document’s reference to the need to “regulate the resurrection of the past against the background of the new current” refers to the need to bring Poland’s postwar commemorative culture into line with the regime’s current political goals. Martyrology, the paper made clear, was concerned not only with death, but also with life, or, more specifically, with the emancipation of those suffering among the living. An awareness of the victory gained, and commemoration with a view to the future would lead Poland on the path of progress and social emancipation. “Poland,” the document stated succinctly, “will not be the land of the martyred dead. Poland will be the land of the living.”59
The new Polish state was clear in delineating a mode of remembrance that would accommodate both national commemorative traditions and the political exigencies of the present. Polish wartime martyrdom and its commemoration, the position paper stated, incorporated two elements: the criminal acts of the Germans and, conversely, the Poles’ suffering and struggle, which were not in vain and did not result in the defeat of the Polish nation. Martyrdom, this document noted, grew out of the “contact and interaction of the Hitlerite psyche with the Polish psyche.” “The German psyche,” it stated,
was established on unusually fertile soil from which arose the new German religion: Hitlerite racism. . . . And thus in the years of occupation the Germanic “master race” declared war on the Polish “slave race,” the purpose of which was the extermination of our nation. Yet, the nation of the “enslaved” began to defend itself, answering aggression with aggression. The nation of the “enslaved,” unable to reconcile itself to the yoke of bondage, thus called itself to battle. The “master race,” unable to tolerate opposition, further tightened the noose of terror. In the course of the years the struggle became increasingly obstinate, and the implacable consequences of its growth were, first of all, the consequence of the new German religion: murder of several million people; the second consequence was the psychic posture of the Poles: the fight for freedom at the cost of one’s own blood.60
Racist German brutality and heroic Polish virtue were common to the Polish understanding of the wartime experience, and these nationalistic and dualistic categories proposed a politically useful and culturally accessible way of recalling the past. They offered Poles an identity based in common suffering, left room for the sacrificial and messianic traditions in Polish commemorative culture, and at the same time provided a model of national solidarity that could be projected onto the challenges of reconstructing the Polish state and building socialism. Not least, they provided a clear justification for Poland’s expansion westward at the expense of a depraved and vanquished Germany. In sum, it was possible to cultivate this notion of martyrdom by combining both national tradition and current political goals.
Despite its appeal and effectiveness, this Polish-national martyrological paradigm was limiting, because in the years to follow, it was difficult to reconcile with the element of Auschwitz history that would define the site in the collective memory of most of the world: the Shoah. Although the mass extermination of Jews was not denied in the public presentation of Auschwitz in the early postwar years, Jewish genocide was seldom upheld as a unique phenomenon. Instead, the paradigm either marginalized the mass murder of Jews or, as was often the case, implied that Poles had shared in that fate, not only as the first victims of Nazi aggression and occupation, but also as certain victims of Nazi extermination policy in the future. Nazi policy in Poland was the basis for this perception, especially during the first two years of the occupation. Jews remained in Poland, but the Nazis deported Poles by the hundreds of thousands to Germany for slave labor; Jews had their own governmental institutions or councils, subject as they were to the Nazis, but Poles had no political or cultural representation; Jews were clearly the victims of Nazi violence and murder, but Poles were also randomly and systematically rounded up, incarcerated, and tortured as political prisoners.61
Polish historians and publicists also pointed to evidence suggesting that Poles, in the course of time, would have been marked for extermination as well. Citing a stenograph of a November 1942 speech by Himmler, representatives of a district commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland concluded at a June 1946 meeting that the Nazi invaders had, in fact, planned for the mass extermination of Poles. The expulsion of Polish peasants from the Zamość region in late 1942 and early 1943, their report stated, was only a preliminary step leading to the goal of mass extermination for the purpose of providing more Lebensraum (living space) for the German people.62 Describing the goals of Nazi ideology, the 1946 report of the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland stated: “It aimed at the wholesale exploitation of the forces of the conquered nations for the benefit of Germany, and afterwards at their extirpation. The Jews were to be completely extirpated before the end of the war; the Poles were intended to do slave labor for the Germans before sharing their fate.”63 Similarly, the report concluded that “the camps in Poland were one of the principal instruments for achieving the criminal aims of Himmler, Greiser and Frank: the complete extermination of the Poles after a short period of exploitation.”64
Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz echoed this theme in his testimony at the Höss trial. According to the Polish premier, the German invaders had undertaken “an unmerciful, nihilistic plan to exterminate nations, especially Slavic nations, and first and foremost the Polish nation, which was to follow the praeludium of eradicating the Jewish nation.”65 And at the April 1945 ceremonies commemorating the second anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Minister of Education Skrzeszewski reminded his audience that “not only Jews had to pass through the death factories, but also a great number of our nation and other nations. The unleashing through Hitlerism of anti-Semitism and the consequent eradication of 3,200,000 Jews in Poland had in view only the invitation to further victims and beyond that the liquidation of those easily determined victims: we and the Jews.”66 Or, in the words of one publicist, “The Germans prepared for Jews and Poles a common fate on Polish soil. The differences consisted only in time.” This is why, according to the author, Jews and Poles were brothers in blood and defense in “struggle for your freedom and ours.”67
There was some validity to speculations and fears that the Nazis had been planning to annihilate the Poles. On 1 May 1942, Artur Greiser, Gauleiter of the Wartheland, proposed the “special treatment” of thirty-five thousand tubercular Poles. In December of that year, Dr. Wilhelm Hagen, from Warsaw’s Nazi administration, claimed in a letter to Hitler that there were secret discussions about the extermination of one-third of some two hundred thousand Poles to be resettled in the General Government, the central region of occupied Poland under the authority of Hans Frank.68 Raul Hilberg, although in no way equating the genocide of Jews with the treatment of other victim groups, has nonetheless noted that “[t]he Germans . . . did not draw the line with the destruction of Jewry. They attacked still other victims, some of whom were thought to be like Jews, some of whom were quite unlike Jews, and some of whom were Germans. The Nazi destruction process was, in short, not aimed at institutions; it was targeted at people. The Jews were only the first victims of the German bureaucracy; they were only the first caught in its path.”69 Polish fears of becoming the “next victims” were real, and there is evidence to suggest that even if the course of events during the occupation did not appear to justify these fears, leading Nazis did consider the possibility of undertaking mass killings of Poles.70 At Auschwitz approximately ten thousand unregistered Polish deportees were murdered, and one hundred thirty-seven thousand registered Poles were subjected to enslavement, torture, starvation, and mass execution. Moreover, Poles had only a 50 percent chance of survival at Auschwitz.
The validity of this claim notwithstanding, the fact remains that Poles were never subjected to a systematic and comprehensive policy of genocide, and to equate the German treatment of Poles with the treatment of Jews was an oversimplification and distortion of the historical record. Nonetheless, the notion of Jews and Poles subjected to a common fate—whether under the occupation as a whole or in the Auschwitz camp—remained an enduring myth that could, in subsequent decades, be politically exploited in a variety of ways, especially during the so-called “anti-Zionist”
