Auschwitz -- US Pledges Aid to Restore Camp

 Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

On Saturday, U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton visited the brand new Schindler's Factory Museum in Krakow -- a branch of the city's history museum dedicated to the period of Nazi German occupation in World War II. During her visit she announced U.S. plans to pledge $15 million over five years to help restore and maintain the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, not far from Krakow. The site was made into a memorial/museum after World War II but has suffered considerable deterioration over the years. Flooding this year forced it to be closed to the public.

Below is the US government statement. For a full text of Clinton's speech click HERE

Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation Announcement

Office of the Spokesman

Washington, DC

July 3, 2010

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In a speech today, July 3, at the Schindler Factory Museum in Krakow, Poland, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced the U.S. intention to contribute $15 million over five years to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, subject to Congressional authorization and appropriations. The World War II-era factory of Oskar Schindler, the German entrepreneur who saved hundreds of Jewish factory workers from the Holocaust and, Krakow, the closest major city to the camp and an important center of Jewish life before WWII, provide a meaningful setting for the U.S. announcement. The Secretary’s announcement of the anticipated U.S. contribution illustrates the significance of the Auschwitz-Birkenau site, helps commemorate the 1.1 million victims who perished there, and demonstrates America’s commitment to Holocaust education, remembrance, and research.

U.S. Contribution

*Subject to Congressional authorization and appropriations, the United States’ contribution of $15 million over five years will begin in FY 2012.

*The U.S. contribution will help fund a €120 million endowment to preserve and safeguard the remains of the camp. Due to the temporary nature of the camp’s initial construction, the buildings and other artifacts at Auschwitz-Birkenau are in poor condition and in serious danger of irreversible deterioration.

*The United States strongly encourages other nations who have not already done so to follow suit and to contribute to the Auschwitz-Birkenau fund to preserve the site for future generations.

Importance of Auschwitz-Birkenau
*The Auschwitz-Birkenau death and concentration camp is one of the most widely recognized symbols of racism, bigotry, and hatred where untold millions suffered unthinkable and heinous treatment under Nazi tyranny. While there are hundreds of other historically important camps and mass grave sites, Auschwitz-Birkenau has become a symbol of the Holocaust.

*In 2009 alone, more than 1.3 million people from around the world visited the museum and memorial, among them survivors of Nazi persecution and their descendents, students, educators, and many who only for the first time learned of the horrors that went on at this infamous camp.

*The preservation and continuation of Auschwitz-Birkenau is essential so that future generations can visit and understand how the world can never again allow a place of such hatred and persecution to exist. It is also an important educational tool to show those who doubt that the Holocaust ever existed that indeed, tragically, it did.

Germany and Poland -- Fire (Worms) and Flood (Auschwitz)

There has been an arson attack on the historic (rebuilt) synagogue in Worms, Germany, apparently by pro-Palestinian protesters who took out their anger at Israel by attacking a synagogue that had been built in the 11th century, destroyed by the Nazis, and totally rebuilt from the rubble and reconsecrated in 1961. It forms part of  a museum complex -- including the "Rashi House" Museum -- but also is used at times for services. The great 11th century Jewish scholar Rashi studied here, and the old Jewish cemetery in Worms is the oldest suriving in Europe, aside from the Jewish catacombs in Rome.

Reports said fires were set Sunday night at eight spots around the synagogue, but the fire department acted quickly and there was no serious damage. Police were reported to have found at the scene eight copies of a letter  that read, "Until you give the Palestinians peace, we will not give you peace."

Meanwhile, severe rains and flooding in southern Poland forced the closure of the Auschwitz Museum and Memorial at the former Nazi death camp and threatened the camp's archives.

Poland -- Link to an Auschwitz article....

At Auschwitz, July 2009. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

I'm linking to an article, A "New Jew" Goes to Auschwitz, by Jay Michaelson, in The Forward, that provides an interesting take on how the Holocaust and Auschwitz (as a real place and as a symbol) are regarded by young generations for whom it is all increasingly distant history. (For someone in his or her 20s, it is more or less like World War One or the Edwardian Age is to my generation!) The article is subtitled "The Cathedral of Holocaustism."

Like many of my generation’s so-called “New Jews,” I see the recourse to the Holocaust as a substitute for living Judaism: an ersatz religion whose frisson of spiritual passion ultimately provides only negative reasons to live a Jewish life. As an activist, I am also dubious of how unspeakable tragedy was so readily converted into a platform for pretension, posturing and political exploitation. And as a teacher and writer, I know how easy it is to use the Holocaust as the ultimate cheap shot: the surefire way to get kids’ attention, get your book published and score points for piety when all else fails.

This summer, though, I visited Auschwitz for the first time. No, I was not in the parade of Jewish tourists on the European genocide trail, but since I was studying in Krakow (which, I hasten to point out, is joyful, cultured, vibrant and colorful) for the summer, I felt it was important to go, and so one rainy Sunday I went. So what happens when a “New Jew” goes to Auschwitz? In fact, despite my expectations, the trip underscored rather than undermined my ambivalence.

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Inevitably, the way we view the past changes. The comments on this article are particularly interesting...

Poland -- Dark Tourism at Auschwitz

Gate at Auschwitz, July 09. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

There's an academic field (or sub-discipline?) known as "Dark Tourism." The term -- as the web site of the Dark Tourism Forum puts it, is

a label first coined in the mid 1990’s by Professors John Lennon and Malcolm Foley of Glasgow Caledonian University, [and] is the act of travel and visitation to sites of death, disaster and the seemingly macabre. Lennon and Foley’s book ‘Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster’, first published in 2000, whilst not the first publication to address the subject area within academia, it was the first to systematically outline some of the issues and concerns associated with tourism, death and associated suffering.

