Context
In the town of Chrzanów there is a place that used to be called Esther’s Square, where the Great Synagogue stood until its demolition in the 1970s in Communist Poland. A weeping willow (White Willow) was planted there sometime later, which became part of the local landscape until it was unexpectedly cut down in 2018. Before the Nazi genocide, Jews made up half of 20,000 residents of Chrzanów and their history and memory in the city weakens each year.
Esther’s Willow is a public project of the artists: sisters Marta and Katarzyna Sala from Chrzanów (Poland) and Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman from Philadelphia (USA), whose ancestors lived in Jarosław and Warsaw in Poland.
The central aim of the artistic intervention was to replant the tree at the site of the synagogue and name it Esther’s Willow, bringing back to life the currently unnamed square.
Highlights
- Countering death, destruction and then neglect brought by the Nazi and the Communist regimes in a small town in southern Poland
- Benefitting from symbolic associations of a planted tree (White Willow) in Polish and Jewish culture, related to melancholy, remembrance and uniting cultures, in order to bring people together
Description
On July 3, 2022, a Silent Procession commemorating the former Jewish community of Chrzanów marched through the streets of the town. Its participants set off from the vicinity of the railway station to finally arrive at the former Esther Square, where the artists planted the willow in the place where the Great Synagogue once stood.
Artists Katarzyna Sala, Marta Sala, and Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman led the planting of Esther’s Willow—a white willow sapling. Traditional cultural-medicinal uses and cosmological meanings of the willow in Central and Eastern European rites served as the project’s ethical-aesthetic guide. The artists’ four-years-long process of research and collaboration brought together regional and local institutions, current residents, descendants and survivors to mark, contemplate, mourn, and honour the square and the generations that lived there.
The gesture of replanting the tree revealed an old, intimate space of ancestral transcultural experiences where Jewish and Slavic communities jointly revered willows. In their worldviews, the willow appeared as a tree of power, an antidote to cure disease, infertility, and bodily pain. The willow as a link between the living and the dead was able to once again create a bridge and a basis for mutual relations. The artists were also inspired by a traditional practice of using “silent water” – water drawn from a natural body of water by night, in silence, for medicinal purposes, a practice used by Jews and Slavs alike.
The silent march through the town’s streets was accompanied by musicians carrying their instruments, which remained silent throughout the walk and participants carrying jars of silent water. The Procession symbolically reversed the course of history, following the opposite route from the death march of the Chrzanów Jews, which then took them to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. As soon as the tree was planted, the musicians started to play and residents watered the tree with silent water.
The inhabitants of Chrzanów took part in the event. The descendants (the son and family) of one of Chrzanów’s residents, a woman named Esther (Estera in Polish) that perished during the Shoah, came from Israel to attend the ceremony. Before the war, Estera lived in Chrzanów and prayed at the synagogue in Esther Square, from where she was taken to Auschwitz.
Challenges
- HOW to symbolically bring back memory into public space as an answer to mass execution and irreversible destruction?
- HOW can nature and plants become “allies” in commemorative practices?
- HOW to intervene in a small town’s area and how to involve the residents in remembrance activities?
Solutions
- Designing an artistic interventions that is easy for the public to engage in (free entry, in public space, ability to join anonymously)
- Activities appealing to a broad public that help build joint interest and inspire care for the site with nature and planting
- Combining known and comfortable memory practices (like memory marches) with new artistic language (silent water, silent march, carrying the tree sapling)
- Carefully deriving the idea for the intervention from the context and history of the site
Lessons Learnt
- The initiative took four years of research and preparations to materialise: comprehensive, sensitive and inclusive commemorative practices require necessary prep work and consultations
- The initiative came to life following a meeting of Polish and American artists in Berlin in the context of another exhibition: creating favourable conditions for like-minded people to meet is crucial for fostering future and meaningful collaborations
- Involving descendants in similar projects and giving them the occasion to participate first-hand is crucial for remembrance and social justice
- Empowering local cultural institutions as custodians and keepers of memory is key, from an early stage of the project, to shape the sense of ownership for results and paths forward
Funding and Credits
Esther’s Willow was carried out as part of FestivALT 2022 edition, within the context of a joint project “Places of Remembering and Forgetting” (2021-2022) between NGOs from two Polish cities, Wrocław and Kraków (Urban Memory Foundation and FestivALT respectively) as well as Negotiating Difficult Pasts (NeDiPa) – EU-funded project. It has benefitted from funding from Norway Grants from the Active Citizens – National Fund (EEA Grants) as well as by the European Union (Citziens, Equality, Rights and Values programme of the EU). Allianz Kulturstiftung has also supported the initiative.
The project was conceptualised by three associated artists Marta Sala, Katarzyna Sala and Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman together with FestivALT in Krakow. Collaborators included: The Irena and Mieczysław Mazaraki Municipal Museum in Chrzanów, Municipal Centre for Culture, Sport and Leisure of Chrzanów, PhD Marek Tuszewicki and Śomi (Dominika Śmigocka).
Further Information
- Video material documenting the event can be found here.
- Further information about the initiative can also be found on NeDiPa project’s blog and FestivALT’s projects section.
- An article describing the project has been published in Polish mainstream daily paper Gazeta Wyborcza (in Polish)