Colours. Or: Where Should We Look for Truth?

The beautiful figurative art of the past has been replaced by colour and patches, which neither bring peace nor offer prospects. Nor do successive generations find either peace or prospects.

Marek Edelman¹

In 1987, several hundred colour slides were found in a second-hand bookshop in Vienna, Arnold Mostowicz says. As it later emerged, these were slides from the Łódź ghetto. It was a shock. It was a shock when I saw these photographs—some of the first colour slides in the history of photography—taken by Walter Genewein, an official in the ghetto. They depicted the Łódź ghetto, yet it was not the ghetto engraved in my memory, although they showed the same human figures, the same houses, the same streets. Where, then, should we look for truth? Where is it concealed? In my memory? Or is this truth conveyed by Walter Genewein’s photographs? How are we to find it? In the archives? In documents? In the cemetery? In the streets of the former ghetto? And how are we to understand the meaning of this vision of the ghetto in colour—in Genewein’s colours?² These words open Dariusz Jabłoński’s 1998 documentary film Photographer.

Arnold Mostowicz was a doctor in the Łódź ghetto. After his deportation in August 1944, he passed through numerous concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau. The end of the war found him in Derenau. After the war, illness forced him to abandon medicine. He then turned to journalism and writing. He died in Warsaw in 2002 at the age of eighty-eight. Mostowicz recalled: I have the impression that it was something completely unreal, something entirely untrue. I cannot comprehend it; I cannot picture myself precisely at that point, in that place, at that time, in such a situation. Somehow it is difficult, well… Walter Genewein, an Austrian citizen, was the chief accountant in the Łódź ghetto. He died in Salzburg in 1974 at the age of seventy-three, a respected citizen. I emphasise that the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, he said, was not a concentration camp of any kind, but a closed district for Jews. A small Jewish town. Genewein was a keen photographer. With tremendous enthusiasm, he photographed, among other things, the work performed by Jews in the ghetto. Although the factories resemble ordinary workshops in an ordinary ‘small town’, we perceive the drama concealed in the detail, in the zoom—in the victims’ gazes.

In Jabłoński’s film, Genewein’s colour slides, discovered in an Austrian second-hand bookshop in 1987, interpenetrate with present-day images of the same parts of the city. Mostowicz’s narration and the documents Genewein left behind. Two different perspectives, different worlds and different frames. And two memories: one painful, hot and emotional; the other soulless and bureaucratic, recorded in documents. The same time and place: the 1940s, Łódź—that is, the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. Alongside the chief accountant’s reports to his superiors, Jabłoński also used in Photographer excerpts from Genewein’s letters to the manufacturer of photographic film, AGFA, in which he orders materials or complains about the quality of those previously supplied.

To IG Farbenindustrie AGFA

My office has a requisitioned MOVEX 12 camera. Please send instructions for its use and colour film for official purposes. As an experienced amateur photographer, I believe that colour photographs depict the achievements of my office more effectively.

