On November 16, 1940, construction of the wall enclosing the Warsaw Ghetto was completed. Up to ten feet tall and encircling approximately 1.3 square miles of central Warsaw, the wall served as a heavily policed borderland between the “Aryan” and Jewish zones of the occupied city. Within weeks, around 30 percent of Warsaw's population, over 400,000 souls, were forced into an area amounting to less than 3 percent of the city's land. For the next thirty months, the wall of the Warsaw Ghetto carved a zone out of the besieged city that was defined by rigid control of movement, the constant threat of spontaneous violence, and, within weeks of the closure of the ghetto, omnipresent death. This visible division of space represented a multitude of other divisions that shaped the lives and deaths of Warsaw's Jews during the years of German occupation, as the separation from the “Aryan” side of the city also painfully separated Jews from their daily lives and the familiar space that had shaped them.Anja Nowak's Violent Space: The Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw effectively ties together multiple threads of the spatial story of the genocide of Warsaw's Jews. In particular, this book contributes to the exploration of space as a distinct form of violence, one that the Nazis imposed through direct and indirect force. In recent years, scholars of the Holocaust have effectively demonstrated that the violence of the Nazi political agenda was not only incidentally tied to the space it occupied, but imagined and enacted through space, with geopolitical and spatial ideas and spaces themselves playing an active role as “social and political agents used to organize power relationships among the perpetrators, their victims, and the bystanders” (p. 3). The novelty of Nowak's work lies in the author's conceptual exploration of violent space not only as a weaponized policy of the Nazi death machine, but more significantly, as the very fabric of daily life as it was experienced by the Jews incarcerated within the ghetto walls.Through twenty-five brief chapters, organized into four thematic sections, Nowak demonstrates how the violent space of the Warsaw Ghetto was created, experienced, and destroyed. Part I, entitled “Localization,” features an introduction to the major methodological approaches of space and place that form the basis of Nowak's study. Part II, “The Making of a Violent Space,” examines how Nazi policies denatured Jewish Varsovians’ relationship to the city's urban space, changing not only the physical space of the city but also the spatially-created relationships between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors. “Experiences of a Violent Space,” the third and longest section in the book, illustrates how violence shaped the conception, formation, management, and experience of the ghetto throughout its thirty-odd months of existence. In this section, Nowak populates the violent space of the ghetto with rigorously-researched analysis of daily life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto, focusing on the spatial dimensions of ephemeral elements such as rumors, news and communication, and the ghetto soundscape. Although many of these topics have long been the subject of rigorous study, Nowak's synthesis of spatial approaches and experiential histories of the ghetto supports a deeper understanding of how Nazi policies of space and place not only imposed violence on the lives of European Jews, but also “forced them to profoundly adapt their behaviors and survival strategies to the violent environment the German occupiers created” (p. 151). Part IV offers a holistic overview of the book's conclusions. Through a deep analysis on first-person sources from Jews incarcerated in the Warsaw Ghetto, Nowak proves that the violent policies of the Nazi authorities created an expansive and at times unpredictable set of effects in the lives of Warsaw's Jews as their lives were upended at every level.Among the major innovations of this work is the serious analysis given to daily life during the later months of the existence of the Warsaw Ghetto. The most compelling approach dealing with this time period is the concept of “death space” (Todesraum) and its application to the experiences of Jews incarcerated within the Warsaw Ghetto after the major deportation actions of summer 1942 and winter 1943. Drawing substantially on witness testimonies, Nowak defines “death space” in this context as a territory that “coincided with a pending death sentence that applied to every Jew the Germans caught in it, no matter their ‘official status’” (p. 240). Through the concept of Todesraum, Nowak lays the groundwork for further ontological explorations of space that clearly connect individual experiences of violence and genocide to various aspects of the built environment.This analysis sheds light on how Jews experienced space in the final months of the ghetto's existence, a period which is often studied in the context of the doomed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising but has not been a frequent subject for studies of daily life. Space took on new meaning as homes and workplaces were transformed into bunkers and hiding places, as Jews turned to the manipulation of space as the primary method of survival in a terrain that was “antithetical to life” (p. 239). It was a space, Nowak argues, that “coincided with a pending death sentence” and was yet “very much alive and inhabited by people” (pp. 239–240). This tension represents the apex of the centrality of spatial processes and became central to the matter of survival for Jews in the ghetto.The main arguments advanced by Violent Space are rooted in both primary and secondary sources, encompassing an impressive breadth of material. While the archival material in the text is primarily sourced from the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the appendix includes references to a wide variety of published material, including scholarly studies and first-person narratives. Of particular note is the inclusion of brief biographies laying out the basic details of the lives of individuals whose lives and work were featured in Nowak's study, including Jewish survivors and victims of the ghetto as well as some of the German agents responsible for their suffering. Indeed, the successful interpretation of eyewitness testimonies through the framework of spatial theory is a major strength of this book. While the names of many of Nowak's sources—Mary Berg, Peretz Opoczyński, Abraham Lewin—will be familiar to scholars of the Holocaust, the positioning of their observations alongside those of Henri Lefebvre, Jane Jacobs, and Kevin Lynch demonstrate the extent to which the violent history of the Warsaw Ghetto can serve as a model for understanding how genocidal policies shaped experiences of space and space production during the Holocaust.Violent Space is an excellent resource for scholars seeking to explore conceptual themes of space and violence in the context of the Holocaust. Nowak's detailed and innovative study of the creation and destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto adds significantly to the field of spatial Holocaust studies through its examination of how violence shaped the life and death of Warsaw's Jews at every phase of the ghetto's existence. Scholars of spatial theory and architecture will additionally find in this volume an inventive application of foundational concepts of space and place as they can be related to histories of violence and genocide. Brimming with details about the singular experience of Warsaw, this book may have benefitted from some inclusion of testimony and analysis originating in other ghettoized urban areas in occupied Europe.While Warsaw's status as the largest European Jewish metropolis and the site of the largest and deadliest wartime ghetto distinguish it as a case worthy of specific attention, allusions to other examples of spatialized violence in ghettoes would help substantiate Nowak's major claims about urban space and Nazi policy.In 1943, the majority of the buildings within the borders of the Warsaw Ghetto—the rooms, corridors, alleyways, and boulevards that had been the place of so much violence—were destroyed by German forces with fire and dynamite. A modernist housing estate was built over the ruins where the ghetto had once stood, incorporating its rubble into the walls of new homes. The physical space of the Warsaw Ghetto no longer exits. It cannot be visited. Similarly, the lives of those doomed to inhabit its violent space were destroyed, as they were uprooted, wedged into cramped living quarters with total strangers, deprived of food, medicine, and basic hygiene, and ultimately exposed to arbitrary violence and ubiquitous death. Anja Nowak's endeavor to “locate violence where it hurt” by exploring violent space through victim testimonies elucidates how violent spatial policies were imprinted upon their targets and how Warsaw's Jews both lived and died in those spaces (p. 255). This work serves as an effective blueprint for those seeking to understand the violent potentials of spatial policy and the importance of space as a central category of lived experience.
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