In my paper, I would like to tackle the problem of representation of Eastern Europe as a post-genocidal void in (mostly) Western Holocaust studies.
For long, Western scholarship was not interested in this landscape and fates of those who were in fact the majority of the six million: the Ostjuden. In recent years, this status quo has been undergoing a major shift, however, the space of Eastern Europe is still interpreted within few visual and conceptual "cues". The terra incognita of the East remains, firstly, an object of the orientalizing gaze shaped by the imagery of Lanzmann's Shoah: idyllic, yet sinister landscapes, a post-genocidal wilderness. Secondly, contemporary space east from Auschwitz tends to be considered as an unspecified, unmappable void. It derives from the othering perspective on these terrains stemming from the colonial bias of the West, the geopolitical isolation during communism and the dispersed character of the Shoah in the East: an immense multitude of killing sites and their visual indistinction. This bias is visible in eminent metaphors recently employed to grasp the phenomenon of Eastern Europe, such as Snyder's (2010) Bloodlands, Pollack's (2014) kontaminierte Landschaften or Giancarria and Minca's (2016) category of selva.
In contrast, I would like to analyze some Polish and international cartographic initiatives spanning from 1960s to present (e.g. by Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites, Yahad – In Unum or the Rabbinical Commission for Jewish Cemeteries) which in their effort to "map the void" could be considered as counter-mappings to aforementioned conceptualizations.
