Journal articles on the topic 'Brójce (Poland : Concentration camp)'

As Andrea Huyssen observes, since the 1990s the preservation of Holocaust heritage has become a worldwide phenomenon, and this “difficult heritage” has also led to the rise of “dark tourism.” Neither as sensationally traumatic as Auschwitz’s termination concentration camp in Poland nor as aesthetic as the forms of many modern Jewish museums in Germany and the United States, the Terezín Memorial in the Czech Republic provides a different way to present memorials of atrocity: it juxtaposes the original deadly site with the musical heritage that shows the will to live.

The article analyzes the circumstances and conditions that led to the successful escape from the Auschwitz concentration camp of a group of Polish prisoners of war under the leadership of Leonard Zawacki, prisoner 13390. The escape was carried out on September 28, 1944 by a group of six prisoners of war, two of whom changed into SS uniforms and “escorted” four glaziers to work outside the camp. Zawacki’s memoirs, published in Poland in the form of a short-run pamphlet, as well as many hours of interviews in which he talked about his traumatic experience, life in imprisonment, partisan unit, and the very escape, are introduced into scientific circulation. Zawacki’s memoirs are a valuable source not only about the history of the World War II and the Holocaust, but also the deep experiences of a man who went through the hell of Auschwitz and survived against all odds.

Abstract Around 30,000 citizens of pre-war Czechoslovakia were persecuted in the Soviet Union, at least 5.000 originated from Czech lands. One of the groups consist of the people who in the period of 1939-1942 sought refuge in the USSR from German or Hungarian Nazism, or who wanted to actively fight against it. They ended up in the Gulag, from which they were freed during an amnesty linked to the creation of a Czechoslovak unit in the USSR. Many were Czechoslovak Jews, including those who escaped from the Nazi concentration camp in Poland. Nisko, while thousands were inhabitants of Carpathian Ruthenia.

This article concerns the media coverage of the 72nd anniversary of the liberation of the German Nazi concentration camp KL Gusen in 2017. It was attended by the representatives of the Polish and Austrian authorities, i.e. the Secretary of State in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Jan Dziedziczak, the Undersecretary of State in the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage Magdalena Gawin and – for the first time – by Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen. The revival of remembrance about KL Gusen has become one of the priorities in the politics of memory pursued by the current Polish government. For Poles, the Gusen camp is of special significance because it was built with the intent of destroying the Polish intelligentsia. The Austrian government sees Polish efforts to commemorate their victims in the context of nationalist and protectionist tendencies in Poland. A just fight for historical truth is overshadowed by the mutual lack of understanding in the countries, which both suffered under German occupation between 1939 and 1945.

Opowiadania oświęcimskie (Auschwitz stories) by Maria Zarębińska-Broniewska was first published in a book version in 1948. All the texts included in the book, however, had beenwritten earlier. First of them were initially released in a daily Polska Zbrojna (Armed Poland) in early June 1945, just a few days after the author’s return from a concentration camp. They were one of the first accounts which concerned women’s concentration camps. The book which was published later included nine out of eleven short stories written by Zarębińska. There is also an extant manuscript a novel’s synopsis. However, a very ambitious project of creating tens of short stories was not completed due to the author’s death. This article is a description of the history of Auschwitz stories and their particular editions; it also includes two forgotten stories which were not included in published collections.

Using the example of the so called “Polish refugees” (pol’perebezhchiki), the paper discusses a research problem of the “blind spots” of historical memory. By the technical term pol’perebezhchiki the NKVD investigators denoted a special social group of the former citizens of the interwar Poland – mainly ethnic Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Jews, – who escaped to the Soviet Union in the 1920s – 1930s, and, according to the order № 00485 from 11.08.1937 issued by Nicholas Ezhov, were almost totally exterminated during the 1937–38 ‘NKVD Polish operation’. “Polish refugees” do not exist, as the objects of commemoration, neither in traditions of national remembrance (Polish, Jewish, Belarusian, Ukrainian or Russian ones), because they cannot be introduced into the heroic or lacrimous national narratives; nor in the memory of their families: as young men, they were not married and did not have children. They are ignored by scholars as well. Based on the materials of the NKVD archives in Perm, the author tries to reconstruct the main features of the standard procedure of the treatment of “Polish refugees” elaborated by the NKVD up to 1931: (1) several months of imprisonment near the Polish-Soviet border, (2) transferring to the “Sarov concentration camp” organized especially for such refugees, (3) several years of labour in one of the GULAG camp, (4) and finally, liberation from the camp and accepting of Soviet citizenship. The object of special interest are the series of biographies of the group of “Polish refugees” who were, at the moment of their arrest, the students of Perm educational institutes.

After some general remarks on a contemporary basic map of Translation Studies, we present the results of a research on a peripherical topic in the field Interpretation Studies: interpreting in a museum setting. The museum concerned is the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, a former nazi concentration and extermination camp situated in Poland, a World Heritage Site, and a symbol of the Holocaust. The research is based on surveys conducted in 2017 and 2018 by Marta Paleczna among the camp’s visitors, guides, and interpreters. We discuss the interpreters’ main problems, which include translating camprelated and other specific terms, collaboration with a guide, the increasing number of visitors and time constraint, and their solutions, which include compressing the explanations given by a guide during the visit, taking over the role of a guide by the interpreter, and lengthening the explanation time by taking advantage of the trip to the museum and back.

Translation played a constitutive role in the formation and further existence of the Soviet Union. From the very beginning up to the decline in 1991, it pervaded every aspect of life. Due to the language policy a huge amount of books, brochures and other publications were translated not only from “capitalist” languages but also between the many languages of the Soviet Union. To a certain degree, this holds true also for the Socialist camp. Nevertheless, up to now, translation studies only showed a superficial interest in translation history of communist reigned countries. The focus in research laid around the question how and up to which extend censorship influenced translations. By that, the systemic character of translation was neglected. In the course of this article, I would like to highlight some systemic features of communist translation methods in communist Poland (1944–1991). Poland was in comparison to other communist reigned states with respect to cultural affairs more liberal. A closer look on translational activities will go beyond the traditional concentration of translations of fictional work. By that, we gain to seek deeper structural features. Based on detailed figures about translations made from and into Polish in the mentioned period of time, we get to see, how cultural policy did not directly depend from the Soviet Union, but showed several independent features.

