Auschwitz-birkenau In Postwar Poland
To describe Auschwitz-Birkenau as a "museum" seems morally shocking: strictly speaking, however, the description is correct, if a museum is understood to be a place where objects are chosen, arranged and displayed with a purpose. In the first place, what the visitor to Auschwitz-Birkenau sees today does not reflect the way the camp developed under the Nazis, or the camp that the Soviet liberators found in January 1945. Many important sections of the site, for example, have been altered, destroyed or allowed to fall into ruin. Some cases in point are the entrance kiosk of today's parking lot, originally the site of the main entrance to the camp - not as is commonly assumed, the gate bearing the notorious "Arbeit Macht Frei" inscription; the visitors' complex next to the parking lot, originally the reception centre for camp inmates; and, most importantly, the crematorium just outside the fence of the main Auschwitz site - a partially reconstructed replica of the ruined original the camp guards hastily blew up, along with other incriminating evidence, prior to evacuating the site. This is not to suggest any similarity of intention with those neo-Nazi groups and revisionist historians who use discrepancies between the original Auschwitz camp plan and today's site as "evidence" to support their Holocaust denials. It is to recognize that from the outset the purpose of preserving Auschwitz had more to do with memory and bearing witness than the straight presentation of objective historical fact - and rightly so, many will feel. Further, although it is Auschwitz that official tours and guidebooks mostly focus on, it was in Birkenau that the vast majority of the killing (mostly of Jews) occurred - a result, some would argue, of the postwar "museum" planners' focus on presenting and preserving sites connected with Polish martyrdom, and a phenomenon perpetuated to this day in the minority of visitors who make it to Birkenau. Third, and most shamefully, until the 1990s officially produced information about the camps downplayed, or to be more accurate, perhaps, omitted to make adequate mention of the specifically Jewish-related aspects of the genocide enacted in the camp. The immediate context for the glaring omission of the Jewish perspective in official communist-era Polish guidebooks and tours of the concentration camps was straightforwardly political. For Poland's postwar communist regime, like those in other East European countries, the horrors of World War II were a constant and central reference point. Following the official Soviet line, the emphasis was on the war as an antifascist struggle, in which good (communism and the Soviet Union, represented by the new postwar governments) had finally triumphed over evil (fascism and Nazi Germany). This interpretation provided an important legitimizing prop for the new regimes. The Soviet Union, aided by loyal national communists, were the people who had liberated Europe from Hitler, and as inheritors of their antifascist mantle, the newly installed communist governments sought to portray themselves as heirs to all that was noble and good. In this schematic view of the war, there was no room for details of the racial aspects of Nazi ideology - people were massacred in the camps because fascists were butchers, not because the victims were Jews or Poles or Romanies. Hence the camps were opened up first and foremost as political monuments to the victims of fascism rather than to the Holocaust. The official decree establishing the museum in 1947 captures the ideological leavening succinctly: "On the site of the former Nazi concentration camp, a monument to the martyrdom of the Polish nation and of other nations is to be erected for all time to come." Recognizing the sensitivities that continue to surround these issues, Poland's post-communist authorities have shown far greater willingness than their predecessors to acknowledge the specifically anti-Semitic dimensions of Nazi devastation. Along with "revised" figures for the numbers of deaths at Auschwitz and Birkenau, official guidebooks to the camp now state clearly that the vast majority of the victims were Jews, and signs give greater prominence to the specifically Jewish aspects of the genocide practised here. In the broader sweep of Polish-Jewish relations, the biggest running sore of recent years in relation to Auschwitz-Birkenau has been the controversy over the Carmelite Convent established in 1984, flush against the walls of Auschwitz, in a building once used by the Nazis as a storehouse for Zyklon B gas crystals. In 1987, following sustained protests from the World Jewish Congress and other concerned organizations over what was viewed as a misconceived and offensive attempt to "baptize" and appropriate the Holocaust for religious ends, the Roman Catholic hierarchy consented to the removal of the convent. Following the nuns' failure to meet the agreed deadline, the dispute flared up in the summer of 1989. Jewish activists from the USA and Israel staged a series of protests at the site under an international media spotlight. Local residents reacted furiously (and on occasions, violently) to what were interpreted as hostile foreign intrusions into Church life. Cardinal Glemp suggested that a world Jewish media conspiracy was being directed against the Church, a remark that provoked several noted Polish-Catholic intellectuals to censure him publicly. In turn, it could be argued that Jewish reactions showed little sympathy for or understanding of the widespread Polish perception of Auschwitz as a symbol of national suffering, at Auschwitz, in particular, and under the Nazis in general, and of the more than three million Gentile Poles killed during the Nazi occupation. All in all, the dispute over the convent provoked much sadness and bitterness, needlessly retarding the slow and often painful process of promoting and reordering Polish-Jewish relations. The collective sigh of relief when the nuns finally moved to the new site designated for them in summer 1993 was audible, not least as their continuing failure to budge had for a while threatened to result in a Jewish boycott of official ceremonies marking the fiftieth anniversary of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The convent is now located next to the Centre for Information, Dialogue and Prayer established in 1992, on a site 1km southwest of the camp, which aims to provide a space for reflection and discussion on the meaning and legacy of the Holocaust, in particular a place of encounter between locals and Jewish visitors to the camps. A further twist to the camp's history came during the ceremonies held to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1995. Once again, an event intended to demonstrate memory and unity threatened to be overshadowed by disputes. Angered by what they saw as a failure to accord Jewish sufferings in Auschwitz their proper place in the two-day commemorations, Jewish participants organized their own emotionally charged act of remembrance at the camp the day before the official ceremony. In his speech at the ceremony the next day, attended by a host of world political and religious leaders, President Lech Walesa, stung by the perceived slight, deviated from his prepared text to acknowledge the unique and specific suffering of Jews - the first time he had ever done so in public. A virtual rerun of the convent controversy occurred in 1998, when radical Catholic nationalist groups began planting a sea of crucifixes around an eight-metre cross just beyond the camp's southern perimeter. Erected to commemorate Karol Wojtyla's visit to the camp in 1979, the cross had always been tolerated by Jewish organizations. The emergence of hundreds of smaller crosses around it was, however, another matter. The Polish authorities battled to defuse the dispute by attempting to secure the crosses' removal via legal expropriation of the land on which they were placed, but this hasn't prevented further - albeit sporadic - outbreaks of cross-planting near the site. The latest controversy to affect Auschwitz involves the establishment of a buffer zone around the camp, within which all commercial activities that could compromise the dignity of the site are to be prohibited. In 1999 the Polish government decreed that the zone would occupy a hundred-metre radius around the boundaries of the camp. Members of the Jewish community nevertheless pointed out that a UNESCO-sponsored agreement dating from 1979 had envisaged a zone 500m deep, and began to campaign for the 1979 agreement's ratification. The existence of any kind of buffer zone was profoundly unpopular with the inhabitants of Zasole , the 10,000-strong Oswiecim suburb which directly borders on the Auschwitz site. The bar on commercial activity was seen by them as an unfair imposition on an area of town that is already marked by economic stagnation and high unemployment. Things came to a head in early 2001, when a popular disco , crassly situated near the camp in a building once used by the Nazis to store clothes and other belongings stolen from inmates, was closed down by the regional governor of Malopolska - over the heads of the Zasole council. The Oswiecim authorities are currently working on an urban development plan that will respect the five-hundred-metre zone while providing room for the economic development of Zasole at the same time - predictably, many in Zasole regard this as a sellout. The difficult and emotionally charged issue of Polish-Jewish relations looks set to remain in the headlines for some time to come.
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