Acknowledgments

This book was originally written as a dissertation titled “Art in Crisis: Artistic Practice from Poland in the Decade of 1939–1949,” which I began in 2012 and defended five years later at the Freie Universität in Berlin under the supervision of Prof. Gregor Stemmrich. I would like first and foremost to thank him for his generous support of my research throughout the years and for his salient critical engagement in the project. I would also like to express my gratitude to my second supervisor, Prof. Noit Banai, for her invaluable advice and open engagement both at the time of finalizing the dissertation and beyond. My research was also made possible through the generous support of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

Turning my dissertation into a book was a steep learning curve so I hugely appreciated the guidance that I found in the review process, especially from Dr. Klara Kemp-Welch, whom I would like to thank sincerely for her valuable feedback and encouraging me to realize greater ambitions for the project. I will carry many of these valuable insights into my future work as the engagement in the art and exhibitions of the 1940s remains an ongoing interest for me.

The process of working on the book manuscript would have been an incomparably more arduous task without the support and experience of the amazing editors and copy editors I had the pleasure to work with: Meagan Down, Aleksandra Kędziorek, and Alan Lockwood. Here I would also like to thank Joanna Mytkowska, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, and Prof. Błażej Ostoja Lniski, the rector of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, for creating such a supportive and professional working environment for their authors. I further thank the Academic Board of the New Histories of Art series, as well as the Editorial Board, for making this publication possible.

Many aspects of my writing were developed during discussions and exchange with colleagues on many formal and informal occasions. I would like to thank Piotr Słodkowski for our collaborations, which greatly enriched my perspective, Michal B. Ron for the thrilling discussions during and after our doctoral colloquiums, and Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu for her inspiring support and thoughtful advice. My interest in the artistic practices of the wartime period was invigorated many years ago through the remarkable opportunity to work together with many talented colleagues as part of a curatorial team headed by Anda Rottenberg, whom I would also like to thank for sharing so generously her knowledge and experience with us.

Last but not least I would like to thank my family for supporting my persevering first with my dissertation and later on with this book. My husband, Daniel, is the first reader of all my writing and I would like to thank him for his love, patience, and support in the moments of crisis, joy, and excitement that were brought through the research and writing. My sister Paula, my parents, Andrzej and Majka, and my grandmother Marianna, I must thank for always encouraging me to follow my dreams.

A Note on Translation

In this book non-English titles for journals or magazines have been preserved in the text; however, titles of articles or publications have been provided in English translation to encourage readability. The original title of all cited print material is supplied in notes, following usual scholarly norms.

English is used for exhibition titles, works of art, and organizations, in keeping with well-known usage, or official attribution from the collecting body or institution associated with the cited material. Original titles of works of art reproduced in this book can be found in the dedicated list of works.

Unless attributed in notes, all translations are by the author.

Introduction

In the Malmö Art Museum collection, there is a small drawing on paper by Maja Berezowska. It was made in 1942 when the Polish artist was a prisoner in the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women, near a village north of Berlin. Berezowska had been arrested earlier that year in her Warsaw flat and interned by the Gestapo in the Pawiak prison, before being transported to Ravensbrück in May.1 Berezowska’s arrest was connected to her caricatures of Hitler, published in 1934 in the French journal ICI Paris.2 Those drawings had accompanied a satirical article and mocked the Führer as a failed lover, depicting him in compromising poses. The drawings’ publication had caused an international scandal, and though Berezowska avoided retaliation at that time, she paid the price years later.

The drawing from the Art Museum collection is a watercolor, depicting two women sitting next to each other, looking sideways in the same direction [fig. 1]. At first glance, the work is a classic portrait, made to express affection for the women it depicts and to commemorate their friendship. Their names are written in the upper left corner and a French phrase below states: les deux amies (the two friends). Yet the more closely one looks at the portrayed women’s faces, the more dissonance one feels between the drawing’s form and the context in which it was made. Both women look beautiful, pensive, and monumental with their long hair and pronounced, red lips. The image contrasts with what is known about harsh conditions women had to endure in the camp, from the violence of forced labor to medical experimentation, which Berezowska was subjected to around the time the drawing was made.3

Berezowska was not a keen commentator on her work and revealed very little about her wartime practice. In one of her few statements, however, she referred to that dissonance between her work’s form and its topic:

When we sat around the table, I hid a piece of paper on my lap and made quick drawings, scenes full of joy, cheerful and loving, which then went from hand to hand, giving the tormented women a moment of forgetfulness, evoking laughter and hope. I drew their portraits. Often those sheets endured better than young bodies that fire turned to ashes.4

Here, drawing is conceptualized as a dual act of imagination, rather than of documentation: the artist imagines her subjects as if they were not in the camp, and the portrayed women recognize themselves in the altered representations. In her commentary, Berezowska avoided any heroization of her artistic practice, choosing not to mention dangers entailed in any clandestine artistic or intellectual activity and not to frame it as an act of political resistance. Her striking analogy between sheets of paper and murdered women’s bodies calls for recognizing the drawing as that which remains, a material trace of impermanent bodies. From this perspective, resistance is connected not so much with political or armed struggle as with persistence or survival, and the drawings on paper are a place of resistance not only of the spirit, but also of matter resisting entropy.