On September 15th 1922, a young Jesuit, Father S. Bednarski, enrolled at the Jagiellonian University, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities, with specialization in modern history, history of culture and history of art. One of his college professors was a well-known historian, Prof. Stanisław Kot. The Jesuit and Prof. S. Kot shared historical interests and ties of friendship. Prof. S. Kot became the mentor and professor adviser of the Jesuit’s doctoral dissertation, Collapse and rebirth of Jesuit schools in Poland (Kraków, 1933), which on June 15th1934 was awarded a prize by the PAU General Assembly and was considered the best historical work in 1933. During his research in archives and libraries in Poland and abroad, the Jesuit had in mind not only his own plans but also his mentor’s interests. The student was loyal to his mentor, who was associated with the anti-Piłsudski faction and politically engaged in activities of the Polish Peasant Party. For this reason, Prof. S. Kot did not enjoy the trust of the state authorities. In 1933, as a result of Jędrzejewicz reform, the Chair of Cultural History headed by him was abolished. Fr. S. Bednarski bravely stood in its defence. The friendship of the mentor and student’s ended in World War II. Prof. S. Kot survived the War and emigrated, where he remained active in politics, while his student died on July 16, 1942 in the German Nazi concentration camp in Dachau near Munich.

The proposed article is devoted to the organization of the penitentiary system of Poland in 1918-1939. Particular attention is paid to the formation of the prison system in the first years of independence of Poland, the legal framework of activity, the internal structure and its evolution, etc. It is established that between the two world wars in the Second Polish Republic lasted the difficult process of organizing of penitentiary system, which began in the fall of 1918 with the declaration of independence of this country and was interrupted by the aggression of Nazi Germany in September 1939. Poland searched for the optimal model of the prison system for twenty years. It was complicated by the difficult financial situation in the first years after the Great War and in the era of the world economic crisis, as well as the different legal bases of the functioning of penal institutions on Polish lands which was the part of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and German empires at the end of XVIII – beginning of XX centuries. It is found out that the first legal acts that initiated the organization of the penitentiary system of the Second Polish Republic were signed by chief of state J. Pilsudski in early of 1919. However, the problem of legislative unification of the activities of Polish prisons was solved only in 1928 with the adoption of an order about the organization of prisons signed by the Polish President I. Moscicki. The Prison Rules of 1931 and the updated Prison Law of 1939 testified to the authorities’ efforts to transform the penitentiary system from repressive to re-socializative. It was found that the establishment of a concentration camp in the Bereza Kartuska (Polesie Voivodeship) contradicted the tendencies mention above on the one hand, and became the logical reflection of the establishment of an authoritarian political system in the Polish state on the other.

The “Riese” project was a huge construction project initiated by German Nazi authorities, which was located in the northeast of the Sowie Mountains (Ger. Eulengebirge) in southwestern Poland. Construction of the “Riese” complex took place in 1943–1945 but was left unfinished. Due to the lack of reliable sources, the exact intended function of the Riese complex is still unknown. The construction was carried out by prisoners, mostly Jews, from the main nearby concentration camps, KL Gross-Rosen and KL Auschwitz-Birkenau. Thanks to the discovery in the National Archives (NARA, USA) of a valuable series of German aerial photographs taken in February 1945, insight into the location of labour camps was obtained. These photographs, combined with LiDAR data from the Head Office of Geodesy and Cartography (Warsaw, Poland), allowed for the effective identification and field inspection of the camps’ remains. The location and delimitation of the selected labour camps were confirmed by an analysis of the 1945 aerial photograph combined with LiDAR data. These results were supported by field inspection as well as archival testimonies of witnesses. The field inspection of the construction remains indicated intentionally faulty construction works, which deliberately reduced the durability of the buildings and made them easy to demolish. The authors believe that it is urgent to continue the research and share the results with both the scientific community and the local community. The authors also want to emphasize that this less-known aspect of Holocaust history is gradually disappearing in social and institutional memory and is losing to the commercial mythologization of the Riese object.

Czech and Polish Table Tennis Players of Jewish Origin in International Competition (1926-1957)The beginnings of the 18th century marked the birth of Jewish sport. The most famous athletes of those days were boxers, such as I. Bitton, S. Eklias, B. Aaron, D. Mendoga. Popular sports of this minority group included athletics, fencing and swimming. One of the first sport organizations was the gymnastic society Judische Turnverein Bar Kocha (Berlin - 1896).Ping-pong as a new game in Europe developed at the turn of the 20th century. Sport and organizational activities in England were covered by two associations: the Ping Pong Association and the Table Tennis Association; they differed, for example, in the regulations used for the game. In 1902, Czeski Sport (a Czech Sport magazine) and Kurier Warszawski (Warsaw's Courier magazine) published first information about this game. In Czech Republic, Ping-pong became popular as early as the first stage of development of this sport worldwide, in 1900-1907. This was confirmed by the Ping-pong clubs and sport competitions. In Poland, the first Ping-pong sections were established in the period 1925-1930. Czechs made their debut in the world championships in London (1926). Poles played for the first time as late as in the 8th world championships in Paris (1933). Competition for individual titles of Czech champions was started in 1927 (Prague) and in 1933 in Poland (Lviv).In the 1930s, Czechs employed an instructor of Jewish descent from Hungary, Istvan Kelen (world champion in the 1929 mixed games, studied in Prague). He contributed to the medal-winning success of Stanislaw Kolar at the world championships. Jewish players who made history in world table tennis included Trute Kleinowa (Makkabi Brno) - world champion in 1935-1937, who survived imprisonment in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp, Alojzy Ehrlich (Hasmonea Lwów), the three-time world vice-champion (1936, 1937, 1939), also survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Ivan Andreadis (Sparta Praga), nine-time world champion, who was interned during World War II (camp in Kleinstein near Krapkowice).Table tennis was a sport discipline that was successfully played by female and male players of Jewish origins. They made powerful representations of Austria, Hungary, Romania and Czech Republic and provided the foundation of organizationally strong national federations.

Do our customary notions of shame, blame and guilt require us to adopt a particular view of the self's singularity and invariance through time? Consider the intriguing case of John Demjanjuk, tried in Israel during 1987 and 1988 for the crimes of “Ivan the Terrible,” a concentration camp guard at Treblinka in Poland, during 1942–43. John Demjanjuk, a retired factory worker living in Cleveland, Ohio, appeared banal at his trial—old, quiet, ordinary and helpless; descriptions from survivors of Treblinka cast Ivan as monstrous in his vigorous brutality. Should John be found guilty and punished for Ivan's crimes? This question takes us beyond any answers sought at the trial. Even if the spatio-temporal identity of the later John and earlier Ivan had been established conclusively, still the justice of punishing the later man for the earlier one's crimes may be questioned. For a philosophical puzzle of personal identity lingers: is the later John the same person as the earlier Ivan? In cases such as this the passage of time and radical changes of character and personality seem to invite the notion that one self or person has succeeded another in the same body. If this were so, would—or should—culpability transfer undiminished from one self to another?

