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Poland and Auschwitz, 1945–1947

ON 14 JUNE 1947, some thirty thousand visitors from across Poland and abroad gathered in Oświęcim, a sleepy town of ten thousand residents on the southeastern border of Upper Silesia. It was a public event, a ceremony, and a spectacle of sorts: the occasion was the seventh anniversary of the day in 1940 when 728 Polish prisoners were brought to a former military base on the outskirts of the town, a base that would serve as a concentration camp for the next five years. But the concentration camp at Oświęcim—“Auschwitz,” as the Germans called it—would become the largest death factory in all of Europe, the site where more than a million perished at the hands of the German occupiers. And so on this June day thousands gathered to remember the dead of Auschwitz, to commemorate their legacy, and to participate in the dedication of the State Museum at Oświęcim-Brzezinka.¹

In the original camp, Auschwitz I, the day’s events opened under the banners and flags of political parties, religious groups, trade unions, and organizations of former political prisoners. The ceremonies began with religious services of various faiths, followed by the speeches of visiting dignitaries and government officials. Vice-Minister of Transportation Zygmunt Balicki, general secretary of the International Federation of Former Political Prisoners, called for international solidarity among all former prisoners in the struggle against Hitlerism. Parliamentary representative Sak, speaking in the name of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland, expressed his hope for the brotherhood of all nations, while Stanisław Dybowski, the minister of culture and art in the new Polish government, announced the creation of a Polish Council for the Protection of Monuments of Struggle and Martyrdom.

Most important, however, were the words of the prime minister and leader of the Polish Socialist Party, Józef Cyrankiewicz, himself a former political prisoner in Auschwitz. The premier recalled for his audience the extent of German barbarism both on and off the battlefield during the years of the Second World War, and to his former fellow prisoners he stated: “Those of us who remain, who remember the heinous factories of death—we are, for the Polish nation, for Europe, for the entire world . . . not only a document; we must be the conscious, organized vanguard of the struggle, so that the tragedy to which we are witnesses, of which we are living documents, is never repeated.” That struggle, according to the premier, included concrete goals, among them “the progress of states toward independence,” “reconstruction of Poland from the ruins,” and “the building of a lasting peace.”² The only salvation for the Polish nation, he claimed, and the only way out of the abyss of terror and destruction, was for the Poles to rebuild their land from the ashes of the German invasion and to struggle for a new beginning.³ The grounds of Auschwitz, according to the premier, would function both as a historical artifact and as an admonition to future generations. “The museum,” Cyrankiewicz stated, “will be not only an eternal warning and document of unbound German bestiality, but also at the same time proof of truth about man and his fight for freedom—a document arousing intensified vigilance so that genocidal powers that bring destruction to nations will never rise again.”⁴ At the conclusion of his speech, the prime minister declared the museum officially open and the crowd joined in the singing of “Rota” (Pledge), a patriotic Polish anthem from the early twentieth century.

The crowd then walked the three kilometers from Auschwitz I to Birkenau, the spacious moor that had served as the massive extermination center of the Auschwitz complex. Passing through the main gate and along the railroad siding where the infamous “selection” of deportees took place, the crowd stopped between the rubble of the gas chambers and ovens of Crematoria II and III. Wreaths were laid in memory of the victims, a cross was erected atop the ruins of one of the crematoria, and the day’s ceremonies were concluded with the singing, once again, of “Rota:”

We shall not yield our forebears’ land,

Nor see our language muted.

Our nation is Polish, and Polish our folk,

By Piasts constituted.

By cruel oppression we’ll not be swayed!

May God so lend us aid.

By the very last drop of blood in our veins,

Our souls will be secured,

Until in dust and ashes falls,

The stormwind sown by the Prussian lord.

Our every home will form a stockade.

May God so lend us aid.

We’ll not be spat on by Teutons

Nor abandon our youth to the German!

We’ll follow the call of the Golden Horn,

Under the Holy Spirit, our Hetman.

Our armed battalions shall lead the crusade.

May God so lend us aid.⁵

This day’s ceremonies were more than a nationalist commemoration of Poland’s concentration camp victims; they also provide a lens through which to view Auschwitz memory in the first years after the liberation. A new world order free of the Hitlerite menace, a museum documenting Nazi atrocities in occupied Poland, the righting of wrongs done to Poland, a vengeful patriotic anthem, and a cross erected on what is arguably the largest Jewish cemetery in the world—these are only a few examples of the public manifestations of historical consciousness at Auschwitz. The June 1947 dedicatory ceremonies were an early register of the characteristics of Auschwitz memory in the early postwar years and an early expression of the political and cultural trends that dominated the public manifestations of that memory in the decades to follow.

In this chapter I examine these trends as they contributed to the development of a collective Auschwitz memory in Poland in the first two years after the liberation. Proceeding thematically rather than chronologically, I first offer a brief discussion of the political and social context for developments at the Auschwitz site in the years 1945–47. Second, I describe and analyze events and trends in these years that communicated the history of the camp to the Polish public—events that stimulated a broad discussion of Auschwitz and its place in the history of the occupation. In the third section, I account for the development of a Polish-national commemorative idiom at Auschwitz, for by 1947 Auschwitz had become the central locus of Polish wartime martyrology. I therefore examine two formative and characteristic aspects of Auschwitz memory in the context of this idiom: the notion of “martyrdom” as applied to Auschwitz victims and the concurrent marginalization of Jewish suffering and victimization. In the course of only two years, Polish national sacrifice became the central element of Auschwitz memory, while the fate of Jews at the camp, although never explicitly denied, remained on the margins of the more comprehensive commemoration of registered Polish prisoners and those of other nationalities.

The Early Postwar Context

The Poland that rose from the ashes of the Second World War was a country much different from what any Pole would have imagined in 1939. From the arrival of Soviet troops on Polish soil in early 1944 until the communist consolidation of power in 1947, Poland was in a state of economic and demographic devastation, had a variety of parties competing for political power, and was, arguably, in a state of civil war. Already in 1943 Stalin had organized in Moscow the Union of Polish Patriots (Związek Patriotów Polskich, or ZPP), a group of exile communists led by members of the newly established Polish Workers’ Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza, or PPR). In July 1944, this group formed the core of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego, or PKWN), which was installed in Lublin and hence was known as the Lublin Committee. At the Yalta Conference of February 1945, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill had reached vague agreement on the formation of a “government of national unity” representing anti-Nazi and democratic forces in the reconstituted Poland. This was a clear victory for Stalin, for the basis of the new government would be the Lublin Committee. The Polish government in exile, based in London, was thus rendered inconsequential, and in January 1945 its underground military wing, the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, or AK), was officially disbanded. The PKWN reconstituted itself at the end of 1944 as the Provisional Government of the Polish Republic, which then became the Provisional Government of National Unity in June 1945. This body, claiming legitimacy on the basis of the Yalta agreements and Western recognition, was composed, in part, of PPR communists. It also included members of the London government-in-exile such the Polish People’s Party (PSL) leader Stanisław Mikołajczyk, who had left London for Poland in the hope of lending this government some democratic legitimacy. Mikołajczyk would be disappointed, however, for despite nominal commitment to diversity and pluralism, the Provisional Government of National Unity was a vehicle for the steady subordination of the state to communist rule. Eventually threatened with arrest, Mikołajczyk was forced to flee Poland in late 1947.

