“Birdless Sky”. On one of the topoi in Lager literature (and its fringes)

A C T A U N I V E R S I T AT I S L O D Z I E N S I S FOLIA LITTERARIA POLONICA 8(46) 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/1505-9057.46.08 Piotr Krupiński* “Birdless Sky”. On one of the topoi in Lager literature (and its fringes) How is it... Remember... Birds are flying in late fall... Long long flocks. Our artillery and the Germans’ is firing, and they’re flying. How to call out to them? How to warn them: “Not here! There’s shooting here!” How?! The birds are falling, falling to the ground... S. Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War1 I could define the task I have undertaken in this study as a special type of archaeology. One which, being supported by the moving foundation of re-reading selected Lager accounts, will attempt to recreate – as much as possible – one of the aspects of the sense of the world of the people interned behind the wires of German concentration camps (as my study will be devoted mostly to KLs). When engaging in my search, I would like to direct the vector of attention towards that which for understandable reasons has remained less, if at all, exposed. From the very first moments upon the liberation of the Lagers (or even prior to that) historians who studied the concentration universe were forced to “secure the traces”, or, in other words, with the utmost care recreate the origins of Nazi concentration camps, and mass extermination camps, their internal organisation, and, most of all, the living and dying conditions of the male and female internees. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that within thus designed reconstruction, a detailed analysis should apply to the system of violence, the catalogue of regulation and non-regulation penalties and harassment to which the internees were subjected, the issue of food or rather starvation camp rations, clothing available to the camp population, as well as the conditions of the accommodation they were forced to endure. Bearing in mind those intersecting areas which utterly determined the Lager fate, in my discussion, as I have indicated, I shall attempt to raise the topic which * Associate Professor; Chair of 19th Century Polish Literature and Culture, Institute of Polish Studies and Culture Studies, Faculty of Philology, University of Szczecin; . 1 S. Alexievich, Wojna nie ma w sobie nic z kobiety, trans. J. Czech, Wołowiec 2015, p. 148. [English version: Alexievich, S. The Unwomanly Face of War. New York 2017] 168 Piotr Krupiński until now has been absent, or was found at the farthest reaches of historical and literary history reflection on camp writings. I could state that I, being a researcher of this extremely diverse literary constellation, have been faced with a paradoxical challenge; in trying to add another element to the slowly emerging glossary of the topics of Lager and Holocaust writings2 (even though those areas are disjunctive, “their division line is not one which is easily defined”),3 I intend to focus not on that which is in literature, but on that which exists as a lack of something, a gap, the only rarely exposed reverse side. In continuing the paradox game, I shall stress once more that I shall be intrigued by the intense presence of absence, “active fading”,4 because that is how, to put it concisely, one should understand the title “empty sky”, “birdless sky”, a sky which became speechless and silent... I. Where birds do not sing? That peculiar figure in Lager literature reappears with surprising regularity; it can be found – it even appeared twice in the titles! – i.a. in the recollections of Seweryna Szmaglewska, Zofia Posmysz, Karolina Lanckorońska, Danuta Brzosko-Mędryk, and Janina Fabierkiewicz-Szyrkowa. I shall quote two examples in this text: The corpses of the executed were burnt in the crematorium, which was adjacent to the high, probably five-metre-tall wall which surrounded the camp. The stack of the crematorium was higher than the wall, and the wind blew the smoke between the blocks – a reddish sickly smoke reeking of burnt bone. The stench has remained with me ever since. I think it scared off birds, because what other reason could there be for there not to ever be a bunch of quarrelling sparrows or swishing swallows? Sometimes there would only appear falcons circling high above, as if a symbol of our masters. And the camp was located between forests, on a lake, and it would seem that there should be a multitude of the winged crowd; even more so that there was enough refuse in our “town” of fifty thousand;5 So when this part of the camp was overcome by the lunch silence, we sneaked out through the kitchen exit, and we dropped in a tuft of weed and sharp grass where blooming sow thistles yellowed as if scattered school paints. 2 I am referring to the studies conducted by Sławomir Buryła (vide ibid., “Topika Holokaustu. Wstępne rozpoznanie”, in: Wokół Zagłady. Szkice o literaturze Holokaustu, Krakow 2016; Tematy [nie]opisane, Krakow 2013; “Pociągi śmierci – kilka uwag o konstrukcji hasła słownikowego”, Narracje o Zagładzie 2016, issue 2), and the Holocaust Remembrance Research Team, Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw (vide Ślady Holokaustu w imaginarium kultury polskiej, J. Kowalska-Leder [et al.] (eds.), Warsaw 2017). The Holocaust topoi was also the main theme of the monographic issue of Narracje o Zagładzie (2016, issue 2). 3 S. Buryła, “Monografia po latach”, Teksty Drugie 2009, issue 5, p. 104. 4 I borrowed Jean Baudrillard’s concept. Vide ibid., Spisek sztuki, foreword S. Lotringer, trans. S. Królak, Warsaw 2006, p. 46. [English version translated from Polish] 5 J. Fabierkiewicz-Szyrkowa, Gdzie nie śpiewały ptaki, Warsaw 1972, pp. 86–87. [English version translated from Polish] “Birdless Sky”. On one of the topoi in Lager literature (and its fringes) 169 We lay there without lifting our heads so that the Germans couldn’t see us, and we took in the tangy scent of the herbs. I suddenly recalled, somewhere there still must be some meadows full of soft grass, kingcups, and fuzzy intoxicating wild carnations buzzing with bees and bumblebees. Yet I sought to no avail the scent of the earth, even though in Majdanek we dug it over deeply many times, still flinging out shovels. It did not smell of a good life-giving soil. It was dry, without its oily shine, as if it was also drained of life, becoming barren. And the sky above it without any birds which would be seeking food to no avail.6 Already at this stage of the discussion it should be stressed that, first of all, it was women who more often indicated that special feature of the “stone world”, and, secondly, note that the listed authors were interned at different camps: Birkenau, Majdanek, Ravensbrück, which clearly suggests that the phenomenon stated above was of a supra-local nature, and was independent of such objective, it would seem, factors as the relief or the broadly understood natural conditions, in which the Germans decided to locate specific camps. Yet the issue being discussed (...truncated)