The Auschwitz death camp lives in the Jewish mind as the most terrible place on Earth. Babyn Yar, another site of staggering mass murder, was thoroughly destroyed by the Nazis in an attempt to hide traces of their immense crimes.
The Wannsee villa in Berlin, where Nazi officials gathered to decide that the Jews of Europe will be killed, is where the Holocaust was conceived, but Auschwitz is one of the main places where it was carried out. Freight trains from all over Europe stopped there, a horrid place where modern technology, Zyklon B gas and ovens made by Topf and Sons were used to murder so efficiently that it became part of a mythology of evil.
This is why, when Matisyahu performed at the 2011 Oswiecim Life Festival and Polish Radio sent me to cover it, my excitement was mixed with dread. When the touring star decided to visit the museum on Saturday morning, I was part of the entourage on the way from the Oshpitzin Jewish Museum to Auschwitz. Since Matisyahu was observant at the time, we walked so as not to violate Shabbat and he did not carry any cash. The cashier at the museum entrance wisely decided to allow him in anyway.
Outside the museum there are various signs asking visitors to respect the memory of the roughly 1.1 million people murdered there. Guests are asked to wear dignified clothes, refrain from eating, and limit picture-taking.
On that summer morning, busloads of people arrived with guests in tank tops and shorts, carrying ice cream and sodas, and the first thing they did – without fail – was reach to their phone and take a selfie with the Arbeit macht frei message (Work sets you free) in the background.
Lessons from the Holocaust
I realized then that my fear of Auschwitz had been based on the naïve idea that evil exists, frozen in time and limited to one physical location. All that is needed to be safe, this idea promised, was not to go there.
I also witnessed how chimeric is the hope that the Holocaust provides us with lessons. The guests were not ignoring the requests printed on the signs, they were simply following a different set of rules than the one adhered to by whomever placed the signs. The symbolic meaning of Auschwitz shifts and adapts to different needs and interests linked to it. It has done so in the past, and it will do so in the future.
THE 1967 Birkenau monument, placed when Poland was a Communist state, did not even mention Jewish people. It refers to “the heroes of Oswiecim that died there” in the struggle against fascism.
As Professor Stanislaw Krajewski wrote in his essay Auschwitz as a Challenge, almost nobody is aware of this monument, perhaps because it was written only in Polish and the political power that made it, the PRL, is gone.
When the gates of Auschwitz were opened by the Red Army, it was possible to view the Holocaust as a gigantic Fascist crime used to dupe those who, encouraged by poverty, wanted to believe in their alleged “great race.” The hope then was that a solidarity of The Internationale will shape a better world for all races and people.
After 1976, when Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski published Main Currents of Marxism, the hope that Marxism would save the world became a fool’s creed.
Kołakowski demonstrated that tyranny, gulags, and starvation are not corruptions of a noble idea but its necessary and logical outcomes.
Other ideologies also lay claims to Auschwitz.
As Krajewski noted, a Carmelite Convent was opened at the so-called theater-building outside the camp’s fence in 1984. It was repurposed as an educational center during Auschwitz’s 60th memorial ceremony.
A large cross used by Pope John Paul II during a 1979 mass held in Auschwitz, then in Communist-controlled Poland, was raised in 1989 when Poland regained its democracy; it still stands at the garden of the former nunnery, covered from public view by a screen.
Catholic priest Maximilian Kolbe, who was among the inmates in Auschwitz, gave his life to save another inmate, a fellow Pole. Christian theology does grapple with the larger lessons of the Holocaust, and the memory of non-Jewish victims is also precious. Conflicts begin when a site of memory is weighed under a cross, or a Red banner, in ways that cripple its total meaning.
THE SAME year Polish democracy was reborn, Israeli youth delegations to Poland began coming in.
Over the years, these educational trips came under some criticism. Some question their impact on still-malleable youngsters about to enlist into a modern military. Others worry if enough outreach is done to get the Israeli kids to meet Polish peers.
In 2003, this new Polish-Israeli relationship got a powerful image to go with it. An IAF squadron under the command of Maj.-Gen. Amir Eshel was photographed above Auschwitz. To see a painted Star of David on a jet above a site designed to erase all Jews off the face of the Earth was deeply moving. It was also a typical case of Israeli bravado nearly causing a diplomatic scandal.
The Polish air force was meant to fly with the Israeli pilots in a joint formation, but Eshel decided to change that plan. That photograph was sent to the ruling elite of the Jewish state with the following words: “We can rely only on ourselves.”
At times, I asked myself if this effort to hammer a positive national emotion out of a death camp is beneficial. Recent films like Asaf Saban’s Delegation, which I saw at the Polin Museum, or The Property by Dana Modan, showed me that I am not alone in appreciating the real, vivid, and profound relationship between Jewish and Polish cultures. Nor am I alone in hoping we may, at times, relay on others in this complex and unexpected world.
Then October 7 happened, the war in the Gaza Strip began, and the streets of my Warsaw neighborhood became littered with hateful slogans against the IDF and against Israel.
When requested, city authorities were quick to respond and remove such graffiti. Yet when one was removed, another was sprayed. Nobody in the street thought of expressing outrage against Hamas; anger was reserved to those who fight terrorists.
Today, as I walk the streets, I wear an IDF watch I recently bought in Tel Aviv.
It may not be a fighter jet, but the Hebrew letters on it replacing the numbers are with me.
Its green dial and signature of sword – and olive branch – also accompany me here, in Auschwitz.