Curatorial and Educational Challenges in Creating the Holocaust Gallery1

Home , Ringelblum Archive, Stroop Report, Umschlagplatz, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

MARIA FERENC PIOTROWSKA, KAMILA RADECKA-MIKULICZ, AND JUSTYNA MAJEWSKA

ASSUMPTIONS ne of the basic assumptions upon which the narrative of the core exhi- Obition has been constructed is that Jewish history is an inseparable part of Polish history. This axiom applies also to the Holocaust Gallery: the Shoah is portrayed as an integral element of Polish history. A second assumption employed in all the galleries is immersion in the visual language of the historical period and in the perspective of “there and then.” Thus, the narrative of the Holocaust Gallery is based, in part, on documents assembled by the Oyneg Shabes group (the Ringelblum Archive). At the same time, the voices from the past are accompanied by a contemporary museum voice which provides context. This leads to the third assumption: the core exhibition is a space for a recreated “theater of history” which emerges in front of the eyes of visitors, bringing history back to life. This does not, however, imply staging but rather

1 An early version of this article was published as “Wyzwania kuratorskie i edukacyjne związane z tworzeniem galerii Zagłada Wystawy Głównej Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich” [Curatorial and Educational challenges in creating the Holocaust Gallery in the core exhibition of the Museum of Polish Jews] in Auschwitz i Holokaust. Edukacja w szkole i w miejscu pamięci [Auschwitz and the Holocaust. Education in the school and the place of memory], ed. Piotr Trojański (Oświęcim: Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau, 2014), 377–89. 30 Part One Museological Questions

creating dramatic effects which reconstruct iconic places and images of the period represented.2 Within these defined parameters, the curatorial team of the Holocaust Gallery set itself the goal of creating a display that was not “merely” historical, but which, above all, stressed loneliness as the fundamental Jewish experience during those years. This loneliness had various dimensions, both physical, resulting from isolation in ghettos, but also existential, linked to the indifference of the surrounding world to placing the Jews beyond the moral uni- verse of the non-Jewish witnesses.3 In addition to these principles common to all the galleries, the team of the Holocaust Gallery has relied also on specific assumptions relating exclusively to this part of the exhibition. The museum is located in the Muranów district in Warsaw, in the heart of the former Warsaw ghetto, opposite Natan Rapoport’s famous monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto. The Holocaust Gallery is actu- ally situated on a part of what was formerly Zamenhof Street, along which Jews were driven toward the Umschlagplatz, from where they were transported to the Treblinka death camp. Thus, the building’s location creates a link between a real site and historical accounts. In order to underscore this genius loci, special emphasis is placed on the history of the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest ghetto in occupied Europe. While recognizing its uniqueness and specific character, it can be seen as a pars pro toto for other ghettos.

EXHIBITION SPACE The gallery devoted to the Holocaust begins as a continuation of the display on the interwar period. Walking past the facades of apartment blocks, the visitor approaches a photograph of a group of people looking up at the sky. This scene depicts the outbreak of the Second World War: the people are watching a German airplane over Warsaw; the buildings crumble into ruins under the impact of German bombing, and so does the prewar world. The September campaign is presented through the eyes of a sixteen-year- old eyewitness, Stanisław Kramsztyk from Warsaw. Raised in an assimilated

2 For more on the premises of “retelling history,” see Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Theater of History,” in Polin. 1000 Year History of Polish Jews, ed. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Antony Polonsky, Museum of the History of Polish Jews (Warsaw: Museum of the History of the Polish Jews, 2014), 30–35. 3 Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, “Holocaust, 1939–1945,” in Polin. 1000 Year History of Polish Jews, 289–290. Curatorial and Educational Challenges 31