När ungefär 20 000 överlevande från nazisternas koncentrationsläger togs emot i Sverige under våren och sommaren 1945 visste flyktingpersonalen och beslutfattarna bland svenska myndigheter mycket litet om deras bakgrund, kultur och etnicitet. I början dominerade inställningen att antagonismen mellan judar och icke-judar från Polen var en religiös eller etnisk ömsesidig motsättning. Efter ett par månader mognade insikten om splittringen i två separata polska identiteter, samtidigt som antisemitismen hos icke-judiska polacker började nämnas vid sitt rätta namn. En liberalare samhällssyn, flyktingpersonalens personliga erfarenheter samt internationella faktorer samverkade till en bättre förståelse för flyktingarnas situation och för deras behov av att bygga upp ett nytt liv i Sverige där många så småningom rehabiliterades.* * *The division between Polish Jewish and non-Jewish concentration camp survivors: reactions from the Swedish society during the spring and summer of 1945 • As approximately 20,000 survivors from the Nazi concentration camps where received in Sweden during the spring and summer of 1945, the refugee workers and decision makers knew very little about their background, culture and ethnicity. Initially, the general opinion held that the antagonism between Jews and non-Jews from Poland was a mutual religious and cultural conflict and only a few observed the harsh verbal antisemitism that was common among non-Jewish Polish refugees. Over the coming months, an awareness of two separate Polish identities developed and the prevalent antisemitism was recognised for what it was. All persons, who lived within the borders of Poland before the war, were initially classified as Poles but gradually a classification according to religious and ethnic belonging developed. After a few months, the govern­ment and authorities realised that it was impossible to demand that all refugees return to their country of origin. A study of the archives of state authorities and aid agencies in Sweden reveals how an in­creasingly liberal view of society, the personal experiences of the aid workers as well as international circumstances contributed to a deeper understanding of the situation of the refugees and their needs to build a new life in Sweden, where many of them eventually where rehabilitated.

Education in post-war Legnica (1945–1968)When the war activities came to a close, first Jews started to come into town, mainly the former prisoners from Gross-Rosen concentration camp, and then the displaced rescued in the territory of the Soviet Union. The newcomers soon opened their own educational facilities and in the school year 1946/1947 in Legnica there were: a kindergarten, a foster house, a heder, a primary school with Hebrew as the language of lecture, a kibbutz and a Hebrew primary school. The educational pluralism did not last long because from the school year 1950/1951 there remained just one state-controlled Jewish school (the other facilities had been closed). The kindergarten was the only exception and although it received the status of a public institution it preserved Jewish character until mid-50s. The subsequent years brought significant fluctuation of teachers and students as many of them left Poland in the first half of the 1950s, whereas from 1956 more newcomers arrived from the USSR. On September 1, 1959 a high-school class was launched in the local primary school. In the 1960s the emigration of Jews from Legnica increased significantly, which resulted in smaller number of students. A breakthrough year was 1968, when, because of too small number of children (38 in total), on August 31 the Jewish high-school and primary school ceased to exist

The aim of the article is the analysis of German policy in Reichsgau Wartheland, an area of western Poland annexed to Germany in the years 1939–1945. In scientific literature German rule in Warthegau with its capital in Poznań is often defined as ,,experimental training area of National Socialism”, where the regime could test its genocidal and racial practices, which were an emanation of the German occupation of Poland. The Nazi authorities wanted to accomplish its ideological goals in Wartheland in a variety of cruel ways, including the ethnic cleansing, annihilation of Polish intelligentsia, destruction of cultural institutions, forced resettlement and expulsion, segregation Germans from Poles combined with wide-ranging racial discrimination against the Polish population, mass incarceration in prisons and concentration camps, systematic roundups of prisoners, as well as genocide of Poles and Jews within the scope of radical Germanization policy and Holocaust. The aim of Arthur Greiser, the territorial leader of the Wartheland Gauleiter and at the same time one of the most powerful local Nazi administrators in Hitler‘s empire, was to change the demographic structure and colonisation of the area by the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans Volksdeutschen from the Baltic and other regions in order to make it a ,,blond province” and a racial laboratory for the breeding of the ,,German master race”. The largest forced labour program, the first and longest standing ghetto in Łódź, which the Nazis renamed later Litzmannstadt and the first experimental mass gassings of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe carried out from autumn 1941 in gas vans in Chełmno extermination camp were all initiated in Warthegau, even before the implementation of the Final Solution. Furthermore, some of the first major deportations of the Jewish population took place here. Therefore in the genesis of the of the Nazi extermination policy of European Jewry Wartheland plays a pivotal role, as well as an important part of ruthless German occupation of Polish territories.

The terrains of Poland, located north of the Carpathians and the Sudetes, have been almost completely abandoned during the period of the LGM sensustricte. The reoccupation of Polish territories took place not until the end of LGM. These areas were then settled by the societies of the Magdalenian complex – a tradition that included upland areas of Western and Central Europe. On the basis of today's state of knowledge, it can be concluded that the eastern borders of Poland are at the same time the eastern boundary of the Magdalenien settlement. Five Magdalenian sites from the areas of today's Podkarpackie Voivodship are known (fig. 1). In the 1940s, a single-row harpoon linked to Magdalenian was found in Przemyśl. Further discoveries of sites fall into the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. Four of the mhave been discovered up to this day: in Hłomcza, Grodzisko Dolne, Wierzawice and Łąka. This sites are only short-lived campsprovided small inventories. So far, no traces of large, longer settled base camp types have been found. If this situation is not only the result of the current state of research, then it may suggest that the areas of south-eastern Poland were part of a larger territory exploited by some Magdalenian community. On the basis of the analysis, it may be assumed that this territory may have covered the areas of eastern Poland. Magdalenian settlement in eastern Poland continues throughout the presence of Late Magdalenian societies in Central Europe, from Dryas I to Alleröd. It means that the population, or traditions of this culture, reached the eastern periphery relatively quickly and for a long time. The question arises if the Magdalenian population, functioning in the eastern borderlands, occupied areas not covered by any previous settlement, and whether were there contacts between them and representatives of other traditions – Epigravettian, whose settlement extends east of today's Polish borders on the territory of Ukraine. Finally, the last question is whether the line of the San is the final eastern limit of Magdalenian. This last question should be answered in the affirmatively, though not categorically. So far, we do not know of any Magdalenian sites from the areas east of Poland. The answer to the remaining questions is difficult. A certain light is being shed on them by the discovery of the site in Święte. The part of the site studied so far provided a small concentration of lithic artefacts – flakes and blades as well as several tools. These materials were described as Epigravettian. The TL dates obtained from the profile indicate that it is contemporary to the Magdalenian settlement. Perhaps, therefore the Magdalenian population who came to this area inhabited the areas that were occupied by the “Epigravettian” population? Perhaps we are also dealing with a zone penetrated by both these communities? So far, we know only one Epigravettian site from this area, which is contemporary to the Magdalenian settlement, but its significance in the discussion of Magdalenien-Epigravettian relations is very important. To what extent this borderland was the area of contacts and what the consequences could have been is unexplained yet. Apart from the few possible imports of Volhynian flint in Magdalenian inventories (Wierzawice, Grodzisko Dolne?), there are no other elements that could be a material confirmation of such contacts. An in-depth analysis of possible contacts on the west-east axis is also hindered by the poor level of recognition of the Polish-Ukrainian borderland on the Ukrainian side. Research conducted in the south-east of Poland shows that the Polish-Ukrainian borderland is an important area through which the border between two cultural traditions passes at the beginning of the Late Pleistocene. This is an extremely important area in discussion on the relationship between Magdalenian and Epigravettian. Today's knowledge and questions set the prospects for further work. Key words: Epigravettian, Magdalenian, Upper Paleolithic, South-Eastern Poland, Polish-Ukrainian borderland, cultural contacts, imports.

After World War II museums in Poland were bound to serve political purposes. The aim of new government was to shape citizens’ awareness according to the Stalinist ideology. 21 July 1944, the Polish Committee of National Liberation (further PKWN) was created in Moscow under the patronage of Joseph Stalin. From 1 August 1944, it was located in Lublin together with its Arts and Culture Department. The period from 21 July 1944 to the end of December 1944 on the so-called liberated territories is discussed herein in the context of museums’ formation. It was the time when new institutions were created (e.g. Museum of Majdanek Concentration Camp) and those existing prior to WWII were re-established, such as the Lublin Museum or the National Museum of Przemyśl. In 1944, museums were facing many problems, inter alia, war damages, plunder by the People’s Army that quartered here, financial difficulties, personnel shortage. The lack of professionals in museums was the result of the PKWN strategy at the time, which first of all required propaganda specialists in culture institutions. The land reform initiated in 1944 affected museums to some extent; they were receiving works of art which had been confiscated from parcelled out landed properties. The only reason for it was the ideological one, however – from the historical point of view – they are regarded as unjust and immoral persecution and harassment against groups of society held by the communists in contempt, i.e. landowners. Sources on which the article has been based: reports of the PKWN and Culture Divisions of Regional Offices (Lublin, Rzeszów, Białystok, and Warsaw), which are in the possession of the Archives of Modern History Records (Archiwum Akt Nowych) in Warsaw.

This story is about a kind of pilgrimage, which is connected to the course of events which occurred in Częstochowa on 22 September 1942. In the morning, the German Captain Degenhardt lined up around 8,000 Jews and commanded them to step either to the left or to the right. This efficient judge from the police force in Leipzig was rapid in his decisions and he thus settled the destinies of thousands of people. After the Polish Defensive War of 1939, the town (renamed Tschenstochau) had been occupied by Nazi Germany, and incorporated into the General Government. The Nazis marched into Częstochowa on Sunday, 3 September 1939, two days after they invaded Poland. The next day, which became known as Bloody Monday, approximately 150 Jews were shot deadby the Germans. On 9 April 1941, a ghetto for Jews was created. During World War II about 45,000 of the Częstochowa Jews were killed by the Germans; almost the entire Jewish community living there.The late Swedish Professor of Oncology, Jerzy Einhorn (1925–2000), lived in the borderhouse Aleja 14, and heard of the terrible horrors; a ghastliness that was elucidated and concretized by all the stories told around him. Jerzy Einhorn survived the ghetto, but was detained at the Hasag-Palcery concentration camp between June 1943 and January 1945. In June 2009, his son Stefan made a bus tour between former camps, together with Jewish men and women, who were on this pilgrimage for a variety of reasons. The trip took place on 22–28 June 2009 and was named ‘A journey in the tracks of the Holocaust’. Those on the Holocaust tour represented different ‘pilgrim-modes’. The focus in this article is on two distinct differences when it comes to creed, or conceptions of the world: ‘this-worldliness’ and ‘other- worldliness’. And for the pilgrims maybe such distinctions are over-schematic, though, since ‘sacral fulfilment’ can be seen ‘at work in all modern constructions of travel, including anthropology and tourism’.

In Western historical consciousness, National Socialist mass murder has become permanently identified with the Jewish Holocaust, Adolf Hitler's maniacal project to annihilate European Jewry. From its earliest days, the Nazi Party sought to exclude Jews from German public life, and when the Nazis came to power in January 1933, their anti-Jewish animus became official policy. What followed was legal disemancipation of German Jews, physical attacks on their persons, ghettoization, deportation, and physical extermination in the East. The story of the Holocaust is well known and generally accepted. Yet two years before German Jewish policy swerved from persecution and harassment to genocide, the Nazis were already involved in state-organized killing of another disfavored minority. Unlike the destruction of European Jews, the murder of this group—the mentally disabled—occurred within the Reich's own borders. Launched with the signing of a “Hitler decree” in October 1939 (backdated to 1 September), the centrally organized program targeted so-called “incurable” patients, whose lives were to be ended by a doctor-administered “mercy death” (Gnadentod). The Nazis attached the term “euthanasia” to their program of destruction, bolstering their rationale for it with humanitarian arguments and cost-based justifications, the latter legitimizing euthanasia as a means to free up scarce resources for use by “valuable” Germans. Over time, the restrictive use of euthanasia just for incurable patients ended; thereafter, the Nazis extended the killing program to healthier patients, sick concentration camp inmates, Jewish patients, and a variety of “asocials” (juvenile delinquents, beggars, tramps, prostitutes). The technology of murder developed in the “euthanasia” program—carbon monoxide asphyxiation in gas chambers camouflaged as shower rooms—would become the model for the first death camps in Poland. Many of the “euthanasia” personnel were likewise transferred to the Polish extermination centers, where they applied the techniques of mass death—refined in murdering the disabled—to the murder of the European Jews.

This study expands the understanding of rare books — witnesses of the events of the World War II.The initial stage of formation of the library collections of Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IOC RAS, Department of the Library for Natural Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences) occurred in the 1940s. Acquisition sources of literature were very diverse, so the collections contain books from the libraries of various institutions of the Russian Empire and the USSR. Among foreign publications, there are monographs and periodicals from the displaced collections of libraries of the German industrial organizations and educational institutions, received after the Great Patriotic War. Monographs of the library of the German Chemical Society were returned to the GDR in 1956. Books of industrial companies “Vereinigte Stahlwerke”, “Deutsches Kalisyndikat Bucherei”, “Berndorfer Metallwarenfabrik Arthur Krupp A.G.”, “I.G. Farbenindustrie” and other are hitherto stored in the library holdings of IOC RAS. I.G. Farbenindustrie was the largest German chemical concern; it had its own laboratories for carrying out scientific research. Many famous chemists, including four Nobel laureates, worked there. The concern collaborated with the Nazi regime, developing artificial fuel, synthetic rubber, toxic substances. It had its own factories (Werk Auschwitz) and concentration camp in Auschwitz. The laboratories conducted chemical studies, and prisoners were involved in it. Providing scientific work with literature was an important component, so the laboratories had their own libraries. After the end of the War, most of the books probably remained on the territory of the plant, which was given to Poland. On its basis, the scientific and technical library of the laboratory was formed there, which later became part of the Chemical Institute. Some of the books from the Werk Auschwitz library got to the USSR, and some of them were transferred to the library of IOC RAS.This article for the first time considers the collections of IOC RAS from the point of view of the field-specific literature published before 1945. Copies with marks of domestic and foreign organizations, personal signs and autographs of scientists are especially valuable. These books can be attributed to the book monuments of the World War II. Thus, one of the most important tasks of the library now is to preserve and study them.

