Postcards from Auschwitz. Daniel P. Reynolds
Soviet State Commission for the Investigation of the Crimes of the German-Fascist Aggressors was the preservation of a past that could be used to bring about the swift punishment of the Nazi perpetrators. Trials of accused perpetrators were important for establishing the legitimacy of communism in Eastern Europe as the vanquisher of fascism.24 Of course, this narrative necessitated officially mandated amnesia about the pact between Stalin and Hitler to devour Poland, which had lasted until Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in June 1941. Given Poland’s victimization at the hands of both Hitler and Stalin, the pro-Soviet agenda did not coincide comfortably with the postwar aspirations of Poles for a liberated and independent state. The competing interests of the Soviet liberators and the Polish survivors of Auschwitz led to tension over whose story would be told—and whose story would be suppressed.25 Soviet oversight of Poland’s new communist government, by no means an expression of Poland’s popular will, ensured the dominance of Polish-Soviet brotherhood in official discourse.26 But Polish national identity could not be so easily suppressed, and Stalin’s imposition of communism reinforced Poland’s sense of victimization at the hands of both Germany and the Soviet Union.27
Polish and Soviet tensions had an immediate impact on the organization of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum as its staff pondered which messages visitors would receive. Would the site commemorate Polish resistance to Hitler in heroic terms? Would it acknowledge the other national, ethnic, and religious groups of victims who perished there? Would it commemorate Polish martyrdom or celebrate liberation by Stalin’s Red Army? How would murdered Red Army prisoners of war, the first group to be gassed at Auschwitz with Zyklon B, be commemorated? However these questions were to be answered, it was clear from the outset that the emphasis would not be on Jewish suffering. Nor would the site emphasize the suffering of other groups such as the Sinti and Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and so-called asocials (the indigent, prostitutes, and other social outcasts).28 While brief mention was made of these victims, their suffering was to be subsumed into a triumphant master narrative of communist-led liberation.
Since the guiding ideology for any postwar memorial at Auschwitz had to advance a pro-Soviet narrative, the museum’s displays had to conform to a worldview that saw history in terms of class, not religion, race, or ethnicity. The fact that the vast majority of Auschwitz’s victims were Jews, or that Gypsies were also selected on the basis of alleged biological difference, was not acknowledged. Instead of emphasizing the racism inherent in Nazi ideology toward its victims, under Soviet influence the museum portrayed the victims, perpetrators, and resisters in terms of a class-based ideology that sought to overcome ethnic and religious identities. The Second World War (the Great Patriotic War, in the Soviet Union’s parlance) was cast as a war between the capitalist/imperialist ambitions of Hitler’s fascism on the one hand and the international liberation of workers and peasants through Stalin’s communism on the other. The Soviet view blurred the victims’ identities into an international collective united in having suffered under Hitler’s capitalist-imperialist aggression.29
Despite the unavoidable submission to Soviet-guided propaganda, the reality of Auschwitz’s location in Poland, its management by Polish authorities, and its outreach to Polish visitors assured that Polish suffering would dominate the museum’s displays. The first incarnation of Auschwitz as a memorial highlighted the (mostly Catholic) Polish political prisoners interned and murdered there. The prevalence to this day of the word “martyr” at the memorial subsumes the diverse identities of the camp’s victims into a Polish Catholic perspective whereby the camp is interpreted as a site of national persecution cast in distinctly Christian terms. (I shall return to the use of the term “martyr” momentarily.) While Auschwitz’s victims included some 150,000 Catholic Poles, more than 1 million Jews, 23,000 Sinti and Roma, 15,000 Soviet soldiers, and thousands of other minorities were killed there.30 The imperatives of Stalinist ideology and Polish Catholic nationalism converged to de-emphasize the fact that Jews formed the vast majority of the camp’s victims.
The researcher Andrew Charlesworth makes the case that the relatively preserved state of Auschwitz I (the original section of the Auschwitz camp system, also called the Stammlager) facilitated its prioritization of Polish over Jewish suffering. He suggests that the District Liquidation Bureau’s permission to dismantle numerous buildings in Auschwitz II (Birkenau), where the majority of Jewish victims had been murdered, allowed officials to sidestep the unique disaster of Jewish suffering. The emphasis on Auschwitz, Charlesworth points out, served a more sinister purpose of actively ignoring Jewish suffering:
[Of these] six death camps whose primary function was the extermination of European Jewry, … Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka could be deemed inappropriate in that they had been destroyed by the Nazis, leaving little or no trace remaining. This was also very convenient for those who wished to ignore the specificity of Jewish suffering, as these were wholly death camps for Jewish extermination. This left Auschwitz and Majdanek.31
Charlesworth’s implication, namely that tacit anti-Semitism motivated the choice of Auschwitz as a central memorial to Polish victims, is hard to evaluate. While the history of anti-Semitism and the plight of Jews in postwar Poland certainly legitimate this suspicion, there were less cynical considerations to take into account as well, particularly in light of the state of ruin that characterized postwar Poland. As Charlesworth acknowledges, Auschwitz was the most extensive, the most recently operating, and the most intact of the Nazi camps in Poland. That fact alone could be sufficient to explain why Auschwitz was chosen as a memorial facility over other sites. Moreover, the solid brick buildings of the Auschwitz I Stammlager were a premium in a war-ravaged country where standing structures were in short supply, quite in contrast to the readily dismantled or burned wooden barracks found at Auschwitz II (Birkenau) or Majdanek. Furthermore, the fact remains that both Jewish and non-Jewish Poles were murdered at Auschwitz, albeit by different methods and in different numbers. Finally, it is important to resist the temptation to reduce either Soviet-sponsored socialism or Polish nationalism to anti-Semitism, even if both were capable of patently anti-Semitic policies and attitudes.
Despite the emphasis on Soviet communist and Polish nationalist ideologies (and the inherent tensions between them), over time it proved impossible to ignore the anti-Semitism behind the Nazis’ murderous logic. A gradual and much belated shift occurred in the portrayal of fascism, from describing it as a rogue form of capitalism (the Soviet view) to acknowledging the racism inherent in Hitler’s fantasy of German superiority. Today, tourists to Auschwitz are informed explicitly about the genocidal logic of the camp and the system of extermination that evolved there for the purpose of ridding Europe of its Jewish population. Given the inhospitable climate in Stalinist Eastern Europe for acknowledging the victimization of Jews, Roma, or any other group defined as an ethnicity, one must wonder how and when that shift in narrative came about and how tourism has been a witness to that shift.
Even before the war’s end, knowledge about the Holocaust had spread internationally among occupying forces and displaced populations, both of which were on the move. The American and British experience of liberating concentration camps such as Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Dachau, though technically not extermination camps like Birkenau, made indelible impressions on those troops and the journalists who accompanied them.32 While these camps within the German Reich were not originally established for the sole purpose of murdering Jews, they became the destination of forced marches from the extermination camps as the Nazis moved their prisoners westward away from the advancing Red Army. Of those who survived the death marches, many died in horrible conditions of disease and starvation in the camps liberated by the Western allies.33 In short, the shocking encounters with Nazi camps was an experience shared by Soviet, American, and British allies.
Likewise, the Jewish diaspora ensured that knowledge of the Holocaust would spread beyond the borders of Nazi-occupied Europe. Wartime experiences and continued anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe after 1945 led large numbers of Jews who had survived the Holocaust to migrate to new countries, especially to the United States, Canada, and the British Mandate of Palestine.34 As accounts of the genocide spread internationally among Jewish communities, the local administration at Auschwitz found it impossible to ignore the growing global awareness of what had taken place there, even if that pressure met with considerable ideological resistance from the state. By the late 1960s, the emphasis at Auschwitz on Polish victimization