Walter Genewein

AGFA-Gevaert N.V. remains a well-known manufacturer of materials and equipment used in photography, film, audiovisual work and printing. Today, AGFA also offers various solutions in pre-press technology and medical systems. The company manufactures and sells products for conventional and digital pre-press, as well as for medical and technical diagnostics. In 1867, a pigment factory was established at Rummelsburger See near Berlin and subsequently registered in Wolfen in 1873 under the name Aktien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrikation. Initially it produced dyes and artificial silk, later photosensitive materials and photographic chemicals, and finally photographic equipment as well. In 1964, AGFA AG and Gevaert Photo Producten N.V. joined forces. The merger created two cooperating companies with equal shares: Gevaert AGFA N.V. in Mortsel, Belgium, and AGFA-Gevaert AG in Leverkusen, Germany. In 1980–81, high silver prices caused considerable financial difficulties, but the company survived with Bayer’s assistance. In 1999, AGFA became a publicly traded company, listed on Euronext through the Brussels Stock Exchange and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. From 1916, AGFA prepared to introduce colour photographic materials to the market. In 1936, the first film designed for colour photography, AGFA color-Neu—protected by 278 patents—went on sale. Alongside Casella, BASF (Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik), Bayer, Hoechst, Huels and Kalle, AGFA formed part of INTERESSEN-GEMEINSCHAFT FARBENINDUSTRIE AG. I.G. Farben was a German chemical conglomerate established in Frankfurt am Main in 1925. In German, Farben means paints or colours. Initially, the companies within the conglomerate mainly produced dyes. They soon moved into more advanced chemistry, including chemical-warfare agents, artificial and synthetic fibres and explosives. During the interwar period, the conglomerate enjoyed the support of the state authorities while implementing a large-scale programme of German economic self-sufficiency. Its representatives already held key posts in the state’s economic bodies. The cartel controlled the entire production of synthetic rubber and a substantial proportion of synthetic-fuel production. During the Second World War, most I.G. Farben plants served the needs of the German armed forces. Factories built during the interwar period could not meet wartime demand, however, and a decision was taken to build two additional plants. In 1940, a preliminary decision was made to locate the second plant at Oświęcim; this was connected with the existence in the town of the newly established concentration camp, which was to provide labour. Auschwitz III Monowitz was established in October 1942, and its prisoners worked for the conglomerate at the Buna-Werke plant. Buna was intended to manufacture synthetic rubber. Prisoners from Buchenwald/Dora-Mittelbau and Gross-Rosen also worked for the conglomerate. I.G. Farben derived enormous profits from their slave labour. The cartel absorbed Degesch (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung GmbH), which supplied Zyklon B to Auschwitz from 1941. It was ostensibly a pest-control agent and disinfectant. Degesch charged five marks for five kilograms of poison. A trial took place in 1947–48. Twenty-four directors of the conglomerate appeared before an American military tribunal; thirteen received prison sentences ranging from six months to eight years. I.G. Farben was officially dissolved in 1952. Nevertheless, it remained listed on the German stock exchange until 2003, when it declared bankruptcy.

Genewein to AGFA: I should like to ask why the entire film takes on a reddish-brown cast. I made a series of photographs for official purposes and, after processing, discovered that both rolls of film had acquired this unattractive reddish-brown cast.

Primo Levi, a prisoner at the Buna-Werke complex in Auschwitz III Monowitz, wrote: ‘[…] in the morning, while it is still dark, we all watch the eastern sky, looking for the first signs of warmer weather. Every day we compare the sunrise: today it rose a little earlier than yesterday; today it is a little warmer than yesterday; in two months, in one month, the cold will break and we shall have one enemy fewer’³. Levi remembered the camp at Monowitz as follows: ‘Buna is by its very nature desperately dull and grey. This boundless tangle of iron, concrete, mud and smoke is the negation of beauty’⁴. One wonders how Buna would have looked in Genewein’s slides, made using AGFA colour materials. Six large-format photographs by Elżbieta Janicka. White and black. Their austere form may bring to mind experimental photography, works on the boundary of Conceptualism and Minimal Art, and the studio and laboratory experiments of 1970s art. Yet this is not a tautological game with the photographic medium or a formalist experiment. On the side, a black strip bears the manufacturer’s name, AGFA, and factory serial markings. What do the photographs depict? Nothing. That is to say, air. Can air be recorded? This is no doubt an interesting question for Conceptual artists as well. The sky photographed at Auschwitz II Birkenau (24.08.2004), Bełżec (03.07.2003), Kulmhof am Ner (31.08.2004), Majdanek (02.07.2003), Sobibór (04.07.2003) and Treblinka II (10.07.2004). What is the sky above Auschwitz like? Probably the same as the sky above Berlin. And what was it like then? Had Genewein recorded the air in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto on his slides, it would probably have looked quite different from the sky above Łódź today, owing to the imperfections of AGFA’s technology at the time—for these were, we should remember, the beginnings of colour photography. Perhaps the sky would have turned red, as in a Fauvist painting, although in those days it may have been equally serene, bright and beautiful. Yes, it seems that at the time it should instead have been red or reddish-brown: the colour of blood⁵.

Genewein to AGFA: I have already contacted Agfa once because an important film containing official photographs turned red during processing. I recently received six films whose expiry date was April 1942 and had to establish once again that white areas appeared pink, blue ones purple, and green ones brownish green. I enclose one photograph as evidence. Please let me know what might be causing this red cast. The films I used previously acquired a blue cast. Thank you in advance for your reply.

