The Landscape of Manhunts

The landscape of Poland – and more broadly, of post-totalitarian Central and Eastern Europe – is as Timothy Snyder (Reference Snyder2010, xiv) pointed out: linked with the deaths of 14 million civilians killed within little more than a decade. Research carried out to the present day reveals the necropolitical character of other post-conflict regions, located not only in Eastern and Central Europe, but also on a wider, global scale beyond European borders: from Guatemala, the Congo and Rwanda, to Korea and Cambodia. In Europe, burial sites are currently being discovered in Spain (Ferrándiz and Robben Reference Ferrandiz and Robben2015). Research on killing sites is becoming a new discipline, blending anthropology, history, archaeology, and forensic methods (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and Lutz 2015). Eastern Europe, as observed currently through the lens of the forensic turn (Forensic Architecture 2014; Dziuban Reference Dziuban2017), has become a complex necrotic landscape connected with death inflicted not only by extermination in concentration camps, but also in more widely dispersed forms of annihilation during the liquidation of the ghettos, and offensives on the Eastern Front, where Einsatzgruppen battalions systematically executed Jewish populations over pits and ravines, as well as smaller-scale murders, especially in the years following Operation Reinhard (1941–1943) when German troops and their helpers tracked down escapees from ghettos and camps. Other conflicts that flared up in the shadow of the Second World War in Eastern Europe brought further casualties.

The topographical analysis I am proposing allows us to consider the landscape that coexisted with the killings as the space of manhunts.

One of the most influential concepts of landscape, reaching beyond its (naturalistic or culturalist) perception as a visual genre, is Tim Ingold’s reformulation of a landscape as ‘taskscape’. As Ingold puts it, landscape is neither a ‘neutral, external backdrop to human activities’ nor an advanced ‘symbolic ordering of space’. A productive reformulation is offered by – as he calls it – a dwelling perspective, ‘according to which the landscape is constituted as an enduring record of – and testimony to – the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left there something of themselves’ (Ingold Reference Ingold1993, 152). The ‘task’ is defined as ‘any practical operation, carried out by a skilled agent in environment’, and the ‘taskscape’ becomes, in this perspective, ‘the entire ensemble of tasks, in their mutual interlocking’ (Ingold Reference Ingold1993, 158). Ingold proposes here reading landscapes as relational, social, dynamic environments of actions, undertaken by present and past actors.

This position prompts us to ask how traumatic ‘lives and works’ constituting a wider history of violence against human beings can be ‘gathered from’ a landscape. How have the ‘immediate experience’ and ‘lived, everyday involvement in the world’ (Ingold Reference Ingold1993: 152) been inscribed into the landscape, when they indicated tracking down escapees, or being tracked? The strategy of understanding the landscape as a record of ‘forms of dwelling’ is inevitably – according to Tim Ingold – connected with memory. It is

How then – one might ask – can the present viewer ‘perceptually engage’ with the area burdened with the past?

The exemplification of the difficult legacy of the possible past ‘dwellings’ in the area can be found in Jan Grabowski’s detailed, historical study of the Dąbrowa Tarnowska county. Grabowski reconstructs some of the war-time forms of social activities and tasks. The ‘manhunts’ set off on a previously agreed-upon day. The trackers ‘followed the fugitives into the forests, hoping for prizes offered by Germans: vodka, sugar, potatoes, oil, but also personal items taken from the victims’ (Grabowski Reference Grabowski2013, 53). ‘Hunters’, ‘catchers’, ‘trackers’ and ‘beaters’ would indeed receive ‘rewards in cash and kind per head’ – clothes, 500 zlotys or a kilogram of sugar to join search parties setting out to look for the Jews in hiding. Participating in the hunts were the Blue Police, ‘volunteer civilians’, ‘catchers from the Arbeitsamt’, ‘casual amateurs’ and even teenagers chasing after hidden children. The people joined in without being forced or intimidated by anyone, traced and chased ‘very eagerly’ as witnesses recalled (Stanisław Żemiński and Zygmunt Klukowski, cited by Grabowski).

