Esther’s Willow is a collaboration between artists Katarzyna and Marta Sala and Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman for Chrzanów (PL), a half-Jewish city until the Nazi genocide and postwar processes that continued a long century of ethnic cleansing. The artists have engaged with local and regional institutions, cultural workers, residents, and Jewish descendants and survivors of Chrzanów to re-plant a white willow sapling in the former Esther’s Square.

Esther’s Square, named as such in the 1920s, had been a locus of Jewish institutional life, and site of the Great Synagogue of Chrzanów until its sudden demolition by people in power in 1973, despite the organizing of Jews and other local cultural workers to repair it. The Sala family had rented an apartment on the now unnamed square for three generations. In 2018, Marta witnessed the cutting down of a white willow tree that had towered over the synagogue’s concealed foundations for as long as she could remember. After this, the artists began to think of the willow as having mourned the city’s destruction on its own living, nonhuman terms; a powerful utterance both to the gravestone-like plaque marking the site of the synagogue, as well as a nearby memorial oak tree, planted the year the willow was cut, marking 100 years of Polish independence, moreover, set in a square constructed shortly after the synagogue’s demolition honoring one-thousand years of Polish culture. The sisters’ collaboration with Sniderman, whose ancestors fled Rzeszów and Jarosław, is born from and meant to contribute to the memory conditions of everyday life in a minor city.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, through experimental video correspondence, public meetings, walks, interviews, workshops, and the slow envisioning of the living memorial and a happening to plant it, the artists grappled to understand a potential rationale and lineage underneath their planting action. They eventually arrived at traditional cultural-medicinal uses and cosmological significance of the white willow across time, space, and peoples as an ethical-aesthetic guide.

The project’s approach then gestures into the city’s traumatic recent past to reach an old and intimate space of transcultural ancestral experience, where Jewish and Slavic communities in Poland mutually, collaboratively, and differently depended on willows to treat viruses, diseases, infertility, chronic pain, and other conditions more often specific to the bodies of women and children, exchanging knowledge, treatments, practitioners, and patients at a site of nonhuman mourning and visionary power that continues, even nominally (“weeping willow”), to mediate between the living and the dead. Here, through the weak resistance of the willow, the whole population of Chrzanów in time remains equally implicated in the work of feeling.

Only July 3rd at 11:00, the artists led a silent collective walk from the Chrzanów train station (where the Jewish population of the city was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau), through the market square (where the people were divided into two groups: one to be deported and the other to return to Esther’s Square in the ghetto), ending in the former Esther’s Square. Able-bodied participants alternated carrying the white willow sapling and everyone each carried a jar of silent water. Once at the square, the collective planted the sapling with the silent water, followed by live music rooted in the city’s cantorial tradition, spoken words, and coffee and plum cake, in this way activating then kind of relations the square nourished for centuries.

Among the Slavs, the term “silent water” was used to refer to water that was collected from a flowing source (i.e., living water) after dusk or at dawn and brought home in silence. Living water combined the features and symbols of fertility and death. As it flowed from the depths of the earth, cold and silent as a grave, and was able to kill people, it was imagined to carry with it the magical qualities of the afterlife. In order not to lose these qualities and not spoil the water, it was necessary to refrain from modifying it in any way. Therefore, silent water had to be collected after dark and it was required to maintain absolute silence until the beginning of the healing ritual. In Yiddish, it was known as Shtilvaser, shtilshvaygende vaser, and this term was translated into Hebrew as Mayim Shetukim, “silent water.”
—Dr. Marek Tuszewicki

In an early workshop for Esther’s Willow, Wojciech Sala — Katarzyna and Marta’s beloved late father and lifelong resident on the former Esther’s Square — advocated for a way to extend the project’s intention beyond the singular happening, posing the question, “What stays there?” Since the planting of Esther’s Willow, the artists and their partners in Chrzanów and Kraków have continued to work together, maintaining and forming relationships rooted in the project’s participatory, transcultural, and feminist ethos, by facilitating a current of other happenings, public markers, workshops, exhibitions, music records, films, and publications dependent on local and translocal dialogue and collaboration.