro­ vide any information about the situation of Jewish cemeteries throughout the country. The committee, which was initially treated with suspicion and hostility by the government and its members were even taken for interro­ gation by the security services, received hundreds of letters in just a few months, some anonymous, from all areas of Poland containing informa­ tion on around 800 cemeteries and mass graves.86 The reverberations of this appeal were so strong that the committee became one of the main players in the discussion around the preservation of Jewish sites. Until the fall of the communist government in 1989—and afterward, when it became a branch of the Jewish Historical Institute—the committee received numerous inquiries and suggestions from individual and local authorities, who often treated the committee as an official Jewish body.87 Based on the information gathered in their public appeal, the committee approached local authorities, asking them to work urgently for the maintenance and protection of the cemeteries. In addition to providing a general overview and concrete information on the critical state of Jewish cemeteries and other remnants, this appeal ref lected and consolidated the notion, among growing parts of the society, that the physical preservation of the Jewish spaces was a moral obligation and a critical task in the project of building a civil society. These moral, civil sensibilities are evident in a letter sent to the committee by a citizen of Fram­ pol, close to Lublin. “I would like to inform you of a totally neglected Jewish cemetery in Frampol, where there are mass graves of Jews murdered during the occupation. . . . I feel it is the moral obligation of the people of Frampol to take care of the resting place of their murdered co-citizens.”88 Another unplanned yet significant aspect of this project was the extent to which it created a unique platform for openly recalling the murder of the Jews at the local level. At a time when the official commemoration of the Shoah was still largely inscribed under the framework of the Polish sac­ rifice, the contextualization of Jewish suffering as part of a more inclusive understanding of national heritage and martyrdom was significant. Many of these letters detailed events leading up to the extermination of the local Jewish community, and they ref lected how Jewish traces had become imbri­ cated with tragic memories. As in other similar letters from previous years, the murder of the Jews stands as the focal point of many of these texts and embodies the moral unease their writers felt with the current, dismal situ­ ation of Jewish gravesites. One such prominent letter was sent to the com­ mittee, on October 17, 1981, by Halina Z., a resident of the small town of

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Kolno, in northeastern Poland, which had been 70 percent Jewish before the war.89 In her emotional appeal, she brief ly describes how cows are grazing in the Jewish cemetery, but her letter focuses mainly on a mass grave in the nearby forest, where thousands of Kolno Jews, executed by the Germans, were buried. There is a mass grave here. . . . Nobody ever lights there a single candle. There are no f lowers there either. When I was a little girl, I used to go there and leave wildf lowers on the grave. I used to be teased very often because of that. . . . My mom told me that the people who are buried there were forced to dig the grave themselves. Many people who were still alive were covered with ground. You could hear at night moans of people trying to get out of the grave. Therefore, I think that someone should please look after this grave.90 Although she was born after the war, the writer recalls the events of the mur­ der as if she herself had witnessed them and seems to adopt her mother’s horrifying account. The mass grave functions for her as what we might call a “post-memorial” site, which facilitates the transmission of cross-generational memories and their enduring, long-term affect.91 The growing stream of these reports helped bring to attention the prob­ lem of Jewish places of burial in the country, but they also revealed that the overall picture had not changed. This can be seen in the concerned letter of an inhabitant of the Silesian town of Chrzanów, addressed to the com­ mittee in July 1981. “[The Jewish cemetery] is surrounded by a wall, but it is very neglected and, more than that, it serves as a meeting place for all sorts of ‘dark’ elements. In the [nearby] town of Trzebinia, there is also a Jewish cemetery, but it is completely destroyed, the headstones are broken and overturned, and the local townspeople are using the place as a garbage dump. As a Polish citizen and a human being, I feel it is my duty to give you this information.”92 In the meantime, the political crisis in the country was escalating. Fac­ ing the growing prodemocratic demonstrations and protests by Solidarity activists, and in an effort to regain their hold on power, the regime struck back. In December 1981, the government declared martial law throughout the country, intending to crush the opposition.93 Until the lifting of martial law in July 1983, civil liberties were restricted, censorship was reintroduced, and opposition activists were jailed and persecuted. At the peak of these events, tanks were sent to patrol the streets of Warsaw, an image that became one of the most iconic representations of the anticommunist movement in Eastern Europe. Although the regime portrayed these repressive measures as

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a necessary attempt to regain public order and to prevent anarchy, the martial law and its implications only sharpened the polarization between the regime and the society, and further weakened the popular and international legiti­ macy of the authorities.94 Unlike previous political crises in Poland, the Jewish issue was not a cen­ tral theme in these current events. Though, facing the growing crisis, the regime resorted to the old tactics of delegitimizing political opponents, try­ ing to discredit the opposition’s leaders by allegedly “exposing” their Jewish origins.95 While some nationalist fractions within Solidarity were themselves “not immune to genuinely-felt anti-Jewish sentiments,”96 in the context of the pro-freedom struggle against the repressive regime, dealing with Jewish culture and history was increasingly perceived among growing parts of the society as a popular counteract.97

• C h a p te r 10

The Dialectics of Preservation

The Polish regime emerged bruised and scarred by the abolishment of martial law. In the second half of the 1980s, the grow­ ing opposition further weakened its popular and international credibility and status.1 The continued stagnation of the economy, severe supply shortages, and the gradual succumbing of the Soviets to the Western bloc signaled the impression that the days of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe were numbered. In this atmosphere, the Polish leadership became more tolerant than before, allowing and even initiating projects aimed at the preservation of material Jewish heritage sites. Desperately seeking international rehabili­ tation, foreign money, and Western tourism, state authorities were increas­ ingly vulnerable to outside pressures over the maintenance of Jewish sites, willing to accept the growing involvement of worldwide Jewish groups who were interested in their preservation. Government officials now circulated the new regulations concerning Jewish sites, clarifying to local authorities that the clearing of Jewish cemeteries and demolishing of synagogues was prohibited, warning them against taking independent action.2 Local leaders in Poland in the late communist years found themselves in a complicated position. They were constantly pressured to take care of the Jew­ ish sites both by international bodies and state officials, who expected them to invest municipal resources for their protection and upkeep, despite the fre­ quent claim by local authorities that they simply did not have sufficient funds 183

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for these projects. Municipalities often tried to def lect their responsibilities to the Polish Jewish organizations, occasionally making the (false) legal argu­ ment that since the Jews are the legal owners of the Jewish sites, they are the ones who must look after them.3 The central government, for its part, was not at all keen to fund these projects from state resources, though it did expect the local authorities to include the expenditures for preserving abandoned Jewish space (mainly cemeteries) in their municipal budget, as a reminder that this was their responsibility, not the Jews’, as the formal possessors of abandoned Jewish property.4 Yet among the professional echelon in the municipal, district, and voivode­ ship authorities, a growing number of official bodies began opening up to the idea of preserving historic Jewish sites and integrating them as part of the local and regional heritage. Plans by state and regional conservators, art historians, and public activists for the preservation and historical reconstruc­ tion of old synagogues had been in place as early as the 1950s. But most of those initiatives remained theoretical, as they were generally not supported by the relevant authorities. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, it appeared that the changing political climate in the country, as well as emerging national and global conservationist sensibilities, to some extent popularized the notion that the preservation of Jewish monuments coincides with the local architectural and cultural vision.5 The story of the Łańcut synagogue exemplifies these developments. The eighteenth-century building survived the war through the personal interven­ tion of the local count, Alfred Potocki, who managed to save it from being burned by the German occupation forces in the first days of the war. In 1956, the town council adopted a resolution to demolish it, but thanks to the tireless efforts of a local public activist, the physician Władysław Balicki, the synagogue was again saved. In the 1960s, Balicki and Jan Michał, a local civil servant, social activist, and author, constantly petitioned the district authori­ ties to allocate resources for the Łańcut synagogue’s upkeep and managed to push for its recognition as a historical monument in 1969. Over the same period of time, Balicki and Michał had been petitioning the powers that be, they were also making plans to turn the synagogue into a regional museum and were gathering Judaica to eventually display there. In 1974, the Łańcut synagogue was affiliated with the local castle museum, and in the 1980s it completed its gradual transition into a Judaica museum, undergoing further preservation works.6 Around the same time, the renovation of the Tykocin synagogue com­ plex was taking place. Tykocin, today a small town with little more than 2,000 inhabitants, was formerly a shtetl near Białystok, where half of the

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population had been Jewish until the war. Already in 1961, the voivode­ ship conservator had planned to conduct an external reconstruction of the seventeenth-century Great Synagogue and to turn it into a culture center.7 These plans were mothballed due to lack of funds and interest, but eventu­ ally, in the course of the 1970s, both the Great Synagogue and the adjacent Talmudic house of study were professionally preserved and reconstructed and have since functioned as the Jewish branch of the local museum, display­ ing Judaica and changing exhibitions. Into the 1980s, conservators and municipal bureaucrats were pushing for the official recognition of Jewish heritage sites as historical monuments. In 1983, for example, the Bureau of Research and Documentation of Historical Monuments in Krosno, in southeastern Poland, addressed the Jewish Histori­ cal Institute in Warsaw asking for its logistic and financial help in document­ ing fourteen old Jewish cemeteries, describing them as “important objects for the Polish culture and the Polish Jewish culture” and as “testimonies of the presence of the Jews in the Polish history.”8 In addition, some municipalities initiated renovation projects of synagogues, turning them into museums, cultural centers, and libraries. In 1984, the authorities in Pińczów, together with the voivodeship officials and conservators, promoted a plan to preserve and renovate the seventeenth-century synagogue in town by turning it into a museum. Since the war, the building had stood crumbling in the center of town and had been used as a warehouse for building materials. Asking for state support in the massive renovation project, voivodeship officials described the synagogue as having “substantial artistic value,” arguing that it was “one of the most valuable examples of sacral Jewish architecture from the late renaissance in Poland.”9 Many of these initiatives did not come to fruition until after the political transformation of 1989, mostly due to lack of funding, but they did ref lect a growing awareness (political or moral) among local officials of the importance of recognizing Jewish sites as part of the national and local heritage. Though the motives behind this phenom­ enon may be varied, it signaled the beginning of a conceptual and discursive change in the status of Jewish heritage sites, gradually replacing the predomi­ nant discourse of previous decades that regarded Jewish sites as lacking any artistic or historical value. These changing norms are demonstrated in the developments surround­ ing the synagogue in Dąbrowa Tarnowska. In 1971, after consistent pressure from local and state authorities, the Union of Jewish Congregations agreed to give up the ownership rights of the synagogue and officially transferred it to the state treasury.10 This meant that after years of attempting to find a solution to the presence of the decaying and dilapidated building at the

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center of town, the municipality could now allegedly take actions to demol­ ish it, as local officials had been constantly proposing throughout the 1960s. The political developments in the country and the changing sensibilities regarding the question of Jewish sites, however, made it difficult to carry out such actions. Unlike with cemeteries, there was no binding prohibition against tearing down synagogues, but the general policy of political caution regarding the future of Jewish sites made it harder to enact such proposals. As the option of tearing down the synagogue was off the table, town and voivodeship authorities were trying to promote a plan for renovating it. According to the plan—conceived by Wiktor Zin, a well-known architect and professor of arts from Kraków—the synagogue was to undergo histori­ cal preservation and used as a cultural center and a ballroom while keeping all of its original decorations and wall paintings. Some preparatory works had begun in the 1970s, but due to the estimated costs of the project (38 million zloty), the works had stopped at an initial stage. Writing directly to the minister of religious affairs in 1977, voivodeship officials from Tarnów reported that only 1 million zloty were secured so far and therefore the reno­ vation of the building—which they defined as “a historical monument of universal value”—could not advance.11 While the physical situation of the synagogue gradually deteriorated in the ensuing years, its symbolic status appears to have undergone some changes. Whereas only a few years before, as we learned, the synagogue was perceived as lacking any historical or archi­ tectural value and was referred to as an aesthetic and sanitary hazard that “defaces,” “pollutes,” and “disfigures” the town’s appearance and well-being, already by 1977 it was regarded as a site of historical importance, worthy of preservation. In the later years of communism, a new “aesthetic regime” was becom­ ing prevalent among the different echelons in Poland, ref lecting the emerg­ ing architectural conventions regarding the historical preservation of local heritage and the beginning of an internalization of the notion according to which Jewish sites should now be protected.12 While the aesthetic framing of the Jewish space was showing first signs of alteration, perhaps the most substantial conceptual change among the local officials was not the basic definition of the aesthetic categories, but rather the recognition that the mis­ sion of ordering the space might in fact coincide with its preservation. In 1983, for instance, the mayor of Jeżów, a village in the area of Łódź, addressed the ZRWM in Warsaw, asking for their support in the issue of the Jewish cemetery: “In the area of the settlement of Jeżów . . . there is a Jewish cemetery which is in a very bad technical situation. For many years it was abandoned and, because of that, the cemetery is one of the worst

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places in our town, from aesthetic and public order perspectives. . . . For the purpose of tidying up [uporządkowanie] the area, we have already cut the bushes, determined the borders of the cemetery, and collected the waste that is there. In the current phase, there is an urgent need to fence the cemetery and to take more actions for tidying it up.”13 Although the mayor seems to replicate the basic perception of the Jewish space as dirty and unaesthetic, his idea of dealing with the dirt is different from earlier proposals made by local officials. He appears to understand that the solution to the aesthetic and sanitary hazard would not be achieved through the elimination of the problem but rather through a literal act of cleaning and rehabilitation of the site, which would also address Jewish demands. Notwithstanding this example, local authorities did not always hurry to come to terms with the new conventions. Some of them attempted legal maneuvers, trying to bypass the increasingly stricter regulations. In the early 1980s, local officials were occasionally using the argument that according to the existing burial law, after the passing of forty years since the last burial, it is possible to clear a cemetery for other purposes.14 Since the last buri­ als in most Jewish cemeteries took place until the war or the deportation of the Jewish communities in 1942–43, it meant that the main legal barrier that protected abandoned Jewish cemeteries was formally no longer in force. The new government’s updated regulations contravened this clause, whereas preservation activists warned against the option that local officials would take advantage of all possible ways to continue with the policy of clearing away Jewish cemeteries.15 In 1982, Eryk Lipiński and Stanisław Podemski, activists from the Committee for Protecting Jewish Cemeteries, wrote to the minister of religious affairs, asking him to clarify the new regulations warn­ ing that “despite previous clarifications and instructions, we can count on the local authorities’ forgetfulness or disdain.”16 Although this tendency toward disobedience continued, local governing bodies gradually started showing first signs of implementation of the values of the new political atmosphere. Still reluctant to adhere to the new reality, many local officials understood that the rules of the game were changing and proposed creative solutions that functioned as a kind of compromise between their own interests and external demands. In 1976, for example, officials from Siedlce, a mid-sized town close to Treblinka, suggested using part of the new Jewish cemetery for construc­ tion: “Considering the strong need for construction areas in Siedlce, leaving an undeveloped area at the center of town is not economically advisable.”17 This proposal was rejected by state officials, but a few years later, the appeal was resubmitted, urging “the great need for investment in Siedlce . . . and

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the concern for the town’s aesthetics, entails the reduction of the territory of the cemetery and its tidying up.” This time the local officials justified the city’s request not only in economic terms, but they presented a solution that “would help to tidy up” the area of the cemetery, which they described as “completely deserted, with headstones pulled down and destroyed, covered with wild grass and waste.” Their plan was to use part of the cemetery for the construction of a housing complex, and on the remaining part to erect a lapidarium, a monument made from the fragments of headstones. They also pledged to build a memorial for the 3,000 Jews who had been murdered on their way to Treblinka and whose bones were buried in the cemetery. This conception, the letter argued, would “solve the problem of the localization of the housing complex and would also achieve the purpose of tidying up the area of the cemetery that has become a waste dump—a situation that profanes the place of the dead.”18 The above suggestion was rejected by the government, but it demon­ strated the commingling of two seemingly contradictory attitudes among the local governance: the desire to remove Jewish sites, on the one hand, and the recognition of the need to preserve them, on the other. This ambivalence is manifested in the ambiguous meaning of the Polish term “tidying up” (uporządkowanie). This term was not new in the postwar Polish vocabulary. Already since the immediate years after the war, local authorities had used it mainly as a euphemism for the demolition and removal of the sites alto­ gether, clearing them for other purposes. But from the mid-1970s on, the denotation of tidying up received a more ambiguous connotation. As evi­ dent in the example from Siedlce, this term was employed as a euphemism for clearing parts of the cemetery; yet it also seems to hold a literal meaning, explicitly addressing the need to rehabilitate the poor state of the place and to halt its profanation. Whether the idea to build the lapidarium was merely a calculated move— some kind of “moral compensation” intended to improve the chances of the project’s approval—it demonstrates the internalization of the new politics of Jewish cemeteries. Although problematic from the point of view of Judaism, this tidying up plan may have been regarded by town officials as fulfilling another interest, apart from the aesthetic and practical objectives. As was becoming clear for local officials, as long as these Jewish sites stood neglected and desolate, they had the potential to attract international criticism and scru­ tiny, putting the blame on the municipal authorities for the obliteration of the memory of the Jews. Tidying up the poor appearance of the Jewish space by clearing away the scattered headstones in order to create a neatly com­ memorative monument, was thus perceived as achieving an aestheticization

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of the cemetery’s appearance and concealing its harmful and hazardous ambiance, while also allegedly paying respect to the dead through an act of symbolic reconstruction. In the later years of communism, the line between these two tendencies— preserving the cemetery, on the one hand, while eliminating the problem, on the other—was not always clear. This blurring is demonstrated in the case of the Jewish cemetery in Żory, a town close to Katowice. In 1989, the municipality addressed the voivodeship authorities over their wish to solve the disastrous situation of the cemetery, a goal they regarded as “very important for many reasons.” According to their description, the cemetery was “neglected and simply destroyed .  .  . the headstones are damaged or broken, the fence is demolished, and the entire site is deserted.” Stating that municipal workers could occasionally collect garbage and fix the fence, “our intention, nevertheless, would be to conduct a general tidying up (generalne uporządkowanie) of the cemetery.” It is not at all clear which concept of tidy­ ing up the town had in mind—whether a reconstruction of the place or, alternatively, the effective removal of the cemetery’s traces. What is obvious, however, is the town leaders’ eagerness to come to what they define as a “comprehensive solution to the issue of the Jewish cemetery.”19 The desire to find “comprehensive solutions” to the local problems posed by the dilapidated presence of Jewish cemeteries in the mid-to-late 1980s was so strong that Jewish institutions often had to intervene and block attempts by overzealous local bodies to tidy up Jewish cemeteries. Realizing that such aestheticization projects could cause more harm than benefit by eliminating the last traces of the cemetery and violating its sanctity, Jewish leaders were suspicious of such local initiatives. For example, in 1985, the ZRWM wrote a letter responding to the mayor of Lubartów, near Lublin, politely expressing their restrictions regarding the town’s plan to tidy up the Jewish cemetery, which served the Jewish community—40 percent of the prewar population— until its extermination in Bełżec, Sobibór and Majdanek.20 The cemetery was severely destroyed by the Germans, who used headstones for construction. During the occupation, several hundred Jews were shot to death there. According to the town’s original proposition, the cemetery would be turned into a park, where a lapidarium would be built f rom tombstone f rag­ ments, while the rest of the scattered headstones would be cleared away.21 The town would agree to cultivate the area of the cemetery and treat it in a dignified way, planting trees and f lowers and installing a few benches. While thanking the mayor for his wish to rehabilitate the site, the Jewish orga­ nization explained that the town’s project was too far-reaching and could interfere with the strictures of Jewish law. The ZRWM, however, agreed to

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designate the cemetery, under strict conditions, as “a garden with charac­ teristics of a cemetery,” since it realized that “no undamaged headstones remained in the cemetery.”22 The ZRWM stressed that the matzevot, which would not be used for constructing the lapidarium, should not be cleared away but instead gathered and buried together at the foot of the monu­ ment. The organization also gave detailed instructions regarding the per­ mitted depth of the digging works and the exact location which was allowed for planting trees and f lowers. In addition, the ZRWM objected to placing benches in the “garden” but did agree to the creation of some footpaths within the old cemetery grounds. The ZRWM’s suggestion, accepted by the mayor, was not ideal from the perspective of Jewish law; but it was the optimal solution that could have been achieved at that time, cognizant of both the urgent need to preserve the cemetery and the lack of funds required to look after its constant upkeep. Realizing that a complete renovation and preservation of the cemetery was not possible, especially when considering its severe damage, the ZRWM was willing to support the town’s plan while making sure that further desecra­ tion would be as minimal as possible. The mayor, on his part, had a strong interest in rehabilitating the site and hoped to achieve not only an aestheti­ cization of the surroundings but also sought to neutralize the problematic and embarrassing presence of the decaying Jewish cemetery. He appears to have also perceived the moral and civil importance of repairing the situation. Trying to identify resources for the project, the mayor asked the principal of a school located close to the cemetery to involve its pupils in the works, thus “providing them a lesson in good citizenship and in taking responsibility for the town’s aesthetics.”23 These kinds of practical compromises were becoming the standard solu­ tion for the problem of Jewish cemeteries in the 1980s, mediating between Polish and Jewish interests and concerns. Contrary to the episode from Lubartów, which demonstrates a case of relatively peaceful consensus that appears to have served all sides, the incidents in the town of Warta in the second half of the 1980s exemplify the dissonant potential of these renova­ tion projects to evoke tensions and controversies. In 1986, Ireneusz Ślipek, a local activist, alerted the ZRWM that municipal workers were brutally demolishing the cemetery with tractors and bulldozers, removing hundreds of headstones, and causing permanent damage.24 Ślipek’s intervention led to long and heated discussions that lasted until 1988. The ZRWM accused the municipality of violating the cemetery, and the mayor vehemently rejected the claims, blaming Ślipek of spreading hostile lies.25 The mayor argued that the town was conducting needed maintenance and cleaning works intended

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to preserve the cemetery and blamed the Jews for neglecting the place. According to his version, the workers were only collecting ruined and dam­ aged headstones to protect them from further damage and were using them to build a lapidarium in the cemetery. The Jews expressed their protest that the town had begun such works without first consulting with them, to which the mayor answered that the municipality only did so after not receiving an answer f rom the Jewish con­ gregation in Łódź, which he had approached with this matter. In a defensive tone, the mayor claimed that while the town had made many efforts to preserve the cemetery and to commemorate “the memory of the Jewish martyrs,” the Jews never expressed any interest in the cemetery and practi­ cally neglected it. “Despite the lack of care f rom the side of the ZRWM, our actions are intended to secure the remainder of the monuments of the Jewish culture.”26 The voivodeship authorities backed Warta’s mayor. Writing to the Ministry of Religious Affairs, they accused the Jews of rais­ ing “unfair and offensive claims.” They also protested that the ZRWM was “not interested in finding a cultural solution to the problem, but wanted to conduct an aggressive campaign.”27 The ZRWM was not deterred by this defensive and hostile tone. They demanded that the mayor return the matzevot to their original locations and added an implicit threat that “this issue is raising attention abroad.”28 They also stated that they had proof that the headstones had been pulled out in a way that caused them great dam­ age, “which makes it hard to believe that they were intended to be used for building a lapidarium.”29 The idea of erecting a lapidarium was refuted by Ślipek, who reasoned that such a solution could be applied only as a “sad necessity” when nothing remained of the former cemetery.30 But in cases when many traces still existed, he argued, “building a lapidarium [would] in fact mean . . . the destruction of most of the cemetery.”31 Although the ZRWM fought hard to stop the Warta municipality’s ver­ sion of tidying up the Jewish cemetery, only a few years before, that same organization appeared less determined to thwart a similar plan envisioned by the authorities in Szczecin. As discussed earlier, shortly after the war, the local authority closed the old German Jewish cemetery for burial. Although many Jews continued to bury their dead in the old cemetery, even as late as 1962, the official Jewish burial ground was located in a separate quarter within the general cemetery. During the 1960s and 1970s, the territory of the old cemetery, centrally situated in town, had been reduced in size and was constantly vandalized.32 Eventually, in 1982, a decision was made by the town and voivodeship authorities to remove the remaining traces of the cemetery, tidy it up, and turn the site into a municipal park. Not only did state officials

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Figure 25. “Maintenance” works in the Jewish cemetery, Warta. 1986. Photo by Ireneusz Ślipek. Courtesy of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum archive, Israel.

support the plan, but it was also approved by the local Jewish congregation and the ZRWM. According to the proposal, only the bodies and gravestones of those Polish Jews who had been buried in the cemetery after 1945 would be transferred to the Jewish quarter in the municipal cemetery. The older German Jewish headstones and remains would not be taken to the other cemetery. A small part of them would be used for constructing a symbolic memorial on the site, and the rest would be transferred into the town’s pos­ session. Moreover, the costs for the entire tidying up project would be cov­ ered by selling the German Jewish headstones for private and industrial uses. This indeed took place.33 The example of Szczecin is unique. Jewish representatives usually did not agree to such an intrusive scheme that contradicted Jewish sensibilities and requirements. In some formerly German cities, for example in Wrocław, Jew­ ish leaders tried to work for the preservation and protection of the heritage sites of German Jews. In Szczecin, however, the Jewish stance was different from their traditional position. Their agreement to differentiate between the old German Jewish graves and the new Polish Jewish ones might suggest that, at least in this case, both the local congregation and the Jewish leader­ ship in the capital did not consider the traces of the German Jewish culture in Szczecin as worthy of preservation.

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Toward the end of the days of the Polish People’s Republic, the question of the preservation of German Jewish traces became a matter of special interest for German Jews who had originated from the formerly German towns and cities in the Western Territories. In 1989, J. Horn, a German Jewish citizen living in Hamburg, visited his hometown of Głogówek, near Opole in Poland, which until 1945 had been called Oberglogau. The sight of his childhood synagogue, now the new offices of the Pewex chain store, made a strong impression on him.34 Writing to the umbrella organization of the Jewish communities in West Germany, he asked them to intervene and stop what he considered “the desecration” of the synagogue. Referring to the town as Oberglogau, while putting the Polish name Głogówek only in brack­ ets, he writes: “In 1938, I had to stand and watch with agony how the Ger­ man Nazis . . . violated the synagogue. In November 1989, I was saddened to see that it was not preserved as a monument, but used by the dodgy organi­ zation ‘Pewex.’ The newcomers, Poles who are in charge of the administra­ tion in Oberglogau, answered my complaint: ‘This is our property, like all buildings in the territories of the west!’”35 The hostile response that Horn received from the local officials relates less to the fact that the building in question was a Jewish space, but rather it being German. It also reaffirms the myth of the Recovered Territories, expressing a defensive tone against any attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the Polonization of the formerly German lands. This exchange took place while Poland was undergoing a dramatic politi­ cal transformation following the victory of Solidarity in the first partially free election of June 1989 and the subsequent peaceful end of the com­ munist regime later that summer. Horn’s appeal received special attention by state officials into the new decade, and it appears to have touched on a central question that bothered Polish authorities at the precipice of a new and uncertain era.36 Having lost the Soviet protective umbrella and having witnessed the reunification of Germany raised acute concerns among Poles about the inviolability of their post-1945 western borders.37 In addition, the end of communism and the move toward a free market economy evoked worrying scenarios that masses of Germans would ask for the repatriation or retrieval of their properties in Poland’s western and northern territories, and that Jews would now try to reclaim their confiscated assets. The discussion on the restitution of private Jewish property became a central topic on the cusp of the new epoch and only increased the Polish anxiety triggered by the growing worldwide interest in the preservation of Jewish sites. This connection came up in a letter sent by descendants of the Jewish community of Chmielnik from Bayside, New York to Chmielnik’s

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mayor, in August 1989, shortly after the official end of the Polish communist regime: “We believe that the restoration and safekeeping of the cemetery is your responsibility. We left it in good condition, and the Nazis did not destroy the cemetery. Due to the neglect and indifference of the city govern­ ment, the destruction took place.” Repeatedly, the letter cites the extermina­ tion of the local Jewish community, making the connection between their tragic fate and the town’s treatment of their material traces. Concluding the letter, the Chmielnik descendants wrote: “Many of our members reported to us during the years that they left property and buildings behind when they were taken away by the Nazis in Chmielnik. As far as we know, they are still to this day the rightful owners. About 80 percent of the properties and buildings in Chmielnik were owned by the Jewish people. Who is collecting the rent?”38

Corpus Delicti Parallel to the growing involvement of international actors in the discus­ sions on the future of Jewish sites, toward the end of the 1980s, the scope of grassroots reconstruction initiatives expanded and often received state support. Many of these projects were orchestrated by Jewish foundations abroad, now able to work more f reely in the country, or by Polish groups and civic associations. In 1985, a memorial wall was erected on the site of the new Jewish cemetery in Kazimierz Dolny, comprised of hundreds of f ragments of matzevot that had been retrieved f rom different parts of the town, extracted f rom walls, sidewalks, and roads. The project was initiated by a local Polish association for the preservation of historic monuments and by a regional museum, and it was funded by the town. A local artist, Tadeusz Augustynek, designed the wall, with help f rom the Polish Jewish activists Monika Krajewska and Stanisław Krajewski.39 The monument’s facade, known by the townspeople as the Wailing Wall (Ściana Płaczu), consists of dozens of recovered matzevot, arranged in a symbolic recon­ struction of the cemetery.40 The impressive memorial wall is purposely broken in the middle by a sudden breach to emphasize the tragic fate of the town’s former Jewish community. By stressing the void, argues the scholar James Young, it “commemorates the painstaking piecing together of lost Jewish memory, but its jagged breach also suggests the devastation that remains.”41 As one approaches the wall, small pieces of paper containing handwritten requests, inserted between the cracks and alcoves of the monument, stick out. This intriguing phenomenon, which has become a new local folk custom, is

Figure 26. Jan Jagielski and Stanisław Krajewski during preparatory works for the construction of the monument in the Jewish cemetery of Kazimierz Dolny. 1984. Photo by Monika Krajewska. Courtesy of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum archive, Israel.

