Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 16, 1994 TAG: 9401190006
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: SWIECIM, POLAND LENGTH: Long
The four main gas chambers and crematories here at Auschwitz, where approximately 1.6 million people, most of them Jews, were gassed and their ashes dumped in the surrounding ponds and fields, were blown up by the Nazis. The remains have been largely left as broken slabs of lichen-encrusted concrete and brick.
Concrete pillars that were used for barbed-wire fences are disintegrating, weathered by the harsh winters in this isolated southwestern part of rural Poland. There is only a small sign indicating that the ashes of about 100,000 people lie in the small pond near one of the crematories.
Now the deterioration of the Birkenau section of the camp is beginning to force decisions by Poland on whether it should be restored, somewhat restored or be allowed to fade into oblivion. The debate is over which fate is appropriate for the site of the largest mass killing of Jews in history.
``Is this something so unique that no effort should be spared in showing future generations?''professor Jonathan Webber, a fellow in Jewish social studies at Oxford University and a founding member of the Auschwitz international committee, asked as he walked over the floor of gas chamber No. 5, the last, hastily constructed gas chamber.
``Or can you say Auschwitz lies in its meaning and not its physical site?''
Taking different positions in the debate over Auschwitz are historians, conservation experts, Jewish representatives and Poles laying plans for its future.
For many, the chilling emptiness of the 430 acres at Birkenau, the second camp at the Auschwitz complex, is the most eloquent testimony to what occurred there.
From the spring of 1942 to the end of 1944, the vast majority of the Auschwitz victims were gassed at Birkenau, in what was then occupied Poland.
Under blankets of snow recently, it was easy for visitors to scratch away the earth near the pits, in the fields and at the pond where the ashes were buried, and find flints of human bone.
For some visitors, the deteriorating ruins are too oblique, even though some renovation has been done to the watchtowers, guardposts, some fences and the wooden barracks where the prisoners of the labor camp were held in appalling conditions.
According to this argument, one of the best ways of insuring that the Nazi atrocities are not forgotten is to reconstruct the gas chambers so that visitors can walk in and, perhaps, imagine better what the horror was like.
Already, some of the wooden barracks where prisoners were jammed into unsanitary and freezing conditions have been rebuilt at Birkenau with new wood and new brick foundations as a way of saving them from collapse. But the changes have raised questions about their authenticity.
The debate has come to the fore now for several reasons. Until 1989, the communist government of Poland, without consultation from the outside world, decided what happened at Auschwitz.
Immediately after World War II, the first Auschwitz death camp, which is actually the smaller of the two, was turned into a museum with artifacts of human hair, suitcases and clothes of the victims on display. The one gas chamber and its ovens were reconstructed.
In contrast, the Birkenau section was left virtually untouched, except for a memorial where the inscription failed to mention that most of the victims were Jews.
When communism collapsed, the new Polish government quickly appointed an international committee of historians, conservation experts, Jewish representatives and Polish Catholics to reshape the way the Auschwitz complex is presented.
The debate over Auschwitz also has been driven by renewed interest in the Holocaust in the last few years, prompted in part by the aging of the generation of survivors and by a changed attitude of many younger Jews who want to remember rather than forget.
Auschwitz gained added attention from the controversy over a Roman Catholic convent building occupied by Carmelite nuns next to the camp, an issue that was resolved in 1993 when the Vatican, under pressure from Jewish organizations, asked the nuns to move after nearly a decade there.
Whatever is done at the Birkenau section of the camp, it most likely will be done slowly.
It took the international committee nearly three years to decide on the wording for a new inscription at the Birkenau memorial that says most of the victims were Jews from different countries of Europe.
After the wording was settled, museum officials said there were technical problems in getting the plaques ready.
To assist the museum in its preservation efforts, the German government announced a grant of about $20 million in 1992 for the next five years.
And a televised fund-raiser in Germany raised $1 million from the public in 1992. The German funds are to be used by the museum in ways approved by the international committee, said Folkmar Stoecker, cultural attache at the German embassy in Warsaw.
So far, some of the money is being spent on a new acclimatization system for the exhibits at the first Auschwitz camp, for reinforcing some crumbling chimneys of wooden barracks and for a conservation workshop at the museum to explore the latest preservation techniques, Stoecker said.
But the emotional question of what to do about the gas chambers has remained unresolved, Stoecker said.
Long grass pokes through cracks in the broken bricks and a piece of rusted metal that was part of a furnace stands in silhouette against the background forest.
