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

Union of Former Political Prisoners (Polski Związek byłych Więźniów Politycznych, or PZbWP), requested from the minister of defense that employees of the Ministry of Culture and Art take control of the Auschwitz site from the Polish regiment stationed there. Although the Polish Army was still holding German POWs at Auschwitz, the military force protecting the site was, according to Cyrankiewicz, no longer needed. These duties, he (mistakenly) believed, could be fulfilled by former prisoners employed as guards. Moreover, the number of visitors to Auschwitz required that the memorial site be staffed by former prisoners familiar with the camp’s history and competent as tour guides.¹³ It was, then, more than fifteen months after the liberation that the staff of the memorial site began its work. Their reports and correspondence suggest that their highest priorities were to salvage the ruins of the camp, protect remaining evidence, and maintain control over—to use Cyrankiewicz’s words—the “wild conditions”¹⁴ then prevailing on the camp grounds.

      Conservation was certainly the most important and most difficult task facing the cadre of workers at Auschwitz.¹⁵ The structures of Auschwitz I were relatively intact, and Birkenau, if considerably more dilapidated, nonetheless showed clear traces of the camp and the extermination process there. Reports indicate that in addition to the masonry barracks, guard towers, ruins of crematoria, and other durable structures, many of Birkenau’s wooden barracks were still standing. Investigators also located mugs, bowls, and plates near the site of Birkenau’s massive storehouses; personal effects and money of Jews on the railway platform or “ramp”; singed prayer books near Crematorium V; and at the entrance to Crematorium II, numbered changing-room tags used to deceive prisoners entering the gas chamber.¹⁶

      Clearly, conditions at the site in the immediate postwar years were difficult on a variety of levels, yet visitors today are often critical of the small number of original structures remaining there, especially in Birkenau. The lack of original “evidence” perhaps cannot be excused entirely; it can, however, be explained in part by the inability of the museum staff, despite their efforts, to prevent decay and destruction on the grounds. In short, the site was undergoing a process of steady ruin, and it was all but impossible to maintain the grounds in a state resembling that of January 1945. One need only consider the sheer size of the grounds, the disastrous material conditions in war-torn Poland, the lack of funds for preservation work, and the inability—despite the presence of armed guards—to protect Birkenau from looters.

      The necessity of creating a protective guard to keep people out of Auschwitz is a particularly disturbing aspect of the memorial site’s early history. Immediately after the liberation, looters (or “hyenas,” as the Polish press referred to them) began seeking riches at the camp. These were frequently individuals from the local population who salvaged goods from the grounds or made a practice of sifting through ash pits in search of valuables, especially gold. There were a number of arrests, and even an incident in which a former prisoner serving as a guard shot and wounded an intruder.¹⁷ The presence of looters at Auschwitz was alarming and was widely condemned in the Polish press as, in the words of one commentator, “the profaning of a holy place of martyrdom of seventeen European nations, and especially the Polish nation.”¹⁸ It was also a cause for alarm among Polish ex-prisoners, who justifiably feared that reports of such plundering would find their way into the foreign press and portray Poland in a negative light.¹⁹

      Although the Ministry of Culture appeared committed to securing the borders of the camp through the formation of a protective guard, it was unfortunately resigned to the hopelessness of preserving everything on the grounds. As Wincenty Hein, an early associate of the museum staff, noted in a report on the early history of the memorial site, “The entire strength of the museum was directed to the rescue and conservation of that which remained. . . . It is necessary to remember that between the liberation of the camp and the arrival of the first crew of workers for the museum there was a period in which the process of destruction . . . was very intensive. That process was, historically in a way, a conditioned response of society, which had no concept of certain values.”²⁰ The “process” to which Hein was referring included both the natural decay of structures on the grounds and the dismantling and removal of materials by the local population—a “society” more concerned, in war’s immediate aftermath, with the raw materials of daily existence than with the historical and commemorative value of their plundered goods. For example, of the hundreds of wooden barracks in Birkenau, only a fraction remained when the museum opened two years later.²¹ Hein’s report also touched on the legal issue of property rights to the grounds of the liberated camp:

      The question of ownership rights on the terrain of the former Auschwitz camp seems simple on the surface level. The law for the protection of Monuments of Martyrdom of the Polish Nation and Other Nations [1947] established a legal situation by which the grounds became the property of the state—that is to say, the question of ownership was solved by the law. But in practice it was necessary to wait about four years for clear orders regarding the borders of the State Museum at Auschwitz. In the meantime, a strange situation developed: the grounds belonged to the museum, yet the lack of a suitable number of guards made it impossible to surround the grounds with effective protection. . . . The local populace either lost out, returned to the sites of their former homes (which is of course understandable), or dismantled existing camp barracks in order to take them away and set them up elsewhere (which is certainly less understandable).²²

      To the Polish government, to former prisoners working at the site, and to the Polish public at large, Auschwitz was a “sacred space”; yet the size, character, and remaining “evidence” of what had transpired there was subject to legal, political, and, not least, financial limitations. The Birkenau barracks, for example, were not always the victims of plunder. Eighteen of them were sold to members of the local population in July 1946, with each barracks divided among five villagers.²³ Later in the year, the town of Dąbrowa Tarnowska obtained a number of barracks to be used for housing construction and the building of a local market,²⁴ while in 1947 barracks from the site were shipped to various localities throughout Poland.²⁵ The dismantling of artifacts such as these reveals the perceived, or perhaps genuine, inability of the Polish state to preserve and protect much of what was left of the Auschwitz camp complex, and also illustrates even more graphically what appear today as rather reckless, if practical, measures taken by the local population in a period of extreme material want.