I first began to read Auschwitz: A Monograph on the Human (English translation, 2022) as a courtesy to a colleague. Readers should know that I serve on the Board of the Auschwitz State Museum, whose director, Polish historian Piotr M. A. Cywiński, is the book’s author. I worked with him on the Special Exhibition entitled Auschwitz: Not Long Ago, Not Far Away, which has been traveling the world for the past six years. I have admired his work and also his ability to withstand the pressures of the former Polish government.
Yet, one does not read a work of 558 pages and 1,744 footnotes only as a courtesy, no matter how courteous this writer (not necessarily known for his courteousness) tries to be. I also began my reading with what turned out to be false expectations. I presumed Cywinski’s Monograph on the Human would focus on perpetrators, rather than on victims, given that the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum’s exhibition centers mainly on the crimes committed there, rather than on the humanity of the victims. To be fair, there are exceptions. For example, Block 27, a pavilion created by Yad Vashem in Auschwitz, enables visitors to encounter Holocaust testimonies and a sensitive presentation of children’s pencil sketches by Israeli artist Michal Rovner. Additionally, the Sauna building, which displays photographs brought by victims in their suitcases, revealing traces of their prewar lives. Still, Block 27 and the Sauna aside, the Museum’s prioritization of exposing perpetrator atrocities led me to anticipate that Cywiński’s book would do the same.
Contrary to my expectation, this book offers a phenomenology of the victims’ lives and deaths at Auschwitz. Utterly captivating, it is organized thematically, its chapter titles recounting seemingly every aspect of a prisoner’s life at Auschwitz. Listening well to what was said and to what was left unsaid, Cywiński is a most sensitive reader, quoting from a vast selection of memoirs and testimonies, as well as from diaries and letters in which victims depict their experience. He is an even more sensitive narrator. His words are sparse, with minimal digressions, and he puts the experience of those who were there at center stage, intensifying the reader’s experience. Nothing is treated as taboo in this work. As a monograph on the human (and not on the humane), it addresses the most difficult content of testimonies that include sex and cannibalism. Reinforcing published recollections of the Sonderkommado embodying a robotic, unemotional numbness during their daily labor, as in Gideon Greif’s We Wept Without Tears (Hebrew 1999, English trans. 2005), Cywiński, too, shows how this sort of existence characterized the ways in which inmates of Auschwitz were made to suppress basic human emotions.
Given that Cywiński draws from a variety of accounts without categorically separating them from each other by group, some might critique his lack of attention to distinctions between, for example, Jewish victims slated for systematic murder and those who were in Auschwitz I as political prisoners or in Auschwitz III as slave laborers. Others might also desire more analysis of chronological