Restoration or Preservation?

Is Auschwitz a tourist attraction to be updated with the times, or a solemn burial ground to be left untouched? An international debate has focused on this question ever since the new director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, Piotr Cywinski, announced plans to renovate and remodel parts of the infamous death camp.Controversy surrounding Mr. Cywinski’s proposal was sparked by an article in Ha’aretz, following his visit in October to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. The article described a “beautification” of Auschwitz.“I think they got the impression I was going to turn it into a kind of Disneyland,” Mr. Cywinski said. “I will not alter anything, only the exhibition.”Worries swirled among some former prisoners that the historical integrity of the place would be compromised, and historians posed the question: If you replace even one piece of rusted barbed wire, can the site still be called authentic?“There are some people who say you should put salt in the earth, so nothing will grow,” the incoming chairman of the International Task Force on Holocaust Education and also the director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, David Marwell, said. “But if you’re going to let people in, you have to make the site accessible.”Mr. Cywinski, 34, inherited a delicate task when he was installed as director over the summer to prepare for the museum’s first-ever facelift as it approaches its 60th anniversary this coming July. His plans to redesign exhibits that focus on prisoner life, housed in the original Auschwitz camp, and to continue structural upgrades to the crematoria in Birkenau — the massive and sprawling camp three kilometers away, where most of Auschwitz’s prisoners were put to death — were approved in December by the International Auschwitz Council, a group composed of politicians, historians, and Holocaust survivors. Since then, the director has been circling the globe, building support and elaborating on the project.Like any other museum curator and guardian of a historical artifact, Mr. Cywinski needs to please a number of diverse interests, and regularly fends off charges of revisionism. This balancing act is especially challenging because Auschwitz is one of the most soul-stirring shrines in the world.“It is a place upon which the entire world is focused,” Mr. Cywinski said during the holiday break, immediately after returning to Poland from Washington, D.C., where he spelled out details of his plans at the United States Holocaust Memorial. “The job requires taking into account a lot of perspectives, but I must prepare for future generations.”The crowds in Auschwitz have doubled from 500,000 to 1 million visitors per year since Poland joined the European Union in 2004, roughly the same time that budget airlines began to link Kraków with major European hubs. The number of visitors to Poland has expanded by more than 30% in the past three years, and the most popular tourist destination remains the southernmost region encompassing the small city of Oswiecim.Foreigners at Kraków’s bus station struggle with that tonguetwister of a name to find one of the hourly shuttles leaving for the camp. About 80 minutes later, they are let out in a parking lot in front of the museum, file inside to watch a short black-and-white documentary, then exit through a back door to the infamous iron arch reading “Arbeit Macht Frei” (work brings freedom).Behind that gate and the rows of barbed wire are the three-story brick barracks that held the area’s first prisoners. Some of the buildings have been dedicated to exhibits — long glass cases containing shorn hair, a room full of suitcases, and another bin full of eyeglasses. The salvaged canisters of cyanide gas pellets, called Zyklon B, leave a particularly chilling and lasting impression.But one impression that the visitor is not afforded, some survivors lament, is the sense that most of those executed in Auschwitz were Jewish — 1.5 million in all, representing the vast majority.“Under communism, faith was not exactly emphasized, and so that aspect has been neglected to some extent,” the director of the Auschwitz Jewish Center in Oswiecim, once a predominantly Jewish city, Tomak Kuncewicz, said. His group has just restored the city’s only remaining synagogue, which stood neglected for half a century. Only in the past two decades has religion in Poland re-emerged from imposed atheism, and the vacuum has been filled in a hurry: In the 1990s, for example, a group of unauthorized crosses appeared on the campus of Auschwitz, commemorating Christian family members who perished at the camp. The crosses were later removed, causing another controversial moment in the history of the state-run museum.The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum opened in 1947 (two years after liberation by Soviet troops), and the exhibits depicting prisoner life — for instance, uniforms worn by homosexuals, Gypsies, political prisoners, and Jews — haven’t been touched since 1955, the year Poland joined the Warsaw Pact.“For a long time, ex-prisoners and politicians have been asking me to change this exposition,” Mr. Cywinski said. He said he plans to add some new themes. One of those is the role played by the Sonderkommando, prisoners charged with some of the most sinister work, such as loading corpses into furnaces.Those exhibits would be a welcome addition as far as the president of the International Auschwitz Committee, Noah Flug, is concerned. Mr. Flug, a survivor of Auschwitz and of the infamous Death March of January 1945, when the camp was evacuated, was initially leery of any proposed alterations to the prison’s contents.“We think it is very important to leave Auschwitz exactly as it was in January 1945,” Mr. Flug said in a telephone interview from his home in Israel. “That is, not to make any new buildings or add anything new.” On the other hand, he said, the proposal to add a Jewish identity to the communist-era exhibits is a good idea, adding that he would like to see video interviews with survivors. His organization represents an estimated 30,000 Auschwitz survivors worldwide.Mr. Flug is also unopposed to the restoration work on the crematoria and other buildings in Birkenau, which has been underway for years now, financed by the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation. The aim of that project is to stabilize the structures — many of them detonated by the Nazis upon evacuation — from erosion caused by groundwater.Unlike Auschwitz I, the sturdy brick barracks initially housing Polish political prisoners, the monstrous complex of Auschwitz II, named Birkenau after the nearby stand of birch trees, was erected as quickly and as cheaply as possible. The wooden barracks weren’t built to last and are slowly deteriorating. The crumbling gas chambers and crematoria are now encircled by a red-and-white chain, and wooden beams here and there have been added to their brick walls for support.Because tampering with the evidence opens the doors to unneeded attention from, at worst, Holocaust deniers, Mr. Cywinski vehemently rejects any notion that the structures of Birkenau will be rebuilt. But if they aren’t at least stabilized, they could disappear entirely.“You know, over the years, nature is going to take its toll,” Mr. Marwell said. “So the practical question is, what do you do?”

Restoration or Preservation?

Restoration or Preservation?

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