Holocaust Studies

Born in Beeston in 1937 and educated at the University of Leeds, the poet, translator, and dramatist Tony Harrison has based many of his poems in and around the North of England. Traditionally championed as a resolutely working class poet, Harrison’s writing often focuses on the public and private lives of his family and Leeds neighbours - a focus epitomised by his aptly named first full collection ‘The Loiners’ (1970) and his second collection ‘The School of Eloquence’ (1978). However, whilst the gaze of the poet seemingly focusses upon the post-War Leeds cityscape, this paper will argue that far from being simply concerned with class inequality and issues of local heritage, the two collections are in fact profoundly shaped by the poet’s keen awareness of both the Holocaust and England’s dark Colonial legacy. Drawing upon Harrison’s published work I will explore how ‘The Loiners’ and ‘The School of Eloquence’ together map a new, transnational landscape of violence and barbarity upon the streets of Leeds. Connected by their shared dark histories, Europe, Central Africa, and the North of England are compressed together within the tight form and often taboo subject matter of the poems, as Harrison breaks down the geographical, imaginative, and ethical boundaries that might have otherwise kept these diverse landscapes apart. 

"Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, this paper conducts a new inquiry into how contemporary Polish fiction and documentary film is engaging with the memory of Poland’s murdered Jewish communities. The increasing attention paid to Jewish memory in Polish visual culture is a direct result of recent historical research that uncovered previously unimagined instances of violence perpetrated by Poles against Jews. Jan Gross’s historical work “Neighbours” (2000), which claimed that, over the course of one day in 1941, the Polish villagers of Jedwabne rounded up their Jewish neighbours and burned them alive in a barn, inspired a revolutionary shift in thinking about the Holocaust in Poland.

This paper argues that the notion of facing the absent Jewish ‘other’ has recently become a privileged ethical moment in Polish cinema, raising questions of responsibility for Jewish deaths. At the same time, the films under discussion, Wladyslaw Pasikowski’s “Aftermath” (2012) and Jolanta Dylewska’s documentary “Po-lin” (2008), both of which take place in the under-theorised cinematic space of the Polish village, explore the (im)possibility of encountering an ‘other’ who is absent and cannot look back. In the absence of the possibility of a face-to-face encounter, Polish cinema obsessively documents the domestic objects and material remnants, most notably gravestones, which Jewish villagers left behind. Such a focus is both fetishistic, and suggestive of how objects and images can address us in the absence of the other. As such, the writing of Levinas on the encounter with the ‘visage’ or face of the other, which cannot itself be captured in representation, becomes relevant to the argument of this paper. In the blurring of the filmed objects in and out of representation and recognition, in their becoming occluded by shadows in the frame, a particular iconoclasm is being performed whereby the visual becomes the ground for the emergence of alterity, for an encounter with otherness. Such a cinematic ethics challenges the equation of seeing with knowing, while re-formulating the position of the witness. This paper explores the implications of this re-formulation for a medium that privileges visuality, in the specific context of Polish cinema’s engagement with Holocaust losses, responsibility and Jewish memory.
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This paper draws on the archaeological model of cultural memory developed by Laura Marks (2000), in which cinema is posited as a privileged medium through which to search through the layers of ‘rubble’, the erasures and silences, created by cultural dislocations and ruptures. The paper considers how cinema can enact Deleuze’s argument that, in order to ‘grasp’ an event ‘we must not show it…but plunge into it, go through all the geological layers that are its internal history’ (1989, 254). The ‘event’ under discussion in this paper is the act of killing, as alluded to, though not shown, in one fiction film, Jan Jakub Kolski’s Burial of A Potato (1990), and one documentary, Pawel Lozinski’s Birth Place (1992). In these films, Laura Marks’s concept of ‘cinema as archaeology’ is literalised and pushed to its limits: the films attempt to excavate the layers of memory and silence that have sedimented around the distant murder of Polish-Jewish villagers by their Polish neighbours, and conclude with a literal excavation of their human remains from the earth, after which filming shudders to a halt. The films’ intense focus on the earth as a material archive allows a reading of the rural landscapes, following David Martin-Jones’s (2013, 718) Deleuzian film analysis, as ‘facified’, as an affective landscape that ‘looks at us’ and speaks of an occluded past. At the same time, the films mark the limits of this communication, bringing us up against the obtuse materiality of formless earth, decayed bone and, in one case, a dirty potato, in which the textured, haptic image signals a particular nullification of the primacy of human existence.

