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As the Memphis in May International Festival honors Poland this month, an exhibit of photographs explores how the Central European country is reckoning with one of its darkest moments.
“Traces of Memory,” a permanent exhibition of the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, southern Poland, shows vestiges and artifacts of the country’s once-thriving Jewish community, which was annihilated during the Holocaust. The images, taken by the late British photographer Chris Schwarz, depict pastures with makeshift memorials to the Jewish dead, and old synagogues that have been repurposed as warehouses and schools, and cemeteries holding the graves of famed rabbinical scholars.
What they don’t show is what’s not there: Jewish people.
The epicenter of European Jewry for hundreds of years, Poland became the principal staging ground for the Holocaust during World War II as Adolf Hitler’s Nazi war machine rounded up Jews by the millions to be shot down in forests, worked to death in labor camps or slaughtered in industrialized killing factories. The Nazis meant to eliminate all aspects of Jewishness, down to smashing the headstones in Jewish cemeteries and looting Hebrew-inscribed stone tablets to pave sidewalks. After the war and Soviet occupation, then-Communist Poland swept under the rug its Holocaust legacy and the role of many Catholic ethnic Poles as collaborators in killing some 3 million of their Jewish countrymen.
Only in more recent years have Poles begun to document this part of their history.
“(The) Communist regime did not embrace the awareness of (Poland’s) Jewish past and Jewish heritage in any way, and the question of Jews, Jewishness and Jewish heritage were not included in the official discourses,” Tomasz Strug, deputy director and chief curator of the Galicia Jewish Museum, said in an e-mail exchange. “No curriculums were covering this either. There are two generations of Poles who were born and raised almost without the official knowledge of the Jewish past of the country, very often living in the proximity of the former Jewish spaces.”
Strug will present a lecture at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Memphis Jewish Community Center’s Shainberg Gallery, where “Traces of Memory” is being displayed throughout May. The exhibit and lecture are free and open to the public.
Strug says efforts to commemorate Poland’s Jewish past have sprung up in a grass-roots fashion rather than from any public initiative. The final portion of the photo exhibit shows some of these efforts, including a Jewish culture festival and annual pilgrimages to sites of death camps and killing fields.
“Only after 1989, this became one of the most important and heated debates in the new Poland,” Strug said. “A debate which was often initiated by the outsiders, either foreign commentators (Jewish and non-Jewish) or Polish Jews who left the country in the postwar years … but quickly seized on by many within the Polish society. This discussion, no matter how difficult it was, resulted in something unique: countless initiatives to restore the memory of Jewish Poland, to protect and restore Jewish heritage, and to rebuild Jewish communities in Poland are being undertaken on all levels: by national government and local governments, by municipalities and NGOs, by local leaders, teachers and other individuals. Today’s Poland is not only a country of reviving Jewish communities, but also a country where many non-Jews are interested in engaging with Jewish culture and history, actively taking part in preserving sites of Jewish heritage and celebrating Jewish life and culture.”
Jews began living in Poland right around the founding of the Polish state in the 10th century. In the 12th century, Jewish refugees from other parts of Europe began moving to Central and Eastern Europe as they were expelled from countries such as England, France, Portugal and Spain.
“By the 16th century, the majority of European Jews are living in these lands,” Strug said.
By the early 20th century, Poland was divided among three empires: Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia. Jews served by the hundreds of thousands in the armies of all three as Austria-Hungary and Germany allied against Russia during World War I. The fighting on the Eastern Front left millions dead and devastated the land. The new nation of Poland was carved out of the fallen empires after the war, only to fall to Nazi and Soviet invaders 20 years later at the start of World War II. That’s when Poland’s long Jewish heritage was suddenly and brutally shut off.
“There are less and less unmarked or unknown or unattended Jewish heritage sites (in Poland),” Strug said. “Still, there is still a lot to be done, especially taking into account the number of Jewish heritage sites in Poland and the scale of Jewish life here before the war.”
‘Traces of Memory’
Continues through May 31 at the Memphis Jewish Community Center’s Shainberg Gallery, 6560 Poplar. Tomasz Strug, curator of the Galicia Jewish Museum of Poland, gives a lecture at 7 p.m. Tuesday. Free and open to the public. Exhibit available for viewing during regular MJCC hours: 8 a.m.-5:45 p.m. Sunday; 5:30 a.m.-9:45 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 5:30 a.m.-5:45 p.m. Friday; noon-8:45 p.m. Saturday.
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