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INTRODUCTION

The Stakes and Terms of Memory at Auschwitz

ALTHOUGH THERE IS A GROWING BODY of literature on the history of the Auschwitz camp, historians have paid relatively little attention to the sharply contested meanings of Auschwitz in the years since its liberation or the uses of memory there. Scholars have explored issues of collective memory, public historical consciousness, and, in more recent years, the representation of the past at monuments and memorials to National Socialist crimes,¹ but no thorough investigation of the postwar Auschwitz site has emerged from this body of literature. Moreover, those works that address postwar manifestations of memory at Auschwitz are primarily concerned with descriptions of the site’s iconography, administration, or exhibitions.² The present work confronts these issues, and also locates the manifestations of collective memory at Auschwitz in their political, cultural, and economic contexts.

There are several possible explanations for the absence, until now, of a study such as this. First, the investigation of public memory is relatively new to the historical discipline, and only in the past fifteen to twenty years have scholars begun to examine public memory as it relates to the representation of the Holocaust, both at memorial sites and in larger social contexts. Second, given the magnitude and horror of the Auschwitz crime, as well as its “familiarity” in the postwar world, it is hardly surprising that most research has focused on the history of the camp while it was in operation.³ Finally, most of the source material for the investigation of Auschwitz memory in Poland has become accessible only relatively recently. This is the first study of its kind to analyze the largely untapped postwar archival collections of the State Museum at Auschwitz, including its administrative documents, press archive, and collections of exhibition plans. In addition, this study includes and evaluates the perspectives and commemorative agendas introduced by organizations of former prisoners such as the International Auschwitz Committee and the Polish Union of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy, Polish governmental institutions such as the Ministry of Culture and Art and the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, and, not least, the oral interviews and written testimonies of individuals who have functioned as the stewards of memory at Auschwitz, whether former prisoners, former employees of the State Museum at Auschwitz, or government officials.

It is also worth noting that Auschwitz and its legacy in Poland have only recently been opened to renewed inquiry and debate, as the decrease in state control over scholarship and pedagogy has offered new avenues of research on the history of the Polish People’s Republic and the history of the Second World War and its legacy in Poland. Scholars have, for example, begun to examine in greater detail the history of the Soviet and German occupations during World War II, Polish wartime losses under both these regimes, and the vexing issue of Jewish-Polish relations in the years 1939–45. Moreover, the recent publication of Jan T. Gross’s work Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland⁴ has unleashed a storm of controversy about Polish complicity in the crimes of the Shoah and has challenged assumptions—common in Poland for decades—about Poles as an exclusively “victim” people. This victim mentality was based, of course, in the historical reality of Poland’s devastating wartime losses—human, material, and psychological. But it was also cultivated, institutionalized, and mythologized in postwar Polish culture and at official memorials like the State Museum at Auschwitz. This analysis is not intended as a corrective to that process. Instead, it proposes to explain its origins and manifestations at Auschwitz, the most important site of wartime commemoration in Poland.

New scholarship and especially the growing visibility of Auschwitz in the international media have aroused greater interest in and critical investigation of Auschwitz and its place in the history of the Polish People’s Republic. Perhaps now, nearly six decades after the end of World War II, this study will be all the more timely as Polish society, scholarship, and especially the staff at the Auschwitz museum attempt to focus and refocus the lens of historical hindsight. This work will clarify and interpret Polish images of Auschwitz from the liberation of the camp until the 1980s. Rather than analyzing surface images alone, this study attempts to explain the origins of and motivations for these images—all in the context of postwar Polish history, culture, and Polish-Jewish relations.

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.

. . .

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 various sectors and sub-camps (e.g., a women’s camp established in August 1942, a Gypsy camp, or a camp for Jewish families from Theresienstadt established in February 1943), each separated from the next by barbed wire and guard towers. Birkenau was also marked as the largest center for the execution of the “Final Solution,” for in 1941 Himmler had ordered Höss to begin developing facilities for efficient and industrialized mass murder (see Map 3).

Map 3. Auschwitz II (Birkenau) Camp, summer 1944. Selected features: 1. “Sauna” (disinfection); 2. Gas chamber and crematorium #2; 3. Gas chamber and crematorium #3; 4. Gas chamber and crematorium #4; 5. Gas chamber and crematorium #5; 6. Cremation pyres; 7. Mass graves for Soviet POWs; 8. Main guard house; 9. Barracks for disrobing; 10. Sewage treatment plants; 11. Medical experiments barracks; 12. Ash pits; 13. “Rampe” (railroad platform); 14. Provisional gas chamber #1; 15. Provisional gas chamber #2

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.

In addition to the three main camps of the complex, forty auxiliary camps were established in the Auschwitz region between 1941 and 1944. Development of this larger network of camps was considered necessary for security reasons and helped to solve the problem of transporting prisoners from Auschwitz and its two larger subsidiaries at Monowitz and Birkenau to work sites throughout the area. The satellite camps, which housed from several dozen to several thousand prisoners, were located near industrial plants, agricultural enterprises, and mines, all of which served as part of a huge SS economic-industrial conglomerate. Thus, inmates of the nearby Harmense and Rajsko camps farmed; prisoners labored in coal mines at Jawischowitz and Janinagrube; at Chełmek they worked in a shoe factory; thousands of others were forced laborers for the coffers of German industrial concerns such as IG Farben, Siemens-Schuckert, Hermann-Göring-Werke, and Krupp.

In late 1943 a major administrative reorganization was undertaken at the Auschwitz complex. Rudolf Höss, commandant since the camp’s establishment in the spring of 1940, was recalled to the Inspectorate for Concentration Camps at Oranienburg near Berlin, and was replaced by SS Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Liebehenschel. In November 1943 Liebehenschel ordered that the camp be divided into three main entities: the base camp (Stammlager) KL Auschwitz I, which was the original and expanded main camp and administrative headquarters of the complex; KL Auschwitz II, which comprised the camp and extermination facilities at Birkenau; and KL Auschwitz III, often simply called Monowitz, which centered on the camp adjacent to the Buna-Werke industrial plant, but included as well most auxiliary camps in the region. Auschwitz II/Birkenau was under the command of SS Major Fritz Hartjenstein, and Auschwitz III/Monowitz under SS Captain Heinrich Schwarz, both of whom were subordinate to the Liebehenschel’s authority. Although this subdivision of the complex remained in effect until the liberation in January 1945, the command structure was to change again in May 1944, when SS Major Richard Baer was appointed commandant of Auschwitz. In the same month Höss returned to Auschwitz as commander of the SS garrison, this time for the purpose of coordinating the destruction of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews, an effort that bore the code name “Aktion Höss,” which he would supervise until late July 1944.

