DECAYING SYMBOL OF IN FAMY
Through time and mass tourism, ‘we are losing another touchstone of authenticity’
Many of those deported to Auschwitz packed a suitcase to bring with them, carefully labelled with personal information. Thousands of them are in protective storage at Auschwitz and are on display. Of the 3,800 the museum possesses, about 2,100 have names of their owners.
The pan- fried chicken wasn’t hot enough at the gates of Auschwitz. Another patron whines the coffee costs more than in Krakow.
The concerns of tourists in a restaurant at the mouth of the world’s most horrid place reveal a paradox. The paradox of Auschwitz.
“Where do you put the public toilets at Auschwitz?” laments Robert Jan van Pelt, a University of Waterloo architecture professor who is a world authority on the site and who developed a master plan for the preservation of Auschwitz and its legacy.
“People always complain about Auschwitz as a tourist site and, of course, with so many people wanting to visit, it cannot be anything but a tourist site,” says van Pelt. “This is the reality of mass tourism.”
But Auschwitz isn’t Disney World. It wasn’t built to be beautiful, nor designed for enjoyment or comfort. It wasn’t even built to last.
“It is an impossible task.”
Auschwitz is now the symbol of the Holocaust.
Although there were other death camps run by Nazi Germany during the Second World War, and, in fact, mobile death squads roaming Europe as part of Adolf Hitler’s so-called “Final Solution,” it is the bleak, brick chimneys of Auschwitz, its metal gates adorned with the motto Arbeit macht frei — the grotesque lie that work sets you free — and the barbedwire fences where starving prisoners once stood in striped uniforms that symbolize the Holocaust.
It has become iconography, shorthand for horror.
Auschwitz and the Holocaust are so synonymous that the camp’s date of liberation — 75 years ago on Monday — when Soviet Red Army troops reached the camp on Jan. 27, 1945, was chosen as the annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
It is at Auschwitz that an estimated 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews, were killed and incinerated.
Post- war, and particularly postCold War when the Iron Curtain dropped, Auschwitz emerged as a symbol, as the symbol, as the landmark most famous for its infamy.
In response, it became a tourist hit.
More than twice as many people as were killed in Auschwitz from 1940 to 1945 now visit the site each year. Attendance broke another record in 2019, with 2,320,000 registered visitors, according to the Auschwitz-birkenau State Museum.
The site, some of it already in ruins from retreating Nazi soldiers trying to destroy the evidence of its purpose, has been further reduced by time and wear and tear.
The popularity of Auschwitz is now choking it.
“The realities of mass tourism that is destroying Venice and Amsterdam are destroying Auschwitz,” says van Pelt.
“We are entering the last decade of having survivors with us who are able to testify as eyewitnesses. Along with losing the eyewitnesses, the site itself, in its present, sprawling form, cannot be maintained forever.
“We are losing another touchstone of authenticity.”
The paradox of Auschwitz. This place that should not have been built now desperately needs preserving.
For survivors of Auschwitz, the camp is more than a relic. It is a huge, gnawing part of their life and legacy.
Their eyewitness testimony to the crimes here are filled with mournful accounts of seeing their mother or father or child or siblings pushed towards the belching chimneys of the crematoria.
“In a few years there won’t be a single survivor of the camps left, there is no getting away from that,” says Auschwitz survivor Paul Herczeg, now 90, living in Montreal and battling cancer.
“While we remain alive, as eyewitnesses, we have to testify to what has happened and to the importance of it.”
When the last of the survivors are no longer here, the guard towers, gates and crematoria of Auschwitz will be the best reminder of how dark humanity can turn.
Herczeg first returned to Auschwitz in the early 1970s with his best friend, Otto Schimmel, who survived the camp with him. He went again a few years later as part of a delegation of survivors to discuss the future of the site, and twice more with family and friends.
This was, Herczeg notes, before it “became fashionable.”
“Everybody comes out of there a changed person. History is the greatest teacher. We need to remember history. We cannot hide history.
“It’s not for the past. It’s for the sake of the future.”
Auschwitz’s i mportance was grasped, by some more than others, almost immediately, and within a year of the end of the war, plans were made to protect the site and a museum was opened in 1947.
Located 50 kilometres west of Krakow, Poland’s second- largest city, the grounds the museum controls cover 191 hectares: 20 hectares are Auschwitz I, the first camp built there, and 171 hectares are at neighbouring Auschwitz Ii-birkenau.
On that land are several hundred buildings and ruins, including the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria. There are kilometres of camp fencing, roads and the railroad ramp at Birkenau where prisoners arrived and were “selected” — between those who looked able to work and those sent immediately to their death.
Auschwitz- Birkenau was added to the United Nation’s list of world heritage sites in 1979.
There is discomfort for some with the special place Auschwitz now holds in Holocaust history.
“The word ‘Auschwitz’ has become a metonym for the Holocaust as a whole. Yet the vast majority of Jews had already been murdered, further east, by the time Auschwitz became a major killing facility,” U.S. historian Timothy Snyder wrote in his book Black Earth. “Yet while Auschwitz has been remembered, most of the Holocaust has been largely forgotten.”
For him, one reason for its famed infamy is, in another Auschwitz paradox, that for a death camp there were a lot of survivors.
Without survivors, dry archeological digs and academic studies would have smothered the stark terror of the place.
Unlike Auschwitz, virtually no Jews survived the death camps at Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełzec or Chełmno. Likely none forced to kneel before an open killing pit by mobile killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen, walked away. But Auschwitz, built as both a forced labour camp and a death camp, was different. A few who entered found an exit.
Further, Snyder wrote, those survivors were mostly Western European Jews. After the war, they returned to the West where they could write memoirs and share their stories in a way that Eastern European Jews behind the Iron Curtain couldn’t.
Snyder fears this reduces the magnitude of the Holocaust.
“Auschwitz has been a relatively manageable symbol for Germany after the Second World War, significantly reducing the actual scale of the evil done,” he writes. “The gates and walls of Auschwitz can seem to contain an evil that, in fact, extended from Paris to Smolensk.”
Van Pelt expresses some sympathy for that.
“One of the problems with the success of Auschwitz is that other places of the Holocaust are suffering. Dachau, for example, has too few visitors and Auschwitz has too many. It would be good if the wealth could be spread,” says van Pelt.
It has been difficult to reimagine Auschwitz as a tourist site.
Not only do the normal laws of tourist economics not apply — pushing visitors through a gaudy gift shop at the end, for instance. Even an entrance fee is seen as an unsatisfactory barrier. There are facilities, now — public toilets, a shop to buy informational books and DVDS; even a restaurant, garnering tepid online culinary reviews, has been built just outside, although it is not owned by the museum.
There have been patches of its post- war history where action on the site was paralyzed by competing sensitivities.
Part of the problem was the Nazis hated so many. Although Jews bore a painful brunt of Hitler’s machinery, there were huge numbers of non- Jewish Russians and Poles, political prisoners, Catholics, Roma, homosexuals killed at Auschwitz. Each community feels a special attachment.
Much of that has been sorted now. But new culprits are arriving: success and opportunism.
Informative exhibits at the camp are displayed in original, historical buildings that were never imagined for this use. They were built to house soldiers. They are not climate controlled. They cannot properly accommodate the crush of visitors.
“Right now, visitors get stuck, literally, as they move through these buildings because they are very narrow rooms,” van Pelt says. “In order to create a modern exhibition in these buildings, all kinds of very difficult decisions need to made on the preservation front.”
Birkenau, the largest of more than 40 camps and sub-camps that made up the Auschwitz complex, is enormous, much of it in ruins. Some 400 brick chimneys are all that remains of wooden buildings that once housed prisoners.
“There are buildings that are really fragile ruins and you really don’t want anyone to step on those ruins and there are always people who will ignore it,” says van Pelt.
“You see from time to time groups of Israeli students climb on the roof of the crematorium to wave a flag. It is really problematic from the point of view of preserving those ruins.”
The best way to control where people can and can’t go is with a high fence, but erecting fresh fences at Auschwitz is, again, problematic. In some way, every part of Auschwitz should be accessible.
“It is extremely expensive to maintain it. There are too many artifacts. People have to make choices — and at Auschwitz, that’s an impossible task.”
The other challenge is development, capitalism at work.
At its peak activity in 1944, Auschwitz’s footprint on the area covered 40 square kilometres with sub- camps beyond that. Today, much of that property is in private hands, outside the control, or even the influence, of the state museum.
That land is full of historically meaningful and important remains of the site under no preservation policy or oversight. Over time, some of the old barracks have ended up in people’s gardens.
“There is enormous pressure of development all around the site,” van Pelt says. “Private business is very much exploiting the economic opportunity that comes from 2.3 million visitors.”
The spot where the gassing of the Jews first started is called Bunker 1. It was also known as the Little Red House because it was a cottage converted into two early gas chambers on the outskirts of the camp.
The building is demolished, the ground planted over.
“It is a very important historical site and for the last five or six years there has been construction around it. People are developing their property. Now you are in a neighbourhood.
“Inside Birkenau, there is only a barbed-wire fence. There is incredible transparency. You can see what is happening on the other side. You can see the parking lot, you can see the reception centre, the businesses.”
Physical stuff — the actual sites and eyewitnesses — are special ways to learn of the Holocaust, but there are other ways. Part of van Pelt’s recent work has been providing one answer — exporting the story of Auschwitz outside the barbed wire.
In collaboration with the Auschwitz- Birkenau State Museum, a huge exhibit called “Auschwitz: Not Long Ago. Not far Away” tells the story of Auschwitz and the Holocaust through 750 historic artifacts. First held in Madrid, it is currently open in New York City. Van Pelt hopes to bring it to Canada.
Sparked by the exhibit, previously unknown artifacts have come to light, including a shofar, a musical instrument made of a ram’s horn important in Judaism and blown on Jewish High Holy Days, that was kept hidden and secretly blown in Auschwitz. It was smuggled out by a survivor sent on a “death march” west in 1945.
As survivors emerged from the camps, some took items that held meaning for them. Then they emigrated around the world. Artifacts of the Holocaust and of Auschwitz are in private and public collections in many countries, including the Montreal Holocaust Museum.
These will act as memory, as memorial and as evidence.
“We have no other comparable catastrophe, if there is any comparable catastrophe, that we have so many artifacts with personal stories attached to them,” van Pelt says.
“The Holocaust is, in general, still the best-documented genocide in world history.”