On July 4, 1946, forty-two Jews were murdered in Kielce, and dozens more were wounded. The eightieth anniversary of the pogrom should be more than another occasion to commemorate its victims. It should also compel us to ask how societies organize the visibility of minorities: when they allow a minority to appear, in what form they display it, and what they remove from view by doing so.

The immediate occasion for raising this question is Dominik Flisiak’s Polish-language article, “Kielce according to Mordechai Canin,” published on Academia.edu. Flisiak recovers the testimony of a Jewish reporter who travelled through Poland after the Holocaust, documenting the remains of one hundred destroyed Jewish communities.

Mordechai Canin, also known as Mordechai Tsanin or Tzanin, מרדכי צאנין, was not a marginal chronicler. He was a writer, journalist, lexicographer, editor of the Israeli Yiddish newspaper Letste Nayes, and an important figure in postwar Yiddish culture in Israel. As a correspondent for the New York Forverts, he returned to Poland to describe the social aftermath of the catastrophe. His major book about that journey has never entered the English-speaking world in its entirety.

The problem, however, is not simply that one author has been forgotten. The problem is that we have forgotten the world in which Canin was not exceptional.

Contemporary Jewish memory has not made the Jews of Poland completely invisible. On the contrary, it has made them extraordinarily visible as victims. We see the trains, ghettos, deportations, selections, camps, and photographs of children being led to their deaths. We see far less of their schools, newspapers, publishing houses, trade unions, yeshivot, theatres, libraries, cooperatives, political parties, and religious movements. We remember them from the moment people began to murder them, while losing sight of the society they had been before.

We remember their deaths so intensely that we cease to see their lives.

This is not ordinary forgetting. Forgetting leaves an empty space. Here, one image is produced as a substitute for another: a particular form of visibility is intensified until it obscures every other form.

Elżbieta Janicka and Tomasz Żukowski identified a similar mechanism in Polish Holocaust memory. The footbridge over Chłodna Street became an emblem of Polish-Jewish relations during the occupation. It presents Jews imprisoned inside the ghetto and Poles on the so-called Aryan side as radically separated by German violence. It is a clear, moving, and safe image. Poles remain spectators.

What disappears from view is nearby Biała Street, which offered one of the routes out of the ghetto and where blackmailers waited for Jews attempting to escape. The visibility of the footbridge produces the invisibility of Biała Street. The Holocaust is not silenced. It is shown in a way that removes an inconvenient social relationship from the field of vision.

The same mechanism appeared in a historical reconstruction of the liquidation of the Będzin ghetto described by Janicka and Żukowski. The roles of Germans and Jews were assigned.........

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