https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9512-2171
ABSTRACT
This article uses a microhistory—a family history, a form of autoethnography—to think through the role of migration archives, and family histories of migration, within the settler colony. By exploring my grandparents’ naturalisation applications, who came to this country as Jewish Holocaust survivors and stateless refugees, I consider what we can learn from bureaucratic archives, and how we can approach the problem of how to use these archives to write histories. Centring ambivalence, uncertainty and openness, this article ponders the devastating ruins of knowledge that we are left with in the long aftermath of the Holocaust, and the ways that those of us from migrant families are implicated in ongoing genocide in Australia. Trying to ethically think alongside the work of Aboriginal scholars, and using frameworks offered by other Jewish scholars, I take seriously the question of how we can work through questions of statelessness, naturalisation, citizenship and belonging in the settler colony, as we write our histories.
In December 2015, I made my way to the National Archives of Australia (NAA) reading room in North Melbourne to look at the naturalisation application files of two of my grandparents, Wolf and Zosia Stawski (or, as they are named in their files, Wladyslaw Stawski and Sofia Stawski). A few years previously, my brother, Ben, had visited that same reading room and seen their landing cards, from their arrival in Sydney on 29 July 1949, on board the SS Sagittaire. On both of their documents, they listed their nationality as “Stateless”, with Wolf being “ex Polish” and Zosia “Formerly Polish”.
After he had found those documents, I contacted Krystyna Duszniak, who runs a Polish research service from Melbourne and helps people connect to their family histories.Footnote1 She conducted research for us through the Polish archives, and suggested that I submit a request through the National Archives system to see what might be available there that had not yet been catalogued. The only items that appeared in their Recordsearch function at that time were the landing documents.
And so, behind the scenes, a search was carried out, and the archives eventually informed me that they had found my grandparents’ naturalisation files.Footnote2 Zosia’s was fully opened. Wolf’s was opened, with an exception. One page was withheld under paragraph 33(1)(g) of the Archives Act, which includes reasons such as “the information withheld is of a nature such that its disclosure would be an unreasonable intrusion on the personal affairs of a person named in the record and could cause distress to the subject”; “It is not likely that, if given the opportunity, the subject would consent to the release of such personal information about themselves”; and “If publicly disclosed, the information could reasonably be expected to cause distress or embarrassment to the person concerned and to family members”, among others.Footnote3 I was not allowed to view the page, but after some correspondence from my mother confirming that she was the daughter of the person whose documents were contained in the file, and that this person was deceased, she was sent a copy of the page. In this way, we learnt that the one page judged as needing to be withheld was a simple German birth certificate for her brother, my uncle, who was born in Friedberg on 17 August 1946 and who came to Australia with his parents, as a stateless refugee child.
In this article I want to examine these naturalisation applications, created by my grandparents in concert with the bureaucracies who governed their lives. These were settler-colonial bureaucracies created to manage migration, and particularly to manage the migration of Jews—and others—from Europe after the war. I want to think along with these documents to understand how they functioned as bureaucratic documents with their own meaning, as well as how they function today as archival documents of ancestors. What does it mean to encounter our family members in the archive? What relationships do we have with archival holdings? How are these relationships ethical, and how are they products of memorial cultures? In the following sections, I will grapple with some of these questions. What animates me throughout is the unresolved, and deliberately unresolvable, question of how to tell the story of what this naturalisation meant to these people, within their lives and their histories. Alongside this purpose sit questions of how to tell the larger story of the ways that the management of migration, naturalisation and citizenship is part of the settler-colonial project: How can I understand my grandparents’ experiences as people both subjected to—and becoming subjects of—the colonial state?
As a family, we have been interested in regaining knowledge of our ancestors, although slow to undertake this work, perhaps. My brother and I are both historians who sometimes work in archives, and our research has been guided by a sense of a place in the world that is shaped by our being the descendants of people who endured the Holocaust. In my work, I have researched cultures of Holocaust memory, Australian child refugee policy, and now histories of statelessness. I, we, live in the shadows of what has come before.
This article is a form of autoethnography and family history.Footnote4 Following the lead of Jewish ethnographers such as Jonathan Boyarin, this article seeks to examine the ways that I have made sense of my—and my family’s—history, through stories.Footnote5 I am also drawing on the work of Narungga woman, poet and academic Natalie Harkin, who has examined the colonial archives for her family. In her work, repatriation, or the gathering of family documents, provides another way of seeing how families have intersected with—or been intersected by—the colonial state.Footnote6 As she writes, “this archive, as papers, words and labels, is not just a product. It is also a process manifested by institutions that were conceived, created and ordered by law-makers with particular ways of knowing, surveying and capturing information ‘about’ us”.Footnote7 In the same piece, Wiradjuri writer, poet and academic Jeanine Leane writes of the encounter for First Nations people with family members in the colonial government archive, explaining:
When a person encounters themselves, or a loved one, on a file, a record, a report, a photograph created and kept by the arms of the state, they are unable to recognise themselves or their loved ones … A file is a text that lurks in a dusty archive like a time bomb. It is a text of violence, and it is a text of doubling: it presents itself—and sees itself—as one kind of text but is actually quite another. It is a text that straddles two worlds, and two realities. To be an outsider reading such texts affords a glimpse inside the mind of the state, a place of paranoia and suspicion; but to read one’s own record, or that of a loved one, can be to experience a violent collision of worlds, an internal shattering as one witnesses one’s own life made unrecognisable by the logic of the state.Footnote8
Importantly, First Nations people always exceed the control that the colonial archive attempts to impose. As Leane writes, “I am an archive. I am a chapter in a bigger archive. All the women I knew were archives. We are the first archives, before the many arms of the state constructed its fiction.”Footnote9 Or as Harkin explains, she writes poetry “to reclaim the fragments of women’s lives stolen by state record keepers in their many guises”, to “confront the hideous effigies constructed by the colonial imagination that once captured us”.Footnote10 Amangu Yamatji historian Crystal McKinnon explains that “Indigenous people are acutely aware that the Australian state organizes itself in racialized ways. We know because we and our communities, our grandparents and our great-grandparents, have all been subject to its oppression and violence”.Footnote11 The rest of us have much to learn from these understandings of the state, its records and the violence of how they are kept.
This article presents a microhistory, which I narrate and ask questions through in order to consider some of the smaller complex stories that make up our collective past.Footnote12 I am interested here in considering the long afterlives and aftermaths of trauma, bureaucracies and migration, of the moments when migrants become incorporated into settler colonialism. Following Ann Laura Stoler, we know that we must look at “colonial archives as both transparencies on which power relations were inscribed and intricate technologies of rule in themselves”.Footnote13 Moreover, as Antoinette Burton has explained, “archives do not simply arrive or emerge fully formed; nor are they innocent of struggles for power in either their creation or their interpretive applications”.Footnote14 We need to understand that “the archive is a contact zone between past and present as well as between researchers and structures of local, national, and global power”.Footnote15
While not all of the archival documents I examine in this article were created within or by settler-colonial Australia, they were all created to document a group of people who were living in the aftermath of having been subjected to genocide. In their power dynamics and urge to control, they are all colonising documents. They were all created, furthermore, as part of a “state archive [that] works to articulate the nation and the state, to link them as the nation-state, and to offer claims and evidence for their shared story”, as Craig Robertson has written.Footnote16 It is useful and important to look at these forms of archives, these remnants of the immigration journey, because, as Ruth Balint notes in her study of Red Cross tracing files from the aftermath of World War II, a somewhat similar form of document, “at the heart of these cases lies all the drama, and the mystery, of human relations … The tracing files are fragments of human stories, of lives ‘caught halfway through’. But they are also windows into the individual politics of migration and the family during a unique period in Australian immigration history”.Footnote17 Or as Robertson has shown in his study of the archival documents surrounding the passport and the ways that these archives are “bureaucratic” and “engage with the production of particular identities and identity categories”, looking at these archives, we can see “the role of archival practices in the disciplining and nationalization of the subject”.Footnote18 This is all part of “the work of exclusion carried out by state authorities”, as Alison Mountz has discussed.Footnote19
The Files
My grandparents were naturalised on 2 August 1957. Their naturalisation process followed the rules set out by the Nationality and Citizenship Act 1955, whereby intending applicants were no longer required to advertise in the newspaper that they were applying: “Declarations of Intention to apply for citizenship no longer had to be made two years before the application and applications could be made six months prior to the end of the five-year residency qualifying period.”Footnote20 In 1952, when Wolf’s brother and sister-in-law had been preparing their applications for naturalisation, they had advertised in the Age and the Argus.Footnote21
Zosia’s application contains an application cover form and a renunciation of allegiance to another sovereign or state, on which it is written that “applt requests STATELESS to be shown on application”.Footnote22 There is also notification that fee payment has been made (£10 in March 1957), verification from two citizens and “householders” that the applicant was known to them “and is a person of good repute”, as well as verification of this from an official (a justice of the peace, teacher, police officer, medical practitioner, dentist or another of the listed occupations), family details, previous countries of residence, occupation, places of residence in Australia, an application for exemption from the Immigration Act, and a certificate granting exemption.
Wolf’s applicationFootnote23—which also contains the application of their son, Elias Jonas (known as Alex)—contains many of the same documents: renunciation of allegiance to a previous sovereign and affirmation of allegiance to the Queen and Australia, and similarly, a notation that he had been registered as “stateless ex Polish” and that he “requests Stateless to be shown on application”.Footnote24 As I was looking through these documents in the archives office in North Melbourne, an archivist chatted to me, telling me that she had never seen this emphasis before, this emphasis they both made, insisting that they be registered as stateless. It was, she was signalling to me—it seemed—important and significant. She appeared to understand it as a choice they were making, something they were affirming.
On Wolf’s form, after this request to be registered as stateless, is a notation: “See also Stat Dec re name”. A couple of pages onwards sits this statutory declaration, in which Wolf Stawski, of 85 Fenwick St, North Carlton, in the words of the form, “do solemnly and sincerely declare”, and in handwritten words, “that, owing to racial reasons whilst in Buchenwald Concentration Camp, Germany, I changed my Christian name from Wolf to Wladislaw, a Polish name, thereby contributing to factors causing my life to be spared. Consequently, the documents issued to me in Europe are in the name of Wladislaw, and I wish my naturalisation papers to be in the name of Wolf Stawski”. This statutory declaration was declared in Melbourne on 20 March 1957. There is a claim to be shown as stateless, and to reclaim his name. These are profound, and profoundly moving, claims. I do not know properly how to write about them.