This brief description of the development and organizational structure of the camp conglomerate illustrates that there was not one, but numerous “Auschwitzes” of which the larger complex bearing the name Auschwitz was composed. Thus, the varied and fractured nature of the complex’s topography, purpose, and command structure makes it all the more difficult to arrive at a clear definition of what the Auschwitz memorial site was, is, or should be. The number of Jews murdered at Auschwitz and the manner in which they were killed remain the most unique and striking characteristics of the camp and its history, but the experience of the Jewish deportee was not definitive. As the above account suggests, the diverse experiences of the Auschwitz survivor or victim defy convenient generalization. While one prisoner worked in the fishery of a nearby auxiliary camp, another laid railroad ties; while one prisoner never saw the Stammlager Auschwitz I, another never left it; and while many prisoners may never have seen the gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau, the majority of Jews deported there saw nothing else.

It is therefore nearly impossible to describe in detail or even to generalize satisfactorily about the conditions under which registered prisoners¹³ at Auschwitz lived, worked, and died, for those conditions varied according to each prisoner’s national or “racial” status, work assignment, and, not least, location in the complex. Whether a registered prisoner lived or died at Auschwitz was often determined by whether she or he survived the first weeks or months. Generally, those prisoners accustomed to relative comfort had the most difficulty in accommodating themselves to the severity of camp life, whereas those who had already been in prisons or ghettos, or who had been prisoners of war had less difficulty adjusting to the brutality and deprivation.

Upon arrival at the camp prisoners were not only stripped of any possessions, but they were also robbed of their identities. Names, as far as the SS was concerned, became irrelevant; each prisoner was assigned a serial number that was tattooed on the left forearm or, in the case of small children, on the leg.¹⁴ Prisoners were usually given a pair of clogs and an ill-fitting striped uniform on which was sewn a piece of cloth bearing the prisoner’s number as well as a symbol designating his or her category. Jews, for example, wore a Star of David; homosexuals, a pink triangle; political prisoners, an inverted red triangle; ordinary criminals, a green triangle; and the so-called “asocial,” a black triangle. Such markings made the prisoners easily identifiable to the camp guards and were immediately associated with a prisoner’s status in the camp hierarchy.

Not surprisingly, the markings on a prisoner’s uniform—both numbers and symbols—bore a relationship to his or her chances for survival. For instance, a German criminal with a low number had learned over the months or years many of the tricks of survival, was perhaps among the camp’s prisoner elite, and may have held some supervisory position. A Jew fresh off a transport, on the other hand, even when spared death upon arrival, was usually subjected to more severe treatment and was far less likely to survive. In general, Jews and Gypsies, regardless of their country of origin, were at the bottom of the camp prisoner hierarchy and were consequently the least likely to survive. Above them were the Russian POWs, and then civilian Slavs, mostly Poles, who were considered by the Germans to be conspiratorial and inferior but who, with the exception of the Polish intelligentsia, governmental leaders, and military elite, were not marked for annihilation. Members of other European nationalities formed the next category, and at the top of the rankings were German prisoners.

The topography of the different camps at Auschwitz certainly varied, but all camps were designed to keep prisoners under strict control and at the very edge of human survival. Describing his early impressions of Auschwitz-Monowitz, Primo Levi recalled:

[O]ur Lager is a square of about six hundred yards in length, surrounded by two fences of barbed wire, the inner one carrying a high tension current. It consists of sixty wooden huts, which are called Blocks, ten of which are in construction. In addition, there is the body of the kitchens, which are in brick; an experimental farm, run by a detachment of privileged Häftlinge [prisoners], the huts with the showers and the latrines, one for each group of six or eight Blocks. Besides these, certain Blocks are reserved for specific purposes. First of all, a group of eight, at the extreme eastern end of the camp, forms the infirmary and clinic . . . Block 7 which no ordinary Häftling has ever entered, reserved for the “Prominenz,” that is, the aristocracy, the internees holding the highest posts; Block 47, reserved for the Reichsdeutsche (the Aryan Germans, “politicals” or criminals); Block 49, for the Kapos [supervisory prisoners] alone; Block 12, half of which, for use of the Reichsdeutsche and the Kapos, serves as a canteen, that is, a distribution centre for tobacco, insect powder and occasionally other articles; Block 37, which formed the Quartermaster’s office and the Office for Work; and finally, Block 29, which always has its windows closed as it is the Frauenblock, the camp brothel, served by Polish Häftling girls, and reserved for the Reichsdeutsche.¹⁵

This account from one of Levi’s memoirs, although descriptive only of one part of the Auschwitz complex in early 1944, suggests that although all prisoners were subjected to strict control, there were clear discrepancies in status and in the severity of their treatment at the hands of the Kapos and SS. Because of this structure, tensions, resentment, and divisions were common, not only among prisoners of various nationalities, faiths, and Nazi-fabricated “racial” categories, but also between members of the various strata of authority. These included “ordinary” prisoners such as Levi, the Kapos in charge of work commandos, Lagerälteste (camp elders), the individual block supervisors, and those prisoners who enjoyed privileged and powerful work assignments, such as those occupying clerical and administrative posts. In Auschwitz I, Poles, the largest prisoner group there, held most positions of authority. In Birkenau, some official prisoner posts were held by Jews. German criminals, employed in functionary positions across the Auschwitz complex, were often the most feared. Regardless of the nationality of the functionary prisoners, differences in status added to existing rivalries, fears and resentments among inmates—a fact not lost on the SS. Moreover, the differing roles of prisoners in the camp structure and administration often blurred the dividing lines between perpetrators, bystanders, and victims at Auschwitz, placing many inmates into what Levi has called the “gray zone” of moral culpability located somewhere between the poles of good and evil, righteous and reprobate.¹⁶

Even if such discrepancies in status and moral culpability at Auschwitz had not existed, the camp atmosphere in general did not encourage solidarity and mutual support among the prisoners. As Yisrael Gutman writes, “In a world with all moral norms and restraints lifted and no holds barred, where congestion, severe deprivation, and nervous tension were ubiquitous, the prisoners easily succumbed to violence and rudeness. Conditions of life in the camp managed to undermine any solidarity that might be expected to arise among human beings who found themselves in identical situations. The assumption that common suffering bridges distances separating people was not borne out by camp reality.”¹⁷ Altruism and mutual aid were certainly not unknown in the camp, but Gutman’s observation challenges the myth of unwavering solidarity among camp inmates, a myth—like that of the prototypic prisoner—so prevalent in the various commemorative agendas that manifested themselves at Auschwitz in the postwar years.

