Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979. Jonathan Huener

of the department’s early position papers pointed to two problematic, even contradictory currents in Polish memory of the war years. “On the one hand,” it stated, “the war experience was so strong and so deep a violation of Polish society that for many people it remained the dominant element of postwar life.” At the same time, by contrast, there was “a weariness of the tragic theme in society and a desire to retreat from it in the hope for a life free and undisturbed by the horror.” Given such symptoms of war-weariness and psychological retreat, the department deemed it necessary to “regulate the resurrection of the past against the background of the new current and . . . clarify the methods of commemoration of the history of the Poles in the years 1939–1945.” These methods were to take two separate, yet parallel, paths: the erection of artistic monuments and shrines of commemoration (a grass roots initiative that had begun during the war) and the documentation of history, primarily through the organization and administration of museums of Polish martyrology such as the one in Oświęcim. Noting the impossibility of commemorating each individual wartime tragedy (“because given the range of German crimes we would have to create out of Poland a land of cemeteries”), the position paper maintained that documentary commemoration in the form of museums, and artistic commemoration in the form of monuments should be limited to the actual sites of mass crimes.⁵⁷

      Although public remembrance of wartime suffering may have come naturally to Poles, it is instructive that this document urged caution and restraint. Commemoration of suffering and sacrifice may have been a reflex response for some; others, however, may have experienced a certain aversion to the memory of the occupation in the hope of returning, as one publicist stated already in March 1945, to a “psychological balance.”⁵⁸ It was therefore incumbent on custodians of memory not only to cultivate, but also to limit and direct Poland’s commemoration of the war years.

      The document’s reference to the need to “regulate the resurrection of the past against the background of the new current” refers to the need to bring Poland’s postwar commemorative culture into line with the regime’s current political goals. Martyrology, the paper made clear, was concerned not only with death, but also with life, or, more specifically, with the emancipation of those suffering among the living. An awareness of the victory gained, and commemoration with a view to the future would lead Poland on the path of progress and social emancipation. “Poland,” the document stated succinctly, “will not be the land of the martyred dead. Poland will be the land of the living.”⁵⁹

      The new Polish state was clear in delineating a mode of remembrance that would accommodate both national commemorative traditions and the political exigencies of the present. Polish wartime martyrdom and its commemoration, the position paper stated, incorporated two elements: the criminal acts of the Germans and, conversely, the Poles’ suffering and struggle, which were not in vain and did not result in the defeat of the Polish nation. Martyrdom, this document noted, grew out of the “contact and interaction of the Hitlerite psyche with the Polish psyche.” “The German psyche,” it stated,

      was established on unusually fertile soil from which arose the new German religion: Hitlerite racism. . . . And thus in the years of occupation the Germanic “master race” declared war on the Polish “slave race,” the purpose of which was the extermination of our nation. Yet, the nation of the “enslaved” began to defend itself, answering aggression with aggression. The nation of the “enslaved,” unable to reconcile itself to the yoke of bondage, thus called itself to battle. The “master race,” unable to tolerate opposition, further tightened the noose of terror. In the course of the years the struggle became increasingly obstinate, and the implacable consequences of its growth were, first of all, the consequence of the new German religion: murder of several million people; the second consequence was the psychic posture of the Poles: the fight for freedom at the cost of one’s own blood.⁶⁰

      Racist German brutality and heroic Polish virtue were common to the Polish understanding of the wartime experience, and these nationalistic and dualistic categories proposed a politically useful and culturally accessible way of recalling the past. They offered Poles an identity based in common suffering, left room for the sacrificial and messianic traditions in Polish commemorative culture, and at the same time provided a model of national solidarity that could be projected onto the challenges of reconstructing the Polish state and building socialism. Not least, they provided a clear justification for Poland’s expansion westward at the expense of a depraved and vanquished Germany. In sum, it was possible to cultivate this notion of martyrdom by combining both national tradition and current political goals.

      Despite its appeal and effectiveness, this Polish-national martyrological paradigm was limiting, because in the years to follow, it was difficult to reconcile with the element of Auschwitz history that would define the site in the collective memory of most of the world: the Shoah. Although the mass extermination of Jews was not denied in the public presentation of Auschwitz in the early postwar years, Jewish genocide was seldom upheld as a unique phenomenon. Instead, the paradigm either marginalized the mass murder of Jews or, as was often the case, implied that Poles had shared in that fate, not only as the first victims of Nazi aggression and occupation, but also as certain victims of Nazi extermination policy in the future. Nazi policy in Poland was the basis for this perception, especially during the first two years of the occupation. Jews remained in Poland, but the Nazis deported Poles by the hundreds of thousands to Germany for slave labor; Jews had their own governmental institutions or councils, subject as they were to the Nazis, but Poles had no political or cultural representation; Jews were clearly the victims of Nazi violence and murder, but Poles were also randomly and systematically rounded up, incarcerated, and tortured as political prisoners.⁶¹

      Polish historians and publicists also pointed to evidence suggesting that Poles, in the course of time, would have been marked for extermination as well. Citing a stenograph of a November 1942 speech by Himmler, representatives of a district commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland concluded at a June 1946 meeting that the Nazi invaders had, in fact, planned for the mass extermination of Poles. The expulsion of Polish peasants from the Zamość region in late 1942 and early 1943, their report stated, was only a preliminary step leading to the goal of mass extermination for the purpose of providing more Lebensraum (living space) for the German people.⁶² Describing the goals of Nazi ideology, the 1946 report of the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland stated: “It aimed at the wholesale exploitation of the forces of the conquered nations for the benefit of Germany, and afterwards at their extirpation. The Jews were to be completely extirpated before the end of the war; the Poles were intended to do slave labor for the Germans before sharing their fate.”⁶³ Similarly, the report concluded that “the camps in Poland were one of the principal instruments for achieving the criminal aims of Himmler, Greiser and Frank: the complete extermination of the Poles after a short period of exploitation.”⁶⁴

      Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz echoed this theme in his testimony at the Höss trial. According to the Polish premier, the German invaders had undertaken “an unmerciful, nihilistic plan to exterminate nations, especially Slavic nations, and first and foremost the Polish nation, which was to follow the praeludium of eradicating the Jewish nation.”⁶⁵ And at the April 1945 ceremonies commemorating the second anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Minister of Education Skrzeszewski reminded his audience that “not only Jews had to pass through the death factories, but also a great number of our nation and other nations. The unleashing through Hitlerism of anti-Semitism and the consequent eradication of 3,200,000 Jews in Poland had in view only the invitation to further victims and beyond that the liquidation of those easily determined victims: we and the Jews.”⁶⁶ Or, in the words of one publicist, “The Germans prepared for Jews and Poles a common fate on Polish soil. The differences consisted only in time.” This is why, according to the author, Jews and Poles were brothers in blood and defense in “struggle for your freedom and ours.”⁶⁷

      There was some validity to speculations and fears that the Nazis had been planning to annihilate the Poles. On 1 May 1942, Artur Greiser, Gauleiter of the Wartheland, proposed the “special treatment” of thirty-five thousand tubercular Poles. In December of that year, Dr. Wilhelm Hagen, from Warsaw’s Nazi administration, claimed in a letter to Hitler that there