Ep. 44: The Fate of Jewish Sites in Poland with Yechiel Weizman

The Holocaust in Poland left hundreds of towns and villages that had previously had large Jewish populations empty.  However, important Jewish sites like synagogues and cemeteries remained.  

Polish communities were then confronted with what do with these places.  In this fascinating conversation with Yechiel Weizman, we talk about his work in researching this and how some communities attempted to destroy these places and how some were were quite literally haunted by their Holocaust past.

Yechiel Weizman is a lecturer in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry, Bar-Ilan University.

Weizman, Yechiel. Unsettled Heritage: Living next to Poland's Material Jewish Traces after the Holocaust (2022)

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:01.186)
Hello everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust history podcast. And today we are talking about memory, sites of memory and what that can tell us about not only the Holocaust itself, but also how in this case, Poland and Polish people in the Polish government, interacted with these spaces. mainly talking about places like synagogues and Jewish cemeteries. It's a really, really fascinating concept and a fascinating

topic and a way to look at this really important past. I couldn't think of a better person to come on and talk about this than Ahil Weitzman, who has been working on this topic and has a great book out on the subject. Ahil, thanks so much for coming on.

Yechiel Weizman (00:47.888)
Thank you Weichmann, I'm really happy to be here.

Waitman Beorn (00:50.478)
Can you tell us a little bit how you got interested into this particular topic and how you sort of began this work?

Yechiel Weizman (00:58.086)
So actually, my initial encounter with this topic was basically on the ground. Like many young Israelis, I visited Poland and I also have a family connection to Poland. My grandparents are from there. And while I started wandering around, especially around those small towns,

I found it particularly interesting to ask what is the meaning of these unusual and quiet places, traces of cemeteries, ruins of synagogues or empty squares where once a prayer house stood. And I became really fascinated with this question, trying to understand what does it mean? What did it mean for...

post-war poli-society after the Jews have been killed to continue living in these spaces and seeing these sites every day. What was the local discussion surrounding these places? so what I did, I started looking into archives from the immediate post-war years until

the end of communism, and I was trying to find basically traces of this discussion that I was hoping to find, namely what to do with these places. And it turned out that this particular question, what to do with this former cemetery or synagogue, was such a central question among

post-war Polish communities, both at the level of the authorities, many local authorities, and also at the level of the population. And it turned out that this question received many different answers and interpretation and the attempt to understand what to do with these places and all of the different practices that were developed surrounding these material traces. Some of them you can still see

Yechiel Weizman (03:19.196)
today when you visit these places, for me they were really fascinating and also very ambivalent.

Waitman Beorn (03:27.788)
Yeah, and I think this is this is one of the interesting elements of this whole topic, right? Is the different ways in which in which these communities chose to or chose not to sort of recognize these spaces. Can you talk a little bit really quickly about sort of why you chose to focus on the sort of predominantly rural small town, Poland?

Yechiel Weizman (03:51.996)
Well, first, there have been some research done about the big cities and the question of the Jewish sites. Michael Mange wrote about it in his book about Warsaw and Wrocław. But what I found is that while visiting these small towns and talking to people, asking them very simple questions.

Can you guide me to the Jewish cemetery or where is the synagogue? This question really touched a very deep and sensitive chord within the local population, unlike in the big city where, you know, there are a lot of people, many of them are not from this particular city. And it seemed that in the small towns where a lot of the local population actually have deep roots in these places,

The Jewish sites, they have or they play a very interesting role in the mental mapping of their surrounding. And I also found this interesting or intimate sense of spatial consciousness also in the archives. I immediately saw that there was a big difference

between how the question of the status and future of Jewish site was dealt with and negotiated in the big cities and in the small towns. In the big cities it was in many ways a question of urban politics that involves architects and high officials and state officials, while in the local communities it was mainly a local issue.

a local issue that pertained to the local history of the Holocaust, pre-war history. And I came to, well, and I realized that it will be more interesting to focus on this particular type of, I would say, urban rural towns or townships. So it's not really villages.

Yechiel Weizman (06:15.42)
because Jews usually in Poland didn't live in the villages, but it is basically the former shtetlachs, the shtetls, where Jews in many cases were the majority among the population. It's another issue. The fact that they were the majority of the population, or 50 % sometimes, and then after the war they're just gone. And then I think this gap between this rooted

pre-war presence and this post-war total absence, it's interesting and it leads it...

Waitman Beorn (06:52.111)
Yeah, I I was going to say, think for our listeners, just to put a finer point on it, a lot of these places that he was talking about had a huge Jewish population. I mean, compared to most places we think about outside of Israel, right? I these are like 50, 60, 70 percent of the local population in these towns was Jewish. And one of the things

You know, I think in a certain sense, Judaism is kind of an infrastructure heavy religion in a certain sense, because you have not just the place of worship, but also prayer houses and mihfahs and all kinds of other things. Right. So in addition to cemeteries. Right. And so in a certain sense, one of things that springs to mind in reading the book and hearing you talk is that, you know, this is the population that leaves lots of built remnants.

behind, right? Because it as a religion, you need these things, right? And so in a way that maybe other groups or ethnicities may not necessarily leave these kinds of things behind. They already are doing that. Plus, there were lots of lots of Jews in these in these towns, which meant that you would often have, you know, more than one synagogue, whereas often in these towns and villages, there's one church or so. Right. But I mean, you could have multiple synagogues and multiple different prayer houses and multiple different buildings. And then, as you say,

In most of these places, the population is almost 100 % gone, either because they're murdered or because they don't come back. so it's literally just an overnight in a certain sense. I mean, in four years, I mean, almost overnight, you have all these empty, empty infrastructure sitting there. And then that that leads to sort of what you're what you're talking about here.

