Roma Sendyka
Erica Lehrer
Wojciech Wilczyk
Magdalena Zych

The texts and photographs presented in this volume were identified in our search for images of the Holocaust in works of “folk art”. This book documents the exhibition Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust (December 2018–March 2019, Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum in Kraków), which was the outcome of research which began in 2016 as part of the international research project TRACES. Images of the artworks and information about the lives of their creators are accompanied by our interpretations as the exhibition’s curators, along with commentaries by experts from diverse disciplines. We hope that together these contributions will allow for a better understanding of this little-known and underappreciated genre of alternative, vernacular, decentralized, Polish Holocaust memory.

Wojciech Wilczyk

The Blow-ups Series: A Commentary

Józef Piłat, Sklepik żydowski z Dębskiej Woli (Jewish Shop in Dębska Wola) 1964, Kielce National Museum

In my documentary photography series There’s No Such Thing as an Innocent Eye ― about synagogues and prayer houses in Poland that no longer function as places of worship ― I opted for a topographic approach. Unlike a typical photo albums, the book that presents my project takes the form of a lexicon, where photographs of the buildings are accompanied by descriptions of their history.

The present project takes a different approach, which was triggered by my relationship with one of the artworks we encountered. Taking pictures of Józef Piłat’s piece entitled Sklepik żydowski w Dębskiej Woli (Jewish Shop in Dębska Wola) at the National Museum in Kielce, I was struck by the manner in which the artist depicted the human figures. Although the sculpture was created on the suggestion of the former director of that museum, its realization reveals the artist’s own affect. The figures of Orthodox Jews, a woman and two men (one older and one younger), have been carved with the utmost care (for example, one can see that the woman is wearing a wig, which is a rare representation in Polish naïve art depicting Jews). Looking at this piece, I decided to use a macro lens set as close as possible to their faces. I wanted to enlarge them, and in this way make the artist’s emotions visible. After this experiment, I decided to take the same approach with all of the objects I photographed for TRACES.

Translated by Zofia Ziemann

Wojciech Wilczyk photos from the series “Blow-ups”
(2016–2018)

Sculpture detail, Władysław Chajec, Auschwitz Commander Hoss [sic] Cruelly Massacres Prisoners, circa 1971, Regional Museum in Jasło

Sculpture detail, Władysław Chajec, Auschwitz Commander Hoss [sic] Cruelly Massacres Prisoners, circa 1971, Regional Museum in Jasło

Painting detail, Adam Czarnecki, Jews/Kikes Get to Work, 1967, National Museum in Kielce

Sculpture detail, Jerzy Kaczmarek, They were the First, 1986, State Museum at Majdanek in Lublin

Sculpture detail, Krzysztof Osak, Perpetrators and Victims of War, 1986, State Museum at Majdanek in Lublin

Sculpture detail, Adam Zegadło, Shared Work, Shared Burden (Shared Fate), 1969, Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw

Sculpture detail, Jan Markowski, Korczak, 1997, Agriculture Museum in Ciechanowiec

Sculpture detail, Zygmunt Sznejfus, Maximillian Kolbe, 2014, collection of Louis and Christa Galinski, Berlin

Sculpture detail, Jan Wojtarowicz, German Factories, circa 1970, collection of Ludwig Zimmerer, in trust at the Museum of Folk Art in Otrębusy

Sculpture detail, Jarosław Furgała, Auschwitz Was for Children, Too, 1978, Ethnographic Museum in Toruń

Sculpture detail, Zygmunt Skrętowicz, from the Auschwitz series, circa 1962, National Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw

Sculpture detail, Edmund Zieliński, God with Us, circa 1970–1975, collection of Ludwig Zimmerer, in trust at the Folk Art Museum in Otrębusy

Sculpture detail, Władysław Chajec, untitled (A Nazi), before 1967, Ethnographic Museum in Rzeszów

Sculpture detail, Edward Kołacz, Auschwitz Triptych, circa 1960–1968, National Museum in Szczecin