From June 1945 until its dissolution in February 1947 the provisional government’s authority rested on minimal public support. Poland had never been a bastion of leftist revolutionary politics; its proletarian classes were less developed than those in the West, and bitter memories of the 1939–41 Soviet occupation of eastern Poland remained. Indeed, for many Poles, it appeared as if the Red Army and its Moscow-trained Polish stooges had replaced the German occupier. The early months of Soviet “liberation” seemed to confirm fears of Soviet-style repression and coercion. Following the Home Army’s failed Warsaw Uprising of August–October 1944, the Lublin Committee began to organize, in cooperation with the Red Army, a new police and security apparatus. Through espionage, intimidation, and terror, these organs assisted in the consolidation of communist rule. Their tactics were directed against anti-Soviet armed insurgent groups such as the right-wing National Armed Forces, against remnants of the AK known as the Freedom and Independence Movement, and against the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The security forces and police did not, however, limit their activities to the fight against armed opposition groups. With the promulgation of a decree in January 1946, they had the freedom to punish those who had been involved in the “fascistization of political life,” and six months later, they would pursue opponents of the new order on the basis of the law “On Offenses Particularly Dangerous at the Time of the Reconstruction of the State.”⁶

The security forces were extensive and effective, and their power was especially evident in the weeks leading up to the parliamentary elections in January 1947. The provisional government had already shown itself capable of electoral manipulation during a July 1946 referendum, and in the January elections, the PPR-led “Democratic Bloc” garnered an 80 percent majority of the vote. The communist victory was, however, the result of falsification and intimidation at every level. A million voters were disqualified, thousands of others were arrested or beaten, workers were transported en masse to the polls—all for the purpose of consolidating PPR power while unsuccessfully attempting to give the appearance of a viable democratic process.

It is clear that the communists held the dominant position in Polish political life, but their takeover of Poland was neither a facile assumption of power nor the imposition of authority on a population wholly opposed to the PPR’s goals for a new society. There were, to be sure, aspects of the PPR program that appealed to various sectors of the population: for peasants, land reform; for some intellectuals, a break from grandiose and irrational nationalist traditions; for workers, the promise of dignity and fair wages. To those willing to support the authorities, the promised social order appeared to offer opportunity, stability, and at least a modicum of personal freedoms, for the regime allowed freedom of religious practice⁷ and, at least in 1945 and 1946, a relatively pluralistic press.⁸

Despite what might appear to be a straight path to Soviet-style communism in the immediate postwar period, Polish political life, as Padraic Kenney has argued, included at least a discourse of democracy.⁹ Before the onset of Polish Stalinism in 1948–49, the language of democratic politics was not yet vacuous, and it may come as a surprise to some that in the ceremonies and exhibitions at the Auschwitz memorial site, for example, representatives of the new Polish state were responding to the needs of the public as articulated by a variety of public voices. It was, as Krystyna Kersten has observed, an era of contradictions. If installing a communist regime in Poland was, as Stalin had claimed, akin to “saddling a cow,” then it is understandable that the provisional government used force and intimidation, while in other instances it exercised restraint. As Kersten notes:

A great majority was decidedly against the Communists, opposed the order established by the PPR and, at the same time, excepting the armed underground, was compelled to cooperate with the new authorities in the rebuilding of the country. In sum, that accumulation of contradictions created a very complex internal situation in the country. The fragmentary picture conveyed by the documents of that time or in memoirs gives an incomplete image, even a false one. The authorities attempted to win society over but, at the same time, burned villages and mistreated AK prisoners. The population fought against the authorities, even by terror, and simultaneously cooperated with the state. The strategy of the authorities depended on the eradication of all existing and potential centers of organized opposition. Society’s strategy, which rested upon millions of individual positions, depended on the defense of cultural values in conditions limited by reality.¹⁰

The “reality” of the immediate postwar era was grim on every level and gave rise to the paradoxical situation that Kersten describes. Exacerbating the political chaos and oppression were enormous economic and social problems. Nearly 20 percent of the population was lost in the war, depriving Polish society of the energy and talent of youth crucial to the rebuilding effort. Poland’s demographic upheaval was also the result of massive population movements, for the Yalta and Potsdam agreements shifted the country’s borders to the west, compensating Poland for losses in the east with territory at Germany’s expense. This resulted in the flight or expulsion of 3.5 million Germans from Poland. Two million Poles returning from slave labor or camps, as well as refugees expelled from formerly Polish territory annexed to the Soviet Union, replaced them.¹¹ Ironically, one goal of many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Polish nationalists became a reality: by 1947 Poland was a homogenous and overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country. The Germans and their accomplices killed nearly 3 million Polish Jews; the Soviets took the Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Belorussians for their own; and the Poles expelled the Germans: the sum of these actions was an irreplaceable cultural loss for the postwar generation.

Population loss, economic deprivation, and political chaos had, of course, devastating psychological effects, not the least of which was a wartime legacy that appeared to be the result of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. France and Britain had declared war against Germany in defense of Poland’s independence; Poland, although defeated at home, continued to fight around the world alongside the victorious Allies, only to be abandoned to the Soviet Union as a recalcitrant member of its new postwar consortium of client states. For this, there seemed to be few clear moral explanations. The Soviet Union’s tremendous wartime sacrifice resulted in the defeat of Nazism and a new super-power status. Britain and the United States could be assured that their dead had fallen in defense of freedom and democracy. Even the Germans could blame their wartime devastation on leaders who had led them astray. In Poland, none of these arguments applied or offered any consolation. Poles fought the war, opposed the Nazis on all fronts, and emerged, in a sense, victorious, but they could not reap the rewards that their honor seemed due.¹² This sense of irreparable, unjust, and, for many, inexplicable loss helps to explain the insistent and omnipresent commemoration of Poland’s fallen in the early postwar years. To what end the sacrifice? The emerging culture of martyrology could ameliorate the pain of this question, if only in small measure and even if it failed to provide a satisfactory answer.

In mourning the nation’s losses, Poland’s commemorative culture also had to come to terms with the loss of millions of Jews on Polish lands. In the aftermath of the war, relations between Poles and their Jewish fellow citizens were strained at best. At worst, a residual and reawakened anti-Semitism resulted in pogroms and murder, and it stands as one of the tragic ironies of the Polish situation that anti-Semitism would take this form in the country that suffered most under Nazi regime.

