Unsettled Heritage: Living next to Poland's Material Jewish Traces after the Holocaust

By Yechiel Weizman

In Unsettled Heritage, Yechiel Weizman explores what happened to the thousands of abandoned Jewish cemeteries and places of worship that remained in Poland after the Holocaust, asking how postwar society in small, provincial towns perceived, experienced, and interacted with the physical traces of former Jewish neighbors.

After the war, with few if any Jews remaining, numerous deserted graveyards and dilapidated synagogues became mute witnesses to the Jewish tragedy, leaving Poles with the complicated task of contending with these ruins and deciding on their future upkeep. Combining archival research into hitherto unexamined sources, anthropological field work, and cultural and linguistic analysis, Weizman uncovers the concrete and symbolic fate of sacral Jewish sites in Poland's provincial towns, from the end of the Second World War until the fall of the communist regime. His book weaves a complex tale whose main protagonists are the municipal officials, local activists, and ordinary Polish citizens who lived alongside the material reminders of their murdered fellow nationals.

Unsettled Heritage shows the extent to which debating the status and future of the material Jewish remains was never a neutral undertaking for Poles—nor was interacting with their disturbing and haunting presence. Indeed, it became one of the most urgent municipal concerns of the communist era, and the main vehicle through which Polish society was confronted with the memory of the Jews and their annihilation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781501761768

Book preview

UNSETTLED HERITAGE

LIVING NEXT TO POLAND’S MATERIAL

JEWISH TRACES AFTER THE HOLOCAUST

YECHIEL WEIZMAN

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Everything Was a Void: New Order and Social Chaos

2. There Are No Jews Here: The Language of De-Judaization

3. To Whom Does It Belong? Ownership and Doubts

4. Resentment and Compassion

5. The Antechamber of Mystery

6. Liberalization, Nationalism, and Erasure

7. Profanation and Dirt

8. Residual Presence

9. Anxiety and Rediscovery

10. The Dialectics of Preservation

Conclusions: Enduring Ambivalence

Notes

References

Index

Cover

Title

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Everything Was a Void: New Order and Social Chaos

2. There Are No Jews Here: The Language of De-Judaization

3. To Whom Does It Belong? Ownership and Doubts

4. Resentment and Compassion

5. The Antechamber of Mystery

6. Liberalization, Nationalism, and Erasure

7. Profanation and Dirt

8. Residual Presence

9. Anxiety and Rediscovery

10. The Dialectics of Preservation

Conclusions: Enduring Ambivalence

Notes

References

Index

Copyright

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Guide

Cover

Title

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Start of Content

Conclusions: Enduring Ambivalence

Notes

References

Index

Copyright

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. The Jewish cemetery in Kolbuszowa

