Genocide/ecocide: culture, public debate, language

Introduction

This introduction situates the six articles included in the special issue in the context of the steady growth of ecocritical and zoocritical perspectives in Holocaust research. It delineates the key themes of the issue and offers summaries of the six contributions. It also speculates about the possible future developments in the transdisciplinary field of environmental genocide studies.

In 1946, Polish novelist and member of the Central Committee for the Investigation of Hitlerian Crimes, Zofia Nałkowska, thus described the Holocaust: ‘People doomed people to this fate.’ (Ludzie ludziom zgotowali ten los.) Nałkowska’s dictum, which provides the epigraph for her collection of short stories titled Medallions (Medaliony), is certainly symptomatic of a thinking about Nazi war crimes that does not yet account for the ontological separateness of the genocide of Europe’s Jews. Scholars have therefore described the aphorism as characteristic of ‘post-Auschwitz humanism’ (pooświęcimski humanizm) and of a ‘denationalization within human boundaries’ (denacjonalizacja w granicach międzyludzkich).¹ Nałkowska’s words are therefore also indicative of the fact that, as Tim Cole puts it, ‘despite the rise of environmental history within the wider discipline,’ until recently ‘Holocaust historiography tended to focus solely on human actors.’² The anthropocentrism of Holocaust research has found reflection in Raul Hilberg’s triangulation of Holocaust participants – victims, perpetrators, bystanders – and in its more recent revisions and extensions, exemplified by Michael Rothberg’s theorization of the category of the implicated subject.³

If Nałkowska’s dictum has been hotly debated on political grounds, its narrow anthropocentrism has not been contested, even though Holocaust scholarship has recently seen an advent of studies whose framework exceeds that of interhuman violence.⁴ More specifically, some scholars have been interrogating the adequacy of human language and way of seeing, while simulating a non-human-focused perspective and redefining agency.⁵ These relatively rare attempts to challenge the anthropocentrism of Holocaust research had been anticipated by Zygmunt Bauman’s use of the horticultural metaphor in his critique of modernity: ‘Modern genocide, like modern culture in general’, writes Bauman in his seminal book Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), ‘is a gardener’s job. […] If garden design defines its weeds […] weeds are to be exterminated.’⁶ If for the Polish-born sociologist, horticulture is but a metaphor for the post-Enlightenment drive to achieve a fully designed and controlled world, which culminated in the Holocaust, for environmental philosopher Eric Katz it is a subject of inquiry in its own right. It is as part of his denunciation of ecological restoration as a phenomenon that consists of ‘a physical and epistemological domination of the nonhuman natural world’⁷ that Katz began to connect ‘the massive destruction of the earth’s biosphere’ and ‘the planned extermination of European Jewry.’⁸ The environmental philosopher illustrated his position by pointing to the intertwining of environmental and ethnic goals within the Nazi policy itself; when the Reichskommissar for the resettlement of the German people, Henrich Himmler, presented his plans for a transformation of occupied Poland, he spoke not only of creating German villages, replanting trees, shrubs, and hedgerows to protect the crops, and altering climate by increasing formation of clouds, but also of an ethnic cleansing of Poles, both Jewish and Gentile.⁹ Similarly to Katz, historian of Zionism and Nazism Boaz Neuman has demonstrated that, contrary to the widespread belief in the embeddedness of a concern for nature in the Nazi ideology, Hitler’s regime was destructive to humans and non-humans alike; the professionals put in charge of creating a Lebensraum in the East, who operated in fields such as afforestation, conservation, agriculture, and soil erosion, participated – directly or indirectly – in the genocide that took place in this part of the world.¹⁰ For Neuman, the Holocaust was therefore part of an ‘ecological’ project that, ‘in addition to dealing with the inanimate, flora, and fauna, had to deal with the human element.’ Neuman specifies that, for the Nazis, the Jew was an ‘ecological hazard,’ ‘a soiled and soiling figure, contaminated and contaminating,’ ‘a threat to German nature, a threat to the German forests.’¹¹ The Nazi ideology thus established a dichotomy of Jew/(German) nature, and posited the Jew as a parasite living at the expense of nature and/or living in an unnatural way. So much so that the Jew was identified by the Nazis as an Unkraut (weed) and an Ungeziefer (pest/vermin) to be eliminated.¹²

