Minority Forensics: Survivor-Led Exhumations and Violence against the Dead in Early Post-Holocaust Poland

• In Event: Responses of Eastern European Holocaust Survivors to Liberation, 1944/1945

Abstract

The Holocaust left behind countless bodies – bodies dispersed across the Eastern European execution sites, former Nazi camps, repurposed Jewish cemeteries; bodies hastily buried at the outskirts of the former shtetls, in the forest, meadows, and along railway lines. This paper traces the early postwar attempts by various actors to contain and respond to the material (omni)presence of dead bodies. It engages with still largely under-researched endeavors by Jewish survivors to recover, exhume and rebury human remains of the victims of the Holocaust, but also takes a closer look at practices instantiating and perpetuating their dehumanization: the mutilation and robbery of the dead by the local non-Jewish populace, and their abandonment by the state.

Author

• Zuzanna Dziuban, Austrian Academy of Sciences (Austria)