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The Muselmann and the Necrotopography of a

Ghetto

Bożena Shallcross

To cite this article: Bożena Shallcross (2020) The Muselmann and the Necrotopography of a
Ghetto, The Journal of Holocaust Research, 34:3, 220-240, DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1785089

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THE JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH
2020, VOL. 34, NO. 3, 220–240
https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2020.1785089

The Muselmann and the Necrotopography of a Ghetto

Bożena Shallcross
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article revises the status, function, linguistic origin, and Ghostly appearances; hostile
experiential meaning of the emaciated figure of the Muselmann spaces; isolation; Muselmann;
through a reading of Holocaust diaries, archival photography, as necrotopography; starvation
well as the post-Holocaust literature; the reading establishes
certain similarities between the Muselmann and other victims of
Nazi genocide. It reconstructs necrotopography as a common
denominator of diverse Holocaust hostile spaces of confinement,
in which dead bodies constitute the terrain’s main features.
The article purports that death in the necrotopograhic spaces
was caused by starvation and exploitation as well as by
solitude and isolation. For a contemporary reader/viewer,
necrotopography represents the return of the Holocaust affect in
its most visceral way.

The song of hunger … a sort of choir recital that will forever remain engraved in the memory
of those who will be fortunate enough to survive.
—Rachel Auerbach

The figure of the Muselmann is traditionally considered to be a product solely of the Nazi
concentration camp system, its lowest ranked prisoner, starved, and doomed for the gas
chamber. Necrotopography defines Holocaust spaces – both those of the Lager and of
the wartime ghetto – as saturated with the presence of either dying, or already dead,
people. Answering the question of what connects the parallel realities of death connoted
by these terms sets the trajectory of this article. They appear here in close encounters and
this proximity constitutes a new and critical perspective that demonstrates the inade-
quacy of the complete conceptual separation of the Lager and the ghetto spaces, along
with the people who lived (and died) there. For they had, in fact, impacted each
other, often adversely, functioning together to co-create a wartime ecology of the
zones of exclusion. My intention here is not to superimpose the figure of the Muselmann
onto that of a ghetto prisoner, but rather to reveal their common denominators – the
mechanism of hunger and isolation in a hostile place of confinement. Such an operation
is necessary if the Holocaust discourse is to retrieve its true affective dimension from the
past. In so doing, this article contributes to several directions of Holocaust discourse: it
counters the reduction of the Muselmann figure to that of an ‘impossible Holocaust
metaphor’ by indicating the point of no return through a medical understanding of

CONTACT Bożena Shallcross bshallcr@uchicago.edu Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, The Uni-
versity of Chicago, 1130 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
© 2020 The Wiess-Livnat International Center for Holocaust Research and Education at the University of Haifa.
 THE JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH 221

starvation;1 it offers the concept of necrotopography to our understanding of the Holo-

caust space, thereby delineating one of its major components, the hostile sphere of iso-
lation as captured in archival photographs and autobiographical writings, and regarding
the latter, it probes hauntological, post-human rhetoric.

Muselmann and the concept of necrotopography

As an anthropological category, the Muselmann belongs to the entrenched stock of Holo-
caust figures. Yet the figure of the Muselmann was identified as an outcast prisoner in the
concentration camp system of Konzentrationslager (KL) Buchenwald quite early, before
World War II. Recently, Jill Jarvis reconstructed the origin of the word, but not its use
as a slur.2 Although always derogatory and xenophobic,3 the slur’s origin explains why
it never functioned in the ghettos. In brief, like the majority of words in KL prisoners’
slang, it derived from the German language. More specifically, as the Polish linguist
Danuta Wesołowska asserts, it emerged from Berlin’s criminal milieu in pre-Hitlerite
Germany, probably at the turn of the previous century.4 The camps usually recruited
their low-level management (such as the kapos) from among German criminals, who
then disseminated their slang there, while the different operating and punitive system
of power in the ghettos did not allow for the slang’s emergence and circulation.5 In the
totalitarian system of the Konzentrationslager ruled by brutal strength and violence,
weak and emaciated prisoners were despised and referred to by a name that expressed
this contempt.
The semantics of the name Muselmann are continually revised. Holocaust discourse
frequently relies on a basic differentiation between inmates who resisted the camp
system and the Muselmänner, meaning those who lost the capacity for such resistance,

1
I refer here to Sharon B. Oster’s understanding of the Muselmann as a temporary condition that many prisoners experi-
enced and claimed afterward, thus survived. Oster does not see the Muselmann’s condition as exceptional, but rather as
similar to the whole spectrum of near-death states experienced by other prisoners. The medical data proves, however,
that there existed ‘the point of no return’ for emaciated prisoners: the swelling of their legs and feet was symptomatic of
such a stage, as well as the irrevocably damaged internal organs. See Sharon B. Oster, “Impossible Holocaust Metaphors:
The Muselmann,” Prooftext: A Journal of Jewish History, vol. 34, no. 3 (2014): pp. 302–348.
2
Jill Jarvis scrutinizes Agamben’s blindsided reading of the word Muselmann as omitting completely its origin in Oriental-
ism, especially, in its French colonial context. While her contextualization of the term presents a valuable contribution to
the discourse, Jarvis does not seek an answer to the critical question how (or whether at all) the French colonial etymol-
ogy of the term was transferred to the German concentration camps. (The word circulated in the camps as a German
transfer.) Moreover, she states that no one ever analyzed the etymology of the word Muselmann; if so, this would
make her article the first scholarly attempt to do so. Jill Jarvis, “Remnants of Muslims: Reading Agamben’s Silence,”
New Literary History, vol. 45, no. 4 (Autumn 2014): pp. 707–728. In fact, after the war two linguists, Witold Doroszewski
and Mojżesz Altbauer, authored the first linguistic examinations of the term. See Witold Doroszewski, “O wyrazie muzuł-
man,” Rozmowy o języku, 4 (1948): pp. 85–92; and Mojżesz Altbauer, “Przyczynki do słownictwa wojennego: Muzułman z
niem. Muselmann,” Język Polski, vol. 30, no. 3 (1950): pp. 84–87. More about Altbauer in Rafał Żebrowski, “Altbauer
Mojżesz (Mosze),” Polski słownik judaistyczny [Polish Judaic dictionary], http://www.jhi.pl/psj/; accessed May 21, 2020.
3
See, for example, Bruno Bettelheim’s publications, in particular the 1943 article “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme
Situations,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 38 (1943): pp. 417–452. Bettelheim, who was imprisoned in KL
Buchenwald, had firsthand experience in this matter.
4
Danuta Wesołowska, Słowa z piekieł rodem: Lagerszpracha (Cracow: Impuls, 1996), p. 93. She writes that lagerszpracha was
‘an entirely new linguistic convention or rather a collection of linguistic conventions,’ based on the German language,
which was the reason why ‘prisoners did not easily identify with them,’ Wesołowska, Słowa z piekieł rodem, p. 63. Lagersz-
pracha, literally ‘camp language,’ was a distorted German word adapted to the Polish language. Wesołowska makes refer-
ences to Altbauer’s article.
5
Besides the Nazi military and auxiliary units, there were Jewish police units, also formed in other Nazi ghettos, whose
members were responsible for maintaining order.
222 B. SHALLCROSS

