Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979. Jonathan Huener
Despite the occasional presence of diverse modes of memory, one can trace the development of a “dominant memory” (that is, what Rousso calls “a collective interpretation of the past that may even come to have official status”)56 at the State Museum and in its activities. A charge of the Polish state since its founding, the State Museum is a prime example of how memory can become institutionalized and how that institution can then utilize a prevailing mode of memory as an instrument of social and political power. It is, of course, impossible to claim the existence of a single, dominant mode of memory at a place like Auschwitz. The camp’s history has always defied generalization, the social frameworks upon which Auschwitz memory was based were diverse and at times in conflict, and the public manifestations of that memory were not static, but in flux. Nonetheless, in the period under consideration three main characteristics of collective memory emerged at the Auschwitz site. First, Poles quickly came to regard Auschwitz as a place of Polish national martyrdom. The multinational makeup of the camp’s deportees and inmates was stressed at times, but by and large the particularly Polish element of sacrifice at the camp received the greatest emphasis in the site’s exhibitions, iconography, and commemorative rituals. As early as 1947 Auschwitz had, in the Polish popular historical consciousness, become a camp primarily intended for the internment, exploitation, and extermination of the Polish political prisoner—a prisoner who was not a helpless victim but a resistance fighter, a hero, a martyr suffering and dying for some higher good, like the Polish nation, the Catholic faith, or socialism.
Second, Auschwitz was acknowledged, but usually not specified, as a place of Jewish victimization. Neither the State Museum nor the Polish government ever explicitly denied that the vast majority of victims at Auschwitz were Jews. But this fact was not emphasized; nor did it designate Auschwitz in any distinctive way. Simply put, Jews were usually included among the so-called “martyrs” of Auschwitz and regarded as citizens of Poland, the Netherlands, France, Hungary, Greece, or one of the many other countries under Nazi occupation. One has to grant that the destruction of Europe’s Jews was not yet, in the first postwar years, the distinct category of historical analysis or broad, public commemoration that it is today. But the fact remains that for decades Polish postwar culture did not treat the Shoah as the salient characteristic of Auschwitz, but relegated it instead to the status of yet another example of German barbarism. Jews were to be remembered for their suffering and death, but they were neither represented as the overwhelming majority of victims at the site nor given proper emphasis in the larger memorialization undertaken there.
Third, the Polish state instrumentalized Auschwitz as a political arena. In the processes of valorizing Polish martyrdom and de-emphasizing Jewish victimization, the Soviet-imposed communist government in Poland frequently used Auschwitz as a site for the accumulation of political currency. As members of the regime and the press sought to vindicate a prevailing ideology through the recollection of Poland’s tragic past, the Auschwitz memorial site, its exhibitions, and its public events served as a rallying point of sorts for the socioeconomic order, for staunchly anti-West German foreign policy, and, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, for vulgar anti-American, anti-Western propaganda. Although firmly grounded in the domestic and international political agendas of the Soviet Union and its satellites, the commemorative tone set at Auschwitz can also be viewed within the context of a postwar European 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