TERESA BALUK-ULEWICZOWA GRETCHEN ENGLE SCHAFFT

An Unknown Tadeusz Kantor: The Institut Für Deutsche Ostarbeit Period

Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990) is one of Poland’s most renowned icons in the arts. Beginning as a painter, he became best known for his avant garde theatrical stage events, which were variously refened to as theatre of the grotesque, Dadaist, postmodem, and abstract. Kantor produced “happenings” on stage and took a role in his productions, often directing the action from a chair or in the midst of the actors themselves. Kantor’s work eventually became well known abroad, as well as in Poland, and he produced his stage events in France, Italy, and the United States, as well as other countries. Although Kantor wrote a great deal of theoretical and poetic essays about his work, he was more abstract when it came to his personal biography, particularly the years of the German occupation of Poland (1939-1944). He used autobiographical material both in his artworks and in his dramatic creations, but it was so disguised that it was left open for interpretation (Kobialka 1993). There is, however, a period in his life which seems to have exerted a tremendous influence on his oeuvre, but which so far has evaded the attention of Kantor researchers, critics and biographers. It is the seven-months between September 1, 1942 and March 31, 1943. This was a period during the occupation when he was employed in the Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit (IDO), a German umbrella organization comprised of 11 separate units called “sections” designed to expedite the confiscation of Polish assets under a scientific cover, produce propaganda, and determine the ethnic (“racial”) composition of the Polish population. Its leading figure was Hans Frank who developed the physical and operational institutes primarily in Nazi- occupied Krakow with several outposts (Frank 1942). 14 Teresa Baluk-Ulewiczowa and Gretchen Engle Schafft

In this chapter, we discuss Kantor’s work, the work of the IDO, and the potential for further analysis of Kantor’s artistic contribution using this relatively unknown period of his life. We use two sources of information that have not been readily available to Kantor scholars in the past: (1) the archives of the IDO that are found in the Jagiellonian University (Archiwum Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego), referred to in this paper as UJA) and in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C (National Anthropological Archives, referred to in this paper as NAA); and (2) information from several Polish surveillance reports compiled by a secret AK (Home Army) observation unit operating within the IDO under the direction of Professor Mieczysław Małecki.1 All of these document sources have become available only in the last decade. Malecki’s archives were known to only a few individuals before a selection from them was published in 2004. After his release from Dachau (21 December 1940) where he had been sent following the arrest of Krakow’s professors and their imprisonment in concentration camps (6 November 1939), Małecki organized clandestine university classes under cover of work in the IDO on Slavic studies.2 Most of the

'The Bień Archive was collated by Adam Bień (1899-1998), one of the domestic ministerial representatives of the Polish Govcmmcnt-in-Exile, captured after the War by the Soviets, tried and imprisoned in the Łubianka Jail. In 1945 Bień hid this deposit of Pol­ ish government documents under the floorboards of a country cottage and only disclosed them in 1997, donating the collection to the Jagiellonian Library. It has been published in a large volume: Archiwum Adama Bienia. Akta narodowościowe (1942-1944). Eds. Brzeski Jan, and Adam Roliński. Kraków: Biblioteka Jagiellońska and Księgarnia Akademicka, 2001 (the original typescript documents are preserved by Fundacja Centrum Dokumen­ tacji Czynu Niepodległościowego in the Jagiellonian Library). For the document relating to the Institut fur Deutsche Ostarbeit (IDO), see p. 176-181. Other AK interim reports on the IDO, which served as the draft information for Bicń’s final version to be sent to the Polish govcmmcnt-in-cxile in London, have been preserved in the private collection of Col. Stanislaw Dąbrowa-Kostka, an AK officer, and only recently published. Further materials on the IDO secretly drafted or removed by its Polish employees come from the Małecki family collection, now preserved by Andrzej R. Małecki. For transcripts, fac­ similes and a bibliographical description of the relevant Polish underground documents on the IDO see Bałuk-Ulcwiczowa, Teresa. Wyzwolić..., 15-97, 291-292, and facsimile photographs nos. 1-29. 2Polish nationals who worked for the IDO rarely did so voluntarily. There were few options for those who were called to such service by the Germans and even those who “voluntarily” worked for one or another of the sections, had few options for survival aside from this. Involvement with the Nazi regime remains a contested subject in today’s Poland. Mieczysław Małecki was officially appointed by the authorities of the Jagiellonian Univcr- An Unknown Tadeusz Kantor ... 15 other Polish underground surveillance reports in private collections, like their ultimate edition in the recently published Bień Archives, were kept hidden and virtually inaccessible for decades. Thanks to the interest the IDO has aroused in recent years, we have managed to reach documents hitherto unknown to researchers and review some known but neglected archival materials. The IDO materials that Schaffi uncovered in the Smithsonian and archived with Gerhard Zeidler in 1996 were complementary to the ma­ terials found in 119 folders of the IDO collection in the Jagiellonian University archives and approximately the same quantity (Schafft and Zeidler 1998). The IDO archives held at the Jagiellonian University comprise a variety of official documents and semi-private papers and letters, working copies of academic papers and articles, press cuttings and notes once held by the IDO and abandoned in Kraków in 1945 when the Germans fled the city.3 The IDO holdings in the Smithsonian are comprised of primary research documents, including questionnaires completed in a variety of locations in occupied Poland, hair samples, finger prints, and photos. (Jagiellonian University now has the original collection and the NAA has retained a digitized copy.) In this cornucopia of source-materials for researchers of the history of Nazi occupation of Poland, records of the IDO’s Polish employees make up a decidedly small but interesting part of the collection, and they include a few doc­ uments with new biographical facts relating to Tadeusz Kantor. Kantor was bom in Wielopole, a small town near Rzeszów (now southeastern Poland) in 1915, when his father was already fighting on the Eastern Front during the First World War. After the restoration of Poland’s independence and the end of the World War I (November sity operating in secret to direct undercover university teaching and also to invigilate the activities of the IDO. See Bałuk-Ulcwiczowa, op. cit.; and an over 1 000 page volume of Jagiellonian University academics’ testimonials on wartime activities: Michalewicz, Jerzy (cd.). Relacje pracowników Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego o ich losach osobistych i dzie­ jach uczelni w czasie drugiej wojny światowej. Archiwum Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Seria F: Varia, Tom 5. Kraków: Secesja, 2005; X, LXV-LXXXV1 (English Introduc­ tion), LXXXVII-XCVIII (Bibliography), For Polish academics’ testimonials on the IDO sec: 47, 58, 144, 496-^198, 647-648, 649-650, 652-654, 746-747, 777, 788, 798-799, 801-807, 885, 917-918, 921, 923,926, 927,928,930, 1054. 3For an account in English on the Polish documents, see Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, op. cit., Summary (265-278); and Michalewicz, op. cit., LXV-LXXXIV. 16 Teresa Baluk-Ulewiczowa and Gretchen Engle Schafft

