Unethical recycling: Matzevot for Everyday Use at FL Holocaust

Imagine you’re walking down the road and you see your sweet grandma’s headstone smashed to bits and used as bricks for the wall of a school building. This is a theoretical for us, but in Poland, it's an everyday reality. Polish photographer Łukasz Baksik documents how people over the years have stolen Jewish gravestones, called matzevot, to use for fences, pavements, and even home tools.

Matzevot for Everyday Use is grave-robbing gone wild.

In some cases, as In “Protestant Gravestone,” we see matzevot used for their original purpose — but by different owners. Oskar and Maria Turon (either consciously or unknowingly) misappropriated the backsides of matzevot as a blank slate for their personal monuments. In “Catholic tombstone” from Topczewa, the new owners  didn’t even bother to use the other side — they just engraved right over the previous owner’s written history. Without fancy camera angles or extra bells and whistles, the photographer uses a blunt black-and-white documentary style to give a head-on account of these sacrilegious acts.

These pictures record a double catastrophe — first, with the Nazis' invasion of Poland and their use of matzevot, and second with the Poles' continuation of the infamous tradition well after WWII. Before the war, there were around 1,200 Jewish cemeteries. At least 400 of those were demolished during the war. It is impossible to regain that collective history. So much of genealogy relies on physical markers to act as clues to trace family lineage — all lost, moved, or destroyed.

The works are curated in a photographic series, with one large image of the full landscape paired with smaller detail images to show where the matzevot are hiding. A “Storage Building” in Końskie looks like an ordinary photo until you start to inspect the images below it, drawing us closer to the wall. Scanning across the surface, you still can’t spot what Baksik is trying to show us. Come even closer: the final shot is the spoiler. From there, you can backtrack through the images to understand what the artist is highlighting.

Some of the more horrific headstone sightings are located in the wall of a basketball/soccer playing field, and even serving as the border for an elementary school’s sandbox. I repeat: tombstone-lined sandbox. These photographs ask more questions than they answer: If these are the few visible tombstones on the wall of this building or that cowshed, how many more were used, with their inscribed sides paved and hidden away with layers of mortar?

As if using gravestones in architecture weren't bad enough, using them as household equipment goes that extra amoral mile. Cut into a disk shape, Jewish gravestones were used as grindstones to sharpen metal tools, without even bothering to grind down the Hebrew inscriptions on the side. I can only imagine this is the Poles' version of shabby chic, a gruesome attempt to achieve that whole “antique” look. The last line of a Tykocin grindstone reads, “[…] [she] sought the path of goodness,” serving as dark irony for the path of anti-Semitism that the new owner of this “tool” has taken.

Between the three rooms of 2D works, there is one physical artifact: the grindstone carved from the matzevah of a woman named Miriam. The hand crank is rusted and looks like it might crumble at any moment, and the sharpening edges are rough and chipped away with heavy use and abuse. Erasure of Jewish culture is talked about broadly in terms of written history and memory, but this is a literal erasure, as these tombstones were slowly ground into nothing with repetitive use.

The old “they didn’t know any better” routine isn’t going to fly here because these folks knew what they were doing (it’s not like they were using Polish headstones), and because this is still happening to this day. There's no shortage of ordinary stone, so other than reasons of greed — people using stolen, aka “free” stone — why is this still occurring?

This goes beyond disrespect or lack of empathy for the other. Just as grave robbers around the world dismantle the efforts of historians to put together the puzzles of the past, Poland slowly continues to wipe out traces of Jewish culture by taking away its history — something that can never be replaced.

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Matzevot for Everyday Use: Photographs by Łukasz Baksik.

Through Jan. 29.

Florida Holocaust Museum, 55 5th St. S., St. Pete.

Daily, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. $8-$16.

727-820-0100. flholocaustmuseum.org.

This article appears in Oct 27 – Nov 3, 2016.