The Forum cites as examples of Dark Tourism such varied places as the London Dungeon, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, Ground Zero in New York, the Sixth Floor in Dallas (from which President Kennedy was shot), Arlington National Cemetery in Washington DC -- and, of course, Auschwitz.

I guess a lot of the travel that I carry out, write about (and, OK, promote) to sites of Jewish heritage can seem to some observers to fall under this rubric -- afterall, I'm talking about often abandoned cemeteries, ruined synagogues and other relics of a civilization and people who were all but wiped off the map in a horribly brutal fashion....

I prefer to see visiting these places, however, as an affirmation -- and acknowledgement -- of life; of lives lived, of culture created, of richness and fullness over the centuries. Yes, destroyed: but, as my brother Sam once (more than once) put it, Jews did not sit around in Europe for hundreds of years just waiting to be killed....their lives, culture, religious traditions, creativity, contributed mightily to Europe as a whole, and visiting sites of Jewish heritage is a recognition of this fact -- as fact that was woefully ignored, suppressed, or diminished for decades.

Visiting specific Holocaust sites is, on the other hand, a pure example of Dark Tourism. Commemoration, memorial and recognition, too, of course. But at death camps and execution sites one remembers and responds to the death and disaster.

Last weekend, I took a friend to visit Auschwitz for the first time. He is an American musician who was on tour in central Europe, and the festival he played in southern Poland was the first time he had been to Poland. Auschwitz is located only an hour or so away from the festival site. My friend had one morning free after the gig, so I drove him up there.

He is not Jewish, but he was born just four years after the end of World War II, and he remembers from his childhood how heavily the legacy of the War and the Holocaust was felt -- even in America. He grew up with the images and the imagery: the Arbeit Macht Frei gate, the crematoria; the railway head at Birkenau where railcars of Jews were separated, to the left, to the right.

Even though we had very little time that morning, touring the site with him -- first Auschwitz I, where the museum exhibits are arranged in brick barracks, then the vast, empty field at Birkenau -- was a powerful and moving experience.

I have been to Auschwitz many times by now, and each time I go there I feel that I am stepping into a place that is sort of in a different dimension. Things get distorted: thoughts, feelings, time, sounds. Inside the perimeter, I often feel that nothing outside exists. Yet, on occasion, I have spent hours simply prowling around outside the camp, photographing the signage and everyday banalities that do exist there "in the real world." (Afterall, more than half a million people a year visit Auschwitz, so it's clear that there will be infrastructure such as parking lots, coffee shops, WCs, restaurants, hotels, and shops selling books and souvenirs.)

Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

This time, I mainly just walked with my friend. Seeing it all, a bit, through his eyes -- his first tangible encounter with the reality of Auschwitz -- as well as my own.

Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

The night before we went there, we sat talking with some of the members of the Czech band that my friend was touring with. The young drummer, David, suddenly volunteered that one of his grandmothers was a survivor of Auschwitz, and that her parents, his great-grandparents, had been murdered there.

Did he want to go with us? I asked him.

No, he had already been and didn't need to go back, he said. But, he told us, "say hello to my family...."

Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

P.S. For those visiting Auschwitz who want to see how Jews lived before the Holocaust, I recommend a visit to the Auschwitz Jewish Center in Oswiecim, the town outside which the death camp was built. Oswiecim's pre-war population was more than 50 percent Jewish -- it was known in Yiddish as Oshpitsin -- and the museum is located in the complex that includes the town's one surviving synagogue. The exhibit deals largely with local pre-war Jewish life, and the center has other resources, too.

Poland -- What to do with Auschwitz

Auschwitz Gate, 2005. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

The directors of the museum/memorial at Auschwitz and the Polish government have issued urgent calls recently for aid to conserve the crumbling infrastructure of the most notorious Nazi death camp. Auschwitz attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, but its buildings, exhibitions and archives are -- literally -- falling to pieces.

The National Post runs an article dealing with the architecture of Auschwitz and the architecture of tourism there. It is a interview with Robert Jan van Pelt, a professor at Ontario's University of Waterloo who has studied the architecture of the death camp, and particularly that of its cremetoria.

Given the lack of resources and the inevitable decay, Prof. van Pelt said one solution quickly emerges. What he says next is stripped of sentimentality but not of respect.

"Most people talk about the future of Auschwitz very emotionally without actually having any knowledge about it and without actually having any grasp of the incredibly contradictory nature of the site in terms of preservation and management.

"I say they should maybe allow Birkenau to be surrendered to nature - which does not mean putting condos on it but simply seal off the site and we allow nature to take over in a kind of symbolic gesture that humanity failed so terribly there that we now give it over to the cockroaches and grass and whatever. They haven't screwed up as badly as we have."

He adds an important caveat: It should not be done as long as there are survivors who may wish a return visit to the site. (He, himself, had a Jewish uncle who died in Auschwitz; he was named after him.)

"People will have to make choices... let us at least make a distinction between what is critical for us, what is important for us and what is merely significant.

"In Auschwitz they were restoring the sewer works of the camps not because it was the most important but because it was the only thing that was not contested.

"Because whatever you do in Auschwitz someone will say that you made the wrong choice."

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