Grabowski estimates that, amongst the 250,000 escapees hiding in the forests and countryside in the General Government (one of the German zones in occupied Poland) after the liquidation of the ghettos, only 40–60,000 survived, which translates into a 20% chance of surviving the Judenjagd (hunt for the Jews). The hunted, in effect, in order to stay alive and evade the manhunts, ‘became animals’ – they had to ‘live like animals’, relocating to remote parts of local woods, digging shelters in the ground, moving around the area after dark. In their testimonies, the victims recollected this animalization with abhorrence, but also in a way revealing that the discourse of manhunt was also ubiquitous among the escapees: ‘using animal analogies to describe both themselves and other forest fugitives, survivors pointed to successful adaptation to their new surroundings’ (Cole Reference Cole2014, 674).

The vocabulary related to hunting can be heard in testimonies given by victims, perpetrators, as well as bystanders. Terms such as ‘pursuits’, ‘manhunts’, ‘tracking’ and ‘searching for hide-outs’ frequently resurface in testimonial narrations. The witnesses describe actions typical for animal-hunting: all-male group trips into the forest; preparing the battue, surrounding the ‘game’, sharing the spoils. By giving details about meetings in the early hours, advancing en masse through a widening terrain, and the use of dogs; the accounts reveal the hunting culture to be a constitutive context for relating to Holocaust escapees – for both perpetrators and their helpers, as well as the prosecuted themselves.

The history of manhunts – practices associated first with the era of slavery in antiquity, and later with the growth of colonial capitalism – has recently been reconstructed by the French philosopher, Georges Chamayou. In his rereading of Western cultural history, the practices leading to the animalization of humans, span from the times of hunting for ‘two-legged animals’ in ancient Europe to the ‘hunting for illegal immigrants’ of the present day:

Chamayou’s ‘history of manhunts’ allows us to situate the forest ambushes on escapees from the ghettos in the era of the Holocaust amongst forms that predate them, especially among pre-modern manhunts after Jews. This contextualization allows us to observe changes, but also to note the overlapping paradigms: as Chamayou guides us into a wide historical perspective, we begin to see that earlier hunts undertaken by crowds acting spontaneously began to be replaced by raids organized by those in power; the former motivating factor of religion gave way to that of race; spontaneous chases with the goal of murder were transformed into meticulously organized genocidal procedures. The dissemination of hunting imagery and hunting practices in the time of the Holocaust should not be understood as a mere metaphor occurring in different accounts, but a symptom of a transformation within a deeply rooted cultural practice of waging war. A racist state is not following ‘the old framework of the law of war, in which the riposte is the central concept’ (Chamayou Reference Chamayou2012, 132). The violence does not need to be justified: it stems from the very nature of the predator who cannot be blamed for his violence, because hunting is part of his vital nature, as being hunted is part of the vital nature of his prey. Holocaust manhunts depend on exactly the rationality of ‘natural predation’: ‘The hostility between predator and prey does not have to be founded on a right of aggression that determines the legitimate cases, because it is inscribed as a necessity in the nature of the species or races involved’ (Chamayou Reference Chamayou2012, 133).

Cynegetic Landscapes

Establishing hunting as ‘the model of legitimacy for its violence, state racism […] reduces political law to a zoological definition of natural law’ (Chamayou Reference Chamayou2012, 132–133). The result is a naturalization of the right to kill, which emerges as a biological need (this narrative was clearly shown by Grabowski as one that became readily accepted by those living in the Nazi ‘hunting area’). Chamayou describes an incident from February 1945 after the escape of a group of prisoners from Mauthausen. The camp’s German authorities organized a multiday event unofficially called ‘catching rabbits’, in which the army, police and local population took part. A hybrid form of hunting (combining the late ‘spontaneous/popular’ and the new ‘organized/state-controlled’ forms of manhunts), which drew the community in the activities of perpetrators, allowed – as the philosopher writes – the ‘leaders of the herd’ (camp guards) to disperse responsibility, ‘as if, through this final mobilization of the population in the hunt, the moribund Nazi state apparatus wanted to cede back to the pack its cynegetic prerogatives during a last common hunting battue’ (Chamayou Reference Chamayou2012, 133).

