We focus on Death Valley in Chojnice, Poland, the site of mass executions during World War II. The Nazi perpetrators shot and killed as many as a few thousand Polish citizens in that location between 1939 and 1945. Afterwards, they attempted to destroy the evidence of the crime by cremating the victims’ bodies, burying them in mass graves and dumping them into local marshes. Currently, this mass execution and burial site is covered by riparian vegetation and located near an apartment area. For many years it functioned as a mildly haunted place, shrouded in social taboos, entailing affective reactions connected to the wartime violence. In the postwar period Death Valley was gradually collectively reclaimed as a site of memory and as a space of everyday social practices: recreation, crop cultivation, searching for wild edibles, to mention just a few. Those activities show that Death Valley may be considered a space of remerging life, both vegetal and social.
Our analysis of Death Valley’s landscape integrates negative aspects of death/violence with positive connotations of living/growing to show their coexistence and interdependence rather than mutual exclusion. Focusing on social and political issues that emerged during our ethnographic research conducted during the “Archaeology of the Pomeranian Crime of 1939” project, we also intend to highlight how the perceived attractiveness of a place influences its perception despite any historical and martyrological context. It also affects how the site is used and arranged and the nature of the commemorations. In the case of Death Valley, the intent of the perpetrators to hide and destroy any human remains was based on the premise of their spatial seclusion from urban movement, incineration and natural absorption into the marshy terrain. Instead, the idyllic landscape was tamed, adapted to new forms of exploitation and slowly absorbed by the growing town.