1. Maja Berezowska, The Two Friends, 1942

At the same time, this work by Berezowska raises questions that reach beyond its interpretation. For example: For what reason did a Swedish museum purchase a drawing by a Polish artist in 1946? The answer is related to displaced artists during and just after the Second World War. Berezowska was liberated from Ravensbrück in April 1945 during the White Buses operation organized largely through the efforts of Folke Bernadotte, vice president of the Swedish Red Cross, who negotiated the release of camp prisoners with Heinrich Himmler shortly before the end of the war.5 Berezowska was among the prisoners rescued from Ravensbrück; as a refugee first in Malmö and then Jönköping, she continued her artistic activity,6 organizing exhibitions of works created in the camp while making new works. In 1946, her camp drawings were shown in the exhibition Polish Art from Ravensbrück in Sweden: Maja Berezowska, Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz in Stockholm, then in Ravensbrück: Pictures from the Years of Captivity in Copenhagen.7

As shown in the case of Berezowska, the study of artistic practices of Polish artists in this period involves dealing with different geographies before, after, and during the Second World War. Numerous of the practices analyzed in the present book, undertaken during the war, were developed in Nazi concentration camps located in the territory of the Third Reich or in parts of German-occupied Polish lands, and numerous of the artists became displaced persons in the war’s aftermath.

I have begun by introducing the work of Berezowska because it brings together threads present through the chapters to come, such as the significance of art during the Second World War, the question of form employed by artists to represent their experiences, and their activities in the aftermath of the war including efforts to reestablish cultural life by organizing exhibitions or setting up new institutions. I will reflect on these issues by studying artistic practices that were developed during the turbulent and cataclysmic period between 1939 and 1949, a decade framed by the beginning of the Second World War and the introduction of socialist realism in Poland shortly after the war by the newly formed, Soviet-backed Communist government. The changes that took place during that decade were dramatic: during the war, Poland was occupied by both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union; the country witnessed tremendous destruction and became a site of genocide; in the aftermath of the Holocaust and forced resettlements, the population of the country became almost entirely ethnically Polish; the borders, redrawn as a consequence of postwar treaties, were shifted westward; and a new political regime was installed.

Western twentieth-century art history often employs notions of “prewar” and “postwar” art, yet artistic practices such as Berezowska’s traverse that split and introduce a third temporality: “wartime” practices situating art neither before nor after but in the middle of those historical changes.8 Studying trajectories of such artists allows us to conceptualize the wartime period and its immediate aftermath not as a break in modern artistic historiography but as a constitutive part, one that remained tied to certain important aspects of prewar art history while becoming foundational to artistic discourse in the postwar period—and being of its time, singular as that was. To focus on this specific period of art history calls for consideration of the experience of the Second World War as a distinct moment in history and, equally importantly, to register its ongoing consequences for artistic and cultural life in Poland, while reflecting on this within a broader theoretical context. This perspective also allows questions to be posed about possible continuities and legacies, in particular the legacies of the avant-garde and of modernism, recognizing ways in which these were actualized in the immediate postwar years.

Focusing on this period requires consideration of those artists, practices, and events that are little known or completely obscure, in certain cases. Maja Berezowska’s camp drawings, for instance, were exhibited in the late 1940s during the two Scandinavian exhibitions, and in Salon Nike in Warsaw in 1950.9 Yet after that brief period of exposure, Berezowska’s wartime work became less visible. It has reappeared only recently, included in two exhibitions: Never Again: Art against War and Fascism in the 20th and 21st Centuries at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2019) and Migration: Traces in an Art Collection at the Malmö Art Museum (2019/2020). Similarly, the artistic practice of the Polish artist Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz fell into oblivion; she had been a fellow prisoner of Berezowska in Ravensbrück, creating remarkable drawings of women in the camp, then attempting from 1948 to reinterpret socialist realism in her own way until her untimely death in 1955. The wartime practices of established Polish artists including Marian Bogusz have also been perceived as marginal, yet once these are taken into consideration, the understanding of better-known parts of such artists’ oeuvres is enhanced.10

For several decades following the Second World War, wartime artistic practices were considered under a very specific framework, dominated by notions of heroism and resistance. Early and seminal examples of studies devoted to artistic practice during the war years in Poland are found in two books by the art historian Janina Jaworska, published in the 1970s: “I Shall Not Wholly Die…” and Fighting Art of Poland. Both books present valuable, rare accounts of oral history collected by Jaworska, along with selected visual material. Both publications, even in their titles, bring to the fore a connection between artistic practice and resistance, even framing art of that period as part of the national struggle against German fascism.11

Rather than attempting to refute this connection, I propose rethinking relations between art and resistance outside of a national-heroic framework. Many artworks discussed here, therefore, are also recognized primarily as testimony, rather than as works of art per se, which also raises the question of how art history can apprehend artworks that challenge established categories of “art,” not through avant-garde negations of established cultural norms, but as a consequence of their proximity to traumatic experiences.

Artistic practices undertaken in the extreme situation of war by artists caught in the most difficult of circumstances, who were refugees or imprisoned in concentration camps or ghettos yet who sustained those practices, have grounded an understanding of art as a fundamental human activity, an activity that was instrumental in many ways in their survival.12 To use Giorgio Agamben’s phrase, art considered in this manner becomes “the essential measure of men’s dwelling on earth,” rather than a subsidiary activity undertaken only after basic needs are met.13 Art is a means through which people in the most extreme, hostile, and dehumanizing circumstances could recognize themselves as human beings. It was this intensity of engagement in art, and art’s fundamental role in defining human status in the world, that was retained, and then was struggled over both politically and aesthetically in the period immediately after the war. I propose to historically reconstruct that perspective in order to readdress debates about politically engaged art and the culture of memory generated during the postwar period. Therefore, it has also been necessary to bring the complexity of relations between ethics and aesthetics to bear on my research.

A particular challenge in writing a history of art of this period stems from the question: To what extent can art history reflect on social and political history? Comprehensive historical studies of Poland in the 1940s have recognized the unprecedented degree of nationwide terror and violence, in which anti-Semitic crimes of the occupation years also included local pogroms and theft of Jewish property after the war.14 The historian Marcin Zaremba described the collective psychological and moral devastation caused by manifold terror during the war and violence inflicted while establishing Communist rule in Poland as “the great fear.”15

Today, the narrative of the history of art and visual culture in 1940s Poland shifts constantly, with the field of research growing vigorously and, as a consequence, tackling this artistic, sociopolitical, and historical entanglement from multiple perspectives.16 Some artworks discussed in this book engage in representing the social reality of that decade directly, while others indirectly allude to the violence of the time, and still others actively anticipate and project different futures that dwell outside a given “here and now,” forging elective affinities with ideals from the prewar avant-garde. Thus, my analysis reflects on how each artwork was enmeshed in its sociopolitical context, as well as registering when it broke away from that context.

The decade in question, indelibly marked by the crisis brought by war, was a period characterized by multiple disruptions; it often isolated individual artists and brutally interrupted or ended the trajectories of their individual practices. At the same time, these disruptive conditions resulted in the establishment of new friendships and alliances. The period’s fragmentary nature is reflected in this book’s structure. Rather than creating a broad narrative encompassing the whole decade, the focus will be on selected case studies, which are nevertheless inscribed into common frameworks of questioning, and seeks to emphasize the relations of artworks to their larger sociopolitical context, thus presenting relevant visual works alongside selected contemporaneous excerpts from literature, art criticism, and memoirs. This strategy, based on juxtaposing differing, previously disconnected sources to create a gestalt in montage form, is pertinent structurally and has precedence in the practice of art-historical inquiry as pioneered to lasting effect by Aby Warburg.17

Each of the book’s chapters addresses a different question by making use of numerous intersections to construct a multifaceted approach to the production of artwork in that period. “Feats of Material Resistance: Portraiture in the Concentration Camps,” the first chapter, focuses on the practices of artists who were camp inmates, while rethinking the notion of resistance. The second chapter, “The Dialectics of Ruins and Rubble in Postwar Representations of Warsaw,” considers the first exhibition mounted in liberated Warsaw and examines the role of art institutions in both the material and the symbolic rebuilding of the country. “Homelessness, Homecoming, and the ‘Joy of New Constructions,’” the third and final chapter, provides closure, bringing together these questions of artistic practices in camps and art’s role in rebuilding Poland in the war’s aftermath, including a study of Marian Bogusz’s early practice, as an inmate in Mauthausen then as a young artist in liberated Warsaw, active in the newly reconfigured art scene in Poland under changing political circumstances.

