1.   Introduction. Meeting in Szczecin, 17^th of December 2021

“It all began in Niebuszewo,” said Natalia and Weronika. I wrote down that sentence with a green fine-tip felt pen on a small piece of paper, thinking that it might serve as an opening for the story. It was almost Christmas and there were curd cheese donuts on the small table. I could smell coffee and Kuna’s fur. Natalia’s studio at the Szczecin Incubator for Culture is spacious and light. A polyptych depicting the artist’s parents, her brother, and herself catches my eye.

I look at it discreetly, embarrassed by the realism and intimacy of the portrayal. Next to it on the walls are Sceny leśne [forest scenes], older and more recent works, and some books. During our previous meeting on the floor lay the photographs developed for the exhibition in Greifswald: portrait photographs of Käthe and Martin Meyer from the “Sara & Israel” series. Today they are absent, but at the same time present. We discuss them as part of Weronika Fibich and Natalia Szostak’s major project. Its first opening was called Apprenticeship, the next one was entitled immer noch Schnee und Eis [German for “still snow and ice”], and now it is called Experiment in Catastrophe.

Two of the titles allude to Hannah Arendt and her precise and at the same time controversial reflection.^[1] They both pertain to the German Jews from the Stettin Regierungsbezirk, deported in February 1940 to occupied Poland, where they were murdered. I want to understand the meaning of the artists’ actions and confront myself with their sensitivity and language of communication, which is different from mine. Thus, at first, I tightly hold on to what is familiar to me. This is why I am so happy to hear mentions of Niebuszewo, information about the streets I know, and references to the past, which I have described from the point of view of a historian.

I enter this world abashed. I catch meanings; I am afraid of misinterpretation and wrong tracks, but Natalia and Weronika urge me to stop worrying because they want my interpretation. Why? They think me a part of the project not only as a scholar, but also as a viewer, a person who perhaps not every day but often walks the Szczecin streets which have retained the memory of the steps of their old inhabitants, a person who walks by the buildings where those people lived.

It is clear that Szczecin is a different city today, but it was not built from scratch. After World War II we inhabited it even though it was pretty much in ruin. We made homes in apartments, which were not actually ours, becoming used to the objects abandoned by the Germans. Some of them had belonged to German Jews, but they were completely forgotten. Everybody talked exclusively about Germans, krauts, Nazis, and post-German property. There was no awareness whatsoever that the genocidal roller in this part of Europe crushed also those who spoke the language of Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Alfred Döblin, many of whom felt more descendants of these two than of venerable rabbis.

We did not have enough imagination to comprehend that. As if a one-dimensional image had been more valuable, or perhaps the only one we needed. Or was it too early? It was years later, owing to the determination and persistent efforts of people such as journalist and activist Andrzej Kotula, that the 1940 events in Stettin found the right expression in the narrative about the city and region.^[2] We have recognized them as important and therefore worthy of preservation, which means that we are trying to find a place for them in our collective memory. It is not an easy thing to do.

The fate of the Pomeranian Jews has also become an area of artistic exploration. Hence, I would like to find out why these two artists became interested in them on the threshold of the 2010s and 2020s and determine the intellectual and emotional sources of their concept. Also vital is the question as to where all this is headed. I intend to look for the answer in what I know, in what I have learned, and also in the inexpressible. For the presence of silence in the described project is greatly felt, both as a fact and guideline.

2. Deportation of Jews from the Stettin Regierungsbezirk, the night of 12‒13 February 1940

The project pertains to a specific event, although I do not know if the word “pertains” is appropriate here. Perhaps it would be truer to say that the project is rooted in the situation and human emotions originating from the deportation conducted on the night of the 12^th ‒13^th of February 1940. It was preceded with years of hard work and suffering. That work consisted in making one people seem repugnant to others. Ideas proved helpful in the successful implementation of that plan. Some were awful like racism or antisemitism, while others like modernization, democracy, and social equality are still believed in by many today.

For contrary to what we are often willing to believe, evil is not born exclusively from evil, but also from what was intended as good.^[3] This observation was made by esteemed expert in Nazism, historian Götz Aly, who convincingly presented the strong backing given to antisemitism by the mass social advancement, which originated from the 19^th-century transformations, often marked by human stress, uncertainty, and disappointment. The scholar also explains that in the circumstances that emerged in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s that process contributed to the genocide conducted on an unprecedented scale, which was the final element of the civilizational breakdown. The very word “work” can seem controversial in this context, but when you listen closely to what Adolf Eichmann had to say during his Jerusalem trial, then you can see that he was constantly trying to convince us that it had been a great effort, behind which stood numerous figures and organizational decisions, people redirecting rail traffic, people driving other people out of their homes, people depriving other people of their property, and, finally, people murdering other people.

The same was true of the 1940 deportation, which were preceded by many years of efforts and a series of conscious decisions. Those required great effort and systematic financing. They were not clearly aimed at extermination from the start. For the “final solution to the Jewish question” was a ghastly process of ability and inability, initially implemented under the guise of politics and law, and increasingly corrupting both those areas of public life and ultimately its executioners. The final stage of the process was death in ghettos, forest executions, mass graves, Auschwitz, Bełżec Treblinka, and other places where the victims were murdered on an unprecedented scale and in a novel manner. Raul Hilberg, the great historian of the Holocaust, wrote that that moment “was the culmination of a process that in retrospect had emerged from an inner logic not recognizable even to the perpetrators. It was primal, beyond rationality and irrationality.”^[4]

That strain obscured the suffering of people gradually deprived of humanity. Things looked similar throughout Germany, so the fate of the Pomeranian Jews was not unique. The beginning was the prohibition of Jews from working in certain offices (1933). Next, they were additionally marked as different in legal terms with the Nuremberg Laws (1935), coupled with symbolic and real violence perpetrated mercilessly and provokingly during the pogrom on the night of the 9^th ‒10^th of November 1938. Those actions were supplemented with the expulsion from the Reich of those Jews who were not German citizens (1938) and the incessant ‘urging’ of those who were German citizens to leave the country. That was motivated to a large extent by the desire to appropriate most of their property, for ideology is one thing and economy is another, particularly so as the German state was short on foreign currency. Finally, came the time for deportation.

It is still a mystery to scholars. Its sense is evident, it is clearly visible in the context of the devised and implemented plans, but there is something unique in it too. The Pomeranian Jews were the first group of German citizens living in the ‘Old Reich’ who were completely illegally deported in such a large group (approx. 1,100 people) from Germany in conditions failing to meet any decent standards. Why did that happen? Was it an ‘exercise’ in what was to become common in the following year? For the mass deportations of German Jews began in the fall of 1941. So was it an experiment, which was to show whether the international public opinion would protest against the expulsion of people from their homes? Or was it perhaps a fulfillment of the vulgar ambitions of the Gauleiter Franz Schwede-Coburg, who dreamed of the Province of Pomerania becoming the first one ‘free of Jews’ in the Reich? The most banal-sounding explanation is the economic-organizational one, namely the willingness to make room for the Germans from the Baltic States who were repatriated to the ‘Old Reich’ and were to work in heavy industry. There are serious arguments to support this. But without full documentation we can only make guesses, some good, others more rough. Those who were expelled from their homes in Stettin, Stargard, Greifswald, or Stralsund probably did not care at all about what is important to historians. They had to face something unexpected and overwhelming.

The tenor of the instruction given to the NSDAP members and SA and Gestapo functionaries who directly participated in the removal of Jews from their homes is seismic. The document was intentionally cold and pragmatic, as the aim was to create an impression that the perpetrators were taking part in something ordinary, in the fulfillment of regular duties. Thus, the most vital here is the technical aspect, namely, that everything was to be done “meticulously and carefully”: the legible and correct filling out of documents; the turning off of stoves; and the counting of spoons, rings, and money. And, last but not least, all that was to be done in silence, order was to be maintained and confusion was to be avoided so as not to wake the neighbours. Not causing commotion was an important category of the work performed that night. Surprisingly the revolution, which was to be conducted in the name of national socialist principles was to be almost completely veiled in silence as far as one of its most vital dimensions is concerned. Yes, it was easy to hear the antisemitic propaganda slogans, but what was crucial was done in silence. A ‘silent revolution’ is an oxymoron that can produce a smile of disdain, for what kind of a revolution is one that no one hears about? But here there is nothing to laugh about, and this is horrifying.