Of the few Jews remaining in Poland or returning after the war,¹³ a sizable percentage attempted to reorganize themselves as a legitimate national minority with religious, educational, and cultural institutions. Many of these Jews, believing they would be secure under a socialist or communist government, were even optimistic about the future.¹⁴ Conditions in Poland, however, were not as accommodating as they had perhaps anticipated, for a wave of attacks against Jews swept across the country in the years 1945–47. In 1945 alone, 355 Jews were killed in Poland, and in the July 1946 Kielce pogrom, 41 Jews were killed and 59 wounded.¹⁵ By summer 1947 nearly 1,500 Jews had died as the result of violent attacks, although it is unclear what percentage of them were murdered because they were Jews.¹⁶ Not surprisingly, many surviving Jews emigrated to western Europe, the United States, or Palestine.

Part—but only part—of the explanation for the violence lies in a history of anti-Semitism in Polish culture and society that reached its apex in the years just prior to the war. In the words of one contemporary commentator, the national tradition of anti-Semitism “continues in Poland as a residual attitude, as a habit, and as a reflex.”¹⁷ Moreover, the prevailing stereotype of the żydokomuna, or Jewish-inspired communist conspiracy, fueled anti-Semitism and incited violence. In Poland, as in most other European countries, many associated the communist movement with Jewish conspiracy. In addition, popular perceptions alleged that Jews had enthusiastically welcomed and served in the administration of the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in 1939,¹⁸ suggesting not only pro-communist sympathies, but also a traitorous anti-Polish attitude. Because of these assumptions and stereotypes, many in early post-war Poland identified Jews with the unpopular Soviet-installed provisional government and especially its security forces.¹⁹ As Władysław Bartoszewski, a member of the wartime Council for Aid to the Jews, or “Żegota,” explained:

After the Second World War, the stereotype of the communist Jew—advanced by the pre-war parties and right-wing political groups, and also to a certain extent by Church circles—was unexpectedly and spectacularly reinforced by the public activity of those Jewish communists who played an important role in the security and propaganda apparatus, at a time when the majority of Polish society was inclined to see this activity as pursued in the direct interests of the USSR. There was a dangerous, and morally absolutely unacceptable tendency to blame the Jews in Poland en masse for the complete suppression of human rights by the new authorities and for the misfortune of the nation which felt it had lost its independence, despite nominally winning the war against Germany as one of the Allies. It should be added that similar generalisations regarding members of the security apparatus who were not Jewish were notable for their absence.²⁰

To immediately link a helpless Jew to the communist takeover in Poland was, of course, absurd, but many supported this view with the common assumption that a disproportionately large percentage of the new governmental elite in Warsaw was of Jewish origin, as were many prewar Polish communists and socialists.²¹ In the words of Michael Steinlauf, the notion of the żydokomuna was “[t]he product of labyrinthine interaction between systems of myth and stereotype on one hand and historical experience on the other.”²²

There were also more immediate and material causes for renewed discrimination against Jews. According to several scholars, the reclamation of former Jewish property was central to the problem.²³ After the war thousands of Jews returned to their homes from refuge in the Soviet Union or from the camps. Much of their property and even many of their synagogues had been appropriated by Gentile Poles who assumed that they would never return. In his journalistic memoir, S. L. Shneiderman rather melodramatically described the dilemma faced when Jews began to return from the camps and abroad:

They were now returning to look for what was left of their homes or their relatives. But when a Polish peddler hands a Jew a loaf of bread or a bowl of soup, he wonders whence this Jew has come. He was persuaded that he would never again see a Jew. Many of these street peddlers have furnished their homes with the belongings of murdered Jews; some are living in Jewish apartments; others have inherited the workshops of Jewish tailors or shoemakers. Looking at the returning Jews, they wonder whether among their number there is not some relative of the Jews whose goods they had appropriated. In the smaller towns, where the inhabitants do not feel the hand of authority as directly as do those who live in the capital, such newly returned Jews have often been murdered.²⁴

Postwar anti-Semitism was also rooted in a factor unique to the Polish situation: unlike the situation in other countries under German rule, where anti-Semitism was generally identified with fascist quisling governments, anti-Semitism in Poland was not wholly discredited by the experience of the occupation. Writing in the journal Odrodzenie, Kazimierz Wyka observed in 1945:

Why has the anti-Semitism of the educated classes, although at present it has no real basis, become tied with reaction in so many cases? Reaction alone cannot explain this. The core of the problem is elsewhere: it lies in the fact that Poland had no Quisling. Please do not imagine that I am trying to be paradoxical. Nevertheless, the tragic paradox of the present situation is that Poland is now the only country in Europe where anti-Semitism is still a factor and is inspiring murders. Ours is the country where the Jews were most thoroughly exterminated and where the resistance against the Germans during the occupation was the strongest, and yet it is here that Hitlerism has left its cuckoo egg. . . . If Polish anti-Semitism had comprised itself as collaborationist, it would later have been destroyed or at least unmasked. But since it never had a Quisling character, it retained its position and is still considered a mark of patriotism.²⁵

Wyka’s argument is perhaps a bit simplistic, but it remains worthy of consideration as one of many reasons for the persistence of anti-Semitism in these years. There were certainly collaborators in occupied Poland, but there was no collaborationist government executing Nazi policy toward Jews. This factor is not decisive in explaining the presence of anti-Semitism in early postwar Poland, but it does invite one to speculate on the forms Polish anti-Semitism might have taken had it been identified with a discredited quisling regime.

Regardless, it is clear that in the first postwar years Poles were able to evade a thorough confrontation with the problem of anti-Semitism. Wartime devastation, reconstruction, demographic upheaval, and political conflict allowed for and even encouraged a retreat from the “Jewish question.” It also encouraged Poles to face the challenge of coming to terms with their “own” losses in the Second World War and turn to the cultivation of a Polish-national martyrological idiom—an idiom that came to center on the history and commemoration of Auschwitz. As Poles learned more about the camp, its place in the German occupation, and the crimes perpetrated there, Auschwitz quickly emerged as the most compelling symbol of Polish martyrdom.

Auschwitz in the Public View

Any consideration of Auschwitz and its place in Poland’s early postwar commemorative culture must come to terms with the presentation of the camp’s history to the Polish public, for the ways of conveying that history—the postwar vectors of Auschwitz memory—helped to define its meaning in the years to come. The nature of the crimes, the identity of both perpetrators and victims, and the significance of the crimes for postwar Poland were all issues open to public discussion as governmental institutions, the press, and former prisoners related the history of the camp to the public at large. Auschwitz was well known to the Polish population even during the occupation, as word of the brutal conditions in the camp spread via the channels of underground resistance²⁶ and reports of prisoners who had been released.²⁷ Even if Auschwitz had a certain symbolic status prior to the liberation, in the first months after the war its history and meaning were far from clear, as the Polish public was confronted with an array of inconsistent evidence and speculative reports on the crimes committed there.

