Postcards from Auschwitz. Daniel P. Reynolds

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СКАЧАТЬ at Auschwitz II (Birkenau) or Majdanek. Furthermore, the fact remains that both Jewish and non-Jewish Poles were murdered at Auschwitz, albeit by different methods and in different numbers. Finally, it is important to resist the temptation to reduce either Soviet-sponsored socialism or Polish nationalism to anti-Semitism, even if both were capable of patently anti-Semitic policies and attitudes.

      Despite the emphasis on Soviet communist and Polish nationalist ideologies (and the inherent tensions between them), over time it proved impossible to ignore the anti-Semitism behind the Nazis’ murderous logic. A gradual and much belated shift occurred in the portrayal of fascism, from describing it as a rogue form of capitalism (the Soviet view) to acknowledging the racism inherent in Hitler’s fantasy of German superiority. Today, tourists to Auschwitz are informed explicitly about the genocidal logic of the camp and the system of extermination that evolved there for the purpose of ridding Europe of its Jewish population. Given the inhospitable climate in Stalinist Eastern Europe for acknowledging the victimization of Jews, Roma, or any other group defined as an ethnicity, one must wonder how and when that shift in narrative came about and how tourism has been a witness to that shift.

      Even before the war’s end, knowledge about the Holocaust had spread internationally among occupying forces and displaced populations, both of which were on the move. The American and British experience of liberating concentration camps such as Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Dachau, though technically not extermination camps like Birkenau, made indelible impressions on those troops and the journalists who accompanied them.32 While these camps within the German Reich were not originally established for the sole purpose of murdering Jews, they became the destination of forced marches from the extermination camps as the Nazis moved their prisoners westward away from the advancing Red Army. Of those who survived the death marches, many died in horrible conditions of disease and starvation in the camps liberated by the Western allies.33 In short, the shocking encounters with Nazi camps was an experience shared by Soviet, American, and British allies.

      Likewise, the Jewish diaspora ensured that knowledge of the Holocaust would spread beyond the borders of Nazi-occupied Europe. Wartime experiences and continued anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe after 1945 led large numbers of Jews who had survived the Holocaust to migrate to new countries, especially to the United States, Canada, and the British Mandate of Palestine.34 As accounts of the genocide spread internationally among Jewish communities, the local administration at Auschwitz found it impossible to ignore the growing global awareness of what had taken place there, even if that pressure met with considerable ideological resistance from the state. By the late 1960s, the emphasis at Auschwitz on Polish victimization began to make way for a more forthright acknowledgment that the vast majority of victims at Auschwitz were murdered for no other reason than being Jewish. What is remarkable is that this transition took place at a time when the Communist Party in Poland was becoming increasingly and overtly anti-Semitic. Tourism, particularly in the mode of service tourism and commemorative visits, had begun to relocate the responsibility for Auschwitz memorialization in a more deliberately international context, with groups from other countries demanding a role in shaping remembrance and preservation at the memorial, as we will see below. Tourism thereby played an important role in furthering the process of acknowledging the Jewish victims at Auschwitz, even at a time when the political climate in Poland would seem to have been unfavorable.35

      Throughout the Cold War, alternating periods of tension and thaw between East and West had a direct impact on tourism, severely restricting travel across the Iron Curtain at some times while easing restrictions at others. But tourism also exerted pressure of its own to allow access to travelers. Besides the fact that tourism was one of the few ways in which citizens from East and West could get to know one another, the considerable amount of wealth generated by the tourism industry was crucial to the struggling economies of postwar Europe. That was particularly true for the Soviet-dominated East, whose currency had little purchasing power internationally. The fact that tourism brought in the West’s hard currency to the economically struggling Soviet Bloc ensured that the doors could never stay closed for long. And whenever those doors opened, tourism between East and West represented an exchange not only of currency but also of cultural values, despite the strident rhetoric of postwar propaganda.36

      Tourists always bring expectations, and the tourism industry has to work to respond and accommodate those expectations while in turn making demands of its own on tourists. The dynamics of tourism as a market, as a circulation not only of goods and services but also of cultural expectations and performances, applies as much to Auschwitz as to any other tourist destination. The dramatic transformations that have taken place at the Auschwitz memorial site are a powerful reminder that tourism cannot be reduced to the passive consumption of displays decided by others. Rather, tourism both responds to and helps influence policies that govern the memorial sites. Whatever other geopolitical factors have shaped access to Auschwitz—and they are considerable—tourism has also played a decisive role, and indeed, one could argue that tourism offered a highly visible stage where geopolitical tensions could find expression. In the years following World War II, tourism became one of the most public arenas in which communist and Polish nationalist narratives at Auschwitz could be challenged by an international public, the grounds on which struggle over access to the site was waged, and the measure by which the gradual opening of Auschwitz to the international community was achieved.37

      The Evolution of Tourism to Auschwitz: The Cold War and Beyond

      The earliest tourists to Auschwitz were composed of school groups from Poland, whose visit to the site was a mandatory part of the curriculum.38 These school groups saw Auschwitz I, the Stammlager, where the Nazis kept Polish figures whom they regarded as ideological enemies, including Polish Communists and many members of the Catholic Church. The first crematorium was built in Auschwitz I, and an adjacent room that had been designed as a morgue was converted into a gas chamber, even though Auschwitz I was not established originally as a center for extermination on a massive scale. At the Stammlager was the infamous Block 11, where the torture and executions of prisoners, including Father Maximilian Kolbe, were carried out. Other prisoners killed at Auschwitz I included 600 Soviet prisoners of war who were murdered in 1941, gassed in experiments using Zyklon B that led to the use of that chemical as the principal method for mass murder at Birkenau. Since the Polish state after the war exercised a monopoly on school curricula, the intact remains of Auschwitz I provided a powerful teaching moment that could be used to reinforce a sense of Poland’s indebtedness to their Soviet liberators and point to sacrifices made by the Red Army to defeat Germany. At the same time, Polish schools reinforced a sense of Polish national solidarity by emphasizing the martyrdom of such figures as Father Kolbe.

      Figure 1.2. The crematorium at Auschwitz I, August 2007, with the entrance to the gas chamber that was originally a morgue. The gas chamber was reconstructed to include shower heads to depict the destroyed gas chambers of Birkenau. Photo by the author.

      Meanwhile, Auschwitz II (Birkenau) remained beyond the earliest guided tours. Visitors could cover the two kilometers to the site on their own, with no guide to accompany them. With limited resources for managing such an expansive site and few suitable structures in which to install exhibitions, Birkenau remained largely a ruin; the story of Birkenau was instead told at Auschwitz I. The collections of hair, the suitcases and the personal effects of the new arrivals, much of which had been warehoused at Birkenau, were brought to the Stammlager after the war to be shown to tourists. The museum faced an overwhelming task of managing a camp complex that included over forty subcamps, of which Birkenau was the most notorious. Given the infamy of Birkenau as an extermination camp, clearly some arrangement would have to be made to emphasize Birkenau in the geography of tourism to Auschwitz, even if the site did not so easily conform to the ideology of the immediate postwar era. As early as 1957, the museum announced an international competition to erect a monument at Birkenau that would serve as a focal point for memorialization there.39 The monument was not erected until 1967, and even there, the Jewish and Gypsy identities of those gassed on arrival was blurred into the undifferentiated and incorrect number of “four million СКАЧАТЬ