1918), his father stayed in the Polish Army and fought in the Polish- Soviet War of 1920-1921 and probably the Third Silesian Uprising (1921). He never returned to his wife and children. During the Sec­ ond World War he was imprisoned in Tarnów Jail by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz, where he died on 1 April 1942 and, it is sur­ mised, executed by rifle squad at the notorious Death Wall. Tadeusz only saw his father once in his life, as he writes in commentaries to his plays. His mother took her children and went to live with her mother, who was the housekeeper of an uncle, Father Józef Radoniewicz, parish priest of Wielopole. In 1925, the family moved to Tarnów and Kantor attended the local secondary school, doing well in the humanities and languages. He took part in the “political life of the school” (Kobiałka 4). He entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków in 1933 and studied painting and stage design, showing an interest in Bauhaus and construction, as well as symbolism during his stud­ ies. Almost nothing more is known of his life before he entered the world of theater and the arts, and although he put numerous biographical details (including members of his family as characters) into his stage productions it seems that he also took great pains to cloak other facts from his personal life in mystery. Following Kantor’s lead, a major compiler and translator of his work stated,

In resisting the temptation to provide a biographical essay, a composite history of the artist’s life that establishes links, patterns or influences for the reader I follow Kantor’s suggestion in “Today is My Birthday” that a single interpretation rigidities thinking processes. An artist’s life and an artistic process escape the strategy of biography, which seeks to impose restrictive and restricting temporal boundaries on them. (Kobiałka xix)

However, we know the context in which Kantor lived. Poland was invaded by the Nazis in September 1939 when he was twenty four years old. Soon thereafter, Kraków was occupied and Kantor, who had founded a puppet theatre while at the Academy, started an underground theatre where experimental theatre productions were mounted in private apartments and venues out of sight of the German forces. To have been caught could have meant death. An Unknown Tadeusz Kantor ... 17

The Institut fur Deutsche Ostarbeit’s (IDO) Section on Race and Volkstum (Ethnology) Research (SVE) hired Tadeusz Kantor in 1942. As a Pole, he was paid about 25% of what his German “colleagues” were paid, but the wage was probably very necessary for his existence. IDO records indicate that his responsibilities were in the part of the SRV called the “Referat Ethnologie” under Anton Pliigel and Elfriede Fliethmann, anthropologists from Vienna. He was employed as “artist (Zeichner) at the time working on ethnological drawings.4 We do know, however, what activities the Section was engaged in during this time period. This information comes from the Smithsonian National Anthropological Archives and the Jagiellonian University Archives. We also have some notes on his activities from the Polish resistance files. Tadeusz Kantor’s Arbeitskarte (employment record card, issued by the Nazi occupation authorities) survives in the Juliusz Słowacki Theater Archives.5 The Ideology and Mission of the SR V. Of the eleven parts of the IDO which were called “sections,” that on Race of Volkstum Research” was the most directly involved in the fate of Polish individuals and groups during the occupation. Its mission was to work with Nazi agencies and departments to further its programs of racial separation and efforts to build hierarchies of different ethnic and cultural groups. To do this, the Section SRV cast “a thick ethnographic net” over Poland, investigating dozens of villages to sort people and send them to their various fates as dictated by Nazi policy. Those close to German heritage would be

