where the past the future of remembrance the … · the future of remembrance —a challenge for...

no. 2 February 2009

PE

OP

LE

HISTORY

CU

LT

UR

E

O Ś W I Ę C I M

WHERE THE PAST MEETS THE FUTURE BY FAY GRAJOWER

THE FUTURE OF REMEMBRANCE —A CHALLENGE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

THE AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU FOUNDATION

THE YOUTH ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS

ISSN 1899-4407

EDITORIAL BOARD:Oś—Oświęcim, People, History, Culture magazine

Editor:Paweł SawickiEditorial secretary: Agnieszka JuskowiakEditorial board:Bartosz Bartyzel Jarek MensfeltBogdan OwsianyJadwiga Pinderska-LechLeszek SzusterArtur SzyndlerColumnist: Mirosław GanobisDesign and layout:Agnieszka Matuła, Grafi konTranslations: William BrandProofreading:Beata KłosCover:Fay GrajowerPhotographer:Tomasz Mól

PUBLISHER:

Auschwitz-BirkenauState Museum

www.auschwitz.org.pl

PARTNERS:

Jewish Center

www.ajcf.pl

Center for Dialogue and Prayer Foundation

www.centrum-dialogu.oswiecim.pl

International Youth Meeting House

www.mdsm.pl

IN COOPERATION WITH:

Kasztelania

www.kasztelania.pl

State HigherVocational School in Oświęcim

www.pwsz-oswiecim.pl

Editorial address:„Oś – Oświęcim, Ludzie, Historia, Kultura”Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenauul. Więźniów Oświęcimia 2032-603 Oświęcime-mail: [email protected]

The main article in the second English language edition of Oś magazine is a lecture by the director of Auschwitz Memorial Dr. Piotr M.A. Cywiński given for students of State Higher Vocational School in Oświęcim. The topic of the lecture was “The Future of Remembrance—A Challenge for the 21st Century”. There are indeed many problems and the conclusion may not appear very optimistic.

We also write about an important initiative taken up to protect all au-thentic remains of the former German Nazi concentration camp—the Ausch-witz-Birkenau Foundation. Its goal is

to guarantee resources for the conser-vation of the Memorial so that future generations visiting the remains of the Auschwitz camp will be able to see, with their own eyes, the authentic sites of the crimes that the Nazis com-mitted during World War II.

In this issue of Oś one can fi nd an inter-view with Fay Grajower, whose exhi-bition Where the Past Meets the Future is currently exhibited at the Jewish Cent-er in Oświęcim. The installation is con-sists of over 100 mixed media wooden “boxes,” each standing alone as an individual painting of a story, place, object or stone of memory, and to-

gether forming a mosaic wall showing a revived world steeped in its past and looking towards its future.

We also recommend reading an ar-ticle about Polish-German youth ex-change project at the International Youth Meeting House. The theme of the seminar was “Human Rights Yes-terday and Human Rights Today”. In the magazine you will also learn about Days of Refl ection at the Center of Dialogue and Prayer.

Paweł SawickiEditor-in-chief

[email protected]

A GALLERY OF THE 20TH CENTURY

ww

w.k

aszt

elan

ia.p

l

EDITORIAL

This promotional postcard dates from 1907. It presents a butterfl y woman and the slogan, “I Fly the Polish World. Oświęcim.” Each of her wings features two smaller postcard views. On the right wing are the Salesian Institution and the 14th-century parish church; on the left are the Hotel Zatorski and the Dominican Church. These were four of the best-known landmarks in the town at the time. Here are a few interesting historical tidbits.At the invitation of the Rev. Andrzej Knycz, the local parish priest, the fi rst Salesians came to Oświęcim on Au-gust 15, 1898 and took possession of the ruins of the old Dominican mon-astery. They built a school with a dormitory and restored the old Holy Cross church (the former Dominican

church), now the church of Our Lady the Help of the Faithful. The German army took over the buildings during World War II. The institution suffered heavy bomb damage, but reconstruc-tion work began soon after liberation and the school had already reopened by March 1945.The parish church of the Most Bless-ed Virgin Mary, located at the Main Square, had an antecedent. The sourc-es indicate that a wooden church stood here in the 12th century. The Tatars burned it. It was rebuilt as a brick edi-fi ce, and suffered repeated subsequent cycles of destruction and rebuilding. Today, we can admire its stylistically eclectic architecture: the portal in the passageway between the presbytery and the sacristy is dated 1529; inside

are a late baroque altar with fi gures of Ss. Peter and Paul, crucifi xes from the 17th century, and a marble baptismal fount from 1613. The Hotel Zatorski in Oświęcim op-erated in a building that today faces the train station across the street. Ini-tially, as shown in the postcard, it was a single-story structure. Before the out-break of World War I, a second story, mansard roof, balconies, and a new front elevation were added. During the occupation, it was known as the “Deutsches Haus” and contained the “Haus der Waffen SS” offi cers’ club. The parapets, balconies, and window ornaments were removed in the 1980s, and the Station Restaurant was opened there. Today, it houses the Scorpion restaurant.

Postcard from Mirosław Ganobis’s collection “A Gallery of the 20th Century”

Oś—Oświęcim, People, History, Culture magazine, no. 2, February 2009

16151413121110987654321

Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum

UNFLAGGING INTEREST IN THE HISTORY OF AUSCHWITZ

More than 1.1 million people from Poland and abroad visited the site of the Nazi German Auschwitz con-centration camp in 2008. More importantly, more than 700 thousand of them were young people—sec-ondary-school and university students. This was the second straight year of attendances of over a mil-

lion, with last year’s fi gure of 1.22 million visitors remaining the all-time record.

The largest cohort of visi-tors last year, 410 thousand, came from Poland. Al-most 720 thousand people came to the museum from abroad. As in the previous year, the largest contingents were from the UK, the USA, Germany, Israel, and Italy. Interestingly, the visitors included 37 thousand from South Korea and more than 5 thousand from Japan, an indication of the interest in Auschwitz beyond Europe, the USA, and Israel.

During the fi rst months of 2008, attendance fi gures were running above those from the previous year. In the second half of 2008, the global economic crisis cut signifi cantly into tour-ism around the world. “In the case of Auschwitz, the drop in the number of visi-tors amounted to only a few percent,” said Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński, the Museum director. “This indicates the constant, unwavering in-terest in the Memorial,” he added. The attendance lev-els over the last few years are higher than at any time in the history of the Museum, which dates back to 1947.

As a way of meeting the challenges presented by the large numbers of visitors, the Museum introduced

a new headset-based guide system last year. Visitors touring the grounds with a guide now receive head-sets. The system helps hold down noise levels at the Memorial, and also assures visitors of increased com-fort. “In fact, based on the experience of groups who are guests in our House, the introduction of the headsets has signifi cantly enhanced the quality of visits, and the previous problems have been eliminated,” observes Leszek Szuster, director of the International Youth Meeting House.

Another big improvement for visitors is the option of reserving guides online at the Museum website, www.auschwitz.org.pl. Last year, almost 250 specially trained and licensed Museum guides served visitors in 14 languages. Thanks to the expert guides, visitors can move effi ciently around the site while learning about its history and the buildings there.

No one can fail to notice that young people from Poland and other countries pre-dominate among the visi-tors. This is due in part to increased involvement by their teachers and educators. The International Center for

Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust offers a range of programs to meet their needs.

Every year, increasing num-bers of individuals and groups opt to spend several days at the Museum, in or-der to take advantage of additional ways of learning more about its history. They listen to lectures on selected subjects in the history of the camp, view documentary fi lms, join workshops at the so-called national exhibi-tions, and learn about the Archives, the Preservation Studio, and the Museum Collections Department. There is great interest in meetings with former pris-oners and people who lived in the vicinity of the camp during World War II.

It is possible to learn about Auschwitz and the Holo-caust anywhere. However, the fullest educational ex-perience is available on the very grounds of the Memo-rial. Last year alone, 6,771 people benefi ted from the various seminars, confer-ences, study residencies, ed-ucational projects, and post-graduate courses offered by the ICEAH.

For years, widespread com-plaints have been heard that, while the number of visitors may be high, this has no effect on increasing tourism activity in the town of Oświęcim itself, since most visitors leave town im-

mediately after seeing the Auschwitz Memorial. The development of the ICEAH offers one way of increasing the length of visitor stays. Unfortunately, the Center has been trying without success for several years to acquire a new headquar-ters, which would make the growth of educational pro-grams and projects possible. “Every program that makes it possible to plan visits last-ing several days is of great importance to the town, on both economic and promo-tional grounds. Those visits lasting several days create the need for accommoda-tions and food services,” notes Town Council Chair-man Piotr Kućka. “These pre-planned visits or resi-dencies involve visits to the town. I feel that cooperation with international institu-tions and with the State Higher Vocational School can promote the educational image of the town. All pro-grams, plans, and activities that prepare groups to visit the Auschwitz Museum through educational resi-dencies lasting several days are important for the town.” More than a million people a year come into the vicin-ity of the town. For many of them their tourist itinerary gives them time to see only the Auschwitz Museum, the Wieliczka Salt Mine, and the Old Town in Cracow. Some of them would surely stay longer in Oświęcim if

there were reasons for them to do so.

“I have the impression that, for many years, the town has not been interested in this enormous stream of people coming to the Memorial. Town Hall does not want to cooperate with the Museum and, without this coopera-tion, tourists will not learn about Oświęcim and, the opportunities created by the International Education Center will be wasted,” says town councilman Wojciech Grubka.

“One of the reasons for this state of affairs is the town’s pseudo-attractions for tour-ists,” says IYMH director Leszek Szuster. Local par-liamentary delegate Janusz Chwierut has a similar view. “The large number of peo-ple visiting the Museum each year is good news. It is a shame that so few of them choose to visit the town center. Yet the Jewish Cent-er, which has created an at-tractive program, shows that this is possible. At present, however, the town authori-ties are doing little in this di-rection, which is a shame.”

However, it is worth hoping that the continuing high lev-el of interest in the history of Auschwitz, and the fact that the Museum is one of the most-visited cultural institu-tions in Poland, will also help in the development of the town.

Bartosz Bartyzel

1.1 million people visited the Museum in 2008

ph

oto:

Bar

tosz

Bar

tyze

l

Prepared by M. Urbaniak


16151413121110987654321

Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum

Professor Władysław Bar-toszewski, the chairman of the International Auschwitz Council, signed the notarial act establishing the founda-tion last month. In an inter-view with Polish Radio, he pointed out that the vestiges of Auschwitz-Birkenau are subject to increasing dete-rioration. “If we want this symbol of humanity to en-dure, we must care for it,” he said. “If we do not now begin thoroughgoing con-servation, we will be ac-cused within several years of destroying this worldwide symbol of the Holocaust.” He suggested that the states of Europe should contribute to the preservation of the camp, since the people who died there during the war were Europeans. “Among

them were Jews and Chris-tians not only from Poland, but also from Hungary, Bohemia, the Netherlands, France, Slovakia, Germany, Russia, the Balkans, and even Greece,” said Bartosze-wski. “This is a question not only of bearing witness to a tragic history, but also of saving our future. Auschwitz, af-ter all, is the best way of explaining to future gen-erations why we must build peaceful relations in Europe and around the world,” said Museum Director Piotr M.A. Cywiński.The revenues and endow-ment of the Perpetual Fund will provide for the op-eration of the Foundation; the Fund will generate the means necessary for a long-

term conservation program. Ensuring the preservation of the original Auschwitz re-mains will require a Perpet-ual Fund of approximately €120 million. “A stable source of money would allow the Museum, for the fi rst time in its his-tory, to make real plans for long-term conservation,” said Director Cywiński. “The amounts needed for conser-vation are enormous. I hope that we will manage to see the day when the annual div-idend from the Fund reaches 3 to 5 million euro. This will be a guarantee for us that fi -nancial considerations never stand in the way of the con-servation and preservation of the Memorial. We are do-ing everything in our power to make sure that, twenty or thirty years from now, the Auschwitz site will continue to be accessible and compre-hensible for visitors.” The Museum Preservation Department will establish the conservation priorities under the strict supervision of the International Ausch-witz Council. The Founda-tion Board of Trustees will oversee the management of the Fund and the dividend. The Board of Trustees and the Board of Directors will be nominated in the coming days, which will make it pos-sible to register the Founda-tion in the Polish courts and formally begin operations.“The highest priority tasks that must be carried out in the coming years include the conservation of the brick and wooden barracks that are in the worst condition, of the remains of the wooden barracks at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, and of the eleven blocks at the Ausch-witz I site that will house the new main Museum exhibi-tion, the conservation and adaptation of the building at Auschwitz I that housed the camp kitchen for the exhibition of camp art, and the work connected with the adaptation of the so-called “Old Theater” building as the future headquarters of the In-ternational Center for Educa-tion about Auschwitz and the Holocaust,” said Preserva-

tion Department head Rafał Pióro.Jewish circles have also ex-pressed their support for the initiative. “I know the con-dition of the Museum very well, and I regard interna-tional help as absolutely es-sential,” Piotr Kadlcik, chair-man of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland, told Rzeczpospolita newspaper. The plan also has the support of the Head Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, who said that “it is immoral for the entire bur-den of conserving Auschwitz to fall on Poland.” Schudrich feels that funding should come mostly from Germany

and from the governments of countries whose citizens died in the camp. To date, the Auschwitz-Birk-enau State Museum has been maintained mostly through appropriations from the Polish state budget and its own revenues. In 2008, aid from abroad amounted to about 5% of the Museum budget. “The favorable re-action to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation from both the Polish government and offi cials in other coun-tries allows us to look hope-fully towards the future,” said Director Cywiński.

Paweł Sawicki

FORMER AUSCHWITZ PRISONERS URGE: PRESERVE THIS PLACE

—NOT FOR US, BUT FOR YOURSELVES!

The fi gures on the size of the grounds and the number of objects under the protection of the Museum give the best idea as to the scale of the task of preserving the Auschwitz site: 191 hectares of land, 155 brick and wooden buildings, about 300 ruins, and the thousands of objects in the Collections Department and the Mu-

seum Archive. The most important task facing the Museum conservationists is maintaining the authenticity of the place. This is a serious, time-consuming, and above all a costly responsibility. The recent establishment of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation is intended to raise money for conservation.

More than 60 years ago, we the undersigned were prison-ers of Auschwitz. This has remained with us for our whole lives. Many of the men and women who were our fellow prisoners are no longer alive. Many did not even live to see the end of the war. Today, our story is nearing its end. We have passed our experiences on to future generations through our recollections, words, and warnings. The trag-edy of Auschwitz left behind a vast area of blocks, bar-racks, guard towers, and ruins. Today, it is up to all of Eu-rope to determine whether those bricks, wires, and stones will speak to future generations and warn them of things that still remain possible. Preserve this place—not for us, but for yourselves, your children, and your children’s chil-dren.Europe after World War II is different, because that war was different from anything that people had done before. Postwar Europe has reevaluated its own experiences and begun building a new community political order on the Old Continent. We believe that our experience, and the memory of the Shoah and of all the innocent victims and the vestiges of Auschwitz can serve as an illustration of this profound meaning of this. Auschwitz is a part of the historical heritage of Europe. The societies of Europe are under an obligation to preserve the material legacy of the camp for future generations. That is why, on this anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we are today appealing to you for European support for the Perpetual Fund, which is intended to res-cue the original remains of the camp from the ravages of time. We should not deprive ourselves of the most tragic, but most eloquent, foundation of the postwar changes to and hopes for our European continent.

THE APPEAL BY FORMER AUSCHWITZ PRISONERS

DIRECTED TO JOSE MANUEL BARROSO, THE PRESIDENT

OF THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION, ON JANUARY 27, 2009, THE ANNIVERSARY

LIBERATION OF AUSCHWITZ.

Prof. Władysław Bartoszewski is signing the notarial act

ph

oto:

Jan

Men

cwel


16151413121110987654321

THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE AUSCHWITZ DOCUMENTS

In November, the German newspaper Bild printed plans for the expansion of the Auschwitz camp from 1941 to 1943, stating that it had gained access to them after they were found “during the cleaning out of a Berlin apart-ment.” Below is an interview with Wojciech Płosa, the head of the Auschwitz Museum Archives, who saw the

documents in a Berlin archive.

Paweł Sawicki: What did they really fi nd in Germany?Wojciech Płosa: Dr. Hans-Dieter Kreikamp, the head of Third Reich Archives at the Bundes-archiv in Berlin, told me the story of the discovery. Someone approached the Axel Springer media company, offering to sell them these documents. Springer bought them and deposited them in the Bundesarchiv, ask-ing Dr. Kreikamp to have a look at them and confi rm their authen-ticity. At the outset it must be noted that no special analysis of the paper was carried out. We do not really know the age of the paper or its structure. The con-tents of the whole col-lection, consisting of 28 plans and 25 documents, have been analyzed in detail. It consists of cor-respondence between the Central Construction Offi ce and various Ger-man institutions, mostly in regard to instructions for building various structures at the camp. The majority of the plans concern Auschwitz, al-though some of them are connected with the Flossenbürg camp, and others with the penal camp for SS men in Flau-enburg. These, however, are a minority.

What do we know about the provenance of these documents? It might seem surprising that they turned up so sud-denly after 70 years.Basically, the thing that’s most disturbing, or rather that makes it necessary to treat these documents with a cer-tain reserve, is not their contents, but their ori-gin. Axel Springer can-not, of course, reveal the identity of the seller, but it is worth stating one essential thing. There can be no doubt that these documents were earlier kept in some sort of archive. There are at least two details that indicate this. The fi rst is the fact that they were

delivered to Springer in the characteristic folder used in various German archives. Aside from this, the documents are paged—that is, the pages are numbered using a characteristic green pencil, and they have holes punched in them so that they can fi t into the folder. At fi rst glance, the folder looks completely ordinary. It is light pink in color and is slightly dusty, because it is rather old. The inter-esting thing is that the part of the front cover of the folder, just where the archival stamp usu-ally appears in German material, has simply been cut out. Judging by the colors of the edges, this would seem to have been done recently. The edges aren’t as dusty as the rest of the folder. Dr. Kreikamp thinks that all of these factors indicate that the material might have somehow been re-moved from a former Stasi archive. However, it will be extremely dif-fi cult to prove this, if it can be proven at all.

What about the subject matter? Some of the material that appeared in the media gave the impression that this was something new, previously unknown, and groundbreaking in terms of historical facts. How much of this was media hype, and how much was true?I would be very cau-tious about saying that this represents a break-through. Many histori-ans treat the Wannsee conference in January 1942 not as the begin-ning of the whole deci-sion chain that led to the “Final Solution,” but rather as a sort of cul-mination. We could al-ready speak of prepara-tions for the “Final Solu-tion” in 1941. Of course, it was not yet planned on such a mass scale, but the fi rst steps had been taken. This interpreta-tion would certainly account for something like the plans for cre-

matoria II and III, which I had a chance to see in this collection. They are extremely preliminary. They do not differ great-ly from what the Nazis later constructed in Birk-enau, but the interesting thing is that, in these fi rst plans dated from 1941, the gas chambers are more squarish. Later, when they were con-structed, they were more rectangular. However, if we accept that prepara-tions were already being made and plans drawn up in the second half of 1941 about the way to carry out the “Final So-lution,” then these plans fi t in perfectly. We have an example here of how this sort of mass kill-ing facility was already being planned, more or less in detail. There is one more interesting thing here—and, as the Museum Archive, this is something we would be very interested in. There are two large-for-mat maps from 1941 and 1942, more or less the size of a desktop, which present the Auschwitz I main camp in detail, along with the sur-rounding areas, bound-ed by the railroad lines. Birkenau is not there, but the Erweiterung is shown, the SS housing, and all the surroundings right up to the edge of town. This is an overall plan of the whole area, and in addition there are many details there, such as playing fi elds. A second map might also have existed, including the Birkenau location, but of course we do not know this.

Himmler’s signature on the plans also evoked a lot of interest.In fact, it’s not his sig-nature, but his initial—a very characteristic block letter “H.” Dr. Kreikamp carried out several anal-yses, since he was also interested. The Bun-desarchiv contains nu-merous identical forms connected with SS men, such as applications for permission to marry.

The SS men had to sub-mit requests to the SS, and the Reichsführer SS—Himmler—had to approve them. He used his highly characteristic initial, which was the same “H” that is found on these plans. It there-fore seems highly proba-ble that he initialed some of these plans. It does not seem likely that he would have done so on the spot, in Auschwitz. We have no such knowl-edge. Our collections permit us to assume that the majority of these plans were drawn up in several copies. In our ar-chives, we have several copies of the plans for the crematoria and other buildings. They can be identical. This could sug-gest that the same thing applies to these plans. One of the copies may simply have been sent to Himmler. I do not know whether it was sent for his approval, or whether he marked documents as received in this way. There is nothing there about “approval” or “ac-cepted”—just the initial.

Aside from the plans, the collection also in-cludes correspondence. It comes from more or less the same time period, the turn of 1941/1942. There are many items concern-ing the building code,

guidelines for construc-tion operations, whom to contact when order-ing supplies, and so on. This is a fairly uniform collection concentrating on a single subject. We therefore have plans for buildings, along with correspondence about erecting them.

Can we then say that the new documents do not really change our knowledge about what happened in Ausch-witz? That’s right. There’s nothing there that we didn’t know before. Some of these plans—perhaps even identical ones—are in the Mos-cow archives.

Do we already know what will become of these plans? Dr. Kreikamp indicated that the Bundesarchiv is very interested in keeping them there. We also know that the Yad Vashem Memorial Insti-tute would like to have these plans, too. I think that it would be a good thing if we declared our interest as well, at least in reference to the ones that have to do with Auschwitz. Of course, it is possible to obtain ex-act copies and scans, but it’s always better to have the original.

Interview by Paweł Sawicki

One of the plans found in Germanyp

hot

o: w

ww

.bil

d.d

e

Auschwitz-Birkenau State MuseumOś—Oświęcim, People, History, Culture magazine, no. 2, February 2009

16151413121110987654321

I SUMMONED UP THE COURAGE TO AVOID REVENGE AND HATRED

At the conclusion of a meeting at the International Youth Meeting House in Oświęcim, Alex Deutsch de-scribed himself by saying, “I am a happy, contented person.” The words that the 96-year-old survivor enunciated in his calm, quiet voice made all the more of an impression because his audience must still have

had clear images in their minds of scenes from a long, hard life after which only a strong, decent man could call himself happy.

Deutsch and his wife Doris joined representatives of the Adolf Bender Center in St. Wendell at the opening of an

exhibition, titled I Survived Auschwitz, on the subject of his life. Susanne Schmidt prepared the exhibition.During the opening, Ausch-witz-Birkenau Museum Deputy Director Krystyna Oleksy thanked Deutsch for his indefatigable efforts to convey the truth about Auschwitz. “The staff and volunteers at the Interna-tional Center for Education about Auschwitz and the

Holocaust have devoted their time to collecting the greatest possible number of memoirs and accounts by

former prisoners,” she said. “These tens of thousands of pages of text are and will continue to be an inex-haustible source of knowl-edge. They have enormous importance in educational work, like your own work, for which I would like to ex-press heartfelt gratitude.”

The most signifi cant event of the evening was a dis-cussion between Deutsch

and Christoph Heubner, the deputy chairman of the International Auschwitz Committee.

Listening to Alex Deutsch, there can be no doubting that hard times are a forge of character, especially of all that is best and most endur-ing in a man’s character. The things that Deutsch had to contend with would have been beyond most people’s capacities—and this applies not only to his two years in Auschwitz. Deutsch was a German Jew who worked as a baker but dreamed of be-

ing a hairdresser; for years, it has been his vocation to serve as a guide for young people. His passage through life seems to have purifi ed him. Reconciled to people and the world in his old age, he says calmly, with a smile, “I have found internal peace, in order to be able to create a new life for myself.” Ausch-witz claimed the life of his wife and little son, stripped him of the home he never went back to, and left him unable for many years to live in the homeland to which he could only bring himself

to return many years later. When he did go back to Ger-many, he not only embraced

the country anew, but also began playing an active role in transforming it by break-ing down barriers and stere-otypes, and by forgiving. “I will continue with my task until my dying breath,” he said at the IYMH, without it sounding like idle words. His task is holding meet-ings with young people, mostly in Germany. He has been doing this consistently since returning to Germany in 1978. There were tears shed during his discussion with Heub-ner—not on Deutsch’s face,

but on the faces of the young people who listened to him. He reminisced about his

There were tears shed during his discussion with Heubner—not on Deutsch’s face, but on the faces of the young people who listened to him. He reminisced about his childhood, partly spent in an orphanage, about his time in Auschwitz, and about his diffi culties adapting to a new life in the USA.

“Do not allow yourself to be driven into hatred and enmity towards others. Learn to live with others, not against them!”

Alex Deutsch

ph

oto:

IY

MH

Oś—Oświęcim, People, History, Culture magazine, no. 2, February 2009International Youth Meeting House

16151413121110987654321

childhood, partly spent in an orphanage, about his time in Auschwitz, and about his diffi culties adapting to a new life in the USA. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the meeting with Alex Deutsch was a moving history lesson for young people who know about the war only from the pages of history books. Aside from the interesting and il-

luminating things he said, there was something more: emotion. The emotion could be felt in a very discreet way in Deutsch’s account—it was restrained, and came to the surface only in a delicate wavering of his voice or in slightly prolonged pauses between his phrases. The emotion became powerful only when it penetrated to his listeners. Then, it evoked deep, authentic feelings in them. Discussion moderator Chris-toph Heubner did an admi-rable job of breaking up the gloomier moments by refer-ring to the brighter spots, or to ordinary, everyday life. Listening to Alex Deut-sch—both his words, and what he says “between the

lines”—it is plain to see that his tragic experiences not only failed to crush him, but in fact strengthened him and furnished him with good humor and a warm, kindly way of relating to others. He tells the young people: “Live for others, and not against them.” When he says this, he is just as credible as when he pays compliments to Polish bread (a subject he knows something about) by say-ing that it’s almost as good as the bread from Saarland (although it can’t compare with the bread of the pre-digital age, when a baker was a craftsman rather than a mere worker). It is perhaps this ordinariness that, hav-ing survived everything he

has lived through, has such an effect on his listeners and permits them, despite the gulf in age and life experi-ence, to feel emotionally close to him.

Alex Deutsch is not some su-perhero. He fulfi lls the task he has imposed on himself, of bearing witness about Auschwitz. He focuses en-

tirely on his audience. He does not use strong words or bombastic gestures. The most beautiful thought he shared that evening was something that he said mod-estly, even shyly. “I sum-moned up the courage to avoid revenge and hatred,” he remarked. “When an opportunity for vengeance arose, I thought: but maybe that was one of those people who helped the prisoners. And then I was incapable of harming that person.” Yet he says himself that, when he learned that his wife and little son had died in the gas chamber, it was precisely hatred and the desire for revenge that motivated his determination to survive Auschwitz in defi ance of all the odds. Survival was,

in turn, nothing more than the fi rst step towards build-ing a new life in the USA, where he had no relatives, no home, no roots, and did not even know the language. It has been a long road and it continues to throw up new challenges even today; even though it was never again as dramatic, it was never easy. When Alex Deutsch and his second wife, Dvora Spiller, fi nally made a home for themselves in St. Louis, race riots broke out in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. That was when, for the second time, Alex Deutsch lived through mindless hatred based on nothing but preju-dice—this time, prejudice

about skin color. His wife’s death in 1977 came as yet an-other blow. These painful experiences marked out a new turning in his life’s story. He returned to Germany in 1978 and, yet again, embarked upon a new life. With Doris, the widow

of his fellow Auschwitz sur-vivor Karl Loeb, he took up residence in Neunkirchen-Wiebelskirchen, in the Saar-land. A new chapter began: his meetings with young people to share the truth about Auschwitz, and the deeper truth about people.

People like him, who can both remember and forgive, who can lose everything and embark upon a new life with unshakable hope and warmth, while reaching out and making contact with others.

Joanna Klęczar

The most beautiful thought he shared that evening was something that he said modestly, even shyly. “I summoned up the courage to avoid revenge and hatred,” he remarked. “When an opportunity for vengeance arose, I thought: but maybe that was one of those people who helped the prisoners. And then I was incapable of harming that person.”

A new chapter began: his meetings with young people to share the truth about Auschwitz, and the deeper truth about people. People like him, who can both remember and forgive, who can lose everything and embark upon a new life with unshakable hope and warmth, while reaching out and making contact with others.

Born on September 7, 1913 in Berlin as the eighth child of the tailor Josef Deutsch and Rosa Hahn Deutsch. After his father’s death, the family’s desperate fi nancial situation led to Alex and his younger brother ending up in a Jewish orphanage in Berlin. In 1928, he was apprenticed as a baker. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, he joined a Jewish association that helped people to emigrate. It was there that he met his future wife, Thea Cohn. They married in 1938.A ban on the employment of Jews in the food industry forced him to give up his trade as a baker in 1935. He worked as a messenger and as a street-sweeper. In 1937, he was assigned to forced labor on a wrecking crew in Berlin. He worked in coal mines in 1938-1939. His son Dennis was born in 1940. On February 27, 1943, the SS detained him and then sent him, along with 1,700 other people, on a transport that arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau on March 1. Thea Deutsch and their son had traveled on an earlier transport, and were killed in the gas chamber upon arriving. Alex Deutsch was assigned to labor in Auschwitz III-Monowitz.Along with other prisoners fi t for labor, he was forced to march to Gliwice in January 1945. Those who survived were taken by train to Buchenwald, and from there to the Langenstein-Zwieberge camp. On April 20, 1945—fi ve days after the SS guards fl ed—Alex Deutsch and three others were found by the Americans. He decided against returning to Berlin. He lived briefl y in Luxembourg, and then in Belgium and France. He arrived in New York on June 25, 1946. He joined his brother Hermann, who had emigrated before the war, in St. Louis. He began working as a baker, later becoming a partner and then the sole owner of a Dutch Boy Supermarket. He married Dvora Spiller in 1948. In 1951, he became an American citizen. Two years later, he and Dvora adopted a three-year-old boy. Alex got out of the grocery business in 1972 and worked until retirement at a Mount City Trust Company branch. Returning to Germany in 1978, he married Doris, the widow of his friend Karl Loeb, and took up residence in Neunkirchen-Wiebelskirchen. As a witness to a tragic past, he tells young people about his fate as a German Jew in the Nation-al Socialist period. His message for the young people is, “do not allow yourself to be driven into hatred and enmity towards others. Learn to live with others, not against them.” A school in the Wellesweiler district of Neuenkirchen was named af-ter him in September 2001. He received the Federal Cross of Merit First Class on November 13, 2007. That same day saw the premiere of a fi lm about him, titled Ich habe Auschwitz überlebt [I survived Auschwitz].

Alex and Doris Deutsch with participants of the meeting

ph

oto:

IY

MH

ALEX DEUTSCH

Oś—Oświęcim, People, History, Culture magazine, no. 2, February 2009 International Youth Meeting House

16151413121110987654321

In the article “Art in Politics” in the November issue of Oś, we wrote about the Second International Social-Po-litical Poster Contest at the IYMH. When asked whether social posters have a chance of attracting the notice of young people, the contest winner, Magdalena Drobczyk, said “young people have a thirst for dialogue, for

dealing with issues connected with interpersonal relations and political and social problems, and posters are an ideal way of getting through to them because they are out on the street screaming, asking questions, mocking, and analyzing. They only need to be revived.”

HUMAN RIGHTS YESTERDAY AND HUMAN RIGHTS TODAY: THE RESISTANCE MOVEMENT AND CIVIC COURAGE

—A POLISH-GERMAN YOUTH EXCHANGE

We liked what she said and it prompted us to check and see what young people want to express through posters. Following up on Magdale-na’s call to revive the poster form, we went to a Polish-German youth meeting on human rights, which is held twice a year in cooperation with the Burg Liebenzell International Forum at Bad Liebenzell.

The fi rst meeting in this cy-cle was held at the IYMH on December 8-14, 2008, under the slogan “The Resistance Movement and Civil Cour-age,” for high school and university students from Oświęcim, Kęty, and Weil der Stadt, Germany. We invited Tomasz Kipka and Stefan Lechwar to cooper-ate. They are on the faculty of the Art Institute at the Cieszyn campus of the Uni-versity of Silesia, and made posters presented during the Second Biennale at the IYMH. They held graph-ics design workshops at the seminar. We placed the subject of civil courage and the resistance movement in both historical and con-

temporary contexts. The program was constructed so that the young people could work out a personal stance of their own on civil courage, which they would then try to express through the poster workshop.

During the session, the young people learned about examples of outstanding civil courage by learning the stories of people like Rosa Parks, Lech Wałęsa, or the students from Tien-anmen Square—people

whose personal courage en-couraged others to follow and provided an example of commitment in impor-tant civic matters. In many cases, the things they did helped change state policy, or even the whole political system. In this context, we held Polish-German group discussions about the di-rect consequences of these

actions for the people in-volved, including dangers and the actual personal price that they paid.

Next, the participants re-fl ected on what it meant to them to be courageous, and what they could do in their own surroundings in various situations that they encounter every day in school, at home, and among their peers. They discussed these situations in mixed groups and next presented them in mime. These parts of the workshop helped us to defi ne the concept of civil courage.

It is worth noting that the defi nition we came up with included all the salient components of the standard scholarly defi nitions. One of the Polish participants said during the summing-up period that, thanks to this workshop, she would try to act more courageously than she had done before in situ-ations that demanded it. The workshop leaders are convinced that this state-ment applies to other par-ticipants as well.

A lecture by Dr. Marcin Kwiecień of the Depart-ment of Legal History at the Jagiellonian University introduced us to the histori-cal context of the issue, or-dering and supplementing the participants’ knowledge on the subject of the resist-ance movement in occu-

pied Poland and the Third Reich. Kwiecień attempted to compare the situation in the General Government and in the areas annexed to the Third Reich, including the scope for resistance ac-tivity. The safeguarding of human dignity in extreme situations was the subject of discussion and group work. Work with archival

material at the Auschwitz Museum yielded many ex-amples of civil courage on the part of the prisoners in the camp and those who aided them. These exam-ples covered both victims and perpetrators. The mul-

timedia presentation at the Museum supplemented and reinforced this information. The young people discov-ered stories of people who risked their health and in many cases even sacrifi ced their lives to save others or in the name of freedom and patriotism. We learned that, even in the most diffi cult conditions, it is possible to act in defense of the high-est values, in matters both small and heroic.

The graphics workshops ran in parallel to the the-matic work. Participants spent many hours work-ing on concepts, sketches, and designs for their post-ers. The results came as a surprise to everyone. The high level of the works ex-ceeded the expectations of the workshop leaders, who

work on an everyday basis with artistically talented students. The participants were doing this kind of ar-tistic work for the fi rst time, and we had not required any particular artistic tal-ent or graphic design skills in the selection process. In their works on social themes, the young people gave bold expression to the

themes of violence, sensi-tivity to human wrongs, totalitarianism, racism, in-tolerance, coexistence, and helping.

The works represent an attempt at a personal ap-

proach to these issues in reference to real-life situa-tions and personal experi-ence. They are a response to the question: “What does civil courage mean to me personally? How should I act in everyday life, in the context of respect for hu-man values?”

Selected posters by the workshop participants are on exhibit, along with en-tries in the Second Interna-tional Social-Political Poster Contest, at the Jewish Cul-ture Center in Cracow. They can be seen, in the beautiful rooms on Meisels Street, until the end of February. The participants will come together again this June at Bad Liebenzell in Germany, where the posters, in print-ed form, will be displayed. On that occasion, our con-centration will focus most of all on the example of the German resistance move-ment in the Third Reich. We will ponder together the possibilities for stand-ing up to the Nazi system in Germany before and during the war, and the motives for action by the members of underground organiza-tions. We will continue the work on the themes of civil courage and respect for hu-man rights today, which we began in Oświęcim, during group work and theater and media workshops.

Teresa Miłoń-Czepiec

The young people discovered stories of people who risked their health and in many cases even sacrifi ced their lives to save others or in the name of freedom and patriotism. We learned that, even in the most diffi cult conditions, it is possible to act in defense of the highest values, in matters both small and heroic.

The participants refl ected on what it meant to them to be courageous, and what they could do in their own surroundings in various situations that they encounter every day in school, at home, and among their peers.

Participants of the meeting

ph

oto:

IY

MH

International Youth Meeting House Oś—Oświęcim, People, History, Culture magazine, no. 2, February 2009

16151413121110987654321

Oś—Oświęcim, People, History, Culture magazine, no. 2, February 2009 Center for Dialogue and Prayer Foundation

A group of people taking part in the Days of Refl ection, organized by Pax Christi, gathered at the Center for Dialogue and Prayer from December 28, 2008 to January 1, 2009. This was the fi fth year that the retreat has been organized. It aims at spending the fi nal days of the year in an international community, usually Polish-

German. A permanent part of the agenda is discussion of the annual papal proclamation marking the World Day of Peace on January 1. The proclamation usually refers to a current peace issue. Last year, the theme of the letter was “The Family as a Peace Community.” This year, it was “Fighting Poverty through Peace.”

FINDING PEACE

Marek Górski, the head of the Polish section of Pax Christi, invited Wanda Półtawska*— an authority on family stud-ies—to this year’s meeting. Wanda Półtawska and her

husband Andrzej Półtawski, who celebrated their 61st wedding anniversary the day after the meeting with the group in Oświęcim, have four daughters. Półtawska was invited to help the group deal with their problems and doubts.

In preparing for the meeting, the participants in the retreat viewed Wanda Różycka-Zborowska’s fi lm Duśka, which tells the life story of Półtawska, a former pris-oner of Ravensbrück con-centration camp. The fi lm concentrates on Półtawska’s wartime experiences. It was an important reference point in this year’s retreat, since it showed how it was possible to form a model family de-spite the distressing experi-ences connected with impris-onment in a concentration camp.

The meeting itself was high-ly personal, thanks to the way Półtawska treated her interlocutors. One of the par-ticipants went so far as to say that Półótawska “saw right through people,” meaning that she wanted to get to know each of them, concen-trated on each question, and gave very detailed answers. There was no room for mis-understanding or over-inter-preting the things she said. Every one of her answers was exhaustive.

What was the discussion about? Aside from the as-pects of her biography, Półtawska talked about the model of the family in the present times, and about the good or evil spirits that fi ll the human body.

A permanent part of the Oświęcim retreat is the Sta-tions of the Cross, led by the Rev. Manfred Dessael-

ers at the Auschwitz II-Birk-enau site. This is one of the most important items on the agenda. Walking in silence from one station to the next, the participants concentrate

on the connection between prisoners’ camp recollections and the sufferings of Christ in a spirit of self-examination and exploration. Hearing about this part of the pro-gram and the unusual way that the participants spend New Year’s Eve in Oświęcim, Półtawska remarked, “talk about marching to the beat of a different drummer.” How-ever, this path is the right one for people in search of inner peace and reconciliation.

During the meeting at the Center for Dialogue and

Prayer, artist Mateusz Środoń discussed his works—poly-chromes of 108 World War II-era martyrs in the chapel of

the Warsaw Rising Museum. John Paul II beatifi ed them in 1999. This was an introduc-tion to a general discussion on the subject of peace, since the martyrs were beatifi ed because, before they died, they forgave their oppres-sors. Forgiveness is one ele-ment on the road to peace. Yet how can one fi nd peace?

There are three conditions for achieving peace: truth, forgiveness, and reconcilia-tion. Truth is the fi rst stage, and a very diffi cult one, because the truth must be enunciated. It must be dis-cussed, with no fear of, for instance, psychologists who help to defi ne it. In order to reach the truth, each person must free him or herself of traumatic experiences. When the truth has been enunci-ated and defi ned, the time comes for forgiveness. Yet how can forgiveness take place, in view of the fact that confl icts are sometimes long-lasting and cannot be dealt

with even over the space of whole generations? For-giveness must come “out of the depths.” When we have

passed through this phase, it is time for reconciliation. Only through reconciliation can we fi nd peace.

After using a text by Nor-bert Reck as a refl ection on peace, the time came for Ben-edict XVI’s proclamation on

“Fighting Poverty through Peace.” The conclusion of these refl ections was that it is important to prevent material poverty from being joined by non-material poverty, which is much worse.

The New Year’s Eve celebra-tions at the Center featured all the standard dancing, singing, and drinking. First, before welcoming the New Year in very select company, the group attended mass for the intention of peace.

Wiktor Boberek

is an M.D. and a psychiarist. She was imprisoned in the German Ravensbrück concentration camp during World War II. A close friend of John Paul II, she was instrumen-tal in the founding of the Institute for the Theology of the Family at the Papal Theological Academy in Cracow, and was its director for many years. She contributed to the work of the Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland.

She was a member of the scouting movement before and during World War II. The Gestapo arrested her on Feb-ruary 17, 1941, and she was imprisoned at Lublin Castle before being transported under a sentence of death (in absentia) to Ravensbrück, where she and other Polish women were subjected to pseudo-medical experiments, mostly involving crippling surgical procedures on their limbs, by German doctors.

She is the author of numerous books, the best known of which is And I Fear Dreams, a collection of reminiscences from Ravensbrück.

* WANDA PÓŁTAWSKA NÉE WOJTASIK (BORN IN LUBLIN

ON NOVEMBER 2, 1921)

“Aside from the aspects of her biography, Półtawska talked about the model of the family in the present times, and about the good or evil spirits that fi ll the human body.”

Truth is the fi rst stage, and a very diffi cult one, because the truth must be enunciated. It must be discussed, with no fear of, for instance, psychologists who help to defi ne it. In order to reach the truth, each person must free him or herself of traumatic experiences. When the truth has been enunciated and defi ned, the time comes for forgiveness.

Wanda Półtawska with participants of the Days of Refl ection

ph

oto:

CD

iM

16151413121110987654321

Professor Witold Stankowski, Director of the Political Science Institute at the State Higher Vocational School, invited the Director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński, to de-liver a lecture on The Future of Remembrance—A Challenge for the 21st Century. The audience included stu-

dents from the SHVS, as well as students from the humanities class at the Stanisław Konarski Powiat School Complex 1, together with their teacher/adviser, Sławomir Podgórski. The lecture by Director Cywiński was the fi rst of a cycle planned by the Political Science Institute at the State Higher Vocational School. Below, we reprint extensive fragments of the lecture.

THE FUTURE OF REMEMBRANCE —A CHALLENGE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

The lecture of Dr. Piotr M.A. Cywiński at the State Higher Vocational School in Oświęcim

ph

oto:

Paw

eł S

awic

ki


I would like to talk about something that each of you is familiar with to a certain degree—that is, the most difficult issues facing the Museum today.

All of the Auschwitz I camp and most of Auschwitz II-Birkenau can be seen in the famous reconnaissance photograph taken by Al-lied airmen in the fall of 1944. That photograph ap-proximates the way things were at liberation. At that moment, a very interest-ing discussion began: what should be done with all of this? After a fairly pro-longed discussion, at a time when a totally devastated Poland was getting back on its feet, it was decided to preserve the two parts of the enormous camp com-plex as a museum. There were other concepts. There was talk about turning the grounds into a vast edu-

cational institution. Some people wanted to build a single gigantic monument. There were also proposals to plow it all under and obliterate it. However, the Museum arose.This is a vast space—more than 190 hectares, mostly at the Birkenau site, which from the very beginning was to be left more or less alone. All the educa-tion, exhibitions, courses, and seminars were to take place at the Auschwitz I site. This was where peo-ple were supposed to learn the facts, after which they could tour Birkenau in a more contemplative spirit. Thanks to the enormous contributions of my prede-cessor, Director Jerzy Wró-blewski, the grounds look pretty good today, and are generally accessible and interpreted for visitors. These two preserved sites were intended to tell peo-

ple the story. Appearances aside, this is not at all easy, because it means that the other parts are no longer in existence. It is difficult, for instance, to talk about the labor of the prisoners below ground at Jawiszo-wice, or about the nature of the huge Buna-Werke plant. For all these years, the two camps have been the narrative space.They have been preserved successfully for 60 years, but not without difficulty. They were not built to last 60 years. You don’t build wooden barracks or guard towers for such a time-span. Some of the struc-tures were erected by the slave labor of the prisoners themselves, and they were not engineers, after all. The building materials fre-quently came from demol-ished local buildings. This creates additional conser-vation problems.

Not only the buildings are getting old, however, but also the eyewitnesses to those events, the former prisoners. Somewhere around 2000, voices be-gan to be heard all over the world that time was passing, that the final ex-prisoners were dying, that we were building a new Europe and communism had fallen. Perhaps a dif-ferent view of the future was needed, more optimis-tic and joyful—we need to build something that we share, and the Auschwitz Memorial has completed its task. Those voices were especially heard before the 60th anniversary of libera-tion in 2005, when heads of state and heads of gov-ernment from 40 countries around the world came here, the largest gathering of rulers in the history of Poland. Some people said that the ceremony in 2005

would be a symbolic turn-ing of the page of history, and that we would joyfully create a new Europe. Has that occurred?

In 2007, 1.22 million people visited the Museum. When we look at attendance over recent years, we see that the negative prognoses, announcing that the sym-bolic significance of the place had passed, were far from accurate. This is still important, living history. It is still a reference point for many people. It is not something from the history books, like the November Uprising [of 1830]. It turns out that the number of visi-tors continues to rise. More and more people want to see this place. After all, it is hard to understand the 21st century, the world and Europe, if you do not understand this place. At-tendance will probably

16151413121110987654321

remain high in 2008 [1.1 million people], despite the economic crisis that is clearly underway. About 7-8% fewer people have been coming here since about June. That is still a very positive statistic, since the drop-off in Cra-cow has been in the region of 35%. That means that the people who come to Oświęcim are not the same ones who come to Cracow.

These high attendance fig-ures are a real problem for the Memorial. Just imagine what 1.22 million people means over the course of a year. It means that, during the peak hours from April to October, 25 to 30 groups are arriving at the Museum per hour. A group enters every two minutes, and people are practically step-ping on each others’ toes. Statistically, one person enters every two seconds at the height of the season. This creates organizational and preservation difficul-ties. It is hard for the guide to speak at length when the next group arrives at the same place within a few moments. For the first time in a long time, it was neces-sary to close the basement of block no. 11, one of the most dramatic places in the history of the camp, during the summer season. This problem does not arise in Birkenau because the grounds are so vast.

If we compare the attend-ance at the Auschwitz Mu-seum with other memorial sites in Poland, Germany, or Austria, it turns out that none of them has such numbers of visitors. In the majority of those places, attendance is either de-clining or has stabilized at a much lower level. What does this mean? Remem-brance is becoming increas-ingly focused on a single place. People are coming here not only to understand the reality of Auschwitz, but also to grasp the reality of Dachau, Gross-Rosen, Bergen-Belsen, and other places. This is something completely new. This one place is supposed to speak for all places. In May, I met an elderly gentleman from the United States at the Museum. His whole fam-ily had died in the Holo-caust. In his final years, he traveled to Europe for the first time, and he came here. While we were chat-ting, he told me with great emotion that he had had to come here, because his fa-ther died in Bergen-Belsen.The Auschwitz Museum

has the highest attendance of any museum in Poland. For people from all over the world, Auschwitz is a very clear symbol. They might not know what Mal-bork is, or Wieliczka, but they know what Ausch-witz is. We might like this or not, we might even re-gret it and cry over it, but such are the facts. No other place within the borders of Poland has such meaning for the entire world.Where do our visitors come from? Most of all, from Po-land. Not only do Poles account for about one-third of the visitors, but their numbers are rising constantly. In the 1990s, it was said that fewer Poles would come, because they only made up 10% of the victims, and so the situa-tion should change. That was wrong. Further down the list we have people from the USA, Great Brit-ain, Germany, Italy, Israel, France—and South Korea. Almost 40 thousand people come here from Korea each year. Yet this isn’t their world. That part of Asia has a grisly World War II his-tory that few people know about. There were hun-dreds of thousands of civil-ian victims. Yet they come here. Why? Only a few years ago, not more than a couple of hundred peo-ple a year came here from South Korea.This makes things difficult

for our guides. How are they supposed to conduct a tour for a group that has completely different refer-ence points? They are not going to ask what things were like here as opposed to what they were like in France or the former Yu-goslavia. Instead, they are going to ask about things that happened very far away. They are going to ask about things the guides know practically nothing about—how could they know about them? This is a new difficulty. In the 1990s, it was said that Auschwitz is a place of universal sig-nificance. It is only in the last few years, however, that we have noted the permanent, regular pres-ence of large groups from outside the triangle of Is-rael-Europe-the USA.

Against this background, it is especially interesting that there were 3 thou-sand visitors from Austria in 2007 [3.4 thousand in 2008—ed.]. This is a kind of black hole on the map of Europe. After all, the largest cohort of SS men in Auschwitz were Austrians, yet Austria has completely distanced itself from this history. It is as if Hitler were a German and not an Austrian, as if this story did not concern them at all. This is a problem, and a great educational chal-lenge.

And so, what does the educational situation look like? The first educational method, of course, is guid-ed tours for groups. About 90% of the visitors to the Museum receive this type of education. The groups are highly differentiated, in terms of culture and geog-raphy to begin with, which makes things difficult. It’s better, of course, when a group of teachers inter-ested in the subject comes for a few days—then we can work with them, tell them more, hold discus-sions. In most cases, how-ever, the tour lasts three hours. Unless the groups are very well prepared, they will take away what they can absorb in three hours. Study groups that spend a longer time here are still a rarity. We are not even able to cope with many study groups simul-taneously in an appropriate way. We are working on adapting the Old Theater building as an Educational Center, because there are in fact many people who would like to stay here longer. There are enough hotels in Oświęcim, there are people who want to stay longer, but we do not have suitable educational facilities.Each group, of course, brings not only its own culture, but also its own knowledge. The aver-age American teenager’s

knowledge about the his-tory of Europe is often in-sufficient. For some peo-ple, Europe is simply “over there,” far away. Yet these people turn up outside the Arbeit macht frei gate. The guides must tell them something, but they have only three hours—during which they cannot impart a vision of European his-tory.

Various religious groups arrive, which in itself can create specific kinds of problems. When the Pope himself came here, he posed basic questions that he was unable to answer—for instance: Where was God? Why did He allow this to happen? For anyone sensitive to religious mat-ters, this place is a very de-manding experience. This applies mostly to Christian and Jewish groups, but on occasion Buddhists, for instance, ask to be able to meditate.

Some visits have a prima-rily political dimension. They are the most difficult, because they involve the media and political mes-sages, which is something I do not like in this place. For me, it is of prime im-portance for the Museum to steer well clear of poli-tics.

The problem of compet-ing memories reached its


ph

oto:

Paw

eł S

awic

ki


16151413121110987654321


ph

oto:

P

aweł

Saw

ick

i


peak in the 1990s. We must remember that, in Poland, the entire postwar history of Auschwitz was passed on by former prisoners, almost exclusively Poles, with Jews almost entirely absent. In Poland, until the end of the communist system, this was mainly a concentration camp. No one negated the fact of the Holocaust, but commu-nist propaganda preferred to speak about people of dozens of different nation-alities, without saying that 90% of them were Jews. This is more or less what the collective memory of Poles looks like. The facts of slave labor and martyr-dom were emphasized. Af-terwards, at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, Dr. Fran-ciszek Piper published his research findings, which changed the proportions in terms of the number of victims.

In the West, on the other hand, completely differ-ent people told the story of Auschwitz. Political pris-oners were a small group. The eyewitnesses to histo-ry were those who had lost their families during the “Final Solution of the Jew-ish Question.” This meant that the historical imagina-tion took on a completely different form. There was no interest, for instance, in the elements of resistance or heroism, because those things applied only to po-

litical prisoners; in the context of the Holocaust of whole families—moth-ers with children in their arms—the emotions, ac-cents, and drama of that story were told in a com-pletely different way.These two completely dif-ferent varieties of memory converged in the 1990s, and this was a very painful encounter. Each side felt ignored by the other—that Poles did not remember the Holocaust, and that Jews did not say anything about Polish victims. Add to this the Roma victims and the question of Soviet POWs and other groups. This made the 1990s very difficult here at times. Fortunately, the emotions have cooled now. These two main currents of mem-ory now take account of each other, and are capable of understanding that they need each other to exist. Over the course of 10 to 15 years, this is a great accom-plishment.

The crucial problem today is protecting what remains at this place—in both the physical and the meta-phorical senses. In the first place, the former prisoners are passing away, and we must remind ourselves in no uncertain terms that, be-fore long, education about Auschwitz will no longer be able to rely on meetings with eyewitnesses. For dec-ades, those former prison-

ers were the foundation of education. What was done? Everyone began making video recordings. Today, however, everything is multimedia, and images have completely different meanings. We thus treat recordings completely dif-ferently from face-to-face meetings. In the Museum, we have something else from the former prison-ers that we can preserve. None of us can go up to a former prisoner and ask about something that hap-pened in the fall of 1941. That is for history teachers and books. The facts are known. The prisoners are capable of showing and telling us what they felt, what absorbed their at-tention, what they feared. That is fundamental to un-derstanding what it meant to be a human being in the reality of Auschwitz.

This exceptional internal human life is preserved in works of art by former pris-oners. In our Museum, we have enormous collections of paintings and sculpture. These are very specific works, because they con-tain enormous emotions. It is difficult even to encom-pass them in words. Doubt, fear, horror and despair are here. Thanks to art, we can touch the core of humanity in ways that cannot be con-veyed otherwise, because the people who could talk about it will be gone.

Another problem is the fact that the history of Ausch-witz is slowly becoming book history. Living, in-timate, family history al-ways stops at the point of grandparents. Unless there has been some great catas-trophe in the family, people generally know where their parents and grandparents are buried. But what about their great-grandparents? It’s a rare thing for any-one to know where all 8 of those graves are. For even earlier generations—the great-great grandpar-ents—living history seems to be unfeasible. Intimate history, the kind you hear about at home, ends at the point of the grandparents. Young people come to the Museum today whose grandparents were born after the war. That means that this is no longer their history. My father was born in 1939 and remembers the end of the war. My grand-father remembered those times in detail, and for me, this history was something that happened in the world of our family. Not for to-day’s young people. This is an additional difficulty that, all over the world, we are probably no longer able to do anything about.

There is yet a different kind of memory, which causes great problems. This is the memory of the perpetra-tors. Everyone who visits the camp views it almost

exclusively from the per-spective of the prisoners. And yet the perpetrators are the real human prob-lem. The prisoners are in-nocent, torn from their sur-roundings, incarcerated in the camp, and tormented to death. They are the vic-tims. The perpetrators are the problem, and they are the ones we should reflect upon most deeply. In the educational sense, this is a great problem. People concentrate on the very tragic, sad world of the victims, but the main prob-lem for contemporary men and women is the problem of the evildoer. This is a problem that, on the level of education, we must solve somehow. How?

More than 8 million people a year visit places of this type, like the Auschwitz Museum, other memorial sites, or Holocaust Mu-seums around the world. This is one of the largest global educational pro-grams. These 8 million people go home, and they are moved, outraged, cut to the quick. Then what? A few weeks pass and there is some other genocide, far away, on TV. After all, satellite pictures literally make it possible to view the sites of burned-down Rwandan villages in de-tail today. Then what hap-pens? Those 8 million are nowhere to be heard, and yet that is a large number of people. Then the ques-tion arises of whether we take the call “Never again!” seriously. Some-thing is wrong with this education. Millions of peo-ple read the Diary of Anne Frank, identify with that girl, and then—nothing. People ask questions about World War II, such as why the Pope did not say any-thing, which is, of course, a fundamental question. Or: Why didn’t the Al-lies bomb? Why didn’t the underground ever tear up the tracks? There is a mul-titude of such questions. Today, the questions are the same: Why doesn’t the European Union do some-thing? Where are the Blue Helmets, the UN, the Red Cross? Innocent people continue to die. 60 years from now, there will be a museum in Rwanda, and people there will weep and ask: What was Europe doing then? Why didn’t anyone do anything? To-day, we have no excuses. In my opinion, this is the main challenge facing con-temporary education.

16151413121110987654321

Jewish CenterterOś—Oświęcim, People, History, Culture magazine, no. 2, February 2009

The artist Fay Grajower was present on January 21 at the opening of her exhibition Where the Past Meets the Future at the Jewish Center. The exhibition is inspired by archival photographs and tales from pre-war Galicia. It consists of over 100 pictures using various techniques. Each fragment tells a story of its

own, and together they make up a mosaic that brings back to life a world that was buried in the past. Below, we are publishing an interview with Fay Grajower.

WHERE THE PAST MEETS THE FUTURE—AN EXHIBITION

AT THE JEWISH CENTER

Agnieszka Juskowiak: What techniques do you use in your work? I see photographs, paintings, drawings...Fay Grajower: The works are done on wood in mixed tech-nique. I mostly use copies of photographs, oil paint and acrylics, collage, and recycled material.

Is it right to say that your main topic is the history of the Jews in Poland? Why did you choose it? The Where the Past Meets the Future exhibition was created as an in-stallation for the Galicia Museum in Cracow. The

brick walls there, and the meaning of a loca-tion in the heart of Cra-cow, had an infl uence on the concept and the subject. The Internation-al Jewish Culture has a life of its own there and attracts the atten-tion of thousands of people. They are look-ing for an enjoyable time, but also for their roots. My father’s ances-tors lived in Cracow for hundreds of years and I felt it was high time for me to do something with the theme.

You paint with very vivid, optimistic colors. Is this a deliberate mood?

Yes. My work is gener-ally very colorful and vivid. In a way, that dis-tances the works them-selves from the diffi cult subject matter I work with, it distances the theme from the concept of beauty. Beauty can be found in the mind of the beholder. Every one of us has some concep-tion of “what art should be like.” The colors resonate with the be-holder’s associations as the beholder looks at the work and, in a way, creates the past. I hope that my work gives the beholders the energy to look deep within themselves in search of images and associa-

tions. That would be a triumph of the human spirit over brutality.

The symbolic layers of your pictures in-clude photographs of Cracow, book jackets, and even photographs of John Paul II or pas-sages from the Bible. When I was prepar-ing for this exhibi-tion, I looked at old photos of Cracow and even bought a couple of postcards on e-Bay. Some of them found a place in my work. The Jewish people are often said to be a “people of the book.” I wanted to fi nd some way of con-veying this idea. Since the Bible is also a book, I used some passages that I came across. I use copies of material. Found or used material is an important part of my work. In this way, I give new life to some-thing that was discard-ed. At a theater festival in New York last year, I saw a play that Karol Wojtyła wrote when he was still a student. I saw Jeremiah, and I was touched by the issues that Wojtyła faced in the underground—his identity, religion, and the events that were taking place around him. Who thought then that he would be the fu-ture Pope John Paul II? That’s the primary liter-ary reference in this ex-hibition. There are also symbols and metaphors from my own personal vocabulary of inherited memory: stairs, win-dows, arches, passage-ways, boats, and rocks.

You place your symbols in abstract forms and patterns. The viewer has to search actively for the meaning.I hope that the view-er will enter into my work—into the world of the image of times and places that are no

more. Protecting mem-ory means discovering history. The atmos-phere here is created out of space and light. In order to survive and retain their meaning for the future, the sto-ries must be retained in memory. Concealing and revealing are in-volved. Some things are obvious. They’re on the surface. Other things, however, need time and patience. The truth must be looked for. Isn’t it the same with people?

What does an artist get out of collage? I concentrate in my work on patterns of memory. It’s the combination of stories and the subcon-scious associations of inherited memory that form our lives. I use the visual language of ab-stract forms, arranging material in layers with calligraphic signs that emerge from natural elements and materials. These layers resemble our internal world. The works in this exhibi-tion can be described as mixed media on wood. The layering of the col-lage is a metaphor for mixed memories. As in the Jewish tradition, texts and phrases some-times intrude upon my pictures, suggesting the dialogue between the visual layer and the text. I think this is what gives my works that openness to interpreta-tion.

Your pictures form a mosaic.I made a mosaic of mo-saics, a world within a world. Each “square” is a work unto itself and could exist separately. Here, each of them is a part of a greater whole and of the entire exhibi-tion. Each has its own meaning, but it also completes the mean-ing of the whole. Each “square” can be seen

Fay Grajower (center)

ph

oto:

JC

16151413121110987654321


as a stone or a brick at a certain moment in time. In order to build a big monument, you need a lot of stones. Each person has their own value and is not a number. The history of each person is excep-tional, and each story is part of a larger mosaic, a larger world.

How do you begin working on a picture? What comes fi rst—the symbols, the colors, or the composition? Generally, I begin with a very large surface. I use broad strokes, col-lages, handwriting, and repeated phrases. Then I break the whole down into smaller fragments and work on each of them separately un-til it becomes a work unto itself. Only later do I rearrange these fragments into a larger whole and keep mov-ing them around until I feel that everything is in its place, that each fragment stands both as a separate work and a part of the whole.

What signifi cance does your own story have here? Thirteen years ago, I went to the Book Fair in Jerusalem. I found myself at a table with beautiful books bound in leather. I pointed out one of them that caught my eye. As opposed to the other ones, it had a binding in black and white stripes, like the ones in Franz Kline’s pictures. It turned out that the binding was made of a piece of tal-lis, the Jewish prayer garment, and the place marker was made of a tsitsit, the fringe at the edge of each of these garments. I opened the book out of curiosity. It was a rabbinical book in Hebrew. I noticed the introduction. There were two signatures there. One of them was “Avraham Meir Gra-jower, Dayan of Cracow [judge in a rabbinical court], 1881.” It was incredible—all Grajow-ers are related. It was a very emotional mo-ment. When I looked into the genealogy, it turned out that there were three generations of dayans in my family, and Grajowers lived in Cracow for at least 200 years, between 1700 and 1900. My father’s par-ents left Cracow for Bel-

gium at the beginning of the 20th century. My father was one of a pair of twins, and the major-ity of his eight siblings were born in Belgium. I put the book into a paper bag and placed it on a shelf. It was something very dear to me. I never talked about it much. When I met Kate Craddy from the Galicia Museum in 2007 and we discussed my exhibition for 2008, I understood that the time had come to com-bine something person-al with something more universal, having to do with not only Cracow, but also Poland and the Jewish history of the many Jews from West-ern Europe. This is Jew-ish history, and it’s the history of Poland—in the details and in gen-eral.

What was it like when you presented your work in Oświęcim? I’m very happy that my work can travel around Poland. The exhibition has already been shown in the Marchołt Gal-lery in Katowice. I hope that, after Oświęcim, people in Częstochowa and Wrocław will also be able to see it. The meeting at the open-ing was very interest-ing. The students from the high school were very involved and they asked good questions. Earlier that day, while talking in the car on the way from Cracow to Oświęcim, I asked whether, despite the fact that there are no Jews in Oświęcim to-day, there might not be somebody there who’s a “concealed” Jew, whose ancestors, or perhaps one of the parents, or grandparents, were Jewish. I was told that this was highly unlikely. Immediately after the opening, a lady came up to me and took my hand in hers. She told me that her grandfather was a Jew, but that he had married a Chris-tian woman and contact was lost with that side of the family. She said she had been searching for years, and asked if I could help her. That happened fi ve minutes after my opening! It’s interesting—how many people are still search-ing for that kind of con-nections?

Interview by Agnieszka Juskowiak

Jewish Center

16151413121110987654321

J

Oś—Oświęcim, People, History, Culture magazine, no. 2, February 2009 History

I remember that, when I worked at the old Haberfeld factory (known in later years as the Carbonated Waters Production and Beer Bottling Plant), there were similar containers on the premises, but I did not pay any atten-tion to them. The bottles from the old Haberfeld facto-ry monopolized my attention at the time. A great deal of time passed afterwards, and then a neighbor informed me that, in his cellar, he had a copper container manufac-tured in Bielsko, as indicated by a small inscription on the bottom that advertised the products of the maker in Bielsko. At the same time, he expressed his doubt that I would be interested in this object, since I collected only memorabilia from Oświęcim. I averred that this was so, but also told him that I had con-tacts with various collectors from all over Poland, and therefore took items from other cities that I could later exchange with them. I went over to his house to pick up the container one day. It did indeed feature the Bielsko manufacturer’s mark on the bottom. However, I was amazed to see that it also had the emblem of the “Jakub Haberfeld Oświęcim” factory

on it. This pleased me great-ly, all the more so because I remembered these contain-ers from years gone by and had regretted not adding them to my collection. As the saying goes, “nothing in na-ture is wasted.” This is anoth-er illustration from my col-lection of the way that objects connected with the history of Oświęcim may escape my attention momentarily, but nevertheless come back.

Mirosław Ganobis

She was born in Oświęcim on March 29, 1923, the third child of Antoni Zabrzeski and Helena Dreścik Za-brzeska. Her father worked as an accountant at town hall in Oświęcim, and her mother was a teacher. In

1929, Anna enrolled at the Queen Jadwiga public school in Oświęcim. She continued her intermediate education at the same school. The out-break of the war interrupted her schooling. In the fi rst years of the occupation, the Germans expelled the fam-ily and seized the villa where they lived.The Auschwitz camp was founded in 1940 and groups of prisoners soon began la-boring outside its perimeter. Anna made her initial con-tact with the small groups of prisoners erecting fences around German-occupied houses on Ogrodowa Street.

Anna gave them food and medicine, sometimes with the consent of the SS guard. She also served as an inter-mediary in correspondence between prisoners and their families. She was employed fi rst in a grocery store and later at a paint store in Oświęcim. She used her entire wages to buy food for the prison-ers. She also collected food from friends and others who were involved in the relief ef-fort. During the period when prisoners could receive par-cels from their families, Anna used this means of supplying them with food. Her brother

Kazimierz, who was a civil-ian worker in the area near the camp, furnished her with addresses. She continued to aid prisoners throughout the occupation.After liberation, she was one of the many Oświęcim resi-dents who joined together to help the freed prisoners. She worked in the hospital at the provisional Polish Red Cross fi eld hospital, and also cared for the patients. For several days, she sheltered Krystyna Żywulska, who escaped dur-ing the evacuation march. Żywulska later became a writer.In 1949, the UB (Security Bu-reau) arrested Anna Zabrzes-ka for contact with her fi an-cé, Tadeusz Cieśla, a former Auschwitz prisoner who was charged with “espionage for the benefi t of the intelligence service of the reactionary Polish émigré centers” and sentenced to death.The Regional Military Court

in Katowice sentenced her to 5 years’ imprisonment on November 2, 1950. She served her sentence in the penitentiaries in Cieszyn, Gliwice, and Grudziądz. After conditional release on November 13, 1954, she returned to Oświęcim and began working in the Com-munal Cooperative. In No-vember 1960, she married Maria Gerard Czernicki. They later had a daughter, Wiktoria. Anna Zabrzeska retired in 1979.

Biographical sketch from:Ludzie Dobrej Woli.

Księga Pamięcimieszkańców

ziemi oświęcimskiejniosących pomoc

więźniom KL Auschwitz,Henryk

Świebocki, ed.Auschwitz-Birkenau

State Museum and Auschwitz

Preservation Society, Oświęcim, 2005

• February 1, 1945Under the authorization of the Lublin government, representatives of the Main Petroleum Bureau took possession of the Buna-Werke plant, which had been built by the German IG Farben company. In mid-February, however, Soviet “trophy hunter” units seized the plant and began dismantling and looting machinery and equipment.

• February 2, 1872The Municipal Coun-cil of the Royal Town of Oświęcim approved the be-ginning of the construction of a school for girls on Szpi-talna St. (now Kościelna St.) and a new town hall on the main square. Architect Leopold Michel designed both buildings.

• February 2, 1951“A man of crystalline char-acter,” the Rev. Jan Skar-bek, vicar of the Oświęcim parish, died after 25 years of pastoral service there.

• February 3, 1925The People’s Bank opened in Oświęcim. Its fi rst direc-tor was Baron Jan Czecz, owner of the estate in Zaborze.

• February 6, 1910The solemn installation of the Eucharistic King was held at the Most Holy Trin-ity convent church of the Poor Clares of the Perpetu-al Adoration in Kęty. Rich-ly ornamented with the

woodcarvings of Stanisław Jarząbek Sr., the place of worship was honored with the title Sanctuary of the Perpetual Adoration of the Most Holy Sacrament.

• February 7, 1915Ceremonies connected with the anniversary of the outbreak of the 1863 Insurrection were held in Oświęcim. The offi cer corps of the I Brigade of the Polish Legions, with Brigadier Józef Piłsudski at its head, attended a gala evening at the Hotel Herz.

• February 9, 1893 Stanisław Królicki, Lt. Col. in the Polish Army and commanding offi cer of the 7th Rifl e Battalion who won fame in the 1939 defensive campaign, was born in Kęty. As a result of his wounds, he died in the Modlin Fortress on Sep-tember 28, 1939.

• February 11, 1982The “14th-15th century urban arrangement of Oświęcim, on a checker-board plan, surrounded by a castellated oval of former fortifi cations together with the irregular density of lanes in the region of the outlets to the old town and the built ensemble of the old town from the turn of the 20th century with the dominant elements of the castle, church, and cloisters” were entered on the register of landmarks of the voivodeship of Biel-sko.

• February 18, 1941 In order to obtain dwell-ings for specialists at the planned Buna-Werke plant, Hermann Goering, Marshal of the Third Re-ich, issued a decree call-ing for the expulsion of all Jews from Oświęcim. The Oświęcim Jews were de-ported to Chrzanów and Sosnowiec and, after the liquidation of the ghettos there, to Auschwitz Con-centration Camp.

• February 24, 1327Following the example of the other duchies of Silesia, Duke Jan I of Oświęcim, known as „the Scholastic,” pledged homage (homa-gium) to John of Luxem-bourg, the king of Bohe-mia, and was invested in return with the heredi-tary fi ef of the Duchy of Oświęcim, including the towns of Oświęcim, Zator, Kęty, Żywiec, Wadowice, and Spytkowice.

• February 25, 1564At the Crown Sejm in War-saw, Polish King Zygmunt August reconfi rmed the “privilege of the correc-tive incorporation and unifi cation of the Duchies of Oświęcim and Zator.” The Land of Oświęcim re-turned to the motherland, retaining its ducal titles and guaranteed a certain autonomy by the privi-leges.

Leszek Żak, local and Beskidy

mountain guide

PEOPLE OF GOOD WILL

ANNA ZABRZESKA (BORN 1923,

MARRIED NAME CZERNICKA)

HISTORY OF OŚWIĘCIM —FEBRUARY

The container shown in the photo-graph comes from Jakub Haberfeld’s old factory, which was located near

the Oświęcim castle, on the road into town. The use of the container is not known. All that is known, is that it is made entirely of copper. It features a small inscription: “Jakub Haberfeld Oświecim-Kęty.”

ph

oto:

Mir

osła

w G

anob

is

The container

FROM GANOBIS’S CABINET

16151413121110987654321

The fi nale of the 12th Great Holiday Aid Orchestra was held on January 11, 2009. Almost 200 volunteers collected on the streets of Oświęcim. Dance groups, a family dance lesson, and concerts featured in the fi nale program, under the slogan “A Healthy Spirit in a Healthy Body.”

ph

oto:

Tom

asz

Mól

p

hot

o: T

omas

z M

ól

ph

oto:

Tom

asz

Mól

ph

oto:

Tom

asz

Mól

ph

oto:

Tom

asz

Mól

Fot.

Tom

asz

Mól

Photographer

16151413121110987654321


TO THE EYES OF TOMASZ MÓL

where the past the future of remembrance the … · the future of remembrance —a challenge for...

Documents