Preface
ON 30 JANUARY 1945, three days after the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops, Tadeusz Chowaniec, a physician from the nearby town of Oświęcim visited the grounds of the camp complex. Shocked by the conditions in the liberated camp, he offered an account of his impressions that day, describing a landscape of burning barracks and storehouses, smoldering pyres, and scattered corpses. Reflecting on the incomprehensibility of what he saw, the physician wrote: “Humanity must see this scene, for in a few years, one will no longer believe what we witness here today. The sharpness of today’s image will be blurred. What should one do to prevent this?”1 A few hundred saw the scene in those first days after the liberation. Millions saw it in the decades to follow—in historical monographs and memoirs, on film, and, of course, at the Auschwitz site itself. Contrary to the author’s fears, humanity believed what he had witnessed that day, for there were too many survivors’ accounts, too many documents and post-liberation investigative reports, and too much physical evidence remaining on the Auschwitz grounds for any serious scholar or observer to doubt the sharpness of his vision or the truth of his testimony.
Since 1945 the suffering, destruction, and carnage that was Auschwitz have remained in the collective memory of Poles, Jews, and people around the world. But despite the hopes of Tadeusz Chowaniec, the image of 30 January 1945 has not been fixed. Instead, postwar images of Auschwitz and its history necessarily and inevitably have been blurred—blurred by the diverse and occasionally conflicting memories of former prisoners, blurred by the diverse and often competing narratives of postwar histories of the camp complex, blurred and even distorted by the cultural imperatives and political exigencies of postwar Polish society and politics. This is a history of those postwar images as they were manifested at the Auschwitz site during the years of the Polish People’s Republic. These images—some reasonably accurate, and others distorted—I consider not only against the backdrop of the history of the camp while it was in operation, but also in the context of postwar Polish history and, not least, against the backdrop of Jewish-Polish and Polish-German relations. In short, this is a biography of post-liberation Auschwitz. It is not limited to an administrative history of the site, a description of its memorial landscape, or a chronicle of the commemorative events that took place there. Instead, it is an analysis of the configurations and reconfigurations of memory at Auschwitz that addresses both the motivations for and, as I will emphasize, the barriers against change in the site’s landscape and commemorative agenda.
My use of the term “memory” in relation to Auschwitz refers not to the memory of the individual, but to an aggregate of individual memories or, as was often the case at the Auschwitz memorial site, an officially sanctioned accounting of the past that came to have legitimate or even mythic status. As the introduction will make clear, this analysis is concerned with “collective” memory and memories as revealed by and manifested in the memorial site’s landscape, exhibitions, and commemorative events. This collective memory has not arisen ex nihilo, nor have its manifestations always been disingenuous or factitious, for Auschwitz memory is necessarily based—albeit to varying degrees—in the history of the camp. Yet Auschwitz memory was constructed, maintained, and modified within a political and cultural framework, resulting in the emergence of three dominant modes of collective memory at the memorial site. First, Auschwitz was presented and groomed as a site of Polish national martyrdom. Second, the plight and struggle of the political prisoner, often styled as a socialist hero or resistance fighter, was elevated over the fate of the Jewish victim of genocide at Auschwitz. Third, the memorial site, through its exhibitions and commemorative events, was often used by the Polish state and its representatives to gain political currency and at times was even instrumentalized as a stage for political propaganda. Although durable, this framework was both bolstered and, at times, shaken by external political considerations, by the influence of prisoner groups in Poland and abroad, and even by the encroachment of historical fact.
The Auschwitz complex was a focal point for the traumatic history of wartime Poland. It was a site of Germany’s most heinous crimes in occupied Poland—most prominently, the annihilation of approximately one million Jews, but also the incarceration and murder of Sinti and Roma (Gypsies), Soviet prisoners of war, Polish political prisoners, and prisoners of more than a dozen other nationalities. In this study I hope to demonstrate that Auschwitz lies not only at the intersection of monumental historical events, but also at the intersection of a variety of conflicting and competing collective memories, each with its own rituals, emphases, and interpretations of the camp’s history. As these lines of memory have converged on Auschwitz throughout the postwar years, the site has functioned as an arena for public education, commemoration, and conflict. For more than fifty years, visitors to that arena have assumed the multiple roles of spectator, participant, and combatant. They have come to learn, to pray, to honor both the murdered victim and the survivor, and to demonstrate at a site that since 1947 has been institutionalized as a charge of the Polish government, bearing the name “State Museum Oświęcim-Brzezinka” or “State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau.”2
The State Museum that is postwar Auschwitz does not lend itself to simple definition and description, for it has always fulfilled a variety of functions. It is, of course, the site of National Socialism’s largest concentration camp and extermination center, and it is therefore to be expected that for many, Auschwitz is a cemetery—the final resting place for the bones and ashes of more than a million victims. It is a site of reverence and remembrance. Yet the memorial site does not resemble a cemetery in the traditional sense. There are few grave markers, and the identity of the victims, to the extent that it is known, is preserved not in marble or granite, but in archival documents. Nor has the site received the care and protection that one might associate with a cemetery. Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, arguably the world’s largest Jewish burial ground, has suffered from decades of neglect, its spacious fields marked by waist-high grasses, several dozen dilapidated buildings and guard towers, and a large abstract monument at the end of a railroad spur. The Stammlager, or base camp, by contrast, has been maintained as a museum, research institution, and tourist center. Since 1946 it has served as the pedagogical and commemorative center of the memorial complex. Nonetheless, it is a cemetery that bears the marks of its origins. As at many cemeteries, flowers and stones are occasionally left behind by visitors to Auschwitz I and Birkenau, but they are not left at individual grave sites, for there are none. Instead, they are usually placed at the former sites of destruction—a torture cell, an execution wall, or the ruins of gas chambers and crematoria. In some cases the site of an Auschwitz victim’s death can be assumed or determined, but the final resting place of a victim’s remains cannot.
Postwar Auschwitz is not only a cemetery, but also, as its official name suggests, a museum. The State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau employs tour guides and historians; it sells books and postcards; it conducts research; it attempts to conserve the artifacts of the past; and it houses extensive exhibitions for the purpose of documenting the history of the camp and educating the visiting public. Auschwitz is also an open-air museum, for across the nearly 450-acre terrain of the base camp and Birkenau are scattered many of the structures of destruction—barracks, guard towers, administrative buildings, and even gas chambers—structures that functioned while the camp was still in operation. As a site of documentation and information, the State Museum has an important pedagogical and admonitory function. It therefore also has the power to influence the visiting public’s understanding of the camp’s history and the power to shape, to varying degrees, that public’s memory of Auschwitz.
Not least, Auschwitz is also an arena of public commemorative ritual. For more than fifty years its monuments, structures, and open spaces have attracted pilgrims and politicians, mourners, and participants in the recurrent manifestacja, or government-sponsored demonstration. The Catholic devout as well as the communist activist have made Auschwitz the locus of public ritual, at times even exploiting the site by linking its history to a prevailing ideology or by evoking one commemorative message and, by extension, one memorial narrative at the expense of another. Thus in some cases, the votive and political rituals cultivated at Auschwitz in the postwar era were undertaken in an exclusionary manner, understating or even excluding the memory of nearly a million Jews killed at Auschwitz—some 90 percent of the camp’s victims.
Privileging