thus conflating this identity with the lack of resistance.6 The reality behind the name
Muselmann calls for a revision of this concept insofar as it separates the spaces of confine-
ment defined by the Nazi administration’s nomenclature as concentration camps, labor
camps, or ghettos from the experience of dying. I want to point out two significant
phases in the history of this discourse: the first, matter-of-fact references to Muselmänner
as outcasts who lost their will to live as found in the writings of inmates who observed or
experienced earlier stages of the phenomenon, and the second, much later, mystifying and
elevating hermeneutics of this rank of a prisoner as the ultimate, paradoxical witness as
presented in Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive.7
In the several decades between those initial descriptions signaling and documenting the
historical existence of the figure and Agamben’s perspective, ongoing medical, psychologi-
cal, and historical research has enriched and shaped our understanding of this conceptual
idiom. In the context of my inquiries, the interdisciplinary periodical Przegląd Lekarski-
Oświęcim (Medical review wAuschwitz) has proved to be an exceptionally useful
source, despite being insufficiently known, of systematic and sustained, high-quality
research.8
The continuing impact of Agamben’s formulation is visible in recent interventions to
the discourse that engage far-reaching consequences of biopolitics fused with new
animism, as exemplified by Ewa Domańska’s research. In her book Nekros: Wprowadzenie
do ontologii martwego ciała (Nekros: An introduction to the ontology of the dead body),9
Domańska perceives the Muselmann as an extreme bio-political outcome of the camps’
system of control over prisoners and their bodies. Through the perspective of this
dying, passive, and ultimately annihilated castaway, she posits the question of what it
means to be biologically human and points to the need, or will, of biological belonging
to humanity as her answer. Postulating her ontology of bodily remains, the author opts
to annul the strict opposition between life and death in a way that is both post-secular
and animistic. Domańska names this cipher of the post-secular material eschatology as
the homo necros. This category is limited in its application here, however, since my under-
standing of necrology differs from Domańska’s in not including a humic/organic perspec-
tive on human remains.
I will not argue against or in favor of her conception of the Muselmann as homo necros
here. My analysis of archival photographs, diaries, and medical and forensic accounts fore-
grounds the phenomenon of the Muselmann as medical on the one hand, and as deeply
affective to the contemporary viewer/reader on the other. It is my contention that
certain variations and approximations of the figure of the Muselmann existed in the

6
It is helpful to note at the beginning of this inquiry Tadeusz Borowski’s understated description of the Muselmann’s con-
dition of finality in his ‘Określenia oświęcimskie’ [Auschwitz camp terminology], which the Polish writer and Holocaust
survivor compiled for the publication We Were in Auschwitz. Tadeusz Borowski, Janusz Nel Siedlecki, Krystyn Olszewski,
We Were in Auschwitz, trans. Alicia Nitecki (New York: Welcome Rain Publisher, 2000). The authors wrote the book in a DP
camp near Munich and published it in 1946. Borowski writes: ‘Muzulman [sic] … a physically and mentally totally
depleted human being who no longer had the strength or the will to fight for his life,’ Borowski et al., We Were in Ausch-
witz, p. 192. Borowski (and subsequently his translator) used the shortened slang version muzułman as it functioned in
Auschwitz instead of the correct Polish form muzułmanin.
7
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazer (New York: Zone Book,
2002).
8
Przegląd Lekarski-Oświęcim is also known as Zeszyty Oświęcimskie [The Auschwitz notebooks]. The periodical has become
more accessible since the 1980s, appearing also in the German language and, more recently, in English; Zeszyty Oświę-
cimskie (OCoLC)630080249.
9
Ewa Domańska, Nekros: Wprowadzenie do ontologii martwego ciała (Warsaw: PWN, 2017).
 THE JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH 223

realm of the ghettos and that this existence was not just extraordinarily brutal in a physical
sense, but made additionally unbearable by the perfectly sealed walls of loneliness in which
one found ‘no one to extend his helping hand.’10

Of antisemitic spaces for Jews

Unlike the much older term Muselmann, the second operative term of necrotopography is
of my coinage, and combines the Greek word nekrós – meaning a dead person, a corpse, or
being dead (adjective) – with topography, namely the characteristic features of a terrain.
Viewing the ghetto’s necrotopography solely as a spatial category – a sort of a background
or a stage where death dominates and becomes a spectacle – would be a limitation verging
on misunderstanding. As a type of space, necrotopography is endowed with an agency that
is hostile and fatal to those confined within, but it is also a fluid, temporal phenomenon
marked by multiple processes that occurred there.11 In the case of the Warsaw Ghetto, for
instance, it was the Jewish neighborhood of Muranów that was transformed from a prewar
ethnoscape to the wartime space of exclusion for Jews and, ultimately, into a necrotopo-
graphic zone.
The spaces of the Holocaust, many of which were spaces of exception, were intimately
connected with the victims forced to suffer there.12 There existed similarities between the
extreme conditions of the Nazi concentration camps and sealed-off wartime ghettos
(mainly of Warschau and Litzmanstadt) that produced parallel iterations of the impossible
life of the Muselmann, not limited to (and by) the KL locations and boundaries, as well as
the KL administrative systems. As tight, walled-in spaces, the ghettos facilitated labor
exploitation and allowed control over the Jewish population, as well as diverse forms of
extreme violence, which included deportations and death squads, often implemented as
collective punishment.13
The basic facts about the living conditions in the ghettos are still shocking in their affect.
For example, in Warsaw, approximately 460,000 Jews were confined in an area of 1.3
square miles, which averages 7.2 persons per one room of inadequate quality, to say the
least.14 The homes in the ghetto could not provide either privacy or shelter, since
people were often killed in their flats during looting or other forms of brutal intervention.
The Germans set the food ration for Jews at 181 calories a day so that even numerous
counter-initiatives, such as soup kitchens and other individual philanthropic gestures,
could not prevent massive hunger.
10
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz. The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 88.
11
Following Henri Lefebvre, I hold that the ‘space is a social product … and a means of control, thus of domination, of
power.’ I would add to this list violence, which is an unavoidable consequence of the perversion of power. See Henri
Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 26.
12
The German jurist Carl Schmitt theorized the geopolitical relationship between power and space in both his prewar and
postwar writing, for example, in his Dialogues on Power and Space, trans. Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, Andreas Kalyvas, and
Federico Finchelstein (eds.) (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015) related to Cold War geopolitics. Derek Gregory introduced
the notion of the space of exception as derivative of Schmitt’s state of exception that connotes the sovereign ability to
transcend the rule of law for the sake of public good. See Derek Gregory, “The Black Flag: Guantanamo Bay and the Space
of Exception,” NGV Triennial Voices, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition_post/the-black-flag-guantanamo-bay-and-
the-state-of-exception, last accessed May 21, 2020.
13
As Anja Nowak shows in her dissertation, one of the main tools of the brutalization and destruction of the Jewish people
was exactly the manipulation of their space. See Anja Nowak, “The Spatial Configurations of the Warsaw Ghetto: Selected
Aspects of Jewish Space and Nazi Policies,” Ph.D. diss., University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, 2018.
14
Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Warsaw,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/
en/article/warsaw; last accessed May 21, 2020.
224 B. SHALLCROSS

