67th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz

Remarks by Małgorzata Omilanowska, Deputy Minister of Culture and National Heritage

Ladies and Gentlemen, former prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Your Excellencies the ambassadors, members of the European parliament, representatives of local authorities, employees of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum—I address you today on the 67th anniversary of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Each year, we repeat these words: “the liberation of the camp.” However, I would like to ask a question: What, in this horrific context, does the word “liberation” mean?
Entering the camp, the Red Army soldiers were surely convinced that they would liberate the prisoners who remained there. At the same time, however, they had to deal with the awfulness of that place, with a crime whose true dimensions they could not even imagine. After them, all humanity had to deal with that horror. The historical fact of the liberation of the camp thus marked the beginning of the road along which we are still traveling—trying to understand something that passes understanding and to speak about something for which there are no words in any language. Never again will we free ourselves of the burden of Auschwitz.

On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz ceased to exist as a criminal German death factory and began to exist as an eternal affront to the conscience of all humanity.

The gesture by Theodor W. Adorno, who stopped composing in 1945 and stated that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” is well known. Yet since that time thousands of artists, writers, and philosophers have tried to measure up to the horror of Auschwitz, the horror of the Holocaust. New generations, including those born many years after the war, continue to look in that direction. Art and the human mind attempt to come to terms with a trauma such as humanity never knew before, although the artists and thinkers know well, like each of us, that there is no coming to terms with that trauma. However, if we renounced that hopeless effort, what would be left? Forgetting. And if we forgot about Auschwitz, what would we be worth?

Yet we go on forgetting continually. On the one hand we ask: Wouldn’t it have been possible to to do something to prevent the national socialist German death factories and the Soviet Gulag from ever coming into existence, to prevent the extermination of the European Jews, Sinti, and Roma, to prevent the murder of millions of Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Russians, and people from so many other nations? We think to ourselves: If only we had another chance, we would stop the slaughter. And yet, at that very same time that we are asking ourselves those painful questions, genocide is occurring at various places around the world.

However, I do not want to think that the inhuman experience of Auschwitz has taught us nothing. I think that on more than one occasion it is precisely the thing that has held us back from new crimes, but this may be merely the naïve faith of a humanist... One way or another we must always bear this weight, all of us fated to live after Auschwitz.

A particular fate has fallen to the residents of Oświęcim and the vicinity who are attempting to create their homes and their regional homeland in this place, and at times in spite of this place where there was once hell, yet without forgetting about what occurred here. The daily efforts by the Museum employees who have devoted their professional lives, energy, and sorely tried emotions to this place and to cultivating the memory of it also deserve appreciation.

There are still prisoners of Auschwitz and other concentration camps and extermination centers among us. They are the ones who really remember. Let us bow before them.

In silence and deep reflection let us pay tribute to the victims, never forgetting about their death and suffering, and let us hope that, despite everything, the inhuman experience of Auschwitz has changed us for the better. If “liberation” means anything here, it is only this.