This article has two aims: to examine the effects of victim proximity to crematoria ashes and ash pits both consciously and unconsciously in a subset of Holocaust survivors, those who were incarcerated at the dedicated death camps of Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, as well as Auschwitz-Birkenau; and to contrast these effects, the subject positions they produce, with their suppression as the basis both for a strategy of survival during incarceration and for a reimagined identity after the war. Within a cohort of four survivors from Rudolf Reder (Belzec), Esther Raab (Sobibor), Jacob Wiernik (Treblinka) and Shlomo Venezia (Auschwitz), I trace the ways in which discrete memories and senses became constitutive in the formation of the subject prior to and after escape – the experience of liberation – so that essentially two kinds of subjects became visible, the subject in liberation and the subject of ashes. In conjunction with these two kinds of subjects, I introduce the compensatory notion of a third path suggested both by H. G. Adler and Anna Orenstein, also Holocaust survivors, that holds both positions together in one space, the space of literature, preventing the two positions from being stranded in dialectical opposition to each other.
From 1945 until around 1960, ceremonies of a new kind took place throughout Europe to commemorate the Holocaust and the deportation of Jews; ashes would be taken from the site of a concentration camp, an extermination camp, or the site of a massacre and sent back to the deportees country of origin (or to Israel). In these countries, commemorative ceremonies were then organised and these ashes (sometimes containing other human remains) placed within a memorial or reburied in a cemetery. These transfers of ashes have, however, received little attention from historical researchers. This article sets out to describe a certain number of them, all differing considerably from one another, before drawing up a typology of this phenomenon and attempting its analysis. It investigates the symbolic function of ashes in the aftermath of the Second World War and argues that these transfers – as well as having a mimetic relationship to transfers of relics – were also instruments of political legitimisation.
The after-effects of mass atrocity – bodies and bones – struggle to be defined within memorial projects. This article seeks to examine the politics at play in displaying dead bodies to interrogate the role of materiality in efforts to memorialise and raise awareness about on-going violences. It focusses on the nexus between evidence, dignity, humanity and memory to explore bone display in Rwanda. It then takes up two artistic projects that play on the materiality of human remains after atrocity: the art of Carl Michael von Hausswolff, who took ashes from an urn at the Majdanek concentration camp and used them as the material for his painting, and the One Million Bones Project, an installation that exhibits ceramic bones to raise awareness about global violence. In thinking about the intersections between human biomatter, art and politics, the article seeks to raise questions about both production and consumption: how bones and ashes of the dead are produced, and how they are consumed by viewers when placed on display in a variety of ways.
This article focuses on ongoing contestations around burned human remains originating from the Holocaust, their changing meanings and dynamics, and their presence/absence in Holocaust-related debates, museums and memorial sites. It argues that ashes challenge but also expand the notion of what constitutes human remains, rendering them irreducible to merely bones and fleshed bodies, and proposes that incinerated remains need to be seen not as a ‘second rate’ corporeality of the dead but as a different one, equally important to engage with – analytically, ethically and politically. Challenging the perception of ashes as unable to carry traces of the personhood of the of the dead, and as not capable of yielding evidence, I posit that, regardless of their fragile corporality, incinerated human remains should be considered abjectual and evidential, as testifying to the violence from which they originated and to which they were subjected. Moreover, in this article I consider incinerated human remains through the prism of the notion of vulnerability, meant to convey their susceptibility to violence – violence through misuse, destruction, objectification, instrumentalisation and/or museum display. I argue that the consequences of the constantly negotiated status of ashes as a ‘second rate’ corporeality of human remains include their very presence in museum exhibitions – where they, as human remains, do not necessarily belong.
prevalent question in responsa literature dealt with the exhumation of human remains from mass execution sites. Out of the thirty questions posed at the time, there are at least eleven entries directly related to mass exhumation.20 Besides corpses, the literature dealt with other types of human remains. For example, in nine cases the status of human ashes was discussed. This is highly relevant in the context of the Holocaust, since, after mass murder, crematoriums were often used to burn the corpses. In six entries, other types of human remains were discussed (bones, hair
On 3 December 1945, four factory workers, on behalf of Trieste Council, removed the rubble of the crematorium, which had been blown up by Nazis immediately before the end of the conflict on 29 April. Under the debris, a large amount of human remains, ashes and bones, was found.46 Immediately, communists sent men to patrol the area, because the victims’ relatives would come in the hope of finding some remains, and would take some of the ashes to honour them privately.47 On 6 December 1945, the Allies’ police forces conducted a more in-depth inspection and
layers of earth which make up its true continuity . . . It is there fore now the visual image, the stratigraphic landscape, which in turn resists the speech-act and opposes it with a piling-up. (Gilles Deleuze) 1 John Sayles’ Lone Star examines ‘life beneath the ashes or behind the mirrors’ by
desecrated. In the absence of bodies to bury, Weichselfish resolved to bring ashes from Chełmno, where the Germans had gassed Kutno’s Jews, to Kutno for reburial. Weichselfish met other Jews from Kutno in Łódź and Warsaw and shared with them his idea to transport ashes from Chełmno and rebury them in Kutno, with a monument to mark the site. They formed a committee and received the permission of local authorities. The committee delegated two survivors from Kutno to travel to Chełmno, where they placed ashes from the crematorium in a black box. 46 Gabriel N. Finder
In October 1926 the Māori-language periodical Te Toa Takitini featured some lines, in English, from Horatius , a poem in the English MP and writer Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (1842): To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods? (st. XXVII, lines 3–8) 1 It was not unusual to see English poetry published in this particular Māori periodical. Regular readers of Te Toa Takitini
By expanding the geographical scope of the history of violence and war, this volume challenges both Western and state-centric narratives of the decline of violence and its relationship to modernity. It highlights instead similarities across early modernity in terms of representations, legitimations, applications of, and motivations for violence. It seeks to integrate methodologies of the study of violence into the history of war, thereby extending the historical significance of both fields of research. Thirteen case studies outline the myriad ways in which large-scale violence was understood and used by states and non-state actors throughout the early modern period across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Atlantic, and Europe, demonstrating that it was far more complex than would be suggested by simple narratives of conquest and resistance. Moreover, key features of imperial violence apply equally to large-scale violence within societies. As the authors argue, violence was a continuum, ranging from small-scale, local actions to full-blown war. The latter was privileged legally and increasingly associated with states during early modernity, but its legitimacy was frequently contested and many of its violent forms, such as raiding and destruction of buildings and crops, could be found in activities not officially classed as war.