The exhibition in Madrid is now open. It’s clear that this project would not have been possible without your personal dedication.
It has been a very long journey. For me it started with pain because the initial idea came after my brother suddenly passed away. I was then given a book, “Man's Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. At first I did not want to read it as I thought it was not appropriate at the time but in the end I read it, I was touched and I felt the need to share the story of Auschwitz in the only way I knew I could do it: an exhibition. This is what we do at Musealia.
These days have been very emotional, complex and long but it’s very difficult to express how I feel. I hope that we have done something that will help people to understand the past, if possible, and hopefully reflect on our society and the society we need to build for the future.
When you go back to the starting point – does this exhibition look as you imagined it then, right at the beginning? And what have you learned during this process?
I am not a historian, I am not an expert on Auschwitz. At the very beginning I was sent a suggestion of books to read – there were over 25 books and films. I also visited the site. After my visit at the former camp, when I was comfortably sleeping in my bed, I felt that I was so lucky to be in that warm bed, to have breakfast the next morning. It made me understand the value of what we have.
The Director, Piotr Cywiński, said that there are things we should not take for granted – the peace that we have, the society that we live in. We should take into consideration the threats of hatred, movements that target those who are different, act differently, think differently or believe in different things. There have been many personal discoveries for me. At the beginning I had a vision that people in my country – and this is why we wanted to start this project in Spain – do not know much about the story of Auschwitz. I felt this need inside. There are a lot of people who contributed later to this vision of mine from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum – not only in terms of artefacts, but also the knowledge, a great team of curators, designers and architects, and all other institutions who loaned the artefacts.
It’s a very plural exhibition; there are many voices in it. I hope people will notice that there is not only one voice telling the story. One can find many different perspectives. This exhibition asks a lot of questions and I hope people will reflect on them and find their own answers.
What will be the most surprising or challenging aspect for the Spanish visitors here?
Let’s see what people say, but when I think of myself and when I knew nothing about Auschwitz, it is amazing to understand that it was not an island, that it did not start with gas chambers. I read an interview that you gave when you said it did not start with the killing, it started with hatred, with words, politicians dividing people. The killing was there eventually but it’s important to understand the wider context.
We try to show this context in the exhibition. The history of Auschwitz is very complex. People will be surprised to see that there were a lot of victim groups. Sometimes we only remember Auschwitz for the Holocaust and indeed, Jews constitute 90 percent of the victims, but we should understand that there were Poles, Gypsies, Soviet POWs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and other minorities targeted by the Nazi ideology. Understanding the universe of the camp may be shocking for people.
You and the whole team made an important but risky decision to start the exhibition not from something that people will recognize immediately. You began with the context which is not really known – especially outside Poland, because this journey starts with the story of the town of Oświęcim far away in the past.
The curators were very interested in it and they wanted people to understand that Oświęcim had a past before being known for the Auschwitz camp. Oświęcim has also a present and a future. It’s a beautiful place to go to. It was important to make people understand that it was a Polish town with a vibrant life. And then history turned. I think people will appreciate it because it may help them to understand the terrible tragedy of the camp in the context of the second world war and the Holocaust.
You know the exhibition by heart. When you walk through those rooms now, is there a place where you still stop?
There are few points. There is of course a shoe with a sock – it’s an extremely powerful for many reasons. Each artefact has a unique voice and each of them start a different conversation with each visitor. For me this object tells that we do not know nothing about this person. It has been erased from history. We do not know the name, the age, the face and yet it tells us so much – also about hope. This child was taken with the family to the undressing room, people were told to leave the things there. It shows us that they did not know and did not believe that another human being is able to do this. This object still affects me. And there are many others, like the Canada section. For me it’s about the dignity of people, what do you punt into your suitcase when you learn that on the next day at 5 am you will be deported. All of the artefacts have this mute warning cry that is so powerful.
The story started from Viktor Frankel’s “Man in the search of meaning”. Do you think that those few years of work gave you a possibility of finding some meaning?
I am really satisfied. Me and the team tried to do something good. This is my little share. I hope this will be good for many people and the society. We have done the right thing. It’s important to me and I hope that everybody involved feels the same.
Interview with Luis Ferreiro,
project Director
Paweł Sawicki