Egzystencje śmietnikowe (Rachela Auerbach, Bruno Schulz)
Refuse Heap Existences (Rachela Auerbach, Bruno Schulz)

Summary/Abstract: The refuse heap in the ghetto landscape is truly incredible. Its horror probably originates from overstepping its, seemingly, natural territory. The ghetto dump appears to break free from the frames, ruptures the form, passes from lifelessness to a sui generis life, ceases to be a motionless pile of refuse and assumes inner power. Ghetto rubbish dumps, i.e. junk, wretched remnants of people’s lives cast into the street, empty shells of existence – such is the landscape of the Holocaust. And yet in these piles of “dead” refuse there pulsates some sort of dark energy, while processes of biological transformation: rot, decay, and mould – symptoms of that life, last endlessly. People who left behind this rubbish had been changed into ashes cast into rivers and scattered on fields. They enter the great cycle of the transformations of Nature. Holocaust is annihilation. It consumes people, whilst each person has his own face, history, and place on Earth. He leaves behind a void. Nothing will fill it. And yet I find it difficult to cease thinking that some sort of a form of life goes on uninterruptedly in an extraordinary manner, perceivable only from a global, planetary perspective. I cannot grasp this aporia of annihilation and duration.

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