2. The surface of a square, Zator

3. Cowshed, Starowola by Parysów

4. The ruins of the Warta synagogue

5. A memorial in the Jewish cemetery in Sandomierz

6. The Dzierżoniów (Reichenbach) synagogue

7. The Jewish cemetery in Dzierżoniów

8. The new Jewish cemetery in Olkusz

9. The Olkusz synagogue

10. The Parczew synagogue

11. The Jewish cemetery in Warta

12. The Dąbrowa Tarnowska synagogue

13. The Jewish cemetery in Krynki

14. The Jewish cemetery in Sokółka

15. A memorial for the Jewish victims, Szydłowiec

16. The Rymanów synagogue

17. The Jewish cemetery in Oświęcim

18. Drawing of the Sandomierz synagogue

19. Drawing of the Zamość synagogue

20. Mass grave of Jews, Zhovkva, Ukraine

21. Olkusz, the site of the former synagogue

22. The ruins of the Great Synagogue in Krynki

23. The old Jewish cemetery in Maków Mazowiecki

24. The Sandomierz synagogue

25. Maintenance works in the Jewish cemetery, Warta

26. Recovered Matzevot in Kazimierz Dolny

27. The Wailing Wall in Kazimierz Dolny

28. Ireneusz Ślipek in the Jewish cemetery in Warta

29. The renovated synagogue in Dąbrowa Tarnowska

30. The Jewish cemetery in Ryki

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have seen the light of day without the help of so many people who have seen me through this project. I am indebted to Marcos Silber and Amos Goldberg for their devoted and inspiring guidance. Their insightful comments and advice, and mostly their endless patience, helped me to flesh out my ideas, sharpen my thoughts, and rethink my research. I was blessed to call the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa my supportive, academic home during my early career stages; it gave me with the optimal conditions for pursuing my research. I began this project in Jerusalem and Haifa and finished it in Leipzig, at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture—Simon Dubnow. I am grateful to Yfaat Weiss, Elisabeth Gallas, and all of my colleagues at the Dubnow Institute, who provided me with the perfect intellectual and social atmosphere to bring this book to fruition.

Sitting for hours in archives and typing away in front of a computer screen can be a lonely and discouraging experience, but I was lucky to have acquired colleagues, teachers, and friends to accompany me over this long intellectual, emotional, and very physical journey. Maria Ferenc-Piotrowska and Jan Piotrowski were my family in Warsaw, and their apartment was my home away from home. The long and inspiring walks with Elżbieta Janicka through her Festung Warschau challenged me to rethink what I talk about when I talk about Polish-Jewish relations. I am grateful to Lucyna Aleksandrowicz-Pędich, for her support and advice and for our joint excursion into the heart of Podlasie back in 2014. Eleanor Shapiro became my chavruta in discovering the contemporary Polish-Jewish landscape, and a constant source of inspiration. In Krynki and its environs, Joanna Czaban helped me tremendously in reaching places and people that I would never have discovered on my own. I am indebted to Ireneusz Cieślik, who generously invested his time and efforts in walking me through the traces of Olkusz’s Jewish past.

I owe a great debt to Erica Lehrer for all her support and encouragement over these past few years, ever since we first met in 2012 during the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir substantially influenced the way I approach my research subjects. Her comments and thoughts on my work and this book helped me sharpen my arguments and approach to my research. Natalia Aleksiun read previous versions of this work, and I am grateful for her remarks and suggestions, which have assisted me tremendously in revising and honing my ideas and writing. I am thankful for Jagoda Budizk, for all of her wise and sensitive reflections and thoughts, and for pushing me to see this project through to the end. Adam Musiał was my home base in Kraków, and I am indebted to him for his valuable help with the extensive Polish translations.

So many people have read sections of my work, commented on my papers, taken the time to meet me, answered my nagging emails, offered their own ideas, and shared their original material. I am particularly grateful to Anna Artwińska, Eleonora Bergman, Dorota Borodaj, Barbara Engelking, Konstanty Gebert, Agnieszka Ilwicka, Jan Jagielski z"l, Karolina Jarmuszkiewicz, Kobi Kabalek, Agnieszka Karczewska, Kamil Kijek, Krzysztof Kocjan, Julia Koszewska, Monika Krawczyk, Łukasz Krzyżanowski, Jacob Labendz, Magdalena Marszałek, David N. Mayers, Michael Meng, Alicja Mroczkowska, Annamaria Orla-Bukowska, Roma Sendyka, Yonatan Shiloh-Dayan, Judith Siepmann, Stephan Stach, Albert Stankowski, Katrin Stoll, John Swanson, Gregor Thum, Magdalena Waligórska, Jonathan Webber, Agnieszka Wierzcholska, Marcin Wodziński, Tadeusz Woleński, and Emma Zohar. I am grateful to the two external readers of this manuscript for their close and meticulous reading and for their generous and helpful comments and suggestions for revision. I would also like to thank Eitan Gavson and Hannah Landes for their professional and committed language editing of several drafts of this book. Working with the editing team of Cornell University Press has been a great pleasure, and I want to specifically thank Emily Andrew, Karen Laun, and Allegra Martschenko for their patience and immense assistance. Finally, I want to thank my mother, Chaya, and my brother, Adi, for their love and support, and to my Frau Doktor, Orly Rabi, for everything.

During these past few years, I have received generous grants and scholarships from various institutions that have enabled me to focus primarily on this research. These include the Minerva Stiftung, the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the Israeli Council for Higher Education, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Israeli Inter-University Academic Partnership in Russian and East European Studies, the Polish Institute in Tel Aviv, the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, and the International Institute for Holocaust Research of Yad Vashem.

Chapter 3 in this book is a revised and extended version of my earlier article: Unsettled Possession: The Question of Ownership of Jewish Sites in Poland after the Holocaust from a Local Perspective, Jewish Culture and History 18, no. 1 (2017): 34–53. It is used by permission of the publisher (Taylor &Francis Ltd., http://www.tandfonline.com).

A note on language: I use the Polish version of place names, except when a recognized English version exists, which is phonetically different than the original name. For example, I use Warsaw rather than Warszawa, but I do use Kraków and Łódź instead of Krakow and Lodz. In the case of towns whose Yiddish name is substantially different from the Polish one, I mention the Yiddish version in brackets.

ABBREVIATIONS

AAJDC Archive of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

AAN Archiwum Akt Nowych (Archive of Modern Records)

AIPN Archiwum Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej (Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance)

APB Archiwum Państwowe w Białymstoku (State Archive in Białystok)

APKa Archiwum Państwowe w Katowicach (State Archive in Katowice)

APKr Archiwum Państwowe w Krakowie (State Archive in Kraków)

APL Archiwum Państwowe w Lublinie (State Arhcive in Lublin)

APLk Archiwum Państwowe w Lublinie Oddział w Kraśniku (State Archive in Lublin, Kraśnik Branch)

APRa Archiwum Państwowe w Radomiu (State Archive in Radom)

APRz Archiwum Państwowe w Rzeszowie (State Archive in Rzeszów)

APSd Archiwum Państwowe w Siedlcach (State Archive in Siedlce)

APW Archiwum Państwowe we Wrocławiu (State Archive in Wrocław)

AŻIH Archiwum Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego (Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute)

CKŻP Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce (Central Committee of Polish Jews)

DDZ Dział Dokumentacji Zabytków (Historical Monuments Documentation Center)

MAP Ministerstwo Administracji Publicznej (Ministry of Public Administration)

MGK Ministerstwo Gospodarki Komunalnej (Ministry of Public Services)

MO Milicja Obywatelska (Citizens’ Militia)

MSW Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych (Ministry of Internal Affairs)

PKWN Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego (Polish Committee of National Liberation)

PMRN Prezydium Miejskiej Rady Narodowej (Presidium of the Municipal National Council)

PPRN Prezydium Powiatowej Rady Narodowej (Presidium of the District National Council)

PRL Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa (Polish People’s Republic)

PWRN Prezydium Wojewódzkiej Rady Narodowej (Presidium of the Voivodeship National Council)

PZPR Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (Polish United Workers’ Party)

TSKŻ Towarzystwo Społeczno Kulturalne Żydów (Social-Cultural Association of Polish Jews)

UdW Urząd do Spraw Wyznań (Ministry of Religious Affairs)

WKŻ Wojewódzki Komitet Żydowski (Voivodeship Jewish Committee)

ZBOWiD Związek Bojowników o Wolność i Demokrację (Union of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy)

ŻKW Żydowska Kongregacja Wyznaniowa (Congregation of Jewish Faith)

ZRWM Związek Religijny Wyznania Mojżeszowego (Religious Union of the Mosaic Faith)

Introduction

On a sunny afternoon in June 2016, I found myself wandering through the streets of Kolbuszowa—a small, provincial town in southeastern Poland. Almost nothing in the town’s contemporary landscape revealed its contrasting past reality. Only the town’s historical coat of arms, which depicts a friendly handshake between a Christian and a Jew, testified to distant times when around half of the local inhabitants were Jews. In 1942, most of them were sent to their deaths by the Germans at the Bełżec extermination camp. Yet over three generations later, the simple act of querying random passersby in the streets—Excuse me, do you know where the Jewish cemetery is?—seemed a bit invasive; it touched on a too-intimate and ambivalent chord within the townspeople. A few reacted with surprise, while others became visibly puzzled and emotionally affected. Others still became a bit guarded and suspicious.

Although no one knew exactly how to get there, every person I spoke to was able to point in the general direction of the cemetery, which was situated on the outskirts of town, in the middle of a wooded area. Having lost my way trying to find it, I entered a small grocery store close to the forest to ask for guidance. A customer, who was in the middle of paying for a bottle of beer, turned around and announced, I know where it is. I will take you there. He seemed to be in his late fifties, was missing some teeth, and wore shabby clothes. He was also drunk. It was clear to me that he has been like this for some time. Although hesitant at first, I decided to follow him out to the cemetery, a twenty-minute walk that took us out of town and into the woods. No signage nor clear trail markers existed, yet my guide seemed to know exactly where he was headed, confidently leading the way, until we arrived at the cemetery’s gate. I would not have found it alone. I thanked him for his generous escort, assuming he would then leave me to myself, but he insisted we enter the compound together.

Inside the relatively preserved cemetery were the usual sights one can find in abandoned Jewish necropolises throughout Eastern Europe: wild and overgrown plant life, off-kilter matzevot (plural of matzevah, a Jewish headstone), old memorial candles, and empty liquor bottles. Surveying the desolated surroundings, my companion shook his head in sorrow, repeatedly murmuring, no respect (bez szacunku). He then bid me to follow him into the heart of the forested cemetery. He had something to show me. After few minutes of making our way through the overgrowth, we arrived at a secluded area, where a large memorial stone marked the place where more than a thousand Jews had been shot and buried by German forces between 1942 and 1943. Still gripping his beer bottle in his hand, the man told me, in detail, the story of these Jews’ execution. I was born fifteen years after the massacre, he said.

This enigmatic, almost surreal, encounter was repeated, in only slightly different versions, more than once in my visits to Polish provincial towns, and left me wondering about the power of the material Jewish remnants to blur the usually stark boundaries between presence and absence, past and present, and remembrance and forgetfulness. Trying to decipher the unique ambiance surrounding the physical traces of Jewish culture in Poland and to understand how their social function, collective perception, and cultural meaning have been constructed and shaped since the Holocaust took me on a long and intensive journey that forked out in surprising and unpredicted avenues. The results of this journey are presented in this book.

Since antiquity, the two most quintessential material coordinates in the life of every Jewish community are the gravesite and the house of prayer. These places, where one’s dead are buried and prayers made, are not simply ritual sites. Rather, they are the embodiments and spatial expression of a community. Historically and conceptually, a Jewish congregation without these two anchors is nearly inconceivable. The sanctity of cemeteries and synagogues differ in Jewish law, yet they share a basic duality in their everyday practice and symbolic status. As a place of death, the cemetery marks the finality of human life and memorializes the dead, but it is also the house of the living (beit chayim)—standing as an everlasting emblem of the congregation’s continuity and cross-generational endurance.¹ A synagogue, conversely, facilitates the sustainment of everyday Jewish life. Yet it is also a memorial to the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem, a small sanctuary (mikdash me’at), that harbors the collective trauma of the Jewish people’s loss of sovereignty and its hope for redemption.² The strong symbolic status of these two sacral anchors was also acknowledged by the surrounding non-Jewish societies, constantly evoking curiosity and antagonism. Since the twelfth century, successive Sicut Judaeis (Papal bulls that governed the treatment of the Jews) determined that those who damage a Jewish cemetery or a synagogue will be fined, thus testifying to the prevalence of such acts.³

Sunbeams peek through the trees in the depth of a forested area. Five off-kilter and old-looking headstones with barely readable Hebrew letters are standing at unequal distances from each other amid the wild vegetation.

