Krakow: Bogdan Frymorgen
Statement
I was born 17 years after the end of World War II in a small Polish town, just a few kilometres from Auschwitz. Yet, throughout my childhood I was surrounded by a strange silence. No one talked about the Jews. It was a silence that made no sense. After all, they were our neighbours, friends and business partners. They were fellow Poles! It wasn’t just my grandparents who must have remembered but decided to keep quiet. My formal education failed in this respect too.
For eight years I went to a primary school named after Janusz Korczak. I was told he was a Polish doctor who died in Treblinka concentration camp along with the children from the orphanage he ran in Warsaw. I remember his pictures on the classroom walls. However, Korczak died not because he was a Pole. He died because he was a Jew. Somehow my teachers failed to mention that Janusz Korczak was Jewish, and that the children who died with him were Jewish too. My secondary school wasn’t much better. Even my history teacher neglected to tell the students that the school stood literally next to the site of a huge synagogue, destroyed by the Nazis. Deprived of any such knowledge and incapable of deciphering the signs of the disappeared culture that could still be seen around me, I reached adulthood in near total ignorance of the Holocaust. For instance what happened to the five thousand Jews that had lived in my home town? What remained of them? Where to look for traces of their history? I couldn’t answer these questions, because I didn’t know they should be asked. It was only when I started my University education in Krakow that the floodgates of knowledge opened.
I saw Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and nothing was ever the same again.
I felt betrayed and fooled. I raged inside at this conspiracy of silence. To my mind it was morally wrong. Thus, my fascination with Kazimierz began. Many years later, I started coming back to Krakow more often. At that time my friend, Chris Schwarz, was setting up the Galicia Jewish Museum in the old Jewish Quarter. We worked together on educational projects in the area and I had time to explore it in intimate detail. The photographs from Kazimierz without words were taken over the course of a few years beginning in 2006. Although evoking a distant era, they are contemporary... yet they don’t look new. I took a conscious decision as a photographer to prove that the connection with the past is still visible. Indeed, in many places little has changed since the 1940’s. At the same time, I became increasingly aware that the old Jewish Quarter was rapidly being gentrified. Although there were institutions and social movements that strived to preserve the memory of the Jews, the increasing number of bars, clubs and restaurants turned Kazimierz into a fashionable part of Krakow. The encroaching commercialization began to overshadow the memory of the past.
My camera tried to redress this imbalance. It filtered out the crowds of tourists and focused on the metaphorical emptiness of the place. When in 2011 I published Kazimierz without words I realized what an important role this project has played in my life. On a very personal level, it has exorcised the toxic silence which haunted me for many years. It completed the cycle of self-education and soul searching. The album has told a story that has to be told, with or without words, lest we forget.
© Bogdan Frymorgen 2012