The ghettoization process in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto shared some similarities with
the Warsaw Ghetto, although it was the last to be closed, in 1944. At one point, the
entire population of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto – roughly about 164,000 people – was
forced to live in an area of 1.5 square miles. This seemed better than the conditions in
the ghettoized part of Warsaw, but unfortunately for the victims only just over half of
the space was habitable. This deliberately enforced shortage of space was necessary to
efficiently command and control the population. Yet, the tight space alone did not kill;
rather, it made killing easier to organize and enact. Such space turned upside down the
notion of the everyday and, therefore, the chances of survival. Ultimately, space, once
an instrument of violence, was changed into a tool of annihilation and became equal in
its telos and function with labor and concentration camps.
Tim Cole argues that ghettoization was, partially, ‘an act of urban planning.’15 Cole
judiciously studied the case of the Budapest Ghetto formation and his finding are persua-
sive, yet of a limited use for the discussion of both Warsaw and Litzmannstadt Ghettos.
The Budapest ghetto, which existed only from November 29, 1944, to January 17,
1945,16 represents a case in itself, separate and incomparable to the other wartime
ghettos. Its original space, architecture, and infrastructure were not modified to any
greater extent; even its walls were only partially constructed of barbed wire, because the
existing buildings’ walls were used to demarcate its boundaries. And yet, during its
two-month history, a necrotopographic space was developed there: no food deliveries
were allowed inside the ghetto to induce starvation, its streets and storefronts were full
of uncollected dead bodies, debris, and waste.
Historically, even those urban planners who were not seduced by the concept of ideal
cities, tended to layout places that had a modicum of convenience and safety for their inhabi-
tants. Urban planning had to take into consideration such objectives as sanitation, communi-
cation, defense, and the efficient use of the environment. Medieval towns, to use another
concrete example, protected residents from invasions in times of war through walls of
defense, but the walls and fences that encircled wartime ghettos did not protect those
squeezed inside; instead, these boundaries functioned in reverse to prevent the inhabitants
from any contact with the outside, especially, from smuggling food or fleeing. Cole’s parallel
with urban planning is relevant if one considers the fact that wartime ghettos were initially
grafted onto the existing urban grid and infrastructure, which the Nazi planners inherited
and modified for their own genocidal objectives. The Nazi planning perverted the original
sites through the architectural elements such as brick walls, watchtowers, gates etc., whose
function was not to serve the inhabitants’ welfare, but was an instrument of their persecution.
One could point out other analogies between the ghetto and camp spaces, especially as
they both evolved and were constant works-in-progress, shaped by the makeshift
‘improvements’ required by subsequent stages of escalating annihilation and the
growing number of prisoner populations. Auschwitz was gradually extended far beyond
the original infrastructure.17 The walls of the Warsaw Ghetto were redrawn and moved
15
Tim Cole, Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 2.
16
The Budapest Ghetto was created by a decree of the Royal Hungarian Government; the Nazi occupation of Budapest
started in March of 1944.
17
In the case of KL Auschwitz, the existing Polish military barracks were utilized; the old Jewish neighborhood was chosen
as the location of the Warsaw Ghetto; and Theresienstadt is another case in point. The tight spaces inside the barracks in
Dachau or Auschwitz were so rudimentary and uniform that, over the years, the barracks became the symbol of the built-
in environment of totalitarianism.
 THE JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH 225

several times; at the end, its territory was drastically reduced and it was turned into a huge
labor camp.18 Parallels to urban planning lost their sense and purpose when the ghetto
inhabitants were moved into smaller spaces – absurdly constricted, unheated, dirty,
devoid of all comforts, ruined and looted spaces of bare life.
The ghetto streets thus turned into a stage for death brought on not only by the bullet or
the cudgel, but also by hunger: in the Warsaw Ghetto alone, about 83,000 Jews died of star-
vation and disease between 1940 and mid-1942.19 Emanuel Ringelblum, one of the
Warsaw Ghetto’s diarists,20 noted how the growing number of dead became the stuff of
the everyday: ‘Almost daily people are falling dead or unconscious in the middle of the
street. It no longer makes so direct an impression.’21 It is such conditions that produced
the necrotopographic zone: dead and dying people collapsing suddenly and everywhere –
in alleys, passageways, courtyards, gates, squares, or on sidewalks – and becoming a
common, visible, and unavoidable physical presence that defies all past connotations of
the public space.22

Corporeity and starvation in photographs from the Warsaw Ghetto

The phase that brought the ghetto inhabitants close to Muselmanization23 is given visual form
in the photograph below. The young and pitiful beggar wearing tatters is humbly leaning in
front of Willy Georg’s camera,24 in a seemingly self-defensive posture, as if the click of his
camera was to have the effect of a gunshot. This is an old trope in the history of photography,
where taking a picture has often been seen as an act of symbolic violence or oppression. As
Georg’s subject stands there in the open exposed to the shot of his camera, he seems to
await something extreme, perhaps his demise. In the eyes of this viewer, he has the quality
of an emblematic Holocaust figure of intolerable, abject fate. (Figure 1).
Georg’s camera knows no mercy in its precise detailing of the inventory of this utter
misery. Its mechanical eye registers and shows accurately, without embellishing the actu-
ality: his body is covered in szmaty [rags] and his bare feet are covered with paper. Przegląd
Lekarski-Oświęcim depicts the Muselmänner in a way that corresponds well with the
photo: ‘[they covered] themselves … with dirty blankets, rags, paper from cement
18
German businessmen, among them Walter Toebbens from Brema, moved their manufactures to the Warsaw Ghetto
where they employed Jews; despite exploitative labor, the manufactures (in the ghetto slang szopy) issued certificates
of employment (Ausweis), which initially protected Jews from deportation.
19
Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Warsaw,” last accessed May 21, 2020.
20
Emanuel Ringelblum was a Jewish historian and the founder of the Oyneg Shabbos project that led to the Ringelblum
Archive. Oyneg Shabbos group collected and solicited documents to chronicle life in the Warsaw Ghetto during the
German occupation. The collecting occurred between 1939–1943 and included testimonies such as poems, diaries,
posters, and essays. A portion of the archives, buried for safety in three milk cans and boxes, was unearthed after the war.
21
Emanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emanuel Ringelblum, trans. and introduction Jacob
Sloan (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1958), p. 130.
22
The history of the Warsaw Ghetto, including its maps and buildings, is the subject of the encyclopedic monograph by
Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, trans. Emma Harris (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
23
Muselmanization is a process during which a prisoner succumbs to death due to starvation, exploitation, and disease.
24
Willy Georg’s pictures surfaced in the 1960s thanks to Raphael F. Scharf who was contacted by Georg. Georg was a thirty-
year-old German soldier serving as a radio operator in the army, who on the order of his senior officer photographed
ghetto life with his Leica camera; one of his five rolls of film was confiscated, but the remaining four rolls were safe
in his pocket. More about this story and Georg’s photographs in In the Warsaw Ghetto Summer 1941. Photographs by
Willy Georg with passages from the Warsaw Ghetto Diaries. Compiled and with an afterword by Rafael F. Scharf
(New York: Aperture Book, 1993). Scharf created a dual narrative by using the photographs and excerpts from various
autobiographical writing from the ghetto alongside Georg’s photographs.
226 B. SHALLCROSS

Figure 1. A bandaged, destitute Jewish youth walks along a street in the Warsaw Ghetto. United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Rafael Scharf.
Note: The photographs’ titles provided by USHMM.

bags.’25 The swollen legs signal an advanced stage of choroba getta [the ghetto disease], as
hunger disease was called there.26 According to the Jewish physicians imprisoned in the

25
Zdzisław Ryn and Stanisław Kłodziński, “Na granicy życia i śmierci: Studium obozowego ‘muzułmaństwa,’” Przegląd
Lekarski-Oświęcim, 1983 (40): 27–72, here p. 36.
26
Swollen legs were a ‘typical’ symptom and recognized as such by numerous other sources.
 THE JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH 227

ghetto, who worked in the Bersohn and Baumann Hospital, where they researched
symptomatology of starvation, swelling was a symptom of the victim reaching the point of
demise.27
The photograph also captures the nameless, emaciated youth’s double exclusion:
first from the gentile part of Warsaw, and subsequently from the district of exclusion
itself, namely the ghetto, which is seen in the snapshot’s open perspectival background.
Although there are people there, some standing and looking at the ritual of picture-
taking, with two men seemingly commenting on the scene, the pictured beggar
appears desperately alone in this shared perceptual field. In his hands, he holds a
small, battered, enamel cup that he uses as his pushke, a collection tin of sorts.28 This
act of begging for sustenance speaks to his resistance and courage despite his abandon-
ment and misery. He relies on charity, which has a long tradition in Judaism that
harkens back to the Hebrew Bible’s teachings.29 Wartime ghettos continued this
legacy despite the extreme conditions, developing their own institutional structures
for aiding the poorest and most afflicted.30 Since they could not meet all needs, many
people were forced to beg and many more died. Marek Stok, one of the ghetto’s diarists
observed this growing crisis:
Thousands of misers, beggars constantly camp on the streets. They are not people, but some
terrifying apparitions. Nightmarish figures in dirty rags, tatters, emaciated faces with feverish
eyes and legs swollen from hunger. … They are everywhere. In courtyards, on sidewalks, by
the walls, and on roadways, they lament, shout and ask for alms.31

Enmeshed in a systematically destroyed religious base and a world of survival of the

fittest, beggars represented the continued hope for individual acts of goodness
despite such acts becoming increasingly rare. In spite of this, photography captured
some acts of individual goodness, such as the image below showing a Jewish man
who stopped to give alms to the emaciated children – evidence that individual gestures
of empathy existed even in the hostile, necrotopographic environment. His extended
hand disrupts the circle of isolation and destabilizes its emergent pattern of indiffer-
ence. (Figure 2).
Georg’s picture of another emaciated youth sitting on the pavement of a Warsaw
Ghetto street suggests that no human suffering is sacred (see Figure 3). The scrutinizing
work of the camera betrays his voyeurism. The shot makes the beggar both an actor
and a spectator in his life’s final stage. His body is half-naked, barely covered by rags,
and his swollen feet again signal that he is suffering from wide-spread starvation, with
the edema symptomatic of hunger’s final, near-death stage, due to irreversible internal
organ damage. His body thus bespeaks his fate. The most striking feature of his dirty

27
The research was founded by the Judenrat [Jewish council] and was published after the war in book form edited by Leon
Płocker, Choroba głodowa: Badania kliniczne nad głodem wykonane w getcie warszawskim z roku 1942 (Warsaw: American
Joint Distribution Committee, 1946).
28
A pushke was a tin container, kept at home or in a synagogue, where money was collected for charity.
29
Across Poland’s prewar Eastern territories, Jewish charity began to function on a larger scale after the Khmelnytsky mas-
sacre that nearly completely destroyed the Jewish community living in these lands along with its wealth.
30
For example, Emanuel Ringelblum asked Rachel Auerbach to organize one of the Warsaw Ghetto’s public kitchens. See
also, Rachela Auerbach, “Brulion monografii kuchni ludowej,” in Karolina Szymaniak (ed.), Pisma z getta warszawskiego,
trans. Anna Ciałowicz, Karolina Szymaniak (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2016), pp. 207–238.
31
Marek Stok, “Pamiętnik,” in “Pamiętniki Żydów,” sygnatura 302/144, Archiwum Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego,
Warszawa.
228 B. SHALLCROSS

Figure 2. A man stops to help two destitute children on the street in the Warsaw Ghetto. United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Rafael Scharf.

Figure 3. A destitute youth sits on the pavement in the Warsaw Ghetto surrounded by other Jews.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Rafael Scharf.
 THE JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH 229

face – sharply sculpted by starvation – are his eyes: large and sad.32 He looks at the camera
as if he wished to penetrate its depth.
Notably, there is no exchange of gazes between him and the onlookers, whose multi-
plied, erect presence creates a circular border around his sitting body. Their bodies,
partly cut out from the photo’s frame, create a solid wall around his solitude and co-
produce the circle of a communal denial, where the central concern is not the youth’s
severely compromised corporeity, but the unexpected novelty of a photographing event.
The scarcity of garments in the ghettos was perpetuated by the Nazi demand that their
inhabitants ‘surrender all their furs, fur coats, collars, muffs, and even odd pieces of fur.’33
This infamous ‘fur action’ made robbing corpses of their clothes and footwear common-
place, despite the halachic principle of respecting human dignity after death and protect-
ing the sanctity of human remains. In the ghetto, funeral rites were seldom enacted fully.34
Mass graves demanded little religious attention and the cadavers were so light that even
children – as seen in Figure 4 where a boy is dragging the corpses to the hole – were
employed in burying them.
Normalcy and the everyday were turned upside down in the wartime ghetto, which suc-
cumbed to the long presence of dead bodies despite the religious rule that required them to
be buried within twenty-four hours.35 Mary Berg observed how degraded funerary rituals
in the ghetto had become:
The little coaches of Pinkiert’s funeral establishment are constantly busy. When a beggar sees
a usable piece of clothing on a dead body, he removes it, covers the nude corpse with an old
newspaper, and puts a couple of bricks or stones on the paper to prevent it from being blown
away by the wind.36

Necrotopography37 thus signifies not only an urban space that is marked by the constant
presence of dying or dead people’s bodies, but also the mass graves of the Warsaw Ghetto,
vast and left open until entirely filled with half-naked or naked, emaciated cadavers, as
graphically evidenced in Figure 4, as well as numerous other photographs of amassed
corpses and common graves.
The mechanism of denial was undoubtedly a welcome ally in producing such spaces of
brutal alienation. Consider the photograph of the two women in Figure 5: the image cap-
tured by Heinrich Joest38 bespeaks the walking woman’s refusal to acknowledge the fact

32
Likewise, ’The Musselmann’s eyes were restless, but they stirred only for one thing: where to obtain food. The look in
those eyes was apathetic, sunken under the eyelids, shining green, they seemed dead already, showing not a will to
live, but a blind and vacuous hunger.’ In Ryn and Kłodziński, “Na granicy życia i śmierci,” p. 43. Zdzisław Ryn (b.
1938) is a Polish psychiatrist and diplomat specializing in the ethics of medicine, psychiatry of concentration camp,
and alpine medicine. Stanisław Kłodziński (1918–1990) was a Polish physician, Auschwitz survivor, and a co-founder
of Przegląd Lekarski–Oświęcim. After his death, the journal was no longer published.
33
Mary Berg, Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary, S. L. Shneiderman (ed.) (New York: L.B Fischer, 1945), p. 122.
34
Sylwia Karolak informatively writes about the funerary rituals of the wartime ghettos in her article “Pogrzeby, których nie
było: O rytuałach niemożliwych (w literaturze poholokaustowej),” Napis, vol. 16 (2010): pp. 211–223.
35
As cited on this page: United States Holocaust Museum, “Bodies, Coffins, and a Funeral Wagon on the Grounds of the
Jewish Cemetery on Okopowa Street in the Warsaw Ghetto,” May 4, 2015, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/
catalog/pa2607; last accessed February 23, 2020.
36
Mary Berg, Warsaw Ghetto, p. 116.
37
The term should not be applied to define battlefields or spaces of natural disasters that are entirely outside the specific
system and objectives of a totalitarian ideology, propaganda and practice.
38
Heinrich Joest was a sergeant in the Wehrmacht, a hotel owner, and an amateur photographer who took pictures in the
Warsaw Ghetto over a few days in September 1941. His undisputable photographic skills are clearly manifested in the
pictures selected for this text.
230 B. SHALLCROSS

Figure 4. A boy working in the Warsaw Ghetto cemetery drags a corpse to the edge of the mass grave
where it will be buried. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Guenther Schwarberg.