The article is devoted to the analysis of Eugene (Yevgeny) A. Nikolsky’s memoirs concerning refugees of the Great War of 1914-18. Nikolsky was authorized by the government organization Severopomosch’ (i.e. “northern help”) established in the end of June 1915 to settle refugees of the North-Western Front. He described his first steps in the welfare of forced migrants taken before the mass refugee movement began. He evacuated over a thousand people from the Radom gubernia of the Kingdom of Poland, where he then served, deep into Russian lands. He faced then complete indifference of the Smolensk and Moscow gubernia officials to war victims and unwillingness to help them. The memoirs highlight extremely difficult situation that developed in Kobrin, Grodno gubernia, in July 1915, as swarms of refugees hoped to stay there till the end of the war and never moved eastwards. The problem was exacerbated by enemy bombing. Nikolsky described dedicated work of the infirmary staff of the St. George community of the Red Cross in Kobrin who assisted the hundreds who were hurt in the bombing of the refugee camp. The memoirs also reflect the period of highest increase of mass refugee movement in August–September 1915. In the city of Roslavl, Smolensk gubernia, E. A. Nikolsky’s working day began at dawn and continued well after midnight. Thus, the humanitarian disaster caused by huge concentration of refugees was averted. And yet, E. A. Nikolsky noted, despite the difficult situation in Roslavl, representatives of the gubernia authorities were absent, apparently believing that assistance to refugees must be the the work of the governmental organization Severopomosch’, nothing to do with them. He encountered unlawful behavior of some officials and representatives of local governments, who attempted to steal money intended for refugee accommodation at every turn. In autumn 1915, E. A. Nikolsky was engaged in food and fodder supply of refugees in the Tula, Oryol and Voronezh gubernias and had to deal with unscrupulous suppliers and corrupt representatives of Zemstvo administration who recommended them. However, in the Riga region in the first half of 1916, Nikolsky was forced to cooperate with profiteers to get food for refugees. Nikolsky's work as an official of Severopomosch’ continued until August 1917, when refugee care passed under the control of the Union of Cities.

This article includes a terminological discussion regarding the notion of camp literature. Within Polish literary science, it is usually applied to literature raising the topic of German Nazi camps, particularly concentration camps and death camps, and, though less often, to Soviet camps, particularly forced labour camps. Yet the definition has proved to be excessively narrow. It should also cover, previously less studied, works of Polish literature regarding, i.a. the Polish concentration camp in Bereza Kartuska, the communist labour camps established in post-WWII Poland, and the Spanish concentration camp in Miranda de Ebro. The notion camp literature could also be applied to works devoted to internment camps, POW camps, or even ghettoes.

AbstractObject discoveries from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (PMA-B) in Poland challenge the efforts to preserve paint on corroded steel supports. The objects have been exposed to outdoor weathering conditions and then buried for about 65 years. This caused severe damage, such as corrosion and paint delamination. The fragile condition of such cultural heritage objects makes their preservation difficult and comprehensive studies for paint conservation are lacking. Additionally, a thorough investigation of used materials is needed to put objects produced by forced labour in historical context. In this study, we analysed signposts from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (Poland) collection to gain information about used materials, the object’s genesis as well as damage phenomenology. Literature research suggests that the signposts may be produced within the former German NAZI concentration and extermination camp. Inorganic constituents were identified using elemental analysis, such as X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and scanning electron microscopy coupled to an energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer (SEM–EDS). Organic matter was analysed utilizing vibrational spectroscopic instrumentation Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). Our results include the use of synthetic organic pigments (SOPs) and binders, which were newly emerged paint materials at that time. The study highlights the need for conservators to have detailed understanding of composite materials and demonstrates the need for further investigation concerning painted steel objects.

The 85 year old woman still had a strong German accent. She had, she told me, been living in Australia since the end of the war when she arrived as a refugee from Germany. Now Helga wanted help, wanted to attend my free euthanasia advisory clinics, wanted to get access to lethal drugs so that she could control the time of her death. I gave her an appointment for the next Sydney clinic, and hung up. I met her a few weeks later and she told me her story; how it was that she had come to this point. As a 22 year old Jewish woman, she was studying medicine in Warsaw when war broke out. When the Nazis invaded Poland, she found herself and her 2-year-old child incarcerated in a concentration camp, separated from her husband. Her expression was flat and detached as she described how her child had died, but how she, because of her youth and fitness, had been able to work and survive those war years. In Europe, at liberation, she found herself alone, her husband dead and with no-one else from her family alive. She travelled to Australia, and had worked for the next 35 years in a Sydney clothing factory. She was not terminally ill. In fact, by any conventional measure, she was not ill at all -- just someone who wanted to know she could peacefully end her life at the time of her choice. She asked me for the drugs she wanted. "Barbiturates", she said, "something that will give me control..." I raised my hands, stopping her in mid sentence. "Can't do it", I said, "it's against the law to assist in a suicide. And you're not even ill -- to help you would be to take extreme risks". It was her turn to stop me. "Risks!" she exclaimed, with more than a hint of sarcasm, "I'll tell you about real risks in life". She continued. "Do you think I'd be asking you for help if I'd been able to finish medicine? Do you think I'd be coming to you, begging for help? And I'm not after that much, I just want what I would have had, if life had been different. What I want is what you've got, something that will allow me to control the time of my death." This month, I described the story to medical and nursing staff in a Perth hospital. I wanted to use Helga's story as an example of one of the groups of people who are increasingly attending my euthanasia advisory clinics. In a clinic series, run in August/September of this year in four Australian cities, 44 patients were seen, 57% of whom were not terminal, and 12% (five patients) were not ill at all, but simply wanted to have the piece of mind that comes from having access to peaceful lethal drugs. In December this year, a second run of clinics will be held across Australia and another 34 patients will be seen. Slowly the profile of a typical clinic attender is being compiled. The results are encouraging; a seeming paradox. Those who are able to get help and obtain what they want, information, drugs, advice etc., immediately become less anxious. A preoccupation, a concern that many of them have had for months, sometime years, evaporates when they are put back in control. The terminally ill feel better, their quality of life improves, they can relax more, and they probably live longer. This then is the paradox: access to good euthanasia legislation, or in the absence of this, the chance to obtain advice from these euthanasia clinics, does not lead to the premature deaths of the terminally ill. Access to clinics results in the sick living longer, better lives. And patients like Helga, people who simply want to know they have control over this most important decision, benefit from the peace that comes when this need is met. Surely these are results of which a medical professional should be proud. Unfortunately, my opponents do not see it this way. Groups that purport to care for the rights of patients continue to oppose the clinics and to lobby the various medical boards for my deregistration. In three states, challenges have been made from such bodies as 'Right to Life', 'Coalition for the Defence of Human Life', 'Trust', and of course the 'Australian Medical Association'. Plans for a comprehensive series of free clinics in locations that will include Hobart and Perth are now in place for the year 2000. Whether they survive or not is yet to be seen... Philip Nitschke, MBBS, PhD. Darwin, November 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Philip Nitschke. "End." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.8 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/end.php>. Chicago style: Philip Nitschke, "End," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 8 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/end.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Philip Nitschke. (1999) End. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(8). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/end.php> ([your date of access]).

IntroductionThe wandering narrator is a familiar figure in contemporary literature. This narrator is often searching for something abstract or ill-defined connected to the past and the traces it leaves behind. The works of the German writer W.G. Sebald inspired a number of theories on the various ways a writer might intersect place, memory, and representation through seemingly aimless wandering. This article expands on the scholarship around Sebald’s themes to identify two modes of investigative wandering: (1) wandering “in place”, through a city where a past trauma has occurred, and (2) wandering “out of place”, which occurs when a wanderer encounters a city that is a holding place of traumas experienced elsewhere.Sebald’s narrators mostly conduct wandering “in place” because they are actively immersed in, and wandering through, locations that trigger both memory and thought. In this article, after exploring both Sebald’s work and theories of place in literature, I analyse another example of wandering in place, in the Paris of Patrick Modiano’s novel, The Search Warrant (2014). I conclude by discussing how I encountered this mode of wandering myself when in Moscow and St Petersburg researching my first novel, The Memory Artist (2016). In contrasting these two modes of wandering, my aim is to contribute further nuance to the interpretation of conceptions of place in literature. By articulating the concept of wandering “out of place”, I identify a category of wanderer and writer who, like myself, finds connection with places and their stories without having a direct encounter with that place. Theories of Place and Wandering in W.G. Sebald’s WorkIn this section, I introduce Sebald as a literary wanderer. Born in the south of Germany in 1944, Sebald is perhaps best known for his four “prose fictions”— Austerlitz published in 2001, The Emigrants published in 1996, The Rings of Saturn published in 1998, and Vertigo published in 2000—all of which blend historiography and fiction in mostly plot-less narratives. These works follow a closely autobiographical narrator as he traverses Europe, visiting people and places connected to Europe’s turbulent twentieth century. He muses on the difficulty of preserving the truths of history and speaking of others’ traumas. Sebald describes how “places do seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them” (Sebald quoted in Jaggi). Sebald left his native Germany in 1966 and moved to England, where he lived until his untimely death in a car accident in 2001 (Gussow). His four prose fictions feature the same autobiographical narrator: a middle-aged German man who lives in northern England. The narrator traverses Europe with a compulsion to research, ponder, and ultimately, represent historical catastrophes and traumas that haunt him. Anna MacDonald describes how Sebald’s texts “move freely between history and memory, biography, autobiography and fiction, travel writing and art criticism, scientific observation and dreams, photographic and other textual images” (115). The Holocaust and human displacement are simultaneously at the forefront of the narrator’s preoccupations but rarely referenced directly. This singular approach has caused many commentators to remark that Sebald’s works are “haunted” by these traumatic events (Baumgarten 272).Sebald’s narrators are almost constantly on the move, obsessively documenting the locations, buildings, and people they encounter or the history of that place. As such, it is helpful to consider Sebald’s wandering narrator through theories of landscape and its representation in art. Heike Polster describes the development of landscape from a Western European conception and notes how “the landscape idea in art and the techniques of linear perspective appear simultaneously” (88). Landscape is distinguished from raw physical environment by the role of the human mind: “landscape was perceived and constructed by a disembodied outsider” (88). As such, landscape is something created by our perceptions of place. Ulrich Baer makes a similar observation: “to look at a landscape as we do today manifests a specifically modern sense of self-understanding, which may be described as the individual’s ability to view herself within a larger, and possibly historical, context” (43).These conceptions of landscape suggest a desire for narrative. The attempt to fix our understanding of a place according to what we know about it, its past, and our own relationship to it, makes landscape inextricable from representation. To represent a landscape is to offer a representation of subjective perception. This understanding charges the landscapes of literature with meaning: the perceptions of a narrator who wanders and encounters place can be studied for their subjective properties.As I will highlight through the works of Sebald and Modiano, the wandering narrator draws on a number of sources in their representations of both place and memory, including their perceptions as they walk in place, the books they read, the people they encounter, as well as their subjective and affective responses. This multi-dimensional process aligns with Polster’s contention that “landscape is as much the external world as it is a visual and philosophical principle, a principle synthesizing the visual experience of material and geographical surroundings with our knowledge of the structures, characteristics, and histories of these surroundings” (70). The narrators in the works of Sebald and Modiano undertake this synthesised process as they traverse their respective locations. As noted, although their objectives are often vague, part of their process of drawing together experience and knowledge is a deep desire to connect with the pasts of those places. The particular kind of wanderer “in place” who I consider here is preoccupied with the past. In his study of Sebald’s work, Christian Moser describes how “the task of the literary walker is to uncover and decipher the hidden track, which, more often than not, is buried in the landscape like an invisible wound” (47-48). Pierre Nora describes places of memory, lieux de memoire, as locations “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself”. Interest in such sites arises when “consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with a sense that memory has been torn—but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists” (Nora 7).Encountering and contemplating sites of memory, while wandering in place, can operate simultaneously as encounters with traumatic stories. According to Tim Ingold, “the landscape is constituted as an enduring record of—and testimony to—the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in doing so, have left something of themselves […] landscape tells – or rather is – a story” (153). Such occurrences can be traced in the narratives of Sebald and Modiano, as their narrators participate both in the act of reading the story of landscape, through their wandering and their research about a place, but also in contributing to the telling of those stories, by inserting their own layer of subjective experience. In this way, the synthesised process of landscape put forward by Polster takes place.To perceive the landscape in this way is to “carry out an act of remembrance” (Ingold 152). The many ways that a person experiences and represents the stories that make up a landscape are varied and suited to a wandering methodology. MacDonald, for example, characterises Sebald’s methodology of “representation-via-digressive association”, which enables “writer, narrator, and reader alike to draw connections in, and through, space between temporally distant historical events and the monstrous geographies they have left in their wake” (MacDonald 116).Moser observes that Sebald’s narrative practice suggests an opposition between the pilgrimage, “devoted to worship, asceticism, and repentance”, and tourism, aimed at “entertainment and diversion” (Moser 37). If the pilgrim contemplates the objects, monuments, and relics they encounter, and the tourist is “given to fugitive consumption of commercialized sights”, Sebald’s walker is a kind of post-traumatic wanderer who “searches for the traces of a silent catastrophe that constitutes the obverse of modernity and its history of progress” (Moser 37). Thus, wandering tends to “cultivate a certain mode of perception”, one that is highly attuned to the history of a