The Future of Auschwitz

 

James E. Young

midst the tumult of events during the fall of

1989, Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Ma-

zowiecki quietly convened a commission to
consider the future of the museum and monuments at
Auschwitz-Birkenau. All too aware of his own fragile
tenure as head of state, Mazowiecki dared to acknowl-
edge Openly what other leaders often prefer to hide: the
change in official memory that comes with a new gov-
ernment regime. And then, in a bold and conciliaIOry
move, the prime minister called on a number of Jewish
Holocaust scholars for guidance in the official remak-
ing of public memory at Auschwitz.

Although now only a memory himself, Mazowiecki set
in motion a complete restructuring of the memorial at
Auschwitz. Under his direction, the Polish Ministry of
Culture appointed an International Auschwitz Council,
composed of Jews from Poland, Israel and Other west-
ern nations, and of Polish Catholic intellectuals and gov-
ernment ministers. Charged with redesigning the
museum and monuments at Auschwitz and reorganizing
the exhibits to strip them of their previous Stalinist cast,
the council has met three times since its formation two
years ago. With little fanfare, it has already begun to re-
definenliterally to reshape?both memory of the Holo-
caust in Poland and its contested historical significance.

In preparation for this task, and at the behest of the
Polish Ministry of Culture, Oxford University?s Centre
for Hebrew Studies invited a group of Jewish intellectu-
als from nine countries to meet at its Yarnton Manor to
consider "the future of Auschwitz. Under the direction
of Jonathan \Webber, who teaches social anthropology at
the Centre and is examining the cultural life of memory
at Auschwitz, this group, which met in May 1990, would
serve as an unofficial advisory board to the council.

 

James E. Young is associate professor ofEnglis/J and udaic
Studies at the University of assaebusetts at Ant/Jars! and is a
member afoot/3 the lnternationai Auschwitz Councii and oftbe
Yarnton Group. He is the author ofWriting and Rewriting the
Holocaust (1988) and The Texture of Memory: Holocaust
Memorials and Meaning in Europe, Israel and America (forth-
coming frorn Yale University Press, Spring 1993), from which

this essay is adapted.

The 1990 Yarnton meeting itself was a remarkably con-
genial affair: Whether this was due to the tempered and
gentle ambience of the manor and its gardens, or to the
afternoon sherry hour, I don?t know. But after three days
of vigorous discussions, this group of twenty-seven Jew-
ish academics, editors, religious leaders, and Holocaust
survivors formulated a list of six general principles and
fourteen concrete prOposals to guide the reorganizatiou
of the museum and monuments at Auschwitz. hen fin-
ished, the group hand-delivered this document~?The
Yarnton Declaration on the Future of Auschwitz?~?to
Poland?s Deputy Minister of Culture and Art.

?The Yarnton Declaration? may never rival the Yalta
Accords in significance, but it did seem like a treaty of
sorts, a framework for settling the unseemly ?memo-
rial wars? conducted 50 long on the mass graves at
Auschwitz. In its apparent consensus, this symposium
might be regarded with cynicism. But in fact, unanim-
ity was never its aim. It was simply the first time Jews
had been invited by the Polish government to sit down
and define precisely the kind of memory they wanted
preserved at Auschwitz, their first Opportunity to offer
the Poles a public set of recommendations.

Nearly two years later, in April 1992, a re-
configured Yarnton group met again, this time in sz'tu at
Auschwitz and at Krakow's venerable Jagiellonian Uni-
versity, under the aUSpices of the Research Centre on
Jewish History and Culture in Poland. They followed up
on the Yarnton Symposium and verified which of their
earlier recommendations had been adopted, which de-
ferred. What follows is a brief description of these pro-
posals and their aftermath by one who was there, a
glimpse into the process of this group?s ?memory work. 

In the Yarnton declaration, we had recommended
that the museum and monuments at Auschwitz-Birke?
nau show clearly that:

1.6 million men, women, and children were mur-
dered there;

0 over 90 percent of those murdered there were Jews,
that aside from the Sinti and Roma, Jews were the only
people condemned to death for ?the crime? of having
been born;

31

 

 there were huge numbers of non-Jews who died at
Auschwitz, especially Poles, as this camp played a key
role in the Nazi campaign to destroy Polish nationhood;

both Jews and non-Jews murdered there came from
all walks of life and all political persuasions, from dozens
of cultural, religious and national traditions; and that

0 the atrocities committed at Auschwitz were perpe-
trated by the German National Socialist regime and its
collaborators. Finally, we suggested that in reorganizing
the museum and memorial, the commission established
by the Polish government consult as widely as possible
with survivors? organizations and other Holocaust re-
search institutions.

