Looking at Bucha. Holocaust Researcher on Visual Testimonies of Contemporary Genocide

Jacek Leociak

Abstract

The massacre of civilians perpetrated by the Russians in Bucha is a point of departure for reflections dealing with textual and visual testimonies of collective violence, acts of genocide, and, predominantly, the Holocaust. The author ponders on selected examples of individual violence and extermination undertakings in assorted historical and political circumstances (from crimes committed against prisoners of war during the American Civil War, lynching, the Holocaust, the war in Syria, and Russian war crimes perpetrated in Ukraine). The differentiation of the historical-political context is accompanied by the diversity of communication media recording and transmitting borderline experiences involving victims: from written testimonies to Internet blogs and Facebook posts, from drawings and photographs published in the press to professional documentary films screened in courtrooms in the course of trials of criminals and in cinemas during special film projections, as well as private photographs and forms obtained with cell phones and put on the Internet. Alongside the variability of historical facts and the media there still remains the unchanging core of all those testimonies: first, the compelling need, an outright injunction, to create them; secondly – fundamental similarity, i.e. a foundation shared by all such testimonies: mortal fear, horror, dread, a feeling of being abandoned, and vulnerability. The author concentrated predominantly on the character of visual communication, the phenomenon of cruelty and violence photography as well as their impact upon the recipient.