ABSTRACT
In an interview about his film Ida, Paweł Pawlikowski sketches the powerful afterimage of the 1960s city stilled by the war trauma: “Growing up in Warsaw, you grow up among tombs. There are plaques everywhere: 200 people executed here, 30 people there. There were bullet holes in the courtyard I grew up in.” Shot in black and white, with still camera – in both its form and its making – this difficult, Polish-language film recalls memories and imaginaries shaped by the visual aftershock of the war. The visual experience of growing up in the 60s was shaped by ruins and reconstruction in many cities, but Warsaw walls have a uniquely troubled history, with walls of tenements deployed as both shelter and the instrument of mass killing, as surfaces of (petrified) memory and shadows of insistent forgetting, as macabre forms of material commemorations and media surfaces of changing ideologies.
This chapter examines the wall plaques Pawlikowski recalls as still (in)forming his imaginaries of the city: a 1948 commemorative project by a Warsaw sculptor Karol Tchorek that marked the city with stone tablets indicating numerous execution sites from the period of Nazi occupation and the Uprising that precipitated the city’s final destruction. With their officially commissioned standard form, these tablets replaced earlier spontaneous acts of local remembrance. The project gave a uniform “plastic form” to the memory of national trauma. Impossible to see in its entirety, with tablets scattered across the city mapping the patterns of sites of killing and individual markers located in discrete places of past trauma, this unique “monument” – executed by the artist over two decades – seems in a dialectical opposition to Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. These stone markers constitute the base of Warsaw’s memorial iconosphere pointing to local politics of memory, to localized voids and absences. By physically marking walls as places of trauma, the tablets work differently than free-standing monuments. They point to histories of specific locations and gesture beyond them – to the memorial and architectural functions of Warsaw walls. They index the street enclosures as places of occupation, of rounding-up and the walls as surfaces of killing, the sheltering and dividing walls in the tenement courtyards, the post-war invisibility of the ghetto wall, advertising surfaces of blind walls, party walls with their material shadows of past interiors.
The chapter reflects on the contemporary fragility of the historical tablets with their inscriptions and the unique archive of their design and documentation of production collected within the sculptor’s studio, built into a ruin of a tenement in 1951 and now threatened by commercial development and demolition. Focussing on the materiality of the wall and inscription as a place of memory, and taking Tchorek’s project as a singular (if dispersed) monument of wall writing, this reflection links the commemorative gestures of the tablets to the surface memory of the walls of Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto stilled in the brick materiality of the wall dividing the Powazki Catholic cemetery from the Jewish cemetery.