4Jagiellonian University Archives, Folder 70, “Aufbau und Pcrsonalstand der Sektion Rasscn und Volkstumsforschung.” Also UJA IDO Folder 10, a letter dated 15 September 1942, signed by Dr. S. Dannbeck, the IDO’s Deputy Director for Finances, requesting the Institute’s pay-office to put Tadeusz Kantor, working in the SRV as of 1 September 1942, on the IDO payroll. From 14 September 1942 to 15March 1943 Tadeusz Kantor was paid out a salary of 382-387 zloty every 15th (or 14th) day of the month (UJA IDO Folder 12). 5Bahik-Ulcwiczowa, op. cit., 80, 85, 100, facsimile photo nos. 30 and 31 (Kantor’s Arbeitskarte). Also Baluk-Ulcwiczowa, Teresa. “Tadeusz Kantor mało znany - okres pracy w Institut filr Deutsche Ostarbcit” (conference paper delivered in Kraków, 3 March 2007, forthcoming in a Polish conference proceedings volume). Sec below, footnotes 18 and 19. For a full description of the IDO, sec Gretchen Schafft. From Racism to Genocide..., op. cit., 11, 15-36, 84-114, 115, 122-123, 157, 180-182, 191-192, 197-199, 231-232. From the document in the Adam Bień Archive (op. cit., 181); transcript in Baluk- Ulewiczowa, Teresa. Wyzwolić..., op. cit., 20. Translated from Polish by T. Bahik- Ulcwiczowa. 18 Teresa Baluk-Ulewiczowa and Gretchen Engie Schafft sent either to the military or to the pre-occupation German state to work for the Reich. Those further from the “Aryan” ideal would be placed in appropriate work camps in Poland or Germany. Those who were deemed undesirable would be sent to ghettos, concentration camps, slave labor, or death camps. We know from the archival papers that Tadeusz Kantor entered the IDO on September 1, 1942 to work as a technischer Zeichner (tech­ nical graphics artist). At this time there were 10-20 Polish Hilfskräfte (academic assistants) working on technical tasks for their German su­ pervisors who bridged no question or disobedience. But even draconian supervision was not 100% effective, for the Polish workers managed to write their observations and remove some documents regarding the IDO’s activities from the Institute. Here is the passage on the SRV from the period of Kantor’s employment, as described in the secret report that was eventually put into Minister Biefi’s Archive.

In the ethnographic section are four German staff. Apart from the already mentioned head of the section, Dr. N ieman [sic], a dozen! of the University of Königsberg, there are also Dr. Fliethmann, Sydow, and one Stark. The Polish employees of this section are used exclusively for ancillary services, such as calculations on the data collected, translations from Polish, the compilation of registers [gross/y misspelled in the Polish text]. The only independent project being carried out in this section [by a Pole, Prof. Małecki} is the “Dictionary of German Loan-Words in Polish,” which is being compiled with effectively no German supervision at all.6

The underground document goes on to explain what different mem­ bers of the staff were researching at the moment. The various ethno­ graphic and linguistic efforts appear to be topics that would have in­ terested anthropologists in non-Nazi countries as well. The difference was the immediate and long-term effects of these efforts, for depending on their “findings,” which were totally subjective despite the effort to make quantitative physical measurements and produce questionnaires that could have been analysed but were not, the Polish people received what amounted to a life sentence as described previously and their hu­ man rights were abridged to the point of death.

6From the document in the Adam Bień Archive (op. cit., 181); transcript in Baluk- Ulewiczowa. An Unknown Tadeusz Kantor ... 19

In a synopsis of a surveillance report of about 6 000 words on the SRV for 1942 and 1943, compiled by its Polish staff, who collected the data for Prof. Małecki Kantor is mentioned twice, with no first name given, as part of a group of 12 Poles admitted to the Section in 1942. On the second mention of his name, more details were provided, and it reads as follows: “Kantor ? Artist (painter), making drawings and maps for Dr. Sydow. Terminated employment on own request. Resident in Kraków.”7 This information is confirmed by an official letter dated 29 March 1943 from Dr. Riemann, the Section’s head, to Dr. Dannbeck, the IDO’s deputy director responsible for financial affairs, which explains that the Pole, Tadeusz Kantor, employed in the SRV as an artist for drawing, is leaving the IDO as of April first on his own request, for employment as an artist in the Staatstheater (viz. the Juliusz Słowacki Theater under German management). Kantor’s Arbeitskarte (Nazi-issued employment record card) has fortunately survived, and alongside the IDO documenta­ tion, confirms the dates of his employment in the IDO and in the theater. What is more important, however, is the context of what was going on in the SRV and the IDO as a whole during Kantor’s period of em­ ployment, for that is the most likely period for him to have known the details of the subjugation of Poles by this Nazi institution.8 A request for a technical artist was made by the director of the SRV to the per­ sonnel department of the IDO on January 27, 1942. The person named in that letter as requested for the position was Alojzy Siwecki, a thirty year old assistant in the Academy of Art in Kraków, the same institu­ tion that Kantor had attended.9 As Siwecki’s name never appears in the personnel lists, it might be assumed that Kantor was hired in his stead. The job description said: [this employee] would be largely independent doing cartography work, especially cartography for the Atlas for Folk Studies, and also illustrations for ethnographic work and technical and cartographical drawings for the purpose of racial studies.