Jewish family, Stanisław cut out of newspapers communiqués about the Polish army’s operations. The communiqués, initially full of élan and optimism, grad- ually became a chronicle of the Polish army’s defeat. Moving further into the gallery, visitors learn in detail about the Soviet and German occupations, as well as about the dynamic process of separating and isolating Jews from the rest of the society in occupied Poland. This followed a sequence of humiliation, visible identification, directives to provide forced labor, confiscation of prop- erty, and ghettoization. The next part of the gallery is devoted to the Warsaw Ghetto. The sealed Jewish district is depicted at two stages of its existence, focusing first on life in the shadow of death and then on the period from the great deportation in summer 1942 to the uprising in the ghetto in April 1943. The narrators leading visitors through the complex and dramatic reality of life in the ghetto are Adam Czerniaków, chairman of the Jewish Council (Judenrat), and Emanuel Ringelblum, the founder of the Oyneg Shabes group—the clandestine archive of the Warsaw Ghetto. Czerniaków represents the official, administrative side of the ghetto’s life; Ringelblum exemplifies the illegal and unofficial one. The narrative is structured around a collision between two conflicting strategies: the German-imposed ruthless regulation of life in the ghetto and Jewish reactions to this imposed reality. The next gallery space is devoted to the “Aryan Side.” Visitors see it for the first time when standing on the bridge tying together the two narratives of the Warsaw ghetto. It plays the role of a link between the story of life in the shadow of death and that of the great deportation in the summer of 1942 and its conse- quences, but the bridge is also a recreation of the footbridge over Chłodna Street in Warsaw linking the small and the large ghettos. In the actual space devoted to the “Aryan Side,” the chronology line takes a detour: the narration begins again in 1940 and culminates in the collapse of the Warsaw uprising in 1944. Here visitors learn about the reality of life in occupied Poland from Polish perspective, molded by the German reign of terror which the Polish Underground State tried to resist. Both these factors deeply affected Polish–Jewish relations during the war. The Aryan Side, leads to the exhibit devoted to Jews in hiding and the complexity of relations between those in need of help and those who helped. By depicting many different stories of such Jews, we attempt to show the whole spectrum of attitudes, from help to betrayal and murder. The next space moves visitors back in time to June 1941 when the Third Reich attacked the Soviet Union and a new stage in the war began. The activities of the Einsatzgruppen are covered here, as are the examples of pogroms carried out by the local population (Lwów and Jedwabne), the operations of 32 Part One Museological Questions

the first death camp—Kulmhof (Chełmno on Ner)—as well as the decisions taken at the 1942 Wannsee Conference, which was followed by Aktion Reinhardt—the murder of Polish Jewry and the transportation of European Jews to death camps located on the territory of the occupied Poland. Only now is the visitor confronted with the German plan for the systematic destruction of the Jews. The next space, the Shoah Corridor, presents the history of two death camps: Auschwitz II–Birkenau and Treblinka II. A dramatic effect forms a coda to the gallery: an empty space, devoid of information, a place for reflection where the visitor can absorb and internalize the losses. Then comes the postwar gallery which opens with the information of what the free world knew about the Holocaust during the war. The narration then focuses on the liberation of the camps and the formation of the so-called Lublin government in July 1944. The narrative in this final gallery continues right down to the present.

CURATORIAL DECISIONS The curatorial challenges we faced were to a great extent linked to the decisions that a curator must take when working on an historical exhibit in a narrative museum. The message the exhibition wants to deliver and hence the visitor’s reactions and conclusions depend on these decisions. We formulated a number of questions while shaping and organizing our narrative:

What is important in our story? What should a visitor take away from the exhibit? Who is the subject of the exhibit’s narrative? Whose perspectives do we want to present in the narrative? Why? How can we use the language of a museum to talk about the Holocaust? How do we define the Holocaust?

This final issue is particularly important, since the definition of the Holocaust influences how it is depicted in the exhibit. The emphasis in the story depends on which school of historiography the curators follow. To some, the Holocaust is synonymous with the “final solution”; others acknowledge that the Holocaust is, above all, the process of physical annihilation.4 In our exhibit, the emphasis

4 Avner Shalev, Dan Michman, David Silberklang, “Ścisła pamięć o Zagładzie w Muzeum Historii Holokaustu w Yad Vashem. Odpowiedź na artykuł Amosa Goldberga” [An accurate Curatorial and Educational Challenges 33 has been placed on “life in the shadow of death”—in other words, on the totality of the Jewish experience in German-occupied Poland: from ghettoization to death. We were especially concerned to show the differences in Jewish attitudes toward persecution. A key component of the authorial concept in the Holocaust Gallery has been to build a narrative based on testimony from the period of the events depicted, from the perspective of “there and then,” not retrospectively. Together with the narrators who describe events, visitors go back to the begin- ning of the war. They see events through the eyes of individuals who do not yet know what is going to happen. This approach allows the visitor to understand that “life in the shadow of death” had the appearance of normality as well as a number of other specific attributes. Of course, visitors are fully aware of what happens later, but the aim of this stratagem is to show the gulf between the contemporary perception of reality, which views events as they develop, and historical knowledge that always examines the past with an awareness of what happened later. Thus, the process of defining the Holocaust is a subconscious theme of our story. Using only contemporaneous texts, we operate in a manner different to many other exhibitions on the Holocaust, which adopt an historical perspective based on the testimony of a small number of survivors. Seen thus, the Shoah becomes inevitable, and the story of any wartime experience is filtered through knowledge of what subsequently happened.