FIGURE 1. The Jewish cemetery in Kolbuszowa. 2016. Photo by the author.

Over the course of Jewish history, cemeteries and synagogues began to acquire a life of their own long after their communities had left the scene. When not destroyed or converted for other purposes, these spaces slowly decayed, turning into the pyramids and mausoleums of Jewish culture. It is often the ruins of these sites that have served as the sole material testimony to a historical Jewish presence in manifold locations throughout the world. This mnemonic capacity of the material remnants of former Jewish communal sites is perhaps most saliently evident in Poland, the home of Europe’s largest Jewish population on the eve of World War II, in whose wake it was almost completely erased. Whether deserted, desecrated, razed, preserved, or renovated, Poland’s Jewish sites stand today as a metonym of the ambivalent place of Jews in Polish culture and imagination since 1945. In this country, where the void left in the wake of a near-total disappearance of its former Jewish population is most vivid—and where the Nazi Final Solution took its shape and form—the remaining Jewish material traces have come to embody both the absence of the Jews and their haunting presence.

Unsettled Heritage presents a historical and anthropological account of the afterlives of the thousands of Jewish communal heritage sites scattered throughout Poland’s postwar landscape and traces the social, political, and cultural history of how Poles have interacted with their presence. Although the seeds of this project were planted with my initial discovery of contemporary Poland’s Jewish spaces, this work is mainly concerned with the country’s communist period, between 1945 and 1989, as it was mostly over this span of time that the current tangible and symbolic status of the nation’s Jewish religious sites were developed and took on the form they have today.

This book focuses primarily on small, provincial towns that had a substantial Jewish presence up until World War II, and it attempts to answer one main question, namely: How were Jewish religious sites, namely synagogues and cemeteries, perceived, negotiated, treated, interacted with, and experienced by postwar Polish society? The main protagonists of this work are the Polish individuals and organizations who came into contact with the presence of the Jewish traces on a daily basis: local officials, municipal bureaucrats, small-town activists, and regular citizens who lived next to the material remnants of their murdered neighbors. How did these people conceptualize and conceive of the newly deserted properties absent the Jewish communities who once frequented them? What was the material and symbolic status of post-war Jewish spaces in their eyes? What were the emotions and meanings that these inanimate traces aroused in the neighboring Poles, and how were they realized? How did the discussions on the fate of Jewish spaces actually take place, and what were the mechanisms, considerations, and justifications that determined the future of Jewish sites?

The picture that emerges when trying to answer these questions is multifaceted. It shows the extent to which the presence of Jewish cemeteries and synagogues, and the pressing questions about their future, became an ongoing—sometimes obsessive—discussion between state officials, local leaders, and their communities. The question, What do we do with this cemetery/synagogue? was, on the one hand, a material and logistical concern, touching on local and national needs and desires in the postwar, communist reality. Yet scratching the surface reveals a deeper, implicit layer that discloses the most complicated and uncomfortable elements of the Poles’ dealing with the fate of their Jewish neighbors. By analyzing both the material and the implicit meanings of this question, this book illustrates how these two layers were interdependent and locked in an ambivalent interplay throughout the communist period and beyond. The perception and treatment of the sacral Jewish traces metamorphosed and took on different outward forms and expressions according to the changing political and cultural climates. The persistence of largely abandoned Jewish sites throughout the Polish interior became one of the most urgent municipal concerns of the communist era, and it was the main vehicle by which Polish society implicitly and explicitly interacted with its memory of the Jews and their annihilation. Living next door to fresh Jewish ruins evoked a broad array of human reactions. These ranged from contempt, fear, unease, and embarrassment to reverence and compassion. Such conflicting responses reflect patterns of thought rooted in prewar Polish folklore and ideology that were later complicated by the ramifications of World War II and communism and also—perhaps mainly—by the unsettling aftermath of the extermination of the Jews.

Although the wartime and postwar fate of Jewish sites in Poland has increasingly received research attention, it remains largely unknown how local administrations, personages, and policies governing their existence—as well as how the urban and rural populace—perceived and interacted with these spaces in their daily lives and across generations. Several works, mainly by Polish scholars, provide important and detailed accounts of what has become of Poland’s mostly abandoned Jewish sites. These studies serve as useful sources of knowledge, detailing the sites’ physical states and their changing legal status from World War II to the present.⁴ The work of the historian Krzysztof Bielawski, for example, presents a meticulous overview of the gradual destruction of Poland’s Jewish cemeteries and supplies an up-to-date picture of their current state, drawing on an impressive array of archival sources and fieldwork.⁵ Yet this invaluable body of research does not construct a systematic and historicized analysis of the social function, cultural meaning, and symbolic transformation of Jewish sites; nor does it explore the local, inner dynamics and nuances of Polish discourse over their problematic inheritance. That is what this book endeavors to do. More than merely seeking to answer the question of What happened to Jewish sites?, I strive to uncover the social interests, beliefs, and attitudes that have contributed to their modern-day perception.⁶

A significant contribution to the study of the afterlife of Jewish sites in postwar Poland is Michael Meng’s Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland, in which he thoroughly traces the transformation of Jewish spaces in five urban centers in Poland and the two Germanies, from the end of the war through the present.⁷ Surveying Poland, Meng focuses on the two large cities of Warsaw and Wrocław, where he shows how competing urban, national, and transnational considerations and dynamics influenced and shaped the future and status of urban Jewish spaces, and how the political and cultural climate that emerged in the wake of the Holocaust and postwar national rebuilding projects determined their fate.

Meng’s comparative approach leads him to undermine the assumed dichotomy between Eastern and Western Europe’s internal negotiation with their wartime past and to challenge the centrality of the Cold War as the prime explanatory model for understanding how Europe remembered the Holocaust and how it dealt with its Jewish heritage. But while arriving at illuminating conclusions, the primary focus on Poland’s large urban centers and on the main political and cultural actors produces a partial picture that inevitably misses crucial nuances, counternarratives, and symbolic layers. These aspects become evident when one adjusts the spotlight from the center to the periphery, concentrating on discussions and practices there at the microlevel and analyzing them critically, while taking into consideration the ethnographic dimension of the Poles’ encounter with the ruptured Jewish space. In so doing, Unsettled Heritage opens up new possibilities of understanding the complexities and ambivalences of Polish dispositions toward the material traces of the murdered Jews.

This book’s primary focus is the urban topography of the country’s small and mid-sized towns. This methodological choice is not an arbitrary one; extant scholarship on Jewish space in postwar Poland has concerned itself mainly with large cities, leaving our knowledge of the fate of Jewish sites in small and provincial towns lacking.⁸ By shifting our attention away from Poland’s large metropolises, this book fills in a gap in current research by mining the rich postwar afterlife of a unique cultural, social, and geographical urban structure that existed in Eastern Europe for hundreds of years, commonly known as the shtetl.

The origins of the shtetl, which is as much a cultural construct and a myth as it is a historical phenomenon, date back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Polish magnets established small market towns in rural areas where Jews played a central role in the local economy and commerce.⁹ Over the course of the turbulent, succeeding centuries, in which Poland was partitioned between the empires, these shtetlach would become the prominent settlement pattern for Polish and Eastern European Jews, who would often form the majority of their local population.¹⁰ With the accelerated modernization that accompanied the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and following the tides of Jewish emigration and the demographic and geographical effects of World War I, the prominence of the shtetl phenomenon diminished.¹¹ Although the biggest interwar Jewish communities occupied Poland’s large cities, around half of the Polish Jewish population, numbering almost 3.5 million souls (around 10 percent of Polish society), remained in these small to mid-sized towns, many of them located in the geographical and social periphery of the country.¹² On the eve of World War II, in a considerable number of these towns Jews still constituted half or more of the local population. The shtetl is sometimes portrayed as a hermetic and isolated Jewish universe; yet the demographic, geographic, and social conditions in these communities led to the development of a unique model of interethnic and interreligious interaction between Jews and their gentile neighbors.¹³ This distinct model, at the same time intimate and dissonant, was characterized as symbiotic-ambivalent by the ethnographer Rosa Lehmann, who used this term to capture the nature of Jewish and non-Jewish neighborly ties in the shtetl.¹⁴ Lehmann’s model envisions strict ethnic boundaries between the two groups; however, it also conceives of a communal familiarity and shared space which, though often nurturing mutual animosity and anti-Jewish violence, led to daily economic and everyday exchanges while maintaining a social distance.¹⁵