Figure 27. “The Wailing Wall,” created out of recovered matzevot in the Jewish cemetery of Kazimierz Dolny. 2013. Photo by the author.

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reminiscent of a similar one at the original Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. This practice might also pay homage to the Hasidic tradition of leaving kvitlach on the grave of a tzaddik, a tradition also adopted by non-Jews. Many of these reconstruction projects were conducted by individuals who were operating on their own. Starting in the mid-1980s, a young archi­ tect from the town of Maków Mazowiecki, Wojciech Henrykowski, and his sister Anna, who had worked as a curator in a local museum, began locat­ ing and extracting parts of headstones that were used during and after the war for public and private construction. The two would drive around town, extracting fragments of headstones from sidewalks, walls, and roads. They had to personally cover the costs of replacing the recovered matzevot with stones. Arriving at construction sites where fragments of headstones were found, they often convinced the workers, using bottles of vodka, to treat the recovered fragments with respect.42 Wojciech and Anna soon became known in town, and many inhabitants informed them of the whereabouts of other matzevot remnants. The recovered headstones, totaling several hundred pieces, were placed together by Wojciech Henrykowski, who constructed a memorial obelisk in the shape of a pyramid modeled after a similar memo­ rial created by Jewish survivors from the town of Sandomierz in 1949. His memorial, built in 1987 with financial help from the town and the voivode­ ship authorities, is located right next to the main bus station, which had been built during the 1970s and 1980s, directly on top of the site of the Jewish cemetery. Many of these individual activists were often considered with suspicion within their immediate surroundings. The Henrykowskis, for example, were regarded in town as eccentric and were believed to be receiving money “from America.”43 Individuals from other towns working to preserve cemeteries were often treated as “lunatics” or “half-Jews.” Some of them even suffered harassment from their neighbors and the authorities. One such activist was the aforementioned Ireneusz Ślipek, who fought against the town authori­ ties’ desire to clear away parts of the cemetery. Ślipek, who had arrived in town as a young child right after the war, and never married, began looking after the Jewish cemetery on his own in the mid-1980s. Until that point, it had been used as a garbage dump and pasture site. He cleaned the place, weeded the grass, and gathered fragments of gravestones that were scat­ tered throughout the town or installed in walls or roads. His neighbors used to harass and mock him. On a few occasions, he found dead rats next to the gates of the cemetery.44 He was also treated with contempt by the local authorities, who referred to him as a “controversial figure” and a “trouble­ maker” whose interventions “harm the relations between the Jews and the

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state and evoke hostile emotions.”45 Taking care of the cemetery became his lifelong mission. Whenever he managed to retrieve a matzevah and place it back in the cemetery, he felt “as if I was reborn.”46 One of the many letters he wrote to the mayor, during his attempts to stop what he saw as the town’s plan to destroy the cemetery, reveals the extent to which the extermination of the Jews, whom he had never personally known, functioned as the driving force behind his activities. After the horrible massacre of the Jews in World War II, the ceme­ tery became a unique memorial that must be protected at any price. Although it was heavily destroyed, it is nevertheless the only testi­ mony to the madness of the occupiers. It is a place of national mem­ ory because here lie the ashes of the victims of the Hitlerite terror. The cemetery in its current borders will be a symbolic grave for all of Warta’s Jews, around 2,000, who were murdered in the Chełmno death camp and in other places. As corpus delicti . . . it should never be destroyed, but cherished.47 Identifying the cemetery as corpus delicti (body of the crime), Ślipek ref lects the perception among growing circles in Polish society that regarded the

Figure 28. Ireneusz Ślipek during preservation works of the Jewish cemetery in Warta. 1987. From the collection of Ireneusz Ślipek. Courtesy of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum archive, Israel.

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task of protecting the traces of Jewish culture as a form of commemoration of the Shoah. Mentioning the perpetrators and recalling the murder of the Jews once and again, Ślipek implicitly warns the mayor that obliterating the cemetery will be tantamount to the Nazi crimes. During the second half of the 1980s, the discussion in Poland about the Holocaust became increasingly sensitive and antagonized, as a new topic entered the cultural spheres: the responsibility of the Poles for the fate of the Jews.48 In many regards, the collective dealing with this almost undiscussed subject was generated by the publication in 1987 of an essay by the literary critic Jan Błoński, titled “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto.” The essay, which was printed in the weekly Catholic magazine Tygodnik Powszechny, was an interpretation of the poem “Poor Christians Look at the Ghetto,” writ­ ten in 1943 by the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz.49 For the first time, publicly, the question of “Polish guilt” was raised in Poland. While Błoński clarified that the Polish nation did not take part in the killing of the Jews, he argued that the Poles were guilty of being indifferent to the Jews’ fate. According to him, the sin of “standing by” is rooted in the hostile Polish attitudes toward Jews before the Holocaust. “Did we show solidarity toward them? How many of us decided that it was none of our business? . . . We could not even welcome and honor the survivors.”50 Błoński discusses not only the wartime behavior of Poles but also their collective repression of the Holocaust and its subsequent, damaging psy­ chological effects. The inability of postwar society to deal openly with this episode, he goes on, led to the development of repressed guilt that has tormented the collective subconscious of the Poles. Referring to the Jews through the metaphor of the biblical Abel, he writes, “His blood has remained in the walls, seeped into the soil. It has also entered into ourselves, into our memory.” The only way to be “cleansed” f rom this complex, he argues, “is to acknowledge our own guilt and ask for forgiveness.” Other­ wise, he warns, “our home, our soil, we ourselves, will remain tainted.”51 The aftermath of the essay’s publication was dramatic. Many readers expressed defensive reactions, while others read it as a call for collective soul searching.52 Although Błoński limits his discussion to the “guilt of indif­ ference” and clears Poles f rom being accomplices to the Holocaust, his text led to the first contested and heated public debates on the responsibility of the Polish society for the fate of their Jews during and immediately after the war.53 During the second half of the 1980s, the growing involvement of inter­ national players in the preservation of Poland’s Jewish heritage coincided

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with the growing centrality of the Shoah in Poland and abroad and threat­ ened to touch on the question of Polish guilt and complicity. This connec­ tion came up in the summer of 1987, surrounding the events in the Jewish cemetery in Kielce, the town which became the symbol of postwar Pol­ ish anti-Jewish violence: On July 4, 1946, forty-two Jewish survivors were murdered by local Poles, and more than forty were wounded. During the 1980s, works had begun to renovate and preserve the cemetery, led by the Nissenbaum Family Foundation, an inf luential Warsaw-based independent organization headed by Zygmunt Nissenbaum, a Polish-born Jew who sur­ vived the Holocaust in Poland and lived in Germany after the war, who was a major figure in preserving Jewish cemeteries and monuments all over Poland during the 1980s and 1990s. The cemetery in Kielce had been substantially and systematically devastated and destroyed since the war by town authorities, local companies, and the townspeople. The memorial stone covering the mass graves of the pogrom victims was f requently van­ dalized and graffitied. In 1987, the Nissenbaum Foundation was the driving force behind the organization of the forty-fifth anniversary of the Nazi liquidation of the Kielce Ghetto in August 1942, in which hundreds of Jewish participants from around the world were supposed to attend. The intense discussions leading up to the anniversary between the foundation, the municipality, and state officials, revealed the anxiety that the events might focus on the 1946 Polish pogrom instead of the German liquidation of the ghetto in 1942. The Min­ istry of Religious Affairs made it clear to the Kielce voivodeship officials that there would be no mention of the July 4th pogrom during the ceremony.54 As part of the events, the Nissenbaum Foundation also initiated the unveiling of a memorial commemorating the Kielce Jews who were sent to Treblinka by the Germans, which they wished to place at the town’s center in the territory of the former ghetto. The mayor tried to oppose this idea, arguing that plac­ ing the memorial in the center might interfere with future development and construction plans, and also claimed that it would be inappropriate to put a memorial site in a middle of a crowded street. Instead, he suggested locat­ ing it far from the center, in the Jewish cemetery.55 The mayor’s suggestion was eventually rejected by state officials, and the memorial was scheduled to be inaugurated in the town’s center during the anniversary commemora­ tions. The town, however, managed to inf luence the format of the events and made sure that the unveiling of the memorial received as little exposure as possible, and tried to distance the events from the center of town to the remote Jewish cemetery.

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What ultimately occurred on the day of the anniversary did not match the expectations of the Polish authorities. According to a report made by ministry officials, the events were characterized by a conf rontational atmo­ sphere. The Jewish participants, led by Nissenbaum, tried to push for a com­ memoration of the “July 1946 events,” while local officials attempted to prevent any mention of it. The report accused the Kielce authorities of failing to control the narrative of the events and allowing the Jews to dic­ tate the tone of the ceremonies, which resulted in “emphasizing the Jewish suffering in isolation f rom the Polish fate.” The town’s attempt to limit the publicity of the unveiling ceremony in the center, it argued, led to moving the events to the Jewish cemetery and thus gave the Jews the opportunity to turn the anniversary into a commemoration of the pogrom. The report also rebuked the town leaders who did not even bother to provide a loud­ speaker. This, they argued, led to an “awkward and embarrassing situation,” where no one heard the government representative’s speech, which was about “Polish Jewish brotherhood and cooperation,” while the Jews, who had a loudspeaker of their own, talked mainly about the pogrom, describing it as “a stain on the town’s history, that has not been discussed in town for more than forty years.”56 These increasing commemorative events further cracked the taboo sur­ rounding episodes such as the 1946 Kielce Pogrom, which were hardly touched upon in public circles. Even more rare at that time, was openly dis­ cussing cases of local collaboration and deliberate involvement of Poles in the direct murder of Jews during the war itself, which by then were still unheard of and unthinkable. It would take more than a decade for Polish society to begin confronting its darkest wartime period, but toward the end of the communist era, the increasing public awareness of the physical state of Jewish spaces revealed their potential to evoke this particularly difficult issue. On September 21, 1986, Halina Masztalerz, a teacher from Białystok, wrote to the offices of the Jewish theater in Warsaw, explaining that since this was the only Jewish institution she knew, she was addressing her plea to them. In a long and impassioned letter, she asked the Jewish leadership to intervene and preserve a mass grave of Jews murdered during the war in the forest near Rajgród, a town in northeastern Poland, where she herself grew up.57 The unmarked grave, she writes, is constantly littered by locals, and for many years, a collection center for carcasses has been operating right on the area. In addition, she reported, an industrial waste dump was recently built next to the grave. She described with great frustration how all of her appeals to the authorities had been unsuccessful and begged the Jews to use their power to stop the profanation and to erect a symbolic memorial. The most

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interesting part of her letter, however, is the concrete description of the Jews’ murder in the summer of 1941.58 The crime was committed by Germans but in cooperation with crimi­ nals from Rajgród—Poles. It is hard for me to write it, but unfortu­ nately this is how it was. I was eleven years old at that time, and I saw one group of men being led to their death. Later, I heard from the elderly people how they died. Their heads had been chopped with spades. I saw the pits in which they were buried. When the criminals returned to the town after the execution, they came to us . . . and they warned my mother that if she told who murdered the Jews, they would do the same to all of us. . . . My mother was always frightened to say anything about it.  .  .  . But I always tried to defend that place. I am constantly thinking about a monument that would rise there one day. This forest is a living history page that ought to be passed to the next generations, so a brother will never kill his own brother again. . . . No garbage dump should be there.59 Apart f rom revealing horrendous details of the murder, the letter also bespeaks the site’s pathological afterlife. The excessive sullying of the grave was a recurring symbolic attempt to repress and obliterate Rajgród’s dark history. Paradoxically, this act of degradation became a form of demarca­ tion, negatively commemorating the dead and emphasizing the existence of a “conspiracy of silence” in the local memory.60 This unusual appeal led to lengthy correspondence involving the local, district, and state officials, that continued into the new postcommunist era.61 The details of the mas­ sacre did not come up during the discussions and were referred to by the Polish representatives as “the murder of Jews after the liquidation of the ghetto” or “the killing of Jews during the war.”62 The Polish authorities appeared to be bothered by the condition of the burial site, realizing per­ haps the problematicness of its current state, which threatened to evoke further dealings with the undiscussed pogrom in Rajgród. Trying to find a solution, they immediately agreed to evacuate the waste dump and ani­ mal remains f rom the site and suggested removing the bodies to a more dignified place. As the Jewish leadership did not agree to the exhumation of the corpses, local officials tried to fence the grave and to look after its maintenance and commemoration. Lacking the resources to do so, how­ ever, they repeatedly pleaded with Jewish organizations to help them locate the funds to find “a comprehensive solution to the . . . very pressing social problem of the commemoration of the martyrdom of the Jewish popula­ tion in Rajgród.”63

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The area of the grave was cleaned up by the local authorities, but it was not fenced or commemorated.64 The story of the pogrom in Rajgród, and in other places, would become known to the public only years later. Although much ahead of its time, the letter of the teacher from Białystok revealed the latent capacity that allegedly empty, post-Holocaust Jewish spaces pos­ sessed to unearth—both figuratively and literally—the seething presence of the buried wartime past.

Conclusions Enduring Ambivalence

I spent the month of August 2011 in Warsaw, making my first steps at learning the Polish language. In my free time, I trav­ eled the country, mainly visiting Jewish heritage sites and memorials. I was then a green student, looking for a topic for my master’s thesis. Though I had a vague notion of where my research would eventually lead me, I knew I wanted to write about the conjectures of memory, space, and the Holocaust. And so, one Friday early evening, I found myself in Otwock, a small town just outside of Warsaw. Until 1939, Otwock had been predominantly Jewish and famous for its many health resorts, which mainly attracted Jews, among them Poland’s prominent rabbis. By name, Otwock was familiar to me, as it figured in Calek (Calel) Perechodnik’s tragic diary entries. Perechodnik had served as a Jewish policeman in the town’s local ghetto, and he had been forced to assist in the deportation of Otwock’s Jewish community—along with his own wife and daughter—to Treblinka.1 I had come to observe the town’s annual memorial march, first initiated by local Polish activists, occur­ ring every August 19, which marked the day in 1942 that the town’s Jewish deportations began. The march was well-attended and included municipal officials, Catholic leaders, and townspeople, all solemnly marching from the train station (the embarkation point from which the Jews had been sent to their deaths) to a mass grave in the forest, where several thousand other Jewish citizens had 203

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been buried, following their execution by the Germans. Along the way, the crowd held lit candles and listened pensively as Perechodnik’s diary entry was read aloud, which described the horrifying events he witnessed that day, sixtynine years ago. When we arrived at the forested mass grave, a short ceremony was held. Prayers were recited, and a priest read extracts from John Paul II’s “Prayer for the Jewish Nation.” Just before the ceremony began, one of the organizers approached me and asked whether I would be willing to say the “El Male Rachamim” (God Full of Mercy) prayer, one of the traditional Jew­ ish prayers recited at funerals and memorial services. His request caught me off guard. I had not expected, nor did I desire, to actively participate in this cer­ emony, believing that I must keep a scholarly distance to ensure an objective field observation. Yet, I felt that at that moment, it was simply impossible to refuse. I also realized that the organizer had asked for help as I was likely the only Jewish person in attendance. Confused and resigned to fulfill the social demand, I took out my old kippah that I found in my bag and put down my ethnographer’s notebook. I had no siddur ( Jewish prayer book) on me, so the best I could do was attempt an oral recitation, struggling to recall the prayer from memory. I am not sure if I managed to recite all the words, though I do not think anyone in the crowd would have noticed either way. Vocalizing the medieval Hebrew of this centuries-old Jewish prayer, while standing next to a Catholic priest, and overlooking a mass grave in the middle of a forest, located hundreds of miles from my home in Jerusalem (yet only a few towns away from where my grandparents had been born), I found myself in the middle of a perplexing, moving moment. The hermetic separation I had thought I could maintain between my academic research and emotional involvement suddenly collapsed. My experience in Otwock challenged my pretension to totally detach myself from my research material and adopt a neutral, impartial perspec­ tive. This failed attempt to remain disinterested, to avoid getting emotionally involved, repeated itself on many successive occasions. As my research devel­ oped and grew, I came to realize that, despite my attempts to conduct a rigor­ ous and unbiased investigation, I was engaged with a topic that antagonizes the (alleged) strict dichotomy between professional and personal life. This forced me to acknowledge what historians sometimes naively forget: we do not come to our objects of study as tabula rasa, that is to say from a purely dis­ interested perspective. We bring to our research our particular personal his­ tory and memories. As I learned to accept during the work on this book, my interaction with my research subjects inevitably—perhaps unconsciously— often profoundly resonated with my own biography and family memories and with other political contexts and mental landscapes.

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From this outsider-insider perspective, I have attempted to make sense of Poland’s material Jewish remnants (specifically, cemeteries and synagogues) through the eyes of postwar Polish society. Unsettled Heritage examined the ways in which those people who lived in closest proximity to the epicen­ ter of the Holocaust experienced, perceived, and negotiated the presence of their neighbors’ traces. The historical narrative and anthropological observa­ tions I have presented thus revolve around two main questions that troubled the Poles after the war: 1) What should actually be done with the physical remnants of our murdered Jews?; and 2) What meaning do we give these inanimate, empty, and abandoned traces, absent their former owners? The answers to these questions took on various shapes and forms throughout the communist era, as they were suffused with conf licting ideas and attitudes that were molded by the manifold pressures of the time and were intensified in those persons and communities who lived next to the Jewish landmarks. For those local officials and townspeople whose Jewish communities had been an integral element of their social and physical landscape, the conscious act of deciding the future of their now forlorn synagogues and cemeteries, and dealing with their stubborn existence, was not a neutral undertaking. The nagging presence of these physical, obtrusive reminders of the past evoked a broad web of responses and sensations, ranging from anxiety, hos­ tility, and contempt to fear, reverence, and enchantment, as they confronted the Polish population with the complicated reality of their postwar present and the shadows of their wartime past. I have tried to elucidate the unique perception, status, and social function of the country’s Jewish sites by excavating and analyzing the material-practical layer of the communist era reality, while concomitantly using a fine brush to reveal a deeper, implicit layer, which discloses the ways in which the interac­ tion with the Jewish space mediated an indirect engagement with an unset­ tling past. These two interpretive frameworks are not mutually exclusive but rather imbricated and interdependent. The economic and landed property debate over the status of Jewish communal property was complicated by the mnemonic capacity of Jewish space as a metonymy for its original owners’ gruesome fate. Conversely, active social acknowledgment of Jewish cemeter­ ies and synagogues as concrete reminders of the dead continues to frustrate attempts to involve practical and economic considerations in the discussion on the future of Jewish sites in Poland. This two-fold perception of Jew­ ish space was variously expressed over the changing political realities of the country’s communist years and was manifested amid a complex interplay between state authorities, municipal officials, the local population, and Jew­ ish leaders at home and abroad.

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In the first few turbulent postwar years, until the end of the 1940s, Poles— Jews and non-Jews—strived to adjust to the radical and transformative after­ math of the cataclysmic war that had so altered the geographical, social, political, and economic aspects of their national reality. In this new world order, absent the once pervasive Jewish presence, an atmosphere of moral breakdown and severe material shortages reigned, giving way to appropria­ tion and plunder of empty synagogues and abandoned cemeteries—not to mention all private Jewish property—assets now largely reframed as legiti­ mately won spoils of war. State authorities drafted the legal basis for the confiscation of Jewish communal property, while local officials constructed the vocabulary and conceptual framework that facilitated and justified its de-Judaization. In these early postwar years, however, Polish Jewish organi­ zations still had a measure of autonomy and political power, and they could use their inf luence to petition the government to protect the inviolability of their religious sites. State officials, while pursuing a strict Jewish disin­ heritance policy, were relatively attentive to Jewish concerns, and on quite a few occasions they compelled local authorities to refrain from misusing and profaning Jewish spaces. But the restraint displayed by local officials in this early period was not merely the result of extrinsic forces. As eager as local authorities were to take over and repurpose their towns’ Jewish sites, the fresh imprints of the Jews’ extermination made it difficult for many of them to lay to rest their haunting doubts and unsettling discomfort over the legal and ethical status of Jewish houses of worship and burial grounds. Contrary to the state’s newly written property laws, many local officials continued to treat Jews, real or imagined, as the legal or moral owners of confiscated synagogues and cemeteries. In the second postwar period, which roughly corresponds to the 1950s and 1960s, such collective uncertainty and unease gradually diminished as municipal leaders began to come to terms with the new normative sta­ tus of Jewish communal property in the wake of another mass exodus of Jews. As the regime was now much less attentive to Jewish concerns, and with the acceleration of urban regeneration and modernizations plans, the gap between the administrative center in Warsaw and its provincial extensions throughout the periphery narrowed, and the government loos­ ened bureaucratic barriers on local requests to repurpose or demolish synagogues and Jewish cemeteries. With an ever-f lagging staff and dwin­ dling resources, and lacking any real political power, Jewish leaders were much less successful in the second postwar period in protecting their sacral sites. But they kept traversing the country to attend to Poland’s remaining Jewish landmarks, using whatever means they could to save them f rom

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complete oblivion. As anti-Jewish and nationalist trends spread among the ruling circles and municipal administration in the 1950s and 1960s, town officials’ desire to appropriate their destroyed neighbors’ traces devolved into a shared compulsion to obliterate their presence through demo­ lition. The mere presence of deserted Jewish cemeteries and crumbled synagogues came to be perceived as an intolerable blemish that required immediate excision. This surgery was a part of an aesthetic architectural discourse that also veiled a symbolic attempt to erase and exorcise the Shoah, cleansing the local landscape of any traces that might undermine the national wartime and postwar narratives. This tendency encountered some grassroots resistance. Singular voices of protest among non-Jewish Poles emerged, expressing moral outrage against the desecration of these holy spaces and conveying mourning and compassion over the fate of their murdered neighbors. On the cusp of the last two decades of communist rule, the outlook for Jewish religious sites appeared to be terminal. But it was precisely then, at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, that the tide turned. Fol­ lowing the brutal, state-sponsored attack on the country’s Jewish minority in the 1968 “anti-Zionist” campaign, which led to yet another wave of Jewish emigration, Poland came under a surge of intense international scrutiny. In this new atmosphere, the country’s decaying and obliterated Jewish sites had suddenly attracted national and worldwide attention, and they came to be emblematic of not only the Jewish fate in the Shoah but also its ongo­ ing danger of annihilation in the present. Confronted with external pres­ sures and their own paranoia, the central government enacted and strove to enforce new laws protecting Jewish sites, pushing the responsibility of social change onto local authorities. Some local governments complied with these new directives, yet many municipalities found it difficult to adjust to the sudden, backtracking policy change and did not easily lay aside their endeavors to cleanse the local landscape of mnemonic Jewish traces. At the same time, compassionate and commemorative sensibilities among the Pol­ ish public grew in number to form a serious social movement. Poles from all over the country, Jews and Christians alike, set out to rediscover their nation’s remaining material Jewish heritage sites and advocate for their protection, motivated by collective soul searching and a chance to express political oppo­ sition to the weakening communist regime. This introspective shift triggered growing engagement with the history of the Holocaust and also elicited painful reminders of a topic that had heretofore been hardly discussed but would become central in the years that followed: the Poles’ responsibility for their neighbors’ fate.

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In the course of the different epochs of the communist years, fragmented and deserted Jewish traces, ruins, and even empty sites appeared to have acquired a sense of idiosyncratic presence. The special ambiance of the Jew­ ish space in postwar Poland was developed under specific conditions but its endurance spans several periods and exceeds the chronological structure of the work. As was demonstrated throughout the book, the distinct percep­ tion and experience of the material Jewish remnants consisted of comingling attitudes of contempt, fear, fascination, and exoticization. These sensations and emotions received different outward manifestations and interpretations, but they all pointed to the same phenomenon; the inability to domesticate the unhomely atmosphere of the Polish Jewish spaces in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Lingering, abandoned, and unclaimed communal lands, formerly belong­ ing to every prewar minority, particularly perturbed the Poles by war’s end. The Polish landscape’s traditional testament to religious and ethnic diversity now undermined the hermeticity of the newly conceived monoethnic and religiously homogeneous identity. Jewish, Christian Orthodox, Greek Catho­ lic, and German Protestant houses of prayer and cemeteries were regularly employed for functions foreign to their purpose, plundered, vandalized, or demolished. From a later point in time, and for certain groups, these traces of alterity have also concretized a cultural movement of undermining the nationalist definitions of the nation and re-imagining Poland as a multicul­ tural society. The determination of the fate of non-Catholic Christian sites in communist Poland was fraught with difficulties and setbacks. Yet the deliberations on their future drastically differed from their Jewish ilk and did not arouse the same numerous restrictions, reservations, and justifications that were involved in the laborious negotiations over the control and fate of Jewish communal spaces. Although the Jewish sacral landscape was greatly diminished in the postwar years, the special sense of unsettlement, unease, and political sensitivity that characterized the discussions on the material remnants of the murdered Jewish communities, to a large extent protected them from complete obliteration. Corollary to the relative ease by which Protestant, Orthodox, and Greek Catholic churches and cemeteries were expropriated and repurposed for the new Polish polis, those not demolished or converted for mundane purposes were quickly transformed and readapted for ritual Catholic communal use. Such Catholicization of foreign holy and honored spaces is certainly rooted in a universal cultural pattern, wherein the religion of the hegemonic class often retains the original location, structure, and function of a conquered holy space and adapts it to its own ritual needs. Similar instances may be

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seen in the Christianization of Russia, where churches were established on the grounds of pagan temples; in Jerusalem, where synagogues and churches were turned into mosques during periods of Muslim rule; and in the trans­ formation of synagogues into cathedrals after the Jew’s expulsion f rom Spain.2 Yet, tellingly, this universal mechanism was abandoned when it came to Jewish houses of prayer in postwar Poland.3 Not a single synagogue was transformed into a Catholic shrine after 1945.4 This intriguing fact strongly testifies to the special place of the Jews in the Catholic Polish culture and imagination, but mainly, I believe, to the unique and charged capacitance of Jewish ritual sites in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The difficulty of tam­ ing and neutralizing their evocative and ambivalent presence was apparently insurmountable. “The Jew is ambivalence incarnate,” writes Zygmunt Bauman. “And ambiv­ alence is ambivalence mostly because it cannot be contemplated without ambivalent feelings: It is simultaneously attractive and repelling. . . . It dan­ gles before the eyes what one would rather not see—that the settled accounts are still open and the lost possibilities are still alive.”5 Bauman uses the con­ cept of ambivalence to account for the special status of Jews in the Western imagination since antiquity, and he claims that anti-Semitism is an attempt to eliminate the notion of ambivalence since it threatens to undermine the rational order of modernity. “Ambivalence,” he continues, “is what all order­ ing activity is sworn against and hopes to eliminate . . . the cause of all order­ ing concerns.” Bauman, himself a Polish-born Jew who left Poland following the anti-Semitic events of 1968, appears to capture here not only the place of the Jews in the non-Jewish eyes but also their material proxies—inanimate and empty cemeteries and synagogues that were left behind in Europe after the Holocaust. The particular ambivalence of Jewish religious sites is located in their unique place in prewar Polish culture and derives from the tension between their commonality with the local landscape and their essential otherness, which replicated the perception of the Jews in the Polish mind, as the most rooted, intimate, and “threatening” other.6 The notion of ambivalence per­ tains specifically to the additional layers of meaning acquired by the material Jewish traces in the wake of the extermination of the Jews. Postwar Jewish cemeteries and synagogues were negotiated both as abandoned properties but also, at least formally, as religious sites. They were seen as a foreign body, which is nevertheless a rooted part of the local heritage. They were perceived as an aesthetical hazard and urban problem while, at the same time, their presence was a concrete reminder of the absent Jews and of the unsettling

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circumstances of their disappearance. These varied social functions and roles invested in the Jews’ communal traces after the war generated ambivalent responses and attitudes among Polish society, which impeded any straight­ forward, dispassionate approach toward these sites. It is precisely this unsettling nature that endowed these “out-of-place” sites with special appeal and charged them with a peculiar magnetic attraction. The mere existence of Jewish prayer houses and graveyards in a landscape devoid of living Jews was, and is, “simultaneously attractive and repelling” as Bauman notes, and introduces a ghastly, liminal element that defies the clear dichotomy between presence and absence, past and presence, and life and death. Bauman also turns our attention to the limitations of modern attempts to eliminate ambivalence. He argues that ambivalence is not only the cause but also the effect of imposing order: “The production of order has its toxic waste.  .  .  . No garden design, however shrewd, can avoid recasting some plants as weeds.”7 Accordingly, the drive to eradicate ambivalence only perpetuates the futility in doing so, and the resources invested in abolishing it acknowledge its power and grasp. As detailed throughout this book, the recurring attempts to de-Judaize the Polish landscape and elimi­ nating Jewish material remnants could only succeed partially. As much as the acts of erasure and defacement attempted to overwrite and obliterate Poland’s Jewish past, they reaffirmed this past’s presence and acknowledged its power. Many cemeteries and synagogues have been restored or reconstructed in recent years; others remain untouched since their forced desuetude, while still others have disappeared, leaving only their empty yet evocative footprints or foundations. Jarringly empty squares in the middle of well-populated towns, sudden clearings in otherwise thick forests, solitary and impassable thickets of bushes along a country road, or, alternatively, impressively reno­ vated sacral buildings and preserved burial grounds, have become integral components of the postwar Polish landscape in the environs of its former shtetlach. Repositories of loss, antagonism, and nostalgia, these spaces func­ tion as fragile, unintentional monuments to the Jews and their fate, harbor­ ing a “non-absent past,” which is, according to Ewa Domanska, “a past that is somehow still present, that will not go away or, rather, that of which we cannot rid ourselves.”8 The narrative told and insights gathered in this book are firmly grounded in a specific time and place. Yet their addition to the record may pave a path for pondering how other societies approach their own material remnants of populations past, especially those whose presence alludes to enduring

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animosities and conf licts unresolved. By tracing the historical trajectories of social perceptions of abandoned spaces, we can learn much about the entanglement of unsettling memories within shifting political ideologies, ingrained religious beliefs, and everyday practical concerns. Historical sites, by their very nature, survive long after the original owners have gone, whether through emigration, escape, expulsion, or eradication. In their owners’ absence, these locations become material metonyms and anthro­ pomorphized emblems. In their continued derelict presence, these objects can pierce the otherwise prosaic nature of everyday existence, adding an ele­ ment of ambivalence to the normative order of public life. These material imprints of foreignness may often be repurposed, reconstituted, razed, or simply ignored, but they are not easily jettisoned from all social conscious­ ness.9 Some vestige often remains, ineffaceable despite the ravages of time, nature, and man. These other places have the capacity to antagonize and undermine national narratives and ideological conventions. At the same time, they harbor an unfulfilled possibility for reconciliation with troubled past and present injustices.10

Epilogue: After 1989 On November 10, 2016, a Facebook post from the community page Olkusz Land (Ziemia Olkuska) shared with its followers the news of “a very sad and upsetting issue.”11 The author angrily described an incident that had occurred earlier that day in his hometown, wherein a local citizen had demolished an old staircase on his own property. It is the peculiar history of this staircase that catapulted a seemingly unremarkable story to social media fame. As the author explained, this particular staircase had originally led up to the women’s section in the town’s old synagogue. The synagogue itself had been demolished in 1957 by the Olkusz authorities and townspeople, who, in return for their part in tearing it down, were permitted to seize the avulsed bricks for their own private use. Many years later, the identities of those who had profited from the synagogue’s destruction was an open secret. The prized staircase was taken by a local citizen who then planted it in his front yard. There it stood, for nearly sixty years, as a material synecdoche of the absent synagogue, as if perpetuating its desecration and pointing an accus­ ing finger at those who had helped demolish it. And then, suddenly, the new property owner decided to destroy it and leave it as a pile of smashed bricks in front of his home. The Facebook post, which attracted heated responses expressing outrage over the devastation of one of the town’s last remaining Jewish remnants, concluded: “First they stole, and now they destroyed.”

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Every once in a while, Jewish traces, fragmented, displaced, and reused, resurface to the heart of contemporary public discourse, revealing the persis­ tent, emotionally volatile nature of Polish postwar material Jewish heritage and demonstrating the extent to which the Jewish past continues to infiltrate the present. Three decades after the 1989 transformation, the conditions and realities shaping the treatment and perception of the country’s material Jew­ ish traces have substantially changed in comparison to the communist years. Today, different actors and new political and cultural mechanisms determine the status of Poland’s Jewish space. The basic ambivalence underpinning the presence of these traces in Poland’s townscapes, however, appears to remain entrenched. Although the post-1989 period exceeds the timeframe of this book, in the final pages I would like to make some concluding observations on the insights presented thus far, from the perspective of the last three decades. Although the end of the Polish People’s Republic, in the summer of 1989, was relatively peaceful and quiet, the social, economic, and cultural consequences of the sudden transition to an open market democracy were dramatic and jarring.12 The political transition to the Third Polish Republic opened new political, cultural, and economic horizons, though large parts of Polish soci­ ety experienced a “trauma of social change” that undermined their sense of familiarity with the social order and their usual way of life.13 The postcom­ munist transition created the conditions for an unexpected revival of Jewish life and culture, yet this period of expanded personal freedoms also enabled more overt manifestations of ultra-nationalist and anti-Jewish tendencies.14 The lifting of all remaining censures, the decentralization of the political system, and the democratization of the public sphere resulted in, among other things, a marked increase in the dissemination of old-new ideologies and emotions into the pub­ lic sphere. Upward trending numbers of nationalistic and neofascist verbal and physical manifestation became an integral aspect of the post-1989 transforma­ tions throughout Eastern Europe, in relative proportion to instances of vandal­ ization of Jewish and minority group heritage sites and property.15 Since 1989, the Polish conceptualization of and deliberation over the status of Jewish sites has taken shape amid a background of increasingly polarized debate within society over the country’s perception of its own postcommunist identity. This struggle to find a cohesive national narra­ tive engulfs almost all areas of public life, and among other things, revolves around the politics of history and memory of the collective past, particularly the World War II era and the communist years.16 Although almost all parties across the political spectrum have declaratively embraced Jewish culture and

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have spoken in memory of the Jewish victims, the thorny history of Pol­ ish responsibility in the Shoah—discussed at home and abroad—has evoked ongoing antagonism and became an ideological battlefield. Massive social rifts over the veracity of Polish complicity in crimes against the Jews palpa­ bly erupted after the publication of Jan Tomasz Gross’s Neighbors in 2000, which provided a detailed and gruesome account of the massacre of the Jewish community in Jedwabne by their fellow Polish co-citizens. Substan­ tial segments of society have welcomed the historical revelations of Polish involvement in the Shoah, viewing it as a call for collective reckoning and soul searching, yet many more, including prominent politicians and church leaders, have reacted defensively and aggressively, expressing an “obsession with innocence” and refusing to accept the possibility that Poles were not only heroic victims but also perpetrators.17 These tendencies strengthened after 2015 when the nationalist-populist Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość [PiS]) rose to power and embarked on a campaign to combat the “slandering of the good name of Poland.” Under this banner, the government has aimed at preventing dis­ cussion on Polish complicity in the Shoah and presenting a counterfactual historical narrative, claiming that Poland and Poles are categorically not responsible for the murder of the Jews. On February 2018, Polish Parliament voted to approve the amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance (the “Holocaust Bill”), which, among other things, deter­ mines that any person who makes the claim that the Poles or the Polish nation have equal or partial responsibility for the Nazi crimes, is subjected to criminal punishment.18 Simultaneously, the PiS government is constantly trying to intervene with and rewrite the ways in which the Holocaust, the wartime past, and Polish-Jewish relations are being publicly mediated. This mission is pursued by showcasing the stories of Poles who saved Jews dur­ ing the war and by trying to determine the narrative of semi-independent museal institutions such as the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the Museum of the Second World War in Gdan´sk.19 Recent quarrels sur­ rounding the admission or denial of Polish involvement in the Shoah led to a rift in the diplomatic relations between Poland and Israel, along with a vio­ lent nationalistic campaign against Polish Holocaust researchers, all of which has evoked an outburst in anti-Jewish verbal abuse in the public sphere.20 Although amid the heated debate on the “Holocaust Bill,” the Polish govern­ ment announced it would invest US$28 million in the preservation of the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw-Okopowa, there appears to have been a marked increase in cases of vandalism in Jewish cemeteries and monuments across the country since the beginning of the crisis.21

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The politics of history of the PiS government is one element of its attempt to reshape Polish society and culture in its recent state-sponsored campaign, backed by nationalist and Catholic circles alike. Other elements of their campaign include the curtailment of f ree media, the severing of the independence of Poland’s judicial system, a brutal attack against LGBTQ people, and the adoption of strict anti-abortion laws—measures that led to unprecedented instances of demonstrations and public protests—the larg­ est since the fall of communism—against the government.22 Within this increasingly polarized atmosphere, discussion of the Holocaust and its spe­ cifically property-rights-related aftermath has been regularly evoked as a political weapon. In the run-up to the 2020 Polish presidential elections, Polish state television—supporting the incumbent PiS-backed president Andrzej Duda—accused Rafał Trzaskowski, the opposition candidate f rom the centrist party Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska), of harboring intentions to return Jewish property to its heirs and to use public money to make reparations.23 Duda’s supporters, who eventually won the elec­ tion, knew the political benefits they would reap by triggering discussion of the restitution of private Jewish property, which had been looted by the Nazis and was later confiscated by the communists, and detonating it in the hands of the opposition candidate. Duda himself committed, dur­ ing the campaign, that he would not allow for the restitution of Jewish property.24 A few months prior, in his speech at a rally preceding the 2019 European Parliament elections, Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced that Poland would not return stolen property to the Jews, nor would it compensate them for their losses, since such act would be “a vic­ tory for Hitler.”25 The Republic of Poland is a country where the number of people living in former Jewish homes is proportionally higher than in any other European country. Given this fact, it is comprehensible that the topic of the restitu­ tion of Jewish property remains one of the most contentious issues today and f requently evokes defensive and hostile reactions, ref lecting real anxi­ eties and concerns all too easily exploited by politicians. Despite lobbying efforts by international Jewish organizations post-1989, Polish governments on both ends of the political spectrum have ref rained f rom formulating any legal solutions that would allow for the restitution of private Jewish property or any alternative form of reparation, f requently making the claim that such massive restitution would severely undermine the Polish economy and that this compensation should instead be paid by Germany.26 The legal possibility for Jewish heirs to reclaim family property was narrowed down even more in 2021, when the Polish parliament adopted a controversial

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amendment that prevents the annulment of unlawful administrative decisions after the passage of thirty years, thus turning the reprivatization of communistera nationalized property into an almost impossible course of action.27 While no road map for the legal restitution of, or compensation for, indi­ vidual Jewish property has been drafted—making Poland the only European country which has failed to do so—a formal framework governing the return of communal Jewish property has been created. In February 20, 1997, fol­ lowing protracted discussions between the Polish government and Jewish organizations in Poland and abroad, the Act on the Relationship between the State and the Religious Jewish Communities in the Republic of Poland, regulating (among other things) the restitution of Jewish communal prop­ erty, was passed by the Polish Parliament.28 This new law paved the way for Poland’s Jewish communities, numbering some 1,700 registered members at the time, to reclaim properties that belonged to prewar Jewish communities and which were originally confiscated by the Nazis and later expropriated by the communists.29 As of 1997, the accounted-for Jewish communal prop­ erty was estimated to include 1,200 cemeteries, most of which had been completely, heavily, or partially destroyed; and some 320 synagogues, the majority either already converted and used for other purposes or standing in ruins.30 Under the act, apart from the nine official Jewish communities that could file for restitution of communal property found in their jurisdiction, another body, the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Monuments (Fundacja Ochrony Dziedzictwa Z˙ydowskiego; FODZ), was authorized to submit property restitution requests. Founded in 2002 by the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland and the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO), the FODZ became a recognized legal Jewish institu­ tion authorized to reclaim assets outside the jurisdiction of local communi­ ties.31 The communities and the FODZ were given a period of five years to file claims for restitution to special regulatory commissions set up for this purpose. Out of the 5,504 claims filed in this five-year window—around 2,000 are still being discussed—in more than 1,500 cases the application was denied or discontinued.32 As of 2019, only 1,208 cases resulted either in a favorable decision for the applicants or in a settlement agreement, leading to the property’s restitution, the transfer of rights to a different property as a replacement for the one claimed, or to financial compensation for the lost land and structures. So far, the Jewish organizations received a sum of 88 million zloty as reparations.33 Cemeteries and synagogues account for more than half of recovered Jew­ ish property, but regained ownership of these sites creates new challenges

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for Poland’s Jewish associations. In the majority of cases, it is clear that res­ tituted synagogues will not revert to their former lives of ritual and civic use, as only handful of cities and towns in present-day Poland support active congregations.34 Because many of these remitted buildings are now consid­ ered historical monuments, once reclaimed, the new owners must bear the responsibility for meeting strict criteria governing their maintenance and security. Jewish organizations accordingly sometimes find themselves bro­ kering creative compromises with local authorities and non-Jewish associa­ tions to use their recovered synagogues and communal buildings for local, “respectable” needs, such as museums and cultural centers. Yet in many cases reclaimed religious buildings, or their lands, have been sold or leased by Jewish communities to private entrepreneurs, on the justification that the daily and acute financial needs of the living community outweigh the need to preserve these “dead” sites for symbolic and commemorative purposes. Opponents of this position argue that sacred land cannot simply be regarded as marketable real estate, and they accuse the Jewish communal leaders who have made this compromise of lacking historical awareness and even of exhibiting great personal greed.35 The debate over the future of these com­ munal properties is ongoing and contentious. It involves bitter, emotional rifts within the Jewish public in Poland and between Jewish organizations abroad and their national Polish-Jewish counterparts. The questions, “Who are the beneficiaries of the material heritage of Poland’s murdered Jews?” and “What is the balance between catering for the everyday needs of the Polish Jewish communities and preserving the memory of the victims?,” lack an unequivocal answer.36 The continued presence of Jewish cemeteries across the country, of which few are still used today for burial, embodies its own set of challenges. Although their restitution allegedly gives the communities more ability to watch over them, in practice this transfer has placed a huge financial burden on their shoulders. Unlike synagogues, cemetery plots may neither be sold nor leased for any other purpose except their original aim, according to Jew­ ish law, and their preservation requires enormous spending that, as the Jew­ ish associations often claim, they are able to only partially cover. For the most part, neither the state nor the local authorities allocate yearly resources for cemetery upkeep and protection. Municipalities often disclaim responsibil­ ity for Jewish cemeteries under their jurisdiction, making the argument that they are Jewish property, and therefore the onus of maintaining and guarding them should fall on the Jewish community.37 Although there is a growing awareness and sensitivity to the status of Jew­ ish cemeteries in Poland, they are not protected by law against demolition

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and often fall prey to a combination of private economic interests, municipal urban planning considerations, and possibly to the burgeoning nationalistic and xenophobic tendencies in the political and public sphere. Jewish orga­ nizations have recently reported several cases of active construction inside their old cemeteries, resulting in the obliteration of the sites’ remaining structural traces and the exhumation and dumping of human remains.38 In some of these instances, private factors acted without outside authorization, whereas in others, local authorities and even local courts used all sorts of legal loopholes to approve requests to build on top of the ruined sections of these cemeteries. Justifications for these decisions were framed on eco­ nomic and aesthetic grounds, the latter taking the following form: since it no longer looks like a cemetery, there’s no impediment to treat it as a piece of real estate.39 No less common are cases of infrastructural development, conducted by municipal bodies and local organizations on or close to Jewish burial sites, where human remains are disinterred and left exposed. In Sandomierz, where in the 1950s vocational school dormitories were built partially on the grounds of the local Jewish cemetery, the buried past has recently resurfaced. In 1954, school representatives argued that the construction of dormitories on the land abutting the school would rectify the poor state of the cemetery, which was already having a negative effect on “the school’s aesthetic appearance.” In their proposal, the school representatives committed to “develop the site and give it an aesthetic look” by employing “a humane approach toward the deceased.”40 Sixty-five years later, in the course of reconstructing an asphalt road traversing the dormitory buildings—which today are part of a complex of tourism and gastronomy schools—dozens of bones were unearthed and remained scattered and bared to the open sky for weeks as both the school directors and dormitories’ managers renounced responsibility for solving the matter.41 Alongside these polemics and disputes, the phenomenon of preserving and renovating crumbling Jewish sites, mainly cemeteries, has become a mass movement nowadays, uniting local, national, and international stake­ holders and involving nonprofit organizations, Jewish representatives, and governmental institutions in Poland and abroad. Although in many Jewish cemeteries, especially in the provinces, one can still encounter piles of gar­ bage, empty alcohol bottles, and animals grazing, the massive littering of Jewish burial grounds is no longer as prevalent as it was in previous decades, thanks to growing public awareness, and clean-up operations.42 The main actors in this field are ordinary Poles—mostly local leaders, artists, students, teachers, Catholic groups, and civic organizations—who are undertaking the

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Sisyphean task of preserving and maintaining Jewish sites in their home­ towns.43 Some of these activists began their work in the early 2000s as a direct response to the publication of Gross’s Neighbors and the attendant storm of heated debate that followed. Many of them see their mission as a moral and educational duty—their attempt to fill a gap in their own local history and promote a pluralistic, tolerant society.44 But caring for Jewish sites also carries other incentives. As a growing number of municipal leaders in the former shtetls have recognized, revitalizing abandoned Jewish heritage sites can help improve the financial and social capital of their towns. Renovating the ample sites these localities still possess has the potential not only to boost tourism but also to create a sense of local pride, serving as a force for cultural and socioeconomic advancement.45 Promoting material Jewish heritage in contemporary Poland has become the paradigmatic channel for engaging with Poland’s lost multicultural legacy, which often takes the form of sentimental longing to an invented past but can also help establish a sense of local and regional identity, to challenge the homogeneity of the Polish identity, and to overcome crossborder strife and sectarian differences.46 The preservation of Jewish sites is part of a larger European phenomenon that has surfaced in recent decades, where Jewish heritage is rediscovered, and Jewish culture is cheered. The author Ruth Ellen Gruber sees this phenomenon as one taking place within a “virtually Jewish” world, where Jewishness is performed mostly by and for non-Jews, and where Jewish spaces are given new social functions and cul­ tural interpretations.47 This cultural rereading has by now become a rooted element in the reanimation of historic city quarters in Central and East­ ern Europe, involving a wide range of cultural, artistic, educational, and commemorative initiatives.48 Non-Jewish engagement with Jewish “things” is often criticized as being a cultural appropriation, as inauthentic, and as propagating an uncritical narrative that masks and conceals uncomfort­ able past episodes and evades difficult questions and inconsistencies in the present.49 Other scholars suggested viewing this phenomenon in nonbinary terms; rather than conceiving of these narratives as authentic or simulacra, they can be seen as what Gruber termed “new authenticities” and chances for the opening up of unique platforms to reexamine fixed identities and ethnic boundaries.50 Within this larger cultural manifestation, renovation projects of Jewish spaces are often framed under catchy slogans, such as those aimed at “recov­ ering the Jewish past” or “bringing back the Jewish memory.” This trope of retrieving something lost functions within a multifarious constellation of national and global interests and involves different political, economic, and

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moral considerations. But for those currently residing in Poland’s empty-ofJews towns, living in formerly Jewish-owned homes, and overlooking Jewish sites, ruins, and empty spots, these expressions seem to hold a more pal­ pable and ambivalent meaning. In 2009, in the village of Brzostek, Jonathan Webber invited the village residents to actively participate in a literal act of reclaiming their own Jewish past by reconstructing the erased Jewish cem­ etery, which in practice was an empty piece of land. Working closely with local leaders, Webber (himself a descendant of Brzostek Jews) involved the inhabitants in the location and retrieval of more than fifty headstones that had been removed f rom the cemetery and used in local farms and barns as building materials during or after the war.51 The matzevot were brought back to the cemetery’s original location, sometimes anonymously, and were re-erected in evenly spaced rows and columns, creating a symbolic recon­ struction of the old graveyard, something “authentic and inauthentic at the same time.”52 In the town of Rajgród, the attempt to commemorate the local Jewish cemetery led to a different outcome. In September 2014, on the initiative of Rajgród’s Jewish descendants, and in concert with the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Monuments and Jewish leaders f rom Warsaw, a large memorial was erected on the former site of the extirpated cem­ etery. Not far f rom there—as was revealed in the aforementioned letter of Halina Masztalerz—is located a mass grave in the forest of Jews who had been murdered by their neighbors in the summer of 1941. As opposed to what transpired in the Brzostek project, Rajgród’s townspeople were not involved in the project. Only a few representatives among the local citizens and authorities attended the ceremony of unveiling the monument, which was carved out of a Jerusalem stone by an Israeli artist and was shipped by sea f rom Israel to Poland.53 Though the writing on the stone does not men­ tion the local participation in the murder and this issue did not come up dur­ ing the ceremony, the monument immediately attracted resentment. Only two months after its installation, it was smashed and defaced by unknown actors. Following a renovation, it was once again vandalized.54 The postcommunist phenomenon of renovating Jewish spaces should be evaluated not only in the binary terms of failure or success, acceptance or dissent, and coming to terms with the past or denying its existence. It often intertwines these different communal responses and attitudes. This is dem­ onstrated in the follow-up story to one of this book’s main protagonists—the Dąbrowa Tarnowska synagogue. At the beginning of the 1990s, the physical state of the monumental object had reached a literal breaking point, threat­ ening to collapse at any moment. All previous attempts by the municipality

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to renovate the site had failed on account of the tremendous costs involved. Dąbrowa Tarnowska’s town leaders had hoped that, following the new 1997 law regulating the restitution of Jewish communal property, the building would find its way back into Jewish hands, exempting the town from the burden of its upkeep. However, the Kraków Jewish community, under whose jurisdiction the synagogue was located, refused to reclaim it, understanding that ownership of the large and crumbling building was a fiscal responsibility they were unprepared, or unable, to undertake. Seeking a creative solution, municipal leaders urgently began search­ ing for sources of funding to renovate the dilapidated synagogue, hop­ ing to neutralize the melancholic and gloomy ambiance of the structure claiming the town’s center and at the same time recognizing the inher­ ent touristic opportunities in its renovation. Writing to the Jewish Histori­ cal Institute (Z˙ IH) in 2008, Dąbrowa Tarnowska’s mayor asked for help locating donors for the synagogue’s reconstruction, which he described as “the most important temple of its kind and one of the most beautiful and impressive synagogues in Poland.” He also wrote that the renovated synagogue would be a memorial for the Jews “who, during the occupation, could always count on the help of the Dąbrowians, who hid them in their houses and supplied them with forged documents.”55 Local citizens also tried raising awareness of the synagogue’s dire state. In 2007, a woman, native to Dąbrowa Tarnowska, wrote another letter to the Z˙IH, expressing her concern for the building’s future: “I am very interested in rescuing this valuable monument even though I am Christian. . . . It would be an enor­ mous and irreparable loss if it collapsed and had to be demolished. Many Jews prayed there after all, and religious buildings deserve to be preserved for future generations.”56 In 2009, a 7 million euro grant was secured f rom the European Union for the renovation. The works lasted four years, during which its artis­ tic decorations and murals were carefully restored. The inauguration of the reconstructed synagogue took place in 2012, attracting national and worldwide attention and also some local resentment. On the eve of the opening ceremony, a local journalist and right-wing politician placed post­ ers around town, bearing the inscription, “The Jews got the synagogue, but our companies got no money” (Z˙ydzi mają synagogę, a nasze firmy nie dostały kasy).57 Today, the renovated synagogue is owned by the town, and it functions as the Center for the Meeting of Cultures (Ośrodek Spotkania Kultur). Whereas before, the building was perceived as “disfiguring” the town’s appearance and “mocking” its “dynamic development,” it now seems to do the opposite.

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Figure 29. The renovated synagogue in Dąbrowa Tarnowska. 2015. Photo by Piotr Frydrych. Courtesy of the photographer.

In many ways, the restored synagogue redefines the aesthetics of the town. The presence of a new, perfectly renovated and immaculate building is strik­ ing against the background of an otherwise unexceptional provincial town. Pictures of the synagogue appear in every local tourist brochure and web portal, and it is widely regarded as a regional attraction. A visit to the synagogue’s interior offers a puzzling and confusing experi­ ence. The high ceiling is masterfully restored with vividly painted images of ancient zodiac symbols and mythical animals. The walls are painted with illustrated biblical scenes, liturgical texts, and signs in Hebrew asking the public to remain silent during prayer. A few religious artifacts are displayed around the hall, including dioramas of religious ceremonies, with placards containing basic descriptions of Jewish rituals performed during impor­ tant life events. A niche in the eastern wall marks the place where the Aron HaKodesh (the Holy Ark) used to stand, displaying an open Torah scroll behind glass. Life-sized plastic figures of traditional Jews are interspersed with panoramic photographs of the surrounding landscape. Abutting dis­ play cabinets showcasing broken matzevot and old tefillin (phylacteries) are parts from a shot down British bomber that crashed outside the town in 1944, while it was on its way to assist the fighters in the Warsaw Polish upris­ ing. The attempt to emphasize the Polish national wartime narrative is pat­ ent. The historical tour does note the persecution and killing of the town’s

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Jews, even brief ly touching on local complicity in their fate; yet it remains loyal to the mainstream discourse, highlighting the suffering of the Poles and the great help they offered the Jews during the war. As a Center for the Meeting of Cultures, the renovated Dąbrowa Tar­ nowska synagogue occasionally hosts artistic and cultural events in the building’s main hall, including Jewish folk music concerts and educational classes focusing on the history of the Jews. Though, as with the curation of the sanctuary itself, these events also adhere to the attempt to offset the place’s Jewish identity with the local Polish narrative. Recent events include an exhibition on the history of the town’s local police unit and a theatrical performance lauding Polish martyrdom, whose declared aim was to fight off distortions of the “historical truth” and dispute accusations that Poles are anti-Semites.58 According to the director of the Cultural Center overseeing the syna­ gogue, for local inhabitants to feel that the synagogue is “theirs,” it must hold events that are not necessarily Jewish and appeal to the sensitivities of the town’s non-Jewish community.59 The director admits that some Jewish visitors feel uncomfortable with objects such as Easter eggs displayed inside the building and that they complain that the Holocaust does not receive adequate attention in the exhibition. “We didn’t want to have a Holocaust museum,” he explains. “It is not only a synagogue, but also a municipal cultural center.” Being in the difficult position of negotiating between the conf licting concerns and desires of Jewish visitors and Polish residents, he is delicately trying to compromise with programming that addresses the cul­ tural needs of the local population, yet is still in line with the sacred nature of the space. “We will not have a rock concert here, for example, but we will have a blues concert,” the director told me. “Why blues?,” I asked. “You know,” he answered, “blues is smooth.” Despite this attempt to accommodate the synagogue to local sensibili­ ties and to tame its antagonistic nature in the eyes of the locals, the town’s tensions surrounding its Jewish past do not appear to be smoothed out. As ethnographic research shows, Jewish heritage in Dąbrowa Tarnowska is still “undesired and inconvenient.”60 While functioning as a source of local pride, the refurbished synagogue nevertheless evokes a sense of estrangement. Some of the locals I met did treat it as an integral part of the local heritage, emphasizing that “it is the biggest and most beautiful temple in the area,” yet others complained that “only Jews come here with their buses,” or that “they [the town] should have used the money for renovating roads.” A factor that may have contributed to this ambivalent perception of the building is the 2011 publication of Jan Grabowski’s book, Hunt for the

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Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland, which revealed the substantial involvement of local Polish citizens—in the area of Dąbrowa Tarnowska—in the killing and extradition of Jews who had gone into hiding in the nearby villages after the liquidation of the town’s ghetto.61 The book was published during the final stages of the synagogue’s restoration, arousing mixed reactions in the country and among the townspeople.62 The tempes­ tuous debate over the book’s findings and the widely popularized inaugu­ ration of the synagogue converged to bring Dąbrowa Tarnowska into the national and international news cycle. Reception of these two unrelated events became intertwined and perhaps shaped the lens through which the synagogue is perceived today. The popularity of the renovated site among Jewish heritage tours, which form the majority of visitors, reaffirms its pri­ mary function as a memorial for the town’s murdered Jewish population and inevitably evokes the recent historical findings. The story of the Dąbrowa Tarnowska synagogue’s afterlife reveals the tension inherent in the renovation of Jewish spaces in Poland’s postcommu­ nist period. On the one hand, their preservation may be perceived as a physi­ cal and symbolic act of commemorating the dead and gone, admittedly one married to an attempt at social reconstruction or at improving the local citizens’ self-image and cultural capital. On the other hand, the aestheticiza­ tion of Jewish sites is sometimes motivated by a secondary wish, not neces­ sarily proclaimed, to ref rame and control the local historical narrative by desensitizing the Jewish site’s somber and haunting persona. This persona is all the more emphasized as long as the evidence of its poor treatment and dilapidated state remain exposed. Yet the fulfillment of these self-serving wishes seems ultimately ephemeral. Rebuilding Jewish ruins may neutral­ ize their disconsonant exteriors and dilute their implicating character, but at the same time their very refurbishment re-establishes, renews, and rein­ vigorates their evocative presence, announcing their curious prominence as dominant landmarks in the local landscape and its history. Seen in this light, rehabilitated Jewish spaces radiate an enhanced gravity, highlighting the very elements which were supposed to have been concealed in their reconstruction. The debate over the status of Poland’s Jewish sites and discussion about their preservation continue to function as a barometer for measuring the changing and conf licting modes of public engagement with Jewish culture, minorities’ heritage and the history and memory of the Holocaust.63 The future of Jewish material traces will probably continue to be determined by the wars of the present and the specters of the past. But as current polemics carries on and occupies the center stage, contemporary Polish efforts toward

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the preservation of Jewish spaces are mostly carried out on a minor scale, often leading to humble yet consequential changes in the local landscape. One example of the latter is the Instructions for Returning Matzevot project (Instrukcja powrotu macewy), initiated in 2010 by the Association for Cre­ ative Initiatives “ę,” a Warsaw-based NGO active in democratic education and sociocultural and community development.64 Spanning several small, provin­ cial towns throughout the country, the project encouraged local inhabitants to find uprooted Jewish headstones and return them to their original cem­ eteries. The project’s activists worked closely with town communal leaders and institutions to not be seen as intruders into the private space and culture of each town, borough, and neighborhood. Together they hung posters in the public domain, informing townspeople about the project and providing a basic explanation about the cultural importance of these Jewish artifacts. The posters were carefully worded to refrain from accusations that could jeopardize the project. In noncombative language, they described the prob­ lem and offered a solution. During and after World War II, many matzevot were destroyed and taken f rom cemeteries to be used for building walls, paving sidewalks, or for other uses, such as grinding wheels. . . . A matzevah is part of a grave, and as such it cannot be used for any other purpose than commemoration of the deceased. Before the war, Jews were a sub­ stantial percentage of the Polish population. They were neighbors, work colleagues, f riends, and citizens of your town. Therefore, we encourage you to take part in the process of returning the matzevot to the cemetery.65 The posters detailed several collection points throughout the participating towns where whole or fragmented matzevot could be left, and they included contact information for people who wish to provide details on the where­ abouts of dislodged matzevot that needed to be returned to the cemeteries. It further emphasized that participation in the project could be done with complete anonymity. In most of the participating towns, matzevot remains were located and returned to their former addresses, thanks to the help of local volunteers, municipal workers, and church leaders. In all, the project provided an opportunity for local citizens to do something with the shattered matzevot that had come into their possession through one way or another, whether they were found in the paving stones of their backyards, the walls of their homes, or hidden away in their attics.66 In Ryki, the local Jewish cemetery was, until 2010, nothing but an empty grassland at the top of a hill, overlooking a pond on the outskirts of the town.

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It had been heavily damaged during World War II, and gradually moldered away during the postwar decades. The cemetery’s matzevot that had survived the war were removed by local citizens. Sand from the burial grounds was repurposed for construction, and the site itself was used for cattle grazing and motorcycles races. A local pub owner in Ryki told me that, as a child, she would toboggan down the hill in winter. “It’s a pity, but there were no Jews anymore,” she said apologetically, “We didn’t learn anything about this history.” In 1984, the municipal board conceived a plan to renovate and pre­ serve the site, but because of lack of financial sources the project was not fulfilled. By the beginning of the 1990s, sixteen fragments of headstones still remained in the cemetery, but all of them disappeared since then.67 Even before the Instructions for Returning Matzevot project posters came to Ryki in 2010, a few matzevot had been anonymously returned to the Jew­ ish cemetery, presumably since the townspeople heard that their town was to be a participant. Yet only two intact matzevot and several fragments found their way home. With the help of a local journalist, the project’s sponsors moved these few recovered remains to the center of the old cemetery.68 Since digging on a cemetery site, even for the purposes of erecting matzevot as a memorial, is problematic in Jewish law, a compromise was reached with a representative of the Rabbinical Commission for Jewish Cemeteries in Poland wherein the headstones were arranged vertically, in a semicircle around the cemetery center.69 Although today’s Ryki Jewish cemetery is a pale shadow of the original site, the difference between a barren hill and a humble, symbolic memorialization creates a modest alteration in space that speaks volumes. On a Sunday afternoon visit to Ryki in 2015, I asked a local cab driver who was parked by the market square if he knew where the Jewish cem­ etery was. He offered to drive me there. In the five-minute drive from the town’s center to the cemetery, the driver—who appeared to be at least sev­ enty years old—told me that while he had lived in Ryki for fifty years, he had not been to the town’s Jewish cemetery. Despite that, and even though the cemetery was on the outskirts of town, surrounded by trees, and bore no visible markings or signs indicating its entrance, the driver knew exactly where it was located, and he stopped his car on the side of the road oppo­ site the grounds. Together, we walked up the hill to observe the cemetery. Apparently genuinely intrigued, he leaned down to get a closer look at the matzevot, brushed his hands along the stones, and cleared away the grass covering them. Then, he asked if I could translate the Hebrew inscriptions. I did. Our short drive back to Ryki’s town center was quiet. Only once did the driver speak as we passed the building of a bank, which had once been the

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Figure 30.

CO N C L U S I O N S

The Jewish cemetery in Ryki. 2015. Photo by the author.

synagogue. He pointed at the building and said, “You know, it was the Jewish church” (kościół żydowski). In many ways, the Ryki cab driver is the target audience for such memo­ rialization efforts as the Instructions for Returning Matzevot project. The finding of scattered Jewish headstones and returning them to their right­ ful place has become a paradigmatic model for the contemporary interac­ tion with the local Jewish history in Poland’s small, provincial towns. These projects do not merely retrieve or recover some lost memory. Rather, they create something new while at the same time unearthing a stubborn past and carving a channel that allows the current residents of former shtetls to confront its presence. The return of fragmented Jewish remnants to their original places, and their arrangement in fragile, imperfect order, creates the opportunity for local Polish inhabitants to accept and make peace with the lingering presence of their local past, offering perhaps a modest path for sustained and long-overdue communal mourning.

• N otes

Introduction

1. For the status of the cemetery in Jewish tradition and culture, see Bar-Levav 2002. For a comprehensive bibliography on cemeteries, burial, and death in Judaism, see Wiesemann 2005. 2. On the origins and genealogy of the synagogue, see Levine 2000. 3. Cohen 1994, 37. The Statute of Kalisz from 1264, a privilege published by the Polish Duke Bolesław the Pious, similarly sanctioned the desecration of Jewish cemeteries. 4. Eleonora Bergman and Jan Jagielski from the Jewish Historical Institute pub­ lished several pioneering studies on the material state, function, and status of Jewish cemeteries and synagogues. See Bergman 2011; Bergman and Jagielski 1996, 2014. See also the comprehensive survey of Jewish heritage sites in Poland, published by Gruber and Myers (1995). The changing legal status of Jewish cemeteries in Poland since the end of the war is discussed extensively in Bednarek 2020. A valuable collec­ tion of official documents on Jewish cemeteries and synagogues in Poland between 1944 to 1966 was gathered by the political scientist Kazimierz Urban (2006). General information on the state of Jewish heritage sites in Poland can be found in internet databases such as the web portal of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Virtual Shtetl, https://sztetl.org.pl. Detailed information on Jewish cemeteries is available on the Jewish Cemeteries in Poland (Kirkuty) website, created by Krzysz­ tof Bielawski, https://cmentarze-zydowskie.pl. 5. Bielawski 2020. 6. The anthropologist Rivka Parciak (2007) provided illuminating insights on the perception and symbolic status of Jewish cemeteries in Poland since the Holo­ caust. Important research was conducted by the sociologist Sławomir Kapralski (2012, 2015), who analyzed the postwar transformation and social function of Jew­ ish sites and monuments. Both of them, however, did not use archival materials from the communist period that would enable us to understand how these sites were treated, perceived, and discussed by local actors and at the time. 7. Meng 2011. 8. For the concrete and symbolic construction of the Jewish space in Poland, mainly in Kraków and Warsaw, see Matyjaszek 2019b. For the postwar transforma­ tion of the urban Jewish landscape in Warsaw, see Chomątowska 2016; Fuchs 2020. On the fate of Jewish spaces in Kraków after the Holocaust, see, for example, Kugel­ mass and Orla-Bukowska 1998; Lehrer 2013. 9. On the history and myth of the shtetl, see Shandler 2014. 10. For new directions in the study of the shtetl, see Katz 2007; Petrovsky-Shtern 2014. 227

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11. Zielin´ski 2007, 116. 12. Kassow 2007, 122. 13. On the social relationships between non-Jews and Jews in the shtetls, see OrlaBukowska 2004. 14. Lehmann 2001. 15. Lehmann 2001, 169. On the urban topography of the shtetl, see Markowski 2007. 16. The only area in postwar Poland in which Jews had a dominant, sometimes even predominant, presence in small towns was the former German region of Lower Silesia. 17. For the appropriation of Jewish houses by the non-Jewish citizens, see chap­ ter 1 of this book. 18. On displacement, expulsion, and migration in postwar Europe, see Cohen 2012; Reinisch and White 2011. 19. See, among others, Aleksiun 2002; Cichopek-Gajraj 2014; Gross 2006; Gross and Grudzinska-Gross 2012; Krzyz˙ anowski 2016; Tokarska-Bakir 2018. See also the edited volumes on the Holocaust’s aftermath in Poland by Tych and Adamczyk-Garbowska (2014), and on the Jews in Europe after the war by Bohus et al. (2020). 20. For the profound social and cultural revolution caused by the war and its aftermath, see Leder 2014. 21. Among the works highlighting different aspects of the Jewish experience in post-1945 Poland, see Auerbach 2013; Kichelewski 2018; Kijek 2020; Rothstein 2015; Ruta 2018. 22. Runia 2006, 16. 23. The literature on these topics is enormous. A thorough overview of the development of the memory of the Holocaust in Poland is provided by Steinlauf 1997. On the Holocaust in Polish cinema, see Haltof 2012. On the Holocaust in Polish literature, see Buryła, Krawczynska, and Leociak 2020. On the Holocaust in Polish theater, see Niziołek 2013. For the communist and postcommunist afterlife of Auschwitz-Birkenau, see, for example, Huener 2003; Zubrzycki 2006. For a sociologi­ cal study on the memory and social perception of the Holocaust in Poland, based on interviews and questionnaires, see Nowak, Kapralski, and Niedźwiedzki 2018. 24. Runia, 2006, 1, 16, 17. 25. On the methodology of critical discourse analysis, see Fairclough 2010. 26. Darnton 1989. 27. Geertz 1973. 28. For the perception of Greek objects and spaces by the new Turkish settlers in Northern Cyprus, see Navaro-Yashin 2012. On Palestinian material traces in Israel, see Kadman 2008. For the fate of Muslim cemeteries in Israel, see Bar 2020. The perception and treatment of Serbian monuments in Kosovo are discussed in Pavličić 2016. For the experience of displaced Muslims who f led from India after 1947 and were resettled in houses abandoned by Hindus who f led from Pakistan and vice versa, see Jatt and Riggs 2021. 29. On the notion of “disturbing remains,” see Roth and Salas 2001. 30. The literature on the history of the Jews in Poland is immense. Perhaps the most comprehensive and updated study in English is Antony Polonsky’s three-volume

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work (2010–12). For seminal work on the perception of Jews in Polish culture, see Hertz 1988. The research on Polish Jews’ history and culture in the interwar period is also extensive. See, for example, the classic monographs by Mendelsohn (1987) and Marcus (1983). 31. For a thorough overview and analysis of current and previous historiogra­ phy on Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust, see Dreifuss 2012. On different understandings of the concept of the Holocaust in Polish historical discourse, see Stoll 2016. 32. Hilberg 1992. For a critical discussion on the term, see Morina and Thijs 2018. 33. Janicka 2008, 238. 34. Stola 2007, 252. 35. Bartov 2011, 492. 36. Dean 2006, 209; Miron 2020, 252. 37. For Polish testimonies of blood in the streets after the murder of the Jews in Tarnów, see Wierzcholska 2016, 274. See also the descriptions of the murder of the Jews in the streets of Dąbrowa Tarnowska, in Grabowski 2013, 31–47. 38. Jan Tomasz Gross (2014), suggests replacing Hilberg’s category “bystanders” with “beneficiaries” or “facilitators.” 39. Gross 2001. Following the publication, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance initiated an investigation of the events in Jedwabne, which corrobo­ rated Gross’s findings but estimated the number of casualties at several hundred instead of 1,600 as Gross had argued. See Machcewicz and Persak 2002. On the Jedwabne massacre from an ethnographic perspective, see Bikont 2015. 40. Z˙bikowski 2006. On the pogroms in the area of Łomz˙a, see also Bender 2013. Kopstein and Wittenberg (2018) compiled a list of over 200 towns in present-day Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus, in which anti-Jewish pogroms occurred in the summer of 1941. These two authors employ quantitative research methods to examine the phenomenon of the pogroms and provide a thought-provoking analysis. Relaying on prewar voting data, they argue that the crucial motivation for participating in a pogrom was a feeling of a political threat to the hegemony of the non-Jewish society. 41. See, for example, Grabowski 2020; Libionka 2020; Skibin´ska and Petelewicz 2007; Skibin´ska and Tokarska-Bakir 2011; 42. A large proportion of these studies are published by historians affiliated with the Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw (Centrum Badan´ nad Zagładą Z˙ydów). See Engelking 2016; Engelking and Grabowski 2011; Engelking and Grabowski 2018; Engelking, Leociak, and Libionka 2007; Grabowski 2012; Grabowski 2013. 43. Engelking and Grabowski 2018, vol. 1, 562. 44. Frydel 2016, 175. 45. Tokarska-Bakir and Greenberg 2010. 46. Gross 2000, 80. For a comprehensive study on the rescue of Jews by Poles, see Urynowicz 2006. 47. Quoted in Engelking 2016, 35. 48. On the problematicness of making sweeping generalizations on the wartime behavior of “The Poles,” see Porter-Szucs 2014, 178–80. 49. For the attitudes of the Polish Catholic Church toward the Holocaust, see Libionka 2010.

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50. Engelking 2016, 179. 51. Janicka 2015, 165; Steinlauf 1997, 53. 52. Tokarska-Bakir 2011, 130. Chapter 1. “Everything Was a Void”

1. Kopciowski 2008, 192. 2. Cited in Kugelmass and Boyarin 1998, 262–63. 3. The demographic data throughout this book is taken from Virtual Shtetl, https://sztetl.org.pl. 4. Cited in Kugelmass and Boyarin 1998, 249. 5. Davies 1981, 489–91; Paczkowski 2003, 146. 6. Snyder 2010, 406. 7. Kochanski 2012, 532. 8. Judt 2005, 101–2. Paczkowski 2003, 136–41. 9. Another official term that was employed later was the Western Territories (Ziemie Zachodnie). 10. For a broader picture of the demographic changes and ethnic cleansing in East-Central Europe following the war, see Ther and Siljak 2001. 11. On the deportation and displacement of Ukrainians from Poland after World War II, see Reilly 2013. 12. Stola 2007, 243. 13. Wylegała 2021. 14. The question of whether the consolidation of communist rule in Poland was solely imposed f rom above by the Soviets or whether it should be described as a social revolution is often debated in research. An attempt to present a synthesis of the two approaches can be found in Porter-Szucs 2014, 186–230. For a further elaboration of the establishment of the communist regime in Poland, see Kersten 1991. 15. Davies 1982, 556. 16. Davies 1982, 560. 17. Nazarewicz 1998, 290. 18. Zaremba 2012. In fact, one can argue that a state of civil war existed in Poland already since 1942. See Prażmowska 2004. 19. Stola 2007, 248. 20. Oren-Monovich 2013, 243. 21. Cichopek-Gajraj 2014, 73. 22. Individual Jewish property in the eastern parts of the country that were occu­ pied by the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941 was first nationalized by the Soviets like all private property and later automatically confiscated by the Germans after Operation Barbarossa. For an extensive explanation of the postwar property laws, see Barelkowski 2013; Krawczyk 2014. 23. Stola 2007, 243. 24. Stola 2007, 244. 25. Quoted in Oren-Monovich 2013, 238. 26. Krzyz˙anowski 2016, 279. 27. Krzyz˙anowski 2016, 304.

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28. Krzyz˙anowski 2016, 280. 29. Cichopek-Gajraj 2014, 70–71. 30. Cichopek-Gajraj 2014, 87. 31. “Okólnik Ministra Administracji Publicznej z 6 lutego 1945 r. o tymcza­ sowym uregulowaniu spraw wyznaniowych ludności z˙ydowskiej.” Reproduced in Urban 2006, 68. 32. Oren-Monovich 2013, 256. 33. As Jacob Labendz (2017) shows, the particularity of the Czech case led to a unique collaboration between the Jewish organizations in the Czech lands and the government in Prague that regulated the selling of surplus synagogues. 34. “Dekret z dnia 8 marca 1946 r. o majątkach opuszczonych i poniemieckich.” Brought in Urban 2006, 99. 35. For a thorough analysis of the effect of the 1946 law on the legal status of Jewish cemeteries, see Bednarek 2020, 232–44. 36. While the term “Jewish property” did not appear in the language of the law, the act did define the property left behind by the former German inhabitants in the annexed territories (and in other parts of the country) under the distinct legal cat­ egory of “formerly German.” 37. Cieślin´ska-Lobkowicz 2014. 38. Meng 2011, 38. 39. Dobroszycki 1990, 5. 40. Zaremba 2005. 41. On the “trustees,” see Grabowski 2014. 42. Engelking 2014. 43. Gross 2006, 40. 44. Cichopek-Gajraj 2014, 67–68. 45. Klukowski 1993, 192. 46. Zaremba 2010. 47. Leder 2014, 80. 48. Libionka 2014, 250–51. 49. Cited in Rejak and Frister 2012, 52–53. 50. Cited in Gross 2006, 40. 51. Z˙ bikowski (2014) provides a thorough synthesis of the different estima­ tions as well as surveying the different views of historians regarding the question of motives in the postwar murder of Jews. On the postwar anti-Jewish violence in Poland, see also Engel 1998; Kopciowski 2008; Krzyz˙anowski 2016; Panz 2017; Skibin´ska 2007. 52. For a broader and comparative overview of anti-Jewish violence in Central and Eastern Europe after the Holocaust, see Apor et al. 2019; Tokarska-Bakir 2020. 53. See the two-volume study by Joanna Tokarska-Bakir 2018. 54. Gross 2006, 248. 55. An emphasis on the anti-Semitic motive is provided, for example, by Gutman 1985. Zaremba (2012, 87–140), situates the postwar violence as part of the cultural trauma caused by the war and its aftermath. 56. Z˙bikowski 2014, 68. Belief in a Jewish-Soviet pact became common before, during, and after the war in many segments of the Polish society, being referred to pejoratively as Żydokomuna. Toward the end of the war and during the Stalinist

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years, it took the form of accusing the Jews of being responsible for the communiza­ tion of Poland and controlling the state organs (primarily the security apparatus). Żydokomuna continues to be a polemical issue in academic and public circles. See also Śpiewak 2012; Zawadzka 2016. 57. Kersten 1992. 58. Engel 2007, 545. 59. Bergman and Jagielski 2014, 542–43. 60. Within the territory of postwar Poland only three small wooden prayer houses survived—in Szumowo, Wiśniowa, and Pun´sk. For a survey of wooden syna­ gogues in Poland before the war, see Piechotka and Piechotka 2004. 61. Kubiakowa 1953, 122–24. For the wartime and postwar fate of Judaica collec­ tions and cultural property, see Cieślin´ska-Lobkowicz 2010. 62. On the fate of Jewish cemeteries in Nazi Germany, see Wirsching 2002. 63. Young 1993, 200. 64. For an English translation of the Yiddish manuscript, see Huberband 1987, 274–333. 65. Huberband 1987, 289. 66. Parciak 2007, 28. 67. Altshuler 2012, 209. 68. Nahoum-Grappe 2002, 556–57. 69. Saltiel 2014. 70. Ciof lâncă 2016. 71. APLk, Zarząd Gminy Frampol, file 3, municipal board to Lublin voivodeship, exact date unclear, 1948. 72. Tzanin 1962, 71. 73. Tzanin 1962, 62. 74. On the phenomenon of digging for gold in execution sites, see Gross and Grudzinska-Gross 2012. 75. APRz, PWRN w Rzeszowie, file 21303, Przemyśl Z˙KW to Przemysł PMRN, November 5, 1952. 76. AAN, MAP, file 1098, Zamość municipal board to Zamość district [powiat], February 12, 1948. 77. See “W Wodzisławiu stanie pomnik pamięci tutejszych Z˙ydów,” May 19, 2012, https://www.tuwodzislaw.pl/wiadomosci,w-wodzislawiu-stanie-pomnik-pamieci­ tutejszych-zydow,wia5-3266-4150.html. 78. On the impressions of Jewish survivors who returned to their towns after the war, see Adamczyk-Garbowska 2007. 79. Mishkinski 1968, 364. 80. Tarkov and Mittleberg 1951, 504. 81. Grabski 2014, 165; Michlic 2006, 205. 82. On the relationship between the Jews and the Communist regime, and on the stereotypical identification of the Jews as Communists, see Kersten 1992. 83. On the establishment and function of the central committee, see Engel 1996; Grabski 2015. 84. The ZRWM was officially recognized in 1949 but received the status of a legal entity only in 1961. 85. Dobroszycki 1990, 12.

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86. Grabski and Stankowski 2014, 248. 87. AZ˙IH, CKZ˙P Wydział Budowlany, file 16, June 10, 1945. 88. AZ˙IH, CKZ˙P Wydział Prawny, file 150, December 9, 1946. 89. Tzanin 1962, 120. 90. AAN, MAP. File 1095, Kraków Jewish community to voivodeship, May 14, 1945; Kraków regional office to Kraków Culture, Art and Education branch, July 25, 1945. 91. Tzanin 1962, 37, 71, 76. 92. AAN, MAP, file 1098, Zamość municipal board to Zamość district, February 12, 1948. 93. APRa, Okręgowy Komitet Z˙ydowski (1945–1950), file 15, municipal board to MO, June 20, 1945. 94. APRa, Okręgowy Komitet Z˙ydowski (1945–1950), file 15, municipal board to Jewish committee, August 16, 1945. 95. Krzyz˙anowski 2016, 294. 96. Altshuler 2012, 210. 97. AZ˙IH, CKZ˙P Wydział Prawny, file 130, October 20, 1946. 98. APLk, Starostwo Powiatowe w Kraśniku, file 105, September 5, 1945. 99. APL, Urząd Wojewódzki Lubelski, file 46, municipal board to district, Janu­ ary 5, 1946. 100. AAN, MAP, file 1098, Chief Rabbinate to MAP, March 28, 1946. 101. Bielawski 2020, 76–77. 102. Miernik 1997, 150. 103. The Department of Denominations in the MAP was the main administra­ tive organ in the first postwar years dealing with all matters concerning the Catholic Church and non-Catholic denominations, including the handling of Jewish sites. In 1950 the MAP was dissolved as part of the reorganization of state authorities, and the department was incorporated into the newly formed Ministry of Religious Affairs (Urząd do Spraw Wyznan´). 104. Urban 2005, 120. 105. APL, Urząd Wojewódzki Lubelski, file 46, MAP to voivodeship, November 28, 1946. 106. AAN, MAP, file 1096, MAP to Ostrów Wielkopolski garrison, May 7, 1946; AAN, MAP, file 1095, MAP to Central Liquidation Office, October 12, 1947. 107. Altshuler 2012, 213. 108. Grabski and Stankowski 2014, 254. 109. Berendt 2014b, 243. 110. Berendt 2014b, 223. 111. Krzyz˙anowski 2016, 294. 112. Young 1993, 194. 113. Jasni 1962, 473–75. 114. AZ˙IH, CKZ˙P Wydział Budowlany, file 16, Garwolin Jewish Committee to CKZ˙P, exact date unclear, 1946. 115. AAN, MAP, file 1098, municipal board to Biecz Jewish Committee, June 13, 1946. 116. AAN, MAP, file 1098, June 27, 1947. 117. Tzanin 1962, 118.

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118. On the efforts to exhume and rebury Jewish victims after the war, see Finder 2015. 119. Ashes were brought by survivors to their new emigration destinations abroad and buried under symbolic monuments. See Parciak 2007, 66. 120. For the postwar exhumations, see Skibin´ska 2007, 561–66. 121. Feldenkreiz-Grinbal 1993, 446. 122. Kahane 1981, 113. 123. Tzanin 1962, 125. 124. Tzanin 1962, 208. 125. Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996. 126. Service 2013, 332. 127. Zaremba 2012, 286. 128. Urban 1996, 246. 129. For the postwar Polish discussion on German religious sites, see Urban 2003. 130. Urban 2003, 281–82. 131. In practice, erasing German inscriptions from headstones proved to be dif­ ficult. It encountered resistance both from the remaining Germans but also from the Polish settlers. In addition, this project turned out to be highly expensive and inefficient. See Thum 2011, 268. 132. On the ways in which the communist rulers tried to portray the annexa­ tion of the former German lands as a return to the historic Polish homeland, see Demshuk 2012. 133. Thum 2011, 223. 134. Halicka 2020, 179. 135. Thum 2011, 297. 136. Service 2013, 266. 137. Service 2013, 331–32 138. For the official treatment of Evangelical cemeteries in the region of Greater Poland, see Biełacki 2017. 139. For example, in the summer of 1946, government officials ordered to erase all original German writings and other distinct German characteristics from aban­ doned German religious sites, which the Catholic Church asked permission to use in the area of Nowy-Tomyśl. See AAN, UdW, file 131/7. 140. Kołacki 2017, 64. 141. Thum 2011, 267. 142. Service 2013, 274. 143. Waszkiewicz 2001, 249. 144. Szaynok 2001, 219. 145. Kijek 2018. 146. Friedla 2017, 106. 147. Friedla 2017, 133. 148. Out of 190 synagogues located in the Western Territories, only 23 survived the war. See Bergman and Jagielski 2014, 542. 149. For a discussion on the legal status of German Jewish sites in communist Poland, see Bednarek 2020, 244–49. 150. Meng 2011, 183–84.

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151. The cemetery survived the war years thanks to the efforts of Konrad Springer, a German citizen who bought the place and was able to protect it. He also helped Jewish inmates incarcerated during the war in the area’s concentration camps. After the war he was saved from being deported to Germany through the help of the Jewish congregation, which also gave him material aid. See APW, Wojewódzki Komitet Z˙ydów na Dolnym Śląsku 1945–1950, file 9, “Protokoły i sprawozdania KZ˙ w Dzierz˙oniowie i Pieszycach 1945–1948.” I am grateful to Kamil Kijek and Anna Gruz˙lewska for referring me to these sources. 152. Hebzda-Sołogub 2017, 10–11. 153. The synagogue was damaged in the November pogrom in 1938. During the war it served as the headquarters of the local Hitler Youth and a warehouse. It probably also escaped demolition thanks to Konrad Springer, who purchased the building. 154. APL, urząd Wojewódzki Lubelski, file 46, Lublin WKZ˙ to voivodeship, April 19, 1946. 155. APW, Urząd Wojewódzki we Wrocławiu, file 690, voivodeship to Ministry of the Recovered Territories, October 16, 1947. 156. Friedla 2017, 99. For examples of anti-Jewish physical attacks in the Western Territories, see Halicka 2020, 323–26. 157. Mieczkowski 2002. 158. See Bergman and Jagielski 2014, 542. 159. The minutes of the committees are stored in APW, Wojewódzki Komitet Z˙ydów na Dolnym Śląsku, files 13, 16, 19, 11, 18, 9, 15. Chapter 2. “There Are No Jews Here”

1. Berendt 2014b, 225. 2. Paczkowski 2003, 177–86. 3. On the referendum and the elections, see Kersten 1991, 232–344. 4. Paczkowski 2003, 191–92. 5. Urban 2006, 103–20. 6. AAN, MAP, file 1098, circular no. 44, May 29, 1948. 7. APKa, Starostwo Powiatowe w Olkuszu, file 1/121, Kraków voivodeship to Olkusz district, May 31, 1948. 8. APKr, Urząd Wojewódzki w Krakowie, file 1066, Nowy Targ district to all mayors, December 16, 1948. 9. APKr, Urząd Wojewódzki w Krakowie, file 1066, Chrzanów district to Kraków voivodeship, February 6, 1948. 10. APKr, Urząd Wojewódzki w Krakowie, file 1066, mayor to Nowy Targ dis­ trict, January 25, 1948. 11. APKr, Urząd Wojewódzki w Krakowie, file 1066, mayor to Nowy Targ dis­ trict, January 15, 1948. 12. A few months before the publication of this open call, in May 1946, anticom­ munist partisans outside of Krościenko stopped a truck carrying a group of young Jews who were trying to leave Poland. Eleven of them were shot to death by the partisans and seven others were wounded. See Z˙bikowski 2014, 77. Unless otherwise stated, all translations to English are mine. APKr, Urząd Wojewódzki w Krakowie, file 1066, mayor to Nowy Targ district, December 23, 1947.

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13. APKr, Urząd Wojewódzki w Krakowie, file 1066, mayor to Nowy Targ dis­ trict, December 13, 1947. 14. APKa, Zarząd Miejski i MRN w Olkuszu, file 74, July 1, 1948. 15. APKa, Zarząd Miejski i MRN w Olkuszu, file 74, November 10, 1948. 16. According to the 1932 burial law in Poland, before the expiry of fifty years a cemetery could be repurposed only in exceptional cases and for indispensable public use. See “Ustawa o cmentarzach i chowaniu zmarłych,” Dziennik Ustaw [Journal of Laws], poz. 35, no. 359, March 17, 1932. See also Bednarek 2020, 508. 17. APKa, Zarząd Miejski i MRN w Olkuszu, file 74, Kraków voivodeship to mayor, May 15, 1949. 18. AAN, MAP, file 1095, Olkusz firefighters to MAP, May 21, 1947. 19. AZ˙IH, CKZ˙P Prezydium i Sekretariat, file 171, Kraków WKZ˙ to CKZ˙P, June 2, 1948. 20. APKr, Urząd Wojewódzki w Krakowie II, file 1066, Finance Ministry to Central Liquidation Office, September 16, 1949. 21. It is interesting to compare this practice of petitioning the authorities to acquire synagogues with a similar practice that was widespread in Spain after the Jews’ expulsion in 1492. City councils, religious orders, university groups, and indi­ viduals wrote to the royal court asking to receive empty synagogues into their pos­ session. They, too, invested many efforts in justifying their requests and explaining why the building of the synagogue is perfectly suitable for purposes such as a church, a convent, or a hospital. See Lacave 1992, 245. 22. AAN, MAP, file 1096, Ostrów Wielkopolski garrison to MAP, February 27, 1946. 23. Kopciowski 2008, 192. 24. Kopciowski 2008, 193. 25. APL, Urząd Wojewódzki Lubelski, file 46, October 28, 1946. 26. AAN, UdW, file 5b/30, municipal board to UdW, September 9, 1950. 27. The argumentation of “appropriateness” was also raised when trying to pro­ mote the redesignation of old synagogues into public archives and libraries. In 1950, the Ministry of Education suggested turning inactive synagogues in Kraków, Kielce, and Rzeszów into city archives, claiming that such a designation would help to preserve them and that “it is respectful and consistent with the original nature of these objects.” See AAN, UdW, file 9/323, Ministry of Education to UdW, November 9, 1950. 28. AAN, UdW, file 25/695, Lublin PWRN to UdW, September 25, 1957. 29. AZ˙IH, CKZ˙P Prezydium i Sekretariat, file 171, municipal board to CKZ˙P, August 19, 1948. 30. AAN, UdW, file 13/396. Opoczno PMRN to UdW, February 8, 1952. 31. This notion of performative utterance was introduced by the philosopher John L. Austin (1962) as part of his speech act theory. According to Austin, performa­ tive utterances are sentences which—unlike those described in positivist thinking— do not attempt to describe a given reality but rather aim to prescribe it. 32. Bergman and Jagielski 2014, 545. 33. Migalska 2019, 6. 34. Several synagogues survived the communist years and kept most of their original characteristics thanks to rigid historical preservation. The most notable example is the Old Synagogue in Kraków (the oldest in Poland), which underwent

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preservation in the 1950s and functioned as the only Jewish museum in the country until the 1970s. The sixteenth-century Remuh Synagogue in Kraków was also pre­ served (with the help of the Joint) and returned to its function as an active prayer house for the local congregation. Some old synagogues were transformed into pub­ lic archives or reading rooms—for example, in Sandomierz, Rzeszów, and Piotrków Trybunalski—with the intention to preserve them as historical monuments. Many of their artistic and architectural elements, however, were severely damaged over the years. See Bergman and Jagielski 2014, 565. 35. AAN, UdW, file 132/138, Szalewicz to Trybuna Ludu, November 12, 1969. 36. Bourdieu 1994, 128. 37. APRz, PRN w Łan´cucie, file 25, municipal board to district, July 15, 1945. 38. APRz, PRN w Łan´cucie, file 25, Gospoda Chłopska to district, September 29, 1945. 39. APK, Okręgowy Urząd Likwidacyjny w Olkuszu, file 55, municipal board to inspectorate of the temporary state administration, April 17, 1945. 40. APK, Okręgowy Urząd Likwidacyjny w Olkuszu, file 55, Irena Baron´ to inspectorate of the temporary state administration, May 4, 1945. 41. Such expressions appear in numerous documents; for example, APLk, PMRN w kraśniku, file 43, PMRN to Kraśnik PPRN, March 3, 1952; AAN, MAP, file 1098, Mielec PPRN to Z˙KW, August 2, 1947. 42. AAN, MAP, file 1096, Ostrów Wielkopolski garrison to MAP, February 27, 1946. 43. For the origins of the sanctity of burial grounds in Judaism, see Kraemer 2000. 44. On this point, Judaism and Christianity differ. Judaism forbids the use of inac­ tive burial grounds for any other purpose, whereas Christianity does not prohibit the repurpose of old cemeteries. In most Western countries, old cemeteries can be reused under certain conditions. On the differences and similarities between Jewish and Christian burial traditions, see Wagner 1999. 45. Stola 2007, 246. 46. Forecki 2015, 79. 47. A similar term was used in the postwar discourse regarding the property left behind by the Ukrainians, for example, formerly Ukrainian farms (gospodarstw poukrainskich). 48. The term mienie poz˙ydowskie appeared for the first time during the war in underground publications of nationalist circles, who envisioned their desired post­ war reality in which Jewish property will be confiscated and used to enrich nonJewish Poles. See Libionka 2014, 188. 49. On the different kinds of “silences” in Poland regarding the Holocaust, see Tokarska-Bakir 2011, 130–31. 50. APKa, Zarząd Miejski i MRN w Olkuszu, file 74, mayor to Z˙ KW, July 1, 1948. 51. APRz, Urząd Wojewódzki w Rzeszowie, file 498, protokol regarding the Jew­ ish cemetery, August 27, 1947. 52. AZ˙IH, CKZ˙P Prezydium i Sekretariat, file 171, school commissioner to Poznań Z˙KW, May 25, 1949.

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53. AZ˙IH, CKZ˙P Prezydium i Sekretariat, file 171, municipal board to Z˙KW, Feb­ ruary 19, 1949. 54. AAN, UdW, file 13/396, Opoczno PMRN to UdW, February 8, 1952. 55. AAN, UdW, file 9/355, Lublin PWRN to UdW, August 4, 1951. 56. APL, PWRN w Lublinie, file 318, Chełm PMRN to Lublin PWRN, December 30, 1968. 57. APRa, Urząd Wojewódzki w Radomiu, file 254, Warka PMRN to Radom PWRN, December 6, 1976. 58. APL, Urząd Wojewódzki w Lublinie, file 353, municipal board to voivode­ ship, April 27, 1979. 59. APL, PWRN w Lublinie, file 353, mayor to ZRWM, April 7, 1983. 60. In a bakery located in a former Jewish residential area in the town of Jędrzejów, the photographer Wojciech Wilczyk spotted writing on the wall: “Tradition since 1943” (Tradycje od 1943 roku). See Wilczyk 2009, 37. 61. AIPN Po, file 15/16, mayor to UdW, June 7, 1960. 62. As early as 1945, the historian and literary critic Kazimierz Wyka critically echoed this sentiment, which went on to become the national postwar narrative: “We would not have done this, however we are deriving some immediate gains from it . . . with a clean conscience and without staining our hands with blood.” Cited in Dobroszycki 1990, 6. Chapter 3. To Whom Does It Belong?

1. On the question of ownership of Jewish communal assets after the war, see also Weizman 2017. 2. APLk, Starostwo Powiatowe w Biłgoraju, file 954, district to mayor, Novem­ ber 19, 1946. 3. APKr, Urząd Wojewódzki Krakowski II, file 3290, MAP to Kraków voivode­ ship, September 2, 1948. 4. This episode was acknowledged in 1950 in a letter of the Finance Ministry to the Ministry of Religious Affairs. See AAN, UdW, file 24/550, September 2, 1950. 5. Some initial uncertainty over the state’s sequestration of Jewish property pre­ vailed even among state officials in Warsaw, who until the end of 1946 frequently offered contradictory responses to questions posed by their inferiors regarding the restitution of property to Jewish organizations, demonstrating that a clear and offi­ cial policy of Jewish ownership and succession had not yet been formulated. The unclarity at the state level, however, soon subsided, while among the local adminis­ tration doubts persisted. On the lack of unified policy regarding the legal status of Jewish communal property until 1946–47, see Oren-Monovich 2013, 258. To some extent, the specific legal status of the few ritual sites that were still in use by active Jewish congregations, as opposed to abandoned sites, remained unclear through­ out the communist years even among the highest ranks. The reason for this lack of clarity was one provision in the 1946 Decree on Abandoned and Formerly German Property, which gave cultural and social associations the right to receive ownership of recognized “abandoned properties” via acquisitive prescription, that is, after dem­ onstrating continuous possession. According to this clause, a Jewish congregation was allegedly entitled to become the owner of communal property via acquisitive

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prescription when allocated with a synagogue or a cemetery for ritual use and could demonstrate continuous possession. This held even though a postwar Jewish congre­ gation could not be regarded as the heir to a prewar community. This legal loophole was never completely resolved. In practice, following the recognition of the ZRWM as a legal entity in 1961, the state tended to treat it as de facto possessors of active ritual sites through acquisitive prescription. See AAN, UdW, file 41/476, UdW to MGK, December 23, 1961. 6. This legal confusion concerning the status of communal property at the local level may have been partially affected by the irregularities in the restitution of private Jewish property, such as the widespread phenomenon of unregulated selling of assets by individual Jews who had been successful in reclaiming them. In many cases, this market was abused by criminals, Poles and Jews alike, who falsified titles and unlaw­ fully reclaimed and sold the property of others. See Krzyz˙anowski 2016, 304. 7. Halicka 2020, 196. 8. Halicka 2020, 194. 9. Halicka 2020, 225. 10. Cited in Thum 2011, 174. As the anthropologist Yael Navaro-Yashin notes (2012, 176–201), similar internal discordance was expressed by Turkish Cypriot citi­ zens, who were resettled in formerly Greek homes, following the 1974 Turkish inva­ sion into Northern Cyprus that displaced the resident Greek population to the south of the Island. The violent eviction of Greek inhabitants and homeowners, and the confiscation of their property, greatly undermined the Turkish Cypriot newcomers’ ability to treat their environs and habitations as theirs. In rare cases, similar qualms and unease were expressed by Jewish immigrants to Israel who were allocated with houses of Palestinians who f led their houses or were deported by Israeli forces dur­ ing the 1948 war. See Kadman 2008, 117–25. See also Confino 2018. 11. It is interesting to notice, that the doubts and discomfort concerning the own­ ership status of Jewish property were directed toward and expressed over specifically communal property, but they were not common among Polish people who occupied or were allocated with Jewish private homes, or at least they hardly receive external expression. 12. AZ˙IH, CKZ˙P Prezydium i Sekretariat, file 171, September 4, 1947. 13. AAN, MAP, file 783, January 8, 1948. 14. AZ˙IH, CKZ˙P Prezydium i Sekretariat, file 171, February 19, 1949. 15. AZ˙IH, CKZ˙P Prezydium i Sekretariat, file 171, February 19, 1949. 16. AZ˙IH, CKZ˙P Prezydium i Sekretariat, file 171, June 18, 1949. 17. AZ˙IH, CKZ˙P Prezydium i Sekretariat, file 249, March 28, 1949. 18. I have yet to come across any documentation indicating that local Polish parties tried to reach similar agreements with German or Ukrainian representatives concern­ ing the right to appropriate Protestant, Orthodox, or Greek Catholic ritual sites. 19. AZ˙IH, CKZ˙P Wydział Prawny, file 133, “wyciąg z protokolu posiedzenia zarządu miejskiego miasta Włoszczowy,” February 28, 1948. 20. AAN, MAP, file 1096, Łódź Jewish committee to MAP, September 26, 1949. 21. AZ˙IH, CKZ˙P Prezydium i Sekretariat, file 249, September 20, 1948. 22. Cited in Krzyz˙anowski 2016, 293. 23. AZ˙IH, CKZ˙P Prezydium i Sekretariat, file 249, Grodzisk prison to CKZ˙P, exact date unclear, 1949.

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24. AZ˙IH, CKZ˙P Prezydium i Sekretariat, file 249, CKZ˙P to Grodzisk prison, May 30, 1949. 25. AZ˙IH, CKZ˙P Prezydium i Sekretariat, file 171, “Oświadczenie,” February 20, 1948; CKŻP to municipal board, October 18, 1949. 26. Labendz 2017, 58. 27. AZ˙IH, CKZ˙P Prezydium i Sekretariat, file 249, Rabbinic Council to CKZ˙P, July 28, 1949. 28. There are different opinions in rabbinic literature concerning the definition and scope of the sanctity of the synagogue. Some maintain that a synagogue pos­ sesses innate sacredness regardless of whether it is still being used for prayer; others argue that when a building of a synagogue no longer serves its original purpose, it retains no inherent sanctity. Derivative of this discussion is the question of whether a synagogue could be sold, to whom, and for which purposes. On the origins of the sacral status of the synagogue, see Fine 2016. For a discussion on the controversy in Jewish law concerning the selling of synagogues, see Charlap 2006. 29. Paczkowski 2003, 230. 30. AAN, MAP, file 1096, Łódź Jewish committee to State Treasury, May 9, 1949. 31. AAN, MAP, file 1096, Kutno firefighters to MAP, September 27, 1949. 32. After the edict of expulsion of the Jews from Spain was published in 1492, local bishops, orders, and individuals were negotiating with Jewish communities in an attempt to buy from them their synagogues and other communal property. The authorities tried to eradicate this phenomenon, arguing that the Jewish communities have no right to sell communal building since they were confiscated by the cities, and threatened prospective buyers of Jewish communal property with loss of their money. See Lacave 1992, 242–43. 33. APKr, Urząd Wojewódzki Krakowski II, file 1066, Regional liquidation office to Kraków voivodeship, November 30, 1948. 34. Paczkowski 2003, 207; Porter-Szucs 2014, 206. 35. Paczkowski 2003, 230. 36. Kichelewski 2010, 512. 37. Grabski and Stankowski 2014, 258. 38. Oren-Monovich 2013, 326. On the numbers and statistics of the Jewish emi­ gration, see Stankowski 2000. 39. Grabski and Stankowski 2014. 40. APRz, PWRN w Rzeszowie, file 21303, Rzeszów PWRN to Przemyśl PMRN, April 4, 1953. 41. APL, PWRN w Lublinie, file 353, UdW to all voivodeships, December 31, 1954. 42. AAN, UdW, file 19/471, Kielce PWRN to UdW, September 8, 1954. 43. The dormitories were eventually built on the unused part of the cemetery. A group of students and teachers from the school indeed took care of the remaining parts of the cemetery throughout the communist years. See Sławin´ski 2011, 88. 44. AAN, UdW, file 19/471, Kielce Voivodeship to UdW, September 8, 1954. 45. In 1957, the Ministry of Religious Affairs once again sent an urgent letter to all voivodeships, following reports of selling of communal property by Jews: “We have received information that in several cases unauthorized representatives

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f rom the Jewish congregation have sold properties belonging to the former Jewish communities.” APL, Urząd Wojwódzki w Lublinie, file 353, UdW to all voivode­ ships, June 28, 1957. 46. Although the phenomenon described here was dominant mainly in the first decade after the war, profound psychological discomfort over the question of own­ ership of abandoned Jewish sites remained embedded in the Polish consciousness, heterogeneously manifesting itself in subsequent years. This will be discussed in Chapter 8. 47. Steinlauf 1997, 60. Chapter 4. Resentment and Compassion

1. AAN, UdW, file 25/574, January 24, 1951. 2. It is important to notice, however, that unlike other countries in the Soviet Bloc, extreme measures of state-sponsored terror, such as executions and incarcera­ tions, were relatively moderated in Stalinist Poland. See Porter-Szucs 2014, 213. 3. Kemp-Welch 2008, 35–48. 4. Wysokin´ska 2016, 230. 5. One of the most ambitious architectural projects during this period was the building of Nova Huta, a new workers’ city within Kraków. See Lebow, 2016. 6. Urban 2006, 226. 7. Sorokowski 1986, 247. While Ukrainian Greek Catholic heritage sites were regularly destroyed, the communist authorities tended to be more tolerant toward Ukrainian Orthodox religious sites. These different attitudes were part of the regime’s more favorable treatment of Orthodox Ukrainians, owing to ties between the Rus­ sian Orthodox Church and Moscow and owing to the fact that Greek Catholics were considered by Polish authorities to be a stronger bastion of Ukrainian national iden­ tity. See Sorokowski 1986, 254. On the treatment of the Orthodox Church in com­ munist Poland, see also Urban 1996. 8. Kovács 2017, 78. 9. Heitlinger 2006, 21; Paczkowski 2003, 225. 10. Kichelewski 2010, 509. 11. Kichelewski 2010, 516. 12. Kichelewski 2010, 517. 13. Paczkowski 2003, 221–22. At the same time, Poles of Jewish origins, such as Jakub Berman and Hilary Minc, served in the highest ranks of the regime. 14. Meng 2011, 77–78. 15. Meng 2011, 74. 16. AAN, PZPR, file 237/18/22, June 12, 1951. 17. APL, PWRN w Lublinie, file 43, municipal board to voivodeship, December 11, 1953. The request was not approved. 18. APL, PWRN w Lublinie, file 43, municipal board to voivodeship, May 18, 1953. Shortly after, the synagogue was pulled down. 19. APL, PWRN w Lublinie, file 43, Sztandar Ludu to Lublin PWRN, March 27, 1953. The letter was not published but forwarded by the editors to the authorities. 20. AAN, UdW, file 9/351, UdW to PWRN Łódź, September 14, 1950. 21. AAN, UdW, file 9/355, voivodeship to UdW, August 4, 1951.

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22. APL, PWRN w Lublinie, file 43, municipal board to voivodeship, May 3, 1952. 23. AAN, UdW, file 14/433, Ostrowiec PPRN to UdW, December 17, 1952. 24. AAN, UdW, file 14/433, TSKZ˙ to UdW, March 26, 1953. 25. AAN, UdW, file 14/433, UdW to Kielce PWRN, exact date unclear, Sep­ tember 1954. Although state officials did not outright approve the erasure of the cemetery, in the 1950s and 1960s, it was partly demolished by Ostrowiec’s local authorities, who uprooted headstones from the area intended to be a park and placed them at one of the site’s corners. Some of the headstones were later used to build the wall of the municipal Christian cemetery. A memorial made out of matzevot was erected there only in 1997. See “Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski,” Cmentarze Z˙ydowskie w Polsce / Jewish Cemeteries in Poland, http://cmentarze-zydowskie.pl/ostrow iec_swietokrzyski.htm. The controversy concerning the matzevot used to construct the municipal cemetery wall continues. See Ofer Aderet, “Jewish Gravestones Used to Build Wall around Christian Cemetery in Polish Town,” Haaretz, April 24, 2017, https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/MAGAZINE-jewish-gravestones­ used-to-build-wall-around-cemetery-in-poland-1.5464288. 26. APL, PWRN w Lublinie, file 98, Lublin PWRN to UdW, December 14, 1954. 27. AAN, UdW, file 19/492, UdW to Lublin PWRN, December 19, 1954. The term liquidation (likwidacja) was the official definition of authorization to clear away cemeteries in communist Poland. Before such authorization was given, the cemetery had to be registered as “closed down,” which meant that it stopped functioning as an active cemetery. In practice, the requirement to close down a cemetery before approving its liquidation was not always kept. 28. Bednarek 2020, 192. 29. The town architect at the time argued in a 2016 interview that he decided to cover the cemetery to preserve it and save it from the ongoing plunder and desecra­ tion, hoping that in the future the headstones could be recovered. The interview is featured in the independent documentary Central Park (Park Centralny), released in 2014 by the scholar and journalist Tomasz Wiśniewski. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=NCC6n1N-8DU. 30. AAN, UdW, file 13/377, TSKZ˙ to UdW, May 30, 1952. 31. APL, PWRN w Lublinie, file 43, Lublin PWRN to Włodawa PPRN, May 14, 1953. 32. AAN, UdW, file 25/574, “Akt Zdawczo-odbiorczy,” August 21, 1950. 33. AAN, UdW, file 25/574, Łask Jewish community to UdW, December 11, 1950. 34. AAN, UdW, file 25/574, Łódź PWRN to UdW, January 24, 1951. 35. APRz, PWRN w Rzeszowie, file 21303, Przemyśl PMRN to Rzeszów PWRN, August 22, 1953. 36. APRz, PWRN w Rzeszowie, file 21303, report of Felicja Gezundhajt, August 17, 1953. 37. See Grabowski 2013. 38. AAN, UdW, file 132/318, Kraków PWRN to UdW, December 23, 1954. 39. According to the law that regulated the status of the Jewish congregations, a minimal number of ten individuals was needed in order to form an official congrega­ tion. In addition, the ZRWM was entitled to officially dissolve small congregations or to merge several congregations together. 40. AAN, UdW, file 132/318, Kraków PWRN to UdW, December 13, 1954.

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41. AAN, UdW, file 132/318, congregation to ZRWM, May 27, 1954. 42. AAN, UdW, file 132/318, UdW to Kraków PWRN, February 24, 1955. 43. AAN, UdW, file 132/318, Kraków PWRN to UdW, February 28, 1956. 44. AAN, UdW, file 9/357, August 20, 1951. 45. Wysiedlenie is the Polish equivalent of the German term aussiedlung (resettle­ ment), which in the Nazi lexicon was the official term for the forced deportation of Jews to their death. Although the word was employed euphemistically, its meaning was known to all, and it became some sort of code word in Polish colloquial discourse and in numerous testimonies of Jewish survivors. In the context of this letter, I translate wysiedlenie as “deportation.” Wysiedlenie was also the common term in communist Poland to describe the deportation of Germans from the Recovered Territories. 46. AAN, UdW, file 19/482, August 17, 1954. 47. AAN, UdW, file 22/437, May 26, 1955. 48. As Stephan Stach (2017) shows, despite the restrictions on the discussion on the Holocaust in Stalinist Poland, the Jewish Historical Institute managed to conduct substantive research during those years. On the engagement of Polish historians in communist Poland with the study of the Holocaust, see also Aleksiun 2004. 49. Quoted in Levi 1992, 109. 50. Ginzburg 1992, xxi. 51. Kozaczkowa 1980, 94–96. 52. I am grateful to Adam Musiał for translating excerpts of this poem. 53. Riegl 1982. 54. In several cases, the Polish Blue Police was involved in the deportation of the Dąbrowian Jews to Bełz˙ec. See Grabowski 2013, 42. 55. Cited in Grabowski 2013, 34. 56. For an expression of the self-perception of the Poles as “helpless witnesses,” see Turowicz 1990. For a critical exploration of the notion of “Holocaust witnessing” in Polish culture, see Hopfinger and Z˙ukowski 2019. 57. Runia 2006, 17. Chapter 5. The Antechamber of Mystery

1. Kwiatkowski 1998, 254–55. 2. Meyer and Woodthorpe 2008, 2; Wright 2005, 54. 3. Foucault 1986, 25. 4. Foucault 1986, 25, 24–25. 5. Foucault 1986, 25. This is perhaps encapsulated in the ancient Greek term for a cemetery, necropolis (the city of the dead). 6. Turner 1967, 97. 7. Kwiatkowski 1998, 255. 8. Foucault 1986, 24. 9. Kwiatkowski 1998, 255. 10. E.C., interview with the author, June 20, 2014, Krynki. Interviewees cited using initials asked to remain anonymous. 11. C.S., interview with the author, June 20, 2014, Krynki. 12. L.J., interview with the author, June 21, 2014, Krynki. 13. Goldberg-Mulkiewicz 1987. On the curiosity of children over Jewish syna­ gogues and burial practices, see Wasilewska-Klamka 2012.