The title of Elżbieta Janicka’s work, Miejsce nieparzyste (2003–2004), a two-part work / The Odd Place (2003–2004), a two-part work, could also have been successfully situated within the context of an exhibition drawing upon the Neo-Avant-Garde tradition, were it not for its actual reference to the shameful history of National Democratic antisemitism in interwar Poland. As Alina Cała recently recalled: ‘In September 1922, the All-Polish Youth organised the first demonstrations at several universities, declaring “war on the Jews”. The organisation was probably responsible for bombings in Warsaw and Kraków in 1923, including at the offices of the assimilationist newspaper Nowy Dziennik and outside the home of Władysław Natanson, rector of the Jagiellonian University, who had refused to make a hall available for antisemitic rallies and also opposed quota restrictions. During the organisation’s second congress and the Congress of Academic Youth in Lviv in 1923, a struggle to introduce the numerus clausus was declared, and the complete exclusion even of Catholics of Jewish origin from ideological, mutual-aid, educational and sporting organisations was demanded’6. In 1937, following attacks by nationalist militias upon Jewish students, the minister of religious affairs and public education authorised university rectors to issue internal regulations. These took the form of segregating seats for Jews in lecture halls—the so-called bench ghetto⁷. The Odd Place abbreviates the annotation placed in student record books: ‘a seat on the odd-numbered benches’. In this way, the University of Warsaw institutionally stigmatised students of Jewish origin.

Genewein to AGFA: The colours green and blue disappear completely. The photographs were taken on the same day, at the same time, and processed without fault. The appearance of the reddish-brown tint is therefore entirely incomprehensible. I should like to avoid this in future.

Sound—the second part of the project—is also an important element of the exhibition. Thirteen sound situations (19 minutes) played on a loop. Sound at the boundary of silence. ‘It was always peaceful here, as it is now. Always. When 2,000 people, Jews, were burnt here every day, there was’—said Szymon Srebrnik, a miraculously surviving witness to the extermination of his people at Chełmno nad Nerem (Kulmhof am Ner)—‘the same peace. No one screamed. Everyone did what they had to do. It was quiet. Peaceful. As it is now’⁸. And birdsong. Birds sang then as well. The commandant of Treblinka, Franz Stangl, recalled in a conversation with the British journalist Gitta Sereny: ‘There were masses of beautiful birds there, and benches and flowers. […] It is not easy to describe all of this now, but it really did look beautiful’⁹.

The sounds of nature. And the artist’s words, spoken in a monotonous whisper on the grounds of extermination camps she visited in 2003 and 2004, places that seem to exist somewhere beyond time and space: ‘Treblinka, take three’ / ‘Treblinka, end of take three’ (birdsong); ‘Treblinka, take four’ / ‘Treblinka, end of take four’; ‘Majdanek, take two’ / ‘Majdanek, end of take two’ (rain can be heard in the distance); ‘Majdanek, take four’ (a dog barking in the background, not oppressively but rather ‘domestically’, suggesting safety); ‘Bełżec, take two’ / ‘Bełżec, end of take two’; ‘Bełżec, take three’ / ‘Bełżec, end of take three’ (a cricket? a dog again barking in the background); ‘Sobibór, take one’ / ‘Sobibór, end of take one’; ‘Sobibór, take two’ / ‘Sobibór, end of take two’; ‘Kulmhof, take ten’ /

‘Kulmhof, end of take ten’ (a piercing silence); ‘Kulmhof, take eleven’ / ‘Kulmhof, end of take eleven’ (birdsong); ‘Auschwitz zwei Birkenau, take two’ / ‘Auschwitz zwei Birkenau, end of take two’ (crickets?); ‘Auschwitz zwei Birkenau, take three’ / ‘Auschwitz zwei Birkenau, end of take three’ (a train in the background, or is it an illusion—perhaps the sound of cars instead?); ‘Auschwitz zwei Birkenau, take four’ / ‘Auschwitz zwei Birkenau, end of take four’ (silence). Photographs of air and sound. Separate. So little and yet so much. The dominant sensation is silence: the silence of the white in the large-format photographs and the silence recorded in spaces of death. The words ‘take three’, ‘four’ and ‘ten’ make us realise how much audio material the artist recorded in these dreadful places. We sense that she is presenting only fragments in the exhibition.

