The Biography of a Memorial Icon: Nathan Rapoport's Warsaw Ghetto Monument Author(S): James E

The Biography of a Memorial Icon: Nathan Rapoport's Warsaw Ghetto Monument Author(s): James E. Young Source: Representations, No. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring, 1989), pp. 69-106 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928524 Accessed: 02-09-2015 13:27 UTC

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions JAMES E. YOUNG

The Biography of a Memorial Icon: Nathan Rapoport's Warsaw GhettoMonument

Up to now, theJewish artist has not displayedany specificinclination in thefield of modernplastic art, and now he will stridethrough the arts of all nations and create a synthesisthrough the prism of his specificmaterial. -Joseph Tchaikov, 1921

Could I have made a stone witha hole in it and said, "Voila! The heroismof theJews"? -Nathan Rapoport, 1986

Introduction

OF THE THOUSANDS OF MEMORIALScreated afterthe war to commemorate aspects of the Holocaust, Nathan Rapoport's Warsaw Ghetto Monu- ment emerges as possiblythe most widelyknown, celebrated, and controversial of all. It was the firstmemorial after the war to markboth the heroismof Jewish resistanceto the Nazis and the complete annihilationof theJews in Warsaw.But in its use of the broadest of cultural archetypes-i.e., the lumbering mytho- proletarianfigures of the Stalinistera and the typologicalimage of Jewsin exile, somewhere between the Arch of Titus and Samuel Hirszenberg'sepic painting Golusl-the Ghetto Monument has found littlecritical consensus. Hailed by war- scarred criticson itsunveiling (19 April 1948, the fifthanniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising) in all of itsheroic splendor,it has been scorned subsequentlyby curators as kitsch figurationand by "cold warriors"as proletarian pap. Early European reviewersinsisted that the gloriesof the Uprisingdemanded as literal an articulationas possible; many guessed that, as the firstrebellion in Nazi- occupied Europe, the Jewish revolt would come to stand for all others. Since then,however, others have found such figurativeheroic art so farremoved from contemporaryaesthetic discourse as to be archaic and even irrelevantas art altogether.2 In itsfusion of public art and popular culture,historical memory and political consequences, however,this monument demands a critique that goes beyond questions of high and low art, tastefulnessand vulgarity.We mightask not only how the monument reflectspast historybut, most important,what role it now plays in currenthistory. The Warsaw Ghetto Monument,in fact,has continued

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions to suggest itselfas the basis for politicaland communal action. In its forty-year life, it has endured as a kind of screen across which the projected shadows of a world'spreoccupations continue to flickerand dance. As itsmaker's hand initially animated cold, amnesiac clay,the monument has since been revitalizedby the parade of public figuresmarching past it and by the ceremoniesconducted at its base (figs. 1 and 2). With the state'sblessings, it is now as much a gatheringplace forPolish war veteransas forJews;to the government'sconsternation, the Ghetto Monument's square is also a gatheringplace for Solidarityand other dissident groups, who have turned it into a performancespace for protests.The monument has been extravagantlyvisited by touringpresidents, prime ministers,and even the pope. Everyonememorializes something different here, of course; each creates differentmeaning in the monument.Elsewhere, its individual figures are echoed in dozens of other monumentsto thisera throughoutEurope and Israel, its images exported as distinctlyJewish martyrologicaland heroic icons. The monumenthas been recastand nationalizedin Israel; itis picturedon both Polish and Israeli postcards and stamps; and it has been animated to the half-tonesof Arnold Schoenberg's Chorusof the Warsaw Ghetto Survivors in a shortPolish film.3

FIGURE 1. Polish national commemorationsof the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,with honor guard layinga wreathat the monument,flames burning in menorot; c. 1983. Photo: estateof Nathan Rapoport.

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions FIGURE 2. Privateceremony by a group of PolishJews and friends,laying flowers and wreaths and reading Kaddish at the monument's base, 18 April 1986. Photo: Monika Krajewska.

The Warsaw Ghetto Monument'slife, as narratedhere, mightthus consistin several parts: its literalconception and constructionamid historicaland political realities; its finishedform as public memorial;and itslife in the mind of its com- munityand of theJewish people over time.Through a criticaltelling of thismonument'sconception, construction, and reception,I would like to reveal the activity of Holocaust memorializationthat takes place firstbetween events and memorials, then between memorialsand viewers,and then between viewersand their lives in lightof thismemorialized past. "There is nothingin thisworld as invisible as a monument,"Robert Musil once wrote. "They are no doubt erected to be seen-indeed, to attractattention. But at the same time they are impregnated with something that repels attention."4It is as if a monument'slife in the communal mind grows as hard and polished as its exteriorform, its significanceas fixedas its place in the landscape. And it is this"finish" that repels our attention, that makes a monument invisible.Unlike words on a page, always gesturingat somethingbeyond the ink and paper givingthem form,memorial icons seem to embody ideas, invitingviewers to mistake material presence and weight for immutable permanence. If in theirglazed exterioritywe never reallysee them, then I would attempthere to crackthe eideticveneer, to loosen meaning,to make visiblethe activityof memoryin monuments.5

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Life of the Monument Maker

On enteringNathan Rapoport's studio six monthsafter his death, one is still struckby the sheer vitalityemanating fromthe scatteredmaquettes and sketches.The studio smells not of death and decay but of wet clay and soil. As the door opens, clusteredfigures and sketchesaround the room all seem to pause in mid-movement;illumined by the skylightoverhead, statues and maquettes seem to turn on theirpedestals ever so slightlyas clouds pass over. It is almost as if the sculptorwere stillhere, reenactingcreation itself, breathing his life'sspirit into these clay sketches,some of them stillwet and shiny,as if freshlymade. As the life of any one of these sculpturesmight be regarded as an extension of the sculptor'sown, the life of the WarsawGhetto Monument as it was conceived and constructedby its maker is no less an extension. To know the monument,we mightturn firstto the human being-living in inhuman times-who created it. Nathan Rapoport was born in 1911 to relativelypoor, working-classJewish parents in Warsaw. It was by financialnecessity, he has said, not artisticchoice, that he trained in childhood as an architecturalapprentice and renovatorof the King's Palace in Wilanova,just outside the city.6When at age fourteenhe applied to a drawingclass at the municipalschool of art,hoping to studyportraiture, and was told there were places leftin sculptureonly, he adapted quicklyto his new medium. Almost immediately,the young sculptorgravitated toward the monumental aspect of sculpture; its size, drama, and social vision all moved him on a purelyvisceral level, he has said. In fact,he fairlyprospered as a young student, being commissionedfrequently by local familiesto do busts of theirchildren, so that he could eventuallyafford to enter the Academy of Art in Warsaw.Within monthsof enrollingat the academy on scholarships,Rapoport was winningprizes for his architectural,metal, and sculpturalwork. He eventuallyreceived presti- gious scholarshipsfrom the academy to studyat the Fine ArtsAcademy in Paris and to travelin Italy. In Rapoport's words,there was nothingparticularly Jewish or contemporary in his sculpturesduring this period; he feltneither very ethnic nor fashionable. From the outset,in fact,both hisJewish and artisticidentities were subsumed in a more capacious social and politicalvision. As a member of Hashomer hatsa'ir (Young Guard of the Zionist Left Wing) and the grandson of Chasidim (one grandfatherwas a cantor,the other a shohet),he remained acutelyaware of the second-commandmentprohibition against making graven images-even as he resisted the taboo as a young, progressivethinker. When he turned to art and sculpture,therefore, he feltcompelled to locate his work outside of Jewishtra- dition altogether,turning to the classicsand to Rodin among recentantecedents for his models. On the one hand, he found that in abstractionhe might circumventthe second commandmentaltogether; signs, symbols, and formswere all permitted. But at the same time,he also regarded his artisticmission in politicalterms: if as

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions a Jew,he was also a socialist,then as an artisthe would be a realist.In spite of his time in France among cubist,expressionist, and other abstractartists, and partly because of his time in Italy among the figurativesculptures of Michelangelo, Rapoport's passion for the human form and portraitureintensified. Later he would insistsomewhat ironically that his own figurativework was actually(if par- adoxically) modern. Afterall, he would say,his figurativeworks were essentially cubist and formal-triangles, circles,and cylinders,which he merely"invested withhuman soul."7 During this period in the 1930s he continued to enter and to win competi- tionsregularly, two of whichheld consequences he could not have foreseenat the time. In 1936 his sculpture The TennisPlayer was awarded a prize at the Warsaw Academy of Art for a "Sports in Art" contest.But when the Polish government tried to submithis work to an internationalexhibition in Berlin thatyear as part of the Summer Olympics,Rapoport refusedto let it show in Nazi Germany.This cost the sculptorhis prize money,but it won him the respectof antifascistartists and commentatorsthroughout Europe. The second eventuallysignificant accom- plishmentcame two years later,when Rapoport placed third(after Jacques Lip- shitz, who placed second) in a competitionfor a monument to Paul Vaillant- Couturier,the socialistmayor of Villejuifand editorof L'Humanite. Having run short of funds in Paris, Rapoport returned to Warsaw in June 1939, three months before the Germans invaded Poland. With Warsaw under siege on 7 September 1939, the twenty-eight-year-oldsculptor fled north and east with thousands of other young Poles in search of the Polish army,which was supposed to be regroupingin the forestsbetween Warsaw and Bialystock.Instead of findingthe Polish army after almost two weeks on foot, however,he found only more refugees, mostlyJewish. Though Russia was technicallyallied with Nazi Germany at this point, her borders withPoland were open to Jewishrefu- gees who could eitherpay forsanctuary or provide skillsand labor deemed valu- able by Stalin at the time. Identifiedas an artisan,Rapoport entered the Russian zone and continued to Bialystok,where he was invitedto join a collectiveof 120 otherJewish artists who had fledthe Nazis. Rapoport recallsthat during his short stayon the collective,he felthe had been liberatedby the Russians,who now fed, clothed, and housed him-all so that he could continue drawing and sculpting. Later that year,members of the partyArts Committeefrom Minsk came to Bialystoklooking forartists and worksfor an upcomingexhibition on "Ten Years of Art fromByelorussia." Upon visitingthe collectivein Bialystok,the committee remarked Rapoport's work and so requested the artist'sportfolio. They were as impressed,it seems, withthe fierypolitical correspondence surrounding his for- saken tennis player and his prize in the Vaillant-Couturiercompetition as they were withhis sketchesand busts.The committeethen invited Rapoport to Minsk, where they installed him in an artist'sstudio withanother Jewish artist at work on a commissioned statue of Joseph Stalin. Rapoport relates here that his new comrade-in-artshad been at work on this monumentfor three years, finishing The Biographyof a MemorialIcon 73