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14. Cała 1995b, 127. 15. Parciak 2007, 16. 16. Nosonovsky 2009, 259n29. 17. Most of the non-Jewish population in Orla is Christian Orthodox. 18. Buszko 2012, 96. 19. Cała 1995b, 236. 20. Cała 1995b, 141–42. 21. Cała 1995b, 226. 22. Nosonovsky 2009, 259n29. 23. Dymshits 2007. 24. This is the source for the famous scene in S. Ansky’s play The Dibbuk, pre­ miered in 1920. 25. Ouoted in Cała 1995b, 141. 26. Cała 1995a. 27. Olga Goldberg-Mulkiewicz (2001, 380) writes about Jewish objects, such as old books, that were used by Poles for healing. 28. Cała 1995b, 220. 29. Goldberg-Mulkiewicz 2001, 381. 30. Bartosz 2009, 353. Adam Bartosz, an ethnographer and a museologist, is the driving force behind the preservation of the Jewish heritage in Tarnów and the com­ memoration of its Jewish community. 31. Bartosz 2009, 353. 32. AZ˙IH, TSKZ˙, file 325/53, TSKZ˙ to MSW, April 14, 1959. 33. AIPN Po, file 15/16, memo on the Jewish cemetery in Wą growiec, Decem­ ber 9, 1968. 34. AZ˙IH, DDZ, file “Chrzanów,” letter of Stanisław K., July 25, 1981. 35. AAN, UdW, file 132/293, report on Jewish cemeteries around Kraków, June 19, 1981. 36. Haim Gouri, “A Journey in Poland, Summer 1981” [in Hebrew], Davar, August 14, 1981, 14. 37. “Olam Umlo’o” [in Hebrew], Davar, December 3, 1975, 8. 38. Stachowiak 2015, 134. 39. Valentine 2008, 38. 40. Buettner 2006, 27. 41. McIlwaine and Moser 2004, 57. The colonial cemetery in Calcutta, India, was described as a place where children play football and drug addicts and criminal gangs meet. See Chadha 2006. 42. Deering 2016, 78. 43. Knyt 2004, 30. 44. Cited in Stachowiak 2015, 131. Chapter 6. Liberalization, Nationalism, and Erasure

1. Paczkowski 2003, 266; Kemp-Welch 2008, 262–65. 2. For an overview of the de-Stalinization process in Eastern Europe, see Simons 1993, 85–105. 3. On the 1956 events in Poland, see Machcewicz 1993.

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4. Machcewicz 1993, 26 5. Berendt 2014a, 435. 6. Kemp-Welch 2008, 118–23. 7. Kichelewski 2008, 161. 8. Kichelewski 2008, 162. 9. Berendt 2014a, 424. 10. Michlic 2006, 234–35. 11. Datner 2014, 317. 12. Berendt 2014a, 426. 13. Machcewicz 1993, 223. 14. Kichelewski 2008, 163. 15. Berendt 2014a, 430. 16. AAN, UdW, file 24/549, Zielona Góra PWRN to UdW, August 9, 1957. 17. AAN, UdW, file 38/447, Wrocław PWRN to UdW, August 24, 1959. Although the law stipulated that a minimal number of ten individuals is enough to be recog­ nized as an official Jewish congregation, the ZRWM had the authority to dissolve small communities. It is not clear if this was the case in Ziębicie since there is no documentation of such decision. 18. AAN, UdW, file 38/447, Wrocław PWRN to UdW, August 24, 1959. 19. AAN, UdW, file 38/447, UdW to Wrocław voivodeship, September 14, 1959. 20. Szaynok 2014, 657–58. 21. Michlic 2006, 235. 22. On the emigration of Polish Jews to Israel after 1956, see Węgrzyn 2016. 23. Kichelewski 2008, 163. 24. AAJDC (NY), Poland: Cemeteries, 1965–1975, 4/43, file 324, Haber to Vilder­ gang, Re: Jewish Cemetery in Yosefov [sic], Poland, December 3, 1965. 25. “Uchwała Prezydium Rządu w sprawie planowej akcji usunięcia pozostałości zniszczen´ wojennych w miastach i osiedlach,” Dziennik Ustaw, poz. 1189, no. 92, August 20, 1955. 26. AAN, UdW, file 24/574, decision no. XXIX/145/56, August 24, 1956. 27. AAN, UdW, file 24/574, decision no. XXIX/145/56, August 24, 1956. The ministry’s official who examined the decision underlined the clause regarding the use of the bricks for construction and added in his handwriting, “Nie!” (No!) 28. AAN, Biuro Spraw Kadrowych PZPR, file 237/XXIII-837, n.d. 29. AAN, UdW, file 24/574, UdW to Łódź voivodeship, November 7, 1956. 30. Urban 1996, 33. Decisions on demolishing German cemeteries and churches in the 1960s are stored in AAN, UdW, file 131/71. At the same time, local authorities in the Western Territories were ordered to conduct minimal construction works in neglected German cemeteries, mainly in order to improve the cities’ appearance. See Thum 2011, 283. 31. “Ustawa o cmentarzach i chowaniu zmarłych,” Dziennik Ustaw, poz. 62, no. 11, January 31, 1959. 32. For an extensive analysis of the 1959 amendment, see Bednarek 2020, 330–59. 33. Urban 2006, 642. 34. AAN, UdW, file 132/282, Płon´sk PPRN to Warsaw PWRN, January 26, 1961. 35. Bielawski 2020, 85. 36. Altshuler 2012, 214.

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37. Altshuler 2012, 89. 38. AIPN Po, file 15/16, Wojewódzkie Zrzeszenie Gospodarki Komunalnej i Mieszkaniowej to Poznan´ PWRN, February 16, 1966; AIPN Po, file 15/16, Wojew­ ódzkie Zrzeszenie Gospodarki Komunalnej i Mieszkaniowej to Poznań PWRN, Feb­ ruary 24, 1966. 39. Such approval was to be given by the Ministry of Religious Affairs and, in the few cases when the synagogue was recognized as a historical monument, also by the Ministry of Art and Culture. 40. Urban 2006, 303–6. 41. AAN, UdW, file 26/478, Kraków PWRN to UdW, March 31, 1958. 42. AAN, UdW, file 26/478, ZRWM to Olkusz PPRN, August 11, 1957. 43. AAN, UdW, file 26/478, Kraków PWRN to UdW, March 31, 1958. 44. The name of the street was later changed back to ulica Bóz˙nicza. 45. APKa, Miejska Rada Narodowa w Olkuszu, file 4, decision no. 7/3/59, June 5, 1959. 46. The Ministry of Public Services (Ministerstwo Gospodarki Komunalnej; MGK) was the other governmental branch which, together with the Ministry of Reli­ gious Affairs (Urząd do Spraw Wyznan´; UdW), was in charge of dealing with the issue of cemetery management. The Ministry of Religious Affairs was responsible for the religious aspects of the cemeteries it oversaw, and the Ministry of Public Services was in charge of logistical and budgetary considerations. The MGK adopted a more secular, practical approach, tending to favor municipal development. The UdW, by contrast, took a more cautious, sensitive approach toward the religious considerations that presented themselves in the properties under their purview. 47. Bielawski 2020, 83. On the 1964 circular, see also Urban 2006, 642–51. 48. AAN, UdW, file 75/32, November 17, 1965. 49. AAN, UdW, file 75/32, November 17, 1965. 50. For other cases of demolition of Jewish cemeteries and exhumation of human remains, see Bielawski 2020, 99. 51. Bartnik 2005, 183. 52. AIPN BU, file 1585/7150, Bielsko-Biała PMRN to Bielsko-Biała Z˙KW, Febru­ ary 21, 1966. 53. AIPN BU, file 1585/7150, “Ogłoszenie,” May 22, 1966. 54. AIPN BU, file 1585/7150, Katowice PWRN to MSW, May 24, 1966. 55. Proszyk 2002, 129. 56. Rabbi Morejno, the only rabbi in Poland as of 1966 and the former rabbi of Łódź, was the most outspoken critic of the government’s treatment of Jewish reli­ gious sites in the 1960s. Since the 1950s he held no official rabbinical position and was constantly quarreling with the official Jewish leadership. However, he introduced himself as the chief rabbi of Łódź and Poland, sending “official” letters under this title. His lengthy correspondences with state officials are brought in Urban 2006, 665–710. Following his criticism of the regime, he was forcefully hospitalized in a mental institution in 1969 for a short period of time. In 1971, he left Poland. See Grabski 1997, 189. 57. Zaremba 2005, 287. 58. Wawrzyniak 2015, 14. 59. Wawrzyniak 2015, 154.

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60. Wawrzyniak 2015, 198. 61. Wawrzyniak 2015, 199. 62. Steinlauf 1997, 130. 63. Young 1993, 186. On the postwar fate and commemoration of Treblinka, see Rusiniak 2008. 64. Steinlauf 1997, 73. 65. Quoted in Wawrzyniak 2015, 199, 194. 66. AAN, UdW, file 67/40, protocol of a municipal meeting about the town’s cemeteries, February 8, 1963. 67. AAN, UdW, file 67/40, February 8, 1963. 68. AIPN BU, file 1585/832, January 24, 1964. 69. AIPN BU, file 1585/832, March 14, 1964. 70. AIPN BU, file 1585/832, June 14, 1964. 71. Kapralski 2015, 199. 72. Kapralski 2015, 202. 73. In the late 1950s the town cleared part of the cemetery’s grounds and used it for various purposes, such as a department store and a playground. Some of the uprooted headstones were moved to the remaining part of the cemetery. 74. Whereas the official historiographic and commemorative tone at this time mainly emphasized Polish Catholic suffering, in the post-1956 atmosphere histori­ cal publications dealing specifically with the persecution and murder of the Jews appeared more than before. See Aleksiun 2004, 420–22. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the history of the Holocaust was also dealt with among liberal segments of the Catholic Church. Although a large part of these discussions tended to focus on stories of rescue of Jews by Poles, sporadic references were also made to the szmalcowniki—Poles who blackmailed Jews who were trying to escape from the ghet­ tos. See Szaynok 2014, 659–60. 75. In 1957, another old synagogue in Kraków—Remuh Synagogue—was reno­ vated, thanks to the efforts of the Joint. 76. The book first appeared in 1957 under the title Bóz˙nice Drewniane (wooden synagogues) and was translated into English two years later. For an extended and updated English version, see Piechotka and Piechotka 2004. 77. Krakowska and Zielin´ski’s sketches f rom Szydłowiec did not receive wide exposure in Poland. In 1963, they appeared in an exhibition in Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv, also curated by David Davidovitcz. The Polish Ministry of Culture and the Israeli embassy in Warsaw were involved in the organization of the exhibition. 78. Krakowska and Zielin´ski 1964, 3. 79. Krakowska and Zielin´ski 1964, 4. 80. Bujak would later become one of the most famous Polish photographers. He is known particularly from his photographic documentation of Pope John Paul II, whom he accompanied for many years. 81. Gostyn´ski 1971, 6, 7. 82. Cited in Gostyn´ski 1971, 35. 83. The drawings appeared in an album, edited by David Davidovitcz (1959), pub­ lished by the Israeli publishing house Dvir. To the best of my knowledge, these works were not presented in Poland.

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Chapter 7. Profanation and Dirt

1. Although cases of vandalism and deliberate attacks of Jewish cemeteries were reported before World War II, they were rather sporadic. 2. AAN, UdW, file 26/464, ZRWM to UdW, April 22, 1958. 3. AIPN BU, file 1585/7150, MSW to all MO commandants, November 11, 1957. 4. The area of Poznan´ was traditionally a center of German culture and had a substantial number of German cemeteries as well. 5. AIPN BU, file 1585/7150, MSW internal memo, 1965, exact date unspecified. 6. Kichelewski 2008, 177. 7. Grimes 1986, 314. 8. In France, for example, there was a series of profanation cases of Jewish cemeteries in 2019–20, which included the smashing of headstones and graffitiing of swastikas. See “France Anti-Semitism: Jewish Graves Defaced with Nazi Swastika,” BBC News, December 4, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50657066; “Jewish Cemetery Desecrated in Southwest France,” Times of Israel, January 7, 2020, https://www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-cemetery-desecrated-in-southwest-france/. An increase in cases of devastation and vandalization of Jewish cemeteries was regis­ tered in 2020 also in the United States. On the day of the 2020 US presidential elections, a Jewish cemetery in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was vandalized. Several headstones were graffitied with the words “TRUMP” and “MAGA” (Make America Great Again). See Teo Armus, “‘Trump’ and ‘MAGA’ Spray-Painted on Gravestones in Michigan Jewish Cemetery,” Washington Post, November 3, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ nation/2020/11/03/michigan-jewish-cemetery-trump-maga/. In 2020, after a court in Athens sentenced leaders of the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn to prison, sev­ eral Jewish cemeteries and a Holocaust memorial were vandalized and painted with swastikas and anti-Semitic slurs in Thessaloniki, Rhodes, and Nikaia. See “Jewish Cem­ eteries, Holocaust Memorial Desecrated in Greece,” Times of Israel, October 19, 2020, https://www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-cemeteries-holocaust-memorial-desecrated­ in-greece/. 9. Diamant 2000. 10. Koch 2003, 81. 11. Koch 2003, 80. Damnatio memoriae (Latin: condemnation of memory) was a rare Roman punishment, whereby all historical mentions and representations of a person’s name were systematically erased. 12. Reports on animal grazing in Jewish cemeteries and on other forms of des­ ecration and profanation appeared already before 1939, although such practices became a mass phenomenon only after the war. See Bielawski 2020, 16–17. 13. AAN, UdW, file 26/466. ZRWM to UdW, May 21, 1958. 14. Such cases were documented, for example, in Parczew, Szczekociny, Izbica, Kraków, Zamość, and Olkusz. 15. Cała 1995b, 214. 16. APL, Urząd Wojewódzki w Białymstoku, file xx1/3, Białystok PWRN to MGK, September 11, 1957. 17. Altshuler 2012, 210–11. 18. Arkuszyn et al. 2014, 172; Garbacz 2016, 235; Stachowiak 2015, 131–34.

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19. The abandoned Abd al-Nabi Muslim cemetery in northern Tel Aviv, for exam­ ple, became a public toilet. The Jewish cemetery in the Mount of Olives in East Jeru­ salem was regularly ravaged with waste during the time when East Jerusalem was under Jordanian rule between 1948 and 1967. See Bar 2020, 5. 20. Grimes 1986, 314. 21. During a conversation I had in Krynki, I heard the argument that thanks to the cows who would eat the grass in the Jewish cemetery, the matzevot remained visible and were not covered with vegetation. 22. Grimes 1986, 314. 23. Such references appear in numerous documents; for example, APL, PWRN w Lublinie, file 353, report on the Jewish cemeteries in Bobrowniki, Irena and Dębica, April 26, 1980; APKr, Urząd Wojewódzki w Krakowie, file 1066, Zakopane mayor to Nowy Targ district, January 25, 1948; APSd, Urząd Wojewódzki w Siedlcach, file 1336, voivodeship to UdW, June 9, 1978. 24. APSd, Urząd Wojewódzki w Siedlcach, file 1338, voivodeship to ZRWM, April 10, 1987. The Jewish cemetery in Kałuszyn figures in Jolanta Dylewska’s docu­ mentary Po-lin (2008). For a poignant criticism of the film, see Janicka and Z˙ukowski 2013. 25. The local firefighters took part in the liquidation of the ghetto in Kałuszyn. See Janicka and Żukowski 2013, 79. 26. APSd, Urząd Wojewódzki w Siedlcach, file 1338, memo on Kałuszyn Jewish cemetery, May 6, 1987. 27. Sendyka 2016. 28. Nora 1989. 29. Sendyka 2013, 326. 30. Sendyka 2013, 325. 31. Sendyka 2016, 688. 32. Ethnographic research in Eastern Europe has consistently shown that the exact location of numerous unmarked killing fields is well-known to local inhabit­ ants, detectable by heaps of garbage or, alternatively, by leaving the vegetation over a given site unplowed. The French organization Yahad-In Unum is engaged in excur­ sions to the rural areas of Eastern Europe, trying to locate unmarked sites of mass graves and killing sites of Jews and other victims of World War II. Their main source of information are local inhabitants who often know exactly where the sites are even though there are no visible traces or signs. 33. Sendyka 2013, 326. 34. See the full report on Francisco’s visit to Zhovkva at https://jasonfrancisco. net/garbage-and-heritage. 35. AAN, UdW, file 132/318, article from Gazeta Krakowska, October 25, 1961. 36. AAN, UdW, file 132/318, May 5, 1962. 37. AAN, UdW, file 132/318, memo on the synagogue, May 11, 1962. 38. AAN, UdW, file 132/318, November 23, 1964. 39. AAN, UdW, file 132/318, UdW to ZRWM, November 6, 1965. 40. AAN, UdW, file 132/318, ZRWM to UdW, December 30, 1965. 41. AAN, UdW, 132/138, Szalewicz to Trybuna Ludu, September 1, 1969. 42. AAN, UdW, 132/138, Szalewicz to Chłopska Droga, March 25, 1970. 43. For more on the anti-Zionist campaign of 1967–68, see chapter 9 in this book.

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44. Douglas 1966. 45. On architecture and urban planning in communist Poland, see Crowley 1994. 46. For the policy toward the preservation of historical monuments in commu­ nist Poland, see Jagielska-Burduk 2011. On the particularity of communist Poland’s conservation policy in comparison to the rest of the Soviet bloc, see Glendinning 2013, 363–69. 47. The distinctiveness of the “Jewish dirt discourse” becomes evident when comparing the bureaucratic language of requests to remove Jewish and other nonCatholic ritual sites. See, for example, an archival file that holds together discus­ sions of Jewish, German, and Orthodox cemeteries from the 1960s: AAN, UdW, file 131/85. 48. The demolition of Jewish cemeteries elsewhere in Europe was often justified in aesthetical and hygienic reason. See, for example, in Bucharest (Ciof lâncă 2016, 320) and in Thessaloniki (Saltiel 2014, 13). 49. APKr, Urząd Wojewódzki krakowski II, file 1066, municipal board to district, March 18, 1946. 50. APKr, Urząd Wojewódzki Krakowski II, file 1066, district architect to district, February 27, 1946; APKr, Urząd Wojewódzki Krakowski II, file 1066, district health inspector to district, February 23, 1946. 51. AAN, MAP, file 1098, “wyciąg z protokolu posiedzenia zarządu miejskiego m. Zamościa,” May 13, 1947. 52. On the omnipresence of garbage in the formerly German territories in the early postwar period, see Halicka 2020, 222. 53. AAN, UdW, file 22/446, Związek Spółdzielni Inwalidów to UdW, September 8, 1954. 54. Kristeva 1984, 2. 55. APL, PWRN w Lublinie, file 318, Chełm PMRN to PWRN, April 11, 1969. 56. Depending on the context, czystość can be translated both as “cleanliness” and as “purity”; nieczystość can mean “filth” but also “impurity.” 57. Douglas 1966, 2, 36. 58. One of Douglas’s most famous intellectual successors is the theorist Julia Kristeva (1984), who shifted the center of inquiry around dirt and cleanliness from culture to the self. 59. See, for example, Bradley and Stow 2012. 60. See Stow 2012. 61. Geller 2011, 93–94. 62. On the concept of the body politic in the context of anti-Semitic racial dis­ course and Nazi language, see Musolff 2010. 63. Bauman 1989, 27. 64. Geller 2011, 273. 65. Kitlin´ski and Lockard 2001, 9. 66. Kitlin´ski and Lockard 2001, 9. 67. Cited in Krzywiec 2016, 269–70. 68. “Wędrowne szczury,” Pod Pręgierz: pismo poświęcone obronie handlu i przemysłu chrześcijan´skiego w Wielkopolsce 6, no. 7, 1934. 69. Huberband 1987, 298.

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70. AAN, UdW, file 19/491, Brzeziny PMRN to Łódź PWRN, November 15, 1954. 71. Czaplin´ski 2014, 40, 42. Chapter 8. Residual Presence

1. The demolition of the synagogue is described in chapter 6. 2. The Armia Krajowa was the largest and most dominant Polish resistance organization during World War II. 3. Mieczysław Karwin´ski, interview with the author, May 20, 2015, Olkusz. 4. Yael Navaro-Yashin (2012, 66–67) notes the lasting sense of apprehension felt by many Turkish Cypriots who were resettled in Greek homes after the Turkish inva­ sion of Northern Cyprus in 1974. Many of the newcomers felt their newly acquired property was tainted and cursed and that their true titles to the land and movable possessions remained unsettled. 5. A long list of towns in which public facilities were constructed on the grounds of Jewish cemeteries is provided by Bielawski (2020, 88). 6. APB, PGRN w Krynkach, file 8, protocol no. XIV/7, February 26, 1971. 7. APB, PWRN w Białymstoku, file 3/B/72, March 31, 1973. 8. C.S., interview with the author, June 20, 2014, Krynki. 9. L.J., interview with the author, June 21, 2014, Krynki. 10. E.C., interview with the author, June 21, 2014, Krynki. 11. Webber 2015, 239. 12. Bielawski 2020, 87, 92, 134. 13. Webber 2015, 240. 14. Joyce 2019, 442. 15. Shneiderman 1978, 186. 16. For legends relating to the supernatural power of synagogues in Polish Jewish folklore and on their transformation after the Holocaust, see Bar-Itzhak 1994. 17. Cała 1995b, 133, 134. 18. Bielawski 2020, 178. 19. Cała 1995b, 213. Similar stories are still prevalent today. In Szczekociny, where a drugstore occupies the ground f loor of the former synagogue, and a social hall operates in the upper level, the husband and one son of the building’s owner—who purchased it in the early 2000s—died within a few years. It has been said that this misfortune is a result of the purchase of the synagogue. See Shapiro 2018, 119. 20. According to a story Ansky heard in his ethnographic reports from the rural areas of Eastern Europe, peasants who worked the land in the territory of a deserted Jewish cemetery died in mysterious ways. See Cała 1995b, 287. 21. Many similar stories appear in accounts of returning Jews. See AdamczykGarbowska 2007, 11. 22. Kugelmass and Boyarin 1998, 265. 23. Shneiderman 1978, 122. 24. Polish individuals and groups that were directly involved in murdering Jews were also believed to have been inf licted with deadly punishments. For exam­ ple, in Jedwabne, stories circulate of deadly illnesses suffered by the perpetrators, of children born with disabilities, and of unexplained death cases. One of the main

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participators in the pogrom, according to the stories, shouted f ranticly on his death­ bed: “There are a lot of them in the grain, out with them.” See Bikont 2015, 81. According to another legend recorded in Jedwabne after the war, after the murder of the Jews, there is no life, light, and work in town. See Adamczyk-Garbowska 2007, 11. 25. Dziuban 2014, 122. 26. See the discussion on “Cmentarz Z˙ydowski,” paranormalne.pl, June 29–30, 2007, http://www.paranormalne.pl/topic/9626-cmentarz-zydowski/. 27. Yaari 2001, 16. 28. Sarwa 2012, 238. 29. Mallet 2011, 79. 30. “Duch rabina straszy w domu kultury?,” Super Express, April 2, 2008, https:// www.se.pl/styl-zycia/porady/duch-rabina-straszy-w-domu-kultury-aa-xSpA-wXdF­ YHQi.html. 31. Steve Lipman, “The Ghosts of a City’s Nazi Past,” Jewish Week, May 30, 2018. https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/the-ghosts-of-a-citys-nazi-past/. 32. For a thorough overview of the spectral turn in the humanities and social sciences, see Del Pilar Blanco and Peeren 2013. 33. Gordon 2008, 8. 34. Cameron 2008. 35. The literary scholar Ruth Wisse (1987) used the figure of the Jewish ghost to conceptualize the presence of the Jewish absence in Poland. She also introduced the metaphor of phantom pain to describe the emerging sensibilities at the end of the 1980s among parts of the Polish society in respect to the loss of the Jews and Jewish culture. 36. Assmann 2007, 5; Gordon 2008, 182. 37. For a critical analysis of the notion of Jewish ghosts in the Polish imagination after the Holocaust, see the collection of essays edited by Zuzanna Dziuban (2019). 38. Waligórska 2014. 39. For a critical view of the recent “Jewish ghosts” trope in Polish culture, as reinforcing the Polish self-perception as “traumatized witnesses” and preventing a discussion on the historical facts of the Holocaust and its aftermath, see Matyjaszek 2019a. 40. Navaro-Yashin 2012, 17. 41. Kozaczkowa 180, 94–96. Chapter 9. Anxiety and Rediscovery

1. IPN Rz, file 055/35, memo of MO officer in Łan´cut, March 23, 1973. 2. On the instrumentalization of the Holocaust in the official Polish discourse before and during the events of 1968, see Leociak 2008. 3. There is a great amount of literature on the “anti-Zionist” campaign. See, for example, Eisler 1991; Głuchowski and Polonsky 2009; Plocker 2011; Stola 2006. 4. Stola 2006, 185, 186. 5. On the different uses of the term “Zionists” in the 1968 propaganda, see Michlic 2006, 243. 6. Kemp-Welch 2008, 148–49.

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7. Tych 2014, 463. For the effects of the anti-Jewish campaign on society and public discourse, see Skalka 2007. 8. Eisler 1991, 127–30. 9. Zaremba 2005, 332. 10. Plocker 2011, 101. 11. Grabski and Stankowski 2014, 268. 12. Steinlauf 1997, 93. 13. The debates and discussions on the status and fate of Jewish sites after 1968 would generate renewed tensions between the religious and secular Jewish leader­ ship, each body accusing the other of failing to protect cemeteries and synagogues and in looking after their own selfish interests. See AAJDC (NY), Poland: Cemeteries, 1965–1975, 4/43, file 324, Kohane to Horwitz, Re: Poland,” March 13, 1972. 14. AAN UdW, file 75/32, UdW to Warsaw PWRN, July 12, 1966. 15. AAN UdW, file 75/32, UdW to Zielona Góra PWRN, April 26, 1966. 16. On the 1966 circular and its legal and practical significance, see Bednarek 2020, 198–202. It is not clear if this circular was dispatched. According to Urban (2006, 783), it was not sent because of the 1968 events. 17. Bielawski 2020, 84. 18. Bielawski 2020, 110–12; Cała 1995b, 214. 19. Gruz˙lewska 2018, 12. 20. AAN, UdW, file 131/506, UdW to Katowice PWRN, October 8, 1968. 21. Jarząbek 2008; Tebinka 2005. 22. Meng 2011, 174. 23. AAN, UdW, file 132/260, memo on Jewish issues [Notatka dotycząca prob­ lematyki z˙ydowskiej] (date unclear). 24. AAN, UdW, file 132/260, memo on Jewish issues. 25. Meng 2011, 174. 26. AAJDC (NY), Poland: Cemeteries, 1965–1975, 4/43, file 324, Levin to Haber, May 6, 1966. 27. AAJDC (NY), Poland: Cemeteries, 1965–1975, 4/43, file 324, Kohane to Haber, July 7, 1966. 28. AAN, UdW, file 131/516, PWRN w Rzeszowie to UdW, June 14, 1968. 29. It is not entirely clear who were these Jewish representatives, since after the death of the official Chief Rabbi of Poland Ber Perecowicz in 1961 this position was not filled. It is most likely that one of these visitors was Rabbi Morejno from Łódź who used to introduce himself as the Chief Rabbi of Poland, defying the prohibitions of the government to do so. 30. AIPN Rz, file 055/35 t.1, internal memo, March 21, 1968. 31. AIPN Rz, file 055/35 t.1, internal memo, March 21, 1968. Spelled sadyk in the report. 32. AIPN Rz, file 055/35 t.1, May 16, 1968. 33. AIPN Rz, file 055/35 t.1, May 16, 1968. 34. AAN, UdW, file 131/516, June 14, 1968. 35. AIPN Rz, file 055/35 t.1, memo of MO officer in Łan´cut, June 14, 1968. 36. AIPN Rz, file 055/35 t.1, memo of MO officer in Łan´cut, June 20, 1968. 37. AAN, UdW, file 131/516, UdW to MGK, December 16, 1970. 38. AAN, UdW, file 131-516, Rubin to UdW, May 18, 1970.

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39. AAN, UdW, file 131-516, Rubin to UdW, August 20, 1970. 40. AAN, UdW, file 131-516, Rubin to UdW, August 20, 1970. 41. AAN, UdW, file 131-516, UdW to MGK, December 26, 1970. 42. AIPN Rz, file 055/35 t.1, memo of MO officer in Łan´cut, March 28, 1973. 43. AIPN Rz, file 055/35 t.1, memo of MO officer in Łan´cut, March 28, 1973. 44. AIPN Rz, file 055/35 t.1, memo of MO officer in Łan´cut, April 31, 1973. 45. AIPN Rz, file 055/35 t.1, memo of MO officer in Łan´cut, April 31, 1973. 46. AIPN Rz, file 055/35 t.1, memo of MO officer in Łan´cut, April 30, 1973. 47. AIPN Rz, file 055/35 t.1, memo of MO officer in Łan´cut, April 30, 1973. 48. The discussions on the fate of the cemetery continued until the mid-1970s. The plans to turn it into a park were not fulfilled. During the 1990s, the Grave of Rabbi Horowitz was eventually reconstructed by Jewish donors. The matzevah was renewed and an ohel (a small structure built around graves of Hasidic rabbis) was erected. Another ohel, of Rabbi Elazar Shapiro from Łan´cut (the son of the founder of the Dynów [Dinov] Hasidic dynasty), was built next to it. The cemetery is often visited by Hasidic pilgrims. 49. Novick 1997, 207. 50. AAN, UdW, file 131/88, May 20, 1971. 51. AAJDC (NY), Poland: Cemeteries, 1965–1975, 4/43, file 324, “Impressions of a visit to Poland,” April 1972. 52. AAJDC (NY), Poland: Cemeteries, 1965–1975, 4/43, file 324, “Impressions of a visit to Poland,” April 1972. 53. AAN, UdW, file 131/91, UdW to MGK, September 3, 1973. 54. Dozens of approvals for clearing of German cemeteries and churches in the 1970s are stored in AAN, UdW, file 131/91. 55. APW, PPRN w Oleśnicy, file 1514, PPRN to Wrocław prosecutor, June 20, 1972. 56. Maciej Chołodowski, “To my, białostoczanie, zagrabiliśmy cmentarz get­ towy. W czynie społecznym,” Gazeta Wyborcza Białystok, August 17, 2018, https:// bialystok.wyborcza.pl/bialystok/7,35241,23789667,to-my-bialostoczanie-zagrabilis my-cmentarz-gettowy-w-czynie.html?disableRedirects=true. 57. Bielawski 2020, 113. 58. This number is less than half of the estimated number of Jewish cemeteries in Poland today. 59. IPN BU, file 1585/7150, report on Jewish cemeteries in the PRL, September 6, 1974. 60. IPN BU, file 1585/7150, report on Jewish cemeteries in the PRL, September 6, 1974. 61. During the same time, Kąkol was personally involved in the efforts to reno­ vate the only remaining synagogue in Warsaw, the Noz˙yk Synagogue. The renova­ tion of the synagogue was the fruit of a politically informed decision to preempt international criticism by “hostile Jewish circles.” See Meng 2011, 177. 62. AAN, UdW, file 132/268, UdW to all voivodeships, November 11, 1976. 63. AAN, UdW, file 132/312, UdW to Sieradz voivodeship, November 13, 1979. 64. AAN, UdW, file 132/317, American embassy to Senator, April 6, 1976. 65. AAN, UdW, file 132/289, Katowice PWRN to UdW, October 3, 1977. 66. AAN, UdW, file 132/284, August 12, 1983.

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67. AAN, UdW, file 132/314, February 20, 1989. 68. For the events of 1970s and their aftermath, see Kemp-Welch 2008, 180–92. 69. Irwin-Zarecka 1989, 65. 70. On the revival of Jewish awareness and identity among the younger genera­ tions of Poles of Jewish origins after 1968, see Rothstein 2015. 71. Steinlauf 1997, 93–94. 72. Śliwin´ski 1983, 58. 73. APL, PWRN w Lublinie, file 355, excerpt no. 383/IK/72r (date unclear). 74. AIPN BU, file 1585/7150, Glinki to TSKZ˙ Kraków, May 11, 1973. 75. APRz, Urząd Wojwódzki w Rzeszowie, file 58, November 9, 1974. 76. APRz, Urząd Wojwódzki w Rzeszowie, file 58, November 9, 1974. 77. Irwin-Zarecka 1989, 88. 78. The election of John Paul II as Pope in 1978, and his visit to Poland in 1979, gave a substantial boost to opposition circles and embarrassed the Polish leadership. According to Kubik (1994, 141), his visit “transformed Poland.” During the stay in the country, the pope has also made a historic visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he empathetically spoke of the Jewish martyrs and referred to the Jews as “Avraham our older brother.” See Irwin-Zarecka 1989, 154. 79. A demonstration of this cultural mood was the publication of historical stud­ ies with titles such as A Republic of Many Nations (Rzeczpospolita wielu narodów) by Jerzy Tomaszewski in 1985, or A Fatherland Not only for Poles: National Minorities in Poland between 1918–1939 (Ojczyzna nie tylko Polaków: mniejszości narodowe w Polsce w latach 1918–1939), also written by Tomaszewski in the same year. 80. The first Polish associations for the preservation of Ukrainian (Orthodox and Greek Catholic) heritage sites in the eastern provinces began their operations in 1983. See Bryła 2014, 114. For the first attempts to come to terms with the material traces of the former German inhabitants in the western lands, see Kołacki 2017, 50. 81. Irwin-Zarecka 1989, 5. 82. AAN, UdW, file 132/289, June 6, 1978. 83. AAN, UdW, file 132/289, June 6, 1978. 84. Wiśniewski 2009, 7. 85. For a good summary of the Solidarity movement’s events, see Kemp-Welch 2008, 237–331; Porter-Szucs 2014, 296–306; Ost 1990. 86. Bergman and Jagielski 2014, 551. 87. The letters are stored in the archives of the department of documentation of Jewish monuments (DDZ) at the Z˙IH, which was managed by two of the found­ ing members of the committee—Eleonora Bergman and Jan Jagielski. 88. AZ˙IH, DDZ, file “Frampol,” Letter of Jerzy M., September 8, 1981. 89. The letter does not mention the pogrom of July 4–5, 1941, in Kolno, when more than thirty Jews were murdered by their neighbors. According to Jewish testimonies, Jewish girls were raped by Poles and forced to run naked in the streets. The victims were forced by Germans and Poles to dismantle a statue of Lenin, carry it to the Jewish cem­ etery while wearing their tallitot (prayer shawls), and bury it inside. See Bender 2013, 16. 90. AZ˙IH, DDZ, file “Kolno,” letter of Halina Z., September 17, 1981. 91. The notion of “post-memory” was coined by literary scholar Marianne Hirsch (2012) to describe the phenomenon of cross-generational adoption of trau­ matic memories.

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92. AZ˙IH, DDZ, file “Chrzanów,” letter of Stanisław K., July 25, 1981. 93. Kemp-Welch 2008, 302–31. 94. Paczkowski 2003, 454–65. 95. Michlic 2006, 259. 96. Irwin-Zarecka 1989, 87. 97. The fortieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1983 demon­ strated the oppositional character of the engagement with the memory of the Jews. The government was trying to take advantage of the events for public relations pur­ poses and invited guests from abroad (for the first time since 1967 also from Israel), scheduling the opening of the renovated Noz˙yk Synagogue in Warsaw to the time of the ceremonies. Many of the Solidarity leaders, realizing well the political utilitari­ anism of the regime, boycotted the official anniversary and held their own alterna­ tive ceremony at the foothills of the Rapoport monument. See Irwin-Zarecka 1989, 106–7. Chapter 10. The Dialectics of Preservation

1. Paczkowski 2003, 465–78. 2. It is interesting to note that while Poland’s official state policy concern­ ing Jewish spaces was undergoing a dramatic change in the 1980s, in Ceauşescu’s Romania, dozens of synagogues and other historical heritage sites were razed to the ground in Bucharest as part of a massive plan for urban regeneration. See Geiss­ bühler 2009. 3. APKa, Urząd Wojewódzki w Katowicach, file 714, Z˙ory mayor to voivode­ ship, February 20, 1986. 4. APKa, Urząd Wojewódzki w Katowicach, file 714, voivodeship to all mayors, January 22, 1986. 5. On the “triumph” of the worldwide conservation movement in the 1970s over the modernist style in architecture that dominated the field in previous decades, see Glendinning 2013, 320. 6. Migalska 2019, 10, 12–13. 7. APB, PWRN w Białymstoku, file 2422/3a, protocol no. 5/73/61, June 19, 1961. 8. AAN, UdW, file 132/284, March 15, 1983. 9. AAN, UdW, file 132/290, Kielce voivodeship to UdW, April 10, 1984. 10. AAN, UdW, file 132/318, UdW to ZRWM, May 3, 1971. 11. AAN, UdW, file 132/318, August 1, 1977. 12. For the notion of an aesthetic regime, see Rancière 2006. 13. AAN, UdW, file 132/313, June 15, 1983. 14. APL, PWRN w Lublinie, file 353, voivodeship planning department to voivodeship religious affairs department, February 16, 1986. 15. The expiry of the forty years period was immediately used by local authori­ ties in the western lands in order to clear away German cemeteries on a mass scale. See Stachowiak 2015, 133–34. 16. AAN, UdW, file 132/268, February 15, 1982. 17. APSd, Urząd Wojewódzki w Siedlcach, file 1336, inspection of the Jewish cemetery, April 20, 1976.

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18. APSd, Urząd Wojewódzki w Siedlcach, file 1336, Siedlce voivodeship to UdW, June 9, 1978. 19. APKa, Urząd Wojewódzki w Katowicach, file 714, Februay 20, 1989. 20. APL, PWRN w Lublinie, file 353, April 16, 1985. 21. The concept of lapidarium as a solution to the problem of old and inac­ tive cemeteries, in particular in the west and north of the country, was an object of heated debates and controversies among Polish conservators during the 1980s. Although some conservators and architects perceived the notion of lapidarium as “a necessary evil” that should be employed as a last resort to save historical monu­ ments, others were guided by more practical concerns and saw it as a convenient opportunity to clear away green spaces on the expense of historical preservation. See Garbacz 2016, 239. 22. Garbacz 2016, 239. 23. APL, PWRN w Lublinie, file 353, March 7, 1986. 24. AAN, UdW, file 132/312, Ślipek to ZRWM, November 26, 1986. 25. AAN, UdW, file 132/312, municipal board to ZRWM, March 18, 1988. 26. AAN, UdW, file 132/312, municipal board to ZRWM, March 18, 1988. 27. AAN, UdW, file 132/312, April 20, 1988. 28. AAN, UdW, file 132/312, ZRWM to municipal board, February 5, 1988. 29. AAN, UdW, file 132/312, ZRWM to municipal board, April 6, 1988. 30. AAN, UdW, file 132/312, Ślipek to the committee, November 26, 1986. 31. AAN, UdW, file 132/312, Ślipek to the mayor, July 19, 1986. 32. Mieczkowski 2002, 7. 33. Mieczkowski 2002, 8. 34. Pewex was a well-known chain of retail shops in communist Poland, in which all transactions were carried out in foreign currency. 35. AAN, UdW, file 132/302, Horn to Central Council of Jews in Germany, December 12, 1989. 36. AAN, UdW, file 132/302, foreign ministry to UdW, February 7, 1990. 37. Halle 2007, 77. 38. AAN, UdW, file 132/290, August 3, 1989. 39. Young 1993, 201. 40. Monika Krajewska (1983) is known for her pioneering photographs of Jewish cemeteries across Poland. 41. Young 1993, 203. 42. Wojciech Henrykowski, interview with the author, May 19, 2014, Maków Mazowiecki. 43. Parciak 2007, 215. 44. Holtzman 2006, 18, 58. 45. AAN, UdW, file 132/312, Łódź voivodeship to UdW, April 20, 1988. 46. Holtzman 2006, 58. 47. AAN, UdW, file 132/312, July 19, 1986. 48. Events such as the screening of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah in 1985 have brought the question of Polish complicity to the forefront of the worldwide discus­ sions on the Holocaust. The film stirred heated debates in Poland and Lanzmann was accused by some Polish commentators of being biased against Poles. See Haltof 2012, 139.

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49. The English version of the essay was published in Błon´ski 1990. 50. Błon´ski 1990, 45. 51. Błoński 1990, 35. 52. For the reactions and controversies surrounding the publication of Błon´ski’s essay, see Polonsky 1990. 53. For a critical reading of the essay, see Czaplin´ski 2014. 54. AAN, UdW, file 132/290, July 7, 1987. 55. AAN, UdW, file 132/290, mayor to Nissenbaum Family Foundation, August 7, 1987. 56. AAN, UdW, file 132/290, report on the events in Kielce, August 25, 1987. 57. AAN, UdW, file 132/238, September 21, 1986. The managers of the Jewish theater forwarded the letter to the Ministry of Religious Affairs. 58. The letter mentions that the murder took place in 1943; however, according to her later testimony and to other accounts, it happened in 1941. 59. AAN, UdW, file 132/238, September 21, 1986. 60. Coined by Eviatar Zerubavel (2006), the notion of conspiracy of silence offers a more nuanced understanding of silence as an active presence of an open secret rather than a passive forgetfulness. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir (2011) uses this term as a key interpretive framework in her analysis of Polish postwar perceptions of the Holocaust. 61. According to a testimony of a Jewish witness to the events, around one hun­ dred Jews were murdered on this day. A Polish man, who was tried in the 1950s for his involvement in the pogrom, claimed that the number of victims was thirty. See Bender 2013, 22. 62. AAN, UdW, file 132/238, Łomz˙a voivodeship to TSKZ˙, November 17, 1986. 63. AAN, UdW, file 132/238, mayor to Z˙IH, April 22, 1991. 64. In 2014, a monument was built inside the Jewish cemetery in Rajgród, not far from the forest. Shortly after, it was demolished. Conclusions: Enduring Ambivalence

1. For an English translation of the diary, see Perechodnik 1996. 2. For the Christianization of pagan ritual sites in Russia, see Lotman and Uspenskij 1984. On the adaptation of synagogues and Churches into mosques, see Peri 1999. The fate of synagogues turned into Catholic churches after the deporta­ tion of Spain’s Jews is discussed in Lacave 1992. 3. For comparison, forty synagogues in the Czech lands were converted into churches after the war, with the support of Jewish leaders who favored such option rather than using synagogues for every day, mundane purposes. See Labendz 2017, 63. 4. Some synagogues were used as places of worship for non-Catholic denomi­ nations. In the village of Mrągowo, in northern Poland, the local synagogue was turned into an Orthodox church. In Z˙ary and Zamość, former houses of prayer are still used by the Pentecostal (Protestant) church. The former synagogues in the west­ ern towns of Oleśnica and Strzegom were converted to Evangelical churches after Jewish deportations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In Jawor, another town

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in the former German territories to the west, the fifteenth-century local emperor handed over the destroyed synagogue to the town with his permission to rebuild it as a Catholic church. In the city of Szczecinek, a Jewish funeral home was transformed into an Evangelical chapel. A few Jewish cemeteries have been reassigned as commu­ nal, nondenominational cemeteries. According to Bielawski (2020, 94), in Miłakowo, the local Catholic church took possession of the former Jewish cemetery. It is not clear if they use it for burial. 5. Bauman 1998, 146. 6. Michlic 2006. 7. Bauman 1998,146. 8. Domanska 2006, 346. 9. On the controversy over the building of the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusa­ lem on the grounds of the Mamilla Muslim cemetery, see Reiter 2014. 10. On the notion of “conciliatory heritage,” see Lehrer 2010. 11. Ziemia Olkuska, “Bardzo smutna i przykra sprawa,” Facebook, November 10, 2016, http://www.facebook.com/ziemia.olkuska/posts/1243122619095013/. 12. A comprehensive analysis of the end of communist rule in Poland is provided by Ekiert and Kubik 2001. For the political and social aftermath of the 1989 transfor­ mation in Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe, see Ost 2005. 13. Sztompka 2004, 166. 14. Michlic 2006, 262. 15. For a comparative analysis of the rise of the radical right in post-socialist Eastern Europe, see Minkenberg 2002. While the profanation of Jewish space, mostly cemeteries, was not a new phenomenon to Polish soil, following the fall of communism, reports on these cases rose rapidly. This is evident from the reports of the Polish NGO Nigdy Więcej (Never Again) which, since the end of the 1980s, publishes annual documentation of racist and xenophobic attacks, including cases of vandalizing of minorities’ cemeteries. The reports are available at http://www. nigdywiecej.org/brunatna-ksiega. 16. For an analysis of the different narratives in contemporary Polish discourse regarding the interconnections between the communist legacy, Polish-Jewish rela­ tions, and the Holocaust, see Korycki 2019. 17. The term “obsession with innocence” was coined by Joanna Tokarska-Bakir in an article published in Gazeta Wyborcza in 2001 and reprinted in Polonsky and Michlic 2004, 75–86. The most resonant recognition of responsibility for the Jed­ wabne crime was made by President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who in 2001, during the sixtieth anniversary of the massacre in Jedwabne, publicly apologized in the name of the Polish nation. On the controversies and discussions following the publication of Neighbors, see Polonsky and Michlic 2004. For a thought-provoking analysis of the local reactions in Jedwabne following the publication, see Wolentarska-Ochman 2006. 18. On the rise of ethnonationalist and anti-Semitic discourse in Poland since 2015, see Michlic 2020. 19. Joanna Plucinska, “Poland Names New Head of Jewish Museum as Tensions Rise,” Reuters, February 27, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-poland­ museum/poland-names-new-head-of-jewish-museum-as-tensions-rise-idUSKCN 20L2E2; Mateusz Mazzini, “PiS and Polish History. How the Party Uses the Past to

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Shape the Present,” Foreign Affairs, April 27, 2017, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ articles/poland/2017-04-27/pis-and-polish-history. For the phenomenon of new museums dedicated to the rescue of Jews by Poles, see Wóycicka 2019. 20. Christian Davies, “Poland’s Jews Fear for Future Under New Holocaust Law,” Guardian, February 10, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/10/ polands-jews-fear-future-under-new-holocaust-law-nazi-atrocities. 21. The suggestion was approved in December 2017 by the Polish Parliament, with 400 votes in favor and only four against. See “Poland Pledges $28 Million for Warsaw Jewish Cemetery Restoration,” JTA, December 20, 2017, https://www.jta. org/2017/12/20/news-opinion/world/poland-pledges-28-million-for-warsaw-jew ish-cemetery-restoration; Sylwia Z˙ygłowicz, “Dewastacja na cmentarzu z˙ydowskim,” itvm.pl, August 17, 2018, https://itvm.pl/n/wydarzenia/08/17/dewastacja-na-cmen­ tarzu-zydowskim/. See also Sylwia Wieczeryn´ska, “Policja wyjaśnia, kto zniszczył macewy na cmentarzu z˙ydowskim w Dąbrowie Białostockiej,” Gazeta Prawna, July 26, 2018, https://www.gazetaprawna.pl/artykuly/1191739,policja-wyjasnia-kto­ zniszczyl-macewy-na-cmentarzu-zydowskim-w-dabrowie-bialostockiej.html; “Head­ stones Smashed at Jewish Cemetery in Poland for Second Time in Less than a Month,” JTA, August 22, 2018, https://www.jta.org/2018/08/22/news-opinion/jewish-ceme tery-in-poland-vandalized-for-second-time-in-less-than-a-month. 22. According to a report compiled by Freedom House, a US-based NGO, Poland can no longer be rated as “full democracy,” together with Hungary. The full report is available at https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2020-04/05062020_FH_ NIT2020_vfinal.pdf. 23. Jan Cienski, “Poland’s Presidential Campaign Ends on an Anti-Semitic Note,” POLITICO, July 10, 2020, https://www.politico.eu/article/poland-presidential­ election-anti-semitism/. 24. Marek Strzelecki, “Polish President Rejects Jewish Property Claims before Election.” Bloomberg, July 9, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ 2020-07-09/polish-president-rejects-jewish-property-claims-before-election. 25. Alan Charlish and Joanna Plucinska, “Polish PM Upsets Jews Calling Com­ pensation Pay ‘Victory for Hitler,’” Reuters, May 21, 2019, https://www.reuters. com/article/poland-holocaust/polish-pm-upsets-jews-calling-compensation-pay­ victory-for-hitler-idUSL5N22X2WW. 26. In 2001, a law that was supposed to settle the issue of returning private prop­ erty seized after the war to its owners was vetoed by President Kwaśniewski, since it included a clause that entitles only Polish citizens to reclaim their assets, thereby excluding the majority of Jewish heirs from the process. 27. Vanessa Gera, “Poland Passes Law that Would Cut Off Property Claims,” Associated Press, August 12, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/europe-middle-east­ poland-laws-aff8252937db7f5b8e3653f71e7726bb. 28. See Krawczyk 2014, 818. 29. The law outlines three different ways for resolving restitution claims. First, the property or land in question may be transferred to a Jewish body. In cases where this option is not possible—for example, when the property is in private hands— the applicants may be awarded a compensatory property, or, alternatively, financial compensation. When the claimed property is a cemetery, the only option available is returning the site to Jewish ownership. When this option is not possible—for

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example, when the site was paved or built on top of—the Jewish claimant may nei­ ther receive compensatory property nor financial remuneration. The law stipulates a different mechanism for the restitution of communal property that belonged to the German Jewish communities in the Western Territories. In these cases, the Jewish community may file claims of restitution only for cemeteries, synagogues, community headquarters, or other assets necessary for the current needs of the com­ munity’s members. For a thorough analysis of the restitution of Jewish communal property, see Tyszka 2015. 30. Bielawski 2020, 5. This estimated number is provided by the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the FODZ. Gruber and Myers (1995, 15) provide a number of 1,008 identified Jewish cemeteries. 31. WJRO is a coalition of Jewish organizations from Europe, Israel, and the United States, which is the main Jewish representative body in the negotiations for restitution of Jewish property in East-Central Europe. FODZ’s jurisdiction cov­ ers the areas that are geographically distant from the existing Jewish communi­ ties. According to its mandate, the foundation uses the funds from the restitution process—achieved through financial compensation or f rom selling recovered properties—for the preservation and renovation of synagogues and cemeteries, as well as for commemorative and educational initiatives. See http://www.fodz.pl. 32. Similar commissions were established to regulate the restitution of prop­ erties of other religious associations that were expropriated during communism. The Catholic Church filed 3,063 restitution claims; Evangelical Church—1,200; and Orthodox Church—472. See Tyszka 2015, 52. 33. These statistics are cited in Borecki 2020, 163. 34. Active Jewish synagogues and prayer houses operate in nineteen cities and towns across Poland. It is difficult to determine how many Jews live in present-day Poland. According to the World Jewish Congress, Polish Jews number less than 10,000 people. According to Gebert and Datner (2011, 10), some 15,000 people are “Jewishly active” in some way, but not all of them are halakhically Jewish. According to the latest national census conducted in 2011, 7,353 citizens declared themselves to be Jewish. The next census is due to take place in 2021. Poland is one of the only countries outside of Israel in which the number of Jews is rising, mainly because of the phenomenon of Poles who are rediscovering their Jewish roots. See Reszke 2013. On the revival of Jewish life from the perspective of one of the most prominent members of the Jewish community in Warsaw, see Gebert 2008. 35. On the emotional debate in Wrocław, following the decision of the city’s Jewish community to sell to private hands the land on which the New Synagogue stood until its destruction in the November 1938 pogrom, see Beata Maciejewska, “Ile warta jest pamięć? Gmina Z˙ydowska chce zabudować działkę po spalonej syna­ godze,” Gazeta Wyborcza Wrocław, November 12, 2019, https://wroclaw.wyborcza.pl/ wroclaw/7,35771,25400857,ile-warta-jest-pamiec.html. See also the controversy over the future of the restituted synagogue in Poznan´ after the city’s Jewish community intended to sell it to a local entrepreneur to build a hotel: Karolina Koziolek, “Poznan´: Hotel w synagodze moz˙e nie powstać,” Głos Wielkopolski, August 14, 2016, https:// www.gloswielkopolski.pl/wiadomosci/poznan/a/poznan-hotel-w-synagodze-moze­ nie-powstac,10481725/. The Jewish community in Kraków was also criticized after it became known that a nineteenth-century synagogue they have leased to a private

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businessman is destined to be a night club. See Stephanie Butnick, “Historic Krakow Jewish Site Becomes a Nightclub,” Tablet, May 14, 2013, https://www.tabletmag.com/ scroll/132223/historic-krakow-jewish-site-becomes-a-nightclub. 36. Heated debates surround the allegation that Jewish representatives are gain­ ing personal profits from trading religious spaces. See Wojciech Surmacz and Nissan Tzur, “Kaddish for a Million Bucks,” Forbes, September 2, 2013, https://www.forbes. pl/wiadomosci/kaddish-for-a-million-bucks/e7j11d7. 37. Ofer Aderet, “Who’s Responsible for Neglected Jewish Cemeteries in Poland? It’s Complicated,” Haaretz, April 12, 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/ europe/.premium.MAGAZINE-whos-responsible-for-neglected-jewish-cemeteries­ in-poland-it-s-complicated-1.5730491. 38. “Poland: Human Remains Exposed as Jewish Cemetery Dug Up to Make Way for Car Park,” Independent, December 9, 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/ news/world/europe/poland-jewish-cemetery-car-park-bodies-dumped-michael­ schudrich-rabbi-siemiatycze-a8100941.html. 39. Violetta Krasnowska, “Sklep na cmentarzu,” Polityka, July 3, 2018, https://www.polityka.pl/tygodnikpolityka/spoleczenstwo/1754286,1,sklep-na­ cmentarzu.read. 40. AAN, UdW, file 19/471, Kielce PWRN to UdW, September 8, 1954. For sev­ eral years, one of the school’s teachers, together with students, took care of the remaining part of the cemetery. See Sławin´ski 2011, 88. For more on this, see also chapter 3 in this book. 41. Janusz Kędracki, “Kości z dawnego cmentarza lez˙ą na placu szkolnym. ‘Przykry obrazek naszej rzeczywistości,’” Gazeta Wyborcza Kielce, September 2, 2019, https://kielce.wyborcza.pl/kielce/7,47262,25143701,kosci-z-cmentarza-leza-na­ placu-szkolnym-przykry-obrazek-naszej.html. 42. In Szczuczyn, cows are still grazing at the Jewish cemetery. See Maciej Chołodowski, “W Szczuczynie krowy pasą się na cmentarzu z˙ydowskim—ziemi nic­ zyjej,” Gazeta Wyborcza Białystok, September 21, 2017, https://bialystok.wyborcza.pl/ bialystok/7,35241,22401402,w-szczuczynie-krowy-pasa-sie-na-cmentarzu-zydows kim-ziemi.html?disableRedirects=true. 43. Numerous official branches, foundations, NGOs and individual activists, Jews and non-Jews, are engaged in preserving, documenting, and commemorating the material Jewish heritage in Poland. In 2020, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Monuments, representatives of the Jewish communities and other state and civic organizations for the preserva­ tion of national heritage, formed the Coalition of Guardians of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland. The coalition groups different official and grassroots bodies in the country who deal with the preservation and upkeep of Jewish cemeteries. Its declared aim is to “protect and promote the memory of Jewish heritage in Poland” and to “preserve the memory of multicultural Poland for future generations.” The coalition’s website provides details on every Jewish cemetery in Poland, with information on the groups and individuals who are taking care of them; https://cmentarzezydowskie.org. A good survey of current projects and initiatives in the field of preservation of Jew­ ish heritage in Poland and in other countries is available at https://jewish-heritage­ europe.eu. 44. On contemporary memory activism in Poland, see Holc 2018.

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45. Murzyn-Kupisz 2015. 46. For the commemoration of German cemeteries, see Stachowiak 2015, 35–36. For a joint Polish-Ukrainian initiative of documenting and researching Polish and Ukrainian cemeteries from both sides of the border, see Arkuszyn et al. 2014. For an examination of the multicultural heritage of Poland between myth and reality, see Kusek and Sanetra-Szeliga 2010. 47. Gruber 2002. 48. Murzyn-Kupisz and Purchla 2009. For an analysis of contemporary artistic and cultural expressions of philosemitism in Poland, see Zubrzycki 2016. Since its establishment in 2013, and especially since the opening of its permanent exhibition a year later, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews has become a key player in the contemporary engagement with Polish Jewish history and culture and in the preservation and documentation of Poland’s material Jewish heritage. 49. For a sharp criticism of the contemporary phenomenon of adopting Jewish culture in Poland, as “philosemitic violence,” see Janicka and Z˙ukowski 2013. 50. Gruber 2009; Lehrer 2013; Waligórska 2013. 51. In 2006, an Israeli descendant of Jews from the town of Szczekociny tried to involve the local population in preserving the Jewish cemetery and dismantling the public toilets that operated there. To mitigate local suspicion and fears, he and other Jewish descendants published an open letter in which they abrogated their rights to private Jewish properties in town. See Shapiro 2018, 122. 52. Webber 2015, 248. 53. The ceremony was documented by Tomasz Wiśniewski, as part of the short independent film RAJGRÓD. Dzieci bez dziadków (2014). https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=EE8CudKzwLQ&t=899s. 54. “Pomnik upamiętniający Z˙ydów w Rajgrodzie zdewastowany. Znowu,” Gazeta Wyborcza Białystok, May 27, 2016, https://bialystok.wyborcza.pl/bialysto k/1,35241,20143961,pomnik-upamietniajacy-zydow-w-rajgrodzie-zdewastowany­ znowu.html. 55. AZ˙IH, DDZ, file “Dąbrowa Tarnowska,” July 30, 2008. 56. AZ˙IH, DDZ, file “Dąbrowa Tarnowska,” letter of Maria P., September 5, 2007. 57. “‘Z˙ydzi mają synagogę, a nasze firmy nie dostały kasy’—radny PiS reklam­ uje swoją gazetę,” Wprost, August 3, 2012, https://www.wprost.pl/kraj/337319/ zydzi-maja-synagoge-a-nasze-firmy-nie-dostaly-kasy-radny-pis-reklamuje-swoja­ gazete.html. 58. Duch-Dyngosz 2017, 128. 59. Paweł Chojnowski, interview with the author, June 11, 2014, Dąbrowa Tar­ nowska. 60. Duch-Dyngosz 2017, 130. 61. An English translation of the book was published in 2013. 62. For the local reactions following the book’s publication, see Anna Bikont, “Puścić Z˙yda na zajączka,” Gazeta Wyborcza, February 20, 2011, https://wyborcza. pl/duzyformat/1,127290,9118509,Puscic_Zyda_na_zajaczka.html. 63. In 2021, perhaps signaling the growing tensions in Polish-Jewish relations under PiS rule, only one Jewish heritage site—the cemetery in Warsaw—was included in a list of 444 heritage sites that received state restoration funding as part

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of a national grant competition. See Jewish Heritage Europe, “Poland: Warsaw’s Oko­ powa st. Jewish cemetery is the only Jewish heritage site among 444 winners of com­ petition for state restoration funding. More than 2250 projects applied,” March 2, 2021, https://jewish-heritage-europe.eu/2021/03/02/poland-okopowa-funding/. 64. The project was inspired by Łukas Baksik’s photo exhibition “Matzevot for Everyday Use” (Macewy codziennego uz˙ytku), in which he documented dozens of dislocated Jewish headstones, embedded in places such as sidewalks, sandboxes, and cowsheds. The project was funded as part of the grant program “Patriotism of Tomorrow,” which is operated by the Polish History Museum and funded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. 65. The posters are available at http://instrukcjapowrotu.blogspot.com/. 66. Agnieszka Kowalska, “Instrukcja powrotu macewy,” Gazeta Wyborcza, Novem­ ber 1, 2010, https://wyborcza.pl/1,76842,8597797,Instrukcja_powrotu_macewy.html. 67. Henryk Moniszko, “Pamięc Zostanie Przywrócona.” Miesięcznik Ryki nr. 9/109 (2003), in AZ˙IH, DDZ, file “Ryki.” 68. “Akcja w Rykach,” September 21, 2010, http://instrukcjapowrotu.blogspot. com/2010/09/akcja-w-rykach.html. 69. The Rabbinical Commission for Jewish Cemeteries in Poland, established in 2002, is headed by the Chief Rabbi of Poland Michael Schudrich. This commission is in charge of making sure that any work conducted in and around Jewish cemeteries does not conf lict with Jewish law. The commission oversees exhumations and discov­ eries of mass graves, and it helps to determine the exact boundaries of cemeteries, relying on technologies such as aerial photographs and on-site verifications.

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• Index

Page numbers in italics indicate photographs or illustrations. “abandoned property”, see property laws: “abandoned property” aesthetics as excuse for destruction, 89, 115–17, 138–44, 147, 186, 206–7, 217 institutional concern with, 81, 210–11, 217, 223 preservation and memorialization, 186–91, 221. See also cemeteries: preservation of; synagogues: preser­ vation of stereotypes against Jews, 145–46 see also dirt vs. hygiene Aleksandrów, 171 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, see JDC Annopol, 88 anti-Judaism, see anti-Semitism anti-Semitism before 1939, 145–46

1939–1945, 30–31

1946–1953, 36, 79–80, 86, 92

1954–1966, 110–13, 133

1967, 140, 162–65

after 1967, 177, 209, 248n8

and Trumpism, 248n8

see also cemeteries

see also synagogues

Będzin, 28, 35, 37 beit midrash, see house of study Belarus, 8, 18, 26, 35–36, 135, 152 Bełchatów, 32, 59, 60–61, 88 Biała Podlaska, 35, 39, 152 Białystok, 32, 90, 102, 125, 135, 171–72, 179, 184, 200–202 Biecz, 38 Bielsko-Biała, 118–19, 130 Bielsk-Podlaski, 125

Biłgoraj, 17, 70, 100–102 Blue Police, see police: before communist period Brzeziny, 146–47 Brzostek, 152, 219 Bucharest, see Romania Catholic, see churches Catholicization, 42, 208 see also Christianization cemeteries 1939–1945, 26–31 1945–1948, 34–35, 52 1950s–1960s, 84–94, 253n13 1970s–1980s, 176–79, 187–97, 253n13 abandoned, 105–8, 176–78, 206 in artwork, 127–31, 179, 247n80, 264n64 Catholic, 35, 41, 111–12, 118, 133, 135, 176, demolition of, 27–35, 41, 46, 84–95,

113–19, 124, 151, 171–72, 187–92,

206–8, 216–17, 250n48, 258n64

desecration of, 27–30, 76, 96–97, 117, 133–35, 153–54, 190, 207, 227n3, 248n8, 255n89, 259n15, 263n51. See also cemeteries: vandalism Evangelical, see cemeteries: Protestant German, 41, 43, 48, 107, 114, 144, 171, 208, 234n131, 234n139, 245n30, 248n4, 254n54, 256n15, 262n46 German-Jewish, 45–49, 133, 178, 191–93 as health risk, 140–48 interest by Jews from abroad, 21–22, 163–71, 194, 199, 205, 217

in local folklore, 5, 100–109, 151–60,

251n19–20

as memorials, 2–3, 11, 27, 38–40, 87–89, 121–27, 134, 172–77, 181, 188, 192–200, 219, 223–26

283

284

INDEX

cemeteries (continued) Muslim, 228n28, 249n19, 259n9 non-Jewish, 42–48, 107, 114, 135, 171 official directives concerning, 51–52, 62, 69, 81, 90, 113–17, 163–64, 171–73, 183, 215, 245n30 pasturing animals in, 34–37, 52, 90, 95, 134–38, 181, 196, 217, 225, 248n12, 262n42 plunder of, 27, 31, 34–35, 40, 52, 90, 94–95, 132–33, 151, 176, 206–8, 242n29, 249n21 preservation of, 27, 48, 50, 55, 62, 75–78, 122, 167–68, 173–76, 180, 183–94, 207, 217–19, 247n73, 262n40, 262n43, 263n51, 263n63, 264n69 Protestant, 40–42, 46, 107–8, 208, 234n138, 263n46 religious status of, 2–3, 27, 64, 77, 104, 189 repurposing of, 22, 26, 35–37, 54–65, 77, 81, 88–90, 95, 114–17, 132, 142, 153–59, 172, 206–8, 211, 225, 245n30, 258n4 transfer to local authorities, 74–79, 81–83, 168–69, 192, 216–17 vandalism, 34, 39, 106–7, 132–38, 151–52, 164, 172–73, 191, 199, 208, 212–13, 219, 248n1, 248n8, 259n15. See also cemeteries: desecration of in Warsaw, see Warsaw: Cemetery see also property laws central authority, see Warsaw: central government central government, see Warsaw: central government Chełm, 66, 88–89, 144 Chmielnik, 35, 193–94 Christian Orthodox Church, see churches: Orthodox Christianization, 209, 258n2 see also Catholicization Chrzanów, 52, 107, 181 churches, 39–43, 74, 85, 114, 179, 208–9 Catholic, 41, 85, 87, 109–12, 142, 175–78, 209, 229n49, 233n103, 234n139, 247n74, 255n78, 258n2, 258n4, 261n32 Christian Orthodox, see churches: Orthodox Evangelical, see churches: Protestant Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Poland, 41 Greek Catholic, 41, 85, 208, 239n11, 241n7, 255n80 Orthodox, 135, 208, 239n18, 241n7, 244n16, 258n4, 261n32

plunder of, 40–41, 208 Polish Catholic, see churches: Catholic Protestant, 40–41, 208, 258n4, 261n32 Roman Catholic, see churches: Catholic Ukrainian Orthodox, 41, 241n7, 255n80 Ciechanów, 37 Citizens’ Committee for the Care of Jewish Cemeteries and Cultural Monuments in Poland, 179–80, 187 Citizens’ Militia, 26, 57, 117, 133, 139, 161, 167, 169, 222 CKŻP, 32–35, 54, 71, 73–77, 80–81 Cold War, 6, 79, 86, 165 communism 1940s, 9, 19–23, 36, 42, 50–52, 235n12 1950s, 79, 85–86, 109–13 1960s, 119–24, 165 1970s, 171, 175–82 1980s, 183–89 end of and following, 159, 193, 214, 259n15 fear of international criticism, 161–65, 170–75, 254n61, 256n97 Judeo-Communism, see Żydokomuna concentration camps, 17–18, 21, 43, 45–48, 53, 120, 123–24 Cultural-Social Association of Polish Jews, see TSKŻ Cyprus population exchange, 13, 159, 228n28, 239n10, 251n4 Czechoslovakia, 22, 77, 86, 231n33, 258n3 Częstochowa, 156 Dąbrowa Tarnowska, 62, 70, 93–94, 97–99, 138–42, 159–60, 185–86, 219–23 death camps, see extermination camps democracy, 212, 260n22 Department of Denominations, 233n103 see also MAP desecration see cemeteries: desecration of see synagogues: desecration of dirt vs. hygiene, 138–53, 186–89, 250n47–48, 250n58 Drobin, 28 Dukla, 135 Dzierżoniów, 44, 46–47, 77, 164 Eastern Bloc, 20, 36, 86, 110, 115, 241n2 emigration Polish-Jewish, 80, 94, 112–13, 140, 163, 171, 207 Evangelical churches, see churches: Protestant

INDEX extermination camps, 14, 39, 120–21, 125 Auschwitz-Birkenau, 53, 120, 121, 130 Bełżec, 1, 72, 93, 121, 189 Chełmno, 73, 75, 84, 121, 123, 146, 197 Majdanek, 121, 189 Sobibór, 17, 121, 189 Treblinka, 17, 71, 76, 121, 125, 187–89, 203 FODZ, 215, 219, 261n31 “formerly German property”, see property laws: “formerly German property” “formerly Jewish property”, see property laws: “formerly Jewish property” Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Monuments, see FODZ Frampol, 31, 180 France, 248n8

285

Polish collaboration, 14–16, 200–202, 212–14, 223, 257n48, 259n17 in public memory, 2–5, 36, 147–48,

153–60, 176–82, 198–99, 207–11,

247n74, 259n17

house of study, 7, 54, 56, 185 Hungary, 86, 110, 260n22 Iaşi, 31 Israel citizens of, 107, 112, 115, 123, 130, 156, 163, 219, 256n97, 263n51 State of, 13, 79–80, 112, 162–63, 213, 239n10, 261n34 Iwaniska, 94–95 Izbica, 31, 34

Garwolin, 38 Gdańsk, 43, 133, 179 ghettos, 14, 24–25, 27, 31, 93, 98, 123–25, 198–201, 203, 223

see also Łódź: Ghetto

see also Warsaw: Ghetto

ghosts and demons, 153–60 Gliwice, 164 Głogów, 163 Głogówek, 193 Góra Kalwaria, 163 Gorlice, 38 Greece anti-Semitism, 31, 248n8 dispossessed property, see Cyprus popula­ tion exchange grief, 17–18, 32, 123, 170–71 Grodzisk-Mazowiecki, 76 Gur, see Góra Kalwaria

Jagiellonian dynasty, 41 Jaraczewo, 67 Jarocin, 66 Jawor, 258n4 JDC, 80, 110, 165–66 Jedwabne, 14–15, 213, 229n39, 251n24, 259n17 Jelenia Góra, 47 Jerusalem city of, 204, 249n19, 259n9

holy sites in, 3, 196, 209, 249n19

stone (building material), 219

Jewish Historical Institute, see Warsaw: Jewish Historical Institute Jewish law (halakha), 2, 8, 48, 64, 77–78, 96, 189–90, 216, 225, 237n44, 240n28, 264n69 Jewish police, 203 see also police: before communist period Jeżów, 186–87 Józefów Biłgorajski, 66

Hasidic culture, 73–74, 104–5, 122, 163, 165–70, 254n48 headstones profanation, 17, 27–35, 90, 119, 130. See also cemeteries: desecration of reclamation, 37–38, 51, 196–97, 219, 224–26 used as memorials, 37–38, 89, 188–91, 194–96, 225–26, 242n25, 257n21, 264n64 Holocaust memorials, 37–39, 87–89, 120–27, 164, 171–72, 194–99, 219, 256n97 omission from public discourse, 65–68, 95–97, 102, 120–27, 243n48, 258n60

Kańczuga, 81 Kazimierz Dolny, 27, 153, 194–96 Kępno, 66, 73 Kielce, 26, 35, 39, 50, 75, 199–202 see also pogroms: after WWII Kodeń, 152 Kolbuszowa, 1–2, 3, 125 Kolno, 37, 181, 255n89 Korczyna, 130 Kraków, 14, 34, 52, 54, 107, 116, 118, 124, 127, 130, 139, 176, 186, 220, 236n27, 247n75 Kraśnik, 34, 35, 89 Krościenko nad Dunajcem, 52 Krynki, 102–3, 106, 150–51

286

INDEX

Krzywcza, 31

Kutno, 39, 75, 78

Kuzmir, see Kazimierz Dolny

Łańcut, 63, 75, 161, 165–70, 177, 184

lapidarium, see headstones: used as

memorials Łask, 84, 91–92 law see property laws see Jewish law

Law and Justice Party, see PiS

Łęczyca, 123–24

Lelów, 71–72

Leżajsk, 73

Lithuania, 8, 15, 18, 26, 36, 42

Lizhensk, see Leżajsk

local administrations, see local authorities

local authorities, 4–5, 46, 52–65, 114–18,

172, 187

in opposition to the central authority, 10,

37, 51–53, 70–83

Łódź

city of, 14, 78, 84, 90, 94–95, 119, 132,

172–73, 186, 191, 246n56, 253n29

Ghetto, 73

Lower Silesia, 18, 40–49, 70–71, 80, 111–12,

163, 171, 193, 228n16

Lubartów, 34, 189–90

Lublin, 34, 90

Łuków, 37, 69, 77

Maków Mazowiecki, 154, 196

MAP, 35–37, 51, 55–57, 78–79, 87, 89,

233n103

mass graves, 72, 137

in or near cemeteries, 27, 124–25, 137,

177, 180

exhumation of, 39, 264n69

(non-)maintenance of, 77, 177, 199–200,

249n32 perception of, 2, 52, 100–101, 122,

136–37, 177, 180–81, 203–4, 219,

249n32

plunder of, 31

reinterment in, 28–30, 171–72 matzevah/matzevot, see headstones memory vs. forgetfulness, 1–2, 82–83, 94–97, 124, 127–38, 176–86, 194–202, 208–26, 255n91, 256n97, 258n60 metonymy, see presence vs. absence MGK, see Ministry of Public Services Michigan, 248n8

Miechów, 34, 37

Mielec, 66, 118

mienie opuszczone, see property laws:

“abandoned property” mienie poniemieckie, see property laws:

“formerly German property”

mienie pożydowskie, see property laws:

“formerly Jewish property”

mikveh/mikvaot, see ritual bathhouse

Ministry of Internal Affairs, 111, 119,

132–33 Ministry of Public Administration, see MAP Ministry of Public Security, 110–11 Ministry of Public Services, 117, 163–64, 246n46 Ministry of Religious Affairs, 56, 81, 84,

89–93, 114–18, 135, 139, 163, 167–71,

191, 199, 240n45, 246n39, 246n46

Mława, 39

MO, see Citizens’ Militia

Moscow, see Soviet Union

mosques, 209, 258n2

MSW, see Ministry of Internal Affairs

Mszczonów, 155

Muszyna, 53

Myślenice, 37

Nazis concentration camps, see concentration camps extermination camps, see extermination camps

Final Solution, 4, 23, 30, 67

Gestapo, 28, 99, 125

ghettos, see ghettos

ghosts of, 157–58

neo-Nazis, 133, 248n8

occupation of Poland, 14–15, 19, 23, 27,

152, 168

pogroms, see pogroms

policies, 15, 27, 30, 122, 124–25, 145–47,

165, 198, 213, 243n45

survivors of, 44

Nowy Dwór, 154

Nowy Sącz, 70, 81, 122–23

Oberglogau, see Głogówek

Oleśnica, 171, 258n4

Olkusz, 53–56, 62, 66, 116–17, 143, 149–50,

211

Olsztyn, 106–7, 118, 133

Opoczno, 60, 66

INDEX Ostrów Wielkopolski, 57, 60 Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, 89, 242n25 Oświęcim, 128, 130 see also extermination camps: AuschwitzBirkenau Otwock, 203–4 Pajęczno, 113–14 Palestinians, 13, 239n10 Parczew, 57–58, 60, 87–88, 90, 95–96 philosemitism, 263n48–49 Piast dynasty, 41, 124 Pinczów, 35, 185 PiS, 213–14, 263n63 PKWN, 19 Płońsk, 115–16 pogroms during WWII, 14–15, 45, 153, 229n40, 235n153, 251n24, 255n89, 258n61 after WWII, 17, 25–26, 50, 58, 153, 199–202 see also Jedwabne police before communist period, 15, 125, 146, 203, 222, 243n54 communist period, see Citizens’ Militia POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 263n48 Polish Blue Police, see police: before com­ munist period Polish Committee of National Liberation, see PKWN Polish United Workers’ Party, see Commu­ nism: 1940s–80s Poznań, 66–67, 73, 133, 146, 248n4, 261n35 Praszka, 60 presence vs. absence, 2–5, 11–12, 26, 82–83, 97–108, 124, 136–38, 147–53, 158, 208–26 profanation see cemeteries: desecration of see synagogues: desecration of property government theft of, see property laws privately owned, 20–24, 41, 44, 48, 55–56, 63–65, 71, 83, 167, 193–94, 206, 230n22, 239n11, 263n51 private theft of, 24–25, 31, 34, 40, 58–59, restitution of, 10, 21–22, 24, 40, 61, 73, 193–94, 214–16, 220, 238n5, 239n6, 260n26, 260n29, 261n31–32 see also property laws

287

property laws “abandoned property”, 20–23, 40–41, 73–74, 81–82, 91–92, 209, 238n5 Act on Abandoned and Formerly German Property, 22, 238n5 Act on the Relationship between the State and the Religious Jewish Communities in the Republic of Poland, 214–16, 220. see also property: restitution of affecting other non-Jewish/German minorities, 18–23, 208–9, 237n47, 239n18, 261n32. See also Cyprus popu­ lation exchange Burial and Cemeteries Law, 53–54, 113–18, 164–66, 187, 206–7, 236n16 “formerly German property”, 22, 40–45, 65, 71, 114, 192–93, 231n36, 234n139, 238n5, 255n80 “formerly Jewish property”, 63–65, 76, 81–83, 114, 91–93, 219, 231n36, 236n21, 237n48, 242n39, 245n17 inheritance, 21–23, 33, 183–84 nationalization, 20–23, 36, 40–41, 45, 82–87 Protestant churches, see churches: Protestant Przasnysz, 30 Przemyśl, 7, 31, 81, 92–93, 124, 153 Przeworsk, 124, 154, 171 Pysznica, 174 PZPR, see Polish United Workers’ Party Rabbinical Commission for Jewish Cemeteries in Poland, 225, 264n69 Rabka-Zdrój, 52 Radom, 34, 37, 76 Radomsko, 28 Rajgród, 200–2, 219, 258n64 see also pogroms: during WWII Recovered Territories, see Lower Silesia Red Army, 19, 31, 123 Reichenbach, see Dzierżoniów Religious Union of the Mosaic Faith, see ZRWM ritual bathhouse, 7, 17, 56, 63, 73–75, 79 Romania, 15, 31, 250n48, 256n2 Ropczyce, 176 Ryki, 17, 66, 154–55, 224–26 Rymanów, 128, 130 Rzeszów, 35 Sandomierz, 37–39, 81–82, 129, 156–57, 196, 217 Sanok, 174 Sędziszów Małopolski, 171

288

INDEX

Shoah, see Holocaust

shtetl, 6–8, 14–15, 27, 184, 210, 218, 226

Siedlce, 34, 38, 187–88

Sirotino, 135

Sławków, 64

Słomniki, 34

Słupsk, 175

Sokółka, 32, 105, 106

Solidarity movement (Solidarność), 175–82,

193, 256n97 Soviet Bloc, see Eastern Bloc Soviet Union culture and policy, 20, 85, 115, 162, 183,

193, 230n14

gulags, 18

and Jews, 36, 44, 49, 52, 79–80, 85–86,

137, 231n56

repatriation from, 42–44, 110–12

settlement in, 19, 40–41, 49, 71

Stalinist period, 79, 85–86, 109–11, 120,

231n56, 241n2, 243n48

territory, 18, 41–42

during WWII, 17, 15, 30

Spain, 209, 236n21, 240n32, 258n2 speech acts, 60–68, 94–97, 141–44, 188–89, 236n31 Stettin, see Szczecin Strzegom, 258n4 superstitions, 103–5, 153–60, 251n19–20, 251n24, 252n35 synagogues

1939–1945, 26–27, 31

1946–1948, 34, 54, 57

1950s–1960s, 84–94

1970s–1980s, 183–86

active today, 261n34

in artwork, 127–31, 247n77, 247n80

demolition of, 27–28, 31, 34, 88, 113–14,

138–40, 206–7, 242n25, 242n27,

256n97

desecration of, 153, 193, 207, 211,

259n15. See also synagogues: vandalism expropriation during WWII, 23–25 German, 45–49 as health risks, 140–48 in local folklore, 102–4, 153–60 as memorials, 11, 97–99 official directives concerning, 62, 69–71, 81, 113, 171, 183, 215

plunder of, 31, 132, 206,

preservation of, 127, 184–86, 207, 236n34,

246n39, 247n75, 254n61, 262n43 in public memory, 149–51 religious status of, 2–3, 77–78, 240n28

repurposing of, 54–65, 71–73, 88–94, 153–60, 193, 216–22, 236n34, 251n19, 258n2–4, 261n35–36 transfer to local authorities, 74–83, 91,

112

vandalism, 91, 132, 151–52, 164, 212–13,

235n153. See also synagogues: desecra­ tion of; property laws

Szczecin, 48, 133, 191–92

Szczecinek, 258n4

Szczekociny, 251n19, 263n51

Szczuczyn, 262n42

Szydłowiec, 35, 125–27

taboo, 100–108, 133–36, 144, 150

Tarnogród, 88

Tarnów, 93, 99, 105–6, 186

Thessaloniki, 31, 250n48, 248n8

Trzebinia, 52

Tsanz, see Nowy Sącz

TSKŻ, 80, 89, 92, 163, 176

Turkey, see Cyprus population exchange

Tykocin, 184–85

UdW, see Ministry of Religious Affairs

Ukraine, 8, 15, 18–19, 26, 30, 34, 40–41, 115,

137, 178

Uman, 135

Union of Fighters for Freedom and Democ­ racy, see ZBOWiD USSR, see Soviet Union Wągrowiec, 107

Wałbrzych, 44

Warka, 66

Warpechy, 153

Warsaw

Cemetery, 87, 132, 176, 213, 263n63

central government, 37, 40, 50–52, 54,

69, 74, 78, 81–85, 88–90, 110–14, 165,

179, 206–7

city of, 6, 14, 87

Ghetto, 28, 87, 123, 146–47, 156,

256n97

Great Synagogue, 157

Jewish Historical Institute, 107, 127, 178,

185, 220

Muranów, 86–87, 156

Nożyk Synagogue, 107, 254n61, 256n97

Polish uprising, 221

tanks on the streets of, 181

University, 162, 166

Warta, 30, 95, 96, 190–92, 196–98

Widawa, 173

INDEX Włodawa, 46 Włoszczowa, 75 Wodzisław Śląski, 31–32 Wolbrom, 72, 78–79, 174 Wrocław, 6, 43, 45, 133, 192, 261n35 Zabrze, 178 Zakopane, 52 Zamość, 31, 34, 129, 142–43, 258n4 Żarki, 157 Żary, 111–12, 258n4

ZBOWiD, 120–23 Zhovkva, 137 Ziębice, 112 Złoczew, 170 Żółkiew, see Zhovkva Żory, 189 ZRWM, 33, 48, 71, 73, 80–81, 89, 93–94, 112, 117, 163, 170, 186, 189–92, 232n84, 238n5, 242n39, 245n17 Żydokomuna, 26, 86, 231n56 see also Soviet Union: and Jews

289