All this should remind us that no single postwar image of the camp and its history can be fixed in the memory of all and that any attempt to cultivate or enforce a single memorial narrative dishonors the memory of countless victims and survivors because, simply put, it distorts Auschwitz history. Indeed, the diversity of memorial narratives of Auschwitz that have proliferated in recent years is the result of that history—a history that defies quick categorization, easy generalization, and the “master” historical narrative. With its three main camps and forty auxiliary camps scattered throughout the region, the Auschwitz complex served the SS, Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), and German industry in a variety of ways: it was a concentration camp, it provided slave labor for German industry, and it became the largest of the Nazi killing centers for European Jews. Deportees from nearly every European country were incarcerated, exploited, enslaved, and murdered at the complex, and the variety of competing and conflicting memories of Auschwitz has grown out of the diverse histories and experiences of prisoners. Moreover, historiographical traditions and commemorative practices, both in Poland and elsewhere, have produced a variety of prisoner prototypes—the patriotic Polish martyr, the conspiring and internationalist communist, or the Jewish victim of the gas chamber, to name only a few. There were, of course, prisoners such as these at Auschwitz, but no single prisoner-type or prisoner experience was representative of all Auschwitz internees.
The representation and uses of history at the Auschwitz site during the years of the Polish People’s Republic are the central themes of this book. It accounts for the official—and some unofficial—historical emplotments and narratives at the State Museum, considering all the while their social and political contexts. Recognizing that all narratives are, to a greater or lesser extent, culturally and politically inflected, it does not claim to establish a fixed and finite historical standard against which all forms of commemoration at Auschwitz are measured. Nor does it propose an ideal commemorative model for the memorial site and museum. But this work does recognize a responsibility to evaluate the public manifestations of memory at Auschwitz in relation to the history of the camp. For this reason, the introduction that follows offers the reader, for the purpose of orientation, a compendium of the camp’s history in addition to a theoretical and historiographical context for the work as a whole.
Chapter 1 then sets the stage for subsequent sections through a discussion of the ways early postwar Poland was acquainted with the history of the camp, examining and describing the main events and cultural currents reflecting and shaping Polish perceptions of Auschwitz in these first years of wartime commemoration. It therefore includes a discussion of the concept of “martyrology” in early postwar Poland—a cultural and ideological notion rooted in many generations of Polish history that profoundly affected both the elevation of Auschwitz in postwar memorialization and the iconographic and pedagogical goals of those responsible for the development and maintenance of the site.
The second chapter offers an account of the transformation of Auschwitz from liberated camp to museum in the years 1945–47. This includes a discussion of the challenging legal, political, and material conditions at the site, as well as the first efforts to create a museum exhibition. In addition, this chapter addresses the emergence of two distinct loci memoriae, or places of memory, at Auschwitz. The grounds of the base camp, Auschwitz I, came to serve as the maintained “museum” portion of the site, while the massive terrain of Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, the largest single site for the extermination of European Jews, suffered neglect and even plunder.
Chapter 3 focuses on the Auschwitz site in the years 1947–54. This was the most difficult period in the history of the museum, for shortly after the official dedication of the site, the ideological imperatives of Stalinism began to color and determine the site’s representation of the past. Thus, it was in this period that international and domestic political considerations had their most pervasive influence on the outward appearance of the site and its exhibitions. “Hitlerites” became “fascists,” the Shoah was further neglected although not actively excluded from the memorial landscape, employees and exhibitions at the museum were subjected to strict state censorship and review, while the Second World War, as well as postwar international tensions, were represented at the site as struggles between Western imperialist and Soviet-led socialist camps. Not surprisingly, this period also saw the most extreme attempts to make commemorative rituals at Auschwitz conform to prevailing political ideology, recalling and illustrating the claim of the French scholar of collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs, that institutionalized memory selects those elements of the past that best fit present needs. The years 1947–54 thus provide the most vivid illustrations of the tractability of memory at Auschwitz, as the grounds of the former camp were instrumentalized almost to the extreme of the State Museum’s total effacement. Yet this uncertain period also saw the emergence of a memorial “vernacular” in defense of the site.
In the early 1950s it appeared that the State Museum at Auschwitz was dying a slow death, but changes implemented at the site beginning in the winter of 1954–55, reflecting the beginning of the post-Stalin “thaw,” breathed new life into the institution. Cold-war tensions had subsided somewhat, Poland and the two German states were becoming settled in their respective blocs, and the memory work at Auschwitz had ceased to be an ideological instigator. Numerous administrative changes were undertaken at the site, the most important of which was the construction of a new exhibition. The fourth chapter therefore analyzes the reasons for these changes, locates them in the context of Polish cultural policy in the early Gomułka era, and proceeds to a detailed analysis of the 1955 exhibition (the vast majority of which is still in use), offering the reader a “visit” to the memorial site.
Although in some respects the 1955 exhibition at Auschwitz symbolized an iconographic and pedagogic return to a “Polish-national” idiom after the Stalinist internationalism of the preceding years, the changes implemented at the site paved the way for increased international involvement in the commemorative landscape and activities at Auschwitz in the second half of the 1950s and throughout the 1960s. This new “internationalization” of the site—the focus of chapter 5—reflected an increase in the museum’s autonomy and added several new “plots” to the Auschwitz story, most prominently, the reinsertion of the Shoah into the iconography and vocabulary of the memorial site. Furthermore, the site’s internationalization illustrated the ways in which its landscape and meaning could be influenced by events well beyond Poland’s borders.
First among the new international influences at the memorial site was the activism of the newly formed International Auschwitz Committee (IAC), an organization for former prisoners of the camp from across Europe. Not only did the IAC influence the landscape and commemorative ritual at Auschwitz; it also initiated a twelve-year effort to erect a massive international monument on the grounds of Birkenau. After a lengthy artistic competition and in spite of tremendous financial barriers, the monument was dedicated in 1967. The following year—more than twenty years after the liberation—the State Museum at Auschwitz opened its first exhibition devoted to the “Martyrology and Struggle of the Jews” in Block 27 of the base camp. This exhibition, although furthering the commemorative diversity at the site, also became a topic of controversy in Poland and abroad, for it was constructed and dedicated at the same time that relations between Poles and Jews were suffering from the repercussions of the Six-Day War and the institutionalized anti-Semitism of the so-called “anti-Zionist campaign.” The exhibition was often closed over the next decade, its inaccessibility a further illustration of the continuing marginalization of Jewish victims at Auschwitz and the role of its museum