Nor do I know the story of how Wolf became Wladislaw. The language used in the stat dec reads, perhaps, more like what an official would write, rather than Wolf’s precise words. Before we saw this file, my family knew that Wladislaw was another form of his name that had been used at various points, and I think we had assumed it was simply what he might have been called by Germans in the camps, or in Germany after the war, or in Poland before the war. But this statutory declaration points to something substantially more meaningful. It is a conscious articulation of what his name would mean, an indicator of what could be a moment of deep trauma—and also profound resistance—from his experience of internment. There are other family stories of the lengths that he went to in order to stay alive in the camps, but this particular story has been lost. At one point, he was assigned to look after a garden and told that if a plant died then he would too. Another story that remains is how he would watch the birds fly in and out of the camps, admiring the way that they could just leave. Sometimes when I look at birds, I remember this.
Wolf’s naturalisation application also contains the details of a medical examination, conducted in Germany before they migrated, and a series of documents in German, translated for us by Sara, my brother’s partner. One of these documents, from 1948, certifies that both Wolf and Sofia were “Victims of the Nazi regime”, that Wolf was “transported to forced labour to Germany” on 18 March 1941, and then to Grossrosen concentration camp in March 1943 and finally to Buchenwald concentration camp, from which he was liberated by the US army on 11 April 1945. It says that, “according to his and his fellow Jewish comrades’ testimonies, he was in no way a collaborator of Nazism”. Through these documents—and others in his file—I learn that I was born exactly 42 years after he was arrested and deported, assuming that these papers document an accurate date. I wonder if 18 March had stayed in his mind as a meaningful date, and how he felt when I was born on that day. The documents also explain Zosia’s movements through the camps: “His wife was since 1941 in the Sosnowice/Szrodula ghetto; then 1943 for forced labour in the Czechoslovakia. She was liberated by the Red Army in Oberaltstadt. She also did not collaborate with the Nazis.”
Another document from 1948 provides Wolf’s parents’ names and birthdates, his occupation (a master tailor), that he is Jewish, and that he is “a Polish citizen”. It provides his birthdate and his marriage information, saying that he was married to Sofia Stawski (née Rosenkranz) on 8 October 1939 in Sosnowiec, Poland. It also says: “I do not have my birth or marriage certificates. These papers have been lost.”Footnote25 The same documents exist for Sofia Stawski, affirming their marriage date and that their documents are lost. Both documents provide the birth information for their son, and Sofia’s document notes that she is a Polish citizen and also that “my husband as well as my child are also Polish citizens”.Footnote26 Finally, their smallpox immunisation form is included: on 24 March 1949, they were immunised at the hospital in Friedberg.
Within this full naturalisation file, two different marriage dates are given for the marriage between my grandparents. The dates are incongruous: one, which is in an Australian document, says 1938;Footnote27 the other, in the German document, says 8 October 1939.Footnote28 But the archives in Sosnowiec, Poland—as well as family stories—tell us that he was married there in 1940 to another woman, Raszka Zajdman, and that they had a daughter, Estera, born in 1938.Footnote29 Both were murdered during the war.
These archival traces testify, then, not to a set of exact dates or places of life. Time is routinely bent to fit the needs of the document-makers, whether these are my grandparents, or the bureaucrats with whom they engaged. These documents of bureaucratic process—of lives noted down in government archives—testify instead, perhaps, to an unknown and unseeable set of relationships between people who document their lives, witnesses who testify to the truth of the document, governments who accept and store the archives, and archivists who maintain and control the records. They testify also to the presence and recording of affect: we see this in a request to be noted as stateless, in the mixture of dates being written to describe the registration of a marriage, and in other moments that are not legible to the reader coming along many years—and two generations—after the fact. We can only wonder at how it felt for them to fill out these forms after enduring the genocidal bureaucracies of the Holocaust. Whether or not they were conscious of it, they were now, after all, entering the differently genocidal bureaucracies of the Australian settler colony. And we must note, alongside these realities, that this type of bureaucratic play is no longer possible: as Anthea Vogl has shown, the increased use of strict and often arbitrarily enforced rules around how truthfulness of documents is determined in Australia has served to penalise refugees and asylum seekers, at times being used to deny them recognition of their refugee status.Footnote30
And it is here I find myself drawn to thinking about these documents of registration as testimonies of silence and ruin. They testify to the bleakness of the Holocaust and to the strangeness of government bureaucracy, of the names that flit in and across and out of the administration of lives, of the way people play with time when engaging with bureaucracy, and of the simultaneous presences and erasures that the archive—and the archivist—institutes. These are archives of victims, survivors, displaced people, refugees, citizens, stateless people. But they are also archives of potential reclamation—from a claim in Germany in 1948 that they were Polish citizens to a declaration a year later, on arrival in Australia, that they were ex/formerly Polish. I cannot help imagining them on the boat on the way over, gradually becoming not Polish. Or maybe it was sudden: the boat pulled out of the dock in Germany and they breathed a sigh of relief, became exes. Or maybe they had not considered themselves Polish for years, but had said or written whatever they needed to say or write to get them through the next meeting, or the next border. I do not know. But I read these documents as part of a history of rejecting borders and of forms of nationalism and nationality that persecute. For there is a Jewish history of this type of thinking about the role and place of the nation-state, of borders, of belonging.
