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that makes one free. In the foreground, in place of the proud soldiers from the photographs, he shows us, of course, prisoners in striped uniforms. “The basic rule one must always remember, if one wants to survive,” Samuel Pisar said after the war, “is: never to admit and never to show the slightest sign of weakness or disability.” In Kościelniak’s drawing, they therefore walk evenly, with effort straightening their bodies, even thrusting out their chests as a sign of vigor that was meant to increase their chances of living even one more day. By the gate stand SS men counting the even rows. At first glance one might mistake them for officers receiving the parade of some victorious army. And there is one more thing: what could not be drawn—music. For instance, the often played Salve Imperator, or the Gladiatoren March. The latter piece murderously fast for such extremely tormented bodies. And the steady beat of the drum. As Dr. Jacek Lachendro recalled in his scholarly work, whatever was played, among all the instruments the drum must have struck the strongest. It had to beat a rhythm that would reach the battered people—allow them to keep an even line, because a single stumble could at any moment drive one of the bandits into a fury.
But to see in the Arbeit Macht Frei gate the frame of a “triumphal procession,” Władysław Siwek’s work allows us even more. His panoramic composition titled “Return of the Penal Company from Work” shows an endless procession of brutalized prisoners. Those in the foreground have already marched under the gate. Some are so close to death that their companions must support them or carry them on their own. It was Good Friday of 1942. For
a sadistic joke, one of them was therefore elevated. He sits on a platform carried by several prisoners. He is barely alive. And yet a tool of torture—a shovel—was thrust into his left hand, and a crown of thorns was placed on his head. But the Passion-like quality of this scene is readable only through the crown and the half-dead figure evoking the Ecce Homo motif, while the proper context of the Paschal Triduum can be read only once one knows the specific day on which it happened. If one were to look for an analogy to the Gospel, what Siwek evoked in the painting is, compositionally, probably closer to Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. What it can certainly be associated with, however, is that characteristic arrangement of ancient triumphal processions—later inherited, in various forms, by successive epochs and all social estates.
The first thing we see here is an enormous number of figures. Roman triumphal processions were known for their length and multitude—and Siwek’s camp veduta looks no different. In those processions there also marched lictors, the dictator’s attendants, holding in their hands the so-called lictors’ rods, a symbol of imperial power. In fact, it is from those fasces—thick bundles of birch rods bound with a red thong—and from the Latin fascis, meaning “bundle,” that the word we know today as fascism derives. Looking at the painting, one could probably identify them with kapos and functionaries—except that instead of ancient bundles, the painting shows batons and sticks. There is, of course, an orchestra and most likely a loud, rhythmic drum. And only because there is no decorative triumphal chariot in the ancient tradition—the one on which the victorious leader stood (for Hitler it was his beloved Mercedes-Benz 770, gliding amid ovations and Hitler Youth drumrolls beneath the triumphal gates of the cities hosting him)—in Auschwitz we see an ordinary platform of planks.
But if we stay a moment longer with triumphal chariots and the association with the Mercedes 770, it is worth looking at the two-and-a-half-meter, intricate Triumphwagen, a sixteenth-century woodcut by Albrecht Dürer in which the master depicted the triumphal procession of the Roman emperor Maximilian I. Above his head we can read a few words carved in elaborate lettering. They include, among other things, the four cardinal virtues: Iustitia (justice), Fortitudo (courage), Prudentia (prudence), and Temperantia (moderation). Meanwhile—returning to Siwek—by a cruel twist of fate, just above the heads of the martyr’s procession from Auschwitz, similarly to Dürer, we see noble and humanist concepts. Here they are laid out using roof tiles along the entire length of the great roof of the camp kitchen: a huge inscription, present during the camp’s operation, stretching toward the roll-call square—a moralizing maxim in German proclaiming that the milestones to freedom are: obedience, honesty, cleanliness, sobriety, diligence, order, sacrifice, truthfulness, and love of the fatherland.
Finally, one must of course pay attention to what is present here and indispensable to every ancient procession: the so-called ornamenta triumphalia, the triumphal insignia. Instead of a laurel wreath—the already mentioned corona triumphalis woven from a thorny shrub; and in place of the traditional ivory baton—a shovel. Of the classical attributes of the triumphator, only the decorative, specially made garments are missing: the tunica palmata and the toga picta. In this case, the striped uniform constituted the entire covering of the battered, elevated, and death-near prisoner.
It is astonishing how culturally strong the archetype of ceremonially crossing a gate is. With only the basic ingredients—marching people, the architecture of a gate, and music—even a primitive SS imagination could easily supply the rest, as if demanding a compositional completion codified since antiquity. And although in a totalitarian state enamored of imperial antiquity the staging of triumphal processions seems obvious, in the context of Auschwitz we are dealing with something more. Namely, with an arrangement that in an unprecedented way—perhaps for the first time in two thousand years—so unambiguously exposes the cruelty embedded in triumphal gates.
Today I stood once again beneath the Arbeit Macht Frei arch. I had to squeeze a little between sizable groups of visitors. They stood casually, staring at the inscription and listening to the guides. They were young and colorful; first they snapped photos with their smartphones, and then, a moment later, they walked through the gate at an unhurried pace. It takes an enormous effort, I thought, to try now to see both hell and the triumphal arch leading to it in this place.
Today, apart from the architecture, there is no trace here of the daily departures and returns, of sadistic scenes drawing on ancient decorum. With time, too, vanished the quiet—and so heroic—triumphs of those who managed to survive one more day in Auschwitz. Analyzing totalitarianisms, historians, psychologists, and sociologists keep writing more books, trying within their fields to reach the essence, to look behind the curtain of what, though unknowable, should still be persistently explored. And aesthetics? Can it, by itself, be of any use to us in thinking about Auschwitz? Above all: beyond what is most essential—listening to testimonies, studying the documents of the crime and the objects left by the victims—can what we know about beauty help us look into the future with attention and vigilance?
When at last I passed under the arch together with others, I remembered that suggestions on this matter had already been given to us many years ago by Zbigniew Herbert. In “The Power of Taste” he wrote:
Indeed, their rhetoric was all too crude.
Marcus Tullius turned in his grave.
Chains of tautology, a few concepts like flails.
The dialectic of tormentors, no distinction in reasoning.
Syntax devoid of the beauty of the subjunctive.
So aesthetics can be helpful in life.
The study of beauty should not be neglected.
Before we join, we must urgently examine
The shape of architecture, the rhythm of drums and pipes.
Official colors, the vile ritual of funerals.