Yechiel Weizman (08:30.159)
Exactly. Yeah.

Yechiel Weizman (08:39.728)
Yeah, and this combination of everything happening so fast, almost overnight as you say, and it leads to very, I would say, ambivalent reactions from the local society, because on the one hand, especially when talking about the question of private property, the absence of the Jews in many ways benefited the local Polish population, because...

Jewish property received new owners. But then I would like to assume that most people would have preferred to receive this property under other circumstances. And then all of this, I would say, moral embarrassment that you can actually sometimes trace in post-war discussions and in archives, I think it also connected to the way that the religious sites

synagogues and cemeteries were perceived because in a way they incarnated being the base the most Jewish trace they incarnated and embodied this sort of a suppressed silence discussion of what had happened to the Jews. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (10:00.846)
And also, you know, what, what the polls, Polish populations role in that was, you know, it's, I think we'll come to that in a little bit. You know, it's this idea of, of literally a physical, almost finger pointing, you know, at the, at the population and it's sitting oftentimes again, as you, you will discuss later, you know, because the Jewish population in a lot of these towns was, was the majority. Oftentimes these places are in like central locations.

Yechiel Weizman (10:07.131)
Exactly.

Waitman Beorn (10:30.734)
in the town itself so you can't miss it because it's literally you know downtown but before we get there let's let's go back in the chronology a little bit. So you know what is what is the situation in 45 46 47 immediate in the immediate post war period.

Because one of things that you do in your, in your project, I think is really helpful is it's periodized and you sort of were able to draw some generalizations about how, both communities, individuals, Jews, and the, Polish government are interacting with these spaces in these different periods and how that changes. So in the immediate period after the war, what's going on in these places?

Yechiel Weizman (11:21.158)
So the immediate post-war period in Poland is characterized by really sense of total chaos. It was almost a civil war between the communist circles and the nationalist groups. And Marcin Zaremba, Polish historian, called this period the time of the great fear. So there were violence and the feeling of...

There was lack of security, the whole notion of ownership, ownership of property, even before the communists took power, in a way, underwent significant changes. The notion of human life after this total war. So everything was, so basically Poland was in a flux. Everything was changing. Nothing was certain.

looked for opportunities to rebuild their lives after the war. And of course, the whole of the borders of Poland are being changed. Entire populations are being either displaced, deported, relocated. You have the Germans, Ukrainians, other population. And it leads to some sort of... It's really a transformative moment. And within this moment,

Jews are trying to come back to their towns and somehow to regather the traces. So this is why the spirit is really important to understand what happened to Jewish property, to Jewish sites right after the Holocaust. Because this question was part of a larger question of how to over

harm the war when the traces of the war are still everywhere.

Waitman Beorn (13:22.574)
Yeah. I mean, and one of things that that that you point out, like, that's really interesting and definitely hadn't hadn't thought about it is, of course, that I may have thought about this part, but, the the the basically Poland is moved, you know, 100 plus miles to the west. Right. So that so that Stalin and the Soviet Union end up occupying what would have been eastern Poland and Poland ends up occupying what would have been eastern Germany.

And so that actually you have Poland now controlling sites that sort of ethnically, historically had been very, very, very German. And, and so you have in those places, not just German populations, but Jewish populations, but they're also German Jewish populations that have been either expelled or murdered. And that this actually causes a different reaction, both by Polish Jews who end up

moving there and non-Jewish polls. Can you talk a little about that? Because I that was really fascinating.

Yechiel Weizman (14:26.576)
Yeah, this is a really interesting discovery that I found. So in those huge areas, the former German lands were now being populated by Poles and Jews, you suddenly have vast amounts of property, lands, houses, factories, and also religious sites, most of them Protestant or Catholic German churches or cemeteries.

but you also have very ancient synagogues and cemeteries that belonged to the German Jewish communities that were almost totally destroyed. And now when Polish Jewish communities were being relocated to some of these lands, mainly in Lower Silesia, they encountered some heritage that on the one hand was familiar, it was Jewish heritage.

But it wasn't theirs, it belonged to German Jews. And it's interesting that in many ways, the leadership of Polish Jewry didn't really see the preservation of the German Jewish heritage as a sacred task. So it was very different from how they perceived the question of preservation of their own Polish Jewish heritage.

So the German Jewish heritage, I think, bore the mark, the German mark. In many ways, it was German. It was connected to the culture, to German culture that tried to destroy them. So there were many interesting encounters in these years. In some cases, when Polish Jewish communities could repossess and reuse

German Jewish religious sites for their own purposes, they did make efforts to preserve it. But in other cases, I would say that the fate of German Jewish heritage was more similar to the fate of German Christian heritage than to the Jewish heritage.

Waitman Beorn (16:42.86)
I mean, I think that's just a really fascinating, a fascinating point. And again, it's, it, it shows how history is complex. Right. And so that, you know, you, it's not just, you know, one might've assumed that, you know, the Jews suddenly would have been like, amazing. A synagogue. love it because we're Jews, but of course Jews are different and like they're it's complex and diverse. And, know, they didn't necessarily have that reaction. one of the things that I wanted to ask you about, cause I thought it was really fascinating is.

The. Attempt in this immediate post war period, but it has it has repercussions that go all the way, you know, basically into the present of trying to define. This quote abandoned property, right? Of communal property, right? And even even I mean, guess the private property falls in this as well. But in terms of of who is allowed to claim it, who is allowed to claim ownership of it and.

The ambiguity, it seems like there's a lot of ambiguity and confusion that actually allows for a lot of agency and a lot of sort of different reactions.

Yechiel Weizman (17:54.118)
Yeah, so very interestingly, unlike private Jewish property, where Jews could file for restitution, although it was very hard and sometimes impossible, in the case of communal Jewish property, what the post-war Polish authorities did was in a way to disconnect any sense of legal continuity between the tribal Jewish communities and the post-war Jewish communities.

And basically it meant that no Jewish organization in post-war Poland could file for restitution of any synagogue, cemetery, or any communal Jewish property. Basically it meant that the story of Jewish Poland is over. And all of this property, this vast amount of property, cannot be owned by any Jewish body.

belong to the state, Jews could receive some sort of right to use it only for prayer. But in most towns, was no Jews to use it, not even a Minyan to use it to pray in synagogues or to bury their dead in the cemetery. basically, signified the direction that the government was aiming at.

to basically to make it clear that the notion of Jewish ownership as a collective is over and done with. But it wasn't so simple at the local level to root out this notion that Jewish community has some sort of ownership, right? And you can see, mainly in the first post-war years, all over Poland, interesting discussion between

local authorities and all sorts of Jewish representatives, official and unofficial. And it seems that it was not so easy for the local authorities to really assimilate the notion that the community Jewish property doesn't belong to Jews anymore and that they don't need any Jewish permission to use it. Nevertheless, they kept asking for Jewish permission, some sort of

Yechiel Weizman (20:21.358)
official authorization to use Jewish sites, even I found evidence of many cases of some sort of weird transactions between the local Polish authority and the remaining Jews, whereby the Jews sold synagogue to the local authority in return for some sort of, for example, commitment by the town to preserve the Jewish cemetery. What was interesting that these transactions had

no legal validity because Jews could not sell or lease or rent those sites because it didn't belong to them anymore. whenever the state authorities found out about these grassroots transactions, they immediately canceled them and they tried to reiterate over and over that these kinds of barters are simply against the law.

My conclusion from this very peculiar incidence is that it's more than just a case of legal misunderstanding. I think it testifies to some deeper level of, I would say, embarrassment and ease concerning this notion that Jewish ownership is a thing of the past.

So in a way, I wouldn't go into moral discussion because I think this is something very... We need to be very careful with talking about collective moral values, but it seems that when dealing about the future of a synagogue or a cemetery, right after the Jewish community was killed, and in this town, in these small towns particularly...

the ghettos were usually open. So everybody saw and heard many of them lived in Jewish houses while they were negotiating the legal status of the Jewish races. So I think it all creates some sort of dissonant reaction which is being manifested in this sense of legal or meta-legal uncertainty.

Waitman Beorn (22:45.538)
mean, one of the things that comes through so well in your book is this idea that, know, non-Jewish polls.

They still understand religion, right? They still understand belief and holiness and sacred places. And even though they're not Jewish, there is, as you point out, this, recognize that a cemetery and a synagogue isn't just any place, even though they're not Jewish and they don't believe in Judaism. They understand because most of them are, you know, observant and religious people. And so it goes back to what you were saying, this idea that

You know, on the one hand, they may want to get rid of these places or use them or repurpose them, but they also are, it sounds like perhaps, are unconsciously making the comparison that we wouldn't do this with a church or we wouldn't do this with a Christian cemetery. And so again, there is this idea of, and you talk about this later on, that, you know, these places, even though they're not of the denomination of non-Jewish Poles, they still have some of the same

sort of spiritual power, I guess, as a religious place.

Yechiel Weizman (24:00.666)
Yeah, and especially in such a Catholic society like Poland. Yes, the discussion around the religious Jewish sites was was never neutral. So it was much more than just property or abandoned property. These were some sort of religious traces. And I wouldn't say sake traces, but the whole notion of the Jewish religious

spaces or Jewish religion in general in the Polish folk culture is highly ambivalent, especially in the countryside, in the provincial towns. So even before the war, Jewish spaces, religious figures had a meaning for the local Polish society. those spaces way before the destruction harbored some sort of

very interesting conflicting perceptions and reactions. They were often considered as this, the other place, really the ultimate other place. And I think that after the war, when you had this total absence, I think it only added or contributed to this, I would say,

pathologization of these spaces and suddenly you have very interesting urban legends of ghosts in the Jewish cemetery. I often heard people who grew up in the 50s telling me about how their parents told Warden not to go to the abandoned Jewish cemetery during the nights or stories about weird noises from empty synagogues.

And you can actually find traces of these stories in official documents. You have local officials talking about some sort of evil rumors that are connected to the abandoned synagogue. And then you realize that, as you say, yes, there was a tendency to get rid of these places, to repurpose them. They reminded things that many people would have preferred to forget.

Yechiel Weizman (26:26.758)
But it was never easy to do it. It was never straightforward because of this ambience of these places.

Waitman Beorn (26:36.696)
I mean, this is, this is something that, and pun intended that I found particularly haunting in the book. because it's, it's weird. I thought about this before, you know, that you don't read about usually I haven't seen any really much scholarly literature about hauntings or ghost stories about concentration camps, you know, like, you, you know, like, you don't, you don't hear about, you know, museum workers or somebody, you know, in Dachau or whatever.

But in this context, you have lots of stories that you've collected from local people talking about, sort of your straight up ghost stories of, there was one amazing story in the book about a synagogue that had been repurposed as I think a cultural center. But the night watchman sees a ghost of two rabbis coming down the stairs. I mean, just real.

real sort of belief in supernatural things. And I'm just, I think that's really, really fascinating because it's, um, you know, and I'm not getting into like, whether ghosts are real or not, you know, that's not like the, the goal here, but again, this idea that it's throughout the book and throughout the topic is this idea of guilt, I think, um, or perceived guilt.

I'm not I'm not suggesting that the entire Polish population is guilty of of complicity, but but certainly lots of them were. But it's this idea of of unfinished, unprocessed. Responsibility, and it seems like that the ghost stories are are part of that, you know, this idea that, you know, that that there's something unfinished here and that that's why there are ghosts, you know, but but.

Yechiel Weizman (28:21.052)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (28:29.218)
But it's, you know, you, do a really, really good job of showing that this is not just a one off kind of thing. Like in all, many, many of these communities, there's either, and I'd love you to talk more about this when I shut up, but there's, there's sort of either reports of ghost stories or, or, you know, hauntings, but also curses and sort of, you know, bad things happening to people because of

what happened to these sites. Can you talk a little bit more about this? I think it's just amazing.

Yechiel Weizman (28:59.836)
Yeah, I think this is really perhaps the most fascinating phenomenon that I came across. How much there is some sort of demonic aura surrounding these places, some of them. And it seems that this whole notion of ghosts and demons, it's more than a metaphor. I take this

this discussion very seriously. And it seems that you often heard, and I heard that people are talking about what happened to the Jewish cemetery in the 50s or the 60s, that the authorities ruined it or built something over it. And because of that, the people who were involved in this or even the entire town,

is suffering the consequences. So allegedly some sort of divine revenge for mistreating the Jewish space and it often goes hand in hand with other stories about people who were directly involved in the killing or robbing of Jews who also received very weird punishments as they died in mysterious ways.

So when analyzing this phenomenon, in a way, I'm trying to be aware that it's not just that people are imagining ghosts or they suddenly have some sort of moral regret or remorse. No, I think it's more complicated than this. In a way, I guess sometimes it's easier to somehow imagine Jewish ghosts as some sort of way to channel

very profound unease because know ghosts have some sort of this mystical nature and it often goes back to this idea of the harmful Jews and here the Jews are coming back to revenge this hostile but I think in a way when you take this phenomenon and try to understand it in the context within

Yechiel Weizman (31:23.974)
these legends are produced, I think it does show that, as you say, there is some sort of unfinished business, something that is no longer alive, but it's also not quite dead yet. And you can see it literally when you these traces. In some of the towns, even after the Jewish cemetery, the synagogue was destroyed, you still have the ruins.

And it seems that these ruins acquired some sort of life of their own, almost in a sense that people are afraid to touch it, to build over it. And I think it also has to do with the political atmosphere during communist time that didn't really encourage any open discussion.

of what had happened to the Jews. And I think when you have this atmosphere of silence and censorship, it only adds to the already profound dissonance and difficulty to really come to terms of what happened to the Jews, and to what extent we were responsible to their fate, and the presence of the Jewish sites in a way...

was a constant reminder to all of this, I would say, and...

and ease.

Waitman Beorn (33:01.39)
Yeah, I mean, and this is one of the things that comes that comes through in in your analysis of sort of the correspondence right between the local communities. And one thing is that I'd love to hear more about you talk about sort of the language that's used of sort of like, you know, there are no Jews here anymore. But of course, it never says.

because the Nazis murdered them. You know, I mean, it just like they it's like they just aren't there anymore. But it's almost like the people don't want to speak into existence. The fact of what of what happened, even though saying that the Germans killed them would not be anything would be problematic for polls. Right. I mean, like

Yechiel Weizman (33:47.868)
Yeah, I think it's fascinating. I'm really interested in language. So in many ways, this book is not only about what happened to these places, but also how the Polish society talked about the presence of Jewish sites. And this language is fascinating both at the bureaucratic level and also at an official level.

and it seems that there was some sort of tendency to avoid any insinuation of why these places are now empty. So for example you have a letter of mayor that is asking to use the Jewish cemetery for construction and this mayor is basically referring to the cemetery

as being abandoned by the Jews during the war. Now it's very interesting because it seems that any insinuation of what happened to the Jews, even if the Poles were not involved in it, has a potential to remind the bleeding circumstances that led to the absence of the Jews.