STRATEGY ON TEXTS The basic message is aimed at a typical student in a Polish secondary school and the information is divided into three layers. The first layer usually consists of a photograph or an original quotation (together with a translation) of not more than twenty words. In the Holocaust Gallery, in addition to Polish, visitors encounter Yiddish, Hebrew, and German. It is made very clear what kind of source the visitor is experiencing; who is the author, in what language it was originally written, and in what circumstances. The second layer is usually a commentary expanding on the context of the source. This is no arbitrary text and it is not written from the point of view of an omniscient historian: its aim is more to inquire, inspire, and encourage

memory of the Holocaust in the Yad Vashem Museum of the History of the Holocaust. A response to the article by Amos Goldberg] in Zagłada Żydów. Studia i materiały 7 (2011): 364. 34 Part One Museological Questions

reflection. We convey the third layer of information (in-depth knowledge) using multimedia devices or in narrative captions to the photographs.

TOPOGRAPHY OF THE GALLERY The topography of the Holocaust Gallery reflects its thematic structure. It also creates a symbolic geography of the places we are describing.5 The Warsaw Ghetto section is the most firmly embedded in the topography. We also understand topography metaphorically, as a way of looking at things. We indicate this especially in the case of the bridge over Chłodna street and the “Aryan Side.” From the bridge, joining the two parts of the story of the Warsaw Ghetto, we look down on the street below. From the perspective of the Jews imprisoned in the ghetto, the street appears idyllic, and becomes the object of longing and nostalgia. When visitors later find themselves on the “Aryan Side,” they encounter more closely the Polish experience of the occupation and they realize that the idyll was only illusory. Our aim is to show visitors that the Holocaust occurred in a specific place, and that acceptance of this fact is essential when reflecting on what has happened. On the one hand, occupied Poland was a peripheral country terrorized by the Germans, deprived of its sovereignty and situated far from the eyes of world public opinion, while, on the other hand, it possessed an adequate infra- structure whose scope allowed the Germans to carry out the mass annihilation of Polish and European Jews. The Germans surveyed the sites of future death camps and selected remote and inaccessible spots that made escape difficult. An example of place where the topography plays a specific role is the exhibit on the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw, where Jews destined for deportation to Treblinka were held. To get to the Umschlagplatz space, visitors go down stairs from the mezzanine. On each step, there is a name of a street in the Warsaw ghetto from which Jews were successively evicted. Opposite the stairs there is an enlarged photograph of the Umschlagplatz—a fenced-off stretch of Stawki Street and a view of the street heading east. Visitors see a crowd of people awaiting deportation and German guards. On the floor, there is a

5 In her article “Kicz i Holokaust, czyli pedagogiczny wymiar ekspozycji muzealnych” [Kitsch and the Holocaust, or the pedagogical dimension of museum exhibitions], Zagłada Żydów. Studia i materiały 6 (2010): 74–86, Anna Ziębińska-Witek describes the meaning of the exhibition’s topography; see also Historia w muzeach. Studium ekspozycji Holokaustu [History in museums. A study of the representation of the Holocaust] (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2011), 71–73. Curatorial and Educational Challenges 35 copy of a map of the Umschlagplatz by Henryk Rudnicki, who was there in the summer of 1942, but managed to avoid deportation.

PERSPECTIVES The issue of perspectives is the key concept of the Holocaust Gallery. We use the classic distinction between perpetrators, victims, and bystanders formulated by Raul Hilberg. The victims’ perspective dominates the exhibition. Because of its inner variety and complexity, it would be better to speak of victims’ perspectives. We weave our story from the voices of a great many narrators, who present different, sometimes contradictory attitudes and survival strategies (an example would be the quotation of different opinions after Adam Czerniaków’s suicide). It is important for us to give a voice to as many testimonies as possible, thereby returning to victims their subjectivity and identity, which is not possible in more linear narrations. In the story of the Warsaw Ghetto, the strategies of the victims are delin- eated, above all, by the character of the narrators. Adam Czerniaków, who was the chairman of the Warsaw Jewish Council responsible to the Germans, represents the strategy of surviving by seeking a modus vivendi with the Germans. Emanuel Ringelblum, historian, community organizer, and creator of the underground archive of the ghetto, by contrast, exemplifies the sphere of underground orga- nizations’ activities. In each thematic space in the exhibit devoted to life in the ghetto before the great deportation, the visitor is confronted with these two perspectives, expressed in quotations from Czerniaków’s and Ringelblum’s dia- ries. The visitor will find in each traces of the same ghetto reality, but different approaches to and attempts at solving the ghetto inhabitants’ problems. In the Holocaust Gallery, the perspective of bystanders is the Poles’ perspective, firmly embedded in relations between Poles and Jews. Hence the Bridge over the “Aryan Side” is one of the key points in our narrative—in it, victims gaze at witnesses and witnesses gaze at victims, passing and exchang- ing glances. We feel that the relationship between these two groups must be analyzed in relation to the geographical and cultural contexts in which the Holocaust took place. Focusing on Polish–Jewish relations encourages the visitor to reflect on how these relations developed at the time of the Holocaust in occupied Poland, not what they were like during the Holocaust in general. We have tried to show the difference in the attitudes of Hilberg’s bystanders and underscore that they were active, functioning individuals sometimes having 36 Part One Museological Questions

influence—at times positive, at times negative—on the course of events and on the victims’ fate. The perspective of bystanders to the Holocaust is shown to the visitor in all its complexity. In September 1939, Jews and Poles experienced the opening phases of the war similarly. It was only during the early stages of the occupation when the Germans introduced segregation, discriminatory regulations, and then confined Jews in ghettos that these perspectives diverged. In the section of the gallery called “Aryan Side,” we focus on the Polish experience of the occupation, which formed the Poles’ attitude toward the Holocaust. In three color photographs of the burning Warsaw Ghetto taken during the uprising, we discover the perspective of Poles looking at the ghetto. The pictures were taken from the roof of a building on the “Aryan” side of Warsaw, some distance from the ghetto and from the fire raging there. This is a metaphor for the gulf between the situation of bystanders and victims, as well as for the sharp divi- sion of the city into Jewish and non-Jewish sections. The perpetrators are continuously present throughout the exhibit’s narrative, above all in the visual layer. One of the attributes of their power is the camera which furnished them with the ability to capture in photographs what they saw and how they saw it. Photographs show how German soldiers saw Jews. Soldiers carrying out mass shootings in the East after the invasion of the USSR and those working in death camps took pictures. The Germans treated photographs as trophies, curiosities, personal souvenirs of war—we, however, treat them not as objective documents, but rather as a condensation of the pho- tographer’s impression, which is never objective about its subject.6 This is the case with the report of General Jürgen Stroop, who sup- pressed the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. Stroop prepared a report for Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler titled “The Jewish residential district of Warsaw no longer exists!” To specific daily reports, he attached fifty-three photographs, showing the uprising from the German perspective. Copies of selected pages with photographs in their original dimensions are displayed on one side of a free-standing panel placed in the center of the exhibit presenting

6 See Ziębińska-Witek, Kicz i Holokaust, czyli pedagogiczny wymiar ekspozycji muzealnych, 216–26, Janina Struk, Holokaust w fotografiach. Interpretacja dowodów [The Holocaust in photographs. Interpretation of the evidence], trans. Maciej Antosiewicz (Warsaw: Prószyński i S-ka, 2007) and Amos Goldberg, “Czy w Nowym Muzeum Historii Zagłady Yad Vashem znajdziemy ‘Innego’?” [Can we find the “Other” in the new Yad Vashem Museum of the History of the Holocaust], Zagłada Żydów. Studia i materiały 7 (Warsaw, 2011): 350–51. Curatorial and Educational Challenges 37 the Jewish narrative of the uprising. In this way, we deconstruct Stroop’s report and show the perspective from which it was written. Aware of their ambiguous character, we approach photographs taken by the perpetrators with care. They are a trace, a depiction of a certain slice of vanished reality and sometimes its sole visual record. We intend that the filter through which visitors view them should be the testimony of the victims. A more general concept of using visual material connected to the Holocaust, which is discussed below, has defined the way in which we approach these photographs. Similarly, in the Shoah Corridor the perpetrators’ perspective is confronted with that of the victims. Here the narrative leads to the death camps in Auschwitz II-Birkenau and Treblinka II, and the visitor is faced with information about what took place there. We narrate the story of Treblinka in the words of escapees, presenting fragments of their manuscripts and their sketch- maps of the camp. On the opposite wall, the story of Auschwitz II-Birkenau is narrated from the perpetrators’ perspective, using photographs taken by the Germans of the arrival of a transport of Hungarian Jews at the camp and their path to the gas chambers, with quotations from Rudolf Höss’s autobiography. However, the narrative conclusion to this space, as well as to the whole exhibit on the Holocaust, is depicted through the testimony of the victims: on the final wall of the Shoah Corridor are displayed copies of four illicit photographs taken secretly by members of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau Sonderkommando, as well as an extract of Lejb Langfus’s testimony, which described the murders in the gas chambers.