The attempt to ascertain the number of victims at Auschwitz and other camps illustrates the confusion. On the day of Germany’s unconditional surrender a Red Army publication announced that 4 million had died at Auschwitz, a figure based on the findings of the Soviet investigative commission that had begun its work after liberating the camp.²⁸ In late summer 1945 the Warsaw daily Życie Warszawy, citing a report by the French occupation authorities in Germany, claimed that a total of 26 million died in German camps during the war, with 12,000–14,000 murdered daily in Dachau alone²⁹—a fanciful figure because Dachau did not function as an extermination center. A year later, the British prosecuting attorney at the Nürnberg Trials set the total number of dead in camps across Europe at 12 million.³⁰ In May 1945 a report in Życie Warszawy stated that 5 million had been murdered in Auschwitz,³¹ and in January 1946 a Nürnberg witness claimed that 4 million Jews alone had perished in Auschwitz.³² A month later a report in Gazeta Ludowa, based on the estimates of the American Joint Distribution Committee for the Aid of Jews, stated that a total of 4.4 million Jews from across Europe had been murdered in all the camps.³³ The lack of consensus undoubtedly confused many Poles, but reports such as these left no doubt that the German atrocities at Auschwitz were of an unimaginable magnitude.

Sensational as reports on the number of victims at Nazi camps may have been, they were only part of the wave of “publicity” after the liberation in January 1945. In the following weeks reports and survivor testimonies appeared in the press and in book form,³⁴ while the Soviet forensic commission began its highly publicized investigations at the Auschwitz site on 4 February.³⁵ The work of this group was augmented by the investigations of other organizations, each with its own research agenda. The Polish Institute of National Remembrance, committed to gathering information on German crimes “lest the heroics of the Red Army be lost,”³⁶ was the initiative of the newly formed Ministry of Education. The Central Committee of Jews in Poland³⁷ formed a subsidiary Jewish Historical Documentary Commission to study the fate of Jews in the camps and to determine their countries of origin.³⁸ In addition, local courts across Poland collected evidence related to German crimes.

For most Poles, however, the main source for information about Auschwitz was the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland (Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce), an institution called into force by the provisional government in early 1945.³⁹ The commission was the main agency for the collection and analysis of evidence related to Nazi crimes on Polish territory, both in camps and at large. The Central Commission also had several subsidiary groups, most notably the Kraków-based Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes at Auschwitz. This subsidiary commission issued the first report on crimes at Auschwitz, and its findings hit the press on the same day as news of the German surrender. The report not only included descriptions of the gassing and crematory processes, but based on research of killing capacity, interviews with survivors, and the testimony of the former commandant Rudolf Höss, it also estimated that 4 million citizens of Poland, the Soviet Union, France, Yugoslavia, and other nations had been murdered at Auschwitz.⁴⁰

The estimate of 4 million dead was, as noted in the introduction, inviolable for Polish and many Israeli scholars, and for decades it remained inscribed in a variety contexts at the Auschwitz site. At the same time, according to the Auschwitz historian Andrzej Strzelecki, the figure took on a symbolic value that hindered further attempts to assess accurately the number of dead.⁴¹ Although this was certainly the case, the number, while inaccurate and based on insufficient research, should not be regarded as a conscious attempt in 1945 to inflate the number of dead for the “polonization,” “dejudaization,” or “internationalization” of Auschwitz and its memory. There is simply not sufficient evidence from these early years to support the claim of conscious manipulation of the figures.

It is also worth noting in this context that just as the number of 4 million Auschwitz victims was for decades considered immutable, so too was the figure of 6 million Polish citizens (3 million “Poles” and 3 million “Polish Jews”) killed during World War II. The number was set already in January 1947 and has remained a constant in postwar Polish scholarship and discourse. While the number of Polish Jews killed is still believed to be around 3 million, recent research has reduced the number of ethnic Poles killed and also has accounted for losses among members of other minorities who were citizens of the interwar Polish Republic.⁴²

Inflated figures such as these can, of course, invite a simplistic and undifferentiated representation of wartime history, whether at Auschwitz or in general. This was especially the case with regard to the figure of 4 million dead at Auschwitz; Polish literature on the subject insufficiently demonstrated or even tended to minimize the Jewish tragedy at the camp.⁴³ Eager to portray themselves and their country as having suffered the most under German occupation and seeing in the horrific extent of crimes at Auschwitz a clear illustration of the German security threat in the early postwar years, Poles were not inclined to offer conservative estimates of the number of victims at Auschwitz. Nor were they inclined to designate Jews as a separate category of victim that had suffered differently than other victim groups. Instead, Jews were generally included simply as citizens of their countries of origin. Thus, just as the number of Polish citizens who died in the war was typically set at approximately 6 million, the fact that half were Jews was often neglected. Similarly, the number of Auschwitz dead was taken to be approximately 4 million, but the precise number of Jewish dead or the proportion of Jews among those dead often remained unspecified, leading to the erroneous assumption that the Nazis subjected Polish Jews, Polish Gentiles, and other prisoners to equal treatment.

The research of the Central Commission and its Auschwitz branch proceeded slowly. The results of its research were provisional and the numerical estimates of victims certainly inaccurate, but in 1946 the group published a more comprehensive preliminary account of its findings. Entitled German Crimes in Poland, the volume is significant for a number of reasons. First, it classified German camps in Poland into four groups: Umsiedlungslager (resettlement camps), Arbeitslager (labor camps), Vernichtungslager (extermination camps) and Konzentrationslager (concentration camps). According to the report, only four extermination camps existed in Poland: Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, and the latter three were used exclusively for the extermination of Jews and Gypsies. Auschwitz-Birkenau, Stutthof, and Maidanek were classified as Konzentrationslager with extermination facilities attached.⁴⁴ Moreover, the Auschwitz complex was a special case, for it consisted of forty sub-camps and three major camps. The Auschwitz complex thus served as concentration camp, forced labor camp, and extermination center combined. This cast doubt upon the prevailing belief that Auschwitz was the largest and most “efficient” extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Europe, and made it all the more difficult to categorize Auschwitz and to arrive at a fixed and accurate understanding of what kind of camp it was, who its victims were, and how the camp was to be remembered and memorialized. Moreover, the report’s classification of Auschwitz as a concentration camp with auxiliary extermination facilities may have strengthened the perception among many Poles that it was a camp primarily intended for Polish political prisoners and Soviet POWs. The commission’s report was brief, vague, and left many questions unanswered. But it was the first published exposition of the Auschwitz crime which, unlike memoirs and newspaper accounts, relied on legal testimony and documentary evidence. As such, the report lent the ongoing investigation of Nazi crimes a degree of verifiable authenticity and, most importantly, offered the public a glimpse into the nature and extent of the horror of the camp.

