In September and October last year, I was part of a study mission to Poland, organised by the Polish government. It included my first visit to the memorial museum at the former Auschwitz death camp, where more than one million Jews were murdered during the Shoah.
Eighty years ago next week, on January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Army, after a brutal death march of its last prisoners. In 2005, the UN declared January 27 International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
With the 10th anniversary of the POLIN Museum as the focal point of our visit to Poland, our small delegation was taken through this iconic museum showcasing a millennium of Jewish life in Poland.
Our broader program included a visit to the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery, where we saw Jewish graves, some of them centuries old, and the mass graves of Warsaw Jews executed during the Nazi occupation.
At the Jewish Historical Institute, which houses the Ringelblum Archive, we perused the documents hidden by Oyneg Shabbes, a small contingent of Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants who secretly documented the pain and horror the ghetto prisoners endured under the Nazis. (A part of the archive is now on view at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum’s Underground exhibition.)We were shown plans for a Warsaw Ghetto Museum, due to open in 2027. And there was a briefing by Jan Lezicki – he is a high-ranking official in Poland’s Foreign Affairs Department, who specialises in liaising with the Jewish Diaspora.
Reconstructed from wartime ruins, Warsaw can’t outgrow its dark past. Poland’s WWII history – and the conduct of Poles, as millions of Europe’s Jews, many who were their compatriots, went to their deaths during the German occupation – is a tangle of competing narratives. Guilt is meshed with innocence; patriotism, politics and national honour with aspirations to free speech and frank debate.
Our first three days, spent in Warsaw, were a prelude of sorts. Our impending pilgrimage to the former site of Auschwitz, scheduled for the fourth day, weighed on me. The Auschwitz that has dwelled inside me for most of my life is a terminus, not only of a railway delivering its desolate quotas of victims, but of the very idea of human decency. Behind its gates lay unmitigated evil. As a boy, I recall a sermon. “Where was God at Auschwitz?” my rabbi asked, noting it’s a question without any straightforward answers.
In the Auschwitz of my mind, it was always winter – mud and snow. But of course, there were springs, summers and autumns, and blue skies.
On a sunny autumn morning, our minibus leaves Warsaw for Oswiecim. It’s the Polish township, Germanised during the occupation as Auschwitz, for which the camp was named. We sit in our bus seats, chatting, tapping on our phones. The ordinariness of travelling through rural Poland in 2024 feels strange, considering where we’re heading. A thought crosses my mind – what if there’d been mobile phones and social media back then? Could cries for help have been issued? And who would have listened?
Oswiecim is a nondescript town, several hours south-west of Warsaw on the highway. Shops, warehouses and a coin laundry roll by our bus windows as the radio blares out Polish rock music and news. Another thought: Do Oswiecim residents know their national history and the significance of their location?
Our bus rolls into the Auschwitz Memorial & State Museum precinct. The mundane streetscapes of Oswiecim give way to intense traffic. Coaches are everywhere, manoeuvring into parking spaces, bringing schoolkids from Poland, and visitors from Israel, the US and other countries, to learn and pay homage. I find the bustle disconcerting.
We’re ushered into a meeting room and introduced to Andrzej Kacorzyk, the museum’s deputy director, and Pawel Sawicki, its social media manager, who will be our guide.
Kacorzyk introduces us to the state-run museum, a project of impressive scale – it has 1500 staff, including 734 guides.
In 2023, 1.6 million people visited the Auschwitz memorial, says Kacorzyk, and one quarter of the annual visitors are from Poland itself. Some 5000 visitors come each day. There is an extensive documentary archive. Volunteers from Poland and other countries spend time in the archive studying specific transports and the individuals who were in them, their lives before Auschwitz, their journeys and their fates.
In Polish schools, year 8 students can learn about the Holocaust and there are online educational resources.
Some of the guides are survivors and relatives of survivors. He makes the point that any Holocaust memorial institution must deal with the challenge of the rapidly vanishing survivor generations as eyewitnesses. The focus has turned to child survivors. “Their experience is totally different to what was experienced by the adults,” notes Kacorzyk.
Since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, there has been a marked decline in visitors from Israel. He pays tribute to Alex Dancyg, a Polish-born Israeli educator who had worked at the Auschwitz Memorial. Dancyg from Kibbutz Nir Oz was abducted during the attacks and later killed. “Our guides and educators were personally taught by Alex,” he recalls.
Sawicki notes that while tours of Auschwitz have generally remained peaceful since the Gaza war began, there have been isolated incidents, including an attempt to disrupt March of the Living. And the memorial’s social media threads have attracted a lot of antisemitic traffic. He is emphatic: “Any type of instrumentalisation of the Holocaust is not only problematic, it’s disrespectful.”
Kacorzyk speaks of plans to hold a virtual Auschwitz commemoration on January 27, accessible online across the globe. Separately, Auschwitz in Front of Your Eyes is an app through which millions of people can access education directly from the memorial. An online tour features live guiding and multimedia content, including archival photographs, artistic works and testimonies. Participants can ask questions.
But we’re not virtual today. It’s Sawicki’s turn now to guide us on a walking tour. He’s a journalist and has been the memorial’s media officer for more than 12 years.
We begin at Auschwitz I. Immersed in Sawicki’s commentary, I look up randomly and I’m confronted by the notorious archway sign “Arbeit Macht Frei”. Translated as “Work Makes You Free”, this cynical, fraudulent promise of gainful, liberating work for the disoriented human cargo forced through these gates has become Nazism’s most famously vile banner. And now it’s right in my face.
Under a near cloudless sky like today’s, the doomed might have looked up and wondered if they would ever again be in the world sharing that sky on the other side of the electrified barbed wire. Squat administrative buildings are preserved in green, manicured surrounds. Sawicki says there was more mud during the war.
We leave Auschwitz I and head to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. We arrive where the rail spur enters the camp, past a preserved ‘cattle car’. (They weren’t disused cattle cars, notes Sawicki, no cattle could have survived in them – they were train cars with no ventilation or drinking water, except what desperate prisoners could scrounge at stations.) One car stands there now – preserved with funding from Auschwitz II-Birkenau survivor, Australia’s Sir Frank Lowy.
We walk past the site of the selection ramps where camp physician Josef Mengele and others pointed one way to send the younger and healthier to their barracks to be worked to death in labour details, and the other way to send the very young, along with older and infirm arrivals, to the extermination lines.
We begin to walk the extermination route. I can’t feel the ground beneath my soles now. Sawicki recounts the well-known lies about bathing and disinfection. He points out the junctures for disrobing. The lines were generally quiet. To avert chaos and panic, babies weren’t ripped from mothers’ arms; all were herded forward to the gas chambers.
I ask as delicately as I can – how long did it take to die? After about 15 minutes, the tumult inside the chambers generally ceased, says Sawicki. When the doors were reopened, anyone half alive was immediately killed. The corpses were burned in one of five crematoria and survivors have described the pervasive stench in the camp.
We’re told the familiar stories of the sonderkommandos cutting off the hair of the dead and removing their teeth for gold fillings. But to hear it in this place is to hear it as if for the first time. There are sections where we’re asked to put away cameras. A mountain of human hair confronts us from behind a large glass showcase. There have been halachic questions about whether it should have been buried, but Sawicki believes the greater good comes from visitors seeing this showcase.
An exhibit of hundreds of pots and pans confiscated from the uprooted arrivals – the makings of mid-20th century kitchens – tears at the heart, as do suitcases, tallitot, eyeglasses, artificial limbs and children’s dolls.
I ask whether those who were spared for labour had knowledge of what awaited family members who weren’t spared. Sawicki says the labourers suspected – there were rumours – and that knowledge, as much as the long, freezing pre-dawn assemblies, the starvation and the beatings, robbed many of the will to live.
Sawicki speaks of the final weeks of Auschwitz II-Birkenau in January 1945 – the death march westwards towards Germany, the remnant found when the Soviets happened upon the camp. I mention Melbourne’s Eva Slonim, who I once interviewed about her experiences as a young prisoner at Auschwitz II-Birkenau and how she witnessed liberation.
It’s time for farewells. One of our group asks Sawicki how he deals with guiding every day. It’s his job, he says, and he simply does it. But there’s nothing simple about his work, and we sense he’s too modest to speak about its importance.
Our minibus waits outside the gates of what once was Auschwitz II-Birkenau – and, 80 years after its liberation, I’m conscious of the privilege of being a Jew who’s able to leave this place in health and in peace.
Our heads heavy, we ride on in the darkening late afternoon through central Poland towards Krakow.
Peter Kohn’s visit to Poland was funded by the Polish government.
‘We begin to walk the extermination route. I can’t feel the ground beneath my soles now.’
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