THE ADDRESS
OF DR. PIOTR M. A. CYWIŃSKI
DIRECTOR OF THE
AUSCHWITZ MEMORIAL
Marian Turski, a survivor, warned: “Auschwitz did not just fall from the sky”.
Halina Birenbaum, a survivor, wrote: “it’s not rain, it’s people”.
Auschwitz emerged out of lust for power and out of megalomania.
Paradoxically it was the quintessence of great progress; the industrialisation of the 20th century.
The camp had been conceived of, designed, planned, sketched, drawn and expanded.
Architects, planners, designers and surveyors worked on it.
And here we are today, standing among wires and chimney stacks,
the remains of barracks and gas chambers, where German Nazis dehumanised, humiliated and murdered Jews, Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and many others.
These are authentic remains of a poorly conceived marriage:
that of Viennese romanticism and Prussian positivism.
We can see how fragile our civilisation is.
Our world proved to be fragile in the age of murderous antisemitism,
Übermensch ideology and a craving for the so-called Lebensraum.
Our world continues to be fragile.
Here we are, we stand with you, Dear Survivors,
you who have walked the darkest path of war.
And it is difficult for us to stand here. More difficult than before.
First, war violates treaties, then borders, finally people.
Civilian victims; dehumanised, terrorised, humiliated-
they do not die by chance.
They are taken hostage by wartime megalomania.
The Warsaw district of Wola, Zamojszczyzna, Oradour and Lidice,
now bear different names: Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel, Mariupol and Donietsk.
Similar sick megalomania, similar lust for power.
And almost same-sounding myths of exceptionalism, of greatness, of primacy…
but written in Russian.
We see before our eyes the end of what we used to call the post-war era.
For decades ‘post-war’ looked different in the east than in Western Europe.
But both parts were conjoined by the very thing that brought together our thoughts and our identity:
our overarching consciousness of the ‘post-war’.
And now it is all elapsing.
Once again innocent people are being killed en masse in Europe.
Russia, unable to conquer Ukraine, has decided to destroy it.
We see it every day, even as we stand here.
And so it is difficult to stand here today.
May we, free people, act differently today.
Being silent means giving voice to the perpetrators,
Staying neutral means reaching out to the rapist,
Remaining indifferent is tantamount to condoning murder.
And today, before our very eyes, our memory is putting us to the test.
Today we can clearly see which door is opening, and which remains closed.
In the first generation after the war the Rolling Stones sang:
War, children, it's just a shot away,
I tell you love, sister, it's just a kiss away.
We need to realise that every gesture of ours is as significant as a lack thereof.
There is a choice in everything.
Today, once again, comes the time for essential human choices.
And only in our memory can we find the key to the choices we are making.
Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński