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 How long will Auschwitz survive?
This month marks the 60th anniversary of the Nazi death camp. It continues to face a unique set of problems.
Visitors to Auschwitz are greeted by two signs at the entrance. The first is a plaque proclaiming it to be a Unesco World Heritage Site. It comes as something of a shock to realise that a death camp is now recognised as an important part of mankind’s heritage. The other sign warns “Beware of pickpockets”, a reminder that Auschwitz is on the international tourist circuit, attracting 500,000 visitors a year. It lies 40 miles west of Krakow, a fashionable holiday destination.
Just beyond the modern entrance is the original steel gateway with its infamous slogan “Arbeit macht frei” (Work sets you free), beneath which columns of inmates were force-marched every morning. Inside the camp, seemingly endless rows of prison blocks survive—silent testimony to the suffering that was endured. However much one has read about the Holocaust, Auschwitz is a chilling sight.
The camp was liberated by the Soviet army on 27 January 1945, and next month the 60th anniversary will be marked by a series of commemorative events. A decade ago, the 50th anniversary was disrupted by Jewish groups which felt they had not been accorded a proper place in the ceremonies. This time, relations between Jews and Christians are easier, but powerful emotions are still evoked by memories of the death camps. The fate of the Jews under the Nazis is universally known, but for the Poles, Auschwitz represents a symbol of their suffering during the war—to a degree faced by no other nation in Europe.
In institutional terms, Auschwitz is a museum, run by the Polish government. Admission is free. It might be assumed that Auschwitz would be one museum which does not have financial problems because of its State funding and because it is able to solicit donations from a diaspora of tens of millions of people who lost relatives here. But the government contribution is only $2.3 million a year, half of what is required, and outside assistance is therefore essential. Much of this comes through the International Auschwitz-Birkenau Preservation Project, set up on the initiative of the US-based Ronald Lauder Foundation. Since 1990 it has raised $25 million for various projects, with help from 11 governments, particularly Germany. More funds are needed, however, such as those required for a planned art gallery.
Auschwitz also faces challenges which are of quite a different order from those of other museums—particularly over highly sensitive questions relating to conservation and presentation. The current challenges confronting the museum must be seen against the backdrop of Poland’s post-war history.
Memorial or museum?
When the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, the immediate task was to save the lives of the 7,000 remaining prisoners and to bury the 600 scattered bodies. It was not until late 1945 that serious consideration was given to what should be done with the site. Much of the topsoil was impregnated with human ash and some felt that the entire area should be razed to the ground, ploughed over and planted with grass as a memorial. However, the majority view was that everything which remained should be preserved unchanged, as a witness to what had occurred.
The whole site formally became the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in 1947 and a small display was set up in one of the blocks. The first camp, Auschwitz I, had been erected in June 1940 to incarcerate Polish political prisoners. It was quickly expanded, and two years later an even larger camp, Auschwitz II, had been established just over a mile away at Birkenau. Although the extermination of the Jews had begun at Auschwitz I, it was at Birkenau that this process was ruthlessly carried out on an industrial scale.Once Auschwitz-Birkenau became a museum, politics determined its presentation. World War II was portrayed as an anti-Fascist struggle led by the Soviet Union. As Poland fell increasingly under Stalin’s yoke, the death camp became a theatre for Cold War propaganda. In 1950 the initial exhibition was changed, with America and Britain being blamed for the birth of Nazism. Following Stalin’s death, and the subsequent liberalisation, the displays were redone again in 1955. This is essentially what visitors see today, half a century later.
Material evidence
For a museum, Auschwitz has relatively little in the way of objects, other than the buildings. The Germans destroyed incriminating evidence immediately before they fled and the Soviet army took useful items, as did the impoverished local population. Most of the exhibits are therefore from the storehouses which held personal objects seized from the newly arrived prisoners, the majority of whom were exterminated within hours. Part of a large room in one of the prison blocks is filled with a jumble of suitcases, neatly inscribed by the owners with their home addresses, in cities across central Europe. These small cases originally contained the entire personal possessions of people who were told they were being resettled for a new life.
Another room contains two tons of human hair, cut from victims immediately before they were gassed. The hair was taken by the Nazi regime for use as lining material for clothes, and a bolt of the processed lining is also displayed. It is impossible to look at the material without thinking about how anyone could wear a coat, knowing it was lined with the hair of the exterminated. Even today the hair remains a controversial display. Should it be buried as human remains or kept on show as vivid evidence of what occurred?
Most of the museum displays comprise photographic panels and text, presented inside 18 of the blocks at Auschwitz I. Some buildings are used for thematic displays, with others being devoted to the victims of various national groups. Politics again intrudes. The Yugoslav display is currently closed. The Czechoslovak exhibit has been split into two, and the recently-opened Czech and Slovak displays on separate floors now have the best presentations. The latest group to be given its own display is the Roma (Gypsies).
Outdoors, new signage has been installed to explain what the various buildings were originally used for. These are done with white text and photographs against a black background. The writing is straightforward and informative, avoiding unduly emotive language. Their design and black background are reminiscent of a memorial, although this is subtly done and most visitors are probably not conscious of the intention. With so much of the site exposed to the weather, continual maintenance is essential, but the approach is usually that of minimal intervention. Occasionally, however, more is done. Currently underway is a project to restore the 3,600 concrete fence posts, which had deteriorated. Barbed wire is being attached to these new posts, giving a vivid impression of the impregnable electrified barrier which surrounded the camp.
The Death Wall, where the SS carried out frequent executions, was re-erected. Visitors now treat it as a shrine, lighting candles beneath it. The first gas chamber and crematorium has also been rebuilt, using the blackened steel oven doors and the macabre trolleys used to insert the bodies. Most visitors are probably unaware that this is a partial reconstruction, but it is on the original site and with original materials. Earlier this year preservation work had to be undertaken on the bunker to prevent further damage from rain seepage.
Final Solution
Having seen the gas chamber in the original camp, most visitors assume they have seen the worst, but Auschwitz II at Birkenau is even more of a shock. At the entrance lies the watch tower, built directly above the railway line. From there one’s initial impression is the vast size of the operation, with 300 blocks stretching as far as the eye can see. These held up to 90,000 people. The view also gives a vivid impression of the sheer scale of the extermination. As many as 6,000 new arrivals were killed in the gas chambers every day, so two weeks of extermination was equivalent to the entire population of this huge camp.
Most of the buildings at Birkenau were of wood, and all that survives are their brick chimneys. Although formerly stables for 52 horses, each was converted to house 1,000 prisoners. There are also 22 brick blocks which still stand. Inside, there are endless rows of triple bunks, in which up to eight people slept in every “bed”. There are no explanatory texts—here none are needed—and visitors are free to wander as they wish. The roofs are secure, to minimise water damage to the interior, but otherwise the buildings are in the dilapidated condition in which they were found. Nearby are the latrine blocks, used by many hundreds of people at one time, in the most primitive of conditions.
Four years ago the “Sauna” was opened up to the public. It was here that the new arrivals selected for slave-labour were washed, deloused, tattooed with their number and given their thin uniform. Visitors follow the original route taken by the prisoners and a glass floor has been inserted to prevent damage to the fragile original surface.
Most new arrivals never got this far. Only the fittest were saved, and three quarters of new arrivals were selected for immediate extermination. Beyond the barracks lie the remains of five sets of gas chambers and crematoria, the first of which were used in 1942. These were blown up by the Nazis just before their eventual retreat, but enough remains of the structures to see the short journey that was taken by those who were first forced to enter the “shower” and then, within minutes, burnt into ash.
Inevitably, these poignant ruins are being weathered away, posing sensitive conservation issues. It was recently decided that action is necessary. A photometrical survey of the first two gas chambers and crematoria is being carried out to monitor what remains. Plans have also been made to dry the interior of the rubble and lay drainage pipes to minimise water seepage. Supports may be necessary to prevent collapses. All around are the loose bricks of the gas chambers and ovens, but fortunately few visitors seem tempted to remove or trample over these gruesome remains. Much of the soil in this area is thickly impregnated with human ash.
Monument
One of the most debated issues at Auschwitz after the war was the planned memorial. Polish architect Romuald Gutt was commissioned to provide the design, but his proposal was never built. In 1957 an international competition chaired by the British sculptor Henry Moore considered 426 entries, but none proved acceptable. The three best entrants were then asked to work together to make a new joint submission, but this too was never approved. It included a symbolic road which would have sliced through the entire site, including barracks, the railway track and a crematorium. Another proposal by Polish and Italian designers was ultimately accepted, and built in 1967.
The resulting International Monument to the Victims of Fascism (below) is an abstract stone construction, which seems to have little impact on the majority of visitors. Suffering in the grimy air of industrial Poland, it has blackened with age, making it appear even more oppressive than when it was erected. However, it is difficult to conceive of any sculpture or memorial which could have anything approaching the emotive power of what lies nearby—the twisted metal and broken concrete slabs of the gas chambers and ovens.
Along with the memorial, the most controversial aspect of Auschwitz’s presentation has been the question of the number of victims—and how they are described. Under the pro-Soviet Polish government, the figure given was 4 million dead, and the scale of Jewish losses was played down. Only since the 1990s has the number been lowered, in line with historical accuracy, and the number of deaths is now cited as 1.1 million. Altogether 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz, some of whom were later moved to other camps or survived. These comprised 1.1 million Jews, 140,000 Poles, 23,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war with the remaining 25,000 from other groups.
Post-Communism
Although the fall of Communism in Poland means that Auschwitz is now presented more objectively, there have been religious tensions. In 1984 Carmelite nuns established a convent on the edge of the camp in a building once used for the storage of Zyklon-B crystals for the gas chambers. The World Jewish Congress regarded the presence there of a Christian organisation as offensive, and a long-running dispute eventually forced the sisters to move to new premises half a mile away in 1993. The row over the former convent re-emerged in the late 1990s, when Catholics began to plant a sea of small crucifixes around a nearby Cross which had been erected to mark Pope John Paul II’s earlier visit. These were removed after further Jewish protests. Last summer the storeroom-turned-convent was taken over by the museum as an educational centre.
The most recent controversy centres on commercial activities in the vicinity of the camp, involving tensions with local residents of the adjacent town of Oswiecim. Its 50,000 inhabitants had nothing to do with the Nazi camp, but 60 years on they live in its shadow, and establishing a degree of normality is not easy. Four years ago a disco was set up in a building nearly a mile from the camp, but which had once been used for storage of prisoners’ possessions, including human hair. Although the Oswiecim municipality gave initial approval for the disco, it was subsequently closed down after international protests. There is also a formal ban on commercial activity in the immediate area just outside the camp.
Unlike most tourist sites, Auschwitz offers little in the way of benefits to the surrounding area, other than a relatively small number of jobs at the museum. Visitors come only for the day and spend very little money in the area. There is a simple cafeteria at the entrance, but few feel like a meal, and for most people, souvenirs are confined to a $1 guide booklet. The recently established narrow buffer zone with no commercial activity seems proper, although beyond this the town of Oswiecim should be allowed to develop as it wishes, while being sensitive about outside sites which once served the death camp. But above all, Auschwitz’s atmosphere must be preserved, as both museum and memorial.
A gallery for the place where art was forbidden
Plans have just been announced to create an art gallery at Auschwitz I, in the former kitchen of the concentration camp. It has a series of long rooms, making it particularly suitable for displays. Located just next to the “Arbeit macht frei” gateway, the kitchen was in front of the roll-call area, where public executions were regularly held. In recent years the premises were used as a workshop for the museum, but this has now been moved to a better location.
The Auschwitz museum has a collection of 6,000 works of art, with 1,614 made during the Nazi period. Drawing and painting were normally strictly prohibited, and punishable, and materials were very difficult to obtain. Yet somehow prisoners continued to draw, and a small number of these illegal works did survive. For instance, a collection of drawings of camp scenes made by an unknown artist was discovered in 1947, buried in a bottle beneath a hospital block. There were also a few authorised artist prisoners who did some work for the Nazi administration, such as Peter Edel and Mieczyslaw Koscielniak. Their output included instructional posters, landscape paintings for German officers, idealised images of nearby factories which used camp labour and portraits of Roma people commissioned by the notorious medical “experimenter” Josef Mengele. Franciszek Jazwiecki (self-portrait shown here) made more than 100 portraits of fellow prisoners. The rest of the museum’s collection are works of art depicting camp life which were made by former inmates immediately after the war. These provide valuable documentary evidence about conditions.
The establishment of the art gallery has been held up by fundraising, but the hope now is that the €1.5 million ($1.96 million) scheme will soon receive backing from the German government and private benefactors. The former kitchen block is suffering from damp and needs considerable remedial work, but assuming the funds are raised, the Auschwitz gallery should open in two years.
Contributions can be sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death, go to www.auschwitz.org.pl
By Martin Bailey The Art Newspaper
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