7The original typescript is in the Małecki family collection, and it contains a variety of types of information, including several lists of the Section's German and Polish personnel. See transcript in Bałuk-Ulewieżowa. Wyzwolić..., op. cit., 79-94, especially 80 and 85. 8Of course, we have no direct evidence of what he personally observed or knew of IDO’s range of activities. ’Archiwum Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego (JUA), IDO Collection, Folder 70. 20 Teresa Baluk-Ulewiczowa and Gretchen Engle Schafft

And what were the anthropologists of the SVR doing in their re­ search? The research in question was generally fieldwork in which one or more German anthropologists would visit a town or village where the local Gauleiter (or SS chief) provided them with appropriate working conditions. They asked for a large hall or room at least 9 meters long, in which they would set up their equipment and conduct measurements on the local population, usually brought in under police escort. The Ger­ mans would be attended by a group of several Polish assistants, who were to help with the collection of data. The data collection differed widely. As many as a dozen different questionnaires and examining forms were used in different locations and various anthropometric and physical specimens were taken. Sometimes as many as 40 different body measurements were taken, and subjects were photographed in a variety of poses, clothed or unclothed. Fingerprints and imprints of the palms might be taken, and calipers used to make outlines of the head circum­ ferences. Subjects were referred to as “material” and the researchers felt no need to impart information to the subjects or the assistants, of the ultimate purpose of the research. The Polish assistants might have sus­ pected or guessed from the general tone of the articles published. The underground reports tell us that whenever the opportunity arose they would advise examined subjects of what to expect, how to behave, and how to answer the innumerable questionnaires. We do not know whether Tadeusz Kantor the “technical artist” took part in the field trips, but it seems highly likely he was at Szaflary during the study. His permanent workplace was in the Section’s headquarters at 8 sw. Anny (then Annagasse), but to be able to carry out his duties he must have seen the “exhibits” and “specimens” brought back from field trips. As Germany’s military situation deteriorated, the IDO’s status changed from an institution involved in a broad range of activities and political propaganda based on a perverted concept of the humanities and social sciences, transforming many of the institutes into a research and development station for the natural and technical sciences geared directly to military needs. (Racial studies were considered a national priority and the SRV adapted with sub-groups reflecting this.) At this time, perhaps the surveillance of the Polish staff was in­ creased. At any rate, the Polish resistance authorities reported a danger­ ous situation for their compatriots in the employ of the Germans: An Unknown Tadeusz Kantor ... 21

On its departure for their last “outing” to Wawrzeńczyce the group [of the SRV’s Polish staff] could sense that they would soon be dismissed, but not even in their wildest dreams could they have expected to be sent not just packing, but to jail. On 26 March 1943 almost the entire group was accused of sabotage and was escorted by Kripo secret agents to prison. The [alleged] sabotage was the theft of 14 books, a typewriter and a microscope. (The typewriter and microscope were found in another IDO building one or two days later.) After their interrogations even the police thought the accusations nonsensical and having threatened them with Auschwitz just in case and carried out searches in the accused’ houses, released them all on the following day. Dr. Riemann, the chief of the section, was sympathetic with regard to those who were arrested, but unfortunately off sick. Most of the Polish workers were dismissed from work.10

We do not know whether Tadeusz Kantor was among those ar­ rested. The official German IDO documents make no mention at all of the peculiar form of group redundancy administered on his colleagues, while his biographer Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz writes that about this time Kantor was offered assistance by the Cracovian theater critic Tadeusz Kudliński, who was charged with looking after young artists on behalf of the Polish underground authorities (Pleśniarowicz 47). We also do not know how Kudliński managed to reach Kantor, but perhaps thanks to the campaign of observation and registration carried out by Małecki on the Polish staff of the IDO. There are at least four general lists of the IDO’s Polish employees extant in the Polish surveillance reports, and they provide many personal details. However, they do not enumerate all the Polish employees in the IDO and, remarkably, apart from the 6 000 word preliminary report for 1942 and 1943, none of the four overall lists mentions Tadeusz Kantor.