In their article “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity”, in which they argue for “diaspora as a theoretical and historical model to replace national self-determination”,Footnote31 Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin write that within the system of Western nation-states, “ideological state apparatuses and discourses all press mightily on different identities to assimilate to the dominant culture”.Footnote32 But there is, they stress, a need to accommodate difference within peoplehood: to have diaspora, but no singular national homeland. “Jewishness,” they write, “disrupts the very categories of identity because it is not national, not genealogical, not religious, but all of these in dialectical tension with one another … In other words, diasporic identity is a disaggregated identity.”Footnote33 They therefore also assert: “What we wish to struggle for, theoretically, is a notion of identity in which there are only slaves but no masters, that is, an alternative to the [state-based, Zionist] model of self-determination, which is, after all, in itself a Western, imperialist imposition on the rest of the world.”Footnote34 Jews, they show, have always come from somewhere else.Footnote35 In this way, being “ex Polish” or “formerly Polish” has a lineage within Jewish history.
So although it is true on the one hand to say that these two people were exiled and rejected by Europe, in their rhetorical and bureaucratic gestures they seem to be taking back the control of defining their relationship to the nation-state. I do not know how authorised my reading of this history is—that is, I cannot know how my grandparents would articulate their claims, how consciously they were enacting a Jewish formulation of this type of diasporic history. But I do also know that when they came to Australia, they were—by virtue of the mere fact of being here—joining the settler-colonial project. Even if the settler colony they were joining also restricted immigration to Jewish refugees,Footnote36 coming to Australia did not mean leaving genocide behind.
Naturalisation
On 26 January 1996, as citizenship ceremonies were taking place around the country, Bob Burgess, a candidate for the Nationals in the seat of Leichhardt in Queensland in the upcoming federal election, referred to Australian citizenship ceremonies as “dewogging ceremonies”.Footnote37 While Opposition Leader John Howard did not publicly support his words, Bob Katter—then a member of the Nationals—did, and stated that people who opposed this view were “politically correct enviro-Nazis and femi-Nazis and all the rest of these little slanty-eyed ideologues who persecute ordinary, average Australians”.Footnote38 These comments reverberated around the country. Howard won the election, taking control of government.
Naturalisation is a ritual for making a people. Migration is another of those rituals. And the bureaucratic files—and their storage in the archives—is a way of documenting, capturing and further making a people. That bureaucracy consists not just in the paper files but also in the tools and technologies of nation-building. As Sara Dehm has written of the passport, it “gives shape to legal relations, lawful subjects and practices of authority and recognition”.Footnote39 “As a specific act of ‘bureaucratic inscription’,” she likewise writes, citing John Torpey’s work on the passport, “the passport as an official document symbolises the efforts of modern bureaucratic states to monopolise control over the ‘legitimate means of movement’. Yet, the document’s materiality has also allowed for migrant acts of resistance to and subversion of such transnational forms of migration control and bureaucratic inscription, through, for example, practices of forged identities and counterfeit documents.”Footnote40 Moreover, she adds, “Indigenous uses of passports mark the failure of settler colonial states to fully monopolise the ‘legitimate means of movement’.”Footnote41 There is “a politics of veracity or bureaucratic legibility” that circles around how states understand the role of the passport in identifying people.Footnote42 Writing about cases involving people challenging the regime of available gender markers for passports, Dehm explains that there are struggles people have initiated regarding the way that the passport recognises “anti-discrimination struggles over the passport as an ‘accurate’ official document of identity verification” and shows that “these court cases” can be read as “acts of individual refusals to be wrongly inscribed within state systems of identification”.Footnote43 These bureaucratic negotiations share a history with the naturalisation papers I am examining in this article as they show the many and varied ways in which people interact with legal categories that attempt to hold them in place, that aim to seize the authority to declare and inscribe people within their systems.Footnote44
Within Australia, naturalisation is a thoroughly racialised process and mode of enacting belonging. “The white supremacist logic of the Australian nation state and its sovereignty means that only those who it racializes as belonging, as white and hetero/homonormative, can be included in its polity,” writes Crystal McKinnon.Footnote45 Control of migrants—welcoming and refusing them—sits within the same racial schema as the control of First Nations peoples. Alongside its assimilative impulses, part of the point of naturalisation in Australia is to ensure that non-Indigenous peoples are permanently occupying the sovereign lands of First Nations peoples. For those of us who are not Indigenous, we cannot separate our being here—our being allowed by the settler-colonial state to be here—from that project. Indeed, as Gwenda Tavan has shown, “‘allegiance’ to the nation-state was a central feature of Australian citizenship policy and discourse throughout much of the 20th century”.Footnote46 And in the immediate postwar period, while large numbers of Jews came to Australia, they were not universally welcomed, and were indeed opposed by some.Footnote47 Klaus Neumann explains that the immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, “was curiously reluctant to vigorously defend the immigration of a rather small number of Jewish survivors. Rather than arguing publicly for the admission of refugees for humanitarian reasons, Calwell downplayed the size of Jewish immigration”.Footnote48
But we can consider a counter-example. In an exercise of Aboriginal sovereignty, as Joseph Pugliese discusses, in 2012 Uncle Ray Jackson, as president of the Indigenous Social Justice Association and working with a collective, organised an Aboriginal Passport Ceremony, held in Redfern on 15 September, with another ceremony held in September 2014. As Pugliese notes, “precisely by resignifying the passport as an Aboriginal technology crucial in legitimating non-Indigenous people’s movement through Australia’s Aboriginal Nations, the ceremonies at once marked Aboriginal people’s unceded and unextinguished sovereignty over Country and their right to offer welcome and hospitality within their own lands”.Footnote49 What can it look like, we are invited to wonder, if refugees, survivors of genocide, are given passports—given the technologies—of belonging to a place and a space by sovereign Aboriginal nations, rather than by the settler-colonial state? Uncle Ray Jackson articulated “the aims of the ceremony”: “the issuing of the Passports covers two areas of interactions between the Traditional Owners of the Lands and migrants, asylum seekers and other non-Aboriginal citizens in this country. Whilst they acknowledge our rights to all the Aboriginal Nations of Australia we reciprocate by welcoming them into our Nations.”Footnote50 The ceremony also recognised the ways that the Australian state murders people in custody—both in immigration prisons and in domestic prisons, police cells and police vans. Pugliese explains that “in the course of the ceremony, non-Indigenous Australians were required to purchase an Aboriginal passport and to pledge a formal acknowledgment of unceded Aboriginal sovereignty over the various Indigenous Nations that cover the Australian continent”.Footnote51 In this way, while processes of naturalisation in the settler colony are a mode of eradicating difference and of instantiating racial control over the land and population—as one technology that is part of a system of making Australia—this Aboriginal Passport Ceremony functions to both enact Aboriginal sovereignty and to welcome refugees and asylum seekers.Footnote52 The ceremony thus makes plain the “illegitimacy” of the settler state’s processes of naturalisation, which attempt to confer control, “to nativise”.Footnote53
Writing of the use of the Haudenosaunee passport on Turtle Island, Dehm explains that this case sits on a struggle around “the lawful encounter between Indigenous nations and settler colonial states”.Footnote54 There is a “particular politics of recognition” at play, one that sits within liberal settler-colonial paradigms.Footnote55 Dehm explains that “state regimes of documentation and their embedded politics of recognition also need to be read alongside differently situated and embodied politics of refusal articulated within collective struggles for different legal arrangements or legal categories”.Footnote56
These histories sit alongside the history of my grandparents. They are not separable. My grandparents moved from a state in which they had experienced genocide—rejecting it in their claims for statelessness—to a different, and differently, genocidal state. They took up citizenship here and were naturalised by a state that would let them live and would not expel them, but which was still, is still, enacting genocide upon another. Their acceptance was part of that genocide, as discomfiting as that reality is. They were given a place to live, but in doing so they became colonisers.
Part of my work in this article, therefore, is to think of naturalisation not just as the process of becoming an Australian citizen, but also as a process of negotiating being within one’s history, where that history is produced by ourselves within a system of nation-states that impact upon our lives. This system makes aspects of an individual’s life exist, but it also makes them knowable. The archives of naturalisation, then, are a gateway into those histories. In some ways, they produce those histories. Using these naturalisation files, I am thinking about the personal, communal and national histories within which people—in this case my grandparents, and I—can be situated.
In this way, my thinking, and this article, is an act of what Marianne Hirsch has termed “postmemory”, to signify the inherited and belated nature of these memories. These are the memories of the genocide and displacement of the Holocaust that we inherit from our parents and grandparents. Hirsch explains that in this context, “postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through representation, projection, and creation—often based on silence rather than speech, on the invisible rather than the visible”. She further writes that postmemory is about an ethical relationship of “remembering” one’s family’s experiences of trauma and loss alongside “the suffering of others”.Footnote57 But, she cautions, these experiences and stories that are being “remembered” through images and objects belong to other people. They should not overwhelm those who are remembering, or take over their stories: “How can we best carry their stories forward, without appropriating them, without unduly calling attention to ourselves, and without, in turn, having our own stories displaced by them? How are we implicated in the aftermath of crimes we did not ourselves witness?”Footnote58
Archives
What does it mean to know something through archives—what kind of knowledge is possible? I do not know how to tell the story of Wolf’s name change to Wladislaw and back to Wolf. I do not know the full story, but more significantly, I know that it is not my story to tell. This was a story that he had to partially share in order to meet some requirement of the state, and a story that he had to live in order to stay alive. It is part of the story of his naturalisation. But the intricacies of it—the breathtaking violence that we see only a hint of—is beyond what we can know, what we can narrate. These naturalisation documents, then, hold so many forms of violence within them. As Natalie Harkin writes, “when you enter the archive, you have to really prepare yourself for the coloniser’s madness”.Footnote59 The encounter with the state’s bureaucracy through the archive is one fully saturated by coloniality and violence. Harkin describes the process of looking at her family records, explaining that, “in one body of family records I obtained in 2000, every file featured the signature of those representatives of state responsible for observing, reporting and documenting my Nanna’s life. They determined what data was important, relevant and interesting for the record, which in turn influenced government mechanisms and policies designed to regulate and control our family’s fate. Colonial regimes of authority are clearly on display here, revealing how power is executed through strategies of control, discipline and regulation over individual lives and societies”.Footnote60
These naturalisation documents in some ways tell a story of making a new life, building a life, starting from scratch. Perhaps? They claim a statelessness that I read as a rejection, but it is a rejection of a state that had already colluded in rejecting them, exiling them, murdering most of their families.
Menachem Kaiser, a Canadian author who is about my age and who in 2021 published a book entitled Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Stolen Nazi Treasure, writes of knowing that his “grandfather was the only one in his family to have survived the war, that his parents and siblings had been murdered, as was nearly all of his large extended family”. “But as knowledge,” he continues, “this was dark matter. We knew nothing about his prewar or intrawar life.” They knew nothing of how they lived, what their names were, or how they had died: “And so when my grandfather died, they died another sort of death.”Footnote61
This is knowing and not knowing—living in the liminality. Kaiser’s family was from Sosnowiec, where part of my family was from. In Plunder, he gives their address, and when I read it I scramble back through the notes on my family, to find an address for where they had lived. I find one—we have an address for 1941, on the marriage certificate of Zalman and Frajda.Footnote62 Zalman was my grandfather’s brother and his wife, Frajda, was also the sister of my grandfather’s first wife (as far as we can tell from the archives). I trace the addresses on Google Maps and can see that it is a 15-minute walk between Kaiser’s family’s house and my family’s house. There is something uncanny, haunting, about it all. We know and we do not know. We know what we know because of these state archives. Zalman and Frajda were both murdered; they cannot tell their story.
It forces me to confront the role of descendants, to ponder the place that we occupy within the familial narrative. How do I know what my grandparents would have thought about me reading their naturalisation applications, let alone writing an article about them? In what sense are these my stories to tell?
These materials contain stories that my grandparents did not share with me—my grandmother died when I was six, my grandfather had dementia from when I was eleven—and I do not know that they would have ever wanted to share them with me. And now I have not just seen these documents; I have had the National Archives open them, make them open access. Now anyone coming along can look at them, make meaning from them, fit them into a narrative.
As well as my grandparents’ naturalisation applications, I went through the process for my mum’s first cousins, finding for them the naturalisation applications for Chaim and Marele Stawski—my grandfather’s brother and his wife. Those applications, however, are located in the Canberra holdings, and at the time I undertook the research, I was not planning on being in Canberra anytime soon. So we had them digitised, and we received those copies, meaning that now, if you look on the NAA Recordsearch site, you can view their application forms. They are highly accessible, not just to family, but also to anyone who knows how to use the NAA website.
I am nervous about this broad availability. If I find it hard to tell these stories, to know the ethical boundaries of what can be told and how to tell it, what happens when a researcher who has never met any of us accesses these documents and uses them to tell a story that they think needs to be told? But maybe my ancestors would have preferred a stranger to see these documents than me. Maybe not. What is buried should stay buried, perhaps—should not be dug up and used to create a history, a story, a mode of connection between past and present. Maybe. Or maybe not. There is no way of knowing. So maybe the discomfort, the ambivalence, the tenuousness is the point.Footnote63 How to write these familial and communal histories of such gravity and loss? These are fundamental questions that the historian must face.
How can any of us make sense of the statutory declaration that sits within Wolf’s file? How do we reckon with what it is saying, was saying, and might be read to say in the future? Jason Francisco, in his work Far from Zion: Jews, Diaspora, Memory, quotes Yiddish writer H. Leivick as follows: “Who told you to rebuild the ruins? Once ruined, it should remain ruined.”Footnote64 There is an important sitting in unknowing, in uncertainty, in the liminality that comes from a certain statelessness. In the ruins. We must confront the “genocidal abyss of memory”, as Jonathan Boyarin has devastatingly described it.Footnote65
These naturalisation applications are, therefore, not merely a simple bureaucratic form (if such a form ever even exists), not only part of the paperwork of a migration program that controls and determines people’s futures. They also work to claim and occupy the land on which the people have migrated to and are now being naturalised, and they are simultaneously repositories of family information. They testify to some of the brutality these people have faced in their lives. These documents are not just part of Australian migration history; they are also part of Stawski family history, and they are also part of Holocaust history and Jewish history. We must understand and narrate them as such. We must honour them as such. And honouring them, I think, lies in the aporia, uncertainty and gaps they create and those they fill. These are documents that show the making, and thus the artifice, of the modern nation-state and all of the bureaucracy and archival holdings that go into creating it.
Conclusion
This is, in many ways, a small story: of a couple of people, with a small family, in a small community in Melbourne. But this is also the story of naturalisation: people with lives being brought into systems of nation-state-making, for the project of granting naturalisation—of determining that every person must have a place within the global nation-state system—is part of a project of making the Australian settler colony, of determining that these people can be, or are, citizens, and these people cannot.
Jeanine Hourani writes of having been a stateless Palestinian refugee: “States give and take away your rights, they decide who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’, and they can ultimately grant or revoke citizenship. Statelessness harms individuals who are impacted by the phenomenon, and States hold the power in global citizenship infrastructure to create and maintain this harm. Why, then, do we continue to talk about statelessness as a deficit of the ‘vulnerable’ stateless individual, and not a problem created by the States that create these vulnerabilities?” She continues: “If we want to address the root problem of statelessness, we need to critically reflect on who has power to create and maintain statelessness. We also need to actively work to transfer that power back to stateless people.”Footnote66
In writing about the ways that migrants to Australia remember their migratory and settlement histories, Joseph Pugliese has shown “there can be no ‘innocence’ about the violent colonial history of this country”.Footnote67 Migrants are part of it. The institutional sites that allow migrants to be on this land are also the sites that actively try to remove First Nations peoples. And as much as I might like to romanticise my grandparents’ claim to being “formerly” and “ex” citizens, the story does not end there. I know about these claims of theirs only because they migrated, because they entered this country and faced a form of recognition by state apparatuses, and because they applied for and received Australian citizenship. And two generations on, I am firmly an Australian citizen, a coloniser, still living on stolen sovereign Aboriginal land.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Marc Mierowsky, who invited me to give the seminar paper that became this article, as well as the generous audience who attended that presentation and offered fruitful thoughts, questions and encouragement. My thanks as well to Michelle Foster and everyone at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness.
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Notes
1 “Polish Citizenship & Family History,” Lost Histories, https://www.losthistories.com/ (accessed 19 October 2022).
2 This process was considerably easier than the process that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people must undertake to attain access to their family’s, or their own, government records. Natalie Harkin details this process and the ways it is part of colonial control. See Jeanine Leane and Natalie Harkin, “When Records Speak We Listen: Conversations with the Archive,” in Law’s Documents: Authority, Materiality, Aesthetics, ed. Katherine Biber, Trish Luker, and Priya Vaughan (London: Routledge, 2021), 61–62.
3 “Annexure 1 Table A: Material Exempted by Folio Number and Grouped by the Application of Exemption Provisions,” NAA: MT874/1, V1956/44231 Stawski, Wladislaw [Wolf].
4 On new moves within the study of family history in Australia, see, for instance, Ashley Barnwell, “Aunting as Family Shadow-Work,” Journal of Family History 47, no. 3 (2022): 317–31; Tanya Evans, Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship: A New Social History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).
5 See, in particular, Jonathan Boyarin, Thinking in Jewish (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 8–33. See also Jonathan Boyarin, Jewishness and the Human Dimension (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 25–44.
6 For other important explorations of repatriation of archives, see Henrietta Fourmile, “Who Owns the Past? Aborigines as Captives of the Archives,” Aboriginal History 13, no. 1 (1989): 1–8; Kirsten Thorpe, Shannon Faulkhead, and Lauren Booker, “Transforming the Archive: Returning and Connecting Indigenous Repatriation Records,” in The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Repatriation, ed. Cressida Fforde, C. Timothy McKeown, and Honor Keeler (London: Routledge, 2020), 822–34.
7 Leane and Harkin, “When Records Speak We Listen,” 54.
8 Leane and Harkin, “When Records Speak We Listen,” 56–57.
9 Leane and Harkin, “When Records Speak We Listen,” 59.
10 Leane and Harkin, “When Records Speak We Listen,” 60.
11 Crystal McKinnon, “Enduring Indigeneity and Solidarity in Response to Australia’s Carceral Colonialism,” Biography 43, no. 4 (2020): 692.
12 For another example of the recent use of microhistory to tell stories of migrant groups on Aboriginal land, see Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli and Francesco Ricatti, “Migrant Lives on First Nation Land: Greek-Australian Memories of Titjikala in the 1960s,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 43, no. 5 (2022): 535–57.
13 Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science 2 (2002): 87.
14 Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories,” in Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 6.
15 Burton, “Archive Fever, Archive Stories,” 11.
16 Craig Robertson, “Mechanisms of Exclusion: Historicizing the Archive and the Passport,” in Burton, Archive Stories, 71.
17 Ruth Balint, “‘To reunite the dispersed family’: War, Displacement and Migration in the Tracing Files of the Australian Red Cross,” History Australia 12, no. 2 (2015): 140–41.
18 Robertson, “Mechanisms of Exclusion,” 71.
19 Alison Mountz, “Specters at the Port of Entry: Understanding State Mobilities through an Ontology of Exclusion,” Mobilities 6, no. 3 (2011): 320.
20 Michael Klapdor, Moira Coombs, and Catherine Bohm, “Australian Citizenship: A Chronology of Major Developments in Policy and Law,” Parliamentary Library, Parliament of Australia, 11 September 2009, https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BN/0910/AustCitizenship (accessed 14 October 2022).
21 NAA: A446, 59/50770 STAWSKI M and NAA: A435, 1950/4/8135 STAWSKI Chaim—born 15 August 1913—Polish.
22 NAA: MT874/1, V1956/44232 Stawski, Sofia.
23 NAA: MT874/1, V1956/44231 Stawski, Wladislaw [Wolf].
24 “Renunciation of Allegiance,” 2 August 1957, NAA: MT874/1, V1956/44231 Stawski, Wladislaw [Wolf].
25 NAA: MT874/1, V1956/44231 Stawski, Wladislaw [Wolf].
26 NAA: MT874/1, V1956/44232 Stawski, Sofia.
27 Wolf Stawski, “Statutory Declaration by a Person Applying, or Intending to Apply, for Naturalization as an Australian Citizen,” 27 August 1956, NAA: MT874/1, V1956/44231 Stawski, Wladislaw [Wolf].
28 NAA: MT874/1, V1956/44231 Stawski, Wladislaw [Wolf].
29 English translations of documents from Sosnowiec Urząd Stanu Cywilnego held in author’s possession.
30 Anthea Vogl, “What Is a Bogus Document? Refugees, Race and Identity Documents in Australian Migration Law,” in Biber, Luker, and Vaughan, Law's Documents, 94–111.
31 Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (Summer 1993): 711.
32 Boyarin and Boyarin, “Diaspora,” 705.
33 Boyarin and Boyarin, “Diaspora,” 721.
34 Boyarin and Boyarin, “Diaspora,” 711.
35 Boyarin and Boyarin, “Diaspora,” 715. Moreover, they assert, “Within conditions of Diaspora, tendencies toward nativism were also materially discouraged. Diaspora culture and identity allows (and has historically allowed in the best circumstances, such as in Muslim Spain) for a complex continuation of Jewish cultural creativity and identity at the same time that the same people participate fully in the common cultural life of their surroundings.” See Boyarin and Boyarin, “Diaspora,” 720–21.
36 Klaus Neumann, Across the Seas: Australia’s Response to Refugees, A History (Collingwood: Black Inc., 2015), 110–11.
37 “National Party Leader Condemns Remarks by National Party Federal Candidate, Bob Burgess, Who Referred to Australian Citizenship Ceremonies as ‘Dewogging Ceremonies’,” radio program, 26 January 1996, https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22media%2Fradioprm%2FZRP20%22.
38 Helen Pringle, ‘“The Crimson Thread of Kinship Runs through Us All’: Bob Katter and the Colour of Australian Law,” ABC Religion & Ethics, 27 August 2018, https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-crimson-thread-of-kinship-runs-through-us-all-bob-katter-and/10214292.
39 Sara Dehm, “Passport Struggles: Lawful Documents and the Politics of Recognition and Refusal,” in Biber, Luker, and Vaughan, Law's Documents, 71.
40 Dehm, “Passport Struggles,” 72–73.
41 Dehm, “Passport Struggles,” 85.
42 Dehm, “Passport Struggles,” 77.
43 Dehm, “Passport Struggles,” 78.
44 Dehm, “Passport Struggles,” 80.
45 McKinnon, “Enduring Indigeneity,” 692. See also Suvendrini Perera, “What Is a Camp … ?” Borderlands e-journal 1, no. 1 (2002): 1–12.
46 Gwenda Tavan, “Testing Times: The Problem of ‘History’ in the Howard Government’s Australian Citizenship Test,” in Does History Matter? Making and Debating Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Policy in Australia and New Zealand, ed. Klaus Neumann and Gwenda Tavan (Canberra: ANU Press, 2009), 128.
47 Klaus Neumann, “The Admission of European Refugees from East and South Asia in 1947: Antecedents of Australia’s International Refugee Organization Mass Resettlement Scheme,” History Australia 12, no. 2 (2015): 74–75. For broader contexts of Jewish immigration across this time, see, for instance, Andrew Markus, “Jewish Migration to Australia 1938–49,” Journal of Australian Studies 7, no. 13 (1983): 18–31. For non-Jewish contexts at this time, see, for instance, Jayne Persian, “‘Chifley Liked Them Blond’: DP Immigrants for Australia,” History Australia 12, no. 2 (2015): 80–101.
48 Neumann, “The Admission of European Refugees from East and South Asia in 1947,” 75.
49 Joseph Pugliese, “Geopolitics of Aboriginal Sovereignty: Colonial Law as a Species of Excess of its own Authority, Aboriginal Passport Ceremonies and Asylum Seekers,” Law Text Culture 19 (2015): 86.
50 Pugliese, “Geopolitics of Aboriginal Sovereignty,” 88.
51 Pugliese, “Geopolitics of Aboriginal Sovereignty,” 88.
52 Pugliese, “Geopolitics of Aboriginal Sovereignty,” 95.
53 Pugliese, “Geopolitics of Aboriginal Sovereignty,” 95. For another example, see the work of the Yidindji Government: www.yidindji.org; Saffron Howden, “Murrumu Walubara Yidindju Renounces Citizenship to Reclaim Australia,” Sydney Morning Herald, 2 November 2015, https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/murrumu-walubara-yidindji-renounces-citizenship-to-reclaim-australia-20151102-gkok6g.html. I am grateful to Elia Shugg for alerting me to this.
54 Dehm, “Passport Struggles,” 71.
55 Dehm, “Passport Struggles,” 72. See also Dehm, “Passport Struggles,” 84, where Dehm shows how Haudenosaunee “repeatedly framed the issuing and use of First Nations passports as a legal practice of Indigenous nationhood”.
56 Dehm, “Passport Struggles,” 72. See also Dehm, “Passport Struggles,” 83, where Dehm discusses the ways that Border Force in Australia has responded to the use of Aboriginal Provisional Government passports.
57 Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 9–11. See also Michael Rothberg’s work on “multidirectional memory”, in particular Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Michael Rothberg, “From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory,” Criticism 53, no. 4 (2011): 523–48.
58 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 2.
59 Leane and Harkin, “When Records Speak We Listen,” 54.
60 Leane and Harkin, “When Records Speak We Listen,” 56.
61 Menachem Kaiser, Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Stolen Nazi Treasure (Brunswick: Scribe Publications, 2021), 6.
62 We also have an address for my grandfather and his first wife, Raszjka, but I cannot find it on Google Maps. The street does not seem to exist (anymore?) in Sosnowiec. There is a street by that name in Katowice, though, the next town along. On a trip to Poland in 2016, I visited Zalman and Frajda’s address, as well as the possible address in Katowice for Wolf and Raszjka. I also visited an address we have for Wolf and his brothers and parents in Czestochowa. It is now a carpark.
63 Kaiser, Plunder, 132.
64 Jason Francisco, Far from Zion: Jews, Diaspora, Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 90.
65 Jonathan Boyarin, Jewishness and the Human Dimension (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 26.
66 Jeanine Hourani, “Reclaiming Statelessness Narratives by Resisting ‘Deficit’ Discourse and Amplifying the Voices of Stateless People,” Critical Statelessness Studies Blog, March 2021, https://law.unimelb.edu.au/centres/statelessness/resources/critical-statelessness-studies-blog/reclaiming-statelessness-narratives-by-resisting-deficit-discourse-and-amplifying-the-voices-of-stateless-people.
67 Joseph Pugliese, “Migrant Heritage in an Indigenous Context: For a Decolonising Migrant Historiography,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 23, no. 1 (2002): 9.