The Historiography of the Holocaust

522 Dan Stone
two distinct phases: communist and post-communist. It was the material survival
of much of the camp’s structure and buildings – in contrast to say Treblinka or
Bel4ec – that allowed Auschwitz to be made a museum in the first place. Since,
as we have seen, hatred of Jews was not something that communist ideology
took seriously, the authorities decided to base the museum in Auschwitz I
(Stammlager) on national displays. Each country that had nationals killed at
Auschwitz was invited to set up a display in one of the former barracks. The
result was not only that there was an over-representation of communist countries,
but that Austria was given a splendid opportunity mendaciously to claim that
it had been occupied by Germany as ‘the first victim of National Socialism’.
Jews were represented in a separate ‘national pavilion’ as though the nationals
of countries such as Bulgaria killed at Auschwitz were not killed for the most
part because they were Jews, and suggesting that there was a Jewish ‘nation’
like a Hungarian or Belgian one.
Under communism, too, Auschwitz became a site of Polish national pilgrimage.
The camp was first opened as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners,
75,000 of whom were murdered there, and the museum was primarily devoted
to commemorating Polish martyrdom. It thus fitted the communist anti-fascist
narrative but also subtly undermined it by stressing the attempt by the Nazis
(the analogy was not lost on most visitors) to wipe out the Polish nation. Yet
although Auschwitz was indeed a site of Polish suffering – a fact unknown to
most Jews in these years – over 90 per cent of those killed there were Jews, as
was rightly pointed out after 1989. The result was the development of a plan to
redesign the museum’s exhibition, and to place more emphasis on Birkenau
(Auschwitz II) as the main killing site of Jews and Romanies. Unfortunately, it
also generated some ugly battles over memory along the way, for example,
over the erection of a Carmelite convent just outside the grounds of the
museum but within the borders of the original camp; over the erection of large
Stars of David and Crucifixes in a field in Birkenau where corpses had been
burnt; and simply over whether there was enough sympathy to go round so that
Auschwitz could be both a symbol of Polish and Jewish suffering. 61
Numerous other death camps and concentration camps – among them
Majdanek, Mauthausen, Natzwiler-Struthof, Dachau and Theresienstadt – survived
relatively intact and have been made into museums. The development of
each reflects the post-war history of political and national narratives. Perhaps
the most striking example is Majdanek, which is little visited but which forces
those who do visit it to undergo a fierce confrontation with the past, not only
because the buildings, including gas chambers, are mostly intact, but because
of the hugeness of the terrain and the overwhelming displays – in the former
barracks – of countless pairs of shoes and other belongings of the victims. Each
of these camps, as well as the many smaller ones that scar the map of Europe
and barely penetrate popular consciousness, contribute to sustaining Holocaust