18:18:18 (2018/2025) is a set of eighteen time-based works that exist in the cracks between cinema and photography. In the spirit of Andy Warhol's durational cinema, each film is comprised of a single take exactly 18 minutes, 18 seconds and 18 milliseconds long, creating a non-narrative visual meditation in a 1:1 relation between cinematic time and real-world time. The films are purely observational in method, with the camera assigned a simple receptive task, and no cutting or splicing in post-production.
Each film was made at a Holocaust site, one among the 42,500 such sites that the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has identified. Each film’s time-span is defined by traditional Jewish symbolism––the number 18 corresponds to the Hebrew word "chai," life—such that each film presents an encounter with a site of genocide that lasts for the time of life itself. Each encounter has its own character, much in the way that silence is not a simple, undifferentiated thing, rather there are types and qualities of silence. In each film, there is a live discrepancy between seeing and knowing, the everyday world of the present and the violent world of the past, the visible and the withdrawn-from-visibility. In this way, each film questions what it means to bear witness to memory, suggesting that remembering is not the overcoming of of the tensions that the films stage, rather the courage to dwell within them.
In and through whatever happens in each film, nothing also happens, i.e. the nothing that the Holocaust made of Jewish worlds. The films perform the simple and radical gesture of allowing that nothing a time and a space also to happen in consciousness, alongside that which is recognizable and comprehensible. In this way, the films invite a practice of mindfulness, itself a life-affirming activity, to turn toward grief and incomprehension, perhaps toward an experience of unity, even echad.
The films are designed for installation in a two-channel projection, floor to ceiling on opposite walls of a single large space. They were shown at the Breman Museum in Atlanta between December 2025 and February 2026, in an exhibition curated by Joel Silverman. The pictures on this webpage show stills from each of the films. The project is a companion to Alive and Destroyed: A Meditation on the Holocaust in Time.
Șimleu Silvaniei, Romania / Unmarked site of the ghetto/transit camp for the Jews of Șimleu Silvaniei.
Zhovkva, Ukraine / Site of the mass grave of the Jews of Zhovkva and surrounding region.
Budapest, Hungary / The last surviving fragment of the ghetto wall, reconstructed in the last decade.
Lviv, Ukraine / Unmarked site of the destroyed Great City Synagogue.
Kraków, Poland / The longest surviving fragment of the ghetto wall, whose scalloped design morbidly recalls Jewish tombstones.
Riga, Latvia / Part of the complex of mass graves in the Rumbula forest.
Kiev, Ukraine / The Babi Yar ravine, site of the massacre of the city's Jews.
Rava Ruska, Ukraine / One of several remote mass graves for the Jews of Rava Ruska, with a concrete memorial but no signage.
Lviv, Ukraine / Unmarked site of the Great Suburban Synagogue.
Zhovkva, Ukraine / Mass grave in the town's destroyed cemetery––the precise location of the mass grave now a garbage dump.
Vežaitine forest, Lithuania / Marked site of the mass grave of the Jews of the small town of Gargždai.
Baia Mare, Romania / Unmarked site of the ghetto/transit camp of the Jews of Baia Mare.
Câmpulung Moldovenesc, Romania / Partially destroyed Jewish cemetery of the town of Câmpulung Moldovenesc in southern Bukovina.
Kraków, Poland / One of the famous intersections in the city's ancient Jewish district, Kazimierz, where Corpus Christi Street meets Rabbi Meisels Street.
Lviv, Ukraine / Unmarked site of the Or Shemesh synagogue.
Satu Mare, Romania / In the reconstructed center of what was the Jewish quarter, still containing one of the city's synagogues.
Uhniv, Ukraine / The erstwhile synagogue.
Kharkov, Ukraine / Drobitysky Yar, massacre site of the city's Jews.
Installation view of 18:18:18 at the Breman Museum, Atlanta, December 2025-February 2026
The following is the text from the booklet I wrote to accompany the installation at the Breman Museum, providing context for each of the sites shown:
18:18:18
Jason Francisco
Jason Francisco
18:18:18 is a sequence of eighteen non-narrative time-based works that exist in the cracks between cinema and photography. In the spirit of Andy Warhol’s durational cinema, each film is comprised of a single take exactly 18 minutes, 18 seconds and 18 milliseconds long, in a 1:1 correspondence between cinematic and real-world time. This duration also corresponds to the Hebrew word חי, “chai,” variously meaning “life,” “alive,” “living,” “life-in-itself.” Purely observational in method, the films are noetic experiments, invitations to offer unmixed attention—what Simone Weil understood as the essence of prayer—toward whatever occurs within a period of time symbolizing life, precisely where genocidal events occurred.
On an informational level, these films describe what may be unfamiliar to those who have not traveled in central and eastern Europe, namely everyday life-worlds in contemporary Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Romania, Hungary (where the work was made in 2017-2018). In this regard, 18:18:18 parallels contemporary scholarship in setting forth a dispersed and de-centered account the Holocaust, against the impulse to reduce it to its most notorious and centrifugal locations, such as Auschwitz and the Warsaw ghetto. The films were made in mostly forgotten locations, representing a tiny fraction of the sites that collectively describe the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe. Those sites include more than 42,500 ghettos, concentration camps, transit camps, slave labor camps, and killing factories so far identified by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, plus more than 2000 massacre sites in forests, fields, ravines, cemeteries, and other locations, as documented by USHMM and Yahad-in-Unum. In certain regards, in the prewar cities and towns where Jews lived—which was essentially every town in eastern Europe—it is difficult to say what was not a Holocaust site. Germans and their local collaborators targeted Jews everywhere they were, per Nazi policy.
On a conceptual level, these films raise thorny questions around the imperative “Never Forget,” the practice of historical mourning, and the challenge of sustaining traumatic loss as a cultural inheritance. In some of the films, the activity of everyday life goes on in an amnesiac relation to the location’s historical status, as if the continuing flow of living were simultaneously a constant draining of the past from the present. In other films, there is no social world per se, rather flora and fauna, light and wind and color in motion. Whatever happens in each film, nothing also happens—a dose of the nothing that the Holocaust made of Jewish worlds—and conversely, the genocidal nothing is full of the ongoing life of the world. In this way, each film stages a discrepant memorial situation: our seeing does not confer our knowing, and our knowing does not confer our understanding.
To look into the nothing of genocide, as it were, is to progress into deepening states of irrecognition. Somewhere within the visible surfaces of the world, the murdered are in darkness, and we are in a different darkness. Theirs is the darkness of the abyss, of having been condemned and murdered simply for existing as human beings. Ours is the darkness of a limited factual account (decades of research notwithstanding), and of incomprehension that only grows as we learn more about how and where it happened. Perhaps, in time, these two darknesses will converge, aided by the actual light of day. For now they are not the same darkness, and so post a series of difficult questions. How to render the Holocaust on its own terms? How to honor the murdered without using them as instruments of our own purposes? How to remember without substituting memory for the thing remembered? How to recognize the Holocaust’s malignancy not only in the form of continued antisemitism, but also Jewish rage? How to say the ways that the Holocaust has entered the collective psyche of Jews like a dybbuk, we ourselves now the ones wielded by its wretchedness? How to say something at all when words and images come to nothing, and how to say nothing in the face of that which will not tolerate our silence?
These films, in short, pose the Holocaust’s own bereftness of meaning. They figure the Holocaust—which is, strictly speaking, according to its own annihilative logic, devoid of figuration—as a force of quiet entropy. If 18:18:18 suggests that remembering means seeking beyond the traces of what we are given, and unsettling any simple relation between an event and its telling, it likewise suggests that remembering is not the overcoming of the divergence of trace and tracelessness, rather the courage to dwell within it, for awhile.
Jason Francisco
Atlanta, 2025
Șimleu Silvaniei, Romania (Hungarian: Szilágysomlyó; Yiddish: Shamlay)
Jews began to settle in the northern Transylvania town of Șimleu Silvaniei, Romania in the eighteenth century, growing to form a modest community of 1,500 people by 1940, some 15% of the town’s population. Smaller nearby communities brought the total Jewish population in surrounding Sălaj County to approximately 14,000 people. Like other Jewish communities in wartime Hungary, those in Șimleu Silvaniei and Sălaj County managed largely to survive until the German occupation of the country in March 1944.
In April 1944, approximately 8,000 Jews were interned in a ghetto established in a brickyard in the village of Cehei (Somlyócsehi), about five kilometers from Șimleu Silvaniei. The ghetto was designed to exist for a handful of weeks, to starve and torture its prisoners while keeping them barely alive, in advance of their deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Three transports left the Cehei ghetto for Auschwitz between May 31-June 6, 1944, carrying a total of 7,851 people. They were among the approximately 435,000 Hungarian Jews sent between May-July 1944 to German death camps, mostly Auschwitz, where 80% of them were gassed on arrival.
The film’s meditation takes place at the site of the ghetto in Cehei.
Zhovkva, Ukraine (Polish: Żołkiew; Yiddish: Zholkve)
Originally built as a private fortress town in the late sixteenth century, Zhovkva, Ukraine became the royal residence of the Polish king in the seventeenth century, and a hub of religious, economic and cultural life. The town was designed by the famous Italian Renaissance architect and theorist Pietro di Giacomo Cataneo, following the model of Zamość, a form of Renaissance urban planning based on the system of proportionally interrelated measurements of human anatomy. Zhovkva’s Jewish community dated to its earliest period, and its great stone synagogue—dedicated in 1700—was widely considered one of the most beautiful in Europe. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, the town was a major center of Jewish publishing, largely classical works of religious literature and rabbinic treatises from diverse countries.
Zhovkva was captured by the Soviets in September 1939, and then by the Germans in June 1941. By November 1941, 6,000 Zhovkva Jews––half of the town’s population––were confined to a ghetto around the synagogue structure. In March 1942, the Germans deported 700 sick and elderly Jews to the death camp at nearby Bełżec. A second deportation occurred in November, when 2,000 Jews were congregated in Zhovkva’s castle, 300 were murdered summarily and the remainder were deported to Bełżec. In March 1943, 600 Jews were deported to death at the Janówska camp in nearby Lviv, and 4,000 were were shot during mass executions in the nearby Bór forest, followed by another 100 in April. In November 1943, more than 800 Jews were murdered in the city’s Jewish cemetery. When the Soviets liberated Zhovkva in the summer of 1944, fewer than 100 Jews had survived.
Zhovkva is the subject of two films in the 18:18:18 cycle. One film’s meditation takes place in Zhovkva’s Jewish cemetery, at the site of the mass graves along the cemetery’s northern wall. A large garbage pile has been created precisely atop the mass graves. The phenomenon of garbage at sites of Jewish heritage is the subject of my photo-text piece, “Garbage and Heritage,” which critically considers the comparatively common phenomenon of marking sites of Jewish death with the depositing of garbage.
The second film concerns a laconic memorial to a massacre of Jews outside the town of Zhovkva on 25 March 1943, in the Bór forest. Zhovkva’s Yizkor (Memorial) Book describes what happened on that day:
On March 25, 1943 the liquidation of the ghetto began. The Germans and their aides combed the area. Men and women were taken out of their homes, and concentrated in the Dominican Square. Germans and Ukrainians equipped with axes destroyed walls and floors to discover hiding places. Some of those who hid and were discovered were murdered on the spot. Some tried to flee from the ghetto, but policemen and groups of the local population, who actively took part in capturing fugitives, waited for those who escaped and took part in their murders. 100 men and 70 women of those concentrated in the square were separated and sent to the Janowska camp [a large forced labor, transit and extermination camp in Lviv]. About 60 skilled workers were taken out and housed in the labor camp established for them in town on Sobieski Street. All the others were taken to the Burk Forest, about three kilometers from Zołkiew, and shot in pits.
This memorial is not found on any map and there are no roadsigns indicating its existence. I found it only because a friend from Lviv, Vasyl Yuzishyn, had served in the Ukrainian military years before, and happened to have been stationed at a now-closed military base outside of Zhovkva, and discovered it by accident. The memorial itself does not indicate the number and locations of the mass graves, which very likely extend into the nearby forest and remain unmarked.
I have traveled deeply through Ukraine since 2001, and this situation is typical across the country in my experience: public commemoration of the Holocaust is scant. It generally occurs in the form of brief inscriptions at or near sites of atrocity, in perhaps 15% of towns with significant prewar Jewish communities. The upshot is that public commemoration does not afford even a superficial in-situ understanding of the destruction of Jewish life in the Holocaust, much less the world that the Holocaust destroyed. The situation owes to the decidedly peripheral status of Jewish heritage in contemporary western Ukraine. It remains an open question whether the Russian war on Ukraine that began in 2014 and escalated to the catastrophe the country has seen since 2022 will further bury Holocaust memory, or the reverse—incentivize a new era of reckoning with the grievous histories that have befallen Ukraine’s peoples in the last century.
Budapest, Hungary
On the eve of the Second World War, some 200,000 Jews lived in Budapest, the largest of the prewar Jewish communities in Hungary. Jewish life in the city reached back to Roman times, with official permission to reside in the city granted in 1261. Beginning in 1526 and continuing for a century and a half of Ottoman rule in the city, Jewish life grew markedly, and from the end of the seventeenth century under Austrian rule, the community quadrupled in size. The revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century saw the Jewish community undergo rapid modernization and extensive assimilation. Budapest Jewry became known for its contributions in literature, science, and journalism. While the interwar period saw an increase in right-wing antisemitism in Hungary as elsewhere in Europe and the US, Budapest overall was a safe haven for the city’s Jews, and Jewish refugees who arrived by the thousands from Slovakia, Germany, and Austria.
Hungary was allied with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Notwithstanding discriminatory law and public antisemitism, the Jews of Budapest as Jewish communities across all of Hungary generally remained relatively safe for most of the war. Hungary’s authoritarian, nationalist, antisemitic government chose not to fully participate in the German-ordered mass murder of Jews, fearing the economic repercussions for the country. The situation changed following the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944. In the year that followed, the Germans murdered half a million Hungarian Jews, many at the killing center of Auschwitz Birkenau; photographs of Hungarian Jews on the arrival platforms have become among the most iconic images of the Holocaust.
By mid-summer 1944, the Jews of Budapest were among the last remaining Jews alive in Hungary. They were not immediately ghettoized, rather scattered into thousands of empty apartments around the city, which were then marked with Jewish stars. At this point, tens of thousands of Budapest Jews were saved in the heroic actions of the Swedish diplomat Roul Wallenberg and other diplomats, who organized false papers and protection. In October 1944, the Germans orchestrated a coup that installed the ultra-right Arrow Cross party, which proceeded to round up more than 70,000 Jews and send them on a death march north to Austria. From November 1944, the city created a closed ghetto for Jews in an approximately 20 block area of the city’s 7th district, while marching some 20,000 from the ghetto to the banks of the Danube, where they were massacred and their bodies thrown into the river. When the Red Army liberated Budapest on February 13, 1945, more than 100,000 Jews were alive in the city.
The film contemplates one of the city’s Holocaust memorials. The wall that surrounded the wartime ghetto stood from 1944 until 2006. In 2010, a 90 foot section of the wall was accurately reconstructed, minus the original barbed wire, as a permanent memorial, including a plaque in several languages, and a map of the erstwhile ghetto. The wall is not authentic, though its location is—in the interior of a courtyard of a building of private apartments. I have seen many varieties of reconstructed or artificially preserved physical remnants of the Holocaust or structures that the Holocaust destroyed. In some cases their fakery is off-putting if well-intentioned (for example renovated synagogues in Dąbrowa Tarnowska, Rymanów, Cieszanów and many places in Polish Galicia), and in some cases simply bizarre (as for example the remade camp at Pustków in Poland). In this case, the feelings of sorrow, revulsion, and nausea that the separation wall induces—induced in me at least—are not themselves contingent on the imitative status of the remnant.
Lviv, Ukraine (Polish: Lwów; Yiddish: Lemberik; Russian: Lvov; German: Lemberg)
Jews were among the first residents of the city currently known as Lviv, founded in what is today western Ukraine in the mid-thirteenth century. Pivotal in the city’s economic development, Jews were quickly granted equal rights in the city, and came to occupy a quarter just adjacent to the city hall. Notwithstanding a series of natural disasters and repeated foreign invasions, the Jewish community grew to nearly 20,000 by 1800, to nearly 60,000 by 1900, and over 110,000 on the eve of the Second World War. In short it was a major center of Jewish life eastern Europe.
With the outbreak of war in 1939, Lviv was occupied first by the Soviets, becoming a locus for tens of thousands of refugees from German-occupied Poland, swelling its Jewish population to over 150,000. The Germans occupied Lviv in the early summer of 1941, quickly staging a devastating pogrom and destroying the city’s synagogues. By November 1941, Jews in the city were forced into a large ghetto in a poor district north of the city. Regular deportations began from the ghetto, first to work camps—including the infamous Janówska Street camp near the ghetto in the city itself—and then to the Bełżec death camp, where most Lviv Jews were murdered, and finally to Auschwitz-Birkenau. When the Soviets liberated Liviv in the summer of 1944, some 2,500 Jews remained alive in the city.
Lviv is the subject of three films in the 18:18:18 cycle. The first film’s meditation takes place in the middle of the Jewish community’s historic center in the old city, at the end of a street still known as “Old Jewish Street.” A complex of community-owned buildings were located here, including two famous ancient synagogues, Great City Synagogue and the Golden Rose. The film shows the site of the Great City Synagogue, which in the summer is now an open-air eating terrace for nearby restaurants. The view is from what was a beis medrash (study hall) located next to the Golden Rose. The wall at the bottom of the frame is part of a memorial dedicated in 2017 to the “Spaces of Synagogues.” The story of the memorial is the subject of a nearly ten year photo-text work of mine called “Spaces of Synagogues.”
The second film considers the site of what was once known as the Great Suburban Synagogue, serving the Jewish community located outside the city’s former walls. Like the Great City Synagogue and the Golden Rose, it was a large brick building—evidence of the Jewish community’s rootedness and again the myth of Jews as mere “guests,”—the Great Suburban Synagogue opened its doors in 1632. Originally designed in a Baroque style with high Mansard roofs, it was modified several times to follow architectural trends, assuming a Renaissance and later a Neoclassical style. A set of smaller prayer houses were attached to it, specific to occupational guilds and brotherhoods. It served as a center of Jewish life in the city for over 300 years, until it was burned by the Germans in August 1941, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union earlier that summer, and the assault on the Jews of Lviv. The ruins were demolished by the Soviets in the late 1940s, and the site remains unbuilt to this day, along with several other open lots on the same street, once known as “Ulica Bożnica,” “Street of God’s House” for the several synagogues clustered along it. Today, public garbage and recycling cans stand in front of what was the Great Suburban Synagogue’s main façade. A small, terse plaque across the street acknowledges—if you know how to decode it—the Great Suburban’s former existence.
The third film considers the site of another destroyed synagogue from yet another of Lviv’s Jewish districts. The Or Shemesh synagogue was one of the city’s Hasidic synagogues, built in 1902, a small but impressive building notable for its Moorish décor. The name literally means “The Sunray.” The Germans demolished the building in the summer of 1941, and the vacant lot came to be the site of a playground. The site’s history remains unmarked, though a daycare for years was located immediately next door, called “Sunshine,” and today a travel agency operates there under the name “Two Suns.” In my experience, such oblique acknowledgment, passed down as a matter of custom and perhaps not for reasons that locals can explain, is a common form of the persistence of communal memory.
Kraków, Poland (Yiddish: Kroke, also Kuzmir oyf der Vaysl)
One of the most famous Jewish communities in Europe, the Jews of Kraków trace their origins to the first half of the 11th century. The community lived in harmony with the city’s other citizens until the early fifteenth century, when in 1407 a blood libel led to anti-Jewish riots and the relocation of some members of the community into the nearby town of Kazimierz, just south of the Main Market Square. At the end of the fifteenth century, most of the Jewish community relocated to Kazimierz, which subsequently became the community’s center and today contains the most extensive Jewish architectural patrimony in Europe. Throughout their history in Kazimierz, Jews lived and worked alongside Polish Catholics. The two communities’ co-existence is symbolically marked by the intersection of Bożego Ciała and Rabbi Meisels Streets, the former named for Kazimierz’s largest church, the Corpus Christi cathedral, the latter for Rabbi Dow Ber Meisels, Chief Rabbi of Kraków from 1832-1856 and of Warsaw from 1856-1870, and a prominent activist in the Polish national movement.
At the time of the German occupation of Kraków in September 1939, the city’s Jews numbered about 60,000 people, a quarter of the city’s population. They were quickly subjected to a battery of discriminatory regulations that marked their bodies and businesses publicly, and restricted their movements. Jews were expelled from all judicial institutions, and their public schools were closed. The city’s Jewish archives, libraries and synagogues were plundered and desecrated––many houses of prayer turned into warehouses and storage units––and enormous amounts of Jewish property were stolen and transported away to the German Reich. By November 1939, the Germans counted the Jewish population of Kraków to be approximately 70,000. They lived in many parts of the city, but in the greatest concentration in Kazimierz, where the majority were poor and religiously observant.
In May 1940, the Germans ordered all Jews expelled from Kraków, following which approximately 60,000 Jews from Kazimierz and across the city left by February 1941. In March 1941, the approximately 15,000 Jews remaining in Kraków were forced to relocate to a ghetto newly established south of Kazimierz, across the Wisła River in the Podgórze district. Roundups ensued in Kazimierz and across the city to drive the condemned Jews into the ghetto. A year later, beginning in May 1942 and proceeding in a series of actions through March 1943, most of the ghetto’s prisoners were deported from Podgórze to the Bełżec death camp, some to the Płaszów concentration camp just to the south of the ghetto, and some to Auschwitz.
Kraków is the subject of two films in the 18:18:18 cycle. One film’s meditation takes place at the intersection of Corpus Christi and Rabbi Meisels Streets, in the heart of the historic Kazimierz district. This neighborhood has been the subject of several works of mine over the years, beginning with photographs from the 1990s included in my book Far from Zion: Jews, Diaspora, Memory (Stanford University Press, 2006). This very intersection, and especially the interior courtyard of the building shown, have been photographed over and over since the nineteenth century, perhaps most famously by Roman Vishniac in the mid-1930s, as embodying the essence of the prewar Polish-Jewish lifeworld. During the Communist period in the postwar years, the neighborhood became derelict and known as one of the most dangerous in Kraków; it has been sharply gentrified in the decades since the Communist period.
The other film’s meditation takes place at a playground across the Podgórze district, just outside the longest remnant section of the wall that the Germans built around the prison-ghetto for Jews. On one side of the wall is a quiet playground, where everyday life goes on almost as if there were no such wall at all. On the other side of the wall is a scrubby forest of young trees growing in the gravelly dirt of what was likely once a small quarry at the time of the ghetto. The wall announces itself as a sepulchral object by its shape. Its scalloped top was designed to look exotic, as if to mark the Jews imprisoned inside the walls as “other” to those on the Aryan side. To Jewish eyes, the semi-circular arches topping each of the wall’s segments made reference to traditional Jewish matsevahs (tombstones), a cruel foreshadowing of the fate of the ghetto’s prisoners during the war, and today a kind of rearshadowing of genocidal history in a place of seeming normality.
Rava Ruska, Ukraine (Polish: Rawa Ruska; Yiddish: Rave)
Jews arrived in Rava Ruska with the founding of the town in 1624, and numbered over 5600 people by the time of the 1931 census, 51% of the town’s population. As everywhere in Eastern Galicia, the Second World War completely destroyed Jewish life in the town: the Germans occupied Rava Ruska on June 18, 1941, and when the Soviets liberated it on July 20, 1944, no more than five Jews remained.
In keeping with the overall pattern of the destruction of Jewish communities in occupied Poland, Rava Ruska was subject to several military attacks. The first took place on March 19, 1942, when approximately 1,000 Jews were arrested on the streets and from their homes and places of work and were deported to the Bełżec extermination camp, located about 13 miles northwest of Rava Ruska. A second attack occurred in July 1942, when another 2,000 Jews were send to Bełżec. Between August-October 1942, Jews from nearby places were transferred to the ghetto in Rava Ruska, and between December 7-11, 1942, approximately 5,000 Jews were murdered in the town itself, and another 2,500 deported to Bełżec. A few dozen Jews were left in Rava Ruska to bury the dead, and deportations from other nearby towns increased the Jewish population during the spring of 1943. The final massacre occurred between June 8–10, 1943, at a mass grave in the forest near the village of Borowe, just to the west of Rava Ruska. This mass grave is the subject of this film; I found it with the assistance of a local farmer. Postwar testimonies reported by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933-1945 establish that local inhabitants were requisitioned to fill in the pits; several witnesses testified to ground heaving for some time after the shooting, while others recalls one group of victims being blown up with dynamite, with body parts scattered around the vicinity. At some point after the war, a portion of this mass grave was covered with a concrete slab and a simple Mogen Dovid (as a Magen David is generally called in Ukraine, following the Yiddish pronunciation). There is no textual information whatsoever at the site.
Kyiv, Ukraine (Russian: Kiev; Yiddish: Yehupetz)
As the capital of Soviet Ukraine when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 194, Kyiv was home to some 160,000 Jews, comprising about 20 percent of the city’s population. In advance of the German occupation of the city on September 19, 1941, about 100,000 Jews managed to flee; those who remained were mostly women and children, the elderly and the sick, and those otherwise unable to leave. Within days, the following order was posted throughout the city in both Russian and Ukrainian:
Kikes of the city of Kiev and vicinity! On Monday, September 29, you are to appear by 7:00 A.M. with your possessions, money, documents, valuables and warm clothing at Dorogozhitskaya Street, next to the Jewish cemetery. Failure to appear is punishable by death.
On September 29-30, 1941, under the guidance of mobile killing squad Einsatzgruppe C, SS and German police units and their auxiliaries murdered approximately 34,000 Kyiv Jews at a ravine northwest of the city known as Babyn Yar (in Russian, Babi Yar). A truck driver who witnessed the massacre later testified as follows:
I watched what happened when the Jews—men, women and children—arrived. The Ukrainians led them past a number of different places where one after another they had to remove their luggage, then their coats, shoes, and overgarments and also underwear. They had to leave their valuables in a designated place. There was a special pile for each article of clothing. It all happened very quickly … I don't think it was even a minute from the time each Jew took off his coat before he was standing there completely naked….
Once undressed, the Jews were led into the ravine which was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep…When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the Schultpolizei and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot. That all happened very quickly. The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun … I saw these marksman stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other … The marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew who had meanwhile lain down and shoot him.
The massacre at Babyn Yar was one of the largest mass killings at an individual location during the Second World War. It was surpassed in numbers only by the massacre of 50,000 Jews at Odessa by German and Romanian units in October 1941, and the two-day massacre known as Operation Harvest Festival in early November 1943, in which 42,000-43,000 Jews were murdered at Majdanek, Trawniki and Poniatowa.
In the months following the September 1941 massacre at Babyn Yar, the Germans killed thousands more Jews at Babyn Yar, as well as Roma (Gypsies), Communist officials, Soviet prisoners of war, and Soviet civilians. In August 1943, with the Soviet army advancing, the Nazis dug up the bodies from the mass graves of Babyn Yar and burned them in an attempt to remove the evidence of mass murder. Altogether, an estimated 100,000 people were murdered and burned at Babyn Yar before the Soviets liberated Kyiv in early November, 1943.
Initial calls to place a memorial at Babyn Yar occurred during the Soviet period, famously in Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem, which presciently begins “No monument stands over Babi Yar.” Much of the ravine was filled in during the Soviet period in the expansion of roadways, new residential districts, and a large city park, and it is extremely difficult to pinpoint all the the massacre sites. The film’s meditation takes place at the part of the ravine not incorporated into those projects—among the massacre sites, but it is uncertain exactly which of them. The difficult of precisely geolocating documented events is common across the vast geography of the Holocaust, in my experience.
In the months following the September 1941 massacre at Babyn Yar, the Germans killed thousands more Jews at Babyn Yar, as well as Roma (Gypsies), Communist officials, Soviet prisoners of war, and Soviet civilians. In August 1943, with the Soviet army advancing, the Nazis dug up the bodies from the mass graves of Babyn Yar and burned them in an attempt to remove the evidence of mass murder. Altogether, an estimated 100,000 people were murdered and burned at Babyn Yar before the Soviets liberated Kyiv in early November, 1943.
Initial calls to place a memorial at Babyn Yar occurred during the Soviet period, famously in Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem, which presciently begins “No monument stands over Babi Yar.” Much of the ravine was filled in during the Soviet period in the expansion of roadways, new residential districts, and a large city park, and it is extremely difficult to pinpoint all the the massacre sites. The film’s meditation takes place at the part of the ravine not incorporated into those projects—among the massacre sites, but it is uncertain exactly which of them. The difficult of precisely geolocating documented events is common across the vast geography of the Holocaust, in my experience.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, several memorials were installed, at once acknowledging and establishing a kind of memorial competition. In the latter part of the 2010s, the Jewish community, with support from the state, was in the process of erecting the Babyn Yar Memorial Complex, including a synagogue and a memorial center. The new memorial was destroyed by Russian missiles in March 2022 in the initial weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, apparently in connection with an attack on a nearby TV tower, itself part of the site’s Soviet-era effacement and overbuilding.
Riga, Latvia
Jewish life in Riga was subject to official prohibitions and periodic expulsions for some five hundred years from the city’s founding in 1201, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the city’s Jewish population sat below one thousand. From 1842, when an official Jewish community of was recognized, the population began to increase rapidly: by 1864, there were 2,600 Jews in the city, which grew to 22,000 by 1897, 33,000 by 1913, and 43,000 by 1935, approximately half of Latvia’s Jewish population.
With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Latvia was occupied by the Soviets, and the Jewish population of Riga swelled to 50,000. The Soviets sent some 6,000 Jews to Siberia, and another 5,000 evacuated east into the Soviet Union with the Red Army when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. The Germans shot several thousand Jews upon entering the city in July 1941, and created a ghetto on the outskirts of the city, which was sealed in October with about 30,000 people. On November 30 and then December 8-9, 1941 at least 25,000 Jews were taken from the ghetto and machine-gunned into pits in the nearby Rumbula forest. The Germans also deported some 20,000 Jews from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to Riga, most of whom were also killed in later actions at Rumbula.
What happened at Rumbula was as follows: after walking some six miles to the massacre site, people were ordered to disrobe and put their clothing and belongings in designated locations. They were then lined up and marched naked to the murder pits in groups of ten, and made to lie face down on top of previously shot victims, many of whom were still alive, writhing and oozing blood and excrement. For cost saving reasons, German machine guns were set to fire single shots, and German soldiers murdered their victims one by one with a shot into the back of the head from a distance of about six feet.
This procedure was typical of the methods of the first phase of mass killing, the Holocaust by Bullets, in which approximately 1.5 million Jews were massacred at close range by firing squads in the occupied Soviet Union in or near where they lived. (It was by this method that members of my own family were murdered.) The second and much better known phase of mass killing, the Holocaust by Gas, in which Jews were transported to the industrial killing factories at Auschwitz, Chełmno, Sobibór, Treblinka, Bełżec, and Majdanek to die by asphyxiation, was an adaptation made for “efficiency” in response to the Holocaust by Bullets. Or to put it differently, the Holocaust by Bullets points to a qualitative difference in the way we speak roundly about the victims of genocide. It is correct to say that approximately six million people were murdered in the Holocaust; it is equally correct to say that one person was murdered six million times.
The film contemplates one corner of the sprawling complex of mass graves at Rumbula.