In addition to these general principles, we agreed
(with far less unanimity) on a number of practical, con-
crete suggestions concerning the day-to-day operation of
the memorial. These ranged from setting up a shuttle bus
between Auschwitz-I and Birkenau to providing a his-
torical orientation for visitors entering and leaving the
memorial; from reviewing existing inscriptions and signs
to creating a ?hall of names, where a continuous tape
of the names of victims would play. We also proposed
the standardization of guides? recruitment and training,
the provision of cassette players and headphones for
those without a guide, and the permanent establishment
of kosher food facilities at the museum restaurant.

one point during the 1990 meeting, after view-
ing slides of boisterous young tourists munching
on ice cream and candy among the barracks at
Auschwitz-I, one of the British participants demanded a
dress and behavior code. ?No way, shot back an irritated
American. ?How are we going to force your stuffy modes
of dress on seven hundred thousand tourists a year from
all over the world? How are these tourists supposed to
dress?? The American acknowledged that a dress code
might pose no hardship on British visitors, or even on the
Poles, who often travel in their Sunday best. But by for-
bidding shorts and sandals, for example, we might auto-
matically exclude half the Israeli visitors. As a compromise,
we recommended the posting of a general invitation to
decorum to remind visitors that this memorial is, if not a
holy site, also not just another tourist attraction.
Another participant asked pointedly just how one
goes about preserving ruins, which by their nature grow
more ruinous every day. Or, short of reconstructing the
gas chambers, just how much renovation should be per-
mitted? Someone reSponded that perhaps we should
seal the camp off altogether, call it a ?city of evil,? and
thereby make it a place set apart, to be contemplated
from afar. Or perhaps we should treat it as a cemetery,
profaned ground, never to be trod upon by the cobam'm,
the Jewish priestly class. Others wondered what to do

32 VOL. 7, No. 6

with the vendors hawking concentration camp trinkets
and memorabilia. Coming from a culture of ?Memorial
Day Sales,? we Americans wondered how we could ask
the Poles to restrain their own entrepreneurial spirit.

A few of the group had come prepared to join the
battle against the convent set up by Carmelite nuns in
1988 outside the gates of Auschwitz I. But because plans
were already underway to move the Carmelite convent
from the camp's perimeter to its new home in the
Catholic education center being built nearly a kilometer
away, the group at Yarnton was relieved not to have to
address it. All of us were shocked, however, by slide im-
ages of decaying movie sets and broken fences left be-
hind by film crews for The Triumph of the Spirit and
?Winds of War. Jonathan Webber reassured the group
that the ersatz gas chambers and crematoria had, in fact,
been dismantled within days of his vociferous objec?
tions. Nevertheless, the group proposed that no mate-
rial changes or innovations be allowed on the
Auschwitz-Birkenau grounds without approval of the
council and museum administrators.

As academics and historians, in fact, most of us were
acutely aware of the potential abuses of historical arti-
facts. Ruins, in particular, tend to collapse the distinc-
tion between themselves and what they evoke.
Crumbling crematoria and barracks invite visitors to
mistake remnants of the past for the reality of the events,
physical evidence of almost any accompanying explana-
tions. If, as was the case until recently, it is erroneously
engraved in stone that ?four million peOple suffered and
died here,? then this is what the ruins corroborate.

But as Michael Marrus, a historian, reminded us in his
report to the group, four million peeple did not die at
Auschwitz. While historians agree that the exact number
of peeple murdered here will never be known, they be-
lieve the most accurate count is 1.6 million victims, of
whom about 1.3 million were Jews. The remaining three
hundred thousand victims were Polish Catholics, Gypsies,
and Soviet POWS. The figure of four million was as wrong
as it was round, arrived at by a combination of the camp
commandant?s self-aggrandizing exaggerations, Polish
perceptions of their great losses, and the Soviet occupiers'
desire to create socialist It is a number that may
have diminished Stalin?s own crimes, even as it created
millions of Polish and Soviet victims at Auschwitz. Ironi-
cally, by assenting to this in?ated number over the years,
Jewish researchers had unwittingly assisted in the Polish
nationalization of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Therein lay several more bones of historical con-
tention. After Stanislaw Krajewski, a Polish-Jewish
leader, informed the group that the old inscriptions
had already been effaced from the tablets at Birkenau,
we were faced with the dilemma of shared memorial

Space. For, as Marrus went on to explain, in its first two
and a half years of Operation, Auschwitz was primarily a
concentration camp for Poles. Between 1939 and 1942,
the barracks at Auschwitz-l (formerly for the Polish
Army) were used to intern Polish political prisoners and
POW 5. Only in its last two years, from spring 1942 to
the end of 1944, after the village of Birkenau was razed
and a death camp built in its place, was this complex de-
voted to killing Jews. While Poles remember that
Auschwitz was the beginning of the end of their nation-
hood, Jews recall Birkenau as the end of Jewish life in
Eumpe. Where Poles remember that one of every two
Poles was enslaved, injured, or killed during the war,Jews
recall the extermination of 90 percent of Polish Jewry.

How then to create a commemorative space big
enough to accommodate the plural memories and sym-
bols of disparate, occasionally competing groups? How
are the correct proportions of space and significance al-
lotted? Is this, or should it be, the function of a memo-
rial site? On the one hand, it seemed intolerable thatJews
who died as Jews should be buried beneath the crosses
of the Carmelite order, a sign of Christian triumphalism
in Jewish eyes. But on the other hand, if we deny to Chris-
tians their traditional forms of remembrance, we may
also thwart their memory of Jewish victims.

We agreed that Auschwitz?Birkenau was the site of
the greatest mass murder ofJews in history. But it was
also in Poland, where some six million Poles died (half
of them Jews) during the German occupation.
Auschwitz would be, by geographic default, a Polish
memorial to both Polish and Jewish victims, a shared
shrine to both Jewish and Polish catastrophe.

Last April, the Yarnton group resumed its delibera~
tions at Auschwitz?Birkenau, reinvigorated and given
new urgency by the sheer power of place. The group
would now see for itself what was remembered and what
was lost at Auschwitz; what had been left to decompose
and what had been reconstructed. On the first day, we
experienced a typical Polish-led tour of Auschwitz-I and
its museums before exploring the vastness of Birkenau
on our own the next day. Two full days of workshops and
plenary sessions followed, during which we discussed the
current state of the memorial grounds and debated ad-
ditional recommendations. On the fifth and last day, we
called a press conference attended by the Polish national
news and television media, at which we issued new rec-
ommendatons, dubbed the ?Krakow PrOposals. 

In the gentle yet persuasive language of an experienced
memorial diplomat, Jonathan Webber proclaimed our
gratification at the changes that had taken place since our
last meeting: A bus now connected Auschwitz-l and
Birkenau; the visitors? guidebook had been improved and
Updated to reflect previously suppressed historical facts;

new markers in Hebrew had Sprouted, as had signs ex-
horting visitors to maintain the dignity of the site. At the
same time, Webber underscored our dissatisfaction with
the slow pace of other changes. The museum still does
not show clearly that 90 percent of those murdered were
Jews; nor is there a policy in effect to govern the erection
of markers or the removal of unauthorized plaques.
Nothing had been done to show the richness of Euro-
pean Jewish life before the Holocaust or the continua-
tion of life afterward in Israel and America.

On its tour of Birkenau?s far reaches, the group saw
that the movie sets were indeed gone, but that other
unauthorized markers continued to bloom in the land-
scape. One set of markers erected by young Polish vol-
unteers provoked astonished gasps and incredulous
headshaking from the group: Arrayed across a great green
meadow, site of former burning pits and mass graves that
were the burial sites for tons of human ashes, were large,
whitewashed Stars of David and crosses. In two Spots,
the young Poles had attempted to create a Symbol of sol-
idarity between Jewish and Polish by nailing
Stars of David to the crosses?in effect, crucifying the
Jewish star. The memorial volunteers had hOped to per-
form an egalitarian ?marriage? of Jewish and Christian
symbols, but Jewish eyes found an ironic and bitter ref-
erence to the of Jews at Christian hands.

ith these images in mind, we returned to the

seminar room in Krakow. Everyone agreed

that the grounds should remain preserved as
they are, with a policy to prevent the further vandaliza-
tion of Auschwitz-Birkenau?awhether by well-meaning
volunteers, tourists looking for souvenirs, or American
museums foraging for artifacts. (The sawing in half and
removal of one of the last remaining wooden barracks
at Birkenau by the US. Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington struck an eSpecially raw nerve among the
group.) We reiterated our previous recommendation
that nothing from the site be carted off and none of the
grounds be altered in any way without the approval of
the entire Auschwitz Council.

At the same time, several members of the group ex-
pressed intense uneasiness with the obsessive, almost
fetishistic veneration of these same relics. The literary
historian David Roskies warned passionately, for exam-
ple, against Jews turning Auschwitz-Birkenau into so
many stations of the cross, its remains into so many
pieces of the cross. We debated whether to conserve the
artifacts as historical evidence or as remnants of the past,
meant to evoke in visitors the sense of having been there.
Do we let the ruins age gracefully, to show the ever-
widening gulf of time between ourselves and the past

(Continued on p. 77)

Auscuwn?z 33

 

 

 



a more expansive notion of who and what we are, be?
ginning in the Bible, amplified in the Talmud, and preva-
lent in the works of modern Jewish thinkers. The great

mystic Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) ex-

pressed it well:

One cannot reach the exalted position of being
able to recite the verse from the morning prayer
(I Chronicles 16:8), ?Praise the Lord, invoke His
name, declare His works among the nations,?
without experiencing the deep, inner love Stirring
one to solicitousness for all nations, to improve
their material state, to promote their happiness.
This disposition qualifies the Jewish peOple to
experience the Spirit of the Messiah. El

AUSCHWITZ
(Contzizztedfrom p. 33)

terror here? Or do we restOre them to their historically
accurate, original forms to convey the full horror of
the enterprise?

While most of the group voiced warm appreciation
and admiration for the job done by the museum?s over-
worked, undercompensated Staff, all agreed that it was
time to address the training of the young Polish guides.
In her command of the facts, our Polish guide, Wanda,
had been exemplary. But hers was not?could not have
been?a Jewish narrative of Auschwitz. We thus pro-
posed that teachers from Holocaust education centers
such as Facing History and Ourselves in Boston or Is-
rael?s Yad Vashem be recruited to conduct training sem-
inars precisely to teach the Jewish narrative of events,
which is still not being adequately told.

We then looked to the preparation of the Jewish
guides who often accompany groups from Israel and
America and found that, in fact, they rarely told the 
z's/a narrative to their Jewish charges. In open sessions
with the Auschwitz Museum staff, we were alerted to
this problem when Wanda, polite and extremely reluc-
tant to offend her guests, painfully related stories of be-
ing verbally abused by angry Jewish youth groups.

In their frustration and memoryvignited rage, Jewish
visitors to the camp had begun to confuse their Polish tour
guides for SS guards. We tried to explain to Wanda that
for many of the Jewish visitors, the nearest objects of rage
and frustration were too often their guides, the surround
ing Polish population, and the country itself. We also re-
solved to improve the preparation of Jewish groups to
make sure that they knew enough of the Polish narrative
to distinguish between Nazi killers and Polish victims.

Indeed, given the overwhelming proportion of Pol-

 

 

ish and Christian visitors to Auschwitz, we had to rec-
ognize that Auschwitz-Birkenau would necessarily fun cs
tion as a shared memorial space, where Polish Catholics
will remember as Polish Catholics, even when they re-
member Jewish victims. As Jews, we do not locate the
victims in a Polish Catholic martyrological tradition. But
neither can we expect Polish Catholics to recite the
mourners? Kaddish. As Jews recall events in the
metaphors of their tradition, so will Poles remember in
the forms of their faith. The problem may not be that
Poles deliberately displace Jewish memory of Auschwitz
with their own, but that in a country bereft of its Jews,
these memorials can do little but cultivate Polish mem~
ory. In this light, we realized that Auschwitz is part of a
national landscape of suffering, one coordinate among
others by which both Jews and Poles continue to graSp
their present lives in light of a remembered past.

With all this in mind, it is clear to me that any pre-
scription for institutional memory at Auschwitz would
be, like memorials themselves, provisional. Most of
our proposals will be ad0pted, others debated further,
refined, augmented, and perhaps elided altogether. In-
deed, the process itself reminds us that as much as we
desire it, no memorial is really everlasting: Each is
shaped and understood in the context of its time and
place, its meanings contingent on evolving political re-
alities. Perhaps the wisest course, therefore, will be to
build into the memorial at Auschwitz a capacity for
change in new times and circumstances, to make explicit
the kinds of meanings this site holds for us now, even as
we make room for the new meanings this site will surely
engender in the next generation. For once we make clear
how many pe0ple died there, for what reasons, and at
whose hands, it will be up to future commemorators to
find their own significance in this past. Cl

SOUTH AFRICA 
(Continued from p. 61)

to stanch a yawning, irreparable guilt?a lifetime?s
worth?with a wad of paper money.

My sister tells me that she and her husband have given
Mavis R1000 (about $400, a substantial sum in that econ-
omy) to build a new mud-brick house, because her fam-
ily was left homeless in the township violence. But, she
adds, ?Don?t tell Mom.?

What did I learn from my return to South Africa? I
learned that I don?t have a well-developed sense of place:
that is not how I remember things.

I learned that I will never understand South Africa
because I don?t want to: I just want to reject it.

I learned that there are some things in life, in fami-

FICTION 7 7