Since Katz first isolated domination as the common denominator of the Holocaust and our catastrophic impact on nature in the early 1990s, other scholars have sought to transcend the anthropocentric focus of Holocaust historiography or even, heeding Neuman’s recommendation, to embrace ecologism as a methodology for studying the Nazi genocide.¹³ As well as following philosophers such as Katz and Bauman, these historians have drawn on the work of Holocaust geographers who, working within the spatial turn in the humanities, studied the role in the Nazi genocide of the topography of concentration camps, ghettos, extermination sites, urban hiding places, spaces repurposed for the internment of Jews, and the roads that saw the death marches.¹⁴ Holocaust geographers regarded the Nazi genocide as ‘a place-making event that saw a creation of new places – ghetto and camp – and a reuse (and reimagining) of existing places – the house, the room, the cattle car.’¹⁵ They hoped that such an approach would reveal the diversity and complexity of the experience of the victims,¹⁶ and guard the genocidal act from its reductive equation with Auschwitz.¹⁷

As the attention shifted from human-made to natural spaces, such as, for example, forests, the beginning of the new millennium witnessed an ecological turn in genocide studies.¹⁸ One of the early manifestations of this turn is the collected volume Holocaust and Nature (2013), edited and introduced by Didier Pollefeyt. The ambition of the Belgian theologian was to connect ‘the historical Holocaust of the twentieth century with contemporary ecological issues,’ without, however, reducing the Nazi genocide to a metaphor.¹⁹ Holocaust and Nature thus established links between ‘the ways the Nazis understood nature, the way the victims of the Holocaust experienced nature, and the way we approach nature today on an individual and collective level.’²⁰ For example, to some victims nature offered solace and hope, or was a source of aesthetic or religious experience. Others, on the contrary, found its beauty at odds with the Nazi atrocities or saw it as indifferent towards their suffering. The perpetrators’ relationship with the natural environment was similarly ambivalent, not to say twisted. Their official glorification of nature and especially of the German people’s relationship with it as part of their Blut und Boden (blood and land) policy notwithstanding, the Nazis exploited and destroyed it ruthlessly for economic, military, and genocidal purposes. For Pollyfeyt, the third category of Holocaust participants – the bystanders – is instructive from the perspective of our present passivity regarding the environmental crisis. Namely, he asks whether we can learn anything from those who, through small actions, became rescuers, that is whether ‘the lessons of the Holocaust [can] make us tomorrow’s rescuers of the earth.’²¹

A more recent and much more widely commented upon example of the ‘environmental histories of the Holocaust’, to use Cole’s term for the new interdisciplinary research field, is the 2020 issue of the Journal of Genocide Studies edited by Jacek Małczyński et al.²² Prompted by the work of Polish Holocaust scholars working in environmental and animal perspectives, the articles collated in the issue titled ‘Environmental History of the Holocaust’ examine the two-way relationship between nature and the Nazi genocide, including the commemorative practices thereof.²³ In his own contribution to the special issue, which discusses the environmental policy at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, Małczyński argues that the same controlling and exploitative thinking that motivated the mass murder of Jews and other ethnic and social minorities undergirds the attitude of the custodians of the victims’ memory towards nature. Namely, they divide plants into ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ organisms, where the former deserve protection because of their historical value, whereas the latter, classified as weeds and hence deemed useless or counterproductive to human needs, are condemned to destruction. Ironically, to tame nature at the former camp, the authorities use, among other means, the notorious herbicide Roundup.²⁴ As Małczyński reminds us, Roundup, produced by Monsanto, succeeded Agent Orange which the US military used during the Vietnam War to destroy approximately five million acres of forests with the aim of exposing communist guerrilla fighters. Roundup is thus a successor of the very product that gave rise to the term ‘ecocide,’ as the scientists who protested against herbicidal warfare called the destruction of the ecosystem and the danger that Agent Orange posed to its animal and human inhabitants. As Małczyński additionally observes, the name of the herbicide used at Auschwitz uncannily calls to mind the hunts for Jews that the Nazis and their local collaborators organized in countries conquered and controlled by the Third Reich.²⁵

Like most novel approaches to the Holocaust, which is unquestionably a morally sensitive topic, the attempt to study it through the prism of humanity’s destructive relationship with nature has met with some resistance.²⁶ In the introduction to the collected volume The Holocaust and Nature, Pollyfeyt anticipates the objections to connecting the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews and our destruction of the environment. These objections have indeed been raised by scholars working in the fields of both ecology and genocide studies. While the former are anxious that ‘bringing ecology and Nazism in close relation – because of the ecological concerns and interests of the Nazi’s [sic] – could harm the ecological movement,’²⁷ the latter feel that associating the two phenomena may trivialize human suffering. As predicted by Pollyfeyt, the issue of the Journal of Genocide Studies edited by Małczyński et al has provoked unease among some Holocaust scholars. Omer Bartov, for example, has argued that factors such as the killing methods used by the Germans, the resistance strategies of the victims, and the responses of the local population to the persecution of Jews had a much greater impact on survival rates than the natural environment. Bartov is equally dismissive of ascribing to nature agency or evidentiary potential; taking the trees growing around the former camp of Treblinka as an example, he states that ‘they were neither silent, nor witnesses […]; they were simply trees.’²⁸ What troubles the Holocaust historian even more is the possibility of linking genocide and ecocide. To voice his concerns, Bartov twists Neuman’s argument that, despite the widespread perception of the Nazis as ecologically minded, their relationship with nature was part of their nationalist (the Nazis only sought to conserve the German Heimat), conservative, and anti-Communist agenda. Overall, the Nazi regime was destructive to the environment while the Holocaust was an integral part of bringing about its desired ecology. For example, to deal with the marshlands, the Nazis used slave labor, working their victims to exhaustion. And so, rather than following Neuman in recognizing that the Nazis’ relationship with humans and non-humans was equally controlling and exploitative, Bartov construes the Holocaust as a genocide intended by the Nazis to prevent an ecocide by human communities (the Jews and the Slavs) who, in their mind, mismanaged the lands they inhabited and were therefore unworthy of existence. While the Nazis, as Bartov questionably contends, put the non-human above the human, today’s environmental damage is inflicted in the name of humanity and is therefore, as we are encouraged to assume, justified at least to some extent. The historian concludes his rejoinder to the special issue by vehemently opposing comparisons between ‘the scale of the human catastrophe caused by the genocide and the scale of the natural degradation it entailed.’ He also expresses his outrage at the idea that the murder of a human being could be compared to the chopping down of a tree.²⁹

As opposed to Bartov, other scholars have welcomed the environmental turn in Holocaust studies. According to Polish literary scholar Przemysław Czapliński, in planning and undertaking the mass slaughter of selected human groups, the Nazis privileged interhuman relations and, seeing the world from a strictly human perspective, considered the non-human as ontologically inferior or even non-existent.³⁰ Consequently, in Czapliński’s view, the enmeshment of Holocaust and environmental studies enables us to see the genocide under a new light, namely as an extension to humans of the controlling and exploitative treatment previously largely reserved to the non-human: ‘during the Holocaust [the Nazis] applied to people the instrumental cruelty that they had learned in their dealings with nature and which, after the war, they reapplied to nature.’³¹ (podczas Zagłady [naziści] przenieśli na ludzi instrumentalne okrucieństwo, którego wcześniej nauczyli się wobec natury i które po wojnie z powrotem naturze zaaplikowali.) Referencing Charles Patterson’s influential study Eternal Treblinka (2002), which posits parallels between our treatment of animals and genocidal violence, Czapliński construes the establishment of the first industrial farm – rather than of the first concentration camp – as an event enabling the Holocaust. In other words, the genocide was not a fruit of new extermination methods, but of an application of the existing killing techniques to humans. For Czapliński, environmental Holocaust studies thus result in a new relational ontology which broadens our attention to the non-human agents and witnesses of the genocide and, with the help of biosemiotics, makes it possible for us to decipher and interpret the signs they produce. Environmental Holocaust studies also encourage us to transgress the unjustified, untenable, and unproductive nature/culture (or animal/human) divide which, during the Holocaust, was the very basis for the exclusion of certain communities from under the protective umbrella of humanity, and which continues to legitimize our abusive treatment of nature.³²

If for Czapliński the environmental perspective sensitizes us to the parallels between human and non-human worlds, Katz appreciates its potential to enhance further the inherent interdisciplinarity of Holocaust research by intersecting ecology and environmental policy with the disciplines of history, philosophy, ethics, politics, and cultural studies.³³ For Cole in turn the ecological perspective helps researchers to heed Saul Friedländer’s call for an integrated history of the Holocaust which consists in the study of the perspectives of human perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. Put differently, rather than focusing on humans as perpetrators of crimes against nature, researchers should apply Friedländer’s historical model and extend their concern to ‘a broad range of non-human actors.’³⁴ Additionally (and in contrast to Bartov), Cole praises the cognitive value of environmental Holocaust histories, arguing that nature significantly influenced ‘the forms of killing, the pace and extent of murder, as well as opportunities for evasion.’³⁵ Finally, in her response to the special issue of the Journal of Genocide Studies, Jessica Rapson expects that by studying the Holocaust through an ecological lens we may be able to learn from history and reconsider our relationship with our natural environment: ‘in re-framing our approach to the legacies of genocide beyond the human and across a longer durée, we may be better equipped to tackle a world for which the past provides no consolation, guidance or comfortable justification.’³⁶ Rapson thus echoes Katz’s view that ‘[a] comparative study of the two evils may point us in the direction of developing a harmonious relationship with both the natural world and other human beings.’³⁷

These suggestions for the future foci of environmental Holocaust research and for the methodological approaches that scholars may engage promise the growth of the new transdisciplinary field and point to possible directions in which it may develop. One of the potential developments is the exploration of trauma resulting from the impending ecocatastrophe. The concept of trauma, which Sigmund Freud famously transposed from medicine to psychology in response to the mental wounding suffered by the veterans of World War I, and which Cathy Caruth elaborated in the context of the growing recognition of the psychological toll of the Holocaust, has recently been used in relation to the anxiety caused by the depressing news about rising air and water temperatures, nuclear pollution, extinction of species, tropical deforestation, and many other symptoms of the environmental ramifications of the human presence on the planet. To conceptualize this anxiety, to the by now familiar term ‘solastalgia,’ scholars have added neologisms such as ‘Anthropocene disorder,’ ‘ecosickness,’ and ‘ecological grief.’³⁸ In her study titled Climate Trauma (2016), Ann Kaplan focuses on Pretraumatic Stress Symptom (PreTSS) as she calls ‘fears about the total collapse of natural and social environments.’ Following the scientific definition of PreTSS as ‘disturbing future-oriented cognitions and imaginations as measured in terms of a direct temporal reversal of conceptualizations of past-directed cognitions in the PTSD diagnosis,’³⁹ Kaplan likens the nefarious effect on the mental health of readers and viewers of the dystopian art that she analyses and which shows ‘what must never take place’, to the effect of art about the Holocaust and other genocides which exposes us to ‘what must never happen again.’⁴⁰

Yet another possible development of environmental Holocaust research, which has been parenthetically mentioned by Kaplan herself,⁴¹ and which has been more fully investigated by other scholars, would involve Michael Rothberg’s theoretical framework of multidirectional memory. In contrast to Rothberg’s original concept, which is geared primarily to a comparative study of different instances of genocidal violence with a view to avoiding different traumatic histories competing for public attention, Rosanne Kennedy’s ‘multidirectional eco-memory’ is grounded in ‘a deep memory of a habitat, conceived as an ecological assemblage in which all elements, human and nonhuman, are mobile, connected and interactive.’⁴² Kennedy’s concept enables us to place ‘memories of the violence against and dispossession of particular human populations in complex, nuanced relation to memory of the suffering, slaughter, and endangerment of animal populations.’⁴³ The usefulness of multidirectional eco-memory is evinced by Kennedy’s transgression of the existing studies of the plight of the whales hunted down to extinction by settlers through her attention to the plight of the indigenous people of Western Australia who, as a result of whaling, suffered dispossession and destruction of their country. More pertinently, the paradigm of ‘multidirectional eco-memory’ has been engaged, if only implicitly, by Nathalie Woodward who posits Patterson’s Eternal Treblinka as an ethical (for multidirectional) exploration of two traumatic realities: the Holocaust and the suffering of farm and laboratory animals.⁴⁴

Notwithstanding the rapid growth of environmental Holocaust studies, whose broad aims are to foreground the shared ontological roots of Nazi violence and the ongoing destruction of the environment, and, as we will discuss later in this Introduction, to flag up the terrifying prospect of new events of mass violence that climate crisis may engender, the world has recently witnessed events that demonstrate our unwillingness and/or inability to learn from history. For instance, aspects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine uncannily resonate with Hitler’s conquest of the same territory in 1941, a conquest that, as Timothy Snyder contends, was driven by a combination of the Nazis’ environmental and racial goals.⁴⁵ If Hitler considered Ukrainians as an inferior race incapable of self-governance and therefore destined for slavery, their land was to be remodeled in the image of German agricultural utopia⁴⁶ or of ‘a German cultural countryside’ in the ‘new territory in the East.’⁴⁷ Similarly, in addition to killing hundreds of thousands people and creating millions of displaced persons, Putin’s war against Ukraine has had a devasting environmental impact. The fighting has caused pollution by damaging water infrastructure (pumping stations, sewage processing plants, and purification plants) and air pollution through the bombing of storage facilities holding hazardous substances, including fertilizers and asbestos. Fires have destroyed forested areas and nature reserves, and the bombs that targeted farms have killed large numbers of cattle, leaving their carcasses to rot.⁴⁸

The conflict in Ukraine is but one of many reasons for another contemporary phenomenon that simultaneously foregrounds the connectedness of human and non-human worlds, and undermines the hope in a wider transformative influence of environmental Holocaust research. This phenomenon is the refugee crisis. The influx of migrants from war zones and areas badly affected by anthropogenic climate change reminds us of the situation in the 1930s and 1940s when Jews were feeling Nazi persecution and the free world did little to save them.⁴⁹ The migrant crisis is also a reminder of the climate emergency that, by causing flooding or drought and, consequently, famine, forces some of those coming to Western Europe to leave their homes and homelands. Already in 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that ‘the greatest single impact of climate change could be on human migration with millions of people displaced by shoreline erosion, coastal flooding, and agricultural disruption.’⁵⁰ What both Moscow’s attack on Kyiv and the flow of refugees from war zones and areas marked by environmental degradation have in common is their ability to act as a warning against genocides that might result from ecocide and the ensuing scarceness of resources. In Black Earth (2015), Snyder identifies the Germans’ desperate sense of limited food supplies or, as he calls it, ‘ecological panic,’ as a major reason for the expansionism of the Third Reich.⁵¹ His book is therefore meant to alert us to the prospect of ‘ecologically induced genocides,’ as Martin Crook and Damien Short have described the inevitable outcome of ‘the political economy of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production.’⁵² Among other recent events that have foregrounded the entanglement of human and non-human worlds, which is the premise of environmental Holocaust studies, is the Covid-19 pandemic which has proven to be a direct result of domestication or – to do away with the misleading euphemism – enslavement and exploitation of animals by humans.⁵³

