The transit camp for Jews at Riebnig (Part II)

Rybna (formally Riebnig) is a small settlement located along the Oder river in Opole Voivodeship, home to 300 or so people, many of whom seem to be involved in farming. There's a school building but no school, and no shops that I'm aware of. At the edge of the village there's a modest stadium where LKS Rybna play their home games (their club crest is a shark, and Rybna translates literally to "Fish"). The village seems to be visited each year by a stork that pitches up on Odrzańska, with the remnants of its nest still visible during my visit this week.

I won't claim to understand the demographics or political composition of the village, but I snooped their Facebook page and it looks like a fairly typical, vibrant enough rural community. The harvest festival and All Saints' Day seem to be the big annual events. Unfortunately, the surrounding area seems to suffer badly from flooding, due to its location right by the Oder.

The sense of being unwelcome I talked about in a previous post was perhaps the result of projection on my part. During my Facebook snooping I looked for references to the transit camp my great-grandparents were deported to in 1941, and one of the two posts I found was an April Fools joke about it being requisitioned to be used to house refugees. There were comments in response to that about gas chambers and applying to be camp commandant.

This discovery, along with my understanding of antisemitism in post-war Poland, likely primed me to feel unwelcome long before anyone even noticed my presence. But then it wasn't long before I had an interaction that reinforced that feeling. My Polish still needs a lot of work, but the person I spoke to made it very clear that German Jews were the people on earth he cared least about, after Muslims.

The final sentence in Alfred Konieczny's 1996 publication The Transit Camp for Breslau Jews at Riebnig in Lower Silesia (1941–1943) reads as follows:

The existence of the camp has not been commemorated. A plaque citing the fiftieth anniversary of the Silesian Uprising is mounted to the wall of the local school. A second plaque, dedicated to the memory of the Jewish inmates in the camp, deserves to be affixed next to it.

The plaque commemorating the Silesian Uprising remains, and there's another dedicated to the devastating flood of 1997, but as far as I can tell there's still nothing in memory of the several hundred Jews who tried to survive in appalling conditions in the transit camp still standing in the centre of the village. Many of those individuals died of illness and malnutrition in the camp itself, and also by drowning in the Oder while forced to work on the riverbank. I'm not an especially sentimental person but my grandparents' plight and that of their fellow deportees should be memorialised at this site, largely because I believe the presence of a plaque could educate future generations, not only about the dangers of antisemitism but of prejudice more generally. I don't believe I'm best placed to campaign for the installation of such a memorial, but in the absence of anybody else interested in doing so, I'm going to give it a decent crack.

I ended the post yesterday just as I headed down to the river.

I walked in the cool November sun, past thin woodland and ploughed fields, to the system of locks that controls water levels and allows barges to move freight up and down the river. A little way past the locks was a tree-lined 'avenue' of young oak, with leaves still clinging to branches but many more carpeting the floor in an ankle-deep layer of orange underfoot. I was once again faced with the dissonance of such an outwardly benign landscape being the scene of human tragedy, while recognising that this tension is hardly unusual.

I sat on the damp grass and ate another boiled egg (three a day is standard), then woke about half an hour later. I don't remember lying down, but the short nap and the boiled egg were enough to get me back to Rybna, where I managed yet again to not take a picture of the building I'd come so far to see.

I did take pictures on the second and third days I visited the village, albeit while doing so I became convinced that my approach to this is wrong, that for the pictures to offer emotional weight the message needs to be conveyed in a much simpler way. Rather than the work being analytical, research-led and broad in its scope, what if it were tighter, but nonetheless presented using a looser aesthetic? I think there's a raw energy driving this, something that's bordering on anger. What do I have to get angry about? In relation to this work, plenty: the injustice of persecution, the absurdity of prejudice, the inaction of people who know better and the poverty of public discourse.

Switching approach means sacrificing the hundred or so frames I've already got, but acknowledging the necessity of letting them go is no doubt important in terms of my development as a photographer.