JUDENFREI stack I

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JUDENFREI stos I
IMG_9602 (1)
IMG_9585
IMG_9528
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Gościnność 1
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JUDENFREI  stos I
IMG_9602 (1)
IMG_9585
IMG_9528
IMG_9540
IMG_9552
IMG_9560
IMG_9505
Gościnność 1
Gościnność
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title:

JUDENFREI stack I

year: 2019
dimensions: 600/600/280 cm
technique: wooden objects (own technique) - realization of the XI Festival of Art in Public Space Open City, Lublin
 
description: It is obvious that Nazi Germany is responsible for the extermination of Jews in Europe. Building an ideology, a system that planned and methodically launched the Holocaust process mostly carried out in Poland in German death camps (in KL Auschwitz, Chełmno nad Nerem, Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka) is a deliberate strategy of the absolute policy of the Third Reich regime. Although Poles were victims, an occupied nation, they unfortunately also became Nazi helpers over time. Given the then historical context, a radical anti-Semitic campaign, mainly in the Podlasie or Lublin region, carried out by the Nazis with the participation of the structures of the Polish nationalist underground, which in the summer of 1941 and later led to a large-scale campaign of catching hiding Jews, it is difficult today imagine that their Polish neighbors did it with extreme zeal. The fact of doing so punishes the fundamental question about humanity, ethics, morality, compassion - humanity.

According to historians, the Holocaust was subject to three phases. The first is the time of exclusion, discrimination, labeling, ghetto creation and indirect extermination, through hunger, illness and devastating work. The second is murdering - mass shooting, sending to mass extermination camps. The last, third phase is catching and liquidating (pogroms) of survivors who have managed to survive until now.

In the perspective of the implemented project, I am interested in the third phase of the Holocaust of Jews, mostly of the citizens of the Second Polish Republic, carried out in 1941-46 in Polish towns subordinated to the General Government (near Lublin). The subject of the installation are neighborly relations between Polish and Jewish neighbors, which can be described as: neighborly pogroms of Jews. I am aware that this is a one-sided, radical assessment of historical facts in view of the occurrence of human impulses, attempts to help, and hiding Jews in hiding by their Polish neighbors in that situation, it is obvious that such attitudes were exceptions.

According to historian Marcin Zaremba, in 1941-1946 there was a series of pogroms and anti-Semitic excesses carried out on the Jewish population in Poland (Ludmiłówka, Przytyk, Dębica, Słomniki, Szczebrzeszyn, Miechów, Kraśnik, Klimontów, Przedbórz, Goźlice, and Jugoszów). Group killing of neighbors was most often carried out on their own initiative. Polish neighbors, executioners were guided by low instincts, hatred, avarice - the desire for easy profit, the aforementioned anti-Semitism. Examples of pogroms in Kielce, Krakow and Rzeszów are extreme situations.

All crimes have been documented, described, among others, by Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Pogroms. Sketches in historical anthropology of Poland 1939-1946, Mirosław Tryczyk, The City of Death. Neighborly pogroms of Jews, Jan Grabowski JUDENJAGD. Hunting for Jews 1942-1945. A study of the history of a poviat, Barbara Engelking, There is such a beautiful sunny day ... The fate of Jews seeking help in the Polish countryside of 1942-1945.

Judenfrei or Judenrein (Polish: Free from Jews) - a term used by German Nazis to describe a given area or city where Jews no longer reside.

The authorities of the Third Reich most often "cleaned" the areas of their Jewish inhabitants by mass deportations to ghettos and concentration camps located in the occupied territories (Germany, Poland and other occupied countries) or mass murders by death squads, sometimes organized by local collaborative authorities, civilians .

 

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