This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions everythingbut Stalin'shead. In the preceding year,however, the committeehad considered and rejected everyhead the sculptorsubmitted, fearing that if Stalin were displeased byhis sculpted head, it mightcost themtheir own. The sculpture was never finished. This lesson in artisticdiscretion was not lost on Rapoport, nor could it have been far from mind throughouthis ensuing career as state sculptor in Russia. But in light of the Nazi assault on the Jews in Poland, he had come to regard himselfboth as survivorand as beneficiaryof the Sovietarts committee. In addition to submittingseveral pieces to the exhibitionon "Ten Years of Art in Byelo- russia," Rapoport thus commenced work on a model of liberated Polish and Jewishprisoners, which he hoped to turninto a monumentone day. It was during this period that the second secretaryof the Party,Kulagin, visited Rapoport's studio in Minsk, liked what he saw, and commissionedthe firstof several state projects. This aestheticinterlude could not last,however. When the Germans attacked Russia and overranMinsk in 1941, Rapoport and his wifewere evacuated to Alma Ata, near Tashkent. While his wife was forced to staybehind, the sculptor was draftedinto a labor battalionand shipped to Novosibersk.Priorities had changed, it seems, and the demand for state artistssuddenly gave way to the need for strong backs. After five months in the labor camp, Rapoport learned that his formerparty patron, Kulagin, had also come to Novosibersk,now as the party's firstsecretary. When Rapoport called Kulagin's office,a woman answered in Yiddish-inflectedRussian and promptlyarranged a meetingbetween theJewish artistand his partypatron. They met,and Kulagin was so horrifiedby the sculptor'sdeteriorating condition that he pulled Rapoport out of the labor camp and situatedhim once again in an expansive artist'sstudio in Novosibersk.Here Rapo- port was supplied withgreat storesof food and vodka, the latterserving as cur- rency in the wartimeeconomy for clay,plaster, and tools. Liberated yet again, now fromthe liberatorsthemselves, Rapoport repaid his debt as recommissioned state sculptor. His new role in the war effortwas straightforward:he would set in bronze and stone all the formsand faces designated worthremembering by the state. His numerous busts of Russian generals, partisans,and workers-ali heroes of the PatrioticWar-are scattered to this day throughout the Soviet Union. Althoughthe aim of thesebusts was officiallythe reproductionof assorted partisans'and workers'likenesses, it was clear to all-especially to the artist-that theiractual subject was heroismitself. During his workas sculptorof People's Heroes, Rapoport continued to visu- alize and sketchvarious historicalmonuments: first to the liberationof political and Jewishrefugees like himselfby the Russians and then,amidst further reports fromEurope between 1941 and 1943, to the deportationand massacre of Jews. His firstmodel-long since lost-for a monument to the destructionof Polish and Russian Jewryconsisted of a huddled familywatching a young girlbeing led away by German soldiers. Still grasping his own condition as both political and

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Jewishemigre, Rapoport continued to mix his sets of archetypalfigures; at this point in the sculptor'siconic lexicon, there seemed to be only the heroic and the victimized-one political,the otherJewish. In the midstof these peregrinationsand monumentalsketches in late spring 1943, news of the Warsaw Ghetto insurrectionreached Rapoport in Siberia. He now says that nothinghad ever moved him like thisbefore; he lived only so that he mightcommemorate such an event,which he regarded as both a socialistand Jewishrevolution. Since all of his earlysketches and maquettesstayed behind, we don't know what Rapoport's initialsculptural responses were. He describesthem now as impossiblyromantic and idealized, withouta concrete notion as to what was actually going on. Therefore, he traveled to Moscow expresslyto acquire more informationand met there with Ber Mark, who was receiving reports almost daily fromthe Jewish Antifascist Committee of the Soviet Union.

The Warsaw GhettoUprising

As the historianMark gathered details of the rebellion through the officesof the AntifascistCommittee, the sculptorlearned of eventsthrough him. Since part of my aim here is to reassertthe monument'srelationship to events,I have relied on Mark for most of the followingaccount of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In this way, we can keep in mind that what Rapoport knew of the uprisingdepended on how he knewit and that,as his knowledgeof eventswould informhis memorial conception,it would also contributeto our public memory of eventsas crystalizedin the monument.8 Officiallyestablished on 2 October 1940 in a decree by Ludwig Fischer,S.S. governorof the Warsaw District,the Warsaw Ghetto was intended as both city- scaled concentrationcamp and transitcenter forJews on theirway to death at Treblinka. As was the strategicwont of the Germans, theyinformed the Jewish communityof this edict ten days later,on Yom Kippur, to investit with appro- priate symbolicgravity. Within weeks, the Germans erected thirtymiles of wall, ten feet high and topped with broken glass and barbed wire to surround the ghetto,located in what had been largelythe Jewishslum sectionof Warsaw (fig. 3). In addition to itsoriginal 50,000 inhabitants,however, by April 1942 the Ger- mans had crammed into the ghetto another 500,000 Polish Jews, including 150,000 deportees fromoutlying provinces and shtetlach.Between slave labor and shootings,disease and starvation,100,000 Jews died in the Warsaw Ghetto by June 1942. The firstphase of the annihilationof WarsawJewry-starvation-as decreed and prosaicallyfigured by Fischer included both itsmeans and its literal end: "The Jews will die from hunger and destitution,and a cemeteryis all that will remain of the Jewishquestion."9 Bordering theJewish cemetery in Warsaw, the ghettowould in thisvision eventuallybe annexed by it. Aftertwo yearsof concentrationand starvationin the ghettocame the Great The Biographyof a MemorialIcon 75

This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE BATTLES IN THE WARSAW

- GHETTO IN APRIL 1943

hI -..h ?2? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~----,~

- h dl- h- h ~~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ '

FIGURE 3. Map of the Warsaw Ghetto~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Oand uprsigs 0 1944.h.

FIGURE 3. Mapof the Warsaw Ghettoand uprisings~~~~~~h~-,h-c.1944. f- h,,.,h Liquidation;n six22JTO weeks etween 1942 and 12Sptme 1942 t~he Ger-I Liquidation;in six weeks between 22 July1942 and 12 September~~~~~~~-d-SP, 1942,-t. ~,he, Ger

mans deported 310,322 Jews fromthe Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka,where they were gassed to the last child. Though a number of escapees returnedin the first week to warn of the massacre underway,the Judenrat dismissed these reportsin favorof fabricatedletters purportedly written by Jews resettled in eastern labor camps. When the enormityof thisliquidation became clear bythe end of August, the ghetto'sAntifascist Bloc-composed of Hashomer hatsa'iractivists from the Zionistleft wing, Po'alei Zion (Workersof Zion), Dror, He'halutz, and the Polish Workers Party-transformed itselfinto the Jewish FightingOrganization (Zy- dowska organizacja bojowa) and replaced the discreditedJudenrat as central authorityin the ghetto. This mostlyyoung resistancecoalition had deferred to the authorityof their elders until now. But with the proportionsof the catastrophe now horriblyclear, theymoved at once to overturnthe order: fromnow on, theydeclared, Jewishgroups would no longer administertheir own decima- tion,but would only rise in theirdefense. The beginningof the WarsawGhetto Revolt thus came not withthe uprising itselfthe followingyear but withthe coalescing of all resistancegroups during that bloody July into the JewishFighting Organization. Traditionallyexplosive

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions rivalriesbetween right-and left-wingJewish political groups would give way to the activedefense of all Jews-except thosewho eithercollaborated or who would not recognizethe danger of traditionalresponses. Suffused in politicalmanifestos and rhetoricfrom the leftand right,all of these groups perceived at the outset that this could not be just an uprisingof Jews against Nazis but a revoltof new fightingJews against the old passive order. In fact,the compositionand aims of the JewishFighting Organization reflectedthe intenselypolitical atmosphere in whichit was formed.Days beforethe ghettonewspaper Der Oifbroi(The Ferment) had describedJewish resistance as an extensionof a largerrevolution in Europe,'0 the dailynews organ of the AntifascistBloc, Der Ruf(The Call), was also exhorting "theJewish masses" to rise:

Jewishpeople! Jewish workers! Jewish youth! Gather your forces and poolthem for battle! Standunited shoulder to shoulderin a commonfront against fascism. Only destructionof the Nazi war machineby antifascistarmies together with the massesof oppressedpeoples will finally put an end to our enslavementand lead to full socialand nationalredemption of theJewish masses! "I

The AntifascistBloc would rise here not as Maccabees only,but also as workers.12 Where the AntifascistBloc had called repeatedlyon "theJewish masses" to rise up against the Nazis throughout 1941 and 1942 and to initiatea battle for both national and economic liberation,the right-wingYiddisher militerisherFar- band (JewishMilitary Alliance of Betar Revisionists)perceived itselfprimarily as a militantJewish self-defense group. These two principalfactions comprising the ghetto fightersreflected the inspirationfor fighting:as part of an international revolutionarymovement and as a self-defensemovement. The ultimatemixing of Jewishand proletarianfigures in the monumentmay thus have been as inevi- table as the mixed identitiesof the fightersthemselves. That the twenty-four- year-old commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization and leader of the revolt,Hashomer hatsa'iractivist Mordechai Anielewicz,would come to emblem- atize all the fightersbecomes all the more intriguing,given the politicalrivalries at stake here. Forjust as he identifiedas a fightingJew only insofar as he was also a Labor Zionistand socialist,using insurrectionand revolutionas his models, his ideological enemies on the right in the Farband fought alongside and under Anielewiczas militantrevisionists. As a Jewishself-defense organization, the Far- band was fightingprimarily to save a remnantof the Jews for theirhomeland, not to bring about a new economic order. Anielewiczand the FightingOrgani- zation saw each onlyas it facilitatedthe other.The fighters'senses of theirJewish, Zionist,and socialistidentities were so intertwinedas to make them inseparable in the sculptor'seyes. 13 The firststages of rebellioncame withdismantling the Judenrat, emergence of a unifiedJewish FightingOrganization, and the purging of traitorsin the ghetto.The armed strugglebegan on 18 January1943; on thisday, a contingent

