| You think you’re going to experience something, and you may even actually experience it, but then suddenly you realize that you didn’t experience anything, and it doesn’t bother you at all. It doesn’t bother you that you can’t remember anything about what you didn’t experience and what you experienced. It doesn’t (...)
more >> |
| | Down Garwolińska to the end, then hang a right onto Makowska along the railroad tracks toward Olszynka. Sometimes all the way to the roundhouse. The street looked like a village road; on hot days it would be lined with guys sitting and drinking. Branches of fruit trees reached over the fences. (...)
more >> |
|
|
Lidia OstałowskaWatercolors
Dina was well over seventy years old. At that age, you tend to recollect.
The Americans wore clean, pressed uniforms, but they were drunks. Right after them the Russians came to the camp. Dirty, because they had just come from fighting, Mongolians. Her friend Leša joked that they were Dina’s brothers. They bantered. The Soviet officers offered wine to Leša, to Dina and her mom. They wanted to celebrate.
But first they got out from behind those wires.
Dina: “I found this bicycle and started riding it, straight ahead. I felt terribly free. To one side there was the forest, all the tree trunks were black from the fighting, no branches at all, they must have all been burned. Suddenly I saw a white horse, trotting along. I got off the bike.
“The horse was too tall for me to mount it.”
More often than not, Dina’s memory took her to the Ziegeunerlager. Celine in a sky-blue kerchief, mourning her child. A girl had a kid who was crawling tied to her leg so it didn’t disappear. Fire-breathers were blowing out plumes of flames, entertaining the S.S. officers.
Now Dina was still thinking about the watercolors she painted in the camp. They were probably rotting away in some storage facility, expendable. But it was only thanks to them that her mom lived to be 82 years old, and that she had children and grandchildren. She complained to her daughters that she couldn’t sleep. It was because of those paintings. If she got them back, there’d be no more insomnia.
The cold war was over. The post-communists were imitating the West. Dina had no doubt about it. Totalitarian Poland had retained the portraits, and free Poland would give them back.
But the museum was deaf to her demands. Around and around the same thing. The watercolors—acquired as anonymous, legally and in good faith—had to stay at Auschwitz. They were a part of the camp’s heritage, documentation of Doctor Mengele’s crimes.
This was inconceivable. Had Poland really changed its political system?
Dina didn’t give up, and arranged for some American journalists to report in their newspapers and on their websites that the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum was holding stolen art. When the robbed woman tried to ask by what right, the heads of the museum talked about the priority of the public good over private property. Stalinist stereotypes: people don’t matter, what matters is the state.
What was going on with them? During the recent commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, President Lech Wałęsa couldn’t cough up the word “Holocaust.” There was no time allotted in the program for a prayer for the murdered Jews. Which was why at the lunch break some of the Jewish participants went over to Birkenau. At the ruins of the crematory, Elie Wiesel, Szewach Weiss, and Jean Kahn said the Kaddish. The German President Roman Herzog listened in.
The Poles don’t give anyone the chance to change their minds about them.
The media were quick to rattle their sabers. Poland—whether it wanted it or not—was now part of the western world. Under capitalism property is respected. If the post-communists wanted to get into NATO, then let them first return the watercolors.
Dina had allies. The West had long since recognized the dignity of those who survived. They weren’t accusing them of being cowards now, weren’t giving them uncomfortable pangs of conscience; conversations didn’t become hushed when the subject came up. War memoirs sold. Borowski, Levi, Wiesel, and Kertesz hadn’t exhausted the topic. Publishers were buying new autobiographies, studios fresh screenplays, and documentary filmmakers were interviewing witnesses.
Such was the fashion. Pop culture had been on the side of the persecuted since the American television channel NBC had broadcast the show “Holocaust” starring Meryl Streep over four consecutive January evenings in 1978. The episodes (totaling over ten hours) told the story of the Weiss family, who were assimilated German Jews.
The critics had lambasted the show, were still doing so. Unrealistic and trivial, full of historical errors, offensive to the survivors. On top of all that, the station had interrupted the program with commercials. Was that ethical, making money out of tragedy?
Professor Jeffrey Goldfarb, American sociologist: “A crappy show, almost a soap opera, taught 120 million Americans more about the Holocaust in a couple of days than they had found out in decades. It brought about real political change, aesthetics were secondary.”
Goldfarb has taught at the New School for Social Research for years. The New School was founded in 1919 by a group of intellectuals protesting against an infringement of academic freedom (Columbia University had required research for the army). When Hitler came to power, the New School became a haven for 170 European academics fleeing from fascism. Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Maritain, and Roman Jakobson, to name a few, taught at the University in Exile.
New times, new challenges. For at least twenty years, the States, Europe, South America, and Africa had been settling accounts. Hence the imperative to record a difficult past.
Amy Sodaro, a PhD student at the New School, is interested in memorialization. And she’s serious about it: she wants to know how memorials of atrocities and museums shape what we remember. She’s checked out a few institutions, including the Holocaust Museum in D.C. It puzzled her that the American government would spend money on it, given that the Holocaust happened in Europe.
Amy Sodaro: “The reasons were purely political. Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate for President, was losing the support of the Jewish electorate. Which is why he came up with the idea of commemorating the Holocaust.”
The American public wasn’t sure. “Yeah, we fought in World War II, but the Holocaust wasn’t our deal,” people said.
Jeffrey Goldfarb: “The mini-series on NBC marked the moment when the Holocaust stopped being exclusively part of Jewish memory in the U.S.”
Amy Sodaro: “The exhibit begins and ends with the information that it was Americans who liberated the concentration camps in Germany. Quite a bit of space is taken up by Jewish immigration to the U.S. after the war. It’s a way of Americanizing the Holocaust.”
The exhibition’s lay-out complies with all the conventions of a movie. The birth of Hitler’s state: bad. The fight and liberation by the Americans: good. Along the way: dramatic slides, all of which illustrate things that are contrary to American values.
Amy: “The message is clear. American pluralism and freedom of the press is our weapon against the threat of another genocide. After a visit to the museum, the public, morally transformed, full of emotions, is supposed to cry out loud, “Let us defend democracy!”
That institution just off the National Mall is one of America’s most visited museums. Dina remarked to art critic Dora Apel that her daughter and granddaughter were never going to see the watercolors because they were never going to go to Poland. Washington would be closer.
Translated by Jennifer Croft
Back |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
There are more than 31,000 publishers registered in Poland. However, the market is highly concentrated. The 300 largest publishing firms still hold almost 98 per cent of it. More »
|
|
|
|
