INTERVIEW
WITH BARBARA GIRS
The history of this particular book is personal on different levels. It contains memoirs, so these are personal experiences of three Auschwitz survivors. But the personal aspect is also reflected when we talk about the designer of the book, your father, Anatol Girs. I do believe that it is difficult to understand this story without learning about his life and his experiences, both as a book publisher and designer, but also as a person who survived the war.
My father was born in Crimea in 1904 and only escaped to Poland with his mother after his father was arrested by the Bolsheviks and sent to Siberia where he later died. He finished his schooling in Warsaw, including at the School of Decorative Arts. He had what I think was a remarkably successful career as a book designer and graphic artist, and ultimately, along with his friend Boleslaw Barcz, created the design firm Atelier Girs-Barcz and eventually the publishing company Oficyna Warszawska. They designed numerous for Główna Księgarnia Wojskowa, the official publishing house of the army. Pilsudski championed their work, they won many international prizes in book design – all in their early to mid 30’s, When the war started and as it progressed, it was important to them to try and keep as many artists as possible working so that they could give them some kind of income instead of charity. During the Warsaw Uprising, Barcz, a wonderful portrait artist, was killed and shortly after my father, his first wife and his mother were rounded up and taken to Auschwitz. It would be the last my father saw of them. From Auschwitz he was transported to Dautmergen, which is where he first met Borowski. They talked, my father read his poetry and promised him that if they made it out alive - of course, not knowing when the end would be - that he would publish his poetry. Both of them were eventually transported to Dachau. And at the end of the war, they ended up in Freimann, a DP camp, where Siedlecki and Olszewski were also. I believe that Borowski knew them from before but I’m not sure. The four of them would sit around at night and tell stories of what they had lived through, what they had seen.
Do we know how this meeting turned into a book? On one hand it seems to be very natural for him because of his profession and because of his own experiences. If they were sitting and telling the story the natural thought for a book publisher would be that this should be written down.
I heard this when I was very young and then I would hear it repeated at various times with other people around. It was obvious to my father, because of his age and what he had gone through in his life that first-hand accounts are important for history. Yes, of course, the three of them would have had endless stories to tell. From Siedlecki’s niece I learned that he had already started writing his own accounts before the book came up. It was natural for my father, as you said, to think about things in book form. He did suggest to them that the three of them write a book together. I know that he said that Borowski was not enthusiastic about the idea. He considered himself a poet and not a prose writer and had to be talked into taking part in this. But they did eventually all write their own experiences stories.
Your father was deported to Auschwitz relatively late. His experience of the war was different than those three men that had been in this camp for a much longer time. He was also learning about Auschwitz seen through their eyes.
Of course, but he was there long enough to know how horrendous it was. I remember him telling me – I was very, very young, younger than I would think I would have told a child about experiences of seeing people being murdered with a shovel or with a pickaxe. He talked about the brutal, sometimes pointless labor of digging holes, filling them, and digging them again, that kind of thing. If you worked too slowly - you were hungry, you were tired or sick - you could be hit with a hoe or another implement until you fell, were injured or even died. So, the horrors of the camps were very clear to him. But they the three had far more stories and he was a listener, so I'm sure their stories were interesting to him.
The story of the book is also the story of an emigrant in a foreign country publishing those survivors accounts. So, how your father’s work as a published continued after the liberation?
“Byliśmy w Oświęcimiu” was his third publication. The first was “Imiona Nurtu” by Borowski, and the second was “Stanislaus Polonus, Ein polnischer Fruhdrucker in Spanien,” by Aloys Ruppel from the Gutenberg Gesellschaft, a project my father had begun before the war. The 1600 copies of that edition were donated - half to the National Library in Warsaw and half to Gutenberg Gesellschaft to help pay for their reconstruction. Because he had had a lot of contacts in various countries before the war, he knew where to go, who to talk to and how to get things done. And obviously it was something that he needed to do to continue with his life the way it had been. He also printed the “Poszukiwanie rodzin” (search for families) in Munich, These were booklets with lists of names of family members searching for loved ones. And he printed stamps that were used on inter-camp mail, which cost a few pennies but ended up raising quite a a bit of money for the Polish Red Cross. He was a designer, artist, publisher and entrepreneur before the war and the war did not change that.
