Notebooks: Research Notes: Places
Bełżec
Introduction
In tandem with my work on Auschwitz-Birkenau, I've now started to look at more sites associated with the Holocaust, including Operation Reinhard camps such as Bełżec . Unlike Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec was almost completely destroyed by the Nazis during the war, and whereas the former was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979, Bełżec had to wait until late 1997 before a thorough archaeological survey was was conducted, at which time no permanent memorial existed to those who died there (the first memorial was erected on the site in 1963).
Even with a site as large as Auschwitz-Birkenau, it's hard to equate its size with the number of people killed there. Yet this appalling correlation of camp size to victims, is perhaps at its most disturbing in Bełżec, where in a space of less than 300 metres by 300 metres, approximately 600,000 people perished.
Walking
Bełżec measured less than 300m x 300m, yet within this space, as many as 600,000 people perished. The scale of death is difficult enough to imagine, yet for this many people to have died in a space so small makes it even more incomprehensible.
Yet even though I understand that 300m is not that great a distance, it wasn't until I began searching for a similar-sized space in Oxford, a park or part thereof, that I realised just how small it was.
Using a pedometer, I measured my stride and found that 300m was roughly equivalent to 450 paces. I visited three sites and found that two of them gave me quite a good idea as to the size of Bełżec. These were Christ Church Meadow and the University Parks.
The idea was to do something with a walk around such a space and while finding an appropriate space was interesting, it was the walking between and around sites that proved most valuable in terms of this process. As I walked around Oxford, a city I know intimately, my mind turned to other things; things to do with my own life and also lives - the hundreds of thousands of lives - lived in the city throughout the centuries. Many of these lives would have been intimately bound with the landscape I was investigating; with Christ Church and the University Parks.
I also looked at Headington Hill Park and thought about the house which had once belonged to the Morrell family, about the park which would have once been a part of the their garden.
With Christ Church I recalled memories of my own time there, the countless times I have walked around the meadow, the numbers of times I have looked at the view, the view itself, the buildings, their histories, the sheer number of people who have 'witnessed' these monuments.
These memories, these thoughts, when coupled with my objective of 'finding a site for a death camp' were compelling. I once began a project on objects and buildings in Oxford and their role in allowing us to access memory-spaces (individual memories of certain objects and buildings and related events pertaining to a specific time) and these myriad number of memory-spaces which I'd 'accessed' whilst walking held a particular resonance with the hundreds of thousands of memories and memory-spaces which were extinguished in the Nazi camps.
Walking as a process is nothing new of course; Richard Long, the well-known landscape artist uses walking ('making a sculpture by walking') as a means of creating art.
"His text works 'feed the imagination' and his wall and floor pieces 'feed the senses'. In every case the work of art extends 'as far as the eye can see'. This operates both visually and figuratively. Visually a work made on the ground as a stopping place along a walk also includes everything around it, but the choices the artist makes and the things he takes into account, extend beyond the visual into the realms of ideas, movement, time, knowledge, measurement, mathematics, memory and so on."
Richard Long. Walking the Line
Below, an example of one of Richard Long's Text Works
To Build a Fire
A six day winter walk on Tierra Del Fuego
Building a fire each day at each campsite along the way
Ashes blowing in the Wind
Argentina 1997
Text has also come to play an important role in my work, particularly with regard to my Free Writing. Text-based accounts of the walks I'll take in my search for a space in Oxford (as described above) call to mind the Memory Palaces of the ancient Greeks, something which first came to mind in my investigations of the University Parks in Oxford.
Walking around the Parks (and indeed most other places), I often recall in specific places, certain things I'd thought at other times whilst walking there. These thoughts would be triggered by objects (or buildings) and all these separate memories joined to make a whole. Such a process is particularly analogous with the practice of Mnemonic Temples whereby in order to remember something, for example a speech, one would break the speech down and apportion a piece of the text to an object which would in turn be 'placed ' in an imagined (but known) interior - such as a temple. 'Walking' 'around the temple therefore, the person remembering would 'find' an object which would trigger the apportioned piece of text. Therefore, 'walking' through the entire temple, one would remember the entire text.