Emerging truths

Elaborate preparations to mark the seventieth anniversary on Tuesday of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau highlight how Poland has begun to acknowledge its own anti-Semitic past and to recognise that it has a Jewish question, too

Dappling the branches, the winter sun shines through the firs,  casting a glint on the water. The place, you feel, should not look like this. The site of Auschwitz – outside the town of Oswiecim in southern Poland – should rather be dark, drenched in rain, shrouded in mist or, at this time of year, thinly blanketed by snow.

A few hours later and nearly two miles away, at Birkenau, a cold wind lashes the spindly birch trees; the paths swim with mud; a drizzle sets in, and darkness greedily swallows that instantly recognisable image: the red brick watchtower looming over the single railway carriage near the end of the line.

The Polish Government is preparing to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the concentration and death camps at the site known as Auschwitz-Birkenau. A vast tent is nearing completion, designed to protect guests from the elements, while leaving the notorious entrance visible. The diktat of television is clear.

Most prisoners had already died, been killed or forcibly marched west by the time Russian forces arrived on 27 January, 1945. But even though far fewer people were liberated here than at, say, Bergen-Belsen three months later, it is Auschwitz-Birkenau that has increasingly come to stand as the memorial to all. This is in part because it remains highly unusual in two respects. The speed of the Red Army’s advance gave the Germans scant time to destroy the industrial system of death they had created here; many of the structures, including a gas chamber, remain. The ­complex’s dual function, as a concentration camp  as well as a death camp, also left ­survivors who testified to their experience. At Belzec, another death camp in Poland, it is believed, no one survived.

The end of Communism, and the gradual filling in of the “blank spots” it imposed on history, may also help to explain why the anniversary of the liberation each January now features more prominently on Poland’s diplomatic calendar. For the seventieth anniversary, the Government in Warsaw is pulling out all the stops. I was one of a group of reporters invited on a study tour by the Foreign Ministry.

Polish officials stress the special nature of this anniversary. Not only is it a round number, but it is probably the last time that there will be anything like a quorum of survivors able to be present. And survivors, they say – several dozen of whom are expected to attend – will be at the centre of these commemorations.

They also insist that Poland has no intention of playing politics. Politics are, nonetheless, being played. Many national leaders, including David Cameron, are expected. The Treasury Secretary, Jacob Lew, will head a United States presidential delegation. And there has already been a kerfuffle about Russia’s representation, after Vladimir Putin said he was not going and had not been invited – to which Poland responded that no one had been “invited”; foreign governments had simply been informed. It is not clear whether the Kremlin read the signals wrongly – or rightly, divining perhaps that Russia’s president would not be welcome – but it is probably fair to say that, one way or another, another diplomatic opportunity has been missed.

This anniversary, as seen from Poland, however, is not about relations with Russia, even though it was Soviet troops who liberated Auschwitz. The elaborate preparations for this year’s commemoration are primarily about Poland and they are designed, in part at least, to showcase the evolution of official Poland’s attitude both to its present-day Jewish ­population – which stands at a fraction of what it was before the war – and to the place of Jews and Judaism in the history of this profoundly Catholic country. Auschwitz (Oswiecim) is around an hour’s drive from Kraków, which was the old capital of Poland, but also the seat of the German government of occupation. Kraków is also a religious ­centre. Church spires pierce its skyline. Faith opened a channel for resistance to Communism and Kraków is where the Polish Pope, John Paul II, embarked upon his pastoral vocation. Until very recently, however, Jewish Kraków, the wartime ghetto, and the Jewish contribution to the city’s wealth and culture, were given short shrift.

This neglect is even now blamed largely on Communism. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, tour guides note that Polish survivors of the camps demanded, very early on, that the site be preserved, and it was given statutory protection in 1947. The first Auschwitz museum was opened in 1955 and has remained almost unchanged to this day. Among the exhibits are thousands of shoes that were taken from the prisoners, suitcases with the owners’ name and often place and date of birth inscribed on them, and a vast display case that contains only human hair. It is not easy to look at these, still less to understand.

While the exhibits have remained unchanged over decades, however, other aspects have not. The museum opened after the death of Stalin, in the more open political atmosphere of the Soviet “thaw”. Through the late 1960s and 1970s, however, it remained technically open, while being in practice closed. The biggest change, though, took place some  time after the collapse of Communism, when the first references were made to Jews. Until then, it had not been explicitly stated that Jews constituted the vast majority of those who perished.

The Soviet-era doctrine was that Auschwitz and other death camps represented crimes against humanity in general. Jonathan Webber, a British professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, has been involved in documenting Polish Jewry for many years, and notes that one of the most striking features of Soviet-era accounts of Auschwitz was the non-mention of Jews. This is being remedied. The current museum captions make clear that, while more than 1.5 million people died at Auschwitz – including Polish dissidents, Gypsies (Roma), Slavs, homosexuals and ­people with disabilities – the overwhelming majority were Jews.

If Communist Poland glossed over this fact, the Catholic Church seemed not exactly to go out of its way to correct it. As the ­historian, Professor Jan Rydel, conceded at a recent meeting in Kraków, Poland cultivated a self-image of tolerance and heroism. Every Pole, it seemed, could claim to have risked his or her life to shelter Jews. Not until 1987, Rydel says, with the publication of a magazine article describing how Poles had looked on, as Jews threw themselves and their children to their death in the Kraków ghetto, did the tide of self-deception start, quite tentatively, to turn.

Long-seething tensions began to surface. The opening of a Carmelite convent near Auschwitz in 1984 became a huge source of contention. Whether it was, strictly speaking, within the territory of the camp, or just outside it, the premises had apparently been used to warehouse the Zyklon gas that was used in the gas chambers, and the juxtaposition was regarded by much Jewish opinion as far too close for comfort. There were angry stand-offs, until finally, in 1993, Pope John Paul ordered the nuns to leave. The (handsome) building now stands abandoned, falling back into its earlier state of disrepair.

The canonisations of Maximilian Kolbe, a Catholic priest who substituted himself for a Jewish man condemned to death, and of Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, have stirred controversy, too. Completed, though not initiated, by the Polish Pope, they raised concern among some Catholics that the criteria for sainthood had not been met, while some Jews felt that the Catholic Church in Poland was somehow trying to co-opt Auschwitz and lessen its significance for Jews. There is a well-tended shrine to Kolbe in cell 18 of the punishment block where he died.

The prominence being given by the Polish authorities to the seventieth anniversary commemorations suggests an effort by Poland’s current leaders to restore Poland’s Jews to their rightful place in their country’s history – and to start setting the record straight about the relationship between Poland’s Catholic majority and its Jews. “Complicated” was a word that punctuated almost every conversation during my visit last week.

And what might seem a paradox of timing can be seen in a mostly positive light. Even as the countries of Western Europe are trying to fend off fears of growing anti-Semitism, over in Central Europe, some uncomfortable truths are now starting to be acknowledged about the reality of anti-Semitism in Poland and instances of Polish Catholic complicity in the persecution of Jews.

It is true that revisionism, however necessary and justified, carries its own dangers. There are plans for the first-ever modernisation of the 1955 Auschwitz museum, with a new emphasis on the perpetrators, which could stoke hostility towards Germany. And the admirable surge of interest and support for Judaism and Jewish culture in today’s Poland – as demonstrated by the plethora of new publications, university courses, and festivals – could degenerate into ethnographic curiosity that excludes any more truthful appraisal of Poland’s not so distant past. There is room, though, for optimism.

In belatedly recognising that it has a Jewish question, Poland has not only come far, but accepted that there is still some way to go.

Mary Dejevsky is a former Moscow correspondent for The Times and is now a columnist for The Independent.