The next day, Thursday (7/19), we drove
to the Harmęże monastery, located in the small town of Brzeżinka (German:
Birkenau), to view artist
Marian Kołodziej’s “Negative of Memory. Labyrinth” (“Klisze Pamięci.
Labirynty”). Marian Kołodziej was a Polish-Catholic political prisoner who survived
years at Auschwitz. [**Side note: there is an award-winning documentary on
Kłodziej’s life entitled “The Labyrinth”: http://www.thelabyrinthdocumentary.com/]
Our tour of
his art was led by a Franciscan friar, one of the monastery’s few residents. Kołodziej,
who was on the first transport sent to Auschwitz in the spring of 1940 (where he
was given prisoner number 432), only began drawing his experiences late in his
life after he suffered a stroke. When we entered the exhibit, Kołodziej’s words
greeted us: “I propose a journey by way of this labyrinth marked by the
experience of the fabric of death” (Ocalałeś
nie po to aby żyć masz mało czasu trzeba dać świadectwo). Multiplied
through the exhibit space are ghoulish and demonic figures of camp prisoners,
all drawn in pencil or pen, juxtaposed with Holocaust, Judaic, and especially
Christian symbolism. For instance, Kołodziej turned cement posts from
Auschwitz’s electric fence into a cross and drew the crucified Christ on those
posts; the figure of Christ is enmeshed in the same barbed wire that encloses
the camp. Truth be told, I had visited
last year, and promised myself that I would never return to a place that made
me so genuinely uncomfortable. And yet, here I was, exactly 12 months to the
date, surrounded by Kołodziej’s hellish portraits on the walls, on the ceiling,
on the floor—there was no escaping the repetitive images of torture. But somehow,
within my internal chaos of understanding human propensity toward evil, I
realized was staring at an amazing exhibit of art—and feeling the inner turmoil
that I am sure Kołodziej desired of his audience.
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| Kołodziej's art |
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| The younger Kołodziej forcing the older Kołodziej to draw his experiences to show the world what happened. |
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| A combination of demons, important figures from Polish history, a god-looking figure, and a self-drawing of Kołodziej. |
Kołodziej also emphasized the
martyrdom of Maximilian Kolbe, a Catholic priest (now saint) who gave his life
at Auschwitz so another prisoner could live, in his artwork. Many of the
artist’s images display Kolbe as Christ—both as suffering tragic heroes and sacrificing
themselves for the ‘salvation’ of others. Kołodziej felt it was his duty to
mankind to finally share his experiences as an Auschwitz survivor with the
world through his art.
The Harmęże monastery is connected
with the Maximilian Kolbe Church, in which the Kołodziej’s hundreds of drawings
are on display in its basement. We all went upstairs to view the church after
our visit to Kołodziej’s underground ‘labyrinth,’ and there was actually a
shrine to Maximilian Kolbe behind barbed wire, utilizing camp imagery, such as
the red triangle (used to label political prisoners in the camp), and Kolbe’s
inmate number 16670. Having a shrine to a Catholic priest in a church was
already slightly beyond my Protestant understanding, but the narrative is
further complicated by the fact the Father Kolbe was the editor of Mały Dziennik, an antisemitic newspaper
before the war. Then again many Catholic priests held (what is now considered)
antisemitic views before the war. A list of Catholic friars and priests who perished
at Auschwitz-Birkenau is also etched on the wall of this church.
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| The shrine to Maximilian Kolbe inside the church. |
While it is imperative to remember Kolbe’s
heroic actions, I also feel commemoration can go awry if it appears that the
Church and worshippers at this shrine are simply dismissing Kolbe’s pre-war
antisemitism (especially for those in the Jewish community visiting the Kołodziej
exhibit). Even a simple shrine to Kolbe connected with the art museum of a
Catholic-Polish political prisoner made me once again think about the concept
of space, how space is used to remember the past, and the complications of
commemoration in certain spaces. Offsite memorials (which often include religious
overtones) and memorials on the sites where the atrocities occurred, contribute
to the narrative of memory and how the viewer experiences the space, physically,
emotionally, and even spiritually. I instantly think of the Radegast memorial
in Łódź, where visitors could walk into the cattle car present on the same tracks
that deported Jews from the Łódź ghetto and most likely to their deaths. Our
group had mixed reactions over this use of space and one’s chance to “experience”
it. For some, walking into the cattle car was disrespectful, for others it was
more about the knowledge gained by visualizing the conditions, etc. I did walk
into the cattle car at the Radegast memorial and did not feel guilty, but had an
emotional reaction at Treblinka, where the absence of everything forced me to
dwell all the more on the hundreds of thousands murdered where I stood, is a
small, personal example of how different memorials in different spaces can
affect different people in different ways… And maybe it is just in these
different uses, that the message of the Holocaust can be disseminated and
grasped by the myriad of visitors to these blood-stained sites.
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