The conditions of which Gutman writes were intended to breed competition, further divest the prisoners of their traditional notions of human behavior and morality, and, most importantly, keep the prisoners at the edge of survival. The quarters in which ordinary prisoners lived were stifling, poorly heated in the wintertime, rife with vermin and disease, and offered no privacy. “The ordinary living blocks,” Levi wrote,

are divided into two parts. In one Tagesraum lives the head of the hut with his friends . . . on the walls, great sayings, proverbs and rhymes in praise of order, discipline and hygiene; in one corner, a shelf with the tools of the Blockfrisör (official barber), the ladles to distribute the soup, and two rubber truncheons, one solid and one hollow, to enforce discipline should the proverbs prove insufficient. The other part is the dormitory: there are only one hundred and forty-eight bunks on three levels, fitted close to each other like the cells of a beehive, and divided by three corridors so as to utilize without wastage all the space in the room up to the roof. Here all the ordinary Häftlinge live, about two hundred to two hundred and fifty per hut. Consequently there are two men in most of the bunks, which are portable planks of wood, each covered by a thin straw sack and two blankets.¹⁸

In comparison to huts such as these in Monowitz, the two-story heated blocks of Auschwitz I were relatively comfortable. Far worse, however, were living conditions in Birkenau, where prisoners in sector BII (the largest and most populated part of the camp) were housed in prefabricated wooden huts originally designed as stables for fifty-two horses.¹⁹ At Birkenau they were intended to house some four hundred prisoners, but often held hundreds more.

While poor housing contributed in various ways to the death rate among inmates, the prisoners’ inadequate diet, combined with work that was usually physically exhausting, made their survival even more precarious.²⁰ In the morning prisoners received a half-liter of ersatz coffee or tea, at midday approximately 3/4 liter of thin soup averaging 350–400 calories, and for supper about 300 grams of bread with a small amount of sausage, margarine, cheese, or jam. Prisoners engaged in heavy labor were given slightly larger, yet still insufficient rations. The nutritive value of meals at Auschwitz depended on the dietary norms set for inmates of concentration camps, and these norms changed several times from 1940 to 1945. But generally, the amount and quality of food distributed at Auschwitz was far below these norms. Whereas regulations called for 1,700 calories per day for prisoners engaged in lighter work and 2,150 calories for prisoners doing heavy labor, such prisoners at Auschwitz received an average of 1,300 and 1,700 calories per day, respectively.²¹ The discrepancy resulted from SS plundering of foodstuffs or the maldistribution of food by functionary prisoners, who often had the power of life and death over the inmates in their charge. Whether, for example, one’s soup was served from the top or the bottom of the vat could make a tremendous difference in caloric intake.

Poor housing, inadequate diet, and physically demanding work all made the mortality rate among registered prisoners extremely high. Jewish registered prisoners, who by mid-1944 made up approximately two-thirds of all Auschwitz inmates, had an even higher mortality rate. Their treatment at the hands of the SS and functionary prisoners was generally worse than that meted out to other prisoner groups; they were frequently perceived as inferior by their fellow prisoners; and they suffered from an additional psychological burden, namely, that Jews “lived in the shadow of certainty that their relatives had perished, that their own fate was sealed, and that their incarceration in the camp was but a reprieve granted by the Germans to drain them of their strength through slave labor before sending them to their deaths.”²²

Yet those Jews who entered Auschwitz as registered prisoners were, in fact, a small minority of deportees. Although the exact number of Jewish victims will never be known, according to data compiled by Auschwitz historian Franciszek Piper, 890,000 (about 81 percent) of the Jews deported to the Auschwitz complex were not registered, but rather met their deaths immediately after arrival.²³ There is, moreover, a crucial point to be emphasized here: unlike other prisoners at Auschwitz (with the important exception of Gypsies), the overwhelming majority of Jews deported to Auschwitz were not brought there on the grounds of criminal charges, anti-Nazi conspiratorial activity, service in an enemy army, religious convictions, or “asocial” behavior. Jews were deported to Auschwitz for exploitation and extermination because they were defined and identified as Jews by Nazi racial laws. This is the critical distinction that must be made between Jews and Gypsies on the one hand and, on the other, Poles, Soviet POWs, and other prisoner groups.²⁴ It is also a distinction that has frequently been lost on postwar memorialists of Auschwitz.

The above description offers a picture of conditions for registered prisoners, but such a generalization should not overlook an element of Auschwitz history that sets it apart from other camps: the variety of ways in which registered prisoners lived, worked, and died there. The prisoner’s experience depended on a myriad of factors. State of health upon arrival, location in the camp complex, work assignment, nationality, ability to communicate with guards, Kapos, and other prisoners, relationships with supervisors, relationships to the camp resistance movements, the length of time in the camp, the personal will to survive—these are only a few examples of the factors that could determine how, and whether, a prisoner lived or died.

Moreover, the differences in the ways prisoners experienced Auschwitz were at times shockingly crass. Some prisoners fought to stay alive by any means available; others quickly lost their will to live, became so-called Muselmänner,²⁵ and were dead within weeks of arrival. Some prisoners were well fed, although the diet of nearly all was woefully insufficient. Some prisoners enjoyed solidarity and mutual support among their peers; others were taken advantage of, abused, and left to die, friendless and alone. Some prisoners had the connections and courage to become active in covert resistance; others remained unaware of any underground conspiracy whatsoever. Treatment of Soviet POWs was infinitely worse than treatment of German criminals. One prisoner may have been in Auschwitz because of her politics, another because of her “race” as defined by Nazi ideology. At Birkenau there were soccer games and gas chambers—each within sight of the other. In short, Auschwitz, its victims, and its prisoners defy generalizations and convenient categorizations. Just as the history of the camp was multifaceted, so too have collective memories and public manifestations of those memories been diverse and at times even contradictory, to the extent that the commemoration of one prisoner or prisoner group has offended or silenced the memory of another.

Wide diversity of prisoners, complicated administrative structure, brutally harsh conditions—all are aspects of Auschwitz that render it unique among Nazi concentration camps and extermination centers. Although these characteristics are essential to our understanding of Auschwitz and are central to Polish commemorative uses of Auschwitz, the murder of nearly nine hundred thousand Jews immediately after their arrival at the camp remains the most salient and important, but not entirely definitive aspect of its history. The scale of the killing operations at Auschwitz and the manner in which they were carried out have, more than any other aspects of the camp’s history, remained in the consciousness and memory of Jews and non-Jews around the world, and an awareness of the machinery of mass extermination at Auschwitz and its role in the execution of the “final solution of the Jewish question” continues to awaken both horror and interest on the part of scholars, students, and visitors to the memorial site. As the largest single killing center for European Jews, Auschwitz has appropriately emerged as a metonym for the Shoah, and its memorial grounds have become a primary destination for millions of pilgrims, both Jewish and Gentile.

Raul Hilberg has noted that the status of Auschwitz as the foremost symbol of the Shoah is based on at least three of its characteristics: first, more Jews died in Auschwitz than anywhere else; second, Auschwitz was an international killing center with victims from across the European continent; third, the killing at Auschwitz continued long after the other extermination centers of Nazi-occupied Europe had been liquidated.²⁶ There are other bases for the symbolic and metonymic value of Auschwitz—bases that will be addressed in the course of this study—but these three characteristics are an appropriate point of departure for a brief description of the killing operations that were undertaken at the Auschwitz complex.

Auschwitz, as the description of its early history has made clear, was not initially intended to be an extermination center for European Jews, but was a large concentration camp on annexed Polish territory. As at all concentration camps, death was omnipresent and had numerous causes. Executions by hanging or by shooting at the so-called “wall of death” adjacent to Block 11 were commonplace at the base camp and later at Birkenau, Monowitz, and the various auxiliary camps. So-called “selections”—the weeding-out of prisoners considered unfit for work—and the subsequent murder of prisoners by lethal injection or gas began in the spring of 1941. Moreover, prisoners at the Auschwitz complex were continually subjected to various forms of what could be called indirect extermination, that is, death resulting from the effects of hunger, disease, so-called “medical experiments,” exhaustion, or torture.

The systematic and efficient killing of prisoners and recently arrived deportees in gas chambers was, however, a later development at Auschwitz. According to the postwar testimony of Rudolf Höss, the camp’s first commandant, Himmler summoned him to Berlin in the late summer of 1941 and announced, in Höss’s words, the following: “The Führer has ordered that the Jewish question be solved once and for all and that we, the SS, are to implement that order. The existing extermination centers in the East are not in a position to carry out the large actions which are anticipated. I have therefore earmarked Auschwitz for this purpose, both because of its good position as regards communications and because the area can easily be isolated and camouflaged.”²⁷ Höss was also informed that further details of the extermination plans would be brought to Auschwitz by Adolf Eichmann, chief of the Jewish Department of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). Later that year Eichmann and Höss worked out many of the details of the plan, including transport and railroad arrangements and, in September, development of a suitable killing method.

When Eichmann visited Auschwitz, he acquainted Höss with the workings of gas chambers used at “euthanasia” installations and the mobile gassing vans used at various locations. Both used carbon monoxide as the poison, but neither, it was decided, would be suitable for the sort of mass extermination that was to be undertaken at Auschwitz. Instead, a preparation of hydrogen cyanide normally used as a disinfectant, fumigator, and delousing agent was chosen. The product, commercially marketed as “Zyklon-B,” was readily available at the Auschwitz complex. While Höss was away, his deputy Karl Fritzsch used Zyklon-B as a killing agent for humans on a group of Soviet prisoners. When the commandant returned, he supervised the first large-scale killing in the cellar of the base camp’s Block 11, where approximately six hundred Soviet prisoners of war and two hundred fifty other prisoners were gassed to death. After witnessing this second experiment, Höss became convinced that death by Zyklon-B gas would be the most efficient and appropriate means of killing Jews at Auschwitz in the future, and the mortuary of the “old crematorium” (later named Crematorium I) was converted to a gas chamber. It was first used on transports of Jewish deportees in February 1942.

The gas chamber attached to Crematorium I operated for another year, but with the advent of Nazi plans for the “final solution of the Jewish question” in late 1941, the bulk of gassing operations at Auschwitz was moved to Birkenau. Construction on the Birkenau camp had begun in October 1941, and in early 1942 the first gassings took place there in a provisional bunker known as the “little red house.” A second bunker, the “little white house,” began operation in June. Both of these installations were surrounded by trees. Mass graves, later to be replaced by incineration pits, were also in the near vicinity but hidden from the victims by hedges. The Jewish deportees were unloaded at a rail station two and a half kilometers from Birkenau and were then “selected” for registration and work or, in most cases, immediate death.²⁸ Those deemed unfit to live were then marched to the killing facilities or brought there in trucks. They were forced to undress, told that they would bathe and be deloused, instructed to remember where they had left their belongings, and then forced into the gas chamber. Once the chamber was full, the doors were sealed and SS men wearing gas masks poured the Zyklon-B pellets into slots in the side wall. The victims were usually dead within minutes. When the chamber was opened a half hour later, members of the Sonderkommando began their work. The Sonderkommando was a special detail of Jewish prisoners who were charged with removal of the bodies, extraction of valuables from the corpses, cremation, and cleaning of the gas chambers of blood and excrement prior to the arrival of the next group of victims.²⁹

Corpses of the victims of gassings at the base camp, as well as those who had been gassed at Birkenau, were buried in pits near the Birkenau bunkers. In the summer of 1942, however, SS Colonel Paul Blobel from Eichmann’s RSHA arrived at Auschwitz with orders that the corpses be removed. From September until late November 1942 a mass exhumation and incineration effort took place, as pyres of up to two thousand bodies each and, later, mass incineration pits were used to dispose of more than one hundred thousand corpses.

Work on four specially designed gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau had begun in July 1942, but the first of the new installations there was not completed until March 1943. By June of that year four new facilities (Crematoria II, III, IV, and V) were in operation. The killing process in the new gas chambers at Birkenau was similar to that in the temporary bunkers, but it took place on a larger and more streamlined scale. At Crematorium II the process was perhaps at its most efficient. After having been selected for death, the victims were led to the entrance of the crematorium or, in the case of invalids or the weak, they were brought there in trucks. Every effort was made to delude the victims, who were told that they would bathe and be deloused. They were then led into a subterranean undressing room where they could see signs in German and in their native languages bearing the instructions “To the Baths” and “To Disinfection.” Some were even given soap and towels.

As many as two thousand people could be forced into the gas chamber of Crematorium II. Once they were inside, the door was bolted and sealed, and, on the order of an SS doctor, the SS “disinfectors” opened cans of Zyklon-B and poured their contents into induction vents on the roof. In a matter of minutes—at most twenty—all inside were dead. Rudolf Höss, having witnessed the gassing process, described the effects of the sublimated poison: “It could be observed through the peephole in the door that those who were standing nearest to the induction vents were killed at once. It can be said that about one-third died straightaway. The remainder staggered about and began to scream and struggle for air. The screaming, however, soon changed to the death rattle and in a few minutes all lay still.”³⁰

Half an hour after the poison had been introduced, the room was ventilated and Sonderkommando prisoners began hauling the corpses to an ante-room, where they removed women’s hair. They then loaded the corpses onto an elevator that brought them to the crematorium level. Prior to incineration, they removed from the bodies jewelry, gold, and other valuables. The ovens in Crematorium II could burn three corpses in each retort in about twenty minutes, depending on the size and percentage of body fat of each corpse. Ashes and partially incinerated bones were ground, dumped into nearby pits, and later deposited in nearby ponds and the Vistula River. At times ashes were also used as fertilizer at camp farms.

The total capacity of the Auschwitz and Birkenau crematoria was intended to be approximately 4,800 bodies per day. This figure was, according to a surviving member of a Birkenau Sonderkommando, at times raised to about 8,000 by increasing the number of corpses simultaneously burned in the oven retorts.³¹ In the summer of 1944, after an additional railroad spur was built directly into the Birkenau camp, the cremation installations at Auschwitz-Birkenau, including additional incineration pits, could dispose of some 20,000 victims daily. That summer of 1944 also saw the largest and most systematic instance of mass genocide in history: the murder of more than 430,000 Hungarian Jews.

Himmler ordered the cessation of killing operations in the fall of 1944, but by the time Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945, it had claimed at least 1.1 million lives.³² A breakdown of these figures comparing registered and unregistered prisoners and roughly divided according to victim group reveals the following minimum estimates:

1. Between 1940 and 1945 approximately 1,305,000 deportees were sent to Auschwitz, of whom 905,000 were unregistered and 400,000 were registered. At least 1.1 million deportees died, resulting in a mortality rate for the entirety of the camp’s existence of approximately 84 percent.

2. Approximately 1,095,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz, of whom 890,000 were unregistered and 205,000 were registered. Some 865,000 unregistered Jewish deportees and 95,000 registered Jewish deportees died there. In other words, approximately 88 percent of the Jews deported to Auschwitz did not survive, and 79 percent of them were killed shortly after their arrival, the overwhelming majority in gas chambers. Of the 202,000 registered prisoners who died at Auschwitz, slightly less than half were Jews.

3. Some 147,000 non-Jewish Poles were deported to Auschwitz, of whom an estimated 10,000 were unregistered and 137,000 were registered. About 64,000 of the registered prisoners and all of the unregistered prisoners died there, that is, approximately one-half of all Polish deportees.

4. Gypsies at Auschwitz had less than a one–in-ten chance of survival. Of the 23,000 Gypsies deported to Auschwitz (21,000 of whom were registered prisoners), 21,000, or 91 percent, perished.

5. There is, according to Piper’s estimates, no record of any survivors among the 15,000 (12,000 registered and 3,000 unregistered) Soviet prisoners of war deported to Auschwitz.

6. Some 25,000 prisoners of other nationalities (Czechs, Russians, Belorussians, Yugoslavians, French, Ukrainians, Germans, Austrians, and others) were registered as prisoners at Auschwitz, of whom approximately 13,000 survived.

These statistics are staggering and, at the same time, disturbingly anonymous. They are an essential part of Auschwitz history, and a tremendous debt is owed to those scholars who have devoted years of research to the problem of assessing the number of deportees and number of deaths at Auschwitz and other camps. One must, however, exercise caution when using numbers such as these. They are not precise, and, more importantly, one must bear in mind that an inordinate focus on statistics can easily distract from their larger historical importance and contribute to the already disturbing anonymity of the victims and perpetrators. In short, obsession with the numbers both dishonors the Auschwitz victims and mitigates the significance of the crimes against them.

Yet these statistics have a particular relevance for an analysis of Auschwitz memory at the memorial site. The number and kind of deportees and victims outlined above provide us with an empirical measure against which we can compare the presentation of Auschwitz history at the State Museum at Auschwitz, in its exhibitions, and in the public ritual undertaken there. These numbers are, in the context of this study, important in two major ways. First, they contrast sharply with the inflated figure of 4 million Auschwitz victims—a figure cited for decades by Polish and some Israeli historians and, significantly, a figure employed virtually uncontested until the early 1990s at the Auschwitz memorial site itself.³³ Second, these statistics increase our awareness of who was at Auschwitz, who lived and died there and how—an awareness that is crucial to any analysis of who has been memorialized at Auschwitz and how. In other words, the numbers can be employed as one measure by which we can critically assess the manifestations of Auschwitz memory at the site.

Although historians have been concerned with the number of dead at Auschwitz, it is also worth noting that Auschwitz had a relatively high number of survivors in comparison to those sites (Chełmno/Kulmhof, Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec) that functioned solely as extermination centers. This may come as a surprise to many who consider Auschwitz to have been the most deadly killing center, for Auschwitz was neither the first nor, in some respects, even the most terrifying of camps. It is true that more deportees, and among them more Jews, died at Auschwitz than anywhere else; but the number of deportees and specifically of Jewish deportees who were registered and subsequently used for slave labor at Auschwitz was also uniquely high. The simple fact that when Red Army troops entered the Auschwitz complex in January 1945 there were some seven thousand prisoners languishing there sets Auschwitz apart from other killing sites on Polish territory, where survival rates were shockingly low. Martin Gilbert has estimated that only three individuals survived Chełmno/Kulmhof, the first extermination center. His figures for the other killing centers are similarly bleak. Sixty-four Jews survived Sobibór, while as many as two hundred thousand were killed. At Treblinka up to seven hundred fifty thousand Jews were murdered and only between forty and seventy individuals survived. Finally, Gilbert estimates that at Bełżec, where five hundred fifty thousand perished, only two survived.³⁴

If Auschwitz had, relative to other extermination centers, such a high number of survivors, it follows that many of those survivors recorded their experiences in depositions and memoirs, as well as audio and, more recently, video testimonies. There is, simply put, a wealth of information about the experiences of prisoners and the history of the Auschwitz complex. Whether Jewish, Polish, Czech, or French, survivors have left their accounts for successive generations to read, hear, and employ in the construction of individual and collective Auschwitz memories. Initially, such accounts and testimonies added to the body of knowledge on Auschwitz and served as documentary evidence, but over the years the prisoner’s account has taken on a different but no-less-meaningful function, helping to construct, maintain, and revise collective memories of Auschwitz.³⁵ This transformation has been evident at the State Museum at Auschwitz, where many survivors, especially Polish political prisoners, were instrumental in the site’s development and in the public commemorative rituals that took place there. As a consequence, the topography and the pedagogical and political orientation of the postwar memorial site has, in many respects, reflected the memories and meaning that these survivors drew from their experiences in the camp.

. . .

The preceding historical synopsis should reinforce two major points. First, the topography and features of postliberation Auschwitz can present only images of the landscape of the functioning camp complex. The memorial site is not and can not be Auschwitz, but is merely and inevitably a representation—preserved, constructed, reconstructed, or distorted—of Auschwitz as it existed in the years 1940–45. Second, the history of Auschwitz from 1940 to 1945 is far from monolithic. Some aspects of the complex’s history warrant greater attention than others. Some experiences were shared by all registered prisoners. Some lessons drawn from the history of the camp are more important than others. But Auschwitz lacks a convenient master narrative, a prototypic prisoner or martyr, and it resists oversimplification and generalization.

If Auschwitz history is not monolithic, neither should any collective Auschwitz memory be monolithic. Rather, that memory should reflect the complexity of the camp’s history. The memory exhibited at the Auschwitz memorial site has never been totally monolithic, as if hewn from a single stone and presented as a single narrative. Yet for more than forty years the State Museum at Auschwitz exhibited a museological, pedagogical, and commemorative orientation that, to varying degrees, simplified the camp’s history, valorized certain types of deportees and their experiences over those of others, and introduced culturally and ideologically bound memorial narratives grounded in postwar Polish society and politics. Although perhaps not surprising, such a reconfiguration of the past may strike the observer as somehow unjust, for at issue here is the relationship between history and public or collective memory.³⁶

The relationship between history and the memory of events that have shaped our past appears obvious. Close observation reveals, however, that the anticipated nexus between the two is always weaker than might be assumed, for the way a culture or society remembers the past seldom reflects the actual course of historical events. This point may appear obvious, but it is worth further consideration in the context of this study. Thus far, the term “history” in general and the “history” of Auschwitz in particular have been used in a conventional sense, meaning both the actual course of events at Auschwitz and these events as they have been recorded by historians and others. The former represents an objective reality that cannot be reproduced or chronicled with total accuracy; it can be approached by the scholar or student, but nonetheless remains an ideal. “History” in the latter sense refers to the chronicling and codification—in effect, the institutionalization—of the past in ways that are familiar to all of us, such as the construction of narrative texts, the development of archives, or the establishment of historical museums. The work of institutionalizing the past in postwar Poland was highly complex and subject to the demands of Polish national culture and its attendant “martyrological” traditions, as well as the ideological imperatives of the communist state. Accordingly, the construction of an Auschwitz narrative, whether the work of the scholar or the State Museum, remained inseparable from the larger collective memory of the camp.

Collective memory, far less reconstructive and organized than history, arises out of the recollections and desires of the community.³⁷ It is not rigid, but, as Pierre Nora writes, “remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived.”³⁸ History as task, because of its claims to objectivity and analytical rigor, is intended to endure and present a universally valid, if not universally appreciated representation of the past. This it achieves only to a limited extent, for, as suggested above, the work of history, whether that of the scholar or that of the museum, cannot remain isolated from the forces of collective memory. Likewise, historians—some more successfully than others—can contribute to the construction of memory in a variety of ways, whether by publicizing an accurate account of the past or by distorting the past in the service of the present. Nonetheless, the “work” of history is held to a higher standard, and is therefore assumed to reflect the course of events with greater accuracy than the evolving forces of memory.

Because it constantly evolves, reflects the desires of the community, and is not subject to the strictures of the historical discipline, collective memory can also, as Jacques Le Goff has written, “overflow” or supersede history as a form of knowledge and as a public rite.³⁹ History is secular, whereas memory “lives on in a religious or sacred key,”⁴⁰ transcending in its formation and manifestations the structures and rules of the historian’s craft. The sacral nature of memory emerges in various ways, most visibly and prominently at those spaces that Nora describes as the lieux de mémoire, or memory sites.⁴¹ Such sites exist to redefine, illustrate, manifest, and embody individual and group recollections of the past. Monuments, museums, and the spaces of public ritual are all examples of common loci memoriae that function as fora of public commemoration, and it is at sites like these that memory most clearly reveals its collective, participatory, and ritualistic elements.

The State Museum at Auschwitz is one such site, but unlike many other memory sites, it exists both as the location of historical events and, simultaneously, as the arena where public commemoration of those events takes place. It is significant that postliberation Auschwitz has always had a certain tangibility. The memorial site is, of course, a smaller⁴² and inevitably sanitized representation of the complex as it existed in 1945, and only the Stammlager and Birkenau remain accessible to visitors. But that they are accessible at all and have preserved many of their tangible remains (in contrast to Bełżec or Neuengamme, for example), makes them comparatively well suited to the physical objectification of memory, the synthesis and institutionalization of memorial symbols, and the use of their memorial spaces for repetitive commemorative ritual.

Manifested in symbols, exhibitions, and public demonstrations, Polish collective memory at Auschwitz has both explained history and misrepresented it; it has honored the dead and, at times, has been selective about the those whom it chooses to honor; it has shown reverent silence and has also engaged in noisy demonstration; it has been an indicator of liberalizing transformations in the cultural policy of the Polish People’s Republic and has also communicated the ideological rigidity of that state. Such diversity and contradiction in the manifestations of collective memory at Auschwitz should come as no surprise. These contradictions are born of the multifaceted history of the camp complex, but they also reflect the fact that collective memory and its manifestations, as the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs illustrated more than seventy years ago, arise from what he called the “social frameworks of memory.”⁴³ Memories do not originate only on a purely individual basis; rather, they are constructed and maintained with the help of others. Collective frameworks are, then, the means by which the collective memory forms its images of the past, and because these frameworks are the products of present social conditions, they help to construct images of the past that are in accordance with the current cultures, identities, ideologies, and desires of the larger community.⁴⁴ In short, the past is reshaped to suit the needs of the present, its images helping to legitimize the needs of the current social order.⁴⁵

According to Halbwachs, this presentist imperative renders collective memory unreliable as a guide to events that actually transpired. Rather than accurately reflecting the events of the past, collective memory is a composite and mutating image that inevitably deviates from historical reality because of its reliance on society’s mnemonic frameworks.⁴⁶ As Halbwachs noted, “Society from time to time obligates people not just to reproduce in thought previous events of their lives, but also to touch them up, to shorten them, or to complete them so that, however convinced we are that our memories are exact, we give them a prestige that reality did not possess.”⁴⁷ In short, social groups and their frameworks of memory alter or distort memory in the process of reconstructing it.⁴⁸

The ease with which Halbwachs’ social frameworks can transform memory points to the disturbing ease with which collective memory can be manipulated, both consciously and unconsciously. State, family, church, associations, and a myriad of other social groups all have the ability to direct or censor collective memory. Collective memory can be socially mandated as an institution works to create a common mode of memory by selecting those aspects of the past that appear best suited to the exigencies of the present. It is, for example, not uncommon for groups to embellish the past artificially or to abbreviate it dishonestly for the purpose of encouraging social unity in the present.⁴⁹ “One might say,” Patrick Hutton has written, “that memory colonizes the past by obliging it to conform to present conceptions.”⁵⁰

“Colonization” of the past, however, exists not only in the conquest of memory, for manipulated memory is also used as an instrument of social and political power.⁵¹ Its effectiveness as an instrument of power depends, of course, on the relative power of the social group that holds it. A state can, for example, influence the collective memory of a people’s past only to the extent that it retains political power. Religious authorities can continue to shape the ways in which people perceive the origins of their spirituality only as long as their authority is maintained. A museum can influence the public’s understanding of the past only insofar as the knowledge and expertise of its creators and sponsors is respected.

Polish memory of Auschwitz at the memorial site illustrates many of these characteristics of collective memory. The State Museum at Auschwitz is a locus memoriae that has borne the social structures of Auschwitz memory and staged its manifestations. It has done the work of the historian in attempting to represent the past accurately and objectively, and it has also shaped that past to conform to current cultural and political needs. The museum has, both by accident and by design, altered and distorted the past while attempting to reconstruct it in the tangible forms of exhibitions, monuments, and demonstrations. The site has always been selective in what it has presented to the public. As an occasional arena of cold-war propaganda, it has even functioned as an instrument of political power, at times used in vulgar fashion to condemn the western capitalist and militarist threat and celebrate the goals and achievements of Polish United Workers’ Party and its mentor, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Finally, the respective durability of various modes of memory at Auschwitz has been subject to the power of those individuals and institutions that have supervised the working of the State Museum. Each phase in the postwar history of Auschwitz has been marked by changes—some major, others less significant—in the memorial agenda of the museum, its staff, and those institutions of the communist state that have exercised influence or control over the site. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that many major changes to the site have occurred within the last decade, that is, in the wake of Polish communism’s fall.

Despite the applicability of Halbwachs’s ideas for this study of memory at Auschwitz, it is necessary to enter a caveat: a collective Auschwitz memory and the social structures on which it is based need not be static. Rather, it has a diachronic character, subject to temporal factors beyond Poland’s borders and influenced by the revisionary impulses of individuals and groups, and even by the poignancy of historical facts. Even as the collective upheavals associated with the fall of communism challenged many of the assumptions and traditions of collective Auschwitz memory in Poland, so too have the challenges of individuals, groups, and events throughout the post-war decades shaken memory’s framework, causing Auschwitz memory, in a manner of speaking, to “fall out of its frame.” In October 1953 former prisoners of the camp rebelled against the propagandistic memorial agenda imposed upon the Auschwitz site by Warsaw’s Stalinist regime. In 1967 and 1968 members of the International Auschwitz Committee refused cooperation with the State Museum and government authorities on account of Poland’s growing and officially sanctioned anti-Semitism. In 1979 Pope John Paul II visited Auschwitz. His presence, authority, and magnetism legitimized Polish vernacular notions of Auschwitz and, at the same time, transformed the memorial site into a stage for opposition to the regime. In the early 1990s a historian at the State Museum at Auschwitz rejected, on the basis of years of research, the estimate of 4 million dead at Auschwitz—an estimate that had been, until then, inviolable among Polish scholars and memorialists of Auschwitz. These examples, as the following chapters will relate, are illustrative of both the durability of collective memorial paradigms at Auschwitz and, at the same time, memory’s elasticity.

The transformations of memory at Auschwitz reveal that the line between history and memory, or between the “real” and “imagined” Auschwitz, was inevitably blurred. This study remains mindful of the “real” Auschwitz as a measure of the “imagined,” memorialized Auschwitz, for the distinction matters in any evaluation of the manifestations of memory at the site. At the same time, the complexity of the camp’s history and the immensity of the crimes there make any precise and universally applicable standard of representation of Auschwitz history difficult to establish—and difficult to uphold. The analysis to follow will at times be critical of the cultural or ideological inflections that led to the misrepresentation of history at the memorial site, but it does not claim to set a new, neutral standard of representation. There are also suggestions at various points in the book that Auschwitz, if permitted, could “speak for itself.” This is not a call for a site devoid of any interpretation or representation, nor does it imply that an Auschwitz simply left to decay would be more “real” or “meaningful” as a site of memory. In general, however, the landscape, artifacts, and survivors of Auschwitz have been the most effective pedagogical “tools” at the site, far surpassing in didactic effectiveness the ideological interpretations of many exhibitions or the politicized cant of many demonstrations.

None of this should suggest the existence of a simplistic dichotomy between “good,” historically accurate “commemoration” and “bad,” politically inflected “propaganda.” Nor is it a call for historical relativism. Rather, this analysis recognizes the complexities of representing the past at Auschwitz and recognizes the challenges faced when approaching Auschwitz as a historian, and especially as a historian of memory. As Saul Friedländer has emphasized in confronting the “final solution”: “The extermination of the Jews of Europe is as accessible to both representation and interpretation as any other historical event. But we are dealing with an event which tests our traditional conceptual and representational categories, an ‘event at the limits.’”⁵² Ideally, the objective historian—ever the perceptive arbiter—stands outside the subjective processes of memory, but, as Friedländer relates, “[s]ome claim to the ‘truth’ appears particularly imperative. It suggests, in other words, that there are limits to representation which should not be but can easily be transgressed. What the characteristics of such a transgression are, however, is far more intractable than our definitions have so far been able to encompass.”⁵³ In short, there is a tension between the “real” and the “represented” Auschwitz that was and remains a source of unease for both the historian and the public memorialist. As helpful as the demarcation between the “real” and the “represented” Auschwitz may be as a heuristic device, the fact remains that Polish stewards of memory were inevitably concerned with the latter, even as they were, or claimed to be, committed to the former.

Henry Rousso has related the development and mutation of an event’s collective memory to the role of these stewards—what he calls the “vectors,” or “carriers” of memory and defines as “any source that proposes a deliberate reconstruction of an event for a social purpose.”⁵⁴ “Official carriers” are those commemorative phenomena such as monuments and ceremonies that attempt to offer a “comprehensive, unitary representation of the event” being commemorated. “Organizational carriers” of memory are associations and organizations that join in a commemorative act for the purpose of gathering and maintaining a common mode of memory among the members of the groups. Media such as journalism, broadcasting, and literature are the “cultural carriers” of memory, providing what appear to be individualistic perceptions of the past—perceptions that are nonetheless the products of a diversity of memorial images. Finally, the “scholarly carriers” of memory are those sources, such as historians and museum curators, who attempt to reconstruct and interpret the events of the past.⁵⁵

Since 1945 these four vectors of memory have converged on the Auschwitz site. As the following chapters will illustrate, historians and museologists have shaped the representation of the past in their publications and documentary exhibitions, and the Polish and international media have likewise left their mark on public perceptions of the site and its history. Organizational carriers such as national and international associations of former prisoners, state institutions charged with the site’s care and supervision, as well as religious groups have all utilized the memorial space at Auschwitz for the purpose of forging a common mode of memory both within their own groups and beyond them. Not least, the official carriers of Auschwitz memory—the Polish government, its Ministry of Culture and Art, and the State Museum itself—have erected monuments, developed exhibitions, and choreographed ceremonies intended to instill and maintain a “comprehensive, unitary representation” of the events that took place at Auschwitz.

