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60th Anniversary of the Founding of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
An international conference, exhibitions, and a new book to mark the occasion will commemorate the 60th anniversary, in July, of the founding of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.
Polish and international authorities in research on the Holocaust and genocide, and the aftermath, will take part in a conference on Remembrance, Awareness, and Responsibility. The discussion will attempt to foster deeper reflection on the future direction of the Auschwitz Museum in the context of the challenges and threats of the contemporary world.
The three-day conference is scheduled for the beginning of July, and will be the central event in the 60th anniversary of the opening of the Museum at the site of the Nazi German concentration camp.
The anniversary will also feature three exhibitions, one on the most important events in the history of the Museum, another highlighting donations to the Museum, and the third comprising photographs by the Irish photographer Simon Watson.
On the anniversary, the Museum will also publish a book by Museum historian Jacek Lachendro, Czy zburzyć i zaorać?... Idea założenia Państwowego Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w świetle prasy polskiej w latach 1945-1948 [Tear It Down and Plow It Under? The Idea of Founding the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in the Light of the Polish Press, 1945-1948]. Lachendro analyzes the extensive debate over the idea of setting up a museum that went on in Poland in the years immediately following the Second World War.
The Beginnings
Several months after the end of the war and the liberation of the Nazi camps, a group of Polish prisoners began publicly campaigning for the idea of commemorating the victims of Auschwitz. As soon as it became possible to do so, some of them went to the site in order to protect the original camp buildings and ruins.
They set up an organization called “Oświęcim Camp Permanent Security,” and watched over the thousands of pilgrims who began arriving en masse as they searched for traces of loved ones, prayed, and paid tribute to those who had been murdered.
Even before the official opening of the Museum, the former prisoners prepared the first exhibition at the site. It opened on June 14, 1947. About 50 thousand people attended the opening of that exhibition. Among them were former prisoners, relatives of victims, pilgrims from all over Poland, government officials, representatives of the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes and the Central Jewish Historical Commission, and British, Czechoslovak, and French diplomats.
Foundation
On July 2, 1947, the Polish Sejm passed a bill on the preservation for all time of the grounds and buildings of the camp. The same act called the Oświęcim-Brzezinka State Museum into being. The name was changed in 1999 to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim.
This institution includes the grounds of the two concentration camp sites, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, with a total area of 191 hectares. In 1979, after being nominated by Poland, the site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. By now, over 30 million people from over 100 countries have visited the Museum.
Museum or Memorial?
Under the 1947 act of the Polish parliament, the tasks of the Museum are to secure the grounds of the former camp and the buildings there, to collect, assemble, and study evidence and material on the crimes committed in Auschwitz by the Germans, and to make that evidence and material accessible.
However, issues connected with the organization, activities, and development of the Museum continue to be discussed by the former prisoners themselves, as well as museum practitioners, preservationists, educators, and the media.
Even while the Museum was being set up, it was not clear whether it should only describe the past, or should also elucidate and explain the main mechanisms of the system responsible for the crimes. Widely divergent opinions were expressed, from the suggestion that the grounds should be plowed under, to proposals for the maximum possible preservation and the saving of everything possible.
The term “Museum” has itself come under discussion. Not everyone accepts the definition implied in the name “Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.” Some feel that the site is, above all, a cemetery. Others regard it as a memorial or monument. Others still feel that it is a memorial institution and center for education and research into the fates of the people murdered here. In fact, the Museum functions in all these ways simultaneously. These functions are not mutually exclusive, but rather complementary.
Excerpts from the forthcoming book Czy zburzyć i zaorać?... Idea założenia Państwowego Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w świetle prasy polskiej w latach 1945-1948 [Tear It Down and Plow It Under? The Idea of Founding the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in the Light of the Polish Press, 1945-1948].
[...] In the first half of 1946, the press carried texts on the desecration and vandalizing of the Auschwitz site. After the security guards were organized, the nascent museum announced that the grounds were secure, and also that persons who had profaned the remains of the victims had been arrested and convicted. Over time, such articles gave way to information about new museum projects and the ongoing organizational work. Accounts of visits to the site sometimes accompanied these reports.
It was possible to visit the site as early as 1945. Press reports indicate, however, that the visits were restricted to organized groups or were held on the occasion of various ceremonies. Only when organizational work began did the visiting become open to all. In 1946, there were 100 thousand visitors and pilgrims (for many people, especially the relatives of victims, visits to the camp took the form of pilgrimages). A year later, the figure rose to 170 thousand. . . . It was possible to visit the site individually or in a group. All visitors, however, were accompanied by a guard or other Museum employee, functioning simultaneously as a guide. There were separate sets of guides at the Main Camp site, and at Birkenau. The guards carried rifles and wore military uniforms with a patch of material from a striped camp garment sewed on the lapel. Admission was by paid ticket, with the proceeds going to the setting up of the Museum.
Press reports indicate that, before the official opening of the Museum, guides showed visitors the gate with the “Arbeit macht frei” inscription, Block no. 11, and the courtyard containing the Death Wall at the site of the Auschwitz I-Main Camp.
“Although we know that the tragic Auschwitz nightmare is irrevocably over,” wrote Stanisław Peters, “we look warily at the inscription above the gate and feel a slight tremor as we enter the camp grounds. A small town of identical two-story houses arranged symmetrically like boxes in a children’s game. Perfect cleanliness. Every few steps, wreaths leaning against the walls and black tablets with writing and crosses as a reminder that this order, cleanliness, and symmetry was only a screen behind which lurked the most unrestrained sadism . . .”
The same author goes on to describe the courtyard and the Death Wall: “A panel made of cement and wood shavings, painted black, was placed in front of that wall. It serves as background to a cross and a heap of wreaths. Red gravel covers the courtyard. In spite of ourselves, we take our hats off. We are in the most tragic and the most hallowed of places. Here, every clump of earth is soaked with the blood of martyrs.” After leaving the courtyard, the visitors went down into the cellars of Block no. 11. “In the tiny cells,” we read in one account, “it is gloomy. They are empty. . . . There are faint inscriptions on the walls, impossible to read in the dim light. Unfortunately, next to these inscriptions, new ones have been carved. Visitors feel compelled to use ink pens to perpetuate their first and last names . . . We walk upstairs to see the empty “stuben” where here and there a three-tier bunk still stands. On the walls are frescoes painted by the prisoners. Afterwards, we walk along the empty streets between the blocks.”
At the Birkenau site, visitors could see the interior of wooden and brick barracks. “Here . . . as far as the eye can see,” we read in Kurier Szczeciński, “run concrete fence posts, connected with barbed wire. Every few dozen meters there are guard towers. Behind the wire . . . stand brick or wooden barracks. Almost all of the latter are in a state of collapse . . . We enter the vacant barracks of the women’s and men’s camps. Everywhere there are rows . . . of the bunks otherwise known to the prisoners as “boxes” . . . This bunk is something like a rabbit hutch with three levels, perhaps a meter and a half wide, enclosed on three sides.”
However, the most important places for the visitors were the ruins of the crematoria and the pits that contained the pyres.
“Only ruins remain of the crematoria,” wrote former prisoner Marian Toliński, a correspondent for Echo Krakowa. “Tiny white fragments of human bone are visible everywhere on the ground—we are walking on human remains everywhere—in a huge cemetery—the vastest, perhaps, in human history. In the places where the burning was done . . . in holes in the ground, stands dirty-yellow water. This water is in constant motion. Gas bubbles rise continually to the surface from the bodies, incompletely burned, that are still decomposing in the depths.”
The sight of the “gas bubbles” rising from the water must have made a strong impression on the visitors, since press reports referred to it frequently.
