By: Paul Eiss
On our journey, we have encountered many kinds of memorials and we have also witnessed and participated in commemorative acts, from reading testimonies of witnesses and survivors, to leaving pebbles atop the memorial stones of Treblinka, to lighting candles and saying kaddish for the dead.
There are many commemorative sites and structures at Majdanek, which we visited yesterday, beginning with the carefully conserved buildings of the camp itself, including its machinery of killing. But at Majdanek there is one substance which above all others is the material of remembrance: ashes.
The crematorium, a means of rendering human bodies into ash, still stands, as this death camp’s starkest marker. A sign inside the crematorium tells us that Majdanek’s Nazi personnel used that ash to fertilize their gardens, committing final act of brutality in making “use” of these remains.
The central memorial at Majdanek, the 1969 “Mausoleum”, consists of a dome positioned over a huge pile of ashes and bone fragments, the remains of thousands of people who were killed and then incinerated in this camp. There could be no more compelling depiction of genocide than this: many thousand people, once consisting of so many individual bodies, names and lives, are here converted into a single obscure, nameless mass. It is deprived even of its integrity as human remains, as the ashes are mixed with sand, pebbles, bits of glass, and other detritus.
Nearby stands a different memorial, also housing ashes. The “Column of the Three Eagles” is a crude pillar, topped with bird figures, which was constructed by several Polish Catholic political prisoners at Nazi orders in 1943. Unbeknownst to the guards and camp officials, the prisoners placed ashes from the crematorium within the monument. Presumably they meant those ashes to stand for the victims of this place, and for a humanity rendered nameless, unrecognizable. Yet in their hidden repositioning the ashes are set apart—located, placed, protected—in a way that seems to have prefigured the much larger mausoleum constructed decades later, with an ash pile of its own.
It is important to remember that in the Jewish religion cremation is expressly forbidden: the bodily integrity of the dead at the time of burial is of utmost concern. That lends a cruel irony to this place, whose principal memorials—all designed by non-Jews—attempt to honor, even sanctify the ashes of victims, most of them Jews, but in a way that seems to be contrary to Jewish traditions regarding the integrity of the bodies—and souls—of the dead.
And yet we should also recognize the significance and intent of a memorial form that seeks to repossess the ashes from the murderers, and thus to transform the material of utmost suffering and degradation, into a vehicle for protecting, even sanctifying, what remains.
