Postcards from Auschwitz. Daniel P. Reynolds

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СКАЧАТЬ year after the Red Army ’s arrival, the conceptual foundations for preserving the camp as testimony predate its liberation. In other words, the twin purposes of gathering forensic evidence and ensuring memorialization shared the goal of preserving the camp as a form of testimony, a top priority for liberators and survivors alike.20 As a native communist government was groomed for leadership in Poland, Polish agencies began taking over this work in the camps situated within its borders, including all of the Vernichtungslager, or extermination camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka). By April 1946, a little more than one year after liberation, the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art sent a committee of former prisoners to Auschwitz to begin work on the museum, led by the former prisoner Tadeusz Wąsowicz,21 whom Nazis had imprisoned for membership in the Polish resistance and who was to become the museum’s first director.

      While the camp’s liberators needed to preserve evidence for prosecution and punishment of war criminals, the camp’s preservation as a site of commemoration was also always a long-term goal—albeit one with multiple and even contradictory agendas. In the case of Auschwitz and Majdanek, forensics and memorialization were both facilitated by the relatively intact state of the camps, which had been in operation just before liberation, leaving the Nazis insufficient time to destroy the evidence of mass killing. Despite their relatively intact state, there were immediate obstacles to ensuring preservation of the camps. The widespread deprivation across war-ravaged Poland meant that resources were scarce, and some of the physical structures of both camps were dismantled to serve the needs of the living. The wood used to build the barracks was needed for construction elsewhere in Poland, and so in March 1946 the District Liquidation Bureau, the Polish agency charged with the management of buildings and inventory that came into Polish possession after the war, oversaw the dismantling of the barracks at Birkenau.22 Tourists today can see the results of such scarcity at Birkenau and Majdanek, where the vast majority of wooden barracks are gone. At Birkenau, only brick chimneys remain where the majority of barracks once stood. The exceptions are a few wooden barracks at both memorials—some of them reconstructed—and the first barracks built from brick at Birkenau in what was to become the Frauenlager, or women’s camp. Along with the salvaged building materials went other “articles of everyday use” found at the camp, distributed across Poland to families who had lost everything in the war.23 These included utensils, pots and pans, tools, fabrics—whatever was salvageable and practical.

      The primary mission of the Extraordinary Soviet State Commission for the Investigation of the Crimes of the German-Fascist Aggressors was the preservation of a past that could be used to bring about the swift punishment of the Nazi perpetrators. Trials of accused perpetrators were important for establishing the legitimacy of communism in Eastern Europe as the vanquisher of fascism.24 Of course, this narrative necessitated officially mandated amnesia about the pact between Stalin and Hitler to devour Poland, which had lasted until Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in June 1941. Given Poland’s victimization at the hands of both Hitler and Stalin, the pro-Soviet agenda did not coincide comfortably with the postwar aspirations of Poles for a liberated and independent state. The competing interests of the Soviet liberators and the Polish survivors of Auschwitz led to tension over whose story would be told—and whose story would be suppressed.25 Soviet oversight of Poland’s new communist government, by no means an expression of Poland’s popular will, ensured the dominance of Polish-Soviet brotherhood in official discourse.26 But Polish national identity could not be so easily suppressed, and Stalin’s imposition of communism reinforced Poland’s sense of victimization at the hands of both Germany and the Soviet Union.27

      Polish and Soviet tensions had an immediate impact on the organization of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum as its staff pondered which messages visitors would receive. Would the site commemorate Polish resistance to Hitler in heroic terms? Would it acknowledge the other national, ethnic, and religious groups of victims who perished there? Would it commemorate Polish martyrdom or celebrate liberation by Stalin’s Red Army? How would murdered Red Army prisoners of war, the first group to be gassed at Auschwitz with Zyklon B, be commemorated? However these questions were to be answered, it was clear from the outset that the emphasis would not be on Jewish suffering. Nor would the site emphasize the suffering of other groups such as the Sinti and Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and so-called asocials (the indigent, prostitutes, and other social outcasts).28 While brief mention was made of these victims, their suffering was to be subsumed into a triumphant master narrative of communist-led liberation.

      Since the guiding ideology for any postwar memorial at Auschwitz had to advance a pro-Soviet narrative, the museum’s displays had to conform to a worldview that saw history in terms of class, not religion, race, or ethnicity. The fact that the vast majority of Auschwitz’s victims were Jews, or that Gypsies were also selected on the basis of alleged biological difference, was not acknowledged. Instead of emphasizing the racism inherent in Nazi ideology toward its victims, under Soviet influence the museum portrayed the victims, perpetrators, and resisters in terms of a class-based ideology that sought to overcome ethnic and religious identities. The Second World War (the Great Patriotic War, in the Soviet Union’s parlance) was cast as a war between the capitalist/imperialist ambitions of Hitler’s fascism on the one hand and the international liberation of workers and peasants through Stalin’s communism on the other. The Soviet view blurred the victims’ identities into an international collective united in having suffered under Hitler’s capitalist-imperialist aggression.29

      Despite the unavoidable submission to Soviet-guided propaganda, the reality of Auschwitz’s location in Poland, its management by Polish authorities, and its outreach to Polish visitors assured that Polish suffering would dominate the museum’s displays. The first incarnation of Auschwitz as a memorial highlighted the (mostly Catholic) Polish political prisoners interned and murdered there. The prevalence to this day of the word “martyr” at the memorial subsumes the diverse identities of the camp’s victims into a Polish Catholic perspective whereby the camp is interpreted as a site of national persecution cast in distinctly Christian terms. (I shall return to the use of the term “martyr” momentarily.) While Auschwitz’s victims included some 150,000 Catholic Poles, more than 1 million Jews, 23,000 Sinti and Roma, 15,000 Soviet soldiers, and thousands of other minorities were killed there.30 The imperatives of Stalinist ideology and Polish Catholic nationalism converged to de-emphasize the fact that Jews formed the vast majority of the camp’s victims.

      The researcher Andrew Charlesworth makes the case that the relatively preserved state of Auschwitz I (the original section of the Auschwitz camp system, also called the Stammlager) facilitated its prioritization of Polish over Jewish suffering. He suggests that the District Liquidation Bureau’s permission to dismantle numerous buildings in Auschwitz II (Birkenau), where the majority of Jewish victims had been murdered, allowed officials to sidestep the unique disaster of Jewish suffering. The emphasis on Auschwitz, Charlesworth points out, served a more sinister purpose of actively ignoring Jewish suffering:

      [Of these] six death camps whose primary function was the extermination of European Jewry, … Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka could be deemed inappropriate in that they had been destroyed by the Nazis, leaving little or no trace remaining. This was also very convenient for those who wished to ignore the specificity of Jewish suffering, as these were wholly death camps for Jewish extermination. This left Auschwitz and Majdanek.31

      Charlesworth’s implication, namely that tacit anti-Semitism motivated the choice of Auschwitz as a central memorial to Polish victims, is hard to evaluate. While the history of anti-Semitism and the plight of Jews in postwar Poland certainly legitimate this suspicion, there were less cynical considerations to take into account as well, particularly in light of the state of ruin that characterized postwar Poland. As Charlesworth acknowledges, Auschwitz was the most extensive, the most recently operating, and the most intact of the Nazi camps in Poland. That fact alone could be sufficient to explain why Auschwitz was chosen as a memorial facility over other sites. Moreover, the solid brick buildings of the Auschwitz I Stammlager were a premium in a war-ravaged country where standing structures were in short supply, quite in contrast to the readily dismantled or burned wooden СКАЧАТЬ