anti-fascist consensus. And not surprisingly, those West European organizations that were most involved in commemorative activities at the Auschwitz site were often closely associated with the political parties of the West European left.
These are the main components of the dominant memorial framework at Auschwitz in the years of the Polish People’s Republic. The foundations for this framework were laid in Poland’s wartime experience and the first months after the liberation. Shifts in Poland’s political landscape, the ideological imperatives of successive regimes, developments abroad, and the growing prominence of Auschwitz as a site of international commemoration would shake that framework in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. By the late 1970s, domestic and international changes were under way that further internationalized and democratized the site as an arena of public commemoration. These changes, in combination with Pope John Paul II’s visit to the memorial site in June 1979, initiated the collapse of Poland’s framework of memory at Auschwitz, for even as the pope’s words and deeds at the site legitimized the Polish-national commemorative paradigm, they also marked the beginning of its dissolution. The analysis therefore concludes with this watershed in the postwar history of the memorial site and points, in the epilogue, to some of the debates over Auschwitz since. Controversy over the Carmelite Convent, the presence of religious symbols, the uses of the grounds and structures of the former camp complex, and “proprietorship” over the memorial site—these debates were all manifestations of the framework’s undoing after 1979 and coincided with the slow collapse of Poland’s communist regime in the 1980s.
The transformation of the memorial site has not been rapid. Auschwitz has, since the fall of communism, ceased to be a stage for state-sponsored demonstration, and although the State Museum has embarked over the past ten years on a daunting and elusive quest to give all victim groups their rightful place in the memorialization undertaken there, vestiges of the traditional framework of memory remain. The exhibitions and commemorative rituals at the site reflect, even to the present day, many of the memorial paradigms of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. In this respect, Auschwitz memory has been more durable than many expected. This study, on the other hand, emphasizes the malleability of Auschwitz memory. Just as the memory and meaning of Auschwitz are not fixed, but have remained in flux over the past fifty years, so too have the manifestations of that memory at the site been subject to shifting cultural and political currents. Emphasis on Polish martyrdom, neglect or conscious understatement of the Shoah, political exploitation of the grounds and expositions—these are controversial characteristics of the camp’s postwar landscape. The remainder of this analysis will account for these characteristics, but will also account for the variations and conversions of memory at the site. By underscoring the malleability of Auschwitz in the post-war years, it emphasizes the need to extend our investigations of memorial sites beyond mere commentaries on their landscape or exhibitions, for the sources of these physical characteristics are to be found not only in the architecture of Nazi terror, but also in the postwar conditions, debates, and decisions surrounding their creation.
1
Poland and Auschwitz, 1945–1947
ON 14 JUNE 1947, some thirty thousand visitors from across Poland and abroad gathered in Oświęcim, a sleepy town of ten thousand residents on the southeastern border of Upper Silesia. It was a public event, a ceremony, and a spectacle of sorts: the occasion was the seventh anniversary of the day in 1940 when 728 Polish prisoners were brought to a former military base on the outskirts of the town, a base that would serve as a concentration camp for the next five years. But the concentration camp at Oświęcim—“Auschwitz,” as the Germans called it—would become the largest death factory in all of Europe, the site where more than a million perished at the hands of the German occupiers. And so on this June day thousands gathered to remember the dead of Auschwitz, to commemorate their legacy, and to participate in the dedication of the State Museum at Oświęcim-Brzezinka.1
In the original camp, Auschwitz I, the day’s events opened under the banners and flags of political parties, religious groups, trade unions, and organizations of former political prisoners. The ceremonies began with religious services of various faiths, followed by the speeches of visiting dignitaries and government officials. Vice-Minister of Transportation Zygmunt Balicki, general secretary of the International Federation of Former Political Prisoners, called for international solidarity among all former prisoners in the struggle against Hitlerism. Parliamentary representative Sak, speaking in the name of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland, expressed his hope for the brotherhood of all nations, while Stanisław Dybowski, the minister of culture and art in the new Polish government, announced the creation of a Polish Council for the Protection of Monuments of Struggle and Martyrdom.
Most important, however, were the words of the prime minister and leader of the Polish Socialist Party, Józef Cyrankiewicz, himself a former political prisoner in Auschwitz. The premier recalled for his audience the extent of German barbarism both on and off the battlefield during the years of the Second World War, and to his former fellow prisoners he stated: “Those of us who remain, who remember the heinous factories of death—we are, for the Polish nation, for Europe, for the entire world . . . not only a document; we must be the conscious, organized vanguard of the struggle, so that the tragedy to which we are witnesses, of which we are living documents, is never repeated.” That struggle, according to the premier, included concrete goals, among them “the progress of states toward independence,” “reconstruction of Poland from the ruins,” and “the building of a lasting peace.”2 The only salvation for the Polish nation, he claimed, and the only way out of the abyss of terror and destruction, was for the Poles to rebuild their land from the ashes of the German invasion and to struggle for a new beginning.3 The grounds of Auschwitz, according to the premier, would function both as a historical artifact and as an admonition to future generations. “The museum,” Cyrankiewicz stated, “will be not only an eternal warning and document of unbound German bestiality, but also at the same time proof of truth about man and his fight for freedom—a document arousing intensified vigilance so that genocidal powers that bring destruction to nations will never rise again.”4 At the conclusion of his speech, the prime minister declared the museum officially open and the crowd joined in the singing of “Rota” (Pledge), a patriotic Polish anthem from the early twentieth century.
The crowd then walked the three kilometers from Auschwitz I to Birkenau, the spacious moor that had served as the massive extermination center of the Auschwitz complex. Passing through the main gate and along the railroad siding where the infamous “selection” of deportees took place, the crowd stopped between the rubble of the gas chambers and ovens of Crematoria II and III. Wreaths were laid in memory of the victims, a cross was erected atop the ruins of one of the crematoria, and the day’s ceremonies were concluded with the singing, once again, of “Rota:”
We shall not yield our forebears’ land,
Nor see our language muted.
Our nation is Polish, and Polish our folk,
By Piasts constituted.
By cruel oppression we’ll not be swayed!
May God so lend us aid.
By the very last drop of blood in our veins,
Our souls will be secured,
Until in dust and ashes falls,
The stormwind sown by the Prussian lord.
Our every home will form a stockade.
May God so lend us aid.
We’ll not be spat on by Teutons
Nor abandon our youth to the German!
We’ll follow
