Heritage, Memory and Conflict Journal - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2021

Based on the experience of spatial confusion and inadequacy common during visits to uncommemorated sites of violence, the authors propose expanding the topological reflection in the research on the spatialities of the Holocaust, as well as to introduce topology into the analysis of the everyday experiences of users of the postgenocidal space of Central and Eastern Europe. The research material is composed of hand-drawn maps by Holocaust eyewitnesses – documents created both in the 1960s and in recent years. The authors begin by summarizing the significance of topology for cultural studies, and provides a state-of-the-art reflection on cartography in the context of the Holocaust. They then proceed to interpret several of the maps as particular topological testimonies. The authors conclude by proposing a multi-faceted method of researching these maps, “necrocartography”, oriented by their testimonial, topological and performative aspects.

The authors analyse grassroots modalities of the figure of witness in the communities living in the vicinity of uncommemorated sites of past violence. Testimoniality, understood as the disposition to bear witness, i.e. both the willingness to testify and the ability to provide important information, is discussed in relation to complex, heterogenic and dynamic assemblages that form around the sites in question, comprising both human (neighbours, wardens) and non-human actors (the landscape and biotope, material objects), diverse practices, performative gestures, and relations. The analysis is placed in the context of the debate on the complicated status of the “witness” as a category in the Polish post-war culture of memory, as well as of new relevant categories emerging in both Polish and international scholarship on the Holocaust. The authors conceptually systematise testimonial situations and propose a lexicon of testimonial positions, practices and objects that are grounded in the material gathered in fieldwork during the research project on unmemorialised sites of genocide in Poland. They distinguish: the crown witness, the trustee, the volunteer, the official and the contingent witness, and discuss categories of testimonial gesture, testimonial performance, testimonial object, and testimonial words.

The approach employed by memory activists to sites of memory often involves historical practices. This paper presents the results of the examination of historical practices undertaken in locations of Holocaust violence during World War II and the disposal of victims’ remains that were not memorialised properly according to local residents or other groups with an interest in the sites’ past. The analysed practices were observed in the course of field research in various locations in Poland. The goal of the research was to describe these practices, discuss their critical potential, and indicate their distinct features as activities pertaining to contested sites of memory. A central tool for approaching this task is found in concepts of “non-site of memory” and “vernacular historian” as introduced to the debate by Claude Lanzmann and Lyle Dick. As a result, the article presents the cases of four vernacular historians whose practices are experimental combinations of the components of the work of professional historians and ways of working conditioned by local cultural environments, individual experience and commitment to communal life. Although vernacular history is sometimes considered of little value by academic historians, the research shows that the practices in question have the potential to produce new, socially relevant knowledge. Two distinct features of vernacular historical practices in non-sites of memory were observed: these unmarked sites of burial attract activists and prompt them to undertake historical practices; vernacular historians of these locations often undertake unconventional, sometimes experimental activities..

Abandoned sites of trauma in Poland appear to be forgotten, but their removal from social and cultural circles is only superficial. Frequently, these sites are inscribed into the local culture of memory and members of the local Polish communities can usually locate them and share stories about them. However, as they are not commemorated, there is an ambivalent aura around them. In 2017 two foundations (Zapomniane Foundation, The Matzevah Foundation) carried out an intervention into the landscape of Poland by marking thirty burial sites of Jewish victims of the Holocaust with simple wooden markers. The effects of that intervention shed light on the vernacular local memory of the Holocaust and the folk-traditional roots of the practices and behaviors related to these sites.

Abstract: The author discusses uncommemorated and under-remembered sites of past violence in terms of the conditions of their transformation into memory sites. Commemorative ceremonies, which may be staged at non-sites of memory, are presented as affective media of memory and identity, demonstrating social responses to the sites, as well as placing the local past in the context of supra-local memory forms. The argument is grounded in the material gathered from fieldwork during the research project on uncommemorated sites of genocide in Poland and, predominantly, in a detailed case study of a ceremony witnessed by the author in 2016 in Radecznica (Lublin Voivodship) at a burial site of victims of the “Holocaust by bullets”. In the article the discourse of speeches delivered during the ceremony is analyzed, on the assumption that they can reveal rules of national Polish memory culture dictating what may be commemorated and how cultural mechanisms have a power to hinder commemoration. As a result, seven distinctive framings of past events that kept returning in subsequent speeches were identified and interpreted as “memory devices” that enable and facilitate recollection, but also mark out the limits of what can be remembered and passed on.

During the First Scouting Alert (Poland 1965), scouts were tasked with finding and describing sites related to the events of Second World War. Those were mostly monuments, places of conflict, graves and body disposal pits. The scouts were tasked with finding such sites in their neighbourhood according to information collected from local communities. The campaign resulted in 26,000 reports in form of the registration sheets containing self-made maps, short descriptions of the found sites and answers to several questions on how to commemorate them. The Alert can be seen as a nationwide response to non-sites of memory.

The article analyses the reports of the scouts, as well as considering the action as a process. It presents the political background of the action and diagnoses its influence on the results of the reconnaissance conducted - types of places to be found and registered or overlooked by scouts. In particular cases, the Alert generated opportunities during which non-sites of memory could be restored to the public awareness. The paper summarizes the campaign and focuses on two cases: Krępiecki Forest and Adampol, described to present the influence of the Alert on the memory cultures. In the neighbourhood of Krępiecki Forest, the Alert was an impulse to transform a person who saw the mass murder into a key witness. The case of archaeological investigations conducted in Adampol shows the potential of the Alert archive materials to evoke the state of unrest and to become forensic evidence

Abandoned sites of trauma often become objects of art-based research. The forensic turn offered artists the requisite tools to approach uncommemorated post-violence sites to interact with their human and non-human actors. The usage of artistic methods allows us to inspect nondiscursive archives and retrieve information otherwise unavailable. The new wave of “forensic art” joins the efforts of post-war artists to respond to sites of mass killings. In the post-war era, sites of trauma were presented as (implicated) landscapes, or unhospitable terrains. The tendency to narrow space to the site and to contract the perspective is continued today by visual artists entering difficult memory grounds, looking down, inspecting the ground with a “forensic gaze”. A set of examples of such artistic endeavors, following the research project Uncommemorated Genocide Sites and Their Impact on Collective Memory, Cultural Identity, Ethical Attitudes and Intercultural Relations in Contemporary Poland (2016–2020) is discussed as “bystanders’ art.”

The paper describes and discusses the educational workshop in the form of a board game jam held in Radecznica, a village in Eastern Poland. The event, organised by researchers from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, was a follow-up of the research project on uncommemorated Jewish mass graves in the area. The aim of the workshop was to facilitate individual reflection on local Holocaust killings amongst the participating adults, as well as to bolster the memory of mass graves in Radecznica. Combining Holocaust memories with the didactic properties of rapid board game design, it was also an attempt to employ game jams as a method in Holocaust-related education. The workshop’s success leaves us optimistic regarding the method and its possible applications in the future.