Читать книгу Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979 - Jonathan Huener - Страница 10

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 the memory of one victim group or groups is unsettling or even offensive, but it is hardly inexplicable, given the diverse lines of memory that have converged at the Auschwitz site. Memory at Auschwitz has never been fixed, for it has been subject to the vicissitudes of Polish society and politics as well as international political events. Changes in Warsaw’s regimes, the waning and resurgence of anti-Semitism in postwar Poland, growing understanding of the Shoah and the Jewish past at the Auschwitz camp, and even the cold war or events in the Middle East have influenced the representation and recollection of history at Auschwitz.

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 as a register of domestic and international political concerns.

The 1970s were a relatively tranquil decade for the State Museum at Auschwitz, but as the final chapter explains, forces were underway that would compel the memorial site to respond to an ever-growing variety of commemorative constituencies and external pressures, both domestic and foreign. These forces would converge on the occasion of Pope John Paul II’s visit to Auschwitz in 1979, a turning point in the history of the memorial site. This pilgrimage, on the one hand, marked the triumph of Polish-national (and Polish-Catholic) perceptions of Auschwitz and its legacy. On the other hand, the papal visit further democratized the commemorative space at Auschwitz, legitimized it as an arena for antiestablishment protest, and, in a sense, freed the site from the ideological strictures and politicized cant of previous decades. By “liberating” the memorial site in this way, the pope’s visit was the first stage in the collapse of the memorial framework erected at Auschwitz over the previous thirty-five years and also signaled the advent of controversies and debates over Auschwitz that have been characteristic of the present era.

Foremost among these debates was the highly publicized Carmelite Convent controversy, which brought the problems of contested memory at Auschwitz—along with the burdens of Polish-Jewish relations—into the international public view. Although the controversy, which is addressed briefly in the epilogue, began in the mid-1980s, it belongs thematically to the current era of what some might designate the “postcommunist” memorial site. Heated international exchanges about Jewish, Polish, or international “proprietorship” over the site, the presence of religious symbols at Auschwitz, the use of the grounds and structures of the former camp complex for more “everyday” purposes, a memorial site and museum in full view of the international media—these are phenomena that we associate with the convent controversy, but they are no less characteristic of the site in the 1990s and today. For that reason, the convent controversy is an appropriate vehicle for problematizing the proliferation of memories, competing memorial agendas, and ideological struggles that have emerged in the last decade. Recent conflicts over Auschwitz have not been sudden and spontaneous eruptions of Jewish-Catholic tension or merely a manifestation of animosity between Poles and Jews; rather, they are a reflection and registration of diverse emplotments and historical misunderstandings associated with Auschwitz memory at the site since the 1940s. Thus, the arguments set forth in this study are relevant to the most recent history of the Auschwitz site, and the conclusions suggest both the need for and a path toward further investigation in the years ahead.

Have fifty years made such a difference? Walter Benjamin observed that the dead are not safe from politics,³ and this has certainly held true at Auschwitz, more than half a century after the killing there ceased. Pedagogy and topography, modes of commemoration and reflection at the memorial site remain matters of controversy and debate. Ultimately, the postwar history of Auschwitz reveals the futility of upholding a single commemorative interpretation of the site or seeking any redemptive perspective whatsoever in its history. Despite its efforts, the Polish government repeatedly failed to create a single and common mode of collective memory at Auschwitz. Moreover, increasing numbers of visitors, ongoing research, and new forms of commemorative practice will undoubtedly render public manifestations of Auschwitz memory yet more diverse in the years to come. Can Auschwitz, more than fifty years after its liberation, “speak for itself?” We live in an era of growing interest in the ways in which cultures and states have chosen to recall, commemorate, and distort their pasts, and the shapes and uses of memory at the State Museum at Auschwitz prompt us to reflect upon this question. The site most certainly has its own eloquence, but its meaning will undoubtedly remain subject to both our awareness of its history and the shifting contours of its memorial landscape.