The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture

The Totalized Object: An Introduction

The Totalized Object: An Introduction We are crammed, surrounded by things, objects, furniture, clutter, this dead fauna which increases over the years, disturbed at the time of moving house, considered indispensible for life. Never before, during this war, was man so brutally fleeced of the surroundings of things among which he lives. —Kazimierz Wyka Knowledge must indeed present the fatally rectilinear succession of victory and defeat, but should also address itself to those things which were not embraced by this dynamic, which fell by the wayside—what might be called the waste products and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic. . . . Theory must deal with cross-grained, opaque, unassimilated material, which as such admittedly has from the start an anachronistic quality, but which is not wholly obsolete since it has outwitted the historical dynamic. —Theodor W. Adorno The Holocaust Object as Text We associate the Holocaust with human tragedy. Hence, mounds of objects, looted from their murdered owners, seem much less important, their tales ignored . Over the course of time, however, the physical remains of human victims —their jewelry, shoes, clothes, and even their hair—have become the Holocaust’s dominant metonymy. Housed in museums or memorial sites and arranged by professional curators, these objects now stand out as the Holocaust ’s most persuasive and tangible reality. These surviving objects attest to the fact of genocide, if one respects their authenticity; ordinary and humble, these objects are endowed with unique representational power: pillaged or exchanged for the victim’s life, they trigger numerous Holocaust narratives. Usually, the biography of an object continues as long as it maintains its capacity to serve its owner. One disturbing effect of the objects on display in Holocaust 2 THE HOLOCAUST OBJECT IN POLISH AND POLISH-JEWISH CULTURE museums is produced by the reversal of this order: beholders confront lifeless items that were in usable condition at the moment of separation from their owners and, thus, encounter in these vestiges not only their owners’ tragic end, but also stories of violated proximity and forced separation. Since the Holocaust already exists at a temporal remove, its proximity diminishing into memory, both its material vestiges and immaterial traces manifest their past immediacy mainly through metonymy, which allows these fragments to speak on behalf of past wholeness. The tension between such gathered material vestiges and their initial integrated functionality underscores the great power of metonymy: this tension connects memory of the Holocaust with diverse processes of the post-Holocaust era, during which the surviving shreds produced narratives about human lives and how these lives ended. The beholder approaches the material legacy of the Holocaust in order to read its metonymic configurations and, in so doing, to pose questions about its graspable meaning. The now institutionalized display of these objects at sites of death clashes with both their initially intended use and the way in which they attest to the powerful human desire to live; after all, their owners carried these possessions to places of destination and destiny, as objects intended for use in a future life at these locations. Anyone who contemplates the material legacy of AuschwitzBirkenau is struck first of all by both its shabby everydayness and the simple utility of the objects on display—a utility determined by the demands of survival . Amid the chaos of suitcases, kitchen pots, footwear, one will not find canvasses painted by old masters or other precious collectibles. Today, this clash between the former owners’ hope to live and their imminent death continues to produce the symbolic core meaning of Holocaust objects. At the point when the victims, forced to leave their homes, had to make quick and irrevocable decisions regarding what to take with them, their needs were indeed basic. One took warm clothes, food, and symbolic mementos such as family pictures, but left behind furniture. Jewelry and hard currency were kept close to the body or hidden in its crevices. After reaching the ghettos , extermination centers, or concentration camps, the victims and their belongings were subjected to yet another process of segregation and elimination.1 They first were deprived of their belongings, and then their lives. The resulting mass of plundered objects was again sorted before being sent, under the supervision of the special forces, to the Reich. Some of these leftovers, stored in barracks across Hitler’s Europe, were looted after the war and, later, in diminished yet still terrifying immensity, have served as material evidence that the Holocaust was not a figment of some collective imagination. The...