Chamayou uses the term ‘cynegetic’, a word referring to hunting practices that is rarely used today. He derives the word from the writings of antiquity: we can find the Greek term κυνηγϵτικóς (kunēgetikos, ‘of hunting’) in Xenophon’s treatise on hunting with dogs (Kυνηγϵτικóς [Kynegetikós]/Cynegeticus/De venatione/On Hunting) written at the turn of the fourth century bc, as well as in Roman poems on hunting written by such writers as Gratius Faliscus (a contemporary of Ovid and Virgil, author of the didactic poem on hunting, the Cynegetica, of which 541 verses from several books remain), and in the work of Nemesianus, a Roman poet from Carthage (author of the poem Cynegetica, written ad 283/284). Chamayou reclaims the nearly forgotten word, employing it to define the ‘cynegetic paradigm’. He describes it as a complex means of exercising power, in which manhunts become one of the technologies of governance. Contrary to the theories of René Girard, the nature of violence here is not invariant, but changeable: the authorities do not choose victims arbitrarily but use strategies incompatible with the model of ‘sacred violence’ identified and described by Girard. The prerogatives of institutionalized power (an authoritarian state but also – claims Chamayou – the powers of colonial states, monarchies, democracies) can be taken over by spontaneously organized groups (as with lynching). Exercising this type of power depends first on tracking down and catching people; then on detaining them and forcing them into submission.

The cynegetic paradigm of power relates not only to the society, but also to landscapes. It allows us to consider the landscape, I would claim, not only as the passive ‘scene of the hunt’ but also – if we accept Ingold’s position – as a medium of intuitively and polisensually perceived past engagements and tasks. Ingold, explaining his idea of a task-based understanding of landscape, referenced positive or neutral, rather than traumatic, activities that society performed in and with nature: harvesting, travelling, reposing, eating. But what happens – I would like to ask – when the activities of a given community are a potential danger to some of its members? How does this ‘engagement’ of ‘manhunts’ present itself in a landscape? Furthermore, how long are links to past violence preserved? How does landscape become readable as a historic environment in which land can be viewed as ‘an enduring record of – and testimony to – the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left there something of themselves’ (Ingold Reference Ingold1993, 152), i.e. signs of atrocities and danger? When does the archival dimension of the landscape become accessible to the contemporary viewer? If so, what ‘engagements’ does (s)he reactivate: those of a victim, those of a ‘hunter’, or a ‘beater’? How – in short – do we relate today to landscapes of Holocaust manhunts, the very recent type of that which I would like to call cynegetic landscapes? How do we respond to places where people chased and killed other people, how do we perceive the topographically inscribed ‘testimony of the lives and works’ by those who participated in such Second World War acts?

An immediate answer was provided by Tim Ingold in the Temporality of the Landscape itself. It is enough to read one of the many explanatory paragraphs literarily:

Indeed, as I have already established in the recently concluded research project on uncommemorated genocide sites, ^{Footnote b} the transfer of necro-knowledge is the result of a combination of many methods: storytelling, passing vague hints, recalling myths and legends, using certain objects and spaces in a specific way, engaging gestures and body language to give clues to the novice. The observation, listening and combining of incomplete data originating from various sources enables a newcomer to a place of past trauma to decipher its lethal character. Walks (guided by someone with insider knowledge) to significant places of execution, even if devoid of open and comprehensively narrated historical justification, establish the status of a place as significant (I refer here to frequent cases of taking children for a stroll to nearby places, unspecific to them. The lack of a clear explanation of the site’s meaningfulness was often – as I observed – accompanied with an abundance of alternative communication suggesting the site’s tragic gravity). Incomplete data, deliberately presented in a defective form, are actively recombined and completed by recipients (Sendyka et al. Reference Sendyka, Janus, Jarzyńska and Siewior2020a, Reference Sendyka, Kobielska, Muchowski and Szczepan2020b; Sendyka Reference Sendyka2021). Examples of such complex, small-scale but impactful practices can be easily found in reports or accounts by those who research the dispersed, uncommemorated killing sites.

