The reasons why Auschwitz became such an important element of Polish postwar identity are clear: Auschwitz I initially interned Polish political prisoners and Soviet prisoners of war, and the complex was certainly the largest single execution site for the prewar Polish intelligentsia, civic leaders, those who resisted the Nazi occupation, and tens of thousands of ordinary Poles. Yet Auschwitz was also an international camp that incarcerated inmates from every European country. The Polish press and Polish authorities readily acknowledged this in the first years after the war, and there were clear attempts, both in the press and in early plans for the Auschwitz museum, to make the former camp a locus of international remembrance. But despite references in speeches and official documents to the diversity of victims, the public discourse surrounding the camp and its memory increasingly emphasized the memorialization of a specifically Polish martyrdom at the hands of German invaders. Auschwitz, wrote one columnist just prior to the dedication of the State Museum, was “the mass grave of the greatest sons of the fatherland.”50
The term “martyrdom,” a constituent element of Poland’s postwar commemorative vocabulary, is a useful indicator of Polish considerations of Auschwitz and the place of the camp in the country’s culture. “Martyrs,” “martyrdom,” and “martyrology” were consistently used to describe Auschwitz victims, their fate, and their memory. Designating the victims of Nazi persecution “martyrs” was not a practice unique to Poland, but was common in other cultures in the early postwar years. For Poles, however, the specifically Polish and Christian overtones in these terms—natural to their traditional Roman Catholic discourse—were obvious, and lent the Auschwitz inmate a quality of virtue and sacrifice for a higher good, such as patriotism or socialism. Polish prisoners or “martyrs” at Auschwitz were not simply suffering, but suffering and dying because of their Catholic faith, their political convictions, or their love of the fatherland. There were, of course, tens of thousands of Poles condemned to Auschwitz who were neither soldiers, resistance fighters, members of the intelligentsia, nor in any way a threat to the Nazi occupation regime. In the broad outlines of the Polish commemorative mantra, however, they, too, were included in the heroic martyrs’ narrative simply by virtue of being Polish. Jews and Gypsies, representing the overwhelming majority of victims at Auschwitz, were generally not dying in the service of any higher belief or cause, but were victims of genocide. Thus, to designate the Auschwitz victim as a “martyr” was, depending on one’s perspective, either broadly inclusive, or ahistorically exclusive. In any case, to designate all Polish and non-Polish victims as “martyrs” was to keep Auschwitz in a conventional trope of nineteenth-century romantic nationalism and to undermine the historical uniqueness of the camp and the diversity of experience there.
The origins of Poland’s martyrological culture are found in nineteenth-century Polish nationalist thought. After Poland’s partitions (1772, 1793, and 1795) by Prussia, Russia, and Austria, it disappeared from the map of Europe, living on as a nation only in the minds of its patriots. In the course of and following the 1830 November Uprising, there emerged in Poland what Brian Porter has labeled a “rhetorical framework” that “gave Polish intellectuals a vocabulary with which to talk about their nation as they tried to cope with the failure of 1830.” “The struggle for Poland,” Porter argues, “already joined with the welfare of humanity, was further justified through use of a heterodox religious terminology: the quest for independence became a divine imperative and Poland became the ‘Christ of Nations.’”51 Thus, nationally minded philosophers and poets, many in exile, successfully cultivated and propagated a mystical doctrine of Polish sacrifice and messianism. This approach to and justification of the Polish national cause motivated Polish patriots through much of the nineteenth century and was effectively harnessed in the twentieth during the crisis of World War II and the years immediately thereafter. God may not have prevented Poland’s defeat, but there was a divine purpose in her demise: a Christlike historical mission to redeem the nations of Europe through suffering and example. Once resurrected, the Polish nation-state would be a beacon of tolerance, freedom, and political morality.52 In the words of Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s most revered romantic poet: “For the Polish Nation did not die. Its body lieth in the grave, but its spirit has descended into the abyss, that is into the private lives of people who suffer slavery in their country . . . But on the third day the soul shall return again to the body, and the Nation shall arise, and free all the peoples of Europe from slavery.”53 For many in Poland’s wartime generation, this messianic vision of the nation’s destiny became an inspirational myth, and the German occupation provided the perfect example of righteous suffering—whether at the front in 1939, in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, or in Auschwitz—at the hands of a foreign invader.
In the years between 1939 and 1945 Poland lost nearly 20 percent of its prewar citizens (more than half of whom were Jews who perished in the Shoah), and 2 million were sent to the Reich for labor. Between September 1939 and February 1940, more than two hundred thousand Poles were forcibly expelled from the annexed Warthegau region, and in the first months of the occupation more than fifty thousand Poles were killed. There were, to be sure, Poles who collaborated with the Nazi regime—with its bureaucracy, military, and agencies of terror and destruction—and the regime certainly inspired collaborationist behavior on an individual basis. The German occupiers were not, however, interested in establishing a collaborationist government, as in France, or a collaborationist administration, as in the Netherlands. Instead, they colonized and enslaved the Polish lands, decimating the country’s infrastructure and human resources. More than 38 percent of physicians, 28 percent of university and college professors, 56 percent of lawyers, and 27 percent of Catholic priests did not survive the occupation.54
Despite this destruction, the Germans met fierce resistance. Poland had the most extensive underground network and army in Nazi-occupied Europe, and the Germans did not hesitate to use collective reprisals in retaliation for acts of resistance. For good reason, Poles have commemorated and mourned these tragic years in the history of their country, years that seemed to confirm the romantic perception of Poland as the eternal victim of injustice and exploitation. Likewise, the efforts of underground resistance movements were evidence of a redemptive tradition of Polish sacrifice for a higher good.
Poland’s responsibility to the world did not end, however, in 1945, for it also had a postwar mission: to investigate and prosecute Germany’s crimes, to cultivate and maintain the memory of the occupation, and to be a beacon of warning, alerting other nations to the dangers of Hitlerite fascism and racism. Auschwitz and its history had, in this respect, a tremendous commemorative value, and were symbolic of the suffering of Poles and their responsibility to future generations. In the words of the Polish premier Cyrankiewicz on the occasion of the State Museum’s dedication:
One of the concrete manifestations of that battle [against the danger of a new Auschwitz] will be the museum that we open today in Oświęcim, not for reminiscences but as a warning and demonstration to the entire world that the tragedy of millions murdered in the concentration camps must not vanish into thin air with the smoke of crematoria chimneys. For all those who survived this great tragedy, may the museum in Oświęcim become the great battle cry “Never again Auschwitz!”55
Recognizing the importance of commemorating the occupation on a variety of levels, the provisional government had established, even prior to the German capitulation, a “Department of Museums and Monuments of Polish Martyrology” within the Ministry of Culture and Art.56 As the state authority responsible for the creation and maintenance of sites of commemoration, the department developed and publicized the terms by which Polish national martyrdom was to be understood. Registered in various contexts, these terms colored the discussions surrounding the genesis of the State