Reporter’s Notebook: History, memory and responsibility lead to life in Auschwitz
EducationFrom Pittsburgh to Poland

Reporter’s Notebook: History, memory and responsibility lead to life in Auschwitz

Eighty years after German Nazi concentration and extermination camp liberated, seminar brings journalists to Poland to promote 'remembrance' and ask what's next

A railcar that transported prisoners to the Nazi concentration and extermination camp rests in Auschwitz-Birkenau. (Photo by Adam Reinherz)
A railcar that transported prisoners to the Nazi concentration and extermination camp rests in Auschwitz-Birkenau. (Photo by Adam Reinherz)

OŚWIĘCIM, Poland — There’s life in Auschwitz. By design, observing it was uncomfortable and inspiring.

Between Oct. 7-10, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum welcomed 18 journalists to tour facilities, speak with director Piotr M. A. Cywiński and access spaces closed to the general public.

“My job the next two days is to make your life a little more complicated,” Pawel Sawicki told the group Oct. 8.

Sawicki, a journalist who has led more than 1,000 groups through Auschwitz, oversees the museum’s press office.

The “History, Memory and Responsibility” seminar, he said, was a lead-up to commemoration. On Jan. 27, the institution will mark 80 years since the German Nazi extermination camp’s liberation. Heads of state, delegations and 900 journalists are expected to attend. With war waging between Russia and Ukraine, and in the Middle East, the museum anticipates some parties may try to steal the stage.

“I will certainly not let this anniversary of liberation become a political event,” Cywiński said. Commemorating the liberation, he continued, is about honoring survivors and promoting remembrance.

Defining the latter underpinned the seminar.

Opening Auschwitz’s doors

Between Oct. 8-9, seminar attendees spent nearly 14 hours at Auschwitz.

Established by the Nazis in 1940, the concentration and extermination camp consisted of Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Auschwitz III-Monowitz and almost 50 sub-camps.

Dates and facts fail to yield comprehensive understanding; survivor testimony helps, Sawicki said.

Upon reaching the site in Auschwitz I where roll call occurred, Sawicki invoked the words of Nate Leipziger: “We used to joke that they counted us like gold and treated us like dirt.”

After entering a barrack and observing a dehumanizing latrine, Sawicki read the survivor’s memory of the space:

“On each side of it stood three-tiered bunks. My father and I got a middle bunk, second-last from the end. As we sat on the bunk together, my initial shock passed and I was trembling with fear and anger, tears streaming down my face. The full impact of what we were told about people being gassed to death hit me. I had never heard about that in the ghetto. There was talk about people being killed but no one mentioned how. And why? My tears ran uncontrollably. I was still shaking when my father asked what was the matter with me. He told me to pull myself together. I asked him how they could kill a train full of people by gassing. Why, what had they done to deserve to be killed? He did not move or look at me; he just stared into space.”

Seminar participants stand on a constructed walkway while observing a latrine. (Photo by Adam Reinherz)

During two days of tours, Sawicki and colleagues used keys and badges to open doors. Occasionally, alarms were disabled before being set again. In some spaces, like a barrack undergoing conservation or a room lined with stacks of itemized suitcases, journalists were permitted to take photos. In other settings, like a laboratory where specialists remove dust from shoes and document artifacts, including “illegal correspondence” from prisoners, photography was not allowed.

Whether accessing closed spaces or areas open to the general public, touring Auschwitz I and Birkenau requires traversing miles. Groups routinely wait to view three-tiered bunks, latrines, former kitchens and enclosures housing leather shoes, antiquated suitcases and pounds of human hair.

Signage implores visitors to “show your respect by behaving in a dignified manner, honoring the memory of those who suffered and died here.”

Between 1940-1945, 1.3 million prisoners arrived at Auschwitz and 1.1 million died; approximately 90% were Jewish — most Jewish victims were murdered in gas chambers immediately after arrival selections undertaken by SS doctors.

“For the world, Auschwitz is the symbol of the Holocaust. But that’s not the story of the beginning of Auschwitz,” Sawicki said.

Quoting survivor Felix Opatowski, Sawicki said, “Long after the survivors, including myself, are gone, historians will continue to write about the Holocaust, especially about Auschwitz. But they will never really know everything about the camp because nobody ever really knew everything about Auschwitz.”

Museum and memorial

Auschwitz is a museum and memorial, Cywińsk said. Being both requires understanding what the institution isn’t.

“We are not a museum about the Second World War. There is a museum of the Second World War. We are not a museum of Jewish heritage. There is a museum of Jewish heritage,” he said.

“We discuss Auschwitz here — even Treblinka cannot appear in our narrative. We are very focused on this site.”

Paweł Sawicki speaks during a tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau. (Photo by Adam Reinherz)

A primary goal of the museum is preservation. Its Memorial Collection contains about 110,000 shoes, nearly 3,800 suitcases, approximately 12,000 pots, 470 prostheses and orthoses, 390 items of camp clothing, 246 talleism and 1 pair of tefillin. Hundreds of objects are displayed at Auschwitz. The tefillin are not.

Both Cywiński and Sawicki credited the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation with funding conservation.

Founded in 2009, the entity has approximately $193 million. Last year, it donated a little more than $7 million toward conservation work.

In Birkenau, journalists saw several supported projects, including barracks with reinforced beams, raised walkways and protective roofs. Massive tents covered at-work areas. Hard-hatted specialists walked between sites.

“The last decision that the conservators make is to remove an original part and replace it with a new one,” Sawicki said. If replacement occurs, it’s visible, he continued. “Conserving the authenticity of Auschwitz is extremely important to us.”

In Birkenau, several wooden posts purposefully are untreated. The eroded, cracked and broken structures reveal time’s toll.

“There are 3,600 posts, and we conserve them,” Sawicki said. “You can see what would happen if we left them alone.”

Suitcases are itemized in a storage area inside the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. (Photo by Adam Reinherz)

Of Birkenau’s 45 brick structures, six have been conserved and four are underway. A brick building that housed prisoners takes about four years to complete. Costs range, but conserving a sleeping structure could total $1.5 million, he said.

Resources aren’t endless. Inadequate funding is one reason why the museum has never purchased the villa where former commandant Rudolf Höss and his family lived between 1940 and 1944.

“If I have to spend the money of the Auschwitz-Birkenau foundation to preserve the brick barracks at the women’s camp in Birkenau or the Höss house, I would prefer to save the brick barracks in Birkenau,” Cywiński said.

Still, since last year’s release of “The Zone of Interest,” a film detailing the Höss family’s time inside the home, people have repeatedly asked the museum why it hasn’t attempted to acquire the immediately adjacent property.

“We don’t need it,” Cywiński said. Taking visitors to the gallows where Höss was hanged in 1947 and pointing out that he lived 170 meters from the first crematorium is enough: “If you want to save everything, that means you will save nothing.”

Remembrance

For two days, Sawicki and Cywiński stressed Auschwitz’s commitment to remembrance and education.

The museum’s regard for preservation isn’t an end in itself. The goal is “of course, the visits, the education, all those programs of teaching,” Cywiński said. Through these endeavors the museum reinforces the “crucial role of remembrance.”

But remembrance isn’t simply an “empathic look to the past.” he said. It’s something that “must help us understand our role today.” What happened at Auschwitz is unique, and every person, family and generation will relate differently to the atrocity. Remembrance is built in accordance with historical facts, but it must be used to “find some solutions for a better world in the future.”

Seminar participants enter the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. (Photo by Adam Reinherz)

More than 1 million people tour Auschwitz annually. Before the pandemic, the number was almost double. Each person’s visit to Auschwitz is an experience comparable to a “rite de passage,” Cywiński said. “We hope that those people who walk kilometers through Auschwitz and through Birkenau are a little bit different at the end of their visit than they were before. The goal is to change, at least a little bit, their sensibility, their reflection, their core.”

By coming here and leaving a flower or lighting a memorial candle, one can say, “My job is done,” Sawicki said. But visiting Auschwitz also should create a discomfort that prompts one to ask, “Through this experience what can I do?” he continued. “This is remembrance.”

The name game

Before the seminar’s conclusion, journalists were brought to Oshpitzin Jewish Museum. Located two miles from the camp, the Jewish museum promotes the area’s rich history.

A wordplay occurred over time, the museum’s head of education, Maciek Zabierowski, noted. After occupying the town of Oświęcim, the Nazis called it Auschwitz. Today, the town is called Oświęcim, but when the first Jews arrived there in the 16th century, they called it Oshpitzin, which is Yiddish for “guests.”

Since 2000, the Jewish museum has had several approaches to preserving Oświęcim’s Jewish story. There is a collection of artifacts, both religious and secular, detailing former residents’ lives. Adjacent to the exhibition is a sanctuary in Oświęcim’s only surviving synagogue — before the war there were 20 shuls, Zabierowski said.

The Jewish museum maintains a historic cemetery containing fragments of headstones destroyed by Nazis. And, after Holocaust survivor Szymon Klüger (largely referred to as Oświęcim’s last Jewish resident) died in 2000, a cafe and gift shop were built inside his former home.

Zabierowski and the museum’s director, Tomek Kuncewicz, spoke to journalists in a gallery in the cafe’s basement.

When the name “Auschwitz” comes up, most people seek to distance themselves, Kuncewicz said. “There’s an immediate association with the camp, and it’s difficult.”

A sanctuary inside the Oshpitzin Jewish Museum. (Photo by Adam Reinherz)

Part of the Jewish museum’s work is distinguishing Auschwitz from Oświęcim.

“There was a town that existed for centuries and there was a town that existed after,” Kuncewicz said. What happened here was “sort of a coincidence,” he continued. “Situations like Auschwitz can happen in any place.”

On the eve of World War II, Oświęcim had 14,000 residents. About 8,000 were Jewish.

It was a “fairly diverse” place, Zabierowski said. The atmosphere toward Jews was “rather favorable in town,” and before the war “there were relatively low rates of antisemitism.”

Of its 8,000 Jewish residents, fewer than 200 survived. And, among those, not everyone was originally from Oświęcim, Zabierowski said.

Klüger’s 2000 death marked a new chapter, Kuncewicz said. Up until that point, whether in Oświęcim or in other Polish towns, it was still possible to go somewhere and find “someone who could speak to the place’s Jewish history. But this isn’t the case anymore.”

Even so, the story is still being written.

Life in Auschwitz

As journalists toured the Jewish museum, this reporter sat outside with Hila Weisz Gut, 33.

“Since I was young, the Holocaust was always, always, in my life,” the Israeli said.

Weisz Gut’s grandmother and two siblings survived Monowitz.

“The rest of the family perished in Birkenau,” she said. “They went straight to the crematoria.”

After college, Weisz Gut taught students about the Holocaust and World War II.

She initially traveled to Poland with an educational delegation. When offered a chance to return in 2021, she agreed. During that visit, she met Kamil Gut at Café Bergson. He was a barista at the Jewish museum’s coffee shop. The two spoke continuously during her Polish stay. After she returned to Israel, their relationship grew. Months ago, the couple celebrated their wedding with a small reception at the cafe.

Doing so was a way of honoring Klüger, Weisz Gut said.

She and her husband live in the heart of Oświęcim, about 100 meters from the Jewish cemetery, and a 30-minute walk from Auschwitz I.

“I can see Monowitz from my house, from my bedroom window,” she said.

Oświęcim has 34,000 residents. Weisz Gut is its only Jew. Since making the town her home, both Israelis and Jews have questioned her choice.

“Remember, if there was nothing to ruin here that was worth ruining, Hitler wouldn’t have come here,” she said. “I see it as an honor, like a shalicha (emissary), that there is no chance that someone will forget who lived here. It wasn’t only Shimon Klüger. It was a lot of people.”

Calling Auschwitz “Oświęcim” or “Oshpitzin” is a reclamation. Establishing roots two decades after a town nearly lost its 400-year Jewish history is an act of defiance, she said. “It’s very important to be here, to be present. Hitler tried, the Germans tried to do whatever they wanted to. And at some point — maybe like 80 years after — we are showing them that no, they didn’t succeed.”

Hila Weisz Gut sits outside Café Bergson in Oświęcim, Poland. (Photo by Adam Reinherz)

Weisz Gut has friends in Oświęcim. Still, being its only Jewish resident is challenging, she said.

The closest Jewish community is in Kraków, nearly an hour’s drive away. Days earlier, she traveled there for an Oct. 7 commemoration at its Jewish Community Center.

Standing outside the JCC, beside a fence plastered with hostage posters and signage reading “family,” and “stop by and say hi,” community members recited the names of those who perished one year earlier.

“I was there for like five minutes, and then I left because it was too much for me,” Weisz Gut said.

On Oct. 7, 2023, she learned of Hamas’ attack by watching videos on her phone. She said she walked to the Jewish museum immediately after, sat and stared.

“I felt alone,” she said. “I opened the Aron HaKodesh, and I just took myself inside of it and prayed that everything will be OK.”

The past year has been difficult, she continued. “I have a lot of friends that are in Gaza, and I have friends that are Nova survivors, and I have people that I know that were murdered. Fortunately, nobody was kidnapped — so it’s only survivors or murdered — but it’s quite hard.”

When the one-year commemoration arrived, Weisz Gut kindled a yahrzeit candle in Oświęcim, completed a paper for her master’s in Holocaust education and returned to the Polish town’s synagogue.

“I’m not religious, but I just came here and I said Kaddish,” she said.

The Jewish memorial prayer dates back nearly 2,000 years. Jews arrived in Oświęcim five centuries ago. Since then, thousands of Jewish residents have called the Polish town home. Weisz Gut said she’s honored to join them.

“It’s not only death in this place,” she said. “There is life here.” PJC

Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.

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