Abstract
This discussion gathers voices of an international group of researchers and practitioners from various disciplines and institutions who focus on diverse aspects of sites of past violence in their work: archaeology, history, ethics, literature and art, curatorial practices, oral history, education and commemoration. The debate, which took place during the conference “Sites of Violence and Their Communities: Critical Memory Studies in the Post-Human Era” in Kraków in September 2019, itself centres on six main topics: the question of archives of uncommemorated killing sites; research methodology; the position of the researchers themselves; the problem of complicity during conflict and the right to be a witness to past crimes; the place of the Righteous Among the Nations within Polish collective memory and the international debate on the Holocaust; and, finally, new ways of commemoration and education about mass violence. Participants: Katarzyna Bojarska, Michał Chojak, Ewa Domańska, Zuzanna Dziuban, Karolina Grzywnowicz, Aleksandra Janus, Karina Jarzyńska, Maria Kobielska, Rob van der Laarse, Bryce Lease, Erica Lehrer, Jacek Leociak, Tomasz Łysak, Tomasz Majkowski, Christina Morina, Matilda Mroz, Adam Musiał, Agnieszka Nieradko, Łukasz Posłuszny, Roma Sendyka, Caroline Sturdy Colls, Katarzyna Suszkiewicz, Aleksandra Szczepan, Krijn Thijs, Jonathan Webber, Anna Zagrodzka, Tomasz Żukowski
Highlights
The debate, which took place during the conference “Sites of Violence and Their Communities: Critical Memory Studies in the Post-Human Era” in Kraków in September 2019, itself centres on six main topics: the question of archives of uncommemorated killing sites; research methodology; the position of the researchers themselves; the problem of complicity during conflict and the right to be a witness to past crimes; the place of the Righteous Among the Nations within Polish collective memory and the international debate on the Holocaust; and, new ways of commemoration and education about mass violence
Zuzanna Dziuban: What I feel uneasy about is that when we develop our conceptualisations of bystanding, we all too often adopt the perspective of those who construct themselves as “bystanders” and witnesses and, as a result, this perspective is perpetuated without problematising the concept
Bryce Lease: I wonder about this game: can you win it? In a standard Hollywood narrative structure about the Holocaust, we focus on survival rather than on death, so I am curious about whether the game reproduces the focus on survival as the act of commemoration in which the ones who win are the ones who live
Summary
Roma Sendyka: During the unveiling of the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, one of the representatives of the founders in her note to the public said: “Es lebt sich jetzt leichter in diesem Land”: “It’s easier to live in this country (after this monument was erected).” Holocaust-Mahnmal with its 2,711 concrete slabs symbolises all sites of the murder of the six million victims of Shoah – so it refers to the sites of the dispersed Holocaust, so numerous in Eastern Europe. Perhaps we should think of non-sites of memory as consisting of two parallel and complementary archives, one of traditional documents and the other of what’s there in the ground It is there and it just has to come up, be it a material object, a narrative or a ritual in the community. It shows the potential of soil studies, especially when dealing with sites or parts of the terrain that do not contain Jewish human remains Studying such parts during the archaeological works in Sobibór, revealed that soil is a living archive with a strikingly accurate imprint of the camp recorded in the sandy ground in the form of darker marks left by objects and infrastructure.
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