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From Liberation to Memorialization

The Transformation of the Auschwitz Site, 1945–1947

TO MANY POLES in 1945, the need to preserve the Auschwitz site as a memorial to those who had suffered and perished there was obvious. The topography and structures of the Auschwitz complex were well suited to the Polish-national martyrological narrative emerging in the early postwar years. Representing the apex of German racism, it was a center of Polish suffering and heroic Polish resistance. As the site of the largest mass crime in history, it could provide both documentary commemoration in the form of a museum, and artistic commemoration in the form of monuments and memorials. Moreover, the site’s tangibility, artifacts, and open spaces made it an appropriate location for the institutionalization of memorial symbols and rituals.

The first initiatives for creating a memorial site at Auschwitz arose among prisoners in the camp while it was still in operation. As Kazimierz Smoleń, a former prisoner and subsequent director of the State Museum recalls:

We did not know if we would survive, but one did speak of a memorial site. . . . some kind of institution, a monument, or something of that sort. . . . These were not, of course, open meetings or anything like that. One simply could not speak openly of such things or discuss such things. . . . we only knew that it would be impossible for mankind to forget the crimes that were committed in Auschwitz. Certainly the idea of somehow creating a sacrum out of this place existed already in the camp. One just did not know what form it would take.¹

Prisoners could not be certain of their fate while still behind the wires of the camp, but after the liberation, they were, not surprisingly, at the forefront of the effort to establish a “sacred space” at Auschwitz.

Such an initiative was not a simple matter. On the one hand, the testimonies and memoirs of former prisoners, press accounts, and the sheer number of visitors reveal a public preoccupation with Auschwitz and tremendous support for transforming the site into a memorial and museum. On the other hand, conditions at Auschwitz were chaotic in the first months after the war: state institutions and organizations competed for control and use of the grounds, the structures of the camp were steadily falling into ruin, and there was a lack of consensus over the topographic and spatial definitions of the memorial site. The transformation of the site into memorial and museum was therefore a difficult process, lasting more than two years. This chapter describes that process, accounting for the challenges facing those responsible for the preservation of Auschwitz and the public documentation of its history. The result of their efforts—the State Museum dedicated in June 1947—was provisional and open to revision in the future; yet its exhibitions and uses of commemorative space at Auschwitz illustrated the martyrological narrative employed in these early postwar years and set the tone for subsequent uses of the site in the decades to follow.

The Liberated Site

Conditions at Auschwitz in the first weeks and months after the liberation were hardly conducive to transforming the site into a memorial and museum. The sick and dying required medical attention, bodies of the dead had to be buried or cremated, and surviving prisoners needed food and clothing. Assuming the dual role of liberator and occupier, the Red Army was initially responsible for supervising these activities and also helped to protect the site from looters and to maintain order—certainly a difficult task given the expanse of the terrain, which covered more than 450 acres. Already on 1 May 1945 a decision of Poland’s provisional government had placed “those parts of the concentration camp in Oświęcim that were connected to the immediate destruction of millions of people” (practically speaking, this meant the grounds of Auschwitz I and Birkenau) under the administration of the Ministry of Culture and Art, which from that point on had responsibility for protecting the site and creating a concept for a future museum.² This decision, however, did not prevent further desecration (or, to use the common Polish term, profanacja) of the grounds; after the Soviet Army vacated the Birkenau site, a group of former prisoners found it necessary to request that the grounds receive the protection of the Ministry of National Defense.³

In the first months after the liberation, Auschwitz also functioned as a prisoner-of-war camp and internment center for so-called Volksdeutsche.⁴ Although few details are known about the operation of these Soviet and, later, Polish camps, recent research indicates that from March or April 1945 until autumn of that year prisoners were interned at Auschwitz I, and until spring 1946 on the grounds of Birkenau.⁵ Several accounts discuss the living and working conditions of the Germans in these camps. One witness, a nurse with the Polish Red Cross, described how in May 1945 several thousand German POWs were brought to the camp and housed in Auschwitz I,⁶ while a brief diary of a German prisoner chronicles the grim conditions in the POW camp from his arrival in June 1945 until shortly before his death from illness and malnutrition less than a month later.⁷ The POWs and Volksdeutsche worked in various capacities: exhuming corpses, clearing the grounds, dismantling equipment in the factories of the complex (including the Buna-Werke at Monowitz), and dismantling wooden barracks for shipment from Birkenau.⁸ In addition, a number of prisoners were occupied with structural repairs to buildings, and even helped with the construction of some of the museum’s early exhibitions.⁹

Ironically, the presence of Germans at Auschwitz aided efforts to secure and preserve the site. Not only were they an inexpensive source of labor, but the POWs and Volksdeutsche also required military supervision, which in turn reduced the threat of grave robbers and plunderers. The internment of Germans on the grounds of Auschwitz, a practical measure undertaken with perhaps a touch of vengeful justice, illustrated the complexities of transforming the site from camp to memorial. Even if the provisional government had, in early May 1945, set aside the grounds for preservation, the presence of Soviet and Polish military authorities made clear that the site was, at least for the time being, to fulfill a variety of functions.

The first concrete legislative initiative for the protection and memorialization of Auschwitz came from a former Birkenau prisoner and delegate to the National Homeland Council, Alfred Fiderkiewicz, on 31 December 1945. Fiderkiewicz’s recommendation called for the establishment in Oświęcim and Brzezinka of a site commemorating Polish and international martyrdom. A government commission for culture and art approved the recommendation unanimously on 1 February 1946¹⁰ and named Tadeusz Wąsowicz, a former prisoner, director of the site.¹¹ Several weeks later, the provisional government’s Council of Ministers provided a rough and ambitious blueprint for the future of the site: the Ministry of Culture would organize a museum, with Blocks 10 and 11 of the Stammlager preserved as “mausolea.” In addition, one block would serve as a hostel for visitors, one block would be set aside for the research of German crimes, and one block was to house a so-called “Peoples’ University” for postsecondary vocational education. Furthermore, these provisional plans set aside twenty blocks in Birkenau for exhibits dedicated to various nationalities and to the history of other camps. Finally, the blueprint called for the erection of a monument near the Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria as a symbol of international martyrdom.¹² It is significant that in these early plans so much attention and space appeared to be devoted to the “international” character of the future museum and memorial. In the months and years ahead, however, practical concerns, lack of funds, and an awareness of the centrality of Auschwitz in Poland’s emerging commemorative culture de-emphasized the international element at the memorial site.

By April 1946, a group of former prisoners had assumed de facto control of the grounds. The socialist leader Józef Cyrankiewicz, serving then as head of the Polish Union of Former Political Prisoners (Polski Związek byłych Więźniów Politycznych, or PZbWP), requested from the minister of defense that employees of the Ministry of Culture and Art take control of the Auschwitz site from the Polish regiment stationed there. Although the Polish Army was still holding German POWs at Auschwitz, the military force protecting the site was, according to Cyrankiewicz, no longer needed. These duties, he (mistakenly) believed, could be fulfilled by former prisoners employed as guards. Moreover, the number of visitors to Auschwitz required that the memorial site be staffed by former prisoners familiar with the camp’s history and competent as tour guides.¹³ It was, then, more than fifteen months after the liberation that the staff of the memorial site began its work. Their reports and correspondence suggest that their highest priorities were to salvage the ruins of the camp, protect remaining evidence, and maintain control over—to use Cyrankiewicz’s words—the “wild conditions”¹⁴ then prevailing on the camp grounds.

Conservation was certainly the most important and most difficult task facing the cadre of workers at Auschwitz.¹⁵ The structures of Auschwitz I were relatively intact, and Birkenau, if considerably more dilapidated, nonetheless showed clear traces of the camp and the extermination process there. Reports indicate that in addition to the masonry barracks, guard towers, ruins of crematoria, and other durable structures, many of Birkenau’s wooden barracks were still standing. Investigators also located mugs, bowls, and plates near the site of Birkenau’s massive storehouses; personal effects and money of Jews on the railway platform or “ramp”; singed prayer books near Crematorium V; and at the entrance to Crematorium II, numbered changing-room tags used to deceive prisoners entering the gas chamber.¹⁶

Clearly, conditions at the site in the immediate postwar years were difficult on a variety of levels, yet visitors today are often critical of the small number of original structures remaining there, especially in Birkenau. The lack of original “evidence” perhaps cannot be excused entirely; it can, however, be explained in part by the inability of the museum staff, despite their efforts, to prevent decay and destruction on the grounds. In short, the site was undergoing a process of steady ruin, and it was all but impossible to maintain the grounds in a state resembling that of January 1945. One need only consider the sheer size of the grounds, the disastrous material conditions in war-torn Poland, the lack of funds for preservation work, and the inability—despite the presence of armed guards—to protect Birkenau from looters.

The necessity of creating a protective guard to keep people out of Auschwitz is a particularly disturbing aspect of the memorial site’s early history. Immediately after the liberation, looters (or “hyenas,” as the Polish press referred to them) began seeking riches at the camp. These were frequently individuals from the local population who salvaged goods from the grounds or made a practice of sifting through ash pits in search of valuables, especially gold. There were a number of arrests, and even an incident in which a former prisoner serving as a guard shot and wounded an intruder.¹⁷ The presence of looters at Auschwitz was alarming and was widely condemned in the Polish press as, in the words of one commentator, “the profaning of a holy place of martyrdom of seventeen European nations, and especially the Polish nation.”¹⁸ It was also a cause for alarm among Polish ex-prisoners, who justifiably feared that reports of such plundering would find their way into the foreign press and portray Poland in a negative light.¹⁹

Although the Ministry of Culture appeared committed to securing the borders of the camp through the formation of a protective guard, it was unfortunately resigned to the hopelessness of preserving everything on the grounds. As Wincenty Hein, an early associate of the museum staff, noted in a report on the early history of the memorial site, “The entire strength of the museum was directed to the rescue and conservation of that which remained. . . . It is necessary to remember that between the liberation of the camp and the arrival of the first crew of workers for the museum there was a period in which the process of destruction . . . was very intensive. That process was, historically in a way, a conditioned response of society, which had no concept of certain values.”²⁰ The “process” to which Hein was referring included both the natural decay of structures on the grounds and the dismantling and removal of materials by the local population—a “society” more concerned, in war’s immediate aftermath, with the raw materials of daily existence than with the historical and commemorative value of their plundered goods. For example, of the hundreds of wooden barracks in Birkenau, only a fraction remained when the museum opened two years later.²¹ Hein’s report also touched on the legal issue of property rights to the grounds of the liberated camp:

The question of ownership rights on the terrain of the former Auschwitz camp seems simple on the surface level. The law for the protection of Monuments of Martyrdom of the Polish Nation and Other Nations [1947] established a legal situation by which the grounds became the property of the state—that is to say, the question of ownership was solved by the law. But in practice it was necessary to wait about four years for clear orders regarding the borders of the State Museum at Auschwitz. In the meantime, a strange situation developed: the grounds belonged to the museum, yet the lack of a suitable number of guards made it impossible to surround the grounds with effective protection. . . . The local populace either lost out, returned to the sites of their former homes (which is of course understandable), or dismantled existing camp barracks in order to take them away and set them up elsewhere (which is certainly less understandable).²²

To the Polish government, to former prisoners working at the site, and to the Polish public at large, Auschwitz was a “sacred space”; yet the size, character, and remaining “evidence” of what had transpired there was subject to legal, political, and, not least, financial limitations. The Birkenau barracks, for example, were not always the victims of plunder. Eighteen of them were sold to members of the local population in July 1946, with each barracks divided among five villagers.²³ Later in the year, the town of Dąbrowa Tarnowska obtained a number of barracks to be used for housing construction and the building of a local market,²⁴ while in 1947 barracks from the site were shipped to various localities throughout Poland.²⁵ The dismantling of artifacts such as these reveals the perceived, or perhaps genuine, inability of the Polish state to preserve and protect much of what was left of the Auschwitz camp complex, and also illustrates even more graphically what appear today as rather reckless, if practical, measures taken by the local population in a period of extreme material want.