Like the research and reports of organizations like the Central Commission, trials of Nazi criminals in Poland and Germany were also an effective source of information about Auschwitz and helped to shape its meaning in the early postwar period. The British trial of Joseph Kramer, Höss’s adjutant and later commandant of Birkenau, was held in the north German town of Lüneburg, far from Poland. The Polish press nonetheless covered the trial, and it provided a certain amount of information about the life and death of prisoners in the camp.⁴⁵ Likewise, the proceedings of the International High Tribunal at Nürnberg received extensive press coverage. The report of the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland may have been the most authoritative source of information on crimes at Auschwitz, but Nürnberg, a sensational event of international proportions, received far greater attention in the Polish press than did the Commission’s findings. Thus, shocking headlines such as “Auschwitz: A Fate Worse than Death,” witnesses’ descriptions of children burned alive, and the testimony of Rudolf Höss, in which he confessed to supervising the murder of 3 million deportees at Auschwitz,⁴⁶ would remain fixed in Polish memory for decades.

Höss’s own trial, held in Warsaw in the spring of 1947, was one of the greatest media events in early postwar Poland, and probably more than any other event focused the public’s attention on Auschwitz. As the commandant responsible for the construction and early expansion of the Auschwitz complex, Höss was regarded as the personification of Nazi bestiality in occupied Poland. At Nürnberg, the former commandant had been exceptionally forthcoming and frank about his own role at Auschwitz and, for many Poles, took on the role of the prime executor of Hitlerite enslavement and extermination policy. It was only fitting, then, that he be extradited to Poland, tried, and executed in the country where he committed the worst of his crimes. Moreover, Poland saw itself as bearing a special responsibility to the rest of the world: the nation was the arbiter of judgment not only on Höss, but on the system he represented and had helped to create. As Tadeusz Cyprian, one of Höss’s prosecutors, wrote in March 1947: “[T]he court that strips bare the motives of their [the Nazis’] actions with the merciless and cold approach of a surgeon, which penetrates the entire structure of the system in which they were raised or they themselves created—such a court fulfills the postulate of historical justice, for the court itself writes the history of the crime.”⁴⁷ Indeed, the Höss trial was both a chronicle and interpretation of Auschwitz crimes, and the proceedings assumed spectacular proportions. Throughout March of 1947, full-page newspaper reports of the trial proceedings were the order of the day, reports that bombarded the reader with sensational headlines such as “Rudolf Höss—Murderer of 4 Million—Stands before the Polish Court,” “Testimonial Proof of the Crimes of Rudolf Höss—Freezing to Death of POWs,” “Fields Fertilized With Human Ash—Entire Transports Perished in the Crematoria in Five Hours,” or “2,850,000 Gassed in Auschwitz.”⁴⁸

The Höss trial, extensive media coverage, and reports of the government’s forensic commission were the primary means of conveying the Auschwitz story to the Polish public in the first years after the liberation. They informed, interpreted, and directed Poland’s attention to Auschwitz as the salient example of German wartime brutality. There remained, however, room for further definition of the significance of Auschwitz in postwar Poland. Nationalist traditions, the pull of political expediency, and the development of a Polish “martyrological consciousness” would place Auschwitz at the center of the country’s commemoration of the occupation.

Toward a Martyrological Idiom

Władysław T. Bartoszewski has succinctly described why Poles and Jews have often been at odds over the meaning of Auschwitz. For Jews, the camp has become synonymous with the Shoah, a metonym for the extermination process that reached its horrifying conclusion there. It is therefore a locus of Jewish historical identity around the world. “In the collective memory of the Poles,” however, “Auschwitz is primarily the camp set up to destroy the most prominent elements of the Polish nation.”⁴⁹ Bartoszewski’s insight points to the core of the Polish-Jewish debate over Auschwitz: the extent to which it is a memorial to the Nazi extermination of European Jews and the extent to which it is a memorial to Polish political prisoners. More importantly, it points to a Polish perception of Auschwitz that grew in the first years after the liberation—the perception that Auschwitz was to be remembered primarily as a place of Polish national suffering and sacrifice.

The reasons why Auschwitz became such an important element of Polish postwar identity are clear: Auschwitz I initially interned Polish political prisoners and Soviet prisoners of war, and the complex was certainly the largest single execution site for the prewar Polish intelligentsia, civic leaders, those who resisted the Nazi occupation, and tens of thousands of ordinary Poles. Yet Auschwitz was also an international camp that incarcerated inmates from every European country. The Polish press and Polish authorities readily acknowledged this in the first years after the war, and there were clear attempts, both in the press and in early plans for the Auschwitz museum, to make the former camp a locus of international remembrance. But despite references in speeches and official documents to the diversity of victims, the public discourse surrounding the camp and its memory increasingly emphasized the memorialization of a specifically Polish martyrdom at the hands of German invaders. Auschwitz, wrote one columnist just prior to the dedication of the State Museum, was “the mass grave of the greatest sons of the fatherland.”⁵⁰

The term “martyrdom,” a constituent element of Poland’s postwar commemorative vocabulary, is a useful indicator of Polish considerations of Auschwitz and the place of the camp in the country’s culture. “Martyrs,” “martyrdom,” and “martyrology” were consistently used to describe Auschwitz victims, their fate, and their memory. Designating the victims of Nazi persecution “martyrs” was not a practice unique to Poland, but was common in other cultures in the early postwar years. For Poles, however, the specifically Polish and Christian overtones in these terms—natural to their traditional Roman Catholic discourse—were obvious, and lent the Auschwitz inmate a quality of virtue and sacrifice for a higher good, such as patriotism or socialism. Polish prisoners or “martyrs” at Auschwitz were not simply suffering, but suffering and dying because of their Catholic faith, their political convictions, or their love of the fatherland. There were, of course, tens of thousands of Poles condemned to Auschwitz who were neither soldiers, resistance fighters, members of the intelligentsia, nor in any way a threat to the Nazi occupation regime. In the broad outlines of the Polish commemorative mantra, however, they, too, were included in the heroic martyrs’ narrative simply by virtue of being Polish. Jews and Gypsies, representing the overwhelming majority of victims at Auschwitz, were generally not dying in the service of any higher belief or cause, but were victims of genocide. Thus, to designate the Auschwitz victim as a “martyr” was, depending on one’s perspective, either broadly inclusive, or ahistorically exclusive. In any case, to designate all Polish and non-Polish victims as “martyrs” was to keep Auschwitz in a conventional trope of nineteenth-century romantic nationalism and to undermine the historical uniqueness of the camp and the diversity of experience there.

The origins of Poland’s martyrological culture are found in nineteenth-century Polish nationalist thought. After Poland’s partitions (1772, 1793, and 1795) by Prussia, Russia, and Austria, it disappeared from the map of Europe, living on as a nation only in the minds of its patriots. In the course of and following the 1830 November Uprising, there emerged in Poland what Brian Porter has labeled a “rhetorical framework” that “gave Polish intellectuals a vocabulary with which to talk about their nation as they tried to cope with the failure of 1830.” “The struggle for Poland,” Porter argues, “already joined with the welfare of humanity, was further justified through use of a heterodox religious terminology: the quest for independence became a divine imperative and Poland became the ‘Christ of Nations.’”⁵¹ Thus, nationally minded philosophers and poets, many in exile, successfully cultivated and propagated a mystical doctrine of Polish sacrifice and messianism. This approach to and justification of the Polish national cause motivated Polish patriots through much of the nineteenth century and was effectively harnessed in the twentieth during the crisis of World War II and the years immediately thereafter. God may not have prevented Poland’s defeat, but there was a divine purpose in her demise: a Christlike historical mission to redeem the nations of Europe through suffering and example. Once resurrected, the Polish nation-state would be a beacon of tolerance, freedom, and political morality.⁵² In the words of Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s most revered romantic poet: “For the Polish Nation did not die. Its body lieth in the grave, but its spirit has descended into the abyss, that is into the private lives of people who suffer slavery in their country . . . But on the third day the soul shall return again to the body, and the Nation shall arise, and free all the peoples of Europe from slavery.”⁵³ For many in Poland’s wartime generation, this messianic vision of the nation’s destiny became an inspirational myth, and the German occupation provided the perfect example of righteous suffering—whether at the front in 1939, in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, or in Auschwitz—at the hands of a foreign invader.

In the years between 1939 and 1945 Poland lost nearly 20 percent of its prewar citizens (more than half of whom were Jews who perished in the Shoah), and 2 million were sent to the Reich for labor. Between September 1939 and February 1940, more than two hundred thousand Poles were forcibly expelled from the annexed Warthegau region, and in the first months of the occupation more than fifty thousand Poles were killed. There were, to be sure, Poles who collaborated with the Nazi regime—with its bureaucracy, military, and agencies of terror and destruction—and the regime certainly inspired collaborationist behavior on an individual basis. The German occupiers were not, however, interested in establishing a collaborationist government, as in France, or a collaborationist administration, as in the Netherlands. Instead, they colonized and enslaved the Polish lands, decimating the country’s infrastructure and human resources. More than 38 percent of physicians, 28 percent of university and college professors, 56 percent of lawyers, and 27 percent of Catholic priests did not survive the occupation.⁵⁴

Despite this destruction, the Germans met fierce resistance. Poland had the most extensive underground network and army in Nazi-occupied Europe, and the Germans did not hesitate to use collective reprisals in retaliation for acts of resistance. For good reason, Poles have commemorated and mourned these tragic years in the history of their country, years that seemed to confirm the romantic perception of Poland as the eternal victim of injustice and exploitation. Likewise, the efforts of underground resistance movements were evidence of a redemptive tradition of Polish sacrifice for a higher good.

Poland’s responsibility to the world did not end, however, in 1945, for it also had a postwar mission: to investigate and prosecute Germany’s crimes, to cultivate and maintain the memory of the occupation, and to be a beacon of warning, alerting other nations to the dangers of Hitlerite fascism and racism. Auschwitz and its history had, in this respect, a tremendous commemorative value, and were symbolic of the suffering of Poles and their responsibility to future generations. In the words of the Polish premier Cyrankiewicz on the occasion of the State Museum’s dedication:

One of the concrete manifestations of that battle [against the danger of a new Auschwitz] will be the museum that we open today in Oświęcim, not for reminiscences but as a warning and demonstration to the entire world that the tragedy of millions murdered in the concentration camps must not vanish into thin air with the smoke of crematoria chimneys. For all those who survived this great tragedy, may the museum in Oświęcim become the great battle cry “Never again Auschwitz!”⁵⁵

Recognizing the importance of commemorating the occupation on a variety of levels, the provisional government had established, even prior to the German capitulation, a “Department of Museums and Monuments of Polish Martyrology” within the Ministry of Culture and Art.⁵⁶ As the state authority responsible for the creation and maintenance of sites of commemoration, the department developed and publicized the terms by which Polish national martyrdom was to be understood. Registered in various contexts, these terms colored the discussions surrounding the genesis of the State Museum at Auschwitz as well as early exhibits at the memorial site.

One of the department’s early position papers pointed to two problematic, even contradictory currents in Polish memory of the war years. “On the one hand,” it stated, “the war experience was so strong and so deep a violation of Polish society that for many people it remained the dominant element of postwar life.” At the same time, by contrast, there was “a weariness of the tragic theme in society and a desire to retreat from it in the hope for a life free and undisturbed by the horror.” Given such symptoms of war-weariness and psychological retreat, the department deemed it necessary to “regulate the resurrection of the past against the background of the new current and . . . clarify the methods of commemoration of the history of the Poles in the years 1939–1945.” These methods were to take two separate, yet parallel, paths: the erection of artistic monuments and shrines of commemoration (a grass roots initiative that had begun during the war) and the documentation of history, primarily through the organization and administration of museums of Polish martyrology such as the one in Oświęcim. Noting the impossibility of commemorating each individual wartime tragedy (“because given the range of German crimes we would have to create out of Poland a land of cemeteries”), the position paper maintained that documentary commemoration in the form of museums, and artistic commemoration in the form of monuments should be limited to the actual sites of mass crimes.⁵⁷

Although public remembrance of wartime suffering may have come naturally to Poles, it is instructive that this document urged caution and restraint. Commemoration of suffering and sacrifice may have been a reflex response for some; others, however, may have experienced a certain aversion to the memory of the occupation in the hope of returning, as one publicist stated already in March 1945, to a “psychological balance.”⁵⁸ It was therefore incumbent on custodians of memory not only to cultivate, but also to limit and direct Poland’s commemoration of the war years.