Sculpture detail, Edward Kołacz, Auschwitz Triptych, circa 1960–1968, National Museum in Szczecin

Sculpture detail, Józef Piłat, Jewish Shop in Dębska Wola, 1964, National Museum in Kielce. Portrait of Ruchla Orzech

Sculpture detail, Józef Piłat, Jewish Shop in Dębska Wola, 1964, National Museum in Kielce. Portrait of Mejloch Orzech aka Mejlok

Sculpture detail, Józef Piłat, Jewish Shop in Dębska Wola, 1964, National Museum in Kielce. Portrait of Majer Lewenstein aka Major

I. The exhibition

Roma Sendyka
Erica Lehrer
Magdalena Zych
Wojciech Wilczyk

Awkward Objects of Genocide: An Introduction from the Curators

Eight Jewish families lived here ‘fore the war,

Six of them in Dąbrowica, two on farmsteads had their homes.

Their names I record, lest progeny forget,

Different was their faith and on Saturday they prayed.

Innocent they were, never stole a thing.

And they prospered well with the trading, they did.

They tilled the soil too, and never would tire.

On Saturday they fasted, wouldn’t even light a fire.

When Hitler chased them from Germany, to Poland they came,

Not for long, as German bullets found them here just the same.

…

They drove them like cattle to Baranów, where,

At the graveyard, each had to dig his own grave there.

Dąbrowica has no Jews today, not one of them was saved.

…

Blitser Mayer of Ślęzaki was in hiding with his kin,

In 1943 the gendarme Mrozik shot them dead,

‘Twas near the waterway, by the woods’ edge,

Where Mayer, son, and daughter Hannah met their end.

Pejser Mojżesz from Kaczaki made it through the war, barely saving his skin,

But then partisans burnt him and his loved ones in their own homestead.[1]

“Folk Art” And the Past

“Folk” or “naïve” art was produced and, in a certain way, appropriated by the Polish People’s Republic as part of the state’s attempt to reorganize and commercialize what had been viewed as “traditional” art. Supervised, as it were, by specialists, “folk” art” was developed in line with political priorities and public desires.[2] Despite the recent vintage of the category, both consumers and critics alike saw the “folk” (and still see it today) as an expression of an original, authentic communal rural culture situated outside of time and history. Yet, if one turns to it with a historical eye, one is quickly confronted with motifs encoded by the state propaganda machine that worked to consolidate the nation. Therefore, it can be argued that “folk art” is more a tool of historical and cultural politics than a domain where history — especially a history that, for various reasons, was regarded as difficult — might reveal itself. Despite these constraints, there are ways to “read” the objects of “folk art” as documents that can help historicize the realities in which their artists lived and created. The text quoted as this chapter’s epigraph attests to the potential of “folk art” to depict and register past emotions end experiences.

“Folk Art” And the Holocaust

In our project, we treated the rich stores of post-war “folk art” as a unique record of life in the Polish provinces. The fundamental question we posed concerned what these artists knew about the Holocaust as it unfolded beyond large urban centres. What was seen, experienced, remembered? In light of the evolving discussion of the role that the Polish provinces played as a context for World War II’s genocidal violence, we decided to look closely at artworks outside of the contemporary mainstream. We were interested in the quantity of artwork dealing with the war in general, with art specifically addressing Holocaust in particular, and the approaches such works took to chronicling the Jewish genocide in this unique language — thus far an untapped source in Holocaust studies. Although some researchers and curators (including Alina Cała, Olga Goldberg-Mulkiewicz, Katarzyna Grzybowska, Aleksander Jackowski, Erica Lehrer, Marian Pokropek, Karolina Radłowska, Roma Sendyka, and Janina Skotnicka) had previously noted the presence of Holocaust references in “folk” art, there had never been a systematic study of the range and forms of the subject.