Figure 5. A destitute woman lies on a sidewalk along Nowolipie Street in the Warsaw Ghetto. United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Guenther Schwarberg.
 THE JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH 231

that someone nearby is dying of hunger. The woman in the center of the photograph,
captured lying on the sidewalk, looks like a typical victim of Muselmanization. She
could be called Muselfrau to correct the traditional apprehension that Muselmanization
encompassed all stages of an incremental human degradation and physical destruction
usually attributed in Holocaust discourse to men. Reduced to a fraction of her humanity,
the nameless figure is not yet destroyed by the ghetto, and her enlarged eyes and entire
attention are fixed on the basket carried by the woman passing by on the right. The
basket’s contents must have been important to the owner, who holds it close to her
chest with both hands. Her gesture suggests not only the basket’s tangible value, but
also awareness of the woman lying by the wall; perhaps she thinks of her as a
chaper,39 a starving person who would attack passersby and snatch anything that
looked like food. It is clear that this skeletal remnant of a woman is not a threat to
the basket of the other woman, who can afford to look at the camera as she walks by.
After all, on the ghetto’s scale of probability, photo opportunities were much less
common than starvation even when the ghetto became a tourist destination for
German soldiers.40
Joest, who took the photograph of the women as well as the image of the child (see
Figure 6), captured more than the suspense of morality in the latter, revealing also the
workings of optic denial. As the group of three youngsters passes a child dying on the side-
walk, one of them – a girl – glances in its direction, albeit without stopping. Although the
child’s body is in the center of the photographic space, it is clearly not at the center of the
event from the perspective of those passing by, who create an empty space around the
child by maintaining their distance from its body.
The net of their gazes suggests that ghetto realities have broken the basic social mech-
anism of solidarity. Despite the lack of regard for the child’s subjectivity displayed by
others in the image, the physicality of its tiny body renders it as still present, undeniably
there. Lying there, unclaimed, it functions as both a reified image of death and a logistical
problem. This small obstacle with its materiality, not unlike a wooden log or a bump on a
road, dictates how to direct one’s steps to avoid stepping on this remnant of a child. Such
intuitive behaviors in various ways enacted and co-created the ghetto’s necrotopography.
‘The loneliness of dying,’ its unshared intimacy, was easily degraded into necrotopo-
graphic abandonment. Berg observed:
In the streets, frozen human corpses are an increasingly frequent sight. On Leszno Street, in
front of the court building, many mothers often sit with children wrapped in rags … . Some-
times a mother cuddles a child frozen to death, and tries to warm the inanimate little body.
… After they have given up their last breath they often remain lying on the street for long
hours, for no one bothers with them.41

39
Chaper (Polish): a snatcher. For more about this word, see Barbara Engelkind and Jacek Leociak, Ghetto warszawskie: Prze-
wodnik po nieistniejacym mieście (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN, 2001), p. 301. In Black Seasons, Michał Głowiński
describes an instance that occurred in the Warsaw Ghetto, when a boy – even hungrier than him – grabbed his
cookie and ran away. Michał Głowiński, “The Pastry,” in The Black Seasons, trans. Marci Shore, foreword Jan T. Gross (Evan-
ston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), pp. 17–20.
40
As stated by Daniel H. Magilow, “The Interpreter’s Dilemma: Heinrich Joest’s Warsaw Ghetto Photographs,” in David Bath-
rick, Brad Prager, and Michael David Richardson (eds.), Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory (Roche-
ster, NY: Camden House, 2008), pp. 38–61, here p. 40.
41
Mary Berg, Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 115–116.
232 B. SHALLCROSS

Figure 6. A destitute young boy lies on the pavement in the Warsaw Ghetto as other children walk by.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Guenther Schwarberg.

According to other accounts by Berg, as well as by Chaim Kaplan (whose notes expressed
both pain and anger at the sight of naked corpses),42 the ghetto inhabitants’ motives for
ignoring the dead usually stemmed from a high level of social impassivity and the lack
of religious motivation. Erwin (Froim) Baum spoke of a yet another motivation for
such behavior, however: ‘adjusting to the constant presence of the dead among the
living [is] a requirement critical for survival.’43 For him and, in all probability, for the
majority of other people imprisoned in the ghetto, the state of emotional suppression
was a survival strategy necessary to life in extremis. In other words, a state of a forced
‘anaesthesia,’ when emotions are suppressed into the subconscious, was one consequence
of inhabiting a necrotopographic space.
In Figure 7, Joest captured a moment of collective participation in a monumental per-
formance of death devoid of any intimacy and respect. His caption reads: ‘This woman
died before my eyes. People stood around. No one helped her, because no one could
help.’44 The body of the half-naked woman lying alongside the wall of a building is dra-
matically foreshortened, so that her bare feet and swollen legs protrude while her face is
hidden from sight. Joest is manifestly in control of the camera angle, standing in a dom-
inating way over the body. The foreshortened corpse, lying on sidewalk next to bits of
trash, framed by the feet of onlookers standing around may be a testament to social
indifference, but it most clearly demonstrates the photographer’s deliberate decision
to capture in one frame the main components of this death scene: the barely covered

42
Chaim Kaplan, “Scroll of Agony,” in David G. Roskies (ed.), The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe,
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988): pp. 435–449, here p. 447.
43
Quotation from Tim Cole, Holocaust Landscapes (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 4.
44
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “A Jewish Woman Lies Dead on the Street in the Warsaw Ghetto,” February
13, 2004, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa2804.
 THE JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH 233

Figure 7. A Jewish woman lies dead on the street in the Warsaw Ghetto. United States Holocaust Mem-
orial Museum, courtesy of Guenther Schwarberg.

corpse and the fully dressed and shoed bystanders, whose bodies and faces remain out of
the frame. The deliberate framing of others as partially present is more suggestive of
their absence.
Joest’s voyeuristic perspective is nauseating for the artful manner in which it frames
and foreshortens the body, which indicates that he aimed at taking an aesthetically
‘good’ photo that conforms to long established pictorial rules. Joest’s photograph rep-
resents his symbolic violation of death and almost propagandistically objectifies its
subject. It denounces not only the pedestrians – as (impassive) witnesses to the
woman’s death – but also the photographer himself. The image exemplifies several
aspects of necrotopography, where the embodied representation of hunger excludes
the dying peoples’ right for respect and, ultimately, overlooks their subjectivities and
points out ‘the loneliness of dying.’ This unsentimental idea about the necessity of
the presence of the other gathered a persuasive amount of evidence from the photo-
graphs to advance the argument that the prisoners of Nazi camps and ghettos did
not die just from starvation. In their accounts, isolation was equally instrumental as
one of the causes of death:
A total extinction of all social bonds means the termination of one’s self, and eventually of
physical existence. Humans are primarily social creatures. Individualistic behavior is
against their nature as it undermines the foundations on which one’s identity and self are
234 B. SHALLCROSS

established. This argument is consistent with existential thought, e.g. ‘the other’ in Levinas’s
writings, who is the source of one’s own existence.45

Photographs that captured the solitude of the dying, and the social impassivity toward
such events taking place in the concentration camps and on ghetto streets, turned these
snapshots into a powerfully expressive subgenre of Holocaust photography that I term
as necrophotography. The photographs discussed here function in a specific necrophoto-
graphic discourse.46 This discourse – as a sum of everything that was photographically
captured – is informed by the Nazi photographers on the one side, and by various
Jewish organizations on the other. There exist significant differences between these two
sides of the discourse: the Jewish photographers tended to photograph ghetto inhabitants
during their activities, as if they were uninterrupted and unaware of being photographed.
Nazi photographers ascribed to another photographic convention according to which the
victims were cognizant of the Nazi taking pictures.47
We know of ten extant collections that the Nazi soldiers produced: the informative, his-
torical value of their pictures cannot be overestimated. Likewise, their affective value on
the contemporary viewers is ‘huge,’ to quote Allan Sekula’s estimation of such photo-
graphs.48 Were Georg and Joest similarly affected? Did they feel an emotional impulse
to help the victims? Or, did they extend their hands only to have a better camera shot?
It is a dilemma I share with other interpreters.49 The Nazi photographers’ motivations
and, in particular, their postwar narratives cannot be trusted. All we know is that Joest
and Georg controlled the messages they conveyed to Guenther Schwarberg and Rafael
Scharf, respectively, to whom they donated their collections: retroactively, without
means of verification, they spoke of their empathy toward the imprisoned victims.
From a critical perspective and formal analysis, the optics oscillate between their voyeur-
istic curiosity, contempt, suspense of ethics, as well as purported empathy.50
The ‘intolerable images’ of necrophotography demand, as Jacques Rancière argues, that
the viewers take a moral stance.51 In the emotional vacuum of war, however, and despite
enormous communal efforts to help the ghettos’ neediest members, there was little room
for such a stance. The spaces of isolation around these doomed people existed against the
Nazi urban planning for they were ephemeral and spontaneously created in the crowded
streets through shared behavioral patterns, be it evasion of returning their gaze or careful
avoidance of coming into contact with them by maintaining physical distance. This necro-
topography did not result solely from the avoidance of responsibility for the dying,
however; its formation was due to the overarching genocidal policies of the dominant
power.

45
Jonathan Davidov and Zvi Eisikovits, “Free Will in Total Institutions: The Case of Choice Inside Nazi Death Camps,” Con-
sciousness and Cognition, vol. 34 (2015): pp. 87–97, here 94.
46
Allan Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” in Burgin Victor (ed.), Thinking Photography: Communications
and Culture (London: Palgrave, 1982), pp. 84–109, here p. 84.
47
Sometimes, men were photographed taking off their hats, as the Nazi law required.
48
Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” p. 84.
49
See Magilow, “The Interpreter’s Dilemma,” p. 40.
50
For more about photography and Holocaust research, see Raye Farr, “The Use of Photographs as Artifacts and Evidence,”
in Robert Moses Shapiro (ed.), Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other Contempora-
neous Personal Accounts, introduction Ruth R. Wisse (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, 1999), pp. 277–281.
51
Jacques Rancière, “The Intolerable Image,” The Emancipated Spectator, trans. George Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 83–
106.
 THE JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH 235

Ghostly appearances
The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto mentions that affluent and well-dressed Jews deported
from Hamburg changed over time ‘in a visible way, first in their exteriors, next physically,
and in the end, if they have not perished yet, they moved in the ghetto like ghosts.’52 Their
horrifying bodily transformation was paradoxical: they were shrinking until they looked
like death, there was literally less and less of them, and as a result of the gradual disappear-
ance of their somatic mass they became increasingly conspicuous, more strikingly pathetic-
looking. This was the case even within the tight social space of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto,53
whose necrotopographic dimension was different for having few beggars and corpses in its
streets: the Jewish ghetto police patrolled the streets and quickly removed them.
Among wartime ghettos, the Litzmannstadt Ghetto stood out as the most impermeable
of these sites of confinement and exclusion. Let me reiterate that the second largest after
Warsaw, it had the added ‘distinction’ of being the last to be liquidated by the withdrawing
Nazi forces. Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the Judenrat’s infamous head and the ‘king of
the ghetto’ for all intents and purposes, believed that, since its population was a source of
cheap labor, its productivity guaranteed its survival. The calculation translated into deadly
mathematics: after a twelve-hour work day, workers received about half of the required
daily calories.54 The fate of the non-productive members of the Litzmannstadt population
was no better. One of its inhabitants, Dawid Sierakowiak, age sixteen, wrote in his diary on
May 13, 1941:
A student from the same grade as ours died from hunger and exhaustion yesterday. As a
result of his terrible appearance, he was allowed to eat as much soup in school as he
wanted, but it didn’t help him much; he is the third victim in the class.55

Sierakowiak’s unnamed colleague reached the point of no return: there was no amount of
food that could divert the doomed trajectory of his life.56 Sierakowiak was a keen observer
of such external transformations; in one instance, he wrote of another acquaintance that
she ‘looked like death.’ He kept his diary almost until the end of his life; almost, because he
had no physical strength to write another word as he entered the stage of silent, post-verbal
agony in its last two weeks.57 His last diary entry expresses a clear loss of hope: ‘There is
really no way out of this for us.’58 The contrast with his previously strong will to live is

52
Lucjan Dobroszycki (ed.), The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto 1941–1944, trans. Richard Lourie, Joachim Neugroschel, and
others (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 166.
53
Moreover, as a walled and guarded zone of exclusion, the Litzmannstadt Ghetto never functioned as a normal public
space.
54
Unlike other ghettos, which depended largely on smuggled food and other indispensable goods, Litzmannstadt was
sealed off through heavy security; to exacerbate the situation further, its territory was located in the city known for
having the largest German minority loyal to Nazism. Its necrotopographic character was established from the onset,
as people died in public spaces of heart attacks, suicides (by jumping from windows), and by means of executions;
there were no mass graves in that ghetto. For more detailed information about such events, see Dobroszycki, The Chron-
icle of the Łódź Ghetto 1941–1944.
55
The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Łódź Ghetto, introduction Alan Adelson (ed.), additional footnotes
and trans. Kamil Turowski, foreword Lawrence L. Langer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 90. The ghetto
schools lost their provisions and were ultimately shut down in 1941.
56
After the liberation of Lagers by the Red Army and the Allies, many of those initially found alive nevertheless died, having
reached the physical point of no return. Food did not save them; in fact, it killed them. Hunger disease makes intestines as
thin as thread, thus making it impossible to digest any food.
57
The exact cause of his death remains unknown, but it was likely a combination of starvation, exhaustion, and possibly
typhus.
58
The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak, p. 268.
236 B. SHALLCROSS

stark. Perhaps his sharp awareness of the end contributed to his untimely death.59
Undoubtedly, there are parallels between the trajectory of his life (and of other lives
around him) and the one identified with the Muselmann’s fate. Sierakowiak tried to
stay as objective as possible in his record of the embodied experience of survival.
Unlike some other diarists, he does not veer toward fantasy in his account of the
ghetto, relating instead its factuality as a habitat-toward-death.
One could go further and presume that during the last days of his young life he too
shared the ‘terrible appearance’ that he had seen on his now dead classmates. What did
these gymnasium students look like, exactly, when even ‘eating as much soup as [they]
wanted’ could not help them?60 Essentially, the horror of their appearance – visible to
all – stemmed from the reduction of these boys’ bodies to mere skeletons. Perversely,
Dawid and his colleagues had no need for words in articulating their complaint, as
their corporality bespoke their condition directly and most eloquently.
Sierakowiak’s lucid prose, devoid of figurative language, presents the bare bones of a
youth’s life in the ghetto in simple language. Despite managing to stay alive for some
time, he was less active and more apathetic with each day, surely acquiring the same ‘ter-
rible appearance’ as others had around him. His weakened body, in turn, affected his
behavior. While always hungry and in search for food, the destitute Sierakowiak eventually
stayed in bed and, most likely, read until he died.

Postwar representations of necrotopography

Sierakowiak, along with many others who saw hunger in all its incarnations in the familiar
faces of people around them, employed both hauntological rhetoric and imagery in their
ghetto writings that adds to their power of both persuasion and incrimination; the evi-
dence they provide is simply damning. Bogdan Wojdowski’s posttraumatic (and haunt-
ingly written, for that matter) novel about the Warsaw Ghetto, entitled Bread for the
Departed, reveals a different aspect of dying and begging in the ghetto. From a distance
of many years, the author recalls one of the ghetto’s most vulnerable groups of inhabi-
tants – the rabbis – who were hard hit by the de-legalization of various religious insti-
tutions traditionally supported by their communities. Given the total shutdown of
synagogues, houses of prayer, and a ban on private religious gatherings, the rabbis
were unable to perform their religious duties and forced to beg in their new circum-
stances. In the Warsaw Ghetto, they comprised a conspicuous group of ‘holy men,’ as
Wojdowski, somewhat ironically, called them. The writer, himself a ghetto survivor,
did not spare these emaciated ‘holy men,’ whose squatted forms lining the sidewalks
were living symbols of the moral and religious crisis imposed on the dzielnica zamknięta
[closed quarter].
As a constant and very vocal fixture of the increasingly crowded necrotopography, with
their despairing lamentations and loud pleas for ‘Rachmones, rachmones’ [pity, Yiddish],
the begging rabbis were a relentless part of the Jewish quarter’s soundscape, which was
otherwise filled with sounds of beatings and gunfire. The small change that was thrown
59
Przegląd Lekarski-Oświęcim cites similar syndromes: ‘Loss of the will to live, an easy way to enter the pre-agonal stage,
impossibility of healing, impossibility of an effective self-defense and saving one’s life,’ quoted after Wesołowska, Słowa z
piekła rodem, p. 93.
60
The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak, p. 90.
 THE JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH 237

into their pushkes would intensify their incantations, which were offered in biblical phra-
seology and interspersed with Yiddish words. Giving alms to those who were starving and
lived on the brink of death presented a singular ethical challenge for a community fighting
for its survival. In this dire situation, any form of assistance, such as soup kitchens, was
critical not only in helping the poor directly, but also in counteracting the growing
social impassivity.
Wojdowski’s narrator described the begging rabbis as nothing but piles of rags with lice,
barely moving, yet choreographed in their roles of expressive supplicants; in other words,
the narrator perceived their behavior as insincere and casually disdained the holy men as
seasoned performers. Significantly, they could not be considered the Muselmänner of the
ghetto at that stage. This was more than a question of authenticity, which they lacked; it
was due to a degree of physical strength they still retained and the will to survive they did
not yet lose. The rabbis’ complicated vocal activities were an expression of this will and a
case of passive resistance. This behavioral aspect does not concur with some historical
records about the Muselmanized victims’ verbal incapacity and muteness. It may neverthe-
less be worth recalling that victims in the early stages of hunger disease were irritated. They
whimpered, shouted, and could talk; the apathia occurred later.
Wojdowski speaks from an ideologically different position than Sierakowiak; he is on
the side of the starving masses. His novel indicates more than once that the begging
rabbis were not in fact the real Muselmänner of the Warsaw Ghetto, as he saw it. As he
continues to try and capture the blurry line between life and death in victims who attained
a spectral appearance, he invokes two historical events: the typhus epidemic and the liqui-
dation of the so-called Little Ghetto zone. He describes the latter Aktion in a sequence of
images where spectral imagery serves to evoke how the starving population of the zone was
pushed from their ruined, makeshift shelters to the surface and into the daylight.61
Ghostly figures crept out from dark alleys, from the hallways of tenements, from basements
and attics, into the light of day: children abandoning their fathers’ corpses, women abandon-
ing the frozen skeletons of their infants in the ruins. … they joined together in the parade of
skeletons. Emerging from their lairs, they covered their nakedness with rags.62

Wojdowski thus construes the beginning of their deportation as a march of post-human

entities forced from their hiding places and emphasizes how the ghetto’s Muselmänner
were forced to display an uncharacteristic mobility. Emptied of the will to live, these
hollow human shells possessed only what Tadeusz Borowski called ‘biological emotions’
– the affective sum of a physically exhausted existence and the slim chance granted it of
survival.
Connecting spectrality with the abject is part of Wojdowski’s strategy of representation.
Thus, the spectral ontology, in reducing the body to something less than human, compels
comparison to creatures of the subterranean darkness – moths whose delicate, almost
immaterial wings, by association, enhanced the appearance of the emaciated people:
‘Skinny specters, bearing no resemblance to living human beings, they crawled out of

61
As Alina Molisak states, Wojdowski develops a strong connection in his novel between his autobiographical experience
and the novel’s storyline. See Alina Molisak, “‘Judaizm jako los’: On the Essay by Bogdan Wojdowski,” Polin: Studies in
Polish Jewry, vol. 28 (2016): pp. 441–456, here p. 443.
62
Wojdowski Bogdan, Bread for the Departed, trans. Madeline G. Levine, foreword Henryk Grynberg (Evanston, IL: North-
western University Press, 1997), p. 287.
238 B. SHALLCROSS

the gates, out of the ruins of the dead tenements, like moths, with their last failing
strength.’63 Sven-Erik Rose mentions that the Jewish deportees were often compared to
animals, the ontologically ambiguous status that Wojdowski suggests through the use of
words such as ‘lairs’ or ‘moths.’64 For example, Adolf Rudnicki compares the Muselma-
nized protagonist of his short story ‘The Great Stefan Konecki’ to an owl, ‘a terrified
owl’ – a creature of the night. Both Wojdowski and Rudnicki imagined the forced
reappearance of Jews as a return of the familiar – the classic Freudian trope of Unheimlich
reused to imagine the historical catastrophe.65
Whether it was Warsaw or Litzmannstadt, the victims achieved the same ghostly, abject
look, for they reemerged from the underworld of bunkers, basements, dugouts. The
walking corpses infested with lice, their convulsive cries, dementia prompted by hunger
and weakness constituted an unbearable image of anonymous destitution known else-
where as Muselmanization. Brutalization, confinement, starvation, sickness, and exploita-
tive labor omnipresent in their communities affected the expressionless, mask-like faces,
slowed down their movement, hunched their backs, and accentuated the sharp shape of
their bones, their hollow cheeks and large eyes. Wojdowski consistently fashions the phe-
nomenology of ghetto inhabitants as Muselmanized figures who, it should be emphasized,
in this space of racial segregation, must have been Jewish.
He tends to portray the effect of the violence against the remaining Jews as post-human
and animalistic, which runs the risk of the reader rejecting his imagery as intolerable and
unassimilable:
Those who were supposed to die had died already. Those who were going to die later were
still alive, waiting their turn. Driven out by hunger from their dark, unheated dens, they ran
around freely at night through the emptied streets … They dropped clumps of rags with lice
in the streets. Dried-up skeletons, staggering weakly inside loose scraps of clothing, collapsed
on the ground, whimpering painfully.66

Wojdowski’s novel was published in Poland in 1973, twenty years before the spectrality
turn gained its momentum. Nonetheless, his nearly obsessive attention to the prisoners’
spectrality, the gradual dematerialization of their corporeity, bespeaks of his understand-
ing of visual poetics as applied to necrotopographic spaces of trauma.
The repeated imagery of skeletal figures frantically walking to the Umschlagplatz creates
a nearly expressionistic visual sequence filled with realistic details, such as lice or rags, and
punctuated by shifts from skeletons to specters. What does not fluctuate in these depic-
tions is the uniformly abject look of the deportees. Anonymity and invariability constitute
a key aspect of this almost post-realistic theater of death whose undead participants can no
longer perform either agency or individuality. Wojdowski directs his vision downward, to
those base surfaces and underground openings that served as a necrotopographic affor-
dance for the faint movements and sickly appearances of the abandoned ghetto

63
Ibid., p. 284.
64
See the discussion of the abject in Sven-Erik Rose, “Writing Hunger in a Modernist Key in the Warsaw Ghetto: Leyb
Goldin’s ‘Chronicle of a Single Day,’” Jewish Social Studies, vol. 23, no. 1 (2017): pp. 29–63.
65
Stefan Konecki was a pseudonym for Ostap Ortwin, the prominent Polish-Jewish literary critic, who perished during the
Holocaust. Adolf Rudnicki, “The Great Stefan Konecki,” in Ludwik Krzyżanowski and Adam Gillon (eds.), Introduction to
Modern Polish Literature: An Anthology of Poetry and Fiction, trans. H. C. Steven, (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc.,
1968), pp. 236–257, here p. 256.
66
Wojdowski, Bread for the Departed, p. 157.
 THE JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH 239

inhabitants that he so masterfully represents. Confinement, hard labor, hunger, and the
lack of medical attention combined with minimal social interaction transformed their
faces into masks and their skeletal bodies into suffering, slow moving phantoms of the col-
lective body arising from the necrotopograhic Warsaw Ghetto. Thus perceived, the Musel-
mann was a visually uniform ‘spectacle,’ almost devoid of individualized facial features
that had been all but obliterated by hunger’s indifferent hand.

Inferences
Instead of returning to my initial question of what connects the parallel realities of con-
centration camps and ghettos, by now I ask: What distinguishes the Muselmann dying
in the lager and the person dying in the ghetto? In light of my analysis, it is their
similar experience of death marked by starvation in solitude, isolation, and confinement.
This answer illuminates the Holocaust necrotopography’s most horrific aspect: its subver-
sion of the former public space where corpses constitute its terrain’s most characteristic,
indeed pervasive, features. Nothing may be changed in the layout of passageways and side-
walks, yet the usually present small architectural elements – for instance, lampposts, cob-
blestones, or advertising poles – attain a weaker, secondary presence to be dominated by
necrotopography’s performance of its most powerful and contradictory dimension: the
dead bodies that despite their overlooked and reified status, mark the urban environment
so strongly that they become a hindrance for the ever-moving traffic flow of brutalized
mankind. The negated division between a corpse and a terrain feature – a corpse as a
terrain feature – enacts the Holocaust necrotopography’s previously unrecognized,
affective power as well as its ephemeral ontological status. In the postwar strategies of rep-
resentation, necrotopography espouses a spectral rhetoric to indicate the end of a genoci-
dal era and a time of mourning. While numerous material effects of memorialization
produced after the war in the form of diverse monuments, paintings, exhibits etc. have
lost over time their sharp punctum, to use Roland Barthes’ well-entrenched term from
Camera Lucida, an analysis of necrotopography restores history’s affect and opens the for-
gotten past. Tim Cole introduced a cognitive tool of the Holocaust spaces as sites of ‘place-
making events,’67 according to which places were determining factors in victims’ lives. My
critical perspective, although buttressed on Cole’s description, demonstrates a different
side of the Holocaust spaces as created by the victims who, dying or already dead, lost
their agency. Yet it was their easily erased bodies that temporarily transformed the
spaces of their demise.
The body affords evidence not only in forensic medicine, medical anthropology, arche-
ology, or in the existential phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty; it also has a
peculiar role to play in Holocaust studies due to its ability to serve as a post-verbal
witness. The muteness of the dead opens up an expressive sphere of material traces
inscribed on the body as causes of its death.68 Those traces constitute a kind of forensic
testimony. As part of the paradigm of reification, the victims’ bodies also bear witness
67
Cole, Holocaust Landscapes, p. 2.
Manuela Consonni advances a similar argument in her insightful article “Primo Levi, Robert Antelme, and the Body of the
68

Muselmann,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, vol. 7, no. 2 (2009): pp. 243–259. I write more
about the bodily traces as giving witness in my book Rzeczy i Zagłada (Cracow: Universitas, 2010); English edition The
Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).
240 B. SHALLCROSS

to the numerous parallels connecting the condition of those dying of starvation, whether
in a Nazi concentration camp, on ghetto streets, or in the Soviet Gulag.
The concentration camp Muselmann and his ghetto kin died in spaces perverted into
necrotopography that speaks to how totalitarian ideologies reached their telos. Thus, the
starved person who reached the point of no return – as observed in the Lagers by Bettel-
heim, or in the ghettos by Wojdowski and Sierakowiak or, even further in the Soviet Gulag
camps, by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński – was not the same essentialized entity, but a dehu-
manized and emaciated human being that died in the same way.69 Yet necrotopography is
more than an affective and de-essentializing tool of understanding the Holocaust and its
spaces, for it also affords, to a degree, a relational comprehension of the Muselmann’s
otherwise inaccessible subjectivity.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Haun Saussy for his insightful and helpful comments on the earlier version of this
article. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Bożena Shallcross is a professor of Polish and Polish-Jewish cultural studies in the Department of
Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago and a member of the Joyce Z. and
Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies. She published several monographs, edited and trans-
lated volumes, and numerous articles, in which she has explored an intersection of the once funda-
mental division between the seeing subject and the objectual sphere in literature, the visual arts, and
the phenomenal world. One of the main interests of her research focuses on Polish-Jewish studies,
especially on the material world, as demonstrated in her monograph The Holocaust Object in Polish
and Polish-Jewish Culture. Currently, she is working on the book-length project dedicated to the
Kulmhof-am-Ner extermination camp.

69
Much has been written about the differences between the Nazi and the Soviet camps; this article is not focused on the
emaciated figure of the Gulag’s goner [dokhodiaga], although that figure parallels the Muselmann. See Leona Toker, “Tes-
timony and Doubt: Shalamov’s ‘How It Began’ and ‘Handwriting,’” https://shalamov.ru/en/research/121/, accessed Sep-
tember 10, 2018. The goner trope was initiated by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński’s memoir A World Apart: A Journal of the
Gulag Survivor, trans. Joseph Marek (pseudonym of Andrzej Ciołkosz) (London: Heinemann, 1951) and a decade later by
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. Ralph Parker, introduction Marvin L. Kalb, foreword
Alexander Tvardovsky (New York: Signet Classic, 1963).