The experience of the Holocaust ‘[…] called into question’, Lawrence L. Langer wrote, ‘the liberating power of all systems of moral, social and religious values. Life shrouded in darkness rather than illuminated by sunshine—and this is unquestionably the legacy left by the extermination of Europe’s Jews—need not inevitably be devoid of hope; on the other hand, only someone lacking elementary sensitivity could rejoice at a return to absolute normality after a time of such chaos. In fact, one of the fundamental components of the Holocaust’s legacy is the helplessness of the words with which we attempt to describe it, for after events so abnormal all our definitions of normality appear barren and inadequate, since even such basic words as “chaos” are unable to convey, even approximately, the moral and spiritual anarchy of those sinister times’¹⁰. Where is the truth about that time concealed? In the colour slides of Genewein, the accountant and amateur photographer, or rather in Janicka’s black-and-white photographs, in The Odd Place, which we can interpret in the context of Adornian silence? Janicka opposes Genewein’s colours with black and white. Is art at all appropriate in the face of so unimaginable a catastrophe?

‘Totalism is nothingness. Nothingness cannot be described […] It can only,’ Andrzej Szczypiorski maintained, ‘be expressed through art, or one can attempt to express the impossibility of expression’¹¹. ‘Attempting to express the impossibility of expression’ is not the same as remaining silent, even in an ‘Adornian’ sense. If, as Andrzej Turowski wrote, ‘[…] it is impossible to persist in absolute silence (a scream is also a symptom of pain), then art after the Holocaust is ashamed of the words it utters’¹². In the face of so unimaginable an experience, art proves helpless—and somehow out of place. Following Doreet LeVitte Harten, we must ask: can one ‘translate pain into colour?’¹ And more importantly: ‘When confronted with such a subject, would devoting oneself to the pleasures of creation not become,’ as Maria Janion wrote, ‘something immoral and sinister?’¹⁴ Every artistic gesture—a gesture in relation to the Holocaust—must account for an awareness of numerous contradictions, thereby arousing doubt. ‘The first response to historical monstrosity is usually silence and breath-taking shock. In some cases, perhaps most, it is also the final response […]. To submit to the irrevocability of silence,’ Alvin H. Rosenfeld stated, ‘is to confirm, even against one’s will, the triumphant nihilism of Nazism’¹⁵. Successive generations of artists with no connection to that time address the reality of the world after Auschwitz. Why? Probably because, as Marek Edelman wrote, ‘the Holocaust continues to affect the human psyche […]’¹⁶. And perhaps because the Holocaust, as Eleonora Jedlińska stated, ‘[…] should never be incorporated into the normal course of history’¹⁷. And also because, as Rosenfeld observed, ‘The human imagination after Auschwitz is simply not the same as it was before. To put it differently, the very inclusion of the name “Auschwitz” within our vocabulary proves that we now know something we were previously incapable even of imagining’¹⁸.

Walter Genewein expressed the conviction that he had been only an ordinary accountant and amateur photographer working in a ‘small Jewish town’ whose life he recorded. The ‘small Jewish town’ no longer exists. Genewein’s slides remain. What can we capture today apart from air, apart from the emptiness in the places Elżbieta Janicka visited? In which direction should we point the lens? ‘Jonathan Webber associated the word Holocaust with tel olam—“the biblical expression for a place whose physical past should be erased for ever”. This means that the Holocaust should remain for us for ever an “empty place”; a place that we cannot’—Frank Ankersmit wrote in his excellent essay Remembering the Holocaust: Mourning and Melancholia—‘wish to appropriate or actually occupy in the manner in which the historian hopes to master or take possession of the past through metaphors. The discourse of memory is an “indexical” discourse: it draws attention to or indicates the past, surrounds it, but never attempts to penetrate it’¹⁹. In his reflections, Ankersmit invoked the approach of the Dutch poet Armando (real name Herman Dirk van Dodeweerd), who represents the Holocaust ‘[…] not by making easy and simple references to the crimes committed in the camps, but by blaming the landscape, the trees surrounding the concentration camps and the earth, which witnessed the atrocities and thereby became accomplices to the crime. In this instance, access to the Holocaust is more indexical and metonymic than metaphorical. Metonymy privileges simple proximity, respects all the unpredictable contingencies of our memories and, as such, is the very opposite of a proud metaphorical appropriation of reality. Metaphor lays claim to striking directly at the essence of things, while metonymy indicates a movement towards what happens and towards the contiguity of the event—and so on ad infinitum. Instead of forcing (past) reality into the matrices of metaphorical appropriation, metonymy has the quality of connecting a network of associations dependent upon our personal experiences with many other factors’²⁰. Silence. Birdsong. Rain. A cricket. Silence. A dog barking. Silence. It seems that in Janicka’s work, too, we can speak of metonymic contiguity rather than the metaphorical appropriation of reality. Relaxing sounds. Perhaps captivating then, and captivating today. A place for life in spaces of death?