place, that looks for traces rather than common sites of consumption (Moser 37).It is worth exploring the motivations of a wandering narrator. Sebald’s narrator in The Rings of Saturn (2002) provides us with a vague impetus for his wandering: “in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that had taken hold of me after the completion of a long stint of work” (3). In Vertigo (2002), Sebald’s narrator walks with seemingly little purpose, resulting in a sense of confusion or nausea alluded to in the book’s title: “so what else could I do … but wander aimlessly around until well into the night”. On the next page, he refers again to his “aimlessly wandering about the city”, which he continues until he realises that his shoes have fallen apart (35-37). What becomes apparent from such comments is that the process of wandering is driven by mostly subconscious compulsions. The restlessness of Sebald’s wandering narrators represents their unease about our capacity to forget the history of a place, and thereby lose something intangible yet vital that comes from recognising traumatic pasts.In Sebald’s work, if there is any logic to the wanderer’s movement, it is mostly hidden from them while wandering. The narrator of Vertigo, after days of wandering through northern Italian cities, remarks that “if the paths I had followed had been inked in, it would have seemed as though a man had kept trying out new tracks and connections over and over, only to be thwarted each time by the limitations of his reason, imagination or willpower” (Sebald, Vertigo 34). Moser writes how “the hidden order that lies behind the peripatetic movement becomes visible retroactively – only after the walker has consulted a map. It is the map that allows Sebald to decode the ‘writing’ of his steps” (48). Wandering in place enables digressions and preoccupations, which then constitute the landscape ultimately represented. Wandering and reading the map of one’s steps afterwards form part of the same process: the attempt to piece together—to create a landscape—that uncovers lost or hidden histories. Sebald’s Vertigo, divided into four parts, layers the narrator’s personal wandering through Italy, Austria, and Germany, with the stories of those who were there before him, including the writers Stendhal, Kafka, and Casanova. An opposing factor to memory is a landscape’s capacity to forget; or rather, since landscape conceived here is a construction of our own minds, to reflect our own amnesia. Lewis observes that Sebald’s narrator in Vertigo “is disturbed by the suppression of history evident even in the landscape”. Sebald’s narrator describes Henri Beyle (the writer Stendhal) and his experience visiting the location of the Battle of Marengo as such:The difference between the images of the battle which he had in his head and what he now saw before him as evidence that the battle had in fact taken place occasioned in him a vertiginous sense of confusion […] In its shabbiness, it fitted neither with his conception of the turbulence of the Battle of Marengo nor the vast field of the dead on which he was now standing, alone with himself, like one meeting his doom. (17-18)The “vertiginous sense of confusion” signals a preoccupation with attempting to interpret sites of memory and, importantly, what Nora calls a “consciousness of a break with the past” (Nora 7) that characterises an interest in lieux de memoire. The confusion and feeling of unknowing is, I suggest, a characteristic of a wandering narrator. They do not quite know what they are looking for, nor what would constitute a finished wandering experience. This lack of resolution is a hallmark of the wandering narrative. A parallel can be drawn here with trauma fiction theory, which categorises a particular kind of literature that aims to recognise and represent the ethical and psychological impediments to representing trauma (Whitehead). Baumgarten describes the affective response to Sebald’s works:Here there are neither answers nor questions but a haunted presence. Unresolved, fragmented, incomplete, relying on shards for evidence, the narrator insists on the inconclusiveness of his experience: rather than arriving at a conclusion, narrator and reader are left disturbed. (272)Sebald’s narrators are illustrative literary wanderers. They demonstrate a conception of landscape that theorists such as Polster, Baer, and Ingold articulate: landscapes tell stories for those who investigate them, and are constituted by a synthesis of personal experience, the historical record, and the present condition of a place. This way of encountering a place is necessarily fragmented and can be informed by the tenets of trauma fiction, which seeks ways of representing traumatic histories by resisting linear narratives and conclusive resolutions. Modiano: Wandering in Place in ParisModiano’s The Search Warrant is another literary example of wandering in place. This autobiographical novel similarly illustrates the notion of landscape as a construction of a narrator who wanders through cities and forms landscape through an amalgamation of perception, knowledge, and memory.Although Modiano’s wandering narrator appears to be searching the Paris of the 1990s for traces of a Jewish girl, missing since the Second World War, he is also conducting an “aimless” wandering in search of traces of his own past in Paris. The novel opens with the narrator reading an old newspaper article, dated 1942, and reporting a missing fourteen-year-old girl in Paris. The narrator becomes consumed with a need to learn the fate of the girl. The search also becomes a search for his own past, as the streets of Paris from which Dora Bruder disappeared are also the streets his father worked among during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. They are also the same streets along which the narrator walked as an angst-ridden youth in the 1960s.Throughout the novel, the narrator uses a combination of facts uncovered by research, documentary evidence, and imagination, which combine with his own memories of walking in Paris. Although the fragmentation of sources creates a sense of uncertainty, together there is an affective weight, akin to Sebald’s “haunted presence”, in the layers Modiano’s narrator compiles. One chapter opens with an entry from the Clignancourt police station logbook, which records the disappearance of Dora Bruder:27 December 1941. Bruder, Dora, born Paris.12, 25/2/26, living at 41 Boulevard Ornano.Interview with Bruder, Ernest, age 42, father. (Modiano 69)However, the written record is ambiguous. “The following figures”, the narrator continues, “are written in the margin, but I have no idea what they stand for: 7029 21/12” (Modiano 69). Moreover, the physical record of the interview with Dora’s father is missing from the police archives. All he knows is that Dora’s father waited thirteen days before reporting her disappearance, likely wary of drawing attention to her: a Jewish girl in Occupied Paris. Confronted by uncertainty, the narrator recalls his own experience of running away as a youth in Paris: “I remember the intensity of my feelings while I was on the run in January 1960 – an intensity such as I have seldom known. It was the intoxication of cutting all ties at a stroke […] Running away – it seems – is a call for help and occasionally a form of suicide” (Modiano 71). The narrator’s construction of landscape is multi-layered: his past, Dora’s past, his present. Overhanging this is the history of Nazi-occupied Paris and the cultural memory of France’s collaboration with Nazi Germany.With the aid of other police documents, the narrator traces Dora’s return home, and then her arrest and detainment in the Tourelles barracks in Paris. From Tourelles, detainees were deported to Drancy concentration camp. However, the narrator cannot confirm whether Dora was deported to Drancy. In the absence of evidence, the narrator supplies other documents: profiles of those known to be deported, in an attempt to construct a story.Hena: I shall call her by her forename. She was nineteen … What I know about Hena amounts to almost nothing: she was born on 11 December 1922 at Pruszkow in Poland, and she lived at no. 42 Rue Oberkampf, the steeply sloping street I have so often climbed. (111)Unable to make conclusions about Dora’s story, the narrator is drawn back to a physical location: the Tourelles barracks. He describes a walk he took there in 1996: “Rue des Archives, Rue de Bretagne, Rue des-Filles-du-Calvaire. Then the uphill slope of the Rue Oberkampf, where Hena had lived” (Modiano 124). The narrator combines what he experiences in the city with the documentary evidence left behind, to create a landscape. He reaches the Tourelles barracks: “the boulevard was empty, lost in a silence so deep I could hear the rustling of the planes”. When he sees a sign that says “MILITARY ZONE. FILMING OR PHOTOGRAPHY PROHIBITED”, the cumulative effect of his solitary and uncertain wandering results in despair at the difficulty of preserving the past: “I told myself that nobody remembers anything anymore. A no-man’s-land lay beyond that wall, a zone of emptiness and oblivion” (Modiano 124). The wandering process here, including the narrator’s layering of his own experience with Hena’s life, the lack of resolution, and the wandering narrator’s disbelief at the seemingly incongruous appearance of a place today in relation to its past, mirrors the feeling of Sebald’s narrator at the site of the Battle of Marengo, quoted above.Earlier in the novel, after frustrated attempts to find information about Dora’s mother and father, the narrator reflects that “they are the sort of people who leave few traces. Virtually anonymous” (Modiano 23). He remarks that Dora’s parents are “inseparable from those Paris streets, those suburban landscapes where, by chance, I discovered they had lived” (Modiano 23). There is a disjunction between knowledge and something deeper, the undefined impetus that drives the narrator to walk, to search, and therefore to write: “often, what I know about them amounts to no more than a simple address. And such topographical precision contrasts with what we shall never know about their life—this blank, this mute block of the unknown” (Modiano 23). This contrast of topographical precision and the “unknown” echoes the feeling of Sebald’s narrator when contemplating sites of memory. One may wander “in place” yet still feel a sense of confusion and gaps in knowledge: this is, I suggest, an intended aesthetic effect by both authors. Reader and narrator alike feel a sense of yearning and melancholy as a result of the narrator’s wandering. Wandering out of Place in Moscow and St PetersburgWhen I travelled to Russia in 2015, I sought to document, with a Sebaldian wandering methodology, processes of finding memory both in and out of place. Like Sebald and Modiano, I was invested in hidden histories and the relationship between the physical environment and memory. Yet unlike those authors, I focused my wandering mostly on places that reflected or referenced events that occurred elsewhere rather than events that happened in that specific place. As such, I was wandering out of place.The importance of memory, both in and out of place, is a central concept in my novel The Memory Artist. The narrator, Pasha, reflects the concerns of current and past members of Russia’s civic organisation named Memorial, which seeks to document and preserve the memory of victims of Communism. Contemporary activists lament that in modern Russia the traumas of the Gulag labour camps, collectivisation, and the “Terror” of executions under Joseph Stalin, are inadequately commemorated. In a 2012 interview, Irina Flige, co-founder of the civic body Memorial Society in St Petersburg, encapsulated activists’ disappointment at seeing burial sites of Terror victims fall into oblivion:By the beginning of 2000s these newly-found sites of mass burials had been lost. Even those that had been marked by signs were lost for a second time! Just imagine: a place was found [...] people came and held vigils in memory of those who were buried there. But then this generation passed on and a new generation forgot the way to these sites – both literally and metaphorically. (Flige quoted in Karp)A shift in generation, and a culture of secrecy or inaction surrounding efforts to preserve the locations of graves or former labour camps, perpetuate a “structural deficit of knowledge”, whereby knowledge of the physical locations of memory is lost (Anstett 2). This, in turn, affects the way people and societies construct their memories. When sites of past trauma are not documented or acknowledged as such, it is more difficult to construct a narrative about those places, particularly those that confront and document a violent past. Physical absence in the landscape permits a deficit of storytelling.This “structural deficit of knowledge” is exacerbated when sites of memory are located in distant locations. The former Soviet labour camps and locations of some mass graves are scattered across vast locations far from Russia’s main cities. Yet for some, those cities now act as holding environments for the memory of lost camp locations, mass graves, and histories. For example, a monument in Moscow may commemorate victims of an overseas labour camp. Lieux de memoire shift from being “in place” to existing “out of place”, in monuments and memorials. As I walked through Moscow and St Petersburg, I had the sensation I was wandering both in and out of place, as I encountered the histories of memories physically close but also geographically distant.For example, I arrived early one morning at the Lubyanka building in central Moscow, a pre-revolutionary building with yellow walls and terracotta borders, the longstanding headquarters of the Soviet and now Russian secret police (image 1). Many victims of the worst repressive years under Stalin were either shot here or awaited deportation to Gulag camps in Siberia and other remote areas. The place is both a site of memory and one that gestures to traumatic pasts inflicted elsewhere.Image 1: The Lubyanka, in Central MoscowA monument to victims of political repression was erected near the Lubyanka Building in 1990. The monument takes the form of a stone taken from the Solovetsky Islands, an archipelago in the far north, on the White Sea, and the location of the Solovetsky Monastery that Lenin turned into a prison camp in 1921 (image 2). The Solovetsky Stone rests in view of the Lubyanka. In the 1980s, the stone was taken by boat to Arkhangelsk and then by train to Moscow. The wanderer encounters memory in place, in the stone and building, and also out of place, in the signified trauma that occurred elsewhere. Wandering out of place thus has the potential to connect a wanderer, and a reader, to geographically remote histories, not unlike war memorials that commemorate overseas battles. This has important implications for the preservation of stories. The narrator of The Memory Artist reflects that “the act of taking a stone all the way from Solovetsky to Moscow … was surely a sign that we give things and objects and matter a little of our own minds … in a way I understood that [the stone’s] presence would be a kind of return for those who did not, that somehow the stone had already been there, in Moscow” (Brabon 177).Image 2: The Monument to Victims of Political Repression, Near the LubyankaIn some ways, wandering out of place is similar to the examples of wandering in place considered here: in both instances the person wandering constructs a landscape that is a synthesis of their present perception, their individual history, and their knowledge of the history of a place. Yet wandering out of place offers a nuanced understanding of wandering by revealing the ways one can encounter the history, trauma, and memory that occur in distant places, highlighting the importance of symbols, memorials, and preserved knowledge. Image 3: Reflectons of the LubyankaConclusionThe ways a writer encounters and represents the stories that constitute a landscape, including traumatic histories that took place there, are varied and well-suited to a wandering methodology. There are notable traits of a wandering narrator: the digressive, associative form of thinking and writing, the unmapped journeys that are, despite themselves, full of compulsive purpose, and the lack of finality or answers inherent in a wanderer’s narrative. Wandering permits an encounter with memory out of place. The Solovetsky Islands remain a place I have never been, yet my encounter with the symbolic stone at the Lubyanka in Moscow lingers as a historical reminder. This sense of never arriving, of not reaching answers, echoes the narrators of Sebald and Modiano. 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