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions of 800 Latvians and 200 S.S. entered the ghetto without warning to begin rounding up the remaining60,000 Jews.Although caught by surprise, the Jewish FightingOrganization forced the Nazis to withdrawfrom the ghettoin a series of hit-and-runattacks that turned into full-blownstreet battles. Over the next three days, 1,000 Jews were killed fighting(nearly four-fifthsof the Jewish FightingOrganization fighters),and 5,500 Jewswere deported. But over 50,000 Jewsnow remained,and both the Poles and Jewsof Warsawcelebrated the success and significanceof this resistance. "Beginning with January 18, the Jews of Warsawhave been in a stateof permanentstruggle against the Germansand their henchmen,"wrote Mordechai Anielewicz to the Polish Home Army headquar- ters. The Polish Home Army recognized immediatelythe significanceof this uprising for the one theywere planning in the 25 February 1943 issue of their informationbulletin: "The echoes of the firingsand explosions,which reverber- ated through the Warsaw ghettoin January,have been heard all over Poland."'4 The actual date of the uprising'sbeginning, however, could never have carried the commemorativeweight already assigned the officialdate of the revolt's outbreakon 19 April 1943, the eve of Passover.Liberated now fromthe strictures of an ancient paradigm, fromwaiting for God's intervention,the fightersof the JewishFighting Organization would now redeem themselves-as both Maccabees and socialists,Jews and workers.On the eve of Passover,when Jews celebrate God's deliverance of their forebearsin the desert of exile, the JewishFighting Organization grasped fullythat they were now theirown deliverers.For the Ger- mans' part, theyhad recognized long before the strategicvalue in attackingon Jewishholy days: that Easter and Passover coincided thisyear only proved to be doubly fortuitousin thatit inflamedthe day's symbolicsignificance for both Jews on the inside and Poles outside the walls. Easter had alwaysbeen a day of dread forJews, a traditionalday of blood libels and pogroms in Poland and Russia. As Polish poet Adolph Rudnicki rememberedit in his poem "Easter,"the day of the uprisingheld special significancefor the Poles gatheringoutside the ghettowalls to watchand listento the battles:"As soon as the words here heard, 'You may go, the mass is finished,halleluiah, halleluiah!' the congregationshurried fromthe overcrowdedchurches, their souls stillaglow, all vernal,with freshly cut flowers in theirhands, towardsthe wallsto watchthe spectacle.To watchWarsaw's Paschal spectacle."'5 This was to be a day of redemptionall around: Christiansredeemed by the sacrificeof theirJews in the Ghetto,Jews redeemed, if not by theirGod, then by themselves.For the Germans,there was even the furtherinspiration of Hitler's birthday,20 April, a day for deliveringto theirleader the present of a JudenreinWarsaw.'6 Full-pitchedbattles raged for six weeks afterthe opening skirmisheson 19 April. Six monthsafter the last fightershad been buried in theirbunkers or dis- appeared into the sewers, the ghetto rubble was a dangerous place for Nazi patrols. In all, S.S. Major General JurgenStroop seemed able to account forover

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 50,000 Ghetto Jews captured or killed during the uprising. Almost all of the Jewishcombatants died in fighting,while the remainingcivilians captured were either shot on the spot or deported to theirdeaths in the camps. A handful of survivorsescaped the ghetto when the fightingwas over and joined partisan groups and the Polish underground; in Stroop's words, "The Warsaw Ghetto is no more." Depending on whetherone relieson the Nazis' figuresor those of the Polish WorkersParty, German losses during the uprisingrange from 16 dead, 85 wounded, to 700 dead and 1600 wounded. As usual, the precise number-hence, interpretation-of Nazi losses lies somewherein between,probably close to the Polish historicalassociation's estimate of 400 German dead, 1000 wounded, in the firstten days of fighting.As in all historicalmemory, the factsand theirsig- nificancenecessarily come to us intertwined,each represented in the figureof the other.Outside of Yugoslavia'snational uprising,the WarsawGhetto Uprising was the largest and longest armed resistancein Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II.'7

The Monument

The firstrecorded call for a monument to the Warsaw Ghetto was issued not by the state,sculptor, or public-but by a poet. In his brilliantlament and manifesto"We, Polish Jews . . ." the exiled PolishJewish poet Julian Tuwim demanded such a monumentexactly one year afterthe uprising-the intervalin Jewish traditionbetween burial and tombstonededication. Composed in New York in late 1943, immediatelyafter news of the uprisingreached him,this poem was circulatedwidely within the year,reaching hundreds of thousands of Polish refugees in Russia by the followingyear, according to Ilya Ehrenburg.'8 Since it appeared in Moscow in 1944, where it was published in Polish by the Union of Polish Patriots,it seems certainthat Rapoport knew of it; to what extenthe may actuallyhave been inspiredby it may never be known.It was fittingthat the poet firstread his poem publiclyat the monument'sdedication. These words were not engraved in the monument itself,but they might now be said to be inscribed neverthelessin the larger textof the memorial'sperformance: Therealso will be a Crossof the Ghetto-a deeplysymbolic name. There will be theOrder of theYellow Patch, denoting more merit than many a presenttinsel. And thereshall be in Warsawand in everyother Polish city some fragment of theghetto left standing and preservedin itspresent form in all itshorror of ruinand destruction.We shallsurround thatmonument to theignominy of our foesand to theglory of our torturedheroes with chainswrought from captured Hitler's guns, and everyday we shall twine fresh live flowers intoits iron links, so thatthe memory of themassacred people shall remain forever fresh in the mindsof the generationsto come,and also as a signof our undyingsorrow for them. Thus a newmonument will be added to thenational shrine.

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions There we will lead our children,and tell them of the most monstrousmartyrdom of people known to the historyof mankind.And in the centerof thismonument, its tragedy enhanced by the rebuiltmagnificence of the surroundingcity, there will burn an eternal fire.Passersby will uncover theirheads before it.'9

Whence, then,the originalinspiration for the WarsawGhetto Monument? In the poet's imagination,it had already come to exist.The historyof the uprisingitself and itsperceived significance,the sculptor'sown lifeand losthome, and the poet's lament all seem to have moved the stone thatbecame the monument. Given the artist'ssources of historicalinformation (Ber Mark and theJewish AntifascistCommittee of Moscow), his vocationas statesculptor of Sovietheroes, his patron's place in the party,the committeesto whom he submittedhis work, his trainingin the heroic school of socialistrealism, and his own Jewishidentifi- cation as Hashomer hatsa'irnik,the specificconception and figuresof his early maquettes are not surprising.As Rapoport was to ask later,"Where was a Jewish sculptorsupposed to turn for his memorialicons?" On the one hand, Rapoport was coming to his taskunencumbered by a Jewishartistic tradition in whichicons are fewand forbidden.On the otherhand, in Stalin'sRussia he would not be able, in Joseph Tchaikov's postrevolutionarywords, to "stridethrough the arts of all nations and create a synthesisthrough the prism of his specificmaterial."20 In fact, Rapoport was at work in a particulartime (war) and place (Russia), with specifichistoric and public icons available to him. Like the fightersthemselves, he visualized the uprising in both Jewishand proletarianfigures, each enacted in the other. Since any proposal he made would have to be answerable to the party Arts Committee,it seems clear that in addition to his own politicalview of the uprising,he must have been haunted by the visionof Stalin'sunfinished bust. It may not have been merelya matterof appeasing the authorities,but in designing a government-sponsoredpublic monument the sculptornecessarily anticipated both his prospectiveaudiences-government and public. It was under these conditions that Rapoport submittedto the Communist PartyArts Committeehis firstmodel for a monumentto the uprising-and this is where the art-historicalirony begins. Condemned by some postwar criticsas being too Stalinistand notJewish enough,2' Rapoport's monumentwas rejected by Stalin's own arts committeefor being "too narrowin conception,too nation- alistic"-that is, too Jewish.Never having been turned down by the authorities before, Rapoport appealed for help to Ilya Ehrenburg,the Jewish-Sovietjour- nalist and propagandist. Ehrenburg listened sympatheticallybut helplessly,for his own co-edited literarymemorial to the massacre of Russian Jewry,The Black Book of SovietJewry-originally commissioned by Stalin as a potential source of American Jewishsympathy and support-had also been denied production for preciselythe same reason: too Jewish.22Just as the authoritieshad done in the case of TheBlack Book's manuscript,however, they bought Rapoport's maquette from him nevertheless-possibly to ensure that it never be produced in Russia.

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The rejectionso stungthe young sculptor,he later said, thathe retreatedempty- handed to Novosiberskin mid 1943 and vowed to continuethe project. From late 1943 until early 1945, Rapoport remained in Novosibersk,com- pletingprojects for the stateand continuingto modifyhis WarsawGhetto Mon- ument. Since he could not knowduring these years whether he would ever return to Poland, it is likelythat officialcriticism and potentialreview committees continued to weigh upon the monument'sevolving conception. At the end of the war, Rapoport and his familyreturned to Moscow, whence he was grudgingly repatriatedto Warsaw in early 1946. Upon his arrival in Warsaw,he asked the WarsawJewish Committee whether they might consider building a monumentto the uprisingand destructionof the Warsawghetto. They had not onlyconsidered such a monument,they replied, but had already received and rejected a submis- sion froma local Polish artist.What did thisrejected proposal look like,Rapoport asked. "Two hasidim hoeing potatoes," came the reply,whereupon Rapoport unwrapped a small plastercast of his own redesignedmonument-smuggled out of the SovietUnion-which theyaccepted forthwith.The JewishCommittee then asked whetherthe sculptorhad a location in mind. Rapoport was adamant here; the only possible site would be that of the uprising itself,where the firstshots were fired,where the leader of the rebellion,Mordechai Anielewicz,had died in his bunker. In fact,the committeehad already marked the site of the bunker in 1946 with a large red sandstone placed in a flowerbed, inscribedto the Jewish FightingOrganization, and so theyagreed to build the GhettoMonument nearby. Before taking this proposal to the Warsaw City Arts Committee,however, Rapoport and the WarsawJewish Committee needed almosta year to findfund- ing for it. A formerghetto activist and survivor,Adolph Berman, made an initial bequest, whichwas supplemented by theJewish Committee in Warsawwith help fromthe Joint Distribution Committee. When monumentand sitewere proposed to the CityArts Committeeof Warsaw,however, they demurred. Architectsand planners did not know at thattime if the cityof Warsawitself would be rebuilton the siteof itsdestruction; plans were afootto relocatethe Polishcapital altogether, across the Vistula River near the undestroyedPraga sectionof Warsaw.City planners feared that to sanction a monument at the site of the ghetto would be to establishparticular plans before theyhad been decided. In addition, theywon- dered whether,with materials and resources so desperately short, they could politicallyafford to reconstructthe entirecity around a Jewishmonument. Sen- sitiveto Stalin'shostility to the Jews,city planners feared for theirown futureat the hands of the newlyestablished-and Soviet-controlled-unicameralparlia- ment. Among the committeemembers, Rapoport recognized one of his former professorsof sculpturefrom the academy; othermembers included partyofficials and former partisans who sympathizedwith what they regarded as the leftist roots of the uprising and its memorializer.After several days' deliberation,the Warsaw City Arts Committeeaccepted the proposed memorial,but only under