The exhibition we presented was the result of a three-year search for art objects created outside of the familiar, “urban elite” trends of remembering. We searched the archives of ethnographic museums, open-air museums, public and private collections of Polish “folk art” located in Poland and abroad (particularly Germany), and artists’ own archives. We found artworks of various forms: sculpture, painting, painting on glass, ceramics, fibre art, and graphic art. We managed to identify a few dozen pieces that depicted the Holocaust consciously or incidentally. Considering the scale of the genocide and the copious amount of “folk art” in circulation after the war, this is a very small number.

“Awkward”

Within international Holocaust studies, and especially after the fall of communism, researchers have become aware of the abundance of archives from behind the Iron Curtain, including grassroots sources. Current scholarship has long since accepted the vernacular (nonprofessional) domain as an important archive of wartime testimony, particularly oral histories. Even so, “naïve” or “folk art” has not yet been considered for its potential value as a document of Holocaust memory. And yet — however unexpectedly — we have found it offers insights into Holocaust experience, albeit in ways that are distinctive and often controversial.

The objects we found are unsettling and unusual: while some of them can be deeply moving, the grotesqueness of certain pieces makes it harder to access the subtler emotions an artist may have been attempting to communicate. Their aesthetic differs fundamentally from the moderate, minimalistic character espoused in elite art circles regarding the Holocaust, and thus often evoked embarrassment in those viewing the artworks. The positive, almost joyful idiom, the colour and simplicity, playfulness, and typically small scale of these objects depicting the murder of human beings make them seem inappropriate, out of place, even offensive. The main protagonists in these scenes of violence — the perpetrators, the victims, and the witnesses — are portrayed in unfamiliar, sometimes startling ways; it is especially difficult to accept depictions of victims that seem caricatured. Catholic symbolism is troubling when used as the basic semiotic framework for visualizing Jewish suffering. It is puzzling to see historical events framed in the mythic terms of folk cosmology’s battle between good and evil. Equally evident are the echoes of communist ideology impinging on these recollections of the Holocaust.

Memory

While these complications obscure the documentary nature of the artworks, we decided to treat them as particular acts of remembering, opening a new perspective in the discussion about forms of memory in Eastern Europe. Created largely in the provinces — those regions that experienced the Holocaust most brutally, yet did not play a meaningful role in constructing the global culture of Holocaust remembrance — this body of work offers a unique form of testimony. But of what kind, precisely? Is it a posttraumatic afterimage that challenges or evades conventional symbolic expression? Or is it rather the product of a negotiated, “compromise” of collective cultural memory? We are also interested in the question of whose memory these works actually speak for. Are these representations of memory individual, inherited, or communal? Local or imported (especially since many of the works were commissioned, or even designed, by German collectors)? The memory of witnesses/bystanders or of perpetrators? Or, in some cases, of the victims? If the answer is a manifold one, then how do these memories coexist, and how can we understand the conditions leading to their shared expression? One of the artworks in the exhibition, Adam Zegadło’s Wspólna praca, wspólny ciężar (Wspólna dola) (Shared Work, Shared Burden (Shared Fate)), depicts an Orthodox Jew and a Polish peasant carrying a cross together. It travelled with Samuel Fiszman, a distinguished Polish Slavicist and Mickiewicz scholar of Jewish origin who survived the war in Saratov in the Soviet Union, to Bloomington, Indiana (USA), after the scholar was forced to emigrate in 1969 due to due to a violent, government-sponsored antisemitic campaign in Poland. Because the artwork was made in that same year, this depiction of Polish-Jewish fraternity must have been bought (perhaps commissioned) just before Fiszman’s exile as a Jew. The composition and iconography of another artwork in the exhibition, Edmund Zieliński’s Got mit uns (God with Us) was designed by its buyer, Ludwig Zimmerer, a former Wehrmacht soldier, Polonophile, and post-war journalist for West German media who spent most of his adult life in Warsaw in Warsaw. Such transnational entanglements demand careful scrutiny as they give rise to further questions about memorial dialogues, identities, and agency.

