9. De la fosse au cimetière juif. Les transferts de corps après la Shoah

Abstract

One characteristic of the Shoah is the absence of the victims’ bodies. In fact, this very absence is communicated through the term “Holocaust.” However, their bodies—the number of which remains unknown—were not destroyed. The bodies of Jewish victims, most of whom were killed at the very start or at the very end of the Holocaust, were not burned. Rather, they were buried in mass graves. The purpose of this article is to describe the efforts of the survivors to locate, exhume, and identify these bodies and to move them to a Jewish cemetery. While it is difficult to estimate the number of people who have been transferred from mass graves, it is certain that many exhumations have taken place, and some continue to this day. To describe and analyze this phenomenon, we will use a selection of Memorbikher, some of which have already been described by Gabriel Finder, and a few articles from secondary literature source (e.g. Sarah Garibova’s articles on the Soviet Union). In particular, we will use many cases identified during our research, such as 222 examples of exhumations (55 of which are in English) described in the USC Shoah Foundation’s testimonies. The first observation is that these exhumations and transfers are spread out over a very long period of time. The first instances took place in 1940 in Poland in the wake of the first massacres. Jews paid for the right to exhume the bodies and place them in the city cemetery. To our knowledge, the most recent transfer is that of the body of Casimir Oberfeld, who died during his evacuation from Auschwitz to Bohemia. He was buried in a Christian cemetery, and his son repatriated his remains to France in 2018.The article will examine the conditions surrounding the exhumations, and in particular the chain of custody for human remains. Who took the initiative to exhume victims’ bodies, and what negotiations took place with local, national, and even international authorities? What power struggles played out around the issue of these mass graves? What were the technical conditions of exhumation and transfer? This article will also examine the question of how far victims’ bodies were transferred. Many individuals were moved a few dozen feet or a few miles from a mass grave by the Einsatzgruppen to the Jewish cemetery in the village ; others were moved thousands of miles, as was the case for the bones of the Jews who were buried together in a work Kommando in Bohemia and then brought to Israel in 1991 by Jado Weiss. In most instances, the exhumations were perfunctory, without even the intervention of a forensic pathologist. How did the survivors justify moving these remains to a Jewish cemetery? Until recently, there have been very few testimonials about the intervention of rabbinic authorities or justification by religious leaders, but the Jewish traditions of ritual burial in individual graves in Jewish cemeteries were strongly internalized by the survivors. The article will also discuss the graves that were dug in Jewish cemeteries to accommodate the exhumed bodies. What inscriptions were placed on the grave markers? Do they mention where the remains came from?Finally, we will discuss whether or not these exhumations can be considered unique and examine their ability to symbolically replace collective burials, which were impossible due to the absence of physical bodies. This situation contrasts what happened at the Potocari cemetery for the victims of Srebrenica, for example. In the words of the survivors, the transfer of a few bodies served as a replacement for ceremonies that could not be perfumed due to the cremation of the victims.