In this Place

With FestivALT, I led guided walks and pigment workshops at KL Płaszów, the former Nazi camp in Kraków where all four of my grandparents were imprisoned, a site of medicine and poison, transformed into color and community.

KL Płaszów was a Nazi concentration and forced labor camp on the southern edge of Kraków. The Nazis destroyed two Jewish cemeteries to build it. Between 30,000 and 35,000 people were imprisoned there, and at least 5,000 to 6,000 were murdered.

Today the site bears few markers of its history. It has become a de facto park: picnics on mass graves, children speeding their bikes down the hills. One of the only remaining signs of forced labor is a different species of grass, longer and greener than the meadow around it, growing where prisoners were forced to dig pits. A memory written by the land.

In July 2023, as a resident artist of the seventh FestivALT, I led free public walks through the former camp, then a workshop where we made pigments from its plants and earth. The work grows out of The Medicinal Plants of Płaszów, a FestivALT project begun by Jason Francisco after he noticed that many plants growing wild in the camp are medicinal.

Many medicinal plants are also pigment plants. Purple crown vetch (Coronilla varia), pictured above, is a cardiotonic that fixes nitrogen and feeds damaged soil. Its pale lavender flowers became a deep gold that beams vitality. That gold is also the precise yellow the Nazis forced Jews to wear on their clothes, in patches shaped like stars.

Every color made from this site is a pharmakon, the ancient Greek word for medicine, poison, and pigment at once. Would you make paint from a flower grown on a mass grave? If you made the paint, what would you paint with it?

In one workshop a young woman said, slowly, “I think healing is a combination of remembering and forgetting.” Her words became a series of cyanotypes: one triangle for remembering, one for forgetting, healing where they overlap. They hold lace made by my grandmother, her sisters, and her mother, and cubic zirconia from my grandfather’s cousin.