Following Walter Benjamin’s renowned dictum that “there is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” the chapter “Feats of Material Resistance” dwells on moments when formal concerns become ethical issues.18 The question of the limits of representation of the Holocaust in both history and the arts constitutes one of the most debated issues of the second half of the twentieth century.19 This debate, addressing fundamental ethical and aesthetic concerns, was reflected in the visual arts: facing the impossible task of representing the irrepresentable, different forms of abstraction or voided forms were often employed.20 At the same time, the discursive frame, which referred back to Theodor Adorno’s fundamental question about poetry “after Auschwitz,” complicated the reception of artworks and images that had been created during the Holocaust.21 Georges Didi-Huberman, in his seminal book addressing clandestine photographs depicting mass killing that had been taken by Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau, proposed another perspective, which pleaded for imagination, grasping for and describing its lacunar character, rather than emphasizing its inadequacy.22 The present book’s first chapter, following the line of Didi-Huberman’s proposed investigation and questioning how to apprehend images that were made and have remained “in spite of all,”23 is entirely devoted to artworks made by camp prisoners.

The first chapter brings together artists of different backgrounds who, even when they were imprisoned in the same camp, faced different circumstances. For example, Xawery Dunikowski, who was already a prominent sculptor when he was sent to Auschwitz, survived the camp thanks to the help and support of other Polish inmates. The Polish-Jewish artist Halina Olomucki, then a young woman, was first imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto, then in Majdanek concentration camp and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her mother was murdered in Majdanek; Olomucki was on her own and miraculously survived gas-chamber selections—as a Jew, she was targeted in the Holocaust.

For both artists, drawing became a means of recording their experience. In this chapter, questions are posed about the role of that medium, a predominant means of expression available to artists in the camps, and seeks to interpret their drawings both as testimonies or documents and also as artworks. The interpretation of these works reconsiders the often-applied framework of “art as resistance” through the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s question: “What is this mysterious relationship between a work of art and an act of resistance […]?”24 The works are considered as spaces of resistance against the oppression inflicted by fascism, and as feats of material resistance, standing against entropy and also against interpretation.

The performative and gestural aspect of drawing is further problematized in the sketchbook of Ravensbrück survivor Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz. This sketchbook, not analyzed in any detail to date, depicts a series of specific gestures Simon-Pietkiewicz observed among her fellow inmates which she later described as forms of protection from the cruel reality of the camp. This reading of Simon-Pietkiewicz’s drawings combines visual and textual sources by including and accounting for the artist’s unpublished memoirs, deposited in the Ossolineum Library in Wrocław.

While the first chapter focuses on personal trajectories of artists and close readings of their works, the second focuses on the immediate postwar years and the role of Warsaw’s art institutions in rebuilding the country. This and the following chapter offer a particular perspective focused on Warsaw in the second half of the 1940s. Art historians including Józef Chrobak, Marcin Lachowski, and Maria Zientara have described the activities of artists based in Kraków in great detail, especially those united in Grupa Krakowska, both during the war and in its immediate aftermath, while bringing to the fore how their art had been impacted by the Holocaust.25 There, the First Exhibition of Modern Art, held between 1948 and 1949 in Pałac Sztuki, has been seen as a pivotal moment in Polish art history: a high point of postwar modernism and at the same time its twilight, for utopian dreams of progressive artists were about to be shattered with socialist realism’s implementation as artistic doctrine.26 This book, in highlighting artists based in Warsaw, emphasizes the diversity of ideas that emerged around this period and considers the rich possibilities there had been for actualizing avant-garde postulates.

The significance of museums as spaces of community building is exemplified by the Warsaw Accuses exhibition, organized by the National Museum in Warsaw in 1945, which employed radical exhibition design utilizing ruined objects to create an environment resembling the shattered capital outside the exhibition’s walls. Drawing on canonical writings by Alois Riegl and Georg Simmel and the recent work of Gastón R. Gordillo, a distinction is made between ruin and rubble, with ruin considered an aesthetically pleasing form in which certain historical aspects and meanings are preserved, and with rubble understood as delegitimated ruin, an abject space obstructing signification. Warsaw Accuses is consequently reconstructed here and analyzed as a cultural juncture where rubble came to be interpreted as ruin, eventually allowing the museum to create a space for the reinvention of an “imagined community” of nation.27

The chapter’s subsequent section explores specific depictions of Warsaw’s ruins and rubble, articulated in artistic practices from the mid 1940s and later exhibited by the National Museum, and seeks to establish how distinctions between differing embodiments of destruction were rendered visible in drawing. Analyzed examples include works by Tadeusz Kulisiewicz and Antoni Suchanek, artists who were acclaimed for their representations of the widespread destruction throughout the capital. The chapter’s concluding part is devoted to lesser-known drawings, including works by Henryk Hechtkopf that depict the razed district of the former Warsaw ghetto, with aesthetics that set them apart from earlier renderings of ruins and within the framework of rubble.