The document’s reference to the need to “regulate the resurrection of the past against the background of the new current” refers to the need to bring Poland’s postwar commemorative culture into line with the regime’s current political goals. Martyrology, the paper made clear, was concerned not only with death, but also with life, or, more specifically, with the emancipation of those suffering among the living. An awareness of the victory gained, and commemoration with a view to the future would lead Poland on the path of progress and social emancipation. “Poland,” the document stated succinctly, “will not be the land of the martyred dead. Poland will be the land of the living.”⁵⁹

The new Polish state was clear in delineating a mode of remembrance that would accommodate both national commemorative traditions and the political exigencies of the present. Polish wartime martyrdom and its commemoration, the position paper stated, incorporated two elements: the criminal acts of the Germans and, conversely, the Poles’ suffering and struggle, which were not in vain and did not result in the defeat of the Polish nation. Martyrdom, this document noted, grew out of the “contact and interaction of the Hitlerite psyche with the Polish psyche.” “The German psyche,” it stated,

was established on unusually fertile soil from which arose the new German religion: Hitlerite racism. . . . And thus in the years of occupation the Germanic “master race” declared war on the Polish “slave race,” the purpose of which was the extermination of our nation. Yet, the nation of the “enslaved” began to defend itself, answering aggression with aggression. The nation of the “enslaved,” unable to reconcile itself to the yoke of bondage, thus called itself to battle. The “master race,” unable to tolerate opposition, further tightened the noose of terror. In the course of the years the struggle became increasingly obstinate, and the implacable consequences of its growth were, first of all, the consequence of the new German religion: murder of several million people; the second consequence was the psychic posture of the Poles: the fight for freedom at the cost of one’s own blood.⁶⁰

Racist German brutality and heroic Polish virtue were common to the Polish understanding of the wartime experience, and these nationalistic and dualistic categories proposed a politically useful and culturally accessible way of recalling the past. They offered Poles an identity based in common suffering, left room for the sacrificial and messianic traditions in Polish commemorative culture, and at the same time provided a model of national solidarity that could be projected onto the challenges of reconstructing the Polish state and building socialism. Not least, they provided a clear justification for Poland’s expansion westward at the expense of a depraved and vanquished Germany. In sum, it was possible to cultivate this notion of martyrdom by combining both national tradition and current political goals.

Despite its appeal and effectiveness, this Polish-national martyrological paradigm was limiting, because in the years to follow, it was difficult to reconcile with the element of Auschwitz history that would define the site in the collective memory of most of the world: the Shoah. Although the mass extermination of Jews was not denied in the public presentation of Auschwitz in the early postwar years, Jewish genocide was seldom upheld as a unique phenomenon. Instead, the paradigm either marginalized the mass murder of Jews or, as was often the case, implied that Poles had shared in that fate, not only as the first victims of Nazi aggression and occupation, but also as certain victims of Nazi extermination policy in the future. Nazi policy in Poland was the basis for this perception, especially during the first two years of the occupation. Jews remained in Poland, but the Nazis deported Poles by the hundreds of thousands to Germany for slave labor; Jews had their own governmental institutions or councils, subject as they were to the Nazis, but Poles had no political or cultural representation; Jews were clearly the victims of Nazi violence and murder, but Poles were also randomly and systematically rounded up, incarcerated, and tortured as political prisoners.⁶¹

Polish historians and publicists also pointed to evidence suggesting that Poles, in the course of time, would have been marked for extermination as well. Citing a stenograph of a November 1942 speech by Himmler, representatives of a district commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland concluded at a June 1946 meeting that the Nazi invaders had, in fact, planned for the mass extermination of Poles. The expulsion of Polish peasants from the Zamość region in late 1942 and early 1943, their report stated, was only a preliminary step leading to the goal of mass extermination for the purpose of providing more Lebensraum (living space) for the German people.⁶² Describing the goals of Nazi ideology, the 1946 report of the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland stated: “It aimed at the wholesale exploitation of the forces of the conquered nations for the benefit of Germany, and afterwards at their extirpation. The Jews were to be completely extirpated before the end of the war; the Poles were intended to do slave labor for the Germans before sharing their fate.”⁶³ Similarly, the report concluded that “the camps in Poland were one of the principal instruments for achieving the criminal aims of Himmler, Greiser and Frank: the complete extermination of the Poles after a short period of exploitation.”⁶⁴

Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz echoed this theme in his testimony at the Höss trial. According to the Polish premier, the German invaders had undertaken “an unmerciful, nihilistic plan to exterminate nations, especially Slavic nations, and first and foremost the Polish nation, which was to follow the praeludium of eradicating the Jewish nation.”⁶⁵ And at the April 1945 ceremonies commemorating the second anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Minister of Education Skrzeszewski reminded his audience that “not only Jews had to pass through the death factories, but also a great number of our nation and other nations. The unleashing through Hitlerism of anti-Semitism and the consequent eradication of 3,200,000 Jews in Poland had in view only the invitation to further victims and beyond that the liquidation of those easily determined victims: we and the Jews.”⁶⁶ Or, in the words of one publicist, “The Germans prepared for Jews and Poles a common fate on Polish soil. The differences consisted only in time.” This is why, according to the author, Jews and Poles were brothers in blood and defense in “struggle for your freedom and ours.”⁶⁷

There was some validity to speculations and fears that the Nazis had been planning to annihilate the Poles. On 1 May 1942, Artur Greiser, Gauleiter of the Wartheland, proposed the “special treatment” of thirty-five thousand tubercular Poles. In December of that year, Dr. Wilhelm Hagen, from Warsaw’s Nazi administration, claimed in a letter to Hitler that there were secret discussions about the extermination of one-third of some two hundred thousand Poles to be resettled in the General Government, the central region of occupied Poland under the authority of Hans Frank.⁶⁸ Raul Hilberg, although in no way equating the genocide of Jews with the treatment of other victim groups, has nonetheless noted that “[t]he Germans . . . did not draw the line with the destruction of Jewry. They attacked still other victims, some of whom were thought to be like Jews, some of whom were quite unlike Jews, and some of whom were Germans. The Nazi destruction process was, in short, not aimed at institutions; it was targeted at people. The Jews were only the first victims of the German bureaucracy; they were only the first caught in its path.”⁶⁹ Polish fears of becoming the “next victims” were real, and there is evidence to suggest that even if the course of events during the occupation did not appear to justify these fears, leading Nazis did consider the possibility of undertaking mass killings of Poles.⁷⁰ At Auschwitz approximately ten thousand unregistered Polish deportees were murdered, and one hundred thirty-seven thousand registered Poles were subjected to enslavement, torture, starvation, and mass execution. Moreover, Poles had only a 50 percent chance of survival at Auschwitz.

