The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture

Notes

Notes The Totalized Object All translations, if not indicated otherwise, are mine. 1. Despite strict quantity limitations imposed on deportees, the sheer quantity of things amassed can be illustrated by an archival photograph, in which piles of shoes were so high that a ladder was put into use; see the website of the Memorial and Museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau. 2. As the historian Jan T. Gross aptly put it: “The ‘New Order’ had no order.” See Jan Tomasz Gross, Polish Society under German Occupation: The Generalgouvernement , 1939–1945 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 92. 3. Jean Baudrillard, “Consumer Society,” in Selected Writings, ed. and preface Mark Poster (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 33. 4. The uninhibited hoarding instinct is well exemplified in Hermann Göring’s growing greed, as he appropriated the choicest works of art from both European museums as well as private collections, and displayed these among his other trophies in his country estate in Carinhall. 5. On the subject of Nazi cultural politics and the art “collections” amassed by the upper echelon of Nazi leadership, see John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, eds., “Introduction ,” in The Cultures of Collecting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). The authors come to an astonishing conclusion: “Yet one wonders whether the latterday Nazi hunters, fifty years on, are not possessed of the same collector’s zeal” (4). 6. The vast literature on the subject becomes quickly outdated due to ongoing changes in the restitution processes across Europe; the most recent data is discussed in Avi Beker, ed., The Plunder of Jewish Property during the Holocaust: Confronting European History (New York: New York University Press, 2001) and Martin Dean, Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 7. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh.: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 162. 8. Jeremy Bentham, Theory of Legislation, trans. Richard Hildreth (London: Trubner & Co., 1814), 113. The book appeared first in French. 9. Hannah Arendt writes insightfully about this process in her The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt, 1985). German Jews functioned in Nazi Germany as “nationals,” namely, as “second-hand citizens without political rights” (288). 140 Notes to pages 4–9 10. “Decree Regarding the Reporting of the Jewish Property,” in A Holocaust Reader, ed., intro., and notes Lucy S. Dawidowicz (West Orange, N.J.: Berman House, 1976), 50–51. 11. For example, in 1940 the Nazis created in Warsaw the Commissionary Board for the Secured Real Estate (Komisaryczny Zarzåd Zabezpieczonych Nieruchomošci), which took under its control almost all Jewish real estate over the course of six weeks. As in the Third Reich in the 1930s, a disorienting method was deployed: the name of the board did not augur dispossession, but connoted the “security” of one’s property. 12. I should like to invoke here Saul Friedländer’s new approach to Holocaust history, which foregrounds the individual voice of a witness. Saul Friedländer, “The Witness: Towards the Unifying History of the Holocaust,” public lecture at University of Chicago, October 2008. 13. One such case was the Polish-Jewish modernist Bruno Schulz, who took great care to secure his manuscripts, paintings, drawings, and prints, mostly by employing the legal concept of precarium and entrusting them to friends who lived outside the Drohobycz ghetto. We know that, additionally, he also hid some of his archives within the ghetto. Even these precautions proved insufficient and only a portion of his texts were found; regrettably , the writer’s unpublished novel, The Messiah, has not yet been found. See Jerzy Ficowski, Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz. A Biographical Portrait, trans. and ed. Theodosia Robertson (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003); see esp. the chapter “Works Preserved and Lost.” 14. For example, the Auschwitz Sonderkommando’s documents, interred in tin cans and, thus, protected, were found after the war, albeit partly damaged. See Gideon Greif, We Wept without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005). 15. Emanuel Ringelblum, Kronika getta warszawskiego. Wrzesieñ 1939–styczeñ 1943 (Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto: September 1939–January 1943), intro. and ed. Artur Eisenbach, trans. from Yiddish Adam Rutkowski (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1988), 471. 16. Jacek Leociak, Tekst wobec Zagłady (O relacjach z getta warszawskiego) (Text versus the Holocaust [On reports from the Warsaw Ghetto]) (Wrocław: Fundacja na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej, 1997); see in particular the chapter “Losy tekstów” (The...