differences, as the Auschwitz of 1940–1941 differed spatially and functionally after the opening of Birkenau; Auschwitz also generally became more hectic in spring and early summer 1944 when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were deported there between May 15 and July 8.
Additionally, perpetrators’ roles were certainly also central within the events of the Holocaust. Sadly, as we well know, perpetration too emerged from human positions, meaning that a complete study of the human in Auschwitz must also consider perpetrators’ humanity, a topic explored in some pioneering recent films such as Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest (2023). These potential critiques aside, Cywiński’s worthwhile and successful aim here is to construct a gestalt that is organized by victims’ internal experiences, rather than by external categories or chronologies.
The chapter titles, outlining much of the concentration camp experience, bear repeating here: “Initial Shock,” “Assessing the Situation in the Camp,” “Loneliness,” “Death,” “Hunger,” “Thirst,” “The Cold,” “Hygiene,” “Inner life,” “Emotions and Numbness,” “Becoming a Muselman,” “Willpower,” “Camp Community,” “Hierarchy,” “Friendship,” “Empathy,” “Family,” “Children,” “Births,” “Decency,” “Justice,” “Organizing,” “Theft and Trade,” “Struggle and Resistance,” “Communication,” “Culture and Learning,” “Laughter and Joy,” “Fear,” “Love and Sex,” “Faith and Religiosity,” “Hope,” “Suicide,” and “Sacrifice.”
Each chapter also begins with a sketch by Marian Kołodziej, “prisoner 432,” a man who participated in the actual building of Auschwitz. He drew these hauntingly powerful drawings while recovering from a stroke, with restricted hand motions. A Polish set designer after the war, Kołodziej had kept his Auschwitz experience to himself. Only after his illness did he understand that the only way to return to life was to get Auschwitz out of his system. Kołodziej’s drawings are housed in the basement of St. Maximilian Kolbe Franciscan Church in Harmeze, Poland, some three kilometers from Birkenau. His work is an act of rage and compelling artistic testimony.
Certain chapters elaborate on some of the most important memoirs and studies of the Holocaust. Primo Levi famously wrote that had the concentration camps lasted a bit longer they would have invented a vocabulary of their own, citing how words like “hunger” and “cold” took on new depths of meaning in those contexts. Cywiński builds on this notion by offering multiple recollections of hunger and cold, and on the ways in which language was used to express these experiences, also adding thirst to the list.
The late Lawrence Langer, the pioneering scholar of Holocaust literature and Holocaust testimonies, insisted that all narratives of the death camps either reveal or mask the principle narrative of total degradation and dehumanization. There is much in this “Monograph on the Human” that gives voice to Langer’s claim. The chapters “Decency,” “Faith and Religiosity,” “Sacrifice,” and “Empathy” are short, because Cywiński wants to keep the human experience balanced and proportionate. Nevertheless, as the presence of those short chapters suggests, these too were found in Auschwitz, but must be understood in context. Thus, Langer’s view is strengthened by the evidence that Cywiński displays, but, contra Langer, there was more than dehumanization and degradation, as is explored within these other dimensions of the experience at Auschwitz.
Elie Wiesel often said: “only those who were there will ever know and those who were there can never tell.”1 Cywiński respects the first part of Wiesel’s statement, but his work disproves of its latter half. Many of those who were there can and do tell in words. And while no single survivor, even the greatest of writers and most authoritative of the witnesses, could ever tell it all, the testimonies Cywiński gathers give us nonsurvivors (mere witnesses to the witnesses) an unending sense of what it was like to be there. Having captured with such sensitivity, comprehensiveness, and courage what it was like to be in Auschwitz during the Holocaust, Cywiński must now face the challenge of integrating his scholarly contributions with his task as a museum director to communicate to the museum’s two million annual visitors the life experiences of its multitudes of prisoners.