For some years now, the noted photographer and writer Jason Francisco has been exploring the impact of Jewish built heritage on memory in Poland and Ukraine. This past summer we featured his essay on L’viv and the Golden Rose synagogue as one of our Have Your Say op-eds.
We now would like to highlight another of his recent essays, From Sanok to Połaniec, posted on his web site. In it Francisco visits Sanok, in the far southeastern tip of Poland, where the replica of the destroyed wooden synagogue from the town of Połaniec is being built as part of the town’s outdoor Ethnographic Museum, using original construction methods.
It was in Sanok that timber framers using traditional tools and methods began constructing the replica of the ceiling and roof of the Gwozdziec wooden synagogue, which now forms a key installation of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. (It was the great interest aroused by the Gwozdziec project, in fact, that prompted the decision to include a reconstruction of a synagogue in Sanok.)
When Francisco visited last January, he wrote
I could clearly see the process of the reconstruction, specifically the ethnologic fidelity of the construction, being undertaken by hand using only traditional tools and techniques. Even the wooden nails and the scaffolding (with its oblique Star of David references) were impressive to me. A large-format photograph of the building under reconstruction was included in the updated permanent exhibition of the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków, an exhibition that I co-authored, and now open for viewing.
Then he happened to visit Połaniec, where he decided to try to find the site where the destroyed synagogue now being replicated in Sanok once stood, and where a masonry synagogue in the town is now used by Jehovah’s witnesses.
In doing so, Francisco encountered the tangled range of ways in which history, memory, participation, and collusion — not to mention both guilt and victimhood — are entwined and encapsulated.
When we asked [a local man] about the disappeared wooden synagogue, I could see immediately that the question frightened him. He too said he knew nothing about it, only that there had in fact been a wooden synagogue located somewhere near the Jehovah’s Witnesses building. We asked him his age––73 years––and asked whether he had heard any stories about the building, to which he also replied no. But we could see that this was not a case of a simple no, because he kept talking about knowing nothing, and with each sentence he revealed a little something––until it became clear he probably knew quite a lot.
His reticence was not just a wariness of strangers, rather I could see in him something else I’ve learned to recognize––a wariness of the Jewish, of people who might be Jews or close to Jews, of coming close to the Holocaust. I would not call this wariness anti-semitism, rather fear infused with the quality of taboo. In my experience, this kind of fear is largely how the Jewish sits in Polish consciousness today, especially outside of urban areas: the Jewish signifies a deep wound in Poland, even a hallowed wound, certainly an old wound that is paradoxically liable to bleed again at any moment.
As it turned out, the man not only knew where the wooden synagogue had stood but he had fragments of a burnt Torah scroll and, apparently, other items that, he said, he grandfather had saved when the synagogue was torched — a German soldier had seized him and threated to kill him for doing so, he said.
As the conversation, went on, however, Francisco wrote, “a very different story came into view: that his grandfather had taken the Torah scrolls but had not saved them, inasmuch as he––and who knows how many others––simply grabbed from the fire whatever they thought might have been valuable.” And if so, it was for this reason that the German had apprehended his grandfather––for theft, not for some defiant anti-fascist gesture. It was wartime, after all, and a piece of silver might feed a family for months, and might even be worth risking one’s life for. In this reading, the Torah scrolls in the basement represented whatever had been least valuable––until, maybe, now.”
Francisco concludes:
I am left with a story that confounds the categories, in which the town of Sanok and the Polish Ministry of Culture are rebuilding a destroyed wooden synagogue, whose last relic is owned by an inscrutable man about whose family it is impossible to distinguish ignorance from heroism, ulterior motives from honorable ones, altruism from neglect. And this is Poland, a place where historical understanding is less about evidence than it is about attitude––learning how to dwell in ambiguity and in contradiction, to think with the heart, to feel with the brain. In Poland, history occupies the space in-between, the conceptual space between a wooden synagogue displaced in its own re-creation, and the relic of its destruction whose strange and triumphant appearance resolves nothing about how to live with genocide.
Click here to see pictures and read the full essay
1 comment on “Poland: Jason Francisco on Reconstruction and Memory (from Sanok to Połaniec)”
fascinating story and like the author whilst one wants to think the best of the caretaker of the scrolls it would seem likely that there was the main thought of reward.Sad but all too frquent