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions the conditionthat it be unveiled on the fifthanniversary of the uprising,19 April 1948, now less than a year away.For as theyhinted darkly, given an unpredictable politicalclimate and increasinglytight borders, they could not guarantee permis- sion afterthat date. Withoutany studio space leftstanding in Warsaw-much less workingmate- rials or a foundry-Rapoport leftfor Paris to turnhis plastermodel into bronze statuary.Instead of settingimmediately to work,however, he spent his firstsev- eral weeks in Paris familiarizinghimself with the nascentart of postwarEurope. As a figurativesculptor, Rapoport realized thathis place in the contemporaryart scene had always been marginal. But now afterhis years as socialistrealist bust maker in Russia, both his mode and aestheticimpulse seemed of a completely differentera as he looked around. The more abstractand, in his view,nihilistic his peers' work had become, the more representationaland coherent his own missionas prospectivewitness seemed to him. Reluctantly,he visitedhis old men- tors at the Academy of Fine Arts and showed them his project design. Even though theyreassured him and even applauded his concept,Rapoport chose to insulatehimself from further contemporary scrutiny and literallyclosed the door to his studio before going to work. "Could I have made a stone witha hole in it,"he has asked,

and said,"Voila! The Greatnessof the Jewish People"? No, I neededto showthe heroism, to illustrateit literallyin figureseveryone, not just artists,would respond to. This was to be a publicmonument after all. And whatdo humanbeings respond to? Faces, figures, the human form. I did not want to represent resistancein the abstract: it was not an abstractuprising. It was real.23

So using kibbutznikimas his models-that is,live heroes of the Yishuv in Palestine who were livingin Paris afterthe war-Rapoport set out to make, in his words, "a clearlynational monumentfor the Jews,not a Polish monument.I wanted to show the Polish people who we reallywere." Who "we reallywere" would depend, of course, on Rapoport's own identityas it was refractedthrough his mixed self- mythographyas Jew,socialist, and sculptorof heroes. As Rapoport began his work in Paris, a survivorand architect,Mark Leon Suzin, was commissioned to design and constructthe base of the monument in Warsaw.Suzin planned at firstto clear the mountain of rubble fromthe monument's site at the corner of Zamenhoffand Gesia Streets, the latter already renamed M. Anielewicz Street,to anchor the monumentsolidly in the ground. With no mechanical equipment at his disposal, however,architect and assistants undertook thisclearing by hand, a broken stone at a time.After two weeks' work withoutdiscernible effect, he abandoned thisapproach and decided to incorpo- rate the ruins themselvesinto the monument'sbase by pouring tons of concrete and reinforcementover them. Later,as the ruinssettled beneath the foundation,

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions cracksappeared in the monument'sgranite base, whichthe municipalauthorities eventuallyreconstructed in 1959. At the end of 1947, while the foundrywas casting the bronze part of the sculpture in Paris, Rapoport and Suzin traveledto Sweden in search of granite for the monument'sretaining wall. The JewishAgency in Stockholm directed them to the best quarry in the area, where theydiscovered a huge cache of per- fectlycut Labradorite granite blocks, ready to be shipped. "Where is this supposed to go?" they asked. It was ordered during the war by Arno Breker, the great German sculptor,they were informed,for a monumentin Berlin to commemorate Hitler'svictory. Satisfied that it was, in everyway, the perfectgranite for theirown monument,sculptor and architectsent it directlyto Warsaw. One monthbefore the officialWarsaw unveiling, Rapoport's foundryin Paris wheeled out the monument'sbronze statuaryfor its critical debut the day before being shipped: "This is a beautifulwork . . . of intense pathos, lively,powerful, and skillfullybalanced," proclaimed Maurice Brillant,dean of Parisianart critics. He went on to suggest that its figureswere painful,yet peaceful, evocative of Rodin and Emile Antoine Bourdelle, withoutbeing archaic.24"It is pregnantwith epic realism," Waldemar George wrote in the formerlyclandestine resistance newspaperCe matin;"It goes to the heartof thingsand soars so highthat it reaches symbolism."25Other reviewsfollowed suit: "A livingsymbol of ghettoresistance, treated with breath-takinglyricism and grandeur,"according to Georges Pille- ment.26"This is a grandiose creationalive witha mightybreath," in the words of Pierre Desquarque; "Nathan Rapoport shows himselfexceptionally gifted, capa- ble of recapturingthe deeper meaning of heroic statuary."27 Aside fromtheir unanimous praise,the moststriking quality in these reviews was the critics'unwillingness to separate the work from the eventsbeing commemorated. In everycase, the art criticsdevoted as much space to descriptions of the ghetto,the number ofJews killed, and the uprisingitself as theydid to the bronze reliefunder review.Felt historyand its public memoryhad not yetbeen riven by time but remained united somehow in both artists'and critics'minds. Eyes thatmay have beheld actual eventswould now behold the memorialto them: memoryof eventswas stillalmost visceral,so strongas to seem part of the monument itself.The linkbetween events, memorial evocations, and viewerswas crit- icallypalpable in 1948 in waysentirely lost to us now. Only in Warsaw,however, would the statuarybe anchored literallyin the destructionit commemorated, seeminglyless an aesthetic reference to events than a part of them. The journey between itsdebut as bronze statuein Paris and its unveiling in Warsaw as monument thus transplantedthe work from an aesthetic to a historicalrealm. Fearful that Soviet soldiers would stop the ninety pieces of bronze statuaryat the border if he shipped it overland,Rapoport sent it via waterwayto Warsaw,where it arrivedin the last week of March 1948 along

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions FIGURES 4 and 5. Clay maquette of the monument,showing roughly hewn wall and platformarea as well as sculpturein front(top), with all four planned menorotvisible; and bas- reliefin back (bottom),with three of four planned menorot;c. 1947. Photo: estateof Nathan Rapoport.

with the cut stone from Sweden. This gave the Polish stone cuttersin Warsaw, workingfrom Rapoport's gypsumdesign broughtfrom Paris, only weeks to carve the bas-reliefinto the back of the monumentbefore its unveilingon April 19. When Rapoport arrivedin Warsawto erectthe entirememorial, in fact,they had not finished,so togetherwith fivestone cutters,he carved the back side of the monumentas the statuaryin frontwas being installed.

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions FIGURE 6. Detail of maquette,showing bas-relief.

On itsunveiling, five years to the day afterthe firstshots of the uprisingwere fired,Rabbi Dreistmannof Poland opened dedicationceremonies by reciting the mourner's Kaddish, joined by most of the 12,000 survivors,visiting Jewish dignitaries, Polish politicians, and local spectators. According to witnesses and reporters,hundreds of flamingred banners of socialistand communistyouth groups flutteredtogether overhead with blue-and-whitestar-of-David banners hoisted by Jewishand Zionist groups.28Wary of settinghis makeshiftaltar and Holy Ark before such a monumental graven image, however,the rabbi kept the thirty-one-foot-highstone-and-bronze edifice covered discreetlywith sheets during prayers.Only when speakers like YitzhakZukerman, one of Anielewicz's survivingdeputies then livingin Palestine,ascended the platformwas the monument itselfunveiled. In his sensitivityto the spectacle of so manyJews praying before such an icon, the rabbi now appears to have been prescient:for over the years, it has been the monument and its square (not the synagogue) that serves as central gatheringplace for both religiousJewish visitors from abroad and the largelyunaffiliated youngJews in Warsaw.Ironically, it is as ifthe monumenthad retained the sense of sacred space created by the temporaryHoly Ark and altar. For manyyoung PolishJews today, an annual visitto the monumentto laywreaths (not a traditionallyJewish ritual) on the 19thof April has become theironly reg- ular Jewishobservance.29 Earliestsketches of the monumentreflect both an insistenceon Jewishthemes and an emphasis on the proletarianform. Rather than tryingto meld them into one set of figures,however, the sculptorjoinedthem back to back,bound together

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FIGURE 7. Monument shortlyafter its unveiling, 19 April 1948. Note mounds of cleared rubble,no otherbuildings standing,and wreathspiled up at the monument's base. Photo: estateof Nathan Rapoport.

by a free-standingwall of roughlyhewn stone thatwould functionboth structur- ally and figuratively.As edifice,it literallysupports the figuresand meanings projected onto it; as tropicreference, it recallsthe ghettowall dividingJewsfrom the rest of the city.And unlike other more abstractmemorial formssuch as the obelisk or pantheon, this free-standingwall resemblesa great tombstone,with wreathsof flowersperpetually adorning itsbase. In Jewishcustom, small pebbles and stones are piled into littleheaps on its flatsurfaces, only to be swept offby Polish groundskeepers.At night,the bronze figurescome alive in the flickering lightof Jahrzeit candles placed at theirbase, theirshadows jumping and darting against the looming stone wall. This wall's most significantresonance, however,has been almost entirely overlooked. For as Rapoport explained, the wall was intended to recall not just the ghettowalls but the WesternWall in Jerusalemas well. Early photographsof his workingmaquette (figs.4-6) show that the granitestones were indeed conceived to be much more roughlyhewn than the finalversion, reminiscent of the giant blocks of the Kotel. These great stoneswould thus have literallysupported

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions and framed the memoryof the events in Warsaw in the iconographic figureof Judaism's holiest site, itselfa monumentalremnant of the Second Temple and, by extension,its destruction.We also see four menorot,not the finaltwo, placed at each corner of the monument'sbase-another referenceto the Temple Mount. Of all Jewish icons, the menorah in its visual resonance with the Maccabean hanuki'ahmight be that most closelyassociated withclassically Jewish resistance. As the Kotel has become the principal fragmentaryicon of the Second Temple, the stones of this memorial would now suggestthemselves as monumentalrem- nants of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Dynamited,torched, and thenbulldozed bythe Germans,the WarsawGhetto had been demolished a block at a time. In 1948 all that remained was a moon- scape of rubble, piled sixteenfeet high, covering hundreds of acres. Anchored in this landscape of debris, the granite blocks in the monument appeared on its unveiling to rise out of the broken stones,emerging fromthem almost as con- gealed fragmentsof the destructionitself (fig. 7). As a singulartombstone rooted in this great burial mound, it seemed initiallyto draw its strength,massiveness, and authorityfrom its relativelysolitary placement amid the verydestruction it commemorated. Location would reinforcehere the sense of thismemorial's link to events as a metonymicalfragment of the event it commemorates,not just its displacement. Today the monument stillstands alone in a large, well-keptsquare, but it is now surrounded by block-styleapartment buildings, which diminish its earlier

FIGURE 8. Westernview of the monument,with menorah in front;c. 1982. Photo: Monika Krajewska.