The validity of this claim notwithstanding, the fact remains that Poles were never subjected to a systematic and comprehensive policy of genocide, and to equate the German treatment of Poles with the treatment of Jews was an oversimplification and distortion of the historical record. Nonetheless, the notion of Jews and Poles subjected to a common fate—whether under the occupation as a whole or in the Auschwitz camp—remained an enduring myth that could, in subsequent decades, be politically exploited in a variety of ways, especially during the so-called “anti-Zionist” campaign of the late 1960s.⁷¹

In the immediate postwar years, however, it was the designation of the occupation as characteristically German that offered the most political capital in the context of the Polish martyrological paradigm. The reader will recall references to the “Hitlerite” and “German” psyche in the position paper of the Department of Museums and Monuments of Polish Martyrology. It was the “German religion” of “Hitlerite racism” and the Polish response to it that was at the source of Polish martyrdom and its commemoration. Likewise, Auschwitz was a distinctively German crime, and not a “war crime” or crime of ideology. In the early postwar period, the Polish press was filled with the vague terms “Hitlerite” and “Hitlerism.” Government officials or Polish journalists much less frequently used the terms “fascist” or “National Socialist” to describe the invaders. There were fascists and Nazi sympathizers in Poland prior to and during the war, and to label the SS and occupation authorities as such would blur the all-important national distinctions between German and Pole. To put it another way, a crime motivated by ideology rather than by nationality was more difficult to label as specifically German. Moreover, to label the Germans as “National Socialists” would perhaps tarnish the popular appeal of patriotic sentiment and “socialism”—two themes that the early postwar government was eager to cultivate among the Polish population. Finally, to designate Auschwitz and other death factories in Poland as “war crimes” would undermine the specific and singularly Polish element of these camps and would place their horrors within the larger context of European conflict. It is therefore hardly surprising that the Polish press and representatives of the new regime presented the Auschwitz crime as uniquely German, as a crime typical of that nation, and as a crime inflicted by evil personified upon the martyr-country.

Emphasizing the German menace was one way for Poles to articulate their common suffering and common cause, and this served the political exigencies of the fledgling Warsaw government. The threat was not a temporary, exceptional phenomenon, but an ever-present danger in a long historical continuum of Teutonic aggression toward the Slavs and, more specifically, of German aggression toward the Poles. This was, for example, the theme of a 1946 Warsaw exhibition on German crimes, the purpose of which was “to show that the Hitlerite crimes in Poland do not constitute an abstract episode in German history, but are a culminating point—the crowning of eternal German annexationism in the East.”⁷² By recalling German crimes and emphasizing the continuing German threat, the regime was able to posit national identity, national unity, and nationalist fears against a common enemy in the service of its larger political goals, such as international recognition of the Oder-Neisse Line as Poland’s western frontier or the highly symbolic prosecution of Nazi criminals. As the nation that had suffered the most under the Germans, Poland had not only a right, but also a responsibility to annex German territory, to punish German criminals, and to inform the world of the horrors of Auschwitz and other camps. The moral duty was clear. As one Polish publicist wrote in May 1945:

The Polish press has written and continues to write much and often about Auschwitz. But it is all still too little, even for the development of the most superficial view of the immensity of German atrocities. It is necessary to write about Auschwitz again and again. It is necessary to write just now as we have arrived at the day of judgement for the perpetrators of those inhuman crimes. It is necessary to write lest the crimes fall into the shadow of oblivion, so that a false sense of compassion does not become the cause of impunity or easy treatment of the criminals. It is necessary to write in order to rouse the conscience and eradicate the indifference and dullness that has overcome the world after six years of war. We must avenge these crimes—those 4 million innocent victims of Auschwitz call for it.⁷³

Writing and rewriting meant italicizing Polish suffering, underscoring Nazi atrocities, and even deleting references to Jewish mass death while emphasizing throughout the call to bear witness to and avenge German crimes. Revenge could take many forms: territorial “reclamation,” reparations, or the expulsion of Germans from Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia. Such were the early postwar goals of Warsaw’s policy toward a defeated Germany, and Poles had little patience for German cries of postwar injustices inflicted upon them or for voices in Britain and the United States that were sympathetic to the Germans’ plight or calling for Germany’s rehabilitation. It was Auschwitz, more than any other wartime site of destruction, that pointed to the naïveté, danger, and insult of a conciliatory policy toward Germany. As an editorial columnist wrote on the occasion of the Auschwitz museum’s dedication in 1947:

We are a nation that has suffered the greatest wrongdoing at the hands of the followers of the [German] system. We are not repeating the Auschwitz story in order to spread an unnecessary and harmful self-pity. We are reiterating this doubtless truth because we are a state that is sentenced for all time to be the neighbor of Germans—the nation that invented and carried out “genocide.” That is why we, above all else, should be alert to what transpires beyond our western border. And we, above all, have to remind other nations that what was yesterday our lot could befall other nations tomorrow.⁷⁴

Auschwitz memory was to be a catalyst for anti-German attitudes and policy, a pillar of support for a consistent policy on the Oder-Neisse issue, and a general caution to the rest of the world. This admonitory role was an appropriate complement to the symbolic role of Auschwitz as the “golgotha” of the “Christ among nations,” for a martyrological idiom that emphasized the suffering and sacrifice of the Polish nation also gave that nation a unique responsibility, or even mission, to the rest of the world.

As inspiring and politically serviceable as this narrative may have been, it left little room for historical specificity and nuance of interpretation. It emphasized, in the first place, the Nazi goal of enslaving the Poles and destroying their state and nation. Auschwitz was, of course, the most memorable and visible symbol of this, and it represented for many Poles their own exterminationist fate, or at least what would have become so had the Nazis had the opportunity to follow through with their plans. Second, the narrative emphasized the sacrificial suffering of the Polish nation and, at the same time, the resistance and resolve of the prisoners. Neither element of the story could easily accommodate the unregistered deportee, Jewish or otherwise; both offered postwar Polish society a locus of common identity and the postwar Polish state a degree of much-needed legitimacy. As Jonathan Webber has noted, “in the post-war Polish construction of the symbolic meaning of Auschwitz, to identify Jews as the principal victims would have been to clutter, if not to obfuscate, the cultural and political message; it was an inconvenient irrelevance best left to one side.”⁷⁵ Webber’s insight is accurate, especially when applied to the early postwar development of the Auschwitz site and museum, for a Polish-national martyrological idiom required the concurrent marginalization or assimilation of other victim groups. It would be convenient to claim aggressive anti-Semitism as the main author of this narrative, or to dismiss it as the product of communist machinations at the state level. Anti-Semitism was a tragic and obvious problem in postwar Poland, and a new communist regime was consolidating its power in the years 1945–47. But neither of these influences was decisive on its own. One also has to allow for the possibility that the stewards of Auschwitz memory in these early years were drawing upon broader, non-ethnic, and assimilationist notions of “Pole” and “victim”—notions that eschewed Nazi racial categorizations even as they inappropriately blurred the historical distinctions so important to the process of accurate memorialization. In short, the Polish-national martyrological narrative was more complex than is apparent at first glance, and designating the Auschwitz site and museum as its principal illustration was a natural stage in the process of constructing a viable framework of memory in the postwar era.