For few hundred years Lublin developed as a multiethnic city, where Jews – among other minorities – played an important role, participating in process of creating the city's political and economic institutions and public life. Jews had inhabited a separated district, Podzamcze, since the 16th century and, after 1862, the Old Town and other districts as well. While Jews eventually could be found throughout Lublin by the interwar period, the former boundaries between the "Jewish" and "Christian" parts of the city remained strongly imprinted in social and cultural memory. They were an important element in local heritage and affected the everyday life of the city inhabitants. This article analyses the imaginative boundaries that delineated the "Jewish" district of Lublin in the pre-World War II period. Drawing on oral testimonies of residents who have personal recollections from the 1920s and 1930s, it documents the processes by which individuals invoke urban border markers to situate communities spatially, and in so doing invest those markers with cultural difference. Describing the Jewish district as "different" and thus culturally separated is an important element of an of Lublin's historical discourse, and is central to understanding the complex issues connected with the former ethnic and religious diversity of Lublin. The article also contributes to theoretical issues involving borders, borderlands and multicultural spaces or places.
The article is part of the author’s broader project examining oral history testimonies given by pre-war citizens of Lublin and treated as a source that enables to re-read, re-store and re-interpret the social and individual memories of Lublin as a former Polish-Jewish city. Although the Jewish community was almost completely destroyed during World War II by the Nazis, who also demolished the Jewish Quarter in the Podzamcze area, the history and cultural heritage of Jews is a vital element of the contemporary image of the city, which can play an important role in the process of re-building the memory of the formerly multicultural local community. Referring to the theoretical concept of the “trajectory” proposed by Gerhard Riemann and Fritz Schütze, the author focuses on reconstructing images of the suffering and destruction of the Jews of Lublin, that are reflected in the oral testimonies of non-Jewish witnesses. The recorded memories are treated here not as a source of information about past events, but as material that reflects the ways in which individuals and the community as a whole remembers (and forgets) about the past.
W artykule podjęto zagadnienia związane z wykorzystaniem materiałów oral history w działaniach ukierunkowanych na upamiętnianie dziejów lubelskich Żydów, w tym w szczególności Zagłady, oraz szeroko rozumianą edukację w tym obszarze. Przedmiotem analiz będą wybrane projekty zrealizowane w latach 2000–2017 przez instytucję kultury – Ośrodek „Brama Grodzka – Teatr NN”. Przeprowadzone analizy pokazują w jaki sposób lokalni twórcy, odnosząc się do miejsc związanych z żydowską przeszłością miasta, wykorzystując wywiady ze świadkami historii pamiętającymi przedwojenny, polsko-żydowski charakter miasta oraz wydarzenia z czasów okupacji, i poszukując adekwatnego języka oraz form konstruowania narracji o przeszłości, łączą pracę animacyjną i edukacyjną z upamiętnianiem.
EN
The article discusses the role of oral history testimonies in artistic activities aiming at commemorating the history of Lublin Jews, with the special focus on the Holocaust, along with educational work in this area. Several selected projects conducted in 2000–2017 by the Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre Centre will be analyzed in order to investigate how local memory activists from this cultural institution combine educational and commemorative work by referring to places connected with the Polish-Jewish past of the city. Making use of testimonies of people who remember pre-war and war times they search for the appropriate artistic language and create new narratives in the form of multimedia exhibitions and outdoor performative events in order to introduce these issues into the sphere of cultural memory of the local community.
Drawing on scholarship on Holocaust archaeology, object theory and museum studies, this article demonstrates the potency of historical objects as active agents of memory bestowed with a capacity to co-constitute the museum narrative and generate meaning. Using the 2020 exhibit at the museum of the Sobibór death camp as a case study, the article discusses objects on display that once belonged to the Jews deported there in 1942 and 1943. Specifically, the objects in the exhibit are not intended to tell any general story no to represent the victims symbolically; instead, they communicate individual interests, needs and identities of the deportees. Moreover, these objects, atypical for the setting of a death camp, summon social relations of intimacy with the museum audience.
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