,0From the Polish surveillance report on the SRV for 1942 and 1943 (in the Małecki family collection), transcript in Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, Wyzwolić..., op. cit., 81 (translation by T. Bałuk-Ulewiczowa). This “outing” was a regular anthropological field trip in which hair samples, head circumferences, and psychological tests were conducted on as many as 377 people from the population of Wawrzeńczyce. The raw data are found in the NAA, IDO Collection, boxes 35 and 36. For more details of the same event in the secret Polish account, see Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, Wyzwolić..., op. cit., 91. See also AUJ, IDO Folder 71 for Elfriede Fliethmann’s letter of 21 March 1943 to the Kreishauptmann of Miechów thanking him for organizing the “research facilities” in Wawrzeńczyce. 22 Teresa Baluk-Ulewiczowa and Gretchen Engie Schafft

In Małecki’s detailed underground report on the SRV for 1942 and 1943, we leant that Kantor’s current duties were making the maps and illustrations for Dr. Ingeborg Sydow’s article on the Goralenvolk (moun­ tain people inhabiting the Polish Tatras around Zakopane: the Nazis endeavored to prove that the “Goralenvolk” were racially a different “Volk” from the Poles and had separate Goralenvolk ID and food-ration cards prepared for them) in the village of Szaflary, which was pub­ lished in the IDO’s scholarly periodical Deutsche Forschung im Osten (Sydow 305-322). There is further information on the background to this three-part article in the surviving Polish underground reports, ac­ cording to which

it was very poor quality work as a piece of scholarship. Its author, whose knowledge of Polish, not to mention the language of the alleged Goralenvolk, was extremely limited, could not manage with the material on her own and it was easy for her Polish assistants to manipulate her work. Thanks to “assistance” from Poles employed in the IDO (chiefly Prof. Małecki and the Polish staff of the SRV, but also from Juliusz Zborowski, Director of the Tatra Museum in Zakopane, who was obliged under wartime conditions to work in association with the IDO), Sydow eventually published a paper which discredited her academically and failed to prove that the Goralenvolk were a different “nation” from the Poles. Malecki’s team claimed this as a success.11 although it could not have been a particularly difficult task to achieve judging by Sydow’s poor academic quality and the deplorably untidy condition of the manuscript she submitted for publication, which sur­ vives in the Jagiellonian University Archives IDO collection. This is not to say that Sydow’s senior colleagues in the IDO were engaged on impeccably objective scholarship. Nonetheless, Deutsche Forschung im

11 As reported in the Polish surveillance reports and Malecki’s postwar letter to the Rector of the Jagiellonian University: sec transcripts and facsimiles in Bahik-Ulcwiczowa, Wyzwolić..., op. cit., 16, 20 (the Bień Archive), 26, 35,49, 54-55, 62, facsimile photo nos. 2, 4, 14, 15, 19; and Malecki’s postwar letter, 71 (ibid ): “Asked for my opinion on Ms. Sydow’s paper on Szaflary, 1 induced her to remove the properly recorded material on the dialect and replace it with material recorded in standard Polish spelling, which was of course nonsense and frustrated the principal aim of her work, namely to show the differences between the language of the Górale and Polish.” (translation T. Baluk- Ulewiczowa). An Unknown Tadeusz Kantor ... 23

Osten had a substantial circulation and today copies are to be found in many libraries throughout the world. Strangely, only the fascicle with the last of its three installments - an unillustrated part - is extant today (2007) in the IDO collection of the Jagiellonian University Archives. The issues with Parts 1 and 2, which contain maps and drawings, are catalogued but missing from the Jagiellonian University. Fortunately the full article survives in the library of the Tatra Museum, Zakopane, and with it, the illustrations which on the grounds of the information given in the report compiled by the Polish employees of the SRV may most likely be attributed to Tadeusz Kantor. Another article that most likely was illustrated by Tadeusz Kantor was “Das Deutsche Volk und die Völker Osteuropas. Ein Volksbiolo­ gische Skizze” (The German People and the Peoples of Eastern Europe. An Outline on Peoples and Biology) by Elfriede Fliethmann, published in July 1943 in the IDO’s elegant and heavily subsidized propaganda quarterly, Die Burg. Fliethmann, who for a time in 1942 performed the duties of head of the SRV and was Kantor’s superior, is described in the Bień Archive report as having recently worked on this article. It would have been absolutely natural for her to require her subordi­ nate, an art school graduate, to draw the statistical diagrams for the publication. Fliethmann had collected data for a longer study of the Jews in the ghetto in Tarnów. She undertook this study in March and April of 1942 before Kantor’s employment with the IDO with a colleague from Vienna, Dora Kahlich. They were interested in comparing the Jews in Vienna with the Jews in the ghetto, although they had no plan as to how to proceed. They believed that the Viennese Jews had been sent in large numbers to Tarnów. It is clear from the correspondence between the two women that they knew that the Jews were being murdered, and by October 1942, the date at which Kantor entered the employ of the IDO, only 8 000 of the original 40 000 ghetto inhabitants were still there. Kahlich had written to Fliethmann asking her to find out the fate of a half-Jewish man and his children who had been given a reprieve by the Viennese courts, but could no longer be located in Poland. Fliethmann answered: 24 Teresa Baluk-Ulewiczowa and Gretchen Engle Schafft

Do you still think that it makes sense to support them? They are never going to get away from there, or at least only further east, for at this time it is being thoroughly cleaned up here again. I cannot investigate any Jews in Galicia anymore. Of the Tamower, there are only 8 000 left, but as Bernhardt said, almost none of ours (are left). Our material has, therefore, a rare value.12 13

Kantor was very familiar with the city of Tarnów and would certainly have had an interest in the fate of those living there. However, the dates of his involvement with the IDO do not match those of the study nor do they indicate necessarily that he was involved in studies of Jewish populations. It appears that he was directly involved with less serious topics, those surrounding architecture, for example. It seems clear, how­ ever, that he would have had knowledge of the anthropologists’ other activities through his fellow workers, for the Polish contingent in the anthropology field trips were not considered reliable by the German professionals and had many formal and legal, as well as informal and illegal, connections with one another. Fliethmann described an incident during one of her fieldtrips to Hańczowa:

The investigations in Hańczowa were again a handicap-race, as one can only wish with train delays, wagon rides in the night in typical Polish farm carts, unexpected overnight, luckily in orderly Meierhof [farms of people of German heritage]. After Hańczowa, the rebellion on the part of the population was again very strong, so that we could only [do our] work with the help of the border patrol and police. I, naturally, was once again half dead from anger..

Other studies by the anthropologists in the SRV during Kantor’s period of employment included Gołkowice, Stary Sącz (Alt-Sandez), Langenau (Czermin), Schónanger (Szenanger), Hohenbach (Czermin - Kolonia), Borowa, and Weizenbring (Pławska Wola). Curiously, the village of Hohenbach (now Czermin, near the city of Mielec), was the birthplace of Kantor’s father. All of these communities were thought to have inhabitants with some German heritage and the anthropologists intended to find out if any of them could be “saved for the Reich.”

I2UJA Folder 70, Letter from Fliethmann to Kahlich, no discernable date, perhaps early October 1942 (translated by G. E. Schafft). Sec also Schafft, op.cit., 15-36. 13UJA Folder 70, Letter from Dr. Fliethmann to Dr. Kahlich, no date. An Unknown Tadeusz Kantor ... 25

The grotesque in everyday life must have been sensed by all the Poles assisting the German anthropologists in their research which was “important for German victory,” since it was to provide the scientific grounds for racial selection and the final destiny of particular “races” as determined by the Nazi decision-makers. At any rate this was the argument put forward by the SRV researchers in their recurrently lodged, and continually unsuccessful, applications for essential equipment such as a Contax camera. Kantor must have seen the equipment used to record the over 40 body measurements. He must have seen the calipers used to measure the heads of Polish subjects. He must have felt the indecency of intrusion, the imminence of death, the threat in what appeared to be banal actions. He was aware of the manipulation of bodies, of fences, cages, imprisonment in make-shift containers. He knew the danger in giving wrong answers and in the inevitability of death for those singled out for that fate. He must have known of the special danger facing twins for the re­ search value was high and they were sent to Auschwitz when discovered in the anthropological investigations. He knew of the Nazi fascination of making plaster casts and figures of the people they hoped to later eliminate. Kantor’s work can be characterized by the use of a particular kind of stagecraft, set design, acting and on-stage direction. He was constantly working on the themes of the two sides of a situation: construction and destruction, barbarity and subtlety, tragedy and coarse laughter.14 Kantor himself stated that in 1943 and 1944, “I lost confidence in the painted object, the representation of the thing. As a consequence, I began to find everyday objects.... I understood that the poor object, the wom unusable object was available for art.”15 Could he have referred

'‘’“The Theater of Tadeusz Kantor.” Facets Video. Centre National Recherches Scien­ tifiques, 1991 (hereafter referred to as Video). For an English account of some of Kantor’s ideas on art, cf. Pleśniarowicz, Krzysztof. The Dead Memory Machine. Tadeusz Kantor's Theatre of Death. Translated from Polish by William Brand. Kraków: Cricoteka, 1994, 34-35 (reality and the accidental), 38-39 (art: illusion and reality). 15 Video; Cf. Tadeusz Kantor. Pisma. Metamorfozy. Teksty o latach 1934—1974. Tom pierwszy pism Ed. Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz. Kraków: Ossolineum and Cricoteka, 2005, 12-13: “In ’46 and ’47 work became the subject of my painting.... Work and poverty.... The object deprived of its function and raison d’être ... is, by that very ‘poverty,’ capable of undertaking the function of a work of art.” 26 Teresa Baluk-Ulewiczowa and Gretchen Engie Schafft to the worn and unusable “Object” or “Material” that the Germans had so badly mishandled? Did these human objects morph into non-human objects and machines to be manipulated by the artist, who for a time had not been able to control his own destiny? “In the ‘Emballage of Packaging Manifesto,’ I wrote of that the object lies between eternity and garbage.”16 Is he referring to the fate of the Polish Jews? “For me, the object is death. ... One day I realized that the objects can be used like a machine. I called them bio-objects in other words, the object becomes the machine when the living person, that is, man becomes involved in the project.”17 In 1955, Kantor formed the Cricot Theater, a group of artists and professionals and non-professionals. Their ideal was freedom, indepen­ dence, autonomy, risk, and challenging “givens.” In one of their plays, the “Wardrobe,” actors are squeezed into the wardrobe, into bags and wait to escape. Kantor describes them as the lowest rung of humanity, men hanging from coathangers. In “Emballage,” people are enveloped in bags that devour them. In “Let the Artists Die,” and “The Dead Class,” the themes are the round of life, death, and memory. In the latter, the actors are burdened with mannequins representing dead people that they carry on their backs to their school benches. “The benches are a memory machine ... used to trigger memory.”18 In another visual image, “The cradle is also a mechanical machine. It’s cruel because there is no child. The role of the machines is to replace or eliminate the psyche or psy­ chological process.... Machines are a human mousetrap always ready

