I had a weekend to myself recently and decided to go to Krakow, a city I last went to 20 years ago and had found magical. Since then, curiously, it seems to have rather fallen off the metropolitan newspaper-reading traveller’s radar: the only proper journalism I could find about the place was about a decade old. In the place of the usual roundups and itineraries in The Guardian and The New York Times, there were infinite-seeming review sites and lists. The Krakow-related internet, it seems, had been entirely remade to serve the stag and hen community.
Disoriented by this barrage of crowd-sourced lists, I eventually pieced together an itinerary. This was not to be a Dead Jews trip; I have never visited Auschwitz and never will. Nor was it a doleful family homage trip. My family were all from Germany; some hailed from the eastern bits of Germany that were once Poland but I always remember my Prussian grandpa and Bavarian grandma saying snooty things about the ostjuden they encountered out and about in Golders Green.
Despite all this, it became clear that the Galicia Jewish Museum was one I should visit. It is in the former Jewish area of Kazimierz, where tourists are directed to go for all manner of “authentic” experiences. The museum also, of course, ticks the Dead Jews box that so many visitors to Poland expect. I was especially intrigued by how disdainful the museum’s curation made some reviewers and raters: it had too much text and not enough singing and dancing.
But my favourite museums always present riveting stories through archival ephemera, printed books, and letters, and there is no subject better suited to text than this one. So off I went.
It turns out that the Galicia Jewish Museum isn’t just text. Its permanent exhibition – Rediscovering Traces of Memory, curated by the British historian Jonathan Webber – is one of the most unusual, startling symbioses of photography and writing I have seen. The walls of text and image are as intense as a Mittel-European Jewish intellectual at the dinner table in the 1920s: they have a strong thesis, and a burning narrative to explore and offload. Their subject is the interplay of the scanty material remnants of Jewish life in Poland with collective memory, or, more often, as the pictures of ruined synagogues or yeshivahs built over with shopping malls suggest, the erasure of this memory.
Indeed, the museum is unusual in another crucial way. Poland in particular has a history of state-mandated erasure of Polish complicity in the Holocaust. In 2018 its lower house passed a law making it illegal to accuse Poland of Holocaust complicity. Jonathan Gladstone summed up the situation in a Tablet article that year, writing on return from a trip to Poland: “The combined effect of the new law, the regular suppression of Jewish voices at the Auschwitz site, and the effort at Majdanek to render Holocaust history Judenrein is a form of Holocaust denial, or at least Holocaust distortion. The Polish state is consciously endeavouring to minimise the severity of the Holocaust and to exonerate Poland and Poles from guilt over their participation in it.” Not much has changed since.
Naturally this pressure is felt throughout Polish culture, including museums with state funding. Yet as we wander through the pictures of weed-filled Jewish graveyards with, at best, one single grave remaining, and the shattered stones that lie where once lived the arc of a major synagogue, we feel a finger pointing firmly at the shattered Poland that closed in around that most traumatic, egregious period of 1940-1945.
With Jewish heritage “almost completely destroyed” under the Germans, we read, the “virtual absence of Jews after the war, especially in the villages and small towns where they had been a significant percentage of the population, the physical evidence of their world that had somehow survived the war then most fell into ruin during forty years of oppressive communist rule in Poland”. There is mention, too, of the long-standing tradition of “intercommunal violence.. alienation, social rejection… and the rise of an overtly antisemitic Polish political party which encouraged boycotts and anti-Jewish thuggery”.
And there is the material reality that is the subject of this exhibition: the unpreserved, still largely uncommemorated ruins of a destroyed world.
In its focus on the fundamental tension within Jewish memory culture between destruction and abuse by the host culture, and belonging and love of place, the permanent collection is a deep-dive of the highest calibre. Visitors must bother to read the text, and there is a lot, but then they are equipped with the taste of both-ness, of the prickings of life and a vibrant history even as they stare at broken stones.
Chris Schwartz’s photographs are wide-ranging, as detailed and ambivalent as they are depressing. In each, we see a past extinguished, and the DNA of the history of Jewish lives and community. These “glimpses of the Jewish culture that once was” would be easy – even impossible not – to miss. Take Jewish Street in the centre of Tarnów – one of the most important cities in Galicia, with a Jewish community that dated to the 16th century. The city had a a population of 56,000, of whom 45 per cent (25,000) were Jewish. Yet the street is just an ordinary looking road bordered by shuttered beige cement buildings. You’d never know.
There is a section on Holocaust landscapes, and an interest in empty spaces. One of the most striking images in the exhibition is a clump of trees in the countryside near Stary Dzikòw, noticeable amid scorched farmland. This was once a Jewish cemetery and it is preserved by Polish villagers – meaning they don’t farm on it – out of respect.
Before looking at the permanent exhibition, I’d spent a good hour absolutely riveted by another labyrinth of text that the online reviewers found so boring: a temporary exhibition called Henrik Reiss Must Cease to Exist. This is the story, pieced together through official documents, letters, and other fragments, of the Reisses, an extremely rare family of Krakow Jews (engineers) that managed to survive thanks to the successful use of “Aryan papers”. The set of papers they managed to procure, showing them to be the Daraż family, a Polish Christian family from Lviv, is one of the most complete that is known of.
The story here – and it is a gripping one – is the utter porousness of any sense of security that the possession of Aryan papers conferred. For as soon as you managed to bribe your way to a set of papers asserting you were not Jews, ubiquitous networks of informants and antisemites would work against you. To walk on the street or go to a shop was lethal. Few Aryan paper-holders survived the whole five years. Those that did were lucky to encounter people who looked the other way, or actively helped, as well as those keen to inform.
The story of the Reiss’s survival of the war is pure film material. After some years of bliss in Australia, where they arrived after a hellish voyage on an Egyptian ship that sailed from Marseilles, on which countless people who had survived the war and the Holocaust died of illness – Lucja Reiss died of a brain tumour.
And so, this is a unique and powerful museum, making a quiet stand against both the government line on Polish complicity and against the mass touristic expectation of flashy, multimedia museology. For Jews who aren’t keen on visiting death camps, this museum is a bright light amid the theme park of the “Jewish area”.
galiciajewishmuseum.org/en/
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