How to describe the evening and night-time encounters on the night of the 12^th ‒13^th of February 1940? Well known is the testimony of Dr Erich Mosbach from Stettin. In it he mentions the Gestapo functionaries who came to his apartment and told him to leave “in such a friendly manner that they asked us to make it possible for them to carry out their orders.”^[5] Striking is the irony: he describes those who came to remove him from his home as “friendly”, those who let him take one suitcase and then escorted him, his wife, and daughter to the freight station, where they put them on a freight train, kept them inside for about twelve hours without water and with dry bread as their only food, and then ordered that they be transported several hundred kilometers east to Lublin in occupied Poland. On the way Dr Mosbach could see people who were thirsty, cold, dying, people who were humiliated, terrified, and clinging to the last ray of hope that all that would end well. Knowing all that, it is difficult not to conclude that the statement about the men’s gentlemanly behaviour was ironic. I am unsure, however, that irony is a good narrative strategy. Perhaps, but only when juxtaposed with what Manfred Heymann, who was eleven at that time, said years later, making fear the focal point. Another counterpoint for the expression used by Dr Mosbach is the description of the removal from a nursing home of people in their nineties. They were carried out on stretchers and transported directly to the railway station. Hence, if there was peace, it was only illusory.

And what happened on the said evening and night in the home of the aforementioned Meyers? Were the unexpected guests equally gentlemanly towards Käthe and Martin, who lived at Augustaplatz 3 (nowadays Lotników Square)? This remains and I think will remain a mystery. We have no documents on this topic. So what do we know about the deportees? Little, only as much as we can read from the Kennkartes collected at the State Archive in Szczecin. These documents are often the only evidence of the existence of the people deported in 1940 who died or were murdered some time later. Käthe was 60 years old and had gray hair and a bashful gaze. Martin, 8 years his wife’s senior, was a physician. He carefully trimmed his beard; you can tell that he liked to take care of himself.

We also know what they wrote about themselves after their deportation to the General Government. They were detained in the ghetto in Głusk, from where they sent letters to their friends in Holland and Sweden. There is no doubt that the correspondence was self-censored as otherwise it would not have reached the addressees. It reflects the longing for the past peace and the joy derived from small things (sometimes fulfilled, sometimes not) parcels with delicacies and soap, memory of Botticelli’s paintings, a walk on the eve of spring, and words of cordial memories of them, which simply meant that they still existed. The letters also provide information about the Meyers’ suffering. Käthe and Martin talk about darkness, the world’s silence, hunger, and frostbitten feet. In one of the letters Martin writes: “I envy you, dear Magnus, the mental flexibility with which you study linguistics; in our situation I lack mental peace and concentration, and what I used to know, I have largely forgotten; it suffices to read a decent book.”^[6]

One can be almost certain that Käthe and Martin did not survive the war. Their names are absent from the list of first and last names of seventeen people who were deported from Stettin in 1940 and survived in various circumstances. We do not have information about how and when they died either. Given that on the list of deportees drafted by Elsa Meyring there are no annotations next to their names, they most likely became victims of Operation Reinhardt, which means that in 1942 or 1943 they were deported from the ghetto straight to an extermination camp. To Bełżec, Sobibór, or Treblinka, perhaps to Majdanek or Auschwitz II.

I am writing about these events avoiding a cool scholarly tone and detailed references to the various stages of the extermination of the Pomeranian Jews, who were German citizens. Not only because those events have already been described at length in reference literature.^[7] I wish to indicate a certain aspect of research work. As historians, we conduct search queries in archives and libraries, we browse through documents and books, while trying to keep our emotions at a distance, but this is sometimes difficult because this topic is troubling and uncomfortable. Not due to the shortage of documents, but because it is so powerful. We become immersed in it, we soak it up, particularly when the research focuses on some particularly dramatic events, which carry information about human pain, humiliation, and death. These topics are sometimes simply incomprehensible, which is the case with the Holocaust. So perhaps since the beginning of my research into the Stettin deportation (and I have been dealing with this topic for over five years) I have sought in it, in addition to all the cognitive issues, also for an area, which would enable me to see not only the political, statistical, or social dimension of the event described, but also to touch it emotionally.