16 Video; original Polish text inTadeusz Kantor. Pisma. Metamorfozy..., op. cit., 302. 17 Video; cf. Pleśniarowicz, The Dead Memory Machine..., op. cit., 43: “Emballage ... is a 'wrapping' over many human affaire; it shelters poverty, uselessness, helplessness, dcfencelessness, disinterestedness, hope, ridiculousness.” (quoted after Kobiałka, op. cit., 81-82). “Now the OBJECT became the medium. Autonomous, aelf-contained. L’OBJET D’ART. Having one peculiarity: its own, live organs: ACTORS. That is why I called it THE BIO-OBJECT.” (Kantor’s 1980 essay “Miejsce teatralne” (Theater Place). Original Polish text in Tadeusz Kantor. Pisma. Teatr śmierci..., op. cit.) (translated by T. Baluk- Ulewiczowa). 18 Video. The benches arc described in several passages of Kantor’s Partytura to “The Dead Class,” eg. “Benches like catafalques” (Tadeusz Kantor. Pisma. Teatr śmierci..., op. cit., 49). The "human creatures with the dead bodies of children growing out of their backs” that sit in them are described as AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL SPECIMEN (Ibid., 52). An Unknown Tadeusz Kantor ... 27 to snap down on a victim.”19 Kantor’s presence in “The Dead Child” is acute. Meticulously he takes care of the child mannequins, he caresses the dead children. He stops the cruelty and conducts the choir of the departing. Old people play cards with their death notices. In an interview recorded on video, Kantor gives a reason why he is so interested in death: “Perhaps when I was six years old... I witnessed the death of that priest. For a child, the moment of death... I was witness when my grandfather died. I was in the room and afterwards saw the corpse in the coffin. I didn’t understand anything and yet I witnessed death. For the child it is a profound experience, so perhaps the notion of death that appeared in my childhood is apparent in the theater of death.”20 He later spoke of his unwillingness to “take advantage of death” and thus never directly showing death in his productions. “It is very easy when death is shown in the theater, there is always the hope of a stage success, but I don’t want to take advantage of that notion of art. .. .In other words, I do all I can to describe death on stage by formal, purely formal [means], I mean no one dies. I don’t represent the moment of death. But I use many purely scenic means which only give the illusion of death.”21 Kantor always incorporated twins into his productions. His state­ ments about them might also be interpreted in light of Auschwitz.

I always found the twins ... the twins are almost commedia dell’arte char­ acters. They always play twins with all the consequences, because the twins are very close tragic characters, comic and tragic. There are no twins in

Video; One of the characters in the play, The Woman With The Mechanical Cradle, sings a Yiddish lullaby to the non-cxistcnt child Tadeusz Kantor. Pisma. Teatr śmierci... Teksty z lat 1975-1984. Tom drugi pism Ed. Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz. Kraków: Ossolineum and Cricoteka, 2004, 164. 20 Video; In “Wielopole, Wielopole” the Mannequin of the Priest dies nailed to the cross, while the Little Rabbi rushes onto the stage singing a Yiddish nursery rhyme and is shot by a firing squad. The Priest picks up the Little Rabbi, who starts to sing again and is again shot. The sequence is repeated several times “according to the theater's custom" (Tadeusz Kantor. Pisma. Teatr śmierci..., op. cit., 262-263). 21 Video. In 1968 Kantor traveled to Nuremberg for a film which was being made about him. He deliberately chose the ruins of Hitler's stadium as the set for the shooting of the film, and called its “his little revenge on Hitler” and “a ceremony of human emballage in the middle of the colossal ruins of the Hitlcrjugendparadengelande” (Pleśniarowicz, Kantor. Artysta końca wieku..., op. cit., 183). 28 Teresa Baluk-Ulewiczowa and Gretchen Engie Schafft

the commedia dell’arte but in the Cricot Theater the twins are always the same. In “The Water Hen” they were the Jews joined by the board of the Final Solution - that's biblical and in “Lovelies and Dowdies” they are also Jewish.

