Table of Content

This research project focuses on the re-interpretation of historical visual memory that has been lost during the Holocaust, specifically pertaining to the hiding places and bunkers constructed within the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. The project aims to reconstruct and revive those locations through illustration practices, interweaved with historical investigation.

The German invasion of Poland in September 1939 marked the commencement of a harrowing period for the Jewish population, as they were systematically denied their basic rights under the Nazi regime. As a culmination of these oppressive measures, the Jewish inhabitants were confined to the Warsaw Ghetto, enduring extreme conditions of hunger, humiliation, density, and diseases. Amidst the implementation of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question," which sentenced the Jewish population to death, thousands of Jews were transported to the Treblinka death camp, where they faced mass extermination.

In July 1942, the "Great Aktion" unfolded, resulting in the deportation of 300,000 Jews to Treblinka over a span of nine days. This act of extreme violence and cruelty left the Warsaw ghetto nearly deserted, with only 45,000-50,000 individuals remaining out of an initial population of half a million Jews. In the wake of the traumatic events of the Great Aktion, the remaining population recognized that the end was imminent, and the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto was impending. Consequently, preparations were made for this fateful day. A portion of the population, primarily composed of young individuals involved in Zionist youth movements, organized and mobilized themselves for what would later be known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Their preparations included the construction of tunnels, acquisition of firearms and ammunition, and a firm resolve to confront the advancing SS soldiers, even if it meant sacrificing their lives in the process. Simultaneously, the rest of the population began constructing hiding places and bunkers. Encouraged by reports of the Allied army's successful resistance against the German Reich, they clung to the hope that if they managed to remain concealed for several months, or even a year, the war would eventually conclude, increasing their chances of survival. Hiding places were established throughout the ghetto under unimaginable circumstances of deprivation and fear. Some bunkers were designed to accommodate individual families or small groups, while others were ingeniously engineered to shelter hundreds of people, encompassing entire buildings or multiple interconnected structures. The planning and execution of these hiding places varied in complexity, with some being simple and others showcasing remarkable creativity and engineering prowess.

During a month-long period, the Jewish population in the Warsaw ghetto confronted the Nazi regime's attempts to liquidate them through acts of resistance and concealment. However, the SS soldiers mercilessly destroyed the entire ghetto, using fire and bombs to obliterate any evidence and claiming the lives of thousands. Those who managed to survive this onslaught were subsequently transported to Treblinka. Ultimately, on May 16, 1943, the Warsaw ghetto stood empty.

The story of the Warsaw ghetto holds significant prominence among Holocaust narratives in Israel due to its large population. Within the Israeli narrative, there is a particular emphasis on the heroic and extraordinary accounts of the Jewish uprising. From a young age, we are instilled with values of self-sacrifice, courage in times of crisis, and the fight for our rights against those seeking our destruction. However, delving into the history and events of that time reveals an alternate reality. Those individuals who chose to hide and preserve their lives were marginalized and erased from the Israeli narrative as if their desperate struggle to survive and resist the inevitable held no power. Who defines a form of resistance?

In my research, I aimed to trace those hiding places and bunkers in Warsaw. I wanted to re-create those spaces using an artistic, practice-led point of view. I tried to reveal truth or speculation which might create a new source of knowledge or a different perspective on a situation of human trauma and human choices. By listening to hundreds of testimonies in different archives, reading books, seeing pictures and listening to lectures, I started to collect visual evidence of those spaces. How it looked and sounded, how it might have felt, what kinds of solutions they thought of, and what kind of reality they were facing. I started to gather information on sound - where the testifying person is talking fluently, and where there is silence? I tried to trace and chase the silenced, to unfold the untold parts, where lost truths and memories are being held. It felt like the efforts to reach something that is unreachable, form new knowledge of absence, that is a crucial part of those stories.

Furthermore, my work incorporated the use of AI engines, using their collective knowledge to comprehend how they interpret those spaces at that time. How does artificial intelligence interoperates the Warsaw ghetto? Or the Jewish uprising? Or an underground bunker? Can it recreate how the furniture looked like, the walls of the room, and the people who inhabited these spaces?

In my work, I hope that I managed to help give a name or presence to places where their physical and collective memory existence has been lost. This research book reflects the progress I have made thus far, yet I acknowledge that my research is far from over - there are many more archives to look at, many more minutes of silence, and much to reveal.

Stable Diffusion, Prompt based on Aviva Lehavi testimoy: "Illustration of 50 people in Warsaw 1943 squeezed together in a small dark underground room with no windows"

Through examination of the historical documentation of the Warsaw ghetto, how can illustration contribute to the visual perception of the Holocaust by re-creating lost information, memory and space?

How can illustration reconstruct a memory? How can visual storytelling be used to make everyday histories physically present? How can visual storytelling describes lost information? Can it? How can illustration contribute as a research method to the Israeli memory/representation of the Holocaust? How does visual representation help in the construction of collective memory? Can something with no visual representation be presented? How responsible can representation be to historical facts and stories? If the historical event is described with visual storytelling, Is the artwork itself considered to be historically true? How can you measure historical facts in an artwork? Is it necessary? Is my action contributing to history or distorting it? Does visual research have a place or form in historical research? Does it have to have a place in that? How does the collective memory of the Holocaust is changing with time, as most people who survived and were there have passed?

September July

October to Poland 300,000 Jews were deported to gas chambers in the Treblinka death camp. Only about 45,000 Jews remained in the ghetto.

“Urgently and passionately, those of us working on memory and transmission within and beyond the study of the Holocaust have argued about the ethics and the aesthetics of remembrance in the aftermath of catastrophe. How do we regard and recall what Susan Sontag has so powerfully described as the “pain of others?”1 What do we owe the victims? How can we best carry their stories forward, without appropriating them, without unduly calling attention to ourselves, and without, in turn, having our own stories displaced by them? How are we implicated in the aftermath of crimes we did not ourselves witness?

The multiplication of genocides and collective catastrophes at the end of the twentieth century and during the first decade of the twenty-first, and their cumulative effects, have made these questions ever more urgent. The bodily, psychic, and affective impact of trauma and its aftermath, the ways in which one trauma can recall, or reactivate, the effects of another, exceed the bounds of traditional historical archives and methodologies. Late in his career, for example, Raul Hilberg, after combing through miles of documents and writing his massive, 1,300-page book “The Destruction of the European Jews” and, indeed, after dismissing oral history and testimony for their factual inaccuracies deferred to storytelling and to poetry as skills historians need to learn if they are to be able to tell the difficult history of the destruction of the Jews in Europe. Hilberg is recalling a dichotomy between history and memory (for him, embodied by poetry and narrative) that has had a shaping effect on the field. But, nearly seventy years after Adorno’s contradictory injunctions about the barbarity of writing poetry after Auschwitz, poetry is now only one of many media of transmission.

Numerous testimony projects and oral history archives, the important role of photography and performance, the ever-growing culture of memorials, and the new interactive museology reflect the need for aesthetic and institutional structures that broaden and enlarge the traditional historical archive with a “repertoire” of embodied knowledge that had previoysly been neglected by many traditional historians.”

“... [while writing the book] I mainly learned about our limitations, as both researchers and human beings. Because eventually, we too have difficulties. And it is important to underline it- it is a completely different difficulty than those survivors and perishes have, and we can’t obfuscate the boundaries between them. We are not survivors. But we who deal with the past, especially with the radical period of the Holocaust, we too have a problem of inability to describe it. [...by writing the book the way I did] I hope the readers will be able to see that other than not being able to describe and tell what we don’t know, we also lack the ability to fully describe what we do know. And this is a great difficulty. But there’s another great difference between the generation of our teachers who taught us about the Holocaust and our generation… When they were talking about the Holocaust 50 years ago, they talked about Warsaw, Auschwitz, and they knew exactly what they were describing, and the people who heard them knew exactly what they refer to: people knew what those places were like - the colours, the smells - which allowed the use of obscure phrases such as “Human Tragedy”, “Horrible events” and “Night Terror”there was no need to go into specific details because everyone knew what you were referring to… But I think today we’re facing a certain point where we’re going back to previously asked questions, and we have the urge to redescribe the things we believed to be clear. And I believe it forces us to go back and deal with the detailswhich is eventually what every historian does […] Following the urge to use the available sources of information in order to try and understand the complex reality which used to exist.”

Translated from a speech by the historian, prof. Havi Dreifuss, receiving an award for her newly published book “Warsaw Ghetto: The End”

Hearing testimonies, reading Havi Dreyfuss’s book and hearing her open lectures gives a close look at a hell upon earth, which was unbelievably a reality for half a million people [regarding the Warsaw ghetto]. As a person without official former educational historical background, I have been exposed to a different type of information - a sort of open-source of both horror and fear, but most importantly, historical truth, facts and conclusions that shed light on stories. These stories allow the reader a heart-breaking peak into a reality that happened not too long ago, in a place not so far away from here, to people and by people that are not so different.

Historians, scholars and researchers like Havi Dreifuss have the ability to explore, investigate, listen and collect information which together forms a better understanding of the details. These details, piece by piece, help to build the bigger picture of whatever they ask to form - an event, a moment in time, a culture, a city, a neighbourhood, a family, a love story, a person.

“But I think today we’re facing a certain point where we’re going back to previously asked questions, and we have the urge to redescribe the things we believed to be clear. And I believe it forces us to go back and deal with the details - which is eventually what every historian does […] Following the urge to use the available sources of information in order to try and understand the complex reality which used to exist.”

Dealing with the details, as Hevi mentions in her speech, helps historians to form what was lost. These small descriptions, encounters, and opportunities for information - are giving the option to form the complete picture that was lost through destruction, trauma and time.

Through creative practice interweaved with archival work, the ‘chase’ after details can be given a new aspect. By looking for the details, as the practice method of historians, we can try to recreate lost information.

I find details as a crucial aspect in the practice of illustration, as they are an integral part of the research and the story being presented. By chasing pieces of details (both visible and invisible, audible and inaudible), a new aspect of the story can be built. The practice of illustration, by testing its boundaries and questioning its limits, can offer a different perspective and attitude toward historical research: visual historical research. This can look at not only what can be found but also what has been lost. What do the silences, the unspoken, the thing that is missing, reflect on the bigger picture and story? How can creative practices shed light on those, treat them like details too, using them to form lost history? And how can creative practices use the details, both present and unpresent, to chase a truth that could never be held?

The most severe criticism of the use of fiction has of course been directed at authors and filmmakers who are not survivors. But if the criticism or even prohibition of the use of fiction can be justified in the case of these writers and filmmakers, there would seem to be no reason not to apply the same criteria to narratives written by survivors as well. If the risk always exists that fiction will obscure, if not deform,“the truth,” nowhere does the obligation to memory and historical truth seem to weigh heavier than on survivors, not just outweighing but even perhaps eliminating what in all other circumstances would have to be considered a fundamental right of all writers: the right to imagination and creativity, the right to fiction.

But what rights and obligations does the writer-survivor have, and which rights should take precedence, if and when he/she is forced to choose between different and perhaps conflicting obligations and desires? The right of any artist or writer to fashion and experiment with images and narrative forms would for most certainly not appear sufficient justification for fiction in this context. For what is the aesthetic freedom of a writer or a group of writers, what is the freedom of art or literature itself, one could ask, compared either to the annihilation of millions of victims or the monstrous degradation and suffering of millions more? It might well seem disrespectful or shameful even to think in terms of artistic freedom in such a context. It could even be con sidered to constitute an additional injustice against the victims of the Shoah.

It is of course important, especially in this context, to distinguish between fiction, on the one hand, and lies or the motivated, ideological distortion or denial of facts, on the other. In terms of the latter, Pierre Vidal-Naquet has refused to enter into any form of dialogue with the socalled revisionists or negationists of the Holocaust, whom he rightly calls the “assassins of memory.” He eloquently defends memory and history against all such assas sins, but in doing so he also appears to place “fiction” in general, defined as a deviation from or distortion of the truth, in the negationists’ or assassins’ camp. For, even if he acknowledges that there is an irreducible “poetic dimen sion” to historical discourse and claims that no critical historian still believes that the language of history could ever be made completely transparent, he still insists that history and fiction do not and should not ever meet:“S’il est vrai que le travail historique exige une ‘rectification sans fin’ la fiction, surtout quand elle est délibérée, et l’histoire véritable, n’en constitutent moins deux extrêmes qui ne se rencontrent pas.” All “deliberate” fiction is thus in a sense treated by Vidal-Naquet as a“lie” that could potentially be used as a weapon to assassinate memory. In order to protect both memory and history, he argues that fiction should thus be clearly distinguished from and kept as far away from legitimate history as possible. If the historian allows history to be poetic and even admits that it is poetic whether it wants to be or not, he stridently maintains that it cannot overlap with fiction without risking being assassinated by it, a risk considered much too great to run, especially when the subject is the Shoah.

We have seen that in the early Zionist response to the events of World War 2 there was a struggle to enlist the collapse of European Jewry as a symbolic force in the reconstruction of the Jewish homeland. As the dimensions of the destruction became known, it took a tremendous act of faith to assert that even this terrible calamity could be redeemed and added to the mortar of national reconstruction. But theodicies and cultural programs had been erected on the ruins of the two Temples: might one not, then, at least reclaim secular ideologies and cultural priorities from the ashes of Treblinka? Eventually, historical lessons were drawn that were compatible with prevailing ideologies. In Zion the Jews had largely succeeded in reconstructing Jewish history–deliberately leaping over some 2000 years of what Salo Baron called the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history” to reach from the heroism of Bar Kokhba, leader of the revolt against Rome in the 2nd century, to the heroism of Trumpeldor, a pioneer who died fighting Arabs in Galilee, in the 20th. In order to incorporate the events of the holocaust into prevailing historical codes, emphasis was placed on instances of bravery and revolt–culminating in 1952 in the designation of the day commemorating the holocaust (the 27th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan) as “Yom Hashoah Vehagvurah” – the Day of the Holocaust and Heroism (the date was chosen to coincide with the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising). By a few swift strokes, it seems, the memory of the holocaust, and the memories of the worlds that had been destroyed, were nationalized.”

ZOB

Jewish Fighting Organization

ZZW

Jewish Military Union

Jewish population in the Ghetto

Revisioning the Past: The Changing Legacy of the Holocaust in Hebrew Literature / Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi, p.257

Data taken from Havi Dreifuss (Ben-Sasson) / Warsaw and the Jews during the Holocaust: A Window to Personal and Social living in Radical Times / TAU University Webcast

Jewish

“Myths and stories convey symbolic or fundamental truths; some of which are specific to certain cultures and disputed by others, while others are applicable to all human thought. We use these stories in order to make sense of events; to put them in an order that aligns with our view of the world. A very different kind of truth to the evidential kind, and yet no less “truthful”. Therefore, we may take from this that there are multiple truths and no absolute or singular truth. How then can these ideas be understood within the framework of illustration practice? Fundamentally, illustration doesn’t claim to represent reality, it is interpretive. In any case, it shouldn’t be assumed that all the facts are accessible to the illustrator. Illustration is analytical, diagnostic and investigative. Illustrations explain, reveal and make clear. The role, or concern, of the illustrator therefore, is not to report the facts but instead to communicate so as the viewer understands, empathises or questions.”

Testimonies &Visual Research

Interview Code

1996.A.0586.80

Melbourne, Australia Location

1996 Year

English Language

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum