Transposing Past & Present

Creating Spatial Narratives of the Past

“ Listen, child. Do you know if there was bread in the ghetto? Because if you don't know [the anwser], you'll never understand why thousands of people voluntarily left for Treblinka [extermination camp]. ” ⸺ Marek Edelman [1]

Harrie Teunissen, a Dutch map collector/curator and "forerunner in the upcoming field of contemporary map research," characterizes the Holocaust as "largely a spatial history." He quotes Elie Wiesel as stating, "The Nazis' aim was to make the Jewish universe shrink" and elaborates that "this aim required a process of reducing multiple and often mixed spheres of identity to [binary] Jewish versus non-Jewish spaces." [2] As such, it comes with little surprise that "housing and Jewish persecution were increasingly intertwined" during German occupation. [3] In "Housing, Hiding and the Holocaust", authors Tönsmeyer and von Puttkamer note "that accommodation became a scarce commodity [alongside] collapsing housing markets in [occupied countries such as] France, the Netherlands, Norway and Poland," the latter of which is the focus of this mapping project. War damage and building requisitions by occupying Germans further exacerbated poor and cramped housing conditions.

However, it was the Jewish population that was "worst hit by housing restrictions, even prior to ghettoization." Abandoned apartments formerly belonging to fleeing Jewish residents were looted and appropriated by local non-Jewish populations and German occupiers. Pressures on housing conditions exerted by German war-time occupation "accelerated the marginalization and exclusion of local Jewish populations" by both occupiers and other occupied peoples. Under imposed hierarchies, those living under occupation improvised "their own moral economies" that were significantly influenced by housing insecurity and the desire for property ownership. [4]

Eventual ghettoization enacted by German occupiers was a pivotal step step in the Nazi process of brutally separating, persecuting, murdering, and ultimately further displacing much of Europe's Jewish population. The largest ghetto established by Nazis was the Warsaw Ghetto in occupied Poland, which this project focuses on. In Warsaw, more than 400,000 Jews were crowded into an area of 1.3 square miles of abysmal housing conditions. Near the end of the war, ghettos served as deportation hubs to labor and extermination camps. [5]

Connecting Them to The Present

“ The identity of Warsaw is built on two things: resistance during the war and rebuilding after the war. Warsaw was supposed to be the phoenix from the ashes, but they took it from us, they privatised it, and they told us this effort was worth nothing. ” ⸺ Jan Śpiewak [6]

By the end of the war, 90% of Warsaw had been obliterated by German mass bombings, heavy artillery fire, and planned demolition campaigns as well as other structural damage inflicted by Allies. [7] Throughout the course of the war, 40 to 60 million people became homeless or displaced in Europe. [8] Soviet control immediately followed. Poland’s new communist authorities issued the Bierut Decree which "facilitated the city’s reconstruction [by transferring] ownership of all land within the city’s prewar borders to the municipal authorities."

Since the fall of communism, Warsaw city authorities have been "flooded with thousands of claims – both bogus and legitimate – for the restitution of property and plots of land throughout the city," which has upheaved the housing landscape in contemporary Warsaw. Authorities have been accused of colluding with property developers to exploit loopholes in the system, and subsequently "undo the collective achievements of the city’s postwar reconstruction." While some view the complicated topic of reprivitization as righting historical wrongs, it has had serious negative effects on the city. Because reprivatization claims are based on land plots as they existed in pre-war Warsaw, they inaccurately align with post-war structures and spaces. As such, school playgrounds have been reprivatized and turned into "weed-laden car parks." Former public green spaces lie untended, and buildings remain empty and decaying due to uncertainty over their ownership. Additionally, claims to property are further complicated by the fact that they can be bought and sold on the open market, often resulting in swindling and fraud. [9]

Those most affected by the reprivatization process are tenants of formerly city-owned buildings that have been transferred into private owners' hands. Suddenly, "thousands of people living in rent-controlled properties are faced with private landlords that had little incentive or desire to keep them there." The problem is especially acute in central Warsaw, where the communist authorities concentrated social housing, but which has since become a prime location for trendy and luxury real estate. Consequently, the Polish housing crisis continues to grow. A two-person apartment to rent in Warsaw costs ~3,300zł (or $814.73) today, which is just shy of the monthly minimum wage of 3,490zł ($861.64). In the last five years, rent has risen 58% in Warsaw. Attitudes of government officials and even many private citizens reflect anti-communist ideologies and often reject initiatives for social housing that harken back to Soviet Poland.[10]

Poland, once again, is in crisis and sitting on the geographical edge of war. Vulnerable people including both Polish citizens and international refugees have been left to fend for themselves and have often been forced into taking desperate measures, with many turning to squatting in derelict buildings. [11] Tenants advocating for their rights have been met with harassment, violence, and perhaps even death. This is the apparent case for Jolanta Brzeska, a tenant widely thought to have been killed by developers trying to remove her from her from her home after ownership was granted to three historical heirs and a notorious property claims dealer. [12] Finally free from occupation, Poland has the opportunity to empower those living within its borders; the painful echoes reverberating from the calamitous housing landscape of World War II can, at last, be mitigated and the suffering of those afflicted may be honored.

About This Project

Purpose

This project is timely as this year is the 80th anniversary of The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and it calls attention to the complicated and often unjust historic and modern landscape related to housing. In "Cartographies of Catastrophe: Mapping World War II Destruction in Germany and Poland," Jerzy Elżanowski and Carmen M. Enss note that qualitative analyses of post-catastrophic-damage cartography constitute "a serious research gap in the field of urban history." [13] This project aspires to help fill that gap in some capacity in addition to honoring the memories of those who have and those who continue to struggle with suffering associated with housing.