Social Justice Activism through Fantasizing Memory and Intimacy: Letters to a Murdered Jewish Child

• In Event: Memory and Denial

Abstract

Since 2005, on every April 19th, when Poland observes the “Day of Holocaust Remembrance and Counteracting Crimes against Humanity,” children from across Poland write letters to Henio Zytomirski, a 9-year-old Jewish child who was born in 1933 and lived in Lublin until he was murdered in Majdanek extermination camp in 1942. The project, “Letters to Henio,” which was developed and still carried on as an artistic and educational initiative by the “Grodzka Gate Gate–NN Theatre” located in Lublin—invites children and adults to write letters to Zytomirski who is not alive since World War II.
The individual letters address Zytomirski and are written in a personal style, in the second person and present tense, as common ordinary letters are written. They are sent to either his former residential address or the address of the location where his last picture was taken, by a Bank on the main street of Lublin. People who pass by the latter location on April 19th can find his picture there and a special mailbox for them to drop their letter to Zytomirski on the spot.
This paper examines the practice of memorialization through the “doing” of letter writing that includes a fantasy of intimacy and relationship with the dead that overcome distance of time, space, cultures, and guilt. While the letters will never be read by Zytomirski, this project invites people to the “doing of Jewish memory,” as I suggest, and embodies the realization of the void of Jewish life in Poland and the potential relationship to them. Additionally, “Letters to Henio” teaches us how memory is being created away from familiarity and knowledge, but through the minimality of artifacts, through strangeness, without being in the here and now of the (Holocaust) event and or experiencing the actual person—but through acting out a memory that one did not have had from before.
This project invites social justice practices in the streets of Lublin, where passers-by and students are invited to re-imagine, re-connect, re-look Jewish people and culture, through the individuality haunting case of Zytomirski. This work contributes to the scholarship of Holocaust memory and current antisemitism in times when the event of the Holocaust is told with (almost) non-living survivors.

Author

• Carolin Aronis, Colorado State University