‘Paradoxically, there are things in our shared past that we shall never assimilate and that should,’ Ankersmit wrote, ‘cause recurring and chronic illnesses and neuroses. There are aspects of our past of which one may rightly say that they have been healed; that so-called “normal” life has allowed the void they created in our collective mind to be filled once again; that we are able to live normally with them, although they have changed us into people whose future is burdened by the danger of a grim past recurring’²¹. He continued: ‘[…] we can properly “recall and reinterpret” traumatic events only insofar as we do not allow the wounds associated with them to heal. For these are wounds that should continue to hurt. Sometimes, in the life of a civilisation, illness is preferable to health’²². Ankersmit’s words resonate with Werner Weinberg’s: ‘There are wounds that do not heal, and this is because they must not be allowed to heal’²³. ‘Normal history can be’—Ewa Domańska wrote, invoking Ankersmit’s theory—‘absorbed and assimilated by us; traumatic history cannot. In this way, the traumatic past—whether our private past or that of a nation or culture—exists within us as a foreign body that we can neither assimilate nor expel’²⁴. The memory of the Holocaust resides within us precisely as a foreign body that can neither be assimilated nor expelled. Only art offers a chance—admittedly a slight one, but a chance nonetheless—to overcome trauma. And if not to ‘overcome’ it, then at least to experience the past in a way that, by evoking nostalgia and melancholy, sublimates pain into experience.

‘Powerful blows dealt to humanity, deep wounds of a moral nature, can be healed only in culture; irreparable acts can become, only in culture and through culture, not merely an absolving funeral rite but,’ Imre Kertész said, ‘even a value’²⁵.

Writing in the context of Christian Boltanski’s art, Piotr Piotrowski observed: ‘If we accept Frank Ankersmit’s interpretation of Holocaust memory, founded upon the Freudian distinction between melancholia and mourning, as a kind of necessity for “an illness, a psychic affliction from which we can never cease to suffer”—and therefore as melancholia—then Boltanski’s art may be said to be associated with precisely this kind of relationship to the past, one based on “melancholia”. Memory, however, can also become the subject of more critical artistic practices’²⁶. Piotrowski contrasted approaches founded upon ‘melancholia’ with Piotr Uklański’s exhibition The Nazis (2000) and Shimon Attie’s Kraków project Path of Fame (1996). In Piotrowski’s view: ‘For the earlier generation, Auschwitz was in a sense given—given more or less directly because of the living memory of the generation that survived the Shoah and the Second World War. For the second and third post-Holocaust generations, history is mediated to a considerable degree through what appears to these artists as their natural environment—mass culture and the mass media. What connects these generations, in turn, is the institution of Auschwitz: although changing, it nevertheless exists within a concrete space and as such leaves its mark upon the contemporary mind’²⁷. Artists such as Zbigniew Libera, Artur Żmijewski and Maciej Toporowicz employ strategies different from those of their predecessors a generation older. Their works are distinguished by a particular ambivalence. They subject to critical reflection the kind of memory of the Holocaust and Nazism that functions in popular social consciousness, the media and advertising, where authentic memory is displaced by a pop-cultural fiction of extraordinary communicative appeal. On the other hand, they attempt to deconstruct the kind of pathos characteristic of conventional narratives of the Holocaust. Elżbieta Janicka’s extraordinarily sensitive work The Odd Place, which in a sense exemplifies Ankersmit’s reflections, likewise appears to belong to this critical discourse. Janicka represents a distinctly critical position towards modernism’s Constructivist utopias. She expresses distrust and suspicion towards the language of art in general.

