Polish memory of Auschwitz at the memorial site illustrates many of these characteristics of collective memory. The State Museum at Auschwitz is a locus memoriae that has borne the social structures of Auschwitz memory and staged its manifestations. It has done the work of the historian in attempting to represent the past accurately and objectively, and it has also shaped that past to conform to current cultural and political needs. The museum has, both by accident and by design, altered and distorted the past while attempting to reconstruct it in the tangible forms of exhibitions, monuments, and demonstrations. The site has always been selective in what it has presented to the public. As an occasional arena of cold-war propaganda, it has even functioned as an instrument of political power, at times used in vulgar fashion to condemn the western capitalist and militarist threat and celebrate the goals and achievements of Polish United Workers’ Party and its mentor, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Finally, the respective durability of various modes of memory at Auschwitz has been subject to the power of those individuals and institutions that have supervised the working of the State Museum. Each phase in the postwar history of Auschwitz has been marked by changes—some major, others less significant—in the memorial agenda of the museum, its staff, and those institutions of the communist state that have exercised influence or control over the site. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that many major changes to the site have occurred within the last decade, that is, in the wake of Polish communism’s fall.
Despite the applicability of Halbwachs’s ideas for this study of memory at Auschwitz, it is necessary to enter a caveat: a collective Auschwitz memory and the social structures on which it is based need not be static. Rather, it has a diachronic character, subject to temporal factors beyond Poland’s borders and influenced by the revisionary impulses of individuals and groups, and even by the poignancy of historical facts. Even as the collective upheavals associated with the fall of communism challenged many of the assumptions and traditions of collective Auschwitz memory in Poland, so too have the challenges of individuals, groups, and events throughout the post-war decades shaken memory’s framework, causing Auschwitz memory, in a manner of speaking, to “fall out of its frame.” In October 1953 former prisoners of the camp rebelled against the propagandistic memorial agenda imposed upon the Auschwitz site by Warsaw’s Stalinist regime. In 1967 and 1968 members of the International Auschwitz Committee refused cooperation with the State Museum and government authorities on account of Poland’s growing and officially sanctioned anti-Semitism. In 1979 Pope John Paul II visited Auschwitz. His presence, authority, and magnetism legitimized Polish vernacular notions of Auschwitz and, at the same time, transformed the memorial site into a stage for opposition to the regime. In the early 1990s a historian at the State Museum at Auschwitz rejected, on the basis of years of research, the estimate of 4 million dead at Auschwitz—an estimate that had been, until then, inviolable among Polish scholars and memorialists of Auschwitz. These examples, as the following chapters will relate, are illustrative of both the durability of collective memorial paradigms at Auschwitz and, at the same time, memory’s elasticity.
The transformations of memory at Auschwitz reveal that the line between history and memory, or between the “real” and “imagined” Auschwitz, was inevitably blurred. This study remains mindful of the “real” Auschwitz as a measure of the “imagined,” memorialized Auschwitz, for the distinction matters in any evaluation of the manifestations of memory at the site. At the same time, the complexity of the camp’s history and the immensity of the crimes there make any precise and universally applicable standard of representation of Auschwitz history difficult to establish—and difficult to uphold. The analysis to follow will at times be critical of the cultural or ideological inflections that led to the misrepresentation of history at the memorial site, but it does not claim to set a new, neutral standard of representation. There are also suggestions at various points in the book that Auschwitz, if permitted, could “speak for itself.” This is not a call for a site devoid of any interpretation or representation, nor does it imply that an Auschwitz simply left to decay would be more “real” or “meaningful” as a site of memory. In general, however, the landscape, artifacts, and survivors of Auschwitz have been the most effective pedagogical “tools” at the site, far surpassing in didactic effectiveness the ideological interpretations of many exhibitions or the politicized cant of many demonstrations.
None of this should suggest the existence of a simplistic dichotomy between “good,” historically accurate “commemoration” and “bad,” politically inflected “propaganda.” Nor is it a call for historical relativism. Rather, this analysis recognizes the complexities of representing the past at Auschwitz and recognizes the challenges faced when approaching Auschwitz as a historian, and especially as a historian of memory. As Saul Friedländer has emphasized in confronting the “final solution”: “The extermination of the Jews of Europe is as accessible to both representation and interpretation as any other historical event. But we are dealing with an event which tests our traditional conceptual and representational categories, an ‘event at the limits.’”52 Ideally, the objective historian—ever the perceptive arbiter—stands outside the subjective processes of memory, but, as Friedländer relates, “[s]ome claim to the ‘truth’ appears particularly imperative. It suggests, in other words, that there are limits to representation which should not be but can easily be transgressed. What the characteristics of such a transgression are, however, is far more intractable than our definitions have so far been able to encompass.”53 In short, there is a tension between the “real” and the “represented” Auschwitz that was and remains a source of unease for both the historian and the public memorialist. As helpful as the demarcation between the “real” and the “represented” Auschwitz may be as a heuristic device, the fact remains that Polish stewards of memory were inevitably concerned with the latter, even as they were, or claimed to be, committed to the former.
Henry Rousso has related the development and mutation of an event’s collective memory to the role of these stewards—what he calls the “vectors,” or “carriers” of memory and defines as “any source that proposes a deliberate reconstruction of an event for a social purpose.”54 “Official carriers” are those commemorative phenomena such as monuments and ceremonies that attempt to offer a “comprehensive, unitary representation of the event” being commemorated. “Organizational carriers” of memory are associations and organizations that join in a commemorative act for the purpose of gathering and maintaining a common mode of memory among the members of the groups. Media such as journalism, broadcasting, and literature are the “cultural carriers” of memory, providing what appear to be individualistic perceptions of the past—perceptions that are nonetheless the products of a diversity of memorial images. Finally, the “scholarly carriers” of memory are those sources, such as historians and museum curators, who attempt to reconstruct and interpret the events of the past.55
Since 1945 these four vectors of memory have converged on the Auschwitz site. As the following chapters will illustrate, historians and museologists have shaped the representation of the past in their publications and documentary exhibitions, and the Polish and international media have likewise left their mark on public perceptions of the site and its history. Organizational carriers such as national and international associations of former prisoners, state institutions charged with the site’s care and supervision, as well as religious groups have all utilized the memorial space at Auschwitz for the purpose of forging a common mode of memory both within their own groups and beyond them. Not least, the official carriers of Auschwitz memory—the Polish government, its Ministry of Culture and Art, and the State Museum itself—have erected monuments, developed exhibitions, and choreographed ceremonies intended to instill and maintain a “comprehensive, unitary representation” of the events that took place at Auschwitz.
The interpretation, representation, and commemoration of what transpired at the Auschwitz camp was not the sole property of these four types of forces as they converged on the postwar site, for individuals and groups from within Poland and from beyond its borders have also brought their own memorial aspirations and agendas, adding to the site’s landscape occasional spontaneous, unchoreographed manifestations of individual and group memory. Examples of such initiatives are Roman Catholic pilgrims or Jewish individuals and groups honoring those victims neglected in the prevailing memorial paradigms at the site.