In their analyses of memory and the memory of the Holocaust, scholars Michael Steinlauf, James Young, and others have helped to break the ground for a study such as this.5 Steinlauf, in his thoughtful and synthetic study, has effectively analyzed the origins and conflicts associated with memory of the Shoah in Poland. Pursuing a psychological perspective that is well grounded in postwar Polish history and culture, he argues that Polish responses to witnessing the Holocaust—whether repression, “psychic numbing,” a “victimization competition,” or even postwar anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish violence—can be situated in a social process of coming to terms with the past, the goal of which was freeing the individual Pole and Polish society from its “bondage” to the victims of Jewish genocide.6 Auschwitz is an appropriate locus for further examination of this phenomenon, for it stands at the intersection of Poles’ memories of the Shoah and memories of their own persecution under the Nazis. Moreover, as the primary site for Poland’s commemoration of its wartime dead, Auschwitz and the public manifestations of memory there were inevitably infused with both patriotic zeal and political agendas. For postwar Poles, Auschwitz certainly functioned as an arena for their efforts to “master” the Shoah’s tragic history in their midst, but this was not its main purpose. Auschwitz instead allowed Poles to commemorate both their own “martyrdom” within a nationalist framework and the suffering and sacrifice of others within an internationalist communist framework.
The pioneering work of James E. Young also serves as a basis for this analysis. Young has called for thorough study of camp memorials, their origins and reconfigurations throughout the years, and their role in the commemorative practices of governments and social groups. His 1993 publication The Texture of Memory offers an insightful description of the aesthetics and contours of Holocaust memorials and monuments, outlines some of the ways in which these memorials have become “invested” with specific and often inappropriate meanings, and issues a call for further investigation of the development of memorial sites. As Young states at the outset of this work “[W]ere we passively to remark only on the contours of these memorials, were we to leave unexplored their genesis and remain unchanged by the recollective act, it could be said that we have not remembered at all.”7 A charge of sorts to colleagues and students, Young’s words should remind us of the dangers of an uncritical obsession with memorial images. Such images, whether monuments, exhibitions, or commemorative demonstrations can, of course, serve as effective vehicles of communication and commemoration, but as culturally and politically influenced representations of the past, they neither stand on their own as objects of inquiry, nor should they supersede in importance the actual events and phenomena that they are intended to evoke and recall.8 This is especially true when confronting the history of Auschwitz and the representation of that history at the memorial site.
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FOLLOWING THE GERMAN occupation of Poland in September 1939, the Polish town of Oświęcim, located about sixty kilometers west of Kraków, was annexed to the Reich and renamed Auschwitz. Located near the juncture of Upper Silesia, the Wartheland, and the General Government,9 and at the confluence of the Vistula and Soła rivers, the town had a prewar population of about twelve thousand residents, more than 40 percent of whom were Jewish. Ironically, Oświęcim was a cultural center of Jewish life in interwar Poland and was regarded as model community of Jewish-Polish coexistence. The site selected for a concentration camp in 1940 lay outside the town’s borders and had been a base for the Habsburg army and, later, for troops of the interwar Polish Republic.
Initially, the concentration camp at Auschwitz was intended for the internment of Polish political prisoners. With the number of inmates rapidly increasing, the prisons in the region could no longer accommodate them. In the spring of 1940 Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler ordered the establishment of a concentration camp at Oświęcim and named SS Captain Rudolf Höss commandant. German authorities brought in three hundred Jewish residents of Oświęcim to ready the site, and in May 1940, ordered thirty German criminals transferred from the Sachsenhausen camp to serve as the initial elite of functionary prisoners.10 One hundred SS men were sent to staff the camp, and on 14 June the first transport of 728 Polish inmates from the Tarnów prison arrived, marking the beginning of the camp’s role as the primary and most deadly camp for Polish political prisoners, members of the underground, and Poland’s intellectual, spiritual, and cultural elites.
The intelligentsia in interwar Poland included many Polish Jews, particularly in urban centers. Some were fully assimilated into the culture of Polish Gentiles, and were regarded as such. The German occupation regime, however, drew a clear distinction between Polish Jews and non-Jews, especially when it began the process of deporting Jews to ghettos in the larger cities. Throughout this analysis, the terms “Poles” and “Jews” will refer to separate groups among those persecuted by the Nazi regime. Of course, both Polish Christians (who were overwhelmingly Roman Catholic) and Polish Jews were Polish citizens. For the sake of clarity, however, this work will refer to ethnic Poles or Polish Christians as “Poles” and those defined and persecuted as Jews by the Nazis simply as “Jews.” The reality of identities in wartime was, of course, much more complex and should remind us that the distinction was often artificial, even if it was observed by most Christian Poles and rigorously enforced by the Nazis on the basis of their racial ideology.
The Auschwitz camp grew steadily, and in the course of its expansion the Germans evicted and deported the local population—both Polish and Jewish—in order to establish, for economic and security reasons, an “area of interest” surrounding the camp. The resulting Interessengebiet of KL Auschwitz11 covered an area of approximately forty square kilometers. On 1 March 1941 Heinrich Himmler visited the concentration camp at Auschwitz for the first time and ordered Höss : 1) to expand the base camp to accommodate 30,000 prisoners, 2) to supply the IG Farben chemical concern with the labor of 10,000 prisoners to build an industrial plant at Dwory in the near vicinity of Auschwitz, and 3) to construct a camp for 100,000 prisoners of war near the village of Brzezinka.12 Himmler would not inform Höss of plans to use Auschwitz as a center for the “final solution of the Jewish question” until the summer, but in March—three months before the German invasion of the USSR—it was clear that Auschwitz could be used as a site for the mass incarceration and exploitation of Soviet POWs.
Expansion of the existing camp was undertaken at a rapid pace, and included the construction of housing units for the SS, administrative buildings, additional quarters for prisoners, and camp kitchens. By the end of 1941 it could house 18,000 prisoners, and by 1943 as many as 30,000 (see Map 2). Construction on the synthetic rubber and fuel oil factory at nearby Dwory, otherwise known as the Buna-Werke, began in April 1941. Initially, prisoners from Auschwitz were either transported by rail or walked to the factory, but in 1942 IG Farben began construction of a second camp for its workers in the vacated village of Monowice (Monowitz). A subsidiary of Auschwitz, the camp was known until November 1943 as Lager Buna.
Map 2. Auschwitz I Camp, 1944. Selected features: 1. Camp commandant’s house; 2. Main guard house; 3. Camp administrative offices; 4. Gestapo; 5. Reception building/prisoner registration; 6. Kitchen; 7. Gas chamber and crematorium; 8. Storage buildings and workshops; 9. Storage of confiscated belongings (Theatergebäude); 10. Gravel pit: execution site; 11. Camp orchestra site; 12. “Black Wall” (Wall of Death): execution site; 13. Block 11: punishment bunker; 14. Block 10: medical experiments; 15. Gallows; 16. Block commander’s barracks; 17. SS hospital
From the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s on-line Learning Center (www.ushmm.org/learningcenter), courtesy of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
Meanwhile, the arrival of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war in late 1941 led to the hasty construction of an additional camp on a swampy moor near the village of Brzezinka (renamed Birkenau by the Germans), about three kilometers from the base camp. Birkenau was initially intended to hold 100,000 prisoners and was divided into