Testimony

We believe that the objects we have identified may be particularly helpful for research on the history, sociology, and anthropology of Holocaust witnesses and bystanders. These works tempt us with the promise of a direct look at the “raw,” “unedited” memory of a first-hand observer. They might seem to suggest authentic, overlooked evidence of what lies beneath or beyond the official discourse backed by institutional authorities, monuments, and museums, illustrating a true, Polish memory of the Holocaust. Yet any claims about the alleged honesty or naturalness of this material are untenable: too many powerful forces affected the creation of these artworks. We can, however, treat these objects as comprising a unique window on the past, offering insight into the processes of witnessing in Poland. It is worth noting that the majority of these works emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, a historical moment that has been called the “era of the witness” (Annette Wieviorka) or of “testimony” (Dori Laub, Shoshana Felman) due to the attention that Adolf Eichmann’s trial gave to Holocaust victims in Western Europe, the USA, and Israel. Poland’s “witness epoch,” however, falls in the early post-war years (spurred, for example, by the August Trials and testimony before the Central Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland). But the 1960s and 70s were a fraught, complex moment in Polish-Jewish relations, and new attention to Jewish suffering emerged alongside other, contemporaneous processes that both encouraged and mediated expression about witnesses/bystanders. These included the waning of the trauma of war, the official acknowledgement of the Holocaust (and its subsequent repression), the arrival in Poland of volunteers from Germany’s Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, the forced emigration of Jews in 1968–69, and the influence of state propaganda in “Polonizing” the Holocaust. Thus, in our view, the main dilemma presented by the artworks is whether to regard them as testimonies that draw us into an encounter with history, or rather as a form of “negative witnessing” — to use a term coined by Dorota Glowacka — that distances us from the past.

The Holocaust And Genocide

We decided to include among the objects presented in our exhibition only those works that unquestionably and specifically pertain to the Jewish wartime fate, including those that capture it metaphorically, subsume it into Catholic Polish experience, or generalize it as universal human suffering. While there is a violence in curating these artworks in our new context, we believe that this act allows us to glimpse afterimages of the Holocaust even when they have been intentionally or unwittingly obscured. Because we cannot know the full range of artists’ intentions, however, we employ the word “Holocaust” with care. We use the term “genocide,” which may encompass the experience of a broader range of ethnic groups in Poland during World War II, when referring to the larger body of war-related art from which we selected the objects for display.

The Bystander’s Gaze

The interest researchers have taken in observers — witnesses of or bystanders to the Holocaust — over the past two decades takes on new meaning when one is confronted with these visual documents. Watching events from close by or at a distance, this “third party” to historical violence (in ongoing relation to victims and perpetrators) is dependent on visual experience and scopic action. In giving testimony, whether written or oral, narrators return to the images they once saw. If first-hand accounts have been privileged, the passing away of the generation of direct participants accords a new significance to second-hand testimony. This historical shift allows other mediated communications to be awarded the status of testimonies: gestures, images, and objects may serve as material witnesses or historical accounts. Such testimonies have been repeatedly mediated and transmitted. Images that capture bygone vantage points, fields of vision, emotional attitudes to the scene observed, a degree of proximity, or levels of empathy and understanding (or lack thereof), offer particular insights into the nature, experience, and behaviour of the bystander. Although this gaze cannot be treated as a reliable record of either history or memory (having been subject to transformations of time, medium, circumstance, and external ideological influence), it is, nonetheless, one of the most important pieces of evidence we can use to deduce who these observers of genocidal violence were and who they went on to become.

The gaze documented by “folk” artists — produced outside of dominant discourses about the Holocaust, and preserved by museums and collectors — confronts us today with the viewpoints of non-elite witnesses, a gaze that was turned toward the victims, and therefore retains a documentary potential. While this gaze was frequently that of an outsider, marginalized by his local community, it is also that which has been inherited by today’s Polish citizens, a position they share with all “post-bystanders.” Today’s gaze on the suffering of past others — formed in this case in the crucible of witnessing Holocaust atrocity — is the gaze that we today turn towards acts of violence and genocide across the globe, received via diverse media. Our response to this body of work is thus necessarily both a scholarly and an ethical task. Wojciech Wilczyk’s photographs, created for the exhibition, attempt to track and study this gaze. Both the original works and Wilczyk’s present-day responses challenge us as observers, posing questions as to who we are and who we might become when confronted with this inherited gaze.

Affects

One of the tasks we set for ourselves — admittedly a rather naïve one — was the search for visual evidence of empathy on the part of individual artists. Our working hypothesis is that traumatic events were inscribed into local art such that the works retain traces of affective resonance (director Andrzej Brzozowski had sought such traces before us, filming Polish “folk” artists for his documentary Ślady (Traces) in 1967). Although the artworks assembled here represent a wide range of emotional responses to the horrific Jewish fate, identifying a work motivated clearly and solely by empathy ultimately turned out to be futile. We long considered Wacław Czerwiński’s Ostatnia droga (The Final Path) to be such an example. Ludwig Zimmerer, perhaps the most important collector of Polish “folk art” (particularly that which pertains to Holocaust themes), recounted how greatly this piece had moved him, and how it had initiated his years-long interest in this genre of art. We discovered, however, that Zimmerer spotted this piece on a shelf in a state-run Warsaw Cepelia shop, and later we found three other versions of the same scene (as well as evidence that its memorial meaning was imposed by scholars and collectors as much as by the artist).[3]

Although the affective force of this history necessarily tapered off as time passed and artists were no longer drawing on recent (or even their own) experience, and the affective stances we were able to glean in the works were often far from compassionate, the perennial resurgence of the very subject of the Holocaust — in every decade following the war, regardless of the economic situation or political climate — cannot be ignored. It testifies to the relentless return of impulses stemming from the past. While the reasons for each recurrence may be different, they are always accompanied by an affective aura, suggesting an enduring, deeply-rooted, ever-renewing well of emotion; the objects themselves are sometimes its effect, and at other times its source. Ultimately, then, these objects resonate with feeling — though its sources may be situated elsewhere and realized differently than in more mainstream art. We must keep in mind that these works were typically parts of larger fields of meaning-making, of verbal, textual, and image-based narration about the past, arranged and presented by each artist individually, with the awareness that they are speaking beyond their local communities yet obeying these locales’ communicative rules. Because the non-visual components of these communications were typically lost (though oral accounts by Adam Zegadło, Adam Czarnecki, and Franciszek Skocz have been preserved), we draw attention to the partial, dependent nature of the works we present, curating them together with verbal folklore and other media of the time that allows us, in a fragmented way, to suggest the broader impact of Holocaust history’s reverberations. In this way, we hope to draw nearer to the atmosphere in which, for example, Franciszek Wacek used his “toy” Corpse Carrier to tell village children about the war.

Representations

“Folk art” representing scenes of the Holocaust has been created since the end of the war and up to the present day. It follows that the genre existed when in 1949 Theodor Adorno’s famous remark initiated a long-lasting conversation about the impossibility of representing the Holocaust, and such art continued to be produced as his thesis was, according to Michael Rothberg, wrongly turned into an “academic truism.” Folk artists were making Holocaust depictions in the 1980s and 90s when the post-war conversation was invoked once again to censor film and television productions like Schindler’s List (a criticism voiced by many, from Elie Wiesel to Claude Lanzmann), and when Holocaust scholars acknowledged that a tacit sense of decorum and principles of appropriateness had developed for assessing representations of the Shoah (including Barbie Zelizer, Berel Lang, Saul Friedländer). Adorno’s criticism of the “culture of compensation” thus became a kind of Bilderverbot — a ban on producing certain images — which was occasionally challenged by artists from elite circles. The aesthetics and representational strategies of folk artists, developed over the course of seven decades, have never been taken into account in this important discussion. “Folk art” did not fall from view; it had simply never been considered.

In presenting works by Polish “folk” artists as representations of the Holocaust, we ask how they might change the discussion of Holocaust aesthetics, perhaps revealing explicit and implicit rules of appropriateness that obscure important objects from view. What new understandings, and what new questions arise when we encounter these seemingly trivial, callous, erroneous, and simplistic depictions of the past, in jarringly colourful, roughhewn materials, nevertheless created by those who were near enough to witness what was happening in rural Poland in the 1940s.

Preliminary Conclusions

Taking the complexity of the phenomenon we have been tracing into account, we would like to emphasize that “folk arts of witness” requires further and deeper analysis. Understanding “witnessing” as an ethical rather than only an empirical act (not simply a gesture of direct perception, but also an engaged response to what has been observed), we were forced to question both our initial desire to find traces of such witnessing, as well as our assumptions as to what characteristics define it. Having abandoned our expectations of deep, personal, spontaneous, and disinterested empathic response, we nevertheless found these “folk arts of witness”, flawed as they may be, compelling for the ways they disrupt conventional categories and discourses, at turns succumbing to and flouting mainstream-mandated expectations, with their voices and perspectives emanating from their own, marginalized social class. Far from an “honest” record of history, these works represent a unique archive of popular Polish experience and recollection. They testify to post-war strategies and attempts at recounting mass murder, as well as to the work done to control and channel these attempts with semiotic systems supplied by the Communist Party and the Catholic Church. They offer a behind-the-scenes look at the fascinating negotiations of memory among witnesses, victims, and perpetrators, carried out in transactions involving simple, cheap, and accessible objects purchased directly from producers in towns like Kielce, Łuck, or Szczecin, and in government-sponsored Cepelia or Desa shops in Warsaw, Berlin, Paris, and New York.

What we experience today as the “inappropriateness” of these vernacular images raises many questions and opens up this forgotten archive for public debate. A deeper conversation may thus ensue about the historical, ethical, and aesthetic nature of Polish (albeit not only) ways of experiencing, perceiving, imagining, remembering, representing, and communicating the murder of Poland’s and Europe’s Jews.

[1] Ludwik Kłos, “A Ballad about the Jews from the Parish of Ślęzaki” (fragments), trans. Magdalena Waligórska, Okolice i Baranów. Echo Gminy. Regional Quarterly, no. 4 (1994), 22. Magdalena Zych is conducting further research on Holocaust testimonies found in oral folklore.

[2] Problems with the notion “folk” have been discussed by Ewa Klekot. We use quotation marks to emphasize the constructed character of the category adding. The term “folk” is further complicated in Polish due to recent historical debates about the system of feudal serfdom in Polish history. See: Ewa Klekot, Kłopoty ze sztuka ludową (Gdańsk: Słowo/obraz/terytoria, 2021); Adam Leszczyński, Ludowa historia Polski (Warszawa: W.A.B, 2020).

[3] See Erica Lehrer’s “Jewish Figurines and Holocaust Memory…”, this volume.

Texts accompanying the exhibition

Introduction:

OTHER IMAGES

Uncomfortable. Uncanny. Unfitting. Undesirable. Awkward. Unshowable.

We frequently encountered such reactions during our search for “folk art” depicting the Nazi occupation of Poland.

Yet significant groupings of such works representing wartime memory by untrained Polish artists sit in ethnographic collections across Poland and Germany. Some of them — intentionally or by chance — represent the Holocaust. Others obscure the specifically Jewish character of the genocide, framing it instead as Catholic Polish martyrology or a universal human tragedy.

These awkward objects are complex documents, born of various impulses. Their creators are Polish artists, but also collectors, ethnographers, curators, ideologues…

How did these works come about? Who made them, and why? Who bought, commissioned, and collected such scenes? Were they exhibited? For which audience? What do they actually depict? How should we look at them today?

Can we treat them as witnesses to murder?

Room 1:

TERRIBLY CLOSE

Banishment of the Jews. Camp.

The works in this room are based on personal experience. Their authors saw the Holocaust with their own eyes.

The photographer Wojciech Wilczyk documented works we found in our search for such objects in ethnographic archives and private collections. His Blow-ups examine the gaze of witnesses, bystanders, and their descendants towards the victims and perpetrators.

What is gained, and what is lost from such closeness? Then, and now?

Room 2:

HISTORIES

Among the more than 400 war-related works we discovered, violence against Jews appears in about 60. Where evident, it depicts various phases of the Holocaust: pogroms, deportation, humiliation, ghettoization, mass murder in camps, and killings of those in hiding.

These objects began to appear just after the war; they are still being made today. We exhibit some of them accompanied by documents that likely influenced their creators.

In this room we present three original works, from three different decades. They represent the beginning, middle, and end of the 70-year period that separates us from World War II. Perhaps they can help us understand what has changed in how the Holocaust is viewed in Poland.

Room 3:

WORKSHOP

Here we look closely at six works.

Their histories emerge in fragments. We catch glimpses of the various forces that influenced them: The biographies of their makers, collectors, commissioners, sellers: Poles, Germans, Jews. Communist politics and propaganda. Catholicism. Popular cultural clichés. Afterimages and echoes of other works. Museums, exhibitions, competitions. The “folk art” industry. Kitsch, violence, and obscenity.

In this room, we surround the works with selected contexts, derived from historical sources, biographical documents, and visual culture. Since many issues remain unclear, we sought information that would allow us to solve the mysteries that these paintings and sculptures represent today. We also turn to you for help: if you have any information that may be helpful for understanding a given object, please write it here [in the comment book].

Room 4:

EMOTIONS

Jewish Man and Woman. Jewish Shop in Dębska Wola. Jewish Woman during the Occupation. Death of the Dentist. The Final Path. Corpse Carrier. Gas.

The few works in this room sparked our deepest debates. We sought gestures of empathy, examples of ethical witnessing.

The intentions of artists are never singular or knowable. Yet these objects seem to ask us to take the perspective of the victims, to draw nearer to their fate.

Conclusion:

QUESTIONS

These are rare, exceptional works.

In the Polish People’s Republic (1944–1989) open discussion of the Holocaust was discouraged, and often impossible. The subject nevertheless appeared in artworks for a variety of reasons and under various circumstances. We found works of many different media: sculpture, textiles, ceramics, painting, papercutting, printmaking.

The works collected here offer a material context to consider how Holocaust memory in Poland has changed. It lets us see how personal experience and trauma is mixed with ideology, religion, popular media images, local tales, and traditional ways of depicting suffering, as well as the guilty feelings of German Christian Leftists, and the nostalgia of Polish Jews forced to emigrate.

Is this “the Holocaust for sale”? Or is this rather a belated conversation between perpetrators and witnesses? And where do the victims fit in?

What do these visual documents say about the Holocaust and the people who witnessed it?

About its lingering social and cultural effects?

What does it mean to inherit a bystander’s gaze on the Holocaust? Who are we – and who do we become – when confronted with these uncanny documents today?

II. “Folklore” and Jews

Magdalena Zych

“That” Subject

Dalsza część dostępna w wersji pełnej

Erica Lehrer, Roma Sendyka, Wojciech Wilczyk, Magdalena Zych

Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust, Warsaw 2023

Copyright © by the authors, 2023

Copyright © for this edition by Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2023

First edition

ISBN 978-83-67805-70-4

Reviewer: prof. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir

The publisher has made every effort to reach the owners of the wcopyrights for the illustrations, in some cases without success. We ask possible rights holders to contact the publisher to settle legal issues.

This publication was prepared and funded by the National Science Centre, Poland (research project number 2018/31/g/hs2/02447 titled: “Polish ‘Folk Art’ and the Holocaust: Perpetrator-Victim-Bystander Memory Transactions in the Polish-German Context”)

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