“Homelessness, Homecoming, and the ‘Joy of New Constructions,’” the final chapter, connects the prewar utopian avant-garde with issues of wartime artistic practices as means of resistance and of survival in camps, then with postwar dilemmas of rebuilding the aesthetic and the political orders. It describes the early practice of Marian Bogusz, who would become known mostly for his seminal engagement in propagating modern art from the mid 1950s through the 1970s. Here, Bogusz’s wartime artistic formation is considered as an instance of fidelity to modernist aims in the darkest of historic moments. The idea of home is employed as an umbrella term unifying the plethora of Bogusz’s activities—understood as architectural and cultural form but also, emblematically, as a site of human dwelling, beginning with the artist’s architectural project developed in and intended for the Mauthausen concentration camp. Along with a fellow inmate, Emmanuel Muñoz, Bogusz planned an International Artists’ Settlement, which they imagined being built one day on the site of the camp. The utopian project revived modernist architectural forms while proposing a radical approach to commemoration.

The chapter’s second part is devoted to Bogusz’s activities after Mauthausen was liberated and he returned to Warsaw, in specific to the cultural undertakings of the Club of Young Artists and Scientists, which he and others established in the capital in 1947. The club’s dynamic activities can be seen as a continuation of Bogusz’s wartime practice, showing the depth of his engagement in modernism, and their many initiatives can be grasped as attempts at rethinking modern art in the war’s aftermath and in the face of regime change in Poland. The last section of “Homelessness, Homecoming, and the ‘Joy of New Constructions,’” bridges the wartime context and that of the postwar period, and returns to the praxis of Ravensbrück survivor Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz. In her exhibition at the Club of Young Artists and Scientists in 1948, Simon-Pietkiewicz presented socialist-realist paintings devoted to workers and factories in Silesia in southwest Poland.

The three chapters open different perspectives from which artistic practices of the 1940s can be apprehended. Each of the practices considered here provides a case in point for ways in which wartime art and that of the immediate postwar period grounded later formations of artistic practice. Yet rather than being isolated case studies, they remain knit together in presenting the endeavor, potential, and importance of art in disruptive times.

1 See Małgorzata Czyńska, Berezowska: Nagość dla wszystkich (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2018), e-book, chap. “Pawiak.”

2 Jean Mezerette, “Hitler intime et les amours du süsse Adolf,” il. Maja Berezowska, ICI Paris, no. 4 (1934).

3 The drawing is dated November 8, 1942. According to the testimonies of Berezowska’s friends, the artist was among a group of women subjected to medical experimentation in August 1942. The artist suffered from the consequences of those experiments for the rest of her life. See Czyńska, Berezowska, chap. “Eksperyment.”

4 Quoted in Maja Berezowska, Piórkiem przez stulecia (Warsaw: Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1985), 5.

5 Martin Wikberg, ed., The White Buses: The Swedish Red Cross Rescue Action in Germany During the Second World War (Stockholm: The Swedish Red Cross, 2000).

6 Czyńska, Berezowska, chap. “List z raju.”

7 Polsk konst från Ravensbrück och Sverige: Jadwiga Simon, Maja Berezowska, ex. cat. (Stockholm: Aeta, 1946); Ravensbrück, billeder fra fangenskabsaarene, ex. cat. (Copenhagen: Berlingske tidende og Vecko-journalen, 1945).

8 Importantly, these terms’ stability is subject to frequent revisions in art history. For example, the exhibition Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 offered a comprehensive way of rethinking that term from a global perspective. See Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, and Ulrich Wilmes, eds., Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 (Munich: Haus der Kunst, 2016). See also Hannah Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 1–16. For a critical definition of the term “postwar,” see Mark Mazower, “Postwar: The Melancholy History of a Term,” in Enwezor, Siegel, and Wilmes, Postwar, 68–74.

9 Wystawa prac malarskich Maji Berezowskiej: 28.XII.1949–10.I.1950, ex. cat. (Warsaw: Salon “Nike,” 1950).

10 This issue was also explored in a recent exhibition at the Zachęta—National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. See Joanna Kordjak, ed., Radość nowych konstrukcji: (po)wojenne utopie Mariana Bogusza, ex. cat. (Warsaw: Zachęta—Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, 2017).

11 Janina Jaworska, “Nie wszystek umrę…”: Twórczość plastyczna Polaków w hitlerowskich więzieniach i obozach koncentracyjnych 1939–1945 (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1975); Jaworska, Polska sztuka walcząca: 1939–1945, 1st ed. (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1976).

12 See Brett Ashley Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).

13 Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 33.

14 See Jan Grabowski and Dariusz Libionka, eds., Klucze i kasa: O mieniu żydowskim w Polsce pod okupacją niemiecką i we wczesnych latach powojennych 1939–1950 (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2014); Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010).

15 Marcin Zaremba, Wielka trwoga: Polska 1944–1947; Ludowa reakcja na kryzys (Kraków: Znak; Warsaw: Instytut Studiów Politycznych PAN, 2012).

16 For recent contributions, see Luiza Nader, Afekt Strzemińskiego: “Teoria widzenia,” rysunki wojenne, Pamięci przyjaciół—Żydów (Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN / Akademia Sztuk Pięknych w Warszawie; Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi, 2018); Piotr Słodkowski, Modernizm żydowsko-polski: Henryk Streng / Marek Włodarski a historia sztuki (Warsaw: Akademia Sztuk Pięknych / Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2019); Agata Zborowska, Życie rzeczy w powojennej Polsce (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2019); Grzegorz Piątek, Najlepsze miasto świata: Warszawa w odbudowie 1944–1949 (Warsaw: WAB, 2020); Aleksandra Sumorok and Tomasz Załuski, eds., Socrealizmy i modernizacje (Łódź: Akademia Sztuk Pięknych im. Władysława Strzemińskiego, 2017).

17 See Georges Didi-Huberman, “Knowledge: Movement (The Man Who Spoke to Butterflies),” in Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, ed. Philippe-Alain Michaud (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 7–21.

18 Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2005), 47.

19 For a summary of those discussions, see Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Barbie Zelizer, ed., Visual Culture and the Holocaust (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

20 As observed by Dora Apel: “Paradoxically, Adorno’s refusal of aesthetics, which began as a refusal of art altogether, became the conventionalized, dominant aesthetic, or anti-aesthetic, although the negative and allusive Holocaust-related artwork that met this mandate took a wide variety of forms.” Apel, “Art,” in The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, ed. Peter Hayes and John K. Roth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 461–78, doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/ 9780199211869.003.0031. See also Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

21 Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 34.

22 “Should we not treat the impurities, the lacunae of the image, as we have to treat the silences of speech, which is to unravel them, struggle with them?” Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 124.

23 Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 124.

24 Gilles Deleuze, “What Is the Creative Act?” in Two Regimes of Madness, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006), 323.

25 Marcin Lachowski, Nowocześni po katastrofie: Sztuka w Polsce w latach 1945–1960 (Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2013); Tadeusz Kantor, Metamorfozy: Teksty o latach 1938–1974, ed. Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz (Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka / Ośrodek Dokumentacji Sztuk Tadeusza Kantora “Cricoteka,” 2000); Józef Chrobak and Magdalena Wilk, eds., Tadeusz Kantor i WSSP w Krakowie 1947–1950 (Kraków: Galeria Krzysztofory, 2007); Józef Chrobak and Justyna Michalik, eds., Tadeusz Kantor i lata czterdzieste (Kraków: Ośrodek Dokumentacji Sztuk Tadeusza Kantora “Cricoteka,” 2013); Józef Chrobak, ed., Grupa Krakowska: (dokumenty i materiały) (Kraków: Stowarzyszenie Artystyczne “Grupa Krakowska,” 1993); Lech Stangret, Tadeusz Kantor: Drawing (Kraków: Tadeusz Kantor Foundation, 2015); Maria Zientara, Krakowscy artyści i ich sztuka w latach 1939–1945 (Kraków: Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa, 2013).

26 On the history of the exhibition, see Piotr Słodkowski, “Partykularne znaczenia nowoczesności: Wizualność I Wystawy Sztuki Nowoczesnej (1948) w świetle ‘Exposition internationale du surrealisme’ (1947),” Artium Quaestiones 22 (2011): 237–71; Marek Świca and Józef Chrobak, eds., Nowocześni a socrealizm, vol. 1 (Kraków: Fundacja Nowosielskich, 2000).

27 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 5–7.

Chapter 1

Feats of Material Resistance: Portraiture in the Concentration Camps

On the front page of the literary and arts magazine Odrodzenie in 1948, a poem was published dedicated to the memory of those who were murdered in the Holocaust.28 The author was Stanisław Wygodzki,29 an important Polish-Jewish writer, and a former prisoner in the Auschwitz, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Oranienburg camps, who lost his daughter, wife, and parents in the Holocaust. Importantly, the poem was accompanied by a small photograph.30 The black-and-white photo, placed just above the verses, depicts three young women standing in a row. Two of the women, whose faces we can clearly see, stand with their arms hanging down, looking away, avoiding direct contact with the camera, aiming their resigned gazes sideways. The moment captured by the camera is dramatic: it seems that the women have just been rounded up, perhaps they await execution.

Though the photo as it was reprinted in Odrodzenie lacks a caption, the picture is instantly recognizable: it was originally published as a part of the Stroop Report, a book-length document officially titled The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More!, made by SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop for his superior, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, to record the brutal German suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in spring 194331 [fig. 2]. Stroop was in charge of crushing the uprising, which started on April 19. The report begins by listing dead and wounded German soldiers and naming the military units that were involved; that section is followed by an introduction signed by Stroop and daily reports of military actions, which recount in detail how the district was destroyed building by building and how the surviving Jews were murdered or deported to camps. The report has an appendix consisting of fifty-three photographs, which became the most publicly known part of the document.32

2. Photograph of Ghetto Fighters Rachela Wyszogrodzka, Bluma Wyszogrodzka, and Małka Zdrojewicz (right), as reproduced in the Stroop Report, 1943

These photos were taken by the Germans; however, it remains unclear exactly who took them.33 They were later used as evidence during the Nuremberg Trials and circulated widely in the press in both Poland and abroad.34 Among the images from the report’s appendix is the iconic photo depicting a small boy marching with his hands up in a gesture of surrender; he came to be known as “the boy from the Warsaw ghetto” and is a symbol of the Holocaust, signifying in particular the tragic fate of children.35 As such, the use of the images from the appendix transformed completely over time, and rather than documenting German triumph over their helpless victims, they became powerful symbols of fascist oppression and terror.

The photo of the three women in the report was captioned “Female Hehalutz members captured with weapons.” The woman on the right was identified as Małka Zdrojewicz, who survived the war and later named her two comrades as the sisters Rachela and Bluma Wyszogrodzka. According to Zdrojewicz’s testimony, the women were resistance fighters during the uprising:

We went to a neutral place in the ghetto area and climbed down into the underground sewers. Through them, we girls used to carry arms into the ghetto; we hid them in our boots. During the ghetto uprising, we hurled Molotov cocktails at the Germans. […] After the suppression of the uprising, we went into hiding, taking refuge in an underground shelter where a large quantity of arms was piled up. But the Germans detected us and forced us out.36

After their capture, Zdrojewicz and Rachela Wyszogrodzka were taken to the Majdanek concentration camp, while Bluma was executed by firing squad.37

The photo of the three women would appear on the cover of an annotated 1948 edition of the Stroop Report, prepared by Stanisław Piotrowski as the first Polish edition.38 For the Odrodzenie issue the same year, Wygodzki’s poem and the photo were paired purposefully, as his writing relates directly to the depiction of the three fighters and, in addressing the image, questions different modes of looking at it, modes embodied by the figures of the photographer and of the contemporaneous viewer of the photo:

These are my sisters. Take a close look at them,

that’s how they looked just before they were shot,

but don’t look the way the photographer was looking

when in the foreground

stood my sisters from Chłodna and Śliska.39

Chłodna and Śliska were Warsaw streets with historical importance to the Jewish community. Early in the German occupation of Poland, Śliska Street became a part of the Warsaw ghetto, the area closed off from the rest of the city by a brick wall eighteen kilometers in circumference and three meters high. The Jewish inhabitants of Warsaw as well as Jews from surrounding villages were moved there. By 1941, the 460,000 Jews living in the ghetto faced starvation, diseases such as typhus that spread rapidly due to vast overcrowding, and eventual deportation to extermination camps.40 Chłodna Street remained in the “Aryan” part of town and separated the two sectors of the ghetto. A wooden pedestrian bridge was constructed over Chłodna in 1942, connecting the two sectors.41 Thus in the opening stanzas of his poem, Wygodzki points to specific sites related both to the Stroop Report photo and the history of Jewish Warsaw. In his insistence upon looking at the image differently than the photographer had, the poet further acknowledges the difficulty of facing images of victims that have been produced by their assailants. In the subsequent part of the poem, Wygodzki considers alternate ways of looking at the image, which aim, while rooted in specific personal experience, toward universalism while expressing solidarity with human struggle all over the world:

Don’t look as the lens does before a fresco

aiming a moment more, a centimeter, a millimeter,

here are my sisters, Jewish, Polish,

Czech,

French women as they stood the final time in front of a Metro

and of those aiming.

They wore my shoes with a bum heel

and my shabby coat and my old flat cap

me a Jew and a Pole, a Russian and a Frenchman

wishing to see Madrid and free Athens

I am free of fear but feign to sing

as long

as I know

how my sisters looked a moment before execution.

Don’t look as the camera I note did

as it watched more exactly than the barrel,

for I must hate those who shot my sisters,

Polish, Russian, Jewish, French women,

I hate those who need to guess,

as they strip them of my hat, my coat,

of blouses,

who on our tarmac

in my dead sisters

may see an Amazon

or Nike.

I give them back my fear for brothers,

and Nike knows no fear,

I give them back worry for sisters,

an Amazon knows no fear,

I give them back common human names

as many names as sisters can have,

this one who loves freedom and life,

this one who kept an image of the living—

as near as a breath,

as near as a death,

I won’t change their names

as I can’t change their deaths.42

Wygodzki avoids equating the camera lens with the perpetrator’s gaze, as it watches “more exactly than the barrel,” capable of registering more than the photographer intended. Later in the poem, he also firmly rejects the objectifying gaze of a viewer who would scrutinize the image in pursuit of universal metaphors, comparing the specific women to ancient figures like Nike while depriving them of their own stories.

28 Odrodzenie was one of the most influential postwar Polish magazines dedicated to literature and the liberal arts. It was established in the eastern city of Lublin in 1944. Lublin was the headquarters of the Polish Committee of National Liberation, the provisional governing body established by the Communists. The magazine was later published in Kraków and eventually in Warsaw. Until the late 1940s, Odrodzenie was open to debate and presented a variety of perspectives on art; the editorial line then changed upon the official implementation of socialist realism.

29 Stanisław Wygodzki (1907–92) was a Polish-Jewish writer and a translator of German literature. He emigrated to Israel in 1968 due to the anti-Semitic campaign the Polish government initiated that year. For more biographical information, see Antony Polonsky and Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, eds., “Stanisław Wygodzki,” in Contemporary Jewish Writing in Poland: An Anthology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 57–59.

30 Stanisław Wygodzki, “Oto siostry moje,” Odrodzenie, no. 1 (1948): 1.

31 Jürgen Stroop, Żydowska dzielnica mieszkaniowa w Warszawie już nie istnieje! / Es gibt keinen jüdischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau mehr!, ed. Andrzej Żbikowski (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej / Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2009), http://pamiec.pl/ftp/ilustracje/Raport_STROOPA.pdf.

32 Andrzej Żbikowski, “Wstęp,” in Stroop, Żydowska dzielnica mieszkaniowa w Warszawie już nie istnieje!, 11. For a history of the report, see also Daniel H. Magilow and Lisa Silverman, Holocaust Representations in History: An Introduction (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019), 14–16.

33 The SS officer Franz Konrad admitted to taking at least some of the photographs. See Magilow and Silverman, Holocaust Representations, 18.

34 Żbikowski, “Wstęp,” 11.

35 For an analysis of the images, see Magilow and Silverman, Holocaust Representations, 13–20; Batya Brutin, Holocaust Icons in Art: The Warsaw Ghetto Boy and Anne Frank (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg; Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2020), 15–33.

36 Mark Weber, “A Ghetto Fighter Recalls Her Capture,” Journal of Historical Review 14, no. 2 (March–April 1994): 7–8, http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n2p-7_Weber.html.

37 Weber, “Ghetto Fighter,” 7–8.

38 Stanisław Piotrowski, Sprawozdanie Juergena Stroopa (Warsaw: Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza “Książka,” 1948).

39 Oto siostry moje. Przyjrzyj im się z bliska,

tak patrzały one tuż przed rozstrzelaniem,

ale ty nie patrz, jak spoglądał fotograf

gdy na pierwszym planie

były siostry moje z Chłodnej i Śliskiej.

Wygodzki, “Oto siostry moje,” 1.

40 See Martin Dean, ed., Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe, vol. 2, Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 456, 459.

41 Some Chłodna Street blocks were briefly part of the ghetto. For a detailed history of the street, see Jacek Leociak, Biografie ulic: O żydowskich ulicach Warszawy od narodzin po Zagładę (Warsaw: Dom Spotkań z Historią, 2017), 361–532.

42 Nie patrz jak obiektyw gdy staje przed freskiem,

on jeszcze chwilę mierzy centymetr, milimetr,

oto siostry moje żydowskie, polskie,

czeskie,

Francuzki gdy ostatni raz stały przed metro,

a tamci mierzyli.

Nosiły moje buty z rozdartą cholewą

i płaszcz mój zniszczony i mój stary kaszkiet,

ja Żyd i Polak, Rosjanin i Francuz,

pragnący ujrzeć Madryt i wolne Ateny

wolny jestem od lęku, ale nieskory do śpiewu

tak długo

dopóty wiem

jak patrzały siostry moje na chwilę przed rozstrzelaniem.

Nie patrz jak obiektyw, który sławię,

który sławię za to, że celniej patrzał niż lufa,

bo nienawidzić muszę każdego co strzelał do moich sióstr

Polek, Rosjanek, Żydówek, Francuzek,

nienawidzić każdego co pragnie domyślności ufać,

gdy je obnaża z czapki mojej, z palta,

z bluzek,

że na naszych asfaltach,

w moich zabitych siostrach

ujrzy Amazonkę,

lub Nike.

Ja im przywracam mój lęk o braci,

a Nike lęku nie zna

ja im przywracam obawę o siostry

Amazonka lęku nie zna,

ja im przywracam zwykłe ludzkie imiona

tyle tych imion ile sióstr posiadać może

ten który kocha wolność i życie,

ten który obraz żywych zachował—

bliski na odległość oddechu,

blisko na odległość śmierci,

ja ich imion nie zmienię

jak nie zdołam odmienić ich śmierci.

Wygodzki, “Oto siostry moje,” 1.