That is why I have written so much about Gisele Edel and her parents, and also about the family of Lothar Baruch (Lesli Brent) and about him. It seems to me that, in addition to discovering the mechanism of the crime, it is equally important in this case to draw attention to the individual, to reveal at least part of their identity, which was to be destroyed. It is therefore, on the one hand, an act of opposition against the attempts to anonymize the deportees  as well as a willingness to meet and build a relationship, yes, marked by silence and inability, but in my opinion necessary to comprehending what happened in 1940 and the following years. This is not about memory. It is about a gesture.

3.   Project/Process, 2019‒2022–?

“It all began in Niebuszewo.” I return to this sentence to show how important real-life space is for Weronika Fibich and Natalia Szostak’s project. They both (have) lived in this Szczecin quarter of Niebuszewo [formerly Zabelsdorf], which has been clearly associated with Jews since the post-war times. The Jews settled in Szczecin from 1945 onwards. Most of them were repatriates from the Soviet Union, Holocaust survivors, many of whom had been deported from eastern Poland or were refugees who had rightly feared for their life under the German occupation. The quarter’s nickname Lejbuszewo, derived from the Jewish name Lejb, is still used though nowadays very rarely as over the years the quarter has lost is unique dimension, to which contributed the consecutive waves of emigration, particularly the one resulting from the 1968 antisemitic campaign, which triggered the emigration of mostly the younger generation. But anyone who knows the history of this quarter will easily find the spaces connected with its Jewish past.

Weronika Fibich likes to tell the story of her meeting with Róża Jutkiewicz. The two women met in Hamburg during the realization of one of Fibich’s many projects, most of which she carries out at the KANA Theatrical Center. They were discussing the past, the Jewish life in post-war Poland, Niebuszewo, emigration, and Róża’s dream about the tiles in the Szczecin tenement she grew up in, which recurred for many years. In one of the photographs taken in Róża’s childhood, which she showed Fibich the artist recognized the characteristic balcony in her apartment. That one place connected the fates of the two women, who had been completely unaware of each other’s existence until that moment. There is something extraordinary in that but at the same time something random, which makes us realize that the past of others can become something important and close to us in an unexpected way, not necessarily preceded by our activity of some kind. But there should certainly be something that can be called openness and sensitivity to meeting someone or something which can become part of one’s personal experience.

This kind of openness is clearly visible in the subsequent stages of the artists’ ongoing project. Fibich and Szostak started working on it in 2019 and the first result of their work was Apprenticeship executed on the 22^nd of September 2020, when they put four ice blocks in various spots in Niebuszewo. Their choice was not random, as those were the addresses of selected deportees. The individual addresses were to point to specific individuals: Wilhelm Leske lived at Świętej Barbary Street 4 (formerly Dorotheenstraße 4), Max Lachmann lived at Juliana Ursyna Niemcewicza Street 12b (Elyssiumstraße 12b), Flora Friedländer lived at Adama Naruszewicza Street 14 (Stoewerstraße 14), and Betty Mannheim lived at Ofiar Oświęcimia Street 21 (Heinrichstraße 21). In the ice suspended were letters sent by the Meyers from the ghetto in Głusk and hand-copied by the artists. Fibich and Szostak said that Apprenticeship was “an exercise testing whether contemporary memory of the deportation existed and if so then where, what was happening with it, and what role we, that is modern-day Szczecinians, played in it.”^[8]

The project combined several forms of expression. It was an artistic and performative act, an installation, a scholarly research, and an urban game. The information about the past was to emerge from below the melting ice blocks, which left a visible trace, an impermanent one but so is memory. This is what Natalia Szostak said about the nature of the symbols used: “Ice symbolizes the cold that surrounded them. But it is also water, something liquid, uncontrolled, which is now static, halted.”^[9] It is difficult to talk more broadly about the social dimension of the project as it has not been studied. All we have are observations and what has been learned from conversations. We know that the passers-by saw the clear sign in space. We know their reactions and also a little about how that symbol communicated with their sensitivity. But was it perceived in connection with the memory of the 1940 deportation and its victims? Did the melting block really reveal to them the information about the past? We cannot be sure for the artists’ objective was extremely ambitious. Modern Szczecinians know little and sometimes nothing about the war-time events. The clearly nationally- and centrally-shaped historical policy is why the pre-1945 city is usually a space that is anonymous if not alien, and even if it is recognized, then it is still an ‘uninhabited’ place devoid of a personal context. What is the obstacle? As usual: language and historical awareness, shaped by and tied to what is most familiar, that is usually the national.

