Minority Forensics: Survivor-Led Exhumations and Violence against the Dead in the Early Post-Holocaust Poland
Zuzanna Dziuban
- Abstract
- The Holocaust left behind countless bodies – bodies dispersed across the Eastern European execution sites, former Nazi camps, repurposed Jewish cemeteries; bodies hastily buried at the outskirts of the former shtetls, in the forest, meadows, and along railway lines. This paper traces the early postwar attempts by various actors to contain and respond to the material (omni)presence of dead bodies. It engages with still almost completely underesearched endeavors by Jewish survivors to recover, exhume and rebury human remains of the victims of the Holocaust, but also takes a closer look at practices instantiating and perpetuating their dehumanization: the mutilation and robbery of the dead by the local non-Jewish populace, and their abandonment by the state.
My paper moves beyond a mere reconstruction of the specificities and the social context of these practices. Instead, it proposes to reconsider the postwar exhumations and reburials performed by Jewish survivors in Poland as a form of politics of dead bodies – and to do the same with its violent counterparts. I consider the early postwar survivor-lead exhumations both, as a testament to the urgency of the dead, and to the understanding of the survivors that the dead were under constant threat. Inspired by conceptualisations of bottom-up practices of the search for bodies in contemporary Latin America proposed by Schwarz-Martin and Cruz-Santiago (as forensic civism), and by recent framings of the research activities of Jewish survivors in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust as survivor activism, I frame the early postwar exhumations in terms of minority forensics, a politics of dead bodies, and the memory and knowledge production that operated in a complex conjunction with, and against, the dominant necropolitical frames. - Presented by
- Zuzanna Dziuban
- Institution
- Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History, Austrian Academy of Sciences
- Keywords
- Holocaust, cemeteries, forensics, Poland, exhumation, politics of dead
