Memory, Cinema and Deathscapes: Re-membering the Holocaust in Poland

Holocaust memory is at a critical juncture. The intersection of anxieties about survivors and firsthand witnesses growing fewer and frailer, the ever-growing importance and ongoing boom in popular media representations of the Holocaust across the last four decades, and the contemporary threat of Holocaust distortion represents a distinct mnemonic moment: a reckoning with the Holocaust in and as postmemory. This PhD takes this critical juncture as its impetus, exploring how popular media haunts emerging postmemorial Holocaust memory cultures in Kraków, Poland. Poland is central to the Holocaust and its memory – historically, spatially and imaginatively. Popularly conceptualised as a vast deathscape, or landscape of death, and custodian of an overwhelming majority of the Holocaust’s landscapes, Poland is the site of Holocaust memory par excellence. It is, however, significantly overlooked in favour of more established memory contexts such as Germany, the USA and Israel. The Polish context of Holocaust memory is also marked by fraught memory politics, from its Nazi occupation and subsequent antisemitic Communist government to contemporary far-right governing politics and the emergence of a mass Holocaust and Jewish heritage tourism industry. It thus presents a central and a critical context to examine postmemorial reckonings with the Holocaust in and as memory. This PhD takes the particular context of Kraków as its empirical focus. Once the capital of Poland, with a bustling and vibrant Jewish community that emerged over 10 centuries, and the capital of the General Government during the Nazi occupation of Poland, Kraków has an especially rich history vis-à-vis Polish Jewish heritage and the Holocaust. With most of its Jewish community murdered in the Holocaust and the subsequent official antisemitism of the Communist government leading most surviving Jews to flee the country, Kraków’s Jewish heritage fell into a state of formal abandon and obfuscation after WWII. Following the shift to a democratic state in 1989 and a coterminous boom in Jewish heritage tourism to Kraków, however, the city has seen a gradual resurgence in its Jewish and Holocaust histories. Partly this is due to the local and international importance of Steven Spielberg’s (1993) Schindler’s List, filmed in the city’s landscapes and telling the true story of industrialist Oskar Schindler’s rescue of 1200 Jews in wartime Kraków. Broadly conceived as a turning point in globalised and popular Holocaust memory, for Kraków Schindler’s List also represents a shift from silence and post-war decline toward local survivors openly sharing their experiences and a huge influx of tourism to film sites, historic sites and the nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. Contemporary memory cultures in Kraków are thence entangled with the film, and local memory entrepreneurs rely upon its established popular framework to engage tourists with the Holocaust in and as (post)memory. Focusing on three key landscapes in Kraków – Kazimierz, the former Jewish quarter, Podgórze, the former Kraków Ghetto, and Płaszów, formerly the concentration camp KL Płaszów – this PhD examines the ways in which popular media, particularly film (focusing on Schindler’s List) and archival photography, haunts these landscapes and informs emerging memory cultures of postmemorial negotiation therein. I use a memory-postmemory and hauntological conceptual framework to do so, mobilising a multi-method qualitative approach that combines various ethnographic, archival and creative methodologies. This is structured by this PhD’s distinct collaboration – as an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award – with the Galicia Jewish Museum (GJM) in Kraków. The GJM, founded in 2004 and now a key actor in local and increasingly national memory work vis-à-vis the Holocaust and Jewish heritage, has an educational and artistic ethos primarily formed and structured through the rationale of disrupting normative ways of seeing to encourage critical and creative engagement with the Holocaust and broader Jewish heritage across Poland and the former Galician region of Eastern Europe. Through an 11-month internship at the Museum, working in its educational department, this collaboration informs the innovative place- and arts-based geographical research of this PhD and its attention to the entangling of historical and contemporary, affective and imaginative, virtual and tangible geographies of Holocaust memory. It is in tandem with the work of the GJM and my work therein, that I develop the PhD’s use of critical walking methodologies and a creative praxis of collaging. This PhD explores the mnemonic entanglement of popular media with contemporary Holocaust memory in the memory work of local memory entrepreneurs, emphasising in particular the central rhythm of guided historical walking tours, and the postmemorial encounters and reckonings of tourists who travel to Kraków’s landscapes to bear witness to the Holocaust. I argue that cinematic and creative memory work cannot be dismissed as simply kitsch and/or problematic forms of mnemonic encounter amongst ‘generations after’ who have no natural inheritance of the Holocaust in and as memory. Instead, reflecting on the various critical and creative ways Schindler’s List is used to negotiate the Holocaust in and as ongoing memory, they should be taken seriously for their postmemorial potential – particularly in an age of alarming Holocaust distortion.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Rixon, Chloe

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Gandy, Matthew

• Dark tourism
• GALICIA JEWISH MUSEUM
• Holocaust
• Holocaust film
• Holocaust memory
• Holocaust tourism
• Memory
• Poland

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/7d898f49-66f0-4c91-9484-03dcbbbd38ed/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.119872

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/386856