Polish photographer Łukasz Baksik has spent years tracking down countless Jewish tombstones. Baksik shows them being used as grinding wheels in farms for sharpening tools, as parts of barn walls or as paving stones – even as Christian tombstones.
The “recycled” grave markers and memorials are remnants of Poland’s destroyed Jewish community, which numbered 3.5 million people on the eve of the Second World War, and had a history of over a thousand years of vibrant cultural life in the country.
Polish Jewry was annihilated in the Holocaust. Of the thousands of Jewish cemeteries spread throughout Poland, some were destroyed or defiled during the war, but nearly all were left derelict afterwards, as the Jewish communities were no longer there to care for them. As Baksik records, local inhabitants usurped these useful stones for countless uses.
Łukasz Baksik’s exhibition, Matzevot in Every Day, was displayed over the past month at the Centre for Contemporary Art in the Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw. It represents yet another way in which Poland’s citizens have been increasingly coming to terms with their country’s significant Jewish heritage, a process that began shortly after the end of Communist rule. This reckoning has been encumbered by the absence of the Jews, who were nearly all killed, as well as by the weight of guilt at the widespread participation by Poles in the persecution and the murder of their Jewish neighbors.
It is very symbolic of both these elements that recent years have seen an interest by Polish citizens in the refurbishment and restoration of the abandoned Jewish cemeteries. In the absence of the Jewish communities that they served for centuries, these cemeteries are the most tangible connection that remains for many of Today’s Poles to this aspect of Poland’s history and heritage.
Many of the cemetery refurbishment efforts are grass roots affairs, but there are also government sponsored actions, including a program that involves prisoners in rehabilitating cemeteries. Like many European countries, however, Poland is also seeing its share of modern anti-Semitic defacement of Jewish graves and memorials, carried out by "anti-Israel activists".