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FIGURE 9 (left).Detail of westernview of monument,showing inscriptionsclearly legible, "To theJewish people, its heroes and martyrs";c. 1982. Photo: Monika Krajewska. FIGURE 10 (right).Detail, showingLiberte figureas mother,child's arms upraised. Photo: estateof Nathan Rapoport.

monolithicimpact (fig. 8). Instead of seeming to pull order togetherout of the mounds of rubble around it,even being vivifiedby these ruins,from a distance it is now one rectangularblock among many others. The trees, green lawns, and sun bathers during the summer combine to domesticate this memorial a little and relieve some of the basic tensioncreated between its plastic,lifelike figures and massive granitebase. The seven figureson the monument'swestern wall facing the open square are classically,even mythologicallydrawn (figs.9-10): fightingtheir way out of stone, out of the burning ghetto,these heroicallysculpted men and women are transformedto legendary proportions.Together theywould represent"all the people" at all the stages of life. Except for one fallenyouth at the lower right(a paean to the pathetic hero of World War I sculpture),the figuresare risingto resist and protect themselves.Each grasps a weapon of the sort found in the

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ghetto: a muscular prophet figureon one knee picks up a rock; a young boy at the leftclutches a dagger; a young woman at the rightcradles a Kalashnikov;the leader Anielewiczclenches a home-made grenade. Even the motherengulfed by flamesraises her rightarm defensively,as does the babyin her otherarm. All are vulnerablyexposed; none has armor or protectiveclothing of any sort,only a sheath of sculpted muscle. As others have noted, in her bared breast and pose, the woman here clearlyrecalls Delacroix's Liberte and, by extension,the revolu- tionaryinsurrection she has come to symbolizein France.30In his bare chest, tattered clothes, and rolled-up sleeves, clutching his grenade almost like a hammer,Rapoport's Anielewicz is unmistakablyproletarian, marching forth as both workerand partisanto lead his fighters,now as one figuredby the other. The monument'sdedication is inscribedin Hebrew,Yiddish, and Polish "To the JewishPeople-Its Heroes and Its Martyrs,"but to see the martyrswe must walk around to the stone bas-reliefon the shaded side of the monument(fig. 11). In numericalreference to the tribesof Israel, twelvestooped and huddled figures on the reverse embody archaic, archetypalJews in exile, with only three Nazi helmets and two bayonets barely visible in the background to distinguishthis expulsion fromany other.Eyes to the ground,all trudgeresignedly to theirfate- except for a rabbi holding a Torah scroll in one arm, who looks up and reaches to heaven as if to beseech God. By his own admission, Rapoport clearly recalls Hirszenberg's Golus,which became, as David Roskies remindsus, "the firsticon

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FIGURE 11. Detail of eastern viewof monument, showingbas-relief procession of exile. Photo: James E. Young.

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions of Jewish sufferingto gain a mass audience"-itself echoing the procession on the Arch of Titus.31As such, it was used by Rapoport as a recognizablypublic archetype for his newlydeported Jews. And like the poet Avraham Sutzkever, who never portraysa German except as a type,Rapoport has chosen never to representthe faces of Nazis, instead referringonly metonymicallyto themby the tips of theirbayonets, the distinctiveslope of theirhelmets. The result here is a two-sidedmonument, representing two kinds of Jewish types,each to be viewed separately.But in addition to the narrativemovement on each side of the wall (the martyrsmarching laterallyright to left, the heroes ascending vertically),I detecta movementbetween opposing sides withinthe core of the wall itself,from dark side to light.For as we see froma side view of the monument,the martyrsengraved into the granitenecessarily recede into it and become invisible,as if absorbed into the stone. On the westernside facing the open square, however,the heroes' profilesstand out in distinctrelief. In this movementbetween sides, the ancienttype seems to pass intothe shaded wall only to emerge triumphantlyout of the other side into the westernlight: one type is literallyrecessive, the other emergent.

The Monument's Life in Mind and Community

Memoryis not merelypassed down fromgeneration to generationin the Warsaw Ghetto Monument but is necessarilyrecast in the minds of each new generation at its base. Every officialvisitor, every tourist, every government ceremony and dissidentcounter-ceremony adds one more patina of meaning to the bronze and stone in thissquare-and byextension, to the eventscommemorated here. This recastingof memoryhas not been uniformor continuous,however; in fact, until recentlythe Ghetto Monument has led an altogether precarious life in the minds of local, non-JewishPoles. To some extent,this reflects its dual life in two communities:one Jewish,the other Polish. Had a larger remnantof Polish Jewrysurvived in Warsaw,the monumentmight have retained a specifi- callyJewish voice. But in the center of a non-Jewishpopulation regardingitself under stillanother foreignoccupation, it has become a more universalfocal point for its presentcommunity's memory. In his early recollectionsof theJewish Uprising, Polish historianJerzy Kirch- mayer wrote that "the militaryimportance of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is above all in its repercussions among the Polish people."32During the war and immediatelyafterward, Poles regarded the Jewish rebellion as inspirationfor their own uprising a year later. Over the years, however,they have found an increasinglymixed and contraryinspiration in the Ghetto Monument itself.For untilits recentadoption as place de resistanceby dissidents of all ranks and stripes, the monumentwas widelydisdained by Poles as a place of resentment,not resis-

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tance. In the minds of many survivorsof the 1944 Polish Uprising,the Ghetto Monument recalled not theJewish rebellion that may have inspired theirown so much as the absence of a memorialto the Polish Uprising. Poles rememberwell the 1948 campaign in the communistpress to discredit the Home Army'srole in the Warsaw Uprising,the vilificationof their national heroes as quasi-fascists.This led some to suspectthat when authoritiesapproved the Ghetto Monument, it was not only to substitutesocialist heroes of the Jews for Polish heroes of the Home Armybut, even worse,to expunge memoryof the Red Army'spassive role in the Nazis' brutal crushingof the rebellion. No monument rememberswhat all Poles willnever forget:that while 180,000 Poles died in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and the Germans razed the citya block at a time, the Red Armycamped quietlyacross the Vistula River.A 1945 memorialstatue of Russian soldiers dedicated to the Soviet liberatorsof Warsaw Brotherhoodin Arms-just over the riverin the Praga sectionis thus dubbed bylocals as "Monu- ment to the Sleeping Soldiers." Though the firstproposal fora monumentto the 1944 Uprising came fromthe Warsawevening paper, Ekspreswzeczorny, in 1946, and others from differentmemorial committeesfollowed in 1956, 1981, and 1984, political and aestheticdisagreements over everyaspect of the monument -for example, its name and whetherit should be devoted to the uprisingitself

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions or to the Home Army heroes-have paralyzed final production,which is now scheduled for August 1989. The only existingnational memorial to the 1944 uprising-a Polish Nike ambiguouslyinscribed to "The Heroes of Warsaw"-is held in ambivalentesteem as littlemore than a token gesture to remembrance, transcendentand confused in itsclassical referenceto victory.33 Given his own politicalbattles within the Jewish Fighting Organization, Mor- dechai Anielewicz might well have appreciated the bittermemorial wars now waged at the foot of the Ghetto Monument everyApril 19thduring the government's annual ceremonies. As it turnsout, not even the most vigilantefforts by the state can save the monument from performingthe memoryof other,con- flictinginterests (fig. 12). Of course, "Ad Hoc Events on Ghetto Revolt Irk Warsaw,"as the New YorkTimes headline reminds us; any commemorationother than the officialone underminesthe authorityof meaning-and itsnaturalness- imputed to events by the government.In response to the government'scharge that competing commemorationsat the Ghetto Monument aim only to exploit memoryof the uprising for these groups' own causes, the sole survivingleader of the Ghetto Uprising stillin Poland, Marek Edelman, answered, "We came to the conclusion that it would be good to do something,not against the official commission,but parallel to it."34His group's remembranceof the Bundists shot by the Russians after the war was not supposed to displace the state's memory but, perhaps more dangerously still,to add to it. In this way,the overall effect would not be one clear memorialmessage but a cacophony of competingvoices, a mixed message. Painfullyaware of the need fora siteto endow theirown strugglewith nation- alistand collectiveidentity, Solidarity Trade Union movementleaders have always been loudest in theirdemands fora monumentto the Polish WarsawUprising of 1944. Both the governmentand its opposition fullygrasp the consequences of providingsuch a memorialsite, a ready-madearena forthe performanceof contemporary resistance infused with the righteousnessof past resistance. This became especially clear during the 1988 Polish commemorationsof the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, held as usual at the base of the Ghetto Monument. "We com- memoratethis struggle today in a special way,"Lech Walesa proclaimedin a letter draftedfor the occasion, "because in thisland, the land of so manyuprisings, the uprisingof theJewish fighters was perhaps the most Polish of all uprisings."35In this conciliatorygesture, Walesa means to enlarge the Poles' national sense of themselvesto include memory of the Jews, to suggest that they were (and by extension, still are) part of Polish heritage. By thus incorporatingthe Jewish rebellioninto Polish national history,Walesa makes the GhettoUprising available to all Poles as a national figureof resistance,one withincreasingly tangled consequences.36 Withthis in mind, historicalparallels between past, present,and prospective uprisingsare encouraged in officialPolish interpretationsof the Ghetto Monu-

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ment,even as theyare carefullyconstrained. This is accomplished partlyby the monument'scentral location in the cityand partlyby the government'scanny incorporationof it into the national commemorativecycle. Challenged by Soli- darity'sgradual unionization of the Ghetto Monument since 1980, the government launched itsown campaign to nationalizeit after 1983. As the government seems to recognize, the memorial space, if leftvacant, will be filledby someone else's meaning, some memoryother than theirs.The square surrounding the Ghetto Monument has thus become both a dangerous and necessarymemorial space for the state,whose best interestironically is now to preserveits literal reference to theJewish uprising while assiduously avoiding its symbolic reference to currentresistance. In officiallysponsored wreath-layingceremonies, therefore, the governmentwould attemptto sustain the memoryof the Jewishuprising, even as it would limitmemory's potency as contemporaryinspiration. Every year the governmentmay well fear that,left to its own devices,Solidarity might commemorate the Ghetto Uprising by actuallyreenacting it: the six-weekuprising would replay itselfnow in the figuresof present-dayworkers on strike.This is preciselywhat happened in 1988, when commemorationsbegun at the Warsaw Ghetto Monument the 19th of April ended in a strikeat the Gdansk shipyards six weeks later. This is whythe governmenthopes thata recentlydedicated memorial route originatingnear the Ghetto Monument and runningto the Umschlagplatz(site of the Jews' transferto death-camp trains)will, in the words of the state press, "link the already existing monuments commemoratingthe martyrdomof the Jewish people, endow them with due rank, and include them in the symbolic landscape of Warsaw."37The monument is now joined deliberately to surrounding memorialsby a path thatleads fromone memorialtablet to the next,a visitors'walking narrative that confers meaning on all partsof the route,each in lightof the others. Memorybegins here in frontof a "Tree of Common Remem- brance" dedicated both to Jews who perished and to Poles who died tryingto rescue them; withPolish and Jewishmemory seemingly unified, visitors turn to face the Ghetto Monument itself,the next station on this path. From here the trailcontinues with stops-nineteen in all-at syenitetablets commemorat- ing specificheroes of the ghetto,including Ringelblum,Korczak, and various fighters;after winding through several cityblocks, the route ends at the new Umschlagplatz memorial,whence 350,000 Jews were deported to their deaths. As one node among others in a matrixof monumentsdevoted to remembering Polish history,the WarsawGhetto Monumentwould thus be incorporatedinto a national memoriallandscape. The tendencyby Solidarity to figureits contemporary resistance in the memory of the Ghetto Uprising is thus matched by the officialmove to represent memoryof the Poles' averted genocide in the trope of theJews' actual fate. The resultis a reaffirmationboth of the new Polish memoryof Jews as fightersand of

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FIGURE 13 (left).Willy Brandt visitsthe Ghetto Monument,and Der Spiegelasks, "Should Brandt have kneeled?" 14 December 1970. FIGURE 14 (opposite,left). JimmyCarter at the monument.New York : -<- !Times, 31 December 1977. Photo: Associated Press. - > a;FIGURE< 15 (opposite,right). Pope John Paul II kneels at the footof the monumentin prayer,18 June 1983. Photo: estate of Nathan Rapoport.

theJews' destruction in Poland. In fact,with so fewliving and breathingJews left in Poland, Jews have come to exist primarilyin the twin memorial references embodied bythe GhettoMonument: as metonymiesfor destruction and heroism. "The uprisingin the WarsawGhetto belongs to the historyof both the Polish and the Jewish nations," the editors of Warsaw's Trybunaludu write; "The present observances . . . occur at a time of wide upsurge of interestin Poland in the centuries-old Polish-Jewishhistory, in the role of Polish Jews in cultural, economic, and social life,in ourcommon fate. This also includesa growthof interest in the laststage of the common fate, prepared for theJews and Polesby the Nazis."38 As is already clear in Poland's many other memorialsand museums to the time of Sho'ah, the annihilationof Polish Jewryincreasingly serves as the primaryfigure by which Poles have come to remembertheir own sufferingduring World War II .39 In addition to the ways Poles have begun to refigureboth their past and present in lightof the JewishUprising, other national leaders and groups continue to adopt the monumentas theirfighting icon as well. In the accompanying photographs,we recalljust a fewof the differentheads of statewho have called on the monumentto pay theirrespects to it-but to whatand to whom is each of these people payinghis respects?Was Nehru rememberingthe Jewish fighters or

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions his country'sown independence a few years before? As clearlymoved as Willy Brandt was on his historicand conciliatoryvisit to the monumenton 7 December 1970, his German compatriotswere more preoccupied by the proprietyof such a gesturewhen theyasked later,"Should Brandt have kneeled?" (fig.13).4? In the midstof planning to bring Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat togetherat Camp David, JimmyCarter also visitedthe monument.Featured on the frontpage of the New YorkTimes (31 December 1977), the president'spilgrimage of remembrance may have been intended as much to reassure worriedJewish leaders as it was to recall the uprising itself(fig. 14). When John Paul II returnedto Poland as pope, it was as national hero thathe visitedthe WarsawGhetto Monument (fig. 15). When he leftthe monument,having remembered the ghettofighters, he was in turn rememberedas a fighterin the Polish resistance. In what maybe regarded as the mostextreme example of self-representation in the figuresof this monument,a delegate fromthe PalestineLiberation Orga- nization also laid a wreath at the monumentin 1983 and pronounced that "as the Jews were thenjustified to rise up against theirNazi murderers,so now are

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions the Palestiniansjustified in theirown strugglewith the Zionists."Whether or not the PLO found actual or only rhetoricalinspiration in the Ghetto Uprising, during the Palestinians' intifadafive years later in Gaza and the West Bank, another delegation of Palestinianslaid a wreathdedicated in Polish "to those who perished in the Ghetto Uprising from those who perished in the Palestinian Uprising.' Ironically,the monumentmay finallyallow this kind of appropria- tion,for even though the WarsawGhetto Uprising was conceived and carried out largelyby Zionistgroups withinthe Jewish Fighting Organization, no trace of the rebels' Zionist origins is evident in the monumentitself. Were its figuresmore explicitlyZionist, this monument mighthold significantnew consequences for the kind of self-understandingit now generatesin its Palestinianvisitors. In fact,the decision to recast the Warsaw Ghetto Monument in Israel after 1967 came about partlyamid fears that its Jewishlife in Poland could not be guaranteed. During Poland's anti-Semiticpurges followingthe Six-Day War, AmericanJews and Israelis worriedthat, as PolishJews were being expelled from the partyand unions,Jewish meaning would be elided fromthe memoriallandscape. It was not thatanyone feared the actual dismantlingof the monument;in being left to stand so all alone in an environmentboth hostile to and bereftof Jews, however,the Ghetto Monument'sJewish significance and character now seemed threatenedas neverbefore. With this in mind,the American philanthro- pistand Warsawsurvivor Leon Jolsoncommissioned a reproductionof the monument fromits original forms,with slight aesthetic modifications, to be installed at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem,where itsJewish national spiritwould be preserved (fig. 16). By the time the frontalrelief of the WarsawGhetto Monument was installed here in 1975, Rapoport's Anielewicz had already been adopted as an honorary Israeli archetype,reproduced on postage stamps,book jackets, tour pamphlets, and commemorativeguides to Holocaust Remembrance Day programs.42Con- ceived by a nationalistsculptor, inspired by a Jewishuprising, this monument recalls simultaneouslyboth the traditionalweakness of diaspora Jewryand the consequent need fororganized defense,which was embodied firstin the Warsaw rebellionand then again in the newJewish state. In Israel, therefore,this cannot be a memorial to victimsso much as it is to victory:it recalls the Jews' ultimate triumphover the Nazis in theirsurvival and, in havingrisen at all, theJews' victory over theirown past responses to persecution.If in being framedby the stones of the Kotel, Anielewicz and the JewishFighting Organization can be perceived as direct descendants of the Maccabees, then the Israel Defense Force would now see itselfdirectly descended fromthe ghettofighters. That a handful of fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto lived to fightas well in Israel's War of Independence only reinforcesthe link between past and presentheroism. In effect,Rapoport has helped resolve the dilemma of Jewish monument makers working in a traditionwith so few monumental icons. For he has in

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions FIGURE 16. Monument'sreproduction at Yad Vashem,Israel, showingfront and back walls of originalas a procession leading to ascending heroes, Liberteas modestlydraped. Photo: estateof Nathan Rapoport.

the end contributedto popular Jewishiconography its own icon of resistance and martyrdom.Located now in the matrixof Israeli memoryat Yad Vashem on Har Hazikaron (Remembrance Hill) in Jerusalem,the reproductionof the Ghetto Monument figuresHolocaust memoryin the images of heroes, even as it is in turnrefigured by Israel's own wars. By unitingpast heroismand resistance with present, the monument reciprocallyinvites Israelis to remember parts of their own war experiences in the image of the Ghetto Uprising. In the monument'ssquare at Yad Vashem, Israeli soldiers,new immigrants,and Baptisttour- istsalike lingerbefore it. The touristsmight be forgivenif they occasionally glance between bronze ghettofighters and young soldiers gathered nearbyto fixthem in analogue; after all, the soldiers themselvesare bused to this square as part of theirmilitary education preciselyto know themselvesin lightof past fighting Jews. In fact,when the Ghetto Monument'sreproduction was initiallyunveiled in Jerusalem,it memorializedonly the heroes: thebas-relief to the martyrsfollowed eighteenmonths later. Instead of emergingfrom actual blocksof Jerusalem lime- stone recalled by the monument'sbase in Warsaw,however, the ghetto fighters are set here againsta red brickwall, recalling the ghettowall, not the great stones

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions of the Kotel. And unlike its back-to-backsetting in Warsaw,the two sides of the monumentare opened up like a book to show both heroes and martyrssimulta- neously,inviting a comparisonby the eye as it followsthe processionof archetypal martyrsfrom right to leftto the heroicallyrising fighters. Even here the subtler movementwithin the stone of the Warsaw monument is recalled: the martyrs' facade is recessed into the brick,while the adjacent fightersemerge from it. Unlike the Warsawversion, however, Liberte's right breast is draped modestlyin deference to Jerusalem'sreligious sensibilities, no longer quite as free as she had been in Europe. In several countries,one or two historicalfigures have come to embody memoryof the Holocaust period, each reflectingand affirminga nation's ethos and understandingof events.As Mordechai Anielewiczand Hannah Szenish- two who rose to resist destruction-might exemplifynational memory of the Sho'ah in Israel, Elie Wiesel and Anne Frank would figure popular American remembranceof the Holocaust in images of victimizationand hope. While Sho'ah and Gvurah (Heroism) are almostalways twinned in Israel (as illustratedby Rapo- port's monument, or the designation of Yad Vashem as "Heroes and Martyrs Authority"),American memoryof thisperiod is mostoften figured by Holocaust only.Even Yom Hasho'ah Vehagvurah(Day of Holocaust and Heroism), decreed byan act of the Israeli parliamentin 1951 to fallon the 27th of Nissan (the middle of the uprising period), is marked by the abbreviated Yom Hasho'ah (Day of Holocaust) in America. Aside froma much modifiedversion of the monuments fightersat the Workmen'sCircle Building in New York,only the Ghetto Monu- ment'sbas-relief of martyrsis recastin America. Bronze reliefsentitled The Last Marchtaken fromthe originalcast have been reproduced at synagoguesand sem- inaries in New York City,Syracuse, and Dallas-and are dedicated to the six mil- lion Jewswho perished,without reference to the monument'sheroes.43 When Walter Benjamin observed that "even the most perfectreproduction of a workof artis lackingin one element:its presence in timeand space, itsunique existenceat the place where it happens to be," he suggestedtwo greatertruths as well: that part of the work of art is its particulartime and place and that even though a work can be reproduced, once transported,its presence may not be recoverable.44Later in the same essay,Benjamin bringsto our attentionan aspect considered at greaterlength here: in new timesand places, reproductionsaccrue new kinds of presence, new meanings and significance.The Warsaw Ghetto Monument, in particular,has undergone as many personalitychanges as it has reproductionsin Israel and America. Depending on which part is reproduced, in what medium, and where, the monumentremembers only heroes, only martyrs,only Jews, or only Poles. In its many echoes and reproductions,the Ghetto Monument'simage has become a kind of memorialcurrency, an all-purposeicon- ographic tender whose value fluctuatesin everynew timeand place.

