Postcards from Auschwitz. Daniel P. Reynolds
to the Holocaust, both in terms of the event experienced by those who were there from 1941 to 1945 and as a collective memory in the present. I frame this reflection in terms of bearing witness, asking how tourists to places like Auschwitz receive and process testimony from the past. Tourists do not arrive as blank slates but as socially and politically situated subjects with different degrees of historical knowledge who bring expectations to Auschwitz and other such memorials, hoping that they will acquire some new or deeper understanding of the murder of six million Jews. By hoping to access the space of an event that is temporally beyond reach, tourists search for an immediacy they may not find in literature, film, or other media. The degree to which expectations are fulfilled affects the nature of bearing witness through tourism.
Historically, tourists to Auschwitz have embodied multiple and even contradictory identities, both over time and across its terrain. This variety of tourist experiences belies the categorization in so much scholarship of visitors as either tourists or pilgrims (or some other term in a binary opposition). Instead of the stale tourist/pilgrim (or tourist/student, tourist/scholar, tourist/artist) dichotomy, which merely recapitulates the “they are tourists, I am not” scheme, witnessing offers a framework that is especially relevant for Auschwitz and possibly explanatory of its evolution as a memorial site. The focus on witnessing does not magically resolve the tension between the tourist and the pilgrim; instead, it focuses on what the visitor perceives at Auschwitz in relation to the suffering of prisoners, the brutality of perpetrators, or the indifference of others. Since tourists arrive after the event being memorialized, actual witnessing seems at first to be impossible. But if we explore the concept somewhat further, thinking of witnessing as an intersubjective, communicative mode of transferring knowledge, there is some merit in characterizing tourism to Auschwitz as such.12 The claim of witnessing needs to overcome the inescapable temporal gap that separates tourists from the perpetrators and victims. If tourists are called to bear witness, what or who takes the place of the dead whose testimony they seek? The history of the memorial may offer clues that begin to answer that question.
Auschwitz as Memorial and Museum: The Postwar Era
Like other Nazi concentration and extermination camps, Auschwitz has existed as a memorial and museum far longer than it functioned as a center for torture and killing. Obviously the evacuation of the camp by the Nazis and its liberation by the Red Army mark a definitive moment in the site’s history, the end of the Nazis’ largest and, by the end, most developed site of genocide and repression. The Red Army arrived to witness a camp that had been abandoned by the SS, who had attempted to destroy the evidence of their crimes by blowing up the remaining crematoria. But the destruction was far from complete, and many prisoners remained behind to bear witness to what had transpired there. The story of the site since 1945 has been the effort to gather and preserve evidence of what took place there, to create a site for memorialization and education, and to contextualize the Nazi crimes within competing and shifting political narratives. At the same time, Auschwitz has undergone a gradual transformation from a local to a global tourist destination.13
That evolution was not clear from the outset, at least during the Cold War. As the historian Tim Cole points out, Auschwitz was better known on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain than on the Western side for decades after the war. Because different liberating armies reached different camps, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald were more familiar names to Great Britain and to the United States, respectively.14 As the Holocaust became an ever-greater part of public discourse in the West, the name of Auschwitz became better known by the 1970s, so much so that by now it has become a “metonymy for the Holocaust as a whole”15 in the East and West alike. The end of the Cold War meant easier access to the site for Western scholars, whose accounts of Auschwitz began to appear in the 1990s.16 As these studies have shown, the archives at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum serve as an important primary source of documentation about the Holocaust, but they also serve a secondary purpose: They offer an account of the management of the site as a tourist destination, not only conveying facts and figures but also revealing the geopolitical currents the site’s managers have had to navigate over the years.17 The development of tourism has in fact been a constant feature of the place’s postwar history, a force both shaping and being shaped by the memory and remains of Auschwitz since 1945.
Before the arrival of the Red Army on January 27, 1945, the SS had already taken the majority of prisoners on a deadly forced march westward, but some 9,000 prisoners who were too sick or feeble to be evacuated were left behind. In the immediate aftermath of liberation, the camp served as a field hospital and displaced-persons camp for those who remained. Although Red Army and Polish volunteers worked to restore the health of those whom they could save, malnutrition and disease continued to claim many lives. Of the former prisoners who recovered, most were able to leave the camp by March or April 1945.
Meanwhile, as medics and volunteers tended the sick, investigators began to gather evidence of the crimes committed there. As early as November 1942, the Soviet Union had established the Extraordinary Soviet State Commission for the Investigation of the Crimes of the German-Fascist Aggressors, a body devoted to prosecuting and punishing perpetrators of Nazi war crimes. It was this body that had mandated the preservation of the camps liberated by the Red Army. Before reaching Polish territory, the Soviets had preserved evidence of the murders committed in Soviet and Baltic territories by the Einsatzgruppen, the SS units that liquidated Jewish populations as the German Wehrmacht advanced eastward. In July 1944, the Red Army discovered the Majdanek camp on the outskirts of Lublin, and within a month it had established a museum on the site to bear witness to the atrocities perpetrated there. Among the barracks and mass graves, Majdanek also held ample evidence of the use of gas chambers to murder Jews sent there for extermination.18 Thus, by the time the Red Army reached Auschwitz six months later, it had already made clear its intention to preserve evidence of war crimes for posterity.19 While the first official steps at establishing a museum at Auschwitz date to April 1946, slightly more than a year after the Red Army ’s arrival, the conceptual foundations for preserving the camp as testimony predate its liberation. In other words, the twin purposes of gathering forensic evidence and ensuring memorialization shared the goal of preserving the camp as a form of testimony, a top priority for liberators and survivors alike.20 As a native communist government was groomed for leadership in Poland, Polish agencies began taking over this work in the camps situated within its borders, including all of the Vernichtungslager, or extermination camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka). By April 1946, a little more than one year after liberation, the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art sent a committee of former prisoners to Auschwitz to begin work on the museum, led by the former prisoner Tadeusz Wąsowicz,21 whom Nazis had imprisoned for membership in the Polish resistance and who was to become the museum’s first director.
While the camp’s liberators needed to preserve evidence for prosecution and punishment of war criminals, the camp’s preservation as a site of commemoration was also always a long-term goal—albeit one with multiple and even contradictory agendas. In the case of Auschwitz and Majdanek, forensics and memorialization were both facilitated by the relatively intact state of the camps, which had been in operation just before liberation, leaving the Nazis insufficient time to destroy the evidence of mass killing. Despite their relatively intact state, there were immediate obstacles to ensuring preservation of the camps. The widespread deprivation across war-ravaged Poland meant that resources were scarce, and some of the physical structures of both camps were dismantled to serve the needs of the living. The wood used to build the barracks was needed for construction elsewhere in Poland, and so in March 1946 the District Liquidation Bureau, the Polish agency charged with the management of buildings and inventory that came into Polish possession after the war, oversaw the dismantling of the barracks at Birkenau.22 Tourists today can see the results of such scarcity at Birkenau and Majdanek, where the vast majority of wooden barracks are gone. At Birkenau, only brick chimneys remain where the majority of barracks once stood. The exceptions are a few wooden barracks at both memorials—some of them reconstructed—and the first barracks built from brick at Birkenau in what was to become the Frauenlager, or women’s camp. Along with the salvaged building materials went other “articles of everyday use” found at the camp, distributed across Poland to families who had lost everything in the war.23 These included utensils, pots and pans, tools, fabrics—whatever was salvageable and practical.
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