In view of the above, it seems that what was crucial in Apprenticeship was the artists’ own experience, because they were the ones who practiced recalling and remembering to the largest extent. They patiently worked with documents, looking in them for the human experience, individuality, faces, styles of handwriting, and homes. For Weronika and Natalia, the Meyers’ letters, which they rewrote by hand, were a liberating and acute act, which provided unique insight into the cold of the space where the married couple found themselves after the deportation and into their emotions and fear. At the same time it was a moment of initiation, which directed the artists onto the long-term process realized in the course of their subsequent artistic enterprises. It is characterized by a certain repetition of gestures, situations, artifacts, paths, and metaphors. But this is not mechanical repeatability, as the subsequent stages of the process are induced by the subsequent intellectual and emotional impulses, such as reading Emmanuel Lévinas, Hans Belting, or W. G. Sebald.^[10] The ice blocks used in Apprenticeship are something different from      the ice used in the immer noch Schnee und Eis installation, which was displayed at the group exhibition at TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin between February and June 2021. The same is true of the trips to the Lublin region, which the artists took during the realization of Experiment in Catastrophe in February 2021 and January 2022, and with the photos of Käthe and Martin Meyer, which recurred in several forms. The repetitions are meaningful. They emphasize the fact that a one-off gesture is insufficient, that what is needed is work that lasts much longer, though it is impossible to determine its end. It is continuous work with memory, and more specifically with places of memory and places in memory.

Although Natalia and Weronika’s actions were carried out under different names and they use multiple forms of expression, their essence is uniform. It is expressed in the conscious gesture of making present the absence of all those who were deported from Stettin in 1940 and murdered in the German-occupied Poland. It is not a new gesture and it is practiced in many places where the Holocaust created a void. It intertwines with various types of artistic and performance actions. One example of making the absent present is the Jewish Museum Berlin, designed by Daniel Libeskind. Another two examples are Gunter Demnig’s international project Stolpersteine and the numerous activities undertaken by the “Grodzka Gate ‒ NN Theatre” Centre in Lublin, Poland.^[11] Writing about the Lublin cultural institution, Izabela Skórzyńska, a historian dealing with Holocaust memory, has stressed how important for her research is the act of leaving and sending into the past of what no longer exists, that is the victims of the genocide as well as the city, which fell victim to urbicyde, which for ever obliterated the old traces of the Jewish presence. This act is to result from the deep experience of the absence or emptiness by those who “today experience the pain of the non-existence of the Jewish identity, taking responsibility for this regardless of who they are.”^[12]

Making something present is not a simple reproductive activity. Nor is it an attempt to ‘put on somebody else’s shoes’. Thus, it is far from naive ‘psychologization’ or ‘metaphysics’. One should constantly bear in mind that we have to do with a performative act, which gives the audience a lot of room for interpretation. It is therefore up to the audience to interpret the photographs and videos from the artists’ journey. It is the audience that in the end will interpret the emptiness of the winter landscape, the colour yellow, which often appears in the photographs, and, for instance, the following words said by Natalia Szostak:

“When we got on the empty suburban bus, the blue sky was getting dark. We got off a few stops later, on Głuska Street. We took a turn and walked in among the one-story buildings, beyond which ended the asphalt road and the light of the streetlamps. Suddenly — darkness. The opening of the space, the crunching of the snow, the whiteness, the contour of the terrain. We turn toward the forest. An intact smooth plane of powdered snow, silence. There they are. Four solid vertical slabs. Overgrown, covered with moss. Right by the road, as if stepping out of the wilderness. Grown into its wall; halted.”^[13]

The sensitivity and openness of the audience determines whether they want to follow the artists’ suggestions. In other words, whether they agree to meet them and participate in the process the artists have set in motion. It is also up to the audience whether they want to follow the artists until the end, for the process contains elements, which assume participation in something very intimate, even if it continues to move in a performative space. For the aforementioned act of departing and forgetting is clearly associated with burial and mourning, rituals invariably connected with death, but which have never been performed in the case of most Holocaust victims. Thus, Natalia Szostak and Weronika Fibich’s project is also a certain variant of mourning, a substitute and not fully articulated completion of the ritual relating to those who have not been mourned and whose graves do not exist.

If, as psychologists claim, mourning is a natural beginning of the process of forgetting the deceased, then the process initiated by Apprenticeship is to serve this purpose too. This sounds paradoxical in the context of the earlier declarations pertaining to remembering and memory, but this contradiction is just illusory. It has long been known that memory and forgetting are intertwined, constituting key categories in studying individual and collective memory. This is why the question asked by Izabela Skórzyńska is so important for both artists who have created this project, and also for its audience: How can one forget something that cannot be forgotten?^[14]

In the context of referring here to the categories important from the perspective of memory culture, one may also reflect on how Weronika Fibich and Natalia Szostak’s project fits in with the contemporary models. It is certainly an attempt to create a dialogical, supranational memory where memories do not ‘blend in’ or become mixed or collectivized. The key is the conversation, the mutuality in referring to various points of view, and the ability to attach various images of history and experiences connected with it.^[15] For the Szczecin artists national matters are actually less essential. Fibich and Szostak do not discuss them almost at all, but they undeniably create a space for a meeting based on a conversation and an exchange of experiences, and these can be rooted in various languages, gestures, and traditions.

The category of mediated memory might also be important for understanding the memorial practices proposed by the artists. It is certainly difficult to talk here about post-memory in the way that Marianne Hirsch writes about it. For it is not the memory of descendants of the deportees, that is those who grew up in an environment dominated by narrations originating from before their birth.^[16] Thus, here we cannot talk about mediation of trauma. This situation is different. However, in Hirsch’s concept the suggestion that the contemporary relationship with an object or source is mediated not through memories, but through imagination and art is interesting.^[17] This seems accurate, because referring to imagination is fundamental in Weronika Fibich and Natalia Szostak’s project/process. It is stimulated by photographs, ice blocks, and the letters written by deportees.

An interesting variant of mediated memory is prosthetic memory, where the elements of imagination and creativity also play a considerable role.^[18] It also has several other features, which are a good definition of the artists’ actions. The term was coined by Alison Landsberg, who explained that this kind of memory, “which I call prosthetic memory, emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theatre or museum. In this moment of contact, an experience occurs through which the person sutures himself or herself into a larger history (...). In the process that I am describing, the person does not simply apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event, through which he or she did not live.     ”^[19] It seems necessary to add that prosthetic memory is characterized by “the ability of prosthetic memories to produce empathy and social responsibility as well as political alliances that transcend race, class, and gender.”^[20]

4.   Ending. 12 February 2022

It is late afternoon, an arduous one but at the same time almost still. In the background plays Ayumi Tanaka’s trio’s album Subaqueous Silence, which has accompanied me over the several weeks of my work on this text. I cannot explain this concurrence clearly. It simply happened. It exists. But to me the music is not an illustration; it has become an extension, a supplement to what Natalia and Weronika have done in their project/process. Maybe because of the silence, which is so vital in it? Maybe because it carries a similar kind of intimacy and sensitivity? Maybe? I realize the arrogance of my thinking, because I am independently annotating something on the margin of the original concept created by the artists, who are highly conscious of what they are doing. But I also remember their encouragement to find my own interpretation of what they are doing and their assurance that their work is open for ‘discoveries’ and provides an opportunity for various encounters.

I still wonder whether I have understood Natalia and Weronika’s work correctly although I am unsure today whether a correct interpretation actually exists. Perhaps more important are the impulses that it has given me and the fact that owing to it I am perhaps not certain but I can feel deeply that the unemotional historical account is insufficient if not inappropriate in the case of the 1940 deportation or perhaps with respect to the Holocaust as such. I would like the project/process initiated by the Szczecin artists to continue and I am grateful to them for meeting me. Because together we can reflect on how to remember and forget what cannot be forgotten.