Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979. Jonathan Huener

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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      FOLLOWING THE GERMAN occupation of Poland in September 1939, the Polish town of Oświęcim, located about sixty kilometers west of Kraków, was annexed to the Reich and renamed Auschwitz. Located near the juncture of Upper Silesia, the Wartheland, and the General Government,⁹ and at the confluence of the Vistula and Soła rivers, the town had a prewar population of about twelve thousand residents, more than 40 percent of whom were Jewish. Ironically, Oświęcim was a cultural center of Jewish life in interwar Poland and was regarded as model community of Jewish-Polish coexistence. The site selected for a concentration camp in 1940 lay outside the town’s borders and had been a base for the Habsburg army and, later, for troops of the interwar Polish Republic.

      Initially, the concentration camp at Auschwitz was intended for the internment of Polish political prisoners. With the number of inmates rapidly increasing, the prisons in the region could no longer accommodate them. In the spring of 1940 Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler ordered the establishment of a concentration camp at Oświęcim and named SS Captain Rudolf Höss commandant. German authorities brought in three hundred Jewish residents of Oświęcim to ready the site, and in May 1940, ordered thirty German criminals transferred from the Sachsenhausen camp to serve as the initial elite of functionary prisoners.¹⁰ One hundred SS men were sent to staff the camp, and on 14 June the first transport of 728 Polish inmates from the Tarnów prison arrived, marking the beginning of the camp’s role as the primary and most deadly camp for Polish political prisoners, members of the underground, and Poland’s intellectual, spiritual, and cultural elites.

      The intelligentsia in interwar Poland included many Polish Jews, particularly in urban centers. Some were fully assimilated into the culture of Polish СКАЧАТЬ