The flames of the Holocaust consumed and wiped out this particular socio-geographic and demographic reality. Though Jewish congregations (albeit in a significantly diminished capacity) still existed in the larger cities, most of Poland’s former shtetlach had become, or soon became, completely emptied of their Jews.¹⁶ This striking gap between prewar rooted Jewish presence and postwar near-total Jewish absence from the communal fabric was emphasized by the persistence of what, in many of these towns, had become the last remaining traces of Jewish life: abandoned cemeteries, empty synagogues, and other communal sites, such as ritual bathhouses (mikvaot, singular: mikveh) or houses of study (batei midrash, singular: beit midrash). While in the large cities discussions on the future of Jewish sites often included city planners, architects, urban regeneration experts, and high-ranking state and Communist Party officials, the debates on the question of Jewish sites in the provinces were far less professional and formalized. The small-town mayors, town council members, local leaders, and average citizens who took part in these discussions—and who are central to this book—were immersed in an all-too-personal and emotionally charged engagement. They were negotiating the presence and future of familiar properties, used by their former neighbors who had been an integral part of their own communal fabric, whose murder they had either personally witnessed or heard immediate tell of, and in whose houses many of them were now living.¹⁷

The locus of the (former) shtetl is thus a particularly interesting case study for examining how people treat, perceive, and experience material heritage traces of absent communities that were violently uprooted from the shared local landscapes. In addition, the relatively intimate nature of human connections in a small town—as opposed to the urban estrangement, which is more characteristic of the big city—offers a unique prism for exploring the interconnections between language, memory, and spatial practices. Focusing on small towns in the Polish geographic and social periphery and paying close attention to discussions and practices at the local level shed new light on the internal dynamics of the decision-making processes over the future of Jewish spaces and offers a re-examination of the deliberations, and tensions, between the central communist regime, town officials, and the local population over these sites’ fate. Further, this bottom-up perspective demonstrates the limitations of hegemonic discourses to hermetically determine the status of material Jewish traces in the periphery.

My choice to focus specifically on religious sites, mainly cemeteries and synagogues, derives primarily from the fact that these sites attracted the preponderance of postwar discussion and attention, involving both the Polish authorities and remaining Jewish organizations. Although nonsacral public Jewish property, such as community buildings, schools, and hospitals were also left behind after the war, they did not attract the same level of attention. The unique symbolic value of Jewish religious spaces, their special status in Jewish law, and the universal and Christian sensibilities regarding houses of worship and places of burial all charged the discussion over their future with an intense sense of urgency. As the most distinctively Jewish symbols, discussion over their future was particularly sensitive and problematic, for Jews and Poles alike.

