Efforts to reckon with the enormity of human loss during the Holocaust frequently turn to inanimate objects, which provide an oblique but no less powerful encounter with the horror of genocide. This is perhaps most readily evident today in the displays of everyday objects in Holocaust exhibitions, including individual items (e.g., Bundist leader Samuel Mordecai ‘Artur’ Zygelbojm's broken eyeglasses, on display in New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust) as well as masses of them (shoes, suitcases, toothbrushes, and the like, all confiscated from concentration-camp prisoners). Observers regularly cite the display of these objects as having a singularly powerful impact on visitors. In this short, compelling monograph literary scholar Bożena Shallcross calls attention to other engagements with Holocaust objects—namely, the mention of objects that are connected in some way with the mass murder of European Jewry in works of Polish poetry and prose written by Poles and Jews either during or shortly after the war. In addition, and in relation to these literary works, Shallcross invites readers to consider the very materiality of texts written during the war. In her hands, this subject offers a point of entry to understanding the Holocaust of provocative reach and originality.
Material objects acquired new values of unprecedented urgency and consequence during the Holocaust. The powerful imbrication of human lives with the stuff of daily life—articles of clothing, household goods, tools—came apart as the social contract in Nazi-controlled lands was breached. Nazi Germany persecuted its victims by confiscating their property, by replacing their basic material needs with inferior goods (e.g., for concentration-camp inmates, wooden clogs instead of shoes and uniforms made of coarse cloth woven from nettles), by scavenging their bodies for hidden treasures (gold, jewelry), and ultimately by reducing human beings to raw material for commodities (hair for cloth, fat for soap). Shallcross begins by reminding readers of the extraordinary challenges inherent in the material practice of writing under these circumstances: the scarcity of paper and writing implements; the danger of having seditious writings discovered; and, as a consequence, the hiding of writings in the hope of their eventual retrieval by the author—or, failing that, their discovery by someone else. Shallcross terms such texts precarium, thereby also calling attention to the fragile, “precarious” contingency of their existence. Within the extreme conditions of the Holocaust, the “epidemic” production of precarium is all the more remarkable, given that the very act of writing had been transformed “into a hazardous preoccupation” (7).
Close readings of selected texts provide the core of Shallcross's study. These works include some translated texts that are available—and in a few cases, widely familiar—to readers of Holocaust literature who do not know Polish (e.g., Czesław Miłosz's poem “Campo dei Fiori”; Tadeusz Borowski's short stories in his collection This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen; Jerzy Andrzejewski's novella Holy Week) as well as works less well known outside of Poland. Shallcross positions her study of this carefully curated set of texts in relation to the larger milieu of interwar Polish literary modernism, in which her authors' aesthetic sensibilities were formed as readers and, in most cases, in which they began their careers as writers. As she offers close readings of individual works, Shallcross also opens up wide-ranging analyses. In addition to drawing thoughtfully on the insights of major literary and cultural theorists, Shallcross positions her readings in relation to a wide sweep of world culture (the Bible, Plato, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Balzac, Fred Astaire), thereby demonstrating these works' engagement with established literary conventions and cultural sensibilities even as they strive to engage events understood while they were unfolding as constituting an atrocity without precedent.
Shallcross draws careful distinctions among the various implications, especially ethical ones, of the literary handling of objects. Some objects figure strategically in acts of defiance in the face of murder (exemplified by Władysław Szlengel's poem “Top Hat”); others bear the stigma of loot appropriated from Jews by their Polish neighbors (notably, in Zuzanna Ginczanka's terrifying poem “My Last Will”). Ultimately, the “absolute reification of the individual” devalues camp inmates to the status of “living objects,” as evinced in Borowski's stories about Auschwitz (114). Shallcross offers a subtle parsing of this trope in her analysis of these gruesome stories, and she is equally thoughtful in her reading of the reduction of human beings to raw material for the manufacture of soap—a process that never went beyond the experimental phase—as recounted in “Professor Spanner,” one of the short pieces in Zofia Nałkowska's collection Medallions. Over the course of her book, Shallcross offers an inventory of objects—Szlengel's tuxedo, Ginczanka's “proud estate” of household linens, a Jewish woman's antique ring in Andrzejewski's novella, the cardboard box of meager possessions carried to the gas chamber by the prisoner known as the Schreiber in Borowski's “The Man with the Package,” and so on—indexed to a roster of moral crises and ambiguities. Taken together, these items and their realization in literary works evince a world in which the abandonment of the laws of property exemplifies the failure of the human social order at its most basic level.
The texts Shallcross has selected and the discourses they have engendered, largely in Poland, provide valuable insight into the distinctive struggles that Poles and Polish Jews face in confronting the Holocaust. Shallcross construes these challenges with moral forthrightness and critical nuance. She concludes her study with a brief reflection on objects taken from concentration-camp inmates that now repose in Holocaust museums and invites readers to consider these items' shifting value, including their enduring “demonstration of the Nazis' desire to amass” as well as the potential for discovering within these objects some traces of their former owners' lives and their powerful “desire to live” (133). These objects exhort us, Shallcross concludes, to continue to probe their meanings as an abject cultural inheritance. These meanings are enhanced by literary works written in Polish that, though written decades ago, continue to challenge readers and are further enriched by this incisive study.