He goes on to list three other productions in which the twins are Jews.22 Kantor must have seen the equipment used for the over 40 body measurements, and in his later stagework when he created his monstrous machines must have often recalled the wartime reality he had witnessed. Kantor had indeed emballaged - wrapped himself in the lion’s den, under the umbrella of the Sektion Rassen- und Volkstumsforschung of the Institut fur Deutsche Ostarbeit? And he was certainly not fantasizing when, much later, he wrote:

The situation of the artist is constrained. There is something essential for the artist’s situation in that constraint, something that makes it attractive but at the same time inaccessible and not easy to comprehend in the simple and superficial understanding. Perhaps that constraint, the enclosure, is an important criterion of truth. When I was a child I made paper cakes.... My cake would be flat. But I never noticed that. I would cut it up. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that there was something missing (wanting!), which would at least admit of incision. But that was when I stopped making paper cakes and lost that extraordinary and happy state which is perhaps the same as the artist’s “Situation.” That want is precisely the constraint in question. A constraint in the world’s eyes, of course. A price has to be paid for the extraordinary gift of “operating” outside of life. The artist’s situation is like the situation of someone who, in pursuit of some vitally important objective, suddenly feels that the activity of moving forward is turning into the essence of his mission and his raison d’etre, and, in his search for a way out, or rather of a way across, notices how more and more doors are closing up on him, how many of them he himself has to close and try elsewhere, and go on forward, in the terrible awareness that everything is a void, that the essence of his activity is to close up, which is to separate off and discard all that is continually striving to fill up that void with something. With something that dubs itself reality and usurps the right to be considered the obligatory universality and the only justifiable [condition].. ,23

22 Video. 23Sytuacja artysty, 1977 - Wielopole, Wielopole, Kraków: WL, 1984, 7. An Unknown Tadeusz Kantor ... 29

And it is only once the moment of disaster comes, once the approved “reality” is shattered, disclosed and unmasked, in its own parlance acquiring the epithet of “it all turned out to be a fiction,” when in an inexplicable manner the paradoxes and alternatives mutually cancel each other out - that the “artist’s situation” comes close to the uncovering of its mystery. But it is too late by then. And perhaps no-one has noticed. “Actually, I have never been an abstract artist,” Kantor would say many years later in an interview with Porębski, “the human figure was extremely important for me. ... But that human figure was discredited, we could no longer re-create the beauty of the human body on the humanist principle of Antiquity ... the reason was the Nazi occupation and dehumanization.”24

There was an absolutely realistic relationship between the grotesque and the horror, the Theater of Death of his performances and what he had really experienced, that to which he had been an unwilling witness. The dummies of his plays and his memories were connected by the common factor of wartime experiences. And when years later he played at enveloppage and had a team of postmen parade about the streets of Warsaw carrying a gigantic envelope, maybe he was recalling some quite different experiences, which is described using a quotation from Gretchen Schafft’s book:

As the archivist brought the rolling cart to the table where I sat in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Anthropological Archives ... that day when I found the anthropological collection of Nazi materials ... she was as curious as I. The boxes on the top tray of the cart were tied in cord that seemed to be as old as the boxes themselves. Carefully, I untied the first box. It appeared to me that it had never been opened. In a neat row were envelopes, each stamped with a swastika and marked with a number in the top comer. The swatches of hair, the little curls, were hair samples from research subjects. Hair shaven from heads, hair stuffed into mattresses, hair used to make rugs carries a million stories gathered into vivid, visual Holocaust images. Looking at these hair samples brought forth these nightmares, as well as a hint that each piece had come from an individual with an infinitely sad history. We were chastened. (Schafft 84)

24Scc Pleśniarowicz, Kantor. Artysta końca wieku..., op. cit., 49. 30 Teresa Baluk-Ulewiczowa and Gretchen Engle Schafft

WORKS CITED

Archiwum Adama Bienia. Akta narodowościowe (1942-1944). Eds. Brzeski Jan, and Adam Roliński. Kraków: Biblioteka Jagiellońska and Księgarnia Akademicka, 2001.

Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, Teresa. Wyzwolić się z błędnego koła. Institut jur Deutsche Ostarbeit w świetle dokumentów Armii Krajowej i materiałów zachowanych w Polsce. Kraków: Acana, 2004.

Frank, Hans. “Das Fuhrerprinzip in der Verwaltung.” Die Burg 4 (1943): 213-222.

Kobiałka, Michal. A Journey Through Outer Spaces: Essays and Manijestoos, 1944-1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Michalewicz, Jerzy (ed.). Relacje pracowników Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego o ich losach osobistych i dziejach uczelni w czasie drugiej wojny światowej. Archiwum Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Seria F: Varia, Tom 5. Kraków: Se­ cesja, 2005; X, LXV-LXXXVI (English Introduction), LXXXVII-XCVIII (Bibliography).

Pleśniarowicz, Krzysztof. Kantor. Artysta końca wieku. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie, 1997.

Schafft, Gretchen. From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich. Champaign, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Schafft, Gretchen and Gerhard Ziedler. Register to the Materials ojthe Institut of Deutsche Ostarbeit. Washington, D.C.: National Anthropological Archives, 1998.

ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS

Archiwum Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Kraków, Poland.

National Anthropological Archives, Washington, D.C., USA.