It is in the context of the afore-described crises that the present issue of Holocaust Studies pursues the inquiry into the links between ecocide and genocide. However, unlike the scholarly interventions in the field of environmental Holocaust research outlined earlier in this Introduction, the present collection of articles does not share their historical or topographical focus. Instead, the six articles that follow move beyond the current state of scholarship to investigate the textualizations of the ecocide/genocide nexus in discourse, be it that of testimony, culture, or political debate, thus further foregrounding the interdisciplinarity and heterogeneity of environmental Holocaust research. For some of the authors the focus is more spatial, concerned with the role of nature in the history and memory of specific sites of death and persecution during the Nazi period. Others pay closer attention to the representations of the non-human in varied forms of cultural response to the Holocaust, including memoir, opera, poetry, and film. At other points, debates within public memory cultures are foregrounded in a manner that encompasses (often political) questions of who may speak of the Holocaust and the natural world, and how. The somewhat different foci of the six articles mean that their authors have employed a variety of methodological approaches. While some contributors rely more heavily on studies in environmental history and philosophy, other texts under analysis have invited an ecocritical or zoocritical reading. In any case, the aim of this special issue is not to present a unified corrective to ecocritical engagement with Holocaust studies, but rather to reassert and move forward its diverse cross-disciplinary possibilities. The contributors here are variously scholars of history, memory, literature, music, and film, reflective of a view that ecocritical engagement with the Holocaust cannot be the preserve of only one disciplinary framework.

Despite this, there are nonetheless recurring themes across the articles that follow. One key point is that, for the most part, these are studies more interested in representation and memory than direct analysis of the Holocaust period itself. In this regard, the approach of this issue is distinct from scholarship to date. Read as a whole, the core concern of these articles is not with the role of nature in the Nazi imagination of the 1930s and 1940s, nor comprehensively determining the role of non-human factors in how persecution took place. Importantly, there is little interest is setting up some mode of competition between human suffering and ecological destruction. Beyond the obvious ethical quandaries of doing so, such provocative framing would also distract from the more nuanced analyses that can be drawn; perceptions of the natural world impact the objects of study in almost every conceivable subject with the humanities and social sciences, and the Holocaust studies – in all its varied forms – is no outlier in this regard.

Across the articles that follow, focus on the natural world is not understood to be at the detriment of considering the human. Several contributors analyze examples of cultural response to the Holocaust in which imagery and language of nature has been appealed to, in no small part, to ponder what it is to be human, and indeed to be inhuman. Ecocide is also not framed as simply an assault on the non-human, but also a phenomenon with profound implications for human societies. Genocide and ecocide are in these senses not oppositional, but related and interactive.

Read as a whole, this issue also avoids another binary: one where nature is associated with purity and life, while the human is associated with destruction. In several articles it is noted that, amidst responses to the Holocaust, perceptions of nature can be far more ambivalent than this. Forests may be sites of both survival and murder; animal behavior may be contrasted with human evil and yet also provide metaphors to describe degradation; the earth can be the source of rebirth while also the site of unredeemed death. Ecocritical engagement with Holocaust memory and representations is not about romanticising the natural world, but highlighting its varied and sometimes contradictory intersections with the impacts of human violence.

The special issue begins by directly addressing how the Holocaust and ecocide have been considered together in public life. In this first article, David Tollerton notes that political and media references to the Holocaust have, when expressed in relation to climate change, repeatedly proven controversial. The idea that environmental breakdown may create conditions of societal stress in which genocide and mass violence become more likely can be readily demonstrated, but appeals to memory of the Nazi period amidst contemplation of such future atrocities have provoked fierce opposition. Tollerton examines the varied causes of such controversy and how they overlap with parallel debates about Holocaust memory in relation to such issues as animal suffering and the refugee crisis. But with reference to concepts of bystander behavior, denial, and resource deprivation, he argues that there ultimately are credible lines of comparison.

This first article focuses mostly on British contexts of Holocaust memory, and in the second contribution Mark Celinscak considers an event that has had particular importance in British Holocaust consciousness: the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by British and Canadian troops in April 1945. Drawing on the testimonies of military personnel, Celinscak highlights the role of nature in their attempts to describe and make sense of such experiences. For several eyewitnesses, the beauty of the surrounding region became an important counterpoint to the deprivation seen at Bergen-Belsen. Their appeals to the natural world were notably ambivalent though, with ideas of human beings being reduced to the state of animals becoming a recurring trope among their recollections.

Sabina Giergiel and Katarzyna Taczyńska again focus on a particular site of memory: the Jasenovac camp complex in what is now former Yugoslavia. A location of key importance for the Porajmos (Romani genocide) in the region, Giergiel and Taczyńska study the role of the natural world – in particular the Sava River – as a crucial element in the structure of the historic site, in post-war commemorative endeavors, and in the accounts of prisoners.

