20th century tragedies in the words of Anda Rottenberg
Anda Rottenberg is a renowned Polish art critic and historian, also known for her installations in the Polish pavilion at the Venice Biennale. From 1993 to 2001 she served as the director of the prestigious Zachęta art gallery in Warsaw. She has also written several autobiographical short stories about the tragic history of 20th century Central and Eastern Europe, told through the lens of her family’s tragic past. She was born in 1944 in Novosibirsk, in central Siberia, to a Russian mother and a Polish father of Jewish origin. She shared with SIR some images from the past that bear witness to the daily horrors of the Shoah.
The Jewish cemetery in Nowy Sącz. Anda’s earliest memory of her father, Wolf Rottenberg, is linked to a photograph of her as a child with her father and about 15 Holocaust survivors at the Jewish cemetery in Nowy Sącz. After the war, they decided to erect a memorial to those family members who had been killed by the Nazis, most of them in the Bełżec concentration camp and other Nazi death camps.
The Jewish cemetery in Nowy Sącz is visited by Jews from all over the world.
The Tzadik (Rabbi) Chaim Halberstam, founder of a dynasty of Hasidic Judaism, is buried there. During the war, the cemetery was the scene of numerous executions, with at least 2,500 people massacred, according to official sources. After the war, survivors tried to rebuild the cemetery by bringing in tombstones (matzeva) found elsewhere, including tombstones that had been damaged because they had been used to pave roads or for other purposes, and by transferring the remains of murdered Jews to nearby villages or to the many forests of the Carpathian region.
An autobiographical book. “My father was a tailor. He was born in 1909 in Biczyce, about four kilometres from Nowy Sącz, a hundred kilometres south-east of Cracow. It was a very small village with about 20 family farms of Jews, Poles and Germans. In 1940 the Germans deported the village’s Jewish families to the Nowy Sącz ghetto, including the women and children of the Safir family, the four Buchbinder brothers, my grandmother and my aunt, my father’s sister.” Rottenberg’s autobiographical book “Proszę bardzo”, published in Warsaw in 2009, includes a detailed map of Bizice, written in German. “This map was created by the Germans to identify the houses of those who were to be sent to the ghetto. They did this with all the Jews, leaving the Poles and Germans free,” she explains.
The partition of Poland. In 1942, the Nazis began to implement the so-called “Final Solution”: the mass extermination of all Jews. There were similar plans for other minorities and, eventually, for Poles, who were regarded as mere “manpower”. “My father was not an Orthodox Jew. He had been brought up in the Polish cultural environment. He was a Polish patriot, his worldview was Polish, and his Jewish roots were of secondary importance to him. He had served with the Polish Cavalry Division in Dębica in the mid-1920s. However, when the war broke out, conscription occurred in an extremely chaotic context. As a result, my father, like many others, was unable to enlist. He decided to flee and tried to reach Lviv by crossing the San River. He might have succeeded if he had done so before 17 September 1939, when the Red Army invaded eastern Poland, the western part of which had already been invaded by the Germans.” The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact between the USSR and the Third Reich, signed in August 1939, established the division of Poland between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany in exchange for mutual non-aggression. In 1941, Hitler violated the pact by declaring war on the USSR.
From the White Sea to Siberia. “The Soviets had reached the opposite bank of the San River. After arresting my father, they transferred him to a prison in Lviv and then to the Kandalaksa gulag, above the Arctic Circle.” In her book, Rottenberg writes that her father worked fourteen hours a day on the White Sea. He survived only because “his body did not start to decompose once he had managed to protect himself from frostbite”. “The war between the USSR and Finland (the Winter War) forced the Soviet officials to evacuate the prisoners from Kandalaksa and transfer them to Siberia. My father ended up in one of the many Siblag camps near Novosibirsk.”
Prison and labour camps began to appear in Siberia, in the Novosibirsk area, as early as 1925.
Survivors of the great famine of 1930 and, after 1939, deportees, including many Poles, soon joined the tens of thousands of prisoners. With grim sarcasm, the author of ‘Proszę bardzo’ describes the cemeteries where millions of prisoners were buried, graveyards turned into sports and recreation grounds at Stalin’s behest. These inhumane decisions, which showed no respect for human beings, dead or alive, and whose sole purpose was to conceal the real number of victims of the camps, left the families of the deceased without any means of locating their graves.”
The family’s peregrination. “My parents had met each other in the concentration camp. My father remembered what Poland was like before the war, when life was very different from the situation in Novosibirsk. He therefore suggested to my mother that they return to Nowy Sącz. It was difficult for her because, as a Russian, she had been deprived of her Soviet citizenship. But they finally succeeded…” The Rottenberg family’s return to Poland in 1946 and their resettlement in Nowy Sącz shortly thereafter reunited them with the few family members who had survived the Shoah. Among them was Wolf Rottenberg’s brother Kazek, who had spent two years in hiding during the war with a Polish peasant family in a village near Biczyce. He fell in love with the farmer’s daughter, married her and spent the rest of his life in his native area. After the war, several cousins moved to Budapest, and from there some fled to Australia and others to Canada. Others still live in Switzerland. Anda Rottenberg’s family eventually settled in Legnica, a city in southwestern Poland, in 1951. Wolf Rottenberg continued to work as a tailor for as long as he could. He died in 1976 in Kołobrzeg, in the retirement home where he had been living. Rottenberg says that despite the anti-Jewish campaign of March ’68 in Poland, she did not suffer the consequences of anti-Semitism “neither at school nor at university.”
“I experienced anti-Semitism.” However, she clearly remembers a shocking incident that occurred in Legnica in 1968. “I saw my father, always elegant, well-groomed, a very fine man, burst in tears while watching on television the then leader of the Polish United Workers’ Party (POUP), Władysław Gomułka, calling on Jews to leave the country.” On a personal level, Anda Rottenberg was the target of anti-Semitic slurs after the famous art curator Harald Szeemann put on display Maurizio Cattelan’s artwork “The Ninth Hour,” which depicts Pope John Paul II being struck by a meteorite in Zachęta in the year 2000. Aggressive protests from radical Catholic and traditionalist circles in Poland led her to resign as director of the gallery. “That was when I realised that Poland was still an anti-Semitic country. Later on, I started reading and researching about Jedwabne and other pogroms. On the basis of these readings and meticulous research by historians, I now believe that the extermination and concentration camps were created in Poland, on Polish soil, precisely because of the prevalence of anti-Semitic attitudes in pre-war Poland.”
(Fonte: AgenSIR – News archiviata in #TeleradioNews ♥ il tuo sito web © Diritti riservati all’autore)