""This chapter traces the networks of haunting and spectrality in the cinematic spaces of two films, Polish director Wladyslaw Pasikowski’s Aftermath (2012), and the Spanish-Mexican production, The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001). While emerging from different contexts, both films are concerned with the re-emergence of a repressed past that is envisioned as a spectral return. In Aftermath, the spaces of a Polish village are haunted by the unresolved traumas of a particular event, in which Polish villagers murdered their Jewish neighbours by burning them alive and burying them en-masse in the foundations of a villagers’ house. In The Devil’s Backbone, set during the Spanish Civil War, the ghost of a young boy stalks an isolated Spanish orphanage. Like the Jewish villagers of Aftermath, he has been secretly murdered and his body is unburied and unmourned, hidden in the cistern in which he was drowned.
The chapter will place these films into dialogue with Derrida’s writing on haunting in Spectres of Marx, focusing particularly on how, in this text, the spectral is figured as a presence that looks at its addressees, before and beyond their awareness of this look. The ways in which the films suggest the ‘look-back’ of a spectral presence can be read as a cinematic approximation of the point of anamorphosis, as developed by Lacan (and re-worked by Zizek and Sobchack) in relation to Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors. Lacan describes how an apparent stain that appears when the painting is looked at straight-on becomes, when viewed obliquely, a death’s-head which irrupts onto the visual field, suggesting the point from which the painting itself is already ‘looking back’ at its viewer. The chapter argues that both films present a fascination with objects and signs that manifest a threatening and repressed underside of ordinary rural scenes. These objects and signs refer to past deaths and prefigure future deaths, connecting in a network of images of anamorphosis that irrupt onto the present.
As in Derrida’s writing on the spectral, the haunting that takes place in both films is orientated towards the re-instatement of a kind of justice or order. However, this vision is presented differently in the films; in The Devil’s Backbone, the ghost helps to kill his murderer and thus avenge his own death, while a new victim undertakes the role of haunting the orphanage, in a cyclical process that suggests there is no end to the return of traumatic events. In Aftermath, however, the unearthing of the villagers’ bones, their reburial in a memorial space, and the processes of mourning that are conducted seem to terminate the haunting of the landscape. This chapter thus questions the ethical implications of what has been called ‘remembering to forget’, raising ghosts and spectres in order to send them away again so that they do not remain to haunt the living with memories of unresolved, traumatic pasts. Drawing once again on Derrida, the chapter considers an alternative position, one that refuses to terminate the process of mourning, as an ethical obligation to the deceased.
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"This book provides a detailed account of contemporary cinematic representations of Polish-Jewish relations, particularly concerning Holocaust memory. It examines how Polish and transnational film, installation and web-based art is engaging with the memory of lost Jewish communities. While the book analyses several important filmic works before 2000, it considers the millennium to be of great significance in the representation of Polish-Jewish relations, as it was around this time that historical research revealed previously unimagined instances of violence perpetrated by Poles against their Jewish neighbours. In 2000, historian Jan Gross published Neighbours in Poland, which claimed that the Polish villagers of Jedwabne murdered their Jewish neighbours during WWII, a claim that was subsequently disputed and debated at length. Revelations of Polish violence towards Jews interrogated the foundations of Polish Holocaust memory, which has centered largely on the heroic actions of Poles who risked their lives to rescue Jews. It was, unsurprisingly, these historical narratives that were promoted heavily under Communism, and they also form the backbone for most cinematic treatments of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust, as I have noted elsewhere (Mroz, 2013, please see attachment).
Given that the debates around Jedwabne have generated the ‘most prolonged and far-reaching of any discussion of the Jewish issue in Poland since the Second World War’ (Polonsky and Michlic 2004, xiii) it is somewhat surprising that no study has explored the impact and resonances of the Jedwabne revelations on Polish and transnational audio-visual works. Sociological studies have pointed out that Poland has recently seen a ‘Jewish Renaissance’, a surge of interest in Polish-Jewish memory and in contemporary Polish-Jewish communities, but there has as yet been no sustained analysis of the response to these developments in visual culture. In the context of these revolutionary changes in thinking about Polish-Jewish relations, this book charts the new ways in which contemporary audio-visual projects mourn absent Jewish neighbours, and reimagine spaces ‘haunted’ by Jewish pasts. The book will provide a new perspective on representations of Polish-Jewish relations by conducting a sustained analysis, informed by film theory and philosophy, of how films and artworks enable new encounters with perpetration, victimhood, and witnessing, roles which are frequently intertwined in complex ways. 
The need for this book partly arises from the fact that philosophical, critical and artistic material originating in Poland has frequently been marginalised in Holocaust studies in favour of critical and theoretical writing, film and artworks originating in France, Germany, Israel and the United States. This is despite Poland’s geographical centrality to the Holocaust, the way in which many Poles witnessed the destruction of their Jewish neighbours, and the conflicts of memory around the Holocaust between those within and outside Poland (including, frequently, Polish-Jewish survivors residing abroad). More specifically, very few books, in either Polish or English, have been devoted to the representation of the Holocaust in Polish cinema. This book will thus provide an important intervention in academic debates about current visual representations of the Holocaust, and explore new constructions of Polish politics, identity and memory through visual images.

The book has the following distinctive features:

1. It provides the first comprehensive account of Polish and transnational visual culture’s response to increasing self-reflexivity around Polish-Jewish relations and Holocaust memory, particularly following the historical studies investigating the events of Jedwabne.
2. It addresses the new ways in which film and visual culture is engaging with the Holocaust, including via multi-platform spectatorship and online material, and explores the implications of this for the re-configuration of Polish-Jewish memory. The book also aims to track the powerful links between audio-visual projects and other forms of commemoration, such as monuments and museum exhibitions.
3. It uses an interdisciplinary approach to place into dialogue a number of discourses, whose intersection promises to be fruitful but has not yet been explored in the context of Holocaust memory in Poland, for example, film-philosophy and notions of mourning and hauntology derived from Jacques Derrida. 
4. It analyses films that have received very little critical attention in either English or Polish-language publications on Holocaust cinema, which have more often focused upon fiction films by well-known directors, and frequently revolve around the experience of concentration camps or urban ghettos. By contrast, the book will largely examine the theoretically marginalised spaces of shtetls, rural villages and small towns, in critically neglected documentary and fiction films.

The book will be the result of original, independent research across a broad range of Polish- and English-language texts, including films, documentaries, academic works, and museum publications, with the specific purpose of analysing developments in Holocaust representation within visual culture. It will be the principal outcome of a British Academy grant, in operation between September 2013 and August 2015, allowing the author to conduct extensive fieldwork in Poland, including at the Jewish Motifs International Film Festival in Warsaw and the Krakow Jewish Festival, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, the Warsaw Film Archive, and other Polish museums, galleries, and memorial spaces which provide access to video art and installations.
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