On one side there is the grayish enclosure of the camp, intact, as if still frozen in 1945, with its barbed wire covering it, its brick barracks, its watchtowers, its remains of gas chambers. Surrounding, a church, residential buildings, convenience stores, a church, an incessant coming and going of buses… The banality of everyday life in the face of the all-powerful symbol of Nazi barbarism, the greatest killing project developed by the human. At the dawn of the 80e anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, Oświęcim, a small Polish city of 34,000 inhabitants, thus coexists with this burden of history.
After the invasion of Poland by Hitler’s Germany in September 1939, it was in this southwestern city, 50 kilometers from Krakow, that the concentration camp was established a year later. and extermination, released on January 27, 1945. KL-Auschwitz I, II and III, incarnation of the final solution, will be one of the many concentration camp complexes which will contribute to the massacre of more than six million European Jews, including three million from Poland, during the Second World War.
However, how can we live in a place harboring the worst atrocities of the last century? In Oświęcim, everyone strives to convince that a “normal life” is possible here. “If we thought about it all the time, we wouldn’t be able to live!” » says Stanislaw Olejarz, a security guard with an affable face. This native of Oświęcim is aware of the “difficult history of the place”, since both his parents were made slaves by the occupier. His father was sent by force to Germany in the 3rde Reich, while his mother, who worked on a nearby farm, could not escape the sordid sight of the crematorium by going to sell milk. “After the war, she refused to watch films about the war. 30 years ago, when there were still people who had lived through this period, the Auschwitz camp was taboo, they did not want to talk about it. »
“Pretty town”
Being born and growing up in Oświęcim means, for many residents, having to face puzzled looks. “People from elsewhere often think that we still live in the camp! » says with a sigh Gabriela, a 21-year-old resident who works in a café in the center, praising her “pretty town, which has a lot to offer, with a lot of heritage”. “Anyone who sets foot here will be able to convince themselves of this,” says the young student, who nevertheless plans to go and live abroad. Many residents, however, are exasperated that their city is only associated with this historic cataclysm.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau site, a UNESCO world heritage site transformed into a museum, attracts up to two million visitors per year, a significant tourist boon for the local economy. However, beyond the camp, Oświęcim also tries to exist other than in terms of its tragic dimension. In recent years, various initiatives have emerged. When you cross to the other bank of the Sola River, resplendent in summer, Oświęcim has everything of an ordinary Polish town, with its market charming (market square), its small cafes, its castle dating from the 13th centurye century… Inaugurated around twenty years ago, the Oświęcim Jewish History Museum, which tells of this once flourishing life, is part of this cultural renewal.
At the Bergson café, which adjoins the establishment, Duty unexpectedly meets Hila Weisz-Gut, a 34-year-old Israeli who moved to Poland for love. When she set foot in Oświęcim for the first time in 2007, as part of an educational trip, a whirlwind of apprehensions shook her. But time has passed since then, Hila has gained her bearings, her gaze has softened on this city that she has made her own. From the window of his room, when getting up in the morning, there is this stunning scenery which immediately imposes itself on the view of Hila, with the Jewish cemetery of Oświęcim, below, miraculously preserved, and, at far away, the chimneys of the former Monowitz labor camp, which was part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. This is the place where her grandmother was imprisoned like cattle and from which she came out alive. “There are two types of survivors: those who speak and those who keep their mouths shut. My grandmother was the second type, she never talked about her experience with her grandchildren, due to her trauma. » So, as if to fill this void, Hila makes it her duty to perpetuate the memory of those who perished.
-Places full of misfortune
Beyond the Auschwitz Birkenau Museum, which extends over 200 hectares, the site of the former concentration camp complex, much larger, conceals other places full of misfortunes. Like this old canteen intended for the SS, or this Frauen Strafkompanie, a barrack transformed into a penal company for women. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Auxiliary Places of Memory Foundation is working to rescue them from oblivion. Dagmar Kopijasz is part of the small armada of volunteers who collect artifacts, like shoes from former prisoners, vases, furniture. “There is a certain nostalgia, this feeling of emptiness among certain residents at the idea of this coexistence of the past,” Dagmar wants to believe.
For a long time, however, Oświęcim gave the impression of wanting to avoid his past. During the communist era, official propaganda associated the memory of Auschwitz with the “martyrology and struggle of the Polish people and other peoples”, even if it meant erasing the memory of the Jewish genocide. Certainly, if many Poles may have ended up in the horrors of the camp, the fact remains that, of the 1.1 million massacres at Auschwitz, 90% were Jewish. If consciences have evolved since then, the painful past is still the subject of tension. Even the idea of creating a Jewish museum encountered resistance around twenty years ago, as recalled by Artur Szyndler, curator of the Oświęcim Jewish History Museum. “We cannot ignore the very important role that the Jews have played in the history of here. We must become the voice of their heritage. »
Before the war, more than 60% of the population of Oświęcim was Jewish, like countless towns of the time in Poland, before their total decimation. What might life have been like without the Shoah? The mere thought makes you dizzy. Poland had the largest Jewish population in all of Europe. Today, in what was once the cradle of European Judaism — Polin means, in Yiddish, “here you will rest” — he only risks a few tens of thousands. Many of them emigrated after the war, notably in 1968, during the anti-Semitic campaign orchestrated by the communist authorities of the time.
Multi-ethnic past
“In Poland, we do not teach the history of Poland, we teach the history of the Polish nation,” regrets Konstanty Gebert, Jewish intellectual and contributor to the journal of ideas Kultura Liberalnawho entertains in his Warsaw apartment, where every wall is lined with shelves of books. He deplores that the country’s multi-ethnic past is often swept away. “For a large part of Poles, the history of Polish Jews is not theirs. Poles often do not realize that they live in towns that were 80% Jewish before the war. »
The prospect of living among the ghosts of Oświęcim nevertheless seems unbearable to those for whom, like Ewa Łuczyńska, Auschwitz evokes above all a source of torment. Daughter of a survivor, this guide in the former Warsaw ghetto, where she lives, confides in a soft voice “to have the impression of knowing what Auschwitz is since [s]early childhood, without having lived there. The camp, his mother, who escaped the hell of the gas chambers at the last minute, talked about it constantly: forced labor, human misery, hunger. One day, when she was a teenager, the 74-year-old Polish woman saw an archive photo of a woman who “looked like the living dead”. It’s his mother, in her twenties, in Auschwitz. “She served as a guinea pig in Nazi medical experiments, and had typhus injected twice, to see how an already weakened, undernourished body would react,” relates Ewa, who “absorbed part of her trauma.” Like many people belonging to this damaged generation, his mother hid her Jewish origins from him throughout her life, for fear of anti-Semitism which would resurface. “One day I asked her to tell me the truth about our Jewishness, and she replied, in Yiddish: “Ewa, don’t ask stupid questions.” »
