and the immensity of the crimes there make any precise and universally applicable standard of representation of Auschwitz history difficult to establish—and difficult to uphold. The analysis to follow will at times be critical of the cultural or ideological inflections that led to the misrepresentation of history at the memorial site, but it does not claim to set a new, neutral standard of representation. There are also suggestions at various points in the book that Auschwitz, if permitted, could “speak for itself.” This is not a call for a site devoid of any interpretation or representation, nor does it imply that an Auschwitz simply left to decay would be more “real” or “meaningful” as a site of memory. In general, however, the landscape, artifacts, and survivors of Auschwitz have been the most effective pedagogical “tools” at the site, far surpassing in didactic effectiveness the ideological interpretations of many exhibitions or the politicized cant of many demonstrations.
None of this should suggest the existence of a simplistic dichotomy between “good,” historically accurate “commemoration” and “bad,” politically inflected “propaganda.” Nor is it a call for historical relativism. Rather, this analysis recognizes the complexities of representing the past at Auschwitz and recognizes the challenges faced when approaching Auschwitz as a historian, and especially as a historian of memory. As Saul Friedländer has emphasized in confronting the “final solution”: “The extermination of the Jews of Europe is as accessible to both representation and interpretation as any other historical event. But we are dealing with an event which tests our traditional conceptual and representational categories, an ‘event at the limits.’”52 Ideally, the objective historian—ever the perceptive arbiter—stands outside the subjective processes of memory, but, as Friedländer relates, “[s]ome claim to the ‘truth’ appears particularly imperative. It suggests, in other words, that there are limits to representation which should not be but can easily be transgressed. What the characteristics of such a transgression are, however, is far more intractable than our definitions have so far been able to encompass.”53 In short, there is a tension between the “real” and the “represented” Auschwitz that was and remains a source of unease for both the historian and the public memorialist. As helpful as the demarcation between the “real” and the “represented” Auschwitz may be as a heuristic device, the fact remains that Polish stewards of memory were inevitably concerned with the latter, even as they were, or claimed to be, committed to the former.
Henry Rousso has related the development and mutation of an event’s collective memory to the role of these stewards—what he calls the “vectors,” or “carriers” of memory and defines as “any source that proposes a deliberate reconstruction of an event for a social purpose.”54 “Official carriers” are those commemorative phenomena such as monuments and ceremonies that attempt to offer a “comprehensive, unitary representation of the event” being commemorated. “Organizational carriers” of memory are associations and organizations that join in a commemorative act for the purpose of gathering and maintaining a common mode of memory among the members of the groups. Media such as journalism, broadcasting, and literature are the “cultural carriers” of memory, providing what appear to be individualistic perceptions of the past—perceptions that are nonetheless the products of a diversity of memorial images. Finally, the “scholarly carriers” of memory are those sources, such as historians and museum curators, who attempt to reconstruct and interpret the events of the past.55
Since 1945 these four vectors of memory have converged on the Auschwitz site. As the following chapters will illustrate, historians and museologists have shaped the representation of the past in their publications and documentary exhibitions, and the Polish and international media have likewise left their mark on public perceptions of the site and its history. Organizational carriers such as national and international associations of former prisoners, state institutions charged with the site’s care and supervision, as well as religious groups have all utilized the memorial space at Auschwitz for the purpose of forging a common mode of memory both within their own groups and beyond them. Not least, the official carriers of Auschwitz memory—the Polish government, its Ministry of Culture and Art, and the State Museum itself—have erected monuments, developed exhibitions, and choreographed ceremonies intended to instill and maintain a “comprehensive, unitary representation” of the events that took place at Auschwitz.
The interpretation, representation, and commemoration of what transpired at the Auschwitz camp was not the sole property of these four types of forces as they converged on the postwar site, for individuals and groups from within Poland and from beyond its borders have also brought their own memorial aspirations and agendas, adding to the site’s landscape occasional spontaneous, unchoreographed manifestations of individual and group memory. Examples of such initiatives are Roman Catholic pilgrims or Jewish individuals and groups honoring those victims neglected in the prevailing memorial paradigms at the site. They have added controversy as well as diversity to Auschwitz.
Despite the occasional presence of diverse modes of memory, one can trace the development of a “dominant memory” (that is, what Rousso calls “a collective interpretation of the past that may even come to have official status”)56 at the State Museum and in its activities. A charge of the Polish state since its founding, the State Museum is a prime example of how memory can become institutionalized and how that institution can then utilize a prevailing mode of memory as an instrument of social and political power. It is, of course, impossible to claim the existence of a single, dominant mode of memory at a place like Auschwitz. The camp’s history has always defied generalization, the social frameworks upon which Auschwitz memory was based were diverse and at times in conflict, and the public manifestations of that memory were not static, but in flux. Nonetheless, in the period under consideration three main characteristics of collective memory emerged at the Auschwitz site. First, Poles quickly came to regard Auschwitz as a place of Polish national martyrdom. The multinational makeup of the camp’s deportees and inmates was stressed at times, but by and large the particularly Polish element of sacrifice at the camp received the greatest emphasis in the site’s exhibitions, iconography, and commemorative rituals. As early as 1947 Auschwitz had, in the Polish popular historical consciousness, become a camp primarily intended for the internment, exploitation, and extermination of the Polish political prisoner—a prisoner who was not a helpless victim but a resistance fighter, a hero, a martyr suffering and dying for some higher good, like the Polish nation, the Catholic faith, or socialism.
Second, Auschwitz was acknowledged, but usually not specified, as a place of Jewish victimization. Neither the State Museum nor the Polish government ever explicitly denied that the vast majority of victims at Auschwitz were Jews. But this fact was not emphasized; nor did it designate Auschwitz in any distinctive way. Simply put, Jews were usually included among the so-called “martyrs” of Auschwitz and regarded as citizens of Poland, the Netherlands, France, Hungary, Greece, or one of the many other countries under Nazi occupation. One has to grant that the destruction of Europe’s Jews was not yet, in the first postwar years, the distinct category of historical analysis or broad, public commemoration that it is today. But the fact remains that for decades Polish postwar culture did not treat the Shoah as the salient characteristic of Auschwitz, but relegated it instead to the status of yet another example of German barbarism. Jews were to be remembered for their suffering and death, but they were neither represented as the overwhelming majority of victims at the site nor given proper emphasis in the larger memorialization undertaken there.
Third, the Polish state instrumentalized Auschwitz as a political arena. In the processes of valorizing Polish martyrdom and de-emphasizing Jewish victimization, the Soviet-imposed communist government in Poland frequently used Auschwitz as a site for the accumulation of political currency. As members of the regime and the press sought to vindicate a prevailing ideology through the recollection of Poland’s tragic past, the Auschwitz memorial site, its exhibitions, and its public events served as a rallying point of sorts for the socioeconomic order, for staunchly anti-West German foreign policy, and, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, for vulgar anti-American, anti-Western propaganda. Although firmly grounded in the domestic and international political agendas of the Soviet Union and its satellites, the
