Extended Amnesia (text extracts)
Oświęcim ~ January 2017
A thick blanket of snow covers the ground outside. I am in Hotel Kamienic and the room stinks of stale cigarettes. There is one lukewarm radiator and two single beds. The electrics look distinctly dodgy. The shower takes a good two minutes to reach a lukewarm temperature and does not get hot. Downstairs, in reception, are three dogs, one of which has such laboured breathing that I imagine it going into cardiac arrest. An overly decorated Christmas tree dominates the entrance hall bathing it in flashing light but what hits me as I enter the hotel is the strangely combined smell of canine and cigarettes ~ like the memory of a lingering aroma from the past.
I arrived yesterday – by 3.30 it was already getting dark and snow was falling thick and fast. I was handed a room key at check in but then redirected to a warmer room where the balcony doors closed properly. I walked into town to ascertain distance, to get a lay of the land, which was fast becoming buried. It was dark and slippery underfoot and my orientation was sketchy as the driving snow kept my head down and lights from oncoming vehicles blinded me. Thinking to have an early night I estimated it to be about 9pm, but it was only 6pm! Time seemed to have stalled. I slept fitfully, jerked awake by fleeting images and racing thoughts: what was I doing here seeking memories, planning to visit sites of atrocity & trauma. I kept thinking about the walk into town – I had layers of warm clothing and shoes but the Jews that were kept in the camps or marched between camps had just the barest of clothing. How did the survivors survive; why did they not just succumb? Am I here to re-experience their trauma? This now seems like a ridiculous idea.
Auschwitz museum lies a stone’s throw away from the hotel, a stone thrown directly across the River Sola, but there are no footbridges unless I walk up to the busy A4, the Krakow Road. My first destination though is the station. I want to see where (I can imagine) the Jews would have been brought in before the final march to the Auschwitz camp, to get a sense of transit. The temperature registers minus 2. I climb the footbridge that spans the multiple lines of rail tracks. On the far side are six rows of box-carts shunted together, a suitable memorial. Snow is falling as fat flakes and there is an eery stillness to the scene.
Birkenau is a foreboding place to enter – like the gateway to Hell! The entrance is overly familiar, as iconic as the Arbeit Macht Frei entrance to the Auschwitz camp. Now, as I approach, it is gripped by the depths of winter. I walk into a barrack devoid of all items yet heavy with loss. Outside I photograph steps leading down into a snow covered pool. I photograph three brick stacks, extinguished but still intact. I cross over a ditch and walk through a field, knee-thick in snow, to the outlines of other barracks, made eery by their absence: the bare foundations sketched in the ground. I photograph a magnificently desolate tree, completely stripped bare, then approach a copse of silver birch and startle three roe deer. I am avoiding entering the camp, of coming at it too directly – I am more interested in the clues, or ways that the surrounding landscape can be framed to evoke the past. I photograph a thicket of tangled woods that are highlighted with icy outlines. I circumnavigate the trauma, literally the other side of the fence, and photograph a pile of logs that could be a pile of torsos.
Ukraine, Kiev Region ~ November 2019
In November 2019 I return to Ukraine, this time concentrating on the Kyiv region, to see what still remains of the Jewish communities. I arrive in Kyiv at 5.40pm – it is dark and I have no network coverage so the world is even more indistinct and foreign than normal. This is my seventh trip for this project and I should be comfortable with the travel, but instead I feel that customary dread, that sense of not belonging, of not being at home, the familiar yet unfamiliar. It doesn’t help that I arrive late at night; it doesn’t help that the words everywhere are largely in Cyrillic, including street names; it doesn't help that before coming I couldn't purchase Ukrainian currency. My navigation skills are hampered, like an injured bird without its internal compass. But there is ATM in the airport and a city bus waiting outside … so I sit down again after a long flight and wait the journey to play itself out.
On the flight I watched The Devil Next Door: the trial of Ivan the Terrible – The Demon of Treblinka. I have Demjanjuk's face, old and young, etched into my mind. During the trial the prosecution tried to demonstrate how the grainy black & white photo they had retrieved from the KGB files, the younger Ivan, matched the older face of Demjanjuk now: the inter-pupillary distance between the eyes, the upper face, the height of the ears, the marked widows peak. The defence did an equally convincing job of disproving this evidence. There was, as with all good trials, uncertainty both ways: the older Demjanjuk was an auto worker from Cleveland, a Ukrainian immigrant after the war, innocent looking and a bit simple. The scrutiny of the killer’s face jumbled in my mind with images shown during the trial of emaciated corpses, skin & bone and dead eyes, and graphic descriptions by the survivors of skulls being crushed. The witnesses broke down, one after another, or became bullish, pointing their accusations at Ivan who sat there, impossible to read, until he is smiling when the defence tore apart the prosecution and the retelling of the atrocity seemed to have become entertainment!