Vežaitine forest, Lithuania
Jews first settled in the small town of Gargždai, Lithuania (Yiddish: Gorzd) in 1639, following the granting of rights and privileges by King of Poland and Lithuania Władysław IV Vasa. The Jewish community grew steadily, and by 1897 the town’s 1,455 Jews comprised 60 % of the population. The 1000 or so Jews in Gargždai in the 1930s maintained a social and economic life comparable to thousands of Jewish communities across eastern Europe, with a communally managed bank and hospital, schools, synagogues, charitable associations, libraries, newspapers, sports clubs, and Zionist organizations.
The Germans occupied Gargždai from June 22, 1941, the first day of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and two days later some 200 Jews were massacred in a field outside the town—very likely the first massacre of Jews in occupied Lithuania, perhaps in the occupied Soviet Union, i.e. the genocide of Lithuanian Jewry can be said to have started here. Some 500-600 Jewish men and women, including children and the elderly, were arrested in subsequent weeks, and shot into trenches in two massacres approximately a week apart in September 1941, by Lithuanian collaborators and German mobile killing squad Einsatzgruppe A. This occurred in the Vežaitine forest, some seven miles from Gargždai. Postwar testimony about the second of these massacres comes from a priest from the nearby town of Vežaičiai, who happened to be riding by the massacre site on his bicycle during the killing. His appeals to the Germans to spare the women were in vain. The Soviet commission investigating Nazi crimes determined that 751 people from Gargždai were murdered in the war, the vast majority Jews.
The film contemplates one of the two mass graves of the Jews in the Vežaitine forest. Of the hundreds of Holocaust mass graves I have seen and photographed, this one is among the most isolated.
Baia Mare, Romania (Hungarian: Nagybánya; Yiddish: Banya)
Baia Mare is a Transylvanian industrial and mining town that was part of Hungary until 1918 and during the Second World War. Jews were expressly prohibited from settling in the town until 1848, and the community remained comparatively small: in 1890, Jews were 7% of the total population in 1890, and 14% in 1930.
The Hungarian authorities rounded up the Jews of Nagybánya on May 3, 1944, and placed into one of two ghettos set up in and nearby the town. The larger of these ghettos was supposed to have been established in the vacant areas of the city’s glass factory, but instead was set up on the grounds of an iron and metal work factory. At its peak, it held approximately 3,500 Jews. The approximately 6,000 Jews concentrated in the two ghettos in Nagybánya were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in two transports between May 31 and June 5, 1944.
The film contemplates the site of the ghetto at the now abandoned iron and metal work factory.
Câmpulung Moldovenesc, Romania (Yiddish: Kimpulung)
Jews arrived in the small town of Câmpulung Moldovenesc in the southern Bukovina at the end of the seventeenth century, where a small community lived until it received permission to form a legally independent community in 1859. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Jewish community began to grow, forming a steady 15% of the population between 1880 and 1940, about 1700 people.
In 1941, virtually all the town’s Jews were deported to Transnistria with most of the Jews of Bukovina and Bessarabia, around 200,000 people. Owing to the unique geopolitical situation of Transistria—it fell under the wartime administration of the Romanian government of Ion Antonescu, which erratically enforced German genocidal policy in the northern part of the territory—approximately a third of the Jews sent to Transnistria managed to survive. Approximately 1,350 Jews returned to Câmpulung by 1947, from which point the population began to decline precipitously: 270 Jews remained in 1970, 18 in 2004, and none by 2018, when I spent time there.
In 1941, virtually all the town’s Jews were deported to Transnistria with most of the Jews of Bukovina and Bessarabia, around 200,000 people. Owing to the unique geopolitical situation of Transistria—it fell under the wartime administration of the Romanian government of Ion Antonescu, which erratically enforced German genocidal policy in the northern part of the territory—approximately a third of the Jews sent to Transnistria managed to survive. Approximately 1,350 Jews returned to Câmpulung by 1947, from which point the population began to decline precipitously: 270 Jews remained in 1970, 18 in 2004, and none by 2018, when I spent time there.
The film contemplates the Jewish Cemetery of Câmpulung, which is comparatively intact, in contrast to the overwhelming majority of Jewish cemeteries in eastern Europe. Indeed, it is a place of extraordinary peace and beauty, as if to prompt one kind of answer to the destroyed world. With the disappearance of the town’s Jews, a local farmer has appropriated part of the cemetery’s grounds for raising chickens.
Satu Mare, Romania (Hungarian: Szatmárnémeti; Yiddish: Satmar)
Satu Mare is a small town in northwestern Romania, part of Hungary until the First World War and again between 1940 and 1944. Jews did not settle in large numbers until the 1820s, and in the following 120 years the Jewish population grew from 1,300 to approximately 13,000 in 1941, 25% of the population. From the beginning of the twentieth century, a large influx of Chassidim split the town religiously, and by the mid-1920s, the Chassidim under the leadership of Rebbe Yoel Teitelbaum took control of communal affairs; the Satmar Chassidic dynasty—today one of the largest in the world—originates from this town.
On April 26, 1944, a ghetto was set up in Satu Mare, into which some 18,000 Jews were forced from the town and its surrounding villages. They were transported to Auschwitz between May 19-June 1, 1944. A small Jewish community returned to Satu Mare after the war, dwindling in number over the decades to nearly zero today.
The film contemplates the reconstructed center of Satu Mare, once the town’s main Jewish business district and now a quiet pedestrian zone. Behind it rises the rooftop of the ornate Decebal Street Synagogue, erected in 1892 in a Moorish style, once the pulpit of Teitelbaum himself.
Uhniv, Ukraine (Polish: Uhnów; Yiddish: Hivniv)
Founded in 1462, Uhniv is today the smallest city in Ukraine. Jewish history in the town extends at least to the beginning of the seventeenth century, and with the exception of the period of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, during which virtually all the town’s Jews were massacred, the community lived harmoniously until the Second World War. This is not to say the town was prosperous. It was not. An essay in the Hivniv Yizkor (Memorial) Book describes conditions in the early twentieth century this way:
Except for the elegant synagogue, Beis Medrash and three small shuls, there were no public institutions or cultural organizations, and no industry whatsoever. Sources of livelihood were meager, [and] there was no thought of learning a trade or planning for the future. In fact, there was no future for young people. ...Generation after generation, the people of Hivniv accepted their lot as if it was nature's decree, [and] all their prayers were to get through their daily struggle for existence in time to see their children married. They were not rebels, and they did not complain about those few who had money. Everything was ordained. Everything was peaceful. Nobody dreamed of change.
Today, with the exception of the great synagogue and its beis medrash––both incorporated into the campus of a vocational school, the former serving as a garage for heavy machinery and the latter as a girls’ dormitory––every remnant of the town’s Jewish past has been razed to the ground. Indeed, large sections swaths of the town are barren lots. Uhniv now, as then, remains poor, battered, and seemingly prospectless. In the aftermath of two world wars, half Communism and the struggles of independent Ukraine, it is a situation that can hardly be called a decree of nature.
The film contemplates the facade of the former beis medrash, by the side of the great synagogue.
Kharkiv, Ukraine (Russian: Kharkov)
Though Jewish life in the city of Kharkiv dates to the early eighteenth century, the Jewish population remained comparatively small through the end of the nineteenth century, owing to its location in what is today eastern Ukraine, outside the Pale of Settlement. At the turn of the twentieth century, Jews numbered some 5% of Kharkiv’s total population, a number which increased markedly with the dawn of the Soviet period, when Kharkiv served as the capital of Soviet Ukraine between 1919-1934. By 1939, the city’s Jews numbered some 139,000 people, and Kharkiv flourished as a vibrant center of Jewish life. Religious Jews, Zionists and Bundists were all highly active, and the community was exceptionally well educated, over one-third with university degrees, many working as doctors, lawyers, scientists, writers, and government bureaucrats. In contrast to communities further to the west, the Jews of Kharkiv were also highly assimilated, with a third of Jewish men marrying non-Jewish women by the late 1930s.
The Germans captured Kharkiv on October 24, 1941, and by mid-November, the mobile killing squad Einsatzgruppe C had arrived in the city. On December 14, the Germans posted a decree ordering all Jews to evacuate the city on penalty of death, and relocate to the Tractor and Machine Tool Plant at the city’s eastern edge, where they were stripped of their belongings and confined. In December 1941-January 1942, approximately 16,000 Kharkiv Jews were marched southeast to a ravine known as Drobytsky Yar, where they were shot into trenches. Another 15,000 were massacred into pits in other locations around Kharkiv, some by bullets, some by carbon monixide, and some by fire.
The film’s meditation takes place at the Drobytsky Yar ravine, where the massacre occurred.
Notes and acknowledgments
This exhibition is a companion to my book Alive and Destroyed: A Meditation on the Holocaust in Time (Daylight, 2021), a decade long project that was the umbrella for a range of other works, including my artist’s books The Kiss of Time; The Mutilated Life of Everyday History; An Homage to Mendel Grossman; The Camp in its Afterlives; and The Almost Black Book of Auschwitz Monowitz. Alive and Destroyed also spun off a series of photo-text stories on several site-specific issues, and two permanent exhibitions of at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków (“Traces of Memory” reading the Jewish past in Polish Galicia, and “An Unfinished Memory” concerning Ukrainian Galicia). All of these works and much more are available on my website, www.jasonfrancisco.net. A proper list of acknowledgments is contained in Alive and Destroyed, but I note again here the great debt I owe to the musician, singer, poet and translator Asia Fruman.
Without the open-mindedness and confidence of Leslie Gordon and the staff at the Breman Museum, this exhibition would not exist, and I am grateful to them for their trust and their hard work. Most of all, this exhibition would not exist without Joel Silverman, who saw value in this project from the first time I described it to him not long after I made it, and who did a thousand things to bring it to realization over the last several years. I am deeply grateful to him.
To say it better: I am an artist, a photographer, an essayist, a poet, but not really a filmmaker, and though I have been active for nearly forty years, I have never done an exhibition of this kind before. I made these films with a first generation Blackmagic pocket cinema camera fitted with a Schneider 10mm f/1.8 Cinegon lens, knowing that Blackmagic’s color science is legendary. Nonetheless, my own color grading was mediocre. Joel—an expert in color grading among a wide range of other skills—is responsible for the stunning appearance of these films. Joel is also responsible for the minimalist elegance of the physical installation, literally balancing on a ladder for hours bringing my coarse vision to fine focus. (A built-down statement such as this demands that the smallest details be right). And Joel is responsible for a sound curatorial hand on the rudder in every other sense. Though the conception and the research and the raw material of 18:18:18 are mine, this exhibition is equally Joel’s achievement, and indeed more purely, as the flaws belong to me.
Jason Francisco
December, 2025, Atlanta
December, 2025, Atlanta