I became interested in these old hotels and resorts last summer, when I visited the Catskills for the first time to attend the Catskills Institute conference on the history of the area. The institute’s co-founder and conference organizer, Brown University Sociology professor Phil Brown (who is also the author of Catskill Culture), took participants on a bus tour of the abandoned resorts, and we stopped for a time at the Bethel Sunshine Camp. Brown had secured permission for us all to look around (all of these spaces are “No Trespassing” zones). I was amazed by how much of the interior is intact. The kitchen pantry shelves still have neat stacks of plates, cups and saucers as if meals are still served there regularly. The camp’s theater looks ready to host a new production: its stage is bare and clean, and rows of empty seats await an audience. Yet in the girls’ bedrooms, peeling paint dangles from the ceiling in giant sheaves of cream or white or light blue and the rusted bed frames stand like skeletons on rotted, fragile wooden floors. In some of the rooms, objects remain, discarded or forgotten: a bouquet of now-shriveled roses, a red and white teddy bear, a track trophy. Here, as in all of the spaces, the few remaining objects make these spaces so eerie and so discomfiting — they disturb not because they are empty, but because so much was left behind.

When I went back to the Catskills this spring (which was actually more like winter — there were snow flurries in the air, and the temperatures hovered in the thirties), I returned alone to the Bethel Sunshine Camp and explored the Pines, La Minette and other abandoned resorts in the area. Near La Minette, a drive-in movie theatre stands empty, its parking lots covered with weeds, its blank screens clean, sheer white. In a La Minette bungalow, children’s number and letter magnets lie scattered on a rusted refrigerator, and on front lawn of the Pines, a pillow covered with shards of hay rests on a sea of dried, overgrown grass. Telephones, many with their receivers off the hook and upturned, sit on the floor of every room of the Pines as well as in the lobby, and in the office, overgrown with mold and moss. In these silent spaces, these remains disturbed me the most. It was as if each telephone was yearning to communicate with something and someone who was long gone and could never return. And in this way they stood like stark metaphors for lost communication and time’s rapid, constant fleeting. Here and elsewhere, the spaces haunt: stinging reminders of what we lose, what objects and experiences we choose to keep and which we leave behind.

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Joscelyn Jurich

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Between July 12 and 16, 1995, up to 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serbs under the command of the indicted and still at-large former General Ratko Mladic.  July 11, 2005 marked the ten-year anniversary of the massacre. On that day, 610 victims of the Srebrenica massacre were buried at the Potocari commemoration center in the Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina.  

There was a time when I was afraid to look at these photographs.  

I developed them at the end of August, after a summer of reporting in Bosnia-Herzegovina.  Though images from the Srebrenica commemoration still intermittently flashed through my mind without warning — bullet-punctured skulls in a mass grave, an old man sobbing and clutching his grandson’s coffin as it was lowered into earth — the thought of looking at them seemed somehow more threatening than my fractured, yet fierce, memories.  

For several days they sat on my desk, bulging in their sealed envelopes. Could I bear to face what I’d experienced? I didn’t know how to make sense of it myself, and nothing and no one had helped so far.  And of course by now the newspapers had no mention of Srebrenica, as if the real story was a one-day ceremony and not the daily lives of people in the area — Bosniaks, Bosnian Serbs, returned refugees, family members of victims, and victimizers.  
    
After the commemoration, friends and I drove through the winding roads of the Serbian Republic and back to Sarajevo.  Around 1am I arrived in Bascarsija, the historic Ottoman section of the city where I was living, and phoned my parents.  “You don’t know what I’ve seen!” I told my father.  “I won’t be able to sleep.  I saw a father jump into the grave of his son who’d been killed … How can I forget this?”

I told him I was sure I’d have nightmares that night and every night afterwards.  “You won’t dream about it,” my father assured me.  He was right.  Instead, images flickered through my mind during unpredictable times of the day:  the lyrical, cyclical movement of coffins as men passed them from hand to hand to hand; the despairing duplication of rows of green shrouded caskets lying in the old battery factory where the Dutch troops were headquartered in 1995.  At other times, phrases, not pictures, jarred me back to the experience:  the comment of a young Bosnian Serb woman living in Srebrenica — “It’s hard to live here because it’s hard to always live between the past and the future,” or the refrain often heard from those whose family members were killed — “We don’t need a commemoration — all we want are our relative's bones.”

When I finally looked at my photographs, I was shocked by how innocuous they were.  I’d had nothing to fear. Everything was so inappropriately static and calm. The images of the mass grave we visited just outside Potocari didn’t reveal the haunt and hush as it was unveiled.  Missing, too, was the tremulous voice of the translator for President of Bosnia Herzegovina’s State Commission for Missing People, Amor Masovic, as he told us the shattered vertebrae and bones we were looking at were approximately 50 of those “who never made it” as they fled Srebrenica for Tuzla.  Masovic then soberly explained that almost all these bodies were incomplete. The remains of each individual might be scattered throughout multiple graves. It could take years to make positive identifications and inform victims’ families.  

The wide angle shots of the commemoration couldn’t capture the cacophony of disparate yet interconnected sounds: the dzenaza (funeral) prayer, whose final lines implored, “That Srebrenica / Never happens again / To no one and nowhere!”; the whir of European Union Force helicopters circling above, monitoring the events on the ground; the muffled, crackled voices of officials as they condemned the massacre, one after another.  No image could convey how the mist hovered over the lush surrounding hills like uneasy, heavy spirits, ready to descend — hills that almost certainly contain more scattered remains of those massacred around Srebrenica.

There was a moment during the commemoration when I and the Serbian journalist with me put down our cameras to offer tissues to a woman with tears streaming down her face as she bailed rain water out of her son’s still-empty grave.  I had the humiliating realization that this was perhaps the most significant thing I had done that day.  

Are these photographs evidence of witness bearing, or merely being there? I’m still not sure.  To me they are merely a reminder of the importance of looking, and of remembering — and understanding the complex responsibilities that accompany both.

Joscelyn Jurich