Home as an Uncanny Site of Violence in Polish-Jewish Autobiographical Texts on the Holocaust

From Belonging to Domicide

On the eve of World War II, Jewish men, women, and children belonged in their hometowns, their neighborhoods, and their streets, tied to the physical space with their home addresses. This sense of belonging encompassed the physical place where they lived. The home was always situated somewhere, and its concrete location mattered deeply for the memory of all that was later lost. ⁹ Hence, numerous early testimonies specified the addresses on the eve of the war. Cesia Małka Landau noted that on 1 September 1939—the first day of the war—she lived with her husband, Icek Szlama Landau; two children; and a Catholic maid in Częstochowa at 19 Wolności Square. ¹⁰ “When the Germans arrived in our city in 1941, we lived at 48 Białostocki Street,” the teenager Lida Braun opened her testimony. ¹¹ In the case of smaller settlements, the authors still tried to locate their accounts in space, as did Fania Żorne, writing, “My parents had a farm in the village Dubie, 10 km from Brody.” ¹² This trope is not only characteristic of testimonies. A Yiddish poet, Avrom Zak, opened his 1944 poem Mayn Shvento-yerske . . . [My Święto jerska . . . ] with the following words: “My Święto jerska, twenty-eight, windows above trees: / my last, dear place and my last, very last rest.” ¹³ Addresses reflected the writer’s emotional attachment and possibly even a sense of being accepted as one of the locals. Recalling one’s fate in the Holocaust unfolded—however, fragmentarily—as a tale of the loss of that address or place and all those who called it a home.

Other survivors saw their home not as an address, but rather as a family living together or in close proximity, inscribing the author into the physical space of the town or neighborhood and the emotional network of familial relations. Amalia Bertgram opened her testimony stating “I come from Krakow” and proceeded to list a husband, child, parents, and eight siblings “in addition to the entire distant family” who all lived there before the war. ¹⁴ What she implied was her own and many other addresses where she felt at home, a space that had shaped her personal biography as a daughter, sister, and mother. Hence, homes were sites of belonging, where one lived with one’s family, where one had neighbors, where one was raised, played, worked, cooked, prayed, socialized, and celebrated family milestones and holidays.

Inevitably, these images are already haunted by the experiences of violation and loss. The experience is succinctly described in the opening paragraph of a memoir from Wilno (Vilna, today Vilnius in Lithuania) by Abraham Sutzkever, one of the greatest Yiddish poets of the twentieth century: “When I turned on the radio the morning of 22 June [1941], a hysterical German scream leapt out at me like a pack of lizards. From the clamour I realized that the German army had crossed the border. I darted outside, eager for a familiar face.” ¹⁵ Here, an everyday situation—turning the radio on in the morning—changes into a symbolical attack on the author’s intimate space. Sutzkever needs to leave his place in an attempt to restore the violated order of home. He goes out to meet somebody familiar and ultimately chooses to go to his mother’s apartment. The symbolical image of a pack of lizards augurs future physical violations.

Different authors choose different strategies to narrate this violation and transformation of home. Zak juxtaposes the above quoted image of a safe, quiet, beloved place with an image of ruin. The initial two lines are followed by the words “I left there [bay dir] everything, I left my heart and soul,/ I remained ruined, deserted—as ruined and deserted you are now.” ¹⁶ Together they form a stanza that is repeated at the end of the poem and frames the text. The repetition has a haunting effect and is also a marker of trauma. Whatever can be told about home—is always already fractured as is the identity of the poet.

A distinct strategy of juxtaposition also appears in Alter Ogien’s testimony where home is only featured as an implied site of belonging, togetherness, and safety. Ogien lived at 11 Smocza Street, in the heart of Jewish Warsaw. Narrating his encounter with German violence while in line for bread in November 1939, he notes that it was “impossible to show up on the street” for fear of being seized for forced labor and abused. ¹⁷ Thus, in the first weeks and months of the German occupation, in contrast to the danger of being outside, he found a sense of relative and temporary safety in the home he shared with his wife. He likely did not have to abandon his home to move to the ghetto. Until his escape from Warsaw, his testimony focused on the collective suffering, hunger, and misery.

This trope of home as a relatively safe place juxtaposed with the dangerous street is present in many texts narrating the first encounters with German violence. Abraham Sutzkever noted in his 1944 memoir Vilna Ghetto that in the first days after the German invasion,

There was barely a Jew on the streets . . . Most of the population had shuttered itself at home. New and sinister types appeared all over the town wearing armbands and carrying small rifles on their shoulders. Among them was a student I recognized from Vilnius University. ¹⁸

What Sutzkever’s memoir adds to Ogien’s insight is the representation of a radically and quickly changing cityscape. The city Sutzkever considered his own and people he knew suddenly become alien.

But home as juxtaposed with the street does not always offer a safe space or quickly ceases to do so. Rather than give Jewish women and men a shelter, home can become a trap and expose one to anti-Jewish violence. Ewa Szek—a young woman from Lublin, who before the war had worked helping her mother in a tailor shop—vividly remembered the arrival of the Germans in her town in September 1939. On 15 December 1939, Jews were registered for forced labor. When the registration was completed, Jews had to give away the keys to their stores. Szek recalled, “The Gestapo, with the help of the Polish population looted Jewish stores. Jewish apartments were also robbed, and people were beaten until they bled.” ¹⁹ In her testimony, Eugenia Gutsztadt recalled the exact time the German army marched into her native town of Radom in November 1939 in the early afternoon. What followed were the Germans’ assaults on Jewish shops and apartments, to which “the Aryan part of the population pointed them. Among those denouncing were many prostitutes.” ²⁰ Gutsztadt may have found relief by implicating these women in the domicide she witnessed. A pharmacist in Kołomyja (today Kolomyya in Ukraine), Marceli Najder recalled in his diary, windows in Jewish homes were broken as soon as the Soviets left the town: “Nobody went out to the street. Looting of apartments and homes began.” His apartment was broken into by Ukrainians and Poles and looted as well although “more respectable Ukrainian citizens were ashamed of the violence.” ²¹ Lida Braun remembered that on the third day, after the Germans had arrived in her town of Głębokie (today Hlybokaye in Belarus), “the Byelorussians incited the Germans and they took from our apartment all the clothes and kitchen equipment.” ²² Pesach Herzog testified that as early as the summer of 1941, in Tarnopol, “Germans and Ukrainians walked through Jewish homes and looted.” ²³ Even surviving the war and losing one’s family did not normalize that initial violation of the sanctity of one’s home. Ida Mazower lived in Wołkowysk where the Germans arrived after much of the city center had been destroyed by bombs on 23 June 1941. After the arrival of the Germans, they immediately began robbing Jewish stores and “even [purloined items from Jewish] private apartments.” ²⁴ Her own apartment was looted in early July, but, while the jewelry was taken, her money was left intact. She noted that “they [the Germans] entered the flat and hit my uncle who reacted to the uncovering of my bedridden aunt.” ²⁵ The violence occurring indoors was never only about material loss. Rather, it obliterated a sense of safety, which homes no longer provided and thus such violations proved particularly painful, even if nobody was hurt. Here Ida alluded also to the fact that in Jewish homes, parents could no longer protect their children, and husbands no longer could protect their wives.

Two elements in these accounts of first encounter with German violence are crucial: the violation of the home and betrayal by non-Jewish neighbors. Charlotta Klarfeld recalled how one man, Czesław Kasprowicz, who lived in the building she owned in Lwów at 30 Prądzyńskiego Street, “turned out to be a great lover of Germans and helped them in persecuting Jews.” Her family became an easy target for the man:

My husband was a Pole without religious affiliation [bezwyznaniowy]. All the neighbours knew that I am of Jewish descent. One day Czesław Kasprowicz appeared in my apartment with an “offer” that I should vacate [the apartment] as he wanted to grab it himself. When I categorically refused, he wanted to beat me up. I was spared only due to the presence of an acquaintance who was with me at the time. ²⁶

Kasprowicz’s threats could easily turn deadly:

Since I did not wear the armband with the Star of David, he threatened that he would report me to the Gestapo. Fearing his frequent blackmails, I left the house together with my husband and child, moving in with my family and naturally leaving behind my husband’s sister, who took over the function of running the house. ²⁷

Kasprowicz’s assault at and on the home resulted in the family fleeing it for temporary safety among Jewish relatives.

Abraham Sutzkever remembered the fear of anonymous Jew-snatchers: “My apartment was a wooden garret located on the second floor. It was wide open and undoubtedly would have been a target for searchers.” ²⁸ He explained, “Staying home put me at risk of being discovered by the Jew-snatchers.” ²⁹ That is why he very quickly decided to seek a hideout in his mother’s apartment. At first, he hid in the chimney and later under the sheet-metal roof. But it was ultimately their neighbor, named in the memoir, who launched the process of the destruction of home.

During that period [a hot July of 1941] I roasted in my hideout, I never left it, even at night. I fell ill while in hiding. . . . Mother whispered to me through a crack, begging me to leave so that I could take in some fresh air and allow my feverish body to recover. I allowed myself to be convinced only once. I slid out of my hiding place and found myself at home. It was a Friday night. Mother had already lit the Sabbath candles. The scent of lilac wafted through the window like an omen of peace. I partially undressed to wash myself. Ptashek [who had moved into the apartment below Sutzkevers’ that had belonged to a Jewish family] entered at that very moment. ³⁰

Sutzkever narrates here a failed attempt at a restitution of the home order through a family religious ritual (Shabes) centered on the figure of the mother as well as through everyday activities (washing). By joining his mother, Sutzkever seems to enter another spatio-temporal dimension. He is back home again. The moment the neighbor enters is thus symbolic, and the whole scene acquires a powerful metaphorical dimension. Ptashek does not respect the intimacy of the situation and starts talking to Sutzkever’s mother about his plan to take over their apartment when they move to the ghetto. Sutzkever’s mother ignores him and continues the ritual (blessing of the candles) without responding—in this way trying to protect her home against their neighbor’s violation. He leaves only quickly to return with a stormtrooper, destroying entirely the fragile order of the home that they had tried to rebuild. Ptashek indeed seized the apartment later.

In Klarfeld’s and Sutzkever’s accounts, the neighbors who violated their homes are named which is rare in other testimonies. ³¹ Klarfeld portrays Kasprowicz as a collaborator who also broke her family’s implied trust: they knew one another, interacted with one another before the war. For others, that memory may have been too painful or too problematic in a postwar account—but a sense of betrayal was implicit in the text. In Sutzkever’s case, the situation was different– Ptashek was a new neighbor who manifested his hatred toward Jews and not somebody the Sutzkevers knew intimately. In this case, no sense of betrayal could be implied.

Other testimonies mention sexualized and sexual violence perpetrated directly in Jewish homes. These acts accompanied smashing furniture and looting valuables and as such were usually implied rather than described directly. An anonymous female pianist from a middle-class Jewish family in Warsaw recalled that in the first months of the occupation,

[w]alking into Jewish homes began. Under a pretext of some “inspection” Ukrainian nationalists, who collaborated with the Germans, knocked on the doors—almost always drunk and looted, stole, undressed people naked, raped girls. Back then it was all awful, although it pales in comparison with what I experienced later. ³²

A few months later, her own apartment was violated when a Ukrainian with the Gestapo came in to view the flat. After a few days, he returned with several other men—all of them drunk and holding revolvers:

They made my father strip naked. I was in bed sick, one of them took a ring of my finger, but at the same time he kissed my hand. They kicked everyone out of the kitchen and went there with a young woman who was staying overnight with us. ³³

In her testimony, the survivor crossed this fragment out and remarked that she never found out what had happened, presumably that the young woman was raped.

Domicide and Jewish Things

The process of domicide both entails and engenders things: violated, traded, robbed, abandoned. This problem has recently become a prominent topic in the cultural history of the Holocaust that seek to consider non-human agents. ³⁴ In the process of domicide, things that were previously part of a stable order of home, a complex network of social, emotional, and spatial relations, partly lose their roles and acquire new ones.

Found in Jewish homes or taken on the road, objects could be both personal and familial, generic and imbued with meaning. Some were “Jewish” by provenance, used in daily lives or family celebrations, while others were by virtue of “birth,” as they performed religious functions and had easily identifiable “Jewish” character. When Jews left their homes to move to the ghettos or to escape when going into hiding, they took some of these objects, some carrying monetary and some of sentimental value, with them. Things became also a means of survival, since they could be traded for food or services. On the other hand, they also exposed their owners to the greed of non-Jews. Ultimately, these things—if they had not been stolen, sold, or lost earlier—the owners were forced to abandon during round-ups, arrests, deportation actions, and finally—in the death camps.

In Avrom Zak’s poem Shvento-yerske, things that constitute the very structure of home, such as furniture or walls, and are usually not immediately considered personal, are personified and represented as dear friends or family members:

I remember the eleventh day of December nineteen thirty-nine. / . . . Last look at the walls / Last silent kisses. Last, short talks with the close ones. / . . . I said goodbye to the bookcase, and the desk with manuscripts. / A last look at the paintings on the walls here—there. / A step towards the door and back again: / I want to take another look, say another word, and yet another.

The repetition and poet’s emphasis in the last lines express his emotional attachment to his home. Things here serve also as a synecdoche of a version of his prewar self that Zak had to abandon (the poem tells the story of the writer’s escape to the Soviet Union). More importantly, however, the elliptic structure of Zak’s phrase does not allow any differentiation between people and things—they became one.

Rachel Auerbach, a Polish-Yiddish writer and one of the three surviving members of the underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, was one of the first to recognize, on an analytical level, the role of things in the Holocaust. In her texts written after the Gross-Aktion in the ghetto, she remarked, “The tragedy and misery of things equals the tragedy and misery of people and at the same time is its faithful image and metaphor,” ³⁵ and “Death, destruction, disintegration of personality is also a destruction and disintegration of things.” ³⁶

Household things emerge as a prominent motif in texts that narrate the move to a ghetto. This move is a violation of the existing order. When people are forced to leave their homes, Abraham Sutzkever observes, it affects not only them but the very building they had just left. The writer describes the moment when Germans rounded up the inhabitants of Vilkomirer (Wiłkomierska) street to bring them to the ghetto. While the inhabitants wait in the courtyard, looking resignedly at the homes they had just lost, Sutzkever adds, “Even the buildings appeared bewildered. It was the first time in years that they were free of occupants. They no longer contained any warmth.” ³⁷ This image can be read as a metaphor of domicide seen from the side of the very materiality of home—deprived of people and their things, buildings lose warmth, start to die.

Writing about the move to the ghetto on 6 September 1941, Fajga Dimentman, a teacher from Wilno, visibly pregnant at the time, recalls,

A rumor spread that we were to be led to the ghetto. Nobody knew where that ghetto would be. We were prepared for the move. I lived with my husband at Piłsudski Street. From that area they began to take people out on a Saturday at noon. The street looked tragic: groups of Jews walked with packages on their heads. Everyone wanted to take as much as possible. People fell under the weight. Some packed things on wagons and into bathtubs and in that way tried to make the move easier. ³⁸

In these weighty packages was also a desire to rebuild home in a new place in a form as close as possible to its original model, which for most was to prove futile.

The move to the ghetto sometimes involved inhabiting sites that had belonged to non-Jews resettled out of the ghetto territory. Abraham Sutzkever gives a remarkable account of his first ghetto apartment that he quickly abandoned in search of his family:

We found an apartment on Lidske Street. We were naïve to think that we would be able to catch our breath there. The apartment was empty, but the belongings of its former [non-Jewish] inhabitants were scattered on the floor. Meat was being cured in a pot on a chair, a knife was sticking out of a loaf of bread, and an unfinished glass of tea that [Horst] Schweinberger interrupted the previous occupants was abandoned on the table.

I stretched out on a straw bed and gathered my thoughts. Where was I? Where was my wife? Where was Mother? ³⁹

Sutzkever’s account allows us to observe the uncanny nature of the move to the ghetto. He enters a site that is clearly defined by household objects as home. Yet, it has just ceased to be one and it looks more like a theater stage. Sutzkever seems to have carefully chosen the objects that focus his and the reader’s attention: meat, a knife, and an unfinished glass of tea. Indeed, he makes it look like a murder scene—a scene of a domicide. It is the loss of the actual owner and the decontextualization of the household things that produces the uncanny effect, and thus make it impossible for Suztkever to define the place he entered and intensify the feeling of non-belonging. He also has no means, that is, no things of his own, to inhabit the place.

If initially it was about taking everything possible, as Dimentman recalled, soon it became about choosing what to sell or what to take to another makeshift home. As the process of genocide advances, people decide to go into hiding, first in the ghetto, and later on the so-called Aryan side.

What people could take with them depended to a large extent on when individuals left their homes. The later Jews went into hiding, the less they still had in their possession and the less control they had over their possessions. What Jewish men, women, and children took to their bunkers, hid or left for safekeeping had primarily a practical role to play or to pay off blackmailers. ⁴⁰ Among practical objects, tools necessary in preparing hiding places made their imprint in the memory of survivors. Aside from these building tools, mentioned by men, testimonies take note of objects necessary for bringing food provisions into hiding places, such as potato sacks.

In most cases, there was no possibility of taking furniture or household items into the hiding places. The anonymous female pianist who was able to smuggle herself out of the Warsaw ghetto on 9 March 1943 commented, “Of course I could not take a single thing with me.” Hiding in Saska Kępa—a neighborhood in Warsaw east of the Vistula River—she was able to pay for her upkeep because her Polish friends sold her pictures and other possessions, and thus she could afford the rent and Aryan papers. ⁴¹

Therefore, whenever Jewish household goods could be removed from the home, they were given to non-Jewish neighbors for safekeeping. Only in some hideouts could families set up separate spaces for living quarters, cooking, and washing. In the vicinity of Borszczów (today Borshchiv in Ukraine), thirty-eight Jews hid together in caves, led by Esther Stermer. Her group took some furniture to the caves. ⁴² Quilts and pillows ranked among their most important possessions. She set up facilities in her hideout for washing, which helped to transform the cave into a home. ⁴³ Indeed, the daily routines centered on household objects seemed to give some resemblance of home. Especially when Jewish holidays approached, which brought back memories of family before the war, cleaning the hideouts helped to give its inhabitants a fleeting sense of home. In Żółkiew (today Zhovkva in Ukraine), as the High Holidays approached in September 1943, “[t]he women were cleaning the bunker as best as they could,” noted a teenager Clara Kramer, who hid in it together in a group of eighteen Jews, including her parents. ⁴⁴

Among the objects taken from home, only a few had a sentimental or religious value. Part of the material culture of hiding places consisted of Jewish ritual objects that provided the Jews with meaning and instruments that allowed them to continue their religious practice which, as we have seen in the previous section, was an important part of keeping or restoring some order of home. In Żółkiew, the Melmans were able to hide a Torah scroll in the bunker described by Kramer which they prepared for several family members. The scroll was used for prayer—effectively turning the bunker into a family shtibel, a prayer space organized in domestic space for close family members. ⁴⁵ The residents of the bunker ascribed supernatural powers to the Torah scroll in their possession. Survivors who had emerged from the hiding place when Żółkiew was liberated believed that the Torah protected the house in which they hid from burning down and therefore exposing their presence. In the cave, the group described by Esther Stermer followed the Jewish calendar and observed Jewish holidays. They also had a prayer book for the High Holidays. ⁴⁶ It helped them keep a semblance of normality by making religious practice possible.

As earlier with whole apartments, things taken with or left for safekeeping that were a part of the strategy of survival also exposed their owners to violence. Fajga Dimentman recalled that the move to ghetto was witnessed by the neighbors:

On the pavements, Aryans stood and looked at this tragic wandering. Some looked with a gaze full of mercy, others with sneers and curses, but the majority looked with jealousy at the Jewish bundles. Some Jews were not able to drag their packages any longer and left them behind on the street. The Aryans took advantage. ⁴⁷

The memory of a greedy gaze and hands all too happy to help themselves to Jewish packages on a Wilno street connects Dimentman’s account with the often-voiced belief that the majority of the country’s citizens should receive a larger share of resources and benefits. Now, this desire could be realized by the acquisition of Jewish homes and Jewish goods. Much as in the descriptions of looting carried out inside Jewish homes, the presence of Fajga’s non-Jewish neighbors and their active role in watching and profiting from the destruction of Jewish homes plays a central role in her memory.

The motif of greed for Jewish things figures prominently in an exceptional poetic document, a poem penned probably in the summer of 1942 in hiding by a remarkable Polish-Jewish poet, Zuzanna Ginczanka ⁴⁸ This poem, deeply embedded in the European and Polish literary tradition, has the form of a testament in which the poet bequeaths her possessions to the Polish concierge Zofia Chominowa of Lwów who had denounced her:

Non omnis moriar—my proud estate,

Meadows of my tablecloths, fortresses of indomitable wardrobes,

Spacious sheets, precious bedding

And dresses, light dresses will be left after me.

I did not leave any heir here,

So let your hand ferret out the J things,

Chominowa, of Lwów, brave wife of a snitch,

Sly informer, mother of a Volksdeutsch.

Let them serve you and yours, why should they serve strangers.

My dear ones—not a lute, not an empty name. ⁴⁹

Ginczanka’s poem ties her future demise (she was able to escape Lwów but was later arrested in Kraków and perished in the Płaszów camp) with the greed for Jewish things—objects that become easily available to former neighbors, acquaintances, and accidental onlookers. Calling her denouncer’s family ironically “dear ones,” Ginczanka is able to capture the paradoxical intimacy of violence. The use Ginczanka makes of the language that decontextualizes the meaning and the very form of testament brings about yet another side of the uncanny. She seems to willingly expose her personal objects to violence that is presented ironically as a ritual of mourning that happens in the intimacy of the home, between close ones:

Let my friends sit down with a goblet

And toast my funeral and their riches:

Kilims and tapestries, serving dishes, candlesticks—

Let them drink the night through, and at first light’s dawning

Let them search for precious stones and gold

In couches, mattresses, comforters and carpets.

O, how they will work, like a house on fire,

Skeins of horsehair and sea grass,

Clouds from torn pillows and feather beds apart

Will cling to their hands, will change both hands into wings; My blood will glue the oakum with fresh down

And will suddenly transform the winged to angels. ⁵⁰

As Bożena Shallcross remarked, “Giving her personal belongings and, by extension, the fragmented self imprinted in her dresses to her neighbor/murderers, the poet secures an uncanny victory.” ⁵¹ The strategy of irony helps the poet take possession of the belongings that brought death upon her, and at the same time regain symbolically the agency she was deprived of: “I remember you, and you, when the Schupo were coming, You also remembered me. Recalled also me.” ⁵² Ginczanka decides Chominowa’s fate as Chominowa had decided hers. The catalog of things that she constructs in the poem is not only a documentation of the objects precious to her but also becomes a powerful accusation of theft. In 1946, this catalog of objects that were looted by Chominowa served as an indictment in the trial where she and her son Marian stood accused. She was found guilty and sentenced to four years of prison. ⁵³

Whether destroyed in an act of violence, stolen from the owners, or abandoned by them on many an occasion unwillingly, the decontextualized household things have an uncanny character. Abraham Sutzkever recalled the moment, early in the occupation days of Wilno, when he returned home after being imprisoned, and he saw his mother’s things in the courtyard: “Shirts and blouses, inflated by the breeze, looked like ghosts.” ⁵⁴ Things that belong to the intimacy of one’s home are suddenly exposed and deprived of their usual function. However, Ginczanka’s poem shows us, as do some accounts of hiding, that the uncanny things could function also on a different level—to recontextualize the situation of violence and regain agency.

Coda: House of Dreams

The process of domicide affected not only the actual Jewish households but also Jewish dreams of them. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard remarked that our family home, distant or lost, becomes “more than just a memory. It becomes a house of dreams, our oneiric home” that evokes “the absolute intimacy” experienced at home, to which we can return in dreams, fantasies, or literature. ⁵⁵ In another text, he mentions that dreams allow for a participation “in the original warmth [of our family home], in this well-tempered matter of the material paradise. This is the environment in which the protective beings live.” ⁵⁶

The protective function of images of home resurfaces in different testimonies, as has been demonstrated by Jacek Leociak and Marta Janczewska. ⁵⁷ On her way to Umschlagplatz, Leokadia Schmidt imagines her previous life: “A faithful, loving husband and friend. Our work together. Our comfortable and cozy apartment, where everything we had had been bought with our hard-earned money, where every object was dear.” Daydreaming about home to survive, she is also able to destabilize the sense of the actual reality: “Perhaps [Umschlagplatz] is indeed just a dream that will end soon? Perhaps I will wake up in a moment in my old apartment in a clean bed?” ⁵⁸

However, dreams did not remain unaffected by the trauma of domicide. In the reality where “terror . . . pursues mankind even into sleep,” the absolute intimacy of the image of home proves to be impossible, and is always already infected with fear. ⁵⁹ This process is perhaps best represented in the writings of Rachel Auerbach. On 15 April 1942, Auerbach, then a prisoner in the Warsaw ghetto, wrote in her diary, “I start this entry, as I have done many times, with a dream I dreamt last night.” Trained in psychology and psychoanalysis, Auerbach used dream interpretation as a way to access and express the uncanny reality of the Holocaust. Sociologist Barbara Engelking describes Auerbach’s method as a classic Freudian labor of dream interpretation. ⁶⁰ Throughout her lifetime, Auerbach resorted to the interpretation of her dreams in moments of great anxiety and terror. In these dreams, images of her home—both her childhood home in Łanowce (Lanivtsi) in Eastern Galicia and her youthful home in Lwów (today Lviv in Ukraine) where her late brother’s family lived—often resurfaced and blended.

Spring 1942 was a time when more and more information about the extermination of Jewish communities reached the Warsaw ghetto. The 15th of April was just two days before the first organized terror action in the Warsaw ghetto when fifty-two people were murdered. In this time of great anxiety and fear, Auerbach’s dream takes her back home, something that, at first, seems to offer a promise of safety:

I remember two fragments [of the dream]. One—of optimistic nature, like a detail enlarged on a screen. The plump, still childish arm of my niece, Lusia, from Lwów. In a feathery light blue tiny frill of a patterned summer dress. Something exquisitely delicate, like the deep yellow fluff of newly-hatched chicks taken by their mother hen for their first walk, in the first warm, mild day after Pesach. ⁶¹

Through her cinematographic imagination and close description of a single detail, Auerbach is able to evoke home—close family, caring mother and her children, coming together for a holiday, intimacy, warmth, and tenderness. From a series of diminutives and adjectives connoting or evoking physical softness (plump, feathery, fluffy, mild), as well as brightness (light blue, yellow, summer dress), emerges an image of a safe space. However, upon interpreting the dream, this impression of safety is entirely deconstructed. Ultimately, the “optimistic” fragment of the dream turns into a source of anxiety and offers no relief. This is the moment when the image of home starts turning uncanny, or unheimlich, literally: un-homey. The first stage in this process is the injection of fear into a description of a place of “absolute intimacy” and safety. The home that Auerbach experiences in her dream is very fragile, and its inhabitants—evoked both through a detailed description of her niece’s arm and through the image of chicks and their mother-hen—delicate and defenseless:

The tenderness and a deep sorrow that accompany it [the dream] are my own contribution, a reminiscence of my longing for Selig’s children, my fear for them, and the horror [. . . ] connected with the news about the shooting of whole Jewish orphanages in Lublin and Tarnopol. Reports of this nature are proliferating, they come not only from the Reich, but also from the Gouvernement, from Galicia, from my Lwów. ⁶²

Through the enumeration and use of the possessive adjective in the last phrase, Auerbach is showing how terror is gradually moving closer to home, understood as Lwów in her dream, to finally conquer it. Here, Auerbach abandons the personal perspective and goes on to offer more general reflections about the reality of Holocaust:

Goodbye letters come from ever more numerous places, or letters begging for help written by those who managed to escape extermination and are now roaming from village to village, in the fields, in the forests, helped or blackmailed by peasants, experiencing the most fantastic fates. What used to be a rare experience, or a compilation of queer atrocities formed in the imagination of some writers, affects now the masses. [. . . ] All those Gräuelgeschichten [atrocity stories] from detective novels, all Conan Doyle’s ideas became phenomena of the everyday. There is only one difference—here, no miracle happens in the last moment, nobody unties Sherlock Holmes so that he can save, also in the last moment, an innocent victim from the most elaborately conceived death. Here each last moment comes to an end of each of its sixty seconds. No happy end follows. ⁶³

Auerbach often used references from literature and art as a framework to interpret the realities of the Holocaust. Here, she is trying to capture the process of the uprooting of the individual and the community from everyday reality, from the world as it was known to them. Thus, it is no mere accident that she evokes the gothic stories of Edgar Allan Poe, German tales of horror, or mystery stories where the motif of the uncanny figures prominently. The experience of the reality of the Holocaust is that of a nightmare that is then reworked in the dreams of the victims: “The nightmare of the day forms an ever-thicker deposit on the fluid of consciousness, and dreams cloud this deposit, acrid trails billow up, and surrealistic excesses condense a reality more improbable than the most improbable dream.” ⁶⁴

After a discussion of specific events or social phenomena from the time of mass extermination, Auerbach finishes the diary entry for 15 April 1942 with a description of the second fragment of the dream that she mentioned in the very opening. Again, in the dream she returns home, but this time it is not to Lwów, but to Łanowce, her birthplace. In contrast to the condensed evocation of Lwów that opened the account, this one is longer and devoid of any optimism. Łanowce in the dream is so un-heimlich, un-homey that Auerbach mentions the locale in parentheses, which may signal the unexpectedness of this pairing. Her oneiric home, or house of dreams, as Bachelard calls it, becomes an actual house of tortures:

In this dream I already suffered this fate. I was caught, tied with a rope, brought into some garden (the locale . . . Łanowce), and put in front of a den guarded by a huge dog. I was—so to speak—to “be devoured by animals.” Or maybe there were rabid dogs in the den, I thought to myself, and even if they don’t bite me to death, they will infect me with rabies. The horror and torture of this dream consisted above all in my attempts to come up with a way to rescue myself. Maybe something à la “Daniel in the lion’s den” will happen to me, after all you can lure dogs, mollify them. As I was just about to try this, this hound responded with an unclear growl. At the same time, I was frantically trying to decide, whether I should talk to the women who were working nearby. I was looking for some neutral words so that they, God forbid, would have nothing to denounce me for but also, if they were not “planted,” to convince them to untie and hide me. Doubts and this fear. It was a terrible torture and I woke up all covered in cold sweat. ⁶⁵

Auerbach’s interpretation of her ghetto dream is a characteristic exemplification of the process of deep transformation that the constructions of the victims’ homes underwent. ⁶⁶ Ultimately, her construction of home fails and brings no consolation. In the diary entry, this process is symbolized by the movement from the “optimistic fragment” and evocation of safe space to the closing fragment where Auerbach’s place of birth becomes totally alien and acquires the uncanny qualities of a mystery or mythical story. If there is some hope, it is not in the realm of remembering the lost family past, but in the realm of Jewish tradition (represented here by the biblical story of Daniel). Still, it is noteworthy that when she tries to imagine her own death for the first time in her ghetto diary, it happens in the site of her murdered home.

Conclusion

Autobiographies frequently feature the author’s understanding of home as an anchoring ground for the creation of the self. The intimacy of home was no different for Polish Jews facing the Holocaust. In the Jewish documents—testimonies, diaries, memoirs, and literary texts—their authors revisit their homes across time and space: from soothing memories of the prewar, through homes violated by looting Germans and non-Jewish neighbors, to the new tangible homes in the ghettos, created under duress in conditions of material deprivation and emotional distress, to a hiding place in barely habitable spaces. This process allows us to not only follow the physical peregrinations inherent in repeated expulsions but also the dynamic processes of de-domestication and futile domestication.

Homes defined and rooted Jewish women and men before the Holocaust and thus helped them think about the loss they experienced: loss of a place and loss of a family. At the same time, Jewish witnesses often recalled the murder of their own home inscribed into the domicide as an experience of other fellow Jews in their hometown. Hence, in the structure of those representations is embedded a contradiction that finds its expression in the discourse of the uncanny.

Ultimately, for survivors who returned, their homes are empty, haunted by ghosts, inhabitable, and yet an important part of their fractured, post-traumatic identity:

A lonely abandoned house

On a hill in a small village

Why are you so quiet? Why

so much sorrow, sadness and pain[.]

Do you miss me, feel bad without me?

You should know that my soul

Sends her thoughts toward you

No matter if we come back here or not. ⁶⁷