But on the other hand, the moral economy invested in this language is much more complicated because on the one hand, and I think it also goes to private property, and there was a huge discussion of private property after the war, private Jewish property, and this is part of my new project. On the one hand, Poles, authorities or individuals

they tried hard not to mention anything about the war, about the deportation, because in a way that could have jeopardized their own sense of legitimation to use this place. But at the same time, they had to remind the authorities or to stress the fact that the

Yechiel Weizman (36:14.108)
the moral legitimacy to use these places is precisely because it belonged to the Jews and the Jews are not here anymore. in a way, they needed to find ways to make it clear that this was a Jewish site and hence, because the Jews are not here, it belongs to us.

but at the same time to limit any discussion of the details. And these two conflicting, I would say, sensibilities, they conflict with each other and it creates some very interesting paradoxes when you are trying to say something without saying it, but then what happened? This big taboo or silent discussion, it only becomes much more present.

the thing that you're trying to hide.

Waitman Beorn (37:15.862)
Yeah, one of things that I thought was really fascinating and I think it was a surprise to me because I guess my assumptions going into it is that not nearly as many communities as I would have thought just did their own thing and did it anyway. There was an awful lot of like asking for permission and sanction and oftentimes not getting it. from my impression from your work is that

most of time when they were told you can't do it, they didn't do it. and that there wasn't just a sort of unilateral, we're going to bulldoze the cemetery or we're going to bulldoze the destroy the synagogue, though that did happen in places, but it wasn't necessarily the, the, the norm, way that I kind of imagined it would have been.

Yechiel Weizman (38:03.152)
Yes, especially I would say in the first decade after the war. Yes, so during these years, the state officials were rather able to supervise what's happening in the periphery. The supervision was stricter. So in many cases, when local authorities

didn't receive the permission to repurpose a synagogue or to build over a cemetery, they didn't do it. Later, since the late 50s and 60s, when the government became more more nationalistic and even anti-Semitic, local authorities felt more confident in a way to just...

do what they want and implement their own decisions. Sometimes it was also an issue of time, yes. Even if places were not actively destroyed or repurposed, after a few decades, they were simply demolished, dilapidated, overgrown with bushes.

Waitman Beorn (39:27.47)
Yeah, I mean, this is something that I think is interesting too, is this idea of, um, you know, that these places begin to crumble as a direct result of their neglect. Um, and then that becomes its motivation or justification for destroying them. You know, this idea that they're, dangerous and, and this gets back to language too, cause you talk about

Yechiel Weizman (39:49.136)
Yeah, it's.

Waitman Beorn (39:55.404)
this idea of public health and hygiene and you know because sometimes these places are used as latrines or toilets or dumps or whatever but of course this is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy right

Yechiel Weizman (40:08.206)
Exactly. This is basically some sort of a circular argument. Yes. After a few years, these places were already being destroyed, demolished due to lack of care. And then the local authority comes up with the argument since this cemetery or synagogue is...

jeopardizing the society, the sanitary hazard, we have to clear it. And in many cases when you read this language, I dedicate one chapter to this whole notion of dirt discourse. When you read discussion about Jewish sites in the 50s, 60s, 70s, you can see that when local authorities are

describing them usually in the context of asking for permission to destroy it to use it they are being described in very harsh terms as some sort of embodiment of filthy places dirt contamination you have all this very visual language that you can almost imagine how these places look like now it's true and we have photographs

And you can still see today in some places those sites, by the way, like many other abandoned sites of foreign minority, where and are being treated as some sort of dump yards, places where people bring their cows to graze. So it is...

a matter of actual physical situation of these places, but then it's also a matter of how language describe, not merely describe, but also prescribe these places to be some sort of dangerous, unholy, filthy places that must be destroyed or demolished.

Waitman Beorn (42:29.166)
Yeah, one of the things that going along with language that I think is really interesting and I'd love for you to sort of expand on a little bit is this distinction between desecration and profanation, right? Because I think with regards to how people treat spaces, it's really insightful. And it goes back to our conversation earlier about

recognition of some kind of spiritual value to a place, even if you don't agree with that from your own religious perspective.

Yechiel Weizman (43:03.292)
Exactly. Yes, know we often, you know, use terms such as the secretion, profanation interchangeably. But it's interesting. And I and I adopted the distinction of scholar of religion, Roland Grimes, that is, and he differentiating between the secretion and profanation. The secretion is some sort of an act where the

perpetrator is not necessarily aware of the religious or special status of the target This is a more simple way of understanding the vandalistic acts that you can see in many places around the world. But profanation is something deeper.

in profanation the perpetrator takes his act very seriously. It doesn't mean that he believes in the religious nature of this place and is trying to invert it, but he in a way inadvertently recognizes that this place has some sort of value and it's some sort of attempt to break this taboo.

some sort of transgressive act of defilements. And I think this is a better way to capture these practices that really defined the existence of Jewish sites, because I think it's more than just practical reasons, lack of respect or dismay in many ways. And I think...

precisely because of this, I would say, mnemonic capacity of this Jewish sites after the Holocaust, after what had happened. So they acquire another dimension of, I would say, ambivalent, I wouldn't say holiness, but certainly they are not any other, they are not like any other place.

Yechiel Weizman (45:30.244)
And we are talking about collective and communal responses. I'm not saying that every individual that is destroying a cemetery is necessarily aware of what he's doing, but we talking about some sort of communal collective response that in a way dictates some sort of local code of interaction or

with these places. And this is why I think still Jewish sites even today in a way harbour this, I would say, commingling set of very interesting and conflicting attitudes.

Waitman Beorn (46:19.256)
Yeah, I think this is, I'm forgetting the word you used, but it's something like negative commemoration or anti-commemoration where like, where like by its, it's like, it's like attention, right? Like, like all publicity is publicity, right? So it means like by giving, even when you are, you know, desecrating, profaning, destroying someplace, it is a, it is a form of commemoration, which I thought was a really interesting way of thinking about it.

Yechiel Weizman (46:27.59)
Yeah.

Yechiel Weizman (46:32.176)
Yeah, exactly.

Yechiel Weizman (46:46.31)
Yeah, I use the term I borrowed from an anthropologist named Gertrude Koch, and she called it negative memorial practices. So it's very, it's highly paradoxical because basically what happens here that this exact essence that is being targeted and becomes the target of the profanation only received

Waitman Beorn (46:56.258)
Yeah, there we go.

Yechiel Weizman (47:16.368)
more presence because of the attempt to erase it. You can see this dynamic, especially concerning sites that are connected to the murder of the Jews, mass burial sites, many of them located inside Jewish cemeteries. And then it seems that there was like some sort of even ritualistic sense of defilement.

that only in a way demarcate the borders of these otherwise unmarked places.

Waitman Beorn (47:56.13)
Yeah, I mean, this is something that really, really resonated with me, you know, because when I was doing my research for the first book in Belarus, but it was really would have been Eastern Poland, I was one of the things I did was I visited these little villages trying to find these killing sites where the soldiers from the German army unit I was writing about had killed people.

And what was fascinating in a lot of instances was something that you observed. And I want to hear you talk about now kind of how you, how you engage with local populations. But, you know, we went to the town and there was like some local historian guy, you know, who was an amateur, just a townsperson or even just a neighbor or something. And, and my translator would sort of say, do you know where the, killing site was? And they'd be like, absolutely. And they would take us directly to this place.

that was in the middle of the woods and you never would have known what it was, but it was clearly common knowledge. Everybody knew like that's the place. and, and, and it's this, again, this, this, this fascinating haunting sort of memory that, that will not go away. That is passed down within these communities. Even, even as it's ignored in sort of

obvious material ways, but it's not in sort of the memory of the community. And so what I would love to hear more about, because one of the things I was really fascinated by was your sort of field work and going into these communities and asking people things and sort of what was the response that they gave you and what are the different sort of reactions that you encountered.

Yechiel Weizman (49:37.276)
Yeah, just as you said, when talking to people, it became clear to me that these places, even if they are not marking the official map of the town, and even if they are really in some remote corner of the forest, people know about it. Even when people say that they have no idea, in a way I could sense that, well,

they maybe have some idea, but... And it became all the more evident where I went to these places and I received help from all different types of people, for example, some local drunk in the town of Kolboshova, who volunteered to take me to the Jewish cemetery, which is in the middle of the forest. I would never find it alone.

but he knew exactly where it is. And I think that a good way to conceptualize this intriguing phenomenon is using the definition of the anthropologist, Roma Sendica, and she calls these places non-sites of memory. So on the one hand, these are non-sites. This is a term borrowed from another anthropologist. These are non-sites.

do not really exist as sites of memory. They are not commemorated, are not marked in any way, but nevertheless, they are known sites of memory. it seems that there are invisible boundaries or invisible markers that anchor these places in the local mental mapping. Sometimes these invisible boundaries are known

only to the insiders. So for example, this mass graves in Belarus and in other places where a person from the outside would never see these places. He would never recognize the boundaries, but they are somehow very rooted in the local mental mapping. And sometimes these boundaries are visible, for example, through heaps of garbage and

Yechiel Weizman (51:59.726)
alcohol bottles and other forms of, I wouldn't say commemoration because it's really some sort of act of defilement, but this is exactly the notion of negative memorial practices. So these places have some sort of, I would say, gravity, some sort of radiation. And the way to decipher this radiation is to understand how the local community perceive this.

receive this place as part of their own landscape. So this is really fascinating.

Waitman Beorn (52:40.434)
I mean, there's a, it remains me of a, um, there was an exhibit in the Galicia museum in Krakow, um, of a photographer who went around Poland, lots of these rural places and, and photograph all kinds of stuff. But one of the photographs was sometimes these cemeteries in the middle of a farmer's field. Um, and you could tell it was a cemetery because there were trees growing around and everything else because the farmer went around it, you know, because there were

There were tombstones and stuff and it would have torn up his tractor or whatnot. But again, it's an example of these sorts of these sites of absence that are obvious once you sort of pick it up because it would make, there would be no other reason why there'd be this patch of woods in the middle of a farmer's field, right? I mean, I'm curious because I'm guessing that a lot of people you talk to are post-war generation, which means that somebody had to

had to tell them where these sites were in order to pass down that information. I do have a sense of sort of how that works?

Yechiel Weizman (53:45.564)
So yeah, this is a very interesting point because it shows how the line between knowledge and forgetfulness is often not very clear. So I think that many of the people that I talked to, especially those who grew up in the 50s, the entire Jewish issue was some sort of big mystery. So especially in those small towns where...

most of the people or half of the people were Jews, it was obvious that there was something that is not really being discussed, but it was obvious to them that there is some sort of big question mark. And I think this sense of mystery in many ways really intrigue those people. So you would often hear stories about children in the 60s,

going to the forest to look for this, not all of them even knew how to call this place, cemetery. There are many different terms that were developed after the war and precisely because it was a that nobody goes to or it was a topic that nobody talks about, but it's obvious that there is something, there was something. And so many of these people

somehow gather these traces of information and memories. And when finding this place in the forest that used to be a cemetery, it only turned these locations into really interesting and meaningful places that would often become places of parties or drinking competitions.

someone who told me that they used to grow weed in the Jewish cemetery because it was the perfect location. So it was on the one hand this place that nobody goes to and nobody talks about and precisely because of this it became some sort of attraction to children and also to other people who are I would say outside of the normative boundaries of the society.

Yechiel Weizman (56:13.1)
It's very common in those small towns that the persons who know about the cemetery, who even took care of the cemetery, are often people who are a bit outside of the society. So their social status in a way helped them to somehow to...

to acquire some sort of deep knowledge of these places because these places were also outside of the boundary of the society.

Waitman Beorn (56:55.054)
Yeah, I thought that was really interesting. The mystery and the exploring of these places. And then later on in the book, you have some examples of like Poles discovering these places as if they are archaeologists finding Roman ruins or someplace, which I thought was a really interesting sort of turn of phrase. I'm curious. like one of the things that you show

As we move forward a little bit in the chronology, right, is that in the 70s, almost corresponding with this growth of Holocaust awareness globally, you know, with, with the Holocaust mini series and then, you know, building on Eichmann trial in 61 and, and all these sorts of things, um, that at least officially Polish government and authorities become a little bit more sensitive to

what we might today call sort of the the optics of of, know, their treatment of Jewish sites. So can you take us from some sort of that time to the present in terms of like, what's the status of of these sites throughout Poland?

Yechiel Weizman (58:09.852)
So today I would say that the process that started at the same 70s and 80s has become a norm. So the norm is today that Jewish sites are important and should be cherished as part of the Polish culture. I would say that this is the official mainstream view of even of the former Polish right-wing government. And you can see a lot of local initiatives.

of preservation and renovation of Jewish sites and festivals and Jewish events. But in many ways, I would say that these new norms, they don't really solve the acute problems that are still there concerning the question, what is the future of these sites? Because a Jewish cemetery,

needs to be constantly renovated, taken care of, preserved. And it's also a financial question. To whom does this heritage belong? Who's supposed to take responsibility on these places? The same goes to synagogues. And sometimes you have a very interesting situation where a local authority is really showing keen efforts to preserve

a place of worship, a synagogue or a Jewish cemetery, trying to promote the local Jewish history. And of course, it also involves touristic and economic concern. But then you have another question of what is the purpose of these places? Is it Jewish places or should it be used for the local community? And also what...

is the local story that we are trying to tell because if you really go down to the wartime history in many of these towns there are really unsettling episodes concerning how the local polis society treated the Jews or benefited from their absence and you have this paradoxical situation that I describe in the epilogue of the book

Yechiel Weizman (01:00:37.222)
that sometimes because the efforts of the local authority, for example, to renovate a synagogue, then it creates some sort of tension and it brings visitors, but then it also turns the focus to the question of, what really happened to the Jews? And I think it's always this tension on the one hand, the attempt to renovate Jewish site because this is the right thing to do politically.

But then, places now, some of them become really touristic attractions, especially in those small towns where you don't really find any other reasons for foreign visitors to come. But then, when it becomes some sort of source of attention, people also start asking questions. And then it seems that the post-communist afterlife of Jewish sites

On the one hand, it's a political issue, but on the other hand, I would say it only reinforces the haunting still, haunting presence of the Jewish story, even if now the political and cultural settings are quite different from the communist years.

Waitman Beorn (01:01:59.706)
I wonder if this is sort of analogous to, you know, the feeling amongst some polls, right? That, that the pole, story of Polish non-Jewish suffering during the third Reich, during the world war two, is, sort of subsumed into Jewish suffering or by the Jewish suffering, right? Where like the, the, the, people come to people come to crack off and they go to Auschwitz, you know, because they want to, they, they want to see Auschwitz, but they're

They're missing out on, you know, the, the, Polish non-Jewish story. and I wonder if, if in some of these smaller communities, there's also that tension, right? Because you have, you know, you have all of these tour companies like Jewish heritage, tourist tour companies where, you know, if you're, if your family is from this particular schedule, they'll take you there to show you the, you know, the town and everything else. But as you say, then, then that sort of raises the question of.

of what really happened, also I have sometimes felt, and this is anecdotal, but I've sometimes felt sort of a, from people, a resentment of like, you know, why do these people just come in? They just want to see the Jewish sites and then they go home or whatever, you know, that they don't actually want to see or learn about our suffering, our read non-Jewish Polish suffering. And so then it becomes this.

the suffering Olympics I talk about, know, like who suffered more and who gets who gets remembered and that kind of thing.

Yechiel Weizman (01:03:30.044)
Yeah, you can definitely sense it today. And of course, it also has to do a lot with the national politics. But I think that somehow a way to resolve this competition of suffering from the point of view, I would say, of the mainstream Polish society is in a way to try to paint a picture of, look, Jewish...

culture is part of our heritage, is being preserved. And in a way, this attempt to reintegrate Jewish culture into Polish culture creates some sort of an easier way to talk about Polish-Jewish coexistence. so this is a different, it takes us to a different discussion than this Polish-Jewish competition of suffering.

But I think it's always there. It's always there and you can see, for example, I had a project about one particular town, Olkush, that I talk about in the book. I developed a larger micro-historical project about this town and you can clearly see how there is some sort of interesting spatial dialectics. you have, so whenever there are attempts to renovate or...

preserve a Jewish cemetery, there is some sort of demand by grassroots national organization to build some sort of new patriotic, nationalistic monument. And you can see it's very interesting. It seems that there is some sort of unofficial competition of shaping the, I would say, the monumental skyline of the town.

So whenever I visit this particular town, I can see that while there are more and more, for example, plaques commemorating the Jewish community and this sort of thing, suddenly I see another huge cross, another commemoration of the victims of communism. By the way, is this notion of the suffering under communism. is...

Yechiel Weizman (01:05:51.68)
another very important trope that is being invoked in Poland in a way to compete with this notion of Jewish suffering. So I think on the surface I would say there is some sort of attempt to create an image of Polish-Jewish coexistence, of some sort of coming to terms with Jewish culture, but I think

you have all the time this quiet, unofficial dialectical interplay that is being manifested in building monuments and memorials and doing festivals and memorial marches.

Waitman Beorn (01:06:41.314)
Well, this always, it always seems to me too, that, that one of the primary sort of, you know, operating issues here, and this is not just in Poland, it's anywhere, anywhere that there was a Nazi occupation and the Holocaust took place. So Baltic States, you know, Ukraine, et cetera, but that the fundamental distinction is that Jews were really always only victims. I mean, let's

They were always only the victims of the Nazis. They have sort of pure victim status in that sense. Whereas all the other populations were definitely victimized by the Nazis, definitely suffered, but there were groups among those populations that were collaborators and so were perpetrators. And so there's always that uncomfortable tension. It doesn't exist by and large within Jewish communities because they were

clearly the victims. They don't have to, they don't have to deal with whether or not they were complicit. Whereas these other populations have to, well, they don't necessarily address it, but it's always in the background. And I feel like with what you've just described, whether it's, know, whenever I'm sort of being trolled online by Polish right-wing nationalists, it's always Witold Pilecki, right? They always bring up like,

You know, the guy who escaped Auschwitz and told the world, know, which is great. Great. Thank you. You know, good, good guy. But it's always this, but what about, what about, what about this guy? You know, and it's, I think it's because for, for many, for many people. And of course there were lots of polls and Ukrainians and everybody who helped Jews, but you know, there's, there's an underlying recognition of. We need to overcompensate for the part of our population that was complicit, that the did, that did do bad things.

And so then this creates that sort of competition of, well, if you're putting up a monument, we'll put up a monument. And if you're going to talk about how the Jews were persecuted, we're going to talk about how we saved them, and this kind of stuff.

Yechiel Weizman (01:08:48.24)
Yeah, yeah, it's, yeah, I think in particularly in Poland, where you have this, this very root notion of being the Jesus among the nation and the entire Polish history of being conquered and being really victim of so many, so many conflict. And then in a way, the Jews, I would say the great I would say,

Jews are being targeted because they have the nerve to be the victims. So who are you to take our place? And I think it brings out so many anger. Yes. So this question of who is the victims, who are the victims is really getting into pathological dimensions all the time.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:47.384)
Well, I I again, I think for everybody listening, I'm sure that you found this as fascinating as I did. And it, it should make us all think differently about space and about, about sort of historical places and, what happens to them. you know, and the fact that, that not just in the context of the Holocaust, but whenever you have a place like this, what, what people do with it tells us a lot about

not just the historical event, but also how they place that event in their own life, in their own history, how they relate to it, how they want it to be seen, you know, with, all kinds of different things. And so I think that this is a really great example of that. taking up a lot of your time, before, um, we let you go, um, I want to close with, with the question that we always ask, which is what is, what is one Holocaust book?

Yechiel Weizman (01:10:29.553)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:10:43.598)
that you have found particularly sort of useful or insightful or meaningful that you'd recommend to our readers or our listeners.

Yechiel Weizman (01:10:50.522)
Yeah, so actually I recently began reading a new book by Hannah Pauline Galay. It's called the Occupied Words, What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish. Now it's fascinating. It's not my field, but I'm really interested in language and how language changes after a catastrophe. And I think that what she's showing in the book is really

our language, how this vernacular Jewish language is being fundamentally different and how its transformation really reflects the trauma of the Holocaust. And it's a very sensitive approach to listen to the nuances and changes of language. And I find it very interesting and also very helpful.

to think through this approach.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:53.74)
And a great recommendation because that one just won yesterday, the National Jewish Book Award for Holocaust. clearly, you're not the only one that thinks that. We'll probably have to get her on the podcast as well. Again, for everyone else, thank you for listening. Please subscribe, give us a like, leave a comment. These are all helpful things. And Yahil, again, thank you so much for coming on and talking about your project.

Yechiel Weizman (01:11:57.946)
Right, right,

Yechiel Weizman (01:12:04.014)
right

Yechiel Weizman (01:12:21.606)
Thank you, Whiteman. It was a really pleasure for me to discuss it with you. Thank you.