52 No. 67 JUSTICE approach. Golden Harvest,15 written by historian Jan Tomasz Gross, shares much with Lower’s. Both authors attempt to tell the history of the Holocaust “from below” and from“the margins.”Focusing on a single photo helps both authors to reveal a suppressed social history about the role of local collaborators in the Holocaust. Unlike Lower, however, Gross does not try to identify each of the individuals captured in the photo. Instead, the photo is used to shed light on the collective character of the crime, and the way it so markedly transformed basic social norms. Taking a closer look at what first seems to be an ordinary photo of farmers at the end of a day of work in the fields reveals the memorialization of a gruesome occupation – digging up the death fields of Treblinka in search of gold teeth. The photo is a witness to the ordinariness, the mundanity of this event, to the fact that it had become a communal occupation, undertaken in broad daylight. Noticing a collection of skulls and bones placed at the foot of the“farmers”amid what seems to be an innocent photo – is what is so unsettling for us as readers. For Gross, the power of the photo lies in the way it captures the strangeness of the familiar, or, as Hannah Arendt termed it “the banality of evil.”Likewise, philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman16 suggests that we must remain attuned to the lacunas in Holocaust photos, since the problem is not simply a technological one of obtaining more information. In the Miropol photo we see a bent woman, whose head is covered with smoke from the firing guns. Her body begins to dematerialize together with this smoke. Either, we can treat the smoke as a problem that limits our vision, or we can pause and reflect: what can this image tell us about the limits of representation of the Holocaust? Rachel Auerbach, journalist, historian, and Holocaust survivor from the Warsaw ghetto, who wrote one of the very first books about Treblinka, describes a strange fog that she encountered when she arrived as part of a Polish delegation of inquiry to the grounds of Treblinka in November 1945. In her book, she emphasizes how fog should become an important part of representing the truth about Treblinka: “Where did this fog come from?” someone in our car asked. “There will always be a fog over this place,” one of the Treblinka veterans replied. And I could sense that he was trying to say something, something important and profound. Something he had never said in his life before. But he couldn’t say it.17 The fog literally and figuratively obscures – both the mother's face in the former sense, and the horrors of the Holocaust in the latter sense. n Leora Bilsky is the Benno Gitter Chair in Human Rights and Holocaust Research at the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law and the Director of the Minerva Center for Human Rights at Tel Aviv University. The Israel Science Foundation supported this research under Grant no. 1163/19. 15. Jan Tomasz Gross, GOLDEN HARVEST (Oxford University Press, 2016). 16. Georges Didi-Huberman, IMAGES IN SPITE OF ALL: FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS FROM AUSCHWITZ (University of Chicago Press, 2008). 17. Rachel Auerbach, “In the Fields of Treblinka” (Yiddish original: Oyf di felder fun treblinke, 1947). See the English translation: “In the Fields of Treblinka,”THE DEATH CAMP TREBLINKA: A DOCUMENTARY 19-74 (Alexander Donat, ed., Holocaust Library, 1979).
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgzNzA=