on in a religious or sacred key,”40 transcending in its formation and manifestations the structures and rules of the historian’s craft. The sacral nature of memory emerges in various ways, most visibly and prominently at those spaces that Nora describes as the lieux de mémoire, or memory sites.41 Such sites exist to redefine, illustrate, manifest, and embody individual and group recollections of the past. Monuments, museums, and the spaces of public ritual are all examples of common loci memoriae that function as fora of public commemoration, and it is at sites like these that memory most clearly reveals its collective, participatory, and ritualistic elements.
The State Museum at Auschwitz is one such site, but unlike many other memory sites, it exists both as the location of historical events and, simultaneously, as the arena where public commemoration of those events takes place. It is significant that postliberation Auschwitz has always had a certain tangibility. The memorial site is, of course, a smaller42 and inevitably sanitized representation of the complex as it existed in 1945, and only the Stammlager and Birkenau remain accessible to visitors. But that they are accessible at all and have preserved many of their tangible remains (in contrast to Bełżec or Neuengamme, for example), makes them comparatively well suited to the physical objectification of memory, the synthesis and institutionalization of memorial symbols, and the use of their memorial spaces for repetitive commemorative ritual.
Manifested in symbols, exhibitions, and public demonstrations, Polish collective memory at Auschwitz has both explained history and misrepresented it; it has honored the dead and, at times, has been selective about the those whom it chooses to honor; it has shown reverent silence and has also engaged in noisy demonstration; it has been an indicator of liberalizing transformations in the cultural policy of the Polish People’s Republic and has also communicated the ideological rigidity of that state. Such diversity and contradiction in the manifestations of collective memory at Auschwitz should come as no surprise. These contradictions are born of the multifaceted history of the camp complex, but they also reflect the fact that collective memory and its manifestations, as the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs illustrated more than seventy years ago, arise from what he called the “social frameworks of memory.”43 Memories do not originate only on a purely individual basis; rather, they are constructed and maintained with the help of others. Collective frameworks are, then, the means by which the collective memory forms its images of the past, and because these frameworks are the products of present social conditions, they help to construct images of the past that are in accordance with the current cultures, identities, ideologies, and desires of the larger community.44 In short, the past is reshaped to suit the needs of the present, its images helping to legitimize the needs of the current social order.45
According to Halbwachs, this presentist imperative renders collective memory unreliable as a guide to events that actually transpired. Rather than accurately reflecting the events of the past, collective memory is a composite and mutating image that inevitably deviates from historical reality because of its reliance on society’s mnemonic frameworks.46 As Halbwachs noted, “Society from time to time obligates people not just to reproduce in thought previous events of their lives, but also to touch them up, to shorten them, or to complete them so that, however convinced we are that our memories are exact, we give them a prestige that reality did not possess.”47 In short, social groups and their frameworks of memory alter or distort memory in the process of reconstructing it.48
The ease with which Halbwachs’ social frameworks can transform memory points to the disturbing ease with which collective memory can be manipulated, both consciously and unconsciously. State, family, church, associations, and a myriad of other social groups all have the ability to direct or censor collective memory. Collective memory can be socially mandated as an institution works to create a common mode of memory by selecting those aspects of the past that appear best suited to the exigencies of the present. It is, for example, not uncommon for groups to embellish the past artificially or to abbreviate it dishonestly for the purpose of encouraging social unity in the present.49 “One might say,” Patrick Hutton has written, “that memory colonizes the past by obliging it to conform to present conceptions.”50
“Colonization” of the past, however, exists not only in the conquest of memory, for manipulated memory is also used as an instrument of social and political power.51 Its effectiveness as an instrument of power depends, of course, on the relative power of the social group that holds it. A state can, for example, influence the collective memory of a people’s past only to the extent that it retains political power. Religious authorities can continue to shape the ways in which people perceive the origins of their spirituality only as long as their authority is maintained. A museum can influence the public’s understanding of the past only insofar as the knowledge and expertise of its creators and sponsors is respected.
Polish memory of Auschwitz at the memorial site illustrates many of these characteristics of collective memory. The State Museum at Auschwitz is a locus memoriae that has borne the social structures of Auschwitz memory and staged its manifestations. It has done the work of the historian in attempting to represent the past accurately and objectively, and it has also shaped that past to conform to current cultural and political needs. The museum has, both by accident and by design, altered and distorted the past while attempting to reconstruct it in the tangible forms of exhibitions, monuments, and demonstrations. The site has always been selective in what it has presented to the public. As an occasional arena of cold-war propaganda, it has even functioned as an instrument of political power, at times used in vulgar fashion to condemn the western capitalist and militarist threat and celebrate the goals and achievements of Polish United Workers’ Party and its mentor, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Finally, the respective durability of various modes of memory at Auschwitz has been subject to the power of those individuals and institutions that have supervised the working of the State Museum. Each phase in the postwar history of Auschwitz has been marked by changes—some major, others less significant—in the memorial agenda of the museum, its staff, and those institutions of the communist state that have exercised influence or control over the site. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that many major changes to the site have occurred within the last decade, that is, in the wake of Polish communism’s fall.
Despite the applicability of Halbwachs’s ideas for this study of memory at Auschwitz, it is necessary to enter a caveat: a collective Auschwitz memory and the social structures on which it is based need not be static. Rather, it has a diachronic character, subject to temporal factors beyond Poland’s borders and influenced by the revisionary impulses of individuals and groups, and even by the poignancy of historical facts. Even as the collective upheavals associated with the fall of communism challenged many of the assumptions and traditions of collective Auschwitz memory in Poland, so too have the challenges of individuals, groups, and events throughout the post-war decades shaken memory’s framework, causing Auschwitz memory, in a manner of speaking, to “fall out of its frame.” In October 1953 former prisoners of the camp rebelled against the propagandistic memorial agenda imposed upon the Auschwitz site by Warsaw’s Stalinist regime. In 1967 and 1968 members of the International Auschwitz Committee refused cooperation with the State Museum and government authorities on account of Poland’s growing and officially sanctioned anti-Semitism. In 1979 Pope John Paul II visited Auschwitz. His presence, authority, and magnetism legitimized Polish vernacular notions of Auschwitz and, at the same time, transformed the memorial site into a stage for opposition to the regime. In the early 1990s a historian at the State Museum at Auschwitz rejected, on the basis of years of research, the estimate of 4 million dead at Auschwitz—an estimate that had been, until then, inviolable among Polish scholars and memorialists of Auschwitz. These examples, as the following chapters will relate, are illustrative of both the durability of collective memorial paradigms at Auschwitz and, at the same time, memory’s elasticity.
The transformations of memory at Auschwitz reveal that the line between history and memory, or between the “real” and “imagined” Auschwitz, was inevitably blurred. This study remains mindful of the “real” Auschwitz as a measure of the “imagined,” memorialized
