In Memoriam
Whatever we forget is remembered somewhere
Poland’s historical landscape is a map of scars and open wounds that lie like dormant volcanoes with the memories of infernal episodes ready to erupt, just beneath your feet. Forgetting to remember history is not an option here; traces of memory, like bullet holes in building walls, are everywhere.
Places and objects can sometimes be more eloquent than words, if one is willing to listen to them. Zofiówka, just outside Warsaw, is one of these places of terrible beauty. To get there, you’ll pass forests and old wooden mansions that remember the days when the local area, called Otwock, used to be a Jewish health resort town at the turn of the 20th century. A derelict sanatorium, Zofiówka is a place whose layers of brutal history have created a raw, haunting atmosphere that attracts, among others, urban explorers, seekers of the paranormal and graffiti aficionados. Many foreign visitors are shocked that there isn’t a museum or that it hasn’t been boarded up, but this is exactly why this site is so special - because it hasn’t been sanitised and is allowed to speak uncomfortable truths from its liminal space. It’s not pleasant, there is no gift shop and there are no interactive displays to distract you from the dark, heavy and sorrowful energy of the place.
In 1908, Zofiówka became a psychiatric hospital for working and middle-class Jews. It was named after Zofia Endelman, who is said to have bought the land with her own gold jewellery to set up a sanatorium with the leading doctors of the time. Under the direction of doctor Stefan Miller, it quickly expanded into a well-known hospital which encouraged patients to work in its gardens as part of their free treatment. If you’re brave enough to enter the ruins, you can still see some of the original tiling from its golden age in the 1930s, beneath layers of rubble and broken glass. As you walk through these forgotten wards, you can’t help but feel like you’re walking on gravestones.
The Nazis took over the hospital in 1939 and turned it into part of the local ghetto. The patients and staff of Zofiówka were subjected to sadism and barbarity under the management of Nazi Jost Walbaum. However, the darkest day in Zofiówka’s history was the 19th August 1942; following the liquidation of the nearby ghetto, the Nazis and their Ukrainian guards slaughtered almost all the patients and doctors and buried their bodies in a mass grave. The patients who survived were sent to Treblinka concentration camp and a group of doctors who managed to escape in an ambulance van before the massacre started, ended up committing suicide. After completing the aims of their Aktion 4 euthanasia program, i.e. killing all disabled adults and children, the Nazis decided to turn the hospital into a centre for eugenics and the ‘Germanisation’ of Polish children who would be adopted by Aryan families. Incredibly, those very same buildings became a tuberculosis ward following the war and remained so till the mid 1980s. In its last days as a functioning institution in the 1990s, the hospital treated mentally ill children and teenagers.
Presently, Zofiówka lies in a state of entropic decay, its crumbling walls engraved with decades of unimaginable suffering. In today’s world of performative gestures, honouring those who died and suffered in the past can be a personal, silent act of commemoration whereby we remember by engaging with spaces and the memory of the souls that once inhabited them. From the castles of the Cathars to Zofiówka sanatorium, I have always found a strange solace in exploring ruins and abandoned historical buildings that have been left to the elements of nature and human vandalism. For me, the graffiti that covers all the walls at Zofiówka feels like it’s voicing the pain it has witnessed, like an expression of disbelief and frustration at humanity’s failings.
Every time I make a pilgrimage to Zofiówka, I feel like I am actively remembering something that defies words, but then I am strangely reassured by the thought that perhaps the limits of language are precisely what make memories so precious. Adorno declared that poetry was not possible after the Holocaust, yet poets like Jerzy Ficowski (A Reading of Ashes) are some of the few writers who came closest to transcribing the memory of people and places into figurative language. While statistics of horrors fail to speak to the heart, poetry can remind our souls of the truths the world would much rather we forgot.
According to Yom Kippur liturgy, whatever we forget is remembered somewhere. It seems that forgotten places, like the sanatorium of Zofiówka, are where we can truly begin to wrestle with the memories of past trauma in a way that will never be possible in any museum.