the Holy Spirit, our Hetman.
Our armed battalions shall lead the crusade.
May God so lend us aid.5
This day’s ceremonies were more than a nationalist commemoration of Poland’s concentration camp victims; they also provide a lens through which to view Auschwitz memory in the first years after the liberation. A new world order free of the Hitlerite menace, a museum documenting Nazi atrocities in occupied Poland, the righting of wrongs done to Poland, a vengeful patriotic anthem, and a cross erected on what is arguably the largest Jewish cemetery in the world—these are only a few examples of the public manifestations of historical consciousness at Auschwitz. The June 1947 dedicatory ceremonies were an early register of the characteristics of Auschwitz memory in the early postwar years and an early expression of the political and cultural trends that dominated the public manifestations of that memory in the decades to follow.
In this chapter I examine these trends as they contributed to the development of a collective Auschwitz memory in Poland in the first two years after the liberation. Proceeding thematically rather than chronologically, I first offer a brief discussion of the political and social context for developments at the Auschwitz site in the years 1945–47. Second, I describe and analyze events and trends in these years that communicated the history of the camp to the Polish public—events that stimulated a broad discussion of Auschwitz and its place in the history of the occupation. In the third section, I account for the development of a Polish-national commemorative idiom at Auschwitz, for by 1947 Auschwitz had become the central locus of Polish wartime martyrology. I therefore examine two formative and characteristic aspects of Auschwitz memory in the context of this idiom: the notion of “martyrdom” as applied to Auschwitz victims and the concurrent marginalization of Jewish suffering and victimization. In the course of only two years, Polish national sacrifice became the central element of Auschwitz memory, while the fate of Jews at the camp, although never explicitly denied, remained on the margins of the more comprehensive commemoration of registered Polish prisoners and those of other nationalities.
The Early Postwar Context
The Poland that rose from the ashes of the Second World War was a country much different from what any Pole would have imagined in 1939. From the arrival of Soviet troops on Polish soil in early 1944 until the communist consolidation of power in 1947, Poland was in a state of economic and demographic devastation, had a variety of parties competing for political power, and was, arguably, in a state of civil war. Already in 1943 Stalin had organized in Moscow the Union of Polish Patriots (Związek Patriotów Polskich, or ZPP), a group of exile communists led by members of the newly established Polish Workers’ Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza, or PPR). In July 1944, this group formed the core of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego, or PKWN), which was installed in Lublin and hence was known as the Lublin Committee. At the Yalta Conference of February 1945, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill had reached vague agreement on the formation of a “government of national unity” representing anti-Nazi and democratic forces in the reconstituted Poland. This was a clear victory for Stalin, for the basis of the new government would be the Lublin Committee. The Polish government in exile, based in London, was thus rendered inconsequential, and in January 1945 its underground military wing, the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, or AK), was officially disbanded. The PKWN reconstituted itself at the end of 1944 as the Provisional Government of the Polish Republic, which then became the Provisional Government of National Unity in June 1945. This body, claiming legitimacy on the basis of the Yalta agreements and Western recognition, was composed, in part, of PPR communists. It also included members of the London government-in-exile such the Polish People’s Party (PSL) leader Stanisław Mikołajczyk, who had left London for Poland in the hope of lending this government some democratic legitimacy. Mikołajczyk would be disappointed, however, for despite nominal commitment to diversity and pluralism, the Provisional Government of National Unity was a vehicle for the steady subordination of the state to communist rule. Eventually threatened with arrest, Mikołajczyk was forced to flee Poland in late 1947.
From June 1945 until its dissolution in February 1947 the provisional government’s authority rested on minimal public support. Poland had never been a bastion of leftist revolutionary politics; its proletarian classes were less developed than those in the West, and bitter memories of the 1939–41 Soviet occupation of eastern Poland remained. Indeed, for many Poles, it appeared as if the Red Army and its Moscow-trained Polish stooges had replaced the German occupier. The early months of Soviet “liberation” seemed to confirm fears of Soviet-style repression and coercion. Following the Home Army’s failed Warsaw Uprising of August–October 1944, the Lublin Committee began to organize, in cooperation with the Red Army, a new police and security apparatus. Through espionage, intimidation, and terror, these organs assisted in the consolidation of communist rule. Their tactics were directed against anti-Soviet armed insurgent groups such as the right-wing National Armed Forces, against remnants of the AK known as the Freedom and Independence Movement, and against the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The security forces and police did not, however, limit their activities to the fight against armed opposition groups. With the promulgation of a decree in January 1946, they had the freedom to punish those who had been involved in the “fascistization of political life,” and six months later, they would pursue opponents of the new order on the basis of the law “On Offenses Particularly Dangerous at the Time of the Reconstruction of the State.”6
The security forces were extensive and effective, and their power was especially evident in the weeks leading up to the parliamentary elections in January 1947. The provisional government had already shown itself capable of electoral manipulation during a July 1946 referendum, and in the January elections, the PPR-led “Democratic Bloc” garnered an 80 percent majority of the vote. The communist victory was, however, the result of falsification and intimidation at every level. A million voters were disqualified, thousands of others were arrested or beaten, workers were transported en masse to the polls—all for the purpose of consolidating PPR power while unsuccessfully attempting to give the appearance of a viable democratic process.
It is clear that the communists held the dominant position in Polish political life, but their takeover of Poland was neither a facile assumption of power nor the imposition of authority on a population wholly opposed to the PPR’s goals for a new society. There were, to be sure, aspects of the PPR program that appealed to various sectors of the population: for peasants, land reform; for some intellectuals, a break from grandiose and irrational nationalist traditions; for workers, the promise of dignity and fair wages. To those willing to support the authorities, the promised social order appeared to offer opportunity, stability, and at least a modicum of personal freedoms, for the regime allowed freedom of religious practice7 and, at least in 1945 and 1946, a relatively pluralistic press.8
Despite what might appear to be a straight path to Soviet-style communism in the immediate postwar period, Polish political life, as Padraic Kenney has argued, included at least a discourse of democracy.9 Before the onset of Polish Stalinism in 1948–49, the language of democratic politics was not yet vacuous, and it may come as a surprise to some that in the ceremonies and exhibitions at the Auschwitz memorial site, for example, representatives of the new Polish state were responding to the needs of the public as articulated by a variety of public voices. It was, as Krystyna Kersten has observed, an era of contradictions. If installing a communist regime in Poland was, as Stalin had claimed, akin to “saddling a cow,” then it is understandable that the provisional government used force and intimidation, while in other instances it exercised restraint. As Kersten notes:
A great majority was decidedly against the Communists, opposed the order established by the PPR and, at the same time, excepting the armed underground, was compelled to cooperate with the new authorities in the rebuilding of the country. In sum, that accumulation of contradictions created a very complex internal situation in the country. The fragmentary picture conveyed by the documents of that time or in memoirs gives an incomplete image, even a false one. The authorities attempted to