When routinely using AGFA photographic materials, we are unlikely to think about AGFA’s past, the dark history of I.G. Farben, the macabre connection between the economy and the Holocaust, or Genewein’s slides. Janicka invokes memory with extraordinary subtlety and suggestiveness, through an eloquent gesture. By focusing attention upon the carrier itself—upon the medium—she clearly draws upon the experience of Conceptualism. Conceptualism and… the Holocaust? Janicka consciously and consistently uses the achievements of Conceptualism and Minimal Art in the sense of visual borrowings and structural analogies, manifested in simplicity, austerity of form, discipline and restraint of language. At the same time, she turns the aims and ambitions of those tendencies inside out, thereby conducting a sophisticated game with the viewer. Abstract, modernist, Minimalist and Conceptual art is powerful art that rejects all weakness. It aspires to perfection and is pedantic; rational and assured, complacent in its perfectionism, even pompous. ‘The Minimalists’ declared aim was certainly,’ Stephen Bann wrote, ‘to purge every trace of anthropomorphism’²⁸. The artists of the 1990s drew the consequences of the lesson offered by Minimal Art while emphasising aspects that had lain beyond the tendency’s sphere of interest. Anthropomorphism returned, while formal rigour and economy of language were retained. The body, physicality and illness—that is, what the discourse of Minimal Art had rejected—moved to the centre of attention. Here one might indicate artists such as Mirosław Bałka, Antony Gormley, Doris Salcedo, Rachel Whiteread, Anish Kapoor and Peter Halley. In terms of meaning, the centre of gravity was thus in a sense reversed: away from the aesthetic questions that preoccupied modernism and towards an interest in aspects absent from the discourses of the time, while preserving the foundations of the visual language proper to Minimal Art. Post-Minimalism. Art emancipated theoretically from the modernist, Neo-Avant-Garde legacy, yet entering into dialogue with it on the visual plane. The final effect in terms of form is very similar, but something entirely different is at stake. In the project The Odd Place, Elżbieta Janicka touches the limits of language, finally bringing modernity—which had already been brought to an end by the extermination camps—to a close. Conceptualism à rebours.

Janicka used the medium to criticise the company that manufactures it. As Łukasz Ronduda observed, the artist ‘[…] combines the Minimalist (iconoclastic) tradition of representing the Holocaust with criticism of a contemporary German corporation that once helped organise the Holocaust (the artist does so by problematising the medium she uses; in this way, she reveals her indirect entanglement in the Holocaust caused by her use of equipment made by Agfa, a company that built its power through participation in the economy of the Holocaust’²⁹. It is also worth noting that, in the context of the exhibition at Atlas Sztuki in Łódź, her work constitutes a symbolic return to the city—the Litzmannstadt Ghetto—that Genewein recorded on AGFA materials. Janicka’s gesture is, in a sense, the reverse of Genewein’s. A remedy. An antidote.

AGFA to Genewein: We are sending you colour films from the latest series. The colour defects, including the excess of red, were caused by technological difficulties and should no longer occur. At the same time, please remit the amount due to our account.

