Jewish Poland, Real and Imagined: Memory, Memorialization and Facing History

Submitted by Dave Fulton

Professor Webber began his talk by relaying a story of how a group of Jews from the US came to Krakow and wanted to tour a synagogue (on Yom Kippur, no less) to take pictures, even though a service was taking place inside. These visitors were incredulous that there is a Jewish population living in Poland at all and this image of Poland had to be actively dislodged by the reality of people praying inside.  (They in fact did not enter to take pictures.)

The story was a useful backdrop for facing the complex history of Jews in Poland – a task that sits at the interface of what is real and what is imagined. 

Much of his talk was about how these same complexities play out at Auschwitz.  On one hand, it is a cemetery for over a million people who died.  Their ashes are literally on site.  In this regard, Webber feels that it ought to be a place where people are encouraged to grieve, and perhaps even leave flowers for those who died.  On the other hand, it is a museum with over 1.5 million visitors a year and almost a tourist site; a place where  visitors have come expect to take in a tidy story of the Holocaust.  He mentioned that the barbed wire has been replaced twice, because visitors even expect the barbed wire to match what they have in their minds. But Webber doesn’t think this is a place where people can take in the “totality” of what happened in the Holocaust.

He thinks there needs to be more clearly articulated educational aims for visiting this site – and that it ought to offer people the opportunity of a life-changing experience, instead of (more cynically) something that visitors check off their list.  To that end, he would like to see more emphasis on what happened to Jews before they even got to Auschwitz – the discrimination, the ghettoization, etc. 

 He commented that Auschwitz is a “fiendishly complicated place,” and is in many ways emblematic of the contradictions, paradoxes, and levels of incoherence we find when trying to make sense of the history of Jews in Poland.