The interpretation, representation, and commemoration of what transpired at the Auschwitz camp was not the sole property of these four types of forces as they converged on the postwar site, for individuals and groups from within Poland and from beyond its borders have also brought their own memorial aspirations and agendas, adding to the site’s landscape occasional spontaneous, unchoreographed manifestations of individual and group memory. Examples of such initiatives are Roman Catholic pilgrims or Jewish individuals and groups honoring those victims neglected in the prevailing memorial paradigms at the site. They have added controversy as well as diversity to Auschwitz.

Despite the occasional presence of diverse modes of memory, one can trace the development of a “dominant memory” (that is, what Rousso calls “a collective interpretation of the past that may even come to have official status”)⁵⁶ at the State Museum and in its activities. A charge of the Polish state since its founding, the State Museum is a prime example of how memory can become institutionalized and how that institution can then utilize a prevailing mode of memory as an instrument of social and political power. It is, of course, impossible to claim the existence of a single, dominant mode of memory at a place like Auschwitz. The camp’s history has always defied generalization, the social frameworks upon which Auschwitz memory was based were diverse and at times in conflict, and the public manifestations of that memory were not static, but in flux. Nonetheless, in the period under consideration three main characteristics of collective memory emerged at the Auschwitz site. First, Poles quickly came to regard Auschwitz as a place of Polish national martyrdom. The multinational makeup of the camp’s deportees and inmates was stressed at times, but by and large the particularly Polish element of sacrifice at the camp received the greatest emphasis in the site’s exhibitions, iconography, and commemorative rituals. As early as 1947 Auschwitz had, in the Polish popular historical consciousness, become a camp primarily intended for the internment, exploitation, and extermination of the Polish political prisoner—a prisoner who was not a helpless victim but a resistance fighter, a hero, a martyr suffering and dying for some higher good, like the Polish nation, the Catholic faith, or socialism.

Second, Auschwitz was acknowledged, but usually not specified, as a place of Jewish victimization. Neither the State Museum nor the Polish government ever explicitly denied that the vast majority of victims at Auschwitz were Jews. But this fact was not emphasized; nor did it designate Auschwitz in any distinctive way. Simply put, Jews were usually included among the so-called “martyrs” of Auschwitz and regarded as citizens of Poland, the Netherlands, France, Hungary, Greece, or one of the many other countries under Nazi occupation. One has to grant that the destruction of Europe’s Jews was not yet, in the first postwar years, the distinct category of historical analysis or broad, public commemoration that it is today. But the fact remains that for decades Polish postwar culture did not treat the Shoah as the salient characteristic of Auschwitz, but relegated it instead to the status of yet another example of German barbarism. Jews were to be remembered for their suffering and death, but they were neither represented as the overwhelming majority of victims at the site nor given proper emphasis in the larger memorialization undertaken there.

Third, the Polish state instrumentalized Auschwitz as a political arena. In the processes of valorizing Polish martyrdom and de-emphasizing Jewish victimization, the Soviet-imposed communist government in Poland frequently used Auschwitz as a site for the accumulation of political currency. As members of the regime and the press sought to vindicate a prevailing ideology through the recollection of Poland’s tragic past, the Auschwitz memorial site, its exhibitions, and its public events served as a rallying point of sorts for the socioeconomic order, for staunchly anti-West German foreign policy, and, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, for vulgar anti-American, anti-Western propaganda. Although firmly grounded in the domestic and international political agendas of the Soviet Union and its satellites, the commemorative tone set at Auschwitz can also be viewed within the context of a postwar European anti-fascist consensus. And not surprisingly, those West European organizations that were most involved in commemorative activities at the Auschwitz site were often closely associated with the political parties of the West European left.

These are the main components of the dominant memorial framework at Auschwitz in the years of the Polish People’s Republic. The foundations for this framework were laid in Poland’s wartime experience and the first months after the liberation. Shifts in Poland’s political landscape, the ideological imperatives of successive regimes, developments abroad, and the growing prominence of Auschwitz as a site of international commemoration would shake that framework in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. By the late 1970s, domestic and international changes were under way that further internationalized and democratized the site as an arena of public commemoration. These changes, in combination with Pope John Paul II’s visit to the memorial site in June 1979, initiated the collapse of Poland’s framework of memory at Auschwitz, for even as the pope’s words and deeds at the site legitimized the Polish-national commemorative paradigm, they also marked the beginning of its dissolution. The analysis therefore concludes with this watershed in the postwar history of the memorial site and points, in the epilogue, to some of the debates over Auschwitz since. Controversy over the Carmelite Convent, the presence of religious symbols, the uses of the grounds and structures of the former camp complex, and “proprietorship” over the memorial site—these debates were all manifestations of the framework’s undoing after 1979 and coincided with the slow collapse of Poland’s communist regime in the 1980s.

The transformation of the memorial site has not been rapid. Auschwitz has, since the fall of communism, ceased to be a stage for state-sponsored demonstration, and although the State Museum has embarked over the past ten years on a daunting and elusive quest to give all victim groups their rightful place in the memorialization undertaken there, vestiges of the traditional framework of memory remain. The exhibitions and commemorative rituals at the site reflect, even to the present day, many of the memorial paradigms of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. In this respect, Auschwitz memory has been more durable than many expected. This study, on the other hand, emphasizes the malleability of Auschwitz memory. Just as the memory and meaning of Auschwitz are not fixed, but have remained in flux over the past fifty years, so too have the manifestations of that memory at the site been subject to shifting cultural and political currents. Emphasis on Polish martyrdom, neglect or conscious understatement of the Shoah, political exploitation of the grounds and expositions—these are controversial characteristics of the camp’s postwar landscape. The remainder of this analysis will account for these characteristics, but will also account for the variations and conversions of memory at the site. By underscoring the malleability of Auschwitz in the post-war years, it emphasizes the need to extend our investigations of memorial sites beyond mere commentaries on their landscape or exhibitions, for the sources of these physical characteristics are to be found not only in the architecture of Nazi terror, but also in the postwar conditions, debates, and decisions surrounding their creation.