THE AFTERMATHTop

The Polish film Aftermath (2012), directed by Vladyslav Pasikowski, discusses –with pictures and references from the Old Testament– the guilt of Polish peasants for the murder of the Jewish inhabitants of their village in 1939 (see more on this Pető, 2014: 4-9). In the film, two brothers from the village seek to discover the secret, despite being warned against such a course of action. They end up suffering the consequences of their stand. For a long time, the secret does not even have a name, because the Jews who once lived in the village have been erased from the collective memory and from history. In revealing the hidden secret, one of the brothers pays the ultimate price: he is bound to a cross by other villagers as punishment for having opened the door of silence –for having revealed the formerly hidden tombstones and thereby the crimes perpetrated by the villagers. By means of his sacrifice, the outside world is brought into the local conflict, as those who constitute a minority within the community are unable to tell the story, for they too have become “Others”. The murders, we discover, were motivated by the selfish desire of villagers to acquire Jewish property, a desire they legitimised by claiming that the Jews had murdered Jesus.

Holocaust historians have forgotten about this tiny Polish village, and a subtle reference to this fact is made in the film, for local history works do not even mention the Jews who had been living in the village and who were murdered there in 1939. The only record of the Jewish community is a number of tombstones, which have been removed from their original location and used to construct a pavement, a fence, and –symbolically– the well of the Catholic parish church. One of the brothers has never left Poland and runs a small farm, while the other, having emigrated in 1981, returns to the village when he hears about his brother’s “odd” behaviour. The conflict in the village arises when the first brother begins to move the tombstones from the places where they have lain for long decades. In doing so, he disturbs the web of concealment and denial. Poland’s wartime past begins to be processed and explored on the basis of religious pictures, which assist people in understanding and interpreting the past.

Remarkably, the film accomplishes this without any hint of dulling pathos, excessive romanticising or superficiality. The film demonstrates, in an exemplary manner, how one can –on religious and moral grounds and risking everything– represent and support an issue that has no confirmed or recognised name in the minds of others. Those who have lived at some time in the past must be remembered; their tombstones must be visible and their memory must be upheld. This is the goal of the first brother, an uneducated Polish peasant. Assisted by the local parish priest, he brings attention to the tombstones in the graveyard, an action he considers a religious and moral imperative. Can a moral matter be helped, if it has no name? We may well ask this question, for the characters in the film, though they have all been to school, have never spoken of the WWII history of their local area. For various reasons, modernity (including teaching on the Holocaust) has not yet reached the village. Just one language has been spoken about the past and in connection with the “Other”: the vulgar language of medieval anti-Semitism. Symbolically, the Star of David is tied to the gate of the brothers’ house, thus branding them “Other” too.

Using the language of pre-modernity and basing their actions on morality, the brothers then proceed to seek out the mass grave of the Jews. They do not use the language of academic study or of human rights; rather, they seek to formulate an answer to medieval anti-Semitism at the same conceptual level. In the film, the unspoken, non-verbal and unnamed event is the murder of the local Jews. By speaking in a visual and moral language that lies outside modernity and secularism, the film is able –from the inside– to give a name to the event and then to determine the responsibility of the villagers. It is this interiorised religious and moral sense of responsibility that the film speaks of, using post-secular language. The notion of “post-secular society” was first used by Habermas to describe how the separation of church and state is being questioned within the framework of non-institutional and spiritual religiosity (2008).

In contemporary Eastern Europe, after the forcible forgetting of memory policy under communism, a memory bomb exploded in 1989. Society was said to have broken out from under the red carpet, under which everything had been hidden. Suddenly, everything was rendered visible. In the village described in Aftermath,even the red carpet was not really needed: the crimes committed had already been covered up, and in the absence of any real contact with the outside world the villagers had been able to use communist laws to bury their secret even deeper. The release of the film Aftermath gave rise to a heated debate in Poland. There were accusations of anti-Polish slander, and yet the film contained a qualitatively new element: those who have indirectly benefited from the murders are the ones who tell the story in the film, through the excavation of the Jewish tombstones. The perpetrators (or victimisers) and their families are living in houses that once belonged to the murdered Jews. Yet here it is the murderers rather than the victims who are now required to narrate the murders. The two brothers in Aftermath search for a language in which to express something that they did not witness themselves but which is, nevertheless, a part of them. This is Marianne Hirsch’s notion of post-memory, but here remembrance does not mean inclusion in an existing community of remembrance, and so it differs from the manner in which Holocaust survivors gradually established their own community (Hirsh, 2002). Rather, here it means being cast out of a community that is founded on a web of silence and complicity and in which there is no possibility of acceptance. The act of being casting out, even to the point of physical destruction (as in the case of one of the brothers), goes beyond language and beyond telling. Even so, it is interpreted in a post-secular frame that still manages to be spiritual, for this alone renders it bearable.

Evidently, the situation in Hungary, home to Central Europe’s largest Jewish survivor community, is even more complicated. While silence and forgetting meant, for many, abandoning one’s Jewish identity, among some families and groups of friends the discussion of past events was a means of establishing identity. In informal salon-style gatherings, people told family stories, and this became an important means and condition for group cohesion. Personal narration gave credibility to the historical events: by telling the stories, people made them true. Linked with this were efforts to improve the emotional and intellectual well-being of the surviving mourners, thereby combining the command for nichum aveilim with memory policy. This command connects the story of the brothers in Aftermath with the two case studies as battles over politics of memory in Hungary. It is about this language, or lack of language, that I would like to write, having reflected on the film Aftermath, in my analysis of two similar contexts. I argue that “post-secular development” has resulted in a qualitative change in storytelling and in the politics of memory, and that this change poses a challenge to the Jewish community of survivors as they seek to determine how they should make public their memories and tell their stories to a wider audience. In the other case, an elite Budapest intellectual forcing the local community is doomed to fail.

IN THE GLASS CABINETTop

This second context is the “Vitrin” [glass cabinet] project of the Anthropolis Egyesület, a Hungarian cultural association.[3] The project uses visual anthropology in primary and secondary school teaching, whereby the point of departure is that history should be linked with an object or a specific person, as through them emotions can be evoked and experienced. A private initiative, the project began with the processing of the history of a single survivor family, its glass cabinet. Initially, the project received support from the Lindenfeld Company and, subsequently, from the European Union. In the course of the project, volunteer primary and secondary school teachers (teachers of Media Studies, History, and French) were instructed how to tell personal stories using digital storytelling. Participating students themselves select the stories to be told, do the necessary research and then make the film. The role of the teacher is to provide the students with professional assistance throughout this process. The rationale of the project is the reverse of that used for the Shoah Visual History Archive, where events were documented on the basis of interviews following an interview guide and resulting in personalised stories of the Shoah that could then be taught to students (Pető, 2013: 205-211). The films of the “Vitrin” project are related only tangentially to the customary historical narratives, for the choice of topic is up to the students and is their responsibility. Thanks to students’ familiarity with digital technology, the use of such technology in the project caused far fewer difficulties than the organisers had anticipated.

At a meeting held in Budapest to evaluate the project’s findings in March, 2014, a bone of contention among teachers was that ever since it became compulsory in Hungarian schools to hold a Holocaust Memorial Day on April 16^th, students had exhibited increasing resistance to instruction on the Holocaust. They expressed the view that Holocaust Memorial Day was just one more formalised and institutionalised expectation in politics of memory. Some students publicly protested against compulsory viewing of films about the Holocaust. These developments mirrored changes in the Hungarian political discourse that were accompanied by a growing acceptance of verbal antisemitism and a sharper distinction between “Us” and “Them”. The secondary school teachers reported that their students were demanding to know why school time was being used to address things of little importance to them and to Hungarians in general. In this way the Hungarian/Jewish difference (or dichotomy) was actually being recreated in connection with an aspect of politics of memory that aimed to end this difference. An enormous challenge for teachers was somehow to smuggle in the little word “also”: that is, to gain acceptance among Hungarian schoolchildren that the Holocaust was “also” of importance to them. This is a far cry from the story-telling in Aftermath where the perpetrators feel they must speak out and remember, and where they do so beyond and outside institutions. This type of discourse is particularly difficult in impoverished regions beset by ethnic conflicts: for instance, in north-eastern Hungary, where the “Them” and “Us” dichotomy is manifest in the hostility exhibited towards Roma people. One of the teachers involved in the “Vitrin” project, a history teacher at a school with students mainly from a Roma ghetto, received an odd opportunity. A far-right paramilitary force from a neighbouring village –a force with links to the far right Jobbik party– hounded the local teacher, a village native, out of the area, because she was considered to be Jewish. In World War II, the teacher’s father had hidden six Jews at his home, thereby saving them. Instead of receiving recognition from the local community, his daughter was now forced to move away from the village. The Hungarian reality differs from the story presented in Aftermath to the extent that the daughter of the man who had saved Jews in 1944 was forced to flee habitual harassment in her village in 2014, but she did not lose her life. The kind of life also has a price. The defining memory cultures survive in eastern Hungary in a similar isolation to what we see in Poland. A colleague of this teacher sought to process her experiences in the “Vitrin” project with the involvement of her Roma students but the first woman did not want to feature in a film. Even though she was even offered anonymity, she declined to take part – out of fear. The vocabulary used by the director of Aftermath to express the story in Poland was not available at this point in the Vitrin project. The teacher rejected sacrificing her life – although her life would not have been in immediate danger. But other films are being created within the framework of the project, some of them seeking to give purpose and meaning to our memory of the Holocaust. It is not the experiences of others that are transposed into their own situation. Rather, utilising the possibilities of digital technology, the filmmakers try to put their own experiences and emotions into film.

LOCAL HISTORIES THAT MATTERTop

The third context is Cserépfalu, which is a small village in the Northern Eastern Part of Hungary with around a thousand inhabitants. Before 1944, nine Jews were living there, who were arrested by the Hungarian gendarme and taken to the nearby ghetto and never returned. Their property, which was not much, was acquired by the villagers. A young librarian from Budapest, Péter Tóth moved to this village in the 1990s, started local historical research and posted his findings on a blog. This activity was greeted by the locals as it attracted touristic attention to the picturesque village, but when Peter Tóth started to inquire about the Jewish citizens before the deportation of 1944, he met ignorance and even hostility.[4] In the official webpage of the village there is not a word about the traumatic history of the village. The line on the page that in 2001 there were only Hungarians living in the village is a clear coded message for those who are considering buying holiday homes there that no romani are living there.[5]

Due to criticism and warnings in his blog, Peter Toth changed the name of Cserépfalu to Cserepflau, but it did not help much.[6] He organised a memory walk for the deportations of the nine Jewish citizens. Two citizens of the village decided to be present: himself, the organiser and another person, who had also moved in the village lately. The memory event for two participants was guarded by three local policemen. Later, a family of five members joined them. They had been threatened to be stoned if they participated at the event. The mayor, who in private discussions supported his work, opted not to participate. Peter Tóth started to put together the pieces of the Jewish inhabitants of the village; some of them were victims of a pogrom already in 1920 and moved out. He found material about the Jews of his village in Yad Vashem but not in the local archive. Peter Tóth said in the interview: “We cannot hide what has happened to them. We cannot live in ignorance, when we know what has happened”. Namely that on May18^th, 1944 nine Jews were living in the village and by June 16^th none. The plural first person, “we” however is a problematic one here, as the community of remembrance is questioned. Who can demand a community to remember if they are not willing to do so and it is against their interests?

THE DEMAND TO REMEMBERTop

The tikkun olam, the basic prayer of Judaism, includes the command to repair the world. Much has been written about how this command is to be interpreted in the various schools of Judaism, but here I choose to write about the common roots of Christianity and Judaism and about the shared normative expectation that one should seek to make the world a better place. In Hungary, which is home to one of Europe’s largest Jewish communities, the local Jewish organisations bear significant responsibility for their silence on memory policy in the pre-1989 period and for creating the post-1989 framework in this field. In 2014, the commemorative year “Hungarian Holocaust 70” is an important opportunity for the telling of stories. Especially since the government offered so much financial support to it. Instead of a story with a happy ending, a memory war has started. The monument of German occupation at the Liberty square aimed to create an alternative narrative to the previous antifascist discourse. A new Holocaust Museum called the House of Fates is being planned without any relevant information about the content. Why is 15 (or 18) minutes long screaming a response to all these government actions?

Surprisingly, the framework for story-telling has been determined by the paradigm of the Veritas (Truth) Historical Research Institute, which was recently established by the Christian-conservative government. For this institute, the task is to research the “truth”.[7] Paradoxically, the civil organisations, historians, and Jewish organisations that have rallied against the Veritas Institute have defined their primary task as formulating and sustaining a “counter-truth” – rather than analysing the factors that go beyond the true/false binary.

The Facebook group “The Holocaust and my family”, membership of which is by invitation only, posts the stories, memories and reflections of its members. Each one of the stories is heartbreaking and movingly true. Many people have written the stories of their families and then scanned in or posted photos of their murdered or surviving relatives. A great number have never spoken of these experiences before. Each story is full of the pain of people whose voices have never been heard before. One person noted on the group’s page that the establishment of the group was the single positive result of the government’s intrusive politics of memory. Members of the group –isolated as they are from the outside world, from hostile commentators and, indeed, from 90 percent of Hungarian society– have continued the politics of memory practices that were developed in the house parties and salon-style gatherings of the 1980s. Now, however, they are doing it in the digital space. Here there are no stories that do not fit in the traditional Holocaust narrative: there are no Roma, poor people or LGBTs. In line with the established narrative, women are mothers and protectors. Why should we remember in any other way when the accepted framework of remembrance has been created into what it is over such a long period? While confirmation of one’s identity by a reference group is a basic human need, in order to move forward we need also to think about the extent to which the survivors bear a responsibility. Which command should take precedence: nichum aveilim or tikkun olam? In this difficult situation, reversing the logic of victimiser and victim –at first sight a seemingly unacceptable tactic– may lead to a meaningful result. The brothers in Aftermath did not have Jewish neighbours, and the village-dwellers had never seen a non-white or non-Catholic Pole. In the Aftermath’s concluding scene, young people who have arrived from Israel recite the kaddish by resurrected tombstones. In Hungary, it is as though the inevitable introspection of Jewish memory policy has excluded any possibility of looking outwards, and yet the two practices are not necessarily incompatible.

At its extraordinary meeting on February 9^th, 2014, the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities (MAZSIHISZ) declared that it would not take part in the events of the Holocaust commemorative year established by the democratically elected government, because it disagreed with the decisions of the government in the field of politics of memory. The MAZSIHISZ then made it known that it would celebrate the commemorative year separately. Through its decision, the Federation effectively renounced the opportunity to participate in the development of a memory culture where many do not understand –and do not even want to understand– what they are supposed to be commemorating in connection with 1944. “Chosen trauma” (Vamik Volkan’s term) is placed in opposition to experienced trauma. This dilemma, however, is significantly more complicated than that of the Polish brothers in Aftermath, who merely knew about the existence of a secret. The teacher in the northern Hungarian village who shuts herself in her rented room and dares not speak of her father’s actions to the second teacher, who wishes to discuss those actions in the presence of her students, will find her position is far more difficult. The mayor of Cserepfalu posts the advertisement for the memory walk for the nine murdered Jewish citizen of his village but he himself does not participate as he knows nobody else from the village will do.

The crimes –the murders– are still present; they have not passed away and will not pass away. The only change concerns the framework of remembering. But if we are to make the world a better place by speaking about such issues, then we also need to recognise that the world has changed: digital technology has not only modified our access to the past; it has also altered what we regard as authentic. A further change revolves around our emotional political expectations in a post-secular world. What remains, however, is tikkun olam as a practical everyday command. By recognising emotions and identity, we are able to reach out to others. If we fail to understand Others –Roma people or LGBTs– we too will be left vulnerable. And unless we can define ourselves in conjunction with someone else, we will have failed to truly understand the deeply immoral and corrupt logic that gives rise to the notion of the “Other”. We all bear a responsibility for the rise in antisemitism, for Holocaust denial and for the relativising of crimes. Sulky disdain for those who think differently from “Us” and a belief that “We” are the only ones who know objectively what happened, will lead only to a further polarisation of society and of memory cultures. When the librarian from Budapest demands that “we” should remember and one more person shows up demonstrates the failure of this strategy.

In the recent past, in Hungary there has been a failure to develop an internalised narrative among those who do not regard –or do not experience– the Holocaust as their own personal story of suffering and who, within the framework of post-memory, do not consider themselves in any manner responsible. Yet the parents and grandparents of these people worked very diligently in the Hungarian state administration to make inventories of the assets of the Jews, even moving into the apartments and houses allocated to them after the Jews’ departure and always considering it best not to inquire about their previous owners. In the impoverished village in northern Hungary, the Roma children asked the teacher in vain about her father’s stories; they received no answer. The intellectuals who moved from Budapest to a small village in the northern part of Hungary are asking questions but the villagers are not ready to answer and he meets the silence of the Aftermath.

CONCLUSIONSTop

The history of the Holocaust is the history of Europe; as Europeans we all continue to live it. It is not wise to appropriate to ourselves the story of suffering, because even in the short term such a course will lead to isolation, pillarisation and a rise in antisemitism. The brothers in Aftermath, by going beyond themselves and the traditions of their family and community, could reach out for a different post-secular memory policy frame. That was put in into practice by the “Matzeva Project” in 2014 collecting more than 1000 tombstones (matzevas) previously built in the Prague district of Warsaw in roads, walls, even toilets or used as knife sharpeners to return the fragments to the cemetery. The two brothers in the film rendered themselves vulnerable as a result, but, if we are honest, we know this to be the task faced by us all. By following the traditional command of tikkun olam, we can accomplish the task – doing so hopefully with less shed blood than in the film, although we should not be under any illusions.

The main argument of the protesters against the memory politics of the Hungarian government is that with this monument of German occupation it revised the history of the Holocaust in Hungary. Tucker’s typology (Tucker, 2008: 1-15) of historical revisionism presents three types of historical revisionisms. The first one is the significance-driven revisionism: that is, when there is a change in what historians find significant in history. The second is evidence-driven revisions: when new evidence is discovered. And the third is the value-driven revisionism: when historical events and processes are reevaluated due to a new system of values becoming hegemonic (Tucker, 2008: 3). In the case of the two villages in the northern part of Hungary the significance driven to revisionism is going in parallel with the value driven revisionism: what happened in those villages in 1944 is not considered to be important by the local villagers. The government supported memorialisation projects are constructing the monuments for the murdered Jews as this has happened in a social and cultural vacuum. If this tendencies of revisionism are supported by these two strategies of non-remembering, then there is nothing remaining but to scream.