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A Triumphant Gate of the Polish Narrative

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A Triumphant Gate of the Polish Narrative A Triumphant Gate of the Polish Narrative The Symbolic Reconstruction of the Bridge over Chłodna Street in Warsaw vis-à-vis the Crisis of the Dominant Polish Narrative of the Holocaust Elżbieta Janicka Abstract: The article is a study of the symbolic topography of Warsaw’s Chłodna Street. In 1940–1942, Chłodna Street was an “Aryan” border strip, dividing the small and large ghettos. For the past quarter-century, the symbo- lic dominance of this space has been made manifest by the subsequent commemorations of the ghetto’s wooden footbridge that existed here between January and August 1942. These commemorative artefacts evolved from a counter-commemoration (1996), into a commemoration through the use of painting (2007) and photography (2008), into a symbolic reconstruction of the bridge (2011). The analysis of this dynamic, from representation of an object to its materialization, is complemented by a reconstruction of the patterns and stakes of narratives that make up the subsequent layers of the Chłodna Street narrative palimpsest. An important context for the analysis, apart from the history of the site, is the fact that today, the means of control over the space of the for- mer Ghetto are in the exclusive possession of the non-Jewish majority. A turning point in the commemoration process was Roman Polański’s film The Pianist (2002). The bridge over Chłodna was reconstructed “one to one” – in Warsaw but outside the space of the former Warsaw ghetto. The film was shot in the midst of a nationwide debate taking place in Poland about Jan Tomasz Gross’ book Neighbors (2000). The debate concerned the Poles’ participation in the Holocaust and the socio-cultural determinants of their attitudes and behavior. Within Polish dominant culture, the narrative shock was so immense that a return to the old Polish tale of heroism and martyrdom seemed impossible. Meanwhile, the mainstream journalistic discourse cast Gross and Polański on two sides of a narrative opposition. The former supposedly represented subjectivism and rash generalizations, while the latter was supposed to embody objectivism and fair judgment. The silhouette of the bridge over Chłodna Street merged at that point with a counterfactual vision of the Polish context of the Holocaust. The international success of The Pianist (Palme d’Or and Oscar) sealed the evolution of the bridge as a figure: from an abject to an object of desire, a tourist attraction, and an export commodity. (A separate issue, also addressed in the article, is how the events depicted in the film relate to the story of Władysław Szpilman, mediated originally by Szpilman’s ghostwriter Jerzy Waldorff and then by the scriptwriters, Ronald Harwood and Roman Polański. In both cases the most serious discrepancies concern depictions of the Poles’ attitudes toward the Jews during, but also before, the Holocaust). The success of the film was the determining factor in a decision made to invest public funds in another, and up to now the last, commemoration of the bridge over Chłodna: its symbolic reconstruction in situ. What was reconstructed was not so much the bridge as it was in 1942 but the bridge as depicted in the film, and with it the film’s idealized portrayal of the Polish context of the Holocaust. The figure of the bridge suggests tight iso- lation of Jews and Poles – an isolation instituted by the Germans. By so doing, it feeds into the image of Poles as helpless bystanders (onlookers/gawkers, at times even witnesses) in the face of the Holocaust. The figure of the Polish bystander/witness to the Holocaust is in turn a key figure of Polish innocence. In addition, the symbolic reconstruction of the bridge draws the attention of the users of this space away from another site on Chłodna Street, where Jews and Poles came into direct contact with each other throughout the entire existence of the Warsaw ghetto. In obscuring the factual state of affairs uncovered as a result of the Jedwabne debate, the sym- bolic reconstruction of the bridge over Chłodna Street functions as a discourse-reproducing machine of sorts, alowing the dominant majority to “indulge in retrospective hallucination” (Baudrillard). The article uncovers the workings of a roly-poly narrative mechanism that renders impossible any successful reassessment and rejection of the Polish dominant culture and prevents common knowledge about facts from bearing in any way on the collective consciousness. Keywords: symbolic topography; spatial turn; antisemitism; philosemitic violence; Warsaw ghetto; Hilberg’s triad; Polish bystander (concept revision); collective narcissism; politics of memory; historical politics SLH 9/2019 | p. 1 of 112 Chłodna Street fulfilled the function of an important traffic hub up to the immediate postwar years. It was an arterial road cutting across Warsaw from east to west. It lost its importance as one of the main urban arterials with the completion of the East-West Route (Trasa W-Z, 1949), thereafter falling into disrepair and oblivion. In 2011, on the eastern side (closer to the city center) it was subjected to a so-called revitalization. As a result, it became a busy place again, but this time as a tourist attraction, i.e. a partic- ularly constructed representation of itself and its past. The current spatial and symbol- ic management exposes its status as a boundary street between two parts of the for- mer Warsaw ghetto: the so-called small ghetto and large ghetto. Chłodna Street, then, cannot merely be looked at as an element of an 18th century urbanist solution, known as the Saxon Axis. One can treat and interpret it as a symbolic axis, and also as a nar- rative axis in possession of the majority group, as it is the latter which lays down the conditions of access to the public space, creating in this way a narrative about itself. After the so-called regaining of independence by Poland in 1989, the process of the so-called recovery of memory began, as the de facto construction of a new narrative about the identity and past of the dominant community, subordinated to new needs and interests, not necessarily only symbolic ones. Chłodna Street found itself at the center of an accumulation of increasingly intense manifestations of memory and identity. When viewed as a former border strip, Chłodna Street, in particular its present-day for- matting, constitutes a model exemplification of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ thesis that the energy of a structure manifests itself on its margins. The street resembles a symbolic rift valley, a place of collision of symbolic massifs, of the outcropping of symbolic moun- tain formations and the resultant creation of a narrative. Is the symbolic topography of this place simply a chaotically increasing surplus, or is it a system of communicating vessels characterized by a recognizable order of inner flows, sensitive to the fluctua- tions of external pressures? Does the system have a rule, a law governing the spatial- symbolic arrangement? The street has a long and rich history. At the beginning of the 1990s there was, however, only one memorial: one of the serial plaques by Karol Tchorek, situated on the western side, off the beaten track, marking the burning in this place of the corpses of Polish civilians murdered by the Germans in the Wola massacre during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Today, apart from the four memorials to the martyrdom of the Sibe- rians (defined as Catholic Poles deported to Siberia by the authorities of the USSR which occupied the eastern parts of prewar Poland between September 17, 1939 and June 2, 19411) located on the eastern side of the street, one can count almost ten com- 1 The above definition is as popular as it is inaccurate, since the policies of the USSR were class-oriented and applied equally to Poland’s citizens regardless of their denomination. The construct of the Siberians – while polonizing the deportees – is a tool of exclusion of non-Poles from the community of suffering. Combined with the popular myth of Judeo-Communism (żydokomuna), it is commonly used to present Jews as the perpetrators of persecution targeted against the majority populations (Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians). This alleged, en- tirely fabricated, persecution serves in turn to justify the stance and behavior of the dominant group toward Jews. This antisemitic narrative is known as double genocide theory. SLH 9/2019 | p. 2 of 112 memorative artefacts near the junction of Chłodna and Żelazna Streets alone. Three memorials pay tribute to Father Jerzy Popiełuszko. A further two mark the location of a German gendarmerie station – the Nordwache – directly linked to the events of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. There is also the well-known and popular Keret House (2011), known as the “narrowest house in the world.” In addition, as many as four objects com- memorate the wooden bridge over Chłodna Street, which existed for a few months in 1942.2 All commemorations emerged in the second decade of the Third Polish Republic, i.e. from the year 2000 on, culminating in the symbolic reconstruction by Tomasz Lec (2012). The reconstruction of the bridge is the central object in this place, stretched over the street like a brace-gate. It organizes the space and at the same time the narrative. The Bridge over Chłodna Street (1942): Instrument of Torture, Emblem of Humiliation The bridge in question is the wooden bridge from the time of the ghetto. The north- ern side of Chłodna Street belonged to the large ghetto, the southern (although not all of it) to the small ghetto. The middle of the street was “Aryan,” as one would say and write back then, without inverted commas. Through the “Aryan” corridor ran an “Aryan” tram used by “Aryans.” The exclusion of the western side of Chłodna Street and the erection of walls in the middle of Żelazna Street in October 1941 restricted to a mini- mum the possibility of getting around from the northern part of the ghetto to the southern and vice versa.
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