Babyn Yar Memorial Site is set within a small park; a huge statue of Olina Tahini stands watch at the entrance – Soviet and strong, cold yet nostalgic. In the park two cleaners are sweeping leaves into long piles (it’s easy to see echoes of history in the innocent gestures). The ravine is a large ditch lined by arching trees but rising up from the ground is a chilling monument of twisted limbs as if the bodies have been dug up in agony and cast in bronze. Baba means old lady, Yar means ravine: it’s difficult to tell how old as the ground covers its grave so completely.
I head south on the Metro in time for the shabbat service at the Brodsky Synagogue. The service has only a few elderly men in attendance when I arrive however it soon begins to fill until I count at least a hundred men (it's all men; the women peer down from the upper gallery) who shake hands and stroke each other on the back in tender motions. The children are allowed to run around making noise (girls & boys) and the melodic prayers are constantly interrupted by hushes. There isn’t one cantor but two, as if the community is doubling up on charisma. I recognise the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine when he stands and makes a long speech followed by a resonant Shalom from the younger rabbi. When the prayers rise in fervour and hands clap, after a quiet period of dovening, I feel an overwhelming sense of the heimliche here, so strong that I don’t wish to leave, so resonant that I forget I am in Ukraine. This is a bonded community that is so easily forgotten by an assimilated Jew. I recognise the the smiles, the nods, the subtle gestures, the familiar family. There are no musical instruments – it is the powerful surge of the human voice that carries the momentum. When the ark opens and the sefer torah is taken out and paraded to the central Bimah, I realise just why I have come here, to Ukraine – it is here, in a vibrant and revitalised community, that the realisation of loss is so apparent: here I see the power of the Jewish culture that was once so much larger – here the old lady of the ravine is nowhere to be seen.
North East Poland ~ Feb/March 2022
How strange to be heading back to a land of contested stories and competing narratives, nations expanding, diminishing and disappearing in the power play of empires. There is an inextricably link between the national and the ethnic, the Jewish and the non-Jewish, the personal and the collective. The land I am heading back to also holds particular memory for me: Białystok is a fabled place in the genealogy of my family – ‘we came from a place that was both Poland and Lithuania and also part of Russia…’ It’s unclear whether it was the border between Poland and Lithuania or Poland and Russia: an indistinct memory of what was and what wasn’t the Pale of Settlement. The family narrative is doubly confused by the tales of shtels (the seduction of the Fiddler on the Roof!). Fact and fiction merge as the myth of memory. To look at the map of partitioned Poland in the 19thC is to look at a completely different world: Poland is squeezed between Prussia, Austria and Russia – the Pale of Settlement encompasses a vast tract of land that consumes the national boundaries that we are familiar with today. And Białystok is the other side of the border; which side of the border was crucial in terms of Jewish life: the difference between the tolerance of the Polish aristocracy, the demands of Prussia and the repression of Russia.
The day before I am due to fly, however, Europe is flipped onto its back. I am entering Poland whilst Ukraine is belly up – Russia invading from the north, east and south. I watch the images of war from the comfort of my hotel room: the anti-narrative demonstrating that history does not necessarily have a progressive trajectory, that civilisations can be torn to shreds and sovereign nations dispensed with – the shadow of the past crushing into the present!
On the flight over I watch Citizen K – a documentary about the Oligarchs but really a look at the machinations of Putin: a young and bland looking Vladimir (perhaps already a skilled master of disguise) is asked by a girl ‘what event in your life has influenced you the most?’ Putin thinks for a while, almost hesitant, then answers: ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union.’ He adds: ‘this is an adult answer, sorry, but you asked me an adult question.’ The serious intent is clear: Yeltsin’s mistake will need to be rectified at some point: the redistribution of land, the reclaiming of Russia’s border. I read in the Guardian that Putin is ‘in some sort of self-induced concept of reality that is very revanchist, based in the past, and in the trauma of the dissolution of Soviet Union.’ The memory he holds on to is an old score that needs to be settled.
The next day, in the market square on Plac Newy, Kraków, I see the mishmash of enmeshed memories: Nazi medallions and Soviet hats, miniature paintings of stereotypical Jews alongside Nazi passport stamps and photographs of Nazi officers that look like holiday snaps. The stall-holder tells me he’s been collecting these trinkets for 30 years, from house clearances, basements, donations. At another stall there are even more overt Nazi memorabilia but the stall-holder doesn’t want me to photograph them – he gestures to the badges and to his chest and shakes his head to signify he isn’t Nazi. I’m struck that here in the heart of Kazimierz, the centre of revitalised Jewish memory, Nazi trinkets are casually sold alongside Jewish. As if to pacify me he shows me the harmonicas and then plays me a sweet melody.
Wall mural, Tykocin, Poland