or Birkenau, arguably the world’s largest Jewish burial ground, has suffered from decades of neglect, its spacious fields marked by waist-high grasses, several dozen dilapidated buildings and guard towers, and a large abstract monument at the end of a railroad spur. The Stammlager, or base camp, by contrast, has been maintained as a museum, research institution, and tourist center. Since 1946 it has served as the pedagogical and commemorative center of the memorial complex. Nonetheless, it is a cemetery that bears the marks of its origins. As at many cemeteries, flowers and stones are occasionally left behind by visitors to Auschwitz I and Birkenau, but they are not left at individual grave sites, for there are none. Instead, they are usually placed at the former sites of destruction—a torture cell, an execution wall, or the ruins of gas chambers and crematoria. In some cases the site of an Auschwitz victim’s death can be assumed or determined, but the final resting place of a victim’s remains cannot.
Postwar Auschwitz is not only a cemetery, but also, as its official name suggests, a museum. The State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau employs tour guides and historians; it sells books and postcards; it conducts research; it attempts to conserve the artifacts of the past; and it houses extensive exhibitions for the purpose of documenting the history of the camp and educating the visiting public. Auschwitz is also an open-air museum, for across the nearly 450-acre terrain of the base camp and Birkenau are scattered many of the structures of destruction—barracks, guard towers, administrative buildings, and even gas chambers—structures that functioned while the camp was still in operation. As a site of documentation and information, the State Museum has an important pedagogical and admonitory function. It therefore also has the power to influence the visiting public’s understanding of the camp’s history and the power to shape, to varying degrees, that public’s memory of Auschwitz.
Not least, Auschwitz is also an arena of public commemorative ritual. For more than fifty years its monuments, structures, and open spaces have attracted pilgrims and politicians, mourners, and participants in the recurrent manifestacja, or government-sponsored demonstration. The Catholic devout as well as the communist activist have made Auschwitz the locus of public ritual, at times even exploiting the site by linking its history to a prevailing ideology or by evoking one commemorative message and, by extension, one memorial narrative at the expense of another. Thus in some cases, the votive and political rituals cultivated at Auschwitz in the postwar era were undertaken in an exclusionary manner, understating or even excluding the memory of nearly a million Jews killed at Auschwitz—some 90 percent of the camp’s victims.
Privileging the memory of one victim group or groups is unsettling or even offensive, but it is hardly inexplicable, given the diverse lines of memory that have converged at the Auschwitz site. Memory at Auschwitz has never been fixed, for it has been subject to the vicissitudes of Polish society and politics as well as international political events. Changes in Warsaw’s regimes, the waning and resurgence of anti-Semitism in postwar Poland, growing understanding of the Shoah and the Jewish past at the Auschwitz camp, and even the cold war or events in the Middle East have influenced the representation and recollection of history at Auschwitz.
All this should remind us that no single postwar image of the camp and its history can be fixed in the memory of all and that any attempt to cultivate or enforce a single memorial narrative dishonors the memory of countless victims and survivors because, simply put, it distorts Auschwitz history. Indeed, the diversity of memorial narratives of Auschwitz that have proliferated in recent years is the result of that history—a history that defies quick categorization, easy generalization, and the “master” historical narrative. With its three main camps and forty auxiliary camps scattered throughout the region, the Auschwitz complex served the SS, Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), and German industry in a variety of ways: it was a concentration camp, it provided slave labor for German industry, and it became the largest of the Nazi killing centers for European Jews. Deportees from nearly every European country were incarcerated, exploited, enslaved, and murdered at the complex, and the variety of competing and conflicting memories of Auschwitz has grown out of the diverse histories and experiences of prisoners. Moreover, historiographical traditions and commemorative practices, both in Poland and elsewhere, have produced a variety of prisoner prototypes—the patriotic Polish martyr, the conspiring and internationalist communist, or the Jewish victim of the gas chamber, to name only a few. There were, of course, prisoners such as these at Auschwitz, but no single prisoner-type or prisoner experience was representative of all Auschwitz internees.
The representation and uses of history at the Auschwitz site during the years of the Polish People’s Republic are the central themes of this book. It accounts for the official—and some unofficial—historical emplotments and narratives at the State Museum, considering all the while their social and political contexts. Recognizing that all narratives are, to a greater or lesser extent, culturally and politically inflected, it does not claim to establish a fixed and finite historical standard against which all forms of commemoration at Auschwitz are measured. Nor does it propose an ideal commemorative model for the memorial site and museum. But this work does recognize a responsibility to evaluate the public manifestations of memory at Auschwitz in relation to the history of the camp. For this reason, the introduction that follows offers the reader, for the purpose of orientation, a compendium of the camp’s history in addition to a theoretical and historiographical context for the work as a whole.
Chapter 1 then sets the stage for subsequent sections through a discussion of the ways early postwar Poland was acquainted with the history of the camp, examining and describing the main events and cultural currents reflecting and shaping Polish perceptions of Auschwitz in these first years of wartime commemoration. It therefore includes a discussion of the concept of “martyrology” in early postwar Poland—a cultural and ideological notion rooted in many generations of Polish history that profoundly affected both the elevation of Auschwitz in postwar memorialization and the iconographic and pedagogical goals of those responsible for the development and maintenance of the site.
The second chapter offers an account of the transformation of Auschwitz from liberated camp to museum in the years 1945–47. This includes a discussion of the challenging legal, political, and material conditions at the site, as well as the first efforts to create a museum exhibition. In addition, this chapter addresses the emergence of two distinct loci memoriae, or places of memory, at Auschwitz. The grounds of the base camp, Auschwitz I, came to serve as the maintained “museum” portion of the site, while the massive terrain of Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, the largest single site for the extermination of European Jews, suffered neglect and even plunder.
Chapter 3 focuses on the Auschwitz site in the years 1947–54. This was the most difficult period in the history of the museum, for shortly after the official dedication of the site, the ideological imperatives of Stalinism began to color and determine the site’s representation of the past. Thus, it was in this period that international and domestic political considerations had their most pervasive influence on the outward appearance of the site and its exhibitions. “Hitlerites” became “fascists,” the Shoah was further neglected although not actively excluded from the memorial landscape, employees and exhibitions at the museum were subjected to strict state censorship and review, while the Second World War, as well as postwar international tensions, were represented at the site as struggles between Western imperialist and Soviet-led socialist camps. Not surprisingly, this period also saw the most extreme attempts to make commemorative rituals at Auschwitz conform to prevailing political ideology, recalling and illustrating the claim of the French scholar of collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs, that institutionalized memory selects those elements of the past that best fit present needs. The years 1947–54 thus provide the most vivid illustrations of the tractability of memory at Auschwitz, as the grounds of the former camp were instrumentalized almost to the extreme of the State Museum’s total effacement. Yet this uncertain period also saw the emergence of a memorial “vernacular” in defense of the site.
In the early
