Remembering Auschwitz

30.01.2008

Anna Piwowarska shares her reflections on the Auschwitz death camp, coinciding with last week's Holocaust Memorial Day.

Sunday, 27 January 2008 marked the 63rd anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. In a church service to mark the occasion in the town of Oswiecim, the local priest, Aleksander Karkosz, recalled the day when the death camp prisoners were freed. He remembered how shortly afterwards a vocational school was opened in Oswiecim. Their first job was to make 700 coffins in order to bury those who had been murdered by the Nazis at the time of liberation or those who died of hunger or illness shortly afterwards. So, it seems even at the time of Auschwitz’s liberation the black shadow of death still loomed over Oswiecim. It does so until today and anyone who goes there will experience this first-hand.
I myself have been to Auschwitz only once, around ten years ago, with a couple of English friends. I remember how we wandered around without a tour guide, in a daze of shock and horror. This was a feeling that no school textbook or statistics could evoke. I was not prepared for the sensation of standing inside a gas chamber or staring at a mountain of tiny shoes that spoke more than a thousand words. What has stayed with me most clearly from the visit are the photographs of the prisoners. Dressed in identical garments, with shaved heads and faces drawn through hunger, pain and illness, they represent what happens when humankind is dehumanized. Whether they are Jews, Poles, Romas or others; whether they are women or men; young or old - they all stare out of the photographs with a similar gaze. A gaze that has lost hope in humanity and that has stared into the face of death.
Despite having the opportunity, I have not returned to Auschwitz. It was one of the most memorable trips of my life, but one I couldn’t make again. I can’t imagine what someone of Jewish origin must feel when stepping inside the gates of the camp. A Jewish inhabitant of Krakow who I recently met told me that she has never been there and doesn’t intend to. I probably wouldn’t myself if my whole family had been murdered there.
However, Auschwitz has also an incredible power to unite. This was clearly shown during the 63rd anniversary ceremony. Flowers were laid for the 231 Red Army soldiers of the Hundredth Lwów Infantry Division who died whilst liberating the camp. At a time when Poland is emotionally reliving the Katyń massacre through Andrzej Wajda’s portrayal of it in his Oscar-nominated film, it is difficult for Poles to forget Russia’s wartime atrocities. However, it is also important that we remember this act of help. The minister in the President’s Chancellery, Ewa Junczyk-Ziomecka, also remembered and named some of the Polish families that were murdered for helping their Jewish countrymen. Again, amidst instances of Polish anti-Semitism during and after the war, such acts of humanity and courage must also never be forgotten. Junczyk-Ziomecka’s words at the ceremony summed up the importance of memory saying: „Let memory act as a shield against anger, hate, aggression, racism and anti-Semitism, for us and the next generation.”
Thankfully, the memory of the Holocaust shows no sign of fading. Every year thousands of Israeli school children make the harrowing trip to the Nazi death camp. Most tourists who visit Krakow, take time away from the picturesque cobbled streets and cozy cafes of Poland’s ‘jewel in the crown’ to set foot in the bleak camp. On the day of this year’s anniversary, Poland’s capital also showed that it had not forgotten. Along the streets of the capital, an empty tram named Widmo (Phantom) with a star of David replacing the number at the front, rode around the city empty as a poignant reminder of the Jews who were taken from Warsaw. At each stop of its journey high-school pupils stood holding banners with the words “We remember”.
Sixty three years ago in the camps of Auschwitz, Birkenau and Monowitz around 7,000 prisoners were liberated. Around 4,500 of them landed in the Red army or Polish hospitals, amongst these around 200 children. Accounts tell of patients not wanting to wash, scared that gas instead of water may come out of the showers. Nurses found bread hidden under hospital mattresses, as patients could not get used to the fact that they were being offered regular meals. Many refused to take injections, remembering the lethal injections they had witnessed in the death camps.
I have my own faded memory of the effects of concentration camps on my own family. My great-grandfather, great-grandmother and great-uncle all survived the Sachenhausen and Dachau concentration camps although they spoke little of it. My great-grandmother, Jadwiga, was the strongest of the three, perhaps as she was the least harshly treated. However, her husband, Wincenty, who miraculously survived the ‘March of Death’ from Dachau to Hamburg, never recovered mentally. My mother remembers lunches there when the table was overflowing with Jadwiga’s delicious chicken soup, pork cutlets and dumplings, yet at the end of the meal my great-grandfather was found eating potato peels straight from the rubbish bin. I most remember by great-uncle, a quiet gentle man who escaped the horrors of what he had witnessed into a world of crossword puzzles. He lived with Jadwiga till the end of his life, never married and rarely spoke. Although I was tiny at the time, I remember his gentle gaze, when he looked up at me from his crossword. It was a gaze similar to the one in the photographs that I saw in Auschwitz. A gaze which imprints itself on our memory and ensures that neither we, nor any generation that follows us, will ever forget this stain on the world’s conscience.