Warsaw 3

Natan Rappaport’s The Fight stands in what was once the heart of Warsaw Ghetto. One side of the monument shows the heroic, muscular figures of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising with Mordechai Anielewicz standing in the center. A woman holds her infant aloft. A man rises from what can easily be imagined as the ashes of the ghetto. Another militant woman clutches a gun and looks fearlessly on her opponents. 

The Jews look like Greek Gods; braver and more beautiful than human beings – let alone emaciated, oppressed prisoners with nothing left to lose. The monument of course has been thoroughly critiqued, including by the late Anielewicz himself, who said something along the lines of, “Do you think we ever looked like that?” Furthermore, the effort to portray the militants as exceptional Jews fighting for their dignity reduces their complex identities to something simple in our imaginations: heroes. Remembering them as such ensures that we forget the complexities, the infuriating intricacies of their identities. 

In a sense, the front of the sculpture can be seen as similar to the back of the sculpture: a line of Jews with ill-defined faces march to their deaths under the watchful eye of soldiers bearing ideologies of mass destruction. While they are intended to be shown as the ones that the resistors avenge, viewers are left with an impression that they were some how less knowledgeable, less able, inherently different from the exceptional figures represented on the front. Thus, they too are misrepresented, conflated with one another until we almost forget what makes their humanity theirs. 

It is worth saying that these critiques seem somewhat obvious to students of Jewish studies today who have the advantage of archives, seasoned professors, and hearing generations of scholarly debate. And so perhaps the most valuable part of the monument comes after the critique, when one tries to make the figures on both sides out, realizing that both sides of the monument post critique ask them the same questions. Who were they? What was it like to resist with nothing left to lose? What were all of those people thinking in Umschagplatz? What aspirations did they have? How did they define their Judaism? 

The questions are of course endless, and I can only imagine the ones that arose for my classmates. We too are subsumed under one identity but enjoy the richness of the differences between one another every day in this unusual and eerie place. We rushed off to the next Jewish history site before we could even discuss amongst each other, remembering the ambitions of our day and considering only for a moment what the resistors might think of us.

Ariana Lee '15