Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945-1979 (review)

In this important work, Jonathan Huener relates the history of Auschwitz in postwar Poland. The book's main story is about the memorialization of the camp, from its liberation by the Soviet army in January 1945 to Pope John Paul II's mass at Birkenau in 1979. Huener analyzes the 1947 creation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and traces the changes in exhibitions and other museum practices through the years. He invites readers on a virtual tour of the former camp's alleys and state-sponsored commemorative rituals. He grounds all of this in the distinctive Polish sociocultural and political context of that period.

Huener argues that the memory of Auschwitz in the Polish People's Republic was constructed, maintained, and modified within a political and cultural framework that resulted in overlapping modes of collective memory: first and foremost, Auschwitz was represented as a site of Polish national martyrdom. The imprisonment of Poles, rather than the genocide of Jews, was memorialized, and Poles were commemorated as the central victims of the camp. Some of the potency of Auschwitz for Poles certainly derived from how neatly the camp fit into the master narrative trope of Polish martyrology. But it was also reinforced by institutional design. Indeed, Huener shows how such a narrative was reified through the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which was created as a result of the efforts of former Polish political prisoners. Auschwitz I, the base camp where most inmates were Polish political prisoners and Soviet prisoners of war, became the cornerstone and the locus memoria of the Museum, while Auschwitz II (Birkenau), the largest site of the extermination of the Jews, was left to neglect and oblivion. Auschwitz I, with its brick buildings and proximity to the center of Oświęcim, was certainly more congenial to the creation of a museum and the hosting of various exhibitions than Birkenau could be, given that camp's frail wooden barracks and relative isolation in the small village of Brzezinka, three kilometers from Auschwitz. But this seemingly "rational" spatial and structural configuration had significant repercussions for the very definition of what Auschwitz had been—an issue with which the Museum struggles to this day. Visitors to Auschwitz I learned about Polish political prisoners, not about the mass murder of Jews, and this shaped the collective memory of generations of Poles (and other East Europeans).

A second narrative layer was added by socialists when the Museum was still in its infancy (1947–54). The Stalinist version of the war cast Auschwitz as the battleground between heroic proto-socialists and evil Fascist/Western imperialists. It memorialized "Victims of Fascism" from Poland and twenty-seven other nation-states who were exploited and exterminated at the camp, and liberated by the victorious and just Soviet army. In both the Polish-national and the socialist narratives, the lives and deaths of political prisoners overshadowed those of Jews, whose fate as victims of genocide was conveniently marginalized.

This portrayal of the war and of Auschwitz softened a bit in the mid-1950s, when the main exhibition of the Museum—most of it still operating to this day—was created. During that period, Auschwitz was increasingly "internationalized." Yet while the growing international character of the Museum and the erection of a memorial at Birkenau underlined the decline of the Polish-national commemorative idiom, it still failed to recognize the specific fate of the Jews at Auschwitz. Indeed, it was not until the early 1990s that the Jewishness of Auschwitz-Birkenau would be fully and publicly acknowledged. Moreover, John Paul II's mass at Birkenau, performed during his first visit to Poland as the head of the Catholic Church in 1979, opened up a Pandora's box: it took the site out of the hands of the communist party-state, which had made ample ideological and political use of it, and proclaimed Auschwitz's universal human message. In doing so, however, it also...