other camps. One must, however, exercise caution when using numbers such as these. They are not precise, and, more importantly, one must bear in mind that an inordinate focus on statistics can easily distract from their larger historical importance and contribute to the already disturbing anonymity of the victims and perpetrators. In short, obsession with the numbers both dishonors the Auschwitz victims and mitigates the significance of the crimes against them.
Yet these statistics have a particular relevance for an analysis of Auschwitz memory at the memorial site. The number and kind of deportees and victims outlined above provide us with an empirical measure against which we can compare the presentation of Auschwitz history at the State Museum at Auschwitz, in its exhibitions, and in the public ritual undertaken there. These numbers are, in the context of this study, important in two major ways. First, they contrast sharply with the inflated figure of 4 million Auschwitz victims—a figure cited for decades by Polish and some Israeli historians and, significantly, a figure employed virtually uncontested until the early 1990s at the Auschwitz memorial site itself.33 Second, these statistics increase our awareness of who was at Auschwitz, who lived and died there and how—an awareness that is crucial to any analysis of who has been memorialized at Auschwitz and how. In other words, the numbers can be employed as one measure by which we can critically assess the manifestations of Auschwitz memory at the site.
Although historians have been concerned with the number of dead at Auschwitz, it is also worth noting that Auschwitz had a relatively high number of survivors in comparison to those sites (Chełmno/Kulmhof, Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec) that functioned solely as extermination centers. This may come as a surprise to many who consider Auschwitz to have been the most deadly killing center, for Auschwitz was neither the first nor, in some respects, even the most terrifying of camps. It is true that more deportees, and among them more Jews, died at Auschwitz than anywhere else; but the number of deportees and specifically of Jewish deportees who were registered and subsequently used for slave labor at Auschwitz was also uniquely high. The simple fact that when Red Army troops entered the Auschwitz complex in January 1945 there were some seven thousand prisoners languishing there sets Auschwitz apart from other killing sites on Polish territory, where survival rates were shockingly low. Martin Gilbert has estimated that only three individuals survived Chełmno/Kulmhof, the first extermination center. His figures for the other killing centers are similarly bleak. Sixty-four Jews survived Sobibór, while as many as two hundred thousand were killed. At Treblinka up to seven hundred fifty thousand Jews were murdered and only between forty and seventy individuals survived. Finally, Gilbert estimates that at Bełżec, where five hundred fifty thousand perished, only two survived.34
If Auschwitz had, relative to other extermination centers, such a high number of survivors, it follows that many of those survivors recorded their experiences in depositions and memoirs, as well as audio and, more recently, video testimonies. There is, simply put, a wealth of information about the experiences of prisoners and the history of the Auschwitz complex. Whether Jewish, Polish, Czech, or French, survivors have left their accounts for successive generations to read, hear, and employ in the construction of individual and collective Auschwitz memories. Initially, such accounts and testimonies added to the body of knowledge on Auschwitz and served as documentary evidence, but over the years the prisoner’s account has taken on a different but no-less-meaningful function, helping to construct, maintain, and revise collective memories of Auschwitz.35 This transformation has been evident at the State Museum at Auschwitz, where many survivors, especially Polish political prisoners, were instrumental in the site’s development and in the public commemorative rituals that took place there. As a consequence, the topography and the pedagogical and political orientation of the postwar memorial site has, in many respects, reflected the memories and meaning that these survivors drew from their experiences in the camp.
. . .
The preceding historical synopsis should reinforce two major points. First, the topography and features of postliberation Auschwitz can present only images of the landscape of the functioning camp complex. The memorial site is not and can not be Auschwitz, but is merely and inevitably a representation—preserved, constructed, reconstructed, or distorted—of Auschwitz as it existed in the years 1940–45. Second, the history of Auschwitz from 1940 to 1945 is far from monolithic. Some aspects of the complex’s history warrant greater attention than others. Some experiences were shared by all registered prisoners. Some lessons drawn from the history of the camp are more important than others. But Auschwitz lacks a convenient master narrative, a prototypic prisoner or martyr, and it resists oversimplification and generalization.
If Auschwitz history is not monolithic, neither should any collective Auschwitz memory be monolithic. Rather, that memory should reflect the complexity of the camp’s history. The memory exhibited at the Auschwitz memorial site has never been totally monolithic, as if hewn from a single stone and presented as a single narrative. Yet for more than forty years the State Museum at Auschwitz exhibited a museological, pedagogical, and commemorative orientation that, to varying degrees, simplified the camp’s history, valorized certain types of deportees and their experiences over those of others, and introduced culturally and ideologically bound memorial narratives grounded in postwar Polish society and politics. Although perhaps not surprising, such a reconfiguration of the past may strike the observer as somehow unjust, for at issue here is the relationship between history and public or collective memory.36
The relationship between history and the memory of events that have shaped our past appears obvious. Close observation reveals, however, that the anticipated nexus between the two is always weaker than might be assumed, for the way a culture or society remembers the past seldom reflects the actual course of historical events. This point may appear obvious, but it is worth further consideration in the context of this study. Thus far, the term “history” in general and the “history” of Auschwitz in particular have been used in a conventional sense, meaning both the actual course of events at Auschwitz and these events as they have been recorded by historians and others. The former represents an objective reality that cannot be reproduced or chronicled with total accuracy; it can be approached by the scholar or student, but nonetheless remains an ideal. “History” in the latter sense refers to the chronicling and codification—in effect, the institutionalization—of the past in ways that are familiar to all of us, such as the construction of narrative texts, the development of archives, or the establishment of historical museums. The work of institutionalizing the past in postwar Poland was highly complex and subject to the demands of Polish national culture and its attendant “martyrological” traditions, as well as the ideological imperatives of the communist state. Accordingly, the construction of an Auschwitz narrative, whether the work of the scholar or the State Museum, remained inseparable from the larger collective memory of the camp.
Collective memory, far less reconstructive and organized than history, arises out of the recollections and desires of the community.37 It is not rigid, but, as Pierre Nora writes, “remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived.”38 History as task, because of its claims to objectivity and analytical rigor, is intended to endure and present a universally valid, if not universally appreciated representation of the past. This it achieves only to a limited extent, for, as suggested above, the work of history, whether that of the scholar or that of the museum, cannot remain isolated from the forces of collective memory. Likewise, historians—some more successfully than others—can contribute to the construction of memory in a variety of ways, whether by publicizing an accurate account of the past or by distorting the past in the service of the present. Nonetheless, the “work” of history is held to a higher standard, and is therefore assumed to reflect the course of events with greater accuracy than the evolving forces of memory.
Because it constantly evolves, reflects the desires of the community, and is not subject to the strictures of the historical discipline, collective memory can also, as Jacques Le Goff has written, “overflow” or supersede history as a form of