Like Celinscak, Giergiel, and Taczyńska, Andrew Barrett also gives sustained attention to what is presented as eyewitness testimony, though here the situation is greatly complicated by doubts about the relationship between truth, memory, and representation. In his article, he focuses on Misha Dofenseca’s now discredited memoir Misha and on Francesco Lotoro’s opera Misha e i lupi, drawing particular attention to what he terms ‘animal witnessing.’ It is a literary device that, Barrett explains, uses the portrayal of animals to frame human behavior as an aberration from nature. Considering the varied representation of wolves in Dofenseca’s hoax memoir and Lotoro’s opera (written and performed prior to the public revelation of Dofenseca’s deception) Barrett argues that ‘animal witnessing’ is an important, underexamined, but morally ambiguous practice.

From animal imagery, testimony, and opera in Barrett’s article, Laura Major’s contribution turns to imagery of the earth itself, specifically amidst the Holocaust poetry of Avraham Sutzkever, Tadeusz Borowski, Czesław Miłosz, Nelly Sachs, and Paul Celan. More than any other article in this special issue, Major writes specifically in dialogue with those who have previously criticized bringing academic writing on the Holocaust into dialogue with environmental consciousness. Responding in particular to Omer Bartov and David Patterson, Major proposes that reading these poets with an eye to nature imagery does not ultimately entail a demotion of human suffering. The earth, as represented in such literature, becomes a deeply ambivalent site, one of destruction and death, and yet also rebirth and endurance.

Helena Duffy similarly highlights the role of the forest as, simultaneously, both liberating and murderous space in the context of Polish Holocaust memory. Following Barrett’s and Major’s articles on literature, Duffy’s study moves our attention to cinema, focusing on Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida. Despite receiving international praise, the film’s reception in Poland was more mixed, reflecting wider tensions in the nation’s troubled navigation of both victimhood and complicity in persecution. Duffy argues that in this regard Ida is in fact disruptively valuable as it casts the forest as a problematic site in Polish-Jewish relations. In highlighting elements of political discomfort with some forms of memory and intersection, Duffy’s contribution in this specific way resonates with Tollerton’s article which begins the special issue.

The present issue of Holocaust Studies is fundamentally about presenting the possibilities of dialogue with matters of nature and ecocide, rather than offering a singular neat vision of where this particular interdisciplinary endeavor must go in future. While sharing a desire to avoid placing human suffering and the destruction of nature into some morally questionable zero-sum competition, the studies presented here aim to demonstrate the potential and diversity of exploring intersections between the memory of genocide in the Nazi period and critical reflection on humanity’s often conflicted relationship with nature.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Helena Duffy

Helena Duffy (MSt Oxon, PhD Oxford Brookes) is a professor of French at the University of Wrocław, Poland. Her research interests lie in contemporary French and comparative literature and cinema, focusing on cultural representations of the Holocaust. She is the author of World War II in Andreï Makine's Historiographic Metafiction (Brill, 2018) and The Holocaust in French Postmodern Fiction (Legenda, 2022). She is also a co-editor of Trauma, Ethics, Hermeneutics (Legenda, 2024) and Storying the Ecocatastrophe (Routledge, 2024). Her current research is concerned with the role of nature in Holocaust literature and cinema.

David Tollerton

David Tollerton is an associate professor in memory studies at the University of Exeter. His most recent book is Holocaust Memory and Britain's Religious-Secular Landscape, published by Routledge in 2020.

Notes

1 Zaleski, “Różnica.”; Czapliński, “Poszerzanie pola Zagłady,” 12. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Polish are Helena Duffy’s.

2 Cole, “Expanding (Environmental) Histories of the Holocaust,” 273.

3 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject.

4 Nałkowska’s dictum has been subject to heated polemic regarding the novelist’s inclusion of the (Jewish) victims and the (German/Polish) perpetrators in the universalising category of humanity. See Borkowska, “Wokół motta Zofii Nałkowskiej.”

5 Czapliński, “Poszerzanie pola Zagłady,” 14.

6 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 92.

