Exposing Wounds: Traces of Trauma in Post-War Polish Photography

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INTRODUCTION: EXPOSING WOUNDS 
 
 
From the dim recesses, 
as if from the abyss of Hell, 
there started to emerge 
people who had died long time ago 
and memories of events 
that, as in a dream, 
had no explanation, 
no beginning, no end, 
no cause or effect. 
They would emerge 
and keep returning stubbornly, 
as if waiting for my permission to let them enter. 
I gave them my consent. 
I understood their nature. 
I understood where they were coming from.  
The i m p r i n t s 
impressed deeply 
in the memorial past.  
 
(Tadeusz Kantor, Excerpt from ‘Imprints,’ Silent Night (Cricotage), 1990)
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The etymology of trauma derives from the Greek τραῦμα, meaning ‘wound’. Trauma is 
still used in medical contexts to denote physical damage to the body. It has also come to 
be used to denote psychological damage; a wound inflicted upon the mind. In his 
influential writings on trauma, Sigmund Freud suggested that a wound of the mind does 
not heal in the same way as a wound of the body.
2
 It is also more difficult to recognise 
and to comprehend. In fact, one of the salient features of trauma is its 
                                                      
1
 Tadeusz Kantor, A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944-1990, ed. and trans. 
Michal Kobialka (Berkeley: California University Press, 1993), 182. 
2
 See Sigmund Freud, ‘From The History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1918[1914]) in The Standard Edition of 
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: 
Vintage, 2001); Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) (New York: Bantam Books, 1967).   

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incomprehensibility. Freud suggested that there occur exceptions to ordinary experience, 
such as accidents or life threatening events, which the subject is unprepared for and which 
produce stimuli powerful enough to rupture the mind’s “protective shield.”
3
 Building on 
Freud’s insight, Cathy Caruth has described how a traumatic event is akin to a “breach in 
the mind’s experience of time, self and world,” by which the wounding event is 
“experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available 
to consciousness.”
4
 Accounts from the liberation of Nazi German concentration camps in 
1945 support this theory, and demonstrate a breakdown of both vision and language when 
confronted with the horrors of the camps. In April 1945 the British Army’s Film and 
Photographic Unit (AFPU) entered the camp at Bergen-Belsen and more than two 
hundred photographs were taken. One AFPU photographer, Sergeant Oakes, recalled his 
incomprehension at the scenes he saw: “...we couldn’t understand it. We had seen 
corpses, we had seen our own casualties, but these bloodless bodies ...”
5
 In her recent 
study of photographs taken at the liberation of the concentration camps, Barbie Zelizer 
documents how the first journalists at the camps struggled with the inadequacies of 
language to describe what they saw; she notes that “‘Words fail me’, was their repeated 
refrain.”
6
  
While a traumatic event may be experienced bodily, it remains unassimilated by the 
conscious mind. Instead, an invisible ‘wound’ is inflicted on the subconscious psychic 
material, imprinting an invisible, inaccessible and indelible trace that lies dormant in the 
subconscious. Freud stated, “Even things that seem completely forgotten are present 
somehow and somewhere, and have merely been buried and inaccessible to the subject.”
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The excerpt from Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor’s poem that begins this chapter articulates 
the way in which events can be retained or stored in the mind as “i m p r i n t s / 
impressed deeply / in the memorial past.” Kantor also recognised a particular feature of 
these impressions, namely that at a later date they re-emerge and “stubbornly” return with 
                                                      
3
 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Chapter IV. Freud posited two different models of traumatic 
experience: childhood trauma relating to castration anxiety that forms part of psycho-sexual development; 
and the model of traumatic neurosis associated with war and severe accidents. My interest lies in the latter, 
although pscyho-sexual traumas will be touched upon in the second chapter.  
4
 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins 
University Press, 1996), 4. 
5
 Sergeant Harry Oakes, AFPU, Imperial War Museum Sound Archive interview, accession no. 19888/4 
reel 2.  
6
 Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through The Camera's Eye (Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press 1998), 85. 
7
 Sigmund Freud, “Constructions in Analysis” (1937), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological 
Works of Sigmund Freud, vol 23, ed. and trans., James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 260. 

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“no explanation.”
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 Freud used the term nachträglichkeit, often translated as ‘deferred 
action’, to describe this peculiar temporal structure in which the original trauma is 
experienced retrospectively. A trigger in the present activates the imprinted trace and 
returns the trauma to the conscious mind. It is only at this later date that the original 
traumatic event reveals itself, at a time and distance removed from the laying down of its 
impression.
9
 Caruth summarised the paradox at the heart of traumatic experience, namely, 
“that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know 
it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness.”
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In 2003 Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda reflected upon the 1957 release of his film 
Kanał [Canal], which recounted the tragic heroism of the Polish Home Army during the 
1944 Warsaw Uprising. Wajda suggested that making the film was for him, and by 
implication his generation, a necessity. He simply stated, “we had to expose our 
wounds.”
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 Wajda’s film focused on a particular moment in Polish history, when Polish 
resistance fighters had attempted to liberate Warsaw from German occupation, timed to 
coincide with the arrival of the Soviet Union’s Red Army. When the Soviet Army 
presence did not materialise, the Germans waged an arduous campaign which killed more 
than two hundred thousand people and demolished the majority of the city of Warsaw. 
Kanał tells the story of a company of Home Army fighters who escaped the German 
onslaught through the city’s sewers. These physical and psychic wounds of Polish history 
become the repeated subject of Wajda’s films. Importantly, Wajda was only able to 
communicate these traumas retrospectively, after a delay; Kanał was released more than a 
decade after the events of 1944 and the time lag suggests the temporal distance needed for 
his generation to comprehend the events of the Second World War.  
Kanał was also the first film to be made in Poland about the Warsaw Uprising. The delay 
therefore speaks to another trauma in this period of Polish history, namely the rewriting 
of that history in the post-war years, which the art historian David Crowley has described 
as the “the myopic and crooked practice of History” in Poland under Soviet rule.
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 Events 
which were unpalatable to the Soviet censors, or which pejoratively implicated the Soviet 
                                                      
8
 Kantor, A Journey Through Other Spaces, 182. 
9
 See Freud, ‘From The History of an Infantile Neurosis.’ 
10
 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 91-2. 
11
 Andrzej Wajda, preface to John Orr and Elzbieta Ostrowski, The cinema of Andrzej Wajda: the art of 
irony and defiance, (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), xii. 
12
 David Crowley, Warsaw (London: Reaktion, 2003), 18. 

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