The towns appearing in this study are located in different regions of the country, within the country’s post-1945 borders, including localities in the former German territories that were annexed to Poland after the war. Towns in the country’s prewar eastern borderlands that were relinquished to Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania after the war do not fall under the scope of this book. My guiding principle in selecting the towns was to construct as broad, representative, and nuanced a picture as possible, with the aim of highlighting typical patterns while also including exceptions that would undermine monolithic conclusions. In most of the examined towns, an organized Jewish congregation no longer existed after the war. In some, only a handful of individuals remained, while in others no Jews resided after 1945. In a few towns, a small community continued to exist through the 1960s and even beyond. This wide array of selected towns represents the multiple fates that befell Jewish religious remnants during or after the war, and it showcases the variety of actors and circumstances that took part in determining their afterlife. The chosen localities also represent various patterns of German persecution and different local histories of Polish-Jewish relations. Taken as a whole, this mosaic of case studies reflects the diverse and conflicting perceptions, vocabularies, and attitudes that arose in response to the existential problems posed by the material Jewish remnants.

Not all towns receive the same amount of attention in the book. Certain places are more dominant than others in specific periods, while others appear throughout the entire book in different chapters. In the course of the book, I zoom in and out in changing resolutions, moving between the local, regional, and national perspectives. In some cases, I devote a lengthy and in-depth discussion to specific towns to illuminate and analyze certain phenomena and mechanisms, while some towns are mentioned singularly as examples to demonstrate a general phenomenon. The main rationale behind this methodology is to be able to tell one story, built on a montage of microhistories. As such, this approach elucidates the nuances that compile the larger picture while also points to the boundaries and limitations of any grand narrative.

The book proceeds chronologically, beginning with the first succeeding moments after the liberation of Poland and ending in 1989, with the collapse of Poland’s communist regime. In these forty-five years, despite the ever-changing political and cultural climate, a coherent narrative may be woven, highlighting the processes and developments that influenced how the citizens of the Polish People’s Republic treated and perceived their former neighbors’ sacral sites. The division into chapters is not hermetic, as I occasionally move back and forth across these temporal borders. At various places on our march through time, the theme of historical narration is suspended in order to provide in-depth anthropological analyses on phenomena that rebuff periodization and endure today. Appended to this account is an epilogue, which addresses some significant developments in and transformations of Poland’s surviving Jewish spaces after 1989 and into the first two decades of the new millennium, revisiting some of the towns that appear throughout the work.

Unsettled Heritage contributes to the growing body of research surveying the cultural, material, and demographic consequences of the war that radically shattered the existence of millions of people—who either lost their lives or everything that defined life for them through murder, displacement, dispossession, and relocation.¹⁸ It complements other studies that specifically deal with the aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe which to date are mostly concerned with the homecoming of survivors, anti-Jewish violence, emigration, and property restitution.¹⁹ As it mainly draws on the actions and views of non-Jewish institutions and persons, this book also contributes to the understanding of the war’s long-term impact on Christian-Polish society, exemplifying the cultural revolution, which the Poles underwent after 1945 and which has shaped their contemporary identity.²⁰

Unsettled Heritage may also be approached as a retroverse perspective on the communist political and administrative regime, as well as the relationship between the authorities and the people, by diverting the attention to the periphery of the communist apparatus. Accordingly, I challenge the common monolithic perception of the regime that often conveniently removes agency from civic organizations and local bodies and points the finger at the wrongdoings and fallacies of the country’s central rule alone. A closer examination of this period’s struggles with its question of remnant Jewish space helps to undermine this common dichotomy between the regime and collective Polish society, showing the extent to which municipal and regional authorities, and local leaders and actors, had substantial political space to maneuver independently and significantly influence overall policy in communist Poland.

Though mainly attentive to non-Jewish Poles’ motives, views, and actions toward Jewish space, this book sheds new light on postwar Poland’s Jewish minority, joining a recent trend in similar studies to move past the common portrayal of Jews as passive subjects or, alternatively, as enthusiastic communists. Instead, this work emphasizes their agency and initiative to negotiate their own place and identity within the new system.²¹ Unsettled Heritage demonstrates the unique role and importance Polish Jewish organizations and individuals had in shaping the attitudes and policies toward Jewish spaces at the local, national, and transnational levels. It also highlights the essentially unknown stories of minuscule Jewish congregations outside Poland’s urban centers, who chose not to leave their hometowns and saw