7 Katz, “The Holocaust as an Environmental Problem,” 430. For Katz’s critique of ecological restoration see Nature as Subject. Published in 1997, the collection of essays includes reprints of articles that had appeared between 1992 and 1995. A similar argument has been voiced by Michael Pollan who postulates that the ‘blood-and-soil rooted’ landscape was intended ‘to give the German people its characteristic garden and to help guard it from unwholesome alien influences’ which might weaken the ‘Nordic races.’ Pollan, “Against Nativism,” 52. Quoted by Katz, “The Holocaust as an Environmental Problem,” 432. Cf. Snyder, Black Earth, 28. Timothy Snyder goes further by recasting the Holocaust as a project of ‘the restoration of nature on a planet polluted by Jews.’

8 Katz, “Nature’s Healing Power,” 79.

9 Ibid.

10 Neuman, “National Socialism, Holocaust, and Ecology,” 106.

11 Ibid., 110.

12 Ibid., 110–111. Cf. Snyder, Black Earth, 8.

13 Ibid., 102.

14 Charlesworth, “Contesting Places of Memory.” See also Kelly Knowles, Geographies of the Holocaust.

15 Cole, “Geographies of the Holocaust,” 333.

16 Hatt, “Teaching the Holocaust through Geography.”

17 Charlesworth, “The Topography of Genocide,” 218.

18 See, for example, Cole, “Nature Was Helping Us”; Weiner Weber, “Shedding City Life”; and “The Forest as a Liminal Space.”

19 Pollyfeyt, “Preface,” 10.

20 Ibid.

21 Pollyfeyt, “Preface,” 11.

22 The term was proposed by Cole, “Nature Was Helping Us.”

23 2017 saw the publication of a special issue of Narracje o Zagładzie entitled ‘Animals/the Holocaust’ (Zwierzęta/Zagłada) and of a special issue of Teksty Drugie entitled ‘Environmental History of the Holocaust’ (Środowiskowa historia Zagłady). The articles in the special issue of the Journal of Genocide Studies are by Jacek Małczyński, Ewa Domańska, Mikołaj Smykowski, and Agnieszka Kłos.

24 Małczyński, “The Politics of Nature,” 213.

25 Zierler, The Invention of Ecocide.

26 A good example of such resistance is the reception of feminist Holocaust studies.

27 Pollyfeyt, “Preface,” 10.

28 Bartov, “What is the Environmental History of the Holocaust?” 421.

29 Ibid., 428.

30 Czapliński, “Poszerzanie pola Zagłady,” 11.

31 Ibid., 12.

32 For arguments against the human/animal divide see LaCapra, “Humans, Other Animals, and the Humanities.” In Peoples, Animals, Pasts. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

33 Katz, “The Holocaust as an Environmental Problem,” 429.

34 Cole, “Expanding (Environmental) Histories of the Holocaust,” 276.

35 Ibid., 275.

36 Rapson, “The Environmental History of the Holocaust,” 447.

37 Katz, “Nature’s Healing Power,” 80.

38 For a survey of terminology, see Craps, “Climate Trauma.”

39 Kaplan, Climate Trauma, 3.

40 Ibid., 21. Original italics.

41 Ibid., 27.

42 Kennedy, “Multidirectional Eco-memory in an Era of Extinction,” 269.

43 Ibid.

44 Woodward, “Eternal Mirroring.”

45 The comparisons between Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the Hitler’s invasion of the region, including the mass murder of Jews, have been frequent. For example, when Russian bombs hit buildings close to the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial, President Zelensky was quick to interpret it as a repetition of history.

46 Snyder, Black Earth, 18–19.

47 Neuman, “National Socialism, Holocaust, and Ecology,” 109.

48 “The Environmental Impact of the Conflict in Ukraine.”

49 Ibid., 8–9.

50 Wennersten and Robbins, Rising Tides, 4.

51 Snyder, Black Earth, 324.

52 Crook and Short, “Marx, Lemkin and the Genocide-Ecocide Nexus,” 299.

53 Chakrabarty, “The Chronopolitics of the Anthropocene.”