Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979. Jonathan Huener

      INTRODUCTION

      The Stakes and Terms of Memory at Auschwitz

      ALTHOUGH THERE IS A GROWING BODY of literature on the history of the Auschwitz camp, historians have paid relatively little attention to the sharply contested meanings of Auschwitz in the years since its liberation or the uses of memory there. Scholars have explored issues of collective memory, public historical consciousness, and, in more recent years, the representation of the past at monuments and memorials to National Socialist crimes,¹ but no thorough investigation of the postwar Auschwitz site has emerged from this body of literature. Moreover, those works that address postwar manifestations of memory at Auschwitz are primarily concerned with descriptions of the site’s iconography, administration, or exhibitions.² The present work confronts these issues, and also locates the manifestations of collective memory at Auschwitz in their political, cultural, and economic contexts.

      There are several possible explanations for the absence, until now, of a study such as this. First, the investigation of public memory is relatively new to the historical discipline, and only in the past fifteen to twenty years have scholars begun to examine public memory as it relates to the representation of the Holocaust, both at memorial sites and in larger social contexts. Second, given the magnitude and horror of the Auschwitz crime, as well as its “familiarity” in the postwar world, it is hardly surprising that most research has focused on the history of the camp while it was in operation.³ Finally, most of the source material for the investigation of Auschwitz memory in Poland has become accessible only relatively recently. This is the first study of its kind to analyze the largely untapped postwar archival collections of the State Museum at Auschwitz, including its administrative documents, press archive, and collections of exhibition plans. In addition, this study includes and evaluates the perspectives and commemorative agendas introduced by organizations of former prisoners such as the International Auschwitz Committee and the Polish Union of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy, Polish governmental institutions such as the Ministry of Culture and Art and the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, and, not least, the oral interviews and written testimonies of individuals who have functioned as the stewards of memory at Auschwitz, whether former prisoners, former employees of the State Museum at Auschwitz, or government officials.

      It is also worth noting that Auschwitz and its legacy in Poland have only recently been opened to renewed inquiry and debate, as the decrease in state control over scholarship and pedagogy has offered new avenues of research on the history of the Polish People’s Republic and the history of the Second World War and its legacy in Poland. Scholars have, for example, begun to examine in greater detail the history of the Soviet and German occupations during World War II, Polish wartime losses under both these regimes, and the vexing issue of Jewish-Polish relations in the years 1939–45. Moreover, the recent publication of Jan T. Gross’s work Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland⁴ has unleashed a storm of controversy about Polish complicity in the crimes of the Shoah and has challenged assumptions—common in Poland for decades—about Poles as an exclusively “victim” people. This victim mentality was based, of course, in the historical reality of Poland’s devastating wartime losses—human, material, and psychological. But it was also cultivated, institutionalized, and mythologized in postwar Polish culture and at official memorials like the State Museum at Auschwitz. This analysis is not intended as a corrective to that process. Instead, it proposes to explain its origins and manifestations at Auschwitz, the most important site of wartime commemoration in Poland.

      New scholarship and especially the growing visibility of Auschwitz in the international media have aroused greater interest in and critical investigation of Auschwitz and its place in the history of the Polish People’s Republic. Perhaps now, nearly six decades after the end of World War II, this study will be all the more timely as Polish society, scholarship, and especially the staff at the Auschwitz museum attempt to focus and refocus the lens of historical hindsight. This work will clarify and interpret Polish images of Auschwitz from the liberation of the camp until the 1980s. Rather than analyzing surface images alone, this