The uniqueness of this particular copy of the book that was donated to the Auschwitz Memorial is the cover. It is in fact a piece of a striped uniform from a concentration camp. Where did this idea come from?
A lot of mention of that fact has been made in the Polish media, some of which makes it sound—if I understood the reviews correctly-- as though the use of the fabric is almost sacrilege. I don’t understand that suggestion at all. If the authors and my father could wear that fabric for months, if not years, it seems like an obvious choice of binding, from a design sense. It seems to me that it would have been a natural thing for him to illustrate what people became in the camps: no name, no title, just a number on a rough piece of cloth. So much of your personality is shown by how you dress, how you wear your hair. Those choices say something about you. The camps took all of that away. On the title page in the original, the numbers are larger and the names are smaller because you were a number. From a design perspective all those details have meaning. And he was a designer.
He did not only create a book, bound with a prisoner’s striped uniform. There's another copy that he made using leather from an SS uniform and some barbed wire that fenced a camp.
When he was a publisher in Poland, he would always make one copy or maybe two that was bound in leather as the “show copy” to send to exhibitions. The gold standard copy. He did the same with “Byliśmy w Oświęcimiu.” And what better material to use than the leather from the coat or jacket of the despised SS. And there was plenty of barbed wire around. You use what is available and what is relevant to the subject matter at hand.
At that time, he was a man on crossroad. He finally emigrated to the US, but did he ever think about coming back to Poland?
No, I don't believe he did. I know that he tried to talk Borowski out of going back to Poland because he felt that with the Russians there, the future did not look good for Poland. His wife and his mother had died, his friend and business partner had been killed, his business was destroyed; he felt he was better off going to the country that had liberated him. In addition, an American officer had given him a letter of introduction to a professor at Columbia University so he thought there might be the chance of employment when he got to the U.S.
Did he continue to publish books in the US?
He worked as an artist for a printing company for most of his career in the United States. He did not have a private publishing company, although he did print small editions for private clients over the years. When my father arrived he had no money, didn’t speak the language, and there was a lot of suspicion about foreigners. Instead, he worked at his job and painted as a creative outlet.
But finally, he settled and he found his place.
Yes, it wasn't anything like what it was in Poland, but I think he would have said that he had a good life here, not perhaps doing exactly what he would have liked to do, but I certainly hope it was a good life.
How do you remember him as a daughter? What kind of a father he was?
He was wonderful to me, but he wasn't the father that would go outside and play ball with you. But he told great stories. He made up stories to tell my sister and I me when we were little, you know, at night before going to bed. He was a creative person. He was funny, he liked to laugh. I always found it surprising to hear that survivors don't like to talk about their experiences because he didn't mind talking at all. He didn't feel the need to keep what he had experienced secret.
Besides the charming fairy tales, I grew up hearing vignettes from his childhood visits to Tartar encampments in Crimea, a child’s recollection of the Russian Revolution, and ultimately, war stories. It was a very different background than most of my friends. The only negative was that he suffered from what we now know as PTSD: he was always afraid that something bad would befall him family. From what little I’ve said about him here, I think you can understand why. Loss was big part of his life.
Your father’s book is now at the Auschwitz Memorial. How do you feel about this?
I think it's wonderful that it is there, that people will be able to see it. Obviously, it's very gratifying. Although my daughter has her own copy, I’m sure she will visit Auschwitz in the future and it will be exciting to see her grandfather’s contribution to history there at the museum. Also for the historical record, that it's preserved in its place of origin, so to speak, where people can access it. And of course, now there's the new edition of “Byliśmy w Oświęcimiu” published by Słowne that just came out, which is also tremendously gratifying.
Paweł Sawicki
The Auschwitz Museum has received a special copy of the first edition of the book „Byliśmy w Oświęcimiu" from 1946, bound in a fragment of an original prisoner's striped uniform.
The collection of memoirs by Auschwitz survivors Tadeusz Borowski, Janusz Nel Siedlecki and Krystyn Olszewski was first published in Munich by Oficyna Warszawska na Obczyźnie founded by Anatol Girs, who met the authors in one of the camps. A small part of the edition was bound in striped uniform cloth. In an interview with Paweł Sawicki, his daughter, Barbara Girs, talks about the history of the book's creation and about her father, Anatol Girs.