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Conclusion

Most discussionsof the GhettoMonument ignore the essentiallypublic dimension of its memorial performance,remaining either formallyaestheticist or almost piouslyhistorical. While it is true thatRapoport willnever be regarded by art historiansas highlyas contemporariessuch as Jacques Lipshitzand Henry Moore, neither can his work be dismissed criticallyon the basis of its popular appeal. Unabashedly figurative,heroic and referential,his work seems to be doomed preciselyby those qualities-public accessibilityand historicalreferentiality-thatmake it monumental.But in fact,it maybe just thispublic popularity that finallyconstitutes the monument'saesthetic performance-and that leads memorials like the Warsaw Ghetto Monument to demand public and historical disclosure,even as theycondemn themselvesto criticalobscurity. Instead of stop- ping at formalquestions, or at issues of historicalreferentiality, we mustgo on to ask how memorial representationsof historymay finallyweave themselvesinto the course of ongoing events. While questions of high and low art may well continue to informthe discus- sion surrounding Holocaust monuments,they must not dictate the criticaldis- cussion any longer. Instead, we mightkeep in mind the reductive-occasionally vulgar-excesses in popular memorial representations,even as we qualify our definitionsof kitschand challenge its usefulnessas a criticalcategory for the dis- cussion of public monuments.Rather than patronizingmass tastes,we recognize the sheer weightof public taste and thatcertain conventional forms in avowedly public art mayeventually have consequences forpublic memory-whetheror not we think they should. This is to acknowledge the unfashionable,even archaic aspects of Rapoport's work even as we look beyond them. It is also to recognize that public art such as this demands additional criticalcriteria if the lives and meanings of such works are to be sustained-and not denied-by art-historical discourse. For there is a differencebetween avowedly public art-exemplified in public monumentslike this-and art produced almostexclusively for the art world-its critics,other artists,and galleries-that has yetto be properlyrecognized. People do not come to a monument like Rapoport's because it is new, cuttingedge, or fashionable; as Rapoport's criticsare quick to note, this monument is none of these. Where contemporaryart is produced as self-or medium-reflexive,public Holocaust monumentsare produced specificallyto be historicallyreferential, to lead viewersbeyond themselvesto an understandingor evocation of events. As publicmonuments, these memorialsgenerally avoid referringhermetically to the processes thatbrought them into being. Where contemporaryart invitesviewers and criticsto contemplateits own materiality,or its relationshipto other works before and afteritself, the aim of memorialsis not to remarktheir own presence

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions so much as past eventsthat are no longer present.In thissense, Holocaust memorials immediatelypoint beyond themselves. The fundamentaldilemma facingcontemporary monument makers is thus two-sidedand recalls the dilemma facingprospective witnesses in any medium. First,how does one refer to events in a medium that can refer only to itself? And second, if the aim is to remember-that is, to referto-a specificperson, defeat,or victory,how can it be done abstractly?For manywho survivedto testify to the Sho'ah, memoryand testimonyare one; witnessfor these survivorsentails the most literal transmissionpossible of what they had seen and experienced. Since few survivorswould regard themselves as witnesses to form alone, as became clear in the art recoveredfrom the ghettosand camps, even artistsof the avant-garderedefined their aesthetic task as testimonialrealists.45 What has come to be regarded as "documentary"art and literatureseemed to them the only mode in which evidence or witnesscould be delivered. But as historiansand lit- erarycritics have come to accept the impulsein writersto testifyin narrative,even as theylook beyond witnessto the kindsof knowledgecreated in such writing,so mightcritical viewers of Holocaust memorialsaccept the parallel impulsein Holo- caust memorialmakers to testifythrough figuration-before turning to the ways public memoryis organized in such figures.46 As others have noted, modern and avant-gardesculptors between the wars in Europe were rarelyinvited to commemoratethe victoriesor losses, battlesor war dead of WorldWar 1.47 The reluctanceon the partof donors and government sponsorsto commissionabstract memorials, in particular,seems to have stemmed fromtwo parallel impulses in the public and state.On the one hand, the aim of war-relatedmemorials was perceived generallyto valorize the sufferingin such a wayas tojustify it historically.On the otherhand, thisaim was bestaccomplished by recallingtraditional heroic icons in order to investmemory of recentwar with past pride and loyalties,which would also explain the recent war in waysvisible and seeminglyself-evident to the public. In bothcases, figurativeimagery seemed to naturalize best the state'smemorial messages. It was clear to those in position to memorializeWorld War I that the primaryaim of modern sculptorsafter the war was to repudiate and lament-not affirm-both the historicalrealities and the archaic values thatseemed to have spawned them. Not that many of the modern sculptorswould have shown much interestin such projects to begin with. At the end of what was regarded as the nadir of European civilization,artists and monumentmakers vociferously resisted tradi- tional mimeticand heroic evocationsof events,contending that any such remembrance would elevate and mythologizethem. In theirview, yet another classically proportioned Prometheuswould have falselyglorified and therebyaffirmed the horriblesuffering they were called upon to commemorate.In the minds of many graphic and literaryartists of the time, this would have been tantamount to betrayingnot only theirexperience of the Great War but also the new reason for

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions art'sexistence after the war: to challenge the world'srealities and the conventions encouraging them. If figurativestatuary were demanded of them, then, only antiheroic figureswould do, as exemplifiedin the patheticheroes of Wilhelm Lehmbruck'sFallen Man and SeatedYouth (1917). As true to the artists'interwar vision as these works may have been, neitherpublic nor state seemed ready to abide memorial edifices built on foundations of doubt instead of valor. The pathetichero was thus condemned byemerging totalitarian regimes in Germany and Russia as defeatistfor seeming to embodyall thatwas worthforgetting-not remembering-in the war. Abstraction,in addition to the waysit diffusesa work'ssense of mimeticwit- ness, may frustrateas well the memorial'scapacity as locus forshared self-image and commonly held ideals. In its hermetic and personal vision, abstraction encourages private visions in viewers,which would defeat the communal and collectiveaims of public memorials.On the one hand, the specificityof realistic figurationwould seem to thwartmultiple messages, while abstract sculpture could accommodate as many meaningsas could be projectedonto it. But in fact, it is almostalways a figurativemonument like the WarsawGhetto Monument that servesas point of departure forpolitical performances. It is as iffigurative sculpture like this were needed to engage viewerswith likenesses of people, to evoke an empathic link between viewerand monumentthat mightthen be marshaled into particularmeaning. In referringto the general condition of the world, an inner state of mind, broken trustin mankind, or even art's inabilityto represent the real, abstract formsstill offer artists the widest possible varietyof expression. Maya Lin's suc- cinctlyabstract Vietnam Veterans Memorial, for example, commemoratesthe nation'sambivalence toward the VietnamWar and itsveterans in waysaltogether unavailable in figuration.8Instead of merelycondemning the figurativemode as archaic and out-of-touch,however, we mightalso acknowledgethe need in public audiences for figuration,even as we recall the constructednature of figurative iconography.In thisway, we can keep monumentalfiguration from naturalizing itself,from putting a finishon itssignificance. By breakingthe figurativeicon into its performativeparts and reinvestingthe memorialtext with the memoryof its own constructedness,we mightthus rememberthe essentialabstraction of figu- rativeiconography. Through this attentionto the activityof memorialization,we mightalso re- mind ourselves that public memoryis constructed,and that there are worldly consequences in the kinds of historicalunderstanding generated by monuments. Our questions have not been, Can a monumentwitness events? or How do monuments distort history?but rather,How have monuments like this organized historicalmemory? What are the social, political,and aestheticdimensions com- prisingthe monument'spublic life? What is our role in it all? and finally,What are the consequences for our currentlives in lightof the waysour past is memo-

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions rialized? In these questions,we findthat the performanceof the Warsaw Ghetto Monument depends not on some measured distancebetween history and itsmon- umental representationbut in the conflationof privateand public memory,in the memorialactivity by whichminds reflectingon the past inevitablyprecipitate in the presenthistorical moment.

Notes

I would like to thank the Memorial Foundation forJewish Culture and the National Endowment for the Humanities for grantssupporting work on this article,which I delivered in much abbreviatedform at the Associationfor Jewish Studies annual con- ferencein Boston, 1986. 1. David Roskies has discussed both this resonance and the exile motifitself in much greaterdetail in Againstthe Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in ModernJewish Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 276-80. 2. Though Rapoport's monumentcontinues to be celebrated in the popular press and Jewishjournals, it has been almost completelyignored by the art-historicaland cura- torial establishment.Selected essays about the Warsaw Ghetto Monument include: Eliezer Ben Hadash, "Nathan Rapoport: Sculptorof Jewish Resurgence," Israel Today, 12 January 1960, 8-9; Leon E. Brown, "Monumental Worksfrom Warsaw to Phila- delphia,"JewishTimes, 16 February 1984, 1, 3; Helen Collins, "The Magical Worksof Nathan Rapoport,"JewishHorizon, 25 March 1982, 1, 3; Anne Glass, "'Never to Forget "'JewishStandard, 15 May 1972, 2-3; Bernard Gotfryd,"Casting the Holocaust in Bronze,"JewishMonthly, April 1985, 18-19; Freema Gottlieb,"Monument to Survival: A Talk withNathan Rapoport,"Haddassah Magazine, December 1981, 24-25, 37; Marc Kornblatt,"Nathan Rapoport Remembersthe Uprising,"Congress Monthly, April/May 1983, 13-14; Ernie Meyer,"Monument to Revolt Set Up at Yad Vashem,"Jerusalem Post,15 January1975, 2; Nathan Rapoport,"Chronicler of the Holocaust,"JewishStan- dard,15 June-1 July1972, 3, 18; Bea Stadtler,"Remembering the 6,000,000,"National JewishMonthly, April 1968, 12, 16; Richard Yaffe,Nathan Rapoport: Sculptures and Mon- uments(New York, 1980). 3. In thisseven-minute film by Jan Kulma, the monumentis broken into cubistpastiche, filmedin its parts, put to Arnold Schoenberg's Chorusof theWarsaw Ghetto Survivors, and narrated in a librettovoice-over, "This I Cannot Forget." It was produced for Warsawtelevision, though never shown. 4. Robert Musil, "Monuments," in PosthumousPapers of a Living Author,trans. Peter Wortsman(Hygiene, Colo., 1987), 61. 5. In an earlier essay,I suggest that a critiquelike thismight thus save iconsof remembrance fromhardening into idolsof remembrance;see James E. Young, "Memoryand Monument," in GeoffreyH. Hartman, ed., Bitburgin Moral and PoliticalPerspective (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 112; reprintedin expanded formin Young, Writingand Rewritingthe Holocaust: Narrative and theConsequences of Interpretation(Bloomington, Ind., 1988). For an excellentdiscussion of "the strugglebetween iconoclasm and idolatry,"see

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions W.J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text,Ideology (Chicago, 1986), 160-208. 6. Much of the following material and all of Rapoport's words are culled from three days of interviews with him taped by the author, 15 February, 22 February, and 1 March 1986. I have relied on Rapoport's recollections, not to privilege their accuracy so much as to make the sculptor's own memory and understanding of events part of the memorial work here. 7. For examples from his work, Rapoport pointed to the triangle in his monument to Mordechai Anielewicz at Yad Mordechai in Israel; the circle in Jacob Strugglingwith the Angel, located in Toronto; the two cylinders in Megilat-esh(Scroll of Fire) at Kesalon in Israel; and the great rectangular block of the Warsaw Ghetto Monument itself. 8. A methodological dilemma emerges here: in focusing solely on the monument, the author would risk turning events themselves into a mere footnote to their memorialization. As readers will recognize, this is, in fact, one of the critical liabilities in any study of a text's signifying activity: inquiries into how texts work seem often to exclude the historical events spawning such texts in the firstplace. With this in mind, I reiterate that this issue of a text's relationship to events is at the heart of this particular inquiry; it is only in this context that I present any version of the uprising at all. 9. Quoted in Reuben Ainsztein, The Warsaw GhettoRevolt (New York, 1979), 3. The precise source of this quotation is unclear, since Ainsztein's attribution of it to The Black Book (New York, 1946), 178, is in itself mistaken. 10. Even before the Great Liquidation, on 7 June 1942 Hashomer hatsa'ir's ghetto-published Der Oifbroiwould proclaim: The Jewish masses have not yet rid themselves of their distrust of their own fighting capabilities and given up the hope of salvation coming from outside.... Within the limited possibilities of the ghetto we must prepare the ground for a revolutionary Jewish deed. From Jewish pain and sufferings there must grow up the strength that together with all the revolutionary forces in Europe and the backing of the Red Army will rise to fight against Nazi slavery. Quoted in Ainsztein, Warsaw GhettoRevolt, 29. 11. From Der Ruf, 15 May 1942, as quoted in Ber Mark, Uprisingin theWarsaw Ghetto(New York, 1975), 99. 12. A year after the uprising, the Jewish Workers Alliance cabled this anniversary message from Warsaw (19 April 1944) to the Jewish Antifascist Committee in Moscow, requesting that it be printed in the Russian press: In connection with the anniversary of the heroic struggle in the Warsaw Ghetto, we send battle greetings to the victorious Soviet Army, to Gen. Ber- ling's Polish Army, and to Jewish workers throughout the world, battling for economic and national liberation. Quoted in Mark, Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto,192. This appeared in Moscow about the time Rapoport was submitting his sculpture to the authorities. 13. On another, more personal level, it is also possible that Rapoport simply identified with the leader Anielewicz. Both were members of Hashomer hatsa'ir before the war, and both fled to Russian-occupied territory when Germany attacked Poland. While Rapoport stayed in Russia, however, Anielewicz returned to organize the Jewish resistance. During the Great Liquidation, Anielewicz had gone to Bedzin and Sosnowiec on an Antifascist Bloc assignment; when he returned, he found that his mother and sister had been deported and killed in Treblinka. Rapoport's own mother and sister

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions were deported and killed in the same action. Accordingto the sculptor,in one of his mother'slast lettersfrom the ghettoto him in Russia, she complained that"all you left me were brushes and paints,when it should have been guns and bullets." 14. Ainsztein,Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, 79, 81. 15. Ibid., 108. 16. For more on this kind of apocalypticcoordination between Nazi "actions" and the Jewishcalendar, see Roskies,Against the Apocalypse, 191, 202. 17. Among first-personand historicalaccounts of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, these worksin English offerfull, occasionally competing, versions; Ainsztein, Warsaw Ghetto Revolt; Meyer Barkai, The FightingGhettos (Philadelphia, 1962); Wladyslaw Barto- szewski, The WarsawGhetto: A Christian'sTestimony, trans. Stephen G. Cappellari (Boston, 1987); Marek Edelman, The GhettoFighters (New York, 1946); Philip Friedman, ed., Martyrsand Fighters:The Epic of theWarsaw Ghetto (New York, 1954); Bernard Goldstein,The Stars Bear Witness(New York, 1949); Yisrael Gutman, TheJews ofWarsaw: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt (Bloomington, Ind., 1982); Gutmanand Shmuel Krakowski,Unequal Victims: Poles andJews During World War II (New York, 1986); Mark, Uprisingin theWarsaw Ghetto; Vladka Meed, On BothSides of the Wall (Israel, 1973); Sybil Milton,ed. and trans.,The Stroop Report (New York, 1979); Yuri Suhl, TheyFought Back (New York, 1965); David Wydowinski,And WeAre Not Saved (New York, 1985). 18. See Julian Tuwim, My, ZydziPolscy ... [We, Polish Jews ... ], ed. Chone Shmeruk (Jerusalem, 1984), 7. 19. Ibid., 20. The next line of the poem reads, "And the Christianswill cross themselves," whichdistinguishes somewhat ironically between Christians and Jews,who would tra- ditionallycover theirheads in such a holyplace, not uncover them. 20. Joseph Tchaikov,Sculpture (Kiev, 1921), as quoted in Avram Kampf,Jewish Experience in theArt of the Twentieth Century (South Hadley, Mass., 1984), 35. 21. See Sybil Milton, In FittingMemory? Holocaust Memorials and PostwarPolitical Culture (Detroit, 1989). David Roskies also questions the Jewishnessof this monument'sfig- ures in Againstthe Apocalypse, 297-301. 22. Ilya Ehrenburg and VasilyGrossman, eds., TheBlack Book: TheRuthless Murder ofJews byGerman-Fascist Invaders Throughout the Temporarily Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in theDeath Campsof Poland During theWar of 1941-1945, trans.John Glad and James S. Levine (New York, 1981). Though the original plates for this book were destroyedin Russia, most of the manuscriptwas eventuallybrought to Israel, where it was published in Russian in 1980 by Yad Vashem and the Israel Research Institute of ContemporarySociety. It may also be worthnoting one of the goals set forthby the editorsof thisvolume: "The Black Book should become a memorial placed over the innumerable graves of Soviet people viciouslymurdered by the German Fascists"(xii), another memorial denied by the authorities. 23. From author'sinterview, 22 February1986. 24. Maurice Brillant,"Le Monument aux combattantsdu ghettode Varsovie,"L'Epoque, 14 March 1948 (this and the followingtranslations are mine). 25. Waldemar George, "Le Monument aux defenseurs du ghetto de Varsovie ...," Ce matin,16 March 1948. 26. Georges Pillemont,"Monuments-expositions," Les Lettresfrancaises,25 March 1948. 27. Pierre Desquarque, "Paris a salue avantVarso[v]ie le monumentaux heros du ghetto," Arts,19 March 1948. 28. See "WarsawUnveils Ghetto Memorial,"New YorkTimes, 20 April 1948, 1.

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 29. I am indebted to Stanislaw Krajewskifor sharing these observationswith me in his "To Be a Jew in Poland Today,"lecture and unpublished manuscript. 30. See Roskies,Against the Apocalypse, 297. 31. Ibid., 276. 32. As cited by Ainsztein,Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, 171. 33. Thomas S. Gladskyhas already noted that,unlike other countriesin the Soviet bloc, Poland's memorial landscape remains relativelyfree of monumentsto international socialism.Instead of monumentalbusts and statuesof Lenin, Marx, and Mao, political memorials in Poland concentrateon specificallyPolish socialistsand heroes. In this way,social democraticheroes like Felix Dzierzynskiand Julian Marchlewskiremain anchored in a Polish national continuum,even as theycome to representthe larger revolutionarymovement through its Polish part. See Thomas S. Gladsky,"Polish Post- War Historical Monuments: Heroic Art and Cultural Preservation,"Polish Review 31, nos. 2-3 (1986): 153-54. By referringto the specificheroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising-all Polish Jews,most socialists-Rapoport's monument unwittinglyor not adheres to this un- writtenrule of Polish postwarmemorial sensibilities. In so doing, it seems also to lend the uprising and its leaders an unmistakablyPolish cast, especially when viewed throughPolish eyes. 34. Quoted in "Ad Hoc Events on Ghetto Revolt Irk Warsaw,"New YorkTimes, 14 April 1988, A17. 35. New YorkTimes, 18 April 1988. 36. In a fascinatingelaboration of the politicalnuances at stake here, Mark Erlich quotes the young leader of Warsaw Solidarity,Zbigniew Bujak, who declared in his address at the commemorationof Bundists HenrykErlich and VictorAlter: "We need to find our connection to history.And Erlich and Alter are my past"; in "Honoring the Past to Change the Future: Solidarityand the WarsawGhetto," Tikkun, September/October 1988, 25. 37. From the daily press reviewof the Polska agencja prasowa, 19 April 1988, 4 (emphasis added). 38. From ibid., p. a. 39. For a more extended discussionof thisissue, see Young, Writingand Rewritingthe Holo- caust,175-81. 40. See the cover of the German newsweeklyDer Spiegel,14 December 1970. 41. My thanks to Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblettfor providing photographs of this wreath,laid 19 April 1988. 42. In choosing a kibbutznikliving in Paris as the model forMordechai Anielewicz,Rapo- port may have only affirmedthe linkhe already feltbetween heroes of the ghettoand those of the Yishuv. For immediatelyafter the dedication of the Warsaw monument (nearly coincident with the founding of the JewishState), Rapoport immigratedto Israel, where he was commissionedto build yet another memorial to Anielewicz at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai (literally,Monument to Mordechai). Originallylocated near Netanya and called Mitzpe hayam before movingto the Negev, this kibbutzwas comprised largelyof Polish immigrantsfrom the Hashomer hatsa'ir movement. Inspired by the uprising led by one of their own, the kibbutz adopted Anielewicz'sname in 1943 to memorializethe courage of itsleader. Five years later,one month afterthe dedication of the Warsaw Ghetto Monument, the kibbutz itselffell under Egyptiansiege during the Israel war of independence. To what extent the kibbutzwittingly enacted its heroic self-figurationmay never be clear,but its des-

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This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:27:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions perate stand against an entire Egyptianbattalion in May 1948 seemed to establisha direct link between the courage of the WarsawGhetto and thatof the kibbutzin the national mind of Israel. See Margaret Larkin, The Six Days of Yad Mordechai(Israel, 1965). 43. This is not to say thatthe WarsawGhetto Uprising itself is forgottenin America. The Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization (WAGRO) sponsors an elaborate memorial ceremonyevery 19thof April in New York,attended by thousands of survivors,children of survivors,former partisans,and dignitaries.In addition, every few years WAGRO publishes a commemorativejournal collectingdozens of remembrances, officialtributes, and newlysurfaced details surroundingthe uprising. 44. WalterBenjamin, "The Workof Artin the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"in Illu- minations,ed. Hannah Arendt,trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1969), 220. 45. See Janet Blatter,"Art from the Whirlwind,"in Blatterand Sybil Milton,eds., Artof theHolocaust (London, 1982), 22-35. 46. For much more comprehensivediscussion of the difficultiesin bearing literarywit- ness, see James E. Young, "InterpretingLiterary Testimony: A Preface to Rereading Holocaust Diaries and Memoirs,"New Literary History 18 (Winter 1986-87): 403-23. 47. For examples, see Albert E. Elsen, ModernEuropean Sculpture, 1918-1945: Unknown Beingsand OtherRealities (New York, 1979), 122-25. 48. As might have been expected, even the most popular of abstractmonuments, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, has made concessions to the figurativedemands of its public. Apparentlydissatisfied with seeing only themselvesin the reflectionof names on itsblack marble walls,some of the veteransdemanded a more figurativerepresen- tationof "actual soldiers"nearby. As a result,a figurativestatue of threerepresentative soldiers was added to the setting-to be joined eventuallyby a figurativestatue of nurses,also veterans,who served in Vietnam. For furtherdiscussion, see Charles L. Griswold,"The Vietnam Veterans Memo- rial and the WashingtonMall: PhilosophicalThoughts on PoliticalIconography," Crit- ical Inquiry12 (Summer 1986): 688-719.

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