PHOTOGRAPHS As mentioned above, perpetrators are the authors of most of the photographs displayed in the galleries. Wishing to avoid suggesting to visitors that this German perspective is objective, we consistently emphasize the context in which a photograph was taken. Another problem was whether, in describing the Holocaust, one was glam- orizing horror. Using pictures of dead bodies without careful consideration and removing photographs from the context, place, and situation in which they were taken can mean that they become those thoughtlessly repeated “icons of the Holocaust” that mass culture grinds up and incorporates into its armory. We feared that at a time when “watching the pain of others” has become merely entertainment experienced without great emotion when watching the news, visitors can respond with simple indifference, shutting themselves off from the 38 Part One Museological Questions

content or manifesting an excessively emotional response, which results only in superficial feelings of empathy for the victims.7 Our view is that such photographs have greater impact when they are used sparingly. We have considered carefully every case where we used photographs. For instance, to support the narrative about religious life in the Warsaw Ghetto, we use an enlarged photograph of a corpse clothed in rags with the face covered with a newspaper. The photograph is accompanied by a text on the collapse of the traditions associated with death and funeral rituals. In the Warsaw Ghetto, most Jews were unable to afford the luxury of burying a family member—in the shadow of the extreme destitution that was rife in the ghetto, it was common to leave corpses on the street. We interpret the gesture of covering a dead per- son’s face with a newspaper as an attempt to preserve cultural norms in extreme circumstances.

BETWEEN AESTHETICS AND THE ETHICS OF REPRESENTATION The meta-rule of the Holocaust Gallery is minimalism. The use of each text, photograph, or item is justified by the constructed narrative. In this way, we wanted to enter into a dialogue with the visitor, to encourage him or her to make the effort to create meanings for the exhibit’s constituent elements. It was important for us that the Holocaust Gallery not rely on facile emotions that the visitor would quickly shake off. This premise defined the character of the gallery’s conclusion. The Holocaust is not part of a logical historical con- tinuum, a continuation or natural outcome of earlier developments. Hence, in the POLIN core exhibition, the Holocaust Gallery has not been made part of any larger structure; no message is drawn from it and no final interpretation of it has been made. We agree with Anna Ziębińska-Witek that exhibitions that provide visitors an opportunity for individual interpretation should be made difficult for them. In her words: “Unfinished and ambiguous stories require engagement of the visitor, forcing a confrontation with his or her expectations which are linked with a specific way of ‘telling history.’”8 Our goal has been to find a form for this story that will discourage visitors either from slipping into facile sentimentalism or retreating into indifference. Hence, the principal narrative method is the written word—a medium to which the victims had access (as distinct from photography, which was a

7 Ziębińska-Witek, “Kicz i Holokaust, czyli pedagogiczny wymiar ekspozycji muzealnych.” 8 Ibid. Curatorial and Educational Challenges 39

medium to which mainly the perpetrators had access). Hence a certain amount of effort is required from the visitor to access the gallery’s message; the more detailed the information desired, the greater the effort. We have indicated a clear boundary between seeing events from a Jewish perspective, which we invite our visitors to do, and building a sense of false identification between visitors and victims. This identification can be a strategy for visitors to help block out feelings of unease and depression.9 This, in our view, is an aesthetic which is melodramatic in character since it expresses crisis and menace, but also immediately restores the moral order. It also means that the nightmare of the Holocaust becomes easier to assimilate10 and can even become somewhat uplifting.11 We have wanted contact with the various perspectives of bystanders, victims, and perpetrators, which we present in the exhibit, to block such pro- cesses. We hope that visitors will understand that experiencing the Shoah as such is not possible for them and that the goal of the exhibit is not to create a simulation of this experience.

INTERPRETATION The exhibit is not a finished text, but like every text it possesses its own auton- omy. We do not have the tools which would give us full control over the visitors’ experience. Experiencing the exhibit is a far more complete experience than reading about it: the dramatic effect, the exhibit’s aural and visual layers, and the presence of other visitors are also significant. Visitors’ convictions, their emotional readiness to engage with the content presented, the knowledge with which they start their visit, also play a key role. It should be emphasized that the interpretation presented here is only one of many possible. From the moment of the opening of the core exhibition, the Holocaust Gallery began its own life, independent of our control. It is for visitors to decide whether the curators’ and scholars’ vision is comprehensible, and whether our goals have been at least partially achieved.

Translated by Jarosław Garliński

9 Goldberg, “Czy w Nowym Muzeum,” 353. 10 Amos Goldberg, “Głos ofiary i estetyka melodramatu w historii” [The voice of a victim and the aesthetics of melodrama in history], Zagłada Żydów. Studia i materiały 5 (2009): 231. 11 Goldberg, “Czy w Nowym Muzeum,” 356–57.