``If you have a brick wall against which people faced the firing squad,'' Webber of Oxford said, ``is it important to have the wall or remember they were shot?''
At one end of the spectrum of opinion is that of a French pharmacist, Jean-Claude Pressac, who for years doubted that the Holocaust happened and then reversed himself in a book published in 1993 that details the techniques the Nazis used to kill so many people at Auschwitz.
At an international conference at Auschwitz in August to help guide the museum and the international committee in its decisions, Pressac said that one of the least damaged gas chambers and crematories should be reconstructed.
Only if visitors followed the steps the victims took down into the subterranean cloakroom where they were ordered to undress, and then herded into the room where they were gassed, would visitors get the ``slap in the face'' necessary to remind people ``that this was insane and criminal,'' he said.
``You can't create memory, but you can create an experience that is as powerful as memory,'' Pressac said.
But for many, including museum officials, Pressac's point of view would render Auschwitz into a theme park, cheapening its meaning and making visitors into voyeurs.
``Auschwitz, as the world's largest cemetery, is holy ground,'' said Bohdan Rymaszewski, secretary of the International Committee of the Auschwitz Museum.
``What is perfectly acceptable procedure in other museums here borders on profanity. There are many who feel the camp should be reconstructed to its original state. In my opinion this would be nothing other than forgery.''
Like many Poles who are knowledgeable about Auschwitz, Rymaszewski said it was important to leave the remains as they are to show the world that the Nazis tried to blow up the gas chambers as a way of concealing their horrendous deeds.
That opinion was shared by George Wheeler, a stone specialist in the conservation department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York who has visited Auschwitz several times and who attended the conference in August.
Wheeler was brought in by the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation to look at various conservation possibilities for Auschwitz. The foundation was established by Lauder, an American businessman, to raise money for the effort.
``For me it's almost voyeuristic to recreate a gas chamber,'' Wheeler said. ``You're playing to a voyeuristic public, and it has very questionable motives.''
The museum officials, sensitive to growing outside opinion, say they believe that they have found a middle ground between overloading Auschwitz with traditional museum-style paraphernalia and allowing it to decay totally.
If the reconstructed wooden barracks were not put onto brick foundations, they would disintegrate, the officials said.
The Nazis originally built the wooden barracks directly onto the swampy ground, in part because the barracks were intended to last only as long it took them to complete the killings, the officials said.
``Our overriding priority is the museum's authenticity and dignity,'' said Franciszek Cemka, director of museums at the Polish Culture Ministry.
``Thus we will seek to limit the intrusion of modern substances. One of our greatest constraints as curators is that Auschwitz is at the same time a museum, holy ground, cemetery and monument.
``How do we show visitors that under a particular patch of grass lie the ashes of thousands? Opening a cross section would understandably offend religious sensibilities.''
Thus, Cemka added, ``Because of its unique character, Auschwitz is largely an exercise in compromise.''
Of other death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland:
In 1944 the German forces destroyed the one at Treblinka, where some 850,000 Jews were gassed and burned. A memorial consisting of 17,000 granite shards set in concrete around a 40-foot obelisk stands on the site.
At the site of the Plaszow camp near Krakow, there is a huge concrete monument.
At Majdanek, just outside Lublin, the camp (spelled Maidanek by the Germans) has been preserved and includes guard towers, barbed wire, barracks and crematories. Of the approximately 350,000 people killed there, about four-fifths were Jews.
Regarding Auschwitz, there are other potential conflicts about its use as a memorial.
Visiting the death camp in July, Webber suggested that a suitable monument to the Jewish victims would be the building known as the ``sauna,'' where prisoners were taken to have their clothes disinfected.
But then other groups would object, he said, adding, ``Gypsies, for example, would complain they did not have a monument.''
Historians generally agree that of the approximately 1.6 million victims, 1.3 million were Jews and 300,000 were Polish Catholics, Gypsies and Russian prisoners of war.
The museum officials, however, have other ideas for the ``sauna'' building.
Already, they are trying to collect the names of the estimated 1.6 million victims with the idea of putting them, under glass, on the walls of the ``sauna.''
But the names of most of the Polish Jews would be almost impossible to retrieve, said Miroslaw Obstarczyk, a historian at the museum, because the names were left in the ghettos of occupied Poland after the victims were put on the transports. And the ghettos and the records of the names no longer exist.
by CNB