Jews, Germans, and Allies by Grossmann Atina

Author:Grossmann, Atina
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

BODIES ON DISPLAY

All contemporary evidence makes strikingly clear the obvious but still underanalyzed point that lives and identities, both individual and collective, were reconstructed—and that reconstruction was represented—in gendered and embodied ways. Just as the persecution and murder of all Jews had been differentiated by age and gender, so too was their return to life. Precisely because gendered roles and sexed bodies had been so catastrophically unsettled by a Nazi Final Solution that aimed to produce desexed Musselmen and that prioritized the annihilation of mothers, children, and the “unfit,” life was reborn and identity remade through the reconstruction of gendered roles and sexed healthy bodies. As a collective, the She’erit Hapletah conceived and represented renewal and rehabilitation in terms of the body, which was after all easier to cure and to exhibit than the psychic wounds, most of which did not lend themselves to display for political purposes, or did not manifest themselves until many years later.

In the many images of the DPs preserved in films, newsreels, and photos, and in the stories told in memoirs and contemporary reports, we find the story of Jewish bodies. The visual trajectory moves from images of rotting corpses to those of emaciated bodies, both female and male, being examined, poked, and measured, their scars exposed for the cameras, and then being treated, disinfected, and slowly patched together. The story concludes with new pictures of healthy, strong, and well-fed bodies. Women appear as young mothers in the ubiquitous and by now iconic processions pushing baby carriages, cradling newborns, holding chubby toddlers by the hand, hanging laundry, and caring for children in DP camp kindergartens. Men appear muscled and bare-chested in sleeveless T-shirts, playing soccer, boxing, or running track during the many sports competitions that were such an important part of DP life, or even more powerfully (and eerily perhaps) strutting in the marching formations of the DP police.96 At times, the gender divisions are complicated by generational factors; young fathers are seen bouncing babies on their laps, or both boys and girls are presented in their Zionist youth groups, marching, singing, doing calisthenics, and wearing paramilitary-style uniforms.97 Inevitably, these images obfuscate as well as make visible; they show health and vigor but efface the pain and the scars also carried by tough bodies and smiling young parents.

But the DPs were not only filmed and photographed for others; they also photographed themselves. “We are obsessed with the need to have ourselves photographed, and to possess photos of our friends,” Simon Schochet remembered about Feldafing. For people who often retained no photos of their lost loved ones or of themselves as children, “To have a pictorial image of yourself which you can critically look at, laugh at, or admire, is to us the final unmistakable proof that we are really living creatures.” Staring back at themselves they saw the strong, healthy people that so surprised observers: “we can confront ourselves vis-a-vis from a glossy paper print and be reassured that we truly resemble in face, body, and dress all the other men and women with whom we share this great planet.

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