Treblinka and Its Contexts – Past and Present

Tuition: $325 | YIVO members: $250**

This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.

Instructor: Elżbieta Janicka

A Jewish town, a Polish village, a German Nazi camp archipelago located within walking distance of one another, connected by a road built out of the matzevot… This seminar proposes to follow that road in time and space. Our ground of investigation will be – respectively – Kosów Lacki where the matzevot come from, Wólka Okrąglik and Treblinka, the place of murder and (un)rest of nearly one million Jews from several European countries among which the most numerous were Jews of Poland.

We will retrace prewar, wartime and postwar history of these sites until the present day. Our questioning will pertain to the interrelations between them. We will contextualize them geographically, topographically, socially, economically, politically and culturally (meaning also: religiously). We will ask what are the consequences of such a contextualization for the bigger picture. In other words: What stems from it for the description and understanding of the Holocaust?

Yet another question is how these sites look and what is going on there today. How does “Treblinka” function as an umbrella term for the forced labor camp Treblinka I (1941-1944), the extermination camp Treblinka II (1942-1943), and a railway station (set up in 1887 under the Russian Empire, dismantled progressively after 2000 in the Republic of Poland) at Treblinka the village?

The Polish bottom-up and top-down fight to “conquer the space” of the Holocaust and make it symbolically profitable – however conducted with different tools – echoes the postwar Polish exploitation of Jewish ashes and other remains. This raises the question: Why doesn’t the present Polish state strategy of “promoting Polish martyrdom upon the Jewish one” trigger an international scandal and condemnation?

We will investigate a variety of sources including the wartime collections of the Ringelblum Archive, Jewish Social Self-Relief (Żydowska Samopomoc Społeczna, ŻSS) and The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Our reading list will encompass testimonies of the survivors as well as those who did not survive alongside the immediate postwar accounts produced and collected by the Central Jewish Historical Commission (Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna, CŻKH). We will draw on the Kosów Lacki memorbuch as well as the documentation of the 1947 sculptural-architectural contest for and the 1964 erection of the Treblinka memorial – together with the scholarly literature and present-day iconography.

Course Materials:
TBA

Elżbieta Janicka – historian of literature, cultural anthropologist and visual artist. M.A. at the Université Paris VII Denis Diderot; Ph.D. and postdoctoral degree at Warsaw University. Janicka is the author of Sztuka czy Naród? [Art or the Nation?] (Kraków: Universitas, 2006) and Festung Warschau [Forteress Warsaw] (Warszawa: Krytyka Polityczna, 2011). She co-authored Philo-Semitic Violence. Poland’s Jewish past in New Polish Narratives (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021; with Tomasz Żukowski) and This Was Not America. A wrangle through Jewish-Polish-American history (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2022; with Michael Steinlauf). Her individual exhibitions are: Ja, fotografia (1998); Miejsce nieparzyste [The Odd Place] (2006); Inne Miasto [Other City] (2013, with Wojciech Wilczyk). Her research pertains to the identity and community building function of Polish antisemitism as well as the place and role of the Polish majority in the structure of the Holocaust. She works at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

**Become a member today, starting at $54 for one year, and pay the member price for classes! You’ll save on tuition for this course and more on future classes and public programs tickets.