Forests over the Jews: the Forensic Landscapes and the Landscapes of Fear

The most frequently utilized tool to refer to past violence is stored in language; and vernacular toponyms sometimes suggest that victims of executions were buried in the vicinity: ‘the forest growing on the Jews’, [‘lis na jewriejach’], ‘the Jewish forest’, – phrases encountered by Martin Pollack (Reference Pollack2014, 33), and mentioned by many other researchers of abandoned Holocaust sites. The former fear associated with manhunts is perceptible in legends and stories warning about trespassing – entering some sites in the area might attract curses and misfortune. As Maksym, an interviewee of a French team (lead by Patrick Desbois) documenting the Holocaust in Ukraine, described:

Pollack also recalls convictions regarding crop failures and illnesses of animals if the farming activity was carried out in the vicinity of a mass killing site (Pollack Reference Pollack2014, 91–92).

Tim Cole, examining the Holocaust forest topography, admits that, though the forests ‘were convenient places of secrecy’ and typically concealed the perpetrators’ actions, murders and the places where corpses were buried were ‘an open secret’ (Cole Reference Cole2016, 36). The locals deftly pointed out locations of graves even if they had not participated in burying the bodies, and they read the specific semiotics of the terrain to this day, as they presented the ability to Henryk Grynberg, a survivor, who returned to the area of his war-time hiding in search of the clandestine grave of his murdered father: ‘Do you know there was a dugout there? I know because I heard it from others’ (Grynberg Reference Grynberg1993, 19). Animals helped to preserve signs of death in the area:

‘Violence leaves traces’, writes Katrin Schramm, analysing the links between landscapes and death – ‘Be it habitually remembered or consciously evoked, it has profound effects on individual consciousness as well as collective identifications’ (Schramm Reference Schramm2011, 5). Patrizia Violi, a philosopher and semiotician, recently offered a tool that merges studies of trauma sites with methods of analysing signs. Trauma sites are ‘characterized by a specific semiotic trait: an indexical link to past traumatic events’ that ‘exist factually as material testimonies of the violence and horror that took place there’ (Violi Reference Violi2012, 37). The violence of terrorscapes leaves behind ‘a “high density” of historical traces, which are susceptible to being monumentalized, transformed, restored, dilapidated, destroyed: in other words, memorialized or consigned to oblivion’ (van der Laarse et al. Reference Van der Laarse, Mazzucchelli and Reijnen2014, 5). In this conception of landscape, the place itself becomes a trace, a material testimony of past violence. ^{Footnote c}

Another emerging theory and practice of studying post-violence landscapes that allows us to enter sites that have been neglected, abandoned and seemingly completely absorbed by nature, is offered by forensic studies. Ian Hanson proposed the term ‘forensic landscape’ in 2004, pointing out the successive character of the process of how body disposal pits are established in the wake of a murder. In any genocidal location, the traces of murder linked with human existence (human remains, the presence of blood) are tied with material traces: ‘shell cases, footprints and vehicle tracks, crushed and broken vegetation’ (Hanson Reference Hanson, Pye and Croft2004, 41). Further changes around a clandestine burial site occur as a result of the atmospheric conditions, activities of water, animals and the environment in general. The compression of soil, specific patterns of animal behaviour or the discoloration of plants can become readable indicators of a past crime (Calce and Rogers Reference Calce and Rogers2007; Sturdy Colls Reference Sturdy Colls2015, Reference Sturdy Colls, Anstett and Dreyfus2016). Indeed, the criminal evidence can be removed from a location and destroyed; sites of genocide can be transformed by its perpetrators to erase any trace of it: yet a forensic archaeologist can use advanced methodological and technological instruments to decipher places marked by terror (Cox Reference Cox2008). The forensic method, as well as new technological possibilities, allow one to effectively retrieve irrefutable evidence of mass murder and treat sites of violence as crime sites. International courts gave a powerful stimulus for developing these new methodologies in cases pertaining to genocide in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (Koff Reference Koff2004). Currently, researchers are conducting advanced work in searching for old burial sites of victims of terror in Poland and in Spain. ^{Footnote d}

Although the concept of a forensic landscape suggests an archaeological gaze, it might be used more broadly in relation to post-violence landscapes (Cyr Reference Cyr2014, 86). The evidence currently being unearthed by forensic experts is transforming our expectations about landscapes of past crimes. Earlier, historical traces – overgrown, absorbed by time and nature – seemed permanently lost, and those willing to admit they could experience Ingold’s ‘perceptual engagement with an environment that is itself pregnant with the past’ were suspected of semi-neurotic dedication to what Freud called ‘Angstbereitschaft’. The forensic approach can now support, with empirical evidence, that which seemed a mere intuition, but in fact stems from advanced observational skills. One may read in light of the above, the account of Rūta Vanagaitė, a Lithuanian researcher, searching for Second World War killing sites.

The concept of ‘forensic landscape’, understood in this more general, beyond-archaeological way, allows us to understand Vanagaitė’s reaction to the landscape of a small site near the Lithuanian town of Tauragė, as a legitimate observation, far from being a paranoid autosuggestion. It can be appreciated as the result of acquiring an empirical and fully rational ability to read minute traces and affordances of the landscape.

The forensic approach is supported by quantitative analyses and the new field of digital studies employed in social and humanities research. In a volume co-edited by Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano (Geographies of the Holocaust, Reference Knowles, Cole and Giordano2014), two of the articles exemplify research conducted in this manner (Retracing the ‘Hunt for Jews’: A Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Arrests during the Holocaust in Italy by Alberto Giordano and Anna Holian, Reference Giordano, Holian, Knowles, Cole and Giordano2014) and Killing on the Ground and in the Mind: The Spatialities of Genocide in the East by Waitman Wade Beorn and Anne Kelly Knowles, Reference Beorn, Knowles, Knowles, Cole and Giordano2014). Statistics, tables, numbers on maps, and technical drawings based on them show that some areas experienced a stronger threat from ‘predators’ activities’ than others. Reconstructions like these allow us to reproduce the preferences, characteristic movements, activities, and behaviours from the time of the Holocaust in a given region, and therefore they allow us to identify areas offering higher or lower chances of survival.

These new procedures employed in research on landscapes of past violence prompt us to return to the question raised in relation to Tim Ingold’s concept of the ‘taskscape’, perceived with all its past activities. I will ask again: how is the information intimated by a landscape – information about its associations with violence, about its low protective potential, about its past presence of perpetrators hunting for people – ‘permanently recorded’ in it? In their 2010 work, The Landscape of Fear: Ecological Implications of Being Afraid, John W. Laundré, Lucina Hernández and William J. Ripple – biologists and ecologists – proposed the concept of the ‘landscape of fear’, which represents the level of ‘predation risk’. The authors claim that animals are able to learn topography according to the criterion of fear associated with specific locations; that they can react to varying levels of threat. They propose that ‘landscapes of fear’ can be quantified on the basis of observations similar to those Vanagaitė made: observations about the density of the undergrowth, chances of being seen, the presence of certain plants. Taken as such, the ‘landscape of fear’ becomes a useful ecological concept. The field notes by Desbois, Zuroff and Vanagaitė seem to suggest that humans also learn to recognize ‘landscapes of fear’, and hence one may claim that the notion can become operational also within memory studies. Humans react to ‘cynegetic landscapes’ – one may assume – thanks to the activation of an old, innate primate knowledge useful for survival. It is possible for this knowledge to be passed down to following generations, warning about past dangers associated with a given area. The environmental theories of the ‘landscape of fear’ allow us to finally explain the seemingly irrational uncanny feelings some still experience in places of past trauma.

The past violence is retold and re-enacted to next generations. The environmentally embedded translation of natural traces and intergenerational transmission of information is dependent on the work of memory that intensifies in correlation to the level of ‘being afraid’. It was clearly stated by one of the interviewees (Jan Piwoński) who walked with Claude Lanzmann through Sobibór forest: