Although much is known about the wartime fate of Jewish sites in Poland, particularly the larger ones, considerably less attention has been devoted to the postwar transformation of these sites, and even less to Jewish material patrimony within Poland's small provincial towns. Given the size of the Jewish population in prewar Poland and the extent of the genocide, there remained a huge inventory of unused or underused property after the war. Interestingly, unlike the case of abandoned Orthodox Churches in the east or Protestant churches in Silesia, for the most part there have been no positively accepted Catholic claims on synagogues and study halls. Indeed, in the early postwar years government policy protected Jewish buildings and forbad their appropriation and repurposing. But, the winds of Soviet political change in the 1950s were increasingly unfriendly to Jews. At the same time, abandoned religious institutions became more and more decrepit, helped along by local townspeople eager for state permission to demolish the structures. They argued that the buildings’ condition was detrimental to the towns’ appearance and that the abandoned structures were a danger to passersby. And they attracted vermin. At the very least once repurposed or demolished these buildings could be replaced by badly needed facilities, such as firehouses or market buildings. Abandoned Jewish cemeteries faced similar pressures, though they sometimes were also subject to purposeful desecration, including being used as garbage dumps, rest stations, or for the burial of stray animals (136). Tombstones were often dislodged for use in construction or road building. And the sites themselves were given over to pasturage with no effort to retain a semblance of the ordered space we expect from a well-tended cemetery. Of course, the dilapidated state of unused Jewish buildings or burial sites was further evidence of the need to demolish or repurpose.
Unsettled Heritage reveals the periodization of the treatment of Jewish heritage sites. Indeed, abandoned Jewish patrimony was not always treated the same way. In the early postwar years there was a mandate to repurpose, when permitted, into something appropriate—a synagogue into a library or a cinema. Mistreatment or profanation are closely tied to the departure of Jews from Poland in the late 1950s and ’60s in the face of periods of official and popular antisemitism. The same is true of the signage and acknowledgment of Jewish suffering under the Nazi occupation with the heightened nationalism of the 1960s. Jews were displaced as the primary victim and memorial plaques in that period commemorated the “Six Million Poles” murdered by the Nazis without mentioning that half of them were Jews (120). Interestingly, Polish nationalists were pretty much in sync with the communists. Both shared a homogeneous vision of Poland in which Jews should be absent (125).
In the latter part of the book the author departs from a historical overview to address social theory, invoking the British structuralist Mary Douglas's social concept of dirt. For her dirt is disorder or something out of place. This explains the postwar insistence that Jewish remnants posed a danger as a breeding ground for illness. This idea of Jewish spaces as dirt was already apparent in the 1950s when animals were allowed to graze in Jewish cemeteries. Similarly, the placement of public toilets on abandoned Jewish sites or the use of Jewish cemeteries for pigsties. These were spaces that were out of place, and were therefore dirty anyway, so why not relegate them to things kept separate from the ordered realm of homes, schools, and religious institutions? Nor were German burial grounds treated any better. Particularly interesting, as already noted, is the fact that no Jewish shrine in Poland since 1945 was transformed into a Catholic sanctuary. This suggests the ambivalence or reluctance to fully neutralize the Jew's presence in Poland. The author here invokes the work of Zygmunt Bauman, who argues another reason for the ambivalence towards Jewish remnants: they are “a concrete reminder of the absent Jews and of the unsettling circumstances of their disappearance” (209–10). In the same way, the presence of Jewish religious property in places where Jews no longer live defies the dichotomy between presence and absence. This is an interesting, well-researched book that explains a great deal about the cultural geography of Poland over the past seventy plus years. Its particular strength is that it effectively combines meticulous historical research with an anthropological perspective.