1. E. Jedlińska, Sztuka po Holocauście [Art after the Holocaust], Łódź 2001, p. 5.
2. The words of Arnold Mostowicz and Walter Genewein used here and italicised—including Genewein’s correspondence with AGFA—are transcribed from the soundtrack of the documentary film Fotoamator [Photographer] (director: Dariusz Jabłoński; screenplay: Andrzej Bodek, Arnold Mostowicz and Dariusz Jabłoński; cinematography: Tomasz Michałowski; music: Michał Lorenc; editing: Milenia Fiedler; sound: Piotr Domaradzki; production design: Paweł Mirowski; production: Apple Film Production; co-production: Broadcast AV, Telewizja Polska, Canal+ Polska, the Polish Film Production Agency, MDR/ARTE and Canal+ France; support: EURIMA-GES, Open Society Found. and the Foundation for Polish–German Cooperation; Poland 1998; black-and-white and colour, 35 mm, 1,600 m, 56 min).
3. P. Levi, Czy to jest człowiek [If This Is a Man], Warsaw 1996, p. 79.
4. Ibid.
5. See P. Rawicz, Krew nieba [Blood from the Sky], Kraków 2003.
6. A. Cała, Czy Dmowskiemu należy się pomnik? [Does Dmowski Deserve a Monument?], Midrasz, no. 6 (110), June 2006, p. 13.
7. Dzieje Żydów w Polsce. Kalendarium [A Chronology of the History of Jews in Poland], Jewish Historical Institute in Poland, Warsaw 1993, pp. 122–123.
8. C. Lanzmann, Shoah (film screenplay), Koszalin 1993, p. 18.
9. G. Sereny, W stronę ciemności. Rozmowy z komendantem Treblinki [Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience], Warsaw 2002, p. 144.
10. L. L. Langer, Neutralizowanie Holokaustu [Neutralising the Holocaust], Literatura na Świecie, nos. 1–2/2004 (390–391), p. 142.
11. A. Szczypiorski, Totalizm [Totalism], in Gdzie jest brat twój, Abel? / Where Is Abel, Your Brother?, exhibition catalogue, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw 1995, p. 9.
12. A. Turowski, Budowniczowie świata. Z dziejów radykalnego modernizmu w sztuce polskiej [Builders of the World: From the History of Radical Modernism in Polish Art], Kraków 2000, p. 377.
13. See D. LeVitte Harten, Przekładanie bólu na kolor [Translating Pain into Colour], in Gdzie jest brat twój, Abel? / Where Is Abel, Your Brother?, exhibition catalogue, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw 1995.
14. M. Janion, Świadkowie, niewyrażalność i tragedia [Witnesses, Inexpressibility and Tragedy], Midrasz, no. 6 (62), June 2002, p. 48.
15. A. H. Rosenfeld, Podwójna śmierć. Rozważania o literaturze Holocaustu [A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature], Warsaw 2002, p. 245.
16. E. Jedlińska, Sztuka po Holocauście [Art after the Holocaust], Łódź 2001, p. 5.
17. Ibid., p. 22.
18. A. H. Rosenfeld, op. cit., p. 27.
19. F. Ankersmit, Pamiętając Holocaust: żałoba i melancholia [Remembering the Holocaust: Mourning and Melancholia], in Pamięć, etyka i historia. Angloamerykańska teoria historiografii lat dziewięćdziesiątych [Memory, Ethics and History: Anglo-American Theory of Historiography in the 1990s], anthology of translations, ed. Ewa Domańska, Poznań 2002, p. 166. See also F. Ankersmit, Pamiętając Holocaust: żałoba i melancholia [Remembering the Holocaust: Mourning and Melancholia], in Narracja, reprezentacja, doświadczenie. Studia z teorii historiografii [Narrative, Representation, Experience: Studies in the Theory of Historiography], Kraków 2004, pp. 403–426.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., p. 180. See also F. Ankersmit, Pamiętając Holocaust: żałoba i melancholia [Remembering the Holocaust: Mourning and Melancholia], op. cit., pp. 403–426.
22. Ibid., p. 181.
23. Quoted in A. H. Rosenfeld, op. cit., p. 84.
24. E. Domańska, Mikrohistorie. Spotkania w międzyświatach [Microhistories: Encounters in Between-Worlds], Poznań 1999, p. 115.
25. Przemawia przeze mnie Oświęcim. Z Imre Kertészem rozmawia Gábor T. Szántó [Auschwitz Speaks through Me: Gábor T. Szántó in Conversation with Imre Kertész], Midrasz, no. 2 (70), February 2003, p. 39.
26. P. Piotrowski, O „sztuce dziś”, a więc „tu i teraz”… [On ‘Art Today’, and Therefore ‘Here and Now’…], in Sztuka dzisiaj, Materiały Sesji Stowarzyszenia Historyków Sztuki [Art Today: Proceedings of a Session of the Association of Art Historians], ed. M. Poprzęcka, Warsaw 2002, p. 24; and Obraza uczuć. Odbiór sztuki krytycznej w Polsce [Offending Feelings: The Reception of Critical Art in Poland], ResPublica Nowa, no. 3/162, p. 43.
27. P. Piotrowski, Auschwitz versus Auschwitz, PRO MEMORIA, no. 20, January 2004, p. 22.
28. S. Bann, Wskrzeszenie Łazarza [The Raising of Lazarus], Obieg, no. 55/56 (11–12), 1993, p. 13.
29. Ł. Ronduda, Rozmawiajmy poważnie o projekcji „Wyobrażenia Holocaustu” [Let Us Talk Seriously about the Screening ‘Images of the Holocaust’], Obieg (www